Ruby, our new rabbit, has her first official nickname. Spriggy had approximately a thousand, ranging from Fart in a Hot Skillet to his Indian name, Joe Walks Along. So we like to call our animals by handles other than their given names. But even I was impressed when Alan threw this one out: Miss Lisa Bunnay.

It’s an inside joke going back to the late ’80s, when a bunch of us made a video for a friend’s upcoming wedding. (We edited it using two VCRs, which tells you something.) It was set 20 years in the future, when we had all moved on to other things and the wedding couple had spiraled into rural poverty. (One of my favorite clips is one character’s description of coming upon their house, with all the barefoot kids running around the yard yelling, “Stranger comin’!”) Anyway, I believe my fate was to work as a writer for the “Miss Lisa Bonet Show,” which tells you something. It’s hard to overstate what a cultural Bigfoot Bill Cosby was in the ’80s. I found an old open for “The Cosby Show” on YouTube or Hulu or something, and called Kate over to watch; I’ve long contended that Raven Symone is actually 42 years old, and wanted her to see for herself.

It turns out I was wrong, but seeing anew the overwhelming smugness and self-satisfaction of the whole presentation blew my hair back. The mugging! The preening! You get the idea these people are still ordering coffee, then striking a pose for the roar from the laugh track. We the viewers were just as complicit; we had made a black family sitcom into a juggernaut, and yes, the words “post-racial America” were heard then, too. Phylicia Rashad’s husband proposed to her on national television, and she accepted likewise. She even changed her name for him, which is a form of hubris in and of itself. (It turns out she was right about that one, though — unless I missed something, they’re still married.) Dr. Alvin Poussaint was a paid consultant to every episode, which was like printing “now with oat bran” on a box of donuts. It was extra good-and-good-for-you.

Bill Cosby was in town yesterday, going door to door, pushing education to Detroit parents, who must send their children to some of the worst public schools in the country. Fortunately, we saved a little local color just for him:

The neighborhood celebrating his appearance got an extra dose of excitement when a man hit a tree driving what police say was a stolen van. Officer Leon Rahmaan, a police spokesman, says the man was speeding through the neighborhood about 5 p.m. when he spotted police accompanying Cosby.

Rahmaan says the man made a quick turn, lost control of the van and hit the tree less than two blocks from where Cosby was speaking with residents about keeping their kids in Detroit Public Schools. The man ran from the smashed-up van but was arrested after a brief foot chase.

I loves you, Detroit.

As a parent, I will pause and gives Cosby props for “Little Bill.” It was everything “The Cosby Show” wasn’t — simple, endearing, quiet. Kate loved it when she was little, and I loved watching it with her.

Miss Lisa Bunnay’s next nickname will probably be some version of Greased Lightning. I have never seen an animal so unwilling to follow orders when it’s time to return to the cage.

A little beautiful-day bloggage? Sure:

When life imitates “The Wire.” I usually link to the Metro Times version of Detroitblog’s biweekly dispatches, but one of the additional photos on his blog made me think of “The Wire,” so here you are. It’s about a family of squatters in the most squat-friendly city in North America.

I don’t think I’ll renew Vanity Fair this year. They’re starting to embarrass themselves.

Today’s flash-in-the-pan website (HT: Hank): Keggers of Yore. I think I’m in some of these pictures.

Work. Exercise. The last days of summer. I’m away to do it all.

Caught part of the Joan Rivers roast on Comedy Central the other night. To paraphrase Philip Roth: Never have I heard the word vagina spoken so much in one evening, and I am a woman who has heard the word vagina spoken.

Joan’s vagina, we heard, is old, dry, old, stretched, old, foul-smelling, old, well-traveled and I’m probably forgetting something else, but you get the gist. When they weren’t talking about her vagina they were talking about her face, which is fair game when someone has had as much plastic surgery as she has. I never know how the roastee is supposed to react at those things; I guess you’re pretty much required to be a good sport, but Rivers’ face work made it hard to tell — her expression was the same smile throughout, even when they were joking about her late husband, a suicide.

But mostly the talk was about vaginas. When did we decide “vagina” was not only OK to say on television, but funny? It’s not a funny word. It sounds too medical, like pancreas. When I was a girl and first encountered the word in print — because that was a time before people spoke it aloud outside of a doctor’s office — I thought it was pronounced va-GEE-na, and as far as I’m concerned it should be. It was years before I met that hostile long-I sound, and I disliked it immediately. Saying vagina the way it’s correctly pronounced makes you open your mouth just a tad too wide. Like Joan Rivers’ vagina! See, I can be a roaster, too.

