An unexpected night off last night, or a partial one. I was two hours into a seven-hour shift, typical Sunday night, the world of business slowly coming back from the weekend as Monday’s sun moved around the globe. There was a flurry in Australia, not much out of India, Europe ditto and then the equivalent of a five-bell bulletin for the pharmaceuticals industry — the CEO of Pfizer was throwing in the towel, unexpectedly. He said he was tired (which put Madeline Kahn in my head for the rest of the night, singing “…tired of playing the game…”). I got the first few of what surely would be an avalanche of stories into the queue and then my internet went out.

Restarted the laptop. Nothing. Restarted laptop and router. Nothing. Restarted laptop, router and cable modem, ditto. Repeated everything. Nothing. Tried to call Comcast, and the service line was busy. Hmm, a clue. Went on Twitter via my phone, searched “comcast” and got page after page of tweets from “one minute ago” from people using words like SUX and FAIL. Obviously, this wasn’t just our house. So I called the main office in Ann Arbor and got the payroll person/office manager, or rather she would be the office manager if we had an office. She said she thought the überboss was awake, but he was in California. Lucky I have his cell number. Called him, and he covered while I went off to Caribou Coffee and got on their network.

This all took about half an hour.

But Caribou was closing at 10, so the office manager roused the guy who would replace me at 1 a.m., and he agreed to come on three hours early. Meanwhile, we had the Pfizer story dripping into our client’s breaking-news queue right on schedule. My relief IM’d me at 9:55 and took the helm, and I left as Caribou was getting ready to lock up.

Went home, internet still out. But the cable worked, so I watched “Boardwalk Empire” and treated myself to a pre-midnight bedtime. This morning, on Facebook, I saw the guy who replaced me last night, tagged in a photo. It was the first time I’d ever seen his face. (He lives in Texas.)

And I’m telling you all this why? Because it occurred to me during all this what a very modern workplace this is, how very much of the modern world it is. One of our editors is famous for taking a multi-week tour of Europe a few years back, and never missing a shift. He did his research carefully, and made sure he was always near a good wifi hotspot, did his job, and let his bank account reliably refill every payday. He lives across town, in Detroit. Never met him, either, although my friend Michael has, at a party.

“I met your colleague Zack,” he e-mailed.

“Really?” I replied. “What does he look like?”

I know some of you are baffled by all this. (And I know I lost some of you back when I used the phrase “five-bell bulletin.”) I have a part-time job. Title: Editor. I call myself a news farmer. We track news of interest to our corporate clients. We’re entirely virtual, we’re all contractors, and we’re scattered from sea to shining sea. Advantage: Work at home, on your couch, in your jammies and slippers. Disadvantage: Work at home, see no one, communicate with colleagues entirely via IM and e-mail. And so when someone invites you to a party, with actual living flesh-and-blood guests, you’re pathetically grateful, which is how I found myself at a gorgeous Palmer Woods mansion — the Van Dusen, if you’re interested — on Saturday night.

This was part of the Palmer Woods holiday home tour, Palmer Woods being the grandest of Detroit’s grand old neighborhoods, every house a showplace, with a truly diverse population of well-to-do buppies and yuppies and flamboyantly creative and artistic gentlemen. Two of the latter were the official hosts of the afterglow, with their spectacular flower arrangements everywhere and samovars of Pama martinis. And I looked up, and who was leaning against the piano but James McDaniel, whom most of you remember as Lt. Fancy on “NYPD Blue,” but is known around here as Sgt. Longford on “Detroit 1-8-7.”

No, I didn’t talk to him. I think the absolute worst thing about being an actor would be having people flock around you like toadies, telling you how much they like your work. Although Michael did, and said he was a really nice guy.

All in all, not a bad weekend. How was yours?

I’ll tell you what, parties and “Boardwalk Empire” sure beat the news this weekend, which takes us to the bloggage:

Krugman on Bush tax cuts: Just say no:

So Mr. Obama should draw a line in the sand, right here, right now. If Republicans hold out, and taxes go up, he should tell the nation the truth, and denounce the blackmail attempt for what it is.

Yes. Yes yes yes yes yes. Why is this so hard?

Alex says that if I make this column the lead in today’s entry, the headline should be Blow: Me. Whaddaya think? I think the column is stupid, personally.

No, I will not be changing my Facebook profile picture to a cartoon today. As LGM puts it:

It’s an under-publicized historical fact that A. Lincoln was persuaded to issue the Emancipation Proclamation after millions of union supporters changed their Facechapbook avatars to dageuerreotypes of famous abolitionists.

