For the making-of featurette* included with our student-film project, I shot a little video with my Flip:

I call your attention to our awesome camera dolly, a DIY project made from PVC pipe and skateboard wheels. Our director is friends with the folks at InZer0, a local sci-fi series/maybe-a-movie production, and borrowed it from them. It knocks together with a rubber mallet (or your shoes), and the stand slides noiselessly. With it, we were able to do a cool little tracking shot of our talent, Teresa, walking down a hallway, checking doors on either side, with nary a bobble.

As a compromise with the Hollywood version, it’s pretty adequate to our uses.

I have a memory of one of my showbiz-nerd friends telling me the first Steadicam rigs cost $100,000, so I went online in search of other cheap compromises for low-budget filmmakers. Not surprisingly, there are zillions. I think I know what the universe is trying to tell me: It’s time to indulge my long-held dream of producing pornography with real scripts, and a real story. Something to keep ’em in the seats after, you know.

See the dolly shots and the dolly track — in Genesis’ “Invisible Touch” video. Not made from PVC, because it’s Genesis.

(*Note: There is no making-of featurette.)

Bloggage: Just the other day I asked Kate if she’d like to play hockey. Now, I’m thinking she might be better off playing, oh, chess. Oh, and in re: our earlier discussion about the relativity of luck? Check this out — a guy gets hit in the neck with a skate in a freakish accident, severs his carotid artery, leaves a red smear across the ice to remind everyone in the arena of their own mortality, and guess what his doctors say? This:

Vascular surgeon Richard Curl, who assisted Noor, said the cut was about an inch-and-a-half deep and also as wide. Doctors were astonished the skate blade did not hit any other arteries or veins or cause any further damage.

“Luck,” was a factor, according to Noor.

Thought for the day: Everything is relative.

Eric Zorn interviews his old college buddy Gerry Prokopowicz about the latter’s new book, “Did Lincoln Own Slaves?” A sample:

Q: Given that the Q&A format is often recognized by discerning readers as evidence of a lazy writer who doesn’t want to struggle with transitions, why did you choose that format for your book?

A: I got it from your columns.

You know how Michael Moore is, like, fat and evil and a propagandist and not interested in the truth at all? You know? I’m sure his ideological opponents will show the proper way to do things when “Expelled,” their documentary on intelligent design, debuts later this year. They sure got off to a good start with PZ Myers. What’s the ninth commandment again? I always forget.

Finally, Wireblogging continues over at The New Package. Come join the discussion.

More coffee, shower and work, in that order. Be still, heart.

This isn’t a lesson you have to be a writer to learn, but just in case you haven’t, let me lay it out for you:

One person’s poetry is another’s profanity. Context is everything. It’s stupid to argue why black people can call one another nigga and white people can’t. The language you use at the bar, at the frat house, at your grandmother’s dinner table, at church, at the office is likely going to vary widely.

So get over whether or not David Shuster got a raw deal from his employer over using the phrase “pimped out” to describe what Chelsea Clinton’s parents may or may not be doing in re: their daughter. He perhaps thought he was being hip and young and with-in and down with the kids, and Hillary Clinton objected. This cannot possibly come as a surprise to anyone with half a brain. You say tomato, I hear to-mah-to. Let’s chalk the whole thing up to experience.

To be sure, popular discourse has become much more, er, popular in the last 20 years. Again, you don’t need me to tell you this. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are situations where, “boy, is that guy a brainless schmuck” is far more eloquent and to-the-point than “Mr. Shuster displays a shocking lack of couth,” but while “schmuck” is a wonderful word, it means “penis” in Yiddish, and if you start throwing it around like confetti, sooner or later you’re going to meet someone who’s offended by it.

As a woman of five decades, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the casual use of the word “pimp,” if only because it’s the first syllable in “pimple,” and the fewer of those in the world, the better. But really, what a repulsive image to aspire to, that of a badly dressed man who sexually exploits women for profit. I’ll accept the word as a synonym for cheap flashiness, as well as a crude synonym for “to aggressively market for money,” but otherwise, it’s just sort of gross. And again: Context is everything. “The Daily Show” can do a story on FLIFs and no one bats an eye, but if you’re supposedly a legitimate cable-news talent, you’d better not go there. Or maybe you can go there in 2009, but not 2008. Or on Tuesday, but not on Monday. I imagine I’ll live to see the day Anderson Cooper can call the president a douchebag on the air, but it hasn’t arrived yet. (Not that Anderson would say such a thing; he’s too well-bred.)

So let’s retire the discussion before it gets tiresome. Oops: Too late.

Final note: Guess who said, in 1998, “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.” Answer: You’re soaking in it!

