We’re finally getting some competition for Comcast in these parts. As Comcast has recently rewarded my years of customer loyalty with a $20 monthly rate hike, to give me services I don’t use, I listened when the WOW cable guy stopped by yesterday. Most intriguing offer: Real savings on the land line, thanks to the choice of three tiers of service. We use it so little I know that if it rings, it’s likely someone I don’t want to talk to. I’d drop it if it weren’t for my husband’s objections, and the fact the phone mount in my kitchen is huge and will require a large framed portrait of Alexander Graham Bell to hide. So this would work for us, and I’m pissed Comcast hasn’t stepped in with an alternative.

They also offer three tiers of internet service, but in this area I require Maserati-like speed, so no savings there.

But the real elephant in the business-model room would be true choice in cable TV. The doomsday scenario for that industry is when customers can craft their own package from the channels they actually watch. Farewell, Golf Channel, hello AMC, etc. We’re there, more or less, at least with anyone willing to watch TV on their computer. I’m not. I still practice the exhaustion model of TV consumption — slump in chair, pick up remote, surf — enough that it would bug me to not have the option.

Anyone with WOW experience, I’m all ears.

Someone sent me this article, more food apocalypse-porn from Gary Taubes. Headline: Is Sugar Toxic? Let’s see if I can guess what the answer might be, coming from a writer who’s been beating the drum for the low-carb, paleo diet for years. Do I even need to read it? Probably not.

New rule: I no longer listen to anyone who tells me a food that I, and millions of other human beings, have enjoyed for centuries, is “toxic.” If nothing else, I’d like to enforce a certain strict constructionism in language. A toxin is a poison. If I eat this cookie, will I fall to the floor in a writhing heap? No? Then I’m going to eat it. Taubes acknowledges as much in his opening paragraphs:

It’s one thing to suggest, as most nutritionists will, that a healthful diet includes more fruits and vegetables, and maybe less fat, red meat and salt, or less of everything. It’s entirely different to claim that one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it. Suggesting that sugar might kill us is what zealots do. But Lustig, who has genuine expertise, has accumulated and synthesized a mass of evidence, which he finds compelling enough to convict sugar. His critics consider that evidence insufficient, but there’s no way to know who might be right, or what must be done to find out, without discussing it.

If I didn’t buy this argument myself, I wouldn’t be writing about it here.

OK, then!

The longer I live, the more I throw in with those nutritionists. I come from a long line of moderate people who lived into their ninth decade by practicing moderation, and eating a piece of birthday cake ever year.

However. Speaking of food, someone posted this on Facebook yesterday, and while its headline is immoderate — The 20 Worst Foods in America — it’s worth a click-through on your next coffee break. It’s not foods, exactly, but restaurant dishes, compiled by the folks at Eat This, Not That ™, yet another insta-book that became a franchise overnight. I don’t eat at places like the Cheesecake Factory and Blimpie’s often, but every so often circumstances will force us off the freeway and into an Olive Garden or some such. Just last week, Kate and I ate at a Chili’s nearby; I fired up the Fast Food Calorie Counter app on my phone, to get a sense of what we were in for.

And nearly fell on the floor. I’ve never seen so many 1,800-calorie appetizers in my life. Everything seemed to boil down to a fat stuffed into a carb, then deep-fried and glazed with more fat — crispy-cheesey tortilla bombs. I ordered the chicken tacos and ate half. Kate got the sliders and ate half. As these are not foods that reheat well, we passed on the go-boxes, but it reminded me of the other thing that is making us fat — portion size. Do you remember when restaurant plates became platters, when the goal was not to feed you so much as stuff you like a foie gras goose? I do. It was approximately the mid-70s. It started with Chi-Chis. I knew a woman who waitressed there; she was living in a hippie farm commune and asked the dishwashers to scrape the plates into a special garbage bag, which she took home at the end of every shift to feed to their pig. Fitting.

OK, the morning is fleeing, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

Longish, but worth a read, as Hugh Grant — yes, the actor — sits down with a former tabloid hack and gets the download on how prevalent surveillance techniques like phone-hacking and other digital eavesdropping is. Via hidden recording. Brilliant. P.S. And this is a developing story.

Speaking of food, Roy Edroso linked to this, and so am I: A few notes on modernist cuisine and molecular gastronomy, at both the restaurant and McDonald’s-lab level, from the Chicago magazine 312 blog. (Broken link fixed. Sorry.)

It’s not “Sophomore dies in kiln explosion,” but it’s close: Yale student dies when her hair gets caught in a lathe. Something to remember when you’re considering what factory work should pay.

OK, off to the bike, and outta here. The week, it’s nearly over!

