The temperature rose yesterday to a notch or two above freezing, then fell. A dusting of new snow arrived around nightfall. Fog covered everything until it froze, and that’s where it stands now — silver-plated world. Everything is white, not too cold, and the air is so heavy with moisture it can mean only one thing. One or two more inches coming up from the south; should be here momentarily. I’d like to take a walk in it. Maybe I will.

From Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, No. 1: Never open a book with weather. Well, this isn’t a book. It’s the first draft of personal history. And I’m allowed to talk about the weather.

A job I wish I had: Smashing up the ice on the St. Clair River. Seriously. My favorite thing is when the spring rains come in cloudbursts, and the storm drain in front of my neighbor’s house clogs with spring tree-gunk, and I get to wade through the warm puddles with my rake and clear it. Actually piloting an icebreaker through a troublesome jam to send the backed-up water on its way? Bliss. It would be storm-drain clearance on steroids.

Nance’s Rules of Writing: Don’t use stupid, dated, not-very-creative-when-they-were-coined, let-alone-now catch phrases like “on steroids.”

OK, then. I don’t want to continue yesterday’s depressing discussion for too much longer — I mean, in a silver world, you want to be optimistic — but I caught part of “Fresh Air” yesterday, and it seemed to pertain, a little. Journalist David Weigel of the Washington Independent was speaking on the new right, the right on steroids, the super-righty right represented by the teabaggers and CPAC. You know CPAC — these are the folks who were making jokes about flying a plane into an IRS building and killing a 68-year-old veteran (two tours, Vietnam). And of course you know the Tea Party.

I was struck by the portion of the interview where Terry Gross asked Weigel about what the teabaggers believe about the financial meltdown that started the cascading economic catastrophes of the past two years. He said they blame the whole thing on Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the Community Reinvestment Act, which is both not surprising and pretty depressing. I’ve said this before and it didn’t originate with me, but this is what we’re moving toward — a media landscape where not only spin varies from outlet to outlet, but the very facts themselves. Wall Street is not underregulated; Barney Frank is the problem. And vaccines cause autism, of course they do.

Here’s the other thing that struck me: How the sorts of wackos I used to hear on my radio show(s) back in the day — the freakazoids who stayed up all night at the card table under the bare light bulb, writing their single-spaced manifestos or letters to the editor or whatever, who would call and rant about the Bilderbergers and the Federal Reserve and the loss of the gold standard and (my personal favorite) Ezra Pound, that genius — these folks are now being welcomed into the mainstream conservative movement. And they have some new entertaining ideas, about the president’s birth certificate and death panels and so on. And a new spokesgal, who is much prettier than they are.

How comforting.

I ran into one of these guys one day, at Best Buy. I thought it was brave of him to introduce himself, although I probably should have recognized him from his public-access TV show. We chatted a bit. He was pricing camcorders, but dammit, none of them had the feature he needed. Which was?

“Night vision,” he said.

His public-access show was entertaining. This is how he gave web addresses: “H, T, T, P. Colon. Backslash, backslash. T-R-I-P-O-D. Dot — this is a period — C-O-M. Backslash. Tilde. This is the key to the left of the numeral 1, but you have to shift…”

Anyway, they were joking from the CPAC podium about Joseph Stack, the IRS bomber. Had to check to make sure it wasn’t Grover Norquist at the controls, ha ha. Imagine the reaction if– oh, why bother even bringing it up? The liberal media, etc. etc.

I’ll say this: I’m really glad I don’t live in Indiana anymore. I’m sure these folks are all over the place. I see two Don’t Tread on Me flags waving in the neighborhood here, but it’s not a friendly place for the most part, so I don’t feel like I have to smile at them or anything.

Ach. We need to go out with some levity. How about this essay on Rielle Hunter’s “quiet dignity.” Not talking to the media about your stupid life choices qualifies as quiet dignity now? Evidently:

In the early days, Americans came to think of her in the sleaziest terms: the former party girl who used sexual wiles and New Age mumbo jumbo to steal Elizabeth’s husband. Most self-respecting women would feel compelled to say something, anything, in their own defense. And most modern mistresses would do much more than that. A fame-chasing Rielle would have come forward in the first days of her sex scandal, even if it meant defying John’s wishes. She would have talked and talked as the interviews declined in influence, the sad journey from Barbara Walters to Billy Bush. By now she’d have finished her book tour. We’d see her hawking an Internet sex column or sharing Twitpics of Quinn to thousands of followers.

Or maybe, just mayyybeee, she’s holding out for the big payday. Just a thought. Maybe the quiet-dignity meter was recalibrated while I was worrying about the Tea Party, but in my experience, a person who has it doesn’t say things like this:

That same spring, Rielle came to dinner at my home in New York. The Edwardses had just announced that Elizabeth’s cancer was back and was incurable, engendering a national outpouring of support. That didn’t stop Rielle from explaining to the group at dinner, which included journalists from other national publications, that Elizabeth had gotten cancer because she was filled with “bad energy.”

OK, then. Back to the sweatshop! Copy due in two hours!

Since we’ve all decided this recession, the Great Recession, will leave a wide and deep footprint in our national soul, journalists have begun sketching it out. Yesterday on “Talk of the Nation” they were discussing this story in the Atlantic, which I haven’t read and don’t intend to, because it’s February and I’m coping with my usual winter subclinical grumps, and who needs more?

