Kate is playing in the school jazz ensemble this year, and one of the numbers they’re working on is the “Mission: Impossible” theme. (You weren’t expecting “Sketches of Spain” from eighth-graders, I hope.) This necessitated explanations: Yes, it was a movie, but it was a TV show first. It played into the ’60s vogue for all things spy-related, but as one-hour dramas go, it wasn’t bad at all. It was about a special force of secret agents who went around the world doing… oh, hang on. Let’s just look on YouTube.

I thought that if YouTube had anything, it should have at least one example of the opening set piece, where Peter Graves gets the mission, and all of those great pop-culture catch phrases: As always, if you or any of your IM force are caught or killed, the secretary will disavow any knowledge of your actions. This recording will self-destruct in 60 seconds. Good luck, Jim.

And YouTube had something, but it wasn’t the MI I remembered. It was the pilot episode. Not Peter Graves, but the old DA from “Law & Order.” Not a little tape recorder, but an LP in a featureless office where cryptic glances are exchanged. A different voice giving the mission. What the hell?

Well, the internet got me into this mess, and the internet can get me out. The usual Wikipedia caveats apply, but this sounds likely:

The leader of the IMF is initially Dan Briggs, played by Steven Hill. However, Hill, as an Orthodox Jew, had to leave on Fridays at 4 p.m. to be home before sundown and was not available until sundown the next day. Although his contract allowed for filming interruptions due to religious observances, the clause proved difficult to work around due to the production schedule, and as the season progressed, an increasing number of episodes featured little of Dan Briggs. Hill had other problems as well. After cooperatively crawling through dirt tunnels and repeatedly climbing a rope ladder in the episode “Snowball in Hell,” the following week (“Action!”) he balked at climbing a stairway with railings and locked himself in his dressing room. Unable to come to terms with Hill, the producers reshot the episode without him (another character, Cinnamon Carter, listened to the taped message, the selected operatives’ photos were displayed in “limbo”, and the team meeting was held in Rollin Hand’s apartment), and reduced Briggs’ presence in the five segments left to be filmed to the minimum. As far as Hill’s religious requirements were concerned, line producer Joseph Gantman simply had not understood what had been agreed to. He told Patrick J. White, “‘If someone understands your problems and says he understands them, you feel better about it. But if he doesn’t care about your problems, then you begin to really resent him.’” White pointed out, “Steven Hill may have felt exactly the same way.” Hill was replaced (without explanation to the audience) after the first season by Peter Graves as Jim Phelps, who remained the leader for the remainder of the original series and in the 1988–1990 revival.

For the record, I have never locked myself in my dressing room in my life. For the record, I’ve never had a dressing room. If I ever get one, maybe I’ll lock myself in, just for the hell of it. See what it feels like.

Something else I never would have known about here it not for YouTube: Tarp surfing.

And with that, it seems we have skipped to the bloggage. A few weeks ago we discussed a case here in which the local Fox affiliate played a significant role. Here’s another, far more tragic. At what point does seeking TV exposure cross the line into mental illness?

Dumb story, still funny — Joe Biden, comic icon. (You can see the Onion’s Midwestern roots here — only a Wisconsin-centric publication would give the vice president a Trans Am.)

And now I’m off to the shower, and to catch a rabbit. Thank a veteran today, or just turn everything up to 11.

“Last Call” has been on the nightstand, over there in the right rail, for a while now, but I’m still not done with it. It’s a time issue, not one of content; plus, I added “Freedom” to the mix, diluting my attention even further. But “Last Call” — a new history of Prohibition — is a great book, and I’m savoring it like two fingers of good scotch, a sip at a time.

Also, it’s dovetailing with the central plot lines of “Boardwalk Empire,” which takes place in 1920 Atlantic City, immediate after passage of the Volstead Act. It’s about the birth of American organized crime (or, at least, its vault into the big money) and a lot of other things, too, all of which were wrapped up with Prohibition, specifically the emergence of women as a political force to be reckoned with.

Women bore the brunt of their husbands’ drinking, sometimes quite literally cleaning up the mess it left behind, and became the driving force behind Prohibition. Many of the suffragettes came out of the temperance movement, and vice versa. A woman newly empowered in one area might look around for some other things to make right in her life, and so this week’s “Boardwalk Empire” episode introduced the once-taboo subject of birth control.

One of the dowagers of the local temperance movement hands a younger woman a pamphlet, which gets a significant-prop closeup: “Family Limitation” by Margaret Sanger. Once it’s opened it’s a chamber of horrors — Lysol douche, anyone? — but it was a necessary step along the way. Everyone fights with their biology to some extent. This was how women had to do it, once upon a time.

