I had a bit of work tonight, but I still planned to write something afterward. Then Alan turned on George Carlin’s latest special on demand, and I think I’m going to be pretty worthless from here on out.

Man, he’s funny.

But here’s a treat, much more amusing than me: The baby panda in Washington made his press debut today. I highly recommend the photo gallery, although I suspect that if people can die of exposure to cuteness, this critter might be the one who finds out.

More tomorrow, I promise.

The Freep had a story on saunas today, about their popularity in Michigan’s chilliest regions, which arriving Finns found so much like home. My friend Mark lives in the U.P. I haven’t seen him in a while, but I will, sooner or later. His house had a sauna in an outbuilding, and oh what a time we had in there, once upon a time.

He built the whole thing himself, and when we first saw the plans, we thought it would look like a shoebox on its end. It didn’t. There was a sauna on the first floor and a little living/party space on the second, with decks all around. We spent a lot of time sitting around in towels, moving in and out of the heat, drinking beer, jumping in the lake.

What I liked about the sauna was how well-made it was, of rough red cedar. Mark hauled the rocks from the Lake Superior shoreline. The stove was wood-burning, and there was a 55-gallon drum of water that fed both a shower in the middle of the room and another over the rocks. The one over the rocks had a pull cord that ran on hooks all around the ceiling, like the bell cord on a bus — you could just reach up and give it a yank and fill the room with steam.

It was unbelievably hot. I’ve never seen a gym sauna that got nearly so hot. A digital readout in the party space showed the temperature. I would go in when it reached 160, but Mark held out for 180. At that temperature a shot of steam was practically dangerous, and sent me running from the room more than once. (In my towel!)

Anyway, over the years I came to see the sauna as key to long-term drinking, another reason they’re so popular in the U.P., a place where drinking is a pretty key activity. You could get drunk, take a sauna, take a plunge, take another sauna and come out feeling pretty ready for the rest of the night, or just the next portion of the night.

After a few years, Mark added a hot tub to the second-floor deck, and then the party reallly started. I recall watching the Perseid meteor shower in those crystaline U.P. skies one year — in a towel. (Mark shot a deer from the hot tub one year, totally naked. I thought he should pose for a Field and Stream photo with a blaze-orange hat over his privates.)

And then, a few years later, he rewired the hot-tub heater and apparently made a mistake. The thing burned to the ground a few days later. He never rebuilt it, but did put in a new deck, with just a hot tub.

I miss that sauna.

From the Free Press story linked above: “People think you can go to sauna and get a little frisky,” Kurtti says. “It’s way too hot for that.”

You got that right. All you do is bake.

Another story of note today, in the NYT, about Indian mounds in Newark, Ohio, east of Columbus. Most people who took Ohio history think of the 2,000-year-old Indian mounds in the area as burial grounds, but not the one in the story — it’s actually an observatory:

The mounds’ purpose remained a mystery until 1982, when professors from Earlham College in Richmond, Ind., discovered that they aligned perfectly with part of the lunar cycle. Once every 18.6 years, the moon rises at the northernmost point in its orbit. Pregnant and huge, its light framed by rounded earth, the moon hovers within one-half of a degree of the octagon’s exact center. This makes the Newark Earthworks twice as precise as the lunar observatory at Stonehenge. (Stonehenge could fit inside the mounds’ aligning circle, one of the smaller geometric shapes at the Newark site.)

The story is over the fight over their use. For years now, they’ve been the site of…anyone? Anyone? Yes, a golf course!

“Playing golf on a Native American spiritual site is a fundamental desecration,” said Richard Shiels, a history professor at Ohio State University’s Newark campus who is leading the fight to expand public access.

Astonishingly — I mean, who’d have seen this coming? — the people who play golf on the course are yelling about their rights.

It so happens an occasional NN.C commenter is on the pro-mound side. He directs us to this site, which has lots of good information.

Joody asked to see some more pix of the B-tree. Here you go.

