Against the good counsel of our better judgment, a few of us signed up to do another 48-hour film challenge. Not the one we did last year — this one, the original-recipe contest. So I’ve been thinking about stories. This means wasting time with the Apple trailers site, where I’m always left with the overwhelming feeling that I’m just not cut out for showbiz. A movie about a guinea pig strike force in 3D? See, I never would have thought of that.

The next step is wondering if we can assemble a team without turning to Craigslist, which last year gave us a mixed bag, including a guy who presented himself with great enthusiasm. He called me to tell me his idea for a sci-fi short: A man possesses a pack of cigarettes, and… well, I’m trying not to describe them as “magical” cigarettes, but it’s hard not to, because every time he smokes one, he sees a vision of his future. The last one in the pack tells him how he will die.

Now that I write it down, I see it isn’t really a terrible idea, if you did it right. You could make the brand of smokes something like Oracles. He’d have to buy them in a creepy shop; the clerk could be a nice little part. Twenty smokes would give him time to figure out what’s happening. The visions could increase in significance and jeopardy as the pack diminished. The last one would bring the action to a nice climax. You could pepper the dialogue with snarky lines about giving up this filthy habit and “these things are gonna kill me.” Title: “Bob Quits Smoking.”

Unfortunately, when I talked to the guy about it, I must have failed to express my enthusiasm. I believe I told him that under the rules of the contest, sci-fi was only one of the seven or eight possible genres we might be assigned, and did he have any ideas for a chick flick? Because a day or two later he sent me an e-mail withdrawing from the team and complaining that he didn’t feel his ideas were being respected. He didn’t even make it to a single meeting. So I also get a Fail on dealing with sensitive artistic temperaments.

Nevertheless, I think we should do it. The true challenge will be to play it sincere; too many teams treat the assignment as a lark, and end up doing spoofs on whatever they draw — “Snakes in a Minivan,” etc. I think you could stay on the table* just by not cocking your eyebrow.

* Obscure Pulitzer-judging reference for journalists only.

Whatever we end up doing, I hope it includes a follow shot. This link is recommended, especially the video clip. See how many you get. (I was a Fail here, too.)

A quick skip to the bloggage today, because I have ten tons of work today, and ten more tonight. I’m listening to highlights from Barry’s speech in Cairo today, and I have to say, I’m impressed. I’m sure others won’t be. After all, you can’t say something like this…

“Although I believe that the Iraqi people are ultimately better off without the tyranny of Saddam Hussein, I also believe that events in Iraq have reminded America of the need to use diplomacy and build international consensus to resolve our problems whenever possible.”

…without being called a wussy little quisling by someone, probably starting with whoever is on Fox at this very moment. But don’t let that hold you back. Discuss.

Something I didn’t know and find sort of sad: What happens to a man married (and divorced) four times? You end up buried next to your mother. What would John DeLorean say about GM? a Freep columnist wonders. My boycott of Mitch Albom’s employer didn’t last long, but I did avert my eyes from Mitch.

I can say uno mas mojito, por favor therefore I speak Spanish. At least, according to Michael Goldfarb, via Steve Benen.

Remember the “terrorist fist jab?” Gawker does:

Here are ten photos from the past year, proving that fist jabs have overcome their scary, black-person-centric origins and flowered into a glorious tableau of diversity.

And with that, I’m out of here. Sharing week continues with today’s Decorum Share: Tell us something that would have been scandalous in a prior century. I’ll start: Some days, I don’t wear a corset.

A note on our type problems: J.C. is aware, and is working on it from his vacation in the Upper Peninsula, where wi-fi is something no one’s really heard tell of yet. Good news: This seems to be a home-page problem. In the meantime, if you click the headline, it’ll take you to a separate page (with comments) where everything’s OK. Noted? Noted.

EDIT: Type problem seems fixed, for now. Thanks, brother Jim! Also, a version of the Eaton Beaver clip is now linked in comments. Thanks, Duffy.

It’s a measure of how scattered I’ve been of late that I’ve been sitting here for two days thinking I have nothing to write about, and then — forehead slap — I remember that I went to see Elmore Leonard last Thursday. He did a read/chat/sign at Border’s, supporting his new one, “Road Dogs.”

The reading was brief, just the first page of the novel, which in the usual fashion, starts halfway down the page. Maybe three paragraphs, after which he said, “And that’s what the book’s about,” shut it, and started talking. He was aided in this by his son Peter, who just published his second novel — it’s a father-son book tour. The two chatted back and forth for about half an hour, took some questions, signed some books. Among the highlights:

Peter talked about the party his father threw for the cast of “Out of Sight,” after they wrapped shooting in Detroit. He walked into the dining room to find George Clooney had just arrived and was standing by himself. They chatted for a while, and then “the women heard he was there.” Surrounded.

The “10 rules of writing” were delivered at Bouchercon, the convention for crime-fiction writers, and were something he just whipped up on a legal pad. Today the list is a book, and one of the most often-quoted in stories about him, probably because they’re short, snappy and don’t require much introduction. One of the rules: Never use a word other than “said” to carry dialogue. Another: Use no adverbs. Because they suck. (In the signing line, I told him about the reporter for the Ohio University Post who used “ejaculated” to describe an exclamation. His editor announced to the room: “Someone ejaculated on Tim’s copy.” That was hard to live down.)