One of the obvious traits of the so-called pro-life movement that isn’t often discussed is the large percentage of its adherents who oppose all artificial birth control, as well as abortion. To them, it’s very simple: Don’t want children? Don’t have sex. The act is designed to bring babies into the world, and in order to do it in the way God intended, you always have to be open to the idea of increasing your tribe. Nice Catholic married couples can practice something called Natural Family Planning, which works on the same principle, and if you look around the web you can find many enthusiastic adherents talking about how hawt it makes their marital sex lives, how in-tune they are with their bodies, etc. It always puzzled me why it was OK to consciously avoid making babies by regulating your sex life but not OK to use a device or drug. Isn’t this imposing one’s own human will on the Lord’s business, as well? Yes and no. There’s a concept called “prayerful consideration” involved, and well — I check out at this point. Whatever these folks are selling, I’m not buying.

A friend of mine works in upstate New York, near Kiryas Joel, that odd Hasidic town where everyone is orthodox Jewish (and many of them are on public assistance, because if there’s one thing a small town can’t provide for that many people, it’s a living). Orthodox Jews also condemn birth control. My friend tells me the No. 1 most-asked-for service at the public-health clinics in the area is the tubal ligation done on the QT (i.e., without the knowledge of husbands and/or rabbis), perfect for that population, because their own religious practices take women out of the sexual rotation for about two weeks out of every month anyway, and laparoscopic procedures leave no trace and have short recovery times. The women come to the doctors trailing a brood of six or seven, exhausted, impoverished, with one goal uppermost: No more. In many ways they are the counterpart of the women of 1920 — oppressed by their biology but smart enough to know there’s a way it can be different. And that way is worth fighting for.

I have a feeling Margaret Schroeder, the woman at the center of “Boardwalk Empire,” is going to discover the limitations of Lysol as birth control. I salute her, and all her real-life sisters of the period, just the same. It was worth the fight.

So, some bloggage:

The Onion AV Club on “Family Limitation.”

George Soros calls for an end to the other kind of prohibition.

Hysterical clip of John McCain, with the applause line that keeps on giving, via the Daily Show.

Office hours. I must give guidance to the young! Have a great, windy day.

For dinner at Casa NN.C night before last: Mark Bittman’s espresso black-bean chili. Verdict: If you’re a chili purist, probably not for you. But an adventurous eater will find cinnamon, coffee and brown sugar worthy, interesting additions to a bean soup. Plus, it will make you fart like a machine gun, with interesting bass notes lingering in the room. But that’s the price we pay for eating natural foods.

Next time I’m making it with the chocolate variation.

The book that recipe is from — “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” – is not only the single best vegetarian cookbook I’ve ever clapped eyes on, it’s probably the only one you need. Pair it with “How to Cook Everything,” and you could take the rest of my cookbook library. I’d be pretty well-set.

That’s the gist of the comments at the link, above; I now draw you to the one made by Isaac Mizrahi, a fashion designer. Emphasis, as they say, mine:

Throw away all your old recipes and buy How to Cook Everything. Mark Bittman’s recipes are foolproof, easy, and more modern than any others.

What was I saying just last week about the five all-purpose adjectives used to describe fashion? What was one of them? Uh-huh, yeah. You listen to your auntie Nance from now on out.

Oh, I can’t wake up this morning, so I’m scanning Facebook to see what all my local friends thought of “Detroit 1-8-7.” So far the verdict is brutal. I reserve judgment. I couldn’t watch it last night, but I turned it on to stave off sleepiness and as a counter to the mortar barrage of acorns landing on the roof in the wind. I’ll catch up with the DVR over the weekend. Plus, you can’t judge any show by the pilot; if there’s one thing TV promises you, or should, it’s long-term character development over the course of 10 or 12 hours. I did hear one good line: “We fight them here so we won’t have to fight them in Ferndale,” which as network cop-show lines go, is pretty good. (Keeping in mind that “The Wire” pretty much ruined all network cop shows for me forever.) I’ll give the producers credit (literally, as a big part of this production is subsidized by the taxpayers of Michigan) for shooting here; I saw a few familiar faces in there, people I know in our little community of creatives. If the show does for Detroit actors even a fraction of what “Law & Order” did for New York’s, then I’ll tune in every week.

I’m having trouble waking up because today is pretty much the sort of day I’d order from the menu in September — overcast, rainy and warm. The southwest exhaled a big gust of hot air yesterday, and it reached 87 by day’s end, followed by rain. The rain arrived at 4:30 a.m. with wind, making me curse the skylight in my bathroom; how on earth do people sleep with these things over their beds? In even light rain, it’s like having a drummer sitting five feet over your head, improvising. Throw in the acorns for a month every year, and it’s ridiculous. I see why people fall into the Ambien embrace when they get to my age, but there’s something about being female and middle-aged that makes me avoid prescription meds of all but the most essential sorts; I get the feeling it’s just a short hop to Judy Garland’s street. Every night I read about teenagers arrested with fistfuls of pills no doubt cadged from mom and dad’s medicine chest, Vicodin and Xanax and all the rest of it. Mama isn’t that high-strung just yet. Just tired.

So, can we round up some bloggage to flesh out this undercaffeinated, phoned-in entry? Let’s seeee….

