I went to bed expecting a cold and woke up feeling more or less OK, so I’m hoping it’s an omen. Because wooee, we may have a fun few days coming up here. My press credential for the North American International Auto Show was approved, so I’ll be attending the press preview, starting Sunday. Look for updates here and at Grosse Pointe Today, which may be duplicates or may not. I have no specific plan for coverage; I plan to work via the time-honored but forgotten tactic of “letting things happen first, and then writing about them.” So we’ll see. I applied because, duh, this is a pivotal year for the industry that supports this company town, and I wanted to see how recent catastrophes affect the overall mood of the show, which in most years is celebratory.

The first year I went as a working journalist I spotted a common attitude among my colleagues — the supercool mask of Not Impressed. Chrysler is known for entertaining, attention-getting stunts during its press conferences, and that year it introduced a new Jeep, then drove it offstage, through the Cobo Center, smashed through the front window, drove it down the steps, across the street and up a specially constructed rocky-hill platform in front of the Pontchartrain Hotel. They put Angie Harmon, who had been in an earlier press conference, in the way of the Jeep as it blew through the convention floor, and she squealed as she ran out of the way. Later, I mentioned it to another reporter.

“Oh, that,” he said. “They did that 10 years ago.” Well, excuse me. Friends, I admit it to you now: I laughed. It was funny.

I expect a subdued show this year, but it will have to walk a careful line. The point of the show is optimism and salesmanship, but when you’ve taken a bunch of money from the taxpayers, it probably won’t pay to overdo the stunts, or even the liquor — some tightass Baptist southern-state senator might take offense. (In the past, most of the exhibitors have some sort of open bar for press-preview days. A drinking journalist is a happy journalist.) The Firehouse — the food-and-liquor trough across the street traditionally colonized by Chrysler for its diplomacy — is closed this year. And I doubt (muffled sob) there will be a cattle drive. Damnit. But we’ll see.

I’ll be packing the laptop, the Flip and the iPhone. So start watching your RSS feeds Sunday.

In other news at this hour, our longtime friend and reader Adrianne (aka Mrs. Lance Mannion, aka the Blonde) sends along a bit of humor from that fixture in every American newsroom, the amusing soul always described as One Wag. Adrianne works in the far far exurbs of New York City and as a perk of the job gets all the NY tabs delivered to her desk. She writes:

So here’s the front cover of the New York Daily News Thursday morning: “I gave her my kidney, she broke my heart” (and now I want my kidney back!) The story concerns a certain Long Island doctor, Dr. Richard Batista, who had donated a kidney to his wife, Dawnell, in happier days. Dawnell repaid the gesture by sleeping with her physical therapist. Now they’re in divorce proceedings, and he wants the kidney back. Barring that, he’ll take $1.5 million.

I like how Adrianne has already internalized the language of the gossip pages, which you can see in her unselfconscious use of the phrase “in happier days.” This staple of the boldface names came up in Anne Tyler’s “The Accidental Tourist,” in a scene where Muriel writes a country song based on it. Funny I should mention country songs, because Adrianne continues:

I challenged Ken Hall, our editorial page editor and talented writer of doggerel, to come up with a country-western song about the doc’s ordeal. Here’s the result:

First she took my kidney, then she broke my heart
She messed around behind my back and tore my life apart.
She left a hole inside of me that’s very hard to fill
A million and a half bucks, now I’m sending her the bill

CHORUS:

She married me and promised that in health and sickness, too
We’d share it all – and she meant all – so what was I to do?
I should have known that first time when I saw her from afar
That she would be the kind of girl who always leaves a scar.

I’m not some kind of monster, no vampire, ghoul or ghost
No grave digger or gold digger, I feel quite free to boast
My friends all say I’m very nice, and not the nasty sort
But add up what I have in life and I’m an organ short

CHORUS

She might give me a hand? Who cares? Not what I want to hear
She needn’t stick her neck out, or even lend an ear
It’s not as if I’m looking for an arm, a leg and such
I only want my organ back, is that asking too much?

CHORUS

BraVO! I smell synergy here. If anyone wants to set the lyrics to music, I ask only a credit in the liner notes.

It’s a beautiful day with snow on the way. Best hit the retail sector for supplies and, just to be safe, Zicam.

Because I need another time-waster like I need another time-waster, I recently bookmarked the Daily Beast, Tina Brown’s new aggregator. Yesterday, Herself speaks on Princess Caroline, in a piece called “Caroline: The Reasons Why.” (How new media! In the 20th century, I was taught that was a redundancy — reasons or why, but not “reasons why.” But never mind that.) After a few hundred words of shivs to the ribs — calling her an “endive salad,” living “a parochial, socially timid life centered on Manhattan’s most cosseted enclave,” Brown decrees: “The Kennedys, blindsided by the success of pea-picking, penny-ante, polyester-wearing provincials like the Carters and the Clintons, were never all that delighted when Bill Clinton’s wife commandeered RFK’s old Senate seat.”

