Note to self and all others: The turkey brining was definitely worth it. With so few people to feed (four), I haven’t done a whole turkey at Thanksgiving in a while, and even this year’s eight-pound breast was more-more-more than enough. But breasts love to dry out, and all the solutions I’ve tried so far — cooking in a bag, basting like a madwoman — have been only mildly successful in keeping the thing juicy through roasting, resting and through to the table. But the brine did the trick, and was only slightly more work. I put it in the solution at 2 p.m. Wednesday (in a heavy-duty plastic bag, in an ice-filled cooler, in the garage overnight), took it out at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, soaked it in plain water for a bit, tossed it in the oven with the usual preparations minus the salt, and noticed a huge difference. Even the leftovers are still moist. So. Brining: Gonna do that one again.

The birthday was nice, too. I did more or less nothing, which felt like a huge gift from the universe. Went for a walk, bought a nice piece of fish, read a little, wrote a little, napped a bit. Made my own birthday dinner — trout almondine and sauteed spinach, perfect after all the starch and gluten of the previous day, and opened my present. A pressure cooker! Just what I asked for! I intend to spend the rest of the grim weather making a lot of beans and soups and dals and other stuff in it.

Examining the packaging, it occurred to me I could never be a salesman, or perhaps even a marketer. Pressure cookers have been around since your grandmother was capable of climbing a stepladder to clean soup off the ceiling, although they’re much improved; the only reason I wanted one now is that I’ve been assured they no longer spew soup on the ceiling. But guess what the manual touted? They’re “green.” The company is committed to low-impact cookery. And so on. And why would that be? Because pressure cookers consume less energy. You can do in 10, 20 or 30 minutes what would have taken four hours at a simmer on a stove. Oh. Of all the ways I use energy and resources, cooking is one I’ve given approximately 0.0 minutes of thought or concern to. I feel worse about the brining bag than I do whatever energy it took to roast the turkey. But it’s what sells today. Eco-friendliness is to our decade what oat bran was to the ’80s.

The rest of the weekend was a cruise. We tried to see “Take Shelter,” and couldn’t work it into the schedule (far west side, only two screenings a day). “Hugo” was sold out in all but the 2D theaters, and if I’m going to see Marty’s first and probably only 3D feature in the theater, I’m going to see it how Marty intended. So “The Descendants” it was, yet more torture inflicted upon my daughter, who always notes, when we’re choosing our seats for “The King’s Speech” or “True Grit” or whatever, “Everyone here is old.” “That’s because there aren’t any explosions or vampires,” I told her. The film was rated R for language, which I thought would be for two or three F-bombs, but it turned out there were many moments when the air nearly turned blue from the potty-talk, mostly from the young actors. Although, I will grant you, it was done well. There’s a scene where the older sister warns her younger sister away from a bad classmate, and does it with an escalating tirade ending with “SHE’S A TWAT!” that I enjoyed very much. I thought, leaving, that the film was overpraised, but the further I get from it, the more I find myself thinking about it, so it might just be that my critical muscles are underdeveloped. It was certainly a worthy holiday movie. Many closeups of the Cloonester. He was wearing eyeliner.

I’m teaching a colleague’s feature-writing class today, so I have to make haste this morning. Some bloggage:

Caliban’s right: Sitcoms are officially over, so sayeth the New York Times.

I don’t know about you, but I could watch these turkey-attack videos all day. Hilarious. Why doesn’t anyone open an umbrella or wave their arms or just stop running?

For all you writers, a long Q-and-A with Hank, with a lot of smart insights about newspapers and working for them and the internet and everything else:

…we’re going through a big renaissance now. And it just destroys everything I love. Newspapers, for one. Magazines. The notion of paying a writer for her work. The notion of paying editors. Book releases, book signings, book parties, and worst of all, the loss of bookstores. No longer being able to see what someone on the subway is reading, because even book covers are gone now. It took the music industry, too — our record stores, our record collections and the idea that everyone makes out and/or gets laid to one hit song in the same summer. It’s taking away shopping malls, so it’s taking away something I consider key to the American adolescent experience.

…I’m entering a cranky cuss phase. I’m entitled to that, because I have rolled with a lot of change. But for now, I’M STICKING TO MY WAYS. I’m sticking with my dumbphone. I’m not joining Google+. I will tweet if I want and I will Facebook if I want but I’m not going to meld them into some social reader account that synchs me up to instantaneousness and lets the world know what 10 articles I just clicked on and what bar I just walked into. I’m still without an e-book reader or a tablet. I like books; I like they way they smell and the way they feel and how I feel when I buy one and have it with me. I still read my newspaper in the morning. I refuse to check my phone for texts while having dinner with a friend. I’m sticking to my ways as they currently are in 2011. I will be exactly where we agreed to meet at the time we agreed to meet, and if you start sending me last-minute texts with amendments to the plan and GPS coordinates of the new location and a change to the cast of who is joining us, I will probably just bag it and go home, because I still believe that a plan is a plan, and that plans are worth sticking to.

