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.

Brother Rod Dreher, who makes his living scratching his beard and expressing opinions, finds inspiration in a right-wing chain letter making the rounds. The “Letter From the Boss” is the usual story — blah blah I worked so hard building my business blah blah no one ever gave me anything blah blah now I have to bail out a bunch of lazy bastards blah blah I am moving somewhere they appreciate me blah blah blah.

Expect it to appear, edited for space, as a letter to the editor of an Indiana newspaper any day now.

As a piece of grassroots conserva-ganda, it’s only average, and it’s not what interests me. What does is how these pieces morph with every e-mail forward, how the details change. I Googled a phrase and beheld the pages upon pages that have seen fit to reproduce it. In one version, the self-denying boss lived in a “300-square-foot studio apartment.” In another, it’s a “two-bedroom flat.” In most iterations, he’s been building the company for 28 years, but in others, for only 12 years, or 48, or nine.

One version changed many details, presumably for an Australian audience. The 300-square-foot studio apartment of deprivation is “a three-bedroom villa house,” (which doesn’t sound so bad, really). The “rusty Toyota Corolla with a defective transmission” — the first detail to mark is as b.s. for me, because as every Detroiter knows, Toyotas never have defective transmissions — is in this version a “rusty Holden Torana with a wonky transmission.” No Ramen Pride for this guy, but “baked beans, stew and soup.” And so on.

Who thought to make these changes? Who said, “Nah, it’s more effective if he’s worked at the business 19 years, not 28.” Maybe because Ramen Pride noodles weren’t common in U.S. markets 28 years ago?

The time to study these phenomena was after 9/11, when they arrived in in-boxes hourly. That was when I though the good folks who run Snopes should all be given MacArthur genius grants, the better to fund their work toward making this a better, or at least less bullshit-saturated, world. In the days after the disaster, I heard a Fort Wayne talk-radio host, a man who considers himself imbued with military rigor and discipline, blithely pass along the whopper about the six firefighters who were found alive and well under a vast pile of rubble, protected by their sturdy American SUV. Never mind the simplest questions would have poked the story apart like the toothpick construction it was — how much rubble? how did they breathe? who are they? where did the story first appear? why were six firefighters driving around under the towers in an SUV? and so on — it was a good story, and for some people, that’s plenty.

By the way, the Letter from the Boss is pretty amusing. The fact owners of small businesses work hard is hardly news to me, but just for balance, here’s how it worked in my little corner of corporate America: The boss was fond of ordering vast changes in the weekend’s papers around 4 p.m. Friday, after which he’d stroll back to his office, pack up his gear, and then leave, caroling to all in earshot, “Well, I’m off to the lake!”

Not that it matters. Another country, dead wenches, and all that.

Via Roy, I see Videogum is looking for the Worst Movie of All Time. Roy congratulates them for singling out “Crash” and “A.I.,” and I do, too, but I would have added the other “Crash” and, well, dozens more. I’m not quite following V’gum’s reasoning — why “Man of the Year” and not “Patch Adams?” Why “Alexander” and not “Showgirls?” Such questions make up the great barroom discussions of our time. Feel free to join in, here or there.

Friends, I’m off. Have a good weekend, and I hope I survive the coming snowstorm. Five to eight inches and no, I’m not happy about it.

Some of you may have noticed I finally got a new book on the nightstand, after trying for weeks to finish “A Bend in the River.” (It was a compelling read that I unfortunately found easy to put down for days at a time. I’m saving it for summer at the pool.)

I broke down and bought Mark Bittman’s “Food Matters” because it’s time to make a change. We’ve discussed foodies and foodie religion here before, but I could never find a version of it that appealed to me, for a number of reasons that boiled down to stupid snotty elitism and stupid snotty worship of tomatoes. But I’ve been reading Bittman for years, and I’d follow him anywhere, and he has enough of a common touch that he can take the basics of the foodie argument — that our food choices do, indeed, matter — and strip away the vileness of the San Francisco School, which basically says, “And if you had it together, you’d choose what I choose.”