Sorry for the unannounced hiatus Friday. I was having a birthday. (Yes, Mindy and Vince, I got the e-cards. Very amusing.) It was a birthday made more marvelous by the brief visit of John and Sam, aka my tech guy and his wife the archaeologist, who came through en route from here to there on one of their many travels. (They live in Atlanta when they aren’t putting miles on their Explorer.)

This makes approximately the 20th time they’ve visited since the last time I visited them. I think I owe them one.

But their visits here are always so pleasant. That’s one thing about old friends; you just get each other. On Friday, we went first to lunch at a Mexicantown taqueria, then to John King Books, then to Pewabic Pottery, which strikes me as just about a perfect day. I am a pretty cheap date (mainly because we only bought one little Christmas ornament at Pewabic).

My gifts this year included a ball of kitchen string (private joke), a knife sharpener, a cheap paperback of an old Martin Cruz Smith book I haven’t read and the new Rodney Crowell CD. I can ask for nothing more.

But now it’s Sunday, time to plan the week ahead and look over the week just left behind. I see Lance briefly made Memeorandum for his post on Black Friday in his part of the world, which was pretty much the way it was in many other parts of the world, at least those with Wal-Marts:

Yesterday, before dawn, when the sensible Whos down in Whoville were still asnooze, the valiant, the thrifty, the brave, the desperate, the greedy, and the addicted to shopping, lined up outside stores and malls across America, visions of bargain-priced laptops and exorbitant but rare Xbox 360s dancing in their heads. At a Wal-Mart near here hundreds gathered behind a rope waiting anxiously until a clerk pronounced the Christmas season underway with, according to one shopper, these festive words:

“On your mark. Get set. Kill each other.”

What followed, Lance reports, was much of what made the Friday-night highlight reel on the TV news here — rampaging crowds trampling women, security guards kicking the crap out of line-jumpers, the usual Christmas cheer. I was interested to note that clerks at Lance’s Wal-Mart actually stood on counters and threw boxed electronics into the crowd. I don’t know if this was out of fear of being trampled, the way you throw meat at a hungry beast, or if it was just some smartass “kill each other” trick to get the proles whipped up.

Regular readers know I’m no fan of Wal-Mart, although I don’t get frothy about it; my feeling is, if you’re looking for bullies in the world of business, Wal-Mart has plenty of company, company that likely includes many others I do business with. I knew nothing of this the first time I entered a Wal-Mart — I just thought the stores were crummy and cheap-looking. I didn’t start hating them until they ran that commercial about the old man who simply loves shucking and jiving as a Wal-Mart greeter in his blue smock. The things I’ve learned about the company have not disabused me of my feelings, but these day-after-Thanksgiving shenanigans are something else, and the company should have to answer for them.

Note this line from the story in Lance’s local paper, the Times-Herald: The crowd rushed to the back of the store, hoping to snatch up what customers called a dismally scarce supply of cheap laptops, portable DVD players and cell phones.

“Dismally scarce” — that’s the key. I don’t know how limited quantities have to be before “limited quantities” becomes an outright lie and “availability compares to that of winning Powerball tickets” is closer to the truth, but I suspect these Black Friday sales push it as far as it can go. The whole thing is a trick to get the cash registers jingling early and get the news cameras rolling. And call me a mushy old liberal, but I don’t blame the pushers and shovers as much as I blame Wal-Mart, for the same reason I think drug dealers are worse than drug users. Who should know better? Everyone, but especially Wal-Mart. Wait until someone gets seriously hurt in one of these publicity stunts. Just wait. If I were a personal-injury lawyer, I’d be carpet-bombing that crowd with business cards. If ever there was an attractive nuisance, this qualifies.

Enough rantage.

