When you do time on the night city desk with a future Pulitzer winner, then you can be quoted in her chin-scratching Sunday essays.

Julia Keller puts my ill-formed opinions on a par with Alex Kotlowitz’.

Obligatory I-was-quoted-out-of-context disclaimer: The portions of my stream-of-consciousness e-mail — she asked for my take on Britney Spears’ delamination — that she chose to quote might lead some to believe that I was not an early participant in the Britney pile-on. I take full responsibility for making fun of a mentally ill person. Have mercy on my soul.

Letters, we get letters here at NN.C:

I thought I would share a tale of corporate horror with you.  On Saturday, I hosted an open house to attract pipe-fitters to this factory. I had a quota of 25 hires in one day. Steep, but I thought I could do it.  A lot of planning and very very long hours went into this event.  Our Chief Pipe-Fitting Officer asked if he could say a few words, and silly me, thinking it would be a little welcoming/come work here/we love you speech gave the OK. As if I had any choice.

Ten a.m., the doors open, pipe-fitters come in, have brunch, get schmoozed, get steered to the correct managers to interview, get toured around the pretty parts of the factory, it’s all great. Noon, the CP-FO starts his speech.  It’s a f*cking PowerPoint presentation with lots of statistics. It goes on for 40 minutes in monotone.  Then he introduces a Six Sigma black belt who works with the pipe-fitting department.  He goes on for an hour explaining what Six Sigma black belts do for you, me and the world, as well as the history of Six Sigma black beltedness.

Pipe-fitters are leaving through side doors… Pipe-fitters are asking me if they have to stay…..people are walking out of interviews…..

I’m judged by how successful the open house was in attracting pipe-fitters.  I’ve been rendered powerless by two curses of our decade: the Six Sigma black belt and PowerPoint presentation.

Some details have been changed; the experience remains nearly universal. Six Sigma — it’s like Scientology for business people. No one can fully explain it, but it involves thetans and e-meters and being the best black belt you can be and maybe some burnt offerings to an effigy of Jack Welch, at the end of which you are capable of 40-minute PowerPoint presentations and all the rest of it. Being a conscientious objector to corporate America these days, I am largely spared this torture. I guess what’s why you guys get health insurance, though.

The combined sleep deprivations of the week tend to catch up with me by Friday, and I’m dead on my feet. I’m exercising the perogative of every lazy bum and going back to bed for another 90 minutes. By the way, the weather yesterday was every bit as awful as the radar image promised, although we were spared tornados. I had to be down at Wayne State in early evening, and traveled there and back in torrential rains. The freeway was flooded and treacherous, which had the usual Detroit effect, in that it slowed traffic not a whit. At one point I was passed — and this while clipping along at 65 — by a bus. On the way home I hit some debris scattered across the eastbound lanes, something that appeared to be a dozen or so sodden telephone books. Just another day in heaven.

In the meantime, enjoy some bloggage:

Jon Carroll is his old witty self on the problems of being dead when you’re not, identity theft from beyond the grave and, of course, bureaucracy:

A while ago I wrote a column about a man trying to convince the Department of Motor Vehicles that he was not deceased. He stood before the clerk with two pieces of ID and said, in essence, “Behold, for I am a man born of woman, and I live.” He had his daughter with him, and she also had two pieces of ID. (Apparently the daughter was important because she was officially alive and was therefore a qualified witness.)

And the clerk said, again in essence, “That is all very well and good, sir, but our records indicate that you are deceased.” The clerk thought the line on her computer screen should be given equal weight with the solid, well-identified human in front of her.

Finally she said: “This is the kind of thing they handle in Sacramento.” That’s among the 50 worst sentences you can hear, right behind “I’m afraid the tests are inconclusive.”

Once upon a time you stood atop a building while prowling searchlights tried to find you, and you shouted, “Come and get me, copper!” Nowadays you go to your MySpace page and post a semiliterate taunt: “2 fast for the feds to cocky for the cops!” Bonus amusement factor: the cops, being perhaps somewhat less cocky, caught the dumbass within 24 hours.

Back later, perhaps. Please, don’t call me.

This just in: Spring approacheth. The equinox is still a month off, the weather of late has been atrocious, but yesterday when Sprig and I were mincing along the treacherous, icy sidewalk, trying to avoid falling on our canine and human butts, suddenly, there it was — that ineffably subtle change in the air that says, Hold on, I’m comin’.