Maybe it’s because he structures the book around his personal story of losing 35 pounds following a fairly simple non-deprivation diet he calls “vegan until six.” Who doesn’t love a new diet book? Or maybe it’s the timing, me walking past the book at Border’s at the same time the latest salmonella scare was working its way through the news in its usual fashion:

Step 1: Salmonella (or other food-borne illness) breaks out somewhere, government assures us all is well and under control.
Step 2: Hmm, it turns out the contamination may be wider than we previously thought, however government assures us all is well and under control.
Step 3: Further investigation reveals government agencies are unable to actually track the problem very well, because of deregulation and open markets and the like, however, government assures us all is well and under control.
Step 4, 5, etc.: Contamination is wider than previously believed and may never be entirely contained, however, all is well and under control.

When the latest outbreak occurred, we were assured that the problem was confined to “peanut paste” used in those neon-orange vending-machine crackers and a few other easy-to-avoid products (under control! all is well!). Then, no, it’s in this stuff, and that stuff, and finally, yesterday, the last straw, a look at the peanut-processing plant where it all started. Warning: Put down your sandwich and drink a quick glass of water before reading:

BLAKELY, Ga. — Raw peanuts were stored next to the finished peanut butter. The roaster was not calibrated to kill deadly germs. Dispirited workers on minimum wage, supplied by temp agencies, donned their uniforms at home, potentially dragging contaminants into the plant, which also had rodents.

Even the roof of the Peanut Corporation of America plant here in rural southwest Georgia was an obvious risk, given that salmonella thrives in water and the facility should have been kept bone dry.

“It leaked when it rained,” said Frank Hardrick, 40, an assistant manager who, along with four other workers, described life inside the plant. “Different crews would come in to work on it, but it would still leak.”

It goes on at great, disgusting length, and it and similar stories are simply the last straw for me. I’m not naive; my husband has worked in factory-level food processing and I’ve heard the stories. I have a strong stomach — a strong appetite, anyway — and you know what they say about sausage-making. Even hand-crafted food, lovingly prepared, has a decided ick factor. But this is something else. This is a public-health issue.

Among the many things I am furious at my government for at any given moment, the failure of the Food and Drug Administration to keep us safe from the Peanut Corporation of America and its filthy plant is high on the list. I know that absent a workforce of inspectors equal to the armed services, “keeping us safe” is a pipedream. But the more you read about these owners, how they knew they had contaminated product and sent it out anyway, how they were more concerned with low-cost labor than quality labor, how they couldn’t even seem to swing a decent roof repair, it becomes clear that the plant was run this way because they knew they had nothing to fear from the FDA. In fact, they got advance notice of coming inspections, and instructed their minimum-wage workforce to say nothing.

So I’m doing the only thing I can: I’m opting out. I can’t go whole-hog, but I’ll go half-hog. I’ll restructure my grocery shopping around the assumption that every last item in the store could make me sick (especially the meat), that every word on every label is a lie, and I’ll offer in return the appropriate customer attitude and loyalty. And if making my own granola, decreasing demand at a feedlot and eating more fresh vegetables turns out to be a good strategy for my own health, well, then the foodies will win this one ugly. But as the Captain said in “Cool Hand Luke,” “This is how he wants it.”

Screw Big Food.

So, what’s going on in the world? Good to see the Curse of Madonna remains undiminished. I told someone last year, when she took up with Alex Rodriguez, that just you wait — he’s going to have a very bad year. Madonna has that effect on men. Sean Penn, one of the greatest actors of his generation, married Madonna and made “Shanghai Surprise.” Guy Ritchie, the English Tarantino, married Madonna and made “Swept Away.” Warren Beatty made “Reds” when he was with Diane Keaton and “Bugsy” with Annette Bening, “Dick Tracy” with Madonna. A-Rod is trickier, being a non-creative sort; I don’t know enough about baseball to make a credible prediction when they hooked up, but I knew it would be something, because it’s always something with Madonna. It’s her curse, the dark side of the fame and fortune, a sort of reverse Midas touch for men who dare to come near. She extracts their essence and injects it into her wrinkles, or something. Get away quickly enough, and you’ll live to work again (Penn, Beatty). Stay too long, and it may be all over; I hear “RocknRolla” sucked pretty hard, but Ritchie is still young.

Oh, so you say, and what about Carlos Leon, the personal trainer/sperm fountain tapped to produce Madonna’s Mini-Me? The rules may not apply, seeing as how he was essentially used for stud purposes and discarded more or less immediately, but let’s do a little Google … hmm, the NYPost spoke last summer of the Leon Fitness Center, said to be opening “this fall,” i.e., last fall. Oh, here’s more: It’s part of a condo complex in glamorous Long Island City, and is 1,050 whole square feet, about half the size of my house. I’d say: The curse holds.

