My mind is empty as a cup today. We now get three newspapers delivered to the door — a WSJ salesperson called the other day, and I took pity — and I can’t think of anything to write about. Well, there was this: A story in the NYT about a lawyer’s plan to use Google searches to establish community standards. Since more people search “orgy” than “apple pie,” the reasoning goes, this proves the community tolerates more porn than may be immediately evident on its public face.

The NYT calls this a novel approach. I don’t think so.

In the 1970s, Columbus, Ohio was the country’s first test market for an interactive cable service called QUBE. Warner QUBE, to be exact. It was ground-breaking for the time — 30 channels! — and offered what was then cutting-edge technology, the ability to talk back to your TV. The box was hard-wired to your TV and lots of people tripped over the cable, but it was so novel no one cared. Three rows of buttons adorned the box, the size of a fat trade paperback. Ten channels were local broadcast (with Cincinnati’s and Cleveland’s included), 10 more were “community” channels, but the real interesting ones were the 10 on the far right, which were premium — pay-per-view. And of that 10, the most interesting was P-10, in the southeast corner of the box. This was the porn channel. You could have it disabled, but no one I knew did. The free-viewing period before the charge kicked in was ridiculously long by today’s standards — two whole minutes. It was what we’d now call hotel-room porn, hardcore movies with the closeups excised, but they were the real deal. I watched “Captain Lust” there with some friends, agog at the novelty of it all, not to mention the original theme song, sung as a sea chanty (Captain Lust was a pirate): Oh Captain Lust, he’s greedy, mean and horny-o… To give you an idea of how swiftly this changed the local lexicon: I was at a party around that time, and there were three guys named Pete in attendance. The host introduced the first two as P-1 and P-2, but the last guy was a real ladies’ man, so they called him P-10. Everybody got the joke.

We weren’t the only ones experimenting with this amazing technology. (Some things “Swingtown” gets right.) Remember, Betamaxes still cost in the $700 range back then, and this would have been among the first opportunities Americans had to view pornographic movies in the privacy of their own homes.

Meanwhile, elsewhere in the city, an eager prosecutor is preparing a case against a dirty-bookstore owner, or maybe it was a dirty-movie theater owner. Can’t recall. (Kirk, Bernie Karsko told me the rest of this story, and maybe you remember it better.) He’s using the community standards offense. The defendant is smart enough to hire the right lawyer, who looked at his QUBE box, added two and two, and drew up a subpoena of the company’s records regarding P-10 movie purchases. Let’s just see what the community’s standards are when they’re behind closed doors, he says. Warner gets wind of this, pees its corporate pants, raises a stink, etc., and I believe the prosecutor backed down almost immediately. He knew he had a loser on his hands.

I think, but again I’m not sure, that the lawyer in question was Alan Isaacman, the same guy Edward Norton plays in “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” Smart guy. (And a very good movie, I might add, despite its repellant central character.)

So, some bloggage:

Sometimes I think the difference between entrepreneurs and the rest of us is simply the power to get up off the couch. I thought of the human-powered gym years ago. You probably did, too. It’s impossible to sit pedaling, treadmilling, elliptical-ing or whatevering in one of those long lines at most gyms and not wonder why the whole setup isn’t hooked up to a generator. Screw the banks of TVs tuned to ESPN and CNN; what you need to keep going is the dimming of the overhead lights.

(Note that news item is over a year old. I only read about it today, buried within a Slate story about harnessing the power of the breast-bounce. Sorry, guys — no pix.)

Spend any time in Amish country, and you learn a thing or two about storing power. I once visited an Amish quilt shop in rural Allen County. It had a high, pitched roof, and on the south-facing side of the roof — also, coincidentally, the side that customers didn’t see, entering through the front door — was a bank of solar panels. Wires led to a stack of six car batteries, and wires from those powered a huge, industrial-type sewing machine of the sort found in any Asian sweatshop. This is where the quilts were made, and if you know sewing at all, it was obvious in the evenness of the stitching. They never claimed they were hand-sewn, but I always think of this as the height of Amish tricksiness. Many people think of the Amish as North America’s very own tribe of aboriginal innocents, but surprise, they’re not.

Off to work. Back to regular morning blogging this week, I think. I’ve finally slept enough.

Right now I’m tired enough to walk into walls, but we’re having a great time. When the director and I assembled our team for the Detroit-Windsor International Film Festival Challenge, one of our crew was designated “fixer” — he was the guy who could get us locations, talk us into private homes, etc. Among the goodies in his existing tool belt were a big scary decaying mansion and a limo.

We needed the limo. Every time I look at it, I chuckle. A 1977 Lincoln Continental stretch, navy blue, customized with TV antenna (the TV’s long gone), venetian blinds (1977 being before window tinting), and no fewer than three 8-track tape decks. There’s even a flagstaff on the front bumper. Plastic seat covers. Pervasive interior mildew smell indicating long warehousing. Oh, it is glorious:

The edit bay is so busy now it’s smokin’. Five hours to deadline.

Every state has its self-flattering mythology, but Texas’ is one of the worst. HT: Virgotex.

Danny mentioned yesterday’s self-portrait was Warholized. No, this is:

I don’t know how I missed this, a lengthy piece on Elmore Leonard last week in the WashPost, pegged to nothing in particular. The writer, Neely Tucker, seems quite taken by the fact Leonard isn’t an asshole:

Walk through his house, a two-story thing on a nice-but-not-ostentatious street in this leafy ‘burb, and you’ll be hard-pressed to know you are in the house of a writer, much less a famous one. He works at a regular desk with an IBM Wheelwriter 1000 typewriter at the side. It’s in a nice room with some wooden bookcases and a television at one end. He doesn’t own a computer. Then there’s a family room with pictures of his five kids and 13 grandkids and three great-grandchildren and a lovely oil portrait of Christine. The kitchen opens onto a sunroom, and there’s the back yard with 40-foot fir trees and a small swimming pool and a tennis court with a sagging net.

He drives a VW Jetta.

There is no glory wall, no photographs of him with stars in his movies: Cheadle, Clooney, De Niro, Eastwood, J-Lo, Newman, Travolta. He doesn’t go to the Oscars. Until you get to the “business room,” a tiny thing off a hallway by the garage with a couple of bookcases lined with copies of his books, the only sign he’s in the business is in a wet bar off the kitchen: the iconic Annie Leibovitz photograph of him on a hard-backed chair on Miami Beach, all in black, wearing a beret and typing away.

He looks cooler than you could ever hope to be.

“One time when I was a kid, I picked up the phone. This lady said, ‘I have Clint Eastwood calling for Mr. Leonard,’ ” says his son Bill, an ad agency executive who now lives just a few blocks over. “I said, very calmly, ‘Dad, Clint Eastwood is calling from California.’ Everybody screamed. We kids ran to the other room and unscrewed the mouthpiece so we could listen in. . . . He was completely unassuming about Hollywood. He’d say, ‘They’re just people.’ Aerosmith — the whole band — came over to his house a few years ago. They all went swimming.”

This evening, he and Christine go to dinner a mile or so from his house. He gives the maitre d’ his name for the reservation. Goes right over the guy’s head. He tells Dutch he’s late and he’s missed his spot and he’ll just have to wait some more. Dutch, who could buy the restaurant, doesn’t say anything. He and Christine just stand there, looking like a couple of nice retirees, and then Christine flags a waitress she knows, and this lady gets them a booth.

It’s like going out with the egoless Zen master.

Please don’t misconstrue this — I’m as delighted by Leonard’s lack of jerkitude as any person should be — but it makes me sad that not going on the muscle with restaurant hosts and not having a glory wall of pictures of oneself mugging with J-Lo is somehow more noteworthy than doing so.

Every so often I run across the syndicated TV version of TMZ.com. Those of you familiar with it know their stock in trade — not celebrity news, but celebrity humiliation. (There’s a clip today of Andy Dick being carried, physically carried, out of a party, and whoever put that vomit risk in their car is either a hero or fool.) I’m intrigued by the show’s structure, which is familiar to anyone who’s ever sat through a newsroom staff meeting, because that’s what it is — a bunch of young reporter types pitch their stories to an older editor, who makes notes on a whiteboard. You get the sense of a platoon of spies, out to capture celebrities spilling coffee, looking offensively fat/skinny or, of course, being drunk. In that Andy Dick clip, which was filmed from a second-story window looking down on the action, you can hear someone nearby saying, “Are you getting this?” A man participating in the Dick-carrying action looks up at the camera and cries, “Dlisted!” — another gossip blog.

So what we have here is an army of paparazzi, feeding a digital Fleet Street full of gossips, dedicated to the twin propositions that a) celebrities are assholes; and b) we must publicly denounce them as such, preferably by being assholes ourselves (“Courtney Cosucka”).

I’m glad Elmore Leonard isn’t an asshole, but by the time you’re 82, it’s wisest not to be. Maybe that’s why he’s still doing his best work in his ninth decade.

In the story, Leonard makes the same point he makes with everyone who asks why it took so long for Hollywood to figure out how to make his books into decent movies:

Barry Sonnenfeld, the first director to figure out Leonard’s dark humor (“Get Shorty”), says his books are “medium camera-shot” stuff with no close-ups for punch lines, no cues to the audience something funny just happened.

In interviews, Leonard says this was his advice to Sonnenfeld — no cutaways for the reaction-mugging. Maybe that’s the secret, but I thought “Get Shorty,” the film, fell about 17.43 percent short of the praise heaped upon it. Danny DeVito was all wrong for the part of the jerk movie star (it needed someone short and clueless and handsome, a Tom Cruise) and John Travolta — meh. For my money, “Out of Sight” was far superior, and the secret to that wasn’t a lack of close-ups, it was leaving the damn dialogue alone and underplaying it. Leonard’s dialogue is very funny, but it’s dry-as-dust funny — you laugh inside. “Freaky Deaky” opens with a drug dealer being called to the phone in his mansion, a turn-of-the-century showpiece he’s tricked out with his hideous drug-dealer taste, like a green-striped parachute over “the Jacuze.” It’s his girlfriend on the phone, who asks if he’s sitting down. You have to sit down for this, it’s important. He sits down in the chair next to the phone (this being pre-wireless days) and she says, “When you get up, what’s left of your ass is gonna go clear through the ceiling.”

See, he’s armed a bomb. It’s a pressure switch, and when the pressure’s off, boom. But he has a phone, right? So he calls the police. And the bomb squad shows up, and the bomb expert crawls under the chair and says, yep, that’s a bomb. That’s when it starts to get funny — the dealer starts complaining that he’s “got to go the toilet” and the cops just don’t give a shit about his comfort. He’s a drug dealer, they know it, he knows they know it, and what’s the hurry? Let him suffer. They start putting ideas in his head: Now don’t think you can dive into that Jacuzzi and outrun a stick of dynamite, you can’t do it. Then they leave the room. A beat, and …boom. Now that’s funny, but it’s not ha-ha funny. It’s the guy sitting on a bomb in his mansion, the contempt of the cops, “I got to go the toilet, bad.” Just copy and paste, Mr. Screenwriter, it’s easy money. That’s what Scott Frank did in “Out of Sight.” And then they got George Clooney, one of the great underplayers, and Ving Rhames, another one, and they managed to wrap a few steel bands around J-Lo’s ego, and voila. “Out of Sight” is a romantic comedy in which you don’t laugh, only smile.

You’ve heard all this before. I apologize. Very tired this morning. I had the hockey game on for company while I worked last night and finally had to turn it off — the hysteria in the play-by-play and the desperation of the play itself was too much to bear. Dorothy said Penguins in six. She may be right. It might be Penguins in seven. (Or Wings in six!)

So let’s skip to the bloggage:

Geoffrey Feiger’s been on trial here, for campaign finance law violations, and a cursory look at the facts as presented suggest he was guilty, guilty, guilty. Not that it swayed the jury of his peers, who found him not guilty, not guilty, not guilty. (Most of you non-Michiganders probably know him as Dr. Kevorkian’s first high-profile lawyer.) I cannot tell a lie: I don’t care. The prosecution was flawed, and the Republicans (at the state and national level) have been hunting him for too long for me not to be cheered that he gave ’em the slip. The guy is the stone personification of the slimy lawyer, and yet, he’s easily one of the most amusing characters in town, and I’m glad he’s going to be in business a while longer. His TV ads are beyond belief, 30-second goblets of smarm talking about our great American justice system and his pledge to stick up for the little guy, blah blah blah, always punctuated by Feiger, his head tilted and eyes twinkling, smiling with the whitest set of teeth this side of Hollywood. (See here, here and, most spectacularly, here.) If I were the director, I’d add a little twinkle-sparkle effect in the last second. In fact, I bet he’s preparing a “thank you, American judicial system” spot as we speak, and I hope it includes it.

And speaking of court trials, I cannot tell another lie: If I were in a spinning class with someone who yelled, “Good burn!” and “You go, girl!” while the class was ongoing, I’d be tempted to dismount, pick up his stationary bike and slam it down to make my point. So, apparently, were members of this jury, who said as one: NOT GUILTY. Lance Mannion’s wife, the Blonde, and I were in an aerobics class with someone who did that, but it was a big room and he wasn’t quite that obnoxious. He was very big on spontaneous whoooos, however. The Blonde and I really hated that.

Finally, guess what’s on top of the NYT most-e-mailed list? This column: Put a little science in your life. Enjoy it as I did; I’m off to the gym, where nobody better mess with me!

When Alan and I were in Argentina with the Fellows a few years back, we were amazed at how many ’60s-era Ford Falcons we saw on the road. We called them “Aunt Dorothy cars,” in recognition of the last woman we knew who drove one.

It turns out most of them only look like 1960. One of our guides told us the story of how Ford continued to make the Falcon in Argentina for years after the last model rusted to pieces in the States. Still, it was strange seeing that retro old-lady styling and round taillights around every corner.

So I was highly amused by this story in the News today — Argentine family restores their Falcon wagon and loves it so much they drive it 10,000 miles to Dearborn, just to say so in person. Unannounced, I might add:

It would be an understatement to say that the Percivaldis caught Ford by surprise when they pulled up to the Glass House around noon Thursday. The family trooped in to tell their story to a bewildered guard at the front desk.

“He didn’t know what to do,” Diego said.

As always, the good stuff is in the details — how Diego, the father, skirted the high-crime regions of South America on his drive north, and their impressions of the U.S. See if this sounds familiar:

The couple said they also are amazed by the food. “When you drive down the street anywhere in America, you see all these restaurants, hotels, motels, churches and theaters. It isn’t like that in Argentina. The portions of food are so big; if we keep eating all this food, we are going to die,” Diego said.

They’re all flying home, and sending the Falcon by freighter.

Summer is why there are no good DVDs to rent in the fall. I cannot express in strong enough words how much I am not looking forward to “Sex and the City” — this kind of sums up one reason — and I am a person who enjoyed “The Devil Wears Prada.” Is that actually a cougar necklace? And Kim Cattrall actually wears it? On her body?

Boy, I can’t wait for October, a chilly weekend for staying in with the season’s first hearty soup and a nice bottle of wine, and nothing at Blockbuster except “The Love Guru.”

Busy morning, back later. Feel free to bitch about crappy movies.

Whoever had “torn lateral meniscus” in the knee-injury pool, please see the cashier to collect your winnings.

This might be the ultimate in navel-gazing, but if nothing else, it’s pretty cool.

Turns out you can open DICOM files — a medical standard, according to J.C. the Genius — with a free program called iRad.

UPDATE: John suggests this post needs a soundtrack. I agree. Press play, but be warned, song is NSFW, but pretty funny. (And the title shown isn’t the name of the song, probably obscured for bot-foiling purposes.)

Jon Carroll wrote a column about mulch earlier this week. It so happens that I came across not one but two mulch crews on my bike ride yesterday. Mulch is absolutely essential for suburbia to exist, right up there with gasoline and espresso. Ninety percent of it is useless and/or decorative; there’s no reason for a well-established tree to have a collar of mulch rising halfway up the trunk, although it does make mowing around it easier. So finding, say, a teenage maple with mulch piled at least eight inches high at its base is as easy as looking out the nearest window. Over winter mulch will compact, degrade, etc., and in the spring a crew comes around and adds three more inches. Since it only lost one or maybe two inches over the winter, this is a net gain for the mulch pile, and you see some really stupid-looking mulch setups. I’m not a gardener, but my guess is, this can’t be good for the tree. If your feet needed to be wet you might wear wet socks, but adding wet pants is certainly unnecessary, and would be like laying out a welcome mat for pests that like moist, dark places to burrow. But no one asks me. I’m just the dumb lady rolling past on the bicycle.

Anyway, one of the mulch crews I saw yesterday was typical, a bunch of dark-skinned men speaking Spanish. I wondered the same thing I wonder when I pick up, oh, say a small rendering of a stained-glass window featuring praying hands and the “Footprints” verse, all executed in lovely plastic with “made in China” stamped on its base. I think of the sweatshop factory, the miasma of hot plastic coming from the non-OSHA-approved machinery, a life measured out by coffee spoons while this crap goes by on the conveyor belt. I wonder what the person who made it thought of the distant Americans who will display this in their homes. And so I wondered about how mulch is used in the Spanish-speaking world, if the village in Chihuahua or Guatemala or wherever these men came from contains mulch, what they thought when they learned that Americans in one of the wettest places on the planet grind up old trees and heap them up around the trunks of other trees for reasons no one can precisely fathom.

I told myself I was going to think of story ideas on this bike ride, by the way, showing I’m capable of procrastination even in my recreation.

Bloggage: From my ace advertising source JohnC, I know the term for detailed photographic advertising placed on high-rise buildings is a “wrap.” (GM frequently wraps the RenCen; this was for the All-Star Game in 2005.) So. Warner Bros. building in Burbank gets a wrap promoting Madonna’s new album. Worker therein notes that his office seems to be in Madonna’s vagina, more or less. Post gets linked on Metafilter. Hilarity ensues: I used to work there until I got my pink slip. And so on, and on, and on.

GOP operative gives the gender version of the “well, there’s black people, and then there’s n*ggers” defense, here.

One of my favorite newspaper blogs is the Detroit News’ Tax Watchdog, written by reporter Robert Snell and dedicated to the proposition that if you throw a rock in southeast Michigan, you’ll hit a tax deadbeat, and many of them are famous. At the top of the blog today, Anita Baker, on the hook for $481K and change. Bonus: A picture of her Grosse Pointe house.

I also liked this audio slideshow about Red’s Jazz Shoe Shine Parlor, a Detroit institution.

The News is rich this week: I also learned that Sam Wagstaff, the man who discovered, promoted and loved Robert Mapplethorpe, did a three-year stint at the Detroit Institute of Arts as a curator, where he promoted avant-garde pieces such as “Dragged Mass Geometric”: Conceptual art at its highest and most abstruse, “Dragged Mass Geometric” involved two bulldozers lugging a 35-ton slab of granite across the verdant sweep of the museum’s north lawn, with the goal of embedding it in the earth.

Snicker.

And now, off to the gym for Rob’s Torture Class, which I skipped Tuesday for my meeting, which means it’ll be even more torture-ific. Send moral support.