Sometimes life — oh, she is such an amusing gal, isn’t she? Oh, she is. Evidence:

Regular readers of the business page recall the highly amusing breakup of Jack and Jane Welch, in which this smart little trophy wife caught her husband, the titanic ego who used to run GE, playing Hide the Salam’ with an aspirant. Aspiring smart little trophy wife, that is. Forty-four-year-old Suzy Wetlaufer squinched her eyes nearly shut and convinced herself this 68-year-old gentleman was, yes indeedy, her One True Love, and never mind that he’s of the same generation as, you know, her father. That Jane Welch essentially outmaneuvered her genius CEO husband and served up key parts of his anatomy on a platter in her divorce dealings — let’s just say that was one day we found the Wall Street Journal front page a really interesting read.

Well, the ink is dry on the divorce, and now Jack and Suzy are moving their love nest out of Tawdry Town:

It was two weeks before her wedding to retired General Electric chairman Jack Welch, and Ms. Wetlaufer, the 44-year-old former editor of the Harvard Business Review, had plenty to do. There were children to pick up from school and work to be done on Winning, the business how-to book for which she and Mr. Welch received a $4 million advance from HarperCollins in February.

She and Mr. Welch are to wed in a white-steepled church a few blocks away from their Beacon Hill townhouse, followed by a reception at home, in the ballroom. An evangelical Christian rock band will provide the music; Ms. Wetlaufer is a devout Christian.

Oh, but could she be anything else?

Whew. I mean: Whew. Nothing like a few days of more or less solid errand-running and chore-chasing to make you appreciate the last days of the best year of your life. But we have a breathing space now, and what the hell, let’s relax a bit. All I have to do is put a chicken in the oven sometime in the next 40 minutes.

I don’t even want to think about it, but it’s true: This is the second-to-last week. Our last seminar is tomorrow. We graduate a week from Thursday. What’s next, many of you have been e-mailing. The Magic 8 Ball says: Answer cloudy, try again later. When I know, you’ll know. In these last few days, I’m taking advantage of the perks of holding a valid M-Card — libraries, collections, access and, of course, an excuse to spend an hour staring out the window. One of the Fellows was talking about just that the other day; actually he was watching his cats watch the squirrels capering outside the window. “I remember that as a pleasant interlude,” he said, and who am I to argue? No doubt it was.

Speaking of argument: I’m going to miss it. It abounds in an academic environment, although I tried to pick one with my screenwriting prof last night, to no avail — he just barreled on ahead. But I’m sorry, I said it last night and I’ll say it again here: The Billy Bob Thornton character in “Sling Blade” is not a Christ figure, OK? You can’t give him a Bible, a book on carpentry and another on Christmas and say this makes him a modern-day Jesus. (Although, I’ve noticed, that’s how lots of lazy artists work: Look, Madonna’s wearing a crucifix as jewelry, obviously a sly commentary on her Catholic upbringing. And so on.) Cool Hand Luke — now he’s a Christ figure. (Here he is, performing a miracle.)

Meanwhile, linkage:

Back when I was the mother of a little baby and used to torture myself with the Dr. Laura show, I became a fan of its far more entertaining shadow entity, alt.radio.talk.dr-laura — the Usenet group of mostly Dr. Laura doubters who follow the show. Although I haven’t listened to the Toxic Harpy for years, I still keep up with the postings there. It was there I learned that after years of preaching that orthodox religion is the only true path to decency and an upright life, poof she’s no longer practicing Judaism. ARTDL also let me know which college finally accepted pampered D.L. progeny — the mediocre, cultish Hillsdale, located just down the road right here in southeast Michigan. When the Schlessinger spawn dropped out after a mere semester, the posters were all over it with credible hypotheses of what happened. And now they’ve turned up the even more wonderful truth: My God, young Derky is opening a hookah bar. In freakin’ Hillsdale, Michigan. It is to laugh.

Also, a couple of people mentioned that Bob Dylan is now hawking Victoria’s Secret? Slate explains. Points for the headline: Tangled up in boobs.

