Tuesday night

We’ll see how long this lasts. I was up at 5 a.m. today, out the driveway at 5:55 a.m., in Lansing for a half-day conference followed by the story-writin’, then home. Did I mention both legs of the drive were made in pouring rain and fog? Yes, and isn’t that fun, knowing that just at the end of your headlights might be the puddle that sends you hydroplaning, while enormous SUVs pass you — on both sides — at 80 or so.

The last part of the trip home, a Mercedes sat in front of me for six miles, right blinker on. Exited, turned left, merged left, merged right. Blink, blink, blink. My tension level was high enough at that point that I would have happily rammed the back of his car to shut the thing off.

The point is, man am I tired.

But I have fortified with pizza, wine and cake, and all is better. And now I’m thinking about what I read yesterday, from the AP:

PITTSBURGH (AP) — The breathtaking model on your magazine cover: Of course she’s not that thin and unblemished. That reality show you never miss? You’re shocked – shocked that its real-life drama isn’t 100 percent unscripted. And that diva who may or may not have mouthed the words to the national anthem to her own prerecorded voice? Yeah, well, so what? It was a big moment, and she wanted to sound her best.

In America these days, in countless tiny ways, much of what we see and experience isn’t exactly what it seems. We know it, too. And often we don’t care, because what we’re getting just seems to “pop” more than its garden-variety, without-the-special-sauce counterpart.

It’s not a dumb essay, but not a particularly smart one, either. Real life has become a cascade of unreal artifice? That’s a revelation that could only occur to the AP. Honestly, I can’t think of a single thing I care about less than whether Beyoncé was singing live at the presidential inauguration. Not one thing. Singing is a more physical act than most of us would expect, and cold air doesn’t go well with it. Even delivering a rocky note or three is asking to get yourself on Gawker or in the late-night monologues or whatever, and who wants to be known as the girl who was flat on the National Anthem on worldwide TV? So she faked it a little. (Or she didn’t.) It was still her.

If you want to talk about fakery in entertainment, then I want to talk about a show that’s becoming one of my very favorites, because it’s so real — “Enlightened,” a half-hour dramedy-ish thing on HBO. What’s it about? So much, and so little, but mainly, it’s about the way many of us work today.

(Somewhere along the way, it became Wednesday morning.)

It’s a tough sell, this show, as it’s hard to even describe. Season one was about the return of Amy Jellicoe, played by Laura Dern, to work at the soulless corporation that helped drive her to a nervous breakdown some months earlier. The pilot introduces Amy in recovery at a posh Hawaiian rehab facility, meditating on the beach, swimming with the sea turtles and returning to Riverside, Calif. a new woman — the sort who gets up in your face at the office coffeepot and says stuff like, “I am speaking to you with my true voice.”

But in the unspooling of the first season, and especially the second, we come to understand why Amy flipped out in the first place, and why her return, upon which she was immediately exiled to a weird new basement cube farm to work on a project called Cogentiva, is leading to an even bigger flip-out. Because this place may well be hell.

Take the name of the corporation — Abaddon. If you lack an encyclopedic knowledge of the book of Revelation, be advised that’s the name of a dark angel, king of an army of locusts. The company seems to make consumer goods that come in bottles; pre-breakdown, Amy worked in health and beauty, and is seen begging for a demotion to cleaning products to avoid the Cogentiva basement gig. (And because this is 21st-century America, there also seems to be a pharmaceutical wing.) Abaddon is housed in a glistening glass tower in one of those office parks that’s the same from Hartford to Cincinnati to Austin to Riverside, but like its namesake, it’s a destroyer — nominally of the environment, but mainly of the poor schmucks who toil behind those glass walls.