“Vagina” isn’t funny. The body part’s other euphemisms? Funny. Kitty, poontang, ya ya — all funny. “Muffin” — very funny. And the roasters were, in general, not funny, or not funny enough. If you’re going to work that blue, you better be funny, but after the first few vaginas, it just got dull. Gilbert Gottfried livened things up with a long, long vagina riff that actually was funny; it took on the surreal colors of his Aristocrats joke at the Hugh Hefner roast. It was the line about the unicorn peeking out that cracked me up. Gottfried isn’t afraid to walk right up to the abyss and lean way out; in this sense he distinguishes himself from the other no-names or never-wases on the stage. (See this classic account of the Hugh Hefner event, just weeks after 9/11, at which Gottfried brought the house down, and even Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t bad.)

I don’t know how to wrap this up, so how about if I just repeat a Gilbert Gottfried line: Joan Rivers’ vagina has tested positive for dust.

And then go to the bloggage:

The poster for the new “Mad Men” series was not Photoshopped:

I sat in a giant tank of water for a solid Saturday, and it was kind of fun, actually. I mean, once you’re wet, you’re wet. You don’t get any more wet. So you’re just kind of like, “All right, here we are.” And it was a bunch of crewmembers and waiters and an incredibly skillfully constructed set, and I think a pretty cool image that they got out of it as well. I’m sure they could have done some kind of photo trickery, but this makes for a better story, and it’s way cooler to go build it and do it for reals. I think online, there’s a time-lapse image of it filling up, too.

Santorum in 2012! No, I’m not kidding.

Well, shut my mouth: Turns out Rove was involved in the U.S. attorney firings after all.

This is cool: Vote for your favorite song from Woodstock. I’m down with “Soul Sacrifice,” but as usual, I’m in the minority.

I see more of these around here than I did in Indiana. In Royal Oak the other day:

That is, a Ford Crown Vic Police Interceptor, still the best all-purpose cop car of the era, now retired to the private sector. I assume they’re great on the straightaway, less so in the corners, can idle until the cows come home and have lots of butt-funk and spilled coffee in the seat cushions. Alan and I went to a dinner thing earlier in the year, and sat with someone who drove one, decommissioned from an unknown p.d. somewhere in the area. It needed a good deal of work in the low four-figure price range, he said, but once he got it running right? Awesome.

Of course, like the example above, you always hope you can find one with the black-and-white paint job and cow catcher intact. I wonder if, like an old fire horse, it tries to respond when called for backup.

OK, then. It’s Friday, and my attention is preoccupied with the weekend’s activity, the 48 Hour Film Project, beginning today at 7 p.m., concluding, duh, 48 hours later. I guess this entitles me to display a badge:

Here’s something else I’ve been meaning to post for a while; it came up in my drug searching this week. It’s an AP story about the effective legalization of marijuana in California. If you read the New Yorker story a few months ago, little here is all that shocking, but it’s still…shocking. If you’re old enough to have lived through criminalization, decriminalization, recriminalization and now de facto legalization, it’s hard to believe what it’s come to. You can now get butt-kicking pot over the counter with nothing more than the additional bureaucratic step of getting a winking doctor to write you a scrip. Voters approved medical marijuana use in Michigan last year, so I’m paying close attention.

To be sure, I’m not crazy about this; the last thing the world needs is more impaired drivers. On the other hand? It’s pot. I’m reminded on a nice exchange in “Jackie Brown,” Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget Fonda:

ORDELL I’m serious, you smoke too much of that shit. That shit robs you of your ambition.

MELANIE Not if your ambition is to get high and watch T.V.

In other news that turns up when one of your search terms in “prescription drugs,” an Australian daily is reporting Michael Jackson had a chemo port — essentially, a permanent IV site — in his neck. No link; story’s gone; it must be vile libel. Disregard what I just said.

Thanks to Hank Stuever, who posted it on his Facebook yesterday, this is my daughter’s new favorite YouTube video, and perhaps mine, too:

And finally, speak now or forever hold your peace. If ever a video deserved to go viral, it’s this one:

I remember how crestfallen my Catholic bride friends were, when the priest told them they couldn’t play “Here Comes the Bride” in the church. Wait until they getta loada this.

