A wise man once described the calculus he made on the subject of baldness. On the one hand, the expense and daily battle of Rogaine, toupees, glue, hair plugs, not to mention the social anxiety of wondering whether people are noticing, whether one has become a figure of fun like Jim Traficant or, for you Hoosiers, Pat Bauer.

On the other hand, “making peace with baldness.” It seemed an easy choice. I agree.

So I guess we should be grateful, if that’s the word, that Christopher Hitchens did what many men are doing these days — working on their appearance the way women do — and wrote about it.
I guess you could call it a public service. Fixing the teeth, negating his classic smoking-Brit smile, was probably a good idea. As for the “sack, back and crack” man-waxing, I’m reminded of my aforementioned wise man. I’ve had body waxing and found the pain worse in anticipation than practice, but I only waxed regular skin. A man’s scrotum is a different kind of skin, and, well…

I had no idea it would be so excruciating. The combined effect was like being tortured for information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly) sandpaper handjob. The thing is that, in order to rip, you have to grip. A point of leverage is required; a place that can be firmly gripped and pulled while the skin is tautened.

The impression of being a huge baby was enhanced by the blizzards of talcum powder that followed each searing application. I swear that several times [J Sister waxer Janea Padilha] soothingly said that I was being a brave little boy… Meanwhile, everything in the general area was fighting to retract itself into my body…

All this to remove hair from one’s balls? Is this now a baseline grooming requirement? I’ve changed diapers on both genders, and confronted with a denuded landscape down there — not to mention the smell of talcum powder — I’d probably start wondering if I had another David Vitter on my hands. A real woman (or man, if that’s the way you swing) doesn’t shrink from a few hairs, or even a lot of them. Bring back the natural look.

It’s times like these I think, “Thank GOD I’m married.” I just cannot imagine dating in this environment.

Have we lowered the tone enough? Have we started Friday out on the right foot? Have I implanted images in your brain that you would happily inject acid into your skull to remove? No? Then you need to check out the slide show. Not to worry — it’s safe. If you have time for only one picture, try this one.

“Sandpaper handjob” — that’s a great name for a band.

Bloggage:

Howie sent me an AP version of the falling-cow story — thanks, Howie — but I have a better one. The couple are locals, and one is a quote machine: “It’s raining cows out here, man.”

Let’s finish out YouTube week with yet another testimony to the strangeness of Japanese TV: Dogs jumping rope.

Have a great weekend, whether you jump rope or not.

A letter from the Department of Silver Linings:

RENO, Nev., Nov. 5 — As his wedding day approached last spring, Marshall Whittey found that his money could not keep pace with the grandiosity of his plans. But rather than scale back, he chose instead, like millions of homeowners across the country, to borrow against the soaring value of his home.

He and his bride, Holly Whittey, exchanged vows on the grounds of a sumptuous private estate in the Napa Valley. They spent their honeymoon at a resort in Tahiti.

But now, in an ominous portent for the national economy, Mr. Whittey has grown tight with his money. His home is worth far less than it was a year ago, and his equity has evaporated. And like many other involuntary adopters of a newly economical lifestyle, he can borrow no more.

I’ve become accustomed to reading bullshit like this about hedge fund zillionaires, money managers and other solid-gold-toilet vulgarians, but anyone want to guess what Mr. Whittey does for a living? He’s a sales manager at a flooring and tile company. In an area with a building boom at full steam, I’d imagine he knocks down a good buck, but not enough to afford his pimptastic wedding without tapping the home-equity ATM. In his attitude toward money, I expect he’s like a lot of people in that part of the country, where benjamins are like buses — there’s always another one coming along. And I hesitate to say he deserves what he’s getting, since all he’s getting at this point is a rather easy lesson in how to economize, far easier than many of us have gotten over the years. May I see the hands of everyone who’s had to economize in order to eat at some point in their careers? Yes, I thought so. This bozo — and many other bozos like him — are only living without restaurants.

And yes, I know that even Mr. Whittey’s pain is real to him, and the decline in his fortunes is shared by everyone, and that money he spends so foolishly every day supports real, non-foolish people in his chain of connections. Still: Cry me a bloody river.

Girlfriend is surly today, isn’t she? Not really. Just under-caffeinated and under-showered. So let’s make this quick, since it’s a bloggage-rich day:

I was having a major walking-into-walls day yesterday, so the news of the Robertson/Giuliani alliance circled my head for a while before coming in for a landing. My reaction was to quote well-known Hoosier sage John Mellencamp: Nothing matters and what if it did? As usual, Roy puts it better.