But such a fun cranky cuss!

Welcome back to the working week. Let’s get to it.

Poor Kristen Stewart. Such a promising start in showbiz — Jodie Foster’s diabetic daughter in “Panic Room,” respectable appearances in “Into the Wild” and “Adventureland” — and all it takes is one franchise to turn her into a joke. Kate and I saw the first “Twilight” movie three years ago, when she would have been, what? Twelve? And even she couldn’t abide all that moony-eyed crap. Stewart looked constipated throughout that one, and from the looks of the publicity stills, she doesn’t look much better in the “Breaking Dawn” thing that opens today. I guess Stephenie Meyer’s teen-sex-tease fantasy is a pretty big thing to have stuck in your gut. I hope the paychecks made it all worth it.

The details I’m reading today sound laughable. They reduce the honeymoon bed to splinters? The Detroit News critic wondered where the clothes go when the werewolf clan shape-shifts, and why they’re always dressed a minute or two after they switch back. These are quibbles, however, compared to the big money scene. Hello:

Meyer’s Breaking Dawn is infamous for its centerpiece birthing scene, where Edward literally gnaws into Bella’s pregnant belly to give her the sparkly vampire equivalent of a C-section. Fans have wondered for years how they’d transfer that to the big screen, and though we don’t want to spoil the climax of the movie, you should set your expectations in check: There will be blood, but there won’t be a lot of gore (or even clarity). In fact, if you’re totally unfamiliar with the book, you may not be able to tell what’s going on by the way it’s been shot. We feel for you, because when it appears that Edward is indulging in some particularly bloody cunnilingus with Bella at the inopportune time of her delivery, you’re going to be really confused.

Mercy.

What movies will our little family be able to see this holiday season? I guess “Shame” is out, but I am looking forward to taking Kate to “The Other F Word,” a documentary about legendary punk rockers as parents, if it ever gets here.

Oy, what a week. The good news is, the next one will be markedly better, Thanksgiving and all.

I have to get moving early today, so let’s get to the bloggage, eh?

From the Department of Stories Whose End You Saw Coming a Million Miles Away, But Still Find Satisfying: It would appear James O’Keefe is having difficulty setting up Stings R Us.

There’s now a Huffington Post Detroit. I can’t wait to not read it.

Finally, the news from Moe’s part of the world isn’t good. Moe, I hope you know that however this disease progresses, you have our virtual community pulling for you, in every way.

Roger Ebert grades on the curve, and by genre, which can sometimes surprise the novice reader, perhaps when flashy trash like “Point Break” gets three and a half stars. (The fact that movie was released in 1991 and I still remember its star rating should tell you something about how personally I take shit like this.) He’s been tough on Steven Soderbergh, like a parent disappointed that a child is not working up to his potential. One of my fondest movie memories was the year we got eight inches of snow on Christmas eve, scuttling our holiday driving plans, and leaving me to snuggle under Kate’s brand-new sleeping bag on the couch and watch “Ocean’s 11” on HBO, which I enjoyed immensely as a perfect little soap bubble of a summer movie. Ebert gave it three stars, and this dismissal: “I enjoyed it. It didn’t shake me up and I wasn’t much involved, but I liked it as a five-finger exercise. Now it’s time for Soderbergh to get back to work.”

He was similarly sort of meh about “Contagion,” which Kate and I saw last weekend and I loved. I think it’s because I can no longer suspend disbelief to watch the vast majority of thrillers; I have to believe in paranormal activity, or exorcism, or that women walk into creepy dark houses in the dead of night, or that cars can jump off freeways and land in drivable condition, or explosions can be outrun, or whatever.

But “Contagion” thrills by being fictional but absolutely realistic and utterly believable, which means I was well and truly freaked out. A particularly nasty flu virus, trailing central nervous system complications, gets into one woman, who infects three continents in one night of business socializing in Asia, and things go downhill from there. Social disintegration is one of those things I sometimes think about as a large-metro-area resident, although we should all think about it. Fact: Three months before the Y2K milestone, a large water main broke in Fort Wayne, disrupting water service to a big chunk of the north side. Within hours, residents were shoving one another in grocery aisles, fighting over the bottled water. Northeast Indiana has a wide streak of homespun paranoia, but I thought that was a remarkable turn of events for a place that’s generally friendly and neighborly.

We all know what happened during Katrina. Does anybody think a killer flu wouldn’t have the same effect?