Jeez, you’d never know the Kennedys are only three generations from bootlegging shanty Irish trash, would you? And get that “commandeered,” too. Someone tell Hillary: All that listening? Wasted time.

Then she winds up with a bang:

The hope for Caroline’s troubled candidacy now is that another dynastic story than her own may provide her next act. When The Washington Post’s Phil Graham was the manic, magnetic media king of the New Frontier capital, his wife Katharine was drab and invisible in the background. When her husband died in a suicide, she stumbled uncertainly at first. She was inarticulate, she lacked charm. No one really imagined that she would run The Washington Post herself. Then she found, just as Caroline has with politics, that printer’s ink coursed through her veins. Yes you can, she thought. And yes she did.

I have to admit I’d love to see Princess Caroline get the seat just to watch that transformation. Perhaps that’s what the governor is betting on.

Wha-? That’s what we’re looking for in a senator? A narrative? A reality show? “A transformation” to watch? Does anyone give a shit about policy anymore? And what does Katharine Graham have to do with anything? But the Daily Beast was only getting started. Next was “Lance for Senate?” in which the cyclist takes a break from comeback training to open up to Mark McKinnon, who, it should be noted, sits on the board of his foundation. Not that you’d notice from the questions:

You are such an inspiration to so many people. Who inspires you?

What drives your competitive nature?

And, of course, the biggie:

Is there a future for Lance Armstrong in politics?

But that’s nothing compared to the answer:

If you feel like you can do the job better than people who are doing it now, and you can really make a difference, then that’s a real calling to serve, and I think you have to do that. I felt a strong desire to come back and race right now because I felt we had a place and I could have a real impact and that’s why I’m doing it. I don’t think you want to enter political life unless you really think you can really have an impact. Don’t do it for a bet, or a dare or for your ego. Or for any other competitive desire you have. Do it because you can get in there and change people’s lives. That’s why you do it. So, there will come a time, or not, that I say to myself, “You know what, I can help affect change.” And if that day comes, then absolutely.

Lance? Do you have any idea what a senator does? It may surprise you that the job description doesn’t include “getting in there and changing people’s lives,” although that might be a by-product. I really would have liked to see the unedited version of this, before the “how do you keep yourself so awesome” questions were excised.

I actually might like to see him run. I’d love to see the look on his face when someone yells at him, “How did you manage to keep your doping from being discovered?” from the press pack. Not that he’d ever get close to it. Princess Caroline and Sarah Palin showed you don’t have to do that. At least not when you have Mark McKinnon and his notebook nearby.

And just because we’re on the subject of celebrity, don’t miss this Defamer post about how Owen Wilson’s Rolex watch helped save him from suicide. Thanks to LAMary for sending it along; we’re both at a loss for words.

All is not lost, however: Dana Milbank in a priceless account of the RNC chairmanship race. Stay classy, GOP!

I’ll say this for living in America’s most-loathed city (suck it, New York! we rool!) — local-media coverage of the auto-industry crisis is a cut above. You can’t really feed slogans and warmed-over talk radio calls to an informed audience, and so we’re spared “but if they’d only make cars people want, none of this would be happening.” For the most part.

My favorite of these is: America doesn’t want SUVs. Ha. Now they don’t. They don’t want them when gas is $4 a gallon. But until gas got that high, they wanted lots of them. Did everyone sleep through the ’90s and the first half of this decade? People not only wanted SUVs, they wanted them in all sizes, shapes and colors. They wanted big ones (Suburbans). They wanted little ones (Escapes). They wanted their Japanese brands tricked out to look more SUV-like (hello, Honda CRX). They wanted fancy-schmancy luxury SUVs (Escalade, Navigator). They wanted cheap ones for the entry-level market (Hyundai, Kia). Did O.J. Simpson flee in an Accord? I must have missed that.

Even now, they still want so-called crossovers, SUVs that drive and handle more like cars — Buick Enclave, Ford Edge, etc. You can pick many, many fights with the U.S. auto industry and make many, many good arguments against the government helping them, but you can’t change the facts to suit your prejudices, and the fact is, the Big Three invented the SUV, and for a very long time, the SUV was very, very good to the Big Three. So please shut up about that.

(On some right-wing blog I can’t remember, I heard the most stupido argument of all: The companies didn’t want to make SUVs, but were forced to by their onerous UAW contracts, which required them to make the highest-profit-margin vehicles possible. These people really live in their own fantasy world. I don’t want to wake them up. They’re like sleeping babies.)

Here’s the other thing you don’t hear so much here: Those greedy autoworkers. How dare they want stuff like health insurance and pensions. We really are crabs in a bucket, aren’t we? Again, go ahead and make informed remarks about certain work forces having to face the reality of higher co-pays and cost-sharing. But unless you’re willing to give up your own company-paid health insurance in solidarity, kindly shut up about it. Non-union GM retirees lost their health-care bennies earlier this year — replaced by a whole $300/month subsidy to buy private insurance in that marvelous free market, and good luck with that if you’re a cancer survivor or have heart disease. Spare a kind thought for them, eh?

What we’re seeing in Detroit is the death of the well-paid working class, and if that makes you happy, go be happy about it. Asshole.