My Russian teacher cancelled next week’s lesson. She’s Jewish, and it’s Passover. Which must mean that the ABC network broadcast of “The Ten Commandments” is right around the corner. It’s April 23 this year. Woot! I hope Alan doesn’t have anything planned, because it’s going to be wine time in front of the ol’ tube. I’ve missed it several years running, and I’m feeling it, kittens:

When I was researching the book I wrote last year for the Detroit Economic Club, one of the more interesting files was that of Cecil B. DeMille, who addressed them in 1948 on the topic of right-to-work legislation:

In 1936, DeMille was hired to host the Lux Radio Theater, a long-running anthology series featuring the top stars of the day. He held the position for nearly a decade, until 1945, when he balked at the deduction of $1 for political activities by the American Federation of Radio Artists, of which he was a member. The union was fighting a ballot initiative to make California a right-to-work state. DeMille not only refused to pay the fee himself, he also refused to let anyone else pay it for him. The incident ended with DeMille suspended by the union and out of his $100,000-per-year job as host.

DeMille made right-to-work advocacy a pet cause for years afterward.

The DeMille Foundation for Political Freedom existed for decades, and yet, only a few know it existed at all. But everyone’s watched “The Ten Commandments,” at least part of it. Art endures. Politics is just a luncheon address to some bigwigs in Detroit.

Actually, I found another speech in the club’s archives by a Hollywood type — David Wolper, who came in the mid-60s and gave a talk he titled “The Hills are Alive With the Sound of Money.” He was promoting a film he’d produced called “The Devil’s Brigade.” It was about a little-known special forces unit in World War II comprised of — quoting IMDB here — “Canadian troops and a ragtag group of American misfits.” (Misfits are always ragtag, I’ve noticed.) Anyway, the event seemed to have been coordinated with the opening of the film uppermost in mind, and Detroit chosen because of its proximity to Windsor, given the transnational aspect of the Devil’s Brigade. And yet, when was the last time you saw that one? Sometimes art doesn’t endure, either. It helps if the art is memorable.

I might have to dig up this one, however. Any flick with characters named Rockwell “Rocky” Rockman and Billy “Bronc” Guthrie can’t be all bad. And imagine William Holden delivering a line like this:

Lt. Col. Robert T. Frederick: [to Major Bricker] You’ve been in-and-out of nine different camps because you’re the biggest chiseler, hustler, and scrounger in the whole Army. Well, in two weeks our first recruits arrive, and whatever they need, and whatever this camp needs, you’re going to supply. How you do it is your own business. So start hustling.

Start hustling! OK, then.

It’s almost tax-filing deadline. I’m done and filed, and am expecting a small refund, which I’ve already decided to put toward an iPad, because I can think of a million ways to use it for work, which would make it a business expense on next year’s taxes, right? Anyway, our webmaster J.C. Burns — who celebrated his birthday yesterday, by the way — put together one of his occasional (and invaluable) knowledge dumps for new iPad owners. It’s a little technical for the novice, but still full of many tips, suggestions and whatnot if you’re in the same situation. So read, eh?

Until he sent it to me, I didn’t even know he had a Tumblr. Sigh. Another bookmark.

Via BuzzFeed, 52 Things You’ll Only See in America. Unfair, cruel, probably with a good deal of Photoshopping, and yet I still laughed out loud several times. Bad Boys Bail Bonds is real, anyway. Slogan: “Because your mama wants you home.”

People accuse Yanks of being silly about royal weddings, but don’t count the English out. I stumbled across the Daily Telegraph’s special web section the other day, and it’s exhaustive. Best single feature, however: Royal weddings in history, containing a click-through slide show of every one since Victoria and Albert. Bummer: Prince Albert is wearing tight riding pants, but is seen only in profile, so we can’t check for his Prince Albert.

Off to work I go. A good Tuesday to all.

Kid Rock is leading his own Kid Rock-themed cruise this week, from New Orleans to Cozumel and back. Twenty-seven hundred booze-soaked fans, plus a reporter and photographer from the Free Press, are on board. Tell me if you can get through this paragraph without an involuntary shudder:

For this heavy-drinking, heavy-smoking crowd, it’s an itinerary that includes all-hours bars, pole-dancing classes and performances by 16 acts, including Rev. Run, Gretchen Wilson and two up-close-and-personal concerts by Rock himself.

I guess this is the big thing for entertainers now, particularly musicians, but really, anyone whose work can be easily digitized and stolen. Not cruises, necessarily, but added-value revenue streams. No more guitar-shaped swimming pools and a daily trip to the mailbox for royalty checks, now you gotta werq, hon.The Wall Street Journal did a story a while back about performers doing more private shows (ladies and gentlemen, welcome to St. Bart’s and Mr. Qaddafi’s exclusive New Year’s Eve party. Now put your hands together for Beyoncé!), or offering tiered pricing of tickets, with the big-money level (four figures and up) offering such extras as backstage receptions with the star, photo ops, even short VIP encore sets with branded souvenir chairs.

Not sure what the entertainer known as Kid Rock is getting for this thing, but my guess would be: Plenty. Tickets range from $600 to $3,000. Times 2,700… Minus a few grand for the hot dogs and Natty Light… Equals not too shabby.

