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:

You ask me, everything you need to know about Balloon Boy’s family is that they were on “Wife Swap.” Normal families aren’t on “Wife Swap.” (Or its Fox equivalent, “Trading Spouses,” which went out of production a couple years ago.) The premise — two radically different but equally insane kennels of publicity hounds swap their adult female for two weeks — may have started out as entertainment but is basically a freak show. You tell me this family was on “Wife Swap” and it’s a more powerful signifier than learning dad is a heroin addict. Seriously.

I watched this show maybe three times. Once I think I was trapped in a hotel room. (No, that was “The Swan,” lost to the ages, alas.) I don’t forbid myself trash television, although I justify it with bullshit excuses about being large and containing multitudes, and I try to limit my intake. Some bad reality TV is amusing and some just makes you feel dirty. “Wife Swap”/”Trading Spouses” is in the latter group. (So is “Bridezillas.” That’s for another day.)

The breakout, the week that tipped them over into dirty burlesque, was the “Trading Spouses” episode where the hugely obese insane Christian woman flipped out and started shrieking. (Is it on YouTube? Do you even need to ask?) I saw that one. It wasn’t exactly the equivalent of being at Woodstock, but you got a sense that things weren’t going to be the same afterward. And they weren’t. The next time I watched, one of the families was into both raw food and dirt. They lived in the Iowa outback, and had disturbing theories about germs and medicine and the like. They brushed their teeth with butter and baking soda, ate raw chicken and drank some vile milkshake-y substance every four hours, and the mother woke everyone up in the middle of the night for their shot of sludge.

Everyone has a Scorsesean, camera-pulls-back moment from time to time, where you’re suddenly looking at your disgusting self from a high angle, and I had one then. I said, “Either I turn this shit off or I call Child Protective Services.” I opted for the first. (I did stay tuned long enough to marvel at how equable the other family was, for once. They must have selected from the not-insane file, and drew an attractive family of three from San Francisco, who liked to spend their free time at concerts, restaurants and cozy cafés. Not only did the mother endure Iowa with grace — although she refused to eat raw chicken — the father and son wore the Carhartt coveralls the crazy mom put them in with such style, I half expected them to show up on the runway in Bryant Park the following season.)

I gather the gimmick for balloon-boy’s family was that they’re “storm chasers,” only without the boring college degrees and training. The father, who comes across as an unmedicated manic-depressive permanently stuck on the redline, has many interesting theories about extraterrestrials and what happens inside rotational storms. The wife? Dunno about her, except that she’s 100 percent supportive. Well, good. I hope she’s willing to get a second job to pay the bill that I fervently hope the county emergency responders present them with for this freak show. ABC’s not picking up the tab for this one, pal.

Although what do I know? They probably already have.

And another week lurches to its close. I managed to get a 900-word story turned around on a tight deadline, just in time for Kate to come down with something flu-ish. I don’t know if it’s the pig variety, but she was feverish yesterday and somewhat better today, so fingers crossed. I am washing my hands so often I’m wearing away a layer of skin, but it’s surely coming for one of us. I’m hoping it waits until we can all see “Where the Wild Things Are” this weekend. I remember reading that to Kate when she was little; she would make her hands into terrible claws and make little baby roars. Let the wild rumpus start!

Have a good weekend, all.

I don’t know if you’ve been following the Ralph Lauren Photoshopping story. It all started when Boing Boing called them out for trying to quash criticism of this preposterous ad image by getting the blog post pulled as a copyright violation. Things worsened (for Ralph, anyway) when it was revealed that the digitally squished model in question, Filippa Hamilton, had been fired by the fashion house for reaching a bovine 120 pounds. (Note: She is 5-feet-10.)

Yesterday, however, Photoshop Disasters, a truly amusing site that tracks these things, found yet another example of heinous manipulation by Ralph Lauren, in which a woman was turned into a “human Bratz doll.” (Original post at Photoshop Disasters.)