This one, from Sunday’s NYT, sort of snuck up on me, hiding as it was in the Styles section; I thought Sunday Styles was the place you went to avoid reading about strife and misery, but maybe this doesn’t count, although it does to me:

In 18 months, Ms. Lentini went from editing one daily newsletter to still editing that one, as well as the 10 weeklies that generated new ad revenue at no extra cost to her company. Of course, there was a cost: her free time. “It’s, ‘How many plates can I keep going?’ ” she said. “You’re giddy with hysteria.”

She now starts at 7:30 a.m. instead of 9, and works Saturday and Sunday mornings. The night of the Super Bowl, she finished at 11. When she was first hired, she had money to pay someone to fill in during her two vacation weeks. That ended with the recession, so now she doubles her workload the week before vacation. Holidays? “I work most holidays,” she said.

Even while driving one of her daughters to an after-school job as a hair salon receptionist, Ms. Lentini works. “Bridget holds the laptop,” she said. “She’ll say, ‘Mom, you got an I.M. from the photo editor.’ She’ll read it to me, I’ll say, ‘Just put ‘O.K.,’ and write ‘tx’ for thanks. So I can work and drive.”

The story was about the new way we do more with less, and then some more, and some more on top of that, and wondered what might happen when the recession ends, if it ever really does — will we still work this way? My own experience says yes, of course we will; that’s certainly the way it was in newspapers during our long slide, which presaged the general economic collapse. I used to liken it to starving to fit into a two-sizes-smaller dress by prom night or your wedding day or whatever. Diet-diet-diet-celery-water-diet, keep pulling everything in and then comes weigh-in day (quarterly numbers) and whew, you just made it to your goal! Yahoo! [Pause.] Now lose 10 more pounds.

I wonder because I heard from an editor yesterday, pointing out several sloppy goofs in a story I’d handled, and not only was he right, I knew why I made the mistakes: Because I’d edited that story at 1:30 a.m., after a seven-hour shift on my other job. I was still working because I knew I’d have trouble sleeping that night (even though I was exhausted). Why? Because I’m stressed out at how much I have to do. It’s a loop.

I’m not complaining. I’m just wondering. I wonder why we tell our friends story after story about work, its miseries and occasional joys, and yet, so few of our entertainments are about work. (Except for the usual venues — police stations, hospitals and forensics units.) The answer is obvious, I guess: Why pay for a novel or movie about something I live every day? A few years I noticed something: How often the people I met in the pages of a book were independently wealthy, either through family fortunes or early-career windfalls that left them with the means to have novel-worthy midlife crises uncluttered by having to show up at work every day.

One of the many things to admire about “Office Space” is how well it captures the existential misery of life in a cubicle farm, from the chirpy receptionist to the passive-aggressive boss to the ritual of the office birthday cake. You can almost taste the cheap frosting. My favorite sequence in “Up in the Air” is when the three main characters sneak into another company’s Miami team-building party; there’s something about the way the m.c. greets all the members of the best! sales staff! in the southeast region! that sent chills down my spine. (Not that I’ve ever been to such an event. In journalism they just bark, “Back to your oar, 42.” The Miami sojourns for Knight-Ridder were known as Prick School.)

And yet, existential misery is preferable to unemployment, isn’t it? The new normal will be no Miami at all. And no health insurance. The new model for freelancing is Crowdspring, which puts a high gloss on the feeding frenzy. It works like this: You post a project, saying, “I will pay $300 for a logo for our start-up business. It should convey the idea of “bookishness,” but be really smart and sorta techno and have blue in it. Show me what you got.” And then dozens of starving designers (or writers, if that’s the project) do the work and submit it. You pick your favorite and pay your pittance, and everyone else goes home hungry. Doesn’t that sound like fun?

If you have a job, you’re grateful. If you have a job you like, you have rubies and diamonds. Pause a moment to appreciate it.

The Daily Telegraph asks a number of writers to list their Top 10 rules for writing. Part one here, link to part two in part one. Will Self made me laugh:

Regard yourself as a small corporation of one. Take yourself off on team-building exercises (long walks). Hold a Christmas party every year at which you stand in the corner of your writing room, shouting very loudly to yourself while drinking a bottle of white wine. Then masturbate under the desk. The following day you will feel a deep and cohering sense of embarrassment.

Now, I must go to work. (Which I like very much. I only wish it paid better, especially when there’s eight inches of snow atop my aging roof.)

I think I weigh 300 pounds today. Our weekend was a mad dash to Chicago to see friends, and so it consisted of five hours in the car, one hour in hotel, two or three hours of dinner, sleep, two or three hours of breakfast, five more hours in the car. There wasn’t time for anything else, but it was good, if you like eating and driving, and I always like the first and usually like the second. If nothing else, it’s good to see a beautiful, thriving city from time to time.

We crossed the Mitten on a winter weekend because our friends from Turkey are back in the States for a while. Fatih was a Knight-Wallace Fellow and his wife, Idil, was the smartest of the spouses. She learned Russian in eight months while we were there, yes, zero to fluency in eight months. She thought she should learn because of all the Russians in Istanbul these days, and also they were planning on having a baby soon, and Russians are the go-to nannies, the way West Indies natives are in New York City. She did indeed get pregnant in Ann Arbor, had some minor complications that made her doctor forbid her from long plane trips in the third trimester, so they stayed an extra couple months and had the baby in Michigan. When they returned, Idil interviewed nannies in Russian.