Five days stuck on a boat with more than 2,000 wasted rokkers? You’d have to pay ME. But clearly, I’m not the target audience.

Sigh. Another Friday, another rainy one. It’s Opening Day in Detroit, infamous for its nasty meteorological surprises, so I guess this is pretty typical. Still. It would be nice to see my forsythia dare to put their yellow heads out.

So, let’s blog on, shall we:

Matt Taibbi on the Ryan plan:

Republicans, quite smartly, recognize that there is great political hay to be made in the appearance of deficit reduction, and that white middle class voters will respond with overwhelming enthusiasm to any call for reductions in the “welfare state,” a term which said voters will instantly associate with black welfare moms and Mexicans sneaking over the border to visit American emergency rooms.

The problem, of course, is that to actually make significant cuts in what is left of the “welfare state,” one has to cut Medicare and Medicaid, programs overwhelmingly patronized by white people, and particularly white seniors. So when the time comes to actually pull the trigger on the proposed reductions, the whippersnappers are quietly removed from the stage and life goes on as usual, i.e. with massive deficit spending on defense, upper-class tax cuts, bailouts, corporate subsidies, and big handouts to Pharma and the insurance industries.

One of our lurkers-but-not-commenters, Michael Heaton at the Plain Dealer, has what a friend of mine used to call a Socks on the Lampshades Weekend. I enjoyed this piece because it reminds me of a simpler time, when newspapers found a little room in their pages for writers who didn’t always have to inform, but could simply entertain. One simple declarative sentence after another, no fancy transitions — if you read it aloud it would almost play as cruise-ship stand-up, but it made me smile, and I hadn’t even been drinking.

With that, my weekend beckons. Hope yours is great.

I was taking out the trash early this morning when my neighbor, who works for Autoweek and frequently brings home a test model for a day or three, left his driveway in a red Chevy Volt. The only sound it made was the whisper of the tires on the pavement (and the slight scrape of the front fairing, just a smidge too low to go out a driveway headfirst without touching). Price of gas today: $3.89.

I wonder where he plugged it in overnight. (I’ll take “the garage” for $200, Alex.)

Mercy, it was a rough night. Didn’t sleep much at all, and I don’t know why, as I am most definitely not one of the “sleepless elite,” the tiny slice of the population that legitimately needs little shuteye to make it through a day. So seeing as how my brain is failing, l think we need to make this a popcorn-y, snack food-y sort of entry today, and you can take it from there:

I am falling behind on my royal-watching. Monaco is getting a new princess? And she’s a South African blonde giantess with shoulders that make Michelle Obama look like Wally Cox? A former Olympic backstroker? And she’s marrying this bald 52-year-old dweeb who already has two out-of-wedlock children? For the sake of the world’s gossip consumers, I hope they have one of those very modern marriages, where it turns out she’s a lesbian, or, even more shocking, a great lady who can bring a bit of class to that palace full of commoners. How many kids has Stephanie produced by how many bodyguards? Caroline is on her third marriage, her second to the kind of guy who cheats in view of paparazzi? A giantess can only improve the line, although lord knows they’ve had enough new-blood infusions to last a while.

My inbox has filled in recent days with ham-handed phishing attempts. Please send your account number and log-in to this address as soon as possible, your account has been breached! Help I am stranded in a hotel in London, and I am sending this poorly spelled email to everyone in my inbox in hopes they will wire me sums of cash! I assume this is why.

Speaking of blood-will-tell, getta loada the Judds these days. As Tom & Lorenzo say, “Sweet Jesus on a breadstick. We’re speechless.” Plus a lot more.

Time to make some eggs and plan for the tatters of a day.

If it’s Thursday, I must be a) sleep-deprived; b) cranky; and c) feeling the swamp-gas breath of the Reaper, thanks to the New York Times Thursday Styles section.

I know some of you can no longer access the copy, so allow me to describe. Today’s cover story starts with a scene-setter: Brooklyn hipsters gathered around strange machines at a flea market, snapping iPhone photos and tentatively touching them, like chimpanzees confronting a wind-up monkey. Finally, a “lanky drummer from Williamsburg” pays $150 and carries off his prize, which he says is “about permanence.” And what is this strange thing?

Whether he knew it or not, Mr. Smith had joined a growing movement. Manual typewriters aren’t going gently into the good night of the digital era. The machines have been attracting fresh converts, many too young to be nostalgic for spooled ribbons, ink-smudged fingers and corrective fluid. And unlike the typists of yore, these folks aren’t clacking away in solitude.

They’re fetishizing old Underwoods, Smith Coronas and Remingtons, recognizing them as well designed, functional and beautiful machines, swapping them and showing them off to friends. At a series of events called “type-ins,” they’ve been gathering in bars and bookstores to flaunt a sort of post-digital style and gravitas, tapping out letters to send via snail mail and competing to see who can bang away the fastest.

