Seventeen degrees as I write this. It seems it’s been 17 degrees forever, except for earlier this week when it was 38 degrees and raining. Did I mention I bought some cool-weather cycling gear, and tried it out when it was briefly not 17 degrees? I discovered my personal threshold of misery was 40 degrees — anything above, and I could handle it. It hasn’t been that warm since Halloween.

Because I know that my readers come here for a weather report, that’s why.

You know the worst part of being chronically sleep-deprived? The constant failure. You make a to-do list of, say, five items, and you’re lucky if one gets done. You just don’t have the energy. Today, for instance, mine has three: Take dog to groomer, work out, write three script pages. Just watch me fail to do at least one, and maybe two. The first only requires me to stumble to the corner, but who knows? It’s 17 degrees outside! I may not make it. Besides, there’s all sorts of stuff to read on the internet today, like hot details on the “Twilight” sequel. I did my parental duty on that score last weekend, and took Kate to an afternoon matinee that still cost $9.50 for an adult ticket. It was…well, it was competent, assuming the director’s intent was to produce 100 minutes of teen entertainment that looked great and contained many smoldering glances.

When I go to these things, I think of my friend Adrianne, aka Lance Mannion’s Blonde, whose father dutifully took his children to every “Planet of the Apes” movie when they were growing up. He would buy everyone some popcorn, escort them to a row, take up the end seat and promptly fall asleep. In the great tradition of children everywhere, Adrianne and her siblings had no idea how agonizing these films were to their father, until years later he let loose with his mockery of the final installment. “Ape has killed ape!” he intoned, capturing the moment when the arc finally came back down to earth, when the apes realized they had become the humans they’d spent all that screen time conquering. (This would be “Battle for the,” etc. title in the series, for you cineastes.) In the tradition of Adrianne’s father, I kept my snide remarks to one, whispered in Kate’s ear in the early moments of the film, “Whoever has the teeth-whitening contract for this high school is doing a great job.” The rest of my petty observations — if she’s so in love, why does Bella always look constipated? why do the vampire teens go to high school if they don’t have to? why doesn’t the same school change its name to Diversity High and get it over with? wait, her mother has a 17-year-old daughter and she’s married to a minor-league baseball player? let’s see more of this cougar! — I kept to myself. This movie wasn’t made for me, it was made for Kate’s demographic, and she liked it well enough, although even she said, aftereward, “Bella doesn’t smile very much.” That’s my girl.

If Alan had come along, I might have slipped out and gone down the hall to see “Milk.” A friend of mine used to do that — get his kids settled, then say, “Daddy’s going to see ‘First Blood’ now. You wait for me outside when the movie’s over.” A simpler time.

So, we have a few odds and ends to get out of the way, then? We do:

My local papers get on my nerves plenty, but at least they have a few good writers. It’s hard not to read the rest of a story that starts like this…

On third thought, Wayne County Probate Judge David Szymanski has concluded maybe it wasn’t a great idea to jail a woman for writing about her court case on a Web site.

…and continues with this…

Szymanski jailed Anderson, 59, twice Monday after she refused to shutter the site, which she has used as a pulpit in her tangled battle with her brother over the care of their elderly mother. The battle has extended to the mother’s ailing, 17-year-old cat, Toupee (who has his own, first-person column on the Web site).

Judges hate gadflies. Not to mention cats with columns, evidently.

It’s that time of year again: “A Christmas Story” cast, 25 years later. Ralphie in particular has aged well, and Scut Farkas continues to terrify. Thanks, Dexter.

Finally, in the last, desperate days of my time at The News-and-Sentinel, the staff was showed some market research that said, basically, that our readers were dumbasses who thought local television — yes, those even dumber dumbasses — did more in-depth and follow-up reporting. This is preposterous on its face, and it’s probably good that I wasn’t doing the questioning, as I might have been tempted to ask the respondents a further question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, just how stupid would you say you are?” The only reason we could see for this is that TV marketing people said so, constantly: Now with more in-depth reporting to serve YOU, etc. This led to us adopting a bunch of standing column sigs that read FOLLOW-UP ON THE NEWS and IN-DEPTH REPORTING. I only wish I were kidding. But since this next item involves my N-S ex-colleague Dorsey Price, let’s dust off the sigs and call this…

FOLLOW-UP ON THE NEWS

You remember Dorsey’s son Derek, who made the incredibly cornball video, in pursuit of a pile of college cash? And who asked us to vote for him, because the cash went to the video that got the most popular support? He won! We can’t say what the NN.C bump may have had to do with it, but $20,000 is $20,000, so who cares? The money, by the way, came from iCorn. Which is? Ahem: At iCORN we’ve created a new way to select and purchase seed corn and soybean seed….your way and on your schedule. iCORN is now starting their 9th year of business providing high-yield potential corn and soybean genetics with the latest traits.