OK. I’m writing this on Sunday. At this very moment, I’m supposed to be on Belle Isle, shooting the final scene for our video class project, but we cancelled. The temperature is 7 degrees and the wind is blowing at, no kidding, 45 miles per hour. It seemed cruel to make two nice actors, not to mention everyone else in the class/crew, torture themselves in such conditions, particularly given the compensation everyone’s getting, which is: Nothing, plus a sandwich. So we’re shooting the indoor scenes later in the afternoon and will pick up Belle Isle when nature stops being such a cruel mistress. That’s showbiz.

But this leaves me more than the usual bit of time to scrape up some bloggage for you pimps, and here you are:

If that damn German polar bear gets any cuter, I’m moving there.

Great idea to spice up your social life: Detroit’s Guerilla Queer Bar, a movable feast that, once a month, descends unannounced on a different nightspot. In January, they chose Carl’s Chop House, one of those ol’-skool downtown steakhouses that’s been dying since forever. Earlier in the month, the owner went before city council and asked to take the place topless. From this week’s Metro Times:

The bar area is packed, with the customers laughing and bartenders hopping, filling drink orders and collecting tips. The piano player is in full swing, making the trip from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” to Matchbox Twenty and back again, with a brief stop at Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen.” Carl’s ambience is so varnished-wood-and-carpet, it’s kitsch. If you haven’t been, it’s worth a trip. Except for the addition of a dance floor in the main dining room, the place hasn’t changed much since the days when Jimmy Hoffa would cut deals in the conference room upstairs.

What a great idea. What will those creative queens think of next? Quick, buy modern furniture.

You know how your mom told you to always wear clean underwear, so the people in the emergency room wouldn’t think you were trashy? She didn’t know the half of it. Bonus giggle: The name of the club.

Groan: Work. And so the week commences.

On Saturday mornings, I take a class at the Detroit Film Center. Like most things in life, it’s not the destination, it’s the journey. Let’s take a quick tour.

The center recently relocated from the Wayne State area to the Eastern Market, where lots of artists are setting up in the ancient-but-cheap warehouse/loft space. The address is on the Chrysler Freeway service drive, which is confusing to some people. Fortunately, there’s a helpful sandwich board and, this being Detroit, a smear of graffiti (I think it says, “butout”):

But the Hollywood glamour really starts when you step into, um, the…I guess you’d call it the foyer:

It’s a lot murkier than the picture suggests. I think it would be an excellent set for a serial killer’s lair. There’s another sandwich board at the end of this passage, which directs you to take a left turn, and please close the door behind you to save heat. Then you enter the glamorous anteroom:

The incredibly steep staircase is the next leg of your journey. Last week I got there early and took a closer look at that pile of moldering banker’s boxes:

The one on top was labeled “closed appeals.” (Apparently there’s a lawyer’s office elsewhere in the building.) A shameless snoop, I plucked one out at random and started reading a very sad story about a man who loved marijuana more than paying child support. Drama is all around us; all we have to do is look.

But at some point you have to ascend two floors at a sharp angle. I always take note of the chandelier:

Every time I see it I reflect that if it were featured in the New York Times Thursday Styles section, it would sell for $3,000. But keep climbing. Now you’re halfway there:

You’ll notice it starts to look significantly less grimy at this point. By the time you get to the top, it’s actually pretty nice, in a shoestring-budget, kindness-of-strangers, scrabblin’-for-grants kind of way. And the view is great.

I’ll always remember this place as the first time I ever heard actors read lines I’d written. We had auditions for our group project this week, although “group project” probably makes a three-minute narrative film sound a little grand. Not film, video. But it has a story, and two actors, and two locations, and a script. Seven people answered our Craigslist ad, which promised only lunch in return for a day’s work. But this was the strange part — one couple presented themselves as a package deal, so we had them read together. They put a lot of energy into the lines, and it worked very well. Then the next guy came in, and played it just the opposite — very dry, very low-key, and it worked equally well.

We cast the first couple, but told the other guy we wanted to keep him close, because the teacher wants the next class to write something specifically for him. (Just like in Hollywood, only with no money or recognition whatsoever.) On just these Saturdays, I’m getting a little of the newsroom back — that sense of collaboration and teamwork.

Of course, production isn’t until this weekend. I may feel very differently after that.

So, another busy morning on not enough sleep. (Thank you, God, for coffee.) So short bloggage today, but some:

Flash fun to be found here. Load and wait two seconds for the fun to start. If anyone reads Dutch, let me know what it says.

If you’re in a Super Tuesday state, tell us a little about E-Day where you are. An experience in collaborative citizen journalism, eh?

Off to run six errands and make eight phone calls. Back eventually.

Welcome to any new readers we might have today. NN.C got a little old-media pub Thursday, in Ben Burns’ column in the Grosse Pointe News. He did not let slip our secret that we’re really Not the Right Sort to be Pointers, but did get a quip in:

Nancy Nall Derringer, who has a last name that sounds like a 1930’s bank robber, freelances for a variety of local magazines and publications both on the Internet and beyond. And her lance is always sharp.