Off to obsess, worry and have stage fright. Starting gun at 7! Think I’ll go ride my bike.

In the closed and humid little world of newspapering, the sports desk is commonly called the Toy Department, and yes, they resent it terribly. (My feeling has always been: Walk into any newsroom and follow your eyes to the men dressed like overgrown toddlers. Guess where you’ll be.) However, I never thought it was entirely apt, especially when there’s a features department nearby.

What is it with the New York Times, anyway? They aren’t fit to carry the WashPost’s water in features, and every time they try something like this, they only embarrass themselves:

…As this particular summer finally heats up, even citizens who believe that climate control is a God-given right may be questioning whether (air conditioning) has become a luxury they can no longer afford.

Really? This I have to read. First note the weasel words “may be,” a trend-follower’s best friend, along with “seems” and “appears,” a way to spin a trend out of three anecdotes. Then a nod to the obvious — air conditioning is a relatively recent wrinkle in human endeavor, “the great pyramids of Egypt were built al fresco,” blah blah. Then on to the masochists:

Lisa Finkelstein, a freelance editor, stopped using the semi-functional air-conditioning and heating unit in her rented cottage in Tallahassee, Fla., two years ago, mostly for economic reasons.

(Ha ha. As one who shares Finkelstein’s job title, I’d say “mostly for” is entirely b.s. “Entirely for” is more like it. But it gets better.)

“We spent an entire summer getting to know our kids by sitting outside trying to keep our electricity bill down,” said Ms. Holmes, who estimated that the family saved $2,100 last summer; they are repeating the experience this year. “It was very therapeutic and we got closer. We also got thinner — all of our diets changed because we were eating a lot of grilled food. And by the time fall came around, with the change in the economy, we had learned to live off less. So when everyone started talking about how hard things are, we felt like we had already experienced the worst of the worst. It prepared us for the whole year.”

Weight loss! Win-win. I’m sure the kids will look back on their summers of sweaty Monopoly fondly. But there’s more:

“In our social circle, use of the air-conditioner is extremely limited,” said Martin Focazio, who lives in Upper Black Eddy, Pa., and commutes into Manhattan four days a week to his job as a digital media strategist. “It’s not like we’re health-nut crazies or a bunch of dirty hippies dancing naked around the fire. We’re all white-collar geeks living an exurban lifestyle. We just all share the philosophy of rolling with the seasons if you can.”

“In our social circle” = “smug assholes.”

For the record, I get along without a/c as much as possible, too. After all these years in the Midwest, I’ve come to enjoy our warm months. My indoor-temperature comfort zone tops out at 79-80 degrees, however, at which point I flip the switch and don’t feel bad about it for even a minute. I’ve known a few alt-lifestyles types, who try to overthink every economy, and draw squiggly lines around this one (Zen), excluding that one (drudgery), etc. The same woman who gave up her dishwasher because she likes a few minutes of peace and quiet and manual labor after meals wouldn’t dream of washing her lingerie by hand, and vice versa.

It’s all just how you choose to live, that’s all. Finally, we get to my favorite anecdote:

Kim Gorode said her cat became dehydrated from the heat the first summer she went without air-conditioning in her fourth-floor Brooklyn walk-up apartment.

“I had just moved to New York and had no money, and I thought I could get by with fans,” said Ms. Gorode, a 26-year-old who works in public relations.

But about halfway through the summer, Waldo, her orange tabby cat, began vomiting and passing out.

“The vet put him on medication and gave him a saline IV for rehydrating,” she said. The bill for $400 dwarfed the $100 she wound up paying for an air-conditioner.

When in doubt, do it for the kitties.

When my dog was younger, he’d come in from his walks and find the tile hearth, upon which he’d lay belly-down, terrier-style, with his legs sticking straight out behind him. Dog a/c. Smart dog.

Oy, another long day awaits at the end of it, i.e, a seven-hour shift editing health-care news, starting at 6 p.m. I wouldn’t do it without proper a/c on a bet, but what that means is, it’s time to step away from the keys and rest the ol’ wrists. In the meantime, chew on this:

Jon Carroll examines the Tour de France, finds it confusing. Worth reading for one nice simile: Philadelphia Eagles fans are darned Franciscan monks compared with these people. I’ve often wondered how the riders stand the close quarters, m’self.

Gymward bound.