Fred W. McDarrah died Tuesday. If the name means nothing to you, it’s because you weren’t reading the Village Voice in its glory years, when McDarrah was a staff photographer. I was a subscriber, but I’d never heard this story:

As Mr. McDarrah’s renown as a Beat chronicler grew, his second, inadvertent career took shape. One day in the late 1950s, according to several news accounts of the period, a breathless Scarsdale matron phoned him at his office. Did Mr. McDarrah know where she might rent a real live Beatnik, not too dirty, to read poetry at a party she was giving?

Mr. McDarrah, who by this time knew hundreds of Beatniks (a few scrubbed and all needing cash), happily complied, and a going concern was born. Shortly afterward, he placed the following advertisement in The Voice:

add zest to your tuxedo park party … rent a beatnik. completely equipped: beard, eye shades, old army jacket, levis, frayed shirts, sneakers or sandals (optional). deductions allowed for no beard, baths, shoes, or haircuts. lady beatniks also available, usual garb: all black.

Calls flooded in. For $15, The New York Mirror reported in 1960, the client got one Beat and a half-hour of poetry. Two hundred dollars bought three Beats, who read poetry, answered questions, played the guitar and, of course, the bongos. Mr. McDarrah, who took a small commission and let the artists keep the rest, supplied Beats for school groups, photo shoots, meetings and catered affairs in and around New York for about two years, till the early 1960s.

As an agent, Mr. McDarrah was careful to protect the talent from the clientele. He would not procure lady Beats for bachelor parties. Nor would he rent a Beat of any kind to a children’s party. He once turned down a request from a scoutmaster looking to hire, for a speaking engagement, any Beatnik who was a former Eagle scout. (Mr. McDarrah’s refusal in this case may have owed simply to the sheer impossibility of filling the order.)

Necessity is the mother of invention: The anti-rape device. Ouch! Women seem to be showing their teeth all over lately, most notably in Seattle, where a woman bit off her ex-boyfriend’s lip while they were kissing, then spit it on the floor, where it was found covered in cat hair. And in Fort Wayne, a gal named Constance got right to the point:

An argument between a man and his girlfriend of nine months turned so heated Wednesday morning that the 49-year-old woman is accused of biting the man’s groin area and refusing to let go, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Constance Marie Manning, of the 7200 block of Hickory Creek Drive, is also accused of striking her boyfriend with a dog figurine – causing it to break – and chasing him with a kitchen knife.

You know what makes that story funny? It’s not Connie McToothy, but the reporter who thought to include that detail about the dog figurine’s fate, and set it off with em dashes. Our local weekly’s reporters are constitutionally incapable of translating police-report language into English, and so every drunk-driving arrest is reported thusly: “The officer noted a strong odor of intoxicants coming from the driver’s facial area.” We look for this priceless phrase every week, and we’re rarely disappointed.

And finally, two more YouTube links I forgot yesterday:

Via Ashley, the New Orleans story, in 65 seconds, performed by smart kids.

Ken, I’ve contracted something: Barbie breaks the bad news.

The New York Times ran an old recipe in its magazine Sunday, for something called Teddie’s Apple Cake, c. 1973. I looked at the picture and thought, Mmm, might have to try that one. I left the magazine open on the kitchen table, and when Alan stumbled in, exhausted from a day spent doing battle on the Field of Mars, he took one look at it and said, “I want that cake.”

“OK, I’ll make it,” I said. Later, he said again, “I really want that cake.” I took this as a mandate. So when he called in sick the following day, having been felled by a Force 5 head cold, I decided to make Teddie’s Apple Cake as part of his therapy.

Readers, I’ll cut to the chase: Teddie’s Apple Cake is one fine cake, and very therapeutic. Next time I make it, I’m going to follow the lead of the Wednesday Chef, who cut the sugar a bit and substituted dried fresh cranberries for raisins; my sole criticism is that it’s a tad too sweet, and the cranberries will be a nice contrast. My contribution: The recipe calls for an angel-food cake pan, but I’d guess you could substitute a bundt pan in a pinch. It’s a big, chunky cake, so it may not unmold from a bundt perfectly, but you could take that chance.

What I want to talk about today is the counter-narrative in the Sunday NYT story, seen here:

Boris Portnoy, the pastry chef at Campton Place in San Francisco, says that the cake’s texture reminds him of Black Magic Cake, a moist oil-based chocolate cake, the recipe for which could be found on the back of a Hershey’s Cocoa tin.