Fatih told me that for something like $300 a month, you can hire a college-educated Russian woman — if you’re lucky, even one with an M.D. — to be your nanny. “Wouldn’t a woman with a medical degree feel a bit overqualified for child care, and perhaps resentful?” I wondered.

“No, you want one with an advanced degree so you know she’s not a prostitute,” he said. Oh.

So now Idil is pregnant again, and they’ve elected to give birth in the States again. To take advantage of the Greatest Health-Care System in the World? No. So that their daughters will have matching passports. Good thinking. We always knew Idil was smart. Between learning Russian and otherwise exploring Ann Arbor, she took some grad-school entrance exams, too, just for the hell of it. She got a perfect score on the math sections, and close to perfect on the writing. That really bugged her. “What is a nine-letter English word that means ‘talkative’?” she asked.

I thought for a minute. “Garrulous,” I said. She smacked her forehead as though she’d forgotten who George Washington was. Their 5-year-old speaks four languages fluently. She’s going to need dual citizenship, once she grows up to take over the world.

You’ll want to watch out for her. She’s blonde like her mother, a Tatar.

There’s nothing like spending time with ambitious international cosmopolites to make you feel dumb. We went to breakfast with the Bordens and Carpenters, and mostly talked sports and music, but it was smart sports-and-music talk. I learned about Bill Wirtz from Borden, and more from Wikipedia:

Wirtz died at Evanston Hospital on September 26, 2007, following a brief battle with cancer. …During a tribute and moment of silence for him during the Blackhawks home opener on October 8, 2007, the Chicago crowd displayed their displeasure with Wirtz’s operation of the organization by booing the proceedings.

Man, hockey fans can be tough.

And of course this weekend we watched a bit of the Olympics. I have very few strong feelings about the winter games, except that all that trick skiing is silly, but then, luge is pretty silly, too. Speed skating is my life’s great missed opportunity; it’s the one sport I’m truly fascinated by. (I followed the clap-skate discussion closely, a few years back.) Very Hans Brinker.

And, of course, the speed skaters have Stephen Colbert on their side.

In some ways I hate February in Olympic years; there’s too much on TV. This week, I’m going to have to choose between Westminster and the games. I hope nothing good in Vancouver is opposite the terrier group.

So how was your weekend? Bloggage? Not much:

The Alabama shooting case gets ever-weirder. Hello, Professor Crazypants.

With that, I’m off.

January is National Soup Month. Before it slips into the books, let’s recall a few of the month’s steaming pots here at the Nall-Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere:

Sweet potato bisque: I happened to be at the Russell Street Deli, an Eastern Market institution known for its spectacular soups, the week before Christmas, when this was on the menu. It was…mouth-gasmic. It fogged my glasses and my mind. I tried to consider what the “Top Chef” judges call its “flavor profile,” but my tastebuds were happy-dancing so, it was hard to get them to settle down and give some sober feedback. It had many of the notes of a sweet potato pie — cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger — but was savory overall. I found a recipe online that seemed to come close, using buttermilk for the tang, and whipped up a batch. It was very good, but not as good as Russell’s. Three stars (out of four).

Curried butternut squash: An early improvisation, inspired by Mark Bittman. I make a version of this every fall, basically squash soup with curry and a tart apple thrown in the mix. For this, I left out the apple and added a can of coconut milk, and my friends? It was fabulous. I’m buying coconut milk every other week now. Four stars.

Cream of cauliflower: Another Bittman inspiration, brought on by the perennial January realization that I could eat a lot more vegetables if I tried. Sauté onion and garlic, throw in a whacked-up head of cauliflower, cover with broth, simmer to softness, puree and swirl in a half-cup or so of cream. Yum. Three-and-a-half stars.

Roasted garlic with white cheddar: I make this in the winter most years, but not for the last few. It’s an old Betty Rosbottom recipe, simplicity itself: Break up and peel two heads of garlic, cover with olive oil and roast in the oven for 40 minutes or so. Meanwhile, soften some leeks or onions or both, add a few potatoes, cover with broth, simmer simmer simmer, etc. When it’s soft, throw in the roasted garlic [EDIT: Remove the garlic from the oil first] and puree. Finish by stirring in a handful of grated white cheddar cheese. Serve with a green salad and crusty bread you can sop in the oil from the garlic roasting. Refrain from kissing for the rest of the night. Four stars.

Chili: Because if it’s winter in the Midwest, there will be chili. Everyone has their own favorite recipe. You don’t need to hear mine. Three stars.

No-cream of cauliflower and carrot: This was last night. I had a head of golden cauliflower teetering on the edge, so I made it the same way I did the other cauliflower soup, only I added a double handful of carrots and left out the cream and curry. Topped with some grated cheddar, cocked my shotgun, held it to the head of my daughter and forced her to choke down 10 spoonfuls or so, which she advised me were “gross.” Reader, it was not. It was delicious. Three and a half stars.

