First, the movie reviews: “Intolerable Cruelty” started out so promising, it was doubly disappointing when the whole thing collapsed into incoherence about two-thirds through. So many amusing details — Geoffrey Rush singing “The Boxer,” George Clooney’s UV-light teeth-whitening treatments, and especially the National Organization of Matrimonial Attorneys National. Yes, NOMAN, as in, “Let NOMAN put asunder…”

Ah, but it wasn’t to be. By the time the guy with the inhaler came along, I was looking up bad reviews on the laptop.

“Winged Migration” was better.

Truth to tell, though, when it comes to entertainment spending, HBO dollars up on the hoof a lot better than the cineplex. At least, if you’re not a Jesus fan. Where else can you see Gina Gershon playing a Hasidic Jew with hot pants?

I wish I’d had a more exciting weekend to assemble the scraps of tonight. With spring on its way, I started taking the dog on longer walks — we ventured off into some unexplored neighborhoods north of here, and learned again that every block has a homeowner who just doesn’t get it. That’s the house with the untrimmed shrubbery (at best) or trash-strewn yard (far more common), the visual f-you to the rest of the bourgeois world: Hey, jerkoffs, just because you call yours a compost heap doesn’t mean I can’t throw my garbage out the front door! In AA, I’ve noticed, a disproportionate number of these yards have signs in the yard reading, “Another family for PEACE.” Ha. Make of that what you will. I say it begins at home.

Now that I think of it, in AA, virtually every third home has such a sign. It’s like living in a photo-negative version of Fort Wayne. I love it.

I started wading into the hell of our taxes, too. This is a complicated year — the F’ship makes it so — but nothing TurboTax can’t handle, from what I’ve seen so far. TurboTax makes tax preparation so painless, I expect one of these years a little hand will reach out of the CD drive and hand me a glass of champagne upon completion. Nevertheless, the garbage-in-garbage-out rule always applies, and that’s a hell of a garbage pile I’ve got working at the far end of the dining room table. I already decreed: He who touches it or rearranges it in any way dies.

Because it looks — at this preliminary stage — as though we’re not getting hammered, I thought I’d celebrate with an expensive lunch today. I was meeting a fF for an all-afternoon project, so what the hell? Shall we split an $11 Zingerman’s sandwich? Why the hell not? It was delicious — an $11 chicken sandwich had better be nothing but — and even though the price is chest-clutchingly high, as always I left with more than grudging respect for the joint. They make a fairly simple promise: The food will be great and the service will be great and you will go home saying, that was a pricey sandwich, but you know, that’s what an $11 sandwich should taste like. The owner was in there today, too, standing in line with everyone else, and if the staff was inspired to be extra-helpful due to the boss’s presence, all I can say is, they weren’t obvious about it. He wrote a book last year. I got it for Christmas. If you want to know everything there is to know about olives, you should get it, too.

What do you think you’d do if you got a celebrity’s abandoned cell-phone number? I don’t think I’d do what this girl did — basically, be polite when Spike Lee, Adam Sandler and Ken Burns called, wondering where their friend Chris Rock was — but different strokes, etc. It turns out…celebrities are just like you and me! Only their numbers don’t turn up on your caller ID, and sometimes they’re just rude.

Whatever happened to the Return of the Daily Entry? Like lots of good ideas, it was trampled beneath the realities of Fellowship life, which today required me to sit in a chair for TWO AND A HALF HOURS.

Having my hair highlighted.

Thanks, it looks fabulous. This is my first go with ‘lights. Yes, I waited this long. I can’t help it — I was scarred by the ’70s, when it was called “frosting” and you did it by putting on a perforated foil bathing cap and pulling strands of hair through with a crochet hook, which you then dyed a hideous dead-grass color.

The bad news: It still involves foil. The good news: The color is now “sort of a warm caramel,” according to my stylist, who really is quite the talent.

Enough about my damn hair. I’m putting off the night’s big chore, a few sentences about the workshop subjects in tomorrow’s creative-writing class. My teacher is an MFA student who turned down a spot in the Iowa Writer’s Workshop in part because one of the questions they asked was, “Do you cry easily?” Her philosophy is: All criticism must be productive, and must begin with, “What’s working in this piece?” I agree with this approach; what’s the point is reducing an undergrad to tears over a 1,200-word dialogue exercise? It’s the Roger Ebert approach to criticism: Ask only, “Does it succeed at what it attempts?” That said, I really wish more high-school level writing teachers would take a ruler to the hands of students who use the passive voice. A few well-placed whacks might drill it home: Don’t write “the subject outside was drawing no interest from Sarah.” I mean, not ever.