Now you know.

Time to leash the dog and check one item off the list. Have a good one.

Add to the lengthening list of the many business I would not want to be in at the moment this: Funeral homes. Their profit margin — fancy caskets, spare-no-expense funerals — is swirling down the drain with everything else.

It’s the damn boomers, of course, who ruin everything they touch. At Thanksgiving, we had a brief discussion of what we wanted for our last tribute on earth, and neither Alan nor I want a fancy funeral. Frugal Midwesterners we are (soon to be broke Midwesterners), we ask for nothing more than immediate cremation followed by some sort of meaningful dispersal of ashes. (The church of my birth would strenuously object to the scattering part, but I left that building a while back. The thought of my corpse being pumped full of chemicals and laid out for public display grosses me out far more, so that’s that.)

Of course, others have more ambitious plans:

The Royal Shakespeare Company will no longer use the real skull of Polish pianist Andre Tchaikovsky in its performance of Hamlet when it transfers to West End as it is “too distracting for the audience.”

The use of the skull had been kept a carefully guarded secret throughout the play’s four month run in Stratford until leading man David Tennant disclosed that the skull belonged to the late pianist Andre Tchaikovsky – who bequeathed his skull to the RSC for this very purpose.

Andre Tchaikovsky left his skull to the RSC in 1982 after he died of cancer to be used on stage in Hamlet. It took a quarter of a century to happen – and he posthumously appeared as Yorick in the recent production of Hamlet at Stratford.

Tchaikovsky — no word on relation to Pyotr Ilyich — always hated productions where they used a prop for the Yorick scene, his agent said:

“He hated the way it was done. When he saw (Hamlet) with the RSC, he (Andre) said, ‘I am going to leave my skull to the RSC, they really should have a proper skull. It doesn’t work with the plastic thing they have.’ And then we looked at his will, and there it was.”

Back into the prop warehouse for the late pianist; maybe in another 25 years they can bring him out again. If the bigmouth actors can keep their yaps shut, that is.

And so we begin all-bloggage Wednesday here at NN.C. But it’s beefy bloggage:

Remember how I told you you should be reading Roger Ebert’s blog? If you were listening, you already read today’s riposte to critics who accused him of not reviewing “Expelled,” the anti-evolution “documentary.” If not, baste in its sweet, sweet revenge here:

The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics. It isn’t even subtle. Take its treatment of Dawkins, who throughout his interviews with Stein is honest, plain-spoken, and courteous. As Stein goes to interview him for the last time, we see a makeup artist carefully patting on rouge and dusting Dawkins’ face. After he is prepared and composed, after the shine has been taken off his nose, here comes plain, down-to-earth, workaday Ben Stein. So we get the vain Dawkins with his effete makeup, talking to the ordinary Joe.

I have done television interviews for more than 40 years. I have been on both ends of the questions. I have news for you. Everyone is made up before going on television. If they are not, depending on their complexions, they will look sunburned, red-splotched, oily, pale as a fish belly, orange, mottled, ashen, or too dark to be lighted in the same shot with a lighter skin. There is not a person reading this right now who should go on camera without some kind of makeup. Even the obligatory “shocked neighbors” standing in their front yards after a murder usually have some powder brushed on by the camera person. Was Ben Stein wearing makeup? Of course he was. Did he whisper to his camera crew to roll while Dawkins was being made up? Of course he did. Otherwise, no camera operator on earth would have taped that. That incident dramatizes his approach throughout the film. If you want to study Gotcha! moments, start here.

It weighs in at about a million words, each one as sweet as candy. Bon appetit.

How often have you sat through a meeting at your workplace — Six Sigma blah blah blah pursuit of excellence blah blah blah best practices blah blah to the blah — and yearned for something…more? Thought, “the writer’s life for me!” and considered jumping out the window, or maybe walking out the door? If so, let me introduce you to the closest equivalent to a copy desk staff meeting, “The Right Word” blog at the NYT:

Careful readers, including some in the cement industry, are quick to point it out when we confuse cement and concrete.