I’m baffled by this, because it seems that in all the howling about unrealistic body image and the pressure to be thin — arguments that have been growing hair for years — no one is asking the obvious, i.e., can’t Ralph Lauren afford better Photoshop artists? And if not, why? (Dump your stock!) Look at that latter image and ask yourself why whoever put this girl in a digital vise couldn’t be bothered to also manipulate her right hand, which looks like it was transplanted from a nearby cross-dressing linebacker. Photoshop is a skill, and one of the best articles I’ve read in recent years was the New Yorker piece about the world’s most well-paid Photoshop artist (name lost to the ether, sorry), a man who is kept on retainer by celebrities to handle all the pictures they have control over. (Which is to say, all the ones the paps don’t shoot. Yay paps.) He does the Louis Vuitton ads, which is why you don’t recognize their celebrity model (Madonna). If Ralph Lauren’s company can’t afford at least one of his assistants, they’ve got more trouble than some jeering from the internets.

But since Jezebel brought it up, this seems the time to get something off my chest.

I need to say a few words in defense of Bratz.

All conscientious parents hate Bratz, for lo, the Bratz are eminently hate-able. Conservative parents in particular hate Bratz. James Lileks? Hates ’em. Rod Dreher? Hates ’em. The latter fell victim to the curse of all overscheduled pundits the other day, and linked them to current events (see the link, but if you’re too busy, it starts with P and ends with olanski). It used to be feminists who wrote bilge like this, but I guess it’s spread:

A culture that markets Bratz to little girls, and that at nearly every turn tries to turn them into erotic objects, is not a culture whose fingers pointing at Polanski are entirely clean.

Sigh. I hated Bratz too, once upon a time, the big-eyed, clubfooted dolls dressed like streetwalkers, named like starlets (Jade, Yasmin, Cloe — yes, spelled that way) and interested in one thing only (collecting bling). I called them the Li’l Ho’s, Skankz, everything I could think of. But I came to change my mind, and even though Bratz are in eclipse now, their cultural impact on nervous parents lives on, and I’m here with one word of advice:

Relax.

I kept my house a Bratz-free zone, but the small temptresses found their way in, just the same. Kate’s friend Sophia would bring them with her when she came to play, and even though this was in Ann Arbor, and every Ann Arbor child eventually becomes familiar with the sort of parent who bans toys on political or philosophical grounds, I decided to hold my fire and just watch them play with Yasmin and Sluté for a while. Guess what Yasmin and Sluté did in their imaginary world? They went to the playground, goofed around, practiced martial-arts kicks (lethal with those giant feet) — in short, they behaved exactly the way the girls holding them did, because that’s what dolls are for children, and always have been, and always will.

I’m glad I did this. I’m glad my neighbor brought Barbie into our house, too, another toy I swore I’d never buy. My experience as a parent with Barbie was exactly the same as with Bratz, and I was forced to admit the truth: A lot of women are walking around with advanced degrees based in part on elaborate theses of the female image in pop culture, theories that turned on the fact Barbie had an impossible waist-to-hip ratio or leg length or something, and these theories were, in a word, bullshit. When you have children you owe it to them to see the world through their eyes, and when they look at Barbie, even when they look at Yasmin, Sluté and the girlz, they don’t see sexy. They see pretty. When we forbid them from having these things, and use loaded, confusing code words like “inappropriate” or “unrealistic,” we’re making them see the world through our eyes, and folks, they shouldn’t have to do that. And when we fear that seeing a doll with plump lips and a short skirt will turn our little girls into prosti-tots, that’s just creepy.

Not long after I made peace with the visiting Bratz, Christmas rolled around. I’ve always believed that Christmas should be a time when you get one thing you didn’t ask for, and one thing you did, and that year, Kate asked for Bratz. I went to Target and considered my choices. Roxxi, Katia, Nevra — there were so many to choose from, each more horrible than the last. I stood there comparing this trashy detail to that trashy detail, until my brain finally short-circuited and I went all in. I chose the trampiest one of the lot, maybe Roxxi, I can’t remember. She wore a micro-mini and a shirt that showed her belly button, but what really sold her was her fun-fur shrug and day-glo hair extensions. She looked exactly like a woman you’d see standing on a street corner near a 24-hour adult bookstore, peering into the windows of passing cars.

Kate was thrilled to find her under the tree on Christmas morning, and she went off to introduce her to Barbie and the rest of the girls. Within three years, all the Bratz, and all the Barbies, lived in a seminude, dismembered tangle in a Rubbermaid box in the basement with all the other outgrown toys. Perhaps they planted the seed of trashy dressing in my darling daughter, but the last time I checked she was so modest she locks the bathroom door to change her clothes and refuses to wear shorts that rise too high above her knee. She’s an anti-Brat, essentially.