But like most chefs who try out the old recipes for this column, Portnoy was frustrated by its simplicity. ‘‘It’s just good and normal, but kind of one-dimensional,’’ he says. We agreed to disagree, and then he had his chance to make something multidimensional — and vastly better.

Portnoy came up with a number of modern desserts inspired by the flavors and ideas in Teddie’s apple cake — one involved walnuts, olives, an almond mousse and roasted quince; another black walnuts, dulce de leche and olive oil.

Friends, this is one reason people are afraid to cook these days. The hours and hours of cooking shows, the time spent watching the “Top Chef” contenders sweat out the arrangement of one sprig of watercress, an artful smear of sauce and a single scallop on a triangular white plate has terrified way too many people who are perfectly capable of claiming their place at the stove. Just look at the phrase in that first quoted paragraph: “frustrated by its simplicity.” Most people are delighted to discover something that looks complicated isn’t. And look at those alternative takes on the recipe — olives, roasted quince, dulce de leche, mmm yummy, just what I’m looking for in an apple cake. Olives. I ask you.

I’d be happy to eat Boris Portnoy’s pastry, and I’m sure it’s wonderful. But I think even Boris would admit that the best food is peasant food, and peasants don’t have time for almond mousse. Give me a nice lumpy stew over a perfectly pureed root vegetable melange with a little dab of creme fraiche any day.

(And how many people have watched Padma Lakshmi take a bite of some contestant’s creation on “Top Chef” and thought, “I bet she’s going to run offstage and puke it all up in five, four, three, two…”)

If you keep reading that story, you’ll learn that Boris rejected the olives in favor of something, er, simpler. At least flavor-wise. You still have to pick some thyme and do some gymnastics with egg whites. I might try that recipe. But I bet Teddie beats it hands-down.

I’ve been sent so many YouTube gems of late I was thinking of doing an all-video post, but instead we’ll make it all-video bloggage:

Who has time to put these things together? Crank that soulja boy, Barney.

Christianity is certainly, um, strange these days.

And finally, this is my godson, the next Ginger Baker.

Happy baking.

Happy day after Halloween. This is not a premonition of the passing of any member of our household — I hope. (Anyway, that member of the household is licking himself at my feet as we speak.) However, when he does go, I’ll already have his calaca ready.

Today we have our bi-annual flirtation with divorce boat-hauling chore. Back later, if I survive.

On Christmas last year, my brother got, well, drunk. Which, I hasten to add, is OK, because he hardly ever does that, and because he let me drive him home, and that led us to the strange night in Obetz where we met the dog sitting at the bar.

Anyway, my Christmas present to my brother that year included a couple of CDs. One was a Robert Goulet collection, selected for one song — “Come Back to Me,” one of those Broadway B-sides I remember hearing a thousand different singers performing on the Merv Griffin Show. And part of being a happy drunk that Christmas night included him playing that song over and over. So now, with Goulet’s obituaries in the papers and the tributes pouring in, I’m not thinking of “If Ever I Would Leave You.” I’ve got three or four lines stuck in my head:

Don’t get lost in Korvette’s
Don’t get signed by the Mets
Take a train, take a plane,
Don’t give up cigarettes,
Come back to me…

There’s nothing like a great baritone, is there? Sigh.

I liked him in “Atlantic City,” m’self.

Off to carve pumpkins. Come back for pictures.

Why I will never stop reading newspapers: Because blogs will never greet me over my morning coffee with a headline like this:

Police: Drunken dad called drunken mom to pick up son

YPSILANTI — Police detained a Northville couple after a wife who drove to pick up her young son when her husband was stopped for drunken driving showed up even more intoxicated than he was, police alleged.

Given that no one was injured, I can enjoy this story guilt-free. Every part of it tickles me, from the Ypsilanti dateline — as funny place names go, Ypsi is pretty good, although run-of-the-mill compared to, say, Rancho Cucamonga — to the dry, pro-forma “police alleged” at the end. [Pause.] You say there’s nothing funny about two children being driven around by drunken parents? You say the rest of the world doesn’t exist for my entertainment?

Way to rain on my parade.

Things I learned while looking up links: There’s a video online called “Living the Dream in Rancho Cucamonga” — Windows Media Player and broadband connection recommended. (If I were writing a novel set there, I’d call it “East of Pomona.”) Also, Ypsilanti was named for Demetrius Ypsilanti, hero of the Greek war of independence. A bust of him stands at the base of the Brick Dick.

