Lots of work today, and then a (relative) break. So just a short entry today, basically a mixed grill of bloggage:

Gotta love Defamer. Marg Helgenberger takes one for the team.

Finally, George Clooney and I can go out to eat in public.

Remember that scene in “Best in Show” where Parker Posey does her “busy bee! busy bee!” freakout? This site takes it a step further.

I love cats, but they are neurotic. How neurotic? Sometimes you gotta kill them. That’s how neurotic.

Back after deadline.

Stating the obvious, over at the DetNews blog.

I hope at some point in the ever-evolving world of fiber optic-delivered entertainment, we can cherry-pick our cable TV. I’d get all the HBOs, CNN, the weather stuff, maybe Turner Classic Movies and…that’s it. Local news is a joke, network news an even bigger one and as for the quote entertainment unquote — please.

The other day I turned on a random station (I think it was CBS) at a random hour (I think it was 10 p.m.) to see a rather specific and singular image — a young woman, wrapped in plastic but still alive, apparently suffocating. Of course, she was lovely. Loveliness is a risk factor on network TV, unless one is just a degree or two less lovely (or a year or two older) and willing to wear frumpy suits, in which case you can work alongside Jack McCoy and bring evildoers to justice. Otherwise you’re either dead or being tortured by the first break.

Another other day I turned on a specific station — the NBC affiliate — for a little “Law & Order.” Nothing like L&O when you’re feeling exhausted. It’s predictable in exactly the right way and is mostly dumb but smart enough that you can watch it with two-thirds of your brain turned off and still follow the thread, without feeling like you’re wasting your time.

At least, it used to be like that, years ago, when there was just one L&O. The hour I turned in was one of the spinoffs, which open not with a body and a mystery, but a crime. In this one, a fat woman was blindfolded and crying in fear, while a man slapped her and held a gun to her head. Perhaps because I was also reading a magazine and not giving it my entire attention, I left it on. (The fat woman was in on the crime, which was ripped from the Madalyn Murray O’Hair headlines. I think.) Anyway, it was gross.

The show ended, and another L&O iteration started. “Jesus Christ!” exploded Alan. “Didn’t we just watch this?” We turned it off.

I am the world’s biggest Scorsese fan, have watched Joe Pesci put that guy’s head in a vise half a dozen times, and while I watch through squinty eyes, it doesn’t offend me. “Kill Bill” was pretty stupid, but not offensive. “Rome” is violent, but not offensive.

So why do so many network shows offend the living crap out of me? Hard to say, but I think Lisa de Moraes puts her finger on it:

Women play an enormous role in the new television season.

Yes, there’s lots and lots of work — albeit short gigs — for actresses on new series this TV season.

Misery — grotesque, baroque misery — is a huge trend in network TV right now. Maybe they feel it has to be over-the-top to be a contrast to the treacly, manufactured kind on “American Idol.” I don’t know. All I know is, I’m not entertained by dead bodies the way I used to be. Sure, a good murder mystery is as perennially satisfying as a bowl of chili on a cold winter night, but there’s rarely any mystery to be found here. The suspense is in how gross it will be. Will the body by so decomposed we get a vomiting scene? Will the camera tunnel into the knife wound to show the diseased liver? Before the victim dies, will we see her in high heels and a thong, heedlessly tempting fate? Yeah, we probably will.

I almost missed the whole first season of “The Wire” because I was so burned out on police procedurals I refused to give it a chance. (This was before I learned to trust HBO. And “The Wire” isn’t really a police procedural, anyway, but we’ve had this discussion before.) I’m convinced one reason “Six Feet Under” was such a success is that it took us into a different workplace every week. Different from a station house or courthouse, that is.

Tonight I’m gonna watch “Rome,” because it has hot sex featuring Roman soldiers, always a sure winner; it must touch a nerve deep within each of us to imagine sleeping with someone who wears a leather skirt. You think it’s an accident Russell Crowe’s character in “Gladiator” was named Maximus? Please.

From the ABC News website:

‘Ecstatic’ Britney Spears Has Baby Boy

That’s the main headline, or “hed,” as we j-bots say. Here’s the subhed:

Pop Star Britney Spears ‘Ecstatic’ Over the Birth of Her First Child, a Baby Boy

Gotta love it, eh? The subhed repeats the main, and manages to get in my favorite stupid redundancy — that it was a “baby” boy. As opposed to those common cases where women go into labor and produce a toddler or, rarely, a full-size adolescent.

My hed: Pop star Spears, future trailer-park resident reproduce: ‘It’s a boy’ is the call in the delivery room as lawyers stand by for formal-separation squeeze play.

Eh. Maybe a little wordy.

Not everything on NPR is my cup of tea — does Susan Stamberg ramp up that smug chuckle of hers with every new year? — but I’m still reminded often enough of why I listen. Today: A report, on “Day to Day,” on the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Lolita.”

I guess everyone gets a few treats like this in a life: A chance to encounter a great work of art when you’re still a blank slate, before you’ve heard too much about it, before you’ve absorbed the official opinions of the culture. I can remember almost every one, but the best was “Lolita.”

If an education prepares you for anything, it should prepare you for a life of learning. And I learn something from “Lolita” every time I open it. It’s one of the most beautiful books I’ve ever read; you can practically sing it. And then I close it, and think: English was Nabokov’s second language. Or maybe his third.

Think I’ll reread it this winter. It’s been a while.

Sorry for the lag these past couple days. I actually have work to do, and it’s interesting enough to keep me busy, and busy enough to feel like I have a real job ‘n’ stuff. So thrilling. So I may be scarce for the next few days, unless there’s another killer hurricane or whatnot.

Listen to that NPR piece, but only if you have already read the book. If not, read the book first.

…let’s sell all the school buses. DetNews blogging, on a subject that sort of got away from me, here.

What’s that feature in Us magazine? “Celebrities — they’re just like us!”

Sometimes their sitters call in sick, and they have to bring young children to inappropriate events.

P.S. I’m worried about that girl.

I need to start carrying my camera on bike rides again. I need to start getting some photographic evidence of the money sump I find myself living in. Or near. Today I wandered down a previously unexplored side street in the Farms; I was trying to find a straight shot to the lake, so I could turn for home. (This is my rule on bike rides: Stay out 40 minutes minimum, and always ride along the lake for at least a short stretch.)

I can’t remember the street, but I knew I was getting close to the water when I passed several places that looked like English manor houses, only bigger, each one likely sheltering a family of four or so. You know you’re in Plutocrat Acres when you start passing middle-aged Latina women in smocks, walking tiny little dogs. “Deliveries to side entrance” signs blend in with the landscaping.

“I feel like knocking on the door,” said my sister when she visited in July, “and asking, ‘Hey. How did you make all this dough?'”

But that’s the Farms. Up in the Shores, the money is newer, and it shows. One of my favorite places is a fortress-like English Tudor, the driveway lit by a series of nymph statues, each one holding a torch aloft. Honey, tell the groundskeepers that nymph No. 3 is burned out, OK?

And then I come home to the Woods, where I keep it real with my peoples. We walk our own dogs up here in the G.P. ghetto.

Summer won’t let us go. That’s not necessarily a bad thing, but not long after I wrote that DetNews blog entry about the lazy summer day outside my home-office window, I had to close it and turn the a/c on. It hit 90 today; not good in a brick house.

But I got some work done, which means the day yielded little of note. If you want someone to jeer, try Timothy Noah in Slate over why the New Orleans police were correct to ban Snowball from the evacuees’ bus. All I gotta say is: Where I go, Spriggy goes.

Over at the DetNews blog: Telecommuting for the peace and quiet of it.

Some financial chickens are coming home to roost — hello to a hen named High Gas Prices, and salutations to the rooster we call The Looming Heating Season — and so I’ve resolved to get serious about cutting our budget to the bone. Which is to say, I finally found an excuse to join Costco.

Who needs an excuse, you wonder? I do. My previous experience with warehouse clubs was with a gift membership to Sam’s Club, in Fort Wayne. I went twice, I think, mostly to gawk at the quantities and think, Somewhere in the world there’s someone who NEEDS to buy this many Tic Tacs. Frequently half the vehicles in the parking lot would be church buses and those extended-body vans preferred by families where children arrive with the timing and frequency of each year’s batch of Christmas cards. Plus, I’m sorry, but the whole place had that grim vibe of Wal-Mart. If Wal-Mart expended every fiber of its political muscle trying to impeach George Bush I’d still hate them. I think it’s the lighting.

Anyway, Costco. Somewhere in the back of my mind is this idea that it’s different, some meme that floated in when I was asleep. Thanks to Google, none of us has to remember anything anymore; ask it “how are sam’s club and costco different?” and it gives you this story. The outline: It’s pitched a little higher on the demographic scale, and it treats its workers better. What-evuh. I have a blanket opinion that I now drape over all for-profit enterprises, and it’s this: I don’t trust you.

But if they pay their employees better than Sam’s, good for them.

Truth to tell, it’s not that different. You still have to buy enough Tic Tacs to last 100 years. But the food’s better, the liquor and wine selection is sublime and there are enough oddities to make it worth stopping by at least every two weeks or so. We had people coming over for dinner Saturday, and I was pleased to find one of those organic ready-to-serve spring mix salads in the produce section — enough to feed us organic mesclun for a week, even after the dinner party, and at about the same price as the small bag in the regular grocery. And I took the opportunity to stock up on two things that, when they run out, can bring a household to its knees in moments — toilet paper and coffee filters. “Oh, the plague pack,” Alan quipped when he saw the special 36-roll package — large enough to fit into a crib, but not a bassinet — in the pantry. I distributed it throughout the house’s bathrooms, and don’t expect to have to think about t.p. again until Christmas.

As for coffee filters, well, we can stay up allll night on those.

And I took one another plunge: a whole beef tenderloin at the amazing price of $8 a pound. I carved it into two roasts and a mess of filets for the dinner party. Since I wasn’t sure about the quality of the meat, I employed the strategy dreamed up by the French to hide questionable meat for centuries: bearnaise sauce.

No wonder I woke up with my heart pounding at 4 a.m. Must….move…cholesterol!!!

The meat was fine, by the way. But the bearnaise? Made it better.

“Everything’s better with bearnaise” — that should be someone’s personal motto.

OK, then:

You really care about Monaco, don’t you? The future of the tiny principality by the sea, and so forth? Well, then you’ll want to read this kneepads-worthy profile of Prince Albert from Saturday’s NYT. Prince Albert was in the news a while back in what a gentleman like him might call a wee bit of a kerfuffle — an Air France stewardess produced a bouncing baby boy she says was Al’s.

According to the prince’s Wikipedia entry, he may have other out-of-wedlock children running around the world, too. In the NYT profile, Albert states quite boldly that the flight attendant set him up. I guess you can hardly expect a good Catholic boy like him to wear a condom, can you?

Prince Rainier didn’t marry blue-blooded royalty, but the Hollywood kind. It looks as though she repaid him by bearing him a passel of commoners.

Oh, and Carl Hiaasen on the decline and fall of FEMA. Registration required.