What’s the difference, you say? Go back to kindergarten, bonehead. From the NYT stylebook:

cement. Use concrete instead to mean the material that forms blocks, walls and roads. One ingredient is cement, the binding agent that is mixed with water, sand and gravel.

You can almost hear the voice of Ben Stein, can’t you? Click through for more exciting hair-splitting over “podium” and “lectern.”

(All snark aside, I do think these distinctions are important, and I recognize the importance, and thanklessness, of the job of maintaining language standards. I only question whether the public gives enough of a fig to make it part of the NYT’s website.)

From the WashPost, a sobering story on how technology makes a better terrorist:

The heavily armed attackers who set out for Mumbai by sea last week navigated with Global Positioning System equipment, according to Indian investigators and police. They carried BlackBerrys, CDs holding high-resolution satellite images like those used for Google Earth maps, and multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track. They spoke by satellite telephone. And as television channels broadcast live coverage of the young men carrying out the terrorist attack, TV sets were turned on in the hotel rooms occupied by the gunmen, eyewitnesses recalled.

This is terrorism in the digital age. Emerging details about the 60-hour siege of Mumbai suggest the attackers had made sophisticated use of high technology in planning and carrying out the assault that killed at least 174 people and wounded more than 300. The flood of information about the attacks — on TV, cellphones, the Internet — seized the attention of a terrified city, but it also was exploited by the assailants to direct their fire and cover their origins.

Fascinating story.

If you prefer gunplay more relaxed, less deadly and a whole lot funnier, try this piece on Detroit’s last surviving inside-the-city-limits gun store, written by the Metro Times’ own Detroitblogger John. (I’m reliably told the pseudonym protects an actual reporter for the more smugly self-satisfied of the city’s dailies, and why these excellent little sketches of city life aren’t running there is anybody’s guess, but I’d guess it comes down to the suicidal standards of corporate journalism.)

Anyhoo, some great detail about the dangers of ricochet on the indoor range:

He unconsciously shields his groin with his hand as he talks. “A woman was shooting, and I got hit right on the head of my dick!” he says. “But it didn’t hurt. It just come and fell. So about two, three months later a lady’s down here shooting, the damn bullet ricocheted, hit my damn dick. I said ‘What the hell’s going on here!'”

And finally, what the hell is going on here? General Motors needs $4 billion in cash just to get through the end of the month. Anyone want to buy a nice house in Grosse Pointe? I could probably make you a deal.

Off to whistle past the graveyard. Happy Wednesday.

I’ll say this for living in America’s most-loathed city (suck it, New York! we rool!) — local-media coverage of the auto-industry crisis is a cut above. You can’t really feed slogans and warmed-over talk radio calls to an informed audience, and so we’re spared “but if they’d only make cars people want, none of this would be happening.” For the most part.

My favorite of these is: America doesn’t want SUVs. Ha. Now they don’t. They don’t want them when gas is $4 a gallon. But until gas got that high, they wanted lots of them. Did everyone sleep through the ’90s and the first half of this decade? People not only wanted SUVs, they wanted them in all sizes, shapes and colors. They wanted big ones (Suburbans). They wanted little ones (Escapes). They wanted their Japanese brands tricked out to look more SUV-like (hello, Honda CRX). They wanted fancy-schmancy luxury SUVs (Escalade, Navigator). They wanted cheap ones for the entry-level market (Hyundai, Kia). Did O.J. Simpson flee in an Accord? I must have missed that.

Even now, they still want so-called crossovers, SUVs that drive and handle more like cars — Buick Enclave, Ford Edge, etc. You can pick many, many fights with the U.S. auto industry and make many, many good arguments against the government helping them, but you can’t change the facts to suit your prejudices, and the fact is, the Big Three invented the SUV, and for a very long time, the SUV was very, very good to the Big Three. So please shut up about that.

(On some right-wing blog I can’t remember, I heard the most stupido argument of all: The companies didn’t want to make SUVs, but were forced to by their onerous UAW contracts, which required them to make the highest-profit-margin vehicles possible. These people really live in their own fantasy world. I don’t want to wake them up. They’re like sleeping babies.)