Here’s something I noticed a while back: How often the characters in the books I was reading were independently wealthy. Even serious novelists, with aspirations to Pulitzers and Nobels, and yes, I’m looking at you, Jim Harrison, seem to throw in a lot more heiresses and early retired tycoons than the average person might know in real life. It’s an easy way around a problem for writers trying to create fiction about the way we live today; most of us spend most of our waking hours at work, and much of our work sucks ass. I recall reading an interview with Mike Judge, around the time he was trying to sell “Office Space” in Hollywood; none of these zillionaire, Harvard-educated studio heads could understand why the story’s main character didn’t just quit his job and get a better one. They couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact there are millions of Americans who toil for corporations like Abaddon or Initech, in suburban office parks, and that many of them are quietly being driven insane by their jobs. But the next job is likely to be just as crazy-making, maybe even in the same office park, so why give up the seniority and accrued vacation days?

“Enlightened” brings us into this world, this real world, better than anything I’ve seen since, well, “Office Space.” It’s sharper, meaner but also kinder, if that’s possible. Even the bad bosses are simply the overseers for the unseen slavers in the corporate suites.

And if that isn’t a pivot, from Tuesday to Wednesday, from the AP to HBO, from Beyoncé to Laura Dern, well slap my face and call me Streamy McConsciousness. But right now, I have to get to work.

Man, I hope I don’t get this flu that’s going around. We all got flu shots, but late in the season, Kate just about 10 days ago. Now she’s lying on the couch under a blanket pile with what sounds like a migraine. Which isn’t the flu, I know, but it could be an early rumble.

I’m so glad headaches aren’t in the frequent-miseries file in my DNA. That’s the inheritance from dad’s side. I just buy the Tylenol.

Apparently a beautiful day conducted itself outside my window all damn day, while I sat inside, listened to the wind blow through the bare branches and made a million phone calls. Forty-seven degrees? When did I move to North Carolina? You’ve heard, of course, that 2012 is now in the record books as the hottest ever. Oh, how I hope this passes. A January thaw is one thing, but another year like this one? Don’t know if I can do that.

And now it’s evening, and I’m watching “The Abolitionists.” Not enjoying it much, I’m sorry to say; I hate these cheesy dramatizations. Especially low-budget ones.

So let’s go to the bloggage:

First, a hilarious story about a blogger who made an offhand remark about Richard Marx — the top-40 pop-singin’ guy — and provoked an unusual response. Marx read it, and responded. Angrily:

No explanation for why you write that I’m “shameless?” You act pretty tough sitting alone in your little room behind your laptop.

If you’d written you hated my music, that’s cool. Like I could give a shit. But saying I’m “shameless” calls into question my character and integrity.

This is my hometown…where my kids live…where my mother lives…and this will not stand with me.

Would you say that to my face? Let’s find out. I’ll meet you anywhere in the city, any time. I don’t travel again until the end of the week. Let’s hash this out like men.

Never heard of you in my life before, but between various columnist/radio friends and an array of people at NBC, I now know plenty about you. You don’t know anything about me. But you’re about to.

This isn’t going away.

Richard Marx

I include this one because I know Basset follows city-planning news, and this week the mother of all city-planning efforts was revealed — the new Detroit, a place of neighborhoods as urban villages, surrounded by green space, forests, farms, ponds. Well, that’s the drawing-board version, anyway. But the Kresge Foundation said they’re giving one! hundred! fifty! million! dollars! to make it work, so who knows.

Finally, one of my own, the reason I was in Dearborn last month — three charter schools serving almost entirely Arab-American populations, and poor ones at that, landed on Bridge’s list of the best schools in the state. An impressive bunch of people, almost all women, run the shows. And they gave me hummus, which practically counts as a bribe. So. (Link will go live after 8 a.m.)

Oh, this week feels so very, very long. Damn you, holidays — why must you end?

One of the best thing about this interval between the holidays is the lack of pressure, and freedom to do what I want, which today has meant a) eating tortilla chips with guacamole and b) reading. I do too much of the former and too little of the latter, and both are my own damn fault, but let’s not get into the self-laceration, yet. Let’s keep this to what it is, a breezy update on the two books I’ve completed in the last few days.