It’s hard to know how much of this is honest journalism and how much is the cynical kind, perpetrated by editors looking for buzz, so you can take all this with as much salt as you wish, but.

First, New York magazine:

The long-anticipated war of the world versus Wall Street has erupted, and we non–Wall Street New Yorkers are caught right in the line of fire. On the one hand, how can we not share the populist outrage over bankers’ squandering a decade’s worth of profits and still taking bonuses as they bag federal bailouts? Most Americans just read about these guys; we got shouldered aside at the bar by them, and watched their bonuses push real-estate prices beyond our reach. We have greater cause than anyone to loathe the bastards.

On the other hand, until recently, America’s losses were our gains. Those Wall Street bonuses, in part, went to cover taxes that kept our streets clean and safe. They underwrote charity and culture. They supported restaurants, shops, and galleries. They paid the wages of cabdrivers, maids, doormen, and hairdressers. All New Yorkers stand to lose a lot in the austerity plans being imposed upon Wall Street by Washington.

Hmm, yes, I guess that’s true. All New Yorkers will lose a lot if deprived of the rich crumbs that fell from Wall Street’s table. Regrettably, the damage wrought by these greedheads is not confined to New York, and in fact spreads all over the world, to a lot of places where you cannot enjoy the New York City Ballet and related cultural luxuries. And so my sympathy is the proverbial world’s tiniest violin, playing a sad, sad song.

Oh, and please: Do not tell me that not being able to afford a Manhattan apartment is somehow equal to owning a Michigan house actively sending real dollars down the toilet, in large part because of Wall Street’s criminal behavior. Just…don’t.

Next, the cheekier NYT Sunday Styles. Hed: You try to live on 500K in this town. You sense that a story sourced by an author of an “Upper East Side novel of manners,” real-estate agents and the editor of the New York Social Diary is trying to apply the needle:

Private school: $32,000 a year per student.

Mortgage: $96,000 a year.

Co-op maintenance fee: $96,000 a year.

Nanny: $45,000 a year.

We are already at $269,000, and we haven’t even gotten to taxes yet.

Oh, my. [Pause for thought.] You know, this story is just here to push my buttons. I decline to have my buttons pushed. If you’d like to bat it around in comments, fine, but include me out.

I’m disinclined to engage with Candace Bushnell’s thoughts on what taking the train over a chauffeured Town Car might say about a banker forced to do so, in part because I read this story today, too, and a similar one, from the New Yorker, on Friday. You can read it at that link, but you’ll have to register; a video distillation is here.) The New Yorker story is better, but longer, and takes a look at how Florida’s “Ponzi economy” was brought to a catastrophic halt by the mortgage debacle, how housing was the engine of a long train representing Florida’s linked businesses, and when the engine hit a wall, the subsequent derailment was felt all the way back to the caboose. Reporter George Packer talks to people all along the socioeconomic spectrum, all of whom are suffering varying degrees of calamity. It was, honestly, the most depressing thing I’ve read in a very long time, although I was cheered to see that the “we all must share the blame for this” rhetoric was called out a time or two. A St. Petersburg Times journalist said the blame for this disaster looks like an inverted pyramid, with Wall Street and politicians at the top, and I think that’s about right. Packer talks to a couple who never went subprime, never treated their house like a cash machine, never overspent on credit cards, just tried to eke out a living near the bottom of the economy, and they are now the ones saying things like, “Maybe I’m a bad person. That must be why this is happening to me.” This, Packer observes, is more penitence than it currently being shown in New York or Washington at the moment.

So that’s what you should read.

A bit of bloggage? OK, a bit:

When Jim Harrison wrote his wonderful essay, “Ice Fishing, the Moronic Sport,” he wasn’t kidding. Really:

The day began with fishermen setting down wooden pallets to create a bridge over a crack in the ice so they could roam farther out on the lake. But the planks fell into the water when the ice shifted, stranding the fishermen about 1,000 yards offshore.

One hundred thirty-four saved from their own stupidity, one dead. The day’s temperature: Just shy of 50 degrees. I only wish I was kidding.