My favorites were the stories about the old days, about being called in to a movie set to convince Charles Bronson — I assume this was “Mr. Majestyk” — that yes, his character would have a particular female character with him in the pickup truck during the big chase scene, because otherwise who would be driving when he crawled into the bed with a shotgun to fire at the bad guys? (“I don’t know why the producers couldn’t have told him that.”) But also about the era of pulp fiction, which he barely touched on, other than to say he’d been paid 2 cents a word for “3:10 to Yuma,” “which was the top rate for the pulps.” I wish he’d talked more about this bygone era in American fiction, where so many great writers paid their dues and learned their craft. (I was once lucky enough to interview an expert on the mass-market paperback, and I could have talked to him for hours and hours about cover art alone.) Fiction workshops are all well and good, but there’s something to be said for strong characters, snappy dialogue and the whip of the market as a navigator of plotlines. Every so often Leonard is asked why he switched from westerns to crime fiction, and he always shrugs and notes that that’s what the market wanted at the time. Try telling that to the next MFA you meet.

(That said, my favorite MFA, Lance Mannion, is a great respecter of genre fiction and its writers. So this may not apply to all of them.)

Martin Amis, in an essay about Leonard collected somewhere, described his writing as jazz, and that’s the truth. He said he doesn’t outline his novels, never knows where they’re going to end until they do, and that sounds to me like a nice bebop solo, the trumpeter stepping out to noodle around with phrases, themes and melodies for a while, until he’s said all he has to say and steps back to let someone else take a turn. Leonard is Miles Davis with a pen.

I bought “Road Dogs,” which I’m interspersing with “The Quiet Girl,” two books that couldn’t be more different. If Leonard is jazz, Peter Hoeg is atonality, translated from Danish. I can only recommend one, and I think you know which one it is.

So, a little bloggage? Sure:

A tale of two Michigan economies — Ann Arbor and Warren. From the WSJ.

The right’s talking points on Sotomayor, by Dahlia Lithwick, another writer nearing national-treasure status.

Only in Detroit: A city councilwoman is billed a pittance in property taxes for a decade. How much of a pittance? Try $68 a year. Turns out the city records show her address is a vacant lot. Her reaction: Huh. I wondered about that. Now it turns out she probably won’t have to pay much at all. This city. I ask you.

Only in Detroit Journalism: Yes, I saw the “Eaton Beaver turns 69 today” clip from one of our local TV station’s happy-birthday roundup on the morning show. No, I cannot direct you to it, as the station has effectively wiped out the clip. More proof every news organization needs an editor well-versed in dirty jokes, puns and Johnny Fucherfaster stories.

And now, I have a barn to raise and a day to do it. Onward to the work pile.

I need some new idiots. Allow me to explain.

A while back I opened a new bookmark sub-folder for blogs. Called it “idiots.” It was useful in that it reminded me not to take the contents within seriously. I had a strict set of standards: The idiots had to be fun idiots, not depressing ones. I wasn’t interested in screechers, unless they were amusing, campy screechers. I started with seven or eight idiots, and one by one they have disappointed me and I deleted them from the feeds. I’m down to four. Four can’t sustain a coffee-break web-surf, although god knows, Rod Dreher tries. But even he has backed down on the entertaining hand-wringing hysteria of last fall, when the Wall Street meltdown had him running to Costco for 25-pound bags of rice and fretting how unprepared we were for food riots. Now he’s back to wearily shaking his head and disapproving of his fellow conservatives. If he can’t find a slut to kick around soon, I may be dropping him, too. Even Lileks is a bore these days, although it’s amusing to see how capably he’s motoring through the financial crisis at his newspaper, keeping his sunny side up, up. He’s made himself a TV star, he’s back to filing pointless columns about his difficulties with customer service, he’s — ohmigosh — “fisking” George Will for two million words. You need a fresher schtick to stay in my idiots folder.

So send me some idiots to check out. No, on second thought, don’t. If I relentlessly culled all my bookmarks down to the ones I actually visit, I’d be down to the Lolcats, Gawker, Jezebel, Roger Ebert and a handful of others, and I probably should. Cull, that is. I have enough ways to be distracted while working. And at the moment, I have enough work I don’t need the distractions. And Roy still does an excellent job as sort of an Idiot’s Digest.

Also, I have some fiction ideas I’d like to explore this summer, although I know I’ve said that before.

Besides, it’s time I spent more time in the analog world, and maybe admitting I can’t read the entire Internet every day is a good start. This, for example, was published in January, and I had to learn about it from freakin’ Facebook on Monday.

Also, I don’t want to end up like Kevin Smith:

As you mentioned, Zack and Miri didn’t do as well as expected. How did you take that?
I kind of dropped out of society. I just kind of wrapped myself in a weed-infused cocoon … a coma, if you will. And it was great. It was really, really wonderful, man. I don’t want to be one of those people who’s all, “Let me tell you about legalization!” But, my God, I don’t think I’ve ever been happier in my life. And after years and years of … you know, I used to literally fight with people online. I would waste days online, talking to total strangers, some of them probably children. I was a joke.

