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.

When I was in St. Louis, I stayed with my friends Vahe and Cindy, whom I know through my journalism fellowship, back in the dark ages. Both work for the Post-Dispatch, and Vahe is recently returned from the Beijing Olympics. He said our fellow Fellow Adi Gold, who is Israeli, had sent him a story from a Tel Aviv newspaper after Michael Phelps won his second gold medal. That was the relay, if you recall, the squeaker won in its last leg by Jason Lezak. The headline, Adi said, translated to “Two Jews and a black man help Phelps to a gold medal.”

In the great tradition of sleep-deprived people everywhere, “two Jews and a black man” became the week’s punchline for a segment of the press room, Vahe said, culminating in the inevitable “two Jews and a black man walk into a bar.” (I don’t even know if it’s true. I’ll take their word on Lezak, but “Garrett Weber-Gale” doesn’t exactly sound like Abe Rosenberg. Whatever.) So let’s keep the dream alive, eh?

Two Jews and a black man would agree with me that the Wall Street bailout is a raw deal for taxpayers. I’m tired; I blame the midnight interruptions of two Jew and a black man, carousing under my bedroom window. Let’s try that new restaurant tonight, what’s it called? Oh yeah: Two Jews and a Black Man. It’s fusion cuisine.

Anyway. I really am tired this morning, and have no one to blame but myself, but I’m going to the gym come hell or high water, so not much from me this morning. You people seem to have a talent for carrying on with or without a bartender. Just a little bloggage:

You’ve probably seen the gossip stories about the “Brazilian supermodel” who had a fling with young John McCain on a steamy weekend in Rio 51 years ago. I call your attention to the photo of the paramour in her younger days, which today would be reason for any self-respecting modeling agency to throw her out on her padded ass. However, I’m reminded of a story about body image in Brazil that ran in the NYT a while back, which related the original lyrics to “The Girl from Ipanema.” There’s a verse in there about the roundness of her bottom, which translates to “more than a poem, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.” I’m sure two Jews and a black man would agree.

Finally: Hey, Henry Paulson! Why not buy my shitpile?

Back later, or maybe not until tomorrow. Depends.

Really. Don’t look where you want to look. Look at her feet. That woman must be a hell of an actress, because I can tell you, those dogs are barkin’ but she doesn’t let you know.

Here’s a line I’ve been waiting my whole life to use: Sorry I’m late today. I was polishing my screenplay.

Which is the truth. It appears “The Cemetery Precincts” is a go, and if we all lived in the same town, I’d invite you all to be zombie extras, but at the moment, finding locations is a more pressing concern. It’s true that everyone wants to be in showbiz, but with the real, paying showbiz all over Michigan at the moment, the no-budget hobbyist has to go to the end of the line. With the state currently offering filmmakers the highest rebate on money spent in production in the country, you can’t swing a cat without hitting Drew Barrymore smack in the face. Alan came across a sizable shoot on a bike ride the other day; they’d taken over a mansion on Windmill Point Drive down in the Park. I suspect this is “The Prince of Motor City,” a retelling of “Hamlet” set in the auto industry.

Anyway, they had streets blocked off. We’re just looking for a few places we can shoot guerrilla-style.

It was just as well that I was thinking of low-budget zombies and how to explain an uprising of the undead this weekend, because every time I thought of events in the real world, I felt like clawing someone’s throat out. At one point Saturday, as I waited at the gate for my flight home from St. Louis, watching CNN Headline News, we all watched a story about the federal bailout. A clip from our president featured him looking even more the dumb Irish setter than usual, and when he said, “It turns out the markets are interlocking,” lacing his fingers together for emphasis, I thought, How proud Harvard Business School must be of its most successful graduate. And I said, louder maybe than I’d intended to, “BullSHIT.” Up and down the row at the gate: Titters. Granted, maybe they were laughing at the crazy lady talking to the TV, but I like to think that if I’d risen from my seat, climbed up on it and said, “To the nearest federal building! Who’s with me?!” I’d have gotten a few followers. I don’t think Washington is quite aware of how incandescent the fury is out here in Deep Pockets-ville, and what will likely happen as a result, especially if stories like this…

The financial crisis that began in the United States spread to many corners of the globe. Now, the American bailout looks as if it is going global, too, a move that could raise its cost and intensify scrutiny by Congress and critics. Foreign banks, which were initially excluded from the plan, lobbied successfully over the weekend to be able to sell the toxic American mortgage debt owned by their American units to the Treasury, getting the same treatment as United States banks.

…and this…

Even as policy makers worked on details of a $700 billion bailout of the financial industry, Wall Street began looking for ways to profit from it. Financial firms were lobbying to have all manner of troubled investments covered, not just those related to mortgages.

…become widely known and discussed. I’m also thinking that indemnify-the-CEOs stuff is a non-starter, too. But then, I’m an extremist; I advocate stripping them of their assets, and then their clothing, and sending them on a national tour of, say, Springsteen-size arenas, there to be chased through the rows and struck by audience members who will, further, jeer at their shriveled weenies. That sounds like justice to me. Or at least a good start.

You’ve probably seen this, which was going around this weekend, but if not, read and feed on the sweet, pure anger.