When I leave my name with secretaries and receptionists, I sometimes say “Derringer, like the gun.” As tiny two-round pistols that can be tucked into a lady’s garter have ceded their popularity to MAC-10 machine pistols, only a few pick up on the reference. The rest say, “OK, Miss Dillinger,” and leave it at that. Nice to know my married name is still ringing the old bells.

I’d link to the story, but you have to be a subscriber to the dead-tree paper to read the website. And I suspect hardly anyone here is. But welcome to any newbies it scared up. Feel free to join our raucous discussions in the comments. First-time commenters go to a holding pen, but once I’m satisfied you’re not a spammer, you’re approved forever after.

Anyway, that story wasn’t the most interesting thing in the paper yesterday. This was, a display ad in the classified section:

I am requesting your assistance in recovering a GOLD FABERGE EGG ENCRUSTED WITH JEWELS approximately 8 inches tall, attached to a wooden base, valued at over $6,000. The aforementioned egg was taken from a home on Lake Shore Drive, during an underage house party. The subjects that stole the egg along with other jewelry, stated that the ‘egg was thrown from a car window,’ while at a stop sign at southbound Wedgewood at Roslyn, November 12, 2007.

If you have any information, please call…

If I were the editor, I’d hand this ad to my best reporter and tell him or her to go fetch me a story, but I’ve given up expecting such initiative from the local press. Nevertheless, I appreciate their publicity.

In case you’re wondering, we got a few inches of snow overnight, making a search of the Wedgewood/Roslyn intersection problematic today. Anyway, I’m sure it’s long gone. What a thing to find on your dog-walking route. Life imitates “Risky Business.”

(It goes without saying that this was a Faberge-style egg, but that’s just a quibble. There are only about 60 authentic Faberge eggs extant in the world today, and their individual value is in the millions, not six grand.)

It’s still snowing, but no day off for Grosse Pointe schoolchildren, who, like the mayor of Detroit, generally get to school in chauffeured late-model SUVs. It’s a good day for shooting some video, as was yesterday, when the storm was coming. Early afternoon, it was very cold and very clear, so I went for a walk down by the lake and found the ice at our city park as solid as my kitchen floor, making wonderful groaning noises farther out. I had my video camera, so I crept out as far as I dared and tried to capture it. The crews cutting limbs at the Ford estate took a short break, so there was no chain saw noise to ruin the effect. I was thinking of shooting something like the last five minutes on “CBS Sunday Morning,” but once I got out far enough, the groaning stopped. Dammit. So I looked at some swans, trespassed a little on the Ford grounds, and turned back.

The bad news: The water level in the lake is as low as it was in the fall. Maybe lower. We could get three feet of snow today, and it wouldn’t be enough.

So what’s going on out in the big world? It seems the wind is changing. Isn’t it funny, how one day you just wake up in August and realize that fall is nearly here? Today…well, let’s call it Strange New Respect Day. Republicans are reconciling themselves to McCain. Hillary and Obama are making nice to one another. The next phase has begun, and it’s only Feb. 1. The race for the nomination will be effectively over after Tuesday (I suspect), and then we can start focusing on November.

By the way, if there was any doubt Stephen Colbert was a comic genius, it was gone when he pegged Mitt Romney to Guy Smiley:

I mean: Perfect.

(“Sesame Street” is so far past its peak it’s not even worth discussing, but it’s useful to remember the early years, when Jim Henson’s genius still infused the Muppet troupe. From Muppet Wiki: When Count von Count introduced himself in a Beat the Time sketch in his traditional way, “They call me the Count because I love to count things,” Guy responded with, “Well, I’m Guy Smiley. They call me Guy Smiley because I changed my name from Bernie Liederkrantz.”

Bloggage: I’ve always wondered how the downturn in newspapers’ fortunes is playing out in Europe, particularly the U.K., which publishes the liveliest papers in the English-speaking world. Give a smart writer a simple assignment — a general piece on men’s underwear — and watch her run:

Come the Renaissance, as the chausses became tight hose, the braies got shorter and were fitted with a convenient flap for urinating through. That buttoned or tied flap – the earliest codpiece – wasn’t actually covered by outer layers, so Henry VIII, never one for modesty, began to pad his. Historians have suggested that beneath Henry’s appendage may have been hidden the medication-soaked bandages needed to relieve the symptoms of his syphilis. Men free of venereal disease, meanwhile, used the tumescent codpieces as a handy pocket. (“New World cigarette?” “Ah, not for me, my lord, no.”)

