Thrills are hard to come by in the suburbs, especially in winter. The weather’s been too warm to skitch off car bumpers, and Alan’s become focused on trapping a giant raccoon whom we suspect has colonized our deck. So Kate and I went way out on a limb last night and tried Domino’s new pizza.

I should say at this point that I was not a Domino’s hata. It was hardly ever my first choice, but I never thought it was all that awful, as long as you ordered pepperoni. Pepperoni is like chocolate — such a strong flavor that it makes up for deficiencies elsewhere in the product. We had a neighbor a while back in Fort Wayne who worked at the ice-cream plant there, and confided the corporate secret that chocolate is always made on Fridays, and what’s more, is made from the odd lots of the previous week. If you had a batch of butter pecan that didn’t quite measure up, you could salvage it by dumping chocolate into it and no one would be the wiser. (Obviously, this decision was made before the pecans were added.) Not long after that, I bought some chocolate ice cream with a distinct undertaste of cherry and knew he was right.

Since my default takeout pizza is pepperoni, I could always handle Domino’s in a pinch. They deliver fast, and — alone among the local offerings — actually seem to use their insulated heat pouches for something other than showing off on the doorstep.

Detroit is known as a pizza Mecca. Domino’s is headquartered in Ann Arbor; Little Caesar’s is here, along with Hungry Howie’s, a newer chain. Every other major chain store is here, too. We have a huge Italian population, so there are a gazillion mom-and-pop pizzerias, too. Almost all of it is inedible. Little Caesar’s in particular is insultingly bad, a fact they seem to acknowledge with their relentless price-cutting; you can get a large one-topping for $5, and the only time I ever buy it is if I have to feed Kate and her friends. I think the problem is me — I’m just done with cheap pizza. If it’s not a hand-crafted Wolfgang Puck-style offering with fresh tomato, mozzarella and basil, it’s only fuel for a night when I don’t feel like cooking.

But I was interested in how Domino’s had reinvented their basic product, after taking the step of essentially confessing, “We suck.” So I ordered. The pizza came quickly. It was nice and hot. And it was awful. Really.

It still wasn’t as bad as Little Caesar’s, but it opened a whole new vista of bad — the brushed-with-flavorful-garlic-seasoning crust tasted and felt like garlic salt swimming in a bath of oil. I had to wash my hands twice before I dared touch anything afterward. Sauce meh, cheese meh and everything else, SALT SALT SALT SALT SALT. I like salt, so this was a revelation. This was pizza for a generation raised on Taco Bell and pork rinds. This was pizza for those with no taste buds left to corrupt. If pizza was liquor, this was moonshine. And so on.

David Brandon, Domino’s CEO, recently made news by giving up pizza to become the new athletic director at the University of Michigan. To which I’d say: Good career move.

Just try not to do to the Wolverines what you did to a large pepperoni. Although you could argue that they’re already the Little Caesar’s of Big 10 football. Nowhere to go but up.

Looks like Massachusetts is going to be a loser for the Democrats today. Martha Coakley has no one to blame but herself, another blue-state Democrat who thought she was attending a coronation, not an election. What it means for health care reform? (Shrug.) Talking Points Memo lays out a few strategies. The GOP conventional wisdom is that this is a “referendum” on Obama, but I’m sticking with the more conventional cliché, about all politics being local. Coakley was a terrible candidate with a nose-in-the-air sense of herself, and the sooner people like that learn the necessary correction, the better. Scott Brown is of a piece with the current GOP — dumb and obstructionist — and I’m at the point of thinking, if this is the government you guys want, maybe it’s the government we deserve. Sure hope you don’t lose your health insurance.

What can you do? Order more bad pizza.

Looks like we’re heading into another rash of high-profile exits. Kate McGarrigle yesterday. Dennis Hopper, soon. (He’s said to be “in his last days,” but wants to divorce his wife first. Hmm.) Who’s No. 3?

And now it’s 10:30, and I’ve blown deadline yet again. Time to hop to the shower and prepare for the rest of the day.

I’ve never gotten used to the MLK holiday. Newspapers are famously stingy about granting holidays in the first place, and this one falls in with Columbus, Presidents’ and Groundhog as one you might write about, but never get to enjoy. Schools are famously generous with holidays, so for working parents who must make arrangements for child care so soon after the end-of-year holiday child-care headaches, MLK Day is just more exasperation.

When it was instituted, J.C. wondered how long before we’d see “I have a dream” mattress sales on the long weekend. Haven’t seen that yet, but I did get a few e-mails from my retail favorites promising “three-day holiday sales” that don’t actually mention which holiday. It does coincide nicely with January clearance.