Seven years ago, when I was a-fellowshipping in Ann Arbor, we got into a discussion about typewriters. First we culled those who had never had to use one at work, then at all, and found our last man standing with our youngest member, 30 or 31, who had never fought with a margin setting or confronted a blank page that was actually a page. We never broke it down to manuals vs. electrics, as I’m sure I would have been at the other end, someone with strong opinions on exactly how a keyboard should feel, and favorite brands (Smith-Corona for manual portables; Royal for manual desktop, although of course the IBM Selectric changed everything).

God help me, I hope I would die before being caught at a type-in, one of those details that makes me wonder, as Roy Edroso once said, whether they assign pieces like this as hazing rituals for new reporters.

But that’s to be expected, right? As an essential tool of a writer’s life, of course we will develop strong opinions about our writing machines. There was a Royal at my college newspaper. Someone had written SUSIE on her with correction fluid, and she was the one everybody fought over. Susie had just the right feel on the keys, her Magic Margin function worked perfectly, and she had the sort of heft that would stand up to an angry editorialist banging out a few hundred words without hopping all over the desk. If I remember correctly, she was the Royal HH, seen in this fanboy array.

Susie put me off electric portables for good. When I was thinking of my next line, Susie was silent; she didn’t have that spinning-the-wheels hum they all brought to the table. And when I leaned forward to paint correction fluid on a page, her carriage didn’t jump out of place because my boobs touched the space bar.

This was my family’s home machine. Many, many letters to Deb were written on this one. When I had nothing to say, I would peer underneath and reacquaint myself with how the bell worked. (The last three spaces in the line raised the clapper up, up, up, and the fourth brought it down.) Something I learned en route to something else — carpal-tunnel syndrome did not exist when typists worked on typewriters. Something about stopping every page to roll in a new one, and stopping at the end of every line to hit the carriage return, was enough to keep the motion from being too repetitive.

There are other virtues, too, outlined here:

Why celebrate the humble typewriter? Devotees have many reasons. For one, old typewriters are built like battleships. They survive countless indignities and welcome repairs, unlike laptops and smartphones, which become obsolete almost the moment they hit the market. “It’s kind of like saying, ‘In your face, Microsoft!’ ” said Richard Polt, 46, a typewriter collector in Cincinnati.

Another virtue is simplicity. Typewriters are good at only one thing: putting words on paper. “If I’m on a computer, there’s no way I can concentrate on just writing, said Jon Roth, 23, a journalist who is writing a book on typewriters. “I’ll be checking my e-mail, my Twitter.” When he uses a typewriter, Mr. Roth said: “I can sit down and I know I’m writing. It sounds like I’m writing.”

In other words, no Google Brain. Before I get too nostalgic, however, I recall that while Susie sat there quietly, awaiting my next line, I would frequently light a cigarette. Tradeoffs, people.

OK. Time to blow off the Dentu-Creme nostalgia and hop to work. Much bloggage today, and it’s mostly pretty good:

Go ahead and put this on a window or tab you can tuck behind the others, because frankly the video is pretty lame. But for Opening Day, how can you resist Ernie Harwell reading “Casey at the Bat”?

By the way, here in Detroit it snowed just a dusting overnight. Fortunately, the home opener isn’t for another week. Doubtless we’ll see a blizzard.

For his thousands of fans, a picture of Coozledad with a chicken on his head. Pretty funny story, too.

One more for the bad-clown file.

Lake Superior State has its lame-ass Banned Words list, but Wayne State takes a more positive approach: Words we should use more often. I’m pleased to report all but one — “concupiscence” — is in fairly regular rotation in my own vocabulary.

Finally, an amazing look at the Gingriches, Newt ‘n’ Callista, in action as co-hosts of their own video series. Seldom has two people’s character showed so plainly in their physical bodies. Callista is 10 years younger than me, and looks old enough to be my grandmother. Short ad, but worth it. Discuss.

Me, I’m off to work.

It’s hard to explain “Friday” to those of you who don’t live on the Internet for hours a day, but I’ll try:

About a week ago — last Friday, I think — a teenage singer named Rebecca Black released a YouTube video of herself singing a ghastly pop song called “Friday.” Actually, she didn’t release it; Ark Music Factory did. Ark is a vanity pop-music house, where well-to-do parents pay healthy-but-not-outrageous sums to have their little girls immortalized as pop singers. Black’s parents admit to paying $2,000. I think we can all agree that money would have been better-off in her college account, but it appears they got what they paid for.

I saw “Friday” for the first time last weekend, when the official video was at 13,000 views or so. It’s now closing in on 16 million, if that tells you anything. The song is catchy but atrocious — Black autotuned to a fare-thee-well, the lyrics brain-damaged:

Yesterday was Thursday, Thursday
Today i-is Friday, Friday (Partyin’)
We-we-we so excited
We so excited
We gonna have a ball today
Tomorrow is Saturday
And Sunday comes after … wards
I don’t want this weekend to end

It was one big fat juicy trollbait for the whole internet, which roared its approval, delivering parodies, rants, remixes and the like. All in a week! And despite Black’s whining in her Daily Beast interview — “it feels like I’m being cyberbullied” — I think we can all agree she wouldn’t be on “Good Morning America” otherwise, so she maybe should chill. Also, wipe off about 70 percent of that makeup. You’re 13!