Among the things I learned from that article, besides the disgusting one about Henry VIII’s syphilis: Brit slang for undies includes “smalls,” “y-fronts” and just plain “pants” (distinguished from trousers). Also, “there is one delicate area of pant advancement where men are not yet ready to go – universal package sizing.” Because no man wants to go into a department store and be spotted buying the masculine equivalent of a 32A.

What Gannett is Doing to the Free Press is a standard small-talk discussion among Detroit journalists since the paper’s sale two years ago, but to me, it all comes down to the Tips Box, the Gannett trademark, you-are-too-stupid-to-live-your-life feature tacked on to too many stories. With a big winter storm overnight, there’s a huge Tips feature in today’s paper. Among the tips: Protect your lungs from extremely cold air by covering your mouth when outdoors. Try not to speak unless absolutely necessary. Roger that, sir!

It seems a fitting note to shove off for the weekend on. Try not to speak unless absolutely necessary.

Nothing like a death in the family to make you wish you were born a fish. The morning’s activities here at Chez NN.C include a whole-house search for Alan’s Social Security card. It’s for a bank thing. Of course he knows his number, but they want to see the actual card. Let me see the hands of those of you who can lay hands on your Social Security card within 15 minutes. Yeah, thought so. After a while, I thought screw it, let’s get the replacement. There’s an SSA office two blocks from here; he can bring in his passport (which we can find) and get it while he waits.

But can you get it while you wait? Good luck getting an answer. The website offers exhaustive instructions on how to request a card, but is vague on the while-you-wait part, which is important, because this all has to happen today. A call to the office was in order. The local number was disconnected, and all inquiries now go through an 800 number, which employs one of those automated voice recognition programs but NO ACTUAL HUMAN BEING, and…and…

Alan reached someone at the bank. Turns out they don’t need the card if they can see your W-2. Crisis averted. But a new resolution: This year, once and for all, assemble a “grab box” of key family documents so we can avoid this nonsense in the future. I’m not the best record-keeper, but I’m good enough, but life is simply growing too complicated.

Per Kirk’s comments yesterday, I’ve decided to stop feeling bad about enjoying the mayoral scandal. It’s the story that keeps on giving, and it would be…dare I say?…wrong not to smile once in a while. Last night’s big event was the mayor’s public apology, made at his church, but in an empty room, to one pool camera, no media allowed, no questions, in and out in 12 minutes. It was pretty much total crapola, as you might expect, all “I’m sorry” but no mention of what he was sorry for. He has to be very careful what he says now, because he’s facing a perjury investigation, and that’s not a charge to be trifled with. Once again, he showed his beguiling combination of Street and Suit, in his declaration “I would never quit on you.”

(Oh, why even mention it? I hear more mangled English on the evening news than anywhere else in my world. Last night’s neologism: “fictitionally,” which seems to mean “fictional,” but has some extra syllables, making the speaker sound extra-smart. There was also “tenor” used incorrectly, i.e. “The mayor struck the right tenor in his statement,” and this by an anchor.)

But the cherry on top was yet another performance by Steve Wilson, WXYZ’s designated Kwame-botherer. The station deployed its chopper for overhead surveillance of the church, not just to get video but to let Steve know which door he was sneaking into. So Steve was right there to yell, “Who is Carmen Slowski?” as his honor stepped out of his SUV. The mayor Heisman’d him nicely. I’d say it was like a bear swatting away a smaller animal wanting a bite from the carcass, but Wilson is easily as big as Kilpatrick. He’s truly a wonderful figure, because his distinguishing fat-man feature is a wattle that lends a comical note to the blowhard self-importance. Follow that last link, a transcript of his 11 p.m. report, to get a sense of how he rolls:

I’ve faced the mayor many times in the last few years, usually with questions he hasn’t wanted to answer…and tonight proved to be no exception. While most reporters and cameras waited at the side door…our Chopper 7 “eyes in the sky” pointed me to where the mayor was heading—the front door, so when he pulled up and finally stepped out the car, I asked him one of the questions so many of you have been asking—and got a shove in return…As I first revealed last Friday and the Detroit Free Press confirmed today, only days before the text message scandal broke a week ago, the mayor was here at a North Carolina mountain resort eating chocolate-covered strawberries, drinking fine French wine, and soaking in an aromatic bubble bath with a woman using the name Carmen Slowski. Mrs. Kilpatrick and the couple’s three boys were back home in Detroit at the time…and the mayor has never explained why records show there were two people in his room, or just who was the mystery woman sharing his bubble bath.

“Soaking in an aromatic bubble bath.” If you can’t laugh at that, you’re dead.

If the mayor’s lucky, the approaching winter storm everybody’s fretting about today will turn out to be a rip-roarer. Nothing like a foot of wet snow to get people talking about something other than bubble baths, not to mention “fine French wine.”

Note to self: Go shopping today, lay in a supply of fine French wine. If we’re going to be snowed in, might as well do it right.