Martin Luther King Jr. couldn’t control when he was born, but it is interesting that he was born in a month that we all agree could use a few more paid days off. February would bump up against the presidents, March/April has spring break/Easter complications, May is Memorial, June is…well, it’s June. July has Independence, August vacation, September Labor and the start of a million new things. October? That would work. November no way, December ditto.

In Columbus, Columbus Day is a holiday, of course. (But not at the newspaper.) At least it was when I was growing up. The subsequent shoving of Chris into the Dead White Male, O.G. division, may have put a stop to that. As a daughter of the city that bears his name, I retain a stubborn affection for the guy. He had an idea, and he didn’t give up: He kept on sailing toward the west and never thought of taking rest. To our great land at last he caaaaaame, and so we sing his famous name.

I like him enough that it didn’t even bother me when I grew up enough to learn that he actually landed in the Bahamas, not our great land. The point is, he crossed the ocean. During hurricane season. I’d buy that man a drink.

But we’re getting off track here, which was? I forget. Let’s go to the bloggage:

Say what you will — “What you will!” — but for an entertaining fight, you really can’t beat the hard left. From a weekend NYT story on board meetings at WBAI, the public radio station:

Mr. Steinberg held the microphone on Wednesday evening, a bemused smile frozen in place. He waited out the hecklers, not a few of whom were his fellow board members, and turned to the next order of business: whether to seat a newly elected member, Lynne F. Stewart. Ms. Stewart is a well-known radical lawyer — or rather was a lawyer until she was convicted of material support for terrorism, disbarred and packed off to a federal prison. Such credentials are like catnip to WBAI voters, who elected her last autumn before she began serving her sentence. Some board members worry that for WBAI, which is forever on the edge of insolvency, not to mention anarchy, an imprisoned member is of little utility.

For Stewart partisans, however, such talk is profoundly counter-revolutionary. So Nia Bediako, a board member, dressed down the chairman, Mitchel Cohen, who opposed seating Ms. Stewart. “You very insensitively, very unprogressively, said perhaps we could meet in prison,” said Ms. Bediako, her voice dipped in an inkwell of disdain. “This from a so-called revolutionary!”

The right likes to talk in code words (family, values, confirmed bachelor), but the left prefers the translated phrases of communist martyrs (running dog, corrupt troika and many iterations of -ist). A hilarious read.

Mariah Carey played down her beauty in “Precious, with the rest of the title an awkward tribute to the ego of the original story’s author.” So, of course, she had to bring the girls all the way out for the Golden Globes. In case anyone forgot they were there, I guess. Maybe she misunderstood the term “golden globes.”

Funny: The director of “Downfall” — i.e., the source of all those Hitler-finds-out-X mashups — reveals what he thinks of ’em. He likey, and includes links to a couple I hadn’t seen before. The latest: Hitler finds out about the Tonight Show disaster.

Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that government offices will be open. Better go find out.

Shortly before the blue moon, I shared a pitcher of Blue Moon with a new acquaintance, who keeps a foot in public policy. We discussed the coming shitstorm, which in politer company is known as “the financial bind local governments find themselves in as sharply falling property-tax revenues mean curtailed services, increased taxes/fees and pain all around, or all of the above.”

On the way home, I reflected once again that if Barack Obama’s first official act after changing out of his inauguration-day tuxedo was to erect pikes up and down Wall Street and start decorating each with a severed head of a former master of the universe, we’d be talking about repealing the 22nd amendment today. (I’d travel to New York just to take a picture of Angelo Mozilo’s.)

One of these days when the temperature rises above freezing, I’m going to do a short picture-taking tour of my surroundings. Every so often it strikes me how watershed moments very rarely happen the way they do in the movies, with fancy camera movements and a pulsating score underneath to cue you to the drama. You still get up every day, brush your teeth, make coffee. People rarely riot in the streets. It’s bleak out there, but it ain’t “The Road,” not yet. It’s in how one day you’re in the passenger seat instead of the driver’s, so you can watch the storefronts as they flash by, and notice how many are empty, how the For Sale or Lease signs have been there so long they’re now sun-bleached. It’s in how you notice the house down the street, bearing the unmistakable look of abandonment, suddenly sprouts the realty sign of a firm that handles only foreclosures, and that’s no good, but! There are painters woking in there! And the dead tree in the front yard is gone! And wow, maybe it did actually sell, but the next sign is, For Rent. And that’s hopeful, right, because no one has scrapped it yet.

Everybody is seeing coyotes, not just the guy who jogs at 2 a.m., and I find myself getting all Eugenides, wondering if they’re a metaphor, like the dying elms in “The Virgin Suicides,” only no, the dying ash trees are the metaphor, right? They’re the auto-industry metaphor; the coyotes are the subprime-meltdown metaphor.

