If you read newspapers, you might notice the ombudsman/reader representative is occasionally called upon to respond to the hand-wringers among the subscriber base who complain there is never any “good news” in the paper. This isn’t difficult, because it’s simply untrue. Every single edition of virtually every metro daily printed contains a heapin’ helpin’ of so-called good news, and except in extreme cases — 9/11, say — there is usually at least one such story on the front page.

They never answer the obvious follow-up question: Why would anyone want to read nice stories about brave Boy Scouts when you can watch the video of the bridal shop brawl — a story that comes with a great, made-for-tabloid name — on YouTube? I don’t know much, but I do know this: Right now, a producer from “Bridezillas” is speed-dialing that family and praying someone else didn’t get to her first.

Why would you want to read about upright public servants, when you can read about disgraced former Detroit city council president Monica Conyers, who went to court to be sentenced yesterday and unleashed the furies. To be sure, you could wonder if this even counts as news, as Monica’s furies are rarely leashed at all; she can’t even check into a hotel without the police being called. After trying to withdraw the guilty plea she negotiated and signed eight months ago, she threw this into the mix: “My husband is an older man,” and presumably incapable of caring for two teenagers (although he retains chairmanship of the House Judiciary Committee). John Conyers didn’t show, by the way, although he was said to be in his office in the same building when the hearing was taking place. Yet another strange marriage in a world full of them.

Speaking of which, I wonder what Mrs. Massa is thinking these days. I met a gay veteran in a bar in Key West once. Which branch? I asked. “The Navy, of course,” he replied. “Of course?” Weeks at sea on a floating tub full of men. Draw your own conclusions.

Well, pals o’ mine, I wish I could tell you the Buckley’s did the trick, but it didn’t. I feel as awful today as I did yesterday, but now I have twice as much work to do, so I must away. A little bloggage:

I’m wondering if Kate is going to want to see “The Runaways.” My guess is, not if it means sitting next to her mother while Dakota Fanning sings “Cherry Bomb.” The whole movie looks a little, uh, mature.

This is very obscure, but I had no idea: Lynda Barry went out with him? Really? Really.

God, I feel like crap. Please to forgive. We’ll try again tomorrow.

The state of state budgets all over the country is the same — sea of red ink, soon to be joined by more oceans of carmine blood, as programs and jobs and salaries and the like are slashed in a desperate effort to keep up.

(This makes our conservative friends very happy, of course. But let’s leave that argument for another day. Actually, let’s not have that argument at all. BO-ring.)

Here in Michigan, where blood and red ink and dysfunction and all sorts of malevolent forces collide on a daily basis, they’re talking about cutting the Pure Michigan campaign. Which is? Glad you asked:

I know some of you have video blocked, so just so you know, Pure Michigan is the state’s tourism campaign. Narrated by native Tim Allen, these are 30-second spots touting the state’s beauty to potential vacationers around the country. But it’s more than that — the ads air on local TV as well. Full of swooping helicopter shots of blue lakes and white sand and green forests, it’s not just a lure to spend your dollars in-state, but a form of therapy for a state that’s beaten down, but still has an Upper Peninsula. I always watch them when they come on, and not because one featured the channel in front of my friends’ summer cottage. (The one whose depths contain the crude rubber toy exclusively employed for humiliating photographs of those who fell asleep before the others at the nightly parties? you’re wondering. Why yes. And who hurled it there, after starring in a particularly rancid series? You’ll have to see if he ‘fesses up in the comments.)

The total budget for the campaign is $30 million. The Senate-approved budget bill whacks that by half, led by a senator from Novi who is also behind the move to slash or eliminate the filmmaking tax credit that’s led to so much lights-camera-action around here of late. She’s what Cool Hand Luke would call a hard case. The discussion, as you can imagine, is about whether the ads are cost-effective, and various resort-country businesspeople are stepping up to tell the media yes, it boosted business. My question is, but are they effective as therapy? Is there ever a justification for feel-good spending by a governmental body? Especially in a time when we could use a little good feeling?

The “I Love New York” campaign, you might recall, was launched in some dark hours for that state, during its largest city’s Travis Bickle period. Times Square was all porn palaces, the subways smeared with graffiti. I’m sure some public servant there said proclaiming love for this place in ads running in Cleveland and Atlanta was a waste of taxpayer dollars. Who remembers them now? And yet the logo — designed by Milton Glaser, pro bono — endures today and is among the most successful brands in advertising history. Put that in your pipe and smoke it, Mr. and Mrs. Bean Counter.

Michigan’s a pretty beaten-down place at the moment, but we still have our looks. And our Upper Peninsula. It would be nice if our legislators would remember that once in a while.

OK, bloggage:

While we’re talking video, the Butt Drugs commercial. Which shows the best of Indiana. Snicker.

Lindsay Lohan makes a desperate plea for attention. It’ll probably work. It’s working now.

And now, off to work.