Here’s the other thing you don’t hear so much here: Those greedy autoworkers. How dare they want stuff like health insurance and pensions. We really are crabs in a bucket, aren’t we? Again, go ahead and make informed remarks about certain work forces having to face the reality of higher co-pays and cost-sharing. But unless you’re willing to give up your own company-paid health insurance in solidarity, kindly shut up about it. Non-union GM retirees lost their health-care bennies earlier this year — replaced by a whole $300/month subsidy to buy private insurance in that marvelous free market, and good luck with that if you’re a cancer survivor or have heart disease. Spare a kind thought for them, eh?

What we’re seeing in Detroit is the death of the well-paid working class, and if that makes you happy, go be happy about it. Asshole.

Anyway, speaking of cars nobody wants:

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times.

For now, the port itself is the destination. Unwelcome by dealers and buyers, thousands of cars worth tens of millions of dollars are being warehoused on increasingly crowded port property.

And for the first time, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Nissan have each asked to lease space from the port for these orphan vehicles. They are turning dozens of acres of the nation’s second-largest container port into a parking lot, creating a vivid picture of a paralyzed auto business and an economy in peril.

But…but…people want Toyotas! How can this be happening?

It is more unusual to see a lot at the California port filled with thousands of unsold Mercedeses, most of them gathering dirt on the plastic white film that protects their hoods and trunks. Some appeared to have been stashed at the port for several months.

Last week, Mercedes delivered around 1,000 more cars to Long Beach on the Grus, a 580-foot container ship.

“A year ago, I was looking into buying one of these for my wife,” said Kurt Garland, the terminal manager overseeing the unloading of the white, silver and black sports cars, sport utility vehicles and sedans. “Now I’m not. I’m saving money, paying bills, hunkering down.”

Oh, the poor economy is to blame. Not those Mercedes SUVs nobody wants.

(Yesterday I wrote on my Facebook status that I felt “amorphous anger.” I’m starting to see why.)

So let’s lighten up, a bit, shall we? I hope somewhere out there in the ranks of working screenwriters, someone is crafting a script about pirates, and not the ones in the Caribbean. If you can’t get a movie out of Somali hijackers, rocket-propelled grenades, hijacked Saudi oil tankers and the Indian Navy (!!!They have one??!!), you’re not worth your union dues. Or you’re just not reading the newspapers. (I heard on NPR the other day that all the coastal fishing villages in Somalia have become pirate dens, and that all the women want a pirate boyfriend. Well, duh.)

My Great Books discussion group meets in three hours, and I still have a few pages of the reading material to get through (“The Man Who Would Be King,” if you’re interested), so let’s wrap it up with just a bit of bloggage:

One of the reasons I sometimes curse Roy Edroso is, he got me hooked on reading Rod Dreher, and a more entertaining correspondent of Wingnuttia you will not find. What I like about him is his lack of filters; so much of what he writes seems to come directly from an id-well in his brain, and so you’ll sometimes see, in the space of 36 hours, a plea for us to be kinder to one another (“because we’re all carrying a great burden”) and then a denunciation of a bride who wants her wedding dress to show a special tattoo as a slut. It’s so amusing.

Anyway, lately he’s all het up about the Prop 8 backlash in California. “Gay mob assaults peaceful Christians,” he shrieked on Monday, embedding a video clip that showed the reaction when a group of Christians went into the Castro, the most famous gay neighborhood in the whole frickin’ country, to try to pray the gay away. Astonishingly, it wasn’t friendly. I know, I’m as shocked as you are.

The next day, he called for all of us to “stand by the Mormons,” because “a friend” tells him:

Things are pretty grim. On the ground pastors are worried, and for my Mormon friends it is very bad. No LDS person in their right mind who is not a man of courage would announce his church affiliation without knowing it to be safe.

Safe? From what? Disapproval? An argument? I must have missed the invasion of Salt Lake City by the drag-queen army. Even his Beliefnet commenters were unimpressed:

Yeah, it’s like Darfur out there what with all the pogroms and midnight roundups and mass executions of the Mormons out there.

Oh, well. On to Rudyard Kipling. I’m calling it the white woman’s burden.

Today’s update is the ADHD Edition. You’ve been warned:

Peppers and eggs — now there’s a breakfast of champions. Cook the peppers first in some EVOO, and you could even call it healthy. (I will brook no slander of eggs. Moderation, peoples.) Halfway through, I remembered I’m supposed to be lunching with JohnC today, and I probably won’t be hungry until 2 p.m. Ah, well. That’s why we have salads.

