The other day we were watching a promo for the newest iteration of “Grey Gardens” on HBO when Alan asked, “Am I the only person in the world who doesn’t think that movie was a masterpiece?” I assured him he was sitting next to another one. In fact, I thought, we’d watched it together, just a year or two previous, on DVD from the library, and we’d turned it off midway through. It was during the feed-the-raccoons scene, as I recall.

If you haven’t been backgrounded: “Grey Gardens” started life as a National Enquirer story and became a documentary film, and that’s where it stayed for the longest time — a cult classic, as the phrase goes. It’s about a mother-daughter team of lunatics, both named Edie Beale, who lived in an enormous, ramshackle house in an exclusive nook of the Hamptons. If you’ve known a crazy cat lady in your life, you’ve known the Beales, except the Beales were crazy with a twist — they were aunt and first cousin of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy Onassis (the elder Edie was Edie Bouvier Beale, sister of Jackie’s no-good father). They lived in this huge, crumbling pile together, filth and decay forcing them into one or two rooms, where they spent their days talking crazy to one another in these upper-class accents. I guess that made them irresistible to the Maysles brothers, who made the original documentary.

Eventually, in the days of home video, “Grey Gardens” emerged from midnight-screening-at-the-art-house obscurity and into pop culture, and then there was a Broadway musical and now a dramatic remake of the doc, with the story of their early, pre-crazy lives folded in. I’ll probably watch it at some point, but I watch with a cold eye. “Eccentric” may be the polite word for insanity, but ultimately finding entertainment in a portrait of two mentally ill women just doesn’t feel right to me. Whatever floats your boat — I don’t judge. But it creeps me out.

All over this country are people like the Beales, living in less picturesque but very similar surroundings. Once I had this idea for a reporting project — to do a profile of every single person who filed to run in the city election in Fort Wayne in 1995, for council and mayor. The idea was not to look at their positions on the issues, but at them as people, on the grounds these are the politicians you’re most likely to meet in the supermarket, and you might want to know about them. My editors like the idea, and when the filing deadline passed, we made up a list and I divided it with another reporter.

I thought the project was, on balance, a success, but I hadn’t accounted for the Crazy factor, and so we found ourselves obligated to profile at least two people who were not only hopeless candidates, but, frankly, a little nuts. One was borderline and ran for mayor; the other was all the way there and was up for a council seat. Both were on my half of the list.

I walked into the latter’s apartment, a much less picturesque version of Grey Gardens, to find the furniture had been turned upside down. “Spring cleaning,” the candidate said by way of explanation. Two chairs were righted, I was served tea in a filthy cup, and the interview commenced. An hour later I made my escape, having been led on a magical mystery tour of his personal crazytown. I was advised that I should never leave appliances not in use plugged in. I was told that my subject had been caught in a crossfire with the Purple Gang and another band of gangsters, and that’s why he was physically disabled. I was told he had several advanced degrees, but didn’t possess the diplomas because of administrative persecution. And so on.

The next day, just for the hell of it, I went spelunking in our ancient, non-digitized clip files and in nothing short of a miracle, turned up a brief story that mentioned the would-be council candidate. Decades earlier, he had opened an unsecured fire door of a hospital under renovation and stepped into thin air, falling two floors and seriously injuring his back and legs. I was not particularly surprised to learn it had been a plain old accident (likely an attempted suicide) and not Purple-Gang thugs who left him a physical wreck, nor was I shocked to hear the door he’d used was on the mental ward.

I might still have the story in my files, but I like to think I walked a careful line in my reporting, enough to let the readers know who was living in the apartment with the upside-down furniture without holding him up for unnecessary ridicule. Ditto with the other candidate, who lived in a house with a front door about 15 feet from a major thoroughfare, one of those places you wonder why anyone would stay in. He served me coffee from an elaborate china service, added a big dollop of Cool Whip, and we struggled through an interview while every passing truck rattled all the cups and filled the room with its roar. (This, I’m convinced, is what drove him around the bend. I was only there an hour, and it nearly did it to me.)

When one of your names isn’t Bouvier, this is what being nuts is like. No arty documentarians, just a third-rate columnist wondering how she’s going to tell your story without bringing the authorities into your life.

I wrote a lot about mental illness when I was a columnist. The mother of a schizophrenic said something to me I’ll never forget, describing her son: “He’s sick. He’s in pain. Why can’t anybody see that?”

Good question. I guess part of it was that fashionable attitude that flowered in the ’60s, the in-a-crazy-world-who’s-to-say-what’s-sane wave of the hand. Part of it were the revelations of what institutionalization was really like for people who couldn’t afford the best care. “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” played a part. And mental illness, like most illness, is a continuum, and one doctor’s judgment of who needs help imposed upon them and who doesn’t isn’t the same as the next doctor’s. Of my two candidates, the guy in the loud house was firmly in the “eccentric” range, the other edging into intervention territory, but neither was a danger to himself or others, as the legal standard goes. But I also don’t think either was happy, nor healthy.