P.S. I’m the third workshop subject. I submitted something that I see now, in the cold light of 48 hours later, really doesn’t work. I’ll let you know how it goes.

I really should get this done, so I can enjoy one of the nicest fringes of U of M life — The Donald Hall Collection the Film & Video program’s script and video library. It’s the world’s greatest video store, with Fellows free to roam and borrow at will. The other day Alan said, “I think Kate would like “The Red Balloon,” don’t you?” Why yes I did, and I walked out with it, “Winged Migration” and “Intolerable Cruelty,” for after the kid goes to bed.

What’s going on in the news? I see Marge Schott died. Hmm, what a tragedy. You want to know everything wrong with Cincinnati? Read this:

Margaret Unnewehr Schott was the second of five daughters of Edward Unnewehr, a Cincinnati native of German-American extraction who made a fortune in the lumber business.

“My father was Achtung-German,” Mrs. Schott recalled. “He used to ring a bell when he wanted my mother. When I was 21 and went to vote, he told me who to vote for. I said, `Yes, Daddy.’ “

Cincinnati is lousy with folks like this. Everybody talks about the place like it’s this charming American Bavaria with a historic river running right by it, and it is a lovely place, but hardly anyone mentions the ruling class with the giant logs shoved up their butts. I watched “The People vs. Larry Flynt” with a feeling of simmering irritation; for the purposes of narrative smoothness, they moved the whole setting to Cincinnati, implying Flynt lived in Cincinnati and was prosecuted there. The truth: Flynt was prosecuted in Cincinnati but lived in Columbus, which never laid a glove on him, legally. Cincinnati was the spawning ground of famed S&L looter and anti-porn activist, Charles Keating, who pulled the prosecutor’s strings where Flynt was concerned.

In Columbus, he lived next door to an exclusive girls’ school and while I won’t say there wasn’t nervousness, well, we didn’t go all Cinci on him. Take that, you German tight-asses. Ring that bell for your wives, OK?

I really do like Cincinnati otherwise. Zeno’s pizza. Skyline chili. Mmm.

I gotta tell you, my favorite part of “The Passion of the Christ” is the related spoofery. The Morning News brings you highlights from the blooper reel:

Jesus carries a heavy wooden cross through Jerusalem, assisted by Simon (Jarreth Merz).

Off Camera: [laughter]

Monday night, following four bloody hours of screenwriting class, with another two hours or so of writing ahead, and what do I have to say? Damn little. (Although I liked what the girl sitting next to me confided, while we were workshopping part of a script, in which a college kid gets arrested in a foreign country while on spring break. “This is a parent’s worst nightmare,” the prof said. My neighbor whispered, “My dad worries about ‘Girls Gone Wild.'”)

So here are a couple things:

A headline you don’t see in the New York Times every day. Since I’m sure it won’t survive much longer, here it is: Chavez Calls Bush ‘Asshole’ as Foes Fight Troops

Tell it, my brutha.

Beato has a suggestion for a “Passion” sequel.

More tomorrow.

Monday night, following four bloody hours of screenwriting class, with another two hours or so of writing ahead, and what do I have to say? Damn little. (Although I liked what the girl sitting next to me confided, while we were workshopping part of a script, in which a college kid gets arrested in a foreign country while on spring break. “This is a parent’s worst nightmare,” the prof said. My neighbor whispered, “My dad worries about ‘Girls Gone Wild.'”)

So here are a couple things:

A headline you don’t see in the New York Times every day. Since I’m sure it won’t survive much longer, here it is: Chavez Calls Bush ‘Asshole’ as Foes Fight Troops

Tell it, my brutha.

Beato has a suggestion for a “Passion” sequel.

More tomorrow.

Good God, I never thought I’d say it, but here I am, saying it: I miss the year when Rob Lowe chatted up Snow White in the big Oscar opening. Is it just me, or is Billy Crystal stinking up the room? This is ghastly! No one is laughing! And that red-carpet opening? I wanted gowns and are-you-wearing-a-corset, not an uncomfortable stand-up with the Sarandon-Robbins extended family. Is it so hard to get this event right? Stars in unguarded moments, nasty political jokes that make the audience howl, and a few water-cooler embarrassments — this is what I want from the Oscars.