Do we have bloggage? We have bloggage:

Steve Novick, candidate for U.S. Senate in Oregon, really is a guy you’d want to have a beer with. Here’s why. (YouTube link, for those of you who avoid them.)

Don’t waste your time on “Meet the Spartans.” Slate says why:

Various news sources have declared that Meet the Spartans has a running time of 84 minutes. Some online reviews peg the actual running time at 68 minutes. I went to a 5:30 p.m. screening. After previews, the movie began some time between 5:44 and 5:47. The closing credits started at 6:47. After a cast-performed rendition of “I Will Survive” (note: this was a reprise of an earlier performance) staged on the American Idol set (note: not the real American Idol set), the credits ran over a black screen. Perhaps two minutes later, the credits gave way to scenes that weren’t strong enough to make the first 60 minutes, including Spider-Man removing Donald Trump’s toupee. After about five minutes of these deleted scenes, the credits started again. They moved at about 10 lines per minute. And, considering the movie is about an hour long and probably took about six hours to make, they included a surprising amount of names; I’m guessing 8,000. By the time the credits had been slow-rolling for several minutes, the other 15 people in the theater had gone home. As the credits continued, I put on my headphones and listened to some music. At 7:09, more than 20 minutes after the credits began, I was rewarded by the aforementioned five-second, fake-Stallone-as-Britney bit. The lights went up and I left, shaken and depressed.

Not surprisingly:

This was the worst movie I’ve ever seen.

Thank God for the New York Times Thursday Styles, because who else is covering the Slow Design movement? Ahem:

Katrin Svana Eythorsdottir, another designer from Iceland, made a “chandelier” from beads of glucose that clung to twine and caught the natural light. After five months, the chandelier disintegrated (as Ms. Eythorsdottir, who wanted to create a temporary, biodegradable object, had intended). It is true that a decomposing chandelier seems sort of fast, but as it turns out a domestic object with a built-in expiration date is a slow notion, said Carolyn Strauss, a designer, curator and the founder of SlowLab, a three-year-old design think tank with offices in Manhattan and Amsterdam that’s devoted to searching out the slow in cutting-edge design. “You wouldn’t buy that chandelier and go away on a two-week vacation,” Ms. Strauss said. “It’s an object you’d really cherish because of its temporary and therefore precious nature.”

No word on the cost. Whatever it is: Not enough.

OK, friends, I’ve wasted too much of the day already. Hang in there and enjoy yours. I’m after some fine French wine.

I missed the State of the Union last night. [Pause.] Confession: I always miss the State of the Union address, and probably haven’t sat through one start to finish since the Reagan administration. The papers always run a transcript and exhaustive analysis. The late-night comics will mine it for jokes. If it actually produces news, that’ll be on the web within minutes. What do they need me for?

So instead, I opted to spend the evening at Border’s, watching Gerry Prokopowicz promote his new book (see right rail; it’s now officially On the Nightstand, although technically it’s in the kitchen at the moment). As our one-man advance team Brian Stouder reported last week, “Did Lincoln Own Slaves? And Other Frequently Asked Questions About Abraham Lincoln” a great, breezy read of a book that treads a careful line between egghead scholarship and popular appeal, suitable for long winter afternoons on the couch or short hits while making dinner. I first met Gerry when he was scholar-in-residence at the Lincoln Museum in Fort Wayne, an institution every local journalist got a chance to write about sooner or later.

My interest in Lincoln has always been casual, but the more I learn about him, the more interesting he becomes, particularly his oratory. For one of my Lincoln Museum stories I got to interview David Donald, whose Lincoln biography was new at the time, and we got off on one of those wonderful conversational tangents about the Second Inaugural speech, and how radical and brutally honest it was. Imagine a politician of today standing before the nation and saying:

If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through His appointed time, He now wills to remove, and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him? Fondly do we hope, fervently do we pray, that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said “the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.”

It doesn’t quite sound like, “As they stand up, we’ll stand down,” does it? An unfair comparison, perhaps, but again, imagine any contemporary politician telling the nation, “We may be at war forever, and if so, we deserve it, so deal.”

It’s hard to get enthused about a modern State of the Union after that.

The bulk of the presentation was Q-and-A, as that’s the framework of the book. Some of the questions were good, others less so, but fittingly, the show-stopper came at the very end, when Gerry took one last question and a child’s piping voice rose from the back and queried, “Was Lincoln gay?”

“You’ll have to buy the book,” he said, and with that, it was on to the signing.

Bonus: I got to meet Del Szura, who comments here from time to time and is, in fact, a Pointer. Little by little, our influence spreads!

So, bloggage:

Everybody has probably seen this, the Hitler-is-a-Cowboys-fan YouTube thing, but I hadn’t until yesterday, so maybe there are a few who might still be surprised by it. If only they’d hired me to fix all the errors in the subtitles, though.