At first I thought it was way too early, and then recalled that it’s usually the second week in August when I notice autumn off on the horizon, approaching on his dun-colored horse. That is, six months ago.

Then the sheet of ice I was baby-stepping on cracked, and icy water swept over the dog’s paws. He looked pissed. Can’t blame him.

Speaking of dogs. I recall a line from an essay — Thomas McGuane, I think — saying the best dogs refuse to be completely domesticated, that the streak of wildness that remains in them is what makes them worth sharing your lives with. I think of this whenever my own gets into some sort of trouble. Like yesterday. I finished lunch, got a couple of Girl Scout cookies for dessert, and dropped the last quarter of the last Samoa on the floor, because it’s nice to share. Went back upstairs. Shouldn’t have.

Kate has her GS cookie orders bagged individually and sitting on the floor of the family room, awaiting delivery. I’ve been telling myself they’re safe because they’re double-wrapped in plastic and cardboard. When the dog sticks his nose into a bag, I say, “Get out of there” and he does without objection. A couple times I’ve thought I heard something and checked it out, only to find the cookies untouched, the dog peacefully sleeping on his bed, which is what he does most of the time these days.

Until yesterday. Thank God Girl Scout cookies are packaged in super-noisy crinkly plastic packaging, because I heard the plunder in progress from upstairs, ran down and caught him before he did too much damage. Only one box had been torn open. Samoas, of course.

“Bad dog!” I said. He didn’t slink or cower. You knew durn well I was a snake before you brought me in.

Kate used to have a videotape of a BBC production of Beatrix Potter stories. The Tale of Mrs. Tittlemouse is about the fussy, compulsive cleaner and tidier-up of her little mouse burrow. A giant toad in a waistcoat stops by one day and asks for some honey. She says she doesn’t have any, the liar.

“Mrs. Tittlemouse,” he says, in this low, growly, BBC-Cockney accent. “I can smell it.” It’s the filthiest line I’ve ever heard in a children’s production. This cookie event will be known in the future as the Mrs. Tittlemouse Incident.

So, bloggage:

Emma is learning to play the violin. As always with Emma stories, when she changes gears away from her own experience to talk to others — the people who actually justify doing the story — I get impatient. Who cares about these boring people learning the guitar at 50? I want to hear more about Emma:

For years, I’ve operated under the deluded fantasy that, given the opportunity, I could rival Itzhak Perlman on the violin. Not that I’d ever had a lesson. No, this fantasy was born after watching a 5-year-old on “Sesame Street” play a feisty version of “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” A 5-year-old can’t even tie her own shoes, right?

And this was the writer my alma mater let slip through their fingers. (Bonus: Downloadable audio clips of Emma playing “Mary,” as well as “Good King Wenceslas.” Itzhak Perlman can relax a while longer.)

I know some of our readers are into general aviation. Spriggy would like to be taken for a ride like this, although he requests a nice soft cushion in the back seat:

If the central fashion revelation of Oscar night needs to be made any clearer, it’s by comparing this photo of Helen Mirren to this photo of Jessica Biel. Central fashion revelation: You can look as great at 50-plus as women half your age. Central fashion lesson: Ladies of all ages, bras are our friends. Central overall lesson: Worst show ever.

Sometimes the headline says it all: Police say driver in fatal crash was using laptop.

Back later. Carry on, you crazy kids.

We have two items on the agenda today:

1) Set the speed-dial on stun, start firing at 10 a.m. and, insha’Allah, score tickets to the Iggy Pop concert at the Fox Theatre in April, and;

2) Drive to Fort Wayne. Kate’s been clamoring for a trip to see her old friends there, and we finally got it together. I intend to collect on payment for that big editing job I did back around Christmas time, the payment being: Dinner. I told my host to choose a venue suitable to the quality of the work, which means we might end up anywhere from Joseph Decuis to Coney Island. It’ll be a short stay — 36 hours at the most — so I doubt I’ll be picking up the tab for all comers at Henry’s, but one of these days, Alice…

(Acknowledgement of The Truth Department: Detroit is a coney-crazed town, and its Mosque No. 1, so to speak, is a greasy little place downtown called Lafayette Coney Island. It’s open all the time, a great stew of humanity, with swarthy countermen and that ineffable Billy Goat vibe. At bar-closing time, it resembles the set of a Fellini movie. But I ate there exactly once, and feared for my health. I still have yet to find a coney here that’s the equal, taste-wise, of Fort Wayne’s Famous. So I wouldn’t mind eating there at all. They serve Cokes in the little 6.5-ounce bottles. Mmm.)