Nathan Gotsch, one of those young squeaky-clean Fort Wayne guys for whom the phrase “you went to Concordia, didn’t you?” was coined, is trying to produce a TV pilot far away from the Man, man. It’s an expansion of his Josh Jennings for Congress spoof of 2006 — he produced a campaign commercial for a fictional character who decided a job in the House of Representatives would be way better than one at Subway. He got a little attention, if “being mentioned on Tucker Carlson’s show” counts as “a little attention,” and I think it does.

Anyway, Nathan got some attention from the Man, and after considering what going the traditional route would entail, decided to blaze an indie trail. He’s put together a budget for a $25,000 pilot production, and is trying to raise the dough via Kickstarter. Here’s his fundraising page.

I read the script and it’s pretty funny. (Funnier than “Reno 911,” anyway.) If you’d like to help Nathan, go to his Kickstarter page, watch the video, marvel at how much he resembles the absolute essence of a Concordia graduate, and, if you’re so inclined, kick him a few bucks. He has a week to raise about $15K. Goad to my fellow Hoosiers, past and present — although the pilot script never explicitly says so, the story’s set in Fort Wayne, and I can assume this would come up in subsequent episodes. However, if it gets picked up, I think we can expect to see Nathan’s crew in Michigan for exteriors shooting, because we have the fat tax incentives. (For now.) So win-win all around for my Midwest playas.

No pressure, just a chance to use a Web 2.0 idea for good, for a change. (You know how Kickstarter works, right? Nathan only gets the money if he reaches his goal. If not, you’re not billed. That way you aren’t giving him cash to drink away his sorrows because he didn’t get enough to make his pilot.)

Given the bummer tone of recent days, let’s make this Twinkle Thursday, and strive for optimism in all things. It’s what Josh would do.

While this isn’t exactly a happy-news sort of thing, I’m calling it out because it makes me feel optimistic about the future — of journalism, anyway. One of our readers, Kim, left it low in the comments of yesterday’s post, but let’s drag it out into the light of day:

Bob (not Greene) and all the other journos out there who have been accused of making it up: Here’s the story we used from a student journalist who was at the boring press conference but paying close attention (and recording it) because she didn’t want to get it wrong. Note the link to actually listen to the state delegate saying the words he now says were “poorly chosen” and misinterpreted. As you might expect, there’s been a fecal avalanche as a result. Rachel M., HuffPost, Sally Quinn – everybody’s weighing in. There’s a movement to skewer the student reporter because she is a student and because much larger, “actual” papers were present and totally missed it. Why’d they miss it? My guess is they were just making the doughnuts, going to a conservative legislator’s press conference about de-funding Planned Parenthood and filing that Saturday feed-the-beast story. Similar to the reason a local delegate who was present as a supporter of de-funding PP did not hear it – she admitted to not paying attention because she was talking to another delegate. Quite a lesson for the student. I’d say for public officials everywhere, too, but that would make me seem much younger than I am.

The story, if you’re not inclined to click through, quotes a state delegate’s interesting opinion about why there are so many disabled children in the world:

“The number of children who are born subsequent to a first abortion with handicaps has increased dramatically. Why? Because when you abort the first born of any, nature takes its vengeance on the subsequent children,” said Marshall, a Republican.

That’s pretty clear, isn’t it? Marshall, well, he now says he didn’t exactly say that:

“No one who knows me or my record would imagine that I believe or intended to communicate such an offensive notion. I have devoted a generation of work to defending disabled and unwanted children, and have always maintained that they are special blessings to their parents.”

In other words: Shit. And you were recording? Double shit.

I love it when Roger damns with faint praise. In this case, reviewing “The Crazies.”

“The Crazies” is a perfectly competent genre film in a genre that has exhausted its interest for me, the Zombie Film. It provides such a convenient storytelling device: Large numbers of mindless zombies lurch toward the camera as the hero wreaks savage destruction; they can be quickly blown away, although not without risk and occasional loss of life. When sufficient zombies have been run through, it’s time for a new dawn.

“The Crazies” stars NN.C crush object Timothy Olyphant and Radha Mitchell, two actors who class up the joint, although I watched the trailer and it uses the old “no signal” cell-phone trope. As they say in that other zombie movie: One more for the bonfire. (That link doesn’t go to an imdB page, by the way, but to a great “no signal” montage, via John August, which he credits to FourFour. Has all due credit been passed around? I hope so.)

It’s 9:47, which means my Flex Appeal class starts in 13 minutes and I must away. The sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful, and so are you, dear readers. So I’m going out to play.

For a place where ideas are supposed to be exchanged in a lively manner, most newspaper editorial pages are, well, not.