Note all the pureeing. You can do it in batches in the blender, but that’s a pain in the ass. Far better to spend $30 on what Emeril calls a “boat motor” and most cookbooks call an immersion blender. Mine broke last night, which seemed to be a fitting marker for the end of National Soup Month.

Although I will buy a new one this weekend. Because you really need an immersion blender. At least in our house.

Which takes us to the bloggage at the end of a cold but sunny week here in the Mitten:

You want to know why people hate lawyers? Try the NFL’s jerkishness in trying to stop New Orleans retailers from selling T-shirts and other merchandise featuring the fleur de lis and/or the phrase “Who dat?” One of my Facebook friends, Ray Shea, said it best:

The fleur de lis predates the existence of the NFL by more than two millenia. The fleur de lis has flown on flags over Lousiana for more than four centuries. Black and gold has been associated with the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club for almos a century. The phrase “Who Dat” is more than a century old and exists in recorded New Orleans music since the 1930s.

The NFL is granted a temporary non-exclusive license to suck my balls.

Ray is an old friend of Ashley’s, and won my allegiance to the Saints the night the team beat Indianapolis, and he posted, “Who dat pushing Manning’s face in the turf? WHO DAT?” Indeed. Peyton Manning is a guy whose face can never be pushed into the turf too often.

I just surfed through Memorandum to see what’s going on in the world of politics, and found this headline: Palin to Obama: Stop the fingerpointing. And with that, irony died once again and I officially declared the weekend under way.

So enjoy yours.

I was googling “Brothers & Sisters,” the TV show, trying to find something I once read about it. I tried to watch that show and gave up after about half a season, when it became clear the writers were never going to give up this maddening music-cue thing they do.

The show is your basic prime-time soap, with comic elements. Whenever a comic scene commences, however, the sound editors insert this giggly little piano/string thing, the universal music code for “French farce scene about to commence! Get ready to laff!” I remember a couple years ago, reading an interview with some network executive who said it was necessary to telegraph every punch that way, because they’d given up the idea of any viewer giving any TV show their complete attention, and they didn’t want someone to look down at their laptop during a serious confession-of-infidelity scene and look up to find a zany oops-we’ve-been-caught-having-sex-in-the-cloakroom scene. Too jarring. And so tonal shifts are underlined, perhaps so viewers know they’re watching broadcast TV, not HBO.

So I was looking for that interview, and got distracted by reveries of the Allman Brothers, who — you younger folks might not know this — had a monster album in the ’70s called “Brothers and Sisters,” which combined with “music” would of course turn up in any Google search. And by then I had forgotten that one of the things I wanted to say was, nobody has any attention span anymore, because they’re always multitasking.

There was a trainer at my gym who liked to combine the ab work in his classes with “Whippin’ Post,” which I always thought was appropriate.

Which sort of brings me to this story from the New York Times’ Department of News You Already Knew, about how kids today are addicted to the internet. As an abusive parent in this regard, defined as “one who declined to buy the data plan for her child’s cell phone, and who also activated the parental controls feature of the computer’s OS,” I read with keen interest:

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

“I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said Francisco Sepulveda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his smart phone to surf the Web, watch videos, listen to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day.

It’s the texting that makes me insane. A true moderate, I equipped Kate with the moderate plan — 1,500 per month, which feels like all the goddamn texts any normal person would need, don’t you agree, my fellow geezers? Well, you should pay closer attention to your kid, who thinks nothing of texting “yo” or “‘sup?” or “hey” nine million times a day, and I am not kidding. Objecting to this is like saying with all this long hair, you can’t tell the boys from the girls.

I told her if she went over 1,500, I was taking it out of her hide. And no data plan until she gets a job.

After all, I don’t want to happen to her attention span what’s happened to mi– Shiny object! New tab in Safari! Tangent! So let’s go straight to the bloggage, eh? (I pronounce that blo-GAHGE, by the way, from the original French.)

Detroitblog finds a sterling example of that unique American character — the graphomaniac. (Look it up if you don’t know what it is. Why do you think we have tabbed browsing and the internet at our fingertips, fool? If this were a TV show, I’d be playing stern music right now.) Don’t miss the guy’s website.

It so happened I was at John King Books, Detroit’s spectacular used-books treasure house, looking for a couple of volumes that will aid in my horse-eating project mentioned last week. You want to know where graphomaniacs’ work goes to die? Check the local-history shelves at your own town’s version. They are distinguished by their lengthy subtitles (“Officer Down: One Man’s Heroic Crusade Against a Corrupt Police Force and Its Enablers Among the Legal Community, Particularly the Prosecutor’s Office — You Wouldn’t Believe”) and their equally lengthy dedications to the many kind helpers they had along the way to publishing their opus, which no publisher would touch, because it’s simply too hot.

There’s one at my local car wash, or was the last time I visited. I love this car wash, which takes advantage of the few moments you will spend there to push every imaginable sort of impulse purchase at your face. Greeting cards, scented cardboard air fresheners, bulk lots of utility towels, one-size-fits-most floor mats, laminated study guides for everything from the SAT to the periodic table — I have barely scratched the surface. But there, on a table next to the window where you watch them finish your inside windows, is a little pile of books. Self-published, natch. Title: “My Wife Has Cancer.” I can’t bear to pick it up. I hope it was therapeutic for someone.