So let’s kick off the bloggage with a Fort Wayne theme. Hoosiers of the 3rd congressional district, this is your congressman, a man who claims 65 percent of all drug-related ER admissions are for marijuana use.

Man, I’m tired of people tailgating me, too. But I stop short of gunfire.

Do we want to wait until they develop weapons of mass destruction? Or do we want to nip this chimp thing in the bud? Your call, America. Bonus amusement: The landmark observation also supports the long-debated proposition that females — the main makers and users of spears among the Senegalese chimps — tend to be the innovators and creative problem solvers in primate culture.

I’m not laughing at Britney anymore. If only she could sing, you could call this breakdown the Full Judy Garland. (Here we see the female chimp using a crudely fashioned spear.)

Ever wonder just how the camera adds 10 pounds? Slate’s bird-dogging that one:

Bad lighting, mostly. The flat, even illumination on the red carpet makes it hard for the camera to capture dimension, unlike in a photo shoot with flattering soft lights. Cast from an angle, light creates shadows that sculpt the face and body by hiding unwanted flesh. Softer lights can hide wrinkles and smooth out the skin for women, while harsher lights on male faces exaggerate lines for a chiseled look. Without the aid of shadows, however, light exposes the imperfections of the face and body and makes the resulting image bigger and flatter. That’s why everyone avoids white dresses—which cast fewer shadows under even lighting—except the thinnest actresses, like Nicole Kidman.

Off to bird-dog Iggy! Back after the weekend.

After messing with iTunes today, I bring you…

Selections from the album art file!

Remember “The Original Kings of Comedy”? I liked the difference between old-school and hip-hop: In old-school, there’s five guys and one microphone, in hip-hop, 20 guys and everybody has a microphone. That’s David Ruffin on the far right, a man confident enough to rock both that suit and the glasses. Of course, if you could sing like him, you would, too. (I’d bet a dollar that picture was taken somewhere in Detroit, and I’d love to know where.)

Funny to think about, but this is what passed for bad-asses in the mid-’60s. More James Dean than John Lennon, but if a boy wearing boots like the one on the left came to pick up your daughter in 1964, you’d be right to worry. I like it because it looks like every one of those guys held a day job at a tool-and-die shop somewhere. And maybe they did.

The post-Diana Supremes, here. I love the hair, of course, and the black turtlenecks. If anything said, “It’s not the ’60s anymore,” this picture did. That’s Jean Terrell at the top, Cindy Birdsong on the right and ever-faithful Mary Wilson at left. Their first album, post-Diana, was called “Right On.” I like the ’70s Supremes for their lack of Diana-ness, but mostly for “Up the Ladder to the Roof” and “Nathan Jones.”

My car repair — not much of a repair at all, but a simple oil change/wiper blades/fix-the-rear-window-squirter deal — took forever. Fortunately, I had “The Looming Tower,” which now occupies the On the Nightstand space on the right rail, and which you should all run out and buy, because it is a terrific book. It enabled me to pass hour after hour in the customer lounge at the Buick/VW dealer without even being tempted to get into a snit. Also, there was a TV in the lounge, and at one point it was showing something called the Dr. Keith Ablow Show, specifically an episode featuring Kim Mathers, ex-wife of Eminem.

I want to lay out a few things up front, the most important being that I spend very little time thinking about Eminem, at least not compared to, say, George Clooney. But Eminem’s a local, and even though he’s not the kind of guy who you might see eating a media noche at the Cuban joint downtown — he seems to be well into his Graceland period — he’s still a presence here. Once when I was driving home from the Apple store with my friend John, he got off the freeway at 9 Mile Road, two exits earlier than he should have. I pointed this out and he said he just wanted to drive me past a restaurant called Gilbert’s Lodge, where Eminem once worked as a busboy. That kind of thing.