Saw the trailer for “Cadillac Records” on the Apple site this week. It looks as though it has a 50-50 chance of being tremendous or sucktastic. I winced at the moment where the Rolling Stones show up on the sidewalk outside the Chess offices to tell Muddy Waters they’d named their band after one of his songs. But when Beyoncé sings “At Last” — magic. And Adrien Brody is swiftly becoming one of my favorite actors, mainly due to his marvelous honker. I don’t think I’ve seen an imperfect feature make for such a perfect face since, oh, Barbra Streisand.

Trivia: Barbra Streisand was on the Knight Ridder copy-editing tests, along with Charles Addams, for obvious reasons. Now you know. And yes, I caught them both. (Although, rereading this entry prior to hitting “publish,” I see I misspelled Adrien Brody’s name — twice.)

And while we’re making transitions from tissue-thin connections, here’s Adrien Brody in the titular make of his latest movie. Sigh. Detroit was something while it lasted, wasn’t it?

Which brings us around to the automotive bailout, apparently dead in the water, and probably that’s a good thing. You don’t cure a drug addict by giving him one last binge, and after quite a bit of reading I’ve come around to Micki Maynard’s analysis — bankruptcy is a better way out for General Motors than a bailout. Although this, from Tom Friedman, sounds appealing:

I am as terrified as anyone of the domino effect on industry and workers if G.M. were to collapse. But if we are going to use taxpayer money to rescue Detroit, then it should be done along the lines proposed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday by Paul Ingrassia, a former Detroit bureau chief for that paper.

“In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company. … Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”

I like the idea of Mr. or Ms. Hard-Nose putting Rick Wagoner and the Board of Bystanders (to use Jalopnik’s amusing phrase) in charge of the office coffee pot while they tear up contracts and fire people. It will be so amusing to mop up the blood in the gutters of my neighborhood. We live in interesting times, don’t we?

Wherever the former GM workers end up after Paul Ingrassia’s plan has them beheaded, the women among them will want to invest in a nice suit. The NYT says so: The return of the interview suit, it proclaimed yesterday. Jezebel got a little knicker-twisted over it, but that’s just because they’re young and products of our casual culture. The interview suit was simply a given for women my age; we called them hire-me suits. For best results, hire-me suits should always be worn with fuck-me pumps — it sends precisely the right message, which you are free to retract as soon as you get the job. In later years, it was always sort of funny-painful to see younger people going through the interview process, as clearly the relaxation of rules had done them no good. One kid came in wearing what had to have been his dad’s suit, it was that big on him. (He may have borrowed it from David Byrne.) They wore neckties and pantyhose as though these items were made of barbed wire, not the trappings of adulthood. Once hired, they retracted their own messages, and started showing up in Teva sandals exposing dirty toenails. Which is fine, I guess, but you should still make the effort for your first impression. It’s common courtesy.

By the way, does anyone know who made the pantsuit Darryl Hannah wears in “Kill Bill, Vol. 2”? I want that for my next suit, along with the blouse and the six-foot-tall coat-hanger body Hannah brings to the party. She can keep the eye patch.

And now I am distracted by a shiny object and must go. But I wish you all a great weekend.

Of course, all I see are the flaws, but it got a few chuckles last night. Now it’s in the hands of the critics, i.e., you. Go ahead, be brutal:

Can you feel the excitement?

I overachieved on the candy front yesterday. My lesson to you: Don’t ever shop for candy when you’re hungry. Ah, but trick-or-treat hours are promised to be more or less perfect, so I’m sure we’ll sell out. Yesterday’s DetNews had a story about trick-or-treat tourism, which is nothing new here or anywhere else, but may be exacerbated this year by foreclosure:

In several Metro Detroit neighborhoods battered by home foreclosures, the spookiest thing this Halloween is the dramatic numbers of empty homes and “For Sale” signs. With as many as 63,453 homes now for sale in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Livingston counties — many of them empty — once-well-lighted houses now sit vacant, and some parents say they’ll be seeking greener trick-or-treating pastures elsewhere. Several of those who stay behind are stocking fewer bags of candy.

Our neighborhood here, like our neighborhood in Fort Wayne, always gets a million outside kids — it must have that magical combination of middle-class stability, maximum density and young children in residence that rings all the cherries. This used to bug me, but doesn’t anymore. Not everyone can be from Leave it to Beaver-ville, and I wouldn’t want to take my kid door-to-door in many neighborhoods, either.