Forgive me. I think I shouldn’t have had that glass of wine on an empty stomach. But something is happening here, the bedrock is shifting, has shifted, and no one really knows what comes next. All anyone knows is, we were the first state to enter the recession, and will likely be the last to climb out. We’re the new Mississippi. May you live in interesting times, as the Chinese say.

Actually, I’m optimistic. Who isn’t, in January? There’s something tied to throwing out the tree, I think, that feeling of light and space again. As Bossy once said, it’s like getting another room in your house. One-word resolution: Finish. Several things, actually, but that’s what ties them all together. Happy new year to all.

So let’s kick off the bloggage with some supplemental reading, the WashPost ins-and-outs list, done this year by not-Hank, but still funny: Ripped abs/Ripped jeans. I’m there.

Everything you ever wanted to know — and a lot you didn’t — about Warren Beatty’s love life. More than 12,000 women, by his biographer’s estimation, and “that does not include daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on.” Noted.

Finally, the ground beef story that will push you to vegetarianism, or else toward my KitchenAid meat grinder. Pity it ran during the slowest news day of the year.

THe first manic Monday of the new year. Off and running!

For all your Russian-prostitute wardrobe needs. That’ll be 200 rubles, pazhalusta.

My favorite detail from the Brittany Murphy stories? Let’s take a look. TMZ:

Paramedics moved Brittany from the bathroom to the master bedroom, where they found a slew of prescription drugs — “A check of the nightstands revealed large amounts of prescription medication in the decedent’s name. Also noted were numerous empty prescription medication bottles in the decedent’s husband’s name, the decedent’s mother’s name and unidentified third party names.”

According to the notes, the medications included Topamax (anti-seizure meds also to prevent migraines), Methylprednisolone (anti-inflammatory), Fluoxetine (depression med), Klonopin (anxiety med), Carbamazepine (treats diabetic symptoms and is also a bipolar med), Ativan (anxiety med), Vicoprofen (pain reliever), Propranolol (hypertension, used to prevent heart attacks), Biaxin (antibiotic), Hydrocodone (pain med) and miscellaneous vitamins.

I love how that phrase comes at the end of a long list of central nervous system antagonists, like a good punchline. It’s important to stay healthy with the right nutritional supplements.

Actually, this isn’t funny, is it? Or rather, it’s funny how the rest of the world learned this lesson with Marilyn Monroe and Judy Garland, but Hollywood learned a different one, i.e., that there is an endless supply of young women out there to be chewed up and spit out. The young women learned there’s always a doctor who can be persuaded to write the next prescription. And if the local pharmacy gets suspicious, well, write it to your personal assistant or mom or whatever.

How is it possible I’m this far behind in the week and it’s only Tuesday? Go figure. The shortness of the week has something to do with it, as does the unmopped kitchen floor. But the swing through the cop shops yesterday was brutal, a veritable parade of wrongdoing — all the thieves in the world are doing their Christmas shopping in the Pointes, it seems, stealing everything from cars to wheels to iPods. It did lead to an interesting conversation with the police about the details of auto theft; I jotted down notes about “drop cars” when I got home. Drop cars are the easy-to-steal P.O.S. vehicles thieves drive when they’re looking for something nicer. Check plates around the empty parking spot of a stolen car, and you’re likely to make a recovery of the drop car. I guess that’s good for the statistics, but from some of the reports I’ve read you wouldn’t want your drop car back, unless you relish starting it with a screwdriver for the rest of its life.

Detroit and Miami are the auto-theft capitals of North America. I think the city’s motto should be whatever “don’t leave your keys in the ignition, not even for a minute” translates to in Latin.

The best car-theft story I’ve read since we’ve lived here is about a teacher in Detroit who’s had 13 vehicles stolen 14 times. The only reason it’s not 14 cars stolen 14 times is, she finally figured out the route to a quick recovery — keep the gas tank close to empty at all times by buying $5 worth of gas daily. The car runs dry within hours, and it’s found relatively close to where it was taken.

Big-city survival skills. It’s not all about keeping your purse clutched under your arm.

Oh my, look at the time. Must fly. Two must-see videos:

Roomba-riding cat beats down pit bull. And, if you ever find yourself craving Chinese food in Honolulu, you might be better off with a burger.

Well, Washington, you must be verrrry pleased with yourselves. In the words of a headline my friend Adrianne likes to quote, You’re snow king! And you can’t handle it. Although God knows why not. I know this is an unusual event, meteorologically speaking, but it’s certainly not unprecedented. As long as I’ve been reading newspapers, you can count on the eastern seaboard to be buried at least once every two years or so, and you’d think you’d have it figured out by now.