Anyway, in the very little time I’ve spent thinking about Eminem, I sometimes think about Kim. His muse, you might say. They say Bob Dylan wrote “Just Like a Woman” for Edie Sedgwick, and Eric Clapton wrote “Layla” for Patti Boyd Harrison. Kim got “97 Bonnie & Clyde” and, of course, “Kim”:

Get the fuck away from me, don’t touch me
I HATE YOU! I HATE YOU!
I SWEAR TO GOD I HATE YOU
OH MY GOD I LOVE YOU
How the fuck could you do this to me?

The first time I heard that song was around the time Kim went on the lam from some drug charges, and was arrested at Weber’s Inn, a pleasant but decidely unhip hotel just down the road from our house in Ann Arbor. I imagined her sitting by the pool in dark glasses and brown lipliner, an inch of dark roots showing in her blonde hair, drink in hand, and I thought: Can’t blame her, really.

So I was amazed to see this woman on this cheesy afternoon TV crapfest, looking not just presentable but lovely (she has excellent bone structure, evident even in her mugshots), speaking coherently and calmly about her ex-husband. I closed my book and watched for a while. Eminem, whom she calls Marshall, has an ego problem (big surprise there), and a zipper problem (ditto) and a problem expressing love for women, which she blames on his mother, who may be the only other female in the world who has fared worse in Eminem’s lyrics.

None of these are penetrating insights, but coming from Kim, whose life has been nearly as action-packed as her ex’s, it struck me as actual maturity. Dr. Keith played a 911 tape from one of her escapades, in which Kim’s mom lays out the crime in progress, which involved Kim taking her dad’s Navigator (you gotta love Detroit; no one says “the car” when they can sneak in a make and model) and her other daughter’s son, and leaving, which was specifically against a court order, or whatever. The 911 operator gets confused, because these situations are confusing. Whose son? Whose car? Who has custody? She gets it straight, and then asks where Kim might be going in the Navigator.

“I think down to Harper and Cadieux to buy some drugs,” the mom says.

(The other woman in the waiting room looked at me, and we both acknowledged that we knew that corner, although we declined to do a fist-pump. The hometown name rings out.)

At this point I was unsure what this show was supposed to be about, but as with “Springer,” it doesn’t really matter. Dr. Keith asked Kim what she wants now, and she said she wants to be a good mom. I imagine she has the usual supplies — big house in suburbs, Navigator of her own, good help — and is starting to understand the ones you can’t see with your eyes, like self-knowledge. If she’s still able to hold her head up after “Kim,” I’d say she has the backbone to start.

On the other hand, she supposedly capped off this interview — which, in the Detroit hip-hop world, had the gravity of a full hour on “60 Minutes” — by calling a radio station and telling the DJ, on the air, that her ex has a small weenie and needs Viagra to make it work. Sigh. Hell hath no fury, etc.

What? This content is unbecoming to the blog? OK, how about some Britney Spears head-shaving? Please, no cuffs/collar jokes.

So, we’ll try to raise the tone with some bloggage:

Why I love David Sedaris: Because if you’ve ever been in the sort of house trailer described here, you know he nails every detail. (Yes, we’re continuing the white-trash theme here, but this is from The New Yorker.)

This is a little Grosse Pointe-centric, but I know we have some history buffs in the readership, so here goes: The GP Historical Society has a fine online exhibit of the old days here in the GP, including some great pictures of the staggering homes our local plutocrats erected along the lakefront. Nearly all of them are gone now, reduced to rubble by the simple fact that even today’s plutocrat has little need for a house with 60 rooms, requiring a staff of 25. I especially recommend the section on the Dodges, and their jaw-dropping domiciles (Rose Terrace I and Rose Terrace II), not to mention this little bit of ephemera:

LETTER FROM THE WALLET OF HORACE E. DODGE SR. – CIRCA 1920

“For the following reasons I am unable to send you the check asked for:

I have been held up, held down, sand-bagged, walked on, sat on, flattened out and squeezed. First, by the United States Government, for Federal War Tax, the Excess Profit Tax, the Liberty Loan Bonds, Thrift Stamps, Capital Stock Tax, Merchants License and Auto Tax, and by every Society and Organization that the inventive mind of man can invent, to extract what I may or may not possess.

From the Society of John the Baptist, the G.A.R., the Women’s Relief, the Navy League, the Red Cross, the Black Cross, the Purple Cross, the Double Cross, the Children’s Home, the Dorcas Society, the Y.M.C.A., the Boy Scouts, the Jewish Relief, the Belgian Relief, and every hospital in town.

