Before too much more time passes, I have to say something about “Treme,” which wrapped its second season this week. Y’all know my conflicts/prejudices. I feel bad about not writing something sooner. Back before the show even launched, I was asked* about contributing to Back of Town, which quickly became the definitive “Treme” blog, but it became obvious I was out of my league there, and anyway, I didn’t have time.

*My memory may be faulty here; it might have been another work-of-David Simon blog. One of those.

Also, while it’s true I have an opinion on pretty much everything and can overanalyze with the best of them, I’m claiming my TV more for entertainment these days. I’m reserving the right to sit back and enjoy more. The world isn’t short of people who can slice, dice, unpack, unravel and unwind TV with the best of them, and for this one, I mostly choose not to participate. To fully appreciate, “Treme” requires a knowledge of New Orleans that is both broad and deep, and mine is neither. To illustrate, a sample conversation with the late Ashley Morris:

Me: I love New Orleans. We went there on vacation a few years ago.
AM: Oh?
Me: Yes, we stayed in a guesthouse on Ursulines Street. Run by a couple of gay men.
AM: Well, that narrows it down.

So let Ray Shea and the rest of them at BoT do the heavy lifting. Me, I just watch.

As frequently happens when quality television is involved, second seasons are when the ripening occurs, and that’s been the case with “Treme.” The show started with enormous expectations — anything that followed “The Wire” had to — and swiftly disappointed many by not being “The Wire.” But it was definitely in the mold of other Simon work, which is to say, it was about cities and how they work (and don’t work). You’d think, given where people live in these United States, we might want to see more of this. But the world is also full of people who, when they sit down for a night of telly, want the sweet balm of escapism. There are quite a few more who believe urban America is a hellhole, and seek confirmation in following bullet trails through viscera, because that’s what happens to you when you go there — you get shot.

There’s also been some critical backlash, like this piece, which basically says: Yawn. BO-ring. I disagree, obviously. You don’t need multiple shootings and drug busts to give a show forward momentum. “Treme” runs at a more leisurely pace than “The Wire,” but has no shortage of pleasures, the most obvious of which is the music.

The music this season has been wonderful, and there’s more of it than in season one. Every city has its own soundtrack, but New Orleans’ might be the richest on the continent, and the show goes out of its way to depict it, from high to low, to show how its threads weave together and keep making New Orleans’ musical tapestry so unique. I’ve always thought the most interesting places on the map are those where worlds and cultures collide, and they’ve been colliding in New Orleans, at the end of the big river, for centuries, and nowhere is this more evident than in the music coming out of every window and door. Truth be told, if “Treme” was little more than an excuse to link performances together, I’d probably still watch. (And if Albert and Delmond Lambreaux ever release their mashup of modern jazz and Mardi Gras Indian chants, I’ll probably buy it.)

Some of the efforts to include the city’s other big cultural scene, food, feel more strained. Anthony Bourdain got lots of writing credits this season, and while his pen is talented, I hope he doesn’t quit his day job. The scenes of Janette the chef’s evolution as a culinary artist were my least favorite of the season. (Although I probably will never cook fish again without thinking I should listen to it more.) Also, I’m in full agreement with the writer at Dark Brown Waffles who found Lucia Micarelli’s Annie Tee character a big bundle of who-cares. She spent several episodes struggling to birth an unmemorable song. Which goes to show you that in a musical town, some are bandleaders and composers and some are just players. Annie’s a very fine player. End of that story.

You can quibble over the details, but to me, “Treme” is at its best when it shows what’s wrong — and what’s glorious — about urban America, where the country built its strength and lost its way and now can’t come to grips with. We’re a mobile society; we like to strike it rich and find the next thing. New Orleans — and Baltimore, and Detroit, and many others — are reminders that we can’t just move on, that we owe cities something. The road to figuring that out is what “Treme” is all about.

New York magazine’s critic was kinder than the Atlantic’s. You might want to read.

In bloggage today:

I flipped on Nancy Grace last night for about half an hour while I worked. I’ve never watched more than 30 seconds of the blonde harpy, and I wanted to see if the top of her skull would blow off last night. I lasted longer this time, but not much; this clip should give you an idea why. What the–? Is this typical? If so, Fox isn’t the only cable-news outfit with an embarrassment to apologize for. That Susan Moss person! I’m still traumatized.

My appreciation of Monaco’s new princess continues. I tried to link to a single photo from this slideshow, but failed. If you have time to page through, it’s the very last one that made me laugh out loud, no. 27. Princess Stephanie, in her tobacco-colored tan and wrist tattoo — she’s the French version of Aunt Mimi in “Treme.”

And now, the hour grows late, and I gotta go. Happy Wednesday, all.

I know some of you who visit don’t check back for the comments, so here’s something you missed yesterday:

That’s Beartooth Pass, Montana Wyoming, four days ago. I’ve gone through snow in the mountains in June before, but not that much of it. I’m sure it’s lovely, and I’m sure the views are grand, but photos like this remind me how much I’m a flatlander. Once the ground gets high enough that you can fall from it and die, I have to fight the urge to lay face-down and hang on for dear life. Although then you miss all the pretty scenery.

I think that picture was MarkH’s. I hope it was. If not, I’m breaking someone’s copyright.

So. I made time for “Game of Thrones” and “The Killing” finales, finally, and I really don’t have much to add to the chorus. By way of comparison, I think these few paragraphs from Gawker sum it up pretty well. Essentially, one show played by the rules and one didn’t, and if you read any further, know here be spoilers, but let’s get to it:

I’m always interested in shows like “The Killing,” which arise out of a different TV culture. The original was Danish, called “Forbrydelsen,” and if I cared to, I could probably dig up the statistics, but let me retrieve them from memory instead: It was so popular the entire country ground to a halt for an hour every week, for an estimated economic impact of nine trillion kroner. For the finale, you could have walked naked down the main street in Copenhagen, and no one would have noticed. Even the mermaid statue was watching. And so on. All of which should bode well for the American remake, and for a while, it did. The series started out great, and for a few weeks, I totally got it. I loved it, in fact. It was “Prime Suspect,” another crime-story import, with more rain. Lots more rain, in fact. We’ve discussed the rain before, haven’t we? Too much rain.

Here’s something I — we — should have considered, however: There’s nothing on TV in Denmark. Oh, sure, Danes have satellite and cable and all the rest of it, but I bet most of their programming is imported. You just don’t think of Denmark when you think of groundbreaking entertainment, and while it’s western Europe and presumably their culture would be recognizable to us, it’s also one of those places where I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that “Dallas” is still popular. Or “Baywatch.” Or that their “(Insert name of country)’s Got Talent” franchise just crowned an operatic soprano, or a viola player, or a contortionist. Like us, but not. Skewed.

I’ve never been to Denmark, so I can’t say with any authority what their national character is like, but reaching into my big bag of national-character stereotypes, I come up with Gloom, and Individual Industry, and Self-Effacement. Probably they’re so pathetically grateful to get their very own competently produced murder-mystery series, produced in their native language, that they didn’t care that it strung them along for the entire series and then didn’t reveal the killer in the final episode. They don’t mind tuning in next season. It’s a national duty.

Because that’s what happened, if you didn’t hear. After however-many episodes of teasing and misleading and enough red herrings to make lunch for all of Scandinavia, the series ended with…more uncertainty! Another switcheroo! It might have been Billy Campbell, but it probably wasn’t!

You’ll have to wait another year to find out who the real killer was, in other words. Well, you will. And maybe you. But I’m so far out of this show, I might as well have moved to Denmark.

Here’s something Veena Sud (Danish for “fucks with your head”), the creator of the original series and executive producer of the American remake, didn’t consider: We eat murder for breakfast here. Every day in the United States of America, people die on TV, a whole army of them. We peek through their windows and watch them enjoying life, not knowing there’s a killer outside waiting to end it all. We watch them bound and tortured, begging for their lives. Once they’re dead, we tunnel into their wounds to watch their spleens explode. If we’re going to invest a whole series in just one murder, it better pay off. Because we don’t have time for this shit, otherwise.

Fun fact to know and tell: Copenhagen’s murder rate is roughly four per 100,000 population. It’s a city of 2 million, give or take, which means 80 homicides a year. Eighty! There were 361 murders in Detroit, year before last, a city of 800,000. As American as apple pie.

Which is not to say we’re callous about it (although we are). Just that you promised something you didn’t deliver. The show’s tag line, after all, was: Who killed Rosie Larsen? And you didn’t answer the question.

So the hell with Rosie. Bad things happen to prostitutes. Which “CSI” teaches us, three times a week.

“Game of Thrones,” now, that was a series with a payoff. OMG DRAGONS, and not just any dragons, but wee baby dragons! This show changed my mind about fantasy fiction, the whole damn genre. I’ve never been able to get into it, for a number of reasons, but the main one is magic. What’s the point of following a story if the writer’s hole card is magic? Write yourself into a corner? Have your character cast a spell and enchant his way out of it. I’m also not fond of dwarves, or swords, or krakens, or British accents as the all-purpose go-to tongue of the realm. But “Game of Thrones” gave me all of that, and wisely kept the magic at bay until the final moments, and then: Whoa.

(I will say, they kind of wimped out. In the book, Daenerys emerges from the ashes of her husband’s funeral pyre with the baby dragons actually nursing at her breasts. I suspect it would have been too hard/expensive to render with CGI, though.)

The “Game of Thrones” finale settled all the extant story lines and set up the second season with several strong new ones. I’m totally hooked. Now I need to decide whether I want to read the books, or let the show reveal the story to me. My sister’s on the final one, and I asked her, “So, has winter arrived yet?” And no, it hasn’t. The dragons aren’t even full-grown yet. I don’t know if I have the patience for all those pages of exposition. We’ll see.

The hour is drawing late, so let’s go blogging:

I’ve been reading about David Mamet’s conversion to the right wing, but I obviously haven’t read enough details, or at least not the ones revealed in Christopher Hitchens’ review of his new book. The man hasn’t had a political conversion, he’s gone mad:

Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.

What? Life’s too short to waste on this one. I’d rather watch “The Killing” spin out the Larsen case for another 25 episodes or so.

OID: Boy, 7, steals stepfather’s car to go see his bio-dad, leads police on chase.

And as we’re running long today, I think that’s it. We just had a thunderstorm, followed by sunshine. Which means, boys and girls? Yes, humidity! Nothing like having a bad hair day to look forward to.

A few culture notes, because I don’t think enough neurons are firing in my head to handle anything other than arts and entertainment at the moment:

Despite everything I expected, I’m enjoying “Game of Thrones.” I generally despise anything involving broadswords and magic, and GoT has a lot of the former, less of the latter, plus boobs (this being HBO). The characters tend toward ridiculous names, but are helpfully color-coded — the Peroxide Twins, the Strawberry Blonde Clan — or are recognizable enough that I can keep them straight from scene to scene, like Mayor Carcetti on “The Wire,” whom we learned last week was a eunuch. (He’s gossips and schemes. You know how eunuchs are.)

No one is more surprised by this than I am. I’m not a fan of David Benioff, who’s co-writing this thing, and haven’t been since I saw him speak at Michigan way back when. There’s way too much exposition-through-dialogue — Lord Dyphtherion, how go affairs at your castle Wickershamshire? Is your brother still recovering from the injuries suffered in that joust with dark knight Bubonicus? What was at stake? Some significant titles and land? — but Benioff knows everything sounds better in a British accent. And once you’ve got the initial sorting by hair color and subplot, it’s no harder to follow than any soap opera. I’d like a little more magic, though. I assume it’s coming. I hope it won’t be too silly.

As different from “Game of Thrones” as chalk is from cheese, “Treme” is back for its second season, now examining Katrina-scarred New Orleans from a distance of a year and change. This is when residents knew for sure just how much the rest of the country cared about them (not much) and when the overstressed institutions of social order, mainly the police department, began to break down. I’m so bummed Ashley Morris isn’t alive to see this, but fortunately, the people at the Back of Town blog are breaking down each episode for us, and if you’re not following along there, you’re missing something. I recommend it over any professional “Treme” criticism, including this Salon piece (spoilers galore), which boiled down to: I didn’t like this scene, ergo, suckitude.

Y’all know what a David Simon fan I am; I will put my little hand in his and follow him anywhere. But generally, I’m finding this season better than the first, and not just because I know everyone now. Detroit is New Orleans in a colder climate, with a disaster that struck in slow motion, rather than in meteorological form. But they have a great deal in common, and the questions Simon is asking are the same ones anyone with open eyes asks when they live around here, about responsibility, complicity and all the rest of it.

(The scenes with the crazy chef, Enrico Brulard, I can only attribute to Simon’s bromance with Anthony Bourdain, although they’re plenty entertaining. I love food and respect the craftsmanship that goes into preparing it well, but watching Brulard fuss over dishes was a useful reminder not to worry too much about anything that will be in the municipal sewer system in 24 hours.)

Finally, “The Killing” is starting to grate. (All these shows run on Sunday night, when I’m working. Thank my lucky stars for DVRs and on-demand cable) It started out so well, and now in episode six or seven or something, all I’m looking forward to is the end, when the red herrings are shoveled off the deck and we find out who done it, and I’m already worried we’re in for some late-arriving character who will come bearing a suitcase full of deus ex machina. I’m already tired of so much, which I’m now realizing is mainly clichés served up by Enrico Brulard, with artful presentation and some garnish you don’t recognize — the Female Detective Who’s Married to Her Job, the Innocent Party With a Secret, etc. And the rain! Lord, the rain. I know it rains in Seattle, and I know it rains a lot, but presumably people come equipped for it, and occasionally bother to put their hoods up.

I’ve seldom been as thoroughly hooked by anything as I was by the first two episodes of “The Killing.” I’ve seldom been so disappointed by what came afterward.

Your thoughts? It’s sweeps month, you know.

A little bit of bloggage:

Jim Cramer, profiled in the NYT magazine, discusses his joust with Jon Stewart, which wasn’t really a joust at all. Mr. Whinypants says:

“As soon as he started, I realized Stewart was on a mission to make me look like a clown. I didn’t defend myself because I wasn’t prepared. What was I supposed to do, talk about how often I had been right? Praise myself? Get mad? I was mad, but I didn’t want to give the audience any blood. The national media said I got crushed, which I did, and made me into a buffoon.” He looked at his plate and shook his head. “You have a whole body of work and then — ” He signaled the waitress for more coffee. “Stewart was the prosecutor, and I was Exhibit A. But what was the crime? What did I do wrong? I wasn’t running Fannie or Freddie. I wasn’t in charge at Countrywide. CNBC was completely good. Better than the Department of Justice. What I did every night was call these bad actors out. I sat there with Stewart and thought: He’s never even seen my show. He doesn’t even know what I do.” He paused for a moment. “Obviously I didn’t know what he does, either.”

Tell it to someone who cares, Jim.

The last people in the world to discover Donald Trump is not what he seems, speak:

“The last thing you ever expect is that somebody you revere will mislead you,” said Alex Davis, 38, who bought a $500,000 unit in Trump International Hotel and Tower Fort Lauderdale, a waterfront property that Mr. Trump described in marketing materials as “my latest development” and compared to the Trump tower on Central Park in Manhattan.

“There was no disclaimer that he was not the developer,” Mr. Davis said. The building, where construction was halted when a major lender ran out of money in 2009, sits empty and unfinished, the outlines of a giant Trump sign, removed long ago, still faintly visible.

Mr. Davis is unable to recover any of his $100,000 deposit — half of which the developer used for construction costs.

“Revere” — what a strange word to use in that context.

A long piece on Hillary Clinton’s term as SoS that I haven’t read yet, but plan to. Over the weekend, maybe.

Which will start soon. Enjoy yours.

Many years ago, a bunch of my friends and I ended up in Florida for a week. Not spring break, a wedding. What an exciting week it was, of which we must never, ever speak publicly. Daytimes, we recovered in the usual Florida fashion — laying out in chaise lounges by the pool and/or beach.

One day Paul got up to go inside to freshen his drink and didn’t come back. I went in a bit later to freshen my own and found him putting the last touches on a fairly elaborate snack platter — Triscuits with tuna salad, fruit, little cheesy things, etc. Plus a fresh cocktail with a fruit flag on the rim of the glass.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Erica’s getting married,” he said. “I’m having a reception.”

Oh, right. “All My Children.” And there Erica was, wearing a modest red-sequined wedding cocktail dress, marrying for the fourth time, to Adam Chandler. He’d also be the male lead in marriage no. 7, out of 10 as of 2005, the last list I could find, and I’m not spending an extra minute researching Erica’s marriages, let me tell you. Erica Kane Martin Brent Cudahy Chandler Montgomery Montgomery Chandler Marick Marick Montgomery.

I’m sorry Paul died before the internet took over our lives, as I’m sure he’d enjoy surfing the “All My Children” blogs every day, maybe keeping one himself. You know what the big news would be today — it and “One Life to Live” are being cancelled after 40 years or so, part of the slow collapse of the daytime soap. Hard to imagine. I remember my grandmother watching these afternoon stories in the ’60s, when they were in black and white, the action punctuated with organ stings.

Soaps were always the golden handcuffs for actors, steady work that paid very well, but didn’t carry much prestige outside of fan conventions. Although I’m always amazed at how many respectable ones got their start there — Julianne Moore, Marisa Tomei. Demi Moore was on “General Hospital,” although I think we can all agree her technique still has one foot in the Significant Close-up to Close a Scene.

The New Yorker ran a hilarious profile of the showrunner of “Days of Our Lives” a few years back. It was there I learned that the writing on soaps has reached the point where scenes in heaven are fairly routine now. Never watched ’em, myself. Tried, during the Luke and Laura “General Hospital” era, but couldn’t get into it.

So how about a picture? From the Kid Rock cruise:

That’s from the Facebook of Deke Dickerson, whom I gather was a musician in one of the backup bands. Thanks to BobNG for pointing it out. As I said late in yesterday’s comments, I’m disappointed at how much better his album is than any of the many photo galleries published by the Free Press. If you’re on Facebook, you can look it up yourself; they’re public on his wall, but I don’t think any link I’d put here would work. I’m amazed, although I shouldn’t be, by how many guests had multiple Kid Rock tattoos. One had an interesting surgery scar on her thigh, too. I’m sure the story behind that one is something to hear.

A little bloggage for the weekend:

U.S. Postal Service FAIL, as the kids say: The new Statue of Liberty stamp turns out to be a photograph of the one in Las Vegas, not in New York Harbor. Another delightful read by Kim Severson, off the food beat for a while now, and blooming where she’s planted. I saw her speak at a conference in Ann Arbor, and she was by far the most amusing one there.

Finally, something to consider while our American kids are being taught to the test. Tell me if you think these Australian kids will ever forget this lesson about dinoaurs for the rest of their lives:

What does a getup like that cost, anyway? Can I save enough money by next Halloween?

Jolly good weekend to all.

I’m getting to the “Downton Abbey” episodes a bit later than the rest of the world, but I am getting to them. I’ve never been much for these upstairs-downstairs British house dramas, but the ground has to be fertile for the seed to grow, and I guess that’s finally happened. You have to run a modest modern household of your own to appreciate how much work goes into it, even with today’s considerable labor-saving devices. To think what it must have taken to keep a pile like Downton operable as a habitable home, much less what kept it from falling to rubble, is mind-boggling.

The number of scurrying serfs required to keep its fires burning, its beds made, its kitchen turning out meals, its ten thousand chandeliers dusted and its inhabitants properly dressed is mind-boggling. (Although we only meet a few, the Granthams being a modest family. Or maybe the production budget only allowed for a cast of 20 or so.) Of course they all have complicated lives outside of their work, and the family itself is going through the things families went through in the Edwardian era, what with the need to get their daughters well-married and their estate properly passed down, all while the modern age lurks just offstage, the way the ’60s loom in “Mad Men.”

But being a woman, and the mistress of NN.C Abbey here in Michigan, I’m most interested in the domestic details of clothing and housekeeping, the way the ladies dress for dinner, what everyone eats. You needed a valet or maid just to attend to all the details of your wardrobe, to lace your corset or fasten your cufflinks or attach the stiff collar to your stiff shirt, so you can sit at the head of your table like a penguin and preside over dinner. I read once that true upper-class people call tuxedos “dinner jackets,” because that’s what they are.

I notice you don’t see the laundry being done. If you want to keep me awake at night, whisper in my ear that in my next life, I might be reincarnated as a laundress. I’ll stare lasers into the ceiling. The main character in the novel “The Girl With a Pearl Earring” was a laundress in the large and child-heavy household of Johannes Vermeer, and the paragraphs of description of the daily chores involved made my hands ache with sympathetic pain — the washing, the scrubbing, the rinsing, the starching, the bleaching, the wringing, the hanging, the ironing, the folding. My earliest memory of a washing machine at our house was one where you had to move the clothes over, a few at a time, into the spin-extractor, and yet, my mother did it happily. She also owned a washboard for problem cases, and I think she knew what the alternative was.

So far, my favorite moment is the old cook, trying to tell young Daisy, the kitchen maid, that Thomas the footman is not for her. Thomas is gay, and the cook tries to tell her a half-dozen ways, but Daisy, besotted with his attention, can’t hear her. “He’s not a ladies’ man,” the cook says; she’s a rougher sort, but apparently sodomite and buggerer aren’t in her vocabulary. And of course I love anything that drops from Maggie Smith’s mouth. She plays the dowager countess, and she gets all the best lines.

I can’t believe it’s only four parts, and we’re almost there! But a second season is on tap. So in that spirit, and because it’s Burns Day, let’s start the bloggage with a story about haggis. Mmm, gray food served in offal — my mouth is watering.

Although, when you think about it, what we eat isn’t much better. What’s the difference between what you put in homemade tacos and what Taco Bell calls “taco meat filling?” You probably don’t want to know. And in the right frame of mind — i.e., after a beer or three, during a blue moon — I’ll actually eat this stuff. Maybe I should stick to the vegetarian options.

The predates “Downton Abbey” by a few years, but I bought this book a while back — “What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew” — and enjoyed it immensely. It’s an explanation of Victorian England that concentrates on the little details of daily life, including maybe the biggest one: Why have a Downton Abbey at all? (Answer: To have a home base for fox-hunting, and an escape from plague season in London.)

Now I must fly. But first, was Trent Reznor really nominated for an Oscar? If so, I hope he wins. The score in “The Social Network” was outstanding, and I’m not a score-noticer by any stretch.

Good Burns Day to all. I’m headed for Taco Bell.

Here’s an idea to get us through January. Call it Stash the Santa, Leave the Lights. If you decorate the outside of your house for the holidays, come twelfth night/epiphany (i.e., tomorrow) you are strongly encouraged to strike all the Christmasy stuff — the Santas, the creches, the wreaths, the reindeer, whatever. But leave the lights. If your display consists entirely of white lights outlining your spruce tree, leave ’em up. If you put up blue ones, so much the better. (Red and green? On the bubble. But multicolored is fine.)

The idea is to say, Christmas is over and we’re not going to depress anyone by leaving Santa on the lawn until April, but it’s a long few weeks before we start to see anything approaching the softer light of spring, and so we’re going to let the candle of civilization burn in the dark a while longer. Until Valentine’s Day, say.

Who’s with me?

I don’t think Alan will be. Disassemble half the Christmas lights, then bring in the other half six weeks later? Winter sucks. Deal.

Well, that was my idea, anyway.

How are all of you this morning? We’re starting the year off right, with a glugging floor drain in the basement. It’s good that I handle Christmas on a pay-as-you-go basis, as January always seems to hold a few of these nasty surprises. There’s also the appraisal for our house, revealed yesterday, which came in at — calculating here — 52 percent of its 2005 purchase price. Yay, us! We’re po’.

There are times when the only reasonable response to such a pickle is to saute some spinach with garlic and then scramble a couple of eggs in there, too. There is little that can’t be faced on a spinach breakfast. Ask Popeye.

So while I wait for C&G Sewer Service, a question: Where would we be without Jon Stewart? Even in the clips roundups the day after, he’s better and funnier than anyone else on late night. The battle of the would-be Republican National Committee chairmen alone is worth your time. It’s hilarious to watch these tools caper for Grover Norquist. (If it weren’t so terrifying, of course.)

Charles Pugh — once the dumbest reporter on WKJG-TV in Fort Wayne, now the dumbest city council president Detroit has had since the last one:

City Council President Charles Pugh is dissolving his controversial nonprofit after taking criticism for secrecy surrounding it. The Pugh & You: Move Detroit Forward Fund was set up in March to raise money for staff travel and community outreach. But it caused heat for hosting a $5,000 a table fundraiser in August for Pugh’s 39th birthday. Criticism increased when Pugh refused to disclose donors that a staffer confirmed included a strip club operator who gave $500.

(A great picture, too. It needs a thought bubble: Once again, Kwame ruins it for everyone.)

I saw a couple of kids in downtown Grosse Pointe in shorts the other day. The temperature was edging toward balminess, so I thought perhaps they were just encouraging warmer weather. No. Turns out this is the thing, these days. Who knew? (I’m with the choose-your-battles parents. As long as hypothermia or frostbite isn’t a real risk, let ’em suffer.)

And with that, I sign off to await the arrival of a plumber-y looking van in the driveway. You?

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.