I see the publicity surrounding the new “Grey Gardens,” and that’s what bugs me about it — this idea that the Beales should be celebrated, because Little Edie liked to wrap sweaters around her head. That their tumbledown house should somehow still encompass their legacy of illness, maybe in the famous gardens. Sally Quinn, the journalist who bought the house from Little Edie and restored it, gets it, although she’s too polite by half:

What do you recall of Little Edie that day?
Well, I thought she was nuts. I thought she had serious psychological and emotional problems. There was no question about it. She had just escaped into her own fantasy world. I didn’t know the story that much and so honestly, I feel bad about Edie. Your reaction was just to laugh at her because she was such a character and so crazy, dancing in the hall, saying isn’t it beautiful and this incredible outfit she had with safety pins and a turban and all that—and later when I saw the Maysles documentary and then the Broadway play and now the HBO movie, it’s so heartbreaking. I wanted to rewind and go back to that moment and just put my arms around her. I wanted to help her, do something for her.

Putting your arms around Edie wouldn’t have helped. She needed something a lot stronger.

So.

The weekend looms! Any bloggage?

What is it about the gays and “Grey Gardens.” With YouTube.

And that’s it. Add your own if you like. And have a good weekend.

One of the local bloggers refers to the Free Press’ reader comments as the Klavern, and one look at it after a story touching on race — as approximately 75 percent of all stories in Detroit do, and a little imagination can bring the other 25 percent under the umbrella — shows why that’s true:

I see it all now. A new amusement park right on the riverfront.
“GHETTOVILLE” !!!
A real life amusement park. You’ll take part in muggings, and car jackings. See what it’s like to live in a crackhouse neighborhood. Try your skills as either a streetwalker or a crack dealer. Dress up like a clown and serve on the city council.
for the kids there is the “Who’s your daddy” ride

Ha ha. This was attached to a story on the Cobo expansion, which is, of course, about race.

This is one of the things we’ve discussed about GrossePointeToday.com, whether we’re going to allow anonymous comments, and we’ve decided we’d rather have fewer with real names attached than the sort of sewage allowing anonymity would encourage.

Earlier this week, a former editor at the Washington Post’s website defended the anonymous variety, arguing they served as an unpleasant but necessary reminder of a particular segment of the audience. This was picked up by Romenesko, where all important issues of journalism are debated, and it was there that a Gannett reporter replied with his own experience. Hello, future of journalism:

Like other Gannett papers, the Register has turned its newsroom into an “Information Center,” in part by publishing rumors, half-truths and outright lies submitted by anonymous folks with screen names like “Hugh G. Rekshon.” Not long ago, we had a reader who decided to publish on our site the juvenile court record of a young woman, complete with references to drug testing, psychological exams and the girl’s one-time status as a juvenile ward of the state. We routinely publish comments questioning the virtue of female criminal defendants and the citizenship of anyone who seems to have a Hispanic surname. We call that “community conversation.” Others see it as a public stoning, hosted by a newspaper that grants all of the attackers complete anonymity.

And like other Gannett papers, the Register is cutting back on content produced by trained, professional journalists while encouraging community members to submit photos, columns and blogs. A few of our community bloggers have used this forum to write about the details of their drug use and their sexual activities. Most of our contributors choose their topics more carefully, but again, they’re not professionals. Not everyone who can type is a reporter. Not everyone with a cell-phone camera is a photographer. But in the Information Center, we’re all part of a homogenized team of “content providers” — some of whom, not coincidentally, work for free. A well-researched Register news article is published on the same Web page as a reader’s step-by-step instructions as to how a local woman under a psychiatrist’s care should commit suicide using carbon monoxide.

That’s the Des Moines Register, by the way, one of those papers that existed for years as proof that Iowa was a state that valued education, that far from being a collection of farmers and cornfields, could produce a paper that was the equal of any in the country. Won several Pulitzers. I read it when I was in Iowa covering the floods of 1993. They ran exhaustive coverage, much of it presented in Spanish as well. And now it’s the home of Hugh G. Rekshon.

I don’t know why I’m talking about this today. It is Good Friday. Death and execution is topic one today. Maybe that’s why.

So, friends, how are you today? I’m fabulous. I spent most of yesterday away from my computer, and recommend it highly. It turns out there are people out there with whom you can have these things called “conversations,” which don’t involve a keyboard. You can accompany them to restaurants and eat actual food, actual being the opposite of everyone’s favorite adjective these days, “virtual.” We went to B.D.’s Mongolian Barbeque, a place I’d not visited before this year. How had I missed it, this place that McDonald’s-izes the hibachi table? The last I checked, the Mongolians were a nation of proud horsemen who once conquered the world and today eat a lot of yogurt. The fast-casual joint that bears its name invites you to gather a large bowl of raw meat and vegetables, complemented by sauces that range from Fajita Pepper to Thai peanut. You present this mess to a cook who makes snappy banter while he shoves it around on the grill for a few minutes, then take it back to your table, where you’ve been given a bowl of rice. Also, a small tortilla warmer.