Monday, Monday. Gotta get to it.

Well, folks, I’ve been sitting here for two hours, staring at the screen and trying to think of something to get the fingers moving, and I have? Nothing. It appears it’s a rare dry day here, and in the meantime, I’ve got some work backing up, so I’d best get to it. A few linkies for those who care.

I think Prospero was asking about the Grande Ballroom here in Detroit a few days back. There’s a new documentary coming out; you can watch the overlong trailer here, including many many shots of the place as it looks today, i.e., wrecked.

Now here’s a WikiLeak I can get behind: A “major U.S. bank still in existence,” coming soon.

It’s been 10 years since Bush v. Gore. Jeffrey Toobin considers the worst Supreme Court case ever.

You might not recognize the American South’s version of the Civil War being “celebrated” next year.

I think I need a crossword puzzle and a quick walk. Let’s try again tomorrow.

I say this with all the affection and love in my heart for you guys, but it sure is good to get away from this place for a while. I thought it would be Blog City over the weekend, and to be sure, we had all the necessary materials:

The aging folks catch up with one another while the Millennial considers analog space.

I count four laptops in that photo (one closed and hiding), plus an iPad. But it’s deceiving. John was working on getting our stupid printer on our wifi network, which is one reason we’re so glad they stop by a couple times a year.

The stupid printer now works. And we didn’t spend the entire weekend laptopping separately. We made several big meals, shopped at Eastern Market, toured the DIA, ate at Good Girls Go To Paris and got up off of our thangs, except when felled by wine. I got four DVDs from the library, in case we felt like a movie, and discovered “Bottle Shock” is worth your time, but “Synecdoche New York” is not. In fact, it’s self-indulgent nonsense, the result of what happens when a quirky, neurotic screenwriter produces several great, memorable scripts (“Being John Malkovich,” “Adaptation,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”) and then says, “But what I’d really like to do is direct.”

I dunno, maybe you liked it. I didn’t. (Shrug.)

What I did like was this amazing story, which I read all the way through even with guests in the house, a cautionary tale for everyone who is convinced the internet always offers a better shopping experience. Short version: Shopper goes online in search of cheap eyeglass frames, wanders into Crazytown. Somewhat longer version: Bad internet actor finds way to game Google’s allegedly genius algorithm. As I read this more than 24 hours ago, I’m now mainly immersed in the reaction, which ranges from “well, it’s her fault for not Googling more deeply” to overly technical discussions under Google’s hood. Combined with this story today, about not a brain drain, but maybe a brain trickle away from the company, you could get the impression that Google has moved into the next phase of its existence, i.e. crusty old fart-ism. The 21st century, it is so full of wonders: A company goes from shining light of innovation to General Motors in 12 short years.

This pleases me, and has ever since I tried to reach Google with a problem a while back, and discovered it’s as easy as placing a person-to-person phone call to the moon. Everything’s automated, no one has a phone number or even an e-mail address, and if you have a problem with that, screw you and welcome to Dodge City.

And now it is Monday, and guess what? My next-door neighbor has a tree-trimming crew here today. The lead chainsawer is one of those guys who can’t just turn the goddamn thing on and cut a limb. He’s like one of those guys at a red light on a hot motorcycle, who has to go rev-rev-rev-REV and rev-rev-rev-REV every few seconds until you go insane. That’s what I’m hearing now, and so it’s either earplugs or get the hell out and start manic Monday.

Better do the latter. I had a great birthday, and thanks to all who wished me one.

We have a saying in our house: It’s just not Thanksgiving until there’s a plumbing emergency. And guess what? It’s really and truly Thanksgiving now.

Eh, it’s not really an emergency, unless you consider it absolutely essential to have running water in the kitchen. I suspect it’s a failing faucet, nothing my husband can’t handle, but this week he is Sick, Sick with a capital S, and if there’s anything unpacking a faucet requires, it’s a clear head. I could call a plumber, I guess, but I know Alan will veto that one out of hand. He comes from a long line of men who solve their own problems. And so this problem will be solved with much cursing and misery.

We have an extra day in all this, as we both have to work on the holiday, and we’re not celebrating much until the day after, when Alan’s sister arrives, along with NN.c’s webmaster J.C. Burns, along with his plus-one, Sammy. So there’s time. But it’s dwindling.

I meant that about the plumbing emergencies. In back-to-back years, we had clogged drains, first at my parents’ and the following year at my sister’s. It was the classic Thanksgiving clog — potato peels. As I didn’t learn this until I was 35 or so, I say this now to those of you who might not know yet: Don’t put potato peels down a garbage disposal. They don’t get chopped, but slip out the vertical slots in the unit to form stubborn boluses downstream, generally about one inch past the reach of whatever drain snake you might own, and no number of goddammits will free them. You will end up calling a plumber, most likely. The plumbers’ lobby is the reason DON’T PUT POTATO PEELS DOWN THE GARBAGE DISPOSAL isn’t tattooed on every turkey, and the focus of all those tiresome Today show segments on how to eat healthy at Thanksgiving. On Thanksgiving, plumbers gather at the union hall and wait for the desperate holiday-rate calls to come in, while their wives stay home and shop online for resort wear, as they’re all headed for a warm climate as soon as the checks clear.

As for me, I have a million things to do today, and that’s without considering parent-teacher conferences, for which I should at least shower. This will be my first F2F with Mrs. Algebra, who terrifies half the class and bestowed the first B Little Miss Honor Roll has gotten in two years. Better wear the sparkly earrings.

Half the world is already phoning it in, so let’s go straight to the bloggage, eh?

And with that, a thousand sad journalists took their copy of “All the President’s Men” to the dumpster. Sally Quinn, today:

My husband and I are “Dancing With The Stars” fanatics. We plan our social life around it, often regretting invitations that fall on the night of the show. Only in emergencies would we try to TiVo.

Of all the things I could have gone the rest of my life happy not to know, it’s that Ben Bradlee watches “Dancing With the Stars” fanatically. Well, he’s an old man now.

I don’t know about you, but I cannot wait to see the Coens’ remake of “True Grit.” Cannot wait.

I’m really enjoying Salon’s Hack Thirty.

And now it’s 9:30, and I’m supposed to be dialing someone’s digits right now. So best get going.

How far will you go to win an argument with your spouse? Below, behold the old plastic wrap, and the new plastic wrap. Alan does not believe what I told him Saturday, that the original two-pack of 750-square-foot wrap was purchased at Costco in 2005, and therefore we have gone five years between plastic-wrap purchases. He doesn’t see how this is possible, even allowing that I am not given to Marabel Morgan-type stunts with the stuff. We agreed to write “November 2010” on the ends of both boxes of the new stuff, and see if it lasts until Kate’s freshman year in college.

Who is Marabel Morgan? some of you are wondering. Boy, am I dating myself. OK, for you young’uns: Morgan was an early squall in the culture wars, a retrograde Anita Bryant type who peddled a series of extremely successful books for women, advising them how to put the zip back in their marriages, “zip” being defined as sex, mainly, although she did write a cookbook along the way, too. Probably her most famous advice was for wives to wrap themselves in nothing but Saran Wrap and greet their husbands at the door with an icy martini. I guess the martini was a consolation prize for seeing his wife’s sweaty, mashed privates encased in plastic, but whatever blows your hair back. Morgan followed the Biblical formula of wives submitting to their husbands. What’s the flip side of that one, Bible people? I guess the Promise Keepers model, which also requires submission from our side of the aisle, alas. I’m not much of a submitter, all things considered. I guess that’s why I didn’t get married until I was 35. I guess that’s why I fight with my husband over plastic wrap instead of dressing in it.

One final note: Martin Cruz Smith’s new novel features a torture-execution featuring plastic wrap. I’ll spare you the details.

So how was everyone’s weekend? I went to Costco. Got some plastic wrap. I also went to the opera — “La Boheme” — and saw “The Kids Are All Right.” Enjoyed both very much, but it was the film that left me grinning. I love movies where you can luxuriate in the writing, and this was one of them. The story of a lesbian couple and family under stress when their sperm donor enters the picture gets so much right, I don’t care about the little things it gets wrong, and now that I think about it, I can’t really recall any. Highly recommended for Thanksgiving weekend DVDing, as long as there are no kiddies in the room. (There are several brief-but-explicit scenes of boinkage.)

Busy Monday, as always. So let’s get to the bloggage:

I know that sometimes I beat up on the Free Press, but they actually do have a few writers worth their generous paychecks, and one of them is columnist Brian Dickerson, who shares my curiosity about that line in all the Cialis, Viagra and related ED medicine ads: See your doctor if you have an erection lasting more than four hours. I always chuckle over that, and frequently remark to my long-suffering husband, “Someday I’d like to see a scene in a movie where a guy walks into an ER and announces he’s had an erection for four hours.” (He never laughs. I think we’re headed for divorce court.) Anyway, here’s Dickerson’s excellent Sunday offering: It’s been four hours. Now what? It answers the question everybody wants to know: Why four hours? And what happens afterward:

Q: So it’s like a heart attack in your penis?

A: Yes, I guess it would be sort of like that.

Now that’s service journalism.

Have you ever seen an Oprah’s Favorite Things show? I have, once. I found it equal parts compelling and repulsive. For those who haven’t, this is the giveaway show the big O does around the holidays, in which an unsuspecting lucky audience — it’s never revealed until it’s in progress — finds themselves gifted with a truckload, literally, of free stuff, thanks to Oprah. (Along with, I’m compelled to add, a huge tax receipt for the IRS.) You can’t imagine the audience reaction when they learn they’re the lucky ones. Really. It has to be seen to be believed.

Kenneth Jay Lane is selling knockoffs of Kate Middleton’s engagement ring. How did the company turn them around so fast? I’ll tell you how: They’re leftovers from the Diana-ring knockoffs. That’s one advantage to being old enough to remember Marabel Morgan. You remember other stuff, too.

Paul Krugman says: There will be blood. Oh, I don’t doubt it.

Off to the police stations. Let’s see what fresh hell our leafy Edens endured over the past week. My guess is: Not very much.

I took a different path from my car to the journalism department at Wayne State yesterday, and came across this monument:

Maybe my friend Michael, who once chaired the school’s Board of Governors, can explain why Alexander, and why there, but my guess is, there’s no particular story, just a bit of Greco-American pride. Metro Detroit is such a diverse place, not just racially but also in nationally identified groups that I had previously thought of as simply “white people” maybe trending to demi-swarthy — Albanians, Armenians, Chaldeans, Greeks, Croatians, that whole southern European salad, with extra olives (although Chaldeans are Iraqis, actually). Walking across campus, I’m as likely to hear Arabic spoken as English, although also Spanish, Russian and any number of other polyglot tongues.

Anyway, back to Alexander. That island nation has produced scores of individuals worthy of a bust, enough that it’s sort of sad to see the one who wept because there were no more worlds to conquer gazing out over Warren Avenue in Detroit. Although I’m sure the locals would give him a fight.

The term at Wayne is dwindling. I think yesterday will be the last or next-to-last office hours I’ll hold, which means less time out of the house but more time to work on other stuff. I like being on campus, any campus. Yesterday I was offered an opportunity to maybe do a master’s program at Wayne State. (I say “offered a maybe” because that’s entirely how vague it was.) I’m trying to clarify my thinking over the next few weeks, and one of the things that I will have to set aside is what a natural student I am, and how much of my self-worth is tied to how well I do on stupid bullshit like the Pew Research Center’s news quiz. I got a perfect score [preen, preen]. For now, I’ll concentrate on feeling smug. It’s not an entirely noble emotion, but it’s better than considering that only 14 percent of Americans know the current inflation rate.

The good news: I can pursue a degree outside of journalism/communications, which is where the graduate assistantship opportunity lies. The bad news: I’m unqualified for almost any practical field of study — Sigh. Should have taken more math. — and the idea of spending the price of a cheap new car on a master’s in something like English makes no sense when I have another college student coming down the pike in a few more years. There are other options — economics, history, maybe urban planning — but at this point I’m thinking grad school after 50 is a luxury for Peter Weller, but not me.

Which is a segue to the bloggage, and brings us to this charming follow-up item: The littlest Robocop, the sequel: Robocop 1.0 weighs in.

The right wing triumphs, and now they’re gettin’ sassy! Heeeyyyy, Roger Ailes! But it’s not like he doesn’t have a history of this sort of thing.

OK, time to pack my chute and start the real work of the day. Tonight we’re going to see “La Boheme” at the Michigan Opera Theater, and at the moment Alan is coughing up a lung. How appropriate, as Mimi dies of consumption onstage, to have a little side soundtrack.

So have a great weekend, all.

Reading the news these days — excuse me, consuming the news — requires a real strategy. It’s difficult, in a world flooded with links to more information than any human could possibly consume in a 24-hour day, to know which ones to click. Some reveal everything you need to know in the headline:

Home-built plane crashes in Livingston County

Do you really need to know anything more? I mean, y’know, sorry for the damage to the bright firmament of humanity, but…”home-built plane.” Yeah.

[Pause.]

Sorry. I was interrupted. Something hit the kitchen window hard a little while ago. I thought it might have been one of the million sticks that seem to rain out of a mature oak over the course of a season, but when I went outside to take the trash to the curb a few minutes later, there was a robin lying on its back in the driveway, eyes closed but still breathing. I stood around waiting to see if it was planning to die, but soon the eyes opened, so I went back inside, put on some gloves (West Nile) and rolled it onto its sternum, where it remained upright on its own power. Went back inside and poured another cup of coffee, read some more web and just went back out. No robin, and a runny bird poo in the place where it had been sitting. Fingers crossed it made its recovery and exited under its own steam and not in a cat’s mouth. Sometimes all you need is to be reoriented. Sky up, ground down? Check. Man, do I have a headache. Good luck, robin.

I have a mixed bag with wildlife, but I try to do my part. My next-door neighbor in Fort Wayne was a veritable Dr. Doolittle, however. I once saw her catch a wild raccoon with her bare hands, free it from the plastic grocery bag it was hopelessly entangled in, and release it without getting so much as a scratch. After which a bluebird perched on her shoulder and whistled a happy tune. One of the previous two sentences is untrue, but both are equally unlikely to happen. I guess that sort of confidence in handling animals comes from growing up in the country, with a grandfather who neutered his own barn cats. He kept a special tool for those occasions — an old overcoat with one sleeve sewed shut. He’d catch the half-grown toms (no small feat in itself) and stuff them face-down into the sleeve, which presented him with the target area and only two legs to contend with. Swipe, cut, squeeze, snip and release. It was over in a minute.

Horses are gelded more or less the same way, or were, before veterinary anesthetics. “As long as they keep moving afterward, they’re fine,” a grizzled old farmhand once told me. The probably spend the recovery time searching for their lost gonads. And then they forget they ever had them, and become useful to the human race again.

Testosterone may well be the engine of civilization, but in animal/human interactions, it just screws things up. Although it certainly makes for some entertaining entries on Coozledad’s blog.

Four hours of sleep last night. It’s one of those mornings where I suspect I’m actually dying. Better grab a shower. But before that? Some bloggage:

Whew, Dick Cheney, not looking so great. I’m sure his black heart will gurgle on for some time after the host has died; in fact, I’m sure the new host is being prepared now. Why do you think the College Republicans even exist?

“Worst Canadian Thanksgiving ever” — Jon Stewart + Carl Paladino = entertainment. It’s funny to see the Republicans at this time of year. “Men in Speedos,” i.e., a tiny fraction of the gay community, carrying on at a gay pride parade is gross. Photo of woman doin’ it with a horse? Hey, I think I’ll forward this to all my friends! Because I’m in construction!

OIM: When bears attack! Something about this story smells. And it smells like chicken.

Shower, save me.

The weekend was pretty much perfect. Temperatures nudging 80, cerulean skies, the sort of string of lovely days that you always get in the fall, but not always on a weekend. So, as the previous entry should suggest, it seemed fitting to blow off a lot of chore-type stuff and enjoy it while we could. Sailing was Saturday. Yesterday was the housewarming party at the Frank Lloyd Wright house mentioned here a couple weeks back — it’s finally 99 percent done. I’m a friend of a friend of the owners, and came as his plus-one. No photos, at the hosts’ request, but you can still look at the ones at the Hour Detroit link (although the captions don’t always match the photos). It’s as lovely in person as in the pictures; I expect if they haven’t heard from a location scout already, they will soon — the place was born to be a movie set.

We walked over from my friend’s house in Palmer Woods, the grandest of the grand old neighborhoods in Detroit. Walking back alone — had to leave early — I was struck, for the millionth time, by how much money there was in this town, once upon a time. These Tudor-revival and Mission-style and midcentury-modern houses are now owned by buppies and gay men and others unafraid of urban-pioneer living, and there was much discussion of $1,400 monthly winter heating bills and other drawbacks to living in an 8,000-square-foot architectural masterpiece with leaky windows. But without them, that Wright house would still be sitting empty and falling to pieces. So a salute to all.

On the way back I passed a masterful pile identified as the Bishop’s House. The marker was unclear on whether it still is*, but did mention the many religious details of the construction, including a rooftop sculpture of the Archangel Michael battling Satan. Couldn’t see it.

* A quick Google reveals it is not. Whew. Houses like that are hard to justify, even for the One True, these days.

What else? Watched “Howl,” available On Demand. Liked it very much, which I gather from the reviews is not the default position. The story of Allen Ginsberg’s magnum opus (although I hold “Kaddish” in almost equally high esteem) is told in three threads — the trial of Lawrence Ferlinghetti on obscenity charges for publishing it, an interview with Ginsberg by an unseen interlocutor, and the first reading of the poem itself in 1955. It’s a long poem, and long stretches of it are illustrated with animations, and that seems to be everyone’s problem. They’re too literal, they’re not beautiful enough, whatever. I didn’t care. I found myself paying little attention to them; they might as well have been the iTunes visualizer, or the oscilloscope potheads rigged to their stereos back in my wild youth. I was thoroughly taken with the words, the music of which is strong enough to carry the sequences. I guess the filmmakers thought a black screen or the iTunes visualizer would be too much.

James Franco plays Ginsberg as a young man, and together with Kerouac and Cassady tiptoe up to the edge of Abercrombie & Fitch styling, but don’t quite cross over. For $6.99 on the cable bill, I can think of worse ways to spend a Saturday night.

One of the duties I neglected this weekend was crafting something for this space that makes sense, or reads well, or has a point. Obviously. So let’s skip to the bloggage:

Living in Detroit, I guess I should know more about the Insane Clown Posse than I do, but honestly, that is one local act whose orbit simply does not intersect with mine in any way, shape or form. Which is good, because they’re pretty disgusting, the sort of rappers who make Eminem look like Leonard Bernstein. Still, it was simultaneously entertaining, appalling and amusing to read this piece in the Guardian about their true purpose in life:

All of which makes Violent J’s recent announcement really quite astonishing: Insane Clown Posse have this entire time secretly been evangelical Christians. They’ve only been pretending to be brutal and sadistic to trick their fans into believing in God. They released a song, Thy Unveiling, that spelt out the revelation beyond all doubt.

Oh, but it gets better! Check out the lyrics:

ICP have just released their most audacious Christian song to date: Miracles. In it, they list God’s wonders that delight them each day:

Hot lava, snow, rain and fog,
Long neck giraffes, and pet cats and dogs
Fuckin’ rainbows after it rains
There’s enough miracles here to
blow your brains.

The song climaxes with them railing against the very concept of science:

Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work?
And I don’t wanna talk to a scientist
Y’all motherfuckers lying and
getting me pissed.

Fuckin’ magnets, how do they work? Yeah!

The internet moves so fast these days you probably already know about the Ohio House candidate revealed over the weekend as having once been a Nazi re-enactor. (Yes, a Republican. I was as astonished as you were.) What you may not know is that in the Six Degrees of Separation Department, I once spent a weekend at this man’s ancestral summer home. His sister was friends with a friend of mine, and she impulsively invited us all up to their place on Devil’s Lake one Friday. It was a pretty gauzy weekend, but I remember enough to report that there were no, repeat no, Waffen SS uniforms in plain view. I do know they were pretty darn rich, which enables a lot of bad behavior and, far more important, an ability to wall yourself off in a world of people just like you, where no one says, “You know, maybe we shouldn’t be doing this, and if we do, maybe we shouldn’t take pictures of ourselves wearing these uniforms.” Actually, this characteristic is not confined to the rich. Which is why I will never run for elected office.

Which is just a short sidestep to bigotry in general, in particular Carl Paladino’s, who doesn’t want his children “brainwashed” into thinking it’s OK to be gay. Hmm. All I have to say is, “Rabbi? Is it too much to ask you to take your Bluetooth receiver out of your ear when meeting a gubernatorial candidate?”

Finally, via MMJeff, a Daily Howler worth considering:

For decades, your public discourse has been scripted by skillful players—and by their skilled, clownish messaging. We have drowned in ludicrous statements on policy matters; we have drowned in ludicrous statements about targeted public officials. (If we lower the tax rates, we get higher revenues! The Clintons are serial murderers!) And no matter how stupid these messages got, the “press corps” agreed not to notice. Endlessly, Limbaugh got a pass. So did Chris Matthews, during the many years when he worked for plutocrat masters. (No one did more to send Bush to the White House. But for years after that, Joan Walsh had to keep kissing his keister, the better to get on TV!)

Better get moving. Manic Monday now segues into Terrible Tuesday. I want to work less, or at the very least, be paid more. Is that so much to ask?

Last night was the world premiere advance screening of “The Wars of Other Men,” a short film I worked on this past spring. It had to be downgraded from a world premiere to an advance screening because the film wasn’t, what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh, right: Done.

The audience was kind and forgiving, however. The whole purpose of this project was to show we could do a credible short with significant CGI sequences on a micro-tiny budget, and those suckers take time, as James Cameron could tell you. So we were missing a few, but the ones that were in there were great. This is a sci-fi war movie, set in an alternate-history early 20th century, about a small rifle squad on a mission to destroy a weapons plant. When the first threat causes them to run for cover, and they look up to see a zeppelin passing by overhead, flashing signals on a primitive mechanical sign, everybody cheered. The miracle had happened.

The narrative may have been a little confusing for total newbies, as it was missing the climactic explosion. The image is still rendering somewhere in Livonia, I guess.

We shot most of it at the Packard Plant, which lends that certain siege-of-Stalingrad look, as the makers of “Transformers 3” could tell you; they’re over there right now. A friend drove by and said they’ve constructed a passenger-train car, sticking out of a second-floor window. Yeah, well — we were there first. And all our crew had to do was cover up a few zillion square feet of graffiti tags.

This wasn’t my story or script, but I worked on it, and one of the things we hashed over was how much antique language to include. There’s something about the 21st-century American tongue that can’t quite sell a phrase like “have a care with that,” at least not to my ear. All I can say is, there’s a reason so many period pieces about ancient Rome, or wherever, take the easy way out and make everyone British. It just sounds better. And that’s no rap against our actors — I thought Brad Pitt sounded ridiculous in “Troy,” too. But all in all, the biggest incongruity to me was when one of the female soldiers (alternate history, remember) smiled, and showed a distinctly modern set of incisors. Oh, well. No money in a micro-budget for dental prostheses.

Finally, a note about the theater. It was in the Redford, on the west side of Detroit, a grand old movie house lovingly restored:

There are stars in the ceiling — you can see one in the picture. They twinkle.

And, as always, it was very cool to make the turn off West Grand River and see this:

(When Alan sees this, he’s going to say, “Three Stooges festival? Awesome!”)

So, some quick bloggage before I run:

Speaking of movies, everyone is asking me is I’m going to see “Waiting for Superman,” and the answer is: Eventually, I guess. I know enough about the film to know I disagree with its central premise — that bad schools are the fault of bad teachers, and charter schools are The Answer. Charters are a Hail Mary pass for a problem that is far, far more complicated. One of our local school-board candidates, a former teacher himself, seems to understand this. He’s running for re-election, and posted this on his campaign blog. Briefly stated, but worth reading, I think.

Today is Jolene’s birthday. Happy birthday, Jolene.

The hits just keep on coming in the housing meltdown. Look for this to blow up big — I don’t see how it can’t.

As for me, I’m outta here. Have a great weekend, all.

I need to do a limited skinback here. I’ve been mulling something over since Hank brought it up in comments last Thursday, when we discussed the strange case of Andrew Shirvell, the Michigan assistant attorney general waging a one-man war against Chris Armstrong, the gay student-body president at the University of Michigan. Hank said:

Someone I know, a high-functioning autistic man who would certainly know what he’s talking about in this regard, looked at the Shirvell interview and immediately diagnosed a fellow high-functioning autistic man. It’s what happens, he says, when the rigidity and obsessive behavior fails to find an appropriate outlet.

I’ve watched the video a couple of times since then, and I think he’s right. There’s something about Shirvell that’s not quite all there; he seems to have no idea why what he’s doing is at all inappropriate. (It’s hard to judge a person’s demeanor in one of these on-camera interviews, which do not favor amateurs — you sit in a chair, staring into a camera lens while Anderson Cooper yaks in your ear. You have no conventional feedback to tell you how you’re coming across; if you’re lucky you might get a monitor, but not always.) Turning to the wisdom of the crowd, i.e., Googling “‘andrew shirvell’ + asperger OR autism” turns up many other armchair psychiatrists who recognize the same traits they live with every day in a colleague or loved one with this condition. It’s good enough for me. While by no means excusing Shirvell’s behavior, it’s safe to say that outraged umbrage and gaydar jokes here are uncalled-for, and I apologize. Shirvell, meanwhile, has decided this is an excellent time to take a leave of absence. Wise move.

However, I’d like to use this as a jumping-off point for a subject that’s interested me for years — how we deal with, or don’t deal with, mental impairments/illness/less-than-normal brain functioning in our society.

When I was a columnist I wrote a bit about mental health, and I always liked to bat this balloon around with my sources, asking them how we draw the line between eccentric and crazy. “Not very well” was their answer, in a phrase. They often spoke of the frustration of dealing with, say, the very religious family of a schizophrenic patient, who couldn’t or wouldn’t understand things like brain chemistry and psychotropic drugs and 72-hour commitments, but had a very easy explanation in “demonic possession.” Sometimes a person’s symptoms fit very nicely into a particular culture’s drawer, and it takes a while before anyone figures out they have a person on their hands who needs help and support, not reinforcement.

I have no idea at all what sort of family or community Shirvell comes from, but it’s entirely possible that among his tribe, this is normal behavior, even admirable. It’s funny how the internet has made a certain sort of obsession — and what is a blog called Name of Person I Hate Watch but an obsession — not just acceptable but normal. And if people you hang with hate the same people you do, it becomes noble, a cause. And soon no one questions whether Andrew is getting a little too engaged in the cause, he’s just a man with admirable energy and focus.

Maybe we should all undergo a periodic life audit by a panel of friendly strangers with board-certified Common Sense ™. They’d go over a few key documents in our lives, we’d submit to a short interview, and two weeks later the report comes in the mail: Nice work on cutting back on your drinking and increasing your exercise, but you’re starting to become a bore about your vegetarian diet. Watch that.

And so another weekend vanishes in the rear-view mirror. I spent most of it in the kitchen. I’m experimenting with a new food this week — quinoa.

“May I have a pound of kee-no-ah?” I asked the girl at the store.

“I have some keen-wa right here,” she said, handing over a bag. Nicely played. So far I’m finding the Aztec’s magic grain interesting. Yesterday — cold bean salad with cherry tomatoes, mixed greens and quinoa. Today: Fried quinoa in the style of rice. I’ll keep you posted.

Bloggage: When you get to be my age, you’ve already been puzzled by at least half a million success stories, but the one that’s bugging me at the moment is that of Kathleen Parker, who always struck me as the ultimate media chameleon, one of those women who scored the “conservative” slot on op-ed pages back when female columnists were all Ellen Goodman clones, and then switched sides during the Bush meltdown, thereby earning the Strange New Respect award, and — funny how often this happens — a goddamn Pulitzer Prize, and if that isn’t a testament to how slim the pickings have gotten in the op-ed stable, I don’t know what is. Her column always struck me as content-free, I-was-just-thinkin’ culture-war musings on whatever was on the cover of Newsweek in any given month. But she had one thing working for her, something she’s always been willing to trade on. She’s very pretty. An early version of her website had a collection of photos of her, all taken at the same session, a little brainy pin-up gallery of Kathleen with her head cocked, Kathleen leaning her head on her hand and smiling, Kathleen twirling her reading glasses, etc. She once wrote that her mother died when she was very young and her father remarried something like four or five times, thereby confirming another of my long-distance armchair psychological diagnoses — another woman who, like Dr. Laura, could never get dad’s attention, so she grew up to be a men’s-rights advocate and good little defender of traditional gender roles. I may well be full of shit, and if so feel free to tell me so.

Anyway, speaking of puzzling success stories? Parker Spitzer, complete with a wet kiss for the launch by none other than Howie Kurtz. Break a leg, Katie.

Related, the disarray at CNN, from New York magazine:

“They do not recognize a reality that Fox and MSNBC recognize,” says a former senior CNN staffer. “You have to be real showmen and hook into America, which is blue collar and angry. The CNN culture is still very strange. You walk into that building, you think you’re the Jesuits and you’re protecting a certain legacy. They still look at Fox as a carnival—not Fox as a brilliant marketing entity. It’s weird. They’re decades into it, and they’ll protect it to the end.”

Finally I leave you with a recipe. Someone asked me for it and I copied it down, so I’ll share it with you. Never like to waste a good transcription:

This is from the Junior League’s Centennial Cookbook, and don’t draw any conclusions from that — I am as far from a Junior Leaguer as they come, but the book came to the newsroom a few years ago, and I was pleasantly surprised to find some of those skinny blondes could actually cook.

Anyway, this comes together pretty fast, and it’s one recipe where I don’t mind letting someone else do the prep work — butternut squash are such a pain to peel and dice, I generally buy them already prepped at Trader Joe’s.

Curried butternut apple soup

Puree the soup with an immersion blender. Season and serve with a dollop of cream, if you like. Note: This soup improves with keeping. Prepare a day or two in advance if time allows.

Happy soup! It’s going to be soup weather for sure this week.