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.

It’s been a long time since New Year’s Eve was a circled-in-red day on the cal­en­dar. The idea of pack­ing into some hotel ball­room for a warm glass of cham­pagne at mid­night and 10 min­utes of kiss­ing strangers is a vision of hell. We had an impromptu gath­er­ing at our house in Ann Arbor to wel­come in 2004, and that was fun, although the year that fol­lowed didn’t play out all that well, and only under­lined the idea that less is more on Decem­ber 31 of any year.

If I had more money to travel, it might be fun to greet the new year in an exotic locale, Guam or atop Mt. Fuji or some­place with cheap fire­crack­ers and new cus­toms. File that one under pipe dreams. Truth be told, one of the best New Year’s Eves I ever had was when I was a kid, and we went next door to cel­e­brate with the neigh­bors, and the lady of the house made me one apple beignet after another until I couldn’t eat any more. She was Dutch and said it was tra­di­tional. Pow­dered sugar was bet­ter than cham­pagne to a 10-year-old.

The prob­lem is the expec­ta­tion of fun, of course. Even an opti­mist can find it hard to be merry when you’re expected to be, and after a string of under­whelm­ing years I just gave up. Now our cus­tom is to make a nice din­ner, open a better-than-average bot­tle of wine, pop in a better-than-average rented movie, switch over to Times Square at 11:55 p.m. and go to bed 20 min­utes later. Now that I think of it, that was one of the more mem­o­rable nights in recent mem­ory, watch­ing “Spar­ta­cus” and fin­ish­ing 19-whatever laugh­ing over the oysters-or-snails scene.

What­ever your plans are tonight, I hope they’re fun and safe and what­ever you’d like it to be — oys­ters or snails.

So, then. Blog­gage? Not bloody much. Hav­ing com­pleted my entire four-item to-do list yes­ter­day, we cel­e­brated by see­ing “Avatar.” I walked in irri­ta­ble, hav­ing inad­ver­tently cho­sen a 2-D screen­ing time and unwill­ing to wait three more hours for the next 3-D, and got more irri­ta­ble as we sat through 15 min­utes of ads and 15 min­utes of pre­views of movies I’d for­feit a kid­ney to avoid (“Clash of the Titans,” any­one? “Release the kraken” — are they seri­ous?). I spent the time think­ing how many peo­ple I know are call­ing it “Dances With Blue Cats,” and assum­ing this was another waste of an afternoon.

Two hours later I was yelling, “Go, red dinosaur!” and reflect­ing that I hadn’t had this much fun watch­ing the totally pre­dictable since “Star Wars.” Funny how that goes — you watch the setup and reflect that the char­ac­ters couldn’t be more crudely ren­dered if they were drawn in grease pen­cil, the story all but lit with neon signs, and yet you’re still com­pletely enter­tained. It’s the jour­ney, not the destination.

We’re going to have to see it again in 3-D. No, we won’t. 3-D Imax. Then I never have to see it again.

Actu­ally, what amazes me about special-effects bonan­zas like this is how the actors do it. It’s one thing to sum­mon up emo­tion in a kitchen, another thing in a sound stage, another thing entirely while dressed in a spe­cial suit, sword-fighting in front of a green screen. I heard an inter­view with James Cameron in which he described who played the fly­ing dinosaur Zoe Sal­dana leaps onto in the course of demon­strat­ing war­rior skills to her humanoid pupil — some grip big enough to endure take after take of being leapt upon by a skinny actress. Movie magic.

It’s prob­a­bly just a pep­per­oni pizza repeatin’ on him, but the year closes out with a reminder the reaper was busy in 2009, and most of the names on his list were in bold­face. Get well soon, Rusty. Because it would be bad karma to wish for a painful…fail, wouldn’t it? Bad. Karma.

Wel­come to what­ever new read­ers we’re get­ting today; we’re end­ing the old year with a small honor. This blog is included in a Detroit News fea­ture on notable local sites, which I had to stay up late to read. My hus­band always washes his hands of these things, a wise move. There aren’t many rules in our lively com­ment sec­tion other than: Be inter­est­ing. And be aware, the con­tent isn’t usu­ally so lame. Every blog­ger gets a glide pat­tern once in a while. In another two weeks this blog cel­e­brates its ninth birth­day, plug­ging along more or less five days a week. It’s worth what you pay for it, and I hope it sur­prises you from time to time.