In the meantime, who wants a peanut-butter cup?

(Speaking of which, among the ten thousand irrational food fears my own little girl insists on cultivating is this one: She loves peanut butter, hates peanuts. The other day Alton Brown had a show on peanuts, and demonstrated how easy it is to make peanut butter. I paused it, called Kate into the room, and made her watch how peanut-butter is made: Throw some peanuts in a food processor, turn it on, presto, peanut butter. She watched, and said, “I still don’t like peanuts.” That’s my girl.)

Because I have a lot to do today, short shrift but good bloggage for a lazy Friday:

While I enjoyed this piece on a mathematician who “cracked the code” of the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night,” I wish some editor would have reined in the writer who called it “the most famous chord in rock ‘n’ roll.” Oh reeeeeallly? Want to have that debate over a million beers? I’m sure it can be arranged.

In David Edelstein’s review of “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” he concludes with an unnecessarily complicated question:

Now, I could be wrong about this: Perhaps Rogen is catnip to the ladies, the Daniel Craig of sex farce. But this is not a man who appears to take good care of his body, and the movie doesn’t use his lack of physical appeal as a source of laughs—as Apatow sort of did in “Knocked Up.” The way Smith treats Rogen strikes me as the way he’d treat a young Tom Hanks or Jason Segel of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” or Justin Long (who has an overlong cameo as a gay-porn actor)—the quick-witted nerd who could also be a dreamboat. But when Rogen sheds his clothes and climbs atop the lovely Banks and the bells ring and the fireworks explode, well … Imagine if James Franco played Zack, and Miri was an out-of-shape woman with bad skin and a big honker. Can there be that much of a double standard when it comes to actors’ looks?

Answer: Yes.

Speaking of movies, the trailer for “Gran Torino” is online. This is the Clint Eastwood movie shot in and around the Pointes last summer (while we, ironically, toured Carmel, Calif., Clint’s hometown). The good news: It’s clearly the GP. The bad news: Looks like a fairly crappy movie, i.e. “Dirty Harry: The McCain Years.”

Speaking of McCain, why why why is the campaign doing stuff like this? I mean: Way to court the youth vote, gramps.

Anne Hull stops in at Liberty University to see how the war for McCain is being fought at the insular-right-wing-Christian-raised-in-a-bubble level. (Short answer: Who fucking cares?) Still a good read.

Off to bake cupcakes. Happy Halloween.

Great googly moogly, here it is the day before Halloween and I haven’t bought any candy. Must get some, if there’s any left. Anything other than Circus Peanuts, that is, the sad reject of trick-or-treat bags the world over.

Who am I kidding? Of course there’s candy left in the stores — that’s one advantage of living in an emptying metro area in a deep recession. There’s always inventory. It’s not always the inventory you want, but no one runs out. Yet. That’ll come. For the early warning, you need only travel a mile or two west of my neighborhood and check out our local mall, Eastland in Harper Woods. I walk through Eastland with a feeling of nagging familiarity, with another mall named for a compass point dancing just outside my cognitive lobes…oh, what is it?…Ah yes, Southtown. I can already see, Carnack-like, into its future:

It starts when you go to the mall’s big anchors — in this case, Macy’s, Sears and Target. You normally think of Macy’s as a full-service department store, but you can never find what you’re looking for there. When you ask a clerk, “Is this all the winter hats and gloves you have in stock? This is it?,” they look sad and say, “Oh, we don’t carry a full selection at this location. You have to go to (insert name of mall in more prosperous area).” The Sears is full — and I mean full, crammed, racks-in-the-aisles-full — of oddities like spangled cocktail dresses in some sort of weird polyester that looks like a science experiment and cost $14.99, but the Land’s End turtlenecks are nowhere to be found. Target soldiers on; it’s Target and it cannot fail, at least not this year, but the rest of the mall is a carbuncle on its ass. Management has decided its customer base is 99 percent African American, and every store has a name like Urban Scene and sells ghetto-fabulous gear along the lines of Apple Bottom jeans and those manic-embroidered jackets with the big fur-trimmed hoods, but there’s not a pair of Levi’s in the building.

Wait. Wasn’t I talking about candy a minute ago?

Yes, well. I’m thinking Reese’s Cups this year. I’m only staying open for the first hour, anyway. After that I’m going to a neighbor’s house for Girl’s Night Wine-or-Treat. I’ll leave the remaining candy in a bowl on the front steps with a sign reading, “Please take only one.” Some kid will empty the whole bowl into his bag before I’m out of the driveway. That’s the Detroit Way, and I’m not complaining.