An odd and an end from yesterday: You Cincinnatians, does Zino’s still have the greatest pizza in the world? We used to drive down from Columbus for that stuff. It’s the big red onions that does it. And Bob (not Greene) wondered if the Kim who commented yesterday had a last name beginning in L, because if so, he thought they knew each other? She does; you do. Contact me privately if you want to catch up.

It’s a new medium, so the growth curve is spectacular: The Chinese folks who brought you the animated Tiger Woods story tackle the Leno-O’Brien-NBC story. And it is awesome. If I were a young journalism student, this is what I’d be studying.

And now, to commence what is, theoretically, my work. If I don’t get distracted.

I’ve never gotten used to the MLK holiday. Newspapers are famously stingy about granting holidays in the first place, and this one falls in with Columbus, Presidents’ and Groundhog as one you might write about, but never get to enjoy. Schools are famously generous with holidays, so for working parents who must make arrangements for child care so soon after the end-of-year holiday child-care headaches, MLK Day is just more exasperation.

When it was instituted, J.C. wondered how long before we’d see “I have a dream” mattress sales on the long weekend. Haven’t seen that yet, but I did get a few e-mails from my retail favorites promising “three-day holiday sales” that don’t actually mention which holiday. It does coincide nicely with January clearance.

Martin Luther King Jr. couldn’t control when he was born, but it is interesting that he was born in a month that we all agree could use a few more paid days off. February would bump up against the presidents, March/April has spring break/Easter complications, May is Memorial, June is…well, it’s June. July has Independence, August vacation, September Labor and the start of a million new things. October? That would work. November no way, December ditto.

In Columbus, Columbus Day is a holiday, of course. (But not at the newspaper.) At least it was when I was growing up. The subsequent shoving of Chris into the Dead White Male, O.G. division, may have put a stop to that. As a daughter of the city that bears his name, I retain a stubborn affection for the guy. He had an idea, and he didn’t give up: He kept on sailing toward the west and never thought of taking rest. To our great land at last he caaaaaame, and so we sing his famous name.

I like him enough that it didn’t even bother me when I grew up enough to learn that he actually landed in the Bahamas, not our great land. The point is, he crossed the ocean. During hurricane season. I’d buy that man a drink.

But we’re getting off track here, which was? I forget. Let’s go to the bloggage:

Say what you will — “What you will!” — but for an entertaining fight, you really can’t beat the hard left. From a weekend NYT story on board meetings at WBAI, the public radio station:

Mr. Steinberg held the microphone on Wednesday evening, a bemused smile frozen in place. He waited out the hecklers, not a few of whom were his fellow board members, and turned to the next order of business: whether to seat a newly elected member, Lynne F. Stewart. Ms. Stewart is a well-known radical lawyer — or rather was a lawyer until she was convicted of material support for terrorism, disbarred and packed off to a federal prison. Such credentials are like catnip to WBAI voters, who elected her last autumn before she began serving her sentence. Some board members worry that for WBAI, which is forever on the edge of insolvency, not to mention anarchy, an imprisoned member is of little utility.

For Stewart partisans, however, such talk is profoundly counter-revolutionary. So Nia Bediako, a board member, dressed down the chairman, Mitchel Cohen, who opposed seating Ms. Stewart. “You very insensitively, very unprogressively, said perhaps we could meet in prison,” said Ms. Bediako, her voice dipped in an inkwell of disdain. “This from a so-called revolutionary!”

The right likes to talk in code words (family, values, confirmed bachelor), but the left prefers the translated phrases of communist martyrs (running dog, corrupt troika and many iterations of -ist). A hilarious read.

Mariah Carey played down her beauty in “Precious, with the rest of the title an awkward tribute to the ego of the original story’s author.” So, of course, she had to bring the girls all the way out for the Golden Globes. In case anyone forgot they were there, I guess. Maybe she misunderstood the term “golden globes.”

Funny: The director of “Downfall” — i.e., the source of all those Hitler-finds-out-X mashups — reveals what he thinks of ’em. He likey, and includes links to a couple I hadn’t seen before. The latest: Hitler finds out about the Tonight Show disaster.

Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that government offices will be open. Better go find out.

I’ve been curious about Haiti since reading, some years back, Graham Greene’s “The Comedians,” and Madison Smartt Bell’s “All Souls’ Rising.” I’ve known people who traveled there on missionary work and came back with the sort of haunted look that comes when one has acclimated to seeing children walking around with cleft palates and physical evidence of malnutrition a short plane ride from the richest nation on earth. There was a group who went there from a small Christian college not far from Fort Wayne, who stumbled across a voodoo ceremony in progress. The reporter’s account of the innocent Christian youth beholding, with their very own eyes, what they considered to be a summoning of demons, was a bracing read.

The last scene in “Silence of the Lambs,” where Dr. Lecter calls Clah-reece during her FBI graduation party? And he walks off down the strange tropical road, silently stalking his nemesis from the asylum? That was Haiti, and even though it was never identified, one look at the place told you that if a psychopath on the lam could find a place to eat a man in relative peace and quiet, this was the place. At least in the western hemisphere.

Which is not to say Haiti’s problems are entirely self-created. The French and the slavers and the Duvaliers all have blood on their hands. And when a place is as poor as Haiti, an earthquake of that magnitude will have a multiplier effect it wouldn’t have in, say, Los Angeles. Or even San Francisco.