As a Midwesterner, I think it’s amusing that every storm on the east coast is covered like an attack by al-Qaeda. You read the NYT roundup, and they mention how “60 million people” were affected by the storm — or, as the NYT likes to call on its college education from time to time, that many people had “Whittier’s snowbound American landscape recreated” for their edification. (The web story contains a link to the poem. Thanks, English majors!) The unspoken subordinate clause, “…30 million of them journalists.”

I’m just grousing here. Detroit got less snow over the weekend than Columbus, Ohio, which is where we were on Saturday. We’ll catch up, we always do, but by the winter solstice, I’m yearning for the blanket of white to reflect what little light there is.

If I’m talking weather on a Monday, it’s a bad Monday. In the great traditions of Short Attention Span Theater, let’s make this an all-bloggage day.

Staying offline most of the weekend was the best thing I’ve done in a while. I should do more of it. You sign back on after a day away, and discover Brittany Murphy died, and your first thought is “drugs,” your second “anorexia,” and your third, “It’s sort of embarrassing that I even know who Brittany Murphy is,” although I always thought her work as Luanne Platter was her best.

In three minutes, Michigan’s attorney general is going to outline a lawsuit he plans to file, designed to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes. Kind of funny, when you think about it. Sue the bastards!

You are commanded to listen to the podcast/webstream of “This American Life” from this past weekend, which was about the drinking culture on the campus of Penn State University, only of course it wasn’t just about Penn State, but college in general. You are especially commanded to do so if you have a kid in college, or headed that way. It was, how you say, grim. Listening to the students speak of the rituals of college drinking — the tailgating, the pregame, the brand names, the “fracket” — I was reminded of rituals at another well-known American center of binge drinking, the Indian reservation. The students aren’t yet consuming hair spray cocktails, but that’s the next logical step after Red Bull and Vladimir vodka, in my opinion.

I kept asking myself if I was in any position to talk. I drank in college. Almost everyone did. I sometimes overindulged. Almost everyone did. I did it often enough that in sober moments I reflected on how fortunate I was to live on a small, walking-centered campus, rather than one that required a car. I asked myself if I would stand on the steps of a fraternity house, dressed in a tiny cocktail dress and towering stilettos, shivering in my fracket (defined as a cheap, crummy jacket you wear to frat parties, because you know it’s going to get vomit on it by night’s end, and you don’t mind losing it), hoping my tits or legs or pout or whatever will stir the doorman enough to grant me entrance to the party, because that’s where you go to get hammered, and that’s what a girl has to wear to get in — if I would have done this at the age of 19, and I think the answer is no. I didn’t know anyone at Ohio University who had to go to the E.R. from drinking, a common event in State College, Pa. Barfing? Sure. Hospital admissions with a BAC of .25, the average among hospital visits? No. And O.U. was a party school right down to its bones.

Sad, sad listening. And I don’t know what’s to be done.

But I do know what’s to be done today, and that’s work-work-work. So I’m outta here.

I love it when the New York Times introduces me to the rituals and stories of cultures I would otherwise never encounter. White people from Pittsburgh, for example. Today’s food-section piece on the local custom known as the cookie table was a series of delights, starting with finding out about the tradition in the first place. Pittsburgh brides celebrate their wedding not only with cake, but with a long table groaning with cookies, all makes and models, heavy on the ethnic varieties made only on special occasions, like pizzelles and lady locks. How could I have spent my whole life in the Midwest without knowing this? (Answer: Probably by never getting closer to Pittsburgh than the freeway exits.)

Many people have noted many times that the country is becoming increasingly homogenized, and they’re right. It’s nice, then, to read paragraphs like this:

No one knows for sure who started the tradition, or why it hasn’t exactly taken hold outside this region. Many people credit Italian and Eastern European immigrants who wanted to bring a bit of the Old Country to the big day in the New World. Given that many of them were already well practiced at laying out a Christmas spread, baking 8 to 10 times as many treats for a few hundred special friends and relatives may not have seemed like such a stretch.

But even amid the increasing professionalization of the wedding, with florists mimicking slick arrangements ripped from Martha Stewart’s magazines and wedding planners scheduling each event down to the minute, the descendants of those Pittsburgh settlers continue to haul their homemade cookies into the fanciest hotels and wedding venues around the city. For many families today, it would be bordering on sacrilege to do without the table.