Hell hath no fury like the well-heeled given the high hat: An Oakland County real estate company is suing ticket brokers, alleging it spent nearly $100,000 on VIP tickets and celebrity party invitations at the 2007 MTV Video Music Awards in Las Vegas but a company official and his clients were given the brush-off when they showed up at the pricey events. And here I thought the real-estate market was in the toilet. Not if they have that kind of cash to throw around, I guess.

The TV Club over at Slate found fault with a short exchange in Sunday’s episode of “The Wire,” in which an editor subtly upbraids another over his use of profanity in the newsroom. Which prompted Romenesko to ask for personal anecdotes of such encounters. The letters are starting to come in.

OK, folks. Have a good day, all of you, and I’ll try to do the same.

I’m sorry I’m starting late today. I got a glimpse of Javier Bardem at the SAG awards last night and it rattled me so thoroughly I’m just now regaining my senses. He gives me tingles in places I didn’t know I had places. Mercy.

So since I’m tardy off the mark, having spent the morning doing my Wireblogging, why don’t we just make this a quickie linkfest until I pull myself together?

Go on over to Detroitblog and check out the pictures with this post, particularly the second one, with the pheasants. When people suggest the city might try farming some of the vacant lots, I think they’re on to something. I really do. It would be a new kind of farming, to be sure, but the human race is not a static one.

I don’t know why I love the British tabs so much. Maybe because of prose like this:

We reveal the astonishing scary truth about Spice Girl Mel B’s “great love affair” with Eddie Murphy …they only had sex THREE times. But incredibly that was enough to get her pregnant, crash their three-month fling and spark one of Hollywood’s biggest legal bust-ups.

Incredibly! Maybe it’s a Brit thing. After all, Mick Jagger was the one who sang, “Some girls give me children / I only made love to her once!”

I need some beet salad, a workout and a dog walk. Back later.

Scenes from a very modern 18-hour visit between friends:

The kitchen table is strewn with sections from two newspapers, three laptops (one of them the kind with widdle bunny ears), an iPhone, two venti Starbucks cups, my Flip video camera, two Gorillapods and, I dunno, maybe a salt and pepper shaker. “Sometimes I’m reading a paperback, and I try to flick the page with my finger,” says Sam. Not the way you flick a mosquito off the page. The iPhone flick. “Did you see these e-mails from Leslie?” she asks John, looking up from the iPhone. “Already answered,” he replies, not looking up from the laptop.

This is how we interact these days. John shoots a little video of Sam reading the e-mail and shows it to me, because I was sitting next to her when she did so, and I guess I might like to see it from another angle. Sam takes a picture of our stained-glass panel for her iPhone wallpaper. Then she takes a picture of the dog. Then we all realize what we’re doing, and go for a walk.

“Put on hats, it’s cold outside!” a passerby scolds us. Apparently the multiple weather widgets installed on every single electronic device on the kitchen table failed to warn us that it was 30 degrees. So we stop at Starbucks for more venti cups and a warmup. I tie Spriggy’s leash to a post outside. Sam takes a picture of him through the window. Good. He hasn’t had his picture taken in five or 10 minutes, and two or three soft-hearted ladies have petted him on their way in. No wonder his self-esteem is so toweringly high.

We need something, we decide. Maybe…a bottle of wine and a bunch of snacks. Also, a two-pound salmon filet and something from the deli called “Michigan black bean salad.” Cucumber, dill, Greek yogurt, a baguette, and we’re good to go.

Does the iPhone ring during dinner? Of course it does. I wait for John to say, “I’ll call you back after we finish eating,” but he doesn’t, because it’s a semi-emergency, the call is coming from Sam’s brother, stuck in an airplane on a runway at Hartsfield in Atlanta for going on three hours, and he wants to alert the media. Does John have a number at CNN? he wants to know. “How strange that you’re in Atlanta, where we live, but we’re in Detroit, but anyway you’re in the plane and can’t get out,” John says, before giving him the number. I kept waiting for him to check the weather, like the guy in the commercial, who used his iPhone to liberate a similarly imprisoned flight. It wouldn’t do any good, because the reason the flight is sitting on the ground is terrible weather in Atlanta. It’s snowing there, which we learned from an earlier phone call from John’s brother, who also lives there.

I wonder where this salmon came from, I thought. I hope not China.

Anyway, the dinner was delicious. We watched Jon Stewart dismember Jonah Goldberg, put all the devices to sleep and/or charge, and went to bed ourselves.*

This morning I read, not online, a NYT review of a book called “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” It begins:

In “Against the Machine,” the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic Lee Siegel pays a visit to Starbucks. He sits down. He looks around. And he finds himself surrounded by Internet zombies, laptop-addicted creatures who have so grievously lost their capacity for human interaction “that social space has been contracted into isolated points of wanting, all locked into separate phases of inwardness.” How long until they wake up and smell the coffee?