Anyway, speaking of cars nobody wants:

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times.

For now, the port itself is the destination. Unwelcome by dealers and buyers, thousands of cars worth tens of millions of dollars are being warehoused on increasingly crowded port property.

And for the first time, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Nissan have each asked to lease space from the port for these orphan vehicles. They are turning dozens of acres of the nation’s second-largest container port into a parking lot, creating a vivid picture of a paralyzed auto business and an economy in peril.

But…but…people want Toyotas! How can this be happening?

It is more unusual to see a lot at the California port filled with thousands of unsold Mercedeses, most of them gathering dirt on the plastic white film that protects their hoods and trunks. Some appeared to have been stashed at the port for several months.

Last week, Mercedes delivered around 1,000 more cars to Long Beach on the Grus, a 580-foot container ship.

“A year ago, I was looking into buying one of these for my wife,” said Kurt Garland, the terminal manager overseeing the unloading of the white, silver and black sports cars, sport utility vehicles and sedans. “Now I’m not. I’m saving money, paying bills, hunkering down.”

Oh, the poor economy is to blame. Not those Mercedes SUVs nobody wants.

(Yesterday I wrote on my Facebook status that I felt “amorphous anger.” I’m starting to see why.)

So let’s lighten up, a bit, shall we? I hope somewhere out there in the ranks of working screenwriters, someone is crafting a script about pirates, and not the ones in the Caribbean. If you can’t get a movie out of Somali hijackers, rocket-propelled grenades, hijacked Saudi oil tankers and the Indian Navy (!!!They have one??!!), you’re not worth your union dues. Or you’re just not reading the newspapers. (I heard on NPR the other day that all the coastal fishing villages in Somalia have become pirate dens, and that all the women want a pirate boyfriend. Well, duh.)

My Great Books discussion group meets in three hours, and I still have a few pages of the reading material to get through (“The Man Who Would Be King,” if you’re interested), so let’s wrap it up with just a bit of bloggage:

One of the reasons I sometimes curse Roy Edroso is, he got me hooked on reading Rod Dreher, and a more entertaining correspondent of Wingnuttia you will not find. What I like about him is his lack of filters; so much of what he writes seems to come directly from an id-well in his brain, and so you’ll sometimes see, in the space of 36 hours, a plea for us to be kinder to one another (“because we’re all carrying a great burden”) and then a denunciation of a bride who wants her wedding dress to show a special tattoo as a slut. It’s so amusing.

Anyway, lately he’s all het up about the Prop 8 backlash in California. “Gay mob assaults peaceful Christians,” he shrieked on Monday, embedding a video clip that showed the reaction when a group of Christians went into the Castro, the most famous gay neighborhood in the whole frickin’ country, to try to pray the gay away. Astonishingly, it wasn’t friendly. I know, I’m as shocked as you are.

The next day, he called for all of us to “stand by the Mormons,” because “a friend” tells him:

Things are pretty grim. On the ground pastors are worried, and for my Mormon friends it is very bad. No LDS person in their right mind who is not a man of courage would announce his church affiliation without knowing it to be safe.

Safe? From what? Disapproval? An argument? I must have missed the invasion of Salt Lake City by the drag-queen army. Even his Beliefnet commenters were unimpressed:

Yeah, it’s like Darfur out there what with all the pogroms and midnight roundups and mass executions of the Mormons out there.

Oh, well. On to Rudyard Kipling. I’m calling it the white woman’s burden.

Perhaps in preparation for the Great Delamination, I went through one of my periodic stints of tree-shaking yesterday, scanning Monster, CareerBuilder and Craigslist for any freelancing opportunity I might be unaware of. I found one asking for freelance writers willing to turn out five 400-word pieces per week, for $2 per.

I e-mailed and asked for clarification. Surely, I asked, that $2 figure was a mistake?

No, it wasn’t, came the reply: “These are very simple articles that won’t require any research,” and that was the going rate. Two thousand words = $10.

I’m consistently amazed by the economics of this thing. To this day, when there’s a big layoff at a newspaper or some other catastrophe in the life of someone who writes for a living, someone will pipe up in the comments on a blog somewhere: They should start a blog and join an ad network, and then they’ll be working for themselves. Win-win!

Meanwhile, Bossy, who gets 10 times the traffic I do — yes, 7,000 to 9,000 uniques a day — can’t make a living from her blog. (Even though she brought this reader great pleasure with her examination of “Something’s Gotta Give,” a film that made me insane, for many of the same reasons. I mean, sure, playwrights have kitchens like that. If their name is Neil Simon.)

Meanwhile, journalists, would you like to be insulted? Take note of the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. Subhed: “Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay your bills.” Here’s the bailout: If you’re a recently severed journalist, TypePad will give you a free pro blogging account and access to their ad network, which “pays a lot more than simple Google text ads,” a retail value of about $150. After that, it’s all up to you! Take flight, little journalist! And if you learn that your TypePad blog, “while clever,” will not pay your bills, either, perhaps Starbucks is hiring.