Kate and I had some bidness in Royal Oak last night, and started for home right about the time this happened. I’d estimate we were moments behind the action, which if you don’t want to click, is this, in summary: A tanker truck crashed on I-75 about 8:30 p.m. and burst into flames, involving another semi and a car. The fire melted and collapsed the 9 Mile Road overpass and, as the journos like to say, sent a roiling plume of heavy black smoke 200 feet into the air.

We weren’t on 75, but I-696, another freeway that crosses it, about a mile north. From that overpass we were able to briefly see the whole thing — the smoke, the terrible fire, the location. About this far away, but in the other direction.

So what did I do? Called Alan at work, told him to tell the city desk. I’ll be calling the damn city desk until I die. When I was in Fort Wayne, at the beginning of my time there, we still had stringers to cover the rural areas, paid them a pittance to be there when tankers crashed and burned in their neck of the woods. Most of them were old, veterans of days when being a newspaper reporter meant something (which is to say, barely more than it means today). But they brought real enthusiasm to the job — no one could cover all the angles of a feral dog pack terrorizing rural sheep herds — and, by our eyes, real comedy, sometimes.

Our man in Adams County was Simon Schwartz. (Carrying that name in that neck of the woods is like being called Abe Goldberg in New York City. It’s an insider’s name.) He was well into his 80s, and had health problems that sometimes took him off duty for a spell. But at least twice a week, he typed up the week’s news on onionskin paper, on a manual typewriter probably as old as he was, addressed them with a quavery hand and always added a note off to the side on the envelope: RUSH. The editors got a kick out of that one, but I’ll tell you, when a natural-gas explosion in Berne took out a house and burned its occupants, man, Simon dragged his old bones out of bed and got to a phone, dictated the news on deadline and filed a follow by mail, which was rushed to the metro desk.

As I recall, he added a cover note to the editor with whom he’d been working, whom he addressed as Miss Montgomery: “They say (the burn victim) is suffering terribly. It must be like the way sinners will suffer in the fires of Hell. A useful reminder to prepare for Eternity!”

I’m sure Simon is in Eternity by now, and I hope, wherever he is, he’s not suffering. Any man with that kind of work ethic can’t be all bad.

Anyway, the fire is still smoldering here in Detroit this morning. Love quotes like this: “There’s still something burning under there,” (a fire chief) said. “We poured water on the section that collapsed and it boiled.” The freeway will be closed indefinitely, and the overpass, which was brand-new, will have to be rebuilt. Cause of the crash? Still unclear, but it looks like speeding. A car lost control on the curve. A useful reminder to slow down.

I don’t have much bloggage, but I have some:

The Brits have had our language longer than we have, which is how they can come up with so much great slang.

Chickens as art objects.

And now time for breakfast, and the gym. I spent hours at the keys yesterday. Time to spend a few hours away, eh?

I was born in November, 1957. If I read his obsessive ongoing autobiography closely, James Lileks was born in August, 1958. How the hell did I get so much older than him, anyway? Ahem:

Kids today. No respect for kids of yesterday. Thing is, we were required to know every fargin’ thing about the 60s when we were coming up, being schooled in the ways of the Most Important Musical Genre Ever. You were required to nod at your elder and respect their sage ways, and thus I found myself in a few dorm rooms listening to peers explain why Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Reefer and Cocaine were incredible not just for their harmony and song-writing skills, but their abilty to make music that on longer than three minutes. To which you could only say: may all your girlfriends take “Love the One You’re With” to heart everytime you’re out of town.

What the hell is he talking about? I have no recollection of this. There was no bright line between ’60s music and ’70s music. There are few bright lines in any art form, but I guess if you wanted to pick it apart, you could find places where the next thing seemed to arrive allofasudden, but it certainly wasn’t between the ’60s and ’70s, unless you’re talking disco, but I don’t think he is. Rather, I think he’s pooching his little lip out and pouting that in the ’60s, we elevated drug addicts and America-haters to the Top 10.

Of course, I had older brothers and sisters, and picked up their enthusiasms along the way. I started listening to pop music when I was very young; everybody did. You tuned your AM radio to WCOL and left it there until 1972 or so, when WCOL-FM started playing some crazy stuff called “progressive rock” in the overnight hours. (Yes, way — they were country-and-western during the day, and at 9 p.m. or so the Stetsons went home and the hippies took over.) But everyone still listened to the Top 40, too, and the ’60s were a rich, rich time for that. You had everyone from the Jefferson Airplane to Glen Campbell to Martha and the Vandellas elbowing for space. I can still recall, as vividly as the moon landing, the DJ telling everyone they’d be playing the new Rolling Stones single at 2 p.m. sharp, so be there if you wanted to hear it first. And that’s where I heard the opening cowbell of “Honky Tonk Women” for the first time, in my bedroom, on my transistor radio.