Aren’t you glad you stopped by?

My plan today was to bitch about Alice Waters. She is promoting a new book, and getting on my last nerve. Farhad Manjoo in Salon sums up my objections in a nutshell:

Though I have eaten some of the best food I’ve ever encountered at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and though I have generally tried to live by the gastronomic principles that she’s become famous championing, and though I believe that the world would be better off in nearly every way if more people listened to her, there is a limit to what can be expected of us — of me! — and I wanted to tell her, Alice Waters, you just want too much.

Alice Waters is not content for you to simply eat organic produce. No, no. It’s got to be organic and local and seasonal, and really, for it to be any good at all, you have to get it from the farmer who pulled it out of the earth. And ideally that farmer would be a friend of yours. You and he would discuss the soil and seasons and his search for heirloom varieties, and he would give you tips for your own garden, where, of course, you’d spend many of your weekends.

As frequently happens to journalists when they fall under Waters’ spell, though, he’s quickly changing his tune, even after the kitchen goddess says things like, oh, “I am disappointed because (none of the presidential candidates) is talking about food and agriculture,” and then adds that food is:

…the No. 1 issue. Not one of 10. This is No. 1. It’s what we all have in common, what we all do every day, and it has consequences that affect everybody’s lives. It’s not like this is the same thing as crime in the streets — no, this is more important than crime in the streets. This is not like homeland security — this actually is the ultimate homeland security. This is more important than anything else.

In case you people who don’t live in the market basket of America are wondering how you’re supposed to eat in the winter if you’re confined to local produce, the answer is: Root vegetables. Although Waters makes it sound so wonderful: There are turnips of every color and shape!

Yes, well.

We ate from the “100-mile menu” in Stratford last weekend, and lo it was good. But it was also harvest season. I don’t care how many shapes and colors turnips come in. They’re still turnips. I’m not giving up my supermarket just yet.

OK, this isn’t going well. Let’s cut to the bloggage:

It sounds silly, but I’ve read of this happening at least twice before: Hunter shot by dog.

I’m going to Kate’s school Halloween parade tomorrow. I’ll let you know whether the Baby Ho-bag costume story is manufactured for your holiday horror or dead-on. I suspect the former.

More to come later. When I’m awake.

There’s a new series of TV ads for the iPhone running lately, in which ordinary folks stand up in front of a piece of black seamless paper and tell stories about how much they love their you-know-whats, sometimes supported with anecdotes. One features an airline pilot, who talks about how one of his flights had been condemned to a three-hour delay because of weather. “Three hours for a flight that would take one hour and 40 minutes,” he said, knowingly. Oh, man. We’ve all been there.

So, bored, he turned on the iPhone and checked weather.com, where he discovered the weather was actually clearing at the flight’s destination. He called the tower, told them the good news, and whaddaya know, they were cleared for takeoff p.d.q. Go buy an iPhone!

I didn’t greet this news with optimism, as it evidently informs us that a U.S. airport has fewer weather-prognostication tools than the Weather Channel, proprietors of weather.com. I think if most of us realized, on a daily basis, how much all the rest of us are flying by the seat of our pants, so to speak, we’d never leave the house. And yet the world soldiers on.

But the ad was on my mind when I read a non-irritating David Brooks column today, “The Outsourced Brain.” Brooks is at his best on this sort of neutral ground, and he makes an interesting observation — that the beauty of this new information age isn’t how it adds to our store of knowledge, but subtracts from it, by freeing us of having to remember a bunch of stupid crap. After noting his increasing reliance on his car’s GPS system, he writes:

It was unnerving at first, but then a relief. Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns. I myself have been trapped at dinner parties at which conversation was devoted exclusively to the topic of commuter routes.

My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.

Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

I suspect he’s correct. I’ve already noticed the dulling of some of my once-ninja skills in some of these areas. I never used to forget a phone number; I could probably still tell you the numbers of my best friends in junior high school. Nowadays I know my own, and that’s about it, but it’s OK, because they’re all in my phone’s memory, and I don’t need to. I worry more about the loss of geographic knowledge, as geography is more important than any of us think, and not just in the is-Maple-north-or-south-of-Twelve-Mile sense, either. People evolved to be connected to the earth, their own particular patch of it, and being able to delegate it to a GPS unit doesn’t strike me as a huge improvement. Plus, jeez people, do we really need another electronic device to get distracted by?

I keep a compass on my kitchen table’s lazy susan, to remind me which way is north. Every house I’ve lived in until now was oriented square — north out the back door, south out the front, etc. Everything in GP is at an angle. Drives. Me. Nuts.