Don’t become a joke: New motto.

Bloggage:

The line in Obama’s Correspondent’s Dinner routine that made me laugh loudest was the poke he took at Michael Steele — in the heezy, yo! Dana Milbank, not so funny, but an amusing wrapup of the GOP’s gaffe-a-palooza.

Speaking of Roy, he has an amuse bouche up now, about reaction to Ted Kennedy’s improved health. A few of the usual bitingly funny lines are therein.

Admit it: The guy who rescued the wee ducklings is your new hero. And yes, I know there are those who say the ducklings would have been fine without the rescue, but we wouldn’t have the cute video, otherwise.

And now I’m going to make some calls, then go ride my bike for a long time. I plan to pass by an open field near the Milk River, where there will be crowds of Canada geese goslings (Canada goslings?). They will be nearly as cute as the ducks, but their parents are bigger and meaner. I won’t pass too close.

The short version: If you get a chance to see Leonard Cohen on his current tour, take it. You won’t see a better show this year.

In fact, if tickets are available, stop reading now and go buy some, fool. They’re pretty ridiculous, pricewise — the cheap seats at the Fox Theatre in Detroit Saturday were $65 plus service charge, ranging up to $250 — but like I said, this is a rare pop-music outing that’s worth the price. The 74-year-old Cohen plays for more than three hours, and if you have a favorite song, you’re likely to hear it. Alan is not an easily pleased concertgoer, and he turned to me after the third number and said, “This is a top-fiver.” That’s not an annual ranking.

An elegant stage set — a riser for the band, simple scrims lit by changing-color lights, everyone in black and white — walked a careful line that suggested the gravitas one of the greatest living singer-songwriters has accumulated over his long life, but never edged into pretension. This guy worked hard for the money. There was less love-me vibe coming from the stage than you’d find at the American Idols also-rans show. Cohen spent five years in seclusion at a Zen center during the 1990s, and he must have learned some powerful lessons about simplicity and understatement.

Oh, what am I saying? He’s known that for a while. Truth be told, I didn’t leap at the chance to go when Alan suggested it; it’s been my experience that singer-songwriters frequently put on lousy shows, and the sole time I saw Bob Dylan live will remain a lifelong disappointment. Get them in a small enough venue and it works, but what is Cohen about? The lyrics, and that mournful, whispery baritone. He plays best on CD, when you’re alone and able to concentrate and stare out the window at some Canadian landscape. The thought of seeing him overpowered by an electric guitar didn’t sound worth $130, plus service charges, parking and add-ons.

I shouldn’t have worried. The sound mix was a miracle — you could hear every word, even while the musicians did anything but fade into the woodwork. There was everything from a Hammond B3 to an oud to a gong onstage, and you heard every one as well as you did Cohen’s voice. Add three angel-voiced chick singers, one of them Cohen’s longtime collaborator, Sharon Robinson, and that was a stage full of talent that could have supported any singer capably.

At the final encore, everyone took a quick solo, and Cohen lined up the whole gang for an extended farewell that sounded like a valediction. “I don’t know when we’ll be passing this way again,” he said. In other words: This is it, folks. (The story goes that this tour was necessitated by money troubles, but ah well — even the greatest artists have to eat.) As the last show of a distinguished career, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been better.

[Pause.]

In other news at this hour, Kate and I went to see “Star Trek” on Sunday, and that was pretty good, too, although once time travel gets introduced into any movie plot, that’s my signal to stop asking questions and just let it wash over me. Fortunately, it was a pleasant bath.

If you’re looking for a way to intellectually justify your attendance at the same movie, take one op-ed and call me in the morning:

I can still remember the first time I saw “A Piece of the Action,” which was set on Sigma Iotia II, the gangster-movie planet, on which Kirk and Spock donned fedoras and pinstriped suits to blend in. As a boy in grade school, I found it excitingly ridiculous but baffling. Why was Spock waving around a tommy gun?

Fortunately, my big sister, then already in high school, was on hand to explain the wondrous narrative physics of the episode. I was watching a puzzle made from three things, she said: one, the “Star Trek” I understood; two, a period crime movie our father liked, called “The Roaring Twenties”; and three, the clownish “Soupy Sales Show.”

I realized years later that I had heard the future in my sister’s cheeky teasing out of the pop-culture influences in one wonderfully, unashamedly preposterous episode of “Star Trek.” Today, my 22-year-old daughter talks that way about everything.

If you want to relate “Star Trek” to the new world of Hope and Change, well, you take that shit down to the comments, because in this bar, we take our big-explodey-movie fun straight.

Related: Hank Stuever on the Trouble with Quibbles, or how fanboys ‘n’ girls ruin everything. Or try to.

A final bit of bloggage: My poor suburb made it to the front page of Sunday Styles. Of course, it could have been better news — Grosse Pointe Blues.