Mommy’s in a bad mood today. Mommy thinks she should go lift weights.

So a little bloggage:

While Mitch Albom was pretending to be Woody Guthrie in the paper — a new low for phoning it in, I might add, and I don’t even want to think how much he makes — he was actually down in Florida hangin’ with his cool celebrity friends at the Miami Book Fair. (See video.) I also wouldn’t rule out the idea that he’s using makeup (man-kup?) or, possibly Botox. There’s something odd about the way his face moves, or doesn’t move.

Finally, a favor for a friend, another former colleague:

My oldest son Derek is a graduating high school senior, and he has been nominated to participate in a video scholarship contest. The scholarship could net him a nice chunk of college cash. ($20,000 to the first place winner). He created what I think (father or not) is the best on the site (certainly the “corny”-est), but the contest is decided solely upon popular vote, not on quality or creativity. (which right now seems to mean which student can get the most people to vote, and vote, and vote … oh yeah, and vote as many times as they can) … between now and November 28th.

The video is here, and it is indeed corny — I say that with love, because corniness seems to be the point. The scholarship is offered by King Corn, so no matter how you feel about high-fructose corn syrup, you can point your browsers in the direction of a good cause. You can vote as often as you like, and you don’t have to sit through the whole video to do so. And certainly, his dad is going to need all the college-finance help he can get, seeing as how he works in journalism.

Today’s update is the ADHD Edition. You’ve been warned:

Peppers and eggs — now there’s a breakfast of champions. Cook the peppers first in some EVOO, and you could even call it healthy. (I will brook no slander of eggs. Moderation, peoples.) Halfway through, I remembered I’m supposed to be lunching with JohnC today, and I probably won’t be hungry until 2 p.m. Ah, well. That’s why we have salads.

Saw the trailer for “Cadillac Records” on the Apple site this week. It looks as though it has a 50-50 chance of being tremendous or sucktastic. I winced at the moment where the Rolling Stones show up on the sidewalk outside the Chess offices to tell Muddy Waters they’d named their band after one of his songs. But when Beyoncé sings “At Last” — magic. And Adrien Brody is swiftly becoming one of my favorite actors, mainly due to his marvelous honker. I don’t think I’ve seen an imperfect feature make for such a perfect face since, oh, Barbra Streisand.

Trivia: Barbra Streisand was on the Knight Ridder copy-editing tests, along with Charles Addams, for obvious reasons. Now you know. And yes, I caught them both. (Although, rereading this entry prior to hitting “publish,” I see I misspelled Adrien Brody’s name — twice.)

And while we’re making transitions from tissue-thin connections, here’s Adrien Brody in the titular make of his latest movie. Sigh. Detroit was something while it lasted, wasn’t it?

Which brings us around to the automotive bailout, apparently dead in the water, and probably that’s a good thing. You don’t cure a drug addict by giving him one last binge, and after quite a bit of reading I’ve come around to Micki Maynard’s analysis — bankruptcy is a better way out for General Motors than a bailout. Although this, from Tom Friedman, sounds appealing:

I am as terrified as anyone of the domino effect on industry and workers if G.M. were to collapse. But if we are going to use taxpayer money to rescue Detroit, then it should be done along the lines proposed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday by Paul Ingrassia, a former Detroit bureau chief for that paper.

“In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company. … Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”

I like the idea of Mr. or Ms. Hard-Nose putting Rick Wagoner and the Board of Bystanders (to use Jalopnik’s amusing phrase) in charge of the office coffee pot while they tear up contracts and fire people. It will be so amusing to mop up the blood in the gutters of my neighborhood. We live in interesting times, don’t we?

Wherever the former GM workers end up after Paul Ingrassia’s plan has them beheaded, the women among them will want to invest in a nice suit. The NYT says so: The return of the interview suit, it proclaimed yesterday. Jezebel got a little knicker-twisted over it, but that’s just because they’re young and products of our casual culture. The interview suit was simply a given for women my age; we called them hire-me suits. For best results, hire-me suits should always be worn with fuck-me pumps — it sends precisely the right message, which you are free to retract as soon as you get the job. In later years, it was always sort of funny-painful to see younger people going through the interview process, as clearly the relaxation of rules had done them no good. One kid came in wearing what had to have been his dad’s suit, it was that big on him. (He may have borrowed it from David Byrne.) They wore neckties and pantyhose as though these items were made of barbed wire, not the trappings of adulthood. Once hired, they retracted their own messages, and started showing up in Teva sandals exposing dirty toenails. Which is fine, I guess, but you should still make the effort for your first impression. It’s common courtesy.

By the way, does anyone know who made the pantsuit Darryl Hannah wears in “Kill Bill, Vol. 2”? I want that for my next suit, along with the blouse and the six-foot-tall coat-hanger body Hannah brings to the party. She can keep the eye patch.

And now I am distracted by a shiny object and must go. But I wish you all a great weekend.

Barack Obama extends his press honeymoon for one more day with this fascinating New York Times story about the Hawaiian plate lunch, said to be one of those secret-longing favorites of the president-elect.

