Because I have several appointments today, because I slept badly last night, because I haven’t had my coffee, because all I want to do is go back to bed with an old Travis McGee novel and drift off into sweet, sweet oblivion for another couple of hours, it’s all-bloggage Tuesday! Feel free to carry on a lively discussion in the comments; I’ll be back eventually.

Last week’s garage-sale find:

What am I bid for a new-with-tags, XL, apparently never-worn commemorative T-shirt, from the 1997 Stanley Cup celebration? The image is a front-page reproduction of the old JOA News/Free Press Saturday edition. That’s Steve Yzerman with the cup. I recall that victory because we went on vacation in northern Michigan the following week, and were reading the Detroit papers when two members of the team were seriously injured in a post-victory car crash. To call the coverage “hysterical” would have been a grievous understatement. One of the injured players lingered in a coma for some time, but the beast had to be fed, every day. We were there during the “others who survived comas and head injuries offer their thoughts” stories. People speak of beating a dead horse. This story was a smear on the pavement by the time it went away, I suspect.

Alicublog reads the loons so you don’t have to, and I’m grateful, because I’d rather he tracked “Knocked Up” and the ululating approval of the culture warriors. Also, he’s funnier.

James Lileks won’t have to take his chances in the job market with the rest of us, after all. Good for him. It’s hard for me to say that, not because I’m jealous, but because he remains such a clueless nimrod. Ahem:

But this business has been insulated for so long from this sort of agita that it’s really like the Pope introducing merit pay into the College of Cardinals. There’s a reason they call it the Velvet Coffin, after all. There’s something about the journalism profession that makes some of its members feel like secular academics, if you know what I mean. …The union confers a form of tenure. People expect to leave the craft before the craft leaves them.

Dear Jim: Some of us spent a career in the newspaper business without ever being a member of the Newspaper Guild. I, for one, never referred to my job as the Velvet Coffin, nor did I ever hear any other person in my newsroom(s) do so. A few even called their jobs as reporters or editors “the thing I do before I go to work at the Estee Lauder counter, or The Gap, so I have hopes of paying off my student loan before I’m 40.” (Of course, since we worked in smaller markets, we were all talentless hacks, and deserved it.) Most of us worked for significantly less than $92K per annum, and much of it involved work on weekends, nights, holidays and other inconvenient times. And many had nothing you could call “a form of tenure,” as a quick look around YOUR OWN NEWSROOM should tell you. Ah, well. I understand you haven’t been spending much time there for the last zillion years. Maybe in the future, with your continuing income, you can buy a clue. In the meantime, please, shut your piehole. Or go cover a plane crash, if that’s not beyond your capabilities.

As if.

But let’s end on a high note, as D at Lawyers, Guns and Money recalls the 33rd anniversary of Ten-Cent Beer Night at Cleveland Stadium, a one-time-only affair:

During the first few innings, tipsy fans tossed smoke bombs and firecrackers at each other. By the second inning, a topless woman had leaped onto the field and chased down one of the umpires for an unwanted kiss; another streaker joined the Rangers’ Tom Grieve as he circled the bases following his second home run of the night; a father and son team ran into the outfield and dropped their pants. Meantime, golf balls, rocks and batteries rained down on Texas’ players throughout the game. At one point, someone heaved an empty gallon of Thunderbird wine at Rangers’s first baseman Mike Hargrove. As the game neared its conclusion, the evening descended into total chaos. During the ninth inning, the Indians managed to tie the score and placed the winning run on third base. At that point, a fan ran into the outfield to steal Jeff Burroughs’ glove. When Burroughs began chasing the fan, Rangers’ manager Billy Martin, along with several of Burroughs’ teammates, rushed to help out — several of them, including Martin, carried bats.

I feel like I was there.

Alan gazes wistfully at a club that will probably never have him as a member.

That’s the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, by the way. Isn’t it pretty? (OK, so you can’t actually see it, but take my word for it. It’s pretty.) I love that tower, a great landmark when you’re out on the water, and easy on the eyes, too. (And I’m kidding about them not admitting the likes of us. They’re not all that exclusive, and besides, we’ve never tried.)

On Saturday, it rained. Sunday, likewise. But Monday, the holiday, was clear and bright and, well, you see the picture. A perfect day. We sailed close along the coast, and I put the binoculars on the big houses, while contemplating a heist story in which the thieves would hit the houses in January, then make their getaway by snowmobile, over the ice. We passed a giant freighter called Federal Yukon, whose stern announced its hailing port: Hong Kong. I guess that makes it a salty, unless they’re talking about the obscure port of Hong Kong, Minnesota. It’s a bulk carrier, our “Know Your Ships” guide said. BCs carry everything from taconite pellets to potash. (Kind of makes you wonder if the Edmund Fitzgerald would have a song written about it, had it been carrying potash. Hard to rhyme that one without sounding stupid.)

Here’s a stern shot of the Federal Yukon. Note that diagonal structure rising over the aft deck. It took me a minute before I figured out what it was; the blaze-orange lozenge within was the clue. It’s the lifeboat. Orange for visibility, enclosed for survival, it looks like a tiny submarine, nothing as picturesque as the Titanic lifeboats, those big open rowboats staffed by freaked-out members of the White Star Line. But then, I guess by the time you reach the lifeboats, being picturesque is no longer a concern. I’d like to know the launching procedure, and why it’s up on that structure. I’d imagine there’s a stairway to a rear hatch, and it deploys automatically if it ever reaches the water, with all souls on board kissing their asses goodbye.

I’d love to take a trip on one of these suckers, and write about it. Please, no hello-sailor jokes.

Last weekend we saw the Best Actress performance, so this weekend it was Forest Whitaker’s turn. “The Last King of Scotland” was fine enough, and the Oscar was well-deserved, a real game-set-match turn, but I think I’ve OD’d on Africa movies for a while. Black savages, unspeakable violence, death-by-machete brutality, flawed white heroes — is there ever a variation on this theme? Why can’t someone make a film of “King Leopold’s Ghost”? At least then we’d know where the natives got the inspiration for all that limb-severing.

So, the bloggage:

Not much today — I stayed away from digital devices most of the weekend — but I found yet another time-waster: Overheard in the Office, along with its sister sites Overheard in New York and Overheard at the Beach. As an enthusiastic and unapologetic eavesdropper, I love this stuff. I may submit my most recent gem, overheard at the video store:

First guy, holding DVD box: This one shows a hot chick with a sword.
Second guy, holding DVD box: This one just has a bunch of dudes on it.
First guy: So this one wins.
Second guy: Totally.

When Alan was Features editor in Fort Wayne, sometimes our daily download of how-was-your-day-dear involved issues of, how you say, taste. The rebellious world of youth culture was always trying to shake up the squares in Features. I can’t tell you how often he’d have to waste time getting an executive ruling on whether Big Dick & the Penetrators could go in the club listings. (And those rulings usually went all the way up the chain of command, because if there’s one thing editors can do well, it’s avoid making decisions.)

The Cherry-Poppin’ Daddies were another problem. Once Big Dick & the Penetrators had been cleared, on the grounds that the sort of people who were likely to be offended by the name wouldn’t be poring over the fine print in the Where To Go listings, you’d think the Cherry-Poppin’ Daddies wouldn’t be a problem, either. But you never knew when that one would wash up on the shores of some feminist copy editor whose lips would compress to a thin line and whose flag would be raised, the one emblazoned, “No retreat, no surrender.”

Anyway, I’m wondering how many editors are, even as we speak, passing the buck up the chain of command for a ruling on the hot new craze that’s sweepin’ the nation, i.e.:

Cornhole.

Do not laugh, but be prepared to snicker, as you learn a few facts about the game. Did you know, for instance, that Cincinnati is “crazy for cornhole?” Did you know there’s a company called the Ohio Cornhole Company? Did you know that Geauga Lake, the northwest Ohio amusement park, is offering an All-American Cornhole Toss on the midway this year?

Man, just as Borat’s act is over, too.

Cornhole is basically beanbag toss, and gets its name from the grain that fills the bags (corn, not beans). Some people choose to call it “Baggo,” but that’s probably because they’re, you know, homophobic.

Oh, wait. Baggo. Never mind.

It was Family Movie Weekend, but I was the only one who saw all three — “Hairspray” for all three of us, “Shrek the Third” for Kate and me and “The Queen” for the adults. The latter was the only one worth discussing; I wish I’d had time to watch it again, if only to re-examine how they worked the magic, making a terrific, watchable two-hour movie about an idea (what are the uses of tradition?) and where the action consists mostly of people talking on the phone. I guess you do it with killer performances, and every nice thing anyone ever said about Helen Mirren was deserved, and then some.

During that week in 1997, around day four or five, when it seemed the entire world had taken leave of its senses over Princess Di, I stepped off the crazy train. I think I disembarked around the time Mother Teresa died, and she was treated like a crack-house O.D. Maybe not exactly, but definitely not top-o’-the-newscast. In other news at this hour, we go to Calcutta… The local Border’s had a “condolence book” you could sign, sitting on a table with a box of Kleenex. The audience at the big Labor Day classic-car auction lined up to throw gladiolus blossoms into the back seat of a Rolls-Royce that Diana had ridden in precisely once. It was clear this had gone from genuine feeling to a sort of mass hysteria. I didn’t give much thought to how the royal family was dealing with all of this, beyond acknowledging the obvious — the cluelessness of their non-reaction reaction; the Parade Before the Flowers, which inspired that rarity, a truly memorable and funny Maureen Dowd line (“they looked like they were judging a dog show”). “The Queen” isn’t journalism, God knows, only a smart, educated guess about what they were thinking, based on what they did, but it has the feel of something that could be the truth. (Wow, talk about your qualifiers.)

Honestly? I even felt a tiny bit of empathy for James Cromwell as Prince Philip, who was obviously there for comic relief and to lay down the law on such burning questions as How Do We Fly the Royal Standard. His way of coping with Diana’s children’s grief? Take them for a walk in the Scottish highlands. Someday the princes will grow old, and they’ll look back and say: There are worse ways to grieve.

However, even “The Queen” was swept away by the third-to-last Sopranos episode last night, “The Second Coming.” It would seem the ducks are coming home to roost.

This just in: I dropped a half-gallon pitcher of orange juice on the floor this morning. Did the lid come off, allowing all 64 ounces to go all over the goddamn place? Do you even need to ask?

In a sign my luck may be changing, however, Alan was there to help me clean up, and I had a back-up in the fridge. For those of you keeping track at home.

OK, then.

When I was a Hoosier, two of my favorite people in town were Jerry and Linda Vanderveer, who ran an architectural salvage business on the unglamorous south side. If an old house was slated for demolition, they’d go in, strip everything that could be carried away and take it back to the Wood Shack, corner of Baker and Fairfield. If you were restoring a house and wanted some 1912-era vent covers, or pocket doors, or crystal doorknobs or whatever, you went to see them. Their place didn’t look big from the outside and was claustrophobic within, but it had its own kind of order. Doors were in one room, moldings in another, eight or nine fireplace mantels leaning up against a wall in various states of repair/restoration.

A business like that depends on a certain amount of ongoing demolition, and like most rust-belt cities, the Fort had its share. But when you’re talking about vacant old houses waiting to be torn down, Detroit is Mecca. And where Jerry and Linda were one of only a few, if not the only ones, doing the job in Fort Wayne, here there are dozens.

I stopped in at one of these places in Royal Oak last year, run by a woman with more artistic sensibilities. She not only stripped the stuff, she restored it, recombined it with other pieces and did a brisk business making a lot of cottages up north look very shabby-chic. But considering the abandoned-building business here includes not only houses but architectural masterpieces from the glory days, I really shouldn’t be surprised by some of the stuff that turns up. And yet, I always am.

DetNews columnist Neal Rubin offers an atypical, but by no means unheard-of example today: What am I bid for a pair of solid bronze, 9-and-a-half-foot doors once used on a bank vault and designed by architectural legend Albert Kahn? They’re in good shape, considering they spent the last half-century in some guy’s garage. They now reside in Toledo, where a salvage expert took them after retrieving them from the garage, but they’re still underutilized. She wants $38,000 for them, pocket change for the sort of hedge-fund plutocrat who’d go for such a thing. Shipping is steep — $1,000 — but likely less than what UPS would charge you to move 1,200 pounds of bronze from Toledo to your front house.

This is like when the peasants lopped the heads off the statues on the Notre Dame cathedral during the French revolution, and they found them in some guy’s basement a couple hundred years later. Sorta.

Are you in a Friday mood? I’m in a Friday mood. So take 9 minutes, 28 seconds and enjoy this clipfest of 100 movies, 100 quotes, 100 numbers. Once you get the idea, see if you can anticipate the big ones. The only ones I predicted accurately were 50 and 44 (big clue in the freeze frame below). “Ben-Hur” fans will be at an advantage in the 40s, too:

Are you having fun? Good. Because I have to get some work done. Enjoy.

And thanks to Ken Levine for finding this clip on YouTube, which I think says it all:

Jack Valenti came to Columbus once, and I can’t say when, except that I was old enough to read the newspaper and Jim Rhodes was governor. Valenti was paying a call on Big Jim, and the Dispatch story about it said the secretaries were all a-twitter. Why? Valenti was a good-looking man, but he’s no Clooney, either. I think it was just that he knew Clooney, or the day’s Clooney-equivalent; he reflected the Glory of Hollywood, something rare in the Ohio governor’s office. Especially that governor.

(I’ve heard many stories about Rhodes’ boorishness, and I don’t know how many are true, but here’s one, reported by an eyewitness: The governor was meeting with the presidents of Ohio’s public universities, a group he was not inclined to think much of, education bein’ for lawyers and fags and so forth. This one spoke, and that one spoke, and then the president of Kent State chimed in, and Big Jim stood up and stepped over to his bathroom, which opened onto the office. “Keep talkin’!” he said. “I can hear ya fine!” As the KSU president went on, haltingly, the governor of the Buckeye State had a nice, long, relaxing pee. With the door open. He had issues with Kent State.)

Anyway, Valenti. I don’t recall what he was doing so far from Hollywood, but it had something to do with the industry. The obits said he was a b.s. artist without peer, with a Texas drawl :

In his many public utterances, he orated and declaimed, grandly and voluminously, as if addressing the Roman Senate about the urgency of conquering Gaul. A fan of Shakespeare and Yeats and Greek mythology, Valenti spoke in baroque phrases, filigreed and curlicued — all inflected with a slight Texas accent. From his tongue, an opponent’s proposal wasn’t merely unacceptable; it was “an arrow dipped in curare.” And as spun by him, America wasn’t just a great and fine nation; it was “a free and loving land.”

Some people found such verbiage pompous and smarmy, particularly since Valenti, who wrote all his own speeches, was usually talking about something relatively mundane, such as DVD piracy or runaway movie-production costs. Such lofty language would have been ridiculous — if it weren’t such a pleasure to hear a man so out of step with ordinary speechifying.

One had to marvel at the self-confidence it took to gather oneself before an illustrious audience and utter such preposterous phrases as “springing full-blown from the head of Zeus.” And the thing was, you never remembered what a rival had to say.

Well, that’s the lobbyist’s secret charm, isn’t it? Blow into town, get the secretaries all steamy, fill the governor’s ear with sweet nothings, and on to Washington or Cannes or wherever.

Personally, after hearing what some of the Democrats had to say last night, a reference to curare would be welcome. Where did great political oratory go? This is one reason I can’t dislike Jesse Jackson; the guy understands that a speech is, on some level, entertaiment, and he delivers.

Not much to deliver, today, and I apologize: I have a busy day before I blow out of town late this afternoon for a weekend “camping trip” with Kate’s Girl Scout troop. I call it “camping” because we sleep in bunk beds in a heated lodge, making the experience less woodsy and more like a weekend in a bad hotel. But there will be S’mores, and wine if I have anything to say about it.

Back after the weekend.

I needed to get some movies from the library, for a story I’m writing. (Can’t tell you much, but hint: It involves movies.) They had one I needed but not another one, and then I looked up, and what did I see at eye level: “Ben-Hur.” Well. This seemed positively karmic. (What did we say before we all knew about karma? Oh, right — “coincidental.”)

I took it home, and tried to think of the last time I watched it all the way through. Decades at least. The running time is 212 minutes, so it’s not the sort of thing you watch while waiting for a chicken to roast. It’s on cable every so often, and certain scenes are classics, the kind you stop and watch when they flip past — the chariot race, of course, and the galley-slave parts, when the evil Roman general wastes lord-how-many lives just to see if Charlton Heston can maintain a punishing pace at the oars, pushing the overseer to bang his drum faster and faster. (As if. Charlton Heston could withstand anything. He was the Chuck Norris of his day, without the roundhouse kicks.)

I put in the DVD after Kate went to bed, and soon was in the first-act scenes of Judah Ben-Hur meeting his childhood friend Messala, newly returned to Judea as the Roman tribune. And it’s, like, the gayest scene ever. Long, smoldering glances. Silences charged with eroticism. They did that Roman hand-to-forearm clasp, and held it. I’m thinking, “Go on, Charlie. Kiss him. You know you want to.” Dennis Quaid didn’t give off pheromones like this when he was cruising the bars in “Far From Heaven.” Someone asked how that sister of yours was doing, historical-movie code for the Girl Who Will Divide Them, and it’s like they’re exchanging small talk about the weather.

Why didn’t I notice this before? Maybe because the last time I saw this movie I was 19 years old. Long before Google was invented. Laptop open, “homoeroticism in Ben-Hur,” and in about two seconds was reading this in Wikipedia:

In interviews for the 1986 book Celluloid Closet, and later the 1995 documentary of the same name, screenwriter Gore Vidal asserts that he persuaded director Wyler to allow a carefully veiled homoerotic subtext between Messala and Ben-Hur. Vidal says his aim was to explain Messala’s extreme reaction to Judah Ben-Hur’s refusal to name fellow Jews. Surely, Vidal argued, Messala should have been able to understand that Judah, his close friend since childhood, would not be willing to name the names of his fellow Jews to a Roman officer. Vidal suggested a motivation to Wyler: Messala and Judah had been homosexual lovers while growing up, and then separated for a few years while Messala was in Rome. When Messala returns to Judea, he wants to renew the relationship with Judah, but Judah is no longer interested. It is the anger of a scorned lover which motivates Messala’s vindictiveness toward Judah. Since the Hollywood production code would not permit this to appear on screen explicitly, it would have to be implied by the actors. Knowing Heston’s aversion to homosexuality, Vidal suggested to Wyler that he direct Stephen Boyd to play the role that way, but not tell Heston. Vidal claims that Wyler took his advice, and that the results can be seen in the film.

(Charlton Heston denies this, btw. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

I realize, for serious film buffs, this qualifies as the ultimate Duh observation. But I guess there are holes in everyone’s knowledge base, and I’m glad this one was filled. Next week: Why keeping the shark out of sight until the last 20 minutes was the right thing to do for “Jaws.”

And I only just realized that by watching “Ben-Hur,” I missed Bill Moyers’ “Buying the War.” Damn.

If bloggage is light around here lately, it’s because I brutally trimmed my bookmarks earlier this week, in a no-doubt futile effort to cut down my goofing-off temptations. If you see something you think I should link to, send it along. In the meantime, here’s a story about a topic near to my head if not heart these days: How newspapers should handle online reader comments, on individual stories; it’s the trend that’s sweepin’ the nation. This was the subject of the letter to the editor I wrote a few weeks ago, which I might as well have set fire to in an ashtray; it was to the Free Press, and I was prompted to do so after reading the comments on the story about the guy who was first thought to have died from a homophobia-inspired beating, but turned out to have spinal stenosis, instead. (It’s complicated, but it’s not really important for what we’re talking about.) Free Press readers chimed in to say, “I bet he was used to taking a pipe from behind” and other witticisms. You should have seen the chatter after a black kid with an unusual first name was named Mr. Basketball. The Klan probably made printouts for next year’s banquet.

Anyway, I pointed out that it’s useless to fret over your attention to diversity in the newspaper if you’re going to let people attach comments like this to stories, and leave them up, unchallenged. That’s what the above-linked story’s about. Discuss, if you like. I’m off to the gym.

I don’t think Alan was happy with my choice, but I picked “Casino Royale” for Saturday’s On Demand movie night. Bond movies should be the ultimate date movie, don’t you think? Men can swoon over beautiful, doomed Vulva Fantastique, or whatever ridiculous moniker they’ve given this year’s pulchritudinous cannon fodder, and women get to fantasize about Bond, James Bond. He can kick ass, make love like a champ and never minds putting on nice clothes. What’s not to like?

Well, maybe I’m getting old. But Bond is starting to bore me. And when “Casino Royale,” overwhelmingly praised as the best Bond in decades, can’t do the trick, it’s time to give it up.

Not that it wasn’t a rip-roaring entry in the Bond canon. Not that there were insufficient explosions, wussy stunts or a shortage of evil bad guys who weep blood. It’s just that, at some point, you either dig watching stuff blow up or you don’t.

I brightened a little, seeing Paul Haggis’ name on the screenwriting credit, along with two others. It suggested he may have been brought in for a rewrite and polish, and maybe he was. There were a few zingers in the script, but not enough. We know what’s going to happen: Clever opening title sequence; big wham-o chase scene; the mission from M; the briefing on the toys and gadgets; introduction of the villain, who must never be named Bob Smith or John Jones, but Francois the Vile; relocation to one or more exotic locations, preferably in warm climates for maximum bikini utilization; a few more wham-o action sequences; an early love scene in which the girl must die immediately and another in which the girl must die later; more wham-o action; really big wham-o action; finale in which Bond has rolled into the arms of yet another babe, and roll credits.

It’s the same formula followed by he-man pulp fiction of the time (Travis McGee, etc.). I think the reason so many people still think of Sean Connery as the best of the Bonds is because he had the advantage of being first. I was just a kid when “Goldfinger” came out, but it had a cultural impact not unlike that of the Star Wars movies. Oddjob the villain, the bowler that was really an instrument of decapitation, the Aston Martin that sprayed oil out the tailpipes to foil pursuers — kids at school talked about these endlessly, although none of us had seen it, being too young for the spicy scenes of Connery kissing Honor Blackman, the first Bond girl, the fabulously named Pussy Galore.

True fact: The Columbus Dispatch, in its review of and stories about “Goldfinger,” never used her character’s full name, calling her “Miss Galore” on all references. Other true fact: Honor Blackman was 38 when “Goldfinger” was released, three years older than her co-star. She turns 80 this year and has been working pretty much non-stop for 60 years. Mercy.

Anyway, “Goldfinger” was huge. “Secret Agent Man” was a hit for Johnny Rivers, and for a while there, it seemed everyone wanted to be in bed with James Bond, one way or another.

I don’t want to quibble. It was an enjoyable enough movie, with all the traditions honored — gadgetry, lots of product placement. (Thanks for the Astons, Ford Motor Co. Good of you to provide laptops, Sony.) Bond is a man of his time, too, whatever that is, and so the plot turned on such pivots as cell-phone technology, and there was a big, juicy parkour wham-o, and the climactic poker game in the Casino Royale was — Jesus wept — Texas Hold’em. I haven’t seen all of the Bond films, or even most, but this may be the last for me, even with Daniel Craig’s pretty blue eyes and fabulous profile. They’re going to have to work hard for my next $3.99, and more wham-os aren’t going to do it.

Only one bit o’ bloggage today, thanks to Basset, who passes along…23 pairs of perfect breasts. Probably not safe for work, unless you sit with your back to a wall.

We passed a milestone in parent-child relations a couple weeks ago: Kate and I saw a non-animated movie we both enjoyed pretty much equally. It was “The Last Mimzy,” and I have to specify “non-animated” because the Pixar and Wallace & Gromit movies live in a class by themselves. But they only make one or two of those a year, and in between we have lots of weekends and school holidays to fill with moviegoing.

“The Last Mimzy” seduced me in spite of being science fiction, not one of my favorite genres. It was probably the Buddhism themes, that and Rainn Wilson. And while no one would mistake it for “The Departed,” it was no “Princess Diaries,” either.

So, heartened, I’m looking for our next mother-daughter movie date, and am sticking a tentative toe into PG-13 territory. “Dreamgirls” was PG-13, and wonder of wonders, all the sexual references were couched in language that flew miles over the head of my 10-year-old: “You’re knocking off the skinny piece,” in fact, may fly over the heads of many mothers of 10-year-olds. But PG-13 is the realm of the snickering adolescent, and I have to be wary.

I want to take her to see “Year of the Dog,” but I’m wondering at the rating. The reviews are little help (“suggestive references” is all I can find), and there’s no review yet on Common Sense Media, which sounds like it should be one of those sorts of websites, but isn’t. Very …commonsensical, in fact.

Any suggestions for cinematic entertainment as we explore the vast wastelands of Tweendom? You know where to leave ’em.

Have to cut this short today. It’s perfect bike-riding weather, and have a lot to do before heading out to Ann Arbor, where Miss Laura Lippman is reading at a bookstore in my old neighborhood. I get to buy her NYT best-seller, “What the Dead Know,” and perhaps have dinner with her — aren’t you terribly, terribly jealous? (You should be — I’m thinking we might eat at Zingerman’s.)

Bloggage:

Why Jon Carroll is always worth reading:

The tragedy at Virginia Tech this week has provoked lots of deep thinking about What It All Means, because when you’ve got endless airtime to fill, deep thinking is the only alternative to replaying the same five minutes of videotape you’ve played 28 times before. And newspaper columnists have of course weighed in, because we are the world’s leading experts on the Meaning of Everything. We are the FIGJAMs. (“Figjam” is allegedly a nickname given to professional golfer Phil Mickelson by his peers. It stands for “f — I’m good, just ask me.”)

Figjams — I love it.

Alicublog makes a good point: If the Virginia Tech shootings cannot be blamed on guns, well, they can’t be blamed on words and pixels, either.

Fifty-one degrees! Hosanna. I’m out.

While we’re on the bummer theme, let’s get this out of the way: Saw United 93 the other night, and watched the credits roll with mixed feelings. The simple truth is: This is a beautifully written and shot movie about an almost unbearably painful event absolutely no one wants to see. I was enormously impressed, and I never want to see it again.

But I’m glad this movie is out there, and that it sets a few bars, including the most important one: We really don’t know what happened up there. We know some things, but they’re just flash frames; the whole movie went down with the plane, along with anyone who saw it. It was easy to fear, in the anguished, crazy time after 9/11, that the first films made about the tragedy would have highly partisan narratives that would push one version of events over another. “United 93” doesn’t do that. No one stands up and says, “Let’s roll!” and leads the group to a gallant death. It looks, in its no-recognizable-actors way, very much like news footage.

And, if you’ve ever been through a remarkable event, it has the feel of truth. The passengers never act like Bruce Willis in the “Die Hard” movies; they look about to piss themselves from fright, even when they’re being as brave as people can be. And in the last minutes, when the cockpit door has been battered down and the final struggle is taking place, no one man or woman steps forward to be the hero — all we see are a dozen different hands, all straining to get to the controls, before the camera turns to see the view from the windshield. The world turns upside down, and the ground rushes up to meet everyone. The end.

“I bet you’d have been one of those guys,” I told Alan afterward.

“One never knows,” he said.

No, one doesn’t. Really, one doesn’t. We all like to think we’d be brave, but we don’t know until we know, and by then it’s a little late to argue. Of course, it’s never too late for right-wing morons to star in their own little imaginary movie:

Setting aside the ludicrous campus ban on licensed conceals, why didn’t anyone rush the guy? It’s not like this was Rambo, hosing the place down with automatic weapons. He had two handguns for goodness’ sake—one of them reportedly a .22.

At the very least, count the shots and jump him reloading or changing hands. Better yet, just jump him. Handguns aren’t very accurate, even at close range. I shoot mine all the time at the range, and I still can’t hit squat. I doubt this guy was any better than I am. And even if hit, a .22 needs to find something important to do real damage—your chances aren’t bad.

Yes, at the very least, “count the shots,” such a natural response when the door to your classroom swings open and a madman walks in, guns blazing. And check out the ballistics report from a guy who hasn’t been any closer to a real firefight than a TV screen. I know I said I wasn’t going to read any of this stuff, but sometimes it just jumps in front of you.

So, to the bloggage:

Jack Shafer’s defense of pushy reporters is good enough, but he had me at this passage:

The gold standard for journalistic insensitivity was established in the 1960s by an unnamed British TV reporter who was trawling for news at a Congo airport. According to foreign correspondent Edward Behr’s 1978 memoir, the Brit walked through the crowd of terrified Belgian colonials who were evacuating, and shouted, “Anyone here been raped and speaks English?”

I doubt I’ll ever cover breaking news again, but if I do, I’m going to use that line. You know, just for laughs.

Yours truly had another radio essay on the air yesterday, on “Detroit Today,” on WDET, our (what else?) public station. Find it here. Requires QuickTime, etc. The edit isn’t precise, so when it goes to music at about two-thirds through, it’s over. The producer didn’t trim the music; probably too busy. One of these days I’ll get out QT Pro and do a nice fade-out, but for now, bandwidth hog it shall remain.

We had a family discussion/argument about split peas the other day, over, what else, a dinner of split-pea soup — I made the last pot of the season, using up the remnants of the Easter ham and banishing these maddeningly slow-to-exit chilly days. Never mind the specifics of the argument; I will end up looking particularly stupid, and besides, I contend that I never suggested split peas were separated by hard-working immigrants using tiny vises, chisels and hammers, only that the so-called split pea is not a separate species from the green pea found in Green Giant cans and pods in the grocery store.

News flash: It is indeed a different animal. Ahem:

field pea
A variety of yellow or green pea grown specifically for drying. These peas are dried and usually split along a natural seam, in which case they’re called split peas.
Source: epicurious

But as frequently happens to the curious, epi- and otherwise, the research led me down half a dozen paths of delight, including that of Pea Soup Andersen’s, a legendary bit of California kitsch that appears to be the Frankenmuth of the west coast. Anyway, one of these days I’m going to make it out there for a visit, as I love pea soup in all its incarnations. I’m sure LA Mary knows the owner, and can arrange a kitchen tour.

And now, I remind you that split peas are a high-fiber food, and combined with two cups of coffee — whoa, gotta go. Later!