St. Louis was fine, if anyone wondered. After spending Friday night talking, I went over to my friends’ house to meet their new dog, who had moved in only hours before. She’s a skinny, undersized golden rescued from a puppy mill who nevertheless seems to be adjusting well. At eight months she’s unlikely to get too much bigger, but she’s got the blonde silky coat thing going on, and that’s all you can ask from a golden. Name’s Frankie. She came from an all-female litter, and they all were given men’s names. I called her Francesca, Francine, Francie, etc., which is what I do with my loved ones. My own pooch has more diminutives than a Russian novel, enough that it’s a wonder he answers to his own name at all. (Of course, he doesn’t anymore, but that’s because he’s deaf.) Saturday was spent touring the city — such a prosperous-looking place. I can’t figure if that’s because the local economy is strong or my eye’s been Detroit-ified; I suspect the latter. But the inner-ring neighborhoods are blossoming with money, and it was heartening to see. Not everyone wants to live in a subdivision. It’s nice to see a few reaching critical mass.

Not much bloggage today, but a question: Who let America’s aging sweetheart, a star beloved by all who know her, one possessed of the rare talent of sincerity and the ability to laugh at herself, wear this horrible dress to the Emmys? It doesn’t matter how skinny you are — past 70, a woman should wear a sleeve.

Happy Monday to all of you.

We had some fairly apocalyptic weather this weekend — apocalyptic for around here, at least. OK, maybe just “bad” would be less hysterical. What it did was rain buckets and buckets all day Saturday. Then we had a little bit of a break, and then the remnants of the hurricane arrived and it rained more buckets Sunday. In between, we had a little dinner party.

I spent much of Saturday afternoon cooking, and it was nice, with the windows open enough for a breeze and the rain pitter-pattering outside. And then everyone arrived and the kitchen seemed to burst into flames, it was so hot, and I wondered, is this some change-of-life thing? but everyone else seemed hot as hell too, and of course if you turn on the A/C it takes two hours, minimum, to cool everything down, so basically we just suffered. You can’t control everything, I guess, especially hot air masses pushed by monster storms. But there was something about the heat and the shortening days and the buckets of rain and the dinner conversation and “This American Life” on Saturday that made me think, man, we are all screwed. The second chapter of TAL was about the do-nothing Securities and Exchange Commission, and how they’ve sat around on their confused asses for the last couple of years, while Wall Street has waltzed the economy to the edge of a cliff, and I reflected that the campaign has become whether a mean photographer made John McCain look like a monster or if Barack Obama wants to teach your kindergartener how to put on a condom. I said a while back that if Obama could put the Wall Street message in simple language in a 10-minute stump speech with lots of pullout quotes, he might could maybe win this thing.

Of course, at this rate, it might be too late for that.

The dinner party was nice, in case you were wondering. Beef tenderloin, fresh green beans and corn, new potatoes, a little gazpacho to start. Blueberry-peach pie. Very WASPy, very basic. Oh, and since I walk past it in our container garden all summer and daily say, “You know, I need to do more with that tarragon,” a sauce bearnaise for the beef.

Beef tenderloin and bearnaise sauce during a financial meltdown is known as whistling past the graveyard.

This seems a good point to segue into the bloggage, since it falls under the classification A Few More People I Don’t Feel Sorry For: Remember all those people in Galveston who, when told to evacuate, yelled, “Hell no, we won’t go!” while all their friends lifted a glass and gave them a rousing hell yeah? Do you have some sympathy to spare now? Ahem:

With no water or power, no working toilets, no food or phones, people faced growing public health concerns here on Sunday. More than 2,000 residents who had defied an evacuation order were taken off the island, and state officials tried to ensure that no one could return.

“The storm was easy,” said Brenda Shinette, 51, who rode out the hurricane in her home but went to a shelter Sunday hoping to be taken to the mainland. “It’s what came after that was terrible.”

“We have no showers, and the food is spoiled,” Ms. Shinette added. “I feel like I want to pass out, but I can’t tell if it is from too much heat or too little food.”

She said the lack of toilets had become so bad in her neighborhood that she had been avoiding eating so she would not have to use the bathroom.

No? I didn’t think so.

Eminem has a new album coming this fall, and with any luck, an end to his Graceland period. It’s not doing anyone any good.

I should get to work. Just got a Facebook friend request from a guy I knew in Fort Wayne, since moved on. He was just laid off when his paper folded unexpectedly. And here I am making a no-budget zombie flick. Talk about fiddling, etc.

Enjoy financial Armageddon!

Oh, and a quick update, in keeping with our Armageddon theme today: The News’ sports page screams AS BAD AS IT GETS in Armageddon-size type, and they’re not talking about Wall Street, but rather the Lions, and once again Wojo speaks for us all:

DETROIT — This can’t keep happening. It’s cruel and unusual and flat-out absurd. And yet, for the Lions and Jon Kitna, it happens again and again, until fans scream to keep from crying. Every time there’s a glimmer, it’s gone. Almost every time there’s a game to be won, it’s lost.

The Lions are wandering in a bizarre world of their own making, with no clue how to get out. They tossed away another one Sunday, rallying from a 21-0 deficit to take the lead, then collapsing and losing to Green Bay 48-25.