The Government has so governed my business that I don’t know who owns it. I am inspected, suspected, and examined and re-examined, informed, required and commanded so I don’t know who I am, where I am, or why I am here. All I know is I am supposed to be an inexhaustible supply of money for every known need, desire or hope of the human race; and, because I will not sell all I have and go out and beg, borrow or steal money to give away, I have been cussed, discussed, boycotted, talked to, talked about, lied to, lied about, hold up, hung up, robbed and nearly ruined; and, the only reason I am clinging to life is to see what in the H-ll is coming next.”

Only a guy who lived in Rose Terrace I could whine like that.

Finally, speaking of local celebrities, we were eating dinner the other day, and as usual, one end of the table was strewn with the day’s mail, including a copy of Car & Driver. The cover featured three jillion-dollar sports cars, Maserati, Lotus and something else, I forget. Alan tapped the Lotus and said, “I saw one of these downtown the other day. Guy asked me for directions.”

“Anyone famous?” I asked.

“I dunno,” he said. “Some black guy, about seven feet tall. I was surprised he could fit in the thing, actually.”

“He was probably a Piston,” I said. “Did you say anything to him?”

“Yeah. I said, ‘Is that a Lotus?‘”

My husband. Such a Detroiter.

This is a company town, maybe the biggest one in the country (and the sickest), and everything is about cars. And so, at the Motown Winter Blast, people actually stood in line for the chance to sit in a Corvette made of ice.

(Overheard: “Don’t put your tongue on the windshield.”)

I have a busy day today, capped by daylong snow, which would normally be delightful if I didn’t have to drive to Royal Oak. Tomorrow will be busy too, with even more snow — five to nine inches, bless my soul — and so, while I may not make it back, if I do I’ll have lots of stories to tell, no doubt.

In the meantime, console yourself with bloggage:

Yes! Yes! Yes! Someone finally states the obvious: Wind-chill is a crock. I can be more tiresome on this subject than a whole bottle of Ambien, but it’s nice to be right:

As the use of equivalent temperatures spread, people started to notice inconsistencies between real temperatures and their wind chill counterparts. For some reason, a day spent in a minus-40 wind chill was a lot easier to handle than a minus-40-degree day with no wind. Around 2000, two researchers—Randall Osczevski in Canada and Maurice Bluestein in the United States—began looking closely at this problem. Before long, they discovered that the adapted Siple-Passel equations grossly overestimated rates of heat loss.

Just since I’ve been paying attention, wind-chill figures have gone from something that’s only reported when it seems to apply, i.e., when the wind is blowing, to (new this year, in my experience) reported as the “effective” temperature. That is, I open my newspaper and read, “Today it is, effectively, 6 below zero.” Oh, I don’t think so. I know six below. Six below is a friend of mine. And you, 12 degrees with an occasional 15-mile-per-hour gust, are not six below. Besides, isn’t the wind chill what it “feels like” on exposed flesh? So put on some gloves, dummy.

Wind chill now has an evil hot-weather cousin — the heat index. Not crazy about it, either, because if nothing else, the reverse of “put on some gloves” doesn’t always work.

So that ought to set you up for some fun bitching today. If not, enjoy this, a montage of Horatio Caine and the Sunglasses of Justice:

A screen capture of my current desktop widgets. Note the weather radar and the current temperature, bottom left. That cotton ball over western Michigan has been there for days (lake-effect snow, for you non-Midwesterners.) Don’t you wish you lived here?

And so it begins: After a solid week of nursing Kate’s flu, including a full-blown relapse beginning Friday evening that was pretty much a rerun of the first three days, I woke up today to:

1) No school. Temps at minus-2 now, with wind chills fierce enough to frighten even Michigan school superintendents.

2) A tiny, unscratchable tickle in the back of my own throat. It’s too early to say what it is, but it’s safe to say it’s nothing good.

Will I allow this to keep me down? Maybe. We’ll see.

Well, by kickoff time I had allowed my usual who-gives-a-fig attitude toward the Super Bowl to veer into full-blown Colts-hatin’ — and I only watched 45 minutes of the pre-game, but that was enough to tire of the “Peyton Manning: god-king or world-conquering titan?” hagiography. (Football coverage: Where if too much is too much, even more is even better.) Of course it was not to be, but the first quarter was enough to take a little wind out of the sails, so to speak. By then I had to get dinner on the table and was restored to agnosticism. Great halftime show. Love that Prince. Then I went to work, and the rest of the game passed unseen by me. Vince IM’d to say he thought the suicidal robot was in bad taste, considering the current state of the auto industry. Otherwise, that was the extent of my personal post-game.

