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.

Later update today, folks — got an action-packed morning. In the meantime, a little video entertainment for the troops. Yeah, I think I’m going to see it:

UPDATE: Sorry guys. I don’t know how the closed-comments thing happened. Open now.

Time I went to bed last night: 1:10 a.m.

Time the next-door neighbor’s home alarm — a klaxon horn mounted on the outside of the house, 40 feet from my pillow — went off, not due to an intrusion but to someone forgetting to turn it off before going out for morning coffee: 6:10 a.m.

You have a nice day, too.

So you can guess the mood I’m in this morning, on a day forecast to be 92 degrees at its peak, with the usual oppressive humidity. Sorry, Dexter, but I don’t think I’m going to be attending the Red Wings victory parade today. Although the idea of a nice long nap on the ice might sound pretty good by then.

There are those who are energized by parades and crowds, and those who are not. I’m in the latter group, which is unusual, because I’m a classic Myers-Briggs extrovert. But crowds frequently send me into a funk; who are these awful people, and are any of them living near me? I’m likely to think. And do they have exterior home alarms?

I think I should go back to bed. Enjoy Lance Mannion’s take on “Weeds,” here. Did anyone see “Swingtown,” and if you did, what did you think? And here’s a writer’s trick: When all else seems inadequate, try a lede like this:

Let me be blunt: “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” is the finest post-Zionist action-hairdressing sex comedy I have ever seen.

The Boston Globe allegedly did it first, when it described “Shakes the Clown” as “the ‘Citizen Kane’ of alcoholic clown movies.”

Back to bed. Back, probably, later.

It is finally spring here in Michigan, and we’re trying to make our space a little nicer. The enormously expensive back-strip landscaping is fleshing out nicely, and we’ve added a couple bird feeders. Of course this attracts not only the wrong birds — if I wanted mourning doves, I’d have put on a funeral — but squirrels. My experience firing a shotgun last week leads me to fantasize about more interesting target practice, preferably on those little bastards. The other day I wondered idly what they might taste like.

It turns out squirrel cookery is in Alan’s immediate bloodline. His parents used to go hunting together, and sometimes brought home a bag of them. “I remember my mom would boil them, and then fry them,” he said. Alan’s mom was a humble cook with a limited repertoire, but I give her points for guts and pluck for even trying to cook a squirrel. (Although, to be sure, boiled-then-fried sounds positively vile.) Turns out I’m not the only one giving this critter some thought:

(Squirrel) meat is selling faster than butchers can get it, not least because it is currently nesting season. Ever since Kingsley Village Butchers in Fraddon, Cornwall, began offering grey squirrel two months ago, it has shifted up to a dozen a day.

That’s from the Telegraph. The British can be very strange.

The story goes on to reveal the astonishing price English butchers are fetching for “tree rat:”

At £3 to £4 for one, the shop-bought variety is hardly an obvious answer to keeping the lid on an escalating grocery bill.

Jeez. At current exchange rates that’s almost $7 per squirrel. Alan and I split a one-inch Delmonico from time to time, which at current prices costs us around $14. And for that we can get two squirrels? The dollar is weak, but please.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Via Nervous Rod Dreher, a profile of Marston Hefner in GQ magazine, teenage son of you-know-who:

Marston doesn’t actually live in the Mansion—not anymore, not since his parents split up in 1998 and his mom, the blond Playmate Kimberley Conrad (January ’88), moved into a more modest house that adjoins the property. He’s 18 now, about to graduate from high school, a tall and lanky kid with heavy brows, watchful, slightly sad eyes, and a complexion that says “I spend too much time playing video games.” He has none of his dad’s swagger or mothlike attraction to the bright lights of Hollywood—which you could attribute to a young man struggling to define himself in opposition to his famous father, or to the fact that they just don’t spend that much quality time together these days. Marston doesn’t make it over every day. He’s usually here on Thursdays, though, for…backgammon night?

Nervous Rod thinks the kid is a slack zero, because of course GQ is the last authority in all things, and because he disapproves of Hugh Hefner. I’m a parent, too, and I had a different reaction: Marston Hefner is turning out about as well as can reasonably be expected, a typical child of a parent who blots out the sun, his odds in life perhaps 50-50 — his money will provide him cushion and opportunities, while the essential weirdness of his upbringing and its attendant pitfalls will try to take him down.

And while I’m always happy to see a freelance writer getting some work, I’m less fond of hit pieces against people who don’t deserve it, and while the hit wasn’t aimed at young Marston, he’s certainly collateral damage in passages like this, in which the writer interviews Hef pére:

Did you ever try to explain the fact that, just after the separation, you started dating seven blond women?

“Not really. What is there to say?”

There was never any conversation about monogamy or marriage?

“What kind of conversation would that be?”

What kind of signal does that send?

“I think the signal that it sends, quite frankly, which the boys liked, was that instead of somebody replacing mama, I dated a bunch of girls.”

After about forty-five minutes, Hef appears to be losing steam. I turn off the tape recorder, and he rises from the couch. As he does, he rips the kind of fart that one does not even attempt to hide from. No one in the room blinks.

News flash: Hef was a lousy father, and 82-year-old men fart unexpectedly. Wow. I bet Ronald Reagan was the picture of refinement at that age, too. (And, to be sure, not much of a father, either.)

Let’s just hope they had better taste in picking the mothers of their children.

Nice David Edelstein appreciation of Sydney Pollack, actor.

OK, Friday. I’d looked forward to a long, relaxing bike ride today, and in the last half-hour three e-mails arrived that will see to it I’m desk-bound for half the day. Better get to work. Enjoy your weekend, and I’ll see you back here after.

A p.s. to yesterday’s story of John and Sammy’s house: You can’t see it, but underneath that tree is their nearly new Prius, and I’m told it survived the crash with only a few cosmetic dents. The massive oak’s trunk fell directly on the reinforced passenger compartment, something to remember the next time your uncle says he wouldn’t be caught dead in one of those death traps.

And it was a big tree:

OK.

You hardly have to be a grizzled veteran of internet culture wars to know this story would be red meat for the blogs:

Marche Taylor’s prom night experience wasn’t what you would call “the norm.” That’s because instead of a night of dancing and hanging out with friends, the Madison High School senior ended up in a confrontation with school officials and escorted out in handcuffs. Officials said her dress was inappropriate for the prom.

I urge you to check out the video. “Inappropriate” doesn’t really describe it. The photo of Marche being rousted, taken as she passed under the hotel’s lit-up entrance, looks like nothing so much as a Vegas hooker bust.

This story got less attention:

Jasmine Donald calls herself an “over-the-top person,” so it’s fitting she rode to her prom last week in a chauffeur-driven Rolls Royce Phantom.

Donald, 18, wanted to make a bold statement. And for $6,000, she did, thanks to a gift from her grandmother.

The Belleville teen stepped from the $340,000 luxury car into a crowd of paparazzi snapping shots of her walking into the once-in-a-lifetime event.

At least for a night, Donald led the lifestyle of the rich and famous — complete with hired photographers.

Both are pretty depressing, for any number of reasons. The first girl obviously has no one in her life to tell her one doesn’t go to a high-school dance dressed like Li’l Kim, the second no one to say a $6,000 gift from one’s grandmother should be spent on college, not a goddamn posse of fake paparazzi taking your picture. Even a car would last longer. (Hint to others considering this insane idea: When buying an experience from a jar, ask yourself, “Will the actor/participants in this laugh at me behind their backs?” If the answer is yes, save your money. Also: When you spend a hefty four-figure sum to have something be “all about me,” you need to reexamine your priorities.)

I guess it’s to be expected that a couple of shallow teenagers — and many other shallow teenagers, whose stories don’t make the paper — see their high-school proms as some sort of low-rent Oscar night. (Aided and abetted, I might add, by newspaper reporters who helpfully describe them as “once-in-a-lifetime” events. At the moment I am having a once-in-a-lifetime Tuesday morning. You don’t see me booking photographers.) They’ve been seduced by the cult of celebrity, ever detail of which is a filthy lie. The New Yorker had a great piece last week on the fashion world’s undisputed master of Photoshop, Pascal Dangin. How great is he? This great:

For a charity auction a few years back, the photographer Patrick Demarchelier donated a private portrait session. The lot sold, for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, to the wife of a very rich man. It was her wish to pose on the couple’s yacht. “I call her, I say, ‘I come to your yacht at sunset, I take your picture,’ ” Demarchelier recalled not long ago. He took a dinghy to the larger boat, where he was greeted by the woman, who, to his surprise, was not wearing any clothes.

“I want a picture that will excite my husband,” she said.

Capturing such an image, by Demarchelier’s reckoning, proved to be difficult. “I cannot take good picture,” he said. “Short legs, so much done to her face it was flat.” Demarchelier finished the sitting and wondered what to do. Eventually, he picked up the phone: “I call Pascal. ‘Make her legs long!’ ”

Pascal Dangin can make your legs long. But you need to read The New Yorker to learn that. I doubt poor Marche Taylor does so.

And to think, just last week I was feeling sorry for Mischa Barton and her cottage-cheese ass. Screw her. At least she got a few gift bags out of being a celebrity.

So let’s make this a mostly I Hate Celebrities/No Photoshop bloggage roundup today:

Who had to sit behind Sarah Jessica Parker at the “Sex and the City” premiere in London yesterday? My sympathies. (Psst, SJP: That thing was meant for the horses outside.)

And, as usual, the Daily Mail is on the We Point It Out Because We CARE beat, re: SJP’s hands.

OK, a late start today, maybe some improvement later, but for now, I gotta get to work. Carry on.

It’s been so busy this week I didn’t get to tell you about Tuesday night, when I took a day off work and went to Royal Oak for May’s Mitten Movie Project, a monthly screening of short films. Our DFC class project was in it, and it got a few chuckles where it was supposed to, so I was happy.

But the highlight (for me, anyway) was a short by Mike Eshaq, “MT* Crib*: Arab American Style,” which was hysterical. (I’m obscuring the name of the cable channel’s well-known show in the title, just in case they have robo-goons out there looking for copyright violators. In the Q-and-A, I asked Eshaq how he got permission to use their name and graphics and he said, “Um, I didn’t.” So let’s keep it our secret.)

Anyway, a trip to Ali’s crib to see “how they kick it in East Dearborn” followed the template down to every jerky push zoom and quick-cut edit. The actors were all friends, it was a low/no-budget production, but it worked. The first big inside-the-house laugh featured Ali’s mother yelling downstairs in Arabic to make sure no one is sitting on her living-room couches. Talk about comedy as a unifying force; is there a single ethnic group in America where women don’t protect the living room with their lives? In the Snoop Dogg episode of this very series, there was a sign outside the living room: THIS IS NOT A KICK-IT ROOM. (There were signs everywhere in Snoop’s house, in fact. NO EATING IN THE STUDIO and CLEAN UP AFTER YOURSELF. Sometimes having an entourage is like being a Cub Scout den mother, I guess.) It wasn’t clear plastic furniture covers, but it was close.

The featured attraction seemed to be this; we watched all three episodes. The filmmaker wasn’t there — he’s off in L.A. establishing his showbiz career — so the stars came to the Q-and-A. I didn’t really have any questions for them; mine were all for the filmmaker, and they boiled down to “how the hell did you find room in your budget for a freakin’ helicopter,” but that was answered by someone sitting near me, who replied, “His parents are really rich,” and that was that.

The director of our little student production was there, and asked if I’d be game for a weekend filmmaking challenge associated with the Detroit-Windsor film festival next month. Here’s how it works: You assemble a team, and on Friday you’re given four elements — a location, a genre, a line of dialogue and a prop. You have until Sunday to turn in a short film (OK, video) incorporating all four, which are then screened for the crowd and judged for fabulous prizes that usually boil down to a couple hundred bucks. It actually sounds kind of fun. A veteran of one of these described his most recent experience; I forget the location, but the rest were action/adventure, “I’ll have to get back to you later” and a hat or something. “Don’t plan on getting much sleep,” he said. Deadline is a drug, as we all know. We might have to do this.

If nothing else, the making-of featurette will be a great video for NN.C.

So, a little bloggage:

Mitch Albom, man of the people, whines that the Wings are doing really well in the Western Conference NHL finals, and yet still there are empty seats at the Joe. Bad fans, bad! At last count, a hundred or so commenters had reminded him that the state is in a recession, and major-league sports tickets might be considered a luxury under such circumstances.

The Poor Man is back with a while new comics series — The Amazing League of Pundits. And it’s hilarious.

Something I didn’t know was happening: A few thoughts about eBay’s decline.

The scary thing about this new movie, Noise? Is that I identify so strongly. If I had a rocket launcher, some son-of-a-bitch with a gas-powered blower would die…

That’s it, folks. I have a doctor’s appointment in an hour to discuss a flare-up of my plantar fasciitis, and I think I’ll impress him with my commitment to fitness by riding my bike there. At this point, it hurts too much to walk.

The New York Times, with its unerring knack for finding the stupidest people in any non-New York venue it chooses to cover, finds a few in Kokomo:

“We hold onto a lot of traditional values,” said Brian L. Thomas, 39, as he bought a cup of coffee along the courthouse square here on Wednesday. “Saying you’re ready to change is probably not the best or only thing you would want to say around these parts. Frankly, we want it to be like it used to be.”

Many of the two dozen voters interviewed in this central Indiana manufacturing city of 46,000 expressed queasiness over the notions of change that both Democratic candidates have proudly pledged elsewhere. Though residents bemoaned economic conditions that have taken away thousands of factory jobs and given the state the 11th-highest rate of foreclosures, they also said they worried about doing things — anything — very differently.

“What are we going to change to?” asked Ron O’Bryan, 58, a retired auto worker who said he was still trying to decide which Democrat to vote for in the May 6 primary. “You mean change to some other country’s system? What do you think they mean?”

Jeremy Lewis, a 28-year-old window washer, said simply, “Old-fashioned can be in a good way.”

“We want it like it used to be” — that’s Indiana in a nutshell. They could put that on the license plates. When Ron O’Bryan still had a job in the factory, I guarantee someone in town was mourning the good ol’ days when you made your living the good way, on a farm, and spent the evenings shellin’ peas and drinkin’ lemonade.

Other things Kokomo has found amusing: Old Ben, the world’s largest “preserved” steer (photos here; he doesn’t look that big), and, of course, the world’s largest sycamore stump. Perhaps if Obama presented himself as an attraction — world’s first black presidential candidate to be a serious contender, maybe.

I’ll tell you one thing, however: All three of these guys got the Obama e-mail, and believe every word. Maybe spending all your time in North Carolina is a better idea.

OK. All this talk of celebrity sightings yesterday reminded me of a thread on Metafilter Monday, about “Expelled,” the latest attempt by the religious right to condemn Michael Moore’s tactics by aping them. The argument bores me, but I was struck by a few comments about Ben Stein sightings in the wild:

I once saw Ben Stein in an airport, wearing a suit and some kind of hipster foot apparel. There weren’t very many people around, and as a journalist who has met my share of very famous people, I generally know how not to behave around them. But as I’d been amused by Ben Stein’s Money — the game show that turned anti-Semitism into a laff ryot — I gave him a little nod and smile when I walked past him. He whipped his head away with an absolutely exasperated look, as if I’d been a paparazzo from TMZ. Puh-leeze.

For a long time, the editorial department in Fort Wayne paid for a subscription to the American Spectator, and I used to read it with a mounting sense of wonder. (It’s where I learned the word “poofter,” in fact; R. Emmett Tyrell turned homophobia into a laff ryot.) One of my favorite features was Ben Stein’s Diary, which was always exactly the same from month to month. Ben would go about his life, much of which at that time involved acting in commercials and making personal appearances based on being that-guy-from-Ferris-Bueller. He always wrote of his life as an ongoing delight, how lucky he was to fly first class and be fed delicious food from craft services, how people would come up to him in airports and say “Bueller…Bueller” and it was just so wonderful to have these great fans. Who could possibly object to people in public telling you they’d seen you in a movie? It was just so, so great to be Ben Stein, etc. etc.

Glad to know there was no end to his lies, either.

Another recurring theme in Ben Stein’s diary was his overwhelming love for his little boy, Tommy, whom he and his wife adopted late in life. He called him “my little angel.” Tommy was terribly spoiled, but it pleased Ben to spoil him; he liked being rich and being able to fill Tommy’s life with gimcracks and geegaws, and so he did. When I first read about “Expelled” it occurred to me that Tommy should be a grown man by now, so I wondered where he might have ended up. Hmmm:

Ben Stein writes in the current November/December 2001 issue of The American Spectator that “Our son, God love him, has basically stopped going to school…he’s surly, and desperately unhelpful…He has gotten so self-obsessed and self-referential, so utterly unconcerned about anyone but himself, he’s a walking time-bomb for self-demolition. So, he’s going to have to go to boarding school.”

This distraught, clearly loving father writes that upon his return from a recent trip:

“Tommy is in his room sitting at his fancy computer…playing his goddamned Everquest, the worst thing that ever happened to him, a literal curse, a drug that eats away at every drop of energy and initiative. It’s a sort of online ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ and he loves it beyond description. He can stay on forever…He is simply a demon at it. And we are the demon facilitators because we are so happy he’s not using marijuana, we keep letting him play his evil Everquest.”

That was around 2001. In a 2005 entry, it appears Tommy has gotten over Everquest and moved on to drag-racing on public streets with his dad:

Tommy wanted to race again. We did. Again, I peeled, and he didn’t. This time he got way ahead of me. Alas, moments later a police cruiser appeared behind him with its lights flashing. The car pulled Tommy over and I followed them. But the police, staring at me intently, motioned to me to stay in my car. They then went over to Tommy. Then they came to me. “We’re just giving him a warning, because we know who you are and we like you,” said a policeman. “But you should talk to your son. He refuses to admit he did anything wrong.”

Well, he learned from the best, Tommy did.

Trivia note: Ben Stein’s Diary was among the sources plundered by White House plagiarist Tim Goeglein. I’d love to know which part.

Oh, and by the way, a letter to the editor in Newsweek this week:

In your April 14 Periscope interview with Ben Stein (“You Say You Want an Evolution?”), one of Stein’s responses contained a serious error: He said, “There are a number of scientists and academics who’ve been fired, denied tenure, lost tenure or lost grants because they even suggested the possibility of intelligent design. The most egregious is Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian, the editor of a magazine that published a peer reviewed paper about ID. He lost his job.” Sternberg has never been employed by the Smithsonian Institution. Since January 2004, he has been an unpaid research associate in the departments of invertebrate and vertebrate zoology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Dr. Sternberg continues to enjoy full access to research facilities at the museum. Moreover, Stein’s assertion that Sternberg was removed from a Smithsonian publication is not true. The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington is an independent journal and is not affiliated with the Smithsonian.

Randall Kremer, Director of Public Affairs
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.

Bloggage? Oh, a little:

Village Voice gossip Michael Musto dug up a SFW nude photo of Charlton Heston. Not a bad one, either.

WDET, our local public-radio affiliate, had a fascinating story last night on this guy, Orville Hubbard, Dearborn’s racist mayor. Never lost an election in his life, never met a non-white person he wanted to live next door to. A truly vile man, a politician to the bone. They played some sound recordings of the guy, which included a gem where he called Irish Catholics “the worst,” because “they’re so prejudiced.” You can listen here.

The Comics Curmudgeon gets off quite a few zingers in any given week, but his one about the Family Circus is the best.

And with that, pals, I’m off to work, the gym, Trader Joe’s, Target… The list is endless, but most destinations will be reached by bicycle. Envy me, world — I’m preparing for peak oil.