“What’s in there?” I asked the waitress.

“Tortillas,” she said. Oh.

Anyway, against all expectations, this mess is still delicious. I cleaned my plate and wiped it with a tortilla. God bless the melting pot.

And God bless Wikipedia, which notes the first American restaurant chain to open in Ulan Bator was? B.D.’s Mongolian Barbeque! The entry goes on to note: “…neither the ingredients nor the cooking method has anything in common with Mongolian cuisine.” Good to know.

Somewhere in the world is an American restaurant that serves live eels.

OK. So I’m off to buy white eggs, asparagus and maybe a beef tenderloin. We’re staying in for Easter, making it a feast for three. So no ham for us — we’re going with the good stuff.

Happy weekends to all.

I posted this picture on Facebook yesterday:

It’s from my Russian teacher’s fascinating library of Soviet-era children’s books. This is in a beautifully illustrated picture book about the alphabet, pitched at, I’d estimate, the kindergarten cohort. Because this was published in 1962 or so, and because this was the Soviet Union, the parade of alphabet pages are interrupted by propaganda. The sausage-fingered Ukrainian above is, of course, Nikita Sergeyovich Khrushchev. The copy tells us he is a soldier for peace, ha ha. Sometimes peace needs to be imposed at the point of a bayonet. I’m impressed at how the artist captured his essential peasant nature — check out the fit of that jacket around the shoulders. And the brow.

Later in the same volume is a page about Vladimir Lenin. I regret I didn’t take a picture, but I was too amused by the text under his portrait, which reads:

Lenin is dead.
Lenin is alive.
Lenin will rise again.

Just a little mystery of faith for you Catholics to contemplate during Holy Week. You gotta think that was deliberate, but Catholicism isn’t so big in Russia, and I’m not sure that passage (“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”) is part of the Orthodox liturgy. One thing about the internet is, you can throw any question out there and someone will answer it in an hour or two.

How is your week going? Mine is the usual train wreck, complicated by my glance at the calendar Monday to discover it is now the second week in April and I haven’t even started our taxes yet. So that’s what I’ll be doing the rest of today, and maybe the rest of the week. Unholy week, in my case.

So before I send you off with a half-baked effort, here’s a story from the NYT’s front page today, about good Samaritans using social networking and other digital technology to return found objects to their rightful owners:

Companies are also moving to exploit the fact that millions of people have published information about themselves on the Web. Traditional lost-and-founds are migrating online, and a batch of start-ups and hobby Web sites have sprouted with the aim of harnessing people’s altruistic impulses to return lost items.

“Generally when people are given the opportunity to do something good for someone else, they’ll take it,” said Matt Preprost, a college student in Canada who has created a blog, Found Cameras and Orphan Pictures, to reunite cameras and their owners.

The opening anecdote is about a lost camera and the Scottish woman who did not rest until she had returned it to its rightful owners, a couple who thought they had lost all their wedding and honeymoon pictures.

And how coincidental that Metafilter led me to Is This Your Lost Luggage, a site kept by a guy who buys abandoned bags at auction, then photographs their contents. You can claim your property if you don’t mind knowing a total stranger has taken a picture of your “Daddy’s Girl” t-shirt, Roxy bikini and green-and-pink hippopotamus PJs.

If you ever wondered why mystery novels are popular, here’s why. People love to solve a mystery.

The story touches on the findees, some of whom “feel weird” that others were able to find out so much about them, even if it was for a good cause. Good grief. We live in Overshare Nation and this surprises anyone? Be grateful you got your stuff back and shut up about it. As Coozledad pointed out so eloquently the other day, your damn mail carrier knows far more about you than you might think, let alone Facebook.

Finally, I’ve started taking special notice of a few talking heads/bloggers, who are ignoring the conventional wisdom about Michelle Obama — that she looks great — and instead picking nits over her wardrobe, that sleeveless is the same as topless, that cardigan sweaters are tacky, blah blah blah. Oscar de la Renta seems mainly peeved that she’s not wearing more Oscar de la Renta. I know those pink knit suits are popular with some people — hello, Mrs. John Roberts — but for the life of me I don’t understand why people are so up in arms, ha, about Mrs. O. It’s not like she wore a tank top and trucker hat to Buckingham Palace. The NYT celebrates the end of Wife Wear.

You can sense I’m putting off the inevitable. Time to install Turbo Tax and do the job I really should delegate to someone smarter than me.

It seems half the people I know are going gluten-free. Gluten is the new sugar, no, the new lactose — something you can claim a vague “sensitivity” to and give up, thereafter proclaiming you never felt better. While I know that celiac disease is real and that people actually suffer from it, I’m a little dubious about many of my newly gluten-free friends’ health claims. But I have a prejudice. When I was in fourth grade, the teacher asked us to speculate on what is meant when bread is called “the staff of life.”

I raised my hand. “That you’ll die without it?” The teacher chuckled and called on someone else, but I stand by my contention. Life without bread not only lacks a staff, but a point.

Alan was a health reporter for a time, and brought his deep skepticism to the job. It’s his contention that 99 percent of all self-diagnosed food allergies and sensitivities are b.s., that for every person who goes into anaphylactic shock after eating peanuts or shellfish, there are 99 who claim “allergies” that basically boil down to being a picky eater. If ice cream makes you fart, that does not mean you’re lactose intolerant. (Bloody diarrhea is another matter, and yes, you’re welcome for that observation. I suppose there’s a middle ground where you’re confined to your room until you stop smelling like a dairy that’s been abandoned during a heat wave, but everything’s a spectrum.)

But this gluten thing is sweepin’ the nation. Just a brief scan of the celiac disease entry on Wikipedia makes it sound nearly crippling, and no one in my circle who’s given up gluten can really claim to have had it, but may I digress and gross you out some more? From the wiki:

The diarrhoea characteristic of coeliac disease is pale, voluminous and malodorous.

That’s as opposed to the scant, sweet-smelling diarrhea, I guess. Ha ha.

Crunchy Rod, between posts on economic catastrophe, the Benedict Option and the usual mania, posted a while back that his house has given up gluten and casein (milk protein) and they’re all feeling better. (I only wish this was reflected in his writing.) The post attracted the usual comments, wherein some people claimed that making one change in their diet led to clearer thinking, retraction of an autism diagnosis, etc.

Speaking as one who has always had a cast-iron stomach, who can eat virtually anything with no ill effects whatsoever, who has never even experienced heartburn, whose sum total of bad dietary outcomes boils down to “no matter how good it sounds at 2 a.m., White Castles at closing time are almost never worth the morning-after misery,” it is perhaps hard for me to empathize. If one doesn’t have celiac disease, how can cutting one food from one’s diet make that big a change? Maybe if you replace it with something healthier, more complex carbs or whole grains, I can see it. Otherwise, I’m still skeptical. I note how many people are diagnosed with these conditions by “alternative” doctors, and trash the AMA all you want, but I used to sit next to an alt-medicine crackpot at work, and I formed my own opinions, particularly about iridology.

The U.S. is a far more diverse place than it was when I was a kid. Different ethnicities bring different genes into the mix. I’ve heard it said that Asians can actually smell white people, that we reek like aged Cheddar to noses that don’t mess with milk past the breast-feeding stage. So I won’t rule it out. But can anyone tell me what a mixed-bag-of-European-genes person like me has to gain from giving up her twice-weekly loaf of rustic Italian bread?

The question to the crowd today: Gluten — threat or menace?

So, bloggage:

One of the trainers at my gym is trying to sell two Final Four tickets. Great seats (he says), all three games, $2,000. Yesterday it was $2,500. I don’t know what this means — the price reduction, that is — but I hear through the grapevine that there are still seats available. Everyone blames The Economy, but if you’re in the market, yo, I can hook you up.

Jeff TMMO posted this to Facebook, and as of five minutes ago, so had two others, so heads up for the hey-martha story of the week and probably the month. The headline alone is a classic: Police charge man with OVI after he crashed motorized bar stool. And there’s a picture!

Brian mentioned Google’s invasion of privacy a few days ago. A too-perfect story along those lines, that we won’t bother to check out further.

Hey, John Rich: Screw you, too. Love, Detroit.

Off to the gym. Times like these require all my strength.

So, the White House will have a victory garden, a bit of news appropriately released on the first day of spring. Glad to hear it. I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out — I’ll go out on a limb here and predict “spectacularly,” mainly because I’m not in charge — but I’m particularly interested in seeing the shapes it makes the president’s enemies contort themselves into, given their calm, considered reaction to the Special Olympics joke and the Wednesday night cocktail parties.

The main story has a map graphic, and I’m puzzled by all that lettuce. Even a thin family like the Obamas can’t eat that many salads, and lettuce will be a non-starter in a D.C. climate once the summer really settles in. My guess is, this is the initial planting map, and there’ll be quite a bit of modification down the road.

It so happens I’m thinking similar thoughts here at Casa de NN.C. We are infamous for our concrete back yard, but we do have a little tillable patch at the back of the lot that could be put into use as a garden. It would involve taking out a tree, not a big one, but it’s the stuff that would come after that discourages me. I’ve written before about the incredibly aggressive animal population here, probably a direct result of Detroit toughness in general. Squirrels here can be reliably counted on to strip tomato plants clean. The rabbits carry switchblades. My victory garden would have to be fenced and possibly roofed with chicken wire to discourage looting by the animal kingdom.

And any garden produce we grew ourselves would take away from my weekly trip to the Eastern Market, the most pleasant errands of the warm season. So maybe not. The tree lives another year.

The Obamas’ garden will feature hyssop, notable for being the designated paintbrush used to mark the Israelites’ homes with blood during the first Passover, in Egypt. This is clearly a coded message to Obama’s followers to prepare for the Great Purge of Conservatives; I’ll be starting some in a container as soon as the threat of frost abates.

They’re also growing collards. Rush Limbaugh can get some laughs out of that one.

The map doesn’t show, but the story states, that there will be two beehives “for honey,” which strikes me as a bit showy. For pollination, sure, but as we’ve discussed here before, growing your own food and being a locavore tiptoes dangerously close to being a boring jerk sometimes, and I hope the Obamas don’t use their private beehives to lecture their guests about the top notes of the local honey. (That said, I bought a small jar of local honey last summer at the market, in part because the label amused me — “Detroit honey” sounds more like a variety of heroin to my ear — and because I wondered if it would glow in the dark. The whole metro area has seen so much old-school manufacturing over the last century that it’s safe to assume every square inch of soil contains more heavy metal than Ozzfest. And yet, I still eat it, because I assume it coats the innards against more exotic invaders.)

On my season-opening bike rides last weekend, I checked out my friend Steve’s place. Steve used to write a gardening column for the paper in Fort Wayne, and has tilled every inch of his own yard, right down to the park strip. He’s generous with the bounty; a local dog-walker has his permission to take one leaf of Swiss chard every week to feed her iguana. Most of his stuff is behind fences, but the park-strip plot is still there, heaped with compost and waiting to be tilled. He rotates, like a good organic farmer, so I don’t know what’s going in that spot this year. I’m hoping for heirloom tomatoes. Or maybe some hyssop.

What’s in your garden?

There’s so much strange crime in Detroit. Just last week the local constables broke up a champagne-theft ring, or at least its best customer. The police tracked a particularly selective shoplifting ring from the Kroger in Grosse Pointe to a party store in Detroit, which was buying stolen meat but mostly champagne from the thieves. The Kroger manager said he’d make a pass through the wine aisle, and come back five minutes later to find the shelf carrying the $50-a-bottle stuff stripped bare. Even in the Pointes, that’s not normal demand.

These stories interest me because they reveal a set of coping skills I lack. If you presented me with a scenario where I was a) broke; and b) addicted to drugs; then told me I had to get enough money for my fix before, say, noon, it would never occur to me to steal champagne. (I’d nick wallets from purses in the grocery store instead. I’m amazed at how many women leave their purses unattended in shopping carts while they squeeze the Charmin.) Every so often I see one of those oft-e-mailed pieces about the skills required for poverty, how to get free meals and cheap clothing and a month of free rent, that sort of thing. I inevitably fail. I just don’t know enough about the ghetto economy.

One of my Facebook friends posted this story, about the vindication of tightwads in today’s economy. The lead anecdote was about one Amy VanDeventer, who describes herself as “neurotic” about saving money, to the point where she now banks half of each paycheck, up from 25 percent a year ago. She does this by, among other things, repurposing her children’s bagel scraps for pizza toppings and slicing up lotion bottles to get that last little bit. My Spidey sense started to tingle, because I’ve known women like VanDeventer, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I found the telling detail, and whaddaya know, here it is:

VanDeventer was drying her hair in front of a fan after her portable hair dryer broke — until her friends bought her a new one.

I’ve got news for Amy: She’s not frugal, or even a tightwad. She’s a miser. Big, big difference.

People who practice frugality find happiness in simplicity. Misers bring the nastiness. They think an ugly sweater from the 80 percent off rack is better than a pretty one that was only 50 percent off. They’d not only rather eat hamburger than steak, they can’t even enjoy steak, even when you’re picking up the check, because you’re spending money they would have saved. It makes them miserable, all that waste. And waste is everywhere.

I once asked a miser how her vacation went. She said Great! and told me about the clerk at the McDonald’s on the turnpike who got confused and gave her change from a $20, instead of the $10 bill she’d been handed. “So it’s like I made money on it!” she said. Frugal people eat at McDonald’s; misers exult over an error that probably got the clerk fired at the end of the day.

A woman banking 50 percent of her take-home pay who won’t spend $19 at Target on a new hair dryer is not a person to be admired. Of course you may disagree, but that’s how I come down on it.

I’ve worked for newspapers, so I know a thing or two about making do with less. One year I turned off my furnace on March 1, because I couldn’t afford heat. (A valuable early-life lesson: It’s worth the $50 annual American Express fee for a couple of years, if it teaches you to never charge more than you can pay off in any given month.) I wasn’t starving, and I wasn’t poor, but there were times when things ran out or broke and didn’t get replenished or repaired because there just wasn’t any money for it. No biggie. And yes, I too rinse out my shampoo bottles to get the last couple of hair-washes out of it. I can get every drop out of the ketchup bottle. That’s just called Being Midwestern.