Which is? you ask. Get ready:

Drawing on the food ways of the Hawaiian Islands’ many Asian immigrant groups, and chowed down on regularly by everyone from surfers to businessmen to the future occupant of the White House, the plate lunch is simple in form but varied in its elements. Its foundation: two scoops of white rice and a side of macaroni salad, heavy on the mayonnaise.

This carbo load — usually piled into a plastic foam container — is paired with a protein, generally of the pan-Asian variety, often slathered in brown gravy. After a morning of hard work (or hard surf), one might opt for Korean kalbi or meat jun, Chinese char siu roast pork, Philippine pork adobo, Hawaiian kalua pork (a luau favorite), Japanese katsu or salmon teriyaki, Portuguese sausage, American-style beef stew, or loco moco — a hamburger patty and a fried egg.

I was with him right up to the brown gravy, but I get the idea. While perhaps unique in its pan-Asian weirdness, the basic structure of the plate lunch should be familiar to anyone who ever ate beef and noodles, chicken and noodles (including that singular Hoosier oddity, chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes), or my personal favorite, the Amish haystack.

My first screenplay was based in Amish country, and I included a haystack scene. Two teenage boys were sitting at a dinner table, and if a haystack should appeal to anyone, it’s the bottomless pit of an adolescent male stomach. Googling around for a description, most point back to the Amish Cook column, but I think this single line from a Washington Post travel piece says it best:

Plates in hand, we walked a line of women and girls, who each added a scoop of haystack ingredients: cracker crumbs, rice, seasoned hamburger, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, peppers, melted Velveeta cheese and crumbled Doritos.

You see the similarities: Start with a bed of carbs, add protein, top with sauce. It’s not really a recipe so much as it’s a way to clean out the fridge. Lots of recipes start with spaghetti on the bottom, but the interesting thing about Amish food is the way it calls, so often, for the cheapest possible ingredients, real Depression food — hence the crackers. And the Velveeta. (So often city people think of the Amish as the proto-crunchy con, living their pure peasant lives out in the country, which isn’t necessarily untrue, but I only want to note: When you have no refrigerator, Velveeta makes more sense than artisanal cream cheese, eh?)

Anyway, back to the plate lunch. I admire its daffiness, signified by the macaroni salad. Hawaii really is a land of mutts, isn’t it?

Quick bloggage, because I have a lot to do today:

The most interesting thing about this post-election period has been the beating of breasts and searching of souls in the GOP. “Fresh Air” had an interview with the NYT’s conservatism beat writer, David Kirkpatrick, who identified the new and old factions within the party. Old: Social issues, national security and fiscal restraint. New: “High” and “low.” Pretty cruel, I know, but what it boils down to is, if you aren’t embarrassed to say you believe in evolution, and are embarrassed by the separation of the country into “real” and “not real” segments, you’re high. If you love Sarah Palin, you’re low. I’d add to that: If Ted Nugent makes you want to change the subject, high; if you put his “writing” in your magazine, low low low.

Probably of interest to Detroiters only, this nearly slipped past me on Tuesday, a pollster’s look at the two key suburban counties here, Macomb and Oakland, and how the changes of past years reflect on voting trends there.

And probably of interest to journalists only, Ron Rosenbaum delivers a long-overdue takedown of Jeff Jarvis, he of the citizen-journalists-will-save-the-world school of media analysis.

Finally, I posted this to Facebook because I found it simultaneously amusing and depressing: Michelle Slatalla’s rumination on how difficult it is for a woman to lose weight after 40. I’d heard of Spanx, but I’ve never worn them. (Gents: They’re the 21st-century version of your grandma’s girdle.) What I’ve been missing:

I still remember how ecstatic I felt the first time I slipped on a pair of Seamless Mid-Thigh Shapers and managed to zip my tightest jeans. A sense of relief and well-being flooded me.

Unfortunately the good feeling didn’t last. Soon I had to start wearing two pairs at once. If only, like Gwyneth, I could have stopped there.

But I graduated to the harder stuff. I moved on to the Slim Cognito Body Shaping Cami and the Hide & Sleek Full Slip, as well. Yet each time a new layer magically smoothed one bulge, another popped out like a balloon sculpture of a dachshund.

Despite the company’s warnings, I kept going. “If you go with more than two layers, it’s Spanx abuse and you need to get help,” a Spanx spokeswoman warned me.

Two layers of Spanx! No plate lunch for you!

OK, have a good day. I’ll be writin’ and exercisin’, so I can be a big fat middle-aged girl, too.

Great googly moogly, here it is the day before Halloween and I haven’t bought any candy. Must get some, if there’s any left. Anything other than Circus Peanuts, that is, the sad reject of trick-or-treat bags the world over.