Despite my best efforts, not to mention my nearly superhuman powers of procrastination, I cannot read everything on the internet, so this mustard thing nearly slipped past me. Can it be true? Did Sean Hannity actually poke the president as a fancypants elitist for having ordered “spicy mustard…Dijon mustard” on his cheeseburger? Video evidence confirms he did. Wow. I’m impressed.

It so happens I have a little experience in this area — mustard-related class issues, that is. Alan’s dad was tickled by the Grey Poupon commercials Hannity references in that segment, the one where the two Rolls-Royces pull up beside one another and the fancypants poofters inside borrow mustard. So one year for Christmas, as a joke, Alan bought him a jar. His mother took him aside later and said, “You shouldn’t have spent all that money,” having perhaps, like Sean Hannity, absorbed the wrong lesson from the ad. Of course Grey Poupon and other Dijon mustard isn’t expensive at all. It’s just…spicy. And brown. When those ads started running, when the Great Democratizing Push of Dijon Mustard began in the 1980s, mustard was yellow and that was that.

Oh, hell, you’re all graybeards like me. I don’t need to tell you this.

The Rolls-Royce ads worked the way ads are supposed to — they branded Dijon mustard as the choice of Rolls-Royce passengers everywhere, even as Kraft (its owner) was selling it to the masses for a couple bucks. I most often use it in salad dressings of all sorts. It really enlivens a potato salad, if you ask me, and it is the only choice for deviled eggs. In my opinion, Obama’s greater mustard sin was putting it, or any mustard, on a hamburger. I don’t think mustard and beef go together anywhere except on a hot dog. A friend of mine who once worked at McDonald’s told me there’s a strict order to the condiment application there, and that mustard always goes on top of the ketchup blob, because mustard, even plain old McDonald’s yellow mustard, is too strong a flavor to directly touch the meat.

In fact, if you put me in a dark room under a single hot light and sweated me, I’d lay out my whole condiment/meat philosophy: Ketchup, and only ketchup, is for hamburgers, and mustard, and only mustard, is for hot dogs. The start of grilling season at our house really begins with the ritual Sneering at Alan’s Condiment Choices for his Hebrew National, dramatized here by Clint Eastwood:

I like a single stripe of Plochman’s and a few chopped onions, m’self, although I’ve been known to use Dijon and even sweet relish, but never, ever ketchup. Some things are sacred. (Before you Chicagoans weigh in, let me just say that so-called Chicago-style dogs are gross, too — cucumbers? Tomatoes? Bitchpleeze.)

The Straight Dope tackles the mustard question with customary flair, here.

And that’s gotta be the end of it for me, today. I finally scored a new printer, and had planned to start a new Friday feature called Embarrassing Pictures, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to figure out the scanning function, and the work will not let up until mid-afternoon, at which point I’m going to celebrate with a few garage sales, not an owner’s manual. Besides, I know you people love nothing better than a big discussion about nothing — thanks for all those ringtone updates early in the week, btw — so I’ll let you take it from here.

Or maybe we’ll end up talking about torture again. Or stress tests. Or whatever. All I know is, I gotta lotta copy to edit in about two hours. You have a good weekend, you Rolls-Royce driving poofters, you.

Against my better judgment, Kate and I have started watching “America’s Next Top Model” on Wednesdays. I figure it’s best to introduce potentially damaging cultural influences myself, so that she can learn the proper response to this nitwit propaganda — jeering mockery from the couch.

And so far, so good. I mean, what other possible reaction can there be to listening to that idiot panel of judges ganging up on these long-stemmed fillies for “not knowing your angles” or having “the wrong planes in your face.” As dumb as these girls are to line up for such treatment, theirs is the lesser sin compared to the rancid misogyny from the alleged adults in the room. And having never paid much attention to Tyra Banks until she was profiled in the NYT magazine not long ago — as a worthy competitor to Oprah, no less — I have only this to say: WTF? Why does she do that stupid caroling-voice thing in every other sentence? Of course, Oprah does that, too, so I see where she gets it.

I’m hoping that someday my progeny will be able to transfer these important life skills to judging photos like this. I don’t think Lucian Freud could have painted a more devastating portrait of decadence.

(It was Donald Trump, in fact, whom I first heard use the phrase “top model,” in reference to the first Mrs. T. Who never was a top model.)

I am down on celebrities these days. I turn to them for comic relief when politics gets to be too much, and what do they do? Disappoint me, every time, and yes, I’m including you, Oprah:

Chastising a celebrity is an exercise in futility. You feel like a kitten being held by the scruff of its neck, scrabbling wildly in the air without drawing blood. Pointless as this may be, though, I will try to talk some sense into Oprah Winfrey, who has decided to go into business with vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy.