Mr. Siegel’s field trip illustrates several things, not least that Starbucks is today’s most hackneyed reportorial setting. His outing captures a vision of connectivity that is the precise opposite of what it appears to be. For him the semblance of a shared Starbucks experience masks endemic computer-generated isolation, a condition that has prompted psychic and ethical breakdowns that go well beyond the collapse of community.

He should have come for dinner last night. The salmon could have fed another easily, and maybe he would have had some suggestions for Sam’s brother to call. Then she would have taken his picture.

Bloggage:

Does Lee Siegel read Bossy? I’d like to hear what the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic (can I get that job? Because I’ve got the skilz) has to say about her brand of humor writing, which combines the elements of photography, colored type, italics, strikethroughs and Photoshop-with-arrows to tell a story about her slippers which makes you glad you spent 45 seconds hearing about. Why can amateurs figure out the unique syntax of the web, and college-educated professional journalists can’t? Put that in your venti Starbucks cup and drink it, Lee Siegel.

Whenever I see a picture like the one with this story, I remember the federal judge in Columbus, Ohio, who ejected a female lawyer from his courtroom in the 1970s for the crime of wearing a pantsuit. The old geezer’s dead now, but I wonder what he’d think of a 75-year-old lawyer with his gray hair tucked into a neat braid at the back of his head. Note that he got charges dismissed against his client, who was a candidate for tar and feathers last year, when she was accused of hanging up on a boy who called 911. Well-played, sir. A little Googling reveals the same lawyer was instrumental in reviving the career of Andy Bey, which earns him a place in jazz heaven, no matter how long his ponytail is.

You know how you know you’re really, really old? When you see a gossip item that begins like this —

Bye-bye, Justin Bobby! Audrina Patridge has a new beau.

— and you not only have no idea who the people are, you don’t even have the slightest itty-bittiest ghost of a hint of a desire to know who they are, and what’s more, you know that even if you bothered to find out, in the name of keeping up with what the kids are into these days, you know that both people will be over by the time you can Google the names. You just have a sixth sense about these things.

* Some events reported out of order, but all events actually happened.

One question: If the digital new media is supposed to be exploding all the old rules and not following any of the new ones, why do so many of its writers sound like Perry White dictating to the cigar-chomping rewrite man?

In Touch can exclusively reveal what actually happened after Britney Spears checked into LA’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center last week.

A source exclusively tells PageSix.com that Brit’s dad, Jamie, is the one who sounded the emergency on the red Phil phone once he learned his daughter was checking out early.

TMZ has learned Eminem was rushed to the hospital over the holidays.

OK, two out of three of those are old media with websites. But TMZ is new-media all the way, and they do it too. I guess it’s all Drudge’s doing, with his stupid fedora and Walter Lippman affectations. It’s amusing how well that old rat-a-tat-tat passive-voice stuff holds up, isn’t it? And how ironic that it’s used so often on gossip sites, where the news couldn’t be less consequential. By the way, is anyone ever not “rushed” to the hospital? “Eminem was driven to the hospital at a leisurely pace, observing all legal speed limits.” Don’t read that much, do you?

Enough woolgathering. I’m late getting started today because I had my tit in a wringer. Literally, more or less — mammogram time. You have to schedule those so far in advance it’s impossible to coordinate it with one’s less-ouchy days on the calendar, but I was as stoic as I could be. The rule of mammography is squeeze, squeeze, squeeze a little more and then one last big squeeze until the patient yelps, and then you take the picture. The technician gave me a little lecture on the importance of maximum compression (not while I was compressed, thankfully) — the flatter you can make everything, the better “doctor” is able to see what’s going on. Fair enough.

Because this was a digital picture, I was able to look at them immediately afterward. I once had a hairdresser (straight, male) whose wife called her breasts “the hanging bags of fat,” a term that’s stuck with me, and I think about it whenever mammography time rolls around, seeing them squashed under my chin and doing my deep breathing to keep from yelling.

Today I thought about a writing class I took once, led by a real blowhard, who was trying to impress upon us the importance of le mot juste, just the right word. He was doing it with a long story from Arthur Koestler’s novel “Darkness at Noon,” about two men being held in the same prison. They were on opposite sides of a wall, and couldn’t see or hear one another, but over time they started communicating using a tap code. One man is describing an old lover’s “breasts like champagne glasses.” The way the blowhard told this story was excruciating, going on and on about the tap code and how agonizingly slow it was as a means of communication, kind of like this story, and then he gets to the punchline, “breasts like champagne glasses.” And he looks around the room and beams, because isn’t that just the most incredible phrase to describe a pair of perfect breasts?