With the exception of Ta-Nehisi Coates, I generally stay away from the political bloggers at the Atlantic, but I stumbled across this Andrew Sullivan post on Sarah Palin Jr. yesterday, and it made a point I have been making with unbelievers for a while, i.e., most people have no idea how crazy religious-right voters are, what they expect, what they see as their baseline conditions for backing a candidate. I recall a conversation with your basic eastern elitist, a Jew, about the evangelical right’s support of Israel, which I told him had nothing to do with their desire for his people to have a homeland, but rather a precondition for the return of Jesus, and he told me I was the crazy one. Folks, I am not. Sullivan gets it:

O’Donnell is an important figure not because she is a flake, as Bill Kristol says. She is important because she is as yet too guileless to lie about her real views, or to conceal the reactionary worldview that animates them. She is not an outlier. She is a very powerful way to understand what the theoconservative project is really about – and what the GOP base truly believes in.

She is the modern GOP. And maybe her emergence will help more people snap out of denial.

OID: Ten men, including one MSU football player, charged in theft of laptops from Detroit Public Schools. I ask you. No, I don’t.

OK, time to hit the shower, drink more coffee and trudge off to office hours. Have a good one, all.

And with one breezy-hot day and a few widely scattereds, the heat is banished justlikethat. At least for the next couple of days, we should be able to turn off the A/C and instead listen to the neighbors’ annoying lawn service visits. Fine with me. The first week of August marks the traditional Noticing of the Changing Light for me, which means I’m going to grab at least one fat fashion magazine off a newsstand and start planning my umpteenth fantasy closet.

Fantasy closet is like fantasy football, in which women start with the blank slate of a well-designed empty closet — with lots of attractive, Container Store storage options — and fill it with non-existent clothes we can’t afford but pretend we can. Then we wear them in fantasy-closet dress-up games, perhaps while watching “Project Runway,” in which we are presented with fun outfit ideas like this. (I’m thinking of the topmost one.) “Project Runway” is a genius show, enticing millions of normal-size women to watch novice designers of wildly uneven talent turn out one outfit after another that barely covers one’s ass and, in this case, completely uncovers one’s back. It’s a great fantasy-closet shopping spot, “Project Runway,” because only in fantasies are most women freed of such constrictions as bras and the need to sit down from time to time.

I had about three minutes in my entire life when I could have worn a top like that, which threatens with every step to slip and reveal one’s breasts from either a front or side angle. I was 11 years old.

But, as we’re frequently reminded, runways looks are like concept cars — just an idea. By the time that look finds its way to a store rack, the skirt will be nine inches longer and the top closed on the sides and back, and… it’ll pretty much be an entirely different dress. But that’s OK! Because my fantasy-closet body can totally wear anything at all.

In recent years, I’ve done a lot of my fantasy-closet shopping online or in catalogs. Which is why I’m so thoroughly amused by the website Jezebel, which deserves some sort of fashion Pulitzer for the work they’ve done bringing preposterous photo retouching by fashion retailers to the public’s attention. They made a big splash a few years back with their Redbook cover revelation, but have stayed on the job — along with many others, including the always-amusing Photoshop Disasters.

The current Ann Taylor business is particularly wounding, as Ann is one place that, in general, sells affordable, wearable clothes for a wide range of age and body types. I wore a lot more Ann Taylor when I worked in offices, but I remember it fondly, so knowing they’re playing silly games with extreme photo retouching — removing models’ ribcages seems to be a favorite — really chaps my ass. This isn’t “Project Runway.” I pay real, non-fantasy money for clothes from places like that, and I’d appreciate it if they’d cut that shit out.

I once watched Alan get fitted for a suit, and I was struck by the contrast with shopping for my own clothes. Like nearly everyone, Alan’s body differs from the ideal, and this was treated by the tailor as a simple and utterly unremarkable fact. Take it in here, let it out there, hem it thus, adjust, nip, change, presto, a suit. Whereas women are taught from an early age that their bodies are a collection of “flaws” that must be covered, camouflaged, squeezed in and shaped to fit whatever someone else has decided is this year’s model.

Sooner or later you grow out of this shit, to be sure, but I can’t help but think they’d sell more clothes if they cut it out.

My fantasy closet is shaping up nicely. I bought some fantasy boots, and I’m experimenting with cargo pants and jackets to wear with my non-fantasy scarves. I now own five Hermes scarves; how did that happen? Time to roll out the Joan Holloway all-stars, I think.

So, a lovely weekend awaits. Any bloggage? Not much:

Contrary to popular belief, I cannot read the entire internet every day, and in general I avoid its small stories, for two reasons: a) they’re small; and b) the people who write them have a way of making them seem like Watergate crossed with the Hindenburg explosion (“we can now exclusively reveal…”). But this one, about some clown who’s been writing for Andrew Breitbart on the Shirley Sherrod story, caught my eye, mainly because the clown in question is a Wayne State graduate, although who knows? That could be another part of his inflated resume, along with this amuse-bouche:

A government official once claimed that Dr. Pezzi achieved the highest score ever attained on an IQ test administered nationwide, although Pezzi dismisses this as disingenuous pandering.

Anyway, it appears this genius is practicing medicine somewhere in northern Michigan. Beware, tourists!