Zingy lead, but he’s right — it’s ultimately pointless. That women like McCarthy, who not only claims childhood immunizations caused her son’s autism, but that she “cured” it through brave, “alternative” therapies, get soapboxes like this is not only unfair, but infuriating. I respect some aspects of alternative medicine. I’m not totally in bed with the AMA. (If I was, I’d hope they pay better.) But there’s an ugly undercurrent to causes like this that chaps my ass. If Jenny McCarthy can “cure” her kid’s autism, why can’t you? You must not care enough. After all, you got your kid vaccinated in the first place. I’m glad Arthur Allen, at the Slate link above, does not spare the details:

(McCarthy’s) boyfriend, actor Jim Carrey, is even more clueless. At the rally last year, I asked Carrey to give an example of a childhood vaccine we could dispense with. Tetanus, he said. That answer did not reflect a strong—or any, really—grasp of infectious diseases. Children who get tetanus—fortunately, it has been extremely rare in the United States since tetanus vaccination began in the 1920s—suffer horrendous pain, arch their backs, and go into terrible spasms before dying. It’s a very natural disease, to be sure, because the germ causing tetanus lives in dirt. It’s a germ that will be with us forever, and the only way to prevent it is through vaccination.

I wonder where these popculch dim bulbs stand on Gardasil, the cervical-cancer vaccine. In Hollywood, I’d guess you’re far more likely to know someone with HPV than autism. My guess is, they’re on board with it. Ditto with the push for an AIDS vaccine. No one is suggesting chickenpox parties for AIDS, or that pertussis and measles are no big deal, because once upon a time, everyone used to get them.

Perhaps our time spent saying the magic words along with Tyra — “four beautiful ladies stand before me, but I have only three photos in my hand” — will serve as early training on how to judge these pretty airheads who are so hard to avoid. It will be…a vaccination of sorts.

So, a little bloggage:

General Mills finds bloggers to be oh-so-much-more-compliant than pesky journalists. Ahem:

Bloggers, particularly moms, are an audience of such growing importance to General Mills that the consumer-goods company has built a formal network to feed them free products and enable them to run giveaways for their audiences.

MyBlogSpark has recruited more than 900 bloggers — over 80 percent are moms — to register to be eligible for everything from sampling campaigns to product coupons to news of a new ad campaign. General Mills plans to use the network to promote its wide portfolio of products in the food and beverage, beauty, home, electronics, health and automotive categories.

General Mills can be confident the program will fill blogs with positive reviews. One of the requirements for participation reads: “If you feel you cannot write a positive post regarding the product or service, please contact the MyBlogSpark team before posting any content.”

Or risk losing your free cereal, I’d guess.

Bright shiny objects! Get them out of my field of vision! The NYT looks at the science of concentration. (Confession: I downloaded a program called Freedom, which disables all your computer’s links to the outside world — e-mail, internet, instant messaging — and can only be turned off by rebooting the machine. Of course I haven’t used it yet. Give up Google? How would I live? No wonder I can’t write anything of consequence.)

But I can write this. And now it’s off to the gym. Have a swell day, all.

Part of my duties at GrossePointeToday.com is compiling the public-safety reports. After three weeks of this, I’m ready to wrap myself in cotton batting, sell the bikes at a garage sale and never go outdoors again.

It’s the drunk drivers, of course. Most of these arrests are well after dark, when I’m safe in my wee bed, but the other day I came across a report for a broad-daylight arrest, on a residential street where I ride my bike. The driver blew a .23, driving with a dog in his lap. For some people, cocktail hour boils down to “any hour that I’m awake.”

This got me thinking about Alcoholics I Have Known, and the humiliations they went through en route to either sobriety or a parting of ways with your truly. Bed-wetting, seizures, property destruction, emotional devastation, and the usual run-ins with the authorities. I thought of the times I spent watching drunks make that another-round gesture at the waitress, the circling finger.

“But I don’t want another,” I might say.

“That’s OK, I’ll drink yours.” Never let a cocktail go to waste.

A year or so ago, I linked to a Washington Post profile of Elmore Leonard, the first I’ve ever read that discussed his drinking problem, conquered years ago:

One day in the early 1970s, Dutch came back from one trip to Los Angeles — where he might go through 20 drinks in a day — and started throwing up blood. It was acute gastritis. His doctor told him this was usually seen in “skid row bums.” He found himself arguing with his wife “every single night,” with him saying “vicious things, which I couldn’t believe the next day. I’d be filled with remorse.”

He moved alone into the Merrillwood Apartments, where he lived and wrote and went to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and tried to stop drinking for another three years. “I was flat broke.” The book he was working on, “Unknown Man #89,” was rejected by 105 publishers before finding a home.

“It was a very difficult time,” remembers Bill Leonard.

The couple divorced in 1977, the year he had his last drink — Scotch and Vernors ginger ale one morning while shaving.

It was funny to read this, because alcoholism was a theme in his 1970s-era work, and even a casual reader would know the details came from having walked the walk — staggered the walk, maybe — to the point that I had to put “Unknown Man #89” down from time to time and let it soak in for a while. Two characters are alkies in various stages of recovery, and the picture he paints of one of them sitting in a Cass Avenue bar, ordering glass after glass of cheap white wine, is like something by Edward Hopper. He even gets the stance of the bartender down, the way he leans back against the ice machine and props one foot up behind him, hand resting on his thigh. I think I’ve been to that bar. It’s called the Good Times. Ha ha ha.