I think I’m feeling a bit testy because a freelance job I was gunning for fell through today, one that would have solved my cash-flow problems, provided a new challenge and been kind of fun, too. I broke with my usual policy of never getting my hopes up, perhaps because I’m still capable of being seduced by encouragement like, “You sound absolutely perfect for this.” Oh, well. I’m taking this as a sign that another project I was considering, one that would have been back-burnered indefinitely if the first thing had come through, is meant to be. Nose back to grindstone. Tomorrow is another day.

And how can one feel blue when the living room now contains the magnificence that is…the Barbie tree:

Today on our morning walk, Spriggy and I saw a pickup truck parked on Mack Avenue. As we passed, I noticed an antler tip showing. I came closer to find an unlucky buck’s head awaiting mounting, and a nice one, too — a 10-pointer. I expect the next stop was the taxidermist. I held the dog up to take a look and get a few whiffs, which I couldn’t detect, although I’m sure he could.

Deer season in Michigan. I guess it’s as close to a state religion as we have.

Work has pretty much ground to a halt — everyone’s off, it seems, except for Alan, who’s working like a field hand — so I’m starting to prepare for the feast. I’m always interested in how different cultures make Thanksgiving their own; remember Paulie Walnuts’ great speech in that “Sopranos” episode? “First, the antipasto, then the manicotti, and then the bird.” Most of these accounts are interesting but don’t tempt me to change my own traditions. That is, until today:

There’s one thing that you’ll never see on my Thanksgiving table. In fact, it’s never even been on my mother’s table or part of my grandmother’s Thanksgiving fare.

I’m not sure how it clinched the title of the darling of the harvest sweets, but as far as I’m concerned, pumpkin pie is the low-test, gelatinous twin of the more full-bodied and aromatic sweet potato pie.

Mmm, you got that right. Maybe I’ll make one. After Thanksgiving, though — I eat with traditionalists.

“Rooooome” wrapped up this week, with the events of the Ides of March. Amusingly, the episode was called “The Kalends of February.” Even more amusingly, the writers managed to weave the fictional characters’ narratives deeply into the events of history; next time someone asks who killed Julius Caesar, say, “a conspiracy of senators, with the coup de grace delivered by Brutus, but ultimately it was all Lucius Vorenus’ fault, because he was supposed to be Caesar’s muscle that day, and he ran off to deal with his wife.”

I hope we see this show again, one of these days. HBO makes the best shows on TV, but it takes for-freakin’-ever for them to roll around again. I honestly cannot believe we’ll be seeing a Soprano again before 2006 is out, can you?

Finally, there’s a meme going around — name 10 movies you hate. OK. I saw one just the other night — “Spanglish.” It was strange, hating it, because while I was hating it I was recognizing how good many of the performances were, especially Tea Leoni, but that’s what moviegoing is like for me — all ambivalence. Hate is such a strong word, anyway; how about “terribly disappointed by.” I dislike “American Beauty” more with every screening, although I still think it was an OK movie. Or how about “the first movie I saw that everyone else loved, but I hated?” OK, that’s easy: “E.T.” Also, “Ghostbusters.” “Scarface” was atrocious, but in a funny way; “JFK,” ditto. “Jerry Maguire” was a bunch of OK scenes in search of a story.

When Alan and I walked out of “Dead Ringers” we gave our opinions simultaneously: “That was…” and I said, “great” and he said, “god-awful.”

I’m right.

What do you think?

Every freelancer has it, but I didn’t know what mine was until today. My limit, that is.

An editor called, identified herself and her magazine, and proposed a get-acquainted assignment — a personality profile. OK, I said, tell me more. She described the individual, what he’s known for, what they’d like to cover. I jotted down notes. How long? About 1,000 words. When’s deadline? Middle of December. Fine so far.

“And what am I working for?” I asked. Plumbers, contractors, exterminators — they don’t ask this question, the people hiring them do. “Can you give me an estimate?” you ask the plumber, or “What would you charge to do this?” Freelancers grovel for whatever clients feel like paying. I waited for the answer.

“For something like this, around $100, maybe as high as $150,” she said.