The first, “The Lifespan of a Fact,” I recommend highly, mostly to my journalist friends and anyone who writes for a living or a hobby, but really, to anyone who’s ever contemplated the difference between facts and truth. The book consists of the seven years’ worth (condensed and, to some extent, recreated) of correspondence between John D’Agata, writer, and Jim Fingal, fact-checker. D’Agata has written an essay about the suicide of a teenage boy in Las Vegas, although, being a capital-W Writer from the get-go, it’s really about a lot of other things. (Every story is really about a lot of other things, but D’Agata is on the muscle about his larger purpose — to create art, compose lyric sentences and riff on life and death and Vegas and so on. His essay was originally written for Harper’s, but rejected for factual errors, which is where Fingal evidently entered the picture. (It was later offered to The Believer, a magazine where Fingal worked.)

The two clash from the very first sentence, much of which Fingal can’t verify. D’Agata tells him to stop bugging him about this shit — it isn’t important, it doesn’t matter, anyway he’s an essayist, not a journalist, and he takes liberties, and who cares whether there really were 34 strip clubs in Las Vegas at the time, and whether the tic-tac-toe game with the chicken happened on this day or another one? Fingal does, and to his credit, doesn’t allow this University of Iowa professor to intimidate him. And so the process begins. Fingal isn’t editing; that’s someone else’s job. His task is to take every single statement presented as fact and verify whether it actually is.

A college classmate of mine did this job for a while in New York City; it’s a traditional entry-level position in the prestige-magazine trade, and it is thankless. (The fictional narrator of “Bright Lights, Big City,” the thinly veiled autobiographical voice of Jay McInerney, did the same job at a magazine similarly veiled, but obviously The New Yorker.) She was paid a poverty-level wage to take the hallowed prose of writers like Tom Wolfe and Christopher Buckley — to name but two of the unlisted phone numbers in her Rolodex — and peck at it like a chicken. If Wolfe wrote that the morning of July 2, 1973 was hot and rainy in Anniston, Ala., she consulted almanacs or weather stations to make sure it wasn’t really unseasonably cool under a high-pressure system. She called interview subjects to verify they had Remington bronzes on the credenza behind their desks, as described in the text. Were you wearing a navy suit with a pocket square that day? And so on. The only thing she didn’t fact-check were quotes, because people invariably got cold feet when confronted with their own words and tried to back out of them.

It’s a good job for a beginner because it teaches you research skills, and I imagine it also teaches you how to hold your own when some Bigfoot writer, confronted with his own laziness or lousy reporting, pushes back. In “The Lifespan of a Fact,” D’Agata pushes back again and again and again, but then, he gives Fingal so very much to work with. He seems to think that, by declaring he isn’t a journalist, he can do anything he wants with the building blocks of reality, those pesky facts. He changes the name of a school because he thinks the correct name is stupid. He changes the color of a fleet of dog-grooming vans from pink to purple because he needed a two-syllable beat in the sentence. When challenged on these points, he compares himself to Cicero, among others.

Before long, the insults are flying, and Fingal, who grabbed my early sympathy just by getting such spectacular rises out of D’Agata, is becoming something of a pedant himself. There’s a long section on linguistics and quibbles over whether a slot machine called Press Your Luck is named after a short-lived game show or the expression of playing out a winning streak. Was the carpet purple or red? Was Roxy’s Diner on the left as the boy passed the casino’s guest services desk, or down the hall on the left?

It all reaches a crescendo where the two are fighting over the nature of memoir as interpreted by James Frey (D’Agata, you should not be surprised to know, is on Team Frey), the nature of the essay as interpreted by D’Agata, and whether it matters that the kid leaned on a railing that was either four feet high or three feet seven inches high.

By the end, you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. D’Agata’s was a powerful essay, but it’s a more powerful book.

