But what’s my motivation?

A zombie consults with his director, October 2008.

Open thread to remember Paul Newman, who died yesterday.

Sometimes nothin’ can be a real cool hand:

That’s “the end of the world as we know it,” for you non-REM fans. Wouldn’t fit on one line.

I don’t know about you, but when a day opens with an account of the Treasury Secretary on bended knee before the Speaker of the House, continues with clips of the Republican vice-presidential candidate sounding like Miss Teen South Carolina, lurches on to another bank failure and it’s not even 9 a.m. yet, well…that’s not a good day. One should consider going back to bed. I did. Decided, instead, to read a movie review. Hey, it’s Friday. Is Spike Lee still the most overrated director since Steven Spielberg? Check:

The role that black troops actually played is an important story, and might have been a powerful one in Spike Lee’s hands. Indeed, a sense of that power can still be gleaned from the DVD version of Rachid Bouchareb’s “Days of Glory,” a magnificent French-language film that played here two years ago, and told essentially the same story with different skin shades — four Algerian soldiers in the French army fighting bravely against the Nazis for the nation they love while their fellow French soldiers treat them like scum, and their casually despicable racist officers use them as cannon fodder.

But the Bouchareb film allowed the awful ironies of the situation to speak for themselves, while Spike Lee keeps hammering them home with agitprop fervor and clumsy actors playing racist officers as crude cartoons.

Yep. Is Roger Ebert still his No. 1 fan and water-carrier? Hmm, three stars, but I know it’s in here somewhere…oh, OK. Here it is:

In a sense, the scenes I complain about are evidence of Lee’s stature as an artist. In a time of studios and many filmmakers who play it safe and right down the middle, Lee has a vision and sticks to it.

You might have gathered I’m not a fan. Fortunately, Spike Lee’s movies are easy to avoid and, in the grand scheme of things, not much of an irritant. However, one of the great periods of Hollywood flowering came during the Depression, when our parents, or our grandparents, escaped from their dreary lives an hour or two at a time at their local movie house. Now that it looks like we’re in for a sequel to the Depression, it might be nice to have a few decent movies in town, too.

(Well, there’s always “Nights in Rodanthe,” in which, I read, “an elusive band of wild horses shows up for a symbolic gallop on a beach” [WSJ]. Can’t! Wait!)

I’m invited to a small debate gathering tonight at JohnC’s house, but given that we don’t know if the debate is actually happening, maybe not. Hey, John — maybe you should make it a Depression-themed gathering. Have everyone bring a donation to a soup kitchen, or a cake made without flour or eggs. I hear things are tough all over. Mrs. Fuld (nee: Mrs. Lehman Bros.) is even selling her art. I hope Uncle Sam has the guts to seize the checks.

If you guys are looking for something to discuss in the comments, maybe everyone could take a stab at describing an economy in which the credit lines are frozen. Hardly anyone has done so publicly, or if so, they say, “You wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage or car loan.” Since most people are, at any given moment, not shopping for either one, it makes it easy to turn the page and say, “not my problem.” I don’t think most people know how credit works, how lines of credit and short-term borrowing affects, literally, every segment of the economy, how business relies on short-term credit to stock their shelves and longer-term instruments to install new equipment, etc. So Econ 101 for any dummies who might stumble through here and need the education. I figure it can’t be any less useful than more ranting and gloating.

So, bloggage?

“It really is true what they say: Those who do not study the past get an exciting opportunity to repeat it.” — Jon Stewart, national treasure. It gets good at the one-minute mark:

Well, at least you’ll be able to get some decent pot around here without risking your neck.

Finally, when was the last time you heard someone say, “I thought I’d be wearing a jet pack by now. Where’s my jet pack?” Well, it’s here!

Have a good day and weekend. I’ll be casting zombies.

Here’s a line I’ve been waiting my whole life to use: Sorry I’m late today. I was polishing my screenplay.

