My neighbors have a big TV. Really big TV. How big is it? Can’t say — I’ve never seen it up close, because I don’t have to. If the curtains are open even a little bit, I can tell what they’re watching with 75 percent accuracy. (Right now, hockey.) And they live across the street and one door down; it’s a good 200 feet or more from my couch to their TV. That’s a big TV.

Big TVs are all the rage, now that the bugs have been worked out, now that they no longer have the footprint of a Volkswagen Beetle. Everybody I know is buying one. (True story: My friends John and Mary bought one, and hired a guy to hang it on the wall. He said he’d just finished a similar job at then-Sixer/now-Piston Chris Webber’s house. [Yes, he's a Pointer.] He’d hung 13 of them. Thirteen flat-screens in one house! It’s like an episode of “Cribs.”)

Anyway, I guess eventually we’ll have a giant TV, too, once the price drops to $1.98, which it seems on track to do by year’s end. But I won’t feel good about it. I love TV now that TV is so much better than it used to be — thanks, HBO. I love watching DVDs at home. But my TV guilt-meter was calibrated in the days of “Three’s Company,” and there’s something about a giant TV that suggests a world of La-Z-Boy recliners with built-in cupholders and crocheted Kleenex-box cozies. It rings every snob bell I have, and I have a tower full of them. I hate myself. Why? Because part of me wants one, and the other part is covered in shame for doing so.

Here’s the thing about a giant TV: It wants to be on, all the time. I like a TV to be off most of the time. My first and most hard-core TV rule is this: If it’s on, the people in the room must be paying attention to it. If you leave the room for any reason other than a bathroom break or to fetch another beer, it must go off. Once I interviewed some lottery winners, plain old hardscrabble people who woke up one morning $9 million richer, courtesy of the state of Ohio. I caught them after they’d had the money for several months, which is to say, their old house was full to the rafters with new toys, but the new house — 1,000-square-foot master suite, cement pond out back, the works — was still under construction. There was a rock on her finger and a Corvette in his garage, and a giant TV in the living room, which was too small to accommodate it. It was mid-morning, around the time a movie old enough to shave was on TBS. I took a seat to the right of the screen, they sat opposite me. The TV stayed on. When I was talking, they both watched the TV. When they were talking, the one who was talking looked at me, the other one watched TV.

That was a formative experience in giant-TV culture. I still haven’t shaken it.

Oy, we had ourselves a day in the D yesterday. A “workplace shooting,” as they’ve come to be known. Guy fired from an accounting firm on Friday came back on Monday and shot a retiree helping out for tax season and two partners. The retiree died. The other two are still alive. Of course we have a sidebar story on how this might be avoided in the future. Grim humor within: An HR expert says Friday is “traditionally” the day to fire people. Really? I didn’t know that. I tried to think of firings I’ve witnessed, and the only common denominator they all had was the Box. You know the Box, usually a banker’s box, filled by either the fired party (or security) with the detritus of one work life — a few personal files, a stained coffee cup, a framed picture. Is there a sadder sight than a banker’s box with a “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps” mug overturned in the bottom? I don’t think so.

“The Office” has gone a long way toward pointing out the thousand soul-abrading, death-by-a-thousand-cuts indignities of life in cubicle land, but I don’t think they’ll tackle this subject for a while.

I predict [raises finger aloft] that we will come through this blogging thing, turn 320 degrees or so, and out the other side — yes, this is metaphor is intentional — with newfound respect for our unsung friend, the editor. Yesterday’s post was up for hours before I noticed I wrote “…for years I’ve tried very hard to annoy my site statistics.” I meant I ignore them. They’re like the quicksand of narcissism. I’ve read about people who monitor their credit scores daily, who track their eBay feedback nearly as often. And some people track their site stats obsessively, which is one reason I’ve avoided doing so. I mean, I like affirmation as much as the next person, but please.

However, Google Analytics is just out there waiting to be installed and noodled over, and today, my first day with it, was nearly enough to run me off the rails. I have a reader — or else a robo-reader — in Reykjavik. (Holla back, Iceland.) Someone came here via Googling the phrase “what hoody does TI wear in chevy commercial.” (Who’s TI?) And then there are those of you whom I can call by name. One reader in Portland (hey, Vince). One in Cincinnati (Rob!). Forty in Fort Wayne, approximately the remaining readership of the News-Sentinel. I have to stop. I have enough things to procrastinate with.

Buoyed by the success of last summer’s Project Table, I’ve been looking around for another little occupational therapy task for this summer. I check the classifieds daily for just the right diamond in the rough. I’m looking for something old, neglected and without lots of pain-in-the-ass scrollwork or other detail that will drive me crazy when I’m trying to strip/stain/varnish it. If it’s something I can use when it’s all done, so much the better, but something to sell would be OK, too. It has to be cheap. It has to have a certain nay-say-quaw, as those Frenchies say.

