Alan made a baldfaced, shocking statement the other day. He said Al Pacino was a lousy actor. He said he’s nothing but an arm-waving scenery-chewer, and then he dropped a bomb: “Face it, he hasn’t been in a decent movie since ‘The Godfather.'”

Well.

That’s some pretty strong meat there. His IMDb entry, admittedly written by some fanboy, begins, One of the greatest actors in all of film history… and no one has posted jeering rejoinders. This wasn’t an in-depth debate — I believe the context was whether to indulge me in my 4,592nd viewing or partial viewing of “Heat” or to keep clicking the remote — but I got that feeling of itchy doubt that suggested he might have a point. So I stopped reading the biography and clicked over to the filmography.

Alan wasn’t entirely correct; some of the best performances of Pacino’s career were made after “The Godfather,” but not long after. Two-thirds of the ones that made his bones, IMHO — “Panic in Needle Park,” “Serpico,” “Dog Day Afternoon” — were after the first “Godfather.” But by 1979 he was already showing us what could happen to Michael Corleone without a good director telling him to dial it down by 54 percent on take two: “…And Justice For All,” an embarrassment; “Cruising,” ditto; “Author! Author!,” a steaming pile; and, of course, the bad performance next to which all other bad performances must stand and be judged not-even-close, “Scarface.”

Then came, what? “Sea of Love,” in which we’re asked to believe Ellen Barkin is driven into a state of cross-eyed lust at the very sight of him. (I remember their hot coupling scenes, this blonde goddess of steam and the little homunculus.) “Glengarry Glen Ross” was a brief return to the early promise, and then came the headfirst slide into caricature: “Scent of a Woman,” “The Devil’s Advocate” and, God help us all, “Any Given Sunday,” in which Oliver Stone not only indulged the worst instincts of his star but encouraged others in the cast to play along. I remember watching that on the couch with Alan. True to Stone form, it was not only too long, there was another 15 minutes after the big climax, where the wounded-warrior player gets his redemption. I went to bed after the redemption scene, and as Alan crawled in half an hour later, I asked what happened.

“Al Pacino gets another job, and boy, was Cameron Diaz mad,” he said. Poor Cameron had to play every scene at 11; I guess she couldn’t even mellow after they won the big game.

I liked “Heat,” mostly because it had De Niro, Saint Val of the Chiseled Jaw, and a decent turn by Ashley Judd, and the precious Ted Levine and Diane Venora; even Tom Sizemore did work to be proud of in that thing. But now all I see are the scenes when Pacino gives it 110 percent; you want to tell him, “Keep your dignity. Stop yelling so much. Small men should command with authority, not volume, or everyone thinks they’re an asshole.” But noooo.

“Angels in America,” OK, the exception that proves the rule. He’s capable of so much more that when he sucks, it’s his own fault.

My sister saw Pacino on Broadway, in “American Buffalo.” “We were close enough that his spit went all over us when he got cranked up,” she said at the time.

I guess Alan wins this one. Make a contrary case, or nominate your own entry. I have to work on a newsletter.

Today’s question: How the hell did Michael Medved get his job, and how the hell does he keep it?

Really. His Wikipedia entry, for whatever it’s worth, paints the outlines of a real hustler, a guy who’s made artful leaps from one rock to another in the course of making his living, ranging from political speechwriting to novelty publishing to this to that. He hosted “Sneak Previews” after Siskel and Ebert left, a little like being the guy who followed Greg Kinnear on “Talk Soup,” but never mind. At some point, he seems to have crossed that invisible line in today’s media world, the one after which you cannot fail.

We’ve all known people like this, ambitious souls who never seem to do great work, or even good work, but always fail upward. Medved’s like that. He had the advantage of basing his career in film criticism, which doesn’t take a lot of specialized knowledge to do a halfway-OK job. As long as you’re reasonably telegenic and good with a catch phrase, it doesn’t really matter if you know what you’re talking about. You’re just another guy with an opinion. I mean, Richard Roeper is a film critic. How hard can it be?

(To my film-criticizing friends, I don’t mean for a second that the work isn’t serious. It’s just easy to be good-OK or good-enough. Greatness is as rare as it is anywhere.)

Medved brings something extra to the table: His “values.” I welcome someone who can talk about art and culture from a religious perspective, if only more of them did. I always find Amy’s thoughts on TV and movies interesting; she writes from an intellectual Catholic POV, puts some sweat into the effort, and never takes the easy way out. In the end, you have to have something to say other than, “God told me this is wrong, and so it is.” More important, you have to respect the art, to understand that it’s art, not propaganda, and judge it accordingly. But Medved plays dirty. Remember his crusade against “Million Dollar Baby”? He felt moved to mount his soapbox not because the story took a turn he disapproved of, but because (or so he said) he felt it was advertised dishonestly. He thought the trailers promised something uplifting, and it turned out to be a big downer about quadriplegia. He was only thinking of those clueless moviegoers who might be fooled into spending $10 on something that wasn’t “Rocky” with girls.

But even knowing what a duplicitous fellow he is, even I was shocked by this column in USA Today. Perhaps shocked by its honesty; he seems to be dropping all pretense of being a critic, and promoting himself straight to Minister of Cinema in the Republic of Gilead:

Why would Hollywood release a controversial feature film about alleged Mormon terrorists of 150 years ago while all but ignoring the dangerous Muslim terrorists of today?

For the same reason “Hollywood” made a movie about the sinking of the Titanic and not a fatal wreck at the Indy 500, about the 1980 Olympic hockey team and not the 2003 Detroit Tigers, about a rat that cooks and not an elephant elected to Congress, I suppose — because that’s what the movie’s about.

But to answer the question honestly would mean a one-paragraph column, and Medved has space to fill. And so on he goes, accusing “Tinseltown” of having too much “respect for Muslim sensibilities” and that “Hollywood’s reluctance to portray Islamo-Nazi killers remains difficult, if not impossible, to explain.” (Islamo-Nazis? Is that what we’re calling them these days?)

I guess Medved left “Syriana” before George Clooney got his thumbnails pulled out by a member of Hezbollah. Maybe “Black Hawk Down” passed him by. “Three Kings” was probably too easy on ’em. I understand.

He makes the case that Americans shouldn’t be making movies about American religious terrorists as long as there are still movies to be made about Islamic religious terrorists, and they shouldn’t be making movies that make Mormons look bad as long as there’s a Mormon running for president. OK. Medved has a background in screenwriting, connections to vastly wealthy people who share his feelings and a nationwide soapbox to publicize his efforts. What’s he waiting for?

Seriously. Wouldn’t you think a person who’s made his living writing about the movie business would have a clue or two about how it works, starting with the fact there is no “Hollywood” monolith that decides which movies will be made? (Or is there some committee I’m unaware of? It’s possible.) If Medved and his buds want to see movies about bloodthirsty Ay-rabs, the Screen Actors Guild has quite a few swarthy types in their files, and I’m sure they could find plenty for the cast.

You know this rant. I’m bored already.

Here’s something, though: We’ll see movies about Islamic terrorists, eventually. And I predict the best ones will be made by Muslims. They’ll certainly have the deepest understanding of the culture, societies and institutions that breed Islamic extremism, just as an American might feel they’d bring something to a story about American religious extremism. Just sayin’.

Do I have bloggage? Only this:

I’m so old, I used one of these. Filed stories on it, although I preferred the next generation, with the tilt-up screen, so you could see more than four lines at a time. I think it had a 128-baud modem; you stuck the phone into two giant cups on top.

I don’t know why you read the newspaper. I read it to fan the always-flickering coals of irritation at the continuing degradation of the language of Shakespeare and Lindsay Lohan.

From a weekend review of “Skinwalkers”:

The werewolves ride into town on motorcycles, sporting dark sunglasses, shaggy but mostly human except for pearly white, canine teeth.

There shouldn’t be a comma between “pearly white” and “canine.” I guess if I looked through my Strunk & White I could find the precise reason, but I play by ear and I say no. That started me thinking about how you use a comma when you have multiple adjectives in front of a noun. I would write, “MaryMarv* lived in a big blue house,” but also “MaryMarv* is an arrogant, elitist asshole.” I’m sure both are correct, but I don’t know precisely why. Some nice English-teaching nun in the readership, tell me. (Here’s my case: There’s no natural pause between big and blue if you read it aloud, and there is between arrogant and elitist. As I said, I play by ear.)

The next case was more irritating. The story was about a teacher at a local school who’s had some public problems with her temper of late:

Those two incidents earned her a one-day suspension and rebuke this year from D. Allen Diver, then the school’s principal.

“Unfortunately, these patterns of berating individuals have happened far too often during my six years at South,” Diver wrote July 11. “I am continually forced to diffuse situations that you have created because you sometimes appear to speak without thinking or have sent e-mails that are inflammatory.”

Educators are sometimes the most enthusiastic misusers of the language, but this one drives me crazy. It’s “defuse,” not “diffuse,” D. Allen Diver, please. I see this all the time. You defuse a touchy situation the way you defuse a bomb. You diffuse a bad smell by fanning a magazine in the bathroom before you leave. My Oxford American says:

USAGE: The verbs diffuse and defuse sound similar but have different meanings. Diffuse means, broadly, ‘disperse’; defuse means ‘remove the fuse from (a bomb), reduce the danger or tension in.’ Thus: Cooper successfully diffused the situation is incorrect, and Cooper successfully defused the situation is correct.

Of course, the reporter was quoting from a letter in a personnel file, but still. Either correct it or ‘sic’ it. (For continued friendly access to D. Allen Diver, I strongly recommend the former solution.)

Refreshed by curling my lip in scorn at the peons still employed in newspapering, I can then go about my day with a song in my heart.

There wasn’t much written about the gay debate Thursday. I know it was called something with “human rights” in the title, but I will think of it as the gay debate, since it aired on Logo, the gay cable channel, and featured gay questioners, and had the gayest audience ever, including the inevitable elderly lesbian couple, one with gray mullet. I had it on in the background while I worked, and have a few thoughts, none especially deep, but I thought it was sort of sweet and earnest — everyone had that “I can’t believe this is happening…to ME!” thing going on. You don’t see a lot of amateur television anymore, especially when presidential candidates are concerned (all Democrats, and I missed the part where they explained why). And the Logo production was decidedly amateur. The set was sort of homemade looking and some of the questioners looked just gobsmacked to be there, and yes I’m talking about you, Melissa Etheridge, and the post-game interviews were conducted by a young man who looked like he got out of high school five minutes ago. But that gave the whole production charm. Really.

Hillary sort of wiped the floor with everyone else, which she’s been doing consistently this season, although Obama and Edwards held their own. But perhaps only on Logo would you hear someone, when asked for a reaction afterward, say, “She looks really good in coral.” By the time the wrap-up turned to somebody I’d never heard of for the “lighter side” reaction, it was probably inevitable that Dennis Kucinich would be called “adorable. …like someone born in a flower.”

As a native Buckeye, I’ve thought of Kucinich a lot, but never like that.

Speaking of Ohioans, caught “The People vs. Larry Flynt” Friday night on cable. It holds up after a decade, and may have even improved with age. I was stung anew at the injustice Milos Forman perpetrates in the name of narrative coherence — he relocates Flynt from Columbus to Cincinnati. So, so wrong. Ohioans know what I’m talking about. Columbus never embraced Flynt, but it tolerated him better than the Queen City, where he was vigorously prosecuted by Simon Leis, one of those crusading, stick-up-the-butt prigs Hamilton County specializes in. When the movie came out, I wrote an essay about living in central Ohio when Larry was in high cotton, and I’d like to rewrite it now, and throw in all the stuff I had to leave out because of the family-newspaper thing. But it needs a news peg. I’ll save that for when he dies, or brings down another speaker of the house.

Apologies for lameness today. I had a more substantive, linky post in progress, and then discovered Alan had recommended the subject to one of the paper’s columnists, so I’ll step aside and let the people who provide our health insurance go first.

Do I have bloggage? Oh, a little:

I’ve been reading all I can about the current Wall Street meltdown, understanding maybe 80 percent of it. My econ training is apparently all obsolete now, although maybe not entirely. (One conclusion I’ve reached: If the Fed bails these dildoes out again, I’m becoming an anarchist.) If you’re finding it baffling — investment vehicles based on risky mortgages? ARMs as perpetual fee-generators? — you’re in good company. Slate provides a 101-level explainer, in plain English.

The last rat jumps from the sinking ship of the Bush administration. Tim Goeglein’s prolificacy of late, explained? Maybe he’s auditioning to be the News-Sentinel’s culture writer. Or maybe he was just killing time in his office while the wallpaper peeled off.

Discuss.

* name changed to spare the feelings of regular commenters named Mary. I don’t think we have a Marv yet, but I expect one to show up any minute.

All this talk about the deaths of Ingmar Bergman and Michelangelo Antonioni left me feeling a little bit like, oh, a Buckeye. It’s not that I don’t respect the memories of people whose lives were changed by the work of great directors; when Roger Ebert writes about seeing “Breathless” for the first time, I feel like I’m right there with him, sharing his popcorn.

It’s just that my formative movie experience, the one that blew my hair back and left me stunned in my seat and really — I am totally serious — changed the way I looked at movies forever was somewhat different:

I will always, always, always love you, Billy Jack.

I can’t tell you how much praise I read about “Half Nelson” before finally getting it at Blockbuster the other night. Ryan Gosling got an Oscar nomination for his performance, and the thing picked up a whole bunch of other nominations and statues. I was really looking forward to it.

It’s the story of a talented inner-city teacher who is hiding a secret that is revealed about 10 minutes into the script and also in the trailer, so here it is: He’s a drug addict. A crackhead, specifically.

Well. It’s not that it wasn’t good, exactly. I mean, if you like feature films that move very slowly, are shot entirely in ShakyCam and don’t have a whole lot of talking, you’re going to love this. But I remembered a lesson from my screenwriting class. Our teacher said your story won’t be satisfying if the main character doesn’t change, and then we discussed degrees of change. It’s more believable for a character to change from A to B (flawed person starts to understand how his behavior affects others, and makes a move in the direction of changing; see “You Can Count on Me”) than A to Z (flawed person sees error of ways, makes 180-degree turn and is reborn as a totally different person; see “Tuesdays With Morrie”). In “Half Nelson” — and I really don’t thing this counts as a spoiler — Gosling changes from A to…A.1, say. He doesn’t get all the way to B. He shaves. This seems to be the big change.

I found it fascinating to watch, but oddly unsatisfying, for exactly that reason.

Because I think my tastes in pictures are at least small-c catholic, though, I took Kate to see “Hairspray” this afternoon. It was too long by about 20 percent, and John Travolta couldn’t fill Divine’s girdle, but otherwise, it wasn’t a total waste of time for a mom and a kid to see on a rainy afternoon. And I caught the John Waters cameo, which was amusing and appropriate. Did you?

This will be the final post for this week — another mini-hiatus planned, this one to scramble some deadline eggs. I might pop in from time to time, but no more that that until Monday. Hey, it’s August. It’s what all the cool kids are doing.

Mitch Harper advised his readers to visit a farm market over the weekend. I did, but I was going to anyway. I usually go to the Eastern Market downtown, but Saturday decided to offset a little carbon and ride my bike to the West Park Farmers Market, down in GPP. Now that I’ve lived here a few years, I realize the mistake of not buying in GPP, Grosse Pointe Park, or just “the Park” around here. That’s where my people live, but hey, it’s only a couple miles down Kercheval. The market, alas, is less wonderful. It’s festive and market-like, but with only a few sellers of actual produce — everyone else is hawking bottled gourmet sauces, handmade jewelry and that sort of thing. I bought four lovely-looking Georgia peaches, took them home, bit into one and immediately spit it out. It had that interior mealiness that suggests weeks spent in cold storage, with a dark hint that perhaps it wasn’t even a Georgia peach at all, but maybe one of the loathsome California variety.

Note to California readers: I’m sure the peaches you buy are pretty good, and I expect some defense of home-state produce, so save your protests. The lousy California peaches are all exported to the Midwest, where they sit in supermarkets looking like the platonic ideal of peachiness, truly beautiful specimens. If only they weren’t rock-hard and inedible. I used to buy them and put them in paper bags on my counter, waiting for ripeness to arrive. Ripeness = Godot. When a lovely peach sits for two weeks and can’t soften even incrementally, something very strange is going on.

That was dispiriting. The tradeoff in being able to ride a bike to market is always variety — the Eastern Market has the critical mass of customers to support such local treasures as Mushroom Man, Organic Egg Guy and the vital-to-our-emotional-well-being Gratiot Central Market, for all — and I mean all — your meat needs, but still. It’s six more days to next Saturday, and I really wanted some Georgia peaches.

Even more dispiriting was that the bike ride sapped my energies, and the rhinovirus came in for the kill. What’s less exciting than a summer Saturday night spent at home with a worsening cold? This must be why we pay big bucks for digital cable. Nothing particularly good was on, but hey, “Summer of Sam” was coming around on the Retro channel. I have two major allergies in today’s multiplex — Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee. Where critics see (and say, endlessly) “gifted,” “accomplished” and “national treasure,” I see only “overrated.” But now that Spielberg’s made a movie I can not only stomach but actually enjoyed (“Munich”), it seemed time to see whether my immunity had changed with Lee. “Summer of Sam” it was, then. And the short answer is? No. He still sucks*.

Overdirected? Check. Half-baked script? Check. Casting of capable actors in parts that hogtie their talent? Check. Obscenity-strewn** dialogue scenes that go on three times as long as they need to, until you hold your head in your hands screaming stop stop someone please make it stop? Check. Oh, and wait — is there a Message Stick lying around, and is it used to beat on us at regular intervals? Certainly, yes. Finally, did Roger Ebert ladle an astonishing dollop of praise over the whole mess, as he has over pretty much the whole Lee catalog, proving everyone has his blind spots? Yup. Am I saying there wasn’t one good thing about it? No. I liked Adrien Brody, and I thought the “Baba O’Riley” montage was OK, but then, it’s hard to go wrong with “Baba O’Riley.” So there.

(*”S.O.S.” was made in 1999, so I acknowledge “still” may not be accurate. One always hopes for growth in an artist. I only saw part one of the Katrina thing, and it was OK, but it didn’t make me want to watch parts 2, 3 and 4.)

(**As for “obscenity-strewn,” I yield to no one in my tolerance for rough language, but there’s a point at which it becomes annoying, distracting background noise, especially in an overlong scene, because you want to shake the characters and say, “If you’d stop saying ‘fuck’ so often you could maybe get to the point, you fucking asshole.”)

Enough about my little problems. Bloggage!

Evil, evil, evil, evil, stupid: A surgeon general’s report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration’s policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

A declaration: I don’t give a fat rat’s ass about Hillary Clinton’s cleavage — I have my own to worry about — but evidently others do. Thousands of words were spent in the last week discussing whether the junior senator from New York did or did not display uncontrovertible evidence that yes, she does indeed possess a pair of breasts, but by far, the stupidest of all came, fittingly, from Dan Quayle’s former aide Lisa Schiffren. She, mind you, also doesn’t give a fat rat’s ass about Hillary’s cleavage, although being a Republican wife and mother, she puts it more delicately: I overcame my desire to comment on this tempest earlier this week. But then she does — it’s “legit” to talk about the big C, she opines — and then ends with one of those sorority sister, it’s-for-your-own-good-that-I’m-saying-this lemon shake-ups:

But let’s be real here. The fact is, Hillary was wearing a fairly low cut summer top. She was not displaying cleavage, as the shot on Drudge indicates. Someone else wearing the same outfit might have done. But Hillary Clinton does not have cleavage to display. Period. Indeed, Hillary never forgave her mother-in-law, Virginia Kelly for pointing this out decades ago to the young Bill Clinton, a cleavage man if ever there was one. So…it’s OK to discuss something that doesn’t exist? Thanks, girlfriend.

And now, because I believe in saving the most important, depressing, vein-opening stuff for after the trivial, whiny, vein-opening stuff about bad peaches, crappy movies and cleavage, “Inside the Surge,” excellent photos and video from Guardian photographer Sean Smith, embedded with U.S. Marines in Iraq. Just about as depressing as you’d imagine. But required viewing.

I’m not quite ashamed to say I watched the hot-dog eating contest on ESPN Wednesday. I’m especially grateful that the runner-up, Takeru Kobayashi, covered his mouth during his “reversal” in the final seconds, and spared a national audience that. Although he did take his final bow with vomit or something like it down the front of his shirt, and I notice he and the winner didn’t shake hands.

Competitive eating is all the rage these days among reporters looking for the last unexplored, non-sexual subculture safe for a family newspaper. I guess it rings all those obesity-epidemic bells with editors, but speaking as one who tuned in during the introduction of contestants, I can tell you more were skinny or average-size than fat. Both Joey Chestnut, the winner, and Kobayashi, the six-time defending champion, are guys I could easily knock down in a sumo bout. The trick to winning seems to be in technique, not capacity — how wide you can open your jaw, how much you can relax your throat muscles, how much you can suppress your gag reflex. Also, how much you like wet hot dogs; arrayed before each contestant was a battery of cups, presumably filled with water. Each dipped their dogs before stuffing it into the piehole, I suppose partly for lubrication and partly to collapse the bun. There are few things I enjoy in summer more than a good hot dog, but this was just vile. (And not because one of the sponsors was Heinz. KETCHUP DOES NOT BELONG ON HOT DOGS. There will be no further discussion.)

You’d think a place like Michigan would be the cradle of competitive-eating stars, but I guess not. One of my favorite Jim Harrison lines: “Only in the Midwest is overeating seen as heroic.”

I fished almonds out of a bag of granola while Alan peeped through his fingers. I kept expecting something like the 2006 Preakness. But Kobayashi thoughtfully covered his mouth.

The older I get, the less I overeat, which is sometimes hard to reconcile with my size, but believe me, it’s true. And it’s not because I’m getting the middle-aged heartburn thing, either; I still can eat pretty much anything I want without paying a price in anything but thigh circumference. Maybe it has to do with the gradual ebbing of the hormonal tide. I’ve yet to meet a man who can fully understand what it’s like to be female and in the grip of a PMS-induced potato-chip destruction mission. (I always say, “You know how your dick makes you do stupid things? It’s like that.”) I hope it has to do with refinement, with being happy with a little quality rather than a lot of crap, but that might not be it, either. In the long run, it might just be the beginning of the downhill slide toward the Earlybird Special. All the things our bodies do to embarrass us — sweat, exude, crave — diminish with age, or are transmogrified into one area (hair sprouting in places it doesn’t belong). Say what you will about inappropriate sexual urges, but at least it’s proof you’re alive.

You ever notice how many contemporary libido scolds get that way in their 40s? Laura Schlessinger plowed a wide swath in her well-photographed youth, then decided it was her mission in life to condemn all younger women who did the same. The blood cools, and the memories of what it was like to be 25 — they fly right out the window.

Speaking of hormones, I was talking to someone at a party last week, another ex-newsie, who asked if I ever missed it. I said the only thing I missed was the newsroom, and we both agreed there was no better place to work than a bullpen city room, back before fear and flop sweat took over the business. He told a funny story about his northern California paper, which had not one but two transsexuals-in-transition working there, and the uproar it caused — mostly over the which-bathroom-do-you-use issue. He said one night he had to phone in a story, late, and the dictation was taken by Michelle, formerly Mike. It all went well until he signed off with “thank you, sir” and unleashed a torrent of estrogen-induced recrimination about respect and honoring choices and blah blah blah. And all my friend wanted to do was point out that the hormones change everything but the voice, and he just forgot.

Good times.

Well, we seem to have gone to stream-of-consciousness today, haven’t we? Let’s blog it up a little:

A Chicago Tribune critic/blogger asks his colleagues, “If a movie ever made you walk out, what was it?” I don’t know if I ever have — once I’ve paid the money, I’ll sit through just about anything — but I do have a few aborted-rental movies, including “Zoolander” and “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.”

This one’s for the Detroiters — ever wonder what the original Pistons logo looked like? Mitch Harper dug up one from the days of the Zollner Pistons, the current club’s predecessor. That guy looks like he’s quick on his Chuck Taylors, eh? Hilarious.

One of the advantages of being French is that natural slimness, born of cigarettes, genetics and aerobic rudeness. The new French president prefers to maintain it with exercise, which leads his constituents to rise as one and shout, “Quel fromage!”

Back to work. Have a great weekend.

The New York Times home section provides the same service as the Wall Street Journal’s features section — it opens a window onto the unique problems of wealthy people. A recent example: How difficult it is to get specialized service personnel to work at your remote vacation house. As the man says, I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.

Take today, for instance: Return from vacation. If you dare. Yet another piece on how hard it is to find good help these days, in this case housesitters. It turns out that once you turn the keys over to these temporary caretakers, they do all kinds of stuff you don’t want to know about. They drink your wine. They wear your underwear. And they take videos of your 37-pound cat and post them on the internet.

The nerve.

The cat video is disappointing, by the way. You really don’t get a sense of its size.

However, if you wish to mock, I recommend the whole story. There are some amusing anecdotes, the best about a rambunctious terrier named Taffy, a sadly deceased cat and the solution, which shouldn’t surprise anyone: The old switcheroo.

How was your Fourth? Mine was fine. Played a little, worked a little, saw “Ratatouille.” It was stunning; I was near tears over an animated rat and his search for artistic expression. Overheard outside the multiplex: “It’s like I felt emotionally attached to those robots, dude.” (Someone must have seen “Transformers.”) In the evening, we attended some friends’ fireworks show. Overheard after the fireworks, as the neighborhood resounded with mortar fire: “Listen to that. It’s like the people are giving it back to Bush for the Scooter Libby thing.” It featured illegal ones, safely deployed, and set me to thinking about mid-week Fourths, the ones that don’t stretch easily around a neighboring weekend. The work week moves at half-speed, and the Fourth is a feast of idleness. On one of these, years ago, a friend and I blew up a cake. The cake was for sale in a deli where he worked. Spectacularly ugly, decorated in a patriotic theme, it was unsold at closing time, so the owner told my friend to take it home and try to enjoy it. We did. We put a mystery explosive in it, one of those fat round things the size of a tennis ball, set it out in the back yard, lit the fuse and ran.

The explosion was deafening — evidently the firecracker was a version of those really loud things that signal the beginning of a municipal show. It blew a shallow crater in the yard, and needless to say, there wasn’t a scrap of cake to be seen anywhere.

And now it’s back to work, just in time for the weather to clear up and make me feel bad about staying inside. Maybe I’ll take the laptop to the deck.

Back later, perhaps.

I’ve always found medicine interesting, but also, how you say, gross. I shadowed a general surgeon once, and watched him remove a gall bladder (pre-laparoscope days), repair a hernia, do a breast biopsy and one other procedure I can’t recall. It left two overwhelming impressions, the first of tenderness for the patients, whom I only saw after they were completely anesthetized. Laid out on their tables, their heads tipped to one side, skin stained with Betadine, their most intimate body parts exposed, it was almost unbearable to watch them. I wanted to cup their cheeks and kiss their foreheads, tell them they’d be OK.

The other was that all that crap about the “delicate hands of a surgeon” is just that — crap. “Nancy, would you like to see the appendix before I take it out?” the doctor asked. (Apparently it’s routine to snip the appendix anytime you’ve got the abdomen open.) I said OK, took my look, and watched as this very competent general surgeon stuffed the patient’s large intestine back into her cavity with all the grace and care I bring to stuffing my Thanksgiving turkey. Doctors are, essentially, very highly skilled, and highly paid, mechanics.

But it was the breast biopsy that got to me the most, for obvious reasons. The patient was a woman in her 40s with a long history of benign lumps, and fortunately this one was, too. But it took a chunk out of her breast, and so it made me think of the big C and the small r (that would be “reconstruction,” for those who cannot read my mind).

Which made me think of plastic surgeons, the bastards.

OK, they’re not bastards. But there’s a reason they’re not cardiologists, either. About 10 years ago, a top-heavy stripper won a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. She’d deducted the cost of her implants as a business expense, the IRS disallowed it, and she appealed, and won. The woman was nobody you’ve heard of, but it turned out she “lived” in Fort Wayne, “lived” meaning she got her mail and spent a couple nights a year in an apartment there. It was a nice central location for the clubs she spent her life touring between. (The life of a B-list stripper is not a glamorous one.) And she’d had her surgery — surgeries — done there. Really? the city’s journalists queried as one. By whom? Sorry, folks, that was a secret more closely guarded than Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location. But one of the city’s corps of plastic surgeons had opened this girl up multiple times and installed implants of ever-ballooning size until she had the 54-inch bustline of a true stripping entrepreneur. (Part of her argument was that every surgery boosted her income by a predictable margin, and that once she was ready to retire she planned to have them removed, as they impeded life as a private citizen. Amish men at the mall would walk into walls staring at her.)

Call me crazy, but I don’t think this counts as “practicing medicine.” Whenever I talked to a plastic surgeon, I tried to balance the polarities of the job. On the one hand, a talented plastics specialist at Ohio State University had repaired the faces of two of my friends when they hit hard, unforgiving surfaces. Others gave women maimed by cancer a chance to feel whole again. But on the other, well, a doctor friend of mine put it best: “A kid with asthma in Brooklyn has to take four buses and trains in the middle of January to get a breathing treatment and we can’t seem to do anything about that, but let a cardiologist’s wife want to upgrade to a D-cup, and man, we are all over that.”

All this by way of taking the long way around to the NSFW link o’ the week: The Plastic Surgery Beauty Enhancement Awards, brought to you by Make Me Heal, for “all your cosmetic surgery and anti-aging needs.” Actually, the links above are SFW, but if you go further into the site — and don’t think I don’t know where you’re headed, you perverts — be advised it’s not only unsafe for work, but probably unsafe for breakfast, too. Especially some of the postop photos.

Ah, beauty.

So, bloggage:

Nothing is sacred, but this, this! Is elephant dung on the Virgin Mary!

Oh, look. The president of the United States committed an act of craven bullshittery. Shocked, shocked. Etc.

Back to real work now. You all flay Scooter in the comments.

Went for a long bike ride yesterday. Temperature: low 90s. Humidity: Merciless. I felt like riding fast and hard, so I did. About halfway through I started noticing people looking at me. Normally people don’t look at me. I’m no head-turner on my best day, and have fully arrived at that state of middle-aged female invisibility where you begin to blend in with the wallpaper. (I’m convinced I could walk into a bank, enter the vault, fill my pockets with cash and walk out unnoticed. At least if the bank is anything like the deli counter.) But I was turning heads. Pigeon crap on my forehead? The vile jiggling of my thighs? A bloody nose? The hint of cleavage even my hydraulic sports bra cannot contain? I turned the final corner, slowed for a cooldown and thought, “Hmm. I don’t think I’ll be cool by the time I hit the driveway.” Parked the bike, went inside, checked a mirror. My face was the color of an overripe tomato. I mean, not just a flush, not just a healthy glow, but the alarming shade people get before their head actually bursts into flames. I looked about to sustain a cerebral hemorrhage.

Ah well — exercise isn’t for sissies. I drank a quart of water, filled a ziploc with ice and sat with it on my head a while. It still took 45 minutes for the flush to clear. I wonder how close I was to actually passing out.

You know those ads that always say, “See your doctor before starting any exercise program”? And how you say, “Yeah, right”? Well, there’s a reason for those, and I think I’ve found it. Onrushing decrepitude is no longer a vague concept; the fragility of one’s body is a fact that must be faced. Your entire youth was the writing of a check that is now being presented for cash.

On the other hand, look at Jack Lalanne. Please. (And note well: Nice package, Jack!)

Speaking of “stakes” at the movies — we were, weren’t we? — I’m looking forward to the new “Die Hard,” if only to see what’s at stake. The first one touched off a furious round of movie-heist inflation, as I believe Alan Rickman was angling to steal something like $600 million in bearer bonds. (For a long time I was convinced “bearer bonds” were a Hollywood fiction, as they seemed such a convenient stand-in for cash and turned up in so many movies. But no, they really exist.) In the second “Die Hard,” I forget what the bad guys were after, except that it involved a squirrely Latin American dictator and perhaps a planeload of drugs worth considerably more than $600 million. And in the third installment, we all remember Jeremy Irons’ plan was to steal all the money in the world. Seriously; they were carting it away in dump trucks — the gold that backed all the G8’s paper currencies. The bad guys evidently planned to enjoy their wealth in a world where money was worthless, and they held all the precious metals.

As far as I can tell from the previews, in the newest “Die Hard,” Timothy Olyphant is threatening to take away everyone’s e-mail and internet connections. Which means the stakes are terrifyingly high, indeed.

As a former Hoosier, of course I took note of Richard Lugar’s big splash yesterday. I always felt conflicted about Dick when he was one of my senators, for reasons that, to fully understand, you had to live here. On the one hand, I took him as he presented himself: Smart, sober, conservative-but-not-crazy Republican who at least seemed to understand that the rest of the world existed, and conducted himself as such. Like so many Indiana office-holders, he is cemented in office. Democrats ran against him for reasons entirely divorced from the crazy idea that they might take his job — name recognition, street cred, whatever. The whole exercise was simply a more polite version of stretching your neck under a guillotine. On the other hand, I remember one year when he actually bought TV ads — I guess he needed to spend some money — and they featured him in a flannel shirt, proclaiming himself a man of the soil. While always a safe message in Indiana, it creeped me out. Donald Trump is more a man of the soil than the brainy Rhodes Scholar Lugar. It suggested there was a cruder sort of calculation inside that silver head. I didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about it — there’s always the point at which you think “at least he’s not Dan Quayle” — but there it was.

Fortunately Doghouse Riley, who still lives there, puts his finger on it pretty squarely:

Somehow nobody asks “Why is it a moderate Republican, a respected foreign-policy expert, takes five years to recognize and moderately object to an utter fucking Republican foreign policy disaster?” Dick Lugar had the opportunity to be the William Morse of his day and party, or at least its Bill Fulbright; his Hoosier seat would have stayed warm, or at least body temp. Instead he goes on providing cover for dingbats at risk of getting mussed in the next election.

Oh my, look — someone stood up to Ann Coulter. (Well, we knew it wouldn’t be Chris Matthews.) Nothing like putting the mother of a dead child up against a fortysomething bullshit artist to say, “Stop making cheap cracks about my dead child” to make some great TV. Coulter plays it cool, but be not fooled — she felt the need to flip her hair about 60 times once she knew who was on the phone. Playing with her long, blonde locks is her tell. Maybe someone will point this out to her (Coulter), and she can make a crack about how at least she HAS hair, unlike that chemo-crone Elizabeth Edwards.

The best writers tell you about something you don’t really care about — in this case, a dead pitcher — and make you care. Jon Carroll on the late Rod Beck:

I loved watching Rod Beck. He was the closer back when the Giants were good. He had a body that did not appear to have encountered the wonders of Pilates; he had an amazing, unapologetic Fu Manchu mustache; he had a mullet so large it seemed to be a separate creature that had agreed, in exchange for considerations, to spend some time on top of his head.

He looked badder than you; he looked badder than anyone. His entire attitude on the mound was aggression. Just the expression on his face as he leaned in to take the sign was malevolent. The hunch of his shoulders was frightening. I saw major league batters bail on a Rod Beck pitch before it was halfway to home plate. “Life is too short,” I could almost hear them muttering to themselves.