Over the years I’ve enjoyed other stories of vanity-publishing fame, my favorite being that of John Trubee. I howled with laughter, reading his essay in Spin, about how working the overnight shift at a convenience store had made him insane, so much so that he ripped an ad from the back of one of the tabloids he was selling at 3 a.m., scribbled some angry lyrics and sent them off to a company in Nashville offering professional analysis of your song, hoping he’d get a reply saying he was sick and needed to see a psychiatrist. The chorus ran:

Stevie Wonder’s penis is erect because he’s blind,

repeated several times.

Instead, he was told his song had huge potential, and that for $79.95, they’d cut a demo for him. He sent the money, they did (changing the chorus from “Stevie Wonder” to “a blind man”), and the song became an underground sensation. Oh look, here’s the essay. Oh look, here’s a bouquet of links about the whole story.

Some years after that, an editor tossed a column idea on my desk — a traveling company was passing through town, seeking singing talent for possible development by country-music industry starmakers. They agreed to let me watch the “auditions,” and it was clear from the start the whole thing was a scam. They were offering to make, for a fee, a “professionally produced video” that would screen on local Nashville television, potentially reaching the A&R men, agents, managers and others who were always on the lookout for the next cowboy hat.

Those who’ve seen “American Idol” know what the auditions were like, each singer worse than the last. And yet, all but one were offered the deal: Travel to Nashville at your own expense, pay $600 or so for the video production costs, await stardom. The only one who wasn’t invited was, ironically, the best singer by far. She also had some sort of skeletal birth defect that confined her to a wheelchair in a semi-reclining position, although that didn’t stop her from winning karaoke contests all over town.

Once I got the outlines of the arrangement, I went back to the office and called one of the Nashville newspapers. I asked where channel 56 was on the cable dial, and what time “Country Music Star Search” ran. Answer: It was a public-access channel, and the middle of the night. Then I called the singers who were already packing their bags and told them. To the last one, they all said it didn’t make any difference, that you had to spend money to make your dreams come true, and went back to gassing up the car.

I came away with more respect for the producers, who at least drew the line at taking money from a disabled woman, than for the idiots who thought they were the next Garth Brooks. Six hundred bucks isn’t so much to pay for a reality check.

How to wrap up? How about with this gallery of other Ark Music Factory product? I recommend CJ Fam’s “Ordinary Pop Star.”

Let’s keep all the bloggage light today, shall we? It’s Friday, after all:

Those of you who thought “The Player” was the last word in Hollywood bullshit will be pleased to know the bar has been raised yet again: The “Red Dawn” remake, shot in Detroit last year or the year before (can’t remember), is being digitally revised, to change the villains from Chinese to North Koreans.

Michigan’s new attorney general loves Michigan’s new attorney general.

Just what America needs: Another “Charlie’s Angels” remake.

Happy Friday, happy weekend, all. I’m outta here.

Reading the paper in the morning is becoming a real challenge. Not the paper-paper, but…oh, how about the Freep? On a morning when nuclear disaster looms across the far Pacific, a Web headline:

Alice Cooper shocks at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction

I looked at that for a minute before clicking. Really, what could a 63-year-old Republican golfer do that would be considered shocking, even by the wet-behind-the-ears web staff? Appear before his monthly root touch-up? But I’ve heard Vincent Damon Furnier speak before; he’s a witty man who’s always in on his own joke. OK, you’ve got me. I’ll click.

Alice Cooper came into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with a boa constrictor.

Cooper, also known as Vincent Furnier, wore a blood-splattered shirt and brought schoolkids along to sing “School’s Out.” It all seemed appropriate for a band that inductor Rob Zombie said invented the rock show.

That’s it? That’s the shock? A snake and a stain and a few kids? Kids sing on the original “School’s Out,” a hit delivered well past Alice Cooper’s prime, in my opinion. (I lost interest after “Love it to Death,” but all my peers found it.) Even at 14, I knew when I was being “shocked.” The last interview I heard with Furnier — I’m going to call him that, because Alice Cooper was the name of the band — he made a big deal out of putting one over on the squares, how parents were so terribly upset by him, but their kids knew it was just showbiz. For the record, I’d like to note that my parents were never upset by Alice Cooper, not even a little bit. I don’t think they were even aware of them. They followed the Don and Betty Draper model of adulthood, in the sense that they acted like adults and didn’t want to rap with me about what was goin’ down.

To my mind, Alice Cooper was the band made to order for Bob Greene. He went along on their 1973 tour, promoting “Muscle of Love,” an album I don’t recall making it into the collection of a single person I know. I bet whatever he wrote about them was really, really shocking.