My curiosity about the country didn’t extend to plate tectonics. I didn’t even know Haiti was on a fault. Shows what I know. (Nothing.)

Sorry for the late start today. High-level negotiations this morning resulted in me evidently agreeing to eat a horse between now and spring, i.e., a big project. How do you eat a horse? One bite at a time. Expect distractions. Less time for web-surfing, and so on. Which is fine, because it’s giving me ADD, and I don’t need to see any more photos like this, evidence of when Brad Pitt morphed from the Sexiest Man Alive to the guy who twists his beard into beardy dreads. Ew. Brad and his common-law spouse issued a statement about recent events:

“We are devastated by the news from Haiti. We will work closely with our good friend Wyclef Jean to support the humanitarian efforts on the island and help those who have been injured and left without homes and shelter.”

Beautiful. Not to take anything away from the couple, who at least attempt to walk the walk, but that sentence is a sterling example of contemporary press-agentry, ain’a? The second-most overused word on the planet (“devastated”), followed by a name-drop with oak-leaf clusters (“our good friend Wyclef Jean”), a gratuitous adverb (“closely”), a squishy verb (“support”) and a redundancy (“homes and shelter”). Someday I want to see a celebrity statement that reads: “Why does God punish Haiti so? We can’t know the answer, but in the meantime, I’m going to sign checks until I get writer’s cramp.”

Someone is always devastated by something. It’s the awesome of transitive concern-verbs. Another reason to love the Google: You can look up the phrase “is devastated by” and see how it’s being used:

Woman linked to Jon Gosselin says she’s devastated by the lies, says People magazine’s headline. (Lie! Lie! In the copy, she’s merely “sickened.”)

Ryan Seacrest is devastated by the news Simon Cowell is leaving “American Idol.

The Octomom’s doctor is devastated by charges he’s unfit to practice medicine.

Paris Hilton, devastated. Barry Gibb, devastated. It’s the nervous breakdown of our age. A secret reader of my grandmother’s Photoplay magazines, I always wondered about that mysterious phrase. Also, “collapsed from exhaustion.” My nana never told me what I later learned: It’s a euphemism for “too drunk to work.”

Not much bloggage today, but this:

Sarah Palin: Gettin’ paid, yo.

Time to start eatin’ that horse!

Well, we got our snow. The world is white — I’d guesstimate we topped out at three inches or so — and the neighborhood resounds with the blast of two-cycle engines. No, wait — the last one just stopped. That would be ours, and don’t give me any crap about it, Lance Mannion, because we have a long driveway and this ain’t Atlanta. So now the world is white and quiet, and our little part of it is safe for pedestrians. Winter is on. Temperatures remain low, and I’m hoping the snow is safe for a while. It’s been a while since I went out in my North Face and mirrored Ray-Ban aviators. Winter’s own bad-ass.

But today’s question concerns indoor activities: Do you buy movies on DVD? Why or why not?

I ask because I don’t. Or hardly ever, now that Kate is past childhood and the time-for-mom technique of parking her in front of a video. In Ann Arbor a few years ago I came across a tent sale for Border’s warehouse stock, a real Blondie-goes-to-Tudbury’s free-for-all, and they had unsold or cutout or made-obsolete-by-the-director’s-cut DVDs for sale for $5, the magic price point for me, and I think I bought three — “The Producers” (and if you wonder whether it was the original or the remake, you don’t know me at all), “Monty Python and the Holy Grail,” and “Taxi Driver.” I have watched the first two once, and the third maybe three times, mainly for the featurettes. That’s the most DVDs I ever bought at a sitting, but I have maybe a handful more, mostly Criterion Collection classics, that I never or rarely watch.

I wonder because someone must buy DVDs, beyond Blockbuster stores. I see DVDs at garage sales. They’re never, ever, a movie anyone with half a brain would want to watch, even on cable. Being hoodwinked into spending $8 on a ticket before the reviews buried it, sure. And yet someone said, “Ellen DeGeneres in ‘Mr. Wrong’? Yeah, that’s worth $20.” Most movies are crap, and most do their briskest DVD sales in the first month. And the only DVDs I’d buy are things like “Rashomon,” 60 years young.

A few years back I did a story on the great American paperback book, and had a fascinating chat with the author of a coffee-table book devoted to the subject. The paperback, he said, is truly a democratic wonder, and pointed out that the standard price point of mass-market paperback has, over time, tracked amazingly close to that of an hour of work at minimum wage. Before paperbacks, Americans who weren’t wealthy enough to buy hardcover books — and there were millions of them — patronized lending libraries, which were not the same as public libraries, more like video stores for books. You paid a fee to check a book out for a few days, and brought it back. The paperback dime novel, printed on cheap paper and easy to stick in a lunch pail or back pocket for a few minutes’ break time, represented a revolution in bringing books to the masses.

Of course, the masses don’t always want to read the Harvard Classics, so then we got the glorious genre of pulp fiction, about which I will one day write at greater length. It so happens that in the last year I read collections of two of my favorite writers’ early work for the pulps (Elmore Leonard and John D. MacDonald), and boy was that interesting. Your English teacher tells you fiction is art, but there’s a special kind of art created by having to get a lot of exposition up top, before the reader has to turn the page. I’ve always admired fiction writers who could make their living entirely from writing and not teaching, and you get a glimpse of how it’s done — by pleasing the reader. Those who can do it and make it fun to read are well and truly artists, if you ask me.