Little about the past 20 years has been so disgusting to me as the conspicuous consumption we’ve gawked over. From Donald Trump and his gold everything to “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” from designer jeans to designer sunglasses to designer baby clothes to designer kitchen utensils, from eight-year car loans to thousand-dollar senior proms — it’s all vile, and the sooner we flush it from the culture, the better. Let’s bring back “vulgar,” and paste it on those who deserve it. But hoarding money can be a sickness, the same way hoarding animals or household goods is. It’s one thing to buy the dark-meat chicken on sale, but it’s quite another to reuse your coffee grounds four times.

One is inventiveness and thrift. The other is a lack of generosity. Remember the woman with the ointment and the alabaster jar.

Howzabout some bloggage, then?

Of course, I will probably be rethinking miserliness in the very near future.

Roy watches PJTV so we don’t have to. Given the show in question was all about Going Galt, he should get a medal.

Roger Ebert on eroticism in the movies. Not sex, eroticism.

Off to work, so I can afford my coffee.

Who said I’d not like “Thirteen Moons?” Was that you, Jeff? I think so. Well, you’re wrong. Not that you don’t have company:

How, then, to explain the much more frequent patches of bad — really bad — writing in “Thirteen Moons”? This starts with the book’s very first sentences, which are so awful that they beg to be read aloud: “There is no scatheless rapture. Love and time put me in this condition. I am leaving soon for the Nightland, where all the ghosts of men and animals yearn to travel.” To be sure, there were plenty of passages like this in “Cold Mountain” — of prose that somehow managed to be simultaneously portentous, folksy and cloying, like banjo music on the soundtrack of a Ken Burns documentary. But the volume in “Thirteen Moons” has been cranked up considerably.

It seems to me I’m too middlebrow for the New York Times Book Review, because nothing about that passage clangs awful to me. It’s not that I have no discernment; I can find stink-o prose all day, but then, a good chunk of my daily reading comes from newspapers, where the soil is particularly rich. In fiction, my tastes have obviously been destroyed by reading too many pulpy mysteries. Somewhere I have a Mickey Spillane paperback where Mike Hammer shoots the gun out of the bad guy’s hand in their climactic faceoff. I always thought that should be the 1,000-point bullseye on a target — hit the gun in the guy’s hand but leave his fingers intact.

Anyway, back to “Thirteen Moons” — I’m enjoying it because it illuminates a part of history that’s a black hole in my knowledge, the pre-Civil War 19th century. Life was a little keener then. A historian once described to me what must have happened in a famous battle on the riverbanks in Fort Wayne: The initial volley by the soldiers using their muzzle-loaders, the fumble to reload, the rush by the Indians and the remainder of the fighting carried out hand-to-hand, using bayonets and hatchets and war clubs. The overwhelming smell on the battlefield would have to be excrement; I don’t see how the average man, red or white, could avoid shitting himself in fright under such conditions. The Indians won this skirmish, and described it in their stories as the Battle of the Pumpkin Fields, because of the way the dead looked on the crisp October morning, their newly bared skulls steaming and pink after the Indians collected their trophies.

I’m only halfway through, however. Things could change.

So here it is, Wednesday, and while I thought for a while yesterday I had turned the corner with this cold, it appears today that was a false dawn. Good thing, because the temperature is dropping, the wind is howling and I’m not going outside unless someone pays me.

Fortunately, there’s supplemental reading.

Bernie Madoff still has a trick up his sleeve, I just know it. You wait — the judge will sentence him to jail, there’ll be a poof, and he’ll simply disappear and rematerialize on a beach in the South Pacific.

It’s been a few days since I checked in at Coozledad’s retirement home for unwanted and amusingly named animals. Of course I missed a lot.

Amusing fact gleaned from Jack Lessenberry: Rep. John Conyers’ staff has a code word for his wife — “Ghetto.”

Back to bed. With “Thirteen Moons.” Work can wait another hour.

Sometimes by Thursday I am all current-evented out. Which is to say, I can’t take any more. As you might expect, this is happening more of late. Fortunately, the New York Times is thinking of people like me, and so on Thursday it is possible to open your paper, discard the bad-news sections unread, and turn directly to Thursday Styles, where daffiness abides.

Today’s enormous cover art was the left-hand photo in this series, which I will describe for those too impatient to click: A model strides scowling down the Milan catwalk, wearing a red cardigan sweater of the sort preferred by your grandmother, accompanied by mud-brown wool short-shorts and “strapped-on leather waders.” Yes, boots that rise to mid-thigh, which must be secured with garters and a belt, like stockings. This outfit was by Miuccia Prada, and reporter Cathy Horyn observes:

What Ms. Prada’s remarkable collection offered was something that has been lost to other values — and that is intimacy, real contact with people’s lives.