Happy new year to all, and fin­gers crossed for the good kind of surprises.

My neigh­bor has out­door speak­ers, and is play­ing Christ­mas music for… some­one. Santa, or maybe me. I’m only hear­ing it on my trips in and out to the car and recy­cling bin, but it sounds like those records my dad used to get at the Sohio sta­tion when I was a kid — a blend of the Mor­mon Taber­na­cle Choir, Celine Dion and Bar­bra Streisand. Lots of strings and feeeeeeling.

Hav­ing been in one too many stores in the past week, I’ve had it up to my eye­balls with this crap, how­ever. I’m counter-programming with “Every Pic­ture Tells a Story.” The peak of Rod Stewart’s career, in my opin­ion, although obvi­ously this isn’t shared by the rest of the world.

My back hurts, but my work is pretty much done. Alan can han­dle the lit­tle bit of wrap­ping that remains, and I’ve turned out a col­lec­tion of dishes that do not go together in any way, but will serve for our Christ­mas fare, which will be sort of hap­haz­ard and brunchy. There’s an egg thing, a bean thing, a sweet potato bisque. And while I didn’t do a buche de noel, I did some­thing sim­i­lar — choco­late roll. It’s imper­fect, noth­ing like the pic­ture, but it looks more like a log than I thought it would:

The last stop today was the liquor store. I asked for a bot­tle of vodka and a straw.

So, the big day is upon us. I’m tak­ing a few moments to enjoy the tree and a glass of wine. And while I don’t have much to report, I do wish you all a pleas­ant hol­i­day and last week of the year, how­ever you choose to spend it. I’m thank­ful for all of you who read and com­ment here; every day you show up is a gift to me, and I appre­ci­ate it.

Just so Bill O’Reilly hears it loud and clear, then.

MERRY CHRISTMAS!

Well, this is inter­est­ing. The Mex­i­can good guys had a big win last week, killing a high-ranking gang­ster, Arturo Bel­trán Leyva, in what is inevitably called “a gun bat­tle.” The sol­dier who killed him also died in the shootout. Although it’s cus­tom­ary for police and mil­i­tary offi­cers involved in anti-drug work to be anony­mous and wear ski masks and other cloth­ing to obscure their iden­tity, once one of them is killed, their iden­tity is made pub­lic. Ensign Melquisedet Angulo Cór­dova was hailed as a national hero. His mother was pre­sented with the Mex­i­can flag at his funeral, in much the same rit­ual we’ve seen in this coun­try dur­ing mil­i­tary funerals.

The day after, Leyva’s hench­men burst into Córdova’s family’s home and killed his mother and three other rel­a­tives.

Peo­ple today use the word “dec­i­mated” casu­ally. We for­get what it means. Dec­i­ma­tion was a spe­cific pun­ish­ment for one’s ene­mies, and it meant one in ten — you humil­i­ated and hum­bled the con­quered by killing 10 per­cent of their sol­diers. That was con­sid­ered pun­ish­ment enough. What’s going on here is some­thing much worse, a zero-sum game that isn’t, really, because the les­son I men­tioned yes­ter­day applies here, too: There’s always a demand for drugs, legal or oth­er­wise, and always a new gen­er­a­tion of peo­ple will­ing to take them. Legal­ize every­thing and you take the gun­play out of it, but oth­er­wise, there you are.

[Pause.]

Hey, it’s the Christ­mas sea­son! Let’s turn the page and move on to some­thing cheerier! You know the news­pa­per racket is in trou­ble when the freakin’ New York Times, home of the top-of-3A daily Tiffany ad, etc. etc., accepts a full-page ad for the Amish miracle-heater fire­place. It’s a throw­back to the days when com­pa­nies would run ads that looked like news­pa­per copy, because appar­ently there are still seven or eight suck­ers who believe that on one page of the New York Times you can read about the al-Jazeera cam­era­man who spent six years at Guan­tanamo Bay, and on the next a full page devoted to the “mir­a­cle” that an elec­tric space heater enclosed in an Amish-made ply­wood box can make your heat­ing bills “drop to a fraction.”