When I declare bankruptcy, I hope the judge will allow me to name a co-respondent: a radio station in Detroit that’s leading me into financial ruin, 99 cents at a time. You see, Saturdays are all-old school on WGPR, and I rarely get through the day without tracking down some forgotten soul/R&B classic via the iTunes music store. Sometimes it seems they set a short mix on autopilot — I heard Prince’s “I Wanna Be Your Lover” twice in one morning a few weeks ago — but every so often they really dig deep in the library, and oh my, but you see then why Detroit is still a cool city, and always will be. I’m talking Motown tracks that never cracked the top 30, Memphis stuff from the Stax/Volt archive. Can’t forget the 103rd Street Rhythm Band, which sort of slipped into the mists of history once top-40 radio fragmented into formats.

Today’s find: “Tramp,” a Carla Thomas-Otis Redding duet that’s simply too wonderful to be believed.

Soon there will be no jingle in my jangle. But I’ll have lots of cool music to listen to.

…but we have another short break coming up. I’ll be back in the general vicinity of Saturday. In the meantime, read…well, The Poor Man seems worth looking up. The U-M’s own Juan Cole, who reads Arab-world media in their original language, is always helpful. And can’t forget Josh Marshall, but you already knew that.

…same message, one good point. Richard Cohen
(WashPost, RegReq, as we say now) and Jon Carroll.

(Speaking of which: A Poynter column filed yesterday suggests my man J.C. was in the second-runnner-up group for a Pulitzer. Which shows what those people know. Hmpf.)

I know I’ve written about “Naked Came the Stranger” in this space before, but damn if I can find it, and I don’t have time for a house-to-house search. Anyway, even if you’ve never heard about the crap-tacular ’60s pulp novel, written as a prank by a passel of Newsday reporters and editors, this fun piece in Seattle Weekly is a good primer.

All I can say is: Man, the newspaper business sure was fun, once upon a time.

I’m sorry we don’t have photos for this one, because the visual juxtaposition in my Sunday Ann Arbor News was a real stitch. At the bottom of the Metro page, coverage of the 33rd annual Ann Arbor Hash Bash, the city’s annual celebration of some of the most indulgent marijuana possession laws in the country.

After John Sinclair, the White Panther/manager of the MC5 commonly described as a “political activist,” was jailed for possession of a couple joints way back when, he led a campaign to decriminalize weed within the city limits, and for some time, Ann Arbor penalized personal-use marijuana possession with a $5 fine. (It’s up to $25 now.) Every year around April Fool’s Day, potheads gather in and around the U-M campus to light up and, y’know, mellow out. (But only off-campus; on-campus penalties are much stiffer.)

Anyway, I wish you could have seen the photos: Sinclair Himself was speaker this year, and there was a priceless photo of him flanked by a couple of unidentified supporters, all of them well into AARP-land. Dude, the ’60s are, like, so over.

Elsewhere on the Metro front, though, was a photo-and-caption account of the “annual Easter egg hunt and marshmallow drop” in Ypsilanti, where an actual helicopter hovered over Frog Island Park and dropped 10,950 unpackaged marshmallows on scrambling children below.

All I could think was, man, wouldn’t it have been too cool if the chopper lost its way and dropped the payload on the Hash Bash? Now that would be something to see.

As of today, we have three weeks to go in the fellowship. Three weeks! I don’t know how I’m going to cope. Friday I swung through the Donald Hall Collection, the film/video/script library for students of the program, and exercised the faculty/Fellow perk of checking out items overnight. Five DVDs, specifically — “The Battleship Potemkin,” “Citizen Kane,” “Wag the Dog,” “Monsters Inc.” and the last volume of “My So-Called Life.” The student doing the checkout handled this last item reverently.

“This TV show,” she said, “is why I’m a film and video major.” And then we had a long discussion of whether “World Happiness Day” was the best single episode, or maybe “Weekend,” which I love for the look inside little Danielle’s head.

That show is 10 years old. So is, according to the anniversary journalism in my newspapers recently, the Rwandan genocide and the death of Kurt Cobain. NPR had a piece on the latter event this morning. People who were twentysomething then and are thirtysomething now expounded on why Kurt Cobain mattered, and I got it, sorta. I was thirtysomething then and fortysomething now, and while I appreciated Nirvana, the death of its creative center didn’t affect me much either way, except in that generalized state of regret we all feel for the prematurely dead. (“Wow, what a tragedy. Is lunch ready?”) Another 10-years-distant event: John and I standing as godparents for Deb’s son Patrick. Deb remarked afterward, “I heard some girl saying this was, to her generation, what the death of John Lennon was to mine, and all I could think was, oh, in your hat.” (Note: Others feel differently. Nauseatingly so.)

Was 10 years ago when we were all talking about Generation X? I don’t know. I do know that the other day I read, in a newspaper, a reference to today’s young adults as “Generation X,” and I thought, glad to see editing standards in the newspaper business haven’t gone anywhere but down lately. True, the more the years pile up, the easier it is to confuse “something I read yesterday” with “something I read 10 years ago,” but that’s why publications schedule multiple stops on the editing train. The people with the blue pencils are supposed to catch things like this.

Things get so mixed up. One year ago I had my interview for the fellowship. I drove to Ann Arbor Friday night in a driving rainstorm, which became, as the sun went down, a driving ice storm. I checked into my hotel and decided to drive the shortest possible distance for dinner, which was across the street to the Cooker. I had to wait for a table, and did so at the bar, where I struck up a conversation with a man with a pronounced African accent. “Where are you from in Africa?” I asked. He gave me three guesses. I got it on the third guess — Rwanda, after he gave me a hint. (“My country has suffered much heartache.”) He was wildly impressed, and predicted I’d get the fellowship.

(In my creative writing class, we’d wonder whether this entry uses Rwanda as a motif. Let me just say: Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.)

Oh, well. Three weeks. This week is positively clotted with activity, and I’m behind on my script pages, again. Best get cracking. Ninety percent perspiration, and all that.

So what’s the rule on clever references to song lyrics in a newspaper editorial about a music company?

Use them sparingly. Oh, so very sparingly.

Is it possible to go overboard?

Why, yes.

Another day, another mixed grill of AA culture. In the morning: A spotlit stage, a lion in winter, a flattering interlocutor, two chairs and two glasses of water. Yes, it’s a celebration of Arthur Miller here at his alma mater. The tickets were free and I can’t complain too much, but after it was all over it occurred to me that there must be better ways to celebrate a titan of the American theater than to put him on stage and lob cotton-candy softballs at him. But this is the “Inside the Actors Studio” model, and this is how we do it. Granted, the man is 88 years old now, but he’s still sharp; couldn’t we ask him something more penetrating than, “Why are you so much more celebrated in the U.K. and in Europe than you are here?”

Whoa hold the phone, you know? First of all, it’s not like the guy’s standing on street corners juggling for quarters, and the old “Europeans appreciate great art more than we do” ignores some fundamental truths about both them and us, but mostly two:

1) there’s more on TV here; and
2) that whole Jerry Lewis thing.

I mean, even in Ann Arbor, a morning like this was followed by an afternoon like that: A free (for film/video students) screening of “Supersize Me,” which was almost too wonderful to bear, even though we Fellows had to leave early for Thursday’s seminar. The premise of “Supersize Me” is this: A healthy, strapping New Yorker, Morgan Spurlock, decides to eat nothing but McDonald’s food for a solid month and see what happens. When we left, at which time he was only up to week three or so, he was up 17 pounds, his cholesterol was soaring, and his liver was approaching toxicity. The whole thing could be a big tiresome anti-fast food screed if it weren’t so funny, and not in a mean, nasty, ironic way, either. Spurlock actually likes the food, at least at first; the scene where he kisses his double Quarter Pounder before tucking into it is just a stitch.

It opens in May. You won’t want to miss it, although you may never eat a Filet o’ Fish again.