I’m vamping here because I don’t want to read any more about Japan for a while. It’s making me very sorry I read Martin Cruz Smith’s novel “Wolves Eat Dogs,” in which Moscow militia investigator Arkady Renko follows a case to Chernobyl. I’m sorry I remember so well the passage where a scientist there tells the story of the night the reactor blew at a drunken party:

In a second the reactor coolant began to boil. The reactor hall started to pound. An engineer hit the panic switch for the control rods, but the rod channels in the reactor melted, the rods jammed, and superheated hydrogen blew off the roof, carrying reactor core, graphite and burning tar into the sky. A black fireball stood over the building, and a blue beam of ionized light shot from the open core. Fifty tons of radioactive fuel flew up, equal to fifty Hiroshima bombs. But the farce continued. Cool heads in the control room refused to believe they had done anything wrong. They sent a man down to check the core. He returned, his skin black from radiation, like a man who had seen the sun, to report there was no core. Since this was not an acceptable report, they sacrificed a second man, who returned in the same fatal condition. Now, of course, the men in the control room faced their greatest test of all: the call to Moscow.

It should be noted that no black fireballs have appeared in Japan, but I have to wonder about the 60 workers left behind, trying to cool this thing off. I wonder if this is a suicide mission. I note that the power company’s apology is being parsed in Japan, making me sorry I don’t understand all the nuances of the apology in Japanese culture. I should have paid more attention during our Japan worship/paranoia phase back in the ’80s.

So let’s go bloggering, eh?

Evan Bayh signs with Fox. I’m so totally, totally surprised! I saw him on the network news a few days back; he and his wife were in New Zealand when the earthquake hit there. Susan looked sort of puffy. Not fat-puffy, or crying-my-eyes-out-from-fear-of-aftershocks puffy, but more like my-life-sucks-and-I’m-self-medicating-with-box-wine puffy. She was always his greatest asset, a warm and funny charmer to balance his robotic affect; what happened, Hoosiers?

Does anyone have a more contemporary photo of Owsley Stanley? Although kudos to the NYT for this hit of microdot:

Mr. Stanley, the Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer, was in recent decades a reclusive, almost mythically enigmatic figure. He moved to Australia in the 1980s, as he explained in his rare interviews, so he might survive what he believed to be a coming Ice Age that would annihilate the Northern Hemisphere.

And after he got there, I guess he just liked the weather.

And that’s it for me, pals. A swell Tuesday to all.

I like to think of myself as a tolerant person, if you define tolerant as someone who once decided it could never work out with a man because his grocery list contained the item parmashawn chese, but hung around for a few more months anyway. But hear me now and remember it later: If anyone in my circle spends $625 on “Modernist Cuisine”? You’re dead to me. (If you go through the Kickback Lounge, I will consider upgrading your status to Cold Shoulder.)

I’ve been reading about this five-volume, 40-pound, 2,238-page be-all and end-all of 21st-century cooking for a few days now — I guess the pub date was this week, although it should be noted it was self-published. The more I read, the more bugged I get. All reviews take the time to stipulate a few things:

1) This is a very ambitious work, and ambition should be honored;
2) The book(s) — shall we call it a “project,” or something else? — contain many astonishing and beautiful photographs;
3) If you have the will to dive in, there are diamonds there;
4) But not enough to justify the expense, work and other irreplaceable resources that went into producing the thing.

Ahem:

Descending this week on the culinary scene like a meteor, “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” is the self-published six-volume masterwork from a team led by Nathan Myhrvold, the multimillionaire tech visionary who, as a friend of mine said, “decided to play Renaissance doge with food.”

…Ultimately, it is a manifesto declaring that the new form of laboratory-inspired cooking — led by Grant Achatz in the United States; Heston Blumenthal in England; and Ferran Adrià, the father of this cuisine, in Spain — is a cultural and artistic movement every bit as definitive as Impressionism in 19th-century France or Bauhaus in early 20th-century Germany. It proclaims a revolution “in techniques, aesthetics and intellectual underpinnings of gastronomy.”

I read fast, and I had to go back and find the nettle in this opening passage, and it was this: tech visionary. Those guys? Can be real pains in the ass:

“Life has not been boring for me,” Nathan Myhrvold says. An overachiever’s overachiever, Myhrvold, 51, graduated from high school at 14, had two master’s degrees and a Princeton Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics by 23, worked alongside Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, and went on to earn hundreds of millions for Microsoft (and himself) as chief technology officer. Cashing out in 1999, he began pursuing his true passions by the armful: skydiving, car racing, scuba diving, volcanology, and UFOlogy, not to mention whole alternate careers as a wildlife photographer, dinosaur hunter, inventor (his name is on nearly 250 patents and counting), and author of the extraordinary new cookbook Modernist Cuisine.

Wow. Respect. Although one person’s overachiever’s overachiever is another’s dilettante, but never mind that. The guy has zillions and a coltish intellect; let him spend his money — and, again, this is his money he’s spending — on what he wants. He’s only in his early 50s. In his laboratory of wonder, he’s also pursuing big-think solutions to more serious, mundane problems (hospital infections, global warming). I guess everyone hopes for a line like this in their obituary:

His 1997 talk on dinosaur sex is the TED equivalent of Jimi Hendrix playing Woodstock.