Anyway, if you liked the “Traffic” part of Soderbergh’s back catalog, you’ll like “Contagion.” Nothing like watching a scene of American corpses being shoveled into mass graves to light up an October evening. I should also note this is the second Soderbergh film in my memory to feature a blogger as the bad guy. Not the bad guy — that would give them too much credit and screen time — but as a certain type of bottom-feeding sleazebag scuttling through society’s basement. “Blogging is graffiti with punctuation,” one character tells another. Hey, I resemble that remark. But I still really liked “Contagion.”

I was rolling through town yesterday, doing this and that, listening to my local NPR station, when I heard a soundbite from the Sunday chatfests, Michele Bachmann bringing the Krazy:

“I believe that Iraq should reimburse the United States fully for the amount of money that we have spent to liberate these people,” said Rep. Bachmann in an appearance Sunday on CBS’ “Face the Nation.” …“We are there as the nation that liberated these people,” she said. “And that’s the thanks that the United States is getting? After 4,400 lives were expended and over $800 billion? And so on the way out, we are being kicked out of the country? I think this is absolutely outrageous.”

You know what I think? I think Bachmann should change her name to Andrew Dice Clay and hit the comedy circuit. Stupid, offensive, thuddingly unfunny — who would even notice the difference from the original?

“These people,” she says. There must be a formal term for that form of address — the direct accusative, perhaps. “You people” is the more common form; remember when Ross Perot got raked over that one? He was speaking to a largely black audience, and said something like, “And who pays the most when that happens? You people.” Utterly unjustified, that charge, and taken entirely out of context. If he’d said “you guys,” no one would have even noticed. I recall the incident mainly because it was the day one of my lemon-faced, right-wing colleagues made a truly funny newsroom quip about it:

“See, if he’d said, ‘People of you,’ he’d have been fine.”

OK, time to get moving on what promises to be a ridiculously busy day, but not in a bad way, if that makes any sense. How about some bloggage:

Here’s a little something for my homosexual friends. And everyone else who enjoys a good barn-dance song.

Here’s something I wrote for a local public-policy magazine. It promises to be of interest to approximately .02 percent of you — Michigan teacher contract negotiations and education funding, whoo — but click on it anyway, so they throw me another assignment.

New York magazine is looking at food television all week. In the opening installment, Adam Platt writes:

Back in the distant, quaintly mannered era of Jacques Pépin and Julia Child, cooking shows were a guilty pleasure, enjoyed by a handful of high-minded home cooks and the occasional obsessive, fatso schoolboy (like me). But in the last fifteen years, that equation has dramatically flipped. It’s the non-cooks now who tune in to see Emeril Lagasse’s latest recipe, then rush out by the millions to purchase the latest signature frying pan endorsed by Bobby Flay.

Yes, I’d agree with that, because the target market for designer cookware is almost entirely non-cooks. Real cooks pick it up at their garage sales a few years later.

It’s about to rain, and I have to take out the trash. Happy Tuesday to all.

The new biography of Steve Jobs confirms what was already pretty well known about the pancreatic cancer that killed him earlier this month. That is, that the man widely hailed as a genius did a pretty dumb thing when diagnosed with cancer in 2003 — he denied he had it.

Or rather, he denied he had anything serious enough to need treatment with serious medicine. Rather:

His early decision to put off surgery and rely instead on fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet — infuriated and distressed his family, friends and physicians, the book says. From the time of his first diagnosis in October 2003, until he received surgery in July 2004, he kept his condition largely private — secret from Apple employees, executives and shareholders, who were misled.

Later, Jobs did turn to Western medicine to fight his cancer. But from the fall of 2003 to the summer of 2004, when he finally had surgery, he dithered. Everything we know about cancer stresses early detection and treatment as key to long-term survival. So it’s not a leap to conclude that Jobs may have acupunctured himself into an early grave.

It’s unclear whether Jobs thought acupuncture and juice were a real treatment, or if something else was going on in his famously intelligent head. He wouldn’t be the first person who, when faced with a deadly threat in the prime of his life, simply refused to see it as such. In the world Jobs lives in, there’s certainly no shortage of this sort of thinking, and California’s reputation as the center of it is well-earned.

My doctor friend Frank and I would occasionally bat this ball around over beers. Why were some people so ready to believe practitioners of quackery like iridology, Reiki and at least some chiropractic — yes, I think it can be effective for back and neck pain, but asthma? Please — and not their doctors? Why is a guy who went to the Colon Cleanse Academy more believable than one who interned at Johns Hopkins? We ran down the list of million reasons, but Frank, unlike most MDs, was always willing to put a big part of the blame on doctors themselves, the most visible actors in the insane ongoing stage play of American health care. They helped build their own prison, then complained the view was obscured by iron bars. Doctors are, speaking generally, very smart control freaks (like Steve Jobs, come to think of it), and patients frequently are not. After the thousandth emphysema patient who refuses to quit smoking but still complains of symptoms, it’s easy for a doctor to get high-handed, and that arrogance can seep into interactions with all patients. Pretty soon, you are the doc whose patients desert him for a nutritionist. And you have lots of company.