One of the fun­nier moments I’ve spent in the com­pany of Alan’s fam­ily came when his sis­ter Jenny related her con­ver­sa­tion with Aunt Dorothy, who wanted to order one of the “free” heaters for Jenny:

“I don’t want one,” Jenny said.

“Why wouldn’t you want it if it’s free!?” said Dorothy. (There’s such a per­fect logic to this, I don’t know what to say.)

Any­way. The scam of the Amish mir­a­cle heater is pretty easy to fig­ure out, if you read above a third-grade level: The Chinese-made heater is just your aver­age 1500-watt space heater, avail­able at any Wal-Mart for around $20. You pay $350 for the “Amish” man­tel that goes around it. There’s a web­site, of course. Poke around in there and enjoy your­self; did you know the Good House­keep­ing Seal of Approval is “pres­ti­gious?” Srsly.

The Amish are no strangers to this sort of thing. Alan once vis­ited an Amish farm in Indi­ana that turned out olde-timey koun­try wag­ons used in dis­plays at Bath & Body Works. Knock together some scrap ply­wood, throw on some out-of-round wheels, slap a coat of paint on every­thing and then turn the kids loose on it — each one was “hand-distressed” by Amish boys and girls, who assaulted it with chains, steel wool, chem­i­cals and what­ever, prepara­tory to its place­ment in an Amer­i­can shop­ping mall. I love this coun­try so much it hurts.

Two days left, and my list is painful to look at. Yesterday’s excur­sion to the mall was fruit­less but for the pic­ture of Olga the man­nequin in her hello-sailor cock­tail dress. The sooner this fash­ion flies, the bet­ter. Kate tried on a dress at Bet­sey John­son, just for the heck of it, and looked adorable. Two hun­dred dol­lars for a dress seemed a lit­tle steep, she said, and of course I agreed. But it’s funny how a Bet­sey dress can be just as short and just as strap­less, but looks fun instead of trashy. That’s why they pay her the big bucks.

Happy Wednes­day, what­ever yours holds. I’m outta here.

My e-mail pro­gram seems to be hosed. Oddly, I am uncon­cerned. I can pick up the mail in two other places (phone and web), and besides, I’m start­ing to see prob­lems like this as not really prob­lems at all. Week­ends are good for unplug­ging, and I intend to do so. I might even like it.

It occurred to me the other day that mak­ing a writer work on a com­puter with an inter­net con­nec­tion is a lit­tle like mak­ing an alco­holic insur­ance agent move his office to a bar. Which reminds me, if you haven’t read Sweet Juniper’s lat­est post, you should. It’s not about writ­ing or alco­holics, but it is about insur­ance. Sorta. It’s also funny.

Two cups of cof­fee, and I can sense it’s already going to be a short-attention-span kind of day. Some­times I hit the fin­ish line of the week like one of those rubber-legged marathon­ers, and today has one of those hit-or-miss to-do lists: Meet­ing, buy sand­ing sugar, clean house, make elab­o­rate Christ­mas cook­ies. Some­times Fri­day turns out pro­duc­tive against all odds, because I don’t have to work four hours farm­ing news at the end of it. I’m free to work myself into a fraz­zle and col­lapse on the couch with a glass of wine at its end. Plus, I want to make a giant dent in “Chronic City” this weekend.

I need to remind myself, how­ever, that to-do lists are proof you’re alive, and if I wanted even the alive alter­na­tive, I could look up the Face­book photo of our own mild-mannered Jeff with a giant ban­dage taped under his nose. He looks a lit­tle like Jack Nichol­son in “Chi­na­town,” only with­out the nice suit.

So with that, I’m dump­ing this thin gruel into the same ol’ same ol’ cat­e­gory and start­ing my day. Because that sand­ing sugar isn’t going to buy itself, y’know.

Have a great weekend.