I said no thanks. Damn, it felt good, even declining politely. I sort of wanted to do it Linda Evangelista-style — “I don’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 a day” — but that would have been, er, unprofessional. My rule up to now has been: Turn no one down. I need the money and the exposure, and lord knows I have the time. But a dime a word is insulting, yes, even more insulting than blogging for free.

To her credit, the editor was very nice and said she understood perfectly. She said she’d call back when they could afford me, which was even nicer. Still, though, even among writers, there’s a point of diminishing returns, a you-get-what-you-pay-for reality. People who work that cheap are either a) profoundly inexperienced; b) independently wealthy; or c) desperate. All three will bring their own problems with them; the inexperienced don’t understand why you can’t make up quotes, the wealthy will ignore deadline because they have a tennis lesson and the desperate will turn in copy with the unmistakable tang of, well, desperation.

(I happen to know the details of a plagiarism incident that occurred in my orbit last year. If you knew what the writer was paid, you’d have cut and pasted from the internet, too.)

So. There was shopping to be done today — I needed to get Thursday’s main course locked in, which meant I had an excuse to visit Gratiot Central Market. At the southern edge of the Eastern Market, Gratiot Central is, well, a meat mall. A dozen or so retailers of animal flesh gather under one roof and compete vigorously with one another. How competitive are they? How about $6 and change a pound for beef tenderloin, and they slice it free? That’s pretty damn competitive, if you ask me.

The customers are equally competitive. I looked around for a take-a-number dispenser before realizing you do it the way you order cocktails in a crowded bar — elbow your way in and get somebody’s attention, then clamor for your meat. I got a turkey and the tenderloin and lingered awhile in front of the exotic items, chitterlings (“never bleached!”), pig’s feet and hog mauls, not to mention great slabs of tripe and other queasy-making innards. I’ve said it before, and I say it again: It’s one thing to eat the food of your impoverished ancestors when you’re poor, but once you’ve overcome poverty, I think it’s just fine if you want to leave that stuff behind. Lutefisk made sense when you were crossing the ocean and needed protein, or when your fishing waters were iced in for months at a time, but damn, we have refrigeration now, and open-water trawlers working year-round. Why eat fish preserved in lye? Why eat the pig’s large intestines? Have some tenderloin; you’ve earned your seat at the table.

When we were leaving the market, we passed a truck parked at the curb, ready to unload. Cargo: Cages and cages of live turkeys. I rolled down the window so Spriggy could smell them. He didn’t bark, perhaps knowing the condemned deserve a few moments of peace before the chop. Good boy.

(And yes, I learned my lesson. The meat went into the trunk before I left him alone in the car at my next stop.)

Bloggage: Thanks to World o’Crap for pointing out something I should have thought of years ago. She notes George Will’s comment on the latest Lynne Truss book, the one about manners:

Furthermore, it is a brave, or foolhardy, man who shows traditional manners toward women. In today’s world of “hair-trigger sensitivity,” to open a door for a woman is to play what Truss calls Gallantry Russian Roulette: You risk a high-decibel lecture on gender politics. So wrote America’s beloved bow-tied columnist. Only guess what? Have you ever seen such a thing happen? Not the door-holding, the “high-decibel lecture on gender politics.” I have spent all my life in the midwest, but I’ve run with some pretty salty-tongued feminists, and never, not once, have I seen any of them upbraid a man for holding a door.

In my experience, people of both genders hold doors for people; it’s rude to let doors smack into others’ faces. In fact, contrary to the seemingly mythical hairy-legged feminist who takes umbrage at having a door held for her, the only people I’ve seen balk at my door-holding have been men, men who seemed to find pussified the idea that they might walk through a held-open door, even when their arms are full of bankers’ boxes, or whatever.

So, a poll: Have you ever gotten the high-decibel lecture on gender politics from a woman after you held a door? Let’s see how plugged in George Will and Lynne Truss are to the real world.

Ever since the chaos of Kate’s birthday No. 5 — nine children, a too-small house, don’t ask — I’ve put in place a new rule of celebrations. Which is: Smaller is better. I don’t ever want to find myself standing in the middle of the street, hissing furiously at a tardy pizza delivery kid again. So the new guidelines are, if all the invited guests can fit into two midsize cars, we’ll take them wherever they want to go.

This year: Ice skating at Campus Martius Park, followed by lunch at the Hard Rock Cafe, across the street. And let me just say, it was grand. The weather was glorious, the ice not too crowded, the tunes pumpin’.

Happy birthday, Kate.

Some of you may be new arrivals — the Lisa Belkin show airs Sunday, so to those Googlers, welcome. The one-sentence description of this joint is over there on the left rail, but for further information: I’m a freelance writer, formerly a newspaper columnist, recently relocated the the Detroit area, looking for a new path through the career wilderness. I started this site nearly five years ago as a goad to keep a daily journal, but it’s not all about me. It’s more an end-of-day data dump for someone trying to make sense of it all. As Joan Didion said recently, I don’t know what I think about something until I’ve written it down. Politics: Moderate-lefty. Outlook: Too cynical, but trying to correct that. Sense of the world: It’s a funny place. More than that, you can judge for yourself.

So.

I’m very late coming to this debate, but what the hell, now you can read the story that started it all at a site that doesn’t require registration. This would be Jodi Wilgoren’s notorious tale about brats in upscale Chicago venues, and what exasperated shopkeepers are doing to keep them out:

“Part of parenting skills is teaching kids they behave differently in a restaurant than they do on the playground,” McCauley said. “If you send out positive energy, positive energy returns to you. If you send out energy that says I’m the only one that matters, it’s going to be a pretty chaotic world.” And so simmers another skirmish between the childless and the child-centered, a culture clash increasingly common in restaurants and other public spaces as a new generation of busy, older, well-off parents ferry little ones with them.

My dog has aged out of this fight, and was never much of a problem even when she was a toddler, for which I give zero credit to my parenting skills and all the rest to the twin accidents of luck and gender — girls just seem to pose less of a behavior problem to parents, at least in their toddler years. I like to think I wouldn’t have tolerated ear-splitting shrieks and pound-the-floor tantrums, but I’ll never know. I was exquisitely sensitive to every peep and squeal she made in public places, but as I grow older I notice something else, and it’s a revelation: I barely notice crying children anymore. I have developed the tune-out mechanism that eluded me when I needed it most.

From the descriptions in the story, the kids in question were doing a lot more than peeping and squealing or even crying; lying down in the middle of the coffee line certainly ups the ante for bad behavior, and running around pounding on things is grounds for immediate dismissal from any establishment. We’ve all seen the results of negligent parenting. My own personal favorite was when a baby sitting on a woman’s hip reached over and banged on an adjacent cash register in a supermarket checkout line, requiring the clerk to void the sale, then did it two more times while the mother looked in another direction, oblivious.

My only misgiving about the reaction to the story is this: Couched in all those cries for well-behaved children is a strong cadre that doesn’t want them around, period. The so-called childfree movement is a nasty piece of work, and it’s hard not to see their attitudes behind the demand that children’s voices never be heard in public.

Whether you find them appealing or not, kids are part of the human family, and kids make noise. To advocate keeping them out of public spaces is no different than saying old people should stay home, too, because their quavery voices and slo-mo shuffling bums the young and vigorous out.

I guess I’d advocate a three-strikes policy for normal kid behavior, with hopes that clued-in parents will recognize when their children are being brats and take them elsewhere. (One tip from this parent: You can hardly ever go wrong with children in a family-run Mexican restaurant, at least in my experience. They love kids.)

See? A moderate.

The other day it occurred to me that in January, NN.C will mark its fifth anniversary. Perhaps it’s fitting, then, that the week brought two experiences that are…not commonplace, but at least not jaw-dropping, not anymore:

1) I was interviewed by Lisa Belkin, a New York Times reporter who hosts a radio show, “Life’s Work.” Topic: “Living online.” Of course I sounded like a moron, but the results air Sunday at 11 a.m. on XM channel 155, if you have it. And,

2) Yet another stranger e-mailed to ask if I could provide the complete lyrics to “The Ballad of the Big O,” the song Lawson’s dairy stores used in the 1960s, to advertise its super-fresh orange juice. Of course I forget the first verse — my friend Jones knows — but I do know the second:

One man sleeps while the other man drives,
on the non-stop Lawson’s run
and the cold, cold juice
in the tank-truck caboose,
stays as fresh as the Florida sun.

I remember when I first went online in 1994 (or was it ’93), I exchanged an e-mail or two with Warren Zevon. “Isn’t the internet wonderful?” a friend wrote. “Everyone gets to talk to everyone.” Yes, it is.

Speaking of radio: I keep forgetting to mention the great, great “Fresh Air” that was on Tuesday, an interview with Bruce Springsteen that you should listen to, if only to hear the alternate mix of “Born to Run” featuring the glockenspiel and chick singers doing backup. I almost ran off the road.

And at the other end of the spectrum was My Lobotomy on NPR, a truly heartbreaking bit of reporting by Howard Dully, who received a transorbital lobotomy at age 12, thanks to a vindictive stepmother. It’s the sort of thing that, for me, makes me reach for my checkbook during pledge week, the reason NPR is a news source like no other. Having just dozed through an hour, a solid HOUR, of “Primetime” examining the very important case of Anna Nicole Smith’s right to her late husband’s estate, I know what I’m talking about.

If you don’t have time to listen to the piece, the NPR link gives you a good sense of it.

And the picture of the author with icepicks sticking out of his eye sockets isn’t as horrible as you might expect, but it’s pretty awful.

With that: Have a nice weekend.

(Continuing with our “Is Richard Belzer hot or not?” discussion in comments. Thanks to Eric Zorn for pointing us toward the Einstein Chalkboard Generator. And let me just add to the above sentiment, “…as long as he pays attention to his personal hygiene.”)

Here’s the dirty little secret about cooking: It’s easy. Really. People who don’t cook think it’s alchemy, but honest, once you learn a few basic rules — and you learn them as you go along — it’s not so hard at all.

Some of these rules are eccentric; for instance, one of mine goes, “There’s no such thing as too much garlic.” Others are immutable. If you want to be successful deep-frying anything, you’d best get over your fear of making the oil too hot. (Although it can easily be made too hot, and then you have to call the fire department.) Deep-frying is like jumping a horse over a big fence: Commit, go forward and don’t hesitate.

That said, some meals come together more easily than others. For tonight’s spaghetti-and-meatball birthday feast I went to the Italian bakery down the road for some real Italian bread, then stopped at the wine store for a nice chianti. When I came out, the dog had his head in the bread bag, the front seat was a mess of crumbs and I had a quandary.

I threw away the next two slices in the bag and decided no one ever died from a little dog spit. As Julia Child didn’t say, “You’re alone in the kitchen.”

The bread was really good. I’m going back to that place. Without the dog.

The laptop just informed me I’m operating on reserve power, so let’s make this quick: The Trading Spouses crazy-Jesus-freak legend lives on. On eBay!

Today is Alan and Kate’s birthday (49 and 9), which means that when I finish the story I’m working on, I have to go downstairs and bake a cake, then make spaghetti and meatballs. Also, I should probably pay some bills. And do a lot of other stuff, but not spend much time blogging.

So here’s something to consider: INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – Men who live in rural Indiana often use condoms incorrectly, according to a new study that Indiana University sex researchers say underscores the shortcomings of sex education in Indiana’s public schools. Almost half the 75 men statewide who answered the survey’s questions about their latest sexual encounters with women admitted waiting too long to put on a condom or taking it off too soon.

Next time someone snickers at the banana demonstration, just remember: In the Hoosier state, they need that training.