Anything else? I got nothin’. Weekend, sweep me into your arms. I’m ready.

Paul Fussell’s great book on American social class stratification — titled, duh, “Class” — is pretty out of date in the details by now. Written at the dawn of the go-go ’80s, it missed how much that decade changed the relationship between class and money, never mind the ’90s and ’00s, which blew it out of the water.

But a lot of the details are timeless, including my biggest takeaway, which is probably not unique to him, but he gets credit for being the first writer to point it out to me: The hallmark of the middle class is fear. Fear of slipping a rung, either in reality or just in the eyes of others. It explains so much about how middle-class Americans dress, talk and otherwise comport themselves.

Middles love euphemism (“Excuse me, but where is your powder room?”). They like their labels on the outside of their clothes, so everyone knows they bought the right designer purse or necktie. They fret over the condition of their lawns and the shine on their cars. Etcetera. And so it was that I picked up my Detroit News today and immediately identified the area’s biggest residential foreclosure as a distinctly middle-class house. Hell, it might even be proletarian. Who else would build an $18 million, 13,777-square-foot house in a subdivision, complete with bowling alley and “custom wine tasting and cigar rooms?”

“It’s like going to Disney World,” said real estate agent Chris Knight, who has sold the home twice. “It’s a phenomenal, one-of-a-kind special property. Waterfalls, ponds all over the place, streams. Lots of Venetian plaster walls. Imported this, imported that …”

Venetian plaster, you say? It’s so much…classier than regular plaster.

The story reminds us this pile of Venetian plaster — inevitably described as “a mansion” — is not alone in its sad little subdivision, Turnberry Estates:

A third of the subdivision’s homeowners have either faced foreclosure in the past two years or had mortgage problems, public records indicate.

Since March 2008, one house was lost to foreclosure; three were scheduled for sales but avoided them; and two foreclosure sales are pending — including (former Detroit Lion) Charles Rogers, according to the Legal News. The former No. 2 NFL draft pick faces a sale Aug. 31 after defaulting and owing $1.17 million, according to a Wednesday notice in the Legal News.

Turnberry Estates has to stand for something bigger; the writer in me demands it. Nowhere do you see so much evidence of how disconnected wealth and responsibility got in the last 25 or so years than you do in housing — not just in these vulgar money pits but even in more modest upscale homes (always homes, never houses), with their media rooms and enormous closets and wine cellars and poker rooms and all the rest of it. I knew a guy who built a 10,000-square-foot house when he married a woman who had two daughters. They needed the space, he said; they would have a live-in housekeeper to watch the girls when they wanted to do impulsive newlywed things like go out to dinner or fly to New York for the weekend or whatever.

They’re divorced now. But you knew that.

My house is 2,000 square feet. The people who built it raised seven children here, in three bedrooms. My last house was about the same size. The previous owners had five kids — and one bathroom. My friend with the 10K house had separate bathrooms for each daughter. The first thing they did after moving in was convert a dead-air space into a deluxe closet.

Do I sound resentful? I’m not. Enjoy your money, rich people. But when my house is foreclosed upon, I bet it’ll be easier to unload than the $18 million Venetian plaster showplace. Even with a cigar room.

So, some bloggage? Probably we can rustle up some:

The New York Post falls for a wrong-o. Did an accused killer who swallowed rat poison get an emergency liver transplant, as the paper crowed? Um, no. But that is one great headline: Thug’s op is liver worst. Congrats to the greatest copy desk in tab-dom.

Thanks to Rana (I think) for reacquainting me with Tom and Lorenzo, the Project Rungay bloggers who dabble in “Mad Men” on the side. I can take or leave them on the episode guides, but their commentary on the clothes is first-rate. I loved their latest, on Betty Draper last season, including her slammin’ Roman holiday getup. They’ve got great things to say about all the madwomen, though, so warning: You can get lost in that site. But in a good way.

The Michigan oil spill now stretches for 35 miles of the Kalamazoo River, and yes, pals, it looks like we have another BP on our hands. Who could have predicted? And so on.

Kate’s going to the Warped Tour show with her dad tomorrow, and I promised her I’d get her a new guitar strap to collect autographs on. So time to hop to it.

The TV season is winding down, and before it does, I want to throw a little love at “Breaking Bad,” the other show airing at 10 p.m. Sunday. I’m working then, but that’s why God made DVRs. Like “Treme,” “Breaking Bad” rewards second and third viewings, although it’s not what you’d call nuanced or subtle. The story of a 50-year-old high-school chemistry teacher who decides to take up methamphetamine production could easily become a cartoon, but in its third season seems to have hit its stride as a sort of waking nightmare of evil’s effects on those who choose it.