I guess buying John D. MacDonald’s pulp collection would qualify as buying the DVD. (Although I didn’t. It was a gift.)

I am no longer making sense. I’m distracted. I’ve been thinking about a story I’d like to pitch, which really interests me. Now to find a functioning publication that might pay me for it. That’s the challenge.

So, what do you have cued up for the weekend, besides getting out your shiny aviator shades?

One bit of bloggage: I see John Goodman has been added to the cast of “Treme,” by our fave David Simon, now shooting in New Orleans. Goodman will play a “college professor,” I read. Let’s hope his character is named Ashley Morris.

That is all.

It has snowed almost every day in the past couple of weeks, but there’s almost no snow on the ground. We’re getting a form of non-snow, I think, that always seems to be falling but never accumulating. There’s snow everywhere, but the grass isn’t covered yet, which has always been, for my money, the start of winter-in-earnest.

Meanwhile, it’s freezing everywhere else, particularly Florida, where, my newspaper informed me this morning, iguanas are falling from trees. This seemed to warrant further investigation, so — thanks, professor Google! — I typed “iguanas falling from trees” into the search window, and…

…may I just stop for a moment to marvel at that? I went to Ann Arbor yesterday, had lunch with a couple of people to talk about this and that. I mentioned my brother-in-law’s amazing ability, honed after years of falling asleep on the couch in front of late-night television, to be able to give you the name and stars of any Western movie you can name after less than five seconds of viewing time. In the time it takes you to stop on a channel and think, “What’s that?,” he will reply, “‘My Darling Clementine,’ Victor Mature, Walter Brennan, Henry Fonda.” He’s a human IMDb. Which made me think of working nights in a newsroom before universal ESPN and the internet, when all the staff did was answer the phone, report scores and settle bets. Who played second base for the Dodgers in 1950? Won won the Heisman Trophy in 1961? And so on.

Google handles all of that now. If you phoned a friend on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire” today, and they were anything other than a hunt-and-peck typist, they could answer your question in the time it takes to exchange pleasantries. Once or twice, late in that show’s prime-time run, I think that actually happened. You either know about the Beaufort Scale or you don’t. It doesn’t come to you after a long uhhhhh.

To a future with fewer urban legends, if also not so many excuses to call a buddy and catch up, under the pretense of asking a baseball question.

Back to iguanas. It’s true, they’re falling from trees, and this is apparently an urban legend all its own. They’re not Florida natives, the little bastards were introduced by careless pet owners, and they’re spreading. Falling iguanas is, I hear, a “long-standing Florida urban legend,” but not any more — some TV guy captured an actual falling iguana on video, which is almost enough to forgive his atrocious English usage. (The cold weather, he tells us, is “an opportunity to rein in on the critter.” Although I bet, in the script, he spelled it “rain in.”)

But there you are, a frozen falling iguana. Don’t say I never did anything for you.

As long as we’re on the subject, though, I’ve given myself an opening to bring up a piece of e-mail that’s been kicking around since before Christmas, one of our regular readers, who quotes it here:

Crable ”didn’t need to do it. He wasn’t going to jail. He wasn’t under arrest. They were actually going to give him a ride out of there and give him a helping hand to diffuse the situation,” Troyer said.

Story here. It’s about a police shooting, so it’s maybe it’s a little tacky to bring it up in the context of a usage error, but oh well. I see “diffuse” and “defuse” mixed up all the damn time, to the point I don’t think anyone knows how to use them. I’ll give it a try:

Diffuse can be a transitive verb, but is mostly intransitive, and in my opinion, should stay that way. It means, “to spread over a wide area.” Bob’s beer fart diffused through the room, which quickly emptied. The writer of the passage above should have used defuse, as in disabling a bomb, or in this case, to reduce danger or tension. As the gasping crowd moved through the doors, the senator defused the awkwardness with a witty remark. Let’s try to remember this in our written expression, eh people?

You come here for chitchat, you leave with an English lesson. That’s the way we roll here.

Meanwhile, it’s snowing heavily all over the Midwest. Chicago is expecting a foot. All reports here say to expect it to taper off as it reaches southeast Michigan, and we may get an inch or so. In other words, the grass may well still be uncovered this time tomorrow.

I don’t know how many of you followed the link yesterday to the story about the Dearborn sweatshirt, in which the class of 2011 commissioned a design that depicted “11” as twin towers, with the school’s bird mascot bearing down on them, and the phrase “you can’t bring us down.” The fact the school in question is predominantly Arab is just icing on the cake of awkwardness, a situation just begging to be defused, but I had to chuckle at the e-mail I received from a friend, who said:

What goes around comes around. When I was in high school (class of ’86) our class had to have a unifying costume-decorating theme for the annual spring “Olympics” competition opening ceremony. Everything had been done already: cowboys & indians, rock & roll, military, etc. Then we seized upon a brilliant idea: ARABS. Yes, the whole class showed up in towelhead regalia. You know, like, rock the casbah? Inappropriately and inaccurately spanning everything from burqas to belly dancers to Sikhs. I wore a three-piece suit with a towel on my head and carried a gas can. You can be assured we never gave a single thought to any actual Arab-Americans who might have been attending the school or the ceremony. I do remember a banner in our hallway that read: We’re So Sheik.