In other words, I’m looking for a low, wide bookcase, unless I’m not. I’ll know it when I see it.

One of the great tragedies of the impending death of the American newspaper is the loss of yet another source of accidental stories. All the effort goes into Page One, but the rest of the paper is full of nuggety goodness, too, with the added attraction of not being all laid out and packaged for you; you get the thrill of connecting the dots yourself. Yesterday the editor of the St. Paul Pioneer Press made Romenesko for speaking aloud this heresy: Readers buy papers for the ads, too. Well, duh.

For this reason, I’ve always loved the classifieds. Classifieds are super-short stories told in 10 words or less: Wedding dress, size 16, never worn. Make offer. Or: Moving out of state, must sell misc. furniture. Bedroom, living room, kitchen. Traveling light, all must go. When I was stuck for column ideas, I’d turn to the classifieds to get the juices flowing. Sometimes I’d be close to tears. I’d keep thinking about that size-16 wedding dress, NWT.

Now the classifieds are online, on Craigslist. People selling something inexpensive don’t want to spend much on the ad for it. Twice a day I check the furniture-for-sale listings. I have to check it twice because it’s so active, and if you fall behind you’ll miss something. You’ll be relieved to know that even without the self-imposed brevity that goes with paying by the word, the free Craigslist classifieds are as rich with narrative drama as the ink-on-paper kind. Everyone’s moving out of state, it seems. Everyone’s downsizing. Everyone’s liquidating a business, divorcing or otherwise re-ordering their lives. And there’s still stunning waste in the corporate world. Two Le Corbusier black leather chairs for sale, with this note: They were used for one day (one day!!) on stage at an executive conference for one of the car companies. We’re not using them again, so….here they are.

Other cultural notes to be gleaned: If you have an armoire-style entertainment center you’re ready to part with, take it out in the back yard and bust it up for firewood, because you’re not going to get a dime for it in this market. The new entertainment center is long, low and buffet-style, the better to show off your plasma-screen, my dear, and everyone’s trying to get rid of the old one. My father (who sold furniture) always said you should spend your money on wood, not upholstery, because the latter declined in value faster; I think of him whenever I see some poor shlub expecting to get six bills for a double-reclining La-Z-Boy sofa (”from a pet-free, non-smoking home”). Also, this: Whoever came up with the idea of the bed with bookcase headboard, recessed lighting and Luuuuvv Mirror is awaiting a place in the levels of hell reserved for the tacky. Finally, correct spelling is the trigonometry of modern life — no one can do it anymore. I’ve looked at ads for “intertainment centers,” “armwars” and my personal favorite, a pair of “Chip and Dale chairs.”

Haven’t found my bookcase/table/whatever yet. But it’s out there, I just know it. The other day someone was selling two ’40s-style office chairs, in oak, with the added backstory that they were from one of the old Ford factory offices and were given to Dad upon his retirement. See, that’s something you wouldn’t see in a newspaper classified, not when you pay by the word. Just thinking about all the gabardined behinds that sat in those chairs, and the work those people did — designing the Edsel, maybe — is almost impossibly romantic to me. Which is why I always pay too much for stuff like that.

(On the other hand, my sister credits my occasional rewrites of her eBay listings with bringing higher prices. I turned a description of a Heisy glass cocktail shaker with an etched fly-fishing scene into an evocation of the lost era of Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway. It sold for nearly $400. [Blows smoke from pistol barrel.])

So, bloggage:

You will get me on the Grand Canyon Skywalk when you pry my cold, dead fingers from the closest upright land-rooted structure, then quiet the shrieking of my ghost as my corpse is carried onto it. I mean, for someone nervous at heights, this is nightmare material. Good luck with that tourism, Hualapai tribe.

American Idol observation: If LaKisha wanted to cover a James Bond theme sung by another black woman with a big voice like hers — and I can think of no other motivation for choosing Shirley Bassey’s little corner of the British Invasion — why on earth didn’t she pick “Goldfinger”? Yet again, Ken Levine is the go-to funny guy for this:

Interesting that not one contestant chose a Herman’s Hermits song. I just picture Hannibal Phil Stacey singing “Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter” and Mrs. Brown being so terrified she gets a restraining order. …Sanjaya is now just humiliating himself every week. This is like when people dress up their dogs. William Hung was cringing. Please vote him off before Tony Bennett week. I beg of you.

OK, so let’s sign off with an eternal truth: When all else fails, a pretty girl can still move mountains with the right outfit. Particularly if it lacks foundation garments:

Finally finished “The Looming Tower” and will take it back to the library, overdue [kicks dirt], tomorrow. I’ll be buying it in paperback, once it has “the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller” emblazoned across the cover. I think the Big P is a foregone conclusion, but I could be wrong.

The book tells, in great detail, the story of al Qaeda, Islamic fundamentalism and, in particular, Osama bin Laden. Chapter 1 has been excerpted widely, the story of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian fundamentalist generally believed to be the father of Islamism. He was only one of many Muslims to come to America (in the ’40s, sorry Dinesh) and find himself disgusted by what he saw — mostly women, enjoying freedom of all sorts. Oh wait, there was another camel’s nose of leftism in this stew, too:

Qutb was familiar with the Kinsey Report, and referenced it in his later writings to illustrate his view of Americans as little different from beasts — “a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money.” A staggering rate of divorce was to be expected in such a society, since “Every time a husband or wife notices a new sparkling personality, they lunge for it as if it were a new fashion in the world of desires.” The turbulent overtones of his own internal struggles can be heard in his diatribe: “A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”

There you have it, America: The seeds of al Qaeda were planted when some hussy fluttered her eyelashes at this uptight Egyptian. You just never know, do you?

That’s only the appetizer, though. The soul of the book is the twin tales of two fascinating men, John O’Neill and Osama bin Laden. The O’Neill story has been told before, about the singular FBI agent whose train wreck of a personal life did not overshadow the fact he was about the only soul in the FBI who knew just how bad al Qaeda was. He finally left the Bureau in frustration, taking a job as chief of security for the World Trade Center. He started just days before Sept. 11, 2001, the day he died.

Bin Laden’s story was less familiar. I knew the outlines and quite a few facts, but I never got the whole picture until this book, and the picture is pretty banal: Bin Laden is — remains — a rich kid, one of those rich kids whose character is shaped by what he never had to do, that is, go out and earn a living. And so he became a leaf in the wind, an Arab Kennedy cousin of sorts, blown here and there by the whims of whatever caught his fancy at any given moment.

You’ve known these guys; the American version is more likely to be into heroin, or sustainable organic agriculture, or blue-green algae as the health cure doctors don’t want you to know about, but s/he’s as rigid as his al Qaeda brethren are on the subject of jihad. Bin Laden served as the proprietor of the death-to-the-infidel hangout, doling out cash to his entourage the way the American rich kid doles out drugs. He flits from project to project, swanning around Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation with his ragged band of would-be martyrs, hoping to die for Allah. The Afghans thought what you’d imagine, that they were amateurs and pikers, but hey, they all had fat wallets.

In other words, Bin Laden was an overprivileged punk. They’re the dangerous ones.

I learned a lot I either never knew, or knew and forgot. For instance: When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bin Laden went to the Saudi king and begged him not to allow the Americans in. He said he — he and his Afghan “veterans,” his hand-picked mujahideen — would protect the oil fields in this holiest of Muslim lands. Really? said the king. And what will you do when he flings some chemical bombs at you?

“We will fight them with faith!” Bin Laden replied. The Saudi king was unimpressed and put his money on Team America. Infidel!

As amusing as this exchange is, it underlines something important: Bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein. Hated his secularism, his hedonism, his un-Islamic showboating. So of course we invaded Iraq.

“The Looming Tower” is a mesmerizing read, but also a depressingly familiar story, about the damage done by people who claim to be acting on behalf of God. When I was doing my journalism fellowship a few years back, two of our overseas fellows were from the Middle East, one Israeli and one Palestinian. Both were extremely secular. At a restaurant one night in Ann Arbor, the waitress arrived at the table with four plates of sandwiches, and delivered them to the wrong people. As we passed them around, I joked that the bacon cheeseburger couldn’t be Adi’s, the Israeli’s — so traife. It’s the sort of joke I make with my Jewish friends all the time, some of whom keep kosher and some of whom don’t, but all capable of smiling at a weak jest about dietary laws. He actually was offended. Why would I assume he was one of those Jews, the observant ones? He really wanted to know; he couldn’t believe I’d even think such a thing about him. It was a reminder that in a part of the world where most of the problems have their roots in religion, that being religious is a political act in and of itself. I guess I’m taking note of the obvious, that Sammy Bin L. has more in common with religious lunatics in this country than he does with an old thrill-rapist like Saddam. But if you really want to see the influence of this country’s God-botherers wane, there’ll have to be a lot more blood on the floor. I guess I’m saying, count your blessings.

Bin Laden turned 50 a couple weeks ago, still presumably alive, still living in something approaching comfort if not total freedom. He got away with 9/11 because we underestimated him. He continues to live as a free man because we continue to do so.

Bloggage:

The WashPost gives us a nice profile of Felicia Pearson, aka Snoop, the little assassin on “The Wire.” Like Pearson herself, it’s not what you think it is.

Now I have to go; today is the dog’s annual vet visit and I must collect the vile stool sample. I like our vet. Last year he showed me his photo album of strange animal rescues he’s participated in. (He’s on call for tranquilization and/or euthanization services.) There’s a buck with what looks like a 10-point rack being fished out of Lake St. Clair in the midst of a sailboat race, coyotes and foxes of all sizes and predicaments, and of course the savage feral dogs of Detroit. There are no boring jobs, only boring people.

Later.

If you don’t watch “American Idol” you are excused from reading another word. I’ve simply given myself over to the cultural sluice on this one. Kate adores it, and so we watch. And I don’t mind — it’s entertaining in its own way, and if you don’t ask too much of it or yourself, it’s a very enjoyable ride for the viewer. Plus, it’s one of the very rare shows that the whole family can watch together, which is a huge part of its appeal. Just when you think the whole world of entertainment has been sliced and diced into niches, sub-niches and sub-sub-niches, along comes something that’s the 21st-century equivalent of “The Wonderful World of Disney,” only with Simon Cowell. That’s an improvement.

With all that’s written on the subject, I didn’t think there was much more to be said, but Virginia Heffernan manages to find a few more things to say, many of them amusing:

Mr. Cowell, the pitiless judge who still brings to the show the spirit of its British progenitor “Pop Idol,” seemed baffled by the piety Americans brought to the task of singing. Insisting that he wanted nothing but a vanilla hottie to showcase the Pygmalion talents of a guileful music packager, he still couldn’t stop them from singing their hearts out and thanking their moms and God.

To his credit, he eventually let himself be blown away. And he dropped Posh Spice as his paradigm of a musician, settling for Aretha Franklin and Ray Charles. (Mr. Cowell, we shouldn’t forget, used to package puppets, cartoon characters and wrestlers as pop stars; he is new to virtuosity.) He and his compatriots had apparently never tangled with contestants like Kelly Clarkson, who’d grown up singing country, or Ruben Studdard, who’d grown up singing gospel. As for the contestants in those early seasons, their sincerity never dropped.

And on everybody’s favorite barfly:

The most recent seemingly insuperable problems at “Idol” have not come at the hands of the stern father figure, Mr. Cowell, but from Ms. Abdul, his gentler counterpart. Known at the outset for her busty tops and sweet cheerleading — her “mom I’d like to sleep with” vibe — she has lately become a different kind of mother. Dazed, delirious, sulky, petulant, lascivious: she often looks tired and confused, running some words together and inventing others.

Two years ago, a contestant named Corey Clark said Ms. Abdul had courted him and then done him professional favors. ABC deemed the charges exciting enough to devote an ominous and moderately persuasive episode of “20/20” to them, which did double duty as a hit job for the network’s entertainment division.

No specifics seemed to stick to Ms. Abdul, who Fox maintained had done nothing wrong, but the aura of loucheness is almost palpable. Gone is the perky soccer mom with the ’80s dance moves. She now regularly wears the pliant smile, smeared makeup and bedroom eyes of a woman who’s about to pass out.

See, that’s what I mean about entertaining: Kate can appreciate the wholesomeness of the boy singers; Alan, our family’s only real musician, can groove on the finer points of the performances; and I, the sicko culture vulture, can wait for Paula to pass out.

I noticed, last week, the talent gulf in the women was embarrassing. Six skinny white girls who can’t project to the back rows of a powder room up against three or four ladies of color who blow the roof off the dump. Every girl wants to be told she’s beautiful, but is there any compliment more deflating than hearing Simon say, “At least you’re pretty”?

Last week the men sucked eggs, but they improved this week. I voted for the Hispanic kid who took on Nina Simon’s “Feeling Good.” Brave boy.

Now, I take my leave. I have to generate story ideas today, which requires two things: A hot shower and a little light exercise to oxygenate the brain. Please, post no Antonella Barba pix in the comments; we run a clean shop here.

Because it’s never too early for a child to learn how to mock the failings of others, and because if I have to endure one more Disney Channel sitcom my brain will burst into flames, and because Kate had already done her reading, her chores, and whatever else she had to do yesterday, and was ready to settle down for a perfectly defensible 45 minutes or so of television time, because of all this…

I let her watch “Wife Swap” last night. I watched it with her, in fact.

The families were a hip, urbane San Francisco quartet of museum-goers and mildly loony (by SF standards) personal habits (feng shui, sage-burning), and an utterly crackpot Iowa farm clan, who practiced “unschooling,” lived like pigs (bacteria is good!) and ate everything raw, right down to the chickens. I try, whenever we watch so-called reality TV, to keep a running director’s commentary going, explaining about editing and how once you allow cameras to record your life, you’re pretty much at the mercy of them, but after a while it trailed off. The Iowans, with their black toilet and raw chicken salad, were clearly insane.

So then you get the next parental situation: The family’s mental illness is, how you might say, sub-clinical. I don’t think there’s anything in the DSM-IV about brushing your teeth with a combination of butter and clay. (”Yeah, it tastes like dirt,” the teenage daughter says.) I know from long experience — in an Iowa-like state that also begins with an I — that this family’s peculiar beliefs and practices, while unusual, are hardly unheard of. If Kate ends up in the world with any sense of adventure, sooner or later she’s going to run across folks like this and needs to learn coping skills, which include the phrases, “No thanks, I’m not hungry” and “How close in the nearest main road, and how do I get there?”

I was pleased to see she picked up the most preposterous statements right away, as when the Iowa dad, in scoffing at San Francisco mom’s neat-freak squeamishness about germs, asked, “Would God put anything on the earth that would hurt us?” Kate, recently recovered from viral influenza, immediately expressed the idea that why yes, God did that very thing, you moron.

Harder to explain was the clear emotional instability in the house, as when the Iowa family went out to eat in a restaurant, consumed fried everything and paid a predictable gastrointestinal price the next day, and dad behaved as though his children had been fed cyanide milkshakes. And the son who couldn’t confront a contrary opinion without tears, followed by a march into the kitchen to gulp down a raw egg.

OK, the part where the Iowa mom goes out to eat in San Francisco, and the husband insists she shave her legs and underarms, and she says, “In that case, I’m gonna need some scissors?” — that was cruel.

So I think we came through the experience OK. I’ll leave the meta issues of what a brush with national TV exposure does to a person for middle school. But since most of you folks are adults, you might enjoy this, from Radar magazine: Prisoners of YouTube, a thoughtful and sensitive look at what this sort of accidental celebrity brings to a person’s life. HT: Eric Zorn.

So, bloggage:

Did you know that, according to an “unscientific survey,” “the average Grace Lee was a Korean American college graduate who had taken 3.5 years of piano lessons”? Neither did I. The next time “The Grace Lee Project” comes around on the Sundance Channel, we’ll watch that instead. (Demographic note: The name Grace is making a comeback, trend-speaking, but it wasn’t always so. I long ago realized that the only women younger than 40 named Nancy anymore tend to be Asian. My name is too ’50s for words, but Asian Americans, fond of traditional American names, still like it. For about six months I was getting puzzling e-mail from some Knight Ridder internal listserv, and finally realized the computer had mistaken me for one Nancy Na in San Jose, presumably Vietnamese-American.)

Fat Tuesday is extra-fat in Detroit. In Hamtramck, they call it Paczki Day, paczki being Polish for “jelly doughnut.” Think I’ll go get one. At least they’re cooked.

Needless to say, the hole in the sky closed up nicely, and we got…choose your verb. Slammed, dumped on, buried, pounded, whatever. I’d say maybe six inches on the ground, which was getting off easy in terms of this storm. The Fort got close to a foot, Indy a little more.

Needless to say, school’s out. All they’re missing is the all-day (no, I’m not kidding) Valentine’s Day party, so no biggie.

But I have to hit the road in a bit, so I’ll leave you with a few conversation-starters:

Why No One Reads Newspapers, chapter I-can’t-remember-what: Because, with a straight face, we repeat advice like this:

AAA Michigan suggests you stay bundled up while driving and keep these items in your ride during the winter months. The items include ice scraper and brush, coffee can furnace, tools and flashlight, sand or cat litter, food and blankets, jumper cables, first aid kit, cell phone, flares or reflective triangle and a shovel.

Note “coffee can furnace” hiding in the middle of that list, like we’re not going to notice it. Some people can make a case for packing some of that crap, although the only people I know who carry sand are pickup drivers who use bags of it to weigh down the rear wheels. If you need to travel in the remote country, sure, carry a collapsible shovel. If you’re crossing the Rockies via back roads, some Balance bars might come in handy. But for most of us, a cell phone and a snow scraper do just fine. I’ve pushed and/or rocked myself out of deep, icy ruts without kitty litter approximately a million times. And the last time anyone jump-started my car, we had a tiff over whether it’s universal knowledge that the red cable always goes to the positive pole on the battery. (I say yes; he claimed ignorance; a fuse paid the price.)

But the coffee can furnace — that’s a new one. As usual, it raises more questions than it answers. What do you burn in it? (Old parking tickets.) Where do you vent it? (The sunroof.) What do you use it for? (Cooking squirrels you catch in snares fashioned from useless jumper cables.) Now that’s some useful information.

And for those of you who enjoyed the “CSI:Miami” ham-fest the other day, you’ll love this just as much. Note, please, the critical role played by the Sunglasses of Justice. I think they actually trigger the critical event in the clip. He takes them off, the device is armed; he puts them back on, kaboom. Those are some crazy sunglasses:

First, a little light housekeeping: I’m adding some Google ads to the site. From time to time over the years, people have asked me whether I’d consider hosting advertising here, and my answer was always bafflement: Who in their right mind would advertise here? In the six years I’ve been wasting time on this lunacy playing around with this blog, I’ve never really strayed far from the original idea, which is: Daily life, with links. That’s all. If people want to stop by and read, or participate in the discussions, I’m flattered to pieces, but really, if there was ever a blog about nothing, this is it.

However, even nothing has its readers. I added Google ads to my poor, neglected Grosse Pointe Today site when I launched it last fall. Even with haphazard updating and constant excuse-making from its proprietress, I checked my account status the other day and discovered I’d made, lord almighty, $19. Why, that means NN.C could conceivably make, oh, $60 in the same time period. As my friend the Other Alan used to say, “If you saw $60 lying on the ground, would you pick it up?” Of course I would. Google ads are text-based and unobtrusive and do not feature dancing silhouettes or punch-the-monkey games or, my new bete noire, those rollover-and-it-speads-like-a-stain things.

So we’ll see how it works out. Trial basis. Etcetera.

Content will remain status quo. As tempting as it might be to become Perez Hilton.

Another housekeeping note: I’m going to start limiting the time I spend writing here, and dammit, there’s nothing you can do to make me feel guilty about it. All that means is, I’m limiting myself to 45 minutes a day to put together a main entry, and if nothing good emerges in 45 minutes, then I’m going to go bake brownies or something. “But Nance,” you might be asking. “Frequently I read what you post here, and it’s nothing good. Are you saying you spend more than 45 minutes on it? If so, what a waste of time.”

I’m saying it’s none of your damn business. Just that I have to devote more time to paying work, exercise and keeping the dust bunnies from taking over the living room, not to mention my oft-laid-aside fiction writing, which is this year’s do-it-or-drop-it long-term project.

Perspective. It’s all about perspective. I actually considered taking a hiatus, and then realized that’s probably not doable, either. For whatever reason, I seem to need to write this thing more than anyone wants to read it.

OK, then. Bloggage: Fans of this week’s On the Nightstand pick will want to read the NYT’s interview with Jim Harrison today. The picture alone is worth the click-through; if I can live like he does and look no worse at age 69, I’d say that was a fair deal.

TV time. Who’s watching “Rome” this season? (Silence.) Thought so. So let’s start the one-sided discussion!

There’re a lot of nits you can pick with any depiction of ancient Rome. Some aren’t worth picking anymore — I’m fully willing to believe that everyone in the eternal city spoke with a British accent — and some still have some life in them. I’m puzzled, watching this show, as to how they could spend a nine-figure sum and still not have one scene with more than 20 actors in the frame. (I guess they blew their production budget on that silly gladitorial contest between Titus Pullo and six or seven unfortunate would-be executioners last season. Although HBO probably could have financed that entirely by selling T-shirts with “XIII” on them in its immediate aftermath.)

The central storytelling trick of the show — two fictional soldiers who wander, Zelig-like, through the well-known historical events of Rome — is still amusing, never more so than in the episode dealing with the birth of Cleopatra’s son by Caesar. Cleo’s back this season, pressing her case for the boy to be legitimized, laying the groundwork for the seduction of Mark Antony, which should be about as difficult as falling off a log; Antony’s the King of Goats and Cleo’s about as hot as hotties come. I’m noticing the profanity has been upped in this season, which is sort of disappointing, but it’s given me a whole new oath to swear by, thanks to the King of Goats: “on Juno’s c*nt.” And Atia’s whispered parting shot to Cleo is a keeper: “Die screaming, you pig-spawned trollop.” It’s a little strange to see Lucius Vorenus turning into Al Swearengen crossed with Tony Soprano, but I guess even high-quality HBO series have to have a little synergy with one another.

Is my 45 minutes up? It is. Time to walk the dog and hit the shower, in that order. Hope I don’t meet anyone important on the first errand, although it is about 18 degrees at the moment — it’s pretty unlikely.

Last New Year’s Day, TCM showed “Sunset Boulevard” and “To Kill a Mockingbird” back-to-back, which is about all you can ask of an afternoon devoted to taking down the Christmas tree. This year, no such luck. So we dipped in and out of the “Twilight Zone” marathon on the Sci-Fi Channel, which started New Year’s Eve and showed no signs of slowing by midafternoon the following day.

I introduced Kate to TZ after our trip to Chicago and the American Girl Place. I was trying to explain why I didn’t want to buy a doll that looked like her, and told her about the “Living Doll” episode, then found it at the library. She was appropriately amused/creeped out by it, and we watched a couple others on the DVD, including the one about the ventriloquist whose dummy starts talking to him. It was one of the very few times in my life as a parent that I could act like a TV parent (appropriately enough) and say, “So now you see why mom finds certain dolls a little creepy,” and Kate replied that she understood perfectly.

When we turned on the marathon Sunday night, they were showing “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet,” with the young William Shatner. A classic, that one, followed by “It’s a Good Life,” with Billy Mumy as the monster kid who can make his imagination come to life. Of course that was a big hit with Kate, who’s been going around the house ever since shrieking, “Die, three-headed gopher, die!”

I let them wash over me and thought about all that was admirable about the series — the swish pan to Rod Serling and his elegant, well-written intros, the pop-cult references to Freudian psychiatry, and finally, the thing that makes them as good and fresh today as they were 40 or 45 years ago — the way they send their taproots right down into the collective unconscious. Seriously. Kate is a modern kid, ever-wary of being seduced by anything I like, which she considers boring and old. (She was assigned to do a school report on Stevie Wonder — this is life in Detroit — and acted like she had to write two pages on Millard Fillmore.) I can still reach her with an old movie and sometimes a pop song, but it requires extra effort; the minute she sees black-and-white photography she puts up her blast shields. But Talky Tina in “Living Doll” hooked her immediately, and after that she was a sitting duck.

Hit the Big Themes, and you’re golden.

(Pause.)

I just spent the last 45 minutes writing quite a bit more for this post, doubling its length, including linkalicious bloggage and more brain-numbing details of my pathetic daily life. And then Safari quit unexpectedly and it all went away.

Die, three-headed Safari, die!

I think it was a sign. Time to hit the showers.

The thing about “The Wire” is, you can never say you didn’t see it coming. Disaster lurks around every corner, and is usually standing smack in front of you when you get there. But because this is TV, the land of 12-minute DNA tests and prosecutors who never lose, you keep hoping for a miracle. TV is supposed to make us feel good. “The Wire” never does that. And yet, we don’t feel bad. We — I, anyway — feel something else.

The season’s centerpiece was four middle-school boys teetering on the precipice; they could go either way. Of course the odds were overwhelmingly against them, and that’s how it went. One is now a coldblooded killer. Another is living with the first boy, earning his keep dealing drugs. A third has been thrown back into the organization we laughingly call child protective services, and the fourth is kinda-sorta safe, but probably not. Which is pretty much the way these things go. You can do everything right, and yet, when you’re this kind of kid, it’s still not enough to save you.

It’s not just the kids who are unsaved. The police, the teachers, the politicians — all bang their heads against something bigger, and all get bloody foreheads, while the immovable object remains unmoved. The overarching lesson is that it’s best not to try, except that the best characters, and the redeeming moments, come from the people who do try, and fail to move the object, but somehow find a little bit of hope. Remember McNulty last season, his career in tatters, going back to uniformed foot patrol, swinging his baton merrily and looking genuinely happy for once. Colvin tried to solve the drug problem in his own way last season, failed, but came back this year and succeeded (we hope) on a far smaller scale, by saving Namond from the corner. And Bodie, who shot Wallace in season one, found a shred of decency and tried to do the right thing, only to pay for it. He redeemed himself, however, in finding the shred. A small miracle.

So what is it we feel, then, if not good? Here’s my guess: Connection. In a TV show, connection is to feeling good what real intimacy is to just having sex. (Remember Prez’ remarks on this topic to his class?) More satisfying, deeper, sometimes painful but always worth the effort.

There is no justice in the world, so this episode, this season, will of course be ignored by the people who give the awards that make more work like this possible. That’s no reason to stop trying. I can’t wait for next season.

Discuss.

Call me crazy — Hey! You crazy! — but in all the discussion of getting news online, my imagination is increasingly taken with the, shall we say, meta. Let lesser drones worry about delivery systems; I’m all about the voice. The syntax. The evolving grammar of a new language of news. (And if you can’t tell I’m being kind of snarky here, move along, you lesser drones.)