My mother’s favorite cabaret singer died this weekend. My mother and thousands of gay men, that is.

Finally, I know I’m very tough on the world’s most overrated newspaper columnist, but in the tradition of even broken clocks being correct twice a day, I give you…(drumroll)…a Mitch Albom column I actually liked. Halley’s Comet will likely appear before this happens again.

Finally, is it just me, or does “Stimulus Package” sound like the title of a dirty movie? Just wondering.

Enjoy your week.

I wrote a story last summer about the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, and I wish I’d had this story to read beforehand — I had no idea lesbian separatism existed beyond short-term deals like the Rosie O’Donnell cruises. (And the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival.) The organizer and I talked a lot about the idea of maintaining a purely male-free zone — artists who commonly perform with male backup musicians are asked to perform solo, and there are restrictions keeping boy children past diaper age away from the action, to name but two. At the end of it I came to the shrugging acceptance I apply to most of these deals: It takes all kinds.

The NYT story I linked to concerns the “about 100 below-the-radar lesbian communities in North America, known as womyn’s lands (their preferred spelling), whose guiding philosophies date from a mostly bygone era.” The bygone era referred to appears to be the crunchy-granola ’70s, but really goes back far further — Americans have been trying to create insular, utopian communities as long as there’s been an America. Maybe Alex can give us a few thoughts about this; he’s an Underground Railroad historian, and many of these groups provided refuge to escaping slaves en route to Canada. He’s also gay, so maybe he has some insight about why a bunch of white-haired crones want to live in a world where no penises are tolerated anywhere, although God knows the women themselves are plenty forthcoming:

“Outside the gate, it’s still a man’s world,” said Rand Hall, who retired as the publisher of a gay and lesbian newspaper in Tampa and St. Petersburg, Fla., and moved to Alapine in 2006. “And women are not safe, period. It’s just that simple.”

I got news for you, sister: No one is safe, inside or outside the gate, but I suspect she knows that already. Even Alapine isn’t safe, as the story suggests — younger lesbians are increasingly uninterested in living like this, which current residents maybe don’t see as progress, but I do. They never knew the world that made these women feel so uncomfortable in the first place, and that’s one of the things I talked about with the Michigan festival founder, who was a few years older than me and only caught the tail end of it herself — the police raids on gay bars, estrangement from families, the threat of job loss and public humiliation. Not every gay woman can pass, after all, or get away with a Boston marriage in a rose-covered cottage in some university town, masquerading as sisters or dear friends united in shared grief over the loss of their beloved husbands. But she — the festival founder — had been stopped going into women’s restrooms and had others hassles related to being very butch at a time when it simply wasn’t accepted. So I get it.

Unlike some of the crueler comments on Metafilter or the utterly clueless Brother Rod Dreher (who’s always threatening his readership with something called the Benedict Option, and I for one hope he gets off the pot sooner rather than later), I think the passing of these settlements is a sign of progress. This is something the festival founder and I batted back and forth for a while. Are women really threatened or degraded by the presence of a man playing bass on a stage behind lights? She said no, but that someone like me could never understand the attractiveness of such an environment to someone like her, and it’s only for a few days, after all. I’ll give her that.

I’ve known deaf people who would just as soon never interact with the hearing world, black people who’d love to live in a no-whites zone. Just about every group that’s been marginalized, abused or otherwise made to feel unwelcome will always have a few members who simply turn their backs on the whole game. Even men have their no-girls-allowed clubhouses, only we’re more likely to call them by their proper names — “seminaries” and “troop ships,” and yes I’m making a joke.

Ultimately, however, I think segregation is a losing game, and to the extent that women like these would certainly feel more welcome in today’s larger world, I think you can definitely call that progress.

What you can’t call progress, I fear, is a bit of news that broke Friday, too late to even make a final pilgrimage: One of my favorite bars in Fort Wayne closed over the weekend, a victim of the recession and, probably, a citywide anti-smoking law. Fort Wayne has a local-pub tradition similar to St. Louis’. It’s full of humble places where you can always get a cold beer and a decent cheeseburger for not a lot of money. Or was. (Please, someone: Tell me Jack & Johnnie’s is still in business.) The Acme was the regular lunch place for Dr. Frank and me, and he was the first person I called when I heard. He was equally gobsmacked, and proceeded to reel off all the family decisions he and his wife had made there, all the after-event rounds he’d bought there, etc. The place was decorated in the sort of style widely imitated in more self-consciously ironic yuppie boîtes — individual jukeboxes at tables, vinyl upholstery, knotty-pine walls. The neon alone is a treasure.