The other detail that kills me: The drunk drinks wine. Because everyone knows that if you only drink wine, you’re not an alcoholic. I know a guy whose dad killed a fifth — yes, an entire bottle — of bourbon every night between 5-something, when he walked in the door, and 8-something, when he went to bed. His mom nearly matched him. She had to have a hysterectomy, and the doctors told her she needed to at least taper off before the surgery, so she switched to wine, usually two bottles a night. The father was a high-ranking executive at a major corporation, had a Harvard MBA. He wasn’t an alcoholic because he had an important job that he was good at.

(They had four boys. One had a drinking problem and died young in a one-car fatal, another lost his medical license for self-prescribing heavy-duty narcotics, a third was diagnosed with Korsakoff’s syndrome while still in his 30s and the fourth seems OK. The old man was told he was threatening his health with his drinking and quit in his old age, justlikethat. Well, he always did have an iron will.)

There’s another Leonard book, “Freaky Deaky,” with a character who probably does have Korsakoff’s, although it’s not stated out loud. He’s just addled from a life of drinking. I love that Scotch-and-ginger-ale detail from the writer’s life, because there’s a long passage in that book about an end-stage alky’s morning routine — his servant brings him two vodka-and-ginger-ales on a tray for his eye-opener:

Donnell would have to wait for the swollen face to show life mixed with pain, then for the man to get up on his elbow and take the drink. Donnell would then step out of the way. Soon as the man finished the drink he’d be sick starting right there if he didn’t get to the bathroom in time. Starting this wake-up service, Donnell had brought the man Bloody Marys, till he found out being sick was part of waking up. Did it one week and said, Enough of this Bloody Mary shit, cleaning up a bathroom looked like somebody’s been killing chickens in it.

Part of living with an alcoholic means cleaning up their messes — of all sorts. I never had much of a taste for it.

A note: Every so often I write about drinking in this petulant tone, and it usually kicks up a private e-mail from a reader, suggesting I’m “struggling” with drinking myself. For the record: I find myself drinking less these days than ever — hardly ever during the week, mostly only on Friday and Saturday night. Since I’m chronically sleep-deprived, one too many glasses just makes me soporific. Also, the older I get, the less I need to drink to feel it the next day. Hangovers suck. I’m lucky to down three glasses on a Saturday night, these days. So I’m cool. If I’m struggling with anything, it’s how to pass these lessons down to the next generation. Is it possible to learn about drinking without major trial and error? I wonder.

OK, then. Off to work. A bit of bloggage before I go:

Chris Matthews: Capable of learning?

I wonder if it drives Alice Waters crazy that successful cookbooks are written by people like Hungry Girl. “Cap’n Crunch Chicken” — it is to laugh. (If you click through, examine the picture and weigh in: Cheekbone implants, or are those the real thing?)

It’s not all bad news in the economy: Abercrombie & Fitch is struggling. Huzzah.

If I want to get done in time to take a sprained-knee bike ride (with wraparound ice pack), I gotta get going. Have a good weekend, all.

I generally update this blog in the morning, when I’m useless anyway. I read the papers, start the coffee, drink the coffee, open the laptop and take my morning batting practice while I wait for the French Roast to work its magic. I generally try to be done by 10 a.m., and that’s when my day really begins, work-wise.

It turns out I’ve been doing it all wrong:

A young man I’ll call Alex recently graduated from Harvard. As a history major, Alex wrote about a dozen papers a semester. He also ran a student organization, for which he often worked more than forty hours a week; when he wasn’t on the job, he had classes. Weeknights were devoted to all the schoolwork that he couldn’t finish during the day, and weekend nights were spent drinking with friends and going to dance parties. “Trite as it sounds,” he told me, it seemed important to “maybe appreciate my own youth.” Since, in essence, this life was impossible, Alex began taking Adderall to make it possible.

Adderall, a stimulant composed of mixed amphetamine salts, is commonly prescribed for children and adults who have been given a diagnosis of attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder. But in recent years Adderall and Ritalin, another stimulant, have been adopted as cognitive enhancers: drugs that high-functioning, overcommitted people take to become higher-functioning and more overcommitted. (Such use is “off label,” meaning that it does not have the approval of either the drug’s manufacturer or the Food and Drug Administration.) College campuses have become laboratories for experimentation with neuroenhancement, and Alex was an ingenious experimenter. His brother had received a diagnosis of A.D.H.D., and in his freshman year Alex obtained an Adderall prescription for himself by describing to a doctor symptoms that he knew were typical of the disorder. During his college years, Alex took fifteen milligrams of Adderall most evenings, usually after dinner, guaranteeing that he would maintain intense focus while losing “any ability to sleep for approximately eight to ten hours.” In his sophomore year, he persuaded the doctor to add a thirty-milligram “extended release” capsule to his daily regimen.