Checking Wikipedia; it was the same summer as the moon landing, and guess what the B-side was? “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” In many ways, the ’60s were better, Jimbo.

I asked a friend of similar age for a reality check. He replied, “my bet was his little turntable in his room with the cowboy wallpaper only had Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Sgt. Barry Sadler and the soundtrack to Patton.”

Lileks has made some money trashing the ’70s, but I won’t have any of it, especially where music is concerned. There was some great pop music made then, and for some genres — I’m thinking soul and funk — there wasn’t any better time, before or since. I wouldn’t imagine Parliament/Funkadelic made it all the way to Fargo, however.

But don’t trust me; I even liked disco, at least in its natural habitat, i.e., the disco. If you’d ever joined a dance floor full of sweaty, shirtless men waving their hands in the air to “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” you would, too. And as for the bright line between the ’70s and the ’80s, which Lileks loves, I have only to note that I heard quite a few of those early New Wave tunes in the disco, and the shirtless men danced to those, too. They fit right in for a reason.

Eh. I hate all this genre fascism. Bring back the melting pot of ’60s Top 40. There are still places in this racist town where you can turn on a rock station and hear their top of the hour promos: Today’s best rock…and NO RAP. Oh, that’s comforting. Meanwhile, I was driving home late last summer listening to an R&B station, black DJs, black artists, the usual. They were in their Saturday-night old-school groove, Prince and LTD and so on, and guess what they slipped into the mix? Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me With Science.” I’m glad they’re not as tight-assed as their colleagues at the rock stations.

Enough. Now I’m boring myself. So let’s start the bloggage off with an unveiling:

WashPost pop-culture writer and NN.c reader Hank Stuever has a blog! Yay! It’s called Tonsil and it’s not about throats, but a build-up for his great new book, due out in November, “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present.” (It’s available for pre-order on Amazon, via Nance’s Kickback Lounge.) I for one hope Tonsil will live beyond Christmas, since Hank’s voice is one we need to hear more of:

When the Post was starting a far too many blogs in the mid-‘00s, I carped in an in-house memo that none of the paper’s writers should be blogging at all; we should be writing stories that are blogged about. I also have enormous issues about writing for free.

Well, some things have changed. I still work at the Post (last I checked), but I feel like now I have some reasons to blog. (As for writing for free, well, it’s a fucking renaissance out there, isn’t it? So long, six centuries of the printed word! Hello, crapola!)

Anything else?

…it’s nice to be able to type the word “fucking” and just hit publish.

Yes, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m working my way through “Tinsel” now, and will discuss it at length as we get closer to its pub date. (Or when it “drops,” as the hip-hoppers have taught us to say.) It’s Christmas in July in my recreational reading, but as life in Michigan will teach you, winter is never that far away. In the meantime, bookmark Hank, and ignore that pimpage of yours truly in his first entry. This is a mutual-admiration society built on mutual admiration.

Next item: Next month our little family, plus dog, will be vacationing in Chicago for a couple of days, before moving up the west coast of the Mitten to spend the rest of the week at the beach. Any interest in a modest Chicago meetup? Grab a big table at someplace like Buca di Beppo and pass around a platter of meatballs? If so, e-mail me separately.

Breakfast time, and a lot of work ahead. Enjoy it.

It’s an all-pop culture blog today, because that’s what we have at the moment. The news out of China yesterday was about the so-called ethnic Uighurs, which the guy on NPR kept pronouncing “wiggers,” and wandering into the report halfway through, for about two seconds I wondered what Eminem had to do with China. It’s like the stupidity of Michael Jackson’s funeral was flying through the air on invisible wings.

So, then:

You know who also played at the Motown 25th anniversary concert, the one where — we have been reminded approximately eleventy jillion times in the last, GAWD, TWELVE DAYS — Michael Jackson unveiled the moonwalk to the world? Anyone?

Adam Ant.