On edit: I’m thinking I’m being too hard on D’Agata here. Part of me sympathized with him, because I’ve writhed under a too-tight editing thumb myself more than once — which, as I explained above, is different from fact-checking. There are editors who simply cannot leave a fact unattributed to a higher authority, and will happily lard a piece up with clunky phrases, destroying whatever narrative effect the writer might be trying for. One of my favorite illustrations of this came from a colleague who was doing a tick-tock piece on a spree killer. He wrote that the guy stopped at a local grocery and passed two bad checks. The editor asked where he got that information. From the grocery-store owner, he said, who still had the checks (they’d been returned, after all), and showed them to him. The editor insisted on inserting “police said” even though the police had said nothing of the kind, out of some knee-jerk fear that a guy sitting in Riker’s Island on multiple felony murder charges might sue us for libel or something. So I’m sympathetic to rhythm and flow in a piece of non-fiction writing. I just don’t think you have to change the color of a truck to get it. End edit.

All of this interests me because I was once seated at a wedding next to an executive from a large company whose name you would recognize. Some years earlier, another company this man worked for had allowed a famous writer, whose name you would also recognize, to embed in their plant for a book he was writing. The book was published, and contained an anecdote about a close call the writer had had with his personal safety on company property. He wrote that he had been so rattled a particular foreman (whom he named) had taken him to his car and given him his first taste of homemade whiskey.

The executive said he’d confronted the writer later, telling him that he remembered the writer’s first taste of homemade whiskey, because he, the executive, had been there: It had happened after work, off company property, outside a bar, in fact. He was upset because the business could be dangerous, and even bringing alcohol onto company grounds — much less nipping out during work hours for a shot — was a firing offense. The writer, he said, shrugged and basically said it made the story better, the way he told it. It was a bit of harmless embroidery in the service of making the book more readable. And it was, until there was a fatal accident at the company sometime later, and during negotiations with the survivors, the lawyers produced the book and said, “So, you allow your employees to drink during work hours?”

All this by way of saying that facts seem unimportant when you’re concerned with getting a two-beat note at the end of a sentence, but ultimately, they’re very important. And whether you’re a journalist or essayist, they deserve respect.

Book two is “Capital” by John Lanchester, the one on the nightstand, which I’m finishing now. It seems to be taking forever, even though I’m enjoying it quite a lot. A look at the residents of one block of Pepys Road in London, it traces events in a dozen or more lives in 2008, leading up to you-know-what. The throughline is a series of unsettling communications — postcards, a website, graffiti, dead birds — from an anonymous party or parties, proclaiming a simple message: “We want what you have.” I had high hopes for a mystery with mounting tension, but the book is more a Dickensian novel of manners and social mores at a particular point in time. And while it hasn’t made me think hard the way “The Lifespan of a Fact” did, it has been as delicious as a Christmas cookie.

(If you choose to buy either of these, as always, you’re welcome to use the Kickback Lounge to make your purchase.)

With that, I return to previously scheduled light duty, and I hope you are, as well. The snowstorm looks like it’s just about over, and I have to go fire up the blower.

One of my FB pals posted this trailer the other day. It’s for a documentary about Ginger Baker, the infamously crazy drummer for Cream. Very entertaining, it looks like, but language a little salty for most offices:

The New York Times review of “Beware of Mr. Baker” — hey, did I mention I was a Cream fan? — makes it sound right up my alley:

Right at the beginning of the new documentary “Beware of Mr. Baker,” the film’s director, Jay Bulger, is attacked by his subject, the rock drummer Ginger Baker. Not verbally attacked, mind you — though there will be plenty of that — but physically, with a metal cane that draws blood when applied to the bridge of the filmmaker’s nose. Mr. Baker, whom we will subsequently encounter in less agitated moods, is upset about the direction of Mr. Bulger’s project.

…Mr. Baker has never been, to understate the matter, an easy person to get along with, a point that “Beware of Mr. Baker” returns to as it follows him through four marriages, at least a half-dozen bands, roughly one million cigarettes and countless burned bridges. Animated sequences depict a ship, rowed by the drummer’s red-haired avatars, zigzagging the globe — from London to Nigeria to Los Angeles and other spots on the way to his current home in South Africa — leaving a trail of not entirely metaphorical smoldering wreckage.