There’s was this, though: During the pre-game CBS showed a split-screen image of Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith, to underline that one of them would be the first African-American head coach to win a Super Bowl championship. And then the announcer used a word. I always think of it as the flip side of “articulate,” which Joe Biden got caught applying to Barack Obama last week. The word?

“Dignified.” Really. “One of these two dignified men…” Good lord. Doesn’t anyone have an ear for language anymore?

For the record, I wrote the “articulate”-as-insult column at least a decade ago; apparently Joe Biden didn’t read it. But “dignified” is right up there, too. Do white head coaches get called dignified? No. They’re sober, serious, composed, leaders. Dignified is what we call black people who have already proven they’re articulate. Yuck.

On to the bloggage:

I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC… with British accents.

Dan Savage’s whopping fine screed about Mary Cheney. Profanity alert, probably needless profanity, but it needed to be said. I think we pay attention to the culture war because it’s a cartoony, easily understood alternative to the real one. Which grows ever more unbearable.

Remember how I said this was the Winter That Wasn’t? Well, it’s winter now. Here’s a picture of our boat slip. In five more months, there’ll be a boat there.

I took Kate and a friend to the park today, because finally there was ice to skate on, and skate they did. Every time she puts her new skates on, she gets better at it; it’s a pleasure to watch, at least until the wind off the lake strips off all my mascara and I have to step inside the rec center to warm up a bit. There were two teenage girls in there with their mother, complaining that there was snow on the ice and why wasn’t anyone shoveling it off?

“It’s just a dusting, really,” I said, gesturing to the several skaters already out there, gliding around unimpeded. They glared at me. OK, don’t mind me. The fancy-shmancy private-school indoor rink a couple miles away opens to the public every Sunday for two hours; I’m sure they’d be more comfortable there anyway. I went back to watching Kate and her friend write their names in the ice and felt grateful they won’t be teenagers for a few more years.

I guess when they are, I’ll be back to watching them the way I did when they were toddlers, but in this nice in-between period I was free to take a little stroll along the lake, which was just like “Stranger Than Paradise,” only with maybe a little more blue and gray in the shot. I couldn’t really take the time to frame it because the wind was pretty strong and my eyes kept tearing.

I admit to getting tired of it by March, but all things considered, I sorta like winter.

And now it’s Monday, yet another of the days that make me suspect the Grosse Pointe Public Schools hate working parents — it’s an in-service day for teachers, so no school. Last week was the MLK holiday. Next month will be a one-week winter break, followed six weeks later by spring break. It’s hard to imagine that two weeks ago I daydreamed of going back to work in an actual office, with adults and everything. Not until it’s legal to kennel 10-year-olds. (You can kennel infants and toddlers, but once they grow up a little, the deal’s off.)

So, bloggage:

A young man was released from prison here last week. I wasn’t here for the full length of this story, but I gather it went like this: Nathaniel Abraham, at 11, was the youngest person in Michigan convicted of homicide, back in 1997. He was released from prison last week, the day before his 21st birthday. For his final court date, he chose an understated, I’m-ready-to-go-straight costume — an ivory suit with pink pinstriping, accented with pink shirt and pink alligator shoes, a matching fedora, the whole ensemble topped with a rabbit-fur coat.

Of course, in Detroit, a city where racism is the bass note of every song we hear, from hip-hop right down to the Muzak in grocery stores, this image was greeted with …not quite hysteria, but the sort of calm, reasoned discussion you see on lunatic-politics discussion boards. From across the metro area, a million voices rose as one and shouted: Pimp.

But at least it gave the columnists something to gnash over. This one includes a photo. This one doesn’t.

Eric Zorn had one of his very entertaining, supremely time-wasting Lank of Linkin’ roundups today, including this entry: Before you click on The Beast’s annual list of 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2006 (raw language warning), see if you can guess who’s number one from these excerpts: “… nakedly self-serving … has so successfully snowed America that he could go around kicking puppies all day and he’d be applauded for his authenticity. In reality (he) is as phony as slimeballs come.”

I guessed Donald Trump. It wasn’t him (although he was on the list, at No. 21). I must be losing my touch.