You could look it up. I just did, and ran across both the YouTube video (which I recommend for its excruciating badness) and this amusing recap from a blogger, c. 2006. He notices things — commercials for the Commodore 64 personal computer, and Anacin. (This was before we learned aspirin is pure poison for everyone other than middle-aged people expecting a heart attack.) And it wasn’t just Adam Ant. Two other acts of the future played. Get ready: DeBarge and High Energy.

I think it’s useful to be reminded of this stuff from time to time. Berry Gordy had his streak, for sure. He caught a big wave, surfed it perfectly, and rode it all the way to a nice beach in Los Angeles, and has spent the rest of his life telling people about it but not once even coming close to duplicating it. His best artists got out from under his grinding bootheel as quickly as they could, Stevie Wonder and M.J. among them. His new discoveries sort of define “forgettable.” While I remember DeBarge, a Jackson family with 78 percent less talent, it’s mainly for a story a hotel manager in Fort Wayne told me after they passed through town on tour, about how they ordered room service consisting of a $500 bottle of cognac and a six-pack of Coke, and yes, they mixed them.

High Energy is lost to the ages, or at least my creeping Alzheimer’s. As for Adam Ant, well, Berry was all about maximizing the audience, and that crazy English kid had that “Goody Two Shoes” song on the charts, and, what? You don’t remember “Goody Two Shoes,” either? Well, maybe Journey was busy or something. The early ’80s was a bit fallow, pop-wise.

Why am I talking about Adam Ant? Oh, right: Because Jon Mayer played at M.J.’s funeral concert — you know, the noted soul artist. In 25 more years, I think we’ll be saying, yes, he was the Adam Ant of his day, and dated Jennifer Aniston.

If you have but one Jackson-memorial story to read today, make it the WashPost’s:

Carey, wearing a long gown with a plunging mesh neckline — demure, for her — performed her version of the Jackson 5 hit “I’ll Be There,” and looked meaningfully toward Jackson’s casket.

The musician Usher also looked toward Jackson’s casket during his song, then walked toward it and placed his hands on it.

Jennifer Hudson did not interact with the casket but sang a from-the-gut version of “Will You Be There,” accompanied by a troop of backup dancers. Somber, funereal backup dancers, yes, but backup dancers nonetheless. No one tried to moonwalk. It would have seemed disrespectful.

…His transformation of his own face took more than 20 years, as did his journey from beloved, giggling child-star to bizarre, fragile child-man.

The public’s transformation of Michael Jackson, from mutant to messiah, took less than two weeks. “Michael . . . made us love each other,” Sharpton called out. “It was Michael that made us . . . feed the hungry.”

God, it’s almost like you were there.

Elsewhere on the beat, the New York Times has been running some odd culture stuff lately. A few weeks ago, they brought us the shocking news that many people who start blogs lose interest in them after a while. Today, get ready to be blown out of your chair:

Dirty movies just don’t have stories anymore.

Wha-? Huh?

The pornographic movie industry has long had only a casual interest in plot and dialogue. But moviemakers are focusing even less on narrative arcs these days. Instead, they are filming more short scenes that can be easily uploaded to Web sites and sold in several-minute chunks.

I had no idea they had even a casual interest, but then, I think the last dirty movie I saw in long form was by the Dark Brothers c. mid-’80s, and while I don’t think I lasted even seven minutes, I did see what we amateur screenwriters like to call the first act. No plot or script was in evidence then, either.

This seems to be the peg:

Plot-centrism was in full bloom in 2005 with the release of “Pirates,” about a ragtag group of sailors who go after a band of evil pirates.

That movie, with a budget of more than $1 million, had special effects (pirates materializing from the mist), and, yes, lots of sex. Two years later, the movie’s studio, Digital Playground, spent $8 million on a sequel — a remarkable sum in an industry where the average movie costs $25,000, according to the director of the two movies, Ali Joone.

I missed the era of “plot-centrism?” Pirates materializing from the mist? I need to get out more.

Finally, a last bit of bloggage, in which Billy Dee Williams comes up in discussion at a Detroit City Council meeting. That august body takes on a serious issue — malt-liquor ads that imply it’s the fastest way to something, perhaps date rape — in their own special way:

Councilwoman Martha Reeves said her beef is the way the cartoon ads portray Williams: “He’s ugly.”

I need to go in search of my brain. If you see it, mail it home.

One of the more interesting ideas to come out of the twin celebrity deaths of late last week, Blondie and Jacko, was that they represented the end of an era, and not that of easy access to hospice-strength pharmaceuticals, either. The passing of Farrah Fawcett and Michael Jackson is the end of consensus.