Yes! Yes! This is precisely what has been missing from the Italian fashion houses of late — real contact with people’s lives, who are clamoring for some leather waders worn with grandma sweaters.

When I tell people this, they never believe me, but Kirk can back me up: I was once a fashion reporter. A terrible one, granted, but for a couple years in the 1980s I attended New York runway shows and filed reports from Halston’s aerie. (It was always called that — an aerie — and fashion writers are nothing if not followers.) Somewhere in my album is a surreptitious snapshot of Liza Minnelli sitting ringside. I found that despite the twice-a-year trips to New York, and the shoulder-rubbing with Liza, I just couldn’t get into it. The clothes were ridiculous (with some exceptions, like Halston), and it struck me that I simply couldn’t sustain the level of bullshit necessary to do it well, or even correctly. I respect the art and the artists, but when it came time to describe the collections as intimate or overdone or whatever, I was just pulling adjectives out of my ass.

Writing about fashion is a lot like writing about wine. You read these descriptions of chardonnay — “lustful, with strong top notes of apple and ligonberry, and a bang-up finish of nearly astringent balsam and juniper” — and it’s the emperor’s new clothes, it really is.

Something else I noticed: Every single fashion designer, and I mean every single one, dressed in Levi’s and black turtlenecks, or Levi’s and white buttondowns, or Levi’s and T-shirts. Mostly Levi’s 501s. And everyone in New York just dressed in black.

But I still like to read the reports from the runway shows. Because you never know when you’re going to need some leather waders.

Elsewhere in Styles was a mournful account of a vanishing life at the Apthorp, a place whose existence I learned of from Nora Ephron, who wrote a New Yorker essay about her time there. The Apthorp is a sprawling apartment building known for its enormous apartments, most of which have been rent-controlled or rent-stabilized. As I recall, Ephron’s apartment was five bedrooms and more square footage than my house, and she paid something like $2,000 a month, which even then was a tiny fraction of its market price. Lately the building has been snarled in financial problems, but pause for a moment to appreciate “a lone outpost of the kind of bohemian family life that renters could once have there.” How bohemian? The family at the center of the story pays $2,850 for “a 3,300-square-foot four-bedroom with black and green marble fireplaces and several crystal chandeliers, is freshly painted in a shade of white that makes it seem even bigger, reflecting the light that pours in through oversize windows.”

Welcome to reality, folks.

Thus heartened with scorn and schadenfreude, I feel ready to start my day. But first, some quick bloggage:

Thanks to Dexter for reminding me that “Breaking Bad,” yet another of the AMC series, starts its second season Sunday. I wrote about the show last year, just as the first season was wrapping up, just in case you want to, you know, make a few notes.

I haven’t gotten all the way through it yet, but it’s a great read so far: Michael Lewis reports on the financial crisis in Iceland, where speculation has, basically, collapsed the entire economy.

And with that, I run off to the gymnasium to grapple with the medicine ball and Indian clubs. Have a good day.

The other day I saw a movie trailer online — “The Education of Charlie Banks.” It features Eva Amurri. Because my memory for celebrity trivia is stickier than it is for, say, math, I know Eva Amurri is Susan Sarandon’s daughter. I thought I’d watch the trailer, see how much of the old block chipped off on Eva. And I learned something else:

Eva Amurri pronounces her name EH-va. I think it’s fair to say most of the other Evas in this country go with the more conventional EVE-a. I think it’s fair to say young Ms. Amurri has spent a large chunk of her life saying, “No, it’s EH-va” to people who mispronounce her name. Using current actuarial tables, if you totaled up all these moments at the end of Ms. Amurri’s life, they’d come to four days.

Now that I’ve driven most of you away…

One of my alma maters (almas mater?) had a layoff earlier in the week. The Columbus Dispatch severed 20 percent of its staff — 45 people. For those of you who are my age, saying, “Oh, well, I’ve been here 20 years, the Grim Reaper isn’t coming for me,” kindly note that Columbus’ reaper came for a great many people my age or older. From the list of “people you may know” passed along to me, I see a couple people who were there when I was there (and I left in 1984), and a few others with much snow on the mountain. Some of these folks will undoubtedly land on their feet — unemployment in Franklin County is fairly low — but it’s safe to assume others won’t, or they’ll land and twist an ankle, or whatever metaphor you prefer.

This is why I chuckle at the current craze among our friends on the right, which they call “going John Galt,” a shout-out to one of the worst-written novels in the English language. The idea is to protest the current legislative proposals by voluntarily reducing their work output. Withdrawing from the workforce. Some call it “depriving the world of my talents,” which is particularly amusing, as it’s usually the most untalented who are calling it that.

I encourage them to do so, even in this dicey labor market, nay, especially in this dicey labor market. A lot of talented people are on the park bench, and would be happy to take your place. Your bluff is called. Go John Galt.