Walter White tells himself he got into meth-making as a way to leave his family financially staked for life without him — he’s diagnosed with terminal lung cancer in the pilot episode — but as his condition improved and the cancer went into remission, which it had to do if the show was to have more than one or two seasons, the tone shifted and Walt began to grasp the dimensions of the monster he’d loosed into the world. Bodies began to fall. His partner, a hapless man-child aptly named Jesse Pinkman, fell victim to all manner of misery, from heroin addiction to the O.D. death of his girlfriend. The climax of last season was the mid-air collision, a mile or two above Walt’s house, of two commercial aircraft, an accident caused by a distracted air-traffic controller. Who was? The father of Jesse’s dead girlfriend. His attention wandered when a bit of radio traffic used her name in a transmission: Tango Delta Jane two oh three…

This season, the stain is spreading, and reaching closer to Walt’s immediate family. His wife, Skyler, now knows where the money came from, but she’s unmoved by his motivation, and has left him, along with their teenage son and newborn daughter. The latest victim is his brother-in-law Hank, a DEA agent who fell victim to a pair of identical-twin Mexican assassins gunning for Hank, and…

This is sounding ridiculous, I know, but it isn’t. Or rather, it uses its made-for-TV improbabilities well enough that you don’t find yourself rolling your eyes. If I have one criticism of the narrative as it’s unfolded, it’s the abandonment of one of the most interesting themes of season one — the crumminess of a certain middle-class American life, and how one living it can be so easily seduced by money, i.e., a way out of it. Walt’s very survival is threatened because his health insurance doesn’t cover the good chemo drugs. He and his wife attend a birthday party for a college friend of Walt’s, also a chemist, whose path took a different turn, and who lives in lavish splendor. The friend offers Walt a job at his company (with much better health insurance) out of pity, concealing it well, but Walt figures it out. The shame and humiliation such a gesture inspires in the one it’s bestowed upon is a difficult emotion for an actor to summon. But Bryan Cranston does.

The producers are starting to circle around back to it, a little bit. Now that Skyler knows there’s almost a million dollars in cash in a duffel bag in her crawl space, she’s starting to think about its implications. The scene where she walks into her lover’s bathroom and glories in the radiant floor heating was priceless. The things money can buy! (Although if I were her, I’d start with a kitchen reno. Her kitchen is almost gloriously ugly. But at this point, she might as well just buy a new house. Torch the kitchen. Remove the duffel bag from the premises first.)

I hope they continue in this vein. Identical-twin Mexican assassins can only take you so far. Although, sooner or later, the violence and misery has to reach Walt himself. He’s dodged so many bullets, many of them literal, that delaying it will soon be counterproductive. He made a big decision early on that sets everything in motion, and another one this season to keep it that way. But until he loses a finger or a child, it hasn’t cost him enough.

One final thing: I’m struck, watching this show, by its depiction of masculinity. I mentioned Jesse was a man-child, although he’s becoming more of a man. (He’s shed the overgrown baby clothes favored by so many young men these days, anyway. And the loss of the child isn’t doing him any favors.) Walt’s sense of himself as a failed father, husband and provider — especially the latter — is what made him start down this tragic path. Hank, the DEA agent, is a macho cartoon. So far, the most fully integrated man is Gustavo Fring, the kingpin mastermind played by Giancarlo Esposito. Calm, cool, ruthless — just a little more seductiveness and he’d be the devil himself.

We’ll see what happens to Walt & Co. before the month is up. (I think.) Please, no more plane crashes.

And now I must skedaddle. Although I’m sure the Hoosiers among you would rather talk about MARK SOUDER’S RESIGNATION?!??? A SEX scandal? Someone wanted to SLEEP with him? I have just fainted.

With last night a pretty slow one on the health-care editing beat, this story in the NYT made me snap my eyes wide open: “Law & Order” is thisclose to cancellation. Get OUT. I thought I’d never see the day. Literally. As long as the show could continue to calve spinoffs, I thought there would always be a place somewhere on the NBC schedule for the bifurcated drama of separate but equal branches of the criminal justice system. It might dwindle down to “Law & Order: Nuisance Animals,” but dammit, it would be enriching Dick Wolf and employing east-coast actors at all levels of the food chain. It would be, as the lingo goes, part of the brand. Not having it there will take some getting used to. (And will likely never happen. I may outlive the series itself, but surely I won’t outlast syndication.)

I’ve never been a huge fan of the series — see Lance Mannion or James Wolcott for that — but I’ve watched quite a bit of it. I came to it late, when its earliest seasons were already rotating through daily syndication on A&E. It was after Kate was born; she got hungry about the time the 1 p.m. episode was coming on, so I got in the habit of watching while she nursed. (All those soft-focus pictures of mothers gazing with love at their suckling infants? Bunk. You do that for the first day. Then you catch up on your magazines.)

I soon learned the rhythms of the show, as well as its too-obvious signposts. The wry, cold open, in which two stereotypical New Yorkers stumble across a body while arguing about rent or restaurants; the first misdirection; the second misdirection; the arrest at the bottom of the hour, followed by the legal strategizing in the second half, which always finished with a wry walk-off line by D.A. Adam Schiff. I learned that if you see an actor you recognize in a seemingly minor scene early on, that’s the one who will be on trial later on. (This was a syndication thing; Wolf was pretty good about hiring good actors on the upward trajectory of their career, so just because they were better-known in 1996 didn’t mean they were in 1991, when the episode first appeared.) I enjoyed the stunts — the sweeps-month two-parters with “Homicide: Life on the Street,” most notably. For some reason those stayed in the syndication rotation, which was disconcerting; stripped of their first half, they felt orphaned.