Which is the truth. It appears “The Cemetery Precincts” is a go, and if we all lived in the same town, I’d invite you all to be zombie extras, but at the moment, finding locations is a more pressing concern. It’s true that everyone wants to be in showbiz, but with the real, paying showbiz all over Michigan at the moment, the no-budget hobbyist has to go to the end of the line. With the state currently offering filmmakers the highest rebate on money spent in production in the country, you can’t swing a cat without hitting Drew Barrymore smack in the face. Alan came across a sizable shoot on a bike ride the other day; they’d taken over a mansion on Windmill Point Drive down in the Park. I suspect this is “The Prince of Motor City,” a retelling of “Hamlet” set in the auto industry.

Anyway, they had streets blocked off. We’re just looking for a few places we can shoot guerrilla-style.

It was just as well that I was thinking of low-budget zombies and how to explain an uprising of the undead this weekend, because every time I thought of events in the real world, I felt like clawing someone’s throat out. At one point Saturday, as I waited at the gate for my flight home from St. Louis, watching CNN Headline News, we all watched a story about the federal bailout. A clip from our president featured him looking even more the dumb Irish setter than usual, and when he said, “It turns out the markets are interlocking,” lacing his fingers together for emphasis, I thought, How proud Harvard Business School must be of its most successful graduate. And I said, louder maybe than I’d intended to, “BullSHIT.” Up and down the row at the gate: Titters. Granted, maybe they were laughing at the crazy lady talking to the TV, but I like to think that if I’d risen from my seat, climbed up on it and said, “To the nearest federal building! Who’s with me?!” I’d have gotten a few followers. I don’t think Washington is quite aware of how incandescent the fury is out here in Deep Pockets-ville, and what will likely happen as a result, especially if stories like this…

The financial crisis that began in the United States spread to many corners of the globe. Now, the American bailout looks as if it is going global, too, a move that could raise its cost and intensify scrutiny by Congress and critics. Foreign banks, which were initially excluded from the plan, lobbied successfully over the weekend to be able to sell the toxic American mortgage debt owned by their American units to the Treasury, getting the same treatment as United States banks.

…and this…

Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it. Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

…become widely known and discussed. I’m also thinking that indemnify-the-CEOs stuff is a non-starter, too. But then, I’m an extremist; I advocate stripping them of their assets, and then their clothing, and sending them on a national tour of, say, Springsteen-size arenas, there to be chased through the rows and struck by audience members who will, further, jeer at their shriveled weenies. That sounds like justice to me. Or at least a good start.

You’ve probably seen this, which was going around this weekend, but if not, read and feed on the sweet, pure anger.

St. Louis was fine, if anyone wondered. After spending Friday night talking, I went over to my friends’ house to meet their new dog, who had moved in only hours before. She’s a skinny, undersized golden rescued from a puppy mill who nevertheless seems to be adjusting well. At eight months she’s unlikely to get too much bigger, but she’s got the blonde silky coat thing going on, and that’s all you can ask from a golden. Name’s Frankie. She came from an all-female litter, and they all were given men’s names. I called her Francesca, Francine, Francie, etc., which is what I do with my loved ones. My own pooch has more diminutives than a Russian novel, enough that it’s a wonder he answers to his own name at all. (Of course, he doesn’t anymore, but that’s because he’s deaf.) Saturday was spent touring the city — such a prosperous-looking place. I can’t figure if that’s because the local economy is strong or my eye’s been Detroit-ified; I suspect the latter. But the inner-ring neighborhoods are blossoming with money, and it was heartening to see. Not everyone wants to live in a subdivision. It’s nice to see a few reaching critical mass.

Not much bloggage today, but a question: Who let America’s aging sweetheart, a star beloved by all who know her, one possessed of the rare talent of sincerity and the ability to laugh at herself, wear this horrible dress to the Emmys? It doesn’t matter how skinny you are — past 70, a woman should wear a sleeve.

Happy Monday to all of you.

I talked to JohnC yesterday, who also lives in the Pointes, and he said he was about to send me an e-mail passing along the latest civic rumor: That soon-to-be-ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick had closed on a house in Grosse Pointe Shores, at a two-digit number — i.e., close to the lake — on Oxford Road. John’s a reporter too, and we batted around the possibility this was true before deciding it probably wasn’t. He doesn’t have that kind of money (the house is $1.5 million), no one would lend him that kind of money, leaving the city of Detroit would send the wrong message to the constituency he hopes to lead again one day and, finally, it just didn’t pass the smell test. It dovetails a little too neatly with some Pointers’ need to believe everyone wants to live in the 48236, and of course it rings the lizard-brain bell about the Threatening Negro come to disrupt the peace in Whiteville.