Who am I kidding? Of course there’s candy left in the stores — that’s one advantage of living in an emptying metro area in a deep recession. There’s always inventory. It’s not always the inventory you want, but no one runs out. Yet. That’ll come. For the early warning, you need only travel a mile or two west of my neighborhood and check out our local mall, Eastland in Harper Woods. I walk through Eastland with a feeling of nagging familiarity, with another mall named for a compass point dancing just outside my cognitive lobes…oh, what is it?…Ah yes, Southtown. I can already see, Carnack-like, into its future:

It starts when you go to the mall’s big anchors — in this case, Macy’s, Sears and Target. You normally think of Macy’s as a full-service department store, but you can never find what you’re looking for there. When you ask a clerk, “Is this all the winter hats and gloves you have in stock? This is it?,” they look sad and say, “Oh, we don’t carry a full selection at this location. You have to go to (insert name of mall in more prosperous area).” The Sears is full — and I mean full, crammed, racks-in-the-aisles-full — of oddities like spangled cocktail dresses in some sort of weird polyester that looks like a science experiment and cost $14.99, but the Land’s End turtlenecks are nowhere to be found. Target soldiers on; it’s Target and it cannot fail, at least not this year, but the rest of the mall is a carbuncle on its ass. Management has decided its customer base is 99 percent African American, and every store has a name like Urban Scene and sells ghetto-fabulous gear along the lines of Apple Bottom jeans and those manic-embroidered jackets with the big fur-trimmed hoods, but there’s not a pair of Levi’s in the building.

Wait. Wasn’t I talking about candy a minute ago?

Yes, well. I’m thinking Reese’s Cups this year. I’m only staying open for the first hour, anyway. After that I’m going to a neighbor’s house for Girl’s Night Wine-or-Treat. I’ll leave the remaining candy in a bowl on the front steps with a sign reading, “Please take only one.” Some kid will empty the whole bowl into his bag before I’m out of the driveway. That’s the Detroit Way, and I’m not complaining.

So what did we think of Barry O. last night? I tried to watch it with two sets of eyes — the critical, journalist-who-dabbles-in-video one, and the lizard-brain variety, and the verdict was the same. I wasn’t in tears, but I was impressed. As a piece of propaganda, it was a master stroke. Whether anyone was watching? We’ll see. If I were John McCain, I’d hire John Woo:

Quick bloggage today (LA Mary was having a slow afternoon yesterday and did most of the heavy lifting):

As long as there’s Larry Birkhead, we’ll always have Anna Nicole Smith. Note this fabulous shot of America’s luckiest baby daddy packing up the memento mori for an impending move to the ‘burbs. I was so taken by the pink bubble wrap I was sure it was Photoshopped, but a little Googling revealed the truth: Pink bubble wrap exists. (It’s the antistatic variety, for electronics.)

When Alan bought his shotgun a while back, I said I wanted one of these. It turns out there’s more to love about the makers of The Back-Up: They aren’t afraid to exploit high-profile tragedies for their own profit. It’s the American Way!

Finally, the program for Zombie Night is online.

I’m off to put on my winter cycling tights that I splurged on this year — the ones that make you feel like you’re wearing a big diaper, or 1960s-era maxipad — and punish myself.

This one’s for the Buckeyes in da house, yo. I found it buried in a side rail over at John Scalzi’s site, and it’s old, so forgive me if you’ve already seen it:

On the October 15 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio show, (host) Bob Grant said: “[W]hat is that flag that Obama’s been standing in front of that looks like an American flag, but instead of having the field of 50 stars representing the 50 states, there’s a circle?” He then said: “Is the circle the ‘O’ for Obama? Is that what it is?” Grant later said: “[D]id you notice Obama is not content with just having several American flags, plain old American flags with the 50 states represented by 50 stars? He has the ‘O’ flag. And that’s what that ‘O’ is. That’s what that ‘O’ is. Just like he did with the plane he was using. He had the flag painted over, and the ‘O’ for Obama. Now, these are symptom — these things are symptomatic of a person who would like to be a potentate — a dictator.” ‘

You want more? Sure you do. Grant went on:

Hey, I could be wrong. But I wouldn’t say this on this great radio station if I didn’t think there was some merit in this conjecture. And I stress conjecture. And so much of what we talk about is conjecture, is theory, is opinion based on intuition, based on some facts, based on some history.

Because, of course, it’s perfectly reasonable to believe that Obama had his own special stars-stripes-and-an-O flag made for him, because he’s an elitist, you know, and that’s what elitists do. Why, as I write this, my own personal NN.C standard is flying over the roof, as it always is when I’m in residence here at NN.C central. My subjects demand nothing less of their leader. Grant goes on:

I don’t want to overdramatize this. Being dramatic, I must confess, does come easy to some of us, because, maybe that’s why we’re in this business. It is show business, is it not? I know some of my colleagues don’t want to admit that, but they are the greatest showmen in the world. And I tell you this. I tell you this quite seriously. I am alarmed at the prospect of his election. I — I would hope that if he is elected, that I could come before you one day and say, “Hey, there was no need to be alarmed, I was wrong.”

If you knew nothing about Bob Grant at all, you’d know he was old by this point, wouldn’t you? Aren’t you already getting the smell of Dentu-Creme in your nostrils from that last part? I think it’s the “greatest showmen in the world” phrase that does it. It’s like Jerry Lewis in the 22nd hour of the Labor Day Telethon. You just know, any minute, he’s going to start crying.