Oh, well. Spring break has tottered to a close. Cookie Tour ’04 is complete. The week, after starting off with a small snowstorm, finished springlike — it touched 60 degrees today, and I celebrated by getting my dusty bike out and pushing it around town for a while. Although the snow is mostly melted, the world still has that dirty, matted-down look that a winter thaw exposes, and I felt the same. I thought my heart would explode on the big hill home, but it didn’t, so I expect sooner or later I’ll regain my customary warm-season semi-fitness, if you define that as “can walk the dog without wheezing.”

(Renee Zellweger? Good lord, and they played that awful “h’it’s RAY-nin'” speech, which was in the trailer and may have singlehandedly pushed “Cold Mountain” to the wait-for-the-video column for me. Her character in the book was not the sort to dither about RAYn, but what do I know?)

I had the day pretty much to myself, which I planned to spend writing. What I wrote: Three sentences. Not good ones, either. I don’t believe in writer’s block, only laziness, and that’s pretty much what the problem was, today. Also, a library copy of “Smilla’s Sense of Snow,” perhaps the first best-seller I’ve ever read originally published in Danish. I read it when it first came out, and recall loving it up until the end, which was just sort of muddled and strange and mad-scientist-y. You want a mystery novel to have a satisfying ending, but when all the stuff leading up to the ending is so good, it’s not so bad. About a year after I read it, I went to London and found a British edition in a bookstore there. Title: “Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.”

Maybe the ending was better in that one.

I don’t think we’re leading up to a good ending of this entry, either, so let’s go with a few links and call it a night. Steve Lopez in the L.A. Times takes an obvious topic but has some fun with it:

When your neighborhood is always referred to as “artsy,” it’s code for you-know-what. The neighbor across the street was gay. Some of the regulars at the Coffee Table were gay. The couple we bought our house from was gay, and we became dear friends.

“No. A constitutional amendment.”

Christopher Hitchens goes off the deep end with the Mel Gibson movie, but he gets off an amusing line or three: … It came back to me this week that an associate of his had once told me, in lacerating detail, that an evening with Mel was one long fiesta of boring but graphic jokes about anal sex. I’ve since had that confirmed by other sources. I don’t know what makes that passage funny — the fact Mr. Catholic tells jokes about Oz-style lovin’ or “I’ve since had that confirmed by other sources.”

You tell me.

Photoshop a new ending to “The Passion of the Christ.” I think I like “Senator and Mrs. Yeshua Bar Yosef” best.

Sorry for yet another unexplained absence. Short version: The downside to having relatives your kid can sell Girl Scout cookies to is, you have to go deliver the things, and sometimes this means hundreds of miles of driving.

But Aunt Pam and Uncle Charlie got their Peanut Butter Patties. Uncle Charlie did, anyway; Aunt Pam ordered nought but Shortbreads.

And Kate and I had a chance to travel through Ohio on two bright winter days. I made notes — mental notes, because I was driving — for a creative-writing assignment that’s due, like, Tuesday. Theme: Travelogue. Task: Craft a rough short-short plot around a trip. I tried to think of fiction set in northwestern Ohio. Came up with one, “A Simple Plan.” I read that book once, loved it, and could never bring myself to read it again, and put off seeing the movie until it had left the Current Releases shelf at Blockbuster. The book was so evocative of the feeling a person might have, being stuck in a dead-end town very much like the one my husband is from, that I couldn’t bear to go through it twice. It actually made my chest feel tight.

I don’t think my short story will be that good.

Tomorrow, we deliver cookies to Fort Wayne. On Sunday, back to Ohio. God help me, these are some expensive cookies.

I passed time in Ohio reading reviews of “The Passion of the Christ.” David Edelstein wins the Best Blurbs award, for “the film the Jews don’t want you to see,” “a two hour and six minute snuff film” and “the Jesus Chainsaw Massacre.” “What does this protracted exercise in sadomasochism have to do with Christian faith?” isn’t really a blurb (nor is my first example, really — it’s his distillation of Mel Gibson’s marketing strategy — but I think it makes a good blurb, just the same), but it’s a good question.

Then I got home. Guess what? Someone — lots of someones, actually — have spotted an actual live wolverine in the Thumb, making this the first actual sighting of a wolverine in the Wolverine State, ever. So what does the Freep do with it? Makes a cute story out of it, complete with proposed fun names for the poor beast. Sigh. I give up.

Back in a day or two.

Oh, for the love of Pete. (By Paul.) I give up.

Alex is ranting.

John Scalzi has a word or two, as well. And a very good question.

I’m glad someone’s got the energy for this. Because I sure don’t.