So what did we think of Barry O. last night? I tried to watch it with two sets of eyes — the critical, journalist-who-dabbles-in-video one, and the lizard-brain variety, and the verdict was the same. I wasn’t in tears, but I was impressed. As a piece of propaganda, it was a master stroke. Whether anyone was watching? We’ll see. If I were John McCain, I’d hire John Woo:

Quick bloggage today (LA Mary was having a slow afternoon yesterday and did most of the heavy lifting):

As long as there’s Larry Birkhead, we’ll always have Anna Nicole Smith. Note this fabulous shot of America’s luckiest baby daddy packing up the memento mori for an impending move to the ‘burbs. I was so taken by the pink bubble wrap I was sure it was Photoshopped, but a little Googling revealed the truth: Pink bubble wrap exists. (It’s the antistatic variety, for electronics.)

When Alan bought his shotgun a while back, I said I wanted one of these. It turns out there’s more to love about the makers of The Back-Up: They aren’t afraid to exploit high-profile tragedies for their own profit. It’s the American Way!

Finally, the program for Zombie Night is online.

I’m off to put on my winter cycling tights that I splurged on this year — the ones that make you feel like you’re wearing a big diaper, or 1960s-era maxipad — and punish myself.

I started writing a treatment for a feature-length screenplay yesterday. Why? Hell if I know; it’s hard to imagine a piece of writing with longer odds on ever earning a paycheck than a screenplay. My zombie colleagues have been talking about what it would take to make an ultra-low-budget feature hereabouts, and you can’t start without a script, but that’s not the reason. It just seemed time. I’m not one of those loony fiction writers who just claims to be a medium: “the story chose me to tell it,” etc. But every so often you get an itch, and it needs to be scratched.

Here’s what I like about screenplays, though — the structure. A good script is a trip down a well-traveled road, but every drive is different. Unless you’re Charlie Kaufman or Quentin Tarantino, there are rules of beginning/middle/end that must be heeded. There’s not nearly as much time for meandering; in fact, meanders are strictly discouraged. Scenes need to climb a tidy staircase toward a climax. The plot must be moved along. As a writer, I get far more of a sense of forward motion writing a screenplay than I ever do with just plain fiction, as evidenced by the fact I have one completed feature-length script in my drawer and several shorts, and zero finished novels.

Also, writing scripts helps you appreciate movies. I still remember the night I came home from my rewrite class at Michigan, plopped in front of the TV, and found “The Fugitive” just getting underway on HBO. The class that night had been about the challenge of raising the stakes with every scene, and it’s hard to think of a movie that does it better than that one. Each turn of the action puts Dr. Kimble in greater jeopardy and goads him closer to the climax. Every question the books say a writer must ask and answer — what does the hero want? what is standing in his way? — is evident. My favorite scene is the one where he saves the kid in the ER with the broken sternum. Totally implausible, but so well-acted you don’t notice, and even it raises the stakes, as Tommy Lee Jones is left to consider that this wife-killer he’s chasing risked arrest to sneak a dying kid off to emergency surgery. Not that he says so; you just see it on Tommy Lee’s smart, craggy face.

What I hate about screenplays: The rewrites. It’s like giving birth, then stuffing the kid back in and doing it all over again. Although I must say, my rewrite prof, who was a working screenwriter himself, had a wealth of fascinating teaching material. Did you know that the early drafts of “The Truman Show” had the story taking place in New York City? That Truman was a fat, sweaty creep whom we see having sex with prostitutes? Now recall Jim Carrey making his way through Seaside, Fla., in the opening scenes. That was a movie that had some rewrites, I’d say.

Anyway, I have the first act down. Now comes the hard part: the rest.

Quick bloggage before I drag my lardass off to the gym:

Via Kevin Knuth: Stay classy, Harlan, Indiana! You ignorant putzes.

Richard Cohen on Jane Mayer on you-know-who:

Until two cruise ships steamed up to Alaska two summers ago, the record for the silliest statement by a journalist had been held by Lincoln Steffens, in his time a famous American radical. Sent in 1919 to see how Russia was doing under the communists, Steffens supposedly reported, “I have seen the future, and it works.” In 2007, several conservative journalists got off their cruise ships and met Sarah Palin. They saw the present, and she was a babe.