(I saw Sophia recently, too. She’s a top student and multi-sport, confident athlete. I don’t think she owns any fishnet hose, and if she did, it would be for a jazz dance class.)

So swallow your distaste, parents. Those handmade, hemp rag dolls you’ve been buying from indigenous artists might make you feel good, but your daughter wants the li’l clubfootz with a passion for fashion. A few years farther down this road, I’m here to tell you it all comes out in the pop-culture wash.

So many interesting things in the meeee-dya — every so often I like to say it like the pests who brayed it in my ear all these years — this weekend. I hardly know where to start. As many of you know, Detroit is having a moment in the national spotlight; Time magazine bought a house in town to be home base for its yearlong look at the city. Their first cover story is either this week or last, but I haven’t read it yet (although I bookmarked the blog). I’m catching up with everything else this weekend:

“On the Media” looks at poverty porn with the unnamed but unmistakable presence of Jim Griffioen, aka Sweet Juniper. (The piece slams Time magazine for its drive-by tactics, amusingly.)

The New York Times covers Mayor Dave Bing, the ol’ crepehanger.

Best of all was this WSJ feature, looking at the decline through the lens of a single house, which was once in the swankiest neighborhood in town and today is vacant and recently sold for a four-figure price. This was the part that caught my eye:

In 2005, (a previous owner, the Andrews) found a buyer, Kimberly Carpenter, willing to pay their $189,000 asking price. They were too relieved to question why Ms. Carpenter’s closing documents recorded the sales price as $250,000.

County records show Ms. Carpenter took out simultaneous loans of $200,000 and $50,000 from First NLC Financial Services, a unit of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group, an Arlington, Va., investment bank. First NLC specialized in subprime mortgages — loans for borrowers with damaged credit.

At the time, Detroit was swept up in the subprime-lending frenzy that hit much of the country and eventually sparked the financial crisis and deep recession. Lenders became quick to loan to high-risk borrowers.

Ms. Carpenter, 37, says she was buying the house on behalf of her father, Lewis Maxwell, whose own credit record was too blemished. “My father handled all of that,” she says of the financial details. Her father, who worked on the Chrysler assembly line, died of cancer in 2007.

David and Ruth Andrews say Ms. Carpenter paid them $189,000. They say they don’t know what happened to the other $61,000 entered into sales records.

“I have no idea about any of that,” says Ms. Carpenter. “It’s over. It’s out of my head.”

OK, so clearly Carpenter is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, nor does she come from a long line of sharp knives. When I hear the Tea Party people complain that they’re being asked to bail out people who got in over their heads, foolishly signed papers they shouldn’t have signed, I’m sympathetic. But Carpenter at least lost the house and is in a world of financial hurt. Why are the NLC bankers not in jail? That’s what I want to know:

Ms. Carpenter quickly fell behind on her payments. In August, 2006, First NLC Financial bundled Ms. Carpenter’s first loan with a pool of other troubled mortgages and sold them to American Residential Equities, or ARE, a Miami company that specialized in buying bad loans.

First NLC Financial went into liquidation last January, dragged down by mortgage losses. Its parent company, FBR Group, became Arlington Asset Investment Corp. A spokesman for Arlington said the company can’t locate the original files on the Carpenter loans or comment on the lending decision.

By November 2006, ARE’s collection agents were after Ms. Carpenter for $218,348.53 on the $200,000 mortgage, according to county documents.

Good luck with that, ARE. I wonder where the folks are who pimped a quarter-million dollars to a woman who can’t even say, today, what happened to her. There’s enough blame in this disaster to slice it up like a big fat mortgage tranche. But I’ll be saying this until the end: When you open a store giving away free crack if you sign here and here and initial there, and if anyone expresses reservations you say, “Don’t worry, this is the special non-addictive crack we’re giving away” — when that happens, you really can’t complain that the neighborhood is suddenly full of crackheads.