Well, Bob Grant is old — 79. Because older people generally got a more classical education, you’d think at some point he might have caught a glimpse of the Ohio state flag:

I guess not. Back to gumming your food, Bob.

It’s always good to start the day with a big laugh, isn’t it? A big laugh and a huge cup of coffee. On Saturday I had lunch with three of my zombie colleagues, and the talk turned to the things we put into our bodies that are bad for us. The youngest person at the table said he was going to give up coffee for a while.

“Why?” asked the oldest person at the table, who was not me, I’m relieved to say. “You’ll get terrible headaches and you’ll feel awful.” That, in a nutshell, seems to sum up my middle-age attitude toward toxins of all sort: Why abstain? If one is not abusing them, if one uses them only for their mild mood-elevating properties, and in moderation, why fret? Sooner or later something is going to kill each and every one of us. It might as well be coffee.

I’d like to see what death by coffee feels like, some day. Maybe like the depictions of vampire-blood tripping in “True Blood.”

OK, then. When the campaign news becomes too oppressive for me — something that happens several times a day — I’ve become fond of clicking over to WeSmirch, which aggregates gossip blogs. In recent days it’s been led by news of the cross-table sniping in the Madonna/Guy divorce. The rundown: He’s cold, not “spiritual,” entitled. She’s cold, spiritual to the point of looniness, entitled. He wasn’t nice to her after she fell off the horse and broke her arm. She is too tired to have sex, sapped by her four hours of daily exercise, which leaves her feeling, in Guy’s arms, like “a piece of gristle.” In other words, about what you’d expect.

But the best part was when Guy was said to have “abused” Madge by telling her she couldn’t act.

Pause.

BWA HA HA HA HA HA. It’s worth walking away with a relative pittance for that kind of satisfaction.

I’m gym-bound. Fueled by coffee. Let them try to stop me today.

When I read the story about the RNC’s $150,000 clothes shopping spree for Sarah Palin, my heart sank. It was the usage of “appears to spend” that did it, which was in early versions of the story; I thought it was going to be like that “Cindy McCain wears a $380,000 outfit” story, which was, sorry, pure bullshit. Ninety percent of the figure was based on some jeweler’s estimate of what her earrings might cost, although the jeweler never got to check them out with the loupe. I thought the next line would be, “And that yellow Oscar de la Renta dress was spun from pure gold, it looks like. Let me redo the math.”

But this is a little better-sourced. In August, no expenses stated; in September, $49,425.74, plus $4,716.49 on hair and makeup, and isn’t it ironic that we all know there’s no way that much could have been spent on Grandpa Simpson, and Sarah Palin is actually a very pretty woman. Beautiful, even. And so you get the basic irony at the heart of femininity — the better you look, the more you have to spend to make people think so.

Let’s just talk makeup now. Some years ago, before Photoshop, some magazine — Harper’s, I think — ran a copy of the itemized bill submitted by the photo retoucher who worked on a famous magazine cover featuring Michelle Pfeiffer. It went on and on, dozens of places where the airbrush had been used to cover that wrinkle or smooth over that skin booboo. The joke of the list was that the picture had run under a cover line that read, “Michelle Pfeiffer is perfect exactly the way she is,” or something similar. There was another list going around at the time, a makeup artist’s detailed plan for giving Brooke Shields the no-makeup look on another magazine cover. It required 57 separate products costing about $450.

A person who can feel no empathy with another can’t be fully human, so here’s my soft spot regarding Palin: I know, looking at her, that when you’re a woman in the public eye, you just can’t win. To be sure, she looks sensational on the campaign. But if she didn’t, if she showed up for speeches in something she found at the Wasilla T.J. Maxx, there’d be another kind of hell to pay. You might as well look your best while you’re taking shit for stuff you have no control over.

And yes, maybe it’s true that this was all Palin’s doing, that the RNC staffers tried to get her to shop at Dress Barn and she waved her imperious hand in the air and said, “Designer or else, little missy, or you’re going back to D.C. on the next plane. You can take your chances with the Bushes and see how it goes.” But I doubt it. A job needed to get done fast; note how many charges are to department stores in the Twin Cities. The jaw does drop at the $150,000 figure, but my friends? That’s what happens when you pay full retail. They probably got nicked for a “personal shopping” charge, too.

Don’t Republicans know what Hollywood does? You pay a call on the designer and make an arrangement. You wear their clothing somewhere it’s guaranteed to get photographed, and the bill disappears. Well, wait a minute: Nancy Reagan did this and got called on it, so maybe not. Still. Someone at Neiman Marcus saw these folks coming and rubbed their lucky Rolex.

Here’s the ridiculous part, however: Instead of, y’know, owning it, the McCain camp made it worse:

“With all of the important issues facing the country right now, it’s remarkable that we’re spending time talking about pantsuits and blouses,” said spokeswoman Tracey Schmitt. “It was always the intent that the clothing go to a charitable purpose after the campaign.”