Much work to do, nothing much to write about here. So let’s skip instead to the bloggage:

Another outstanding interactive map from the NYT, showing unemployment by county throughout the U.S. I learned the jobless rate in Mackinac County, Michigan, where a friend of mine lives, is an astonishing 24.2 percent. That’s the December figure, and in that Upper Peninsula county the work is distinctly seasonal. Still, that’s 6.2 higher than the same time last year. My old Hoosier neck of the woods is equally eye-popping — 15.1 percent in LaGrange County, 11.2 in Steuben? Yikes.

When you die, your heirs have no legal obligation to pay your bills. Most people don’t know this, so a debt-collection industry has grown up to take advantage of this. Ah, America.

WDET is rejiggering their programming again, trying to brand themselves with a capital D, and brought back Ann Delisi, a DJ with a legendary local reputation, for a weekend show called “Essential Music.” I’ve written before about never hearing new music anymore, how you have to be a dedicated detective to find anything interesting, unless you have satellite radio, a fondness for certain podcasts, or just more time than I have at any given moment. All this by way of saying I discovered JJ Grey and MOFRO over the weekend, and have been downloading ever since. I’d like to know how long you people have been hiding them from me, and who’s to blame.

We haven’t had a food post for a while, have we? Here it is, Fat Tuesday, so let’s have one. What’s For Dinner used to be a common topic here at NN.C, as you old-timers can attest. Occasionally I get an e-mail: Nance, what’s for dinner lately? I’m out of ideas. Well, I am, too. My cooking took a turn when we moved here, and a) we could no longer count on Alan’s presence at the dinner table, given the vicissitudes of morning newspaper production schedules; and b) Kate stubbornly refused to grow out of her toddler tastes, and continued to eat maybe seven foods. I decided life was too short to worry too much about this nonsense, and made a sandwich. FTW.

I think maybe I just needed to walk in the wilderness for a while, because lately I’ve been making my way back. It occurs to me that unless I want to put on five pounds a year indefinitely, ultimately ending up on one of those electric scooters at the grocery store, I should change my ways. The Mark Bittman book is illuminating a new path. I’m trying to simplify, un-process, give meat a detour more often than not and cook a bit healthier, but at the end of the day I want a little reward for all those whole grains and fresh fruit during the day.

So last night I decided butter is proof of God’s love, and decided to show the proper gratitude. I made a spinach soufflé and some oven-roasted potatoes with rosemary from our own bush, struggling through winter in the sunny window. And you know what? It was goooood:

Husband, in background, finds Field & Stream more interesting.

People are terrified of soufflés, and for no good reason. They’re much easier than you think, not nearly as tricky as you’ve been led to believe. If you can beat egg whites and fold them, you too can have a lovely entree consisting mainly of air. Truth be told, I prefer my soufflés of chocolate and for dessert, but for a light supper, it’s hard to beat ’em. Maybe with a little mushroom sauce over the top. Next time.

And while we’re on the subject of pleasures and indulgences, let me recommend the second book on the nightstand at the moment, Laura Lippman’s “Hardly Knew Her.” I know Ms. L has written short fiction before, but this is the first I’ve read of it, and I have to say, I’m impressed. These stories are wry and noir-y, concerned with a corner of crime fiction that rarely gets its full measure of attention — troublesome women. And not just the femme fatale in the fitted suit and veiled hat, either, but far more interesting ones, soulless party girls and over-the-hill sexpots and gold-diggers deprived of their full measure of gold. Oh, and the suburban prostitute-masquerading-as-a-lobbyist, and also the one who screws her contractor to get the little extras out of a home reno, and…you get the idea. Read and enjoy.

Pals, I have a whole list of supplemental readings I was going to post for comment, most on the decline of newspapers and some suggestions for saving them (or their newsrooms), but as I started to do so I realized I have utterly lost my enthusiasm for the discussion. Maybe it’s just today, on this fine, sunny, cold morning that still holds the promise of spring. Or maybe I’ve reached my limit. Anyway, not today. Today is a day for Mardi Gras beads and jelly doughnuts and last splurges before 40 days of Lent. (An agnostic though I may be, I retain the cultural patterns of my Catholic upbringing.) Can we muster some bloggage? Perhaps:

You couldn’t go to the Oscar parties, but Hank and his colleague Amy could, and bring you a full report. It doesn’t sound like that much fun:

Barward, we are thrust against the hardened chest of Gerard Butler (King Leonidas from “300”). Thrust again. Thrust once more. We can’t help it, buddy — we are being pushed from behind by . . . Oliver Stone and his Just for Men eyebrows. It’s a manwich. For some reason, Butler decides to go find his grog someplace else.

One minute these guys are all bluster and go-ahead-knock-it-off, the next they turn into pants-wetting, weak-kneed pansies: Rick Santelli vs. his imagination.

Sean Penn doesn’t need screenwriters — he comes up with his own killer lines, and at parties, no less.

And with that, I’m off. Go make yourself a soufflé.