The Pointes haven’t been all-white for a couple of generations, but they’re pretty white. There are affluent African Americans here and there, but not in any kind of significant numbers. A black family of the Kilpatricks’ demographic and education wouldn’t raise eyebrows, but Kilpatrick himself would raise them, believe me. It’s hard to describe how spittle-flecked the loathing of him is in the suburbs, which always seemed a waste of energy to me. While it’s true his administration has been a disaster, a virtual carnival of pocket-lining and perjury, the specific objection to him suggests things would be different, and better, with a new mayor, and that I’m not sure of. What’s going on in Detroit, what was going on before Kilpatrick and will continue later, isn’t administration as much as it’s looting. It’s a brutal comparison, but to me you could change the name Kilpatrick to Duvalier, and get a pretty rough parallel.

Anyway, the media checked out the rumor and confirmed our suspicion: No sale.

Let’s deal further in ethnic stereotypes, shall we? I was struck by this photo from the New York Times today. This man is evacuating ahead of Hurricane Ike:

Story here. His name is Juan Rodriguez, which I assume in a Texas Gulf Coast resident suggests Mexican heritage, and he owns a chihuahua. Does your dog share your ethnic heritage? Do dogs share any part of their human equivalent’s ethnic stereotype? It’s hard not to see Deutschland’s personality in its German shepherds and Rottweilers, but what France has to do with French bulldogs remains a mystery to me — although, now that I think about it, a French bulldog is generally more fashionable than its English equivalent.

Ah, Friday. Time to clean the house. Any bloggage? Not much, but this:

Roger Ebert, my hero. Are all New York Post writers thugs? Or is this just indicative of the mood at overstuffed, overhyped film festivals?

Have a good weekend, all.

UPDATE: Speaking of chihuahuas, I need to add a link to this, one of my favorite commercials ever. (Embedding is disabled, alas.) It’s from the short-lived Viva Gorditas campaign, and I loved it because, in the late 1990s, it referenced a whole lot of things that were already far out of date and way over the heads of the target Taco Bell demographic, i.e., teenage boys. The classic banana-republic, ruler-who-speaks-from-a-balcony tropes — the red banners, the cheering crowds, the tinny speakers mounted on a pole, the old-fashioned microphone, Che’s beret — just cracked me up. I notice this version is 22 seconds, an odd length, and I recall one that ended with an image right out of a Soviet May Day poster, with the dog leading the cheering crowd down a dike or embankment, with farm fields spreading out to the side, while three jets pass in formation overhead. How on earth did they sell that one to corporate?

When we were in Argentina, and were taken through Evita’s Casa Roja, I longed to step out on the balcony, cup my hand in a wave, and call out, “Viva Gorditas.” Because that’s just the sort of ugly American I am.

Although it doesn’t quite rise to the level of this election year’s Pledge of Allegiance moment — did Barack Obama call Sarah Palin a lipsticked pig, or did he not — I’ve found the examination of this even more minor issue fascinating.

That is: Is the fact Palin got the first passport of her life only last year significant?

Roger Ebert says yes (original link dead; Free Republic copyright violation substitutes):

And how can you be her age and never have gone to Europe? My dad had died, my mom was working as a book-keeper and I had a job at the local newspaper when, at 19, I scraped together $240 for a charter flight to Europe. I had Arthur Frommer’s $5 a Day under my arm, started in London, even rented a Vespa and drove in the traffic of Rome. A few years later, I was able to send my mom, along with the $15 a Day book.

You don’t need to be a pointy-headed elitist to travel abroad. You need curiosity and a hunger to see the world. What kind of a person (who has the money) arrives at the age of 44 and has only been out of the country once, on an official tour to Iraq? Sarah Palin’s travel record is that of a hopeless provincial.

As you can imagine, this column has ignited the knuckle-draggers, including James Lileks, who does his best imitation of a minor character from Sinclair Lewis with this zinger:

We have cathedrals; they’re just younger.