Elsewhere in the food section was a piece on the southern “little layer cake,” the towering cakes turned out by little old ladies, constructed of not two or three layers, but a dozen or more, each one relatively thin. Alan grokked it immediately: “You get more frosting that way.” These are the cakes made for Fostoria cake stands like mine, I suspect, and while making one doesn’t really interest me, I’m fascinated to read about the technique involved, which requires a certain do-si-do with the oven and the frosting station — the cakes are iced while warm, and use boiled frosting, which is difficult to make. Kim Severson, the Times’ peerless food writer, finds the sorts of details that would shame the most skilled anthropologists:

…There are Lane cakes, made with an 1898 recipe named after Emma Rylander Lane of nearby Clayton, Ala., who called it her prize cake. The cake was a childhood favorite of President Carter, whose hometown of Plains, Ga., is a few hours’ drive from Clayton. Harper Lee, who grew up in Monroeville, Ala., mentioned Lane cake in “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

The Lane cake is made with lots of egg whites, the yolks reserved for a rich filling of ground pecans, coconut and raisins flavored with bourbon or local wine. That makes it something of an illicit treat here in dry Geneva County, which is thick with non-drinking Baptists, some of whom substitute grape juice.

Like many of these layer cakes, the Lane cake gets better with a little age. Some cooks still store theirs in a tin with cut apples, to keep it moist while the alcohol mellows and flavors meld.

Whenever I watch “Top Chef,” I’m always amazed at how many of these kitchen wizards, who can turn out sous vides and cat-vomit “foams” and other latter-day trends with such ease, confess they are utterly flummoxed when it comes to dessert and make these soggy fruit things atop some sort of wan pastry thing with a fancy Italian name. How hard is baking? Piece of cake. If you’ll permit me the foodie wordplay.

Bloggage? Oh, a little.

David Leonhardt’s column headline says it all: If Health Care Reform Fails, America’s Innovation Gap Will Grow. Really? People choose jobs based on whether they get health insurance? Really? My husband has been saying this for year; maybe he should be invited to a meeting in Washington, but let’s let Leonhardt state the obvious:

Economic research suggests that more than 1.5 million workers who would otherwise have switched jobs fail to do so every year because of fears about health insurance. Some of them would have moved to companies where they could have contributed more, and others would have started their own businesses.

This link between insurance and innovation isn’t relevant merely for the obvious reason that Congress is in the late stages of debating health reform. It is also relevant because the United States is suffering from an innovation deficit.

Nobody lives forever: God kills Oral Roberts for failing to raise more money.

I went looking for Pilot Joe last night on FlightAware, and found that contrary to his stated intention to fly to Chicago, his plane was actually en route to Alabama. Does Mrs. Pilot Joe know? Hey, Joe — pick up a little layer cake next time you’re there.

And with that, I’m away.

I was reading the New York Times special “winter drinks” issue when it occurred to me that my subset of the baby boom might go down in history as the Lost Generation of Cocktails. Just the first three paragraphs left me feeling I’d been parachuted into a very strange land, or maybe suffered a stroke and woke up with a type of reader’s aphasia. See what it does for you:

For a drink with a ball gag in its mouth, the Night Marcher has a lot to say about where cocktail culture may be heading.

Some major themes in fashionable bars lately: small, elegant, stemmed glassware; arm garters; house-made bitters; a seriousness that is hard to distinguish from humorlessness; gin.

Some major themes in the Night Marcher, a drink that one owner of the Tar Pit, a bar that will open in Los Angeles later this month, calls “our ambassador”: a large, grimacing tiki mug; bondage gear; store-bought Cholula hot sauce; a sense of humor that is hard to distinguish from weirdness; rum.

A drink has a mouth? Into which one can insert a ball gag? And themes? Bondage gear?

Of all the jobs I never held, I may miss bartending the most. One of my secret social fears is that I’ll have some people over for dinner one night, handle the front door and the coat-hanging with ease, and be struck dumb by a request for a Manhattan or, worse, a Rob Roy. With a few exceptions, mixing drinks — and especially cocktails with ball gags — leaves me feeling like those dreams where you’re giving a speech naked.

I don’t know where I went wrong. My dad had bar ware and could make anything. There was a citrus squeezer that captured the seeds, a wooden mallet for cracking ice, jiggers and shot glasses in all sizes, an elegant bottle opener, swizzle sticks in glass/stainless/plastic, and shakers of various types. He didn’t have a bar, but he could stand at the kitchen counter and mix up anything from a Tom Collins to a pitcher of martinis and serve it to you in the correct glass. (Mostly; he didn’t go much for the stemmed stuff, but I always thought martini glasses were a bit too James Bond for people in our demographic.)

My mother could do all this, too, but left it to him, because that was his job at the end of the day — making and serving the drinks. They had one, maybe two, and proceeded to dinner. It was what adults did.

When I started drinking, I started with beer, the classic choice of teens everywhere. Beer was easier to get and easier to steal from your parents, at least if they kept a second refrigerator in the basement stocked with Stroh’s or Budweiser. Beer is an acquired taste, and for a good long time this was the best thing about it, in that it was hard to drink quickly and virtually required nursing, preventing overindulging.

