OK, so it’s cold here this week. Again, it’s Michigan; it happens. It dipped a bit below zero last night, just a few degrees, not terribly far. Uncomfortably cold, life-complicating cold, but nothing terribly dangerous to people with the sense to come in out of it when they can and dress properly when they can’t.

Of course I watched the local news last night, to see what they’d do with it. I wasn’t disappointed.

The stand-up began with the camera focused on a raw chicken, which the reporter had impaled on a stick of some sort. Get it? It’s so cold, the chicken is frozen! Then the guy held up a carafe of what he told us was hot tea. “Watch me throw it in the air,” he said. And he did. There was an impressive cloud of steam. He claimed it froze before it hit the ground, but of course it didn’t, Mr. Lying Liarpants. Then he cut to some time-lapse video showing what happened when they took a large thermometer from the warm studio to the street outside; why, it fell rapidly! Who could have foreseen this astonishing development?

Then he tipped over the chicken on the stick. The camera captured its landing. I don’t know what this was supposed to illustrate. Maybe the reporter thought it might shatter into a million pieces.

My TV friends say this is the latest consultant-driven trend in TV news — props. “If you’re going to report weather, you must have a prop,” they say. Hence the unequipped reporter who squats to pick up a handful of this mysterious substance we call snow, to show how you can pick it right up, and it’s cold on your hand! Hence the rulers in last week’s snowstorm. Hence the chicken.

It would all be amusing, if you didn’t consider that readers are abandoning newspapers by the truckload, preferring to get their local news from television. Yes, there’s a good chance your very own neighbor prefers weather reports with a chicken. I expect I’ll be handed a plucked foul en route to a weather story before the end of my career. Ask now, and I’ll save you the drumstick.

Michael Signorile brings the pain to Mary Cheney:

What is it like, I often wonder, to have your own father court the very religious zealots who believe your kind are emotionally disturbed child molesters? What does it feel like to have your own father empower people who, if they could have their way, would force you to go through “conversion therapy”? What is it like to know that your own family takes cash from people who think you�d be better off dead, and think you�re going straight to hell when that happens?

And for the queer-handed, Jon Carroll offers solace to the southpawed:

In the movie “Cold Mountain,” Nicole Kidman’s character is often portrayed writing letters to her beloved. Since the film is set in the Civil War, she did not use e-mail. Rather, she used pen and ink. In one heart- stopping scene, she paused in her writing and briefly rested her chin on her left hand.

With this one gesture, she says a hearty “blow me” to all the right- handed chauvinists in the world, to the designers of scissors and guitars and school desks, to the tellers of cheap jokes at expensive cocktail parties.

Bonus points for getting “blow me” past the copy desk. Only in San Francisco.

I wrote earlier that my Bible as Literature professor is a whole blog entry unto himself. (Actually, I think the course is called the Bible in English. What-evuh.) I started going with a small group of fellow Fellows, tipped that the professor’s lectures are a show unto themselves, edutainment in the best sense of the word. Whoa. No kidding. Ralph Williams is a local legend at the U of M, and his courses seem to work this way — he lectures to giant, packed halls, while grad students handle the smaller discussion sections. As indolent KWFs, I and my fFs are choosing to attend lectures only, since they are so satisfying, part tent revival, part Shakespeare.

If I had to sum up Williams’ presentation, I’d say one-third Mick Jagger, one-third Jesse Jackson, one-third Laurence Olivier. He starts each lecture with a few handshakes with the crowd, then a recitation the hour’s “rubrics.” Today’s, on the Garden of Eden, were “The song for a woman,” “A man, a woman and a serpent,” “A blessing and a cursing,” “Silent spots in the text: How do you read,” “I don’t know” and “The uncreating word.” (Some of these were obvious, but I still have no idea what “silent spots in the text” were, unless it’s the extended riff he did on the actual meaning of the ancient Hebrew word — “ezer” — used to describe Eve.) His most obvious vocal signature is occasional pauses to exclaim, “Are you following?! Yea/nay?!?”

He dashes around the lecture hall, his enormous hands waving in the air, voice filling every corner, demanding the attention of every pair of eyes. He stands still to demonstrate God blowing the first breath into man, taking Adam’s first respirations with him, and you can hear that, too. It’s all quite riveting. My first thought, five minutes into the first lecture I attended, was, “This guy must be boffo on the Book of Job.” I borrowed my neighbor’s syllabus, and sure enough, there was a special note that the Job lecture would be delivered in two parts on special dates, rooms TBA, with “parents, friends and special guests warmly welcomed to think with us.” When he finishes, I don’t know whether to pack up my notebook or stand up with a lit match.

So you get the idea — academic living legend, very popular, never a dull moment. Now, perhaps, you can get the joke behind the humor paper’s story: Ralph Williams named UM basketball coach.

It strikes me this blog has lost its way. Freed from my self-imposed obligation of a long, end-of-day data-dump, it’s noodled its way into irrelevance. I’m so glad I don’t have any site-statistic software; it would be too depressing.

On the other hand, one of the nice things about this year, after 18 years of being a columnist, is the freedom from having to say something about anything. “Shut up and learn” was my bumper-sticker resolution for this year, and while I haven’t always been successful at the first part, I think I’ve been pretty diligent about the second.

Also, the way the news is these days, commentary seems like such a dull sword. From the Department of You Can’t Make This Shit Up, today’s memo:

* NBC’s entertainment division made an offer to derail a story by its news division, in hopes of gaining an interview with — who else? — Michael Jackson. Read it and weep, in the NYT.

* I’m always saying that if Republicans and/or conservatives want more of a voice in pop culture, they ought to send their kids to film school instead of business school. Well, it looks like they already have a representative deep inside not only the movie business, but the indie/film festival movie business. The bad news: It’s Vincent Gallo.

* Perhaps you’ve been following all the brow-fanning over the MoveOn fete earlier this month, in which many of the speakers made the usual tired George Bush = Adolf Hitler connections. It shouldn’t surprise you to know this is a do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do thing for some conservatives. Eric Zorn does the dirty work; scroll down to “the H word.”

With that, I’m off to my Bible as Literature class. Now that’s a whole entry on its own; later for that one.

Certain inventions just sort of … change the landscape, say. Wheeled luggage. Automobiles. Birth-control pills. Wireless broadband connectivity. And so it was, when our old iMac came up needing a $300 repair, right on the razor’s edge of my fix it/junk it threshhold, our household did an assessment of our computing needs. No, really we just sat around for a couple weeks with our thumbs up our butts, fighting over the laptop. Then the second term started, and the fighting became more pitched — you really can’t underestimate the importance of a computer to today’s student, and with one of one and two of the other, we needed to fix things. I’ll spare you the details, the endless whirl of research, price lists and the like, and cut to the chase:

We are now a two-laptop household. I expect God to strike me dead any minute now.

The new iBook joined the household yesterday. I upgraded the PowerBook to Panther, and now they’re talking to one another, sharing a wireless printer and getting along oh-so-Mac-liciously. I changed my desktop pattern to celebrate. We are a walking Yuppie cliche, is what we are.

On the other hand, there was this revelation: Guess what the Microsoft Office suite costs if you’re a student? This is, mind you, a $400 package out there in the real world. Ready? Forty-five bucks. Downside: It comes as a raw disk in a cheap cellophane envelope. “So the molded clamshell box is what’s driving the price up?” I asked the cashier, who at least got the joke. Final Draft, the $200 screenwriting software I’ve been begging and borrowing through last term? Eighty dollars. Tuition may be going up at five percent a year, but if you have a kid in college? Go visit the next time you’re doing an upgrade, and recoup at least some of your investment.

Since our winter recreational activities have now been broadcast to the greater Comcast service area, perhaps you’ll be interested in what we did today: Visited the Plymouth Ice Festival. Above, Kate with SpongeBob IcePants.

You think these events are fun with your own family, try visiting with a bunch of international Fellows: “This is who? Sponzh Bob?” (Burst of Spanish to children, probably: “And they lecture us about soccer riots.”

Last week we went sledding at the very steep and very fun Veterans Memorial Park sledding hill here in Ann Arbor, and oh what a time we had. Once again, the elderly wooden sleds with metal runners proved the best ride around, but we covered this last January.

About halfway through our outing a woman appeared with a video camera on a tripod. She wasn’t driving a branded NewzVan, but she and her equipment looked professional enough. This is Ann Arbor; she could have been anything from a well-equipped mom covering every instant of little Savannah’s blessed childhood to a grad student doing an impressionistic film about snowflakes. You just never know.

Tonight I was surfing on our antique TV, the one in the kitchen that doesn’t have a remote and requires you to change channels the old-fashioned way. This being Ann Arbor, all the public-access stations are at ridiculously low and sought-after spots on the dial — 16-19, I think — and as I zipped past en route to CNN I thought I saw a familiar sight going by under the community calendar. It was our sledding hill! And that was me, in my new polar-expedition parka, standing at the top getting ready to send Kate down the hill! And there was Alan, on the run where his hat flew off! And Kate again! And we all saw it! We experienced the screaming-monkey thrill of seeing ourselves on the teevee!

What are the odds we’d see something like this? A zillion to one? Why can’t those odds work when I’m buying lottery tickets, is what I’d like to know.

…has an air of great power. The dudes have envied him for so long.

Wil Haygood of the WashPost gives us a nice appreciation of Ron O’Neal, aka Priest, the original Superfly, who died last week of cancer.

Bonus for Central Ohio readers: Some nice details of black life in my hometown circa the era of the film’s release. I flipped when I saw the reference to Lee’s department store on Mount Vernon Avenue, which advertised on the Top 40 stations for years, using the Bobbettes’ “Mr. Lee” as background music.

I saw Ron O’Neal as Superfly, in a similarly memorable evening, and also as Othello at Stratford. In between, there was his turn as the Cuban commander in “Red Dawn.” That, folks, is some range.

It snowed yesterday. Hardly an out-of-the-ordinary event in southeast Michigan; it wasn’t even that bad a storm. Having shoveled the sidewalk, I’d say we got, oh, five or six inches.

But even in a latitude accustomed to this sort of thing, a snowfall like this is a nuisance. Predictably so — commutes lengthen, school and other events are cancelled. It happens.

So last night, we watched the local Detroit news. First story: Snow. Second story: Snow. Third story: Snow. (Yes, friends, it was a “team coverage” event!) Next story: Snow. Then the weather report: Snow. Next story: Snow.

At this point I went to bed. (The reporter was gesturing to the snow at her feet — which the camera operator helpfully tilted down to show us — and saying it “could give drivers trouble.”) Alan reported the ENTIRE REMAINDER OF THE BROADCAST was: Snow.

The new wrinkle seems to be the device reporters are now issued along with their logo-branded jackets — little wooden rulers, like the ones in your desk in fourth grade. They’re occasionally commanded by the anchors to thrust these things into the snow and report how deep it is, so the anchors can then chuckle about being warm and dry in the studio and “Stay warm, Jill!”

The closest we came to anything approaching real news was the hospital angle, when a reporter went to an emergency room and reported people were arriving with injuries from “falls.” (Why they don’t go to dry cleaners in summer thunderstorms to see whether people are bringing their good gabardine suits in with water damage, I don’t know.) A woman wearing a cervical collar on a gurney was interviewed live, to report that it was slippery out there and she did, indeed, fall. “So be careful,” advised the somber reporter. “Back to you!”

Today’s forecast: Bitter cold. I’ll keep you posted.

Comments have been hosed for a couple days. Fixed now.