Oh, well. Onward to the more uplifting things:

I’m not an opera fan by a long shot, but I enjoyed this piece about Peter Gelb, the new director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. It was worth reading just to pluck this marvelous bit of jargon from the word-sluice: “park and bark,” used to describe singers who can’t act. In usage:

…He has commissioned new productions, some of works seldom seen in New York; signed up new singers, who don’t just “park and bark,” as he puts it, but actually act; and recruited directors from Broadway…

There was also a great piece, by an opera aficionado, looking at Barbra Streisand and her miraculous voice, which was bestowed upon a woman who only saw singing as a way to get to what she really wanted to do — acting. She doesn’t warm up, she doesn’t read music, she processes everything from her gut and ear:

“I hear these melodies,” she said. “I hear horn lines and string lines. That’s what’s fun about recording with an orchestra.” She can sing things, and composer-arrangers like Bill Ross or Jeremy Lubbock have the skill to write them down, she said.

She talked about recording with Marvin Hamlisch. “I can go, ‘That’s not the right chord, no, it has to be an 11th or a 9th or something,’ ” she said. “I just know that the chord has to be in contrast, it can’t just be this.” She sang a sustained husky pitch. “I’ll say: ‘It has to rub. I want that slight rub there.’ ”

It’s funny how, when Streisand was given the chance to just act and not sing, the results were pretty uniformly crapola — “Nuts,” “The Prince of Tides,” and so on — but all agree that what makes her singing special is how very emotional it is, i.e. how much acting she does while singing.

Finally, in the On Language column, a piece on “phantonyms” — words that sound like they should mean something, but don’t. They don’t discuss my personal pet peeve (infamous does not mean “really famous”), but it scratched a very specific itch.

On Language, of course, was William Safire’ column. Who is no longer with us.

Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that day. (If I may be excused a little John Phillips lyric.) Have a good one.

For a brief shining moment in 2005 or so, Kate and I had a shared TV ritual — “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy,” 7 to 8 p.m. in my market and probably yours, too. It was fun, and it was educational. Then she discovered “America’s Funniest Home Videos” was on opposite, and that was the end of winning $400 on Civil War trivia. Although I’ve tried to make the best of it.

“You know whenever you see a kid, a father and a baseball bat, something’s going to happen, and it’s going to be a shot to the junk,” I say, figuring it’s best to introduce film-analysis skills early. (You can say the same about trampolines positioned near basketball hoops.) Some parents teach their children what Chekhov said about guns and first acts. We work with the material we have.

It’s amusing, isn’t it, how AFV, as it’s called, predicted YouTube? (And how YouTube predicted “Ow! My Balls!”) Did you know there are more than 19,000 YouTube videos tagged “treadmill?” The treadmill, any fan of viral video can tell you, is even more predictive of wacky hijinks than baseball bats and fathers. Sometimes video makers don’t play fair. This one, for instance. There’s no reason for that treadmill to be on. This is like Chekhov writing a character who says, “May I leave my loaded gun here on this table? Make sure no one touches it. It’s loaded. And it’s a gun.”

Lately, it’s babies. Babies and Beyoncé.

I blame YouTube for ruining my attention span. It boggles my mind when I see people posting webcam videos of themselves talking about one thing or another, specimens that regularly clock in at eight or nine minutes. If I know one thing in this world, it’s that no one wants to watch you yak for eight minutes. Even “leave Britney alone” came in at under three.

Of course, when it comes to viral video, this is the only one you need to watch today:

HT: Sweet Juniper.

Not much for you today. Fortunately, Roger Ebert’s on the job, presenting his long-awaited recollection of O’Rourke’s, his old Chicago watering hole:

O’Rourke’s was our stage, and we displayed our personas there nightly. It was a shabby street-corner tavern on a dicey stretch of North Avenue, a block after Chicago’s Old Town stopped being a tourist haven. In its early days it was heated by a wood-burning pot-bellied stove, and ice formed on the insides of the windows. One night a kid from the street barged in, whacked a customer in the front booth with a baseball bat, and ran out again. When a roomer who lived upstairs died, his body was discovered when maggots started to drop through the ceiling. A man nobody knew was shot dead one night out in back. From the day it opened on Dec, 30, 1966 until the day I stopped drinking in 1979, I drank there more or less every night when I was in town. So did a lot of people.

Our place in Columbus wasn’t so colorful, but it was pretty fun — the Galleria. It was on the ground floor of an office building, and you entered through an indoor, well, galleria. I won’t try to match Ebert, but when I sift through my misty watercolored memories of the place, I remember Tim May, one of the sportswriters, looking through the window to see a homeless man shuffling by to use the bathroom. This was in the very early ’80s, when the public mental hospitals all closed justlikethat, and suddenly we were seeing homeless people everywhere.