All stipulated. There’s just something about five volumes, 40 pounds, 2,238 pages and a plexiglas cover, all in the service of a project that boils down to a foundational text for a silly style of cooking sought after and consumed by the tiniest handful of people in the world. Nathan Myhrvold has carved “The Last Supper” on the head of a pin. Whoop-de-do.

What style of cooking is this? That molecular gastronomy nonsense that’s always tripping somebody up on “Top Chef.” Foams and gels and puzzling techniques Julia Child would laugh at. Like this:

Among his favorite (recipes): scrambled eggs slow-cooked at low temperature in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag using a SousVide Supreme SVS-10LS water oven.

Because that is what the world has been waiting for: sous vide eggs.

Myhrvold made his fortune as Microsoft’s chief technology officer. Ha ha. In the early days of personal computing, when I had my first little laptop, I used to ask J.C. Burns what on earth was in MS Word that justified its $600 cost and bloated footprint on my 160-megabyte hard drive. “Lunch recipes,” he quipped, and it looks like he was right. This is what Myhrvold was thinking about when his underlings were giving the world Mr. Clippy.

Well, as Julia famously said, you are alone in the kitchen, and all that matters is what comes out of it. For people who already have thousands of dollars’ worth of high-tech gadgetry in place, maybe they’ll welcome a $625 reference work to tell them how to use it all. The NYT review acknowledges there is a great deal of very useful information between its many covers, but nearly all of it is for the professional, not the home cook. Maybe a restaurateur can justify the purchase. As for me? Eh, I’ll have a sandwich.

Bloggage for a fogbound Thursday here in Michigan:

Julianne Moore will play $P in the HBO adaptation of “Game Change.” Every time I think about dropping our subscription? They pull me back in!!! Who will play Barack Obama? On this, imdb is silent. Maybe Ms. Lippman knows.

As I believe I’ve mentioned approximately 7,000 times before, one of my several part-time jobs involves news research for the pharmaceutical industry, which every night exposes me to a fairly horrifying but still not widely reported story developing down in Dixie — legal pill mills operating out of storefronts, mainly in Florida, that push an appalling amount of prescription painkillers onto the street under the flimsiest pretense of medical treatment. It is the engine behind an explosion of addiction, overdose and death all over the country. Abuse of legal prescription drugs long ago outstripped that of heroin and other street drugs. It’s the reason pharmacists get ulcers and some are simply no longer carrying these hydrocodone-based potions; too many junkie stickups have taken their toll.

In its own way, the state has tried to tackle the problem; two years ago it created an office to maintain a patient database, in an effort to track obvious abuses. It didn’t fund the office, but y’know — details, details. Lately Purdue Pharma, the company that makes the most sought-after of these drugs, the notorious OxyContin, beloved by Rush Limbaugh and many others, offered $1 million to fund the database. This week, Gov. Rick Scott said, eh, no thanks. He wants to do away with the database entirely; it’s an invasion of patient privacy. Where does the GOP find these guys? I’m speechless.

OK, time to wind up and head out.

I’ve never watched an episode of “Two and a Half Men” in my life and my interest in the second generation of the Actin’ Sheens is pretty much nil, but I gather Charlie Sheen’s public meltdowns are the best thing to happen to guerrilla humor since Sarah Palin.

No sooner had I chuckled through the Sheen Family Circus yesterday than I was alerted to Charlie Sheen in New Yorker cartoons. This story has developed quickly enough — sorry, you couldn’t pay me enough to watch him on “20/20” — that half the lines are going over my head. There are people who have the industrial-strength new-media skilz to monitor two dozen websites and Twitter feeds, but I’m not among them. Not if I’m going to have time to browse Cute Overload once in a while.

But I did take a few minutes and watch most of the clip at this Salon link, mainly because the headline irritated me; whatever else Charlie Sheen is, he’s not “frightening.” The haggard face, the cigarette in the teeth — he reminds me of the guys I used to meet in those summers during college, when my friends and I would go to different apartment-complex pools during the day. (We didn’t know anyone who lived there. That was sort of the point.) I bet he has a funny name for his penis. I bet he calls it “little Elvis” or “the Highlander.”

Back to the humor. This is sort of second-rate, but it contains at least one new fact (to me) — the Plaza Hotel has an Eloise suite. Of course they would, but the thought of Charlie and his goddesses partying there is rahther sobering, as Eloise might say. This who-said-it quiz provided one of my rare humiliations in the area of online quiz-taking (I am an Oxford don of online quizzes. Go on, Pew Center, try to stump me!).

Is this sort of bad behavior really so different from previous episodes of bad behavior? Then why are so many people who clearly have better things to write about writing about it? Why am I writing about it?