Bloggage? I got no bloggage for you today, people. Let’s play a game — you leave the bloggage for me to be amused by. And have a great weekend.

Hour Detroit, the magazine I work for most regularly these days, doesn’t put its content online, so I have to find other links to tell you about a short piece I have in the current issue, about this office at the GM Tech Center in Warren.

Go ahead, click. Marvel. Then come back.

It was designed by one legend, Eero Saarinen, for another, Harley Earl, GM’s first vice president of design, the man generally acknowledged to have brought real style to the product line for the first time. It was the crown jewel in the Tech Center campus, completed after World War II and also designed by Eero Saarinen, along with his father, Eliel. The press materials GM gave me described it as “the most luxurious and romantic office ever built,” and in 1956, it probably was. It has doubtless been usurped by some Nouveau Gilded Age bozo’s realm, but it still looks totally cool and utterly modern.

Partly it’s because mid-century modern is back in a big way, but also because someone had half a brain and declined to do any major modifications over the years. The furniture’s been reupholstered here and there and carpet and drapes replaced, but otherwise that’s the same undulating wall of cherry strips and aluminum extrusions, the same built-in sofas and credenzas, and perhaps best of all, the same high-tech gadgetry.

Note the dials and gizmos behind the desk. They can do everything from open the door remotely — a big power play when the big boss remains seated behind the desk, very “show yourself out, then” — to control the lights and sound system. Just behind the pen set in this picture is the desk lamp, tucked away flush in the desktop. Press a button and it rises, unfolds and turns on. The current occupant of the office, GM VP/design Ed Welburn, demonstrated it, and it’s so mechanical — it rises and descends on what looks like bicycle chain. There’s a TV across the room that can be revealed the same way.

Needless to say, it’s huge. Earl was a big man with a big job, and he needed a big space. Welburn’s more average-size, and said you can get a sense of his predecessor’s outlines from the scale of everything — even the concept cars that Earl showed off at car shows were made for a big man with big feet. Of course, everything was bigger, then, including the future. It’s hard not to pick up that sense of IGY-type optimism from just spending a little time in this way-cool space.

My story was pegged to a major Saarinen exhibit that opens next month at Cranbrook. The PR guys who showed me around the Tech Center said the place had recently had Pentagon-level security, but was easing up a bit (although employees are still forbidden to carry camera phones in certain parts of the complex). I felt lucky to see it — the VP’s office was only one of the many design delights of the place.

Oh, and back to the first link: Make sure you scroll down to see the black-and-white photo of the then-Masters of the Universe out on a hunting expedition in northern Michigan. The picture includes not only Earl and Bill Boyer, another GM heavyweight of the time, but also Arthur Godfrey and ol’ blood-and-guts Gen. Curtis LeMay. One look at this crew and you know that whatever their flaws, they probably got those two deer the old-fashioned way, and no one got shot in the face.

Now, if you can, buy the magazine. Old media supports new media, you know.

Bloggage:

Attack of the giant turkeys. Really.

OK, here’s some good stuff:

If you are tired of family-values Republicans being exposed as vile hypocrites you’re not going to want to read the WashPost’s detailing of Richard Mellon Scaife’s divorce woes. If, however, you agree with me that this sort of thing never, ever gets tiresome, well, you’re going to lap it up like sweet, sweet cream. Sex! Money! Six pairs of sterling-silver asparagus tongs! A Lab named Beauregard!

HT to Lawyers, Guns and Money, who also claims to have turned up another reason to hate the Yankees — Derek Jeter, aka Herpes Harry.

(Herpes is making a real comeback, it would seem. All those who are free of this scourge, kiss your faithful partner, and make a note to talk to your kids about it. Valtrex or not, ewwww.)

Department of Looking on the Bright Side: At least the hand-wringing about Chief Wahoo is over for at least another year. In the meantime, for those of you who can’t leave the Cleveland Indians’ mascot alone, a modest proposal for a makeover. (Note: I have no idea how long the modest proposal’s been out there, so this may be older than dirt. I just like the idea of a ballpark with vindaloo available at the concession stand.)

Ellen DeGeneres, serial dog dumper?

Bow your heads for the Malibu Castle Kashan, destroyed by fire yesterday. And let’s all send good thoughts to L.A. Mary, Danny and our other SoCal readers who may be in harm’s way.

I don’t go to Halloween parties anymore, but if I did, I know who I’d be. Woo, scary.