And like everybody else, eventually I tired of it all. The flip side of such a well-run machine was numbing predictability and, worse, a certain arch smugness — L&O more or less became the self-appointed court of last resort for the endings you wanted to see in real life. Early on, the writing staff established itself as unapologetic headline-rippers, basing its fictional stories on real-life cases that didn’t end satisfactorily, and giving the public the ending it wanted. O.J., Kobe, JonBenet — they all appeared in slightly altered form, with the usual legal disclaimers. (When I was at Michigan, I sat through a few sessions of a TV-writing class with a faculty member who’d done time in the L&O writers’ room. The first order of business was to establish a file full of ripped headlines to base spec scripts on. I was astonished at how many in the class at this prestigious university couldn’t figure this one out. Here she was, giving you a license to dispense with your own imagination, and they couldn’t wrap their heads around it.)

But you have to give Dick Wolf credit for helping show business. I once read that the best and worst thing that can happen to an actor is to get cast on a soap opera — the best being the steady work that can last for years, the worst being, duh, the soap opera. I guess L&O was the upmarket version of that, although his best people rotated through pretty quickly and a few went on to greater things. I wish Sam Waterston would do something else, ditto Diane Wiest, but it’s not like anyone’s beating down the door to cast geezer actors in anything, and both have had stellar careers in film and theater. You can’t blame anyone who chooses to make a living in such a perilous business for choosing job security, and the show isn’t terrible — the earliest seasons are still my favorite, and some of the writing in those brief scenes is so tight and economical, it’s almost haiku.

But they lost me at SVU, a shameless effort to attract the same sickos who enjoy the repulsive CSI franchise. Rape simply isn’t entertaining for me. (Not like MURDER, anyway!) I get really sick of hearing about fluids.

Latest word is that the show will likely not go away; if Wolf can’t reach an agreement with NBC, he’ll be off to a cable channel. So maybe the previous 800 words don’t mean anything. But if it does, I’ve said my piece: Once I was a fan. I’m not anymore. Roll credits.

The best single episode, IMO: “The Troubles.” Argue your own case in comments.

For a while there, I wondered whether “Treme” was shaping up to be David Simon’s “Stardust Memories.” The second-episode emphasis on a trio of do-gooders from Madison, Wis., who descend on New Orleans after Katrina to help “the lower nine,” which they freely admit they’d never heard of before the storm — I squirmed a little.

Every disaster has do-gooders, and most of them are ignorant of the authentic geography or cultural rhythms of the place they’re seeking to help, but what’s the alternative? People who text HAITI to a number on their cell phones? The ones who buy a ticket to a benefit concert, or tint their Facebook profile picture a certain color in a gesture of solidarity? (Maybe so. Ever since I watched a collection of relief items for Hurricane Hugo victims, and saw car after car of people apparently using it as an excuse to clean out their basements, I’ve made my personal do-gooding a cash-only deal: Send money, and await further instructions.)

The characters in “Treme” were there to build houses with their church group, and people certainly needed those. And while they were daffy and ignorant and didn’t know why it costs extra to get a musician to play “Saints” — and were almost certainly big fans of “The Wire” — they got their wild night out in the real New Orleans, and maybe that was the point of those characters after all. They were there to demonstrate that like all great cities, New Orleans will transform you if you let it. You arrive a cheesehead and leave something else.

And it’s not like Simon spares the natives, either. Another daffy douchebag, the local DJ/layabout Davis McAlary, is one of those guys who has no qualms about lecturing his gay neighbors — gentrifiers! the nerve! — about this or that obscure musician who grew up around this or that corner, figures of towering importance they are somehow diminishing, simply by their presence and their skillful home decor. Of course McAlary, played by the fabulous Steve Zahn, is white himself, but he’s a different kind of white guy. He’s a musician, and even though the sole composition of his we’ve heard is ridiculous, that gives him a license to live there that the gay men lack. He’s the opposite of an Oreo, black on the inside. At least he seems to think so.

(Bonus in-joke: He’s a Goddard College graduate, alma mater of David Mamet and attended by our own J.C. Burns. Ha.)

Treme is a neighborhood, and isn’t in the ninth ward, but the series isn’t as narrow as that. It’s shaping up to be yet another Simonesque look at a suffering city, asking how it got that way, why it stays that way and why we should care. So far, it’s pretty clear: It got that way because a terrible storm collapsed badly constructed and maintained floodwalls; it stays that way because the local civic culture and institutions tolerate and foster incompetence, and the federal government can’t seem to make them change; and we should care because of the music. Music is to “Treme” what drug dealing was to “The Wire,” in this case the literal rhythm of daily life. Brass bands parade down the street. Every bar has a stage, and buskers sing on every corner. Anyone with a tambourine or something to bang on can pour out their joy or misery at the drop of a hat, and does.