“Doctors like to complain about the patient who comes in with a sheaf of printouts from the internet,” he would say. “But that patient is the one who is taking responsibility for their own health. It’s all in how you look at it.”

In some ways, knowing Jobs was one of those patients humanizes him as much as his other widely reported flaws. Life is a terminal disease, after all.

The Huffington Post got their hands on an early copy, too. This is the story they pulled from it:

Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the president personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that Obama “was really psyched to meet with you,” Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.

Yes, regulations and unnecessary costs, like federal laws on how hard you can whip your workforce, and how many pollutants you may dump into the soil and waterways and air around your factory. I hate to say it two days in a row, but that’s f’ing rich. Yes, Jobs was “prickly,” the root of which is “prick.”

A pivot into the bloggage, and then I’m on to other things:

When I was younger, and would fantasize about exchanging faces with other women in the world, one who always ended up on my top-five list was Charlotte Rampling. Those amazing cheekbones. Those incredible, hooded eyes. That jawline. So beautiful. I saw a trailer for a new documentary about her yesterday. My oh my, but she’s gotten old. (Still looks great. It’s the bone structure.) I have a feeling that of all the women of a certain age who say they’ve never had work done, she is telling the truth.

Marco Rubio, truth-stretcher.

I agree with James Fallows: Good for WDAV, an NPR station that for once acted with common sense when considering the after-hours work of one of its employees.

A morning’s worth of work to do, and then I’m going to rake leaves. Have a great weekend.

We had a whack Labor Day weekend — Friday’s and Saturday’s temperatures were in the high 90s, and by Monday, they’d fallen 40 degrees, which sort of ruined my plans to spend summer’s final day at the pool, listening to the traditional last-day DJ set. Oh, well. Kate and I saw “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” on one of the steamy days, because sometimes you just need the extra kick only movie-theater air conditioning can provide.

I was delighted to be delighted by the film, which was great fun and surprisingly moving and aw hell MONKEYS ON THE RAMPAGE OOK OOK OOK. I’m sorry trailers nowadays have to give away the whole damn movie, because it would have been wonderful to have the big battle scene take you by surprise, but no. Everyone who’s even seen a TV ad knows it happens on the Golden Gate Bridge. The CGI effects are wonderful, with some liberties taken. Here’s an actual chimp:

Here’s the digital chimp, Caesar, from the film:

As you can see, the unstable pharmaceutical substance that gives the ape species its super intelligence also gives it standard-issue human eyes. Eyes were the secret of E.T., too, although I hated that movie and would happily have subjected the little extraterrestrial to a full government interrogation. Chimpanzees I can identify with. But it’ll take more than eyes to make me fall.

Anyway, “Rise” needed a subtitle: The radicalization of a young primate, say, or a sexier poster line: Abu Ghraib, with even more hair than Khalid Sheik Muhammed. The apes rise for very good reasons, and the battle on the bridge would be commemorated in heroic sculpture once the new ape society is in place, but we have to leave something for the sequel.

Yesterday was the first day of school around here, and the weather stayed cool, segueing into the sort of overcast and chill rain today that includes everything but the Goodyear blimp flying a banner: IT’S OVER, FOLKS. I’m not entirely devastated by it; there’s always a point at which you’re ready to start wearing long pants again. I did buy a pair of new Teva sandals on late-season clearance, and I love them so it would be nice if I could continue showing my toes for a few more weeks. So let’s jump to the bloggage, showing our toes all the while:

Jim at Sweet Juniper took the kids to Sleeping Bear Dunes this summer, and had trouble making the climb. Fortunately, he gave us an account of the experience. Funny.

Don’t let Joe Nocera’s column about the loss of middle ground in Washington make you think you’ve read it all before. There’s some good detail here:

“This is not a collegial body anymore,” (Rep. Jim Cooper, Democrat of Tennessee) said. “It is more like gang behavior. Members walk into the chamber full of hatred. They believe the worst lies about the other side. Two senators stopped by my office just a few hours ago. Why? They had a plot to nail somebody on the other side. That’s what Congress has come to.”

Alan and I went to Windsor for dinner one night last summer, and it was sorta meh. Windsor used to have a thriving restaurant scene, I’m told, and U.S. visitors came often to its Italian, Chinese and other districts. Now that you need a passport and a tolerance for potential border searches, business has fallen significantly. Yet another 9/11 story, this on the explosion of the border-control industry in our region. It was a good decade to wear a badge, apparently. One day, perhaps we naked apes will rise in revolt.

And with that, I must skedaddle. Holiday weeks mean extra work.

I gotta tell ya, ever since I saw the trailer for “The Help,” I have been cringing at the thought this movie would be every bit as excruciating as the preview suggests. Yes, a movie about how a plucky white girl in early-’60s Mississippi empowers the black domestic class by putting on cateye glasses and telling their story:

Skeeter (the plucky one) gets a job as a newspaper cleaning-advice columnist, but when she asks Aibileen for some tips, she realizes that the real story lies in the emotional lives of black women who virtually raise their white employers’ children, but who are treated by those same families as unfit to share a kitchen utensil, much less political or economic power. “You is kind, you is smart and you is impo’tant,” Aibileen repeatedly intones to her young white charge.

I gather “The Help” has been a book-club and best-selling sensation since its publication. I haven’t read it, so I suppose it would be wrong to judge, but just from the capsule plot summaries, it sounds fairly excruciating. Does Skeeter also teach her town’s domestics to dance? No?

The Times’ critic isn’t impressed, except by Viola Davis, who could class up a clown car. She’s so good, I fear she’s in danger of becoming a 21st-century distaff Sidney Poitier, but fingers crossed she still has a comedy or three in her. Has anyone read this book? Am I being unfair? I is not an impo’tant critic, but still.

Ah, the heat has finally broken. We can lay our heads against autumn’s cool cheek this morning, although just for a bit. It’s still summer, and I intend to enjoy it, if I can ever get my work done.

Which I’d best do. Fortunately, some bloggage:

Via Jeff the Mild-Mannered, a Guardian look at the psychology of looting. Pretty clearheaded:

How can you despise culture but still want the flatscreen TV from the bookies? Alex Hiller, a marketing and consumer expert at Nottingham Business School, points out that there is no conflict between anomie and consumption: “If you look at Baudrillard and other people writing in sociology about consumption, it’s a falsification of social life. Adverts promote a fantasy land. Consumerism relies upon people feeling disconnected from the world.”

My community has a library millage on the ballot this November. So: Useful things to remember about librarians.

Oh, wow, look: Tina Brown’s being “provocative” again! I’m so totally provoked.

And I hate to bug out of here with such a weak, phoned-in offering, but I have a lot to do in two days, and I’d best get to it.

Years after seeing its wonderful, flippy trailer, I finally got to see “Teeth” this weekend, on IFC’s free on-demand channel. It’s a horror movie about a girl with vagina dentata, i.e, a real mouth down there. Great premise, imperfect execution.

I think it was a pacing problem — there are four distinct wham-o scenes in which young Dawn O’Keefe’s snapper gets to show what it’s capable of, but after the first, it’s kinda downhill. OK, so it bites, and bites hard. What are you going to do with that? We discover it only does so when it’s not being treated with respect — a little feminist twist on things that I appreciated, but I wanted to see more possibilities explored. Give a girl a biting vagina, and I expect her to be deployed as a CIA sex-assassin by the third act. Although, from the look on her face in the final shot, it’s not far away.

And when that is the high point of your weekend? Seeing a movie about a girl with a toothy vagina? That’s when you know you’re middle-aged.

This was the other one:

“Lord, you are the source of every good thing,” Mr. Perry said, as he bowed his head, closed his eyes and leaned into a microphone at Reliant Stadium here. “You are our only hope, and we stand before you today in awe of your power and in gratitude for your blessings, and humility for our sins. Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government, and as a nation we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that we cry out for your forgiveness.”

When I lived in Indiana, these folks were always insisting that I honor and respect their faith, nay, their “deeply held” faith. Find the word “deeply” in an American newspaper, and nine times out of 10, “religious” follows it. And for the most part, I did. When a carload of Christian college students was involved in a terrible crash and credited prayer with saving their lives, I put it in the story (mentioning seat belts and air bags in the next paragraph). Their respect for the way I think public life should be conducted would be radically different, I suspect. But this bullshit just tears it. May I see the hands of everyone who believes Rick Perry would be crying out for God’s forgiveness under a McCain/Palin administration? Yes, thank you, it’s as I suspected.

I’ve never been comfortable with the Bill Maher approach to religion; the world is a confusing and difficult place, and people take comfort where they can. But unlike the president, I know a preening bully when I see one. Rick Perry, you’re on notice:

As usual, Roger Ebert is on the beam.

In other news at this hour, a squirrel just spent a few minutes walking around on the skylight directly over my head, allowing me a rare look at the underside of a squirrel. It was a male, if you’re interested. I mention this only to note that it’s hard to stay too pissed about anything on a fine summer morning when breakfast included blueberries and peaches.

And today is Monday, which means (groan). So skedaddle I must, and I will see you soon. But a bit of bloggage first:

When I heard the follow-up to the Chrysler Super Bowl commercial would be the gospel choir featured therein doing their own cover of “Lose Yourself,” I ain’t gonna lie: I groaned. But the video is out, and it’s not terrible, nor is the cover. Such a distinctive-looking town; you can see all the Hollywood DPs who have been coming and going here for the last few years have loved it so.

I guess I have to read this Michele Bachmann profile in the New Yorker. It’ll arrive in dead-tree form about the time we’re heading north — think I’ll save it for the long drive.

And oh, hell, why not: Because we all need a little bunny in our lives, the daily bunny. Not to be confused the daily otter.

OK, now I’m leaving. See you tomorrow.

Here’s something I see more often these days — a lament for dangerous playgrounds. Frequently the argument has an undercurrent of hostility; I recall one by a father of two that basically boiled down to, these kids today could all use a few more broken arms, but I’m sorry, I can’t find it now. Most of the people advocating it seem well-intentioned enough, although I note they tend to live in the land of the anonymous “some” who are ruining childhood, but not for attribution.

That many of the Some may be made of straw and live in the Land of Oddly Articulate Taxi Drivers occurs to me, yes.

Here’s how the argument goes: Children’s playgrounds are being, or have already been, ruined. By lawyers, by — finger quotes — experts, but mostly by Some, who want to take all the risk out of childhood, and hence, all the fun.

There’s some truth to this, at least to the bare fact of ruination, although I wonder how much it has to do with risk and how much with money. But I’ve seen some pretty wan playgrounds in my time. The one at a nearby elementary school in Fort Wayne had a single piece of equipment on it — something that looked like a folded slice of Swiss cheese, with a total height of maybe five feet. I gather you climbed on it. Not that I ever saw a child do so.

But something else happened along the way, and playgrounds started getting fun again. When I was a kid, I played at the elementary at the end of my block. There were four or five different playgrounds, sized for the range of grades, and if I remember correctly, they were basic — swings and monkey bars and slides and see-saws, anchored to asphalt. If you fell, you fell hard, although that was rare. But it happened. My major dread of the playground was being dumped from the high position on the see-saw; I had a friend who specialized in it, with a truly perverse timing that suggests she had a bright future in torture of all sorts.

By the time Kate was born, the playground had changed. The “playscape” had come on the scene — sprawling constructions that mimicked kid-size castles, with spiral slides, swinging footbridges, climbing walls and all manner of things you could swing on, jump from and otherwise exhaust your energy and imagination.

A few of our favorites: Planet Westerville, near my sister’s house in suburban Columbus; Kids Crossing and Foster Park’s playground in Fort Wayne; and a Kids Crossing clone here in Grosse Pointe Woods’ Lake Front Park.

One thing all these playscapes had in common was some sort of soft footing underneath, usually wood chips, although I’ve also seen sand and shredded rubber. I honestly never gave these a thought, other than to be grateful for them. It seemed like, oh, progress, the way a padded dashboard is progress, and seat belts, and bike helmets.

I’m now informed I was all wrong. Modern playgrounds destroy children’s natural risk-taking impulses:

When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.

“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.

Excuse me, but New York Times? What a crock of shit. I can go a long way with this movement — yes, kids must take risks to grow; no, playgrounds shouldn’t be made entirely risk-free — but when you need to tuck “stunted emotional development” in there, hiding behind that big “may,” I’m going somewhere else to play.

The story goes on with the usual reporting; a Norwegian psychologist consults her clipboard and identifies “six categories of risky play” and then we get to the inevitable sources for these types of it-seems-one-way-but-it’s-really-not stories — an evolutionary psychologist. The more bullshit I find in the world, the more I can trace back to evolutionary psychology, the talk radio of soft-science scholarship.

“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.

“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

I always wanted to use “posit” as a verb. So here goes: I posit that all this hand-wringing over too-safe playgrounds is perpetrated by a handful of people who really don’t like children all that much. As I said before, it’s important that kids take risks and try new things, but this barely disguised yearning for them to fall from the top of the monkey bars and break bones is deeply hostile. To them I say: OK, your kid goes first. And if you don’t have any, shut up.

Somewhat related, an old treat found while Googling: Sweet Juniper’s Jim on the unique nature of Detroit playground culture.

Let’s hop to the bloggage, so I can get dressed for weights class:

I do not use special soap on my crotch. There, I said it! Nevertheless, Vagisil would like to sell me some, using some lamely “provocative” viral videos they want everyone to post on their Facebooks and be outraged by. I look at these and think, More good voice work for actors. Huzzah.

I used to be lonely, in my discussions with fellow Elmore Leonard fans, when the topic of film adaptations would come up. “Of course, ‘Get Shorty’ was the best adaptation of a Leonard novel,” someone would say, to nods all around. No! No! I screamed inwardly. “Get Shorty” was a huge improvement over all that came before, and a breakthrough, but no way it’s the best, because that title belongs to “Out of Sight,” and this guy agrees with me, so er’body just shut up.

So, two videos:

You wanted to tussle; we tussled. My favorite scene from “Out of Sight”:

And a video I worked on with my summer interns. I’m not much of a video producer, and it’s hard for me to teach this stuff, because I barely have a handle on the technology, and what I see in my head is so different from what appears on the monitor. Still: The assignment was to do a slice-of-life video aboard a Mackinac racer. We were invited out for a Thursday night of fun-type racing. Took two small cameras, the Flip and the GoPro, mostly handled by the interns. And virtually all the audio turned out like that in the first 10 seconds — spoiled by a persistent roar of wind. (Cheap mics are the bane of cheap cameras.) I fixed it by going back a few nights later with my good USB mic, going belowdecks, and reconducting the interview in acoustically cleaner conditions. My critique of the video is: Too many cut-off heads, too few detail closeups to cut away to, not enough of a narrative arc — it plays like a sketchbook. On the other hand, given the raw materials, I don’t think it turned out too-too badly. Tell me what you think, and have a great weekend. Stay cool.

I am growing to despise my other job, at least this summer, when I’m doing it for the lordly sum of $0. A certain amount of pro bono I can handle, but now it’s Wednesday, I haven’t done my grocery shopping for the week and now I have a news explosion to clean up after.

Fortunately, bloggage galore:

Another listicle from Cracked.com, worth passing along: 8 words you’re confusing with other words. They missed one of my pet peeves — defuse/diffuse — but they got the biggies, including phase/faze and reign/rein and tenant/tenet. Oh, and people? “Tack” is a sailing term; it refers to the zigzag course that boats must steer to move into the wind. A tacking boat changes direction frequently, hence the phrase “take another tack.” Not “tact.” Thank you, that is all.

The longer I write on a keyboard, the less I can write by hand. Still, I love notebooks of all sorts, and so does the keeper of this blog.

If I had to choose between the two New Yorker film critics, David Denby and Anthony Lane, I’d be on Team Lane all the way. But Denby makes some good points in this essay on computer-generated effects. Nut graf:

Storytelling thrives on limits, inhibitions, social conventions, a world of anticipations and outcomes. Can you have a story that means anything halfway serious without gravity’s pull and the threat of mortality?

I remember watching “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” a movie with many pleasures for me, until it arrived at a climactic sword fight in a shadowy bamboo forest. Suddenly the characters, who had been grounded, gravity-limited human beings, were able to run straight up the sides of bamboo trees as slender as a pool cue. It was all staged as a dreamy ballet, but it took me out of the story, frankly. Oh, we can run up the sides of trees now? OK, let me file that one away.

A guy I used to work with lost his father recently, and is sharing brief remembrances of the man via Facebook. (Facebook grieving: Now there’s a master’s thesis.) I was amazed to learn that after the death of his mother, his father had married Peg Bracken. Many of us are boomers here, and likely remember her as, first, the author of a great book of whimsy, the “I Hate to Cook Book” and later, as spokeswoman for Bird’s Eye vegetables. She introduced herself in the commercials: “I’m Peg Bracken, and I hate to cook.” She was such a hoot. The remembrance inspired me to do some googling, and I found her obit from the NYT, in 2007. From her recipe for Skid Row Stroganoff:

Start cooking those noodles, first dropping a bouillon cube into the noodle water. Brown the garlic, onion and crumbled beef in the oil. Add the flour, salt, paprika and mushrooms, stir, and let it cook five minutes while you light a cigarette and stare sullenly at the sink.

I love to cook, but a woman who had the ovaries to write that in 1960 is one after my own heart.

OK, I think that’s it. Off to restock my larder. How come no one says that anymore? “Mom, I want breakfast.” “Check the larder for some Cheerios.” A question for Peg, maybe, but me, I’m gone.

Kate’s band, Po, had a gig this weekend. No one starts at Carnegie Hall, so they played at an elementary-school ice cream social. These are end-of-year events avidly looked forward to by one and all, put on by the PTOs, the last party before school dismisses for the year. And what did it do Friday but rain, pushing every activity inside. Po got a space about the area of a king-size bed in the corner of the gym and was but one entertainment option for the K-5 audience:

If you are reminded of Spinal Tap’s gig for At Ease Weekend at the Air Force base, you’re not the only one. The traffic cones were Alan’s idea, and pure genius. Still, we got a few rugrats bolting across the “stage.” Thankfully, none tripped on any cords or toppled speakers.

It was a success. They sounded tight, the technical problems were fairly minor, and Liz, the singer, remembered to introduce the band before the final song. She didn’t call Kate “the Bootsy Collins of Brownell Middle School,” but you can’t have everything. They kept their cool in trying conditions. As Marty, the guitarist’s father, says, every show is worth 10 lessons. Someday they will look back on this and laugh. Because this is funny:

When Kate showed up at jazz-band practice with that guitar strap, one of her fellow middle-school musical smartasses asked if it came with free pot. Truth be told, I didn’t associate it with rasta colors when we bought it; we were only looking for a light enough color that it could be signed by her idols; she sometimes takes it along to concerts for autographs, and the ones in black leather with fake bullets on them won’t show a Sharpie stroke. Oh, well — everyone needs some signifiers that will allow others to leap to erroneous conclusions about them. This is hers.

The other thing we did this weekend was see “Super 8.” Up front, may I stipulate that I’m not a fan of Steven Spielberg, nor of J.J. Abrams, nor of all the movies I’ve seen it compared to, from “Stand By Me” to “The Goonies” and whatever. I’ve avoided everything since “E.T.,” which — hello — I didn’t like. Sue me, I’m a Scorsese girl.

But one should see more films without knowing fact one about them. Given my druthers, I’d have gone for “Midnight in Paris,” but Alan said let’s pick a family movie for once, and all three of us haven’t seen one together since “True Grit” back at Christmastime, so “Super 8” it was. I’m happy to say I enjoyed it quite a bit, while acknowledging its flaws and calculations. Maybe this is adulthood.

Flaws: Jeez, it was loud. We got there early, and sat through the expected slate of previews, which meant summer blockbuster hopefuls. “The Green Lantern,” “Real Steel,” “Captain Marvel,” etc. Those were loud, too. Loud and explode-y and louder still. I understand the appeal of a summer popcorn movie, but criminy. It was fun seeing the glimpses of Detroit in “Real Steel,” which was shot here last summer — the empty parking lot at the Pontiac Silverdome, and Cobo Hall, where the robot fights happen. The special effects in all these films are astonishing, of course, and were as well in “Super 8,” which featured a train derailment that seemed to go on for five minutes and defied the laws of physics, but oh well.

The marketing strategy for this thing seems to be not to reveal too much, to rely on Spielberg + Abrams = Magic, so I won’t reveal too much, either, except to note the pure calculation of setting the story in 1979, which allows parents of today to tell their children on the walk back to the car that yes, men really did wear their hair like that, with sideburns that looked like moss growing across their face. Yes, “My Sharona” really was a hit on the radio way back when, and a rush job on getting film developed was three days. And what is film? Well, it’s uses a chemical reaction to light to… never mind. We have cell phone cameras now, and iMovie. And digital effects.

Because it’s Monday, on to the bloggage:

Someone posted this long-ish essay by Roseanne Barr on Facebook over the weekend, and while I’m not a huge fan of hers, it’s definitely worth a read, if the antics of crazy people in showbiz are your cup of tea. I watched a couple seasons of “Roseanne” when it was on, but evidently not the one(s) featuring George Clooney. He was on this show? What did he play? And this shows that whatever her crazy-bitch faults, Barr at least retains her sense of humor:

The end of my addiction to fame happened at the exact moment Roseanne dropped out of the top 10, in the seventh of our nine seasons. It was mysteriously instantaneous! I clearly remember that blackest of days, when I had my office call the Palm restaurant for reservations on a Saturday night, at the last second as per usual. My assistant, Hilary, who is still working for me, said – while clutching the phone to her chest with a look of horror, a look I can recall now as though it were only yesterday: “The Palm said they are full!” Knowing what that really meant sent me over the edge. It was a gut shot with a buckshot-loaded pellet gun. I made Hil call the Palm back, disguise her voice, and say she was calling from the offices of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Instantly, Hil was given the big 10-4 by the Palm management team. I became enraged, and though she was uncomfortable doing it (Hil is a professional woman), I forced her to call back at 7.55pm and cancel the 8pm reservation, saying that Roseanne – who had joined Tom and Nicole’s party of seven – had persuaded them to join her at Denny’s on Sunset Boulevard.

As though living through a tornado wasn’t enough, now it can follow up maiming injury with rare infection:

Several people who were injured when a tornado devastated Joplin, Mo., last month have become sickened by an uncommon, deadly fungal infection and at least three have died, although public health officials said Friday that a link between the infection and the deaths was not certain. …The fungus that causes the infection, which is believed to be mucormycosis, is most commonly found in soil and wood, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is studying samples from the eight Joplin patients. “It is a very aggressive and severe infection,” said Dr. Benjamin Park, chief of the epidemiology team in the C.D.C.’s Mycotic Diseases Branch. “It is also very rare.”

Actually, despite the human suffering, I find this interesting. Soybean rust, a crop disease, was making its slow way north from South America until we had an active hurricane season a few years back, and the storms picked up the spores and deposited them in the U.S. Presumably this is what happened here. Not much can resist a 180-mile-per-hour wind.

With that, I take my leave. Lovely day in progress, time to join it.