This is the lede of a fascinating story making the rounds this week, from the New Yorker. Margaret Talbot’s piece on the off-label use of prescription stimulants and other ADHD drugs is both thrilling and terrifying, the idea that there could be real help for those of us who stumble through our lives unable to concentrate, even if we have to wheedle our doctors for it. Here’s the terrifying part:

Recently, an advice column in Wired featured a question from a reader worried about “a rising star at the firm” who was “using unprescribed modafinil to work crazy hours. Our boss has started getting on my case for not being as productive.”

Welcome to the new world. Please take your Adderall and get to work.

A few years ago I read a first-person essay by someone who’d taken Ritalin without a prescription, and described the effects as nothing short of revolutionary — the “better than well” sense of energy and focus that allowed the writer to not only work, but work better than he ever had in his life, to concentrate for long periods, to ignore distractions, to finish his novel. How easy it would be to become dependent on such a drug. How simple it would be to fit it into your life.

I can’t believe my generation spent all those years sitting around in smoky living rooms smoking pot, when we could have been swallowing Ritalin and accomplishing something.

(As you can tell, the French Roast is kicking in.)

It’s trendy to refer to our nation’s efforts against self-administered chemicals as “The War on Some Drugs,” or “The War on Some Classes of People Who Use Some Drugs.” You read stuff like this, and you see why it’s funny — because it’s true.

OK. It seems some of you are still back in yesterday’s thread, arguing about torture. Here’s a new starting place for that throwdown, a pretty fair-minded look at how, exactly, we determine what “high-value information” is and how it’s obtained.

If you’d rather take an easier road, torture drives Shep Smith to forget the cardinal rule of live broadcasting.

Meanwhile, why do people bring infants into homes with aggressive dogs? Why, why, why?

And now it’s 10 a.m., time to get to work. Fully engaged, but I could use some Ritalin.

It rained all day yesterday — hard, cold and sideways — and now something hard and needle-like is falling on the skylight. Could it be? Yes it could: Freezing rain/hail! And spring is delayed another day or two.

Don’t mind me. I always liked the feel of a nice snug straitjacket.

A few notes/clarifications/follows:

My comments about Susan Boyle got linked here and there, and reading the comments on other blogs, it seems there are some who believe my contempt was aimed at her, not at those surrounding her. Nothing could be further, etc., although I do wonder why anyone, let alone a nice Scottish virgin (say that phrase in a Scottish accent — it’s fun), would willingly climb between the sheets with Simon Cowell — talk about your deals with the devil. But obviously there aren’t many producers willing to take a chance on a woman like Boyle, and if she wanted to be heard outside her Scottish village, this was probably the only way it was going to happen.

No, my problem is with the people who treat her like some sort of sideshow, and in so doing reveal their not-particularly-hidden contempt for anyone who dares break the mold of what’s considered acceptable in our culture.

One more note: Not long ago I heard something on public radio about John Philip Sousa’s reaction to Mr. Edison’s infernal invention, the phonograph. He saw in an instant what it would lead to — the loss of music as an amateur pursuit, that’s what:

…when music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely…

In Sousa’s time, music belonged to anyone who had the minimal discipline to learn it. Everyone — or, at least, far more people — could pick out a tune on the piano, favor the group with a song, play the fiddle at a Saturday-night dance. When entertainment was scarce, everyone entertained. You lent your talent, whatever it might amount to, to your church choir, your community band, your local musical society. When the music business amounted to the sale of sheet music, it was a far more democratic institution. Music was like the local plant life — unique in a particular place, shaped by circumstances and geography.

Boyle is, I think, far more rooted in this older world than ours. While she’s obviously influenced by the musical theater and other modern institutions, she seems to have one foot firmly planted in a time when being able to carry a tune meant you were somewhere on the scale from normal-to-gifted, not a superstar waiting to be discovered.

Of course her new Svengali will help her make a record. Here’s hoping it enables her to spend her remaining years wherever she wants, in Scotland or on a beach somewhere, singing like a canary just for the joy of it.

Also, I saw most, but not all, of HBO’s “Grey Gardens” the other night, and I have to say, I was impressed. I thought combining the Edies’ backstories with their degradation brought a note of empathy to the whole sad and squalid affair, and the acting, particularly Jessica Lange’s, was outstanding. Just the right combination of needy and calculating, mama spider sitting in her web waiting for the right moment to wrap her daughter up in it for good.

Needless to say, the wardrobe was fabulous. Why don’t we wear cloche hats anymore? They looked good on everyone.

Congratulations to the Detroit Free Press for their well-deserved Pulitzer Prize. Unrelated: The other day I read about a prostitution ring in the metro area that relied on Craigslist, and the Free Press article said:

Sheriff Warren Evans charged Wednesday that Craigslist is major source of prostitution. He said the evidence will be sent to Chicago to bolster a federal civil case filed March 5 against the giant Internet firm by the Cook County sheriff.

“Giant internet firm.” I ask you. It is the truck that ran over our industry, and we don’t even know what color it is.

For what Wikipedia’s worth, the giant internet firm operates out of a nondescript house in San Francisco and has 28 employees.

And now I am off to mail the letter that will seal my summer in a nice package: I’m teaching a class this spring/summer term. At the university level, which I’m sure will give all you tuition-paying moms and dads pause. In internet journalism, at Wayne State. I’m as stunned as you are, but for now, I have to get my letter of offer back to them before the deadline. So I’m off, eh?