I suspect I know why Palin never traveled: Children. She married young and every few years she’s had another kid coming along, and if there’s anything to make a woman say, “You know, maybe another year in Vegas isn’t the worst thing in the world,” it’s the idea of making a trans-Atlantic flight with a small child. Also, and this is harder to quantify, but my guess is, if you live in a place like Alaska, the priority for your time off is pretty simple — sunshine and warmth — and Arizona or Florida is where you go, maybe Hawaii. Or it’s entirely possible Ebert’s suspicion is correct, and she really has no curiosity about the rest of the world. In which case it’s not exactly a campaign issue, but it is interesting.

I remember hearing the same thing about George Bush, and reacting the same way. Bush, son of privilege, a man who had both the money and the time, reached his late 40s without having traveled more widely than North America. (Like all good Texans, he’d been to Mexico.) If this makes me an elitist, so be it, but if you’ve got the resources, you should travel, and travel outside the country. When the Powerball tops $150 million and people around me spin lottery dreams, I don’t even have to think about it. I’d take the money and hit the road, and I wouldn’t come home until I got tired of it. And then I’d hit the road again, and I’d do the sort of travel I’ve only fantasized about: A month in Shanghai, summer in St. Petersburg, beaches in Corsica. India. Japan. Brazil. The Galapagos. Australia. Africa from top to bottom. And that’s only the beginning.

Without making this a discussion of Palin’s provincialism or lack thereof, where have you traveled and where would you like to travel? What was the biggest surprise of the trip? And do we think the dollar will ever recover enough to make travel outside the U.S. possible for the middle class again? (If the answer is no, name a place where you can still get a lot for a little, because my feet are itchy to be on the road again. I thought I’d take Kate to Europe by now, but when the cost is X thousands of dollars, plus 40 percent currency-exchange adjustment, plus 26 percent VAT, the answer is, “Maybe next year.”) And finally, why is it important to leave your country once in a while (and how do you explain that to a pinhead who think it’s about touring museums and cathedrals)?

And if you’re not in the mood for that, here’s some bloggage, an amusing piece from Slate: Walter Sobchak, neocon. Yes, with clips from “The Big Lebowski.” What’s more delicious?

Me, I get to interview a Rockette today. Envy me, world.

The one-year promotion for Comcast’s digital phone service includes two premium cable channels thrown in, so we now get HBO, Showtime and Starz and you know what that means — we now get eleventy-jillion channels with nothing to watch, but with all their on-demand crap, there’s usually something worth spending 112 minutes with on a Saturday night when you’re already tired.

So it was that I found myself watching “Black Snake Moan” by myself. Alan didn’t even make it to the opening credits, which come at about the five-minute mark. At every five-minute point afterward I considered joining him, but there was something compelling about this Southern Gothic train wreck. Writer/director Craig Brewer is the luckiest man in Memphis. First “Hustle and Flow” and the Oscars, and now Samuel L. Jackson playing the lead in his tale of a broke-down southron bluesman who chains Christina Ricci to a radiator?

Why does he do this, you ask? Well, Christian Ricci has “the sickness,” which in medical terms is known as Dick Deprivation Syndrome. Not five minutes after French-kissing her soldier man goodbye as he heads off to Iraq, this after a full-tilt horizontal farewell worthy of such a transition, her eyes roll back in her head and she falls to the ground and runs her hands all over herself and the next shot is of her getting rogered from behind by a big black drug dealer. You find yourself thinking, why doesn’t someone give this girl a vibrator, which would save her a lot of trouble, but thinking is not what this movie encourages. It’s supposed to be a fable, but keeps popping into realism when it suits it, and about the only thing that keeps you watching is the fact Ricci plays two-thirds of the movie in a teensy T-shirt and a pair of white panties. (It was good to see white panties acknowledged as the true pinnacle of sexy underwear. Thongs and lace have nothing on tighty whities, IMO.)

Oh, and the chain, too, which is what Jackson wraps around her waist and secures with a padlock so he can cure her of her sickness, but not in the way you’d think, but with…something. There are some heart-to-heart talks and a lot of blues and a certain amount of Bible-reading, but mainly it’s the standard script about two wounded souls who cure one another by really listening, and also by dancing in a hot Saturday-night juke joint while Jackson plays the guitar.

The nymphomania device kept misleading me, as it seems to beset Ricci at random, like epilepsy. One minute she’s fine, and the next her eyes are fluttering and she’s grabbing 13-year-old boys and all you can think is, well, this is a guy who made a movie about a misunderstood pimp, after all, and maybe that’s the way women are in Tennessee. Who knows? I’ve known a few sluts in my life, and they all made a man buy them a drink or two first, but maybe things are different in the south. I would have liked it better if he’d had the courage to take it all the way, rather than throwing in an explanation for everyone’s affliction and a ridiculous redemption ending, but oh well.

Jackson runs a small vegetable farm, as does our NN.C community member Coozledad. I kept thinking what a better movie it would have been if he’d been the one who found a half-naked woman lying in the road, and the imaginative ways he might have tried to cure her of her sickness. If nothing else, the dialogue would have been better.

Quick bloggage today:

Laura Lippman’s serial started this week in the NYT magazine. It’s a Tess Monaghan story, and it’s off on the right foot. Chapter one, here.

Quick tech question for someone who knows: There was a guy at the Dirtbombs concert Friday night with something I’ve never seen before. It looked like a horizontal mount for seven count ’em seven identical digital cameras — Canon PowerShots, I b’lieve. He’d hold it up, they’d all twinkle their autofocus lights and fire as one. What the heck was it? And please don’t say “a horizontal mount for seven cameras.”

UPDATE: J.C. Burns and kind commenter DanG appear to have the answer: It’s how you get the ‘bullet-time’ effect…dollying dimensionally around a frozen or slo-mo image. The rig was similar to this, only wider and with an antenna-like thing above it that could have been a microphone. Think of an old-timey photographer’s flash bar; it was like that, only with cameras instead of flash powder. But I think they’re right — it’s for capturing that Matrix-y effect.

Off to bed, and I’m sleeping in tomorrow, so don’t call.

Whatever you do, please don’t send me an e-mail first thing on a Monday morning with this line:

Anyone up for the challenge of making a sophisticated Zombie short? Nancy, any new plots occur to you?

This is from the director of our 48-hour film-challenge short. And here I thought I’d get some work done today. Suggestions, anyone? So far I have a zombie “Mamma Mia!” and a zombie “Recount” (“McCaaaaain has no braaaaaain…”), but that’s it. I may need a bike ride for this one.

My sense of Biden as an underwhelming choice passed quickly. I only had to think: The man whom he will replace is Dick Cheney. That made it all better, somehow. Foreign policy expertise = a plus, particularly given the wreckage the current model is in. Remember, folks — look beyond the fence.

As you can see, folks, it’s Monday and I got nuthin’. Spent the weekend trying to put the house in order and mostly failing. The start of the school year — mandated by law to be after Labor Day — seems as though it will never arrive, and yet, I don’t really want it to. It’s been a good summer, and I’ve enjoyed having my little kitten around. Alan had a far more interesting weekend, having seen the following on his afternoon kayak trip yesterday: A 300-pound woman and “a guy who looked like Napoleon Dynamite” sharing a tiny inflatable boat, cruising slowly around the mouth of our marina, and she? Was topless. “She had a tube-top thing, pushed down below all the folds,” Alan reports. “I wonder if maybe they were putting on a show for me.” If so, he…well, “enjoyed” isn’t the word. “Noted the effort,” maybe.

See why I don’t want summer to end?

So let’s skip to some good ol’ bloggage, eh?

From Sunday’s NYT, a long read that’s worth your time, about the struggles of a Florida science teacher to not just teach evolution, but to really get his students engaged with it. It’s an endeavor that is nothing short of heroic — David Campbell seems to be one of those teachers people remember on their deathbed — and equally frustrating:

“Can anybody think of a question science can’t answer?”

“Is there a God?” shot back a boy near the window.

“Good,” said Mr. Campbell, an Anglican who attends church most Sundays. “Can’t test it. Can’t prove it, can’t disprove it. It’s not a question for science.”

Bryce raised his hand.

“But there is scientific proof that there is a God,” he said. “Over in Turkey there’s a piece of wood from Noah’s ark that came out of a glacier.”

Mr. Campbell chose his words carefully.

“If I could prove, tomorrow, that that chunk of wood is not from the ark, is not even 500 years old and not even from the right kind of tree — would that damage your religious faith at all?”

Bryce thought for a moment.

“No,” he said.

The room was unusually quiet.

“Faith is not based on science,” Mr. Campbell said. “And science is not based on faith. I don’t expect you to ‘believe’ the scientific explanation of evolution that we’re going to talk about over the next few weeks.”

“But I do,” he added, “expect you to understand it.”

Jon Carroll dissed rude cyclists a few weeks ago, and has been hearing about it since. Today, a cyclist puts into words what underlies my policy of judicious stop-sign running:

Another, somewhat calmer letter on the entire matter from Gene Eplett: “Think motivation. Think momentum. Cars and pedestrians pay nothing, or nearly nothing, for their momentum. For cars it is simply a matter of which pedal to push, brake or gas. For pedestrians, it is a matter of speed, or lack of it. A turtle doesn’t mind stopping frequently either, because momentum simply is not an issue.

“Bicyclists, on the other hand, expend a lot of effort getting up to speed. Cranking up the momentum every single block, and then giving it all up at every single stop sign, gets old really fast. So, whenever there is any question whether to stop or not, such as when there is little oppositional traffic at stop signs, or anywhere else for that matter, (s)he, understandably, doesn’t stop – doesn’t give up his or her hard-won momentum, that is to say. After a while, if one bikes all the time, a pattern (or habit?) gets established. That’s what you and the complainers are witnessing.”

Zombies on bicycles! It could work!

Back in a bit.

Most weekends I wouldn’t choose “American Teen” at my local multiplex, but there’s not much opening in August and, as you Hoosiers know, there’s a local angle. Nanette Burstein’s new documentary was shot in Warsaw, Ind., close enough to Fort Wayne that the high schools play in the same conference. I had to see how this school of “the region,” as journalists call the area they don’t particularly want to cover, came across on the big screen.

The good news: You recognize Warsaw immediately.
The bad news: You recognize Warsaw immediately.

I don’t know why you go to documentaries — and box office receipts show that you and I are the only ones who do — but I go to learn something I didn’t know already. I like a doc that surprises me, takes me someplace I’ve not yet been, shows me something I didn’t know, or shows me something I did know in a new way. For years, the story of the American high school experience has been that it’s tough, it’s hard, it’s an experience you never forget, but at the end it’s all OK and you head out into the world a stronger person, no matter if you were a jock, a geek, a social, or — you get the idea.

And that’s pretty much what “American Teen” was, too. In this year-in-the-life examination of senior year, there is a jock, a geek, a social/prom queen, a misfit and a heartthrob, and we watch them interact for a year. There was a certain amount of drama — will the jock get a scholarship? Will the prom queen get into Notre Dame? Will the geek get into the Guinness Book of World Records for the worst acne/haircut combination of the century? — but no part of that was really in doubt. Because I saw “The Breakfast Club.” So did Burstein, evidently:

I suppose this is necessary for the marketing; audiences are happiest when they know what they’re getting into, right down to the last scene. But it got on my nerves after a while, especially when so many things were left on the table, unexplored. The role of parents, for instance, nearly all of whom, in this movie, were monsters. OK, not monsters. But steeped in awfulness — the rich girl’s doctor father, the jock’s Elvis-impersonating father, the misfit’s fearful and parochial non-supporters. When the rich girl retaliates with vandalism against a student-council member who dared defy her — and on the life-or-death matter of the prom theme, yet! — her father’s only reaction (that we see) is to tell her her biggest mistake was getting caught. The Elvis impersonator tells his son if he can’t get a basketball scholarship, it’s off to the Army. Poor kids.