That’s one way of looking at it. Remember the Iron Sheik, the wrestling heel? He wore a burnoose and waved an Iranian flag. Iranians aren’t Arabs and don’t wear burnooses, but no one ever said cultural caricatures were subtle. A photography intern I knew years ago took the Sheik’s picture backstage while he shaved his head and chest; I think he was naked, too. Good picture, although the goods were nothing special. Now you know.

Late start today, but a full day otherwise. Enjoy what’s left of yours.

I want to be fair and openminded, so let me say it in public: It’s around this time every year that I decide Texas is perhaps somewhat forgivable, although it will be decades before any of us forget George Bush, big hair and Enron, and centuries before the world does. Those red grapefruit that make their way north in the cold hard winter are damn tasty. I had half of one for breakfast, and friends, it brightened my morning.

Doesn’t counterbalance the Bush family, but there are many more days left in winter. It’s a start.

January 5, hello, how are you? Why is my week filling with static already?

Let’s start with a few questions from yesterday. Jeff wondered if the Detroit auto show is still on. Answer: Hell yes it is. It’ll take more than a recession, bankruptcy, collapse, bailout and multiple-limb amputation to kill that throwdown. I don’t think I’ll be going this year, alas. I would like to see the auto-show version of this ad:

You really can’t beat the automotives for b.s., and their ad agencies for polishing it to a high-gloss shine. I like where the car breaks through the wall and frees a few dozen doves of peace. Because that’s what I think of when I think about Chrysler. Peace. Style. Lech Walesa.

Someone mentioned Barbara Ehrenreich’s new book, “Bright-Sided: How the Relentless Notion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America.” Haven’t read it, probably won’t, but I appreciate the effort and I have always felt the same way, that the relentless emphasis we place on “positivity” and other happy-talk claptrap is probably not the best thing we can do for ourselves in times of trouble, although it can play a role. Ehrenreich was moved to tackle the topic after she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and found the endless platitudes about positive thinking and will-yourself-well to be grating. Having read
“Illness as Metaphor” once upon a million years ago, I remember how appalled I was to learn that cancer and other chronic illnesses were once seen as manifestations of various character flaws, that doctors spoke of a cancerous personality, i.e., you brought this on yourself.

It’s not so far from there to where we are now, when the failure to be relentlessly brave and optimistic in the face of the same illness is silently disapproved of, because why? You can think yourself well? That seems to be the unspoken reproach. Argh.

Optimism has its place in the world. But it’s one of those things it’s probably best to keep to yourself sometimes, too. Especially when you’re not the one having chemo.

That said, a doctor friend of mine once observed that his most peaceful patients at the end of the line, the ones most equable about the presence of the Reaper in the room, were the most religious ones. What is death to a Christian? Just a major change of address, as Anne Lamott says.

It all kind of ties back in with the Chrysler ad, which is “dedicated to Aung San Suu Kyi, still prisoner in Burma.” What does that even mean, “dedicated to?” Athletes are always dedicating their victories to their mothers or some plucky kid with cancer or, in this case, a political prisoner. I’m sure it gives her a warm feeling to know someone is working on her behalf, but I’m not sure how a car commercial is part of the solution to anything other than selling cars.

Look at Ms. Grumpypants! Turn that frown upside down!

OK, how about some bloggage, then:

Thanks to Detroit Moxie and various retweeters, from whom I learned about the Belle Isle Ice Tree, now under construction at Detroit’s signature park. It has humble beginnings, but I hope it begins its transformation soon.

Rachel Maddow’s been on this story for a while, but even a grump can find the dark humor in it: American evangelicals travel to Uganda, spew hatred, and are astonished to discover someone actually listened and took them seriously:

KAMPALA, Uganda — Last March, three American evangelical Christians, whose teachings about “curing” homosexuals have been widely discredited in the United States, arrived here in Uganda’s capital to give a series of talks. The theme of the event, according to Stephen Langa, its Ugandan organizer, was “the gay agenda — that whole hidden and dark agenda” — and the threat homosexuals posed to Bible-based values and the traditional African family.

For three days, according to participants and audio recordings, thousands of Ugandans, including police officers, teachers and national politicians, listened raptly to the Americans, who were presented as experts on homosexuality. The visitors discussed how to make gay people straight, how gay men often sodomized teenage boys and how “the gay movement is an evil institution” whose goal is “to defeat the marriage-based society and replace it with a culture of sexual promiscuity.”

Now the three Americans are finding themselves on the defensive, saying they had no intention of helping stoke the kind of anger that could lead to what came next: a bill to impose a death sentence for homosexual behavior.

A gay friend of mine told me once gets occasional mailings from his religious family, alerting him to various “cures” available through our brothers in Christ. He shrugs, and I carry the outrage on his behalf, as he is a wonderful person in every way, and the idea of someone who should know him best of all subjecting him to this is maddening. Here’s the logical end, I guess.

New book on the nightstand, an oldie but a page-turner: “American Odyssey,” which I picked up intending only to read in, and now find myself reading through it. Riveting.

Tuesday static commences! Go tune yours out.