The one in Columbus, when I was there, was the last stop before retirement, the place for loyal but lame geldings to put their whitening muzzles to the lush grass for the last couple of years, and be asked to do no work more difficult than carrying the children around the pasture, and have I mixed enough metaphors? (I’m told it has since improved. Considerably.) One of the young newsroom guns used to publish an equal parts scathing-and-fun internal critique of the paper, and did a hilarious takedown of Dispatch editorials. At least twice a month the page could be reliably counted on to take note of an approaching holiday, welcome it, and hope it heralded good things. I remember one such headline: Bean Can Day Awaited. Readers, do you know that “bean can day,” in quotes, does not turn up a single result in all of Googledom? Could that aging scribe have been having his own joke, turning in an editorial for a holiday entirely born of his imagination, waiting to see if it would run? I think so. He was like the National Lampoon’s Penthouse parody, where the copy around the centerfold, month after month, was the text of the writer’s resignation letter, never accepted because it was never read.

My friend Leo does his best with what he has to work with in Fort Wayne, and that’s not bloody much, but even in the high-cotton days, I wondered about the paper’s peculiar attachment to certain writers, both local and syndicated. I think we had to have been among the last papers still running the vile Joseph Sobran, years after William F. Buckley himself had cashiered the anti-semitic bastard from the National Review. (Here’s a recent effort, “Sodomy, Abortion and the Forces of Hate,” in which he refers to our “mulatto president” — still swingin’!) And then there was the uniquely awful Thomas Sowell.

I don’t think this takedown of his latest book can be improved upon, so I’ll just link, quote a passage or two, and encourage the rest of you wallow in it the way I did:

Even jeremiads should have their joys; there is something so wonderful about being a writer and a critic that delivering even bad news can be a source of unbearable pleasure. But Sowell takes no joy in anything he has to say: his tone is as dour and depressing as his conclusions. I understand that the man is a conservative, but can’t he crack a smile? Sowell is such a plodder that even sarcasm, conservatism’s reliable and sometimes amusing old ally, is beyond his reach.

This business of dreary writing escapes me. True, writing can be a torment. But then there is the payoff: the unexpected insight, the sly pun, the implication left dangling for the reader to run with. Did Sowell’s research assistants, one of whom has worked for him for two decades, ever hear him shout with joy? Did he ever run into a colleague’s office bursting with enthusiasm about a brilliant sentence that made a whole chapter hang together? I cannot believe it. There is no grandeur in Sowell’s words, no sign of human creativity, no dream or fantasy of immortality. Sowell writes as if called to grim duty.

It’s that good all the way through. I love a piece like this that singles out something you hadn’t thought of but, once it’s pointed out to you, hits you like a sledgehammer. In focusing on Sowell’s unique joylessness, he puts his finger on what’s wrong with so many newspaper editorial pages. Leo frequently pointed out that the death of oxygenated editorial pages tracked with the rise of the one-newspaper town, that the monopoly on print advertising led to the current model of point-counterpoint, on one hand/on the other hand, and what does the future hold? Only time will tell. Whatever. That doesn’t explain how Sowell found such a comfortable home on his page, but Sowell certainly towed toed the ideological line, if also being as boring as dry toast.

Joyless — that’s exactly the word for it. Elsewhere in that story I learned with amazement that Sowell has published 46 books. Forty-six! As Wolfe notes:

I confess to not having read them all. But I have read enough of them to know that Sowell is not one for changing his mind. Although he claims to have been a Marxist in his youth, his published writings never vary: the same themes—the market works, affirmative action does not work, Marxism is wrong, and, yes, intellectuals are never to be trusted—dominate from start to finish.

I’ll say. Ironic that Sowell writes like a mirror image of a good Marxist apparatchik in Stalin’s Soviet Union, ain’a?

While we’re on the subject of writers, two recommendations before I leave:

This NYT piece on the discovery of a major influence on William Faulker — a diary kept by a plantation owner who was an ancestor of a childhood friend — is full of great details, not the least of which is its description of the diary itself:

The climactic moment in William Faulkner’s 1942 novel “Go Down, Moses” comes when Isaac McCaslin finally decides to open his grandfather’s leather farm ledgers with their “scarred and cracked backs” and “yellowed pages scrawled in fading ink” — proof of his family’s slave-owning past. Now, what appears to be the document on which Faulkner modeled that ledger as well as the source for myriad names, incidents and details that populate his fictionalized Yoknapatawpha County has been discovered.

The original manuscript, a diary from the mid-1800s, was written by Francis Terry Leak, a wealthy plantation owner in Mississippi whose great-grandson Edgar Wiggin Francisco Jr. was a friend of Faulkner’s since childhood. Mr. Francisco’s son, Edgar Wiggin Francisco III, now 79, recalls the writer’s frequent visits to the family homestead in Holly Springs, Miss., throughout the 1930s, saying Faulkner was fascinated with the diary’s several volumes. Mr. Francisco said he saw them in Faulker’s hands and remembers that he “was always taking copious notes.”