Gone the way of all things, I guess. I’m still sorry to hear it.

Finally, one bit of bloggage: How to hack portable roadside electronic signs. A guerilla-filmmaking skill I’m going to keep in my back pocket.

My old boss Richard did one of those 25 Things lists on Facebook. He did 35, however, and they were all wonderful, but especially Nos. 2 and 3:

2. We had this weekly feature on one of the newspapers I worked for. This elderly guy would draw an animal and write about it. Very educational. After about three years, though, he started drawing animals that didn’t exist.

3. We also had a hunting column, i.e., which animals were in season, etc. We called it “Dinner.” And we had a chatty obit column called “Cadaver Palaver.”

And so another week begins. Enjoy it, all.

In the grand tradition of self-delusion looking at the bright side, let’s take a look at an interesting story from today’s Free Press:

Stacy Sloan, director of culinary education at Holiday Market’s Mirepoix (mihr-PWAH) Cooking School, says that because of the dismal economy, she had expected sales for this year’s cooking classes to be flat or worse.

But the opposite has happened.

Yes, basic cooking classes at this specialty market in Royal Oak are full, mainly with students who have never cooked for themselves before, and are using the recession as a motivation to eat out less and eat in more. The other day I was stopped outside Kroger by a market researcher, who offered me $10 for a five-minute interview on video; one of her questions was whether I’m eating out less. I said not really, that one pitfall of recessionary economies is their self-perpetuation, as people curtail their spending and by doing so make the situation worse. But I certainly understand the impulse, and to the extent it gets a few more adults comfortable around knives, cutting boards and saute pans, so much the better. There’s something amusing about seeing people learn the simplest things. Last quote:

“You can start out with a roast chicken as one meal and make other meals from it,” he says.

I imagine this guy, getting this idea, bathed in pure white light. I’m glad my mother was cremated, so I can’t hear her rolling in her grave.

But seriously: Home cooking = good. I’ve been doing my nightly news-farming for three years now, and one story I’ve seen grow from nothing in that time to something that alarms even me is the contamination of the U.S. food supply. We’re under another salmonella cloud, this one from peanut butter. Here’s what I find interesting: Most super-market peanut butter is fine, provided you’re not buying in five-gallon buckets. It’s the peanut-butter products that are transported in tanker truck-size loads that are the problem, which is why the recalls are for things like those neon-orange snack crackers you buy from vending machines, and not the jar of Crunchy in your pantry.

It’s best, if you eat processed food, not to think too much about it. I think I’ve told Alan’s many entertaining stories of his college years, spent working in various food-processing plants before. What they’ve done is made him unwilling to eat certain brands of canned soup and frozen pizza. Other people I’ve known have worked everywhere from commercial dairies to candy factories, and none of them eat the stuff they used to make, either. Best line, from my ex-candy making friend: “Chocolate is the opposite of scotch. You’ve got to learn to dislike it.”

But salmonella’s only the beginning. The other day I bought a package of ground chuck for the Derringer family’s dirty little dinner secret: Family Taco Night. As it was going over the scanner I noticed a package sticker I hadn’t read: Product of U.S.A., Canada and Mexico. Ewww. (I made sure that stuff was well-frickin’-done, believe me.) Globalization and open markets mean your supermarket snack cake may be made from ingredients gathered around the world, many in countries where food-safety regulation is, um, flexible. How did melamine get into the food supply? Chinese entrepreneurs found it raised protein levels while costing less than actual protein, with poisoning being merely an unfortunate side effect. This sort of corner-cutting is an established business practice in the Asian economy. Bon appetit.

I see Mark Bittman has a new book out, and unlike the more abrasive Michael Pollan and elitist Alice Waters, he seems to have an actual understanding of how average Americans actually live their lives. The diet he advocates — less crap, more plants — is one most people can manage, if they have rudimentary cooking skills. To the extent these classes are helping make that happen, huzzah.