I liked this comment at Walter Kirn’s blog:

Like Hugh Hefner. Sheen’s flashing, haunted eyes, the nodding head, the sidelong, you-better-believe-it-pal, meaningful looks at his interviewers, all remind the spectator of the panhandler, the street hustler, the drunk tank cell mate, the it’s-reeeally-heavy-maa-an tedium of the Dennis Hopper character in “Apocalypse Now.” And finally, the drunk ranter in every bar in every town. Yeah, pal, you’re brilliant. You’re really special. And you know things ordinary mortals don’t. I gotta go now. We see our reduced selves and recoil.

He left out the way he rattles a rocks glass before he tries to drain it of the last few drops. That’s another thing those guys would do on their poolside chaises.

And Ken Levine’s post isn’t hugely insightful, but kudos for this shoutout to “A Face in the Crowd,” the closest thing to a literary reference you find in showbiz, most days.

My word counter says we’re at 500 on the nose, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

This story was done by one of my students. I pass it along because until I moved to Michigan, I’d never seen a hookah lounge before, let alone one in a strip mall called Off the Hookah. This one sounds like a sports bar for Arab men.

Clint Eastwood is directing a script about J. Edgar Hoover, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. So there. Soooo. Theerrrre.

Oh, and note the lead in that story, which admittedly is from E! Online and not the New Yorker. I think Hank Stuever once noted that stories about movies featuring gay characters always feature a passage about kissing — what was it like to kiss another man, Leo? Was it difficult? How did you prepare? As though a simple kiss is the equivalent of losing 60 pounds and shooting a lengthy scene in which one swims a river of shit. No one ever asks that of the hookers who bang Charlie Sheen.

If you’re not reading the NYT’s Disunion blog, you should be. We’re only a few weeks away from the attack on Fort Sumter.

And is that it? I think it is. Off to the gymnasium.

I kept the Oscars on while I worked last night, because it’s the sort of thing you don’t need to watch-watch, or even pay much attention to. Every time I looked up, Anne Hathaway was in a different dress and James Franco was all but squinting at the teleprompter. I happen to like both of these folks, and I take it from the Twitter traffic that everybody thinks they really sucked. I disagree. Franco sucked (and I loves me some Franco). Hathaway’s only sin was trying too hard. But she was amazing to look at — all those dresses! all that hair! — and in a traditional matchup like that, it would be her only job. Look lovely, and occasionally zing. But she sparkled and zinged enough for the both of them.

I didn’t understand that Hugh Jackman thing. Was it some reference to last year? Because I forgot last year already. The Oscars are always highly forgettable, especially the singing and dancing parts. Here’s what I remember from previous years: Jon Stewart saying, “The score is now Martin Scorsese zero, Three-Six Mafia one.” Rob Lowe and Snow White. And a few acceptance speeches. That’s about it. So I don’t understand the annual whining that the show was too long, too serious, too dull, whatever. It was ever thus, and likely always will be. Let’s prize this opportunity to look at Hollywood unmasked, and revel in all the people who call themselves “artists” with a straight face. And let’s check out Hathaway’s Oscar dresses, shall we?

Tom & Lorenzo counted eight, enough to “rival a Cher Farewell Tour,” and I’d be hard-pressed to find fault with any of them. My favorite was the shiny cobalt column, but that might be my favorite color ever, and if anyone can rock shiny cobalt, it’s a slender strand of a woman with classic brunette coloring. I didn’t know this whole lineup was put together by Rachel Zoe; this may require me to change my opinion of her.

Looking at the pictures, you know what else I noticed? She had red fingernails when she arrived, and nude ones after the show started. So besides the eight costume changes and four hairstyle changes, she also had time for someone to blow through her dressing room with a bottle of acetone. Meanwhile, James Franco evidently smoked a doobie. The girl always works harder.

My single favorite award? David Seidler, 73, the oldest person to ever win for original screenplay. My role models these days are mostly old men, but I think it’s a mark of maturity that I’d rather be Seidler than Hathaway.

Manic Monday, so a quick trip to the bloggage:

Mitch Albom disapproves of Kim Kardashian. Says she does nothing to earn a reported $65 million last year. Oh, I don’t know. I think she works harder getting dressed and staying in shape for her many public appearances than Albom did on that lame-ass column.

Man, the Onion has been on fire lately. Marauding gay hordes react to lack of DOMA enforcement:

“It was just awful—they smashed through our living room window, one of them said ‘I’ve had my eye on you, Roger,’ and then they dragged my husband off kicking and screaming,” said Cleveland-area homemaker Rita Ellington, one of the latest victims whose defenseless marriage was overrun by the hordes of battle-ready gays that had been clambering at the gates of matrimony since the DOMA went into effect in 1996.

Also: Open-minded man grimly realizes how much life he’s wasted listening to bullshit.

Finally, our own Brian Stouder, guest-blogging at Fort Wayne Observed. If you want to know how to live life as a parent of a child at an “urban” high school, well, he shows you how.

Gotta run, kittens. More tomorrow.