I can, and have, gone on for many zillions of words about this, but here it is in a nutshell: I once heard Nora Ephron speak, and she quoted Milton Glaser on car design. (I have looked high and low for the original citation of this, to no avail. So let’s trust Nora for a bit, shall we?) He said the look of cars mimics the prevaling mode of transportation of any era. When cars were first invented, they looked like buggies. As horses gave way to trains, cars started to look like locomotives (witness the Cords of the 1930s). As the interstate highway system began to spread, and cars came into their own, so commenced the glory days of car design, in the 50s, when they looked their most carlike. And then we were in the Jet Age, the come-fly-with-me years, and cars began to resemble airplanes.

(Yes, this train of thought begins to go off the rails in recent years, but I heard the speech in 1980 or so. Nowadays you’d say car design is tapping a deeper vein in the human subconscious. As the gap between the classes grow, we increasingly armor ourselves in quasi-military vehicles, the Hummer being only the most obvious and unimaginative example.)

Anyway, the same can be said for news media. Each technological advance starts by mimicking the one before. When radio news came along, it was little more than newspaper stories being read on the air; same with television. The telephone allowed radio reporters to give live reports on the air, something newspapers could obviously never do. As satellite trucks, ever-shrinking equipment and easy-edit videotape came along, TV news came into its own, fully exploiting its visual potential, and giving us the one-alarm house fire or two-car fatal as the lead story. We could write a whole book about the curious rise of the car chase as national news, but we won’t — I think the New Yorker had a pretty good piece about it earlier this year.

You could cite 1980 as the year newspapers finally acknowledged the obvious, when USA Today debuted with short-short stories, flashy graphics, throbbing color and, just in case you were still too stupid to get it, vending boxes that looked like televisions.

(So ends the in-a-nutshell version of my theory. A very fat nutshell.)

And now here we are in the 21st century, and online news is coming into its own. Newspapers are starting to figure out that putting the same old crap online isn’t going to make it, that you have to use the medium’s unique capabilities to craft a new kind of storytelling, and anyone who sits in a meeting and says, “But if we put links in stories, people will go away from our site and never come back” needs to be told to go make some more coffee. And as this is still a transitional period, occasionally you get a glorious mash-up. I give you this item from the Freep’s main page today, flagged as a “news bulletin:”

A manhunt is under way this morning after a prisoner escaped at Detroit Receiving Hospital.

Check back for more developments.

Now that’s immediacy, eh? The story’s main source is a TV report, which tells you the newsroom is still virtually empty but for a few website-updaters, who have the right idea but no staff yet, but screw it, cite the TV guys, information wants to be free. Yet note the language and imagery, which is right out of a Superman movie: manhunt, carjacking, police searching “on the ground and in the air” and then, that bang-up last line, cut off in mid-sentence — can’t talk now, deadline! You can almost hear Perry White: “Olson! You know about these newfangled machines. Get this story on DailyPlanet.com!” (Meanwhile, Clark Kent slips quietly from the room.) Check back for more developments! This story’s so hot we gotta get it out there now!

OK. Maybe I’ve had too much coffee.

I think I have. God, I love this French Roast stuff.

Bloggage:

Slate caps its gallant crusade to promote “The Wire” with a lengthy interview with David Simon, the show’s creator. If you’d like, Wireheads may use this thread to discuss the penultimate episode, although I just watched the finale and can barely speak of it yet. It should win every Emmy and six more Peabodys, just for good measure, but it won’t. Ah, well. No one should go into any business to win awards, but still, some truths need to be acknowledged, and this is one: Best season of television, ever.

Jimmy Lileks writes five, or maybe fifteen, columns a week about nothing. Jon Carroll writes five columns a week about all kinds of things, and once in a while he tackles a real manageable topic that fits well in a 650-word space, like, oh, work and illusion and our lizard-brain fears. Enjoy.

I have no strong opinions about the six imams ejected from the US Air flight in Minneapolis. People are jumpy; these things will happen. Considering the things that have gotten people ejected from flights in this country — everything from having a buzzing sex toy in your luggage to defecating on the beverage cart — my policy is this: Give the folks a seat on the next available and chalk it up to experience.

However. Reading Debra Burlingame’s revved-up account of what got them booted – chanting “allahu akbar” at the boarding gate, bitching loudly about the war in Iraq, asking for seat-belt extenders for no apparent reason, I have to wonder if anyone thinks these things through. Sure, they were acting suspicious, at least as we consider suspicious behavior in a post-9/11 world. But they were acting ridiculously suspicious, at which point it comes around the circle and becomes non-suspicious again. Because really, if you were going to hijack a plane, would you stand at the gate with five other traditionally clad Muslims, chanting “allahu akbar?” Hell, no. You’d shave your beard, wear Western clothes, carry a briefcase and adopt the bored/irritated expression of every other air traveler. That’s how I’d do it, anyway. Just a thought.