Roger Ebert and other critics have pointed out Burstein’s suspiciously amazing luck with her camera, turning up with just the right no-name kid’s phone mic’d when the significant call comes in, trailing along on the vandalism trip to see the Homecoming Queen spray-painting FAG on the windows of a house, and I agree it’s a bit too pat to be believable. I also wanted to see more about the extras, like the kid whose house got painted. A girl e-mails a topless photo of herself to her boyfriend, and within days it circulates throughout the entire school (helped along by the prom queen, a bully nonpareil) and all we see is one scene of her looking off-camera and weeping a few picturesque tears of regret as she reveals her hurt with a surprising lack of affect.

But it all works out in the end. You knew it would. When college-acceptance time rolled around, and the parents of the mean girl hand her a thick envelope from Notre Dame, my heart sank. She pretended she didn’t know what it was until she opened it and read the good news, whereas everybody in the theater was already saying, “She got in!” as soon as they saw it. Everyone who’s applying for college knows the significance of thick and thin envelopes. And so the premier religious college in America welcomes another sinner, one with a thick streak of cruelty and superiority. But her dad is a legacy; was there ever any doubt?

Three stars.

(Best high-school documentary ever: “Hoop Dreams.” Just my $.02.)

Just a bit of bloggage today: The waste of space that is one of the highest-paid sportswriters in America, in which he goes to see the youngest athlete in the Olympic Games, marvels at how young he is, and finally, as usual, makes it All About Mitch. Contrasted with a truly interesting Wall Street Journal piece on “finishing technique” in swimming, which manages to be both informative and interesting.

And finally, a note: Over the last three years, I’ve been privileged to make an occasional virtual trip to my old house in Indiana, thanks to a blog kept by one of the new owners, Melaine Schreiber. I watched as they tackled the projects I lacked energy for — stripping carpet, refinishing floors and woodwork, updating the kitchen, re-tiling the bathroom. And I watched Jay, the baby Melaine brought to the closing, grow into a toddler and then a big boy. I always thought our house had good luck attached to it. When we moved in, there was a bottle of champagne in the fridge, left by the previous owners. I made sure we left a bottle when we moved out. I wanted to keep the karmic thread going, or whatever.

That was an illusion, as luck frequently is. Six months ago persistent fatigue led to a terrifying diagnosis for Melaine — T-cell lymphoma — and she died yesterday. There’s a word for a world that robs 4-year-old boys of their mothers, but I don’t think it’s one I want to use at the moment. Farewell, Melaine:

Not enough time! Eleven minutes to squeeze in a post! What shall we do? Start speed-typing:

Got a call from my pal Dr. Frank yesterday. We’re old friends, further joined by the fact both of us queered on our jobs at the same time and left Fort Wayne for new horizons within a few months of one another. He is something of a camera hog, a habit that would be intolerable in anyone else but is made charming by the fact he is, well, charming. His name is Dr. Frank Byrne, and you longtime M*A*S*H fans (TV show only) might remember Dr. Frank Burns, Larry Linville’s character, is a resident of Fort Wayne. (Fort Wayne will always be shorthand for Podunk for a certain sort of screenwriter, and I can’t really say they’re wrong.) Anyway, Dr. Byrne’s cornerstone photo on his glory wall is a grip-and-grin of him and Larry Linville. Also up there: Grip-and-grins with the ZZ Top guys and Felix Somebody, lead singer of the Young Rascals. (If I had time, I’d look it up. Something Italian.)

Anyway, he calls yesterday to say he’d heard from an old pal, who saw “CSNY: Deja Vu,” at the Traverse City Film Festival. “And Frank,” the pal said, “you’re in it.”

He is, apparently, interviewed at a CSNY concert at Milwaukee summerfest in 2006. Now I have to see it. And I couldn’t even tolerate the trailer. I haven’t been a fan of that band since “Four-Way Street,” a record so bad my sister gave it to me a week after buying it, and that’s when double albums cost real money.

But loyalty to friends trumps all. The frosting to this story is, the clip featuring Dr. Frank and his family was used on the Ebert & Roeper TV-review show, whatever it’s called, so there’s always a chance it’ll turn up somewhere else and I won’t have to watch the fat, bald remains of Stephen Stills for two hours, but you never know.

OK, off to the gym with three minutes to spare. New On the Nightstand for those of you who follow these things. I have a busy day, so nothing more until late this afternoon or, more likely, tomorrow. I have the feeling three-quarters of you are on vacation anyway.