Paul Farhi wrote about this last week in the WashPost:

To say they don’t make sex symbols like Farrah Fawcett anymore isn’t so much a comment on Fawcett as a comment on “they.” Because they — Hollywood, the media, whoever it is that makes “sex symbols” — can no longer manufacture consensus.

The explosion of choice for your leisure hours, first on cable and then the internet, democratized and splintered the market. We no longer had three TV channels, we had 300. In 300 channels, and 300 million more websites, everyone gets a pinup that pushes their very specific buttons. And now for a transition I’ve been waiting my whole life to write:

Nowhere do we see this more than in pornography.

The other day I surfed past “The House Bunny,” a slight little movie that came out last year. The scene I watched featured the animated corpse of Hugh Hefner telling Anna Faris to come back to the Playboy Mansion and get ready for her Miss November photo shoot, after which they’d send her on a multi-city publicity tour, blah blah blah, and I actually laughed. It was such a joke, the idea that a barely breathing skin magazine could even interest a basement-dwelling blogger, much less an editor, in their Miss November. No one has cared about a Playmate of the Month since Farrah Fawcett was still selling posters.

The other day Roy linked, playfully, to a magazine called Black Tail, and yes, that link is probably NSFW, although it’s not that bad. What interested me was the scroll-down material, the other exciting titles under the Jiffy Fulfillment umbrella — Big Butt, Big Black Butt (for those who find Black Tail too scrawny, perhaps), Juggs, Panty Play, Over 40, Over 50 (!!!) and we’re not even getting into the gay titles, Inches, Black Inches, Latin Inches, Torso, and so on.

Of course, Leg Show is among them. Dian Hanson edits Leg Show, or did. She’s the thinking man’s dirty-magazine editor — note the Leg Show poster in the back room at the Bada Bing on “The Sopranos,” a nice little shout-out to one’s life’s work — and once dated Robert Crumb, who called her the Albert Schweitzer to pathetic foot-suckers. I know I’ve linked to this profile of her in the past, but here it is again, fascinating stuff:

Fetishes are narrow, even brittle, phenomena. There are men who need to see women’s toes but not heels, or heels but not toes; men who need to see women in leg casts; men who need to see a specific kind of woman’s shoe pushing a specific kind of car’s accelerator. “That’s not at all an isolated fetish,” says Dian Hanson, the most cerebral pornographer in America. “There’s an entire club called Pedal Pumpers. The first man who called me about it could only be satisfied with a 1959 Corvette and white pumps. It had to be white pumps. He’d bring hookers home and take them to the garage.”

I don’t want to dwell on porno, but you see my point. We’ve all become fetishists of a sort, or at least specialists. Once, heavy metal was heavy metal. Now it’s Death, Slash, Industrial and 15 other modifiers of Metal. (Sometimes I think the sole qualification for being a pop-music writer is how confidently you can sling those modifiers around.) Country — alt, mainstream or traditional? Even pop — short for “popular,” the very definition of wide appeal — has fractured. There’s power pop, ballad pop, teen pop, soccer-mom pop. For all of Simon Cowell’s attempts to carnival-barker a national consensus on “American Idol,” he must surely know that much of his audience wouldn’t be caught dead actually buying a record by any of those sad-sack tools, and only watch to monitor their over/under bets on when Paula will cry.

It’s staggering, today, to imagine a world where a single artist could sell 120 million records, or 12 million posters. Who could tear us away from YouTube that long? (Speaking of which, how’s that Susan Boyle phenom holding up? Yeah.) Who, or what, could unite the multitudes even long enough to dig $12 out of their pocket for something everyone else has?

The thing about fragmentation is, it satisfies only part of the audience experience. Yes, it is exactly what you want, but it can be lonely. (Of course, the other great thing about the internet is, it connects you with your other fanboys and girls. I still recall the thrill of finding my fellow Warren Zevon fans on AOL.) Maybe “American Idol” works in part because it satisfies our need for at least one bit of shared experience to discuss with our co-workers.

Or maybe this is just the pendulum’s furthest distance from the center, that something else is coming that we will all freak for. And then we can have the strange collective experience of building it up and tearing it down together. Destruction of humanity! Now that’s entertainment.

Have a good holiday, all. Grill many meats and vegetables. The wondrous taste of charred things — that’s something we can all agree on, eh?