I had to watch the third episode twice before I grasped that the uptempo song Dr. John sang near the beginning of the hour, “My Indian Red,” was the same as, or based on, the a capella dirge the Mardi Gras Indians were singing at the end of it, mourning the loss of one of the tribe, whose body had only recently been found. Music is everything in New Orleans, and all it takes is a key or tempo change to take it from joy to sorrow. Or to anger, something you clearly hear in Sonny the street musician’s pissed-off “Saints” for the Madison trio. (And they were right — he was the one who suggested it, not them.)

With four episodes down, you can see subtler themes emerging — the way lopsided success can strain a relationship, the corrupt nature of institutions, the satisfactions and sorrows of personal responsibility, and — that Simon biggie — Why Cities Matter. Although the most interesting character of all, Clarke Peters’ Albert Lambreaux, is working his own thematic agenda entirely, and I’m not sure what it is. His might be a slow-motion crackup caused by PTSD, or maybe just the mystery of the Mardi Gras Indian tradition, which everyone refers to frequently — “the tradition” — but never actually explains or illuminates. More will be revealed, I’m sure.

And then there’s the Ashley Morris stand-in, Creighton Bernette, who delivered the coup de grace in episode four this week — a version of his best-known rant. (There were so many to choose from.) I can now die happy. I hope Ashley, wherever he was, saw it too. If his own heart hadn’t given out two years ago, I’m sure he would have died of awesomeness, right there.

And that seems the best note to end on, especially as a little investigation yesterday by Sue turned up the sad news of what’s become of our once-regular commenter, Whitebeard, aka Duncan Haimerl. Died of a heart attack while recovering from cancer surgery. One of the obituaries noted:

Duncan’s wife, Nancy, takes solace in the fact that Duncan’s mind and sense of humor never failed him. We saw that as he filed columns a few hours before surgery and soon after he began recovery, joking about the details. Duncan found something he loved – cars, and writing about them – and he never stopped doing it, never lost the pure joy of it.

Nancy would like Duncan’s old colleagues and friends to know about the news, and that his suffering at the end was minimal.

RIP, pal. If there’s an afterlife, Ashley’s there, and this week, he’s buying every round.

Around the middle of February, I decided there was a damn good reason that getting to the gym required approximately the same motivation as a nude crawl through — well, through the mile or so of depressing suburban landscape between it and my house. We’re always being admonished to listen to our bodies, and my body was making it quite clear that it wished to indulge its inner bear and hibernate the rest of winter.

Plus, I had this book project that was blotting out the sun, and so. You know what happened next.

The book is down to the last details, leaving the house is no longer a trial, the light is kind and plentiful and I am, predictably, flabbed out again. This time, I need to combine the usual strategy of regular exercise and sensible eating with something more drastic — I’m going low-carb, pals. Send search parties if I’m not back in a week.

I likely will be. I’ve tried Dr. Atkins’ whack diet in the past, and it’s always worked the same way: By day three, I’m hallucinating about potatoes. By day five, I’d pay $500 for a single slice of toast. After a week, it’s all over. But — listen to this rationalization — those have always been with the zero-carb plan, and this time around — listen to this, it’s pure bullshit — things will be different! I’m just trying to stay under 30 grams a day. Tough, but doable.

This morning was a good omen: The cheese omelet folded together so beautifully, it looked like a picture from a magazine. My omelets tend to be tasty, but messy, because I overfill them. I threw in as much cheese as I felt like eating, and it was a perfect little envelope of melty deliciousness.

But we shall see. There’s no doubt low-carb diets work. The problem is, they’re hard to sustain, especially if you like food. Who doesn’t like food? Atkins people, who can go on and on about bacon, but recoil in terror at a roasted sweet potato. I love cauliflower, but show me a person who’s satisfied with a cauliflower vichyssoise and I’ll show you someone who is profoundly missing the point of dinner.

I’ll keep you posted. In the meantime, going back to the gym feels good-bad. Bad in the inevitable soreness, good in the reassertion of muscle, that which can be felt through all the fat, that is. After two weeks, my low-grade back pain is gone, and even my knees feel better after all those squats. I’ve come to believe that the world would be a better, less cranky place if every home contained a well-used Pilates reformer. When I started mat Pilates classes last year, someone said here they are a revelation, and that is Word, friends. If you’re long of torso like me, I beseech you to give them a try. So does your back.

And that makes approximately 500 words of the most boring subject matter on the planet, and that’s all I will inflict upon you. I just want it on the record somewhere: I’m trying.

It seems I’m overdue for a few words about “Treme,” and they are coming. It’s traditional for HBO to give TV critics four episodes of its shows before they write a review, and that’s what I’m giving myself before committing, but so far: I am digging it. It would be a surprise at this point if I didn’t: Like all good white people with New Yorker subscriptions, I’m a David Simon fan. Anyone interested in looking at the problems of American cities, fairly but passionately, is someone I’m willing to cut a lot of slack. And what happened to New Orleans in 2005 is, it became Detroit more or less over the course of a few days — depopulated, blighted, dysfunctional, but with the same can’t-kill-it pulse. I’m interested to see where it’s going.

And how can you not love a show with snappy dialogue like this?

I brought beignets!
Who you fuckin’?

So, bloggage? Some:

Um, what?

A massive oil spill vile mat of flame in the Gulf of Mexico? Boy, I miss the ’90s. Life was simpler then.

As shallow and simple as my brain is in the morning, of course I’m going to read any story with a headline that asks, Why does this pair of pants cost $550? (The photo was of a male model is distinctly run-of-the-mill khakis.) But when they can get this line above the jump –

“The cost of creating those things has nothing to do with the price,” said David A. Aaker, the vice chairman of Prophet, a brand consulting firm. “It is all about who else is wearing them, who designed them and who is selling them.”

– that’s how I spell WIN.

And now I’m off. Enjoy the end of the week.

Not everyone gets to stay up late enough to see “The Colbert Report,” and I hope I’m not spoiling anyone who catches it on the next-day reasonable-hour replay, but last night’s guest was David Simon, and guess whose name he dropped? Ashley Morris’. (You can watch the clip here, and thanks, Del, for digging that up.)

I’m so proud of my stupid little blog. It may not have many readers, but it has the right readers.

(Pause.)

Where is my money?

(Pause.)

For those of you new to this blog, after Ashley left us suddenly in 2008, our web wizard J.C. set up a script that pulled every comment he ever made here into a single thread. The link’s in the right rail, or here. What I find amusing about it is that, even severed from the posts he was talking about, they still make a certain amount of sense, and you can dip in and out of them at will and still get a feeling for the man. Here’s one from near the top:

In St. Petersburg in 1997, I was walking down Nevsky Prospekt, and stopped at the Grand Hotel Evropa. They were advertising “Bud and Burger: $8″. After a week in Eastern Europe, this actually looked good. So I order my burger, get my Bud (they can’t call it Budweiser there because the Czechs own that name), and pound it down. I walk up to the bar for another Bud, and this gorgeous blonde is standing beside me. Being a fearless virile American heterosexual, I say to myself, what the hell. So I look at her and say “Hi, what’s your name”. She responds “Two hundred dollars”. Without missing a beat, I say “Is that your first name, your last name, or is that what your friends call you?” She looks confused, thinks for a second, then says again “two hundred dollars”. Finally, I’m served my Bud, and I walk away. And out in front of the hotel were all of the Russian Mafia guys wearing the uniform: khaki pants, black shirts, italian loafers with no socks, and wrap-around sunglasses. Oh, and they were all leaning on black mercedes, black BMWs, or black somethings. I didn’t follow my Rick Steves guide and try to strike up a conversation…

For those even newer to this blog, Ashley provided the loose framework of the character in “Treme” played by John Goodman. It’s an “inspired by,” not a “based on” characterization, so don’t go getting any ideas; it’s not a line-for-line copy. But knowing that Creighton Bernette’s lines were in some cases lifted from Ashley’s blog, it was funny to read this, in Hank’s review today:

His character was added to the array late in the show’s assembly and his dialogue is saddled with distilling “Treme’s” social commentary.

When a British journalist interviewing Creighton asks if New Orleans is worth rebuilding — since its destruction and sinking is considered by many to be Mother Nature’s fait accompli — the belligerent Creighton assaults him, tries to hurl his TV camera into the Mississippi River and lets loose with the fiery counterargument that is “Treme’s” (and New Orleans’s) broadest concern: The floods were a man-made disaster, triggered by a hurricane but caused by years of government neglect and an inept federal response.

While essential to any story of life in New Orleans, such moments are nevertheless “Treme’s” burden to bear. No matter how hard the writers seemed to have worked to avoid it, much of Goodman’s dialogue in the early episodes has the flavoring of op-ed screeds, and it sometimes seeps into other characters’ scenes.

That’s what a blog is, isn’t it? One long op-ed screed. Ashley’s blog is still up, and while not quite a ghost ship, it’s tended intermittently by his widow, Hana (who was paid for her husband’s inspiration). Spammers have flooded the comments, but I recommend the “greatest hits” links down the left rail, especially “My Life in Porn,” because it links back here in sort of an orgy of log-rolling and ass-kissing.

Hank says “Treme” is good, by the way. It premieres Sunday. Although I will not be seeing it until Tuesday. I’ll explain that later.

Thinking about J.C. and his web wizardry, he asked me once, when we were discussing how I’ve still not made a last will and testament, “All I want to know is, who has control of your online content?” I thought for half a second, and bequeathed it all to him. As far as I’m concerned, if a blood vessel bursts in my brain today, I trust J.C. to keep the bar open. This ghost ship could sail for years. Maybe we can set up a guest-bartender system.

One bit of bloggage today:

By my count, this is the second near-tragedy to strike the Milwaukee Brewers sausage race in my memory. HOW MUCH LONGER MUST THIS DEATH RACE BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE? (This one’s the first.)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go chase down a rabbit. Back later.