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!

Certain jobs are more than jobs. Every editor who’s written a headline knows this. Say you are violently murdered tomorrow. If you’re a systems analyst, the headline on your murder story won’t read SYSTEMS ANALYST DEAD IN GRISLY SLAYING. (In some smaller markets, the slaying will be “GRIZZLY” for the first few hundred papers. Until an editor we’ll call “Kirk” stops the presses and swallows five Valium in lieu of beating the offender with a pica pole.) No, you’ll be “local man” or “woman, 42,” but never “systems analyst,” and not because it’s too long for the headline. Accountants have the same problem.

Now, say you’re a nurse. Or a teacher. Or a dancer. But especially a nurse. Nothing like nursing to spice up a headline. NURSE FOUND STABBED TO DEATH IN APARTMENT — now there’s one to goose street sales. It doesn’t matter that the victim’s job had nothing to do with the crime. Some jobs simply transcend such trivialities. The death is not just a loss to the victim’s family and friends, a blow to the peace of the community; it’s one less nurse in the world. No one gives a crap about systems analysts.

I must point out the obvious — that many of these jobs-that-aren’t-just-jobs have distinct erotic overtones. Admit it: When your mind’s eye envisioned the stabbed nurse, didn’t you see her (never him; a male nurse would be “local man”) sprawled out in a short white dress with a spreading blood stain, starched cap askew? Of course you did, you pervert.

(Man, I can’t wait to see the Google ads on this one.)

Teachers are another. It’s more understandable with teachers; a dead teacher calls to mind a classroom full of sad children struggling to understand why Mrs. Whoever won’t be back the rest of the year, in fact forever. You think of hushed conferences at the classroom door between the flustered sub and the principal, of the grief counselors who will soon be descending in an unmarked van, each carrying a box of Kleenex.

(True story: Alan once sent a story about those satellite trivia competitions in bars to the copy desk. The opening anecdote was about a grade-school teacher who spent three nights a week sipping cranberry juice in her favorite tavern, playing electronic trivia contests. A copy editor replaced her actual name with her online handle, so horrified was she that we were TELLING THE WORLD that a TEACHER goes to A BAR. The next time someone mentions the olden days, when teachers used to have to resign when they got pregnant, remember we haven’t come so far.)

Doctor, lawyer — these are also more-than-jobs. But not all the professions qualify. ENGINEER KILLED IN STREET-DISPUTE CROSSFIRE…nah, just doesn’t work. Even dentists are borderline; no one ever wrote a successful one-hour TV drama about hot dentists in love. But a dancer? Oooh, yes. Doesn’t matter if the decedent hadn’t put on toe shoes, or tap shoes, or even a spangly thong, for years. Once a dancer, always a dancer.

Go ahead, try it at home. Insert your job title in any of the following headlines:

(BLANK) DIES IN SHOTGUN SLAYING
MAN HELD IN BLUDGEONING OF LOCAL (BLANK)
POLICE SAY (BLANK) ‘FOUGHT HARD’ WITH KNIFE-WIELDING KILLER

Some abbreviation is allowed. If you’re the second vice-president in charge of corporate donations for a well-established charity, you can call yourself NON-PROFIT EXEC. But not TYCOON.

OK, then. You can tell it’s exercise season again, because these are the things I think about on long bike rides. Nothing like sharing the road with cars to get one thinking of death and headlines.

Bloggage:

Ken Levine’s going to build a franchise on his “American Idol” post-mortems alone. This one isn’t his best performance overall, dawg, but he starts out so strong — Getting it out of the way first, Sanjaya, with the new mohawk hairstyle is now just the Gimp from “Pulp Fiction” — that I’ll keep him around another week. (I missed much of Idol last night; kept switching back to “Elevator to the Gallows” on Flix. I came in 30 minutes late, but found it mesmerizing. How can you not love a movie that features both a gull-wing Mercedes SL and a Miles Davis score? Of course it’s not scheduled again for DVRing. Drat. Good luck finding that one at my local Blockbuster.)

Laura Lippman’s having quite a week: NYT bestseller list, full-page ad in NYT, and shooting a cameo on “The Wire.”

A few weeks ago I mentioned I was doing a radio essay, on a topic that failed to grab the attention of all the print editors I usually deal with. Working title: “Elmore Leonard’s Master Class on Detroit.” It came out…just OK. (My criticisms are all of myself and my stupid voice, not the production, which was excellent.) It aired last week, so I’m embedding the MP3 file here. (Requires QuickTime.) Thereafter it will live in The Clip File. And I recorded another this week, which I like better. It’s nice to learn new things at my age.

In honor of the impending release of “Grindhouse,” Kim Morgan assembles a list of her favorite car movies. As a Detroit partisan, let me point out that no one makes movies like this about Toyota Camrys. (And the Mini Cooper chase scene in “The Italian Job” doesn’t count. That was just a big fat product placement.) Got any favorite car movies? You know where to discuss.

I’ve been shopping for a new toy of late — a tandem bicycle. I’m gonna offset me some carbon with a vengeance, once I get my hands on one. Kate and I will pedal all over the Pointes on it this summer, but first I have to find just the right candidate. My price range is “reasonable,” which means “below $500.” Mitch Harper had a drool-worthy one on his site earlier this week, but it’s way too rich for my blood, and I don’t think they’re going to drop the price by 50 percent. (It does, however, match my current bike perfectly; they’re both Cannondales from the same year.)

So the answer is, more likely, an old Schwinn Twinn or something similar. Poking around has led me deep into the world of vintage-bicycle nerds and their odd ideas of what things are worth. To give you a sense, I’ve seen Twinns in various states of repair at prices ranging from $80 to $1,500, and the condition of the bikes didn’t range nearly that wide. I’m convinced some people just don’t really want to sell, and so set outrageous price tags to make sure the bike stays in their garage.

Anyway, I have my eye on a couple. I love you, eBay. I cover you with kisses.

Bloggage:

Boy, Madonna and I really are nearly the same age, aren’t we? I kinda like some of these items from her H&M collection. They strike me as understated and classy. What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with her?

Laura Lippman makes the NYT best-seller list this week: I’m #11, separated by an asterisk from Mitch Albom at #10, which means our sales are virtually the same for the week. That’s gotta be a good feeling. Congratulations. Buy the book. Let’s get her above Mitch next week. SHAMEFUL UPDATE: The book is “What the Dead Know.” (Blush.)

I shouldn’t spend so much time blowing love to Ken Levine, but I’d pay money to hear him tell Hollywood stories. Fortunately, he tells them free of charge:

Our line producer informed me that the studio refused to pay our secretary’s parking. The budget for each episode was over a million dollars. Weekly parking was $13. Above-the-line people (writers, directors, producers, actors) got to park on the lot for free. Below-the-line peons had to park in a structure across the street.

And don’t let the Hollywood address fool you. This was not a great neighborhood. I used to call the lot “Fort Paramount.” While working at WINGS on rewrite night we often watched drug deals go down across the street at the parking structure. An ice cream truck would arrive every night about 11 and we would say, “Cracky the clown is here. Looks like he’s got some great shit tonight for the kiddies!”

I’ve probably heard more inside-Hollywood stories than most Midwesterners, but far fewer than the average Californian. Nevertheless, I’m always amazed at how often parking plays a major role in showbiz power struggles. It’s a place where everyone works out all the time, and yet having to walk from a too-distant parking space is considered an appalling insult. (The safety factor Levine mentions is a wild card.) My screenwriting-rewrite teacher was working on a project with Katie Holmes the semester our class was meeting; this was before she became Scientology’s zombie bride. He was going out to Los Angeles most weeks and “taking” meetings with his writing partner and Katie, who was “attached” to this project. (I just love slinging that lingo, but my outsider status requires me to put it in quotes.) One day they arrived at a movie lot in two cars. My teacher and his partner were directed to an inside-the-gate spot, while Katie was told to park at a remote lot two blocks away. That she did this cheerfully and without complaint — even keeping a pair of sneakers in her car for just these occasions — was offered to us as proof of what a wonderful, sweet, not-Hollywood-at-all, down-to-earth girl she was. “She’s really from Toledo,” he’d say.

The project later dissolved before it bore fruit, as I gather 99 percent of them do. You know the rest of Katie’s story.

Rented “Babel” this weekend, an event remarkable only in that it whittles the unseen-Oscar-best-picture-nominees down to two (“The Queen,” “Letters from Iwo Jima”), which is pretty good for post-parenthood Nance. I liked it a lot, but I’ve liked Alejandro González Iñárritu ever since “Amores Perros,” which blew my doors off. “The Mexican Quentin Tarantino,” he’s called, but he’s much better than that. More serious, anyway.

The theme of “Babel” and “Amores Perros” is one that I’m always a sucker for — the way our lives all connect, stranger to stranger, even across continents. The Butterfly Theory in human form, maybe. But here’s what I have to ask someone who saw it in the theater:

Were there subtitles?

Because there were none for the DVD, a pretty cheeky directorial decision for a film where characters speak in seven-count-’em-seven languages, according to IMDB: Japanese Sign Language, French, English, Spanish, Japanese, Berber and Arabic. When I realized none were forthcoming, I decided to just settle in and groove with it — dialogue is just words, and acting is a lot more — and found that I understood it pretty much perfectly, with the exception of the Japanese girl’s backstory, which was superfluous anyway. I know her backstory because I looked it up online; helpful souls at Wikipedia, who apparently speak all these tongues, figured it out and posted a complete synopsis. The movie is called “Babel,” after all. And making people do supplemental reading is totally, whoa, postmodern.

Before I took the DVD back to Blockbuster, I went through the menu until I found a setup screen. I selected “English subtitles” and hit “play.” No subtitles. So who the hell knows? I enjoyed the movie. Brad Pitt may be a handsome devil, but now he’s a handsome devil with serious eye-crinkle. Like his friend George Clooney, he’s striving to age in an interesting manner. I heard Alec Baldwin talk in an interview about the morning-afterness of being last year’s hunk, how it’s not as difficult for men as it is for women, but it is difficult, breaking through into something resembling serious work, especially when women fan themselves at the thought of your butt. (Or at least how it looked in “Thelma and Louise.”)

Through the magic of the Google, I looked up my old Prof. Terry’s take on “Babel.” He frequently surprises me, and this was one of them: Two lousy stars, and a flip of the hand:

Though “Babel” would seem to be a plea for more cross-cultural empathy and understanding … it fails to provide dramatic evidence that any of the bad things that happen to the generally good people here could have been avoided if we all spoke the same language.

Hmm, I didn’t get that that was its aim, but then, I watch a movie in my living room very differently than I do in a theater. At home, I’m a much easier lay. The other day I found myself whiling away an early Friday evening with “Imagine Me & You,” which I objectively recognized as a total piece of crap but still failed to turn off. I think it was because all the characters dressed so well. I just wanted to see what the next scene’s sweater would look like. (There were also a lot of knit hats in that one. I have never been able to wear a knit hat without looking like a person who sells newspapers out of a van on a busy corner.)

“300” — there’s another one I won’t be catching until it hits cable, even if it shaping up to be the “Billy Jack” of the Bush-boosters. Even if it is, like, the gayest movie since “Top Gun” and maybe gayer. Even the previews make that obvious, but this blogger puts the cherry on it:

Any movie that features this many half naked, really good looking guys running around thrusting long shafts into each other over and over and over again, in which so many men spend so much time demanding that other men kneel before them, and in which so many truly butch guys dressed only in panties and leather straps manage to get so constantly and thoroughly spattered with the body fluids of other men… I don’t know. I’m thinking that pointing out that the Greek culture which the Spartans were part of and which they were fighting, killing, and dying to defend was homosexual by choice is, well, appropriate, and merited.

Yeah, me too.

(By the way, those who have seen “300” — does Leonidas have any scene where he’s not yelling at the top of his lungs? The whole trailer, he’s bellowing. “This…is…SPAH-TA! Then we will fight…IN THE SHADE!!!” That would get old fast.)

I’m retooling my blog bookmarks again. My rule: The drop-down menu must not extend beyond the depth of the screen. Every few weeks I add and drop to make it fit. I added Bats left, throws right for the sheer novelty of a Hoosier liberal. Found Kim Morgan, who writes better about movies than I do, via Wolcott. Kept the increasingly disappointing DetNews politics blog because they provide my health insurance. Laura Lippman’s blogging her book tour, but she’s so nice she can’t say anything mean about anybody; her life is an exercise in gratitude. Also, discretion:

Just this morning, I tried on some outfits in anticipation of an engagement later this week. The outfit I ended up choosing is, according to the one outside opinion I sought, “classy and becoming.” It also is a) twelve years old and b) from Banana Republic. But no one will know that unless I wear it inside out. My hunch is that the context of the engagement — not to mention the killer shoes — will lead people to think the outfit is nicer than it is. Unless you read this blog, in which case, if you catch this particular gig, you’ll probably be thinking: “I can’t believe that Laura is such a dork that she’s wearing a 12-year-old Banana Republic outfit.”

From further analysis, I suspect the engagement was an appearance on CBS’ morning show, whatever they’re calling it these days. I missed it, and too bad, because I would have liked to fire off an e-mail to the producer chastising her guest for wearing a 12-year-old Banana Republic outfit.

And then there’s Ken Levine, whose St. Patrick’s Day post I didn’t see until after I’d done St. Patrick’s Day. It’s from a “Cheers” episode that he wrote, so he’s allowed to quote it:

AN IRISH BAND ENTERS. THEY’RE ALL WEARING CABLE-KNIT SWEATERS. ONE OF THEM IS NAMED SEAN.

…

THE BAND BEGINS TO SING AND PLAY A SLOW IRISH BALLAD:

SEAN
(singing) “They broke into our Dublin home, the dirty English dogs. They took away my sister and they beat my dad with logs.”

THEY BREAK INTO A QUICK UP BEAT IRISH JIG FOR A BEAT, THEN RESUME THE LYRICS:

SEAN
(singing) “Along the ring of Kerry you can hear the bleat of gulls, I’ll sip the blood of the English from their bleached and hollowed skulls.” (TO THE BAR) Everybody!!

Everybody! Happy week to all.

Five false starts later, I’m making this an all-linkage Friday.

This link is fascinating, but not safe for work, in the sense that giant plaster vaginas are not safe for work. It’s not porn, it’s medicine. Also, art. (My favorite is the one where the kid’s arm is reaching through the door, so to speak. If I were an 18th-century midwife, that would freak me right the hell out.

I love horse races, at least when the horses don’t shatter their legs in the process. This is one of the best:

God, this was a hard movie to watch. It doesn’t get any easier in small pieces, or over time. Language warning (Jack Nicholson at his nastiest), but also Ann Margret in a black bra:

If you covered the juvenile-justice beat in Detroit, I don’t know how you’d avoid jumping out of high windows. Fourteen-year-old kills 13-year-old in graffiti dispute: Just another day in the D.

Erin go bragh. I’m done.

Someone mentioned bunny-boiling in a comment thread recently, and what do you know, HBO had “Fatal Attraction” on last night. I watched until the turn of the second act, which is when the movie loses its guts and falls into disarray. (If nothing else, studying screenwriting has given me a whole new vocabulary to use in a pretentious manner. If you’re wondering, I mark the second-act turn as either Anne Archer’s car accident or the subsequent confrontation between Michael Douglas and Glenn Close in her apartment. That’s when the escalating action of the story reaches a climax, and you know the rest is inevitable.)

It’s a movie that, ahem, touched a lot of nerves 20 years ago. I tried to watch it dispassionately, and came away thinking that it’s two-thirds of a pretty fair movie. Nice performances all around, with the usual Adrian Lyne sexual shenanigans, in which people are so hot for one another they do it on the kitchen counter, instead of walking 12 feet to the nice comfortable bed. But what really struck me were the phones.

If “The Departed” was a movie whose plot rested on the capabilities of cell phones, “Fatal Attraction” was set solidly in the former era. Every phone is the same type — your basic AT&T touch-tone desk model — and if nothing else, Lyne knows how to make a ringing phone into a harbinger of doom. Glenn sits on her bed and stabs out Michael’s number, over and over, this apparently being before the invention of the Redial button. Nothing is cordless; when people are called to the phone they walk across the room to pick it up. The receivers have weight, and when they’re slammed down, you can feel it. It’s hard to remember, but once upon a time you could have a movie character beaten with a phone and it would actually look like it hurt.

Glenn is harassing Michael by telephone, calling him and calling him and hanging up when his wife answers and then calling some more. When was Caller ID invented, you wonder. I know a guy who broke up with a girl not too long after this movie came out, and he had to use Call Block to keep her from ringing him at 2 a.m., so she spent an entire night going from gas station to gas station, calling him from pay phones. Which could be a pretty dramatic scene in a movie, when you think about it. Hollywood never closes one door, telephone-drama-speaking, without opening another.

P.S. Anyone thought the scene in “The Departed” where Matt Damon sends a text message from a phone in his pocket without anyone knowing was unbelievable — has never seen a teenager send a text message.

The New York Times has a story today that says female politicians are more likely, these days, to emphasize their maternity in selling themselves to the voting public, i.e., vote for me, I’m a mom. Hmm. The story goes into some detail about what a radical departure this is, as previously being a mommy was seen as a sign of weakness: For a long time women seeking high office, particularly executive office, were advised to play down their softer, domestic side, and play up their strength and qualifications. Focus groups often found voters questioning whether women were strong enough, tough enough, to lead. Huh. This just goes to show why I’m ill-suited for a career in politics, as it would be difficult to have one for very long before one developed an all-consuming contempt for voters.

Case in point: I once interviewed a woman at a rally for Dan Quayle. This was when he was briefly running for president, in 2000. “What do you like about him as a candidate?” I asked. “His marriage,” she said. “Go on,” I said. “Just…his marriage,” she said. Unspoken was her obvious contempt of the current occupant of the White House, who was also married, but who cheated on his wife. Quayle didn’t stay in the race long, and I assume this woman ended up voting for George Bush, who was also married. I wonder if she ever remembers this moment and feels like an idiot. My guess: No. One of the subsequent holders of Quayle’s foot-in-the-D.C.-door congressional seat is my old congressman, Mark Souder. He chickenhawked his way out of Vietnam as a conscientious objector and later was a strong booster of the Iraq war.

The archives of American newspapers are full of blustery quotes by male politicians who vowed to “protect” America, as though they were out there patrolling Fallujah in a Humvee, not sitting in Congress risking no injury more severe than accidental stabbing with a ballpoint pen. Remember when that crazy man came into the Capitol building with a gun and started shooting? It was a few years ago; he killed two Capitol police officers. Who was the testosterone-drenched congressman whose response was to lock the office door and crouch behind the desk? Tom DeLay? I think so. I remember thinking at the time, maybe this will be the incident that finally makes us confront the disgraceful state of care for the mentally ill in this country; perhaps it will be led by Congress, whose home was shot up by a man whose most recent treatment was “Greyhound therapy” — the inside-baseball jargon for buying a troublesome nutcase a ticket to another town, where he can be some other locality’s problem. No. Instead the talk was immediately about the far more useful tactic of arming everyone, so that the next attack could be answered by a hail of bullets by brave armed citizens.

If this is what passes for strength in Washington, bring on the mommies. At least I know they’ve been thrown up on and changed about two million diapers. That’s harder than flapping one’s gums.

The bloggage:

Glory hallelujah, I never thought it would happen, and it has happened, and so it must be shouted to the heavens: I finally found a post-“Close Encounters” movie directed by Steven Spielberg that I actually like. “Munich.” Those who know me know this is a true milestone; I’m probably the most reliable Spielberg-hater in five counties. I’m still so stunned that I think I’m going to have to digest it for a few days before I can write about it. I just thought the date should be noted somewhere.

I don’t know why this is amusing, but The Sun has found topless photos/screen captures of all the nominees for Best Actress. (Probably NSFW, depending on where you W.) No, I know why it’s amusing: Because they asked, in the lead-in, who has the best “jubblies” on this year’s red carpet. Surprise of the bunch: Judi Dench. Yes, I said Judi Dench.

There are very few reporters who could write a first-person account of this personal problem — trying to get one’s passport renewed in a matter of days, after one has noticed its expiration and one has a non-refundable flight to Paris coming up — without sounding like an overprivileged twit. The phrase boo-freakin’-hoo comes to mind. And yet, most reporters are not Jon Carroll:

It was still dark outside. I sat on the narrow steps of the passport building. I guess I must have been looming in the gloaming, because I alarmed passers-by who suddenly rounded the corner and encountered my slumping form. I dialed the number on the window. I was placed on hold. I was on hold for quite a while. I began to realize that I looked a lot like an indigent person, huddled in a darkened doorway with an old cell phone pressed to my ear. Were a police officer to come along, what would I say? “I’m on hold with the State Department?” Yeah, I bet that works.

Forty-five minutes are up. Go have yourself a Monday.

Took Kate to her first PG-13 movie over the weekend — “Dreamgirls.” I was willing to risk the corrupting influence of bad language, drug use and some sexuality for her to get a sense of what Detroit was, once upon a time. I don’t know if the lesson sunk in; I suspect for her it felt the same way it did for me when my parents brought up James Thurber. Yeah yeah, the night the bed fell, it fell in Columbus, but…yawn. Thurber didn’t come alive for me until I read “Newspaperman,” his essay on Gus Kuehner, city editor at the Dispatch. I don’t think Detroit will be Motown for Kate until (and if) she falls in love with “Dancin’ in the Streets.”

Whenever we go into Detroit, there seems to be a moment to discuss the 1967 riots. They’re depicted in “Dreamgirls” in sort of a montage-y way, using old news footage and stills. Last night at dinner I said, “Did you get a sense of what the riots were like?” and my little media consumer said yes, she did, but “I don’t know how they could set a whole block on fire. Did they use green screen?” Green screen. I ask you.

No, I said, that was a real news clip of an actual city block on fire, but I kept thinking about green screen. I avoid those “making of” documentaries; I want to preserve what little magic moviemaking still has for me, and knowing that some actor spoke all his lines to an empty soundstage later peopled with aliens and a 25th-century city skyline just makes me sad. If only the Detroit riots had been green screen.

“Dreamgirls” was OK. It’s hard to catch lightning in a bottle once, let alone try to duplicate it with Broadway versions of Motown songs. It’s one of those movies where you’re supposed to spend the first few beats of every scene marveling at the clothes and hairdos, and you do, but little moments I liked best are not the ones in the trailer — most involving Eddie Murphy, who can really really sing. I got a little tired at how heavy the roman a clef stuff was — naming the Florence Ballard clone “Effie” just for starters. And how amusing to see Murphy’s character turn from James Brown to Marvin Gaye, and just in case you didn’t get the message, they gave him Marvin’s knit skullcap. Still. A worthy holiday musical, green screen or not.

Only one bit o’ bloggage today, because it’s such a long read: Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean the government isn’t trying to beam voices into your brain.

Just switched off a radio interview so boring it could peel paint off the walls. (Really. I was getting paint chips in my hair.) Broadcast interviews are difficult, and I’m not one to throw stones, but making one this bad is a two-person job. There’s a certain sort of talker (and writer) who is never content to say “October” when he can say “the month of October,” or better yet, “the month in autumn that falls between September and November, which is to say, the month of October.” The only way to get these people to the point is to step in when they’re drawing a breath and redirect them a bit, but that’s a tricky business — be too abrupt and you sound rude; even the bored audience starts thinking, “Jeez, let the man finish his sentence,” although the sentence was meandering around the room with no period in sight.

Terry Gross has a well-deserved reputation as a skilled questioner, but I’d love to hear one of her raw tapes sometime; I would expect she has the benefit of some good editing. And even she can’t work miracles. I once heard her confess to being so bored in an interview that she actually fell asleep, and woke up when her lolling head hit the microphone.

I’d like to hear that one.

The person in the interview today was talking about Islam, and was distinctly American. But he had that tic you hear sometimes where a person tries to give a foreign word the native pronunciation. So Koran becomes “K’urahn,” etc. Spare me. Did you ever see the video of the initial interrogation of John Walker Lindh, the Taliban kid? Raised in NoCal, when he was questioned by the CIA he put on this preposterous Arab accent. “My fahther’s name…is Frahnk.” Talk Amur’can, kid.

Notice how many reporters say “Neek-a-rah-gwah” but never call the capital of France Par-ee?

Low-intensity rant over.

Here’s one I’m even less enthusiastic about: The iPhone. Oh sure, as a Mac-head I assume the usual kowtowing position in the direction of its elegant design, intuitive interface, blah to the blah. I won’t, however, be an early adopter. I blame my mom.

My mother never carried a big ring of keys. Her car keys were on one fob, house keys on another. She never fell for those all-in-one wallets, either, that holds all your cards, all your money and your checkbook, too; she carried all three separately. It’s obvious why: So when you lose one, you don’t lose everything. As it is, it’s terrifying to think of all I’d lose if my laptop were nicked, but even worse to imagine my laptop fitting into my pocket, too.

On the other hand, how wonderful it would be, as a journalist, to carry your one-man-band in a shirt pocket — to be able to write, take pictures and send the whole shebang back to the office without having a 5-pound device digging into your shoulder.

As for the phone, all I can say is: It’s Cingular. Beware.

Someone once wrote about the language of technology on the big screen, how there’s something about slamming a phone down that becomes part of the conversation, and the cell-phone era just doesn’t have an equivalent. Or rather, it didn’t, but the popularity of the folding phone sort of gave it one — snapping it shut is a gesture that can be performed quietly or angrily. When I saw the iPhone’s flat surface, my first thought was, great, another keypad that’ll have to be locked, and my second was, gotta get a new gesture for hanging up.

“Light Sleeper” was on last night, a film I ordinarily have a great deal of affection for. However, after last night, I see Alan’s point when he said, “Boy, is this pretentious and depressing.” The Call/Michael Been music on the soundtrack may have been the tipping point, especially since the budget seemed to have only allowed for one song, and so over and over the score told us that it feels like the world’s on fire. OK, OK, we get the point. Actually, the setting indicated that New York City was going through a garbage strike, but “it smells like the world’s an old rotting piece of fish” isn’t nearly as romantic-sounding.

Nice cast, though — Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, Victor Garber, David Clennon (!!! my fave !!!), with Sam Rockwell and David Spade in bit parts with character names like Jealous and Theological Cokehead. (They’re the worst kind, aren’t they?)

As you can see, I’m plainly tapped out. Discuss the Surge if you’re so inclined. Throwing more good lives away, or something worse?