Jesus Christ, my brain is going to explode before MJ gets planted. This will be like Princess Diana with three-quarters of the IQ points sucked out, worse accents, bigger phonies and more baldly obvious money-grubbing. Who ARE these mutants? Do I share a country with them? How soon can we move to Denmark or Uruguay?

Even with the TV only murmuring in the background, the stupidity seeped through the room like a toxic gas. After a while I started jotting down the lines that penetrated my concentration. Entirely out of context, of course:

He’s credited with changing the way music videos were done…with changing how artists were marketed. …These people have come here to recognize this.

…And I was wearing these beaded socks by Bob Mackie, and he kept telling me, “Cher, I just love your socks.”

Larry King was really in a class of his own, running what he called “this special, sad edition of Larry King Live.” He asked one guest, a doctor: “What could be done to bring someone back from cardiac arrest?” (The doc replied: “Resuscitation.”)

He pushed his celebrity guests through the mill like sports-talk radio callers the night a big coach gets fired. Disco icon Donna Summer. Donna, you knew Michael, did you not? What are your thoughts, Donna? Donna, what was his greatness? His greatness was perfection, Larry. Will you be doing a tribute song tonight? I will, Larry. Thank you, Donna. Joining us now is Sheryl Crow, who knew him well. Sheryl, how are you feeling tonight?

Randy Jackson called it “one of the biggest shocks of my lifetime.” The helicopter took off from the hospital, bound for the coroner’s office. Where is this helicopter going? You wouldn’t happen to know, Randy? Randy didn’t know.

Madonna “couldn’t stop crying.” Maybe she can draw on this memory the next time she’s called upon to act.

Write it down: Drug overdose. In true Hollywood fashion, his stomach contents will consist of brown rice, organic vegetables and Fiji water, while his bloodstream coursed with more industrial-strength opiates and tranquilizers than you could find in 10 hard-case mental hospitals.

I’m turning off the TV, and I won’t turn it back on until Elizabeth Taylor has been wheeled home from the funeral service. You all carry on, but like Forrest Gump, I think this is all I have to say about that.

Jeez, Farrah Fawcett was 62? Groan. How the time do fly. For the record, I was young when she was young (but older!), and I lived through the era of the Poster. This poster, of course:

In about five minutes, Farrah’s poster replaced Carly Simon’s cover photo on “No Secrets” as the erect-nippled fantasy queen of the dorm room. It was time. American boys might go for a brunette from time to time, but sooner or later they always come back to the archetype of the California blonde. (Fawcett was from Texas, but then, many of the blondes in California are from elsewhere.) I argued over that poster many a night, always met by the same implacable male shit-eating grin: But I like it. OK, fine. Farrah was blot-out-the-sun beautiful and sold a million blow dryers to a million women who aped her haircut, but she was never really threatening. Take note, Angelina. It’s possible to be a sex symbol without making other women want to put a tack on your chair.

It was the smile, of course. And the fact that nothing but the hair looked excessively fussed-over. Since every woman fusses over her hair, it bound her to us, instead of pushing us away, the way breast implants and see-through blouses do. She isn’t showing an acre of skin, only the results of a healthy, athletic lifestyle and the sort of thoroughbred good looks that some people get through the luck of the genetic draw. You know what that poster says? Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. It wasn’t something she could help.

Farrah also wasn’t a man-eater. There was that unfortunate early marriage, after which she dropped the -Majors from her name and apparently swore off matrimony forever, even as she settled down with one man, Ryan O’Neal, for nearly 20 years. And while she had many ups and more downs, most apparently of her own making, she always seemed to be carrying her own weight. She worked in crap and quality, she went off the rails for a while, she had too much plastic surgery, but she was writing her own story, not depending on others to take care of her. Is it possible the girl in the poster, who angered so many feminists, turned out to be one herself?

I am thinking of another picture of Farrah, which you probably won’t see in the obit roundups. It was from a book I bought from a remainder table, “Cheap Chic,” by the editors of Rags magazine, now defunct. The picture looks like it dates from her pre-famous, modeling days, and features her in plain old Levis, white sneakers and a man’s white shirt, tails knotted at the waist. She’s posing on a skateboard, showing evidence of skateboard competence and the customary sunny smile. She looks great, of course, the essence of the American blonde beauty but warm, not Grace Kelly cool, fresh and clean and scrubbed. Don’t hate her because she’s beautiful. She was just one of the lucky ones.