It seems too much to hope that the copy for Jennifer Lopez’ and Cameron Diaz’ presentation speech at the Oscars was written with the former’s ghastly outfit in mind, isn’t it? But how delicious to see J-Lo, with her nipples nearly exposed, reading the line about how Edith Head believed a dress should be tight enough to show you’re a woman, but loose enough to show you’re a lady.

I know, I know, they’re lovely breasts and she’s a lovely woman. But she has two kids now, and criminy — put ’em away once in a while. Long enough for us to miss them.

Nice to see T-Lo agree with me.

I actually fell asleep for a large chunk of the broadcast. I’m sure millions of others did, too.

But I was awake for Meryl Streep. I knew she was going to win when I saw her show up in that gold dress. Match the statue, girl. You know what I find so amazing about her? She was crazy in love with John Cazale back in the day, and was going to marry him, but he died tragically young. She picked herself up, dusted herself off, married a nice sculptor six months later (yes, six months — the unimpeachable Wikipedia says so) and has stayed married to him to this day — thirty-some years. Impressive, for two artists.

And “The Artist” it is. Haven’t seen it.

With that, award season is officially wrapped and we can assume films released after today won’t suck outright. We watched “Exporting Raymond” on HBO over the weekend, a film made for on-demand cable, in the sense that it was slight enough you’d have been pissed to pay $8 to see it in a theater, but still worth watching, especially for a Russophile like me. It’s about the development of the Russian version of “Everybody Loves Raymond,” retitled “Everybody Loves Kostya,” but mostly about the ways Phil Rosenthal, the show’s creator, can’t communicate with Russians, even with the best translators at his disposal.

And God help me, but I think I want to see “Goon,” too. It looks like 90 percent of its humor comes from Canadian accents. Which are funny.

OK, so: Campaign season in Michigan, let’s see what the boys are up to. Rick Santorum “presses culture-war attack,” the WashPost says. Oh he does, does he? Ahem:

Campaigning here Saturday, Santorum said Obama’s focus on higher education constitutes “indoctrination” into the president’s way of thinking.

“President Obama once said he wants everybody in America to go to college. What a snob,” said the former senator from Pennsylvania. “There are good, decent men and women who go out and work hard every day and put their skills to test that aren’t taught by some liberal college professor to try to indoctrinate them. Oh, I understand why he wants you to go to college. He wants to remake you in his image.”

…Asked Sunday on ABC’s “This Week” how his faith fits in with his ideas about governing, Santorum said he disagreed with the “absolute separation” between church and state outlined by Kennedy in a 1960 speech.

Santorum said reading the speech made him want to “throw up.”

(Dryly rubbing hands together.) Excellent.

And how was your weekend?

So this is it, then? Winter solstice? It doesn’t exactly feel like it — too warm — but given that it’s 8 a.m. and barely light, and that it’s raining and looks like it will be doing so for a while, then I guess this must be the place. Today the corner is turned. (Technically, not until 12:30 a.m. tomorrow, in my time zone, anyway.) Enjoy it, Argentina. Because we’re coming for that light. Starts now.

That last link is a sound clip, and somewhat NSFW, depending on your office. From one of my favorite movies-nobody-else-saw: “The Limey.” Roger Ebert gave it three stars, or a half-star less than what he gave “Horrible Bosses,” which was so bad I couldn’t even last through the DVD, and that’s saying something. It was amazingly crude, and do you know what it takes for me to say that? I, who once worked in newsrooms? How did we get to this point? One minute you’re laughing at the semen-as-hair-gel gag in “There’s Something About Mary,” the next a character in a Judd Apatow movie is dressing down another for shaving his balls in the bathroom and leaving the hair in the toilet, so that “my shit looked like a stuffed animal.” This was in “Knocked Up,” which later took a tonal shift to suggest the main character is positively changed by the presence of a child in his life. In other words, they girlied it up to make it suitable date-night fare, which suggests there are women out there who sat through the turd conversation en route to the baby-picture montage over the closing credits, and were pleased. What a world.

Although I hope “Bad Santa” comes around on one of the cable channels in the next few days. Because that was one that did crudity right. More or less.

Excuse me, we have a correction: Technically the winter solstice is at 12:30 a.m. tomorrow, I’m told. In my time zone anyway.

I’m still waiting for the coffee to kick in, so how about a picture I stole from a total stranger’s Facebook?

That’s our own MMJeff on the left. I guess he brought the gold to the infant Jesus, although think, Jeff: If you were traveling by donkey, preparing for the flight into Egypt, would a ginormous candlestick be a practical gift? Still, nice that you played your part in the living Nativity — you really are a Boy Scout, aren’t you? There was one last weekend at the church next to my Kroger store. The camel-wrangler wore the traditional burnoose over jeans and sneakers, and took a few calls on his cell phone while children petted his dromedary. If the wise men lived at this latitude, they would most definitely wear sweatshirts beneath their kingly finery.

Shoes are always the Achilles heel of the period costume. At how many renaissance faires have I watched knights and ladies touring the grounds in Tevas? The Johnny Appleseed Festival in Fort Wayne featured electricity-free carnival rides — I always liked the wind-up spinning thing — run by people wearing Nikes. The true non-farb Civil War re-enactor pays through the nose for a pair of true Civil War-era reproduction boots, which did not come in left-right configurations until afterward.

So, speaking of movies: Alan and I have finally accepted the inevitable, and are doing the years-overdue adult chore of writing our wills. We had the signing at the lawyer’s office yesterday. Without going into too much none-of-anyone’s-business detail, I was delighted to learn that the living trust we’ve set up features a “stuff” section, designed to dispose of particular valuables and/or personal possessions, should that be important to us. We can hand-write our wishes there, amend and cross them out, which strikes me as a very cinematic thing to have in one’s safe-deposit box. The first person I knew in life who had a significant relative die came back from the funeral with the disappointing news that wills aren’t all they’re cracked up to be in the movies. There was no dramatic reading in a lawyer’s office with the women all dressed in black, clutching hankies in their grief. There was no itemized list of goodies, with flowery legal instructions about their disposition, just some version of “I leave all my stuff to X, Y and Z,” and they can sort things out.”

I may, just for laffs, fill out this section with a list of identical distributions, all but the last one crossed out, to suggest a mercurial temperament I simply don’t have.

OK, so, bloggage:

The tea party takes the reins of power: The queer-bashin’ Troy mayor’s path through public service continues to be rocky, and this time it has nothing to do with her I-heart-NY tote bag. She and her confederates defeated a long-planned transit hub in that city earlier this week, by a 4-3 vote, bucking the wishes of the business community, which turned on her with a vengeance this week. The project came with $8 million in federal aid, but they reasoned that with the government drowning in debt, they must do their part, and said no thanks. The Chamber of Commerce was furious — do you know how hard it is for a suburban mayor in Oakland County to piss off a chamber of commerce? — and yesterday a remarkable letter leaked from a government-affairs manager from a major automotive supplier, saying he would put the word out in the business community that they “no longer consider the City of Troy for future site considerations, expansions or new job creation.” Wow.

The mayor, for her part, claims she’s heard “nothing but congratulations and accolades.”

Cathy Cambridge falls out in a black evening dress, looks smashing. I kind of wish she’d put her hair up for events like this, however, if only so we can ogle the rocks.

Perhaps some of you followed the link to the latest story about embarrassing College Republicans yesterday; I think Cooz posted something in comments. A roundup here, at Romenesko’s site. A student tweeted something offensive about the president: My president is black, he snorts a lot of crack. Holla. #2012 #Obama. You know what bugs me most about that? That stupid holla. Y’know: I’m a racist, but I still want to use hip-hop slang.

OK, the Great Christmas Cleaning Project begins. Holla!

It’s December, and time for the nation’s newspapers to clear the decks of any Pulitzer-worthy material they might have hanging around, but trust me on this: The three-part series the New York Times just concluded, about Derek Boogaard, a recently deceased hockey goon, is worth the time it takes to read it beginning to end.

Part 1 is here, with links to the rest of the series at the top of the page. I know some of you might have difficulty accessing NYT material, so it’s worth a Google to see if a non-restricted newspaper is running it off the NYT wire service. It’s really that good, a heartbreaking look at a boy who rose in the NHL by… well, this sums it up pretty well:

There is no athlete quite like the hockey enforcer, a man and a role viewed alternately as noble and barbaric, necessary and regrettable. Like so many Canadian boys, Boogaard wanted to reach the National Hockey League on the glory of goals. That dream ended early, as it usually does, and no one had to tell him.

But big-time hockey has a unique side entrance. Boogaard could fight his way there with his bare knuckles, his stick dropped, the game paused and the crowd on its feet. And he did, all the way until he became the Boogeyman, the N.H.L.’s most fearsome fighter, a caricature of a hockey goon rising nearly 7 feet in his skates.

Boogaard’s death was from an overdose of the prescription painkillers he took to live with his many injuries, although he had crossed the line into addiction some time before, and was in fact just out of rehab when he swallowed the pills that killed him this past May. The package has many links to supplemental materials, including YouTube videos of his most infamous fights. I’m not a hockey fan, but it reminded me of this two-year-old piece, most likely also behind a paywall, called “Why the Red Wings Don’t Fight,” about the Detroit team’s rise to greatness on the Russian model of the game, emphasizing well-rounded players in every position, rather than the stars-plus-enforcers North American lineup:

Fights have always broken out during physical hockey games, but in the 1960s it became a strategy. The Boston Bruins and Philadelphia Flyers used intimidation to win Stanley Cups between 1969 and 1975. Without players who specialized in fisticuffs, a team’s star players would be beaten to a pulp.

…Since the bloody ’80s, the NHL has been struggling to scale back fighting. It instituted penalties for coming off the bench for a fight and extra penalties for instigating. After the lockout season of 2004-2005, the league made strides to speed up the game by increasing enforcement of hooking and interference penalties. These measures further decreased the need for “enforcers.” Fighting plummeted in the 2005-2006 season. The Red Wings had 28 fights in 2003-04 and only six in 2005-06. This season the team has so little need for fisticuffs that it opted to populate its fourth line with skill players, leaving enforcer Darren McCarty in the minors for most of the season.

The bomb lurking inside Boogaard was the brain damage he sustained in all those throwdowns; he was one of the growing number of athletes whose brain was left to science to study, and what the pathologists found was sobering:

Boogaard had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, commonly known as C.T.E., a close relative of Alzheimer’s disease. It is believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. It can be diagnosed only posthumously, but scientists say it shows itself in symptoms like memory loss, impulsiveness, mood swings, even addiction.

More than 20 dead former N.F.L. players and many boxers have had C.T.E. diagnosed. It generally hollowed out the final years of their lives into something unrecognizable to loved ones.

And now, the fourth hockey player, of four examined, was found to have had it, too.

But this was different. The others were not in their 20s, not in the prime of their careers.

The scientists on the far end of the conference call told the Boogaard family that they were shocked to see so much damage in someone so young. It appeared to be spreading through his brain. Had Derek Boogaard lived, they said, his condition likely would have worsened into middle-age dementia.

The NHL’s response? “Not enough evidence” to draw a link between repeated concussions and CTE. Keep digging, boys.

As I said, I’m not a hockey fan, but there sure are a lot of them here, and the Wings are probably the first or second most-beloved team in a city full of them. I’ve never heard a fan complain that the team doesn’t fight enough, and the few people I recommended that WSJ column to nodded in agreement, and said the team doesn’t need to fight, because they play so well.

So why are hockey teams still fighting? One of you who knows better will have to ‘splain that one.

Anyway, a truly sad story still worth reading.

So let’s turn on a dime, shall we? We need a little funny up in here:

Tom & Lorenzo take on a few of the truly astonishing outfits worn to the premiere of “W.E.,” the new Madonna movie, which I am PISSED has not dropped a trailer yet, so I can laugh and mock it. Oh, no, wait: It has. And it looks just about as awful as promised. That Madonna — so transgressive!

One of those roundups of a dozen or so helpful household hints, most of which I’d never heard of before, many of them pure genius.

And to come full circle, a great read from Deadspin on another figure from the sporting world who likely had brain damage, but the more conventional, self-inflicted kind. Never heard of George Kimball before. Thanks, Cooz.

And that’s it for me. Happy Wednesday, all.

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.