I sat there blankly, picturing the old granny in those Playboy cartoons. Because, to me, a champagne glass looks like this:

About two seconds later it occurred to me he was thinking of this:

Which just goes to show le mot juste is never entirely juste. But the granny is probably more comfortable during her mammograms than the saucer-boobed girl.

Have I lowered the tone? Good. Now to the bloggage:

New Hampshire proves you can never count a Clinton out. Discuss.

Liberals are sabotaging RedState’s website. (I think.) Jon Carroll explains.

And now, I’m going to write something someone might actually pay me for. Carry on.

Here’s one for you Hoosiers, via reader Ann Fisher, who spotted it on a Chicago-area food board:

I have in-laws who live in Fort Wayne. Every time we go there, we are treated to “beef” and noodles. I thought it was just a family recipe, but when I was in line at the Meijer’s, an 80 yr old woman informed me they were also having beef and noodles for dinner. I asked if it was a regional specialty, and she wasn’t sure, but told me it was a good way to feed a family of nine (!)

The thing is, it’s pretty vile stuff. I have a feeling, after some research, that it’s a drastic perversion of “Amish beef and noodles” from the Amish in that area. Only because both dishes are intended to be served over mashed potatoes. Nothing like a double dose of carbs. But get this. My in-laws serve it with a side of (drumroll) white bread rolls! 3 starches in one sitting!

I believe the iteration of this recipe that I was served consisted of *cans* of a beef product, possibly Hormel. I didn’t want to go into the kitchen to find out, after the dog-food like aroma wafted out. The noodles are actually kind of nice, thick, german spaetzely things. Thus my question- anyone know of this dish, and what brand the noodles are that are generally used? They are maybe 2 in long and 1/4 in diameter, kind of chewy.

There’s so much to love in that post. The assumption that Hoosier beef and noodles must be a perversion of the more authentic Amish dish, assumptions of Amish authenticity being rampant in Chicagoland. (Trust me, honey: The Amish invented canned beef. These people don’t have refrigeration, remember. You wouldn’t believe some of the crap they eat.) The “dog-food like aroma.” The utter bafflement at its presentation, ladled over mashed potatoes. But hey, nice noodles. Where do you buy them?

I can answer her question right off the bat: You don’t. Those kind of noodles you make, but it’s pretty easy. You don’t need a pasta machine, just a rolling pin, a flat surface and a knife. My Jay County-raised neighbor used to make killer chicken and noodles, and she thought making noodles from scratch was about as difficult as opening a carton of milk. As for the triple-starch presentation, all I can say is, if you spent the morning baling hay and were about to spend the afternoon stacking it in the barn, all those carbs would burn off by 2 p.m. and your stomach would start on the protein. The first and only time I ate noodles over potatoes I was doing the rigorous duty of writing a newspaper column, and the effect was soporific. Within 90 minutes I slipped under my desk for a 20-minute nap, and the residue of that meal I carry on my hips to this day. The problem with country cooking is the problem with evolution — it takes a long time for the diet to catch up to the fact you left the farm two generations ago, hence the ample bottoms you see in Indiana, and all over the midwest, for that matter.

As for canned beef, I cannot say. Beef and noodles, in my experience, is usually made with braised chuck or round or another inexpensive cut suitable for the rural proletariat. But it could very well be canned, too. Your in-laws may consider fresh beef something to be reserved for special guests, not Chicago foodies.

The post concludes with a link to the Allen County Public Library’s photo archive, where we see this peculiar local dish being served in a firehouse. This makes me nervous. What if the alarm went off 90 minutes after lunchtime? You’d never be able to rouse the firefighters from their carb coma. Your house would burn down while the safety forces slept off the potatoes.

I know I’ve said this before, but when I was doing talk radio? The most calls I ever got on a single topic? Was on noodles and potatoes, served together.

OK, then.

I have to admit, I feel sorry for Hilary, and it has nothing to do with the tears. Via LGM, I found this, where Kerry Howley draws the obvious conclusion:

Add to this useful list of the worst jobs in the world: consultant to any candidate with breasts. Show emotion and you’re weak; show strength and you’re a collection of servos. Respond to attacks with emotion and you’re “angry.” Respond with equanimity and you’re cold and distant. Shy from war and you’re too feminine to lead; embrace it and you’re the establishment’s whore. And the worst thing you can do? Acknowledge, in any way, shape, or form, the existence of sexism in these United States.

Word.

Since LSU pned the Buckeyes last night, this seems appropriate: Retired , 73-year-old cop kicks butt of armed, road-raging driver. The driver had a .357. The geezer, a cane. And it happened in? Slidell, Loozieanna.

Day two of the January heat wave threatens to drown us under torrents of rain, but what the hell. It’s still above 50 degrees. Have a great day, all.