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.

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.