People who are extremely gifted at something are often monsters, a theme that’s been explored about a million times but never seems to get old. But there’s something about drummers, too. Is it the constant banging that makes them nuts, or are nutty people drawn to bang on things? I have a good memory for odd fragments of this and that, and Roy Edroso once made a remark in passing about drummers, by way of noting the passing of James Brown:

All jokes aside, it has been my experience that the drummers who conform to stereotype are the ones who just can’t do anything else (just as it’s always the monomaniacal cooks who are the crazy ones) — but if they have anything besides paradiddles rattling around in their noggins, they are usually quite brilliant, and typically exacting when put in charge of group endeavors. The great drummers I’ve worked with — Andy Malm, Ray Sage, Sally Barry, Billy Ficca — all have wide-ranging interests and very short tempers. They love a groove, but they despise a mess.

I’m going to try to add more to this tomorrow, but for now, I’m a limp heap.

Halloween fell on a Wednesday this year, which is the night I take Kate downtown for her music-lessonin’, and I take myself out for a midweek drink. People think of Halloween in Detroit in terms of arson and mayhem, but there’s also this:

And that can only mean?

JUGGALOS:

Right outside where I was planning to eat dinner, too. No problem — I’ve been doing this long enough I know the alternate parking places. So I parked, fed the meter, and took a few snaps:

The pizza has something to do with the band, but frankly, I’m afraid to Google it. On the whole, though, they’re nice kids. I asked before every picture. People are nice when you ask. Note the license plate — South Dakota.

And face it: Nobody takes the trouble to get dressed like this and doesn’t want people to pay attention.

Whoop-whoop! Fam-i-ly! Fam-i-ly!

You can watch this, if you really want to know more. A rare short documentary that’s worth the 24 minutes or so it takes to watch.

And that’s about all I have today. Juggalos. Oh, here’s Tom Nardone, the head of the Mower Gang, on Conan last night. A little late for pumpkin-carving, but not a bad segment.

The days tick ever-closer to election day, when my life will get a lot easier. Yours too, I suspect.

The week is on a downslope. Enjoy it.

I didn’t go to TEDxDetroit this year, after attending the one two years ago. It was, shall we say, a mixed bag. Upside: Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. Downside? Hard to say. Maybe the woman who’d opened a fitness studio where they did aerobics to Bollywood movie-soundtrack music. That’s it? That’s the “idea worth spreading?” You can do aerobics to the “Slumdog Millionaire” score? Ohhh-kay.

But in the end, I think it was this:

I guess everyone who owns a smartphone has a love/hate relationship with it, but this was an eye-opener for me. I couldn’t imagine speaking to an audience where two-thirds were staring down at a screen while I was supposedly the object of their attention. And it’s encouraged! You’re supposed to be tweeting it, the official hashtag is announced, and everyone’s tweets fly by on the screen behind the speaker. I guess this is how it’s done now, but it would make me nuts.

Anyway, two people I’ve interviewed recently were speaking at TED this year, and it was held Friday, so I dipped in and out of the live stream. The first person I heard was described as an “awesomeness expert” who would instruct attendees in “how to be awesome.” Everyone had some snarky detail added to their introduction; one, named Charlie, got a Charlie-bit-my-finger joke, delivered in a British accent. I couldn’t help but notice how many “social media experts” work for firms that appear to have been named by a child — Tiny Fish Partners, or Sleeping Dog Design. (No wonder “Mad Men” is such a hit. Adults! Wow!)

As it turned out, both guys I tuned in for were good, and both told large chunks of stories they told me, so there you have it: If you were reading Bridge, you knew all this stuff weeks ago.

And that was the weekend, although it also featured scallops, and that was very good. Pan-seared with lemon sauce, creamed spinach and oven-roasted potatoes, and “Sleepwalk With Me” afterward on the TV box. Roger gave it 3.5 stars, his readers, 3. I’m with the readers, but it was nice to see Lauren Ambrose again. The story is autobiographical, with the star, Mike Birbiglia, telling a story from his own life. Birbiglia is an average-guy shlump and Ambrose is a ginger-haired goddess, so it was strange to see him onscreen, falling out of love with a woman who so outclasses him in the looks department, but there you are. Hollywood has been asking us for years to swallow the idea that the hot young starlet of the moment wants to fuck, oh, Jack Nicholson, to use but one example out of zillions.

That’s one thing I loved about “About Schmidt,” one of Jack’s more recent films — for the first time since he hit 50, he was given a female partner his own age. She dies in the first 15 minutes, but while it lasted it was shocking.

So, bloggage:

In case you missed Basset posting this in the comments Friday, this is the Democratic candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. Yeah, this guy:

And with the election just days away, he has not actually put that sign in a yard. Instead, it resides inside candidate Mark Clayton’s pickup. “VOTE FOR,” the sign says. The rest is hidden by the seats.

“Jesus did not have a campaign staff. And he had the most successful campaign in human history,” Clayton said recently, when asked if all this adds up to a winning run against incumbent Sen. Bob Corker (R). Jesus “didn’t even have pictures or a Web site.”

This may be America’s worst candidate.

Clayton, 36, is a part-time flooring installer, an indulger in conspiracy theories — and for Democrats here, the living personification of rock bottom. In a state that produced Democratic icons including Andrew Jackson and both Al Gores, the party has fallen so far that it can’t even run a good loser.

I’m late getting to this, but last week saw the death of Emanuel Steward, Detroit’s legendary boxing trainer. As I’ve mentioned here about a million times, I’m a latecoming boxing fan, and have come to appreciate “Manny’s” incisive commentary during many Saturday nights spent with HBO. Among his insights, according to the NYT: “You can’t feel quick in black shoes.”

Meanwhile, his sister says she has her “ass-kicking boots on,” and is stripping his gym of everything, including the ring, to “safeguard his legacy.” How leaving his fighters with no place to train does that, I’m not sure.

One more week until the election is upon us. Let’s see what it brings.

One of the right-rail Bridge stories is mine this week. A couple, actually, but this is the one I’m thinking of, about Proposal 6, about bridges past, present and yet to come. In the course of trying to nail down one fact — does any other state with an international border crossing over water have a similar law to the one being proposed? — a nice lady in the Texas Department of Transportation sent me a list of the four Rio Grande crossings in private hands.

One was the Los Ebanos Ferry, family-owned, a two-minute crossing across a narrow spot in the river. Hand-operated. It rang a bell that got louder until it finally pierced the fog — a John D. MacDonald novel, but not one of the Travis McGee series. What was it called? I know I own it. A glance at the bookshelf. Yes! “The Damned,” published 1952. A group of strangers find themselves at a Mexican ferry crossing, stuck — the ferry isn’t working, so they’re free to sit around in the broiling sun and fight, love and have interior monologues. In true JDM style, they’re vivid, pulpy characters with just enough realness to keep them from tipping over into parody.

A minute or two with Professor Google, and I found this marvelous review, with lots of quoted passages, so I don’t have to retype them. One of the marooned is a businessman who, two weeks previous, had found himself poleaxed by a juicy young thing, and on impulse, bundled her into his car and took off south of the border. A couple weeks later, the erotic heat having burned off, he’s coming back home, despising the girl, disgusted by himself and wondering what he had been thinking. What a wonderful picture MacDonald paints here; you can almost smell the sour booze coming off the philanderer’s pores:

He had tried to call it a deathless romance, a great love. And the rationalization had shattered suddenly, leaving him naked. He saw a gaunt foolish man of middle years spending his savings on a raw, big-bodied young girl with limited IQ. The pores of her cheeks and nose were unpleasantly enlarged. In conversation she repeated herself interminably, expressing childish infatuations with movie actors, TV stars, disc jockeys. Her love-making was an unimaginative compound of all the movies she had seen, all the confession stories she had read. He stared in wonder at the meaty mass of her hips, at the lactic, bovine breasts, startled that he should have thought this worth the risk of destroying his world.

It turns out the ferry in this book, fictional or not, isn’t over the Rio Grande, but the Rio Conchos. Oh, well. It was a nice trip down Pulp Lane.

Watching the debate now, enjoying my third glass of wine, so we’ll see how long I last. I’m having #3 because Kate had a great bass lesson today, and I’m entitled. She took on the upright a couple months ago, and is coming along swimmingly. Such a beautiful instrument, but as I always say when we load it into the car, in my next life my kid plays piccolo.

A little bloggage for those who

The latest variety of hoo-hah from Up North: (ominous chords, organ sting) Agenda 21!!!!!!

Back to the Joe and Paul show.

Thank Coozledad for today’s entertainment; he sent me this a while back. It’s Elvis Costello, performing at the White House two years ago:

Enjoy the delightful four and a half minutes, and you will enjoy it. It got me thinking about…well, about a lot of things. First thing: Who determines who plays at the nation’s No. 1 venue? I’m not naive enough to believe it’s entirely up to the First Family; it’s surely a combination of their preferences, the WH social secretary, and some constellation of other parties weighing in. Timing certainly plays a part, don’t you think? There’s a time when the performer who was once rebellious and not suitable for a presidential audience suddenly becomes so. There’s a time when the cellist is ready for his Lincoln Center honor. But surely the First Family has something to do with it.

So. Today, a thought experiment, and I encourage you not to yield to the easy temptation of snark. Suppose Romney wins the election. Who plays in his White House? Who will be the first performers we’ll see in the East Room with Mitt and Ann in the front row center?

I’m honestly curious. It occurs to me that, for all I know about the Romneys, I have no idea what stirs his soul, besides dressage and his church. Do Mormons have a pop-music vein worth tapping?

I ask this in part because I read this story earlier tonight, about Romney’s church activities in Massachusetts. Another few thousand words that tells you a lot but, in the end, only makes the picture murkier.

On to the bloggage:

This is, what, Jimmy Hoffa’s ninth or tenth possible final resting place? They won’t find him there, but if they do, oh how sad that would be. A driveway in Roseville? (Trust me: It ain’t much.) If he can’t be in the end zone at whatever NFL stadium he’s supposedly in, at least let him be buried under the I-696/75 interchange, which is the last place I heard (on inside information, natch).

OID: Leg on a stretcher. Fake leg. Still.

Finally, one for you Vietnam vets. The napalm girl, later. Beautiful.

I didn’t sleep well last night, due to a too-light dinner and a heavy workload. Nothing like waking up at 4 a.m. with hunger pangs and the usual dead-of-night conviction that ALL THE WORK YOU DO IS SHIT, AND SOONER OR LATER THE WORLD WILL DISCOVER THIS.

I read the iPad for a while, dozed off, got up for good at 5:30. It’s amazing how many people are updating their Facebook and Twitter at that hour. There are really only a couple of hours in the very dead of night when my stream is dead. I know this because one of my Twitter follows is @big_ben_clock, which does nothing but chime on the hour. When two or three of those stack up, I know the United States is sound asleep, coast to coast.

I should follow some Europeans. At that hour, the day is already moving at full speed over there. (And yes, I could simply try to go back to sleep like a normal person, but how can you do that when the world is thrumming with news and information?)