And, finally, another NYT story on another celebrated author, this one 17 years old and German, who is battling plagiarism accusations after her hot book of the moment was found to have lots of cutting and pasting from other sources. This strikes me as a rather ballsy defense, however:

Although Ms. Hegemann has apologized for not being more open about her sources, she has also defended herself as the representative of a different generation, one that freely mixes and matches from the whirring flood of information across new and old media, to create something new. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity,” said Ms. Hegemann in a statement released by her publisher after the scandal broke.

In other words, the sampler’s excuse, i.e., I took that previous thing, yes, but I made it my own. Feh. People who say there’s no such thing as originality are, what’s the word? Unoriginal.

Finally, a good ChiTrib piece on the death of a lesbian bar. A little melancholy, but not — the story points out that as the gay community is welcomed into the mainstream, it has less use for bars as community centers. Anything that gets people out of the smoky air and into the light can’t be all bad.

OK, I’ve prattled on too long and I have much work to do. Enjoy the weekend.

Kate got a snow day today. I’m flabbergasted. The superintendent here is notorious for never closing school; you look at those “you know you’re from Grosse Pointe if” things on Facebook and they all say, “…you hate Suzanne Klein because you never got a snow day.” From where I sit, it looks as though we got five or six inches, remarkable only because it’s taken this long to arrive. And they cancelled school. This is surely a sign of the apocalypse.

Frankly I don’t blame her for being a hard case. All schools are local here. There are no buses. And half the student body has at least one parent who drives a hulking SUV that could scale Mt. McKinley (at least, that’s what the commercials imply). Plus, duh, it’s Michigan. I tell her she doesn’t want the Fort Wayne model, which was to cancel or delay schools at the first sign of a cloud crossing the sky, which makes all the kiddies happy until the end of the year rolls around, and the days have to be made up. Knowing what happens around here at year’s end — in which learning basically ceases after Memorial Day, replaced with a round of picnics, parties and in-class movies — I wonder why state legislators even bother fussing about this stuff.

So, anyway, snow day. I made chili last night. Used my own chuck (ground by moi), added a basket of corn muffins. There are lots of leftovers. Stop by.

Which reminds me of a story someone once told me: A couple of his acquaintance gone to see Branford Marsalis perform in (I think) Bloomington, Ind., and as they were leaving, walked past the stage entrance, where Marsalis was hanging around, talking to the fans. Little by little the crowd dwindled until it was Marsalis and this couple, and he said, “So, what’s a good place to eat around here?” They suggested a few places, and then the man added, “My wife made a pot of chili before we left. It should be pretty good by now. You’re welcome to join us.” Marsalis said OK, that sounded good, and they drove him home with them, and then back to the tour bus. I’m not sure what to make of this story, other than a) the Marsalises are jes’ plain folks; and b) one should never underestimate a touring musician’s longing for home cooking. I think it’s probably a little of both.

Does Branford’s more famous brother still do his great radio show? I forget the name of it, but it should have been called “Master Class with Wynton Marsalis.” I would catch it on Columbus’ public-radio station when I was traveling there often on Friday evenings. It was a really engaging lecture with lots of records, aimed at that precise point where a trained musician would learn something new from it, but an untrained listener could easily follow it, too. He’d tell you why Thelonious Monk was important, play a record, explain why he was a great composer, play a record, drill down into particularly engaging key changes, play a record, etc. By the end of the hour you felt a) entertained; and b) smarter. That’s a hard line to walk.

Add me to the I Hate Facebook club. If it weren’t for the fact many people consider FB my de facto e-mail account, I’d drop it entirely. They’ve retooled it yet again, and it’s the usual train wreck — reload your home page three times, and you’ll get three different news feeds, and one of them will be from two days ago. I think what they’re struggling with is success. I now have nearly 300 “friends,” many of whom I couldn’t identify in a police lineup, but are still pretty good FB players, in that they post good links and can be funny in a status-update line. Other people are far better friends in real life — my best friends, in fact — but lousy on FB, and somewhere there’s an algorithm that will let you sort them out, but Facebook hasn’t figured it out yet. What I need to do is sit down with all my 300 and do a great big cull. I did a targeted one over the weekend and friends? It felt good.

Bloggage? Oh, not very much:

I thought this Henry Paulson book excerpt from over the weekend was remarkable in the story it told about John McCain’s spectacularly dumb move in fall 2008, but the intro was one of those “huh?” moments:

With the stock market in freefall and the country headed for a crippling economic recession, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed the $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan to Congress on Friday, Sept. 19, 2008. By the following Monday, the Troubled Asset Relief Program was meeting resistance on all sides. Mr. Paulson’s next few days, marked by little sleep and no exercise, were frantic with meetings and private phone calls on behalf of the legislation.

I know many, many people who consider a daily workout necessary to remain on top of their game, mentally. I know I feel better when I exercise than when I don’t. It’s also the first thing to fall off the schedule when I get busy. I think it’s remarkable that the editor of this piece, in sketching out the condition of Henry Paulson during a truly scary stretch in his work history, would single out the fact it cost him his workout. If I’d learned that he still made time for the treadmill while the world’s financial system was teetering on the brink, I’d be pissed. Thoughts?