The cruises were sponsored by the National Review and the Weekly Standard, journals of significant influence in conservative circles. The ships disgorged some top conservative editors and writers, who on two occasions were invited at the governor’s mansion. Almost to a man, they were thunderstruck.

No! Really!?

Who thinks the story of the call-center walkouts is legit? Discuss. I’m off to work my flabby ass.

Michael Pollan was on “Fresh Air” yesterday, and as usual, I was left nodding my head in agreement with everything he said, while simultaneously mistrusting all of it with every fiber of my being.

Yes, our agriculture policy needs a huge overhaul. Yes, we should pursue policies that encourage more food to be grown locally. Yes, the world is not well-served by huge feedlots and monocrop farming. Sure, the White House should have a Victory Garden to set an example for the rest of the country and donate the leftovers to local food banks. Yes, let’s consider the rising cost and toxic fallout of fossil fuels when we consider how government will play its role in the marketplace. Yes, yes, yes.

And yet.

There seem to be a dozen places in Pollan’s stump speech, at least, in which “and then a miracle happens” seems to hover over the narrative. I soon learned that it was linked to the parts where Pollan says, “I’m not a policy maker, but…,” another way of waving one’s hand dismissively while saying, “details, details.” I didn’t hear every single minute, so maybe he addressed this at some point, but the biggest stumbling block to agricultural policy, Pollan-style, is the loss of an essential skill in this country: Cooking. Of course I cook, and you cook, but all you have to do is look at the explosion of “convenience” and other heat-n-serve, half-baked and other food in the grocery these days to know that an awful lot of people don’t. And I don’t know how we make our way away from high-fructose corn syrup and toward unprocessed-and-organic without that skill.

If I’ve told this story before, forgive me, but I always think about it when I think of the loss of cooking skills: My newspaper once sponsored a cooking demonstration, for which I served as the speaker’s Vanna White. At one point we made cupcakes in foil muffin cups arranged on a cookie sheet. She filled the first three and I did the rest. All of hers came out perfect and mine spread out like pan pizzas. She pointed out I overfilled the cups by just a tad, and that tad was enough to buckle their sides. “This is stupid,” I said. “Why don’t we just put the cups in muffin tins, the way you’re supposed to?” Alas, not possible. Reynolds Aluminum, one sponsor of the show, wanted the cups demonstrated freestanding on cookie sheets, because they were aimed at home cooks who owned a pizza pan, but not a muffin tin. Sometime in the last 25 years or so, a muffin tin became as exotic as a brioche mold or a tart pan.

I could tell more stories. A couple years ago I did a business-mag story on the explosion of specialty groceries in Detroit, whose biggest growth area is in pre-marinated chicken, pre-assembled casseroles and other just-add-heat entrees. “My wife doesn’t cook, so we live on this stuff,” said one owner. (P.S. His wife is a stay-at-home mother, which suggests she’s also a real underachiever.) “No one I know cooks anymore.”

“I cook,” I said.

“You do?” he said. “Well, you’re in the minority.”

And I’m a college-educated, middle-class person. We’re not even talking about the poor, whose nutritional status is even more perilous. At least the grocer’s wife is getting decent ingredients; the poor kids are living on Red Zone Mountain Dew and pork rinds.

I suppose Pollan would point out that cooking is easy, that a delicious meal can be assembled from a box of spaghetti, some olive oil, garlic and Parmesan cheese. Of course these skills can be taught. But good luck teaching them in a world where muffin tins are specialty kitchen equipment.

I also break out in hives when Pollan says that “food should be expensive,” as though it’s not expensive enough now, pretty much admitting that he’s advocating a Whole Foods-ification of the marketplace. There’s a winning position, pal. Ride that pony all the way to Washington, whydontcha?

So, bloggage:

Obama goes off to hold his dying grandmother’s hand, and you know someone’s gonna have a problem with that. Roy has the rundown.

When we were taking breaks from making our zombie movie, of course a few of us dared speak of the Holy Grail — making a real movie, and how it might be done well on a very small budget. Then I stumbled across a trailer for this movie, which appears to be a big stinkin’ p.o.s. shot in SEVENTY MILLIMETER, entirely financed by corporate America. Has anyone seen this? And how can I get Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, American Airlines and MasterCard to finance my movie?

Off to the gym, folks. I neglected it all last week, so it’s time to pay the piper.