I want to know when that church rummage sale is going to be. (Even though Sarah wears a much smaller size.)

But as I said before: You just can’t win. We’ve become a nation of Robin Givhans, hunting the next Pulitzer in a piece about the semiotics of asymmetrical buttons. Much of her stuff rings a little too snarky for me — hasn’t she ever looked into her closet on a given morning and despaired? doesn’t she ever have PMS Wardrobe Madness? — I’m very glad she does what she does, because occasionally it serves as the national response to such sartorial oddities as the John Roberts family press conference. (I watched that one thinking, “Where do you even buy seersucker short-pants suits and saddle shoes for little boys these days? Does Nordstrom’s have a special department behind a secret door?”)

Frankly, Palin has been making such a mess of things on the trail, it’s probably just as well that she looks good doing it. If her hair was a mess at the same time, it would be too easy for the RNC to say, later, “Oh, that crazy lady…”

Sorry for the late start today, folks — another sleep deficit payback. Back to speed and ready to rock. So, rock on.

Michael Pollan was on “Fresh Air” yesterday, and as usual, I was left nodding my head in agreement with everything he said, while simultaneously mistrusting all of it with every fiber of my being.

Yes, our agriculture policy needs a huge overhaul. Yes, we should pursue policies that encourage more food to be grown locally. Yes, the world is not well-served by huge feedlots and monocrop farming. Sure, the White House should have a Victory Garden to set an example for the rest of the country and donate the leftovers to local food banks. Yes, let’s consider the rising cost and toxic fallout of fossil fuels when we consider how government will play its role in the marketplace. Yes, yes, yes.

And yet.

There seem to be a dozen places in Pollan’s stump speech, at least, in which “and then a miracle happens” seems to hover over the narrative. I soon learned that it was linked to the parts where Pollan says, “I’m not a policy maker, but…,” another way of waving one’s hand dismissively while saying, “details, details.” I didn’t hear every single minute, so maybe he addressed this at some point, but the biggest stumbling block to agricultural policy, Pollan-style, is the loss of an essential skill in this country: Cooking. Of course I cook, and you cook, but all you have to do is look at the explosion of “convenience” and other heat-n-serve, half-baked and other food in the grocery these days to know that an awful lot of people don’t. And I don’t know how we make our way away from high-fructose corn syrup and toward unprocessed-and-organic without that skill.

If I’ve told this story before, forgive me, but I always think about it when I think of the loss of cooking skills: My newspaper once sponsored a cooking demonstration, for which I served as the speaker’s Vanna White. At one point we made cupcakes in foil muffin cups arranged on a cookie sheet. She filled the first three and I did the rest. All of hers came out perfect and mine spread out like pan pizzas. She pointed out I overfilled the cups by just a tad, and that tad was enough to buckle their sides. “This is stupid,” I said. “Why don’t we just put the cups in muffin tins, the way you’re supposed to?” Alas, not possible. Reynolds Aluminum, one sponsor of the show, wanted the cups demonstrated freestanding on cookie sheets, because they were aimed at home cooks who owned a pizza pan, but not a muffin tin. Sometime in the last 25 years or so, a muffin tin became as exotic as a brioche mold or a tart pan.

I could tell more stories. A couple years ago I did a business-mag story on the explosion of specialty groceries in Detroit, whose biggest growth area is in pre-marinated chicken, pre-assembled casseroles and other just-add-heat entrees. “My wife doesn’t cook, so we live on this stuff,” said one owner. (P.S. His wife is a stay-at-home mother, which suggests she’s also a real underachiever.) “No one I know cooks anymore.”

“I cook,” I said.

“You do?” he said. “Well, you’re in the minority.”

And I’m a college-educated, middle-class person. We’re not even talking about the poor, whose nutritional status is even more perilous. At least the grocer’s wife is getting decent ingredients; the poor kids are living on Red Zone Mountain Dew and pork rinds.

I suppose Pollan would point out that cooking is easy, that a delicious meal can be assembled from a box of spaghetti, some olive oil, garlic and Parmesan cheese. Of course these skills can be taught. But good luck teaching them in a world where muffin tins are specialty kitchen equipment.

I also break out in hives when Pollan says that “food should be expensive,” as though it’s not expensive enough now, pretty much admitting that he’s advocating a Whole Foods-ification of the marketplace. There’s a winning position, pal. Ride that pony all the way to Washington, whydontcha?

So, bloggage:

Obama goes off to hold his dying grandmother’s hand, and you know someone’s gonna have a problem with that. Roy has the rundown.

When we were taking breaks from making our zombie movie, of course a few of us dared speak of the Holy Grail — making a real movie, and how it might be done well on a very small budget. Then I stumbled across a trailer for this movie, which appears to be a big stinkin’ p.o.s. shot in SEVENTY MILLIMETER, entirely financed by corporate America. Has anyone seen this? And how can I get Wal-Mart, Coca-Cola, American Airlines and MasterCard to finance my movie?

Off to the gym, folks. I neglected it all last week, so it’s time to pay the piper.