First Toyota, now a Honda recall? The Detroit auto executives must feel like a boxer on the mat at 7 on a 10-count, looking up through the blood and sweat to see their opponent suddenly suffer chest pains.

Betty White’s Super Bowl ad is giving her a little career lift. Ha ha. It’s funny to see the old-bag veterans of Mary Tyler Moore’s show get a second, third or maybe fifteenth wind. Cloris Leachman was all over Comedy Central for a while, working blue-blue-blue at some roast a while back. She called up some young hunk and planted a soul kiss on him, and don’t think that didn’t rock the house. There’s nothing funnier than a horny old lady, as Betty already knows from having chased Lou Grant back in the day.

And with that, I think I’m out of here. Happy snow day, all.

I think I just shot my writing time firing off a thousand-word memo to the students staffing GrossePointeToday.com. It started off as a general guide to covering small city councils, and, as usual, became something else. When something starts with “be on time” and ends with a little story about how I overcame my fear of the New York City subway system, I know I’ve lost the thread. Ah, well. Someday, kids, I’ll be famous, and that memo will be worth something. If I can stop writing memos long enough to get anything else done, that is.

I’ve got about a million things on my mind at the moment, so let’s fall back on that time-tested trick of lazy columnists everywhere — the three-dotter. I called it Items in Search of a Column when I was doing that sort of thing, but I’m repudiating all ties with my former employer, having learned yesterday that they laid off the last remaining full-time staff photographer, along with two other people, late last week. (What’s more, they called the guy in from his vacation to fire him.) A newspaper without photographers, yes. Reporters now carry point-and-shoot cameras and take their own pictures, the standard bush-league model. When I joined that outfit, it was a year off of winning a Pulitzer Prize and, needless to say, writers wrote and photographers photographed. But that was a long time ago.

I’m changing my resume, anyway. New item: 1984-2004: In a coma. It would be less embarrassing.

…For the record, while I only heard it from an adjacent room, it sounded like the Who sucked eggs at the Super Bowl. If nothing else, it inspired my daughter to ask, “Why do only old people perform at halftime?” Alan: “Because the last time they let young people do it, Janet Jackson showed her boobie.” She did like the laser light show, but for the love of Mike, can we book someone other than the Motown All-Stars or some other geezer outfit for 2011? Just a thought.

…More bad news from my hometown: Casa d’Angelo on Fairfield is closing its doors. “Declining revenue,” etc. Today’s story says it’s a domino effect following the closing of a nearby hospital SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, and the emphasis should tell you what I think of that one. Well, it’s their business, they can do what they want. But it’s a loss for the neighborhood that will no doubt be cheered on by the knuckle-draggers, who have been trashing Fort Wayne’s south side as long as I can remember. They think it’s unsafe, which struck me as ridiculous then and even more so now that my bad-neighborhood meter has been recalibrated to Detroit standards. I used to despair that Hoosiers would rather buy a new house in a subdivision exactly like every other one than a craftsman bungalow for half the price in my neighborhood. Looks like nothing has changed.

…Does anything ever change? Sometimes I wonder.

…My cheer at the Saints victory, which was previously predicated on the simple thrill of seeing a feisty underdog defeat their smug betters, escalated to joy upon watching this video. The fact it irks knuckle-draggers who resent the conflating of a football team with the social upheaval of Hurricane Katrina is just the whipped cream on my sundae.

…I hate the new Facebook, whatever it is at the moment. Someone asked the other day if I’d pay for Facebook. Most days, I’d pay to be forcibly disconnected from it. Even as I continue to use it, yes.

…Jezebel on unretouched Madonna. Thanks, LAMary. I find these photos as impossible to resist as chocolate cream pie in the refrigerator, something Madonna doubtless hasn’t tasted in decades.

And with that, it’s into the shower with me. Sorry for the scrambled eggs, but we have a snowpocalypse under way, and I need to run my errands early.

If luck smiles on my schedule today, I hope to make it over to the Detroit Ice House. The managers of the project haven’t announced its location yet, so I won’t, either. But I know. It’s difficult to keep an abandoned house that has been carefully covered with ice much of a secret. They’ve surrounded the place with police tape, so the snow doesn’t get disturbed before the official project photographs are taken. Or so I’m told. It’s close enough for a quick lunchtime hop, and by then the temperature should be high enough that things should be a little drippy. High pressure promises preservative temperatures until the big reveal.

There are enough of these guerrilla art projects going on around here — a previous cadre of hipsters painted abandoned houses, from roof to foundation, including windows, in shades of safety orange and green — that I wonder if we’re on the tipping point of becoming a playground for this sort of thing. I once wrote that only in Detroit could a bartender become a real-estate developer, but now it’s even easier. In “The Farmer and the Philosopher,” the short film we saw the other night, Toby Barlow remarks that Detroit is a pretty big canvas. True dat. But I share Jim Griffioen’s oft-stated concern that poverty porn is not, in the end, a good thing, and attaching a food drive and other do-gooding to a project, while certainly worthy, can’t make it entirely right.

But I’ll reserve judgment until I see it. One of the very few conservative critiques of art I agree with is the idea that art shouldn’t have to come with a big explanation text, that when an artist has to post a signboard telling the viewer what he was after and whose blood the red paint signifies, the work has already failed. The Ice House may or may not “reference the contemporary urban conditions in the city and beyond,” as its blog states, but I do look forward to seeing it.

Which is a very long-winded way of saying, “I know what I like,” so there it is.

On Saturday, I’ll check out the Belle Isle Ice Tree, which makes no claims about urban conditions, other than, “Cold enough for you?”

I need to get out of the house, anyway. I’ve reached the stage of winter where feeling bad is a loop: I feel bad, so I skip workouts/eat too much/don’t get outdoors enough, which leads to more of the same. I should change my name to Ursa and just hibernate the season away, but then, who would dig up stuff to show you every day? Like…

Oh, the things you miss when you don’t watch Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had Jon Stewart on? And Stewart said Fox has “taken reasonable concerns about this president …and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao”? I’d have paid to see that.

You’ve seen the generic TV report and the generic blog post. Here’s the generic Oscar-nominations story. If everyone is hip to this, why do these things keep getting done? (Thanks, Vince.)

I hate it when a story emerges that requires me to suddenly read a million words to get up to speed, and several hundred of the words involve morons whining that they should have to pay for something and why can’t they just steal it the way they did in the good ol’ days, but that seems to be what the Amazon/MacMillan fight last weekend seems to be. For those of you who weren’t tuned in, it involves a price war over e-books that broke out in the wake of the iPad announcement. Amazon is using cheap e-books to sell Kindles, and MacMillan is trying to hold the line on selling its inventory at a loss, for obvious reasons. Here’s Virginia Postrel at the Atlantic with something of an overview. Here’s John Scalzi on Amazon’s screwup. And here’s Scalzi again, being funny, on the many, many stupid things people are saying in the wake of last week’s events, including (in so many words), “it’s not like writing a book is that hard” and “I won’t pay for anything I can steal with impunity.” (I’m thinking this is maybe the only thing you need to read about this.)

May I add one more thing? All those people saying, “E-books are great, because then the last barrier standing between the dedicated amateur and his vast readership will fall to pieces” are invited to sign on as slush pile readers any any publisher within driving distance. And please, in keeping with your views about the real work of publishing, work for no pay. Report at the end of one week. Yes.

Oh, and while we’re at it? I read this thing in Slate about YouTube’s penny-ante rental proposal to help little-seen independent films get a little more-seen, offering feature-length films online for $3.99, and I see that the comments have already started:

“The beginning of the end,” wrote one user in comments; “i thought the purpose of youtube was to watch videos for free.” Another wrote that “Youtube is seriously [sic] selling out,” apparently unaware that YouTube, in fact, already sold out to Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Only in a world where people think nothing of paying $4 for a cup of coffee could they balk at the idea of paying a penny less to watch a movie.

OK, now I’m inspired. I’m going to get dressed, floss the spinach out of my teeth — healthy breakfast, step one to improving one’s perspective on winter — and off to the Ice House! You enjoy Thursday.

I had to go to the Apple store this weekend. Mail continued to give me problems, and it finally reached the point where I realized this might be the irregular-shaped mole of my OS, and it was time for a biopsy. The Genius fixed it with some diagnostic this and that, then noticed a cracked top piece on the laptop. It’s no biggie, I’ve been living with it for months, it doesn’t affect anything but the appearance. But the Genius said he’d replace it under warranty. Like the diagnostic and repair, free o’ charge.

This laptop is now…four years old? Maybe three. At least three. I’ve never paid for anything that went wrong with it. Do their warranties ever expire? I asked Alan when I got home. He said I must be in the computer as a Mac slave/superplatinum customer, or just a blogger who always writes about how good their service is. Whatever. Literally: Works for me.

This was the outdoor “lifestyle center” mall, the one in Macomb County, the dog-friendly one. I frequently leave shaking my head over the tragedy surely waiting in the wings. Dogs are like children; it only takes a few misbehaving ones to ruin the experience for everybody. I know the way you teach dogs to behave in public is to take them out in public, but if you weigh 98 pounds and your dog about the same? You better be carrying a cattle prod, lady.

It’s startling to turn the corner in a store and see an afghan hound standing there looking at you, too. But as long as he’s a good boy, no biggie.

While I was there, I stopped in Sur la Table in search of martini glasses. I’m commencing my cocktail education with a new shaker I bought for us this Christmas, and my first project — pomegranate martinis — is coming along, but I lack the stemware for the right presentation. S-la-T has martini glasses, oh goody, and they’re only…$10? A piece. No. They’re also way too big; I want a martini to be relaxing at the end of a long day, not a sledgehammer. So I was interested in this Atlantic piece on the trend toward giant cocktails. Thank God I don’t make enough money to hang out in places like this; I’d be broke and on Skid Row by now.

Although…there was a place in Athens, Ohio that advertised “Texas cocktails” in the mid-’70s. Mr. Magoo’s. It also had a dance floor and played disco music, which was the craze elsewhere but totally uncool in hippieish Athens. The Arab and Iranian guys went there, hoping to pick up one of those famously easy American girls. They never looked comfortable with a fishbowl-size drink in their hands. I wonder if those cheap, rotgut G&Ts ever led to Islamic regret the next day. Is the Pope Catholic? Etc.

Anyway, after sketching out some truly ghastly sounding drink-and-drown tankards, Wayne Curtis notes:

Small cocktails were favored for a simple reason: they stay chilled from beginning to end.

Well, yeah. I mean, you can always have two.

These martini glasses could hold most of a can of Diet Coke. I’ll keep looking.

Some good bloggage today. Jim at Sweet Juniper has been silent of late, entirely understandable:

I think living in Detroit and watching “The Road” in the middle of January is not a good idea.

Yeah, me neither. Funny essay, though.

Also, a Michiganian with a master’s degree and a fancy resume finds work in Florida — at Publix.

Finally, I think I’m going to have to back the Saints in the Super Bowl. Sorry, Indiana, although not really, because with my support, they are destined to lose. You’re welcome.

And so Monday hits the ground running. Enjoy yours.

The horse-eating project I’m working on involves some historical research, which involves dusty old records, which involves going down to the historical branch of the Detroit Public Library and summoning boxes out of storage. The librarians turn them over with a pair of white cotton gloves, which you are expected to wear when you handle anything within. It’s hard to type in them, however, so there’s a lot of on-and-off when you’re taking notes.

I’m generally not sentimental about ephemera. I can think of nothing less worth having than an autograph. And yet there’s something about holding a piece of letterhead embossed Sullivan & Cromwell, 45 Wall Street, New York, New York. Just a piece of paper, and more than 50 years later, and it still screams white shoe. As does the signature: J.F. Dulles.

A couple years ago, I interviewed a graybeard from our legal community. What’s changed since you started practice in 1969? I asked. The work, not so much, he said; it’s still about money and how it’s divided, and it always will be. But the pace, the old days of chin-scratching and deliberation — that’s gone forever. A client would call with a question, and you’d tell him he’d be hearing from you. Then there was time for thought, and research in libraries, notes on a legal pad. Then you summon the secretary, dictate a letter, maybe revise the letter, type it in duplicate or triplicate, put it in the outgoing mail, onion-skin copies for the file. At every step in the process there was time to change your mind, consider further, refine. No one expected a reply sooner than the next day’s mail, and that was considered a blistering pace. Thought percolates, reduces, strengthens its flavors.

No more. Funny that we have a slow food movement, a slow travel movement, but slow thought is considered lazy. Dude, I saw that on Twitter like, two hours ago.

Speaking of movements, the NYT Thursday Styles section, home of bullshit trend stories of all sorts, has a story today on what you might call the slow blood movement, i.e., freezing your ass off. Today, a clot of the impoverished, the self-righteous and the just plain whack who endure, nay embrace, a life without furnaces.

I’ve read so many of these I can recite them in my sleep, but here’s a theme I see more often these days:

Attitude, not clothing, is what thaws Daniel McCloskey and his roommates in Pittsburgh. Last year, Mr. McCloskey, 22, bought two poorly insulated turn-of-the century clapboard houses for $41,000 in the Lawrenceville neighborhood there, and turned them into a writer’s retreat he named the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writer’s Co-op. …Mr. McCloskey offers monthlong residencies to emerging writers, which is to say a free room in the house at the back. There is a furnace, but his finances are low and mostly it stays off. …Mr. McCloskey warms himself up by spending time in coffee shops, he said — “an hour will do it” — and by maintaining an upbeat demeanor. Doesn’t his girlfriend, with whom he shares a drafty attic room, get grumpy?

“What makes her grumpy is using resources,” he said. “We’re all about staying positive.”

Ah, yes: “Using resources.” Way to sell a greener America, Daniel’s girlfriend — champion a lifestyle of miserly one-downmanship (“I keep my thermostat at 55” “Well, I don’t have a thermostat”) that turns on the embrace of a miserable lifestyle and fingerless gloves. Also, rationalization:

If it’s 20 degrees outside, as it was last week, it might be 15 indoors, so Ms. Gallagher will stoke the fire and go for a long walk; when she returns, the room can be 50 degrees, and 60 by bedtime, though it slides precipitously toward freezing as she sleeps. “The main reason why I do these winter trips,” she said, “is that when your house is 15 degrees, the only problem you have is getting warm. Focusing on survival is right up there with a Zen retreat when it comes to clearing the mind.”

It’s not the cold that’s the problem. It’s you that’s the problem.

For the record, I think most American houses are overheated, and that a chilly nighttime temperature is actually conducive to better sleep. But I like toilets that flush and prefer to focus my mind on work, not survival.

Eh. It’s their house, after all.

OK, now to commence eating the horse. First, a workout to strengthen the body. And one bit of bloggage: Man buried in Haiti rubble survives with help of his iPhone. He was rescued 65 hours later. I imagine he amused himself in the interim playing Wurdle.

I was googling “Brothers & Sisters,” the TV show, trying to find something I once read about it. I tried to watch that show and gave up after about half a season, when it became clear the writers were never going to give up this maddening music-cue thing they do.

The show is your basic prime-time soap, with comic elements. Whenever a comic scene commences, however, the sound editors insert this giggly little piano/string thing, the universal music code for “French farce scene about to commence! Get ready to laff!” I remember a couple years ago, reading an interview with some network executive who said it was necessary to telegraph every punch that way, because they’d given up the idea of any viewer giving any TV show their complete attention, and they didn’t want someone to look down at their laptop during a serious confession-of-infidelity scene and look up to find a zany oops-we’ve-been-caught-having-sex-in-the-cloakroom scene. Too jarring. And so tonal shifts are underlined, perhaps so viewers know they’re watching broadcast TV, not HBO.

So I was looking for that interview, and got distracted by reveries of the Allman Brothers, who — you younger folks might not know this — had a monster album in the ’70s called “Brothers and Sisters,” which combined with “music” would of course turn up in any Google search. And by then I had forgotten that one of the things I wanted to say was, nobody has any attention span anymore, because they’re always multitasking.

There was a trainer at my gym who liked to combine the ab work in his classes with “Whippin’ Post,” which I always thought was appropriate.

Which sort of brings me to this story from the New York Times’ Department of News You Already Knew, about how kids today are addicted to the internet. As an abusive parent in this regard, defined as “one who declined to buy the data plan for her child’s cell phone, and who also activated the parental controls feature of the computer’s OS,” I read with keen interest:

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

“I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said Francisco Sepulveda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his smart phone to surf the Web, watch videos, listen to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day.

It’s the texting that makes me insane. A true moderate, I equipped Kate with the moderate plan — 1,500 per month, which feels like all the goddamn texts any normal person would need, don’t you agree, my fellow geezers? Well, you should pay closer attention to your kid, who thinks nothing of texting “yo” or “‘sup?” or “hey” nine million times a day, and I am not kidding. Objecting to this is like saying with all this long hair, you can’t tell the boys from the girls.

I told her if she went over 1,500, I was taking it out of her hide. And no data plan until she gets a job.

After all, I don’t want to happen to her attention span what’s happened to mi– Shiny object! New tab in Safari! Tangent! So let’s go straight to the bloggage, eh? (I pronounce that blo-GAHGE, by the way, from the original French.)

Detroitblog finds a sterling example of that unique American character — the graphomaniac. (Look it up if you don’t know what it is. Why do you think we have tabbed browsing and the internet at our fingertips, fool? If this were a TV show, I’d be playing stern music right now.) Don’t miss the guy’s website.

It so happened I was at John King Books, Detroit’s spectacular used-books treasure house, looking for a couple of volumes that will aid in my horse-eating project mentioned last week. You want to know where graphomaniacs’ work goes to die? Check the local-history shelves at your own town’s version. They are distinguished by their lengthy subtitles (“Officer Down: One Man’s Heroic Crusade Against a Corrupt Police Force and Its Enablers Among the Legal Community, Particularly the Prosecutor’s Office — You Wouldn’t Believe”) and their equally lengthy dedications to the many kind helpers they had along the way to publishing their opus, which no publisher would touch, because it’s simply too hot.

There’s one at my local car wash, or was the last time I visited. I love this car wash, which takes advantage of the few moments you will spend there to push every imaginable sort of impulse purchase at your face. Greeting cards, scented cardboard air fresheners, bulk lots of utility towels, one-size-fits-most floor mats, laminated study guides for everything from the SAT to the periodic table — I have barely scratched the surface. But there, on a table next to the window where you watch them finish your inside windows, is a little pile of books. Self-published, natch. Title: “My Wife Has Cancer.” I can’t bear to pick it up. I hope it was therapeutic for someone.

An odd and an end from yesterday: You Cincinnatians, does Zino’s still have the greatest pizza in the world? We used to drive down from Columbus for that stuff. It’s the big red onions that does it. And Bob (not Greene) wondered if the Kim who commented yesterday had a last name beginning in L, because if so, he thought they knew each other? She does; you do. Contact me privately if you want to catch up.

It’s a new medium, so the growth curve is spectacular: The Chinese folks who brought you the animated Tiger Woods story tackle the Leno-O’Brien-NBC story. And it is awesome. If I were a young journalism student, this is what I’d be studying.

And now, to commence what is, theoretically, my work. If I don’t get distracted.