I’m off to learn Final Cut Pro — be there soon, Rob — so here’s a bit o’ bloggage:

I see quite a few snarkers took note of Dick Cheney’s wheelchair and made the usual jokes, most of them about Dr. Strangelove. They’ve got it all wrong. This is the cultural reference you’re looking for:

Rich jerk suicide watch: Another one, this one a so-called Celtic Tiger. Tigers elsewhere call him a pussy denounce him as unworthy of big cat-hood.

What do you get when you knock on the door of a house with a “fresh coons” sign in the yard? Why, you get a recipe:

“You soak him in vinegar and water, soak it four, five hours, and that get the wild game taste out of it. After that you cut him up just like you cut up a rabbit, then you preboil it about a half-hour, let the water jump about a half-hour, then take him out, put him in a pan like that, get your seasoning on, then you put him in the oven, just like you do a roast.”

Yes, folks, it’s another gem from Detroitblog. (BTW, I can’t tell you how many reporters of my acquaintance would have failed to write down the best line of that passage — “let the water jump about a half-hour.” Poetry.)

It’s the first day of the rest of the Obama administration. Mark it however you will.

People tell me I should get Netflix. They’re always Netflixing some cool movie I can’t find at Blockbuster or on my eight million cable channels. It’s so easy, they say. I was a charter member and wouldn’t go back for anything.

What about the pop-under problem? I ask. They stare blankly.

I can’t support a company that is trying to kill me with stealth advertising, I say. Several times a night when I’m working, my laptop fan shrieks with fury: Too much Flash! My processors can’t take this! I hit F9, which instantly tiles all open windows, and find six Netflix ads, which I then have to close down one by one. Click, click, click, I, hate, Netflix.

There has to be a better way to do internet advertising. Disposing of the slicks that come with the Sunday paper is a pain, but it doesn’t feel like an encroachment. Also, it doesn’t feel stupid. Part of what I suspect investors in internet companies like about the whole business model is how hands-free it is. Set up a blog entirely without human help. Set up your blog to do your blogging for you, even. With the right scripting you can buy a book, participate in an auction, do all sorts of things without any unnecessary face-to-face, or even voice-to-voice contact. In the business world, this is known as efficiency, cutting those imperfect human beings out of the production process. What good are they? Computers don’t ask for health insurance.

And so it was that I was checking the forecast the other day, and noticed this:

Note the line under the green bar: Stay warm on the links. Weather.com is a virtual cavalcade of linky goodness, its main page clickable nine ways from Sunday, but that one took me aback. For one thing, 22 degrees hardly qualifies as golf weather. For another, every golf course within 100 miles is covered with several inches of snow. For yet another, even the ones that aren’t covered with snow generally aren’t open in the winter. Turf can’t repair itself when it’s dormant, and it doesn’t pay to staff the pro shop for a handful of lunatics who want to play golf in extreme conditions. Dude, unless you have tickets to Florida, the season is over.

But I couldn’t resist. I clicked:

I was taken to a page of “content” so thin as to make a standard Gannett tip box look like a PhD curriculum. How to stay warm on the links? Dress in layers. Make sure you spend extra time warming up before you swing. And what tips page could be complete without this line: And since body heat escapes through your head—Grandma was right about that—wear a wool hat. It’ll help keep your whole body warm. Wow, thanks.

There has to be a better way to do commercial material on the web. There better be. This is worse than junk mail.

Bloggage:

Sadly, No tracks the perambulations of the Mission Accomplished lie, but I’m more interested in the language issues. “We were trying to say something differently,” the president said. Did he mean “different,” and added the extra syllable to sound extra-smart? Or does he understand that “differently” is an adverb that modifies “to say”? Your call. And note his lackey’s usage: ““[That’s] why he endears so much loyalty from people like myself and others who had worked for him.” You don’t endear loyalty, do you? He meant “engender,” right?

Steve Jobs does not have a “hormone imbalance,” he has something “more complex,” requiring a five-month medical leave. Apple stock doesn’t fare well and I don’t blame the market, for once. Surely Apple is more than Jobs, but how’d you like to hold stock in Martha Stewart’s corporate entity and discover Martha’s not feeling so well? There’s a fine line, in the business world, between a strong public face and a cult of personality. The solution: Replace Jobs with “Steve Jobs,” a virtual figure created by Pixar. Orville Redenbacher and Colonel Sanders have already paved the way.

Another charming essay by Roger Ebert, this one on goodness on screen.

Minus-one at the moment. Kill me now.