But the big alcohol trend of my youth were the so-called pop wines, Boone’s Farm and Annie Green Springs among them, sweet and sticky and perfect for getting your 16-year-old girlfriend loaded, in hopes of getting some before the inevitable vomiting on the front lawn (if you were lucky). No one really drank them much beyond high school, but I think they set the template for my generation’s lack of cocktail literacy. Because pop wines were followed by wine coolers, premixed sangrias, Zima and other crimes against humanity. Not everybody likes beer, even after you’ve developed the ability to drink like a grownup. But in that interregnum between legal drinking age and true adulthood (when wine with actual corks entered the picture), they were what served for cocktails for people my age, and with the exception of an occasional summer treat of frozen daiquiris or Slurpee-machine margaritas from a Mexican restaurant, they were what people my age drank.

My friend Becky tended bar (under the tutelage of our own MarkH), and what I learned from her was the following: If you want to keep a bartender happy, don’t order strawberry daiquiris or sloe gin fizzes. We used to go to her place, a restaurant/cocktail lounge connected to a hotel adjacent to the OSU campus, to watch her work (and drink her occasional “mistakes”). I once observed her nearly blow a gasket when the Ohio Women’s Republican Club descended on the joint and tied her up with blenderful after blenderful of fruity concoctions. She taught me that “and water” is music to a barkeep’s ears, advice I took to heart. In a mellow mood and during slow periods she would experiment with new formulations, but I don’t think the Brown Robe or Pink Bunny — both conceived during a beautiful Easter Sunday when “The Robe” was playing on the bar TV — ever caught on.

A brief pop-cult interlude: The radio ads for Annie Green Springs went like this:

Sold my suits and pawned my watches,
bought some Annie Green Springs wine.
Now I’m going up to the country,
gonna find my peace of mind.

Movin’ up with Annie Green Springs,
city’s not the place for me.
Movin’ up with Annie Green Springs,
to a place I’d rather be.

Let’s set aside, for now, the rather disturbing picture that such a ditty conjures, of a man happily embracing drunkenness and unemployment. My brother pointed it out to me one day when I was in junior high, chuckling over the idea of selling wine with a wino’s ballad. It was a funny, singable 15 seconds of song, anyway. Some years ago I was reading a profile of Warren Zevon, which described a dark time of underemployment in his past, when he was so hard up he was forced to write jingles for an undrinkable wine called Annie Green Springs. Sometime after that, I met the man himself, sang him that jingle and asked if it was his. He looked at me like I was insane and said, and I quote, “No.”

But you know who did write it? Professor Google says? BOZ SCAGGS. How would I know this stuff otherwise? Maybe wrecking the newspaper business will turn out to be worth it. You know what else? I remember reading a story in Time magazine around that time, about the trend in pop wine. And guess what? Google found that, too. You marvel, you.

Cocktails came back into vogue a while back, in the ’90s. Martini shakers suddenly started appearing on wedding registries, but by then I felt set in my ways. Inexpensive wine was everywhere by then, and when I came home from work, that’s what we drank, unless it was summer, when I’d have a cold beer on the back steps, like the proletarian slob I always suspected I am. But cocktails continue to haunt me. There’s a passage in an Elmore Leonard book, “52 Pick-up,” where a blackmailer is taunting his mark, the latter a man who started life in a blue collar and traded up to white:

Here comes sport, now, rum collins for the broad and a Heineken. Loaded and he still drinks beer. That’s your background showing, man. Eleven years on the line at Dodge Main. Couple of shots and a beer every day after the shift. Right?

Until I read that it never occurred to me that the Budweiser in my hand was a social marker, but of course it is. The ’90s were also the time when designer beer came along, when someone was always pressing a bottle of some raspberry lager into your hand. This trend seems to have moved on, and thank God for that, because some of that was nasty-ass beer. Last I heard, hipsters in their 20s had rediscovered Pabst Blue Ribbon. Ha ha.

We’ve gone on at some length, now, and we still haven’t solved my cocktail problem. I’m making some progress on my own. There’s a container of simple syrup on my refrigerator door, mixed up last summer when Alan and I went through a mojito phase with mint from our container garden. I can make margaritas in the blender. But the drinks my parents made like it was second nature, gin rickeys and whiskey sours and various collinses, are beyond me. I guess I could look up the recipes online, but I don’t have the right mixers and I certainly don’t keep maraschino cherries on hand.

And so I sit, today, confronting this picture of the Night Marcher in the Times, of a drink in a black tiki mug with a ball gag in its mouth. An artfully scored lime with several picks emerging from it crowns the rim. Some sort of steamy, dry icy-looking condensation swirls off to one side. I feel utterly defeated. I guess I can always stop by and let someone else make one. I’m sure it costs only about $20 or so.