As I may have mentioned here a time or two hundred, I’m a retired equestrienne. One of these days, when I get a working scanner again, I’ll put some pix up of me in my riding togs, jumping fences on my very expensive steed, who was only expensive to me; among people who ride, he was little better than a plug. I rode with 14-year-old girls whose doctor daddies thought nothing of dropping a mid-five-figure sum on a well-trained thoroughbred for their darling daughters, and even that was on the cheap end, even then. At the elite levels, a five-figure sum is the monthly bill.

But never mind that. I did my time in the saddle, and while I never had the build or the talent or the budget to be a contender, I didn’t totally disgrace myself, and I learned a lot along the way. One of the things I learned was how to fall off.

Falling from a horse, in our culture, is made out to be far scarier than it is. In a movie, if a pregnant woman gets on a horse, she will be suffering a miscarriage within minutes. Bonnie Blue Butler only had to put the fence rails up too high to meet her tragic fate. And while there are a number of horrible accidents in riding competitions every year, they are exceptional. People with fancy horses tend to work them in riding rings with deep, soft footing, and what’s good for Dobbin’s legs is also good for your sorry ass when you land in it. Not that it doesn’t hurt, but unless you come off head-first or somehow land on the jump or the rail, chances are you’ll be just fine. The classic riding injuries are not Christopher Reeve’s broken neck but the big three — broken wrist and/or collarbone (from putting your hands out as the ground comes up to meet you), and cracked ribs.

Which brings us to Madonna, who either needs to toughen up or stay out of the saddle. I’ve dismounted more horses the hard way than she’s dismounted boyfriends, and never once did I have to go to the hospital — on a backboard, no less — for what turned out to be bruises. I thought she was Miss Super Fitness. Just get up, dust off your ass, lead your mount back to the block, get back on and finish the class. That’s how the tough girls do it.

My trainer didn’t coddle people who fell. She wasn’t a tyrant about it; a kid who was honestly terrified by the experience wasn’t forced back into the saddle at gunpoint or anything. But she never made a big fuss one way or another. It was like oopsy-daisy, everything OK? Fine, up you go and pick up a posting trot. As all parents know, the bigger the fuss you make over any injury, the more the injured party is frightened. However, I get the feeling that making a fuss over Madonna is pretty much the point of her existence, so I’m not surprised she was content to stay immobile on the ground while worried faces and EMTs peered down at her.

BTW, I was dumped because of “paparazzi,” too. I could never afford a good, well-trained horse, so I rode a couple of young, spooky ones. A barking dog, a loud muffler, a sudden hand gesture or windy day could turn them into the sorts of animals who disappear from underneath you and simultaneously reappear 10 feet to the left. You felt like Wily Coyote, running off the cliff. As I picked myself out of the dirt, I’d tell my trainer, “(X) spooked him.” She’d say, “Learn to stay on your horse.”

In Madge’s defense, however, one of my favorite lines from Thomas McGuane, as a character is riding the spooks out of a young stud colt: “By your mid-thirties the ground has begun to grow hard. It grows harder and harder until the day it admits you.” True dat.

OK, some quick bloggage for, what else, a dreary Monday:

How fast food can kill you. It has nothing to do with cholesterol.

Dear Mr. President, this is how letters get to your desk.

It’s a good thing Berkeley has so many rich people. White roofs for all!

Why I keep fivethirtyeight.com bookmarked, even though the election’s over: For posts like this, about Minnesota’s Senate election.

Finally, since we seem to be heavy on the popculch today, to the next person who sends me the Susan Boyle video:

Stop it. I don’t care how much you were moved, wowed, whatevered. I don’t care. Don’t you realize how condescending this all is? Don’t you know how much you’re being played? Is there nothing Simon Cowell can’t make a buck from? You know why Susan Boyle is such a phenomenon? It’s not because she’s a great singer; how would anyone know? There are two recordings of her singing two songs extant in the world. No, Susan Boyle is a phenom because she’s ugly. Go ahead, say it: Ug-ly. Leave the nicer euphemisms — frumpy, dowdy — for the weak-willed. The bottom line is, when someone is ugly in our culture, we expect nothing good from them. The idea that a ugly woman could open her mouth and have something beautiful come out flummoxes us — how could she have been cultivating a love for music when she was neglecting her eyebrows and fitness routine so? Doesn’t she know our priorities? If a gorgeous woman had come out and given the exact same performance, you probably wouldn’t even know about it.

The next step, after celebrating Susan Boyle for being a fine singer, is a YouTube video of some street-looking black kid who steps to a microphone in a speech competition and delivers a perfect reading of a Shakespearean sonnet. Look, he’s so articulate! Just be aware.

Also, pleeze: Does anyone honestly believe the judges didn’t know what was coming? Do you think people make it onstage at shows like that without a single pre-performance screening? You think Simon didn’t know the camera was on him, red light lit, when he smiled? How dumb are we?

Pretty dumb, I’d say.