But as usually happens, my wee-hours fears were for naught, the day went well, and I just finished a salad-and-pasta meal with two glasses of wine. I would very much like to watch “Bachelorette” on demand, but fear I’ll be taken down before it’s over. Carbs + alcohol = an early bedtime for me.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you about the fall movies I’m planning to see. Roger Ebert reported a bit from Toronto this week, and says he’s willing to bet “Argo” will be the year’s Best Picture Oscar winner. On the list? Why, yes. Also, “The Master” and certainly “Cloud Atlas,” because I lurved the novel so, so much. Roger says: Stirring and grand, and maybe great, but maybe not. Honestly, as usually happens with books I love, I’m less taken with the plot — although the plot(s) in “Cloud Atlas” are mind-boggling — than I am with the author’s prose style, which movies generally don’t deal with.

And yeah, I think “The Sessions,” but that will probably be a wait-for-DVD. And likely “Lincoln,” although if I can’t go as Brian Stouder’s and Jeff the MM’s date, what’s the damn point?

Did any news happen today? We had a little office chat about Nate Silver, who is so bullish on Obama’s reelection that he’s either going to make his career on Election Night or be struck with the urge to take a long vacation. He was scarily right last time, but who knows what that means?

I was perhaps too flip yesterday in dismissing Jonathan Kozol’s own too-flip observation about homelessness. At the time he made it, I recall a changing world in which great wealth was flooding into the nation’s large cities, closing the SRO hotels that had housed the addicted fringe. They were driven into the street with the freed mentally ill, and walking among this cohort in places like New York, Chicago and even Columbus, it was easy to get frustrated with anyone who suggested a simple solution. As many of you have pointed out, housing is the solution to homelessness, but it has to be the right sort of housing, and it has to be bolstered with appropriate support. If I oversimplified, I apologize.

Tom & Lorenzo have been at Fashion Week and critiquing actresses at the various Toronto film festival premieres, and I’m enjoying both very much. Adding to bucket list: Once, just once, inspiring a smart fashion eye to say, “Bow down, bitches.”

September 11, 2012 — an odd-year anniversary, but discuss if you like.

One of the things we did last weekend was go to the Titanic exhibition at the Henry Ford. It’s exactly the sort of exhibit I despise — timed entrance (NO EXCEPTIONS), gimmicky (your “boarding pass” contains an Actual Passenger Name), ultimately sort of meh. Its official name is “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibit,” and unfortunately, I’m not an artifact person. I’ve been ruined by CGI and, frankly, my own imagination — nothing about a 100-year-old piece of china does it for me.

But this is a modern exhibit, which means it is “interactive,” and in this case, it meant there was a giant iceberg — presumably refreshed every night — you could put your hands on. And that was marred for Ms. Grammar and Usage Nitpicker by the legend on the wall nearby:

“Iceberg Right Ahead!”

I don’t care how loud he yelled it, those words shouldn’t be capitalized. They knew that sort of thing in 1912.

It could have been the fact the whole space was elbow-to-elbow that got on my nerves. We saw “Woman Holding a Balance” by none other than Johannes Vermeer two weeks ago at the DIA, walking right in and standing in front of it as long as we liked, occasionally stepping aside to let others peer at it.

And yes, I am Mrs. Nose-in-the-Air. Because, y’know, Vermeer and James Cameron’s mythology.

Would we have cared so much about the Titanic if it weren’t, as we’re told over and over, the height of luxury? Or was it the fact several of the richest people in the world we among those who went down, and all their money couldn’t save them? Ultimately, I just don’t care all that much. And I thought the “stand on the bow” photo-op gimmick was silly — and a gouge. The person on my boarding pass died, by the way. Kate was Madeline Astor, and lived.

So: Change of subject.

You all know how much I love a good montage scene on the TV box. There was a nice one in Sunday’s “Breaking Bad,” and here it is:

Some of the imagery may be confusing, if you’re not a BB fan, but trust me — it all works. Or maybe I just love that song. Tommy James? Shondells? You were among the good ones.

I agree with Neil Steinberg: We shouldn’t mock Romney’s religion. Believe it, don’t believe it, but keep your mouth shut. We’re supposed to be better than that.

Think I’ll watch the First Lady’s speech. Is it Hump Day already? How’d that happen?