Maybe you get to keep the tiki mug.

If this blogging gig paid anything, I’d hire Jolene as my research assistant. Not only does she read the entire internet every day, she actually remembers what she read, searches like a ninja and is always able to provide a helpful link to something that ran six months ago. She was the one who suggested, a few days ago, that we start a discussion this month with recommendations of gift books for the holidays. So I’ll kick off December with her excellent idea.

Federal Trade Commission full disclosure: All links in today’s entry will take would-be purchasers through my Amazon Associates store, aka the Kickback Lounge, where yours truly will receive a tiny percentage of the purchase price. (Commenters’ links most likely won’t.) And a word to any fellow bloggers out there: Amazon’s payments, compared to Google’s AdSense, are the difference between your paychecks at a rural weekly newspaper and those of, say, Katie Couric. Which is to say I made about $17 last month, and sometimes I’d go months before making that much from the don’t-be-evil people. Who are.

OK, then: You’ve already read my thoughts on “Tinsel: A Search of America’s Christmas Present,” but I’m here to recommend it again. Hank Stuever has been getting some very respectable reviews for his look at how the holidays are celebrated in Exurbia, but for my money you can’t beat this one, from Amazon:

This is a nasty book written by a bitter, self-described homosexual with an anti-God, leftist agenda. That being said, it’s an “absolutely phenomenal” read.

Ha. Well. Actually, what comes through in the book (for me, anyway, and I’m not the only one to note it), is how much Hank actually likes all the people he writes about, even as he does not shrink from describing them in situ with the sort of all-seeing eye an anthropologist would envy. Recommended for the overdecorator, or under-spirited, on your gift list.

While we’re pimping our friends-who-just-happen-to-be-celebrated-authors, two for the mystery/crime fiction readers on your list — Laura Lippman’s fine standalone, “Life Sentences,” and her collection of short stories, “Hardly Knew Her,” the latter of which reveals more of Laura’s impish sense of humor than her long-form fiction. (Not that she’s a slug or anything, but many of these stories are just plain funny.) Also, the stories are available in paperback, so you can buy both and make a gift bundle, while tossing a few shekels at Laura for her bundle. I should probably mention that “Hardly Knew Her,” like much of her fiction, takes as its theme what a PhD might call the perfidy of women. Perfidy, but with humor. Win-win-entertain.

“Closing Time,” on the nightstand in the right rail for the longest time, isn’t new — it was published last year — but it’s worth your time even if you have to look a little harder for it. Joe Queenan’s memoir of being the abused son of a charming Irish drunk stayed with me for weeks after I finished it, and stays with me still. Rich with detail of growing up poor at a time when anyone with a work ethic could become comfortably middle class (if they didn’t have a drunk for a parent, that is), and not only poor but white and poor, and not just anywhere but in one of the most interesting cities in the country (Philadelphia), it’s a banquet throughout. It’s not a front-to-back bummer, either, but at its heart a story of how a person can overcome just about anything if he has the right kind of help and just a little bit of luck. I’ve been a fan of Queenan’s for years, and this book adds a new layer to my appreciation of a fine, funny writer.

Because we all know a lot of non-reading readers, and because America needs its share of books that don’t cause even casual readers to break a sweat, as well as something funny for your guests to page through while they watch you cook Christmas dinner, a recommendation from Mindy, who found the website that led to “Cake Wrecks: When Professional Cakes Go Hilariously Wrong.” Revel in the simple yuks provided by cakes with names misspelled on them, or emblazoned: BABY SHOWER FOR BOY. Mindy recommends bookmarking Cake Wrecks as your daily amusement stop, now that the Lolcats seem to have run their course. Yes, what she said.

Which sort of fills out the entry for today, but I want to add one more, a website that should be a book and probably already is, but one you can look at right now — Ugliest Tattoos, name self-explanatory. Whatever you do, don’t click the “sexual” tag. OK, I warned you.

Now add your own recommendations. And for those who use the Kickback Lounge, I’d get your names tattooed on my heart if I could.

In a dark moment I would describe many of the people in Hank Stuever’s wonderful new book as awful, and maybe they are and maybe they aren’t, but certainly they’re my opposite in every way — George Bush-lovin’, Jesus-worshipin’, Red State-occupyin’, exurbia-residin’ Texans. They say tomayta, I say tomahta. And so on. They belong to churches with horrible names like Celebration Covenant, where the sermons come with James Bond themes (“Church Royale 2007”). Their parties for friends require chocolate fountains. Their home decorations make Clark Griswold look Amish. They’ve lost the thread of the Iraq war, and ask what’s going on there now, but lose interest in the answer if it can’t be summed up on a bumper sticker. They’re the sort of people who swallow a radio station’s schmaltzy “Christmas Wish” sermonettes whole, and repay it with happy tears.