“Someday I’m gonna write a book about those guys,” he said in his Texas drawl. “I’m gonna call it ‘Wrong Turn,’ ’cause somewhere along the line, those guys took a wrong turn.” He never wrote the book, but I still think that’s a tremendous title, and if I ever have occasion to use it myself, I’m going to credit Tim.

Off to the gym. I did Pilates yesterday, and am still waiting for the ab soreness to settle in. Sit-ups aren’t called sit-ups in Pilates, they’re called roll-ups. That’s because you do them very slowly, one vertebra at a time, and if you think that’s easy, try it sometime. Ouch.

One thing you have to admit about the American pop-culture barrel: It really has no bottom. You think the Jackass/Bruno/Borat oeuvre was the last word in vulgarity? You have yet to meet Tucker Max. You think the long, sordid story of Michael Jackson’s corpse ended when his moldering bones were finally planted in Forest Lawn? You would be wrong.

I watched the trailer for “This Is It,” which is apparently a Michael Jackson concert movie, only there was no concert, so it’s been repackaged as a “rare, behind-the-scenes look” at the rehearsals, at least whatever sort of rehearsals could be held while Jackson was medicated into temporary uprightness. (I just Googled the phrase “rare, behind-the-scenes look.” Results: 133,000. Not so rare, I guess.) You have to marvel, really, at the unmitigated gall of the Jackson family and the cast of human cattle egrets who follow their herd, eating the blood-engorged ticks on LaToya’s back. The film will be in theaters for two weeks only; tickets will go on sale a month in advance. I suppose this will build buzz among the people included in the opening phrases that appear onscreen — the “billions reached” by his music (an uncomfortable echo of McDonald’s there, eh?), the “world inspired” by his “dreams,” etc.

Let me just pause for a moment and consider the brief flash shots of people driven to near-hysteria by the presence of their idol. A few years back, one of my colleagues won one of those Rotary Club scholarships to spend a few months overseas, being a Rotary ambassador. He went to Chile, where he distinguished himself as an ambassador of pop music; his first duty upon returning was to make mix tapes from his vast record collection and send them to South America, where his new friends were absolutely starved to hear anything other than whatever crap was carried on local radio. ABBA had played a series of shows in Santiago while he was there, and it was an event that nearly brought the city to a standstill. When I hear people talk about Michael Jackson and what his music meant to them, all I can figure is, they must have recently moved here from Chile.

As a cynic, I’ve been cheered to see the reaction to the mountain of evidence in the case, which is pretty much exactly as I predicted when the corpse was still warm: Jackson died of a drug overdose, and was an abuser at a level you could only call baroque; the most ossified Detroit junkie must stand mute in the shade of a man who had a private physician turn his bedroom into an operating theater every night, literally anesthetizing him into unconsciousness. And was I right about the other thing I predicted? Ahem:

“He was just careful about what he ate; he just tried to be healthy,” said Kevin McLin, a friend of the family and Jackson’s former publicist. “He ate turkey burgers, Chinese food, a lot of vegetables. He always tried to eat healthy stuff. … He tried to stay away from red meat.”

So what is the official reaction to this news? Charging Jackson’s doctor with homicide. He killed our hero, that bad man! All the patient wanted was a good night’s sleep, even if it had to be aided by the drug they use to keep you quiet while a surgeon is sawing your sternum in two, and what did the quack doctor do? Gave him too much, depriving the world of his music and inspiring dreams! And we know he was a wonderful, wonderful person, on the brink of a comeback, because his daughter said so at the funeral, right after Auntie Janet made sure she was speaking directly into the microphone.

During the crack wars, when the homicide rate in places like Fort Wayne was climbing through the roof, the editors at my newspaper would send a reporter to chat with the family of the murder victim, even when it was clear the victim was a sleazebag banger with a target on his back. The grieving mother always provided the same narrative: Sure, her boy had been bad, but he was turning his life around. The recent birth of his latest child had changed his heart, and he was planning to get his G.E.D., enroll in college and perhaps found a software empire, or maybe enter the ministry and help others. How tragic he was taken from us when his potential was so, so great.

It’s good to see the narrative hasn’t changed. It’s also good to see there were enough fragments of rehearsal footage, and millions of suckers, for the Jackson family. They have a lot of egrets to feed.

OK, then. I’m working extra hours this week, extra late hours, which have left me sleep-deprived and even crankier than normal. Not so much bloggage, but what I have is pretty good:

The Detroit City Council is rattling its saber about a strip-club crackdown. In a normal city, this would bring out the church people to say, hear hear. In Detroit, it brings out the strippers to say back the fuck off of my livelihood. (And, to be sure, a few church people.) Click through to note the fine booty on the woman speaking at the podium, and for this quote:

“I take care of my family,” said Omni Jenkins, 21, a dancer at a local club. “By cutting us off and making up all these rules, it’s going to cause crime rates to go up. It affects not only the entertainment community, but Detroit as a whole.”

Even lame-duck Martha Reeves gets off a good one. You can find it on your own. I gotta hit the shower. And the coffee pot.

The first great-books club meeting of the year was yesterday, although maybe that’s pushing it. We don’t read any great books in toto, we read selections from them, in a master text called “Great Conversations,” which the library, the sponsor of this shindig, provides. There was dark talk of budget cuts affecting this year’s schedule, but so far — fingers crossed — we’re hanging in there. Members of the group may have to lead a session or two, should we lose our librarian, but we’re ready for that. I signed on for “The Chilean Earthquake” by Heinrich von Kleist, a work and a writer I had never even heard of before, and so much for that English minor, eh?

Anyway, when I joined the group I was hoping for a raucous bunch of table-pounders. I got five retirees. Ah, well. It’s also where I found my Russian teacher, after we read a selection from the “War and Peace” and she revealed she’d just finished her second read of the entire novel — in the original language. And the retirees are always interesting, especially when they make small talk. One recently tuned in to WJR and heard Mark Levin, who is apparently a talk-show host who makes Rush Limbaugh sound like Walter Cronkite. I have to take someone else’s word for this, because I can’t listen to commercial radio anymore. I force myself to take in a little on the weekends, because if it weren’t for the XM they play at the gym, car commercials and these few brief hours of weekend exposure, I wouldn’t hear new music anywhere.

I draw the line at talk, however, no matter when it’s on. Just can’t do it, and when I hear Rush or Sean or someone else drifting from an open window or the UPS truck, my default setting is the same one I employ when I pass a homeless person muttering about motherfuckers. I assume: Crazy. Avoid eye contact. Do not engage.

My book-club friend, a nice lady who was most engaged by the tangent we took on left brain/right brain issues, was horrified by Levin. WJR is a community institution here much the way WOWO is in Fort Wayne, but like lots of AM stations, it’s had to stake out its position in right-wing talk. They generally go for the A-team national shows with lots of local-local hosts, and I notice they sneak Levin on in the evenings, when the rational part of the nation is watching TV and only the insane ones are down in their basements, radio on, cleaning their guns or building birdhouse after birdhouse under a bare light bulb. (And hey, check it out — Dr. Laura now has the coveted 11 p.m.-1 a.m. slot. How the mighty have fallen.)

It’s good to see someone else is horrified. Although less comforting to know more people are seeking this stuff out.

I’m short on time today, and want to say a little about Mary Travers, the latest in this year’s long, long line of obituaries. I can’t exactly mourn her passing — what has Peter, Paul and Mary been since 1970 or so? — but I’d like to at least take note of what she was a part of. “A Mighty Wind” had a mighty fine time mocking the early-’60s folkie era, but I was a young child then, and these were some of the earliest records I can recall choosing myself out of the pile and putting on the turntable. The world won’t mourn the last New Christy Minstrel who leaves the earth, but for all the fun you can poke at it, this was some great music. It was also maybe the last time that overtly religious traditional music was heard in the public square. (I’m not counting “Godspell” and “Jesus Christ Superstar,” and you can’t make me.) The first PP&M record is a little work of art in a time capsule, and today, while we’re marking the passage of the blonde, lots of people will call your attention to “Blowin’ in the Wind” and “Puff the Magic Dragon.” Meh. This is the only PPM record you need, and this is its best single song (side one, track one, I believe). Yes, it’s the one that was used on that “Mad Men” episode last season. Enjoy, and RIP Mary Travers: