So I got “Hannibal Rising” out of the library Saturday, expecting it to be a fine, sucky read in the model of “Hannibal.” (If you don’t understand how something can be fine and sucky, get outta here. It’s the same impulse that makes me want to call my friend Ron whenever the commercial for “Freedom Writers” airs, and say, we are so there.)

Twelve hours later, I closed the book, having read it more or less straight through. I didn’t stay up until 3, because nothing can keep me up until 3 anymore, at least not when I have the option of going to bed at 11. It didn’t suck. Too much. I was astonished.

In this opinion, I noted that I have very little company. The Amazon reviewers are savaging it, as are most professionals; Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times is fairly kind. But I don’t care who knows it: I kinda liked it.

“Hannibal” was such a shock to the system, taking the imprisoned monster of “Silence of the Lambs” and turning him loose in the world, where he promptly reveals himself as, well, a big ol’ fairy. People always speak of the ending, where he makes Clarice Starling his love slave and they live happily ever after in Buenos Aires. They say, “That was so out of character for her, I felt robbed.” Out of character for her? What about him? He’s arranging flowers and fussing over his table settings like Mr. Gay from Gaytown, population you!

Doubt me? Ahem:

Early in the morning the doctor laid his table carefully for three, studying it from different angles with the tip of his finger beside his nose, changed candlesticks twice and went from his damask place mats to a gathered tablecloth to reduce to more manageable size the oval dining table.

I could have bought this guy as merely a serious table-setter, but the changing-candlesticks-twice part was, how you say, the tell. Not to mention the finger beside his nose.

The rest of the book was larded with ridiculous details, all of which were rich fodder for Martin Amis’ takedown of the book in Talk magazine when it came out. I can’t find a copy online, but trust me when I say that after reading it, I thought Harris wouldn’t dare write about Hannibal again. A character is described as having “a rank smell, like sausage from an animal improperly gelded.” (You know, that smell.) There’s a lot of foofraw about the proper reduction of a stock, the outfitting of a picnic basket from Hammacher Schlemmer, and most absurd of all, the really creepy villain who makes martinis from the tears of weeping poor children. How would you order that in a bar?

A lot of that stuff is in “Hannibal Rising,” but either I’m more used to it or it just isn’t dwelt on so much, and doesn’t get in the way. There’s some flower-arranging, but it’s Japanese, hence not quite so twee. The plot I’m not so crazy about — it’s Hannibal’s origin story, and progresses in such a cinematic fashion that you immediately say, “Why, it’s almost as if this book was written simultaneously with the screenplay,” and then you realize, yes, yes it was. Seriously, the climax is so end-of-the-second-act you can practically hear the director shouting, “cut!” There’s even a big explosion, from which some actor will no doubt be harmlessly flung, arms and legs windmilling.

Maybe I didn’t like this book as much as I thought.

Or it might be that it simply benefited from low expectations. Whatever. I enjoyed the trip through eastern Europe it took me on, before we relocated to France and Hannibal’s training in flower arranging begins anew. Maybe what I liked best is, it showed me people like me, and like most readers, who actually like this character. I always thought it was amusing that Harris gave Lecter all the great lines, the most withering put-downs, the best taste, the highest IQ, and then turns around every third page and reminds us that he’s a MONSTAH, dammit, which makes you feel bad for ever wanting to have dinner with him (at a restaurant). Because this was pre-monstrous Hannibal, you don’t feel so guilty about it.

I see from the casting that “Hannibal Rising,” the released-in-February (kiss of death) movie, will feature two of my favorite HBO series actors — Kevin McKidd (Lucius Vorenus in “Rome”) and Dominic West (Jimmy McNulty in “The Wire”), the former as a bad guy, the latter as a French police inspector. It’s going to be accent-a-palooza, I can just see it now. Maybe I should call Ron. I think we have a bad-movie date coming.

Sorry for taking the day off. I was tired. Although I probably should come up with a better excuse; who isn’t tired in January? How about: I was in mourning for Gerald Ford, and it just seemed wrong to fritter time away blogging.

But really, I was tired. Our friends John and Sam came by on their way back home to Atlanta — they’ve been in Michigan most of the last three months (sick parents), but we haven’t seen each other. It seemed time to take the night off, go spend some money on beef tenderloin and open a few bottles of wine. (Although I will say: You can spend all you want on beef tenderloin, but you know what’s a bigger hit? Picking up a couple dozen tamales in Mexicantown for microwavable breakfasts. My kitchen still smells like salsa.)

So, anyway: Tired, but now rested. Back in the proverbial saddle. But I need to hustle. A freelancer’s income depends on multiple income streams, and all the streams are trickles at the moment. There are a few checks expected in the next few weeks, but it’s time for QueryFest 07. Oh, well — what else is January for?

Of course, thanks to the newspaper business, the ranks of potential freelancers swells seemingly hourly. It’s a jungle out there. In the sturm und drang of my last days in Fort Wayne, I talked regularly with a friend who works as a newspaper journalist in another city. His advice: “Don’t get bitter.” Exchanged e-mail with him yesterday, and learned his wife didn’t escape the reaper’s blade in Philadelphia this week. Guess what? He’s bitter.

Ah, but enough of that. This new year more than any in recent memory, I’m sensing a vibe of Big Change in the air. I know now that big change is as likely to be cancer or terrorist attacks as a new pony under the Christmas tree, but I’m choosing to be optimistic. You really do never know, and that’s why we get up every morning: To know.

Actually, yesterday I got up for another reason — I had to be Cocoa Mom at Kate’s school, to make warm chocolate sustenance for the incoming crossing guards, who are inordinately exposed to the elements as part of their duties. This being the Winter That Wasn’t, it was a borderline day; you’re excused from duty if the temperature is above 45 degrees. It was a couple below that, so I came in and stirred up a couple pots of Swiss Miss. Most of the takers were boys, who then sat down around a table in the small kitchen area to drink. I turned around, and caught them in a brief moment when their poses were not that of little boys, but of old men talking over coffee in all the places that old men do that — a casual slump, one hand wrapped around the cup, staring into the middle distance, dreaming of whatever. One boy wore, with no apparent sense of irony, a Sinatra-style fedora, which is probably why my mind made the connection. I just stood there for a minute, looking at the old men they will become (if they’re lucky enough to live that long), enjoying this moment of time travel before the bell rang. A little gift from the cosmos.

And now a little gift of bloggage:

When conservatives get high, they get high with a doctor’s prescription: William Rehnquist, addict. A fascinating story, really, which would have been an interesting cautionary tale, had its central figure chosen to tell it before he died. It seems the man in the striped judicial robes fell victim to a classic trope of the age: If it comes from a doctor, it’s not a drug, it’s medicine. Only the medicine was Placidyl, a “sleep aid” that could knock out an elephant, and the judge was taking three times the prescribed dose. Withdrawal made him a raving loon, and he tried to escape the hospital in his jammies.

Why laid-off newspaper journalists get bitter: “There has not been an occasion for many months when I got on our plane without wondering whether it was really affordable. But I’m not prepared to reenact the French Revolutionary renunciation of the rights of the nobility.” An inside look at the looting of the Chicago Sun-Times. Don’t read if you’re on blood-pressure medication.

One dark cloud on our visit with our friends came when they were preparing to leave early yesterday morning, and John checked his e-mail one last time, only to learn of the death of a college friend, Steve Korte. John writes a nice remembrance, but I’m linking separately to a little treat within for you Columbus natives: Steve’s recreation of “Wake Up, Mr. Tree,” beloved by all Columbus kids who watched “Luci’s Toyshop,” which is to say, all Columbus kids.

I’ve loved Djimon Hounsou since I saw his staggeringly fine ass in “Gladiator,” and resented the preachy movies of Edward Zwick since I saw “Glory” for the second time. Joe Queenan has his own problems with the Zwickian genre, perhaps best described as Whitey Saves the Black Folk. The usual Queenanesque evisceration.

Now I gotta go make dog biscuits. Why? Because I care, that’s why.

I’ve gotten a particular piece of wienie spam four times today. The first one said, “I don’t care why your woody is so small, but 81% of women do.”

The second one said, “I don’t care why your schlong is so small, but 74% of women do.”

The third one said, “I don’t care why your member is so small, but 85% of women do.”

The fourth one said, “I don’t care why your sausage is so small, but 70% of women do.”

Checking the junk file, I see I also got a version with a slightly different sentence construction, with the same tic — the euphemism changes, along with the percentage.

Oh, wait, another just arrived: “woody” and 80 percent.

Spammers. If only we could harness their powers for good.

It’s Friday, a sunny but cold Friday, which means today I’m a-gonna live large. Put in the contact lenses and wear my sunglasses, maybe hit an estate sale, work a bit and look forward to the weekend. On the strength of a hunch and a Free Press preview, I just bought tickets to the Moscow Cats Theater for tomorrow. Kate loves cats and needs to be exposed to more weirdness outside the boundaries of Grosse Pointe, so this seemed to fit the bill. I liked this detail:

When a stray cat jumps into the orchestra pit or refuses to move off the stage, Kuklachev will just move on to the next routine. “When they notice that all eyes are off of them, they will do something to win the attention back,” Gelfman says. “The show never plays the same way twice.”

Cats. If only we could harness their powers for good.

Well, the Rockettes aren’t bringing their Christmas show to the D this year, and it beats the drive-thru Nativity in Sterling Heights.

This feels like an end-of-the-week stew already, so let’s get to it:

I know I haven’t been keeping up with “On the Nightstand,” and yes, I’m about to change it, but before I put “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” back on the shelf, a plug for its wonderfulness. I’ve been reading compilations of journalists’ work for years, and not all of them are worth the paper they’re printed on, but this one — this one has legs. A bouquet of wonderful profiles, followed by personal essays of grace and style. It would make a fine book club selection, or beach reading, or whatever. And yes, it has a new website, full of supplemental materials. Enjoy.

I just read a rave of “Apocalypto” by one of my favorite critics, but you know what they say about opinions. Here’s another take, from Slate’s Dana Stevens:

Here is a partial list of the indignities to which the human body is subjected in Mel Gibson’s Mayan epic Apocalypto (Buena Vista): being impaled on a trap made of animal bones. Being forced to ingest tapir testicles. Being tricked into rubbing a caustic agent on one’s own genitals while the whole village watches and laughs. Seeing one’s father have his throat slit. Getting one’s heart cut out in a sacrificial ritual. Having one’s head subsequently chopped off and thrown down the stairs of a pyramid. Having one’s face chewed off by a panther. …Gibson’s fascination with the Mayans seems to spring entirely from the fact (or fantasy) that they were exotic badasses who knew how to whomp the hell out of one another, old-school.

Extra credit for a fresh use of that old analogy: “so (blank) it makes (blank) look like (blank).” Ahem: A chase scene at a roaring waterfall is so spectacular, it makes “Last of the Mohicans” look like an Esther Williams musical.

Mercy. I’ll wait for the cable debut. Although I still haven’t seen “The Passion of the Christ.” Doesn’t Mel believe in HBO?

Finally, I pride myself — not really; I just take note of it — on not having any accent. I’m from the middle of Ohio, where the natives have no regional accent whatsoever. My St. Louis-raised parents said “fark” and “harse” for fork and horse, but they moved me to the Buckeye state before I started kindergarten, and so — no accent. Evidently, experts agree:

Glad to clear that up. Now, on to “What mental disorder do you have?” Have a swell weekend.

Thanks, I had a nice birthday. “What do you want to do on your special day?” Alan asked.

“Take a road trip,” I said.

“Where?”

“Port Huron.”

Why Port Huron? Because I’ve never been there. And now that I have, I don’t think I have to go back. Not that there’s anything wrong with Port Huron, except the fact that the downtown riverfront view is of an oil refinery on the Canadian side. Our part of Michigan is full of reminders that we’re not Santa Fe, with an economy based on art galleries and restaurants, but man — that’s a depressing sight for a Port Huronian, I’d imagine.

Anyway, we saw Port Huron. Shared a pizza with the fam later, had a super-delicious chocolate cake and watched “Thank You for Smoking” on pay-per-view. It was exactly as I remember the book — a fine good time when it was going on, almost instantly forgettable afterward, which makes it a three-star flick in my book. Nothing wrong with that. Aaron Eckhart has quite the chin dimple.

Somewhere along the course of the weekend, I made time to watch “Thin,” a documentary airing on HBO. It’s about women at an eating-disorders clinic in Florida.

If you’ve known anyone with an eating disorder — what am I saying? Everybody has known someone with an eating disorder. I met my first one in college, one of my roommates. She was recovering from anorexia, although she obsessed about food more or less constantly and had a million strange eating habits, including munching on carrots to the tune of a pound a day. The palms of her hands were orange. Another friend shared an apartment in Manhattan with a bulimic. The layout of the apartment was symmetrical, with a bedroom/sitting area on either side and a bathroom in between. A couple nights a week, the roommate would binge and purge, binge and purge, all night long. A few weeks of listening to vomiting and flushing sent my friend back to the closet she was sleeping in, in Brooklyn.

Anyway, it’s very common. And like all problems, it occurs along a continuum. The women in “Thin” are at the shithouse-rat end of the spectrum; one has a tube in her stomach, which her parents had inserted to keep her alive, although it didn’t take long for her to figure out how to flex her stomach muscles to make it work the other direction. The shots of her gaunt belly, with both the tube and the belly-button ring, were ghastly.

What interests me about eating disorders is how mainstream they are, not just in their frequency but in the increasingly open acceptance of them in regular society. For all the dying supermodels, it’s becoming clear that some people don’t really see anything wrong with it. Supportive pro-anorexia and bulimia websites are out there, and unashamed. Victoria “I’m not anorexic” Beckham claims to have a 23-inch waist. A British writer noted this was the exact circumference of her head. I just got a tape measure and checked — mine, too. Women come in all sizes, but this is ridiculous.

Lately I’ve read about something called “exercise bulimia,” no barfing involved, just obsessive exercise to nullify every calorie ingested. This was reported with a shrug; if you have to be bulimic, might as well be this variety.

But I really goggled at a review of “Thin” in the New York Times, in which Virginia Heffernan noted the infantilizing atmosphere at the treatment center where these women are housed, and then writes:

And after all this restraining of their evil ways, the women can only conclude that they are undisciplined, depraved and out of control, though to look at their gaunt forms and hear about their seriousness of purpose, you can hardly imagine that willpower is what they lack. …Why do these so-called professionals talk like carping schoolmarms? Anorexics notoriously inspire annoyance in other people; it’s not clear why. Maybe, in their self-discipline, they make the rest of us feel slovenly.

Calling anorexia “willpower” and “self-discipline” is like saying someone who washes hands 400 times a day has an impressive commitment to personal hygiene. All you have to do is watch these women eat. They ingest every forkful as though it’s toxic waste. One has to polish off a birthday cupcake and takes forever to do so, complaining throughout that it’s “too sweet” and looking, by the last bite, as though she’s just eaten a turd.

It’s true — anorexics inspire annoyance. It puts me off my feed to see someone at the table mopping butter off an English muffin with a thick stack of napkins. It’s annoying to see someone who can’t spend five minutes without thinking about what she won’t be eating for her next meal. All the women in “Thin” came across as girls, even one who already had two children of her own. One was made that way by her own mother, who taught her the tricks of the game, and another hinted at unspeakable trauma in her past, but in all the family sessions you got the feeling their loved ones were trying hard not to slap faces.

Anyway, in a weekend devoted to overeating, it was an interesting contrast.

So, bloggage:

Gene Weingarten diagnoses John Kerry’s humor problem in a tight paragraph:

The man is as strait-laced as a whalebone corset, as rigid as Formica. His business is politics. He should never be anywhere near a joke.

The same Jerry Seinfeld joke, as would be told by John Kerry– The problem with mall garages is that your mother’s a whore.

Elsewhere in the WashPost, the fascinating story of the AK-47, portions of which I stumbled across in the past. If you saw “Lord of War” you got a nutshell version of this in a Nicolas Cage voiceover, but the story is far more thorough:

The story of the gun itself, from inspiration in Bryansk to bloody insurgency in Iraq, is also the story of the transformation of modern warfare. The AK blew away old battlefield calculations of military superiority, of tactics and strategy, of who could be a soldier, of whose technology would triumph.

When one war ended, arms brokers gathered up the AKs and sold them to fighters in the next hot spot. The weapon’s spread helps explain why, since World War II, so many “small wars” have lingered far beyond the months and years one might expect. Indeed, for all of the billions of dollars Washington has spent on space-age weapons and military technology, the AK still remains the most devastating weapon on the planet, transforming conflicts from Vietnam to Afghanistan to Iraq. With these assault rifles, well-armed fighters can dominate a country, terrorize citizens, grab the spoils — and even keep superpowers at bay.

And all Mikhail Kalashnikov was after was a decent, non-jamming weapon.

On a more peaceful note, NN.C reader and sometime commenter Jeff Gill turns up in the Columbus Dispatch, defending the Hopewell Indian mounds of Newark, Ohio. Well done.

And now we are 49. Sigh. Oh well — maybe I’ll have a career again by 50.

Sports aren’t my thing, but hey — it’s fun to live in a World Series town, especially when the first game hasn’t started yet and you haven’t lost.

Kate and I went down to the ballpark on a mission. We weren’t there to soak in the atmosphere, but to buy a birthday gift for Nikki, whose stomach virus flew in and out the window within 24 hours. The birthday sleepover party was back on for Saturday and, for once, I didn’t need to think about what to buy for a present. Nikki’s a big Tigers fan, plays Little League herself.

“I want to get her a T-shirt and a big foam paw,” Kate said. And so we did. We probably could have found both in the Pointes, but we couldn’t have seen the park on the day of Game One, and we probably couldn’t have gotten the bonus free XL T-shirt being given away on the street by the Ball Park Franks people. It declares BP as the official hot dog of the Detroit Tigers.

(I wonder if Hebrew National has the Yankees account sewn up. If so, that’s a good reason to go to a game there. Love those Hebrew Nationals. I distrust a frankfurter that, like Ball Park, “plumps” when you cook ’em. Never mind the adolescent humor of watching a tubesteak grow tumescent on the grill. I want to know what, precisely, does the plumping? Cellulose foam? Oh, well. It’s not like I have tickets anyway.)

On the way home, Kate asked many questions about baseball, and I answered them to the best of my ability, which should be understood to mean: Not very well. She asked about the Fort Wayne Wizards and I explained the minor leagues. Then she asked about the Columbus Clippers and I explained about the difference between single-A and triple-A minor-league ball. Then she got off on a tangent about the Clippers, thinking the team was named for a manicure accessory, and I tried to explain about fast-moving ships and the Yankee affiliation. We discussed the World Series, and why the teams play two games in one city, then three in the next, and two more in the first city. Then I ran out of information, and tried to remember as much of the stupid Clippers song as I could — something about hometown heroes and ringing your bell. Thank God for the internet, so we can all sing along.

With the birthday sleepover back on, we were free to see “The Departed” after all. We chose to see it at the RenCen, the better to bask in the Saturday-night World Series glory. Alas, however, the projectionist was doing that thing I’ve read about — showing the picture with a dimmer bulb than is called for, resulting in a muddy stew of murk. It was really annoying, and how ironic that this was a Scorsese picture; Marty Himself is said to travel with a light meter and calls projectionists on this bit of miserly penny-pinching. (The low-light projection is believed by some theater managers to save wear and tear on the expensive bulbs.)

It was distracting, and almost, but not quite, enough to affect my enjoyment of the movie. I had to make a conscious decision, 15 minutes in, to will my pupils to open just a tetch wider and try to forget about the murk. It helped that this scene was in progress:

(Leonardo DiCaprio sits down at the bar in a tough Southie dive and orders a cranberry juice.)

BARTENDER: Cranberry juice?!

GUY ON THE NEXT STOOL: Cranberry juice is a natural diuretic. My girlfriend drinks it when she’s havin’ her period. How about you? You havin’ your period?

(DiCaprio smashes a glass on the guy’s head.)

Every woman who’s ever been asked, by anyone other than a medical professional, if she’s havin’ her period can relate to that.

It was a great movie.

I look forward to seeing it again on DVD, when I can control the brightness. If the theater industry is losing money, it’s their own damn fault.

Almost as good was the stroll, afterward, over the Greektown, where Tiger fans thronged the sidewalk. From the cheers I thought we were winning, then checked the score through a bar window: 5-1. Ouch. The cheers were for such heroics as base hits; no one was letting a little lopsided runaway get anyone down, and good for them. How depressed can you get when waiters are lighting cheese on fire in restaurants up and down the street? I ask you.

Bloggage:

If you read one really long story today, I recommend this one: Doonesbury’s War, maybe the first profile of Garry Trudeau done with his cooperation in, like, ever. It’s by our beloved Gene Weingarten, so you know it’s worth your time.

Last week’s mention of “Meerkat Manor” revealed the little critters have fans, and then they have Fans. Here’s one, liveblogging MM every week.

This photo by Fred R. Conrad was on Page One of the New York Times today. I looked at it a long time last night; it’s not exactly “The Garden of Earthly Delights” but there’s a lot to see.

The woman in the pumpkin-colored sweater is clearly what the photographer was aiming at. Her open face, and its expression of pain and bewilderment, is the story in a single image. But I love the woman in the dark blazer that we can see over her left shoulder, looking at the photographer with a suspicious scowl — damn media ghouls! The little boy’s blue T-shirt reads BUCKLEY. It’s a private school for boys on the upper east side. The school’s website suggests they have a blue-blazer dress code, so his casual dress pegs the time period as late afternoon. And the plump Latina holding his hand? Everything about her says “nanny.” Look at the grip she has on him; this is a woman who knows her job. There’s a woman at far right, out of focus, in a pale trench coat. She has a goofy smile on her face, but we’ll make no judgments about her, beause pictures lie. Another out-of-focus man talks on the phone directly behind the boy, and he’s wearing a uniform. I’m thinking doorman. And because this is New York, note how many people are moving, especially the woman on the left, holding a white bag. Look at the length of her stride. New York is the only place where my usual walking pace (brisk) is frequently too slow for the flow of traffic. People in New York always have someplace they gotta be. Gotta make some money. Gotta pay that nanny.

Another day of keyboard-clattering for me, so how about some quick bloggage?

Desperate times call for desperate measures: Aggrieved that younger, prettier and more fecund celebrities are stealing her Mother Bountiful thunder, Madonna picked an African country, parachuted in with her entourage and left with the ultimate party favor: an African baby of her own. (She’ll never be a brunette again. And look for her to wear lots of white from here on out, so the baby photographs better, riding on her hip.) I’m puzzled by one thing, though: The child is not an orphan. He lost his mother at birth, but his father is still alive, and is said to have approved the adoption. If Madonna is such a champ philanthropist, why not write a check to dad, make him a rich man, and let the child be raised by his own father? I’m sure what Madonna spends on dry cleaning in six months could set the whole village up in style. And I’m sure, in gratitude, dad and the other villagers would be happy to provide children for photo opportunities well into the future.

Just wondering.

Forget what all those jerks say about the internet making film criticism obsolete. We’ll always need the good ones. It wasn’t until “The Departed” was released, and Roger Ebert didn’t review it, that I realized he wouldn’t live forever. I’m sure that thought occurs to Ebert himself several dozen times a day lately, but in the meantime, he’s recovering, and I hope he has a few more reviews in him before he goes to the screening room in the sky.

I tried to read “Snow” and couldn’t get past the first chapter. Of course, Orhan Pamuk just won the Nobel Prize. Back to the old drawing board.

I keep a weather-radar widget on my computer desktop. Yesterday, bands of green blobs marched across the screen from west to east. Today, cottony white ones. Sigh. And so it begins.

OK, so I’ll admit it: I watched approximately 180 seconds of Katie Couric’s debut newscast. It so happened I had just started dinner — that is, ordered a pizza — and had about five minutes to put my feet up. I was in a room with a TV, there was the remote, and thanks to the momentous publicity blitz, I recalled that I could, at that very moment, watch some “historic” television.

So I did. For three minutes. History just ain’t as thrilling as it used to be.

If my current viewing patterns are any indication, I’ll next watch Katie in 2015. I hope she has a nice career.

Really, though, do you watch network news? How often do you have the magic combination of time and opportunity to sit down and get your news the way Walter Cronkite used to deliver it? For me, the answer is “pretty much never.” I don’t keep a TV in my kitchen, which is where I usually am at 6:30, but I do have a radio there, and have NPR on at that hour. If any glowing screen comes into my kitchen, it’s my laptop, and I guaran-damn-tee you it’s not running network-news video broadband.

I don’t know about you, but I suspect I’m fairly typical. Others are still commuting home from work, having an end-of-day run/yoga session, mixing cocktails or doing anything other than sitting in one place and allowing a handful of network producers to select their day’s information.

So, that said, is there anything that marks newspapers as network news’ dance partner in the fading sunset of a general-interest media universe more than the obsessive attention paid to this titanic non-story? I’m saying…no.

And the Photoshop diet? This just in: Marketing departments preparing photos of marketable celebrities frequently apply digital-retouching techniques to make sure they look as good as possible. Stop the goddamn presses.

UPDATE: J.C. has a timeline demonstrating the content/breaks ratio. (And more thoughts, from a much more informed perspective.)

OK.

Jury duty: How I longed for a better experience. But it was pretty much like jury duty everywhere, in that I sat in a sweltering room in the Frank Murphy Hall of Justice with 300 other citizens for four hours before we were all turned loose. We watched the standard how-our-court-system-works video, then “Men in Black” for amusement. We were called in groups to courtrooms, only to be told the case was settled or the defendant took a plea or the lawyer decided to extend his Labor Day holiday by 24 hours. Although I never got called. I read the New York Times, then prepped for my afternoon interview, then read Kenneth Turan’s latest collection of movie reviews, which Alan took off the anybody’s pile at work. Is there anything more perishable than a movie review? Not much, and yet I read and read and read, because movie reviews are a) easy to chew; and b) I’d finally seen most of the movies in question. It made me want to see “Mystic River” again, and I decided anew that, in the bout between “Million Dollar Baby” vs. That Moron Michael Medved, it’s a first-round KO.

Kate went back to school yesterday. I have a to-do list the length of my forearm today. Better get to it.

I know I used a version of this picture before, several sunflowers-in-the-silver-pitcher episodes ago, but this is why I bought this thing. It might as well get its publicity.

It was a sunflowery day, the kind of day that makes you wish summer would never end, even though I noted with chagrin today that I must start monitoring the front window again. As the sun creeps south, it lengthens its reach into the living room and threatens to bleach the furniture. In winter, a sunny day means the blinds stay closed most of the day. And now…

…I’m starting to sound like Lileks. A better solution: Get some of that bleached-muslin furniture and let the solar radiation make it even whiter..

Finally saw “Syriana.” And finally, was grateful that I’d waited for the DVD, because this is a movie that requires a second viewing, preferably the next day, to sort everything out. But I’m glad I did. Everybody talks about the stars of a movie, and so it seems everyone knows George Clooney packed on a toddler’s weight in fat to play a CIA agent, but why doesn’t anyone ever talk about Chris Cooper? He’s, like, the greatest character actor since Gene Hackman, and I didn’t even know he was in this thing. In the last several years I’ve seen him play a horse trainer, an orchid thief, a Kansas state police detective, a homophobic Marine and now an oilman, and he just disappears into every character. I’d hire him to train my horse and run my oil company, I would. I think he could do it.

Anyway, it’s hard to say what “Syriana” is about, because if I say, “It’s a demi-thriller about the complexities of the global oil business,” that sounds pretty boring, and it’s not, really. You should see it, if you haven’t already, if only for Tim Blake Nelson’s speech about corruption. (“It keeps us safe and warm!”)

Not much today, as I’m busy and blah blah the usual excuses blah blah. Ashley, our regular commenter and longtime pen pal, was in both the L.A. Times and Sun-Times yesterday, and he wasn’t even charged with a felony, AND the stories were on two different topics. Links at his joint.

Meanwhile, as the nation’s threat level remains at red, I’m continuing my pie-related counterprogramming. Today: Mmm…blueberry.

Sometimes you just want the TV on for background noise. Volume at a low murmur, a moving painting pushed up against the wall. It’s not too distracting that way. I’ve also found it’s pretty much the perfect way to appreciate “Scarface.”

It was on AMC last night. I never watch movies on AMC — there are commercials, and the profanity is scrubbed, but last night I was paying 98 percent of my attention to something else, and besides, it’s “Scarface.” The worst movie ever made. You think losing a few f-bombs is going to hurt the experience?

But actually, I came away from this multitask-aided viewing sort of liking it. How the hell could that happen? I dunno; maybe because I paid attention to the women this time. I liked seeing scrawny, slight-breasted women like Michelle Pfeiffer and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio in plunging necklines. (Nowadays Posh Spice is the model.) I liked Mastrantonio’s ridiculous Afro, and the scene where Pfeiffer listens to her husband crab about everything while he takes a bath. (She sits at her vanity, polishing her nails and tooting cocaine, which seems the right strategy.) Of course, I loved the stupid accents: Toe-nee, we jost got mah-reed yesterday! We were goin’ to soo-prize you!

And, of course, I liked how Miami seems to be entirely populated by young blondes walking down the street in string bikinis. Oliver Stone and Brian DePalma at their best.

It was a short, intense week, but now all my work is done, and it’s Friday! And it’s beautiful! And it’s warm, but not so hot. So I’m giving you this lame-ass entry and a few links:

Lance Mannion speaks for me and many others when he takes note of the tut-tutting over the tone of the Lieberman race — something I’ve paid less than close attention to, although I know it’s pretty ugly — with this cri de blog:

And everybody on down the food chain to the lowliest of the low—I mean me—has again and again expressed their frustration, dismay, and anger at the way insider pundits, politicians, and analysts insist on covering politics as if they live in a universe where Newt Gingrich, Tom DeLay, Karl Rove, Rush Limbaugh, Ann Coulter, Roger Ailes of Fox News (not the good Roger Ailes) and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal, and before them Lee Atwater, Morton Downey Jr, Richard Nixon, Spiro Agnew, Joe McCarthy, and Father Coughlin, had all never been born and as if the poisoned state of political debate was the Democrats’ doing, a bug they keep catching because they refuse to wear their galoshes in the rain and then pass along by not covering their mouths when they cough.

Uh-huh.

The proprietor of Detroitblog is a secretive fellow (he obscured his WHOIS entry), and I suspect for good reason: Evidence suggests he’s a journalist in the employ of one of the dailies, and if word leaked to his bosses that he was blogging on the side, they’d perform their usual First Amendment-inspired clampdown on his right to free expression. Because everyone knows that once you go to work for the princely salary a newspaper pays, they OWN you, brother, you and EVERY WORD YOU WRITE.

Oh, I digress. Anyway, he has a lovely post up, with pictures, on the encroachment of the urban prairie in inner-city Detroit. He had permalinks for a while, but no more, but he doesn’t update often, so if you just go here, I’m sure the post will be at the top for at least a few days.

Like 99 out of 100 tween girls in the Pointes, Kate has a pair of Crocs this summer. For a pair of plastic shoes, they’re priced a little steeply at $25, but eh, it’s summer and she’s never going to be 9 years old and thrilled by turquoise plastic shoes again. (I hope.) However, buying the shoes is only the beginning. Perhaps because everyone has a pair, some in several colors, the next step has to be personalization. After some discussion about the wise use of one’s allowance, we went online to buy a few Crocs charms to stick into the holes.

If you look at the link immediately above, you’ll see the splash screen features a shoe with “LOVE” spelled out in letter charms. I told Kate all about Robert Mitchum in “The Night of the Hunter” and how amusing and cool it would be if she got charms so that one shoe said “LOVE” and the other “HATE.” Astonishingly — astonishingly! — she rejected this idea, perhaps perceiving that she had grown out of the age when she could be propped up in a stroller and dressed in a T-shirt reflecting her mother’s political opinions.

Still, it would be an amusing sight gag for a mean-girl character in a contemporary teen movie. At least as long as Crocs stay in style. Which, given the time it takes to get a movie made, means…forget it.

Man, what a weekend. Pulsating sunshine, azure sky, low humidity, mild temperatures. We/I celebrated by going sailing in fairly light wind, which sort of sucked (but the sunbathing was nonpareil); working on Project Table; riding the bike all over hell ‘n’ gone; watching “Closer” and going on at least a portion of the Grosse Pointe garden tour.

One of the houses featured a long arbor leading from the house to the pool, with years-old roses climbing all over it. The ground beneath was littered with petals; unfortunately, the tour seemed to catch the arbor between blooming cycles. But I was amazed at the thick canes at the base of the plants, and how the thorns were proportionately large. They twined all around the arbor supports, nature’s own razor wire. It wasn’t the sort of place where you’d want to lose your balance and grab a post for support. Which gave me an idea for a fight scene in a movie, where the rich villain and the cool hero are fighting in the arbor, smashing one another against the thorns and tearing the crap out of one another — except the cool hero still looks very, very handsome — before the villain finally dies from…oh, say, a trowel plunged into the throat.

Gardening can be a very violent sport.

Do I have bloggage? I have a bit:

I loved this NYT story about Larry Kramer, the gay playwright and activist, and his brother Arthur. I suspect Larry is a difficult man to have a close relationship with, and yet I came away amazed yet again by the strange bonds of family and love and all the rest of it. The normal heart, indeed.

I know you wake up every morning and ask yourself, “Hey, whatever happened to Maria Schneider, the girl from “Last Tango in Paris”? She became a junkie, among other things. She also starred with Jack Nicholson in “The Passenger,” which is finally being released on DVD. Now you know.

And now I’m going to take a shower. See you later.