And now Monday begins in earnest. I guess we’ll go skating again.

If I could turn back the hands of time, as Tyrone Davis sang, there isn’t a whole lot I’d change. A few boyfriends would remain strangers, I would have paid closer attention in high school Russian class, I would have taken more chances. But for someone whose big mouth has gotten her into so much trouble, I don’t regret all that much. The remarks that were hurtful, yes. The ones that gave voice to a truth everyone in the room was thinking but which were impolitic to give voice to, not really. Every step on that road took me to this spot on the road, or not exactly on the road, more like off in the ditch, spinning my wheels, shrieking to passing traffic, “Sure! That road seems like the one you should take! But beware! Beware!” — I don’t mind this spot too too much. All part of the journey, etc. Soon the tow truck will arrive, or maybe it won’t, maybe I’ll start walking, and…

OK. Abandon metaphor.

My point: If I had it to do over again I wouldn’t have chosen journalism. Time Inc. laid off nearly 300 people yesterday, eliminated three bureaus. Yes, yes, the next Britney Spears story in People may not have five reporters, what a tragedy, etc. I don’t want to sound any big themes about journalism here; in a lot of ways we made our bed and now we’re lying in it, only it turns out it’s no longer a bed but just this sort of narrow cot, and people keep falling out, and…

Abandon metaphor.

What particularly cheeses me is the timing. Speaking out of pure selfishness, this could not come at a worse time. For me, anyway. Too young for retirement, too old to make a graceful sidestep into another field, it seems that those of us who were drawn to journalism by its two great movements of recent memory — New Journalism and Woodstein-style investigation — are now in the worst possible position. Tough times may make tough people, but they also shred a few in the bargain. Again, speaking selfishly, those 289 jobs eliminated yesterday represent 289 lives turned upside down, and not all will be righted. Yes, it happens in every industry. No, I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m just taking note.

Pout, pout, pout.

I remember, many years ago, my newspaper sent a couple of reporters to some training sponsored by our parent company, Knight Ridder. They came back with their heads spinning; some Free Press people were at the same session, bitching about their latest degradation — the paper would not employ stenographers to transcribe taped interviews. How were they supposed to do their jobs, etc. I feel like Scarlett O’Hara, starved to a ravenous husk, remembering the antebellum tables groaning with food as she’s puking up that radish in the Twelve Oaks garden.

As God as my witness, I’ll never…well, I’d better get to work.

But first! Bloggage! Because that’s why you come here, right? A few snarky remarks, a report on how we’re doing in the D, maybe a dinner menu, and then some tasty linkage, after which we turn the floor show over to the commenters. See? We evolved a new form of journalism, justlikethat. Let’s make it pay for the proprietress, and we’ll all be happy. I will, anyway.

Salon reports on the latest alt-foods craze — raw milk. One of my college boyfriends rented a place in the country for a while, next door to a dairy farm, where he bought gallons of raw milk for something like a buck or two. I mentioned this in passing to my mother, who nearly leapt from her chair in alarm, then commenced telling a hair-raising tale about a girl she knew who got undulant fever (medical name: brucellosis, for you Zevon fans) from drinking unpasteurized milk. She made me promise never to touch the stuff, and I did. It was an easy promise to make, as what little I’d had so far was sort of like drinking liquified butter. In the Salon story, people say raw milk keeps them away from sweets. I’ll say — liquified butter will do that.

It made good coffee cream, I’ll allow. Still: Thank God for Louis Pasteur.

With a 10-year-old in the house, “American Idol” is simply an element that we must live with, and the lack thereof would make life impossible, kind of like oxygen. Eric Zorn tried to put up his dukes against the juggernaut of humiliation that is the early episodes, but on this, I’m more with Jody Rosen at the Slate AI blog, who points out “you couldn’t help but suspect that most of the ‘bad’ singers were actually savvy performance artists, angling for a few minutes of airtime.” Yup. And there were teachable moments, just the same; Alan told Kate the moral of this story is, “Always wear a bra.” How true that is.

Do you hate Pachelbel’s Canon in D? Rob Paravonian does.

UPDATE: And while I was feeling sorry for myself a little while ago, I forgot to thank my lucky stars that while I may not work for the New York Times, that also means I’ll never have to write a story like this:

For some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.

“We called Viking over the holidays every year,�? Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.

I mean: Whew.