And yet Stuever, a Washington Post reporter with whom I likely have a great deal more in common, embedded with these folks for an entire Christmas season (2006), returning for parts of two more, and somehow came to love them. He is a far better person than me, and certainly a more skillful journalist, because the book that came out of this experience — “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present” — pulls off a neat trick, revealing every detail about the way three separate families (and many others) celebrate the holiday, without coming off as jeering or judgmental in any way. Stuever climbed every ladder with Tammie Parnell, an affluent mom with a seasonal business decorating others’ McMansions; he stood in Black Friday queues with Caroll Cavasos, a single mother with too much on her plate but a certain fragile optimism that Jesus is watching over her; and he served as official observer to the assemblage of Jeff and Bridgette Trykoski’s jaw-dropping, computer-controlled, music-synchronized Christmas light display, as well as the birth of Jeff’s consulting business as a holiday lighting engineer.

You didn’t know there was such a niche in the working world? You’ve not been to Frisco, Texas, on the far-flung outer ring of Dallas-Fort Worth exurbia, where everything is new and newer and the discovery of a couple of inconvenient pioneer graves in the route of a new highway can barely slow the work down, let alone stop it. Or maybe you have, because there’s a Frisco everywhere, even in down-and-out states like Ohio or Michigan, spreading like kudzu, high-end malls popping up to serve the residents of all those 6,000-square-foot houses, along with megachurches and fast-casual taco restaurants, big-box stores and the usual accoutrements of affluent-white-folks culture.

They keep Christmas in their hearts in places like this, or at least a version of it, simultaneously over-the-top consumerist and “Christ-centered,” and if you can’t quite reconcile piles and piles of presents under the tree with the story of a humble woman giving birth in a barn, well, then you’ve never stood in the clearinghouse for the Angel Tree effort, which seeks to make Christmas merry for the down-and-out, only even these down-and-out Christmases are oddly upscale, Hefty bags full of gifts bestowed upon people who say, “It’s too much” and mean it literally — one recipient gets enough excess to regift it to the even more impoverished. Tammie Parnell finds Christmas in her heart by decorating the home of a friend dying of cancer. Free of charge, of course, although after she’s finished, she never visits the friend again, and when the woman dies six weeks or so later, she consoles herself by telling a friend who helped, “We totally decorated her house! We brought her so much joy.”

Totally.

Parnell was my least favorite Tinselite, even while it’s clear she and Hank clicked as they decorated all those houses. That’s another paradox of upper-middle-class Christmas, outsourcing the hall-decking, but never mind that. Parnell has the eye and her clients don’t have the time, so let’s let her earn a tidy sum knocking herself out two months out of the year. But I cannot tell a lie: There’s a scene deep into the narrative, where Parnell goes searching for her “total moment” — that more-perfect-than-perfect holiday snapshot that children remember forever — and brings in a $150-an-hour fellow holiday entrepreneur named Cookie the Elf. This moment will leave you either helpless with laughter or sneering in contempt, and maybe both. It’s like this woman watched “National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation” and came away with the idea the Griswold holiday would have been so much better if Cousin Eddie and his family had just stayed home.

But probably you would end up liking her, because Stuever likes her, and Stuever makes her likable. She’s not a bad person, just one who has swallowed Christmas hook, line and tinsel. I think I chose her to channel my displeasure with a culture that never met a moral dilemma or conundrum that couldn’t be explained by an uplifting movie or self-help book (you want to know who buys Mitch Albom’s books? Umm…), that ultimately deals with the uncomfortable or painful by turning away. My heart did soften late in the narrative, when Caroll Cavasos suffers a personal tragedy and keeps her heart open and loving throughout. And it’s hard not to like the Trykoskis, cheerfully childless and still willing to turn their home into an experiment in how much a home electrical grid can bear, mainly for the intellectual challenge of its design.

But it’s very easy to like “Tinsel,” and on behalf of the poor newspaper reporter who could use a fallback for the coming newspocalypse, I beseech you: Buy! You can always give it away for Christmas.

Full disclosure: Hank and I are friends-who-have-never-met, he comments here on occasion, and yours truly is mentioned favorably on page 181. Not that such shameless flattery would ever sway my critical opinion, of course. Oh, and to the FTC: I got an advance reader’s copy free of charge.

Extras:

Buy the book via my Amazon store, making the cycle of kickbacks and corruption complete.

Hank talks a little about the project:

The Trykoski house in (I believe) 2005: