People, please. Obviously, it’s funny. Obviously, it’s what she might call kinda ironical-like, given that it came in a speech with yet another crack about Obama and his TelePromTer. But as they say: Consider the source. This is she-who trying to recapture what turned out to be the high point of her career — her speech in St. Paul at the GOP convention. And based on what I saw and read (and cousin, you couldn’t pay me enough to watch the whole thing) it wasn’t even that good — your basic goulash of god-bless-America and thank-you-soldiers-for-our-freedom, and the obligatory backhand to the “professor of law” currently occupying the Oval Office. Your basic red meat for the knuckle-draggers, all delivered completely off the top of her head, because of course she doesn’t use a ‘prompter. Neither did George W. Bush.

If you want to get upset, read…well, you better read this first, the Cliff’s Notes version of yet another I-think-I’ve-got-Obama’s-pedigree-doped-out think piece, and then, only if you dare to swim in slime on a crisp winter morning, should you read the comments on the original piece, because cousin, nothing anyone ever said about Sarah Palin’s baby even comes close.

That’s the second time I’ve used “cousin” as an interjection today. Can you tell I saw “Inglourious Basterds” this weekend? A hoot. We ain’t in the pris’ner-takin’ bidness, we in the Nazi-killin’ bidness, and cousin? Bidness is a-boomin’. Finally, a use for Brad Pitt’s lazy tongue. But he’s not the star of that movie; Christoph Waltz is, and looking at the other Oscar nominees for Best Supporting, all I can say is, if he doesn’t take it home, we live in a cruel world where justice is an illusion.

Which means he could very easily lose, because: See above.

So, how was y’all’s weekend? I spent part of it in the dusty stacks of the Detroit Public Library, and part of it writing (with the internet turned off!), so I saw little of note. Oh, except for the Super Bowl, which I watched with one-third of my attention (I was working at the same time, but it was a slow night for non-football and non-advertising news). As I believe I stated, I was rooting for New Orleans, on the usual irrational grounds: New Orleans is more fun than Indianapolis, Peyton Manning needs that smug smile wiped off his face, it’s always fun when the underdog wins. Usually my backing is the kiss of death, so it was nice to see sometimes it isn’t. I see we’ve already had the red-state chime-in in the previous thread, about how now all Katrina-related wounds are healed and we must hear no more about it. I was unaware of this attitude; is it prevalent? If so, some news: Ain’t gonna happen, cousin.

Also, it would seem we finally, finally have a major snowstorm headed our way. If it comes, it will be only the second shovel-able snow we’ve had this season, which must amuse you east coast folks. Nevertheless, I’ll take it. Droughts are droughts no matter the season.

Bloggage? Not much, but there’s this: Nate Silver on she-who. I’m going to do some rounds and study Russian.

Almost forgot! My favorite commercial.

Apparently this has been a problem all along. The hipsters-in-charge weren’t too happy about the uncooperative weather. The bus and tarp were along the southern exposure, trying to block the sun from the very nice icicles. Otherwise, they were holding up OK:

I can never resist the Tri-X setting on the new camera for long:

Overall? Eh. It’s an interesting achievement, but ultimately — ice on a house. Perhaps I lack imagination.

Yeesh, what a week. You should not be surprised to hear that current events have schadenfreude thick in the air in Michigan. One of my Twitter follows is retweeting every Toyota joke that comes down the pike. My favorite is the new Toyota marketing slogan: “There’s no stopping us now!” They make good cars; they’ll pull through, but stuck accelerators are scary things, and handling a PR disaster like this is not for the weak of stomach. Ay yi yi, but being No. 1 is suddenly seeming a hollow victory.

They may think different in Silicon Valley, but manufacturing is not for the faint of heart. A million widgets that can fail you any number of ways, and now all this software. Alan was having a problem with the throttle on his Subaru a few months ago, and asked the dealer to check it out. The diagnosis? Some old code in the computer. No wonder the best mechanic I knew in Fort Wayne can’t work on his own car anymore.

I don’t want to bug out early, but I must. Another redonkulous day ahead, capped by yet another middle-school dance. I haven’t heard any Lady Gaga in a week — this’ll do me good. A little bloggage before I go:

A woman who collects Playboy magazines. Because why not?

Not everyone working at a newspaper is miserable. My old college classmate Mark just spent a month in Afghanistan for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and came back with one of those great old expensive series newspapers do so well. Part 1 commences here.

For you writer fans, a new interview with Martin Amis.

Christopher Beam looks at that weird sheep ad. EDIT: Bad link fixed. Sorry. And thanks for the heads-up.

And I’m off to the shower.

There are enough of these guerrilla art projects going on around here — a previous cadre of hipsters painted abandoned houses, from roof to foundation, including windows, in shades of safety orange and green — that I wonder if we’re on the tipping point of becoming a playground for this sort of thing. I once wrote that only in Detroit could a bartender become a real-estate developer, but now it’s even easier. In “The Farmer and the Philosopher,” the short film we saw the other night, Toby Barlow remarks that Detroit is a pretty big canvas. True dat. But I share Jim Griffioen’s oft-stated concern that poverty porn is not, in the end, a good thing, and attaching a food drive and other do-gooding to a project, while certainly worthy, can’t make it entirely right.

But I’ll reserve judgment until I see it. One of the very few conservative critiques of art I agree with is the idea that art shouldn’t have to come with a big explanation text, that when an artist has to post a signboard telling the viewer what he was after and whose blood the red paint signifies, the work has already failed. The Ice House may or may not “reference the contemporary urban conditions in the city and beyond,” as its blog states, but I do look forward to seeing it.

Which is a very long-winded way of saying, “I know what I like,” so there it is.

On Saturday, I’ll check out the Belle Isle Ice Tree, which makes no claims about urban conditions, other than, “Cold enough for you?”

I need to get out of the house, anyway. I’ve reached the stage of winter where feeling bad is a loop: I feel bad, so I skip workouts/eat too much/don’t get outdoors enough, which leads to more of the same. I should change my name to Ursa and just hibernate the season away, but then, who would dig up stuff to show you every day? Like…

Oh, the things you miss when you don’t watch Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had Jon Stewart on? And Stewart said Fox has “taken reasonable concerns about this president …and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao”? I’d have paid to see that.

You’ve seen the generic TV report and the generic blog post. Here’s the generic Oscar-nominations story. If everyone is hip to this, why do these things keep getting done? (Thanks, Vince.)

I hate it when a story emerges that requires me to suddenly read a million words to get up to speed, and several hundred of the words involve morons whining that they should have to pay for something and why can’t they just steal it the way they did in the good ol’ days, but that seems to be what the Amazon/MacMillan fight last weekend seems to be. For those of you who weren’t tuned in, it involves a price war over e-books that broke out in the wake of the iPad announcement. Amazon is using cheap e-books to sell Kindles, and MacMillan is trying to hold the line on selling its inventory at a loss, for obvious reasons. Here’s Virginia Postrel at the Atlantic with something of an overview. Here’s John Scalzi on Amazon’s screwup. And here’s Scalzi again, being funny, on the many, many stupid things people are saying in the wake of last week’s events, including (in so many words), “it’s not like writing a book is that hard” and “I won’t pay for anything I can steal with impunity.” (I’m thinking this is maybe the only thing you need to read about this.)

May I add one more thing? All those people saying, “E-books are great, because then the last barrier standing between the dedicated amateur and his vast readership will fall to pieces” are invited to sign on as slush pile readers any any publisher within driving distance. And please, in keeping with your views about the real work of publishing, work for no pay. Report at the end of one week. Yes.

Oh, and while we’re at it? I read this thing in Slate about YouTube’s penny-ante rental proposal to help little-seen independent films get a little more-seen, offering feature-length films online for $3.99, and I see that the comments have already started:

“The beginning of the end,” wrote one user in comments; “i thought the purpose of youtube was to watch videos for free.” Another wrote that “Youtube is seriously [sic] selling out,” apparently unaware that YouTube, in fact, already sold out to Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Only in a world where people think nothing of paying $4 for a cup of coffee could they balk at the idea of paying a penny less to watch a movie.

OK, now I’m inspired. I’m going to get dressed, floss the spinach out of my teeth — healthy breakfast, step one to improving one’s perspective on winter — and off to the Ice House! You enjoy Thursday.

The Mitten is curated by one of our producers, Connie Mangilin, who keeps a relentlessly upbeat attitude about film in Michigan, large and small. She frequently works on the large productions, in part to finance her participation in the small ones. Knowing how much work goes into even a very small one, it’s always amazing to see how many people even bother to do it, and gratifying that so many do it well.

(Of course, many do it not-well, too, but now that I’ve done this a time or three, I can almost always see what the problem was, and forgive them for it. When you can’t pay people, you get people willing to work for nothing. When they are actors, it’s a coin flip. Amateur actors are more likely to have grating upper-Midwest eeaccents that can reduce even well-written dialogue to cole slaw. And nearly all of them are young and most are arty hipster types, which becomes a problem when you’ve written a role for, say, a gangster. A word to directors: Putting sunglasses on a guy with a soul patch and a visible piercing doesn’t make him look particularly threatening. He just looks like an arty hipster douchebag. By the way, many professional actors have voice problems, too. Brad Pitt is from Nebraska southern Missouri, but has a persistent contemporary burr in his voice that works in the “Oceans” movies but sounds ludicrous in many roles, particularly as Achilles.)

Among the highlights last night: “The Farmer and the Philosopher,” a short about Toby Barlow, author and Detroit ad man, and Mark Covington, the inspiring soul behind the Georgia Street Community Collective, a reclamation of a battered neighborhood on the east side. A long-overdue note: Sweet Juniper has featured the GSCC a time or three, and when I mentioned it here some months back, one of you fabulous NN.C readers hit their Paypal button and donated $50. I learned of this sometime later, and while I know whoever did it wasn’t looking for credit (at least, I assume so — I don’t know who it was), here, have some: CREDIT.

Another fave was “Dr. Reddy,” a goofy story about a bad doctor but an awesome karaoke singer — in Telugu! Dr. Reddy was played by an actor — sorry, I didn’t get his name — who has actually worked in various Telugu-language films; it’s the one spoken in southern India, and the videos playing during his karaoke performance featured himself in a big Bollywood-style song-and-dance number. And the karaoke takes place in a biker bar, so what you end up with is a sort of Peewee Herman-goes-to-Hyderabad-via-Sturgis thing. That’s entertainment.

And then there was our film, with extra footage that wouldn’t fit into our 48-hour time limit. One of these days we’ll get it up on Vimeo and you folks can watch it. One of these days.

Until then, there’s a poster:

The existence of this poster just cracks me up. Both my co-writer Ron and I plan to hang it in our houses to impress our easily impressed friends. And if it isn’t a finalist in the competition (we find out any day now) I will stain it with bitter tears.

So, then, bloggage? There must be some:

I was struck by this picture of she-who, presumably taken on the set of some Fox News show. She may not have the Fox Lips yet, but she definitely has the Fox Parentheses, the styling of the hair into punctuation marks framing the face. For some reason this is the preferred hairstyle of TV news, mostly on blondes, but now on the world’s most famous right-wing brunette. I think we’ve seen the last of the messy updo, boys; if that’s your favorite look, hang on to your pictures and be careful how often you kiss them. I predict we’ll start seeing a lot more caramel-colored highlights in the future, too. Just be advised.

Hmm, Hoosiers: Dan Coats to take on Evan Bayh? We’ll see. Non-Hoosiers: The former Sen. Coats was one of the birdbrains behind the Communications Decency Act, an early attempt at regulating smut on the internet, a staggeringly dimwitted piece of legislation that was overturned by the Supreme Court unanimously. When you can get Justice John Paul Stevens and Justice Antonin Scalia to agree on something, you know you’ve got a hit on your hands.

And that’s it for today, folks. Let’s hope for a better tomorrow.

But then, watching it, I realize it’s been like this since at least the third season, although that one stopped just this side of the line between incredible-but-entertaining and ridiculous-and-insulting. This season is turned up to 11.

What happened? In the first season, the story of a polygamous Utah businessman balancing a household of three wives was promising and interesting. It raised questions: What is family? How do we integrate religion into our Monday-through-Saturday lives? What do we owe our community, and what do they owe us? When we’re pulled in more than one direction, how do we keep from being pulled apart? And so on. The second season was even better, once the producers figured out that sex with three women on consecutive nights isn’t all that interesting, even by HBO standards, and started looking at the toll polygamy takes on women, both in the suburbs and in the creepy rabbit warren of Juniper Creek. It was in many ways a replay of Carmela and Meadow Soprano’s tango with the mob in that other show, but it was still worth exploring, and raised another question: Why do we cling to the chains that bind us? (Answer: Because they make such pretty jewelry.)

If anyone’s asking questions now, they’re right out loud and in the script: Don, will you take the bullet? Was that baby you’re caring for kidnapped from an Indian reservation? Could it be because you’ve never really dealt with the miscarriage you suffered in Season 3? And so on.

I swear, if it weren’t for David Simon, HBO would be toast with me. “Entourage” moved from ridiculous-but-entertaining into just-plain-offensive virtually overnight; whenever I land on it now I stay long enough to see whether they’re still serving the same tired salad of misogyny sprinkled with screeching homo-hatred (“Ari: Keep your eyes on Andrew Kline. Lloyd: Keep my eyes on him how? Ari: Pretend he’s Zac Efron’s ball sack.”), with a side of sure-I-believe-Jamie-Lynn-Sigler-likes-short-fat-penniless-guys. Look, one of the gang has a new girlfriend! She’s tall, beautiful and anorexic. Look, Ari’s on a rampage! He’s insulting his gay assistant again. Actually, Ari’s the most interesting character on the show, in the sense that it’s interesting to watch the blackly self-loathing Jeremy Piven deliver lines like this:

Mrs. Ari: What time is it?
Ari: I don’t know. My cock doesn’t wear a watch.

And he ran away from a David Mamet play? I’m not the world’s biggest Mamet fan, but he’s William Shakespeare compared to this.

Hurry hurry hurry, “Treme.” Which is sort of a nice segue to the bloggage. (Yes, I know, a bit early, but I’m having a bad morning, people. I am Ari Gold today.

Anyway, I’m told the parents of this young actress will be featured extras in “Treme.” Although now I’m looking forward to their daughter’s career:

And for anyone who’s ever had a relative whose last words were “Hey ever’body, watch this,” the sad tale of one man’s attempt to top his last wacky party stunt. Must reading. For once, the comments on a Free Press story are worth a look: He’s GOTTA be a white guy. Well, hell yes.

The cock crows 10:30. Time to start the day.

DETROIT — The 911 call came at 6:35 p.m. on Aug. 28 from a car that was speeding out of control on Highway 125 near San Diego.

The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: “We’re in a Lexus … we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck … we’re in trouble … there’s no brakes … we’re approaching the intersection … hold on … hold on and pray … pray …”

The call ended with the sound of a crash.

The story is about Toyota’s sudden-acceleration problem, of course. The driver is described as an “off-duty California Highway Patrol officer.” We both agree that when one is in a car with an apparently stuck accelerator, the first thing to do is shift into neutral. However, I maintain that anyone in a highway patrol would have advanced training in high-speed driving and would know this in his bones, and if he didn’t do so, there must have been a reason — perhaps the car couldn’t be shifted into neutral at speed, I dunno. He maintains I am “overthinking” it, and the guy just panicked and forgot.

And then I realized that this is just about the five-year anniversary of our move to Detroit, and we must be natives for sure now, because we are arguing about cars.

Everyone in that Lexus died, by the way. This just underlines why I am bound and determined that Kate learn to drive on a stick shift, and I don’t care if she burns out a clutch doing so; driving a manual requires you to pay more attention to the task at hand. And there’s another reminder: When we moved here, Kate was in second grade. This time next year, she will be months away from getting her learner’s license. Of course Michigan teens can start driving under supervision at 14 years, eight months. Utter insanity, but that’s how an automotive state rolls. I’m sure kids in Kentucky and Virginia were expected to start smoking at 12, once upon a time, to help the state’s economy.

First of February, today. This is always around the time I notice the light is changing, not so much the time the sun shines but the angle — ask a scientist why, I prefer the poets. The same thing happens the first week in August, when, on lower-humidity days (it never quite gets “low” here), the sun seems distinctly autumnal. As any groundhog will tell you, there’s a lot more winter ahead of us, but today, you can see the high-water mark. And it’s dry.

Both bits of bloggage are old, but not everyone has time to read the internet every day. So here goes:

A Texas politician declines to seek newspaper endorsement, and the newspaper calls this a “major rebuke.” Ha. Endorsements are one of those holdovers from not just an earlier time, but a way-way earlier time, and flat-out refuse to die. The best guesstimates I’ve seen is that in a hotly contentious presidential election year, all the newspaper endorsements in the country might have an influence over 10,000 votes, tops, and that’s being generous. Locally, who knows, but the fact that candidates work so hard to get them, and make such a fuss when they do or don’t, always struck me as sort of pathetic.

Endorsements are based on editorial-board interviews with candidates, followed by a discussion. The publisher usually wins, and the publisher is usually either a pro-business conservative and sometimes a generic center-left liberal. A windy, boring editorial will be published, using the royal “we.” (I sometimes wonder if that royal we isn’t why editorials are so boring; a previous ed-page editor of in Fort Wayne referred to the board as “the page” or “this page,” and solicited columns from “friends of the page,” which is how they were designated: Bob Butthead, Friend of the Page. I once asked why they didn’t ask others to be Enemies of the Page, a far cooler column head if you ask me, but as usually happens when you’re dealing with people who consider themselves not an I but a We, it didn’t go over well.

Anyway, the whole editorial-page structure — Hear Us, Voice of This August Institution — was blown out of the water by the internet, but many of them haven’t gotten the news yet. And so: “Major rebuke.” Now there’s a column I’d read: By Major Rebuke, Enemy of the Page.

And speaking of media institutions that refuse to change, even while the foundations are washed out from under them, Charlie Brooker on how to report news, TV-style. A YouTube link, but funny and worth your time. Wasn’t I just talking about this the other day? If only I’d taken the time to make the video.

Manic Monday is already underway, a day with a perpetually stuck accelerator. Ciao for me, and off to rounds ‘n’ Russian.

Sweet potato bisque: I happened to be at the Russell Street Deli, an Eastern Market institution known for its spectacular soups, the week before Christmas, when this was on the menu. It was…mouth-gasmic. It fogged my glasses and my mind. I tried to consider what the “Top Chef” judges call its “flavor profile,” but my tastebuds were happy-dancing so, it was hard to get them to settle down and give some sober feedback. It had many of the notes of a sweet potato pie — cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger — but was savory overall. I found a recipe online that seemed to come close, using buttermilk for the tang, and whipped up a batch. It was very good, but not as good as Russell’s. Three stars (out of four).

Curried butternut squash: An early improvisation, inspired by Mark Bittman. I make a version of this every fall, basically squash soup with curry and a tart apple thrown in the mix. For this, I left out the apple and added a can of coconut milk, and my friends? It was fabulous. I’m buying coconut milk every other week now. Four stars.

Cream of cauliflower: Another Bittman inspiration, brought on by the perennial January realization that I could eat a lot more vegetables if I tried. Sauté onion and garlic, throw in a whacked-up head of cauliflower, cover with broth, simmer to softness, puree and swirl in a half-cup or so of cream. Yum. Three-and-a-half stars.

Roasted garlic with white cheddar: I make this in the winter most years, but not for the last few. It’s an old Betty Rosbottom recipe, simplicity itself: Break up and peel two heads of garlic, cover with olive oil and roast in the oven for 40 minutes or so. Meanwhile, soften some leeks or onions or both, add a few potatoes, cover with broth, simmer simmer simmer, etc. When it’s soft, throw in the roasted garlic [EDIT: Remove the garlic from the oil first] and puree. Finish by stirring in a handful of grated white cheddar cheese. Serve with a green salad and crusty bread you can sop in the oil from the garlic roasting. Refrain from kissing for the rest of the night. Four stars.

Chili: Because if it’s winter in the Midwest, there will be chili. Everyone has their own favorite recipe. You don’t need to hear mine. Three stars.

No-cream of cauliflower and carrot: This was last night. I had a head of golden cauliflower teetering on the edge, so I made it the same way I did the other cauliflower soup, only I added a double handful of carrots and left out the cream and curry. Topped with some grated cheddar, cocked my shotgun, held it to the head of my daughter and forced her to choke down 10 spoonfuls or so, which she advised me were “gross.” Reader, it was not. It was delicious. Three and a half stars.

Note all the pureeing. You can do it in batches in the blender, but that’s a pain in the ass. Far better to spend $30 on what Emeril calls a “boat motor” and most cookbooks call an immersion blender. Mine broke last night, which seemed to be a fitting marker for the end of National Soup Month.

Although I will buy a new one this weekend. Because you really need an immersion blender. At least in our house.

Which takes us to the bloggage at the end of a cold but sunny week here in the Mitten:

You want to know why people hate lawyers? Try the NFL’s jerkishness in trying to stop New Orleans retailers from selling T-shirts and other merchandise featuring the fleur de lis and/or the phrase “Who dat?” One of my Facebook friends, Ray Shea, said it best:

The fleur de lis predates the existence of the NFL by more than two millenia. The fleur de lis has flown on flags over Lousiana for more than four centuries. Black and gold has been associated with the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club for almos a century. The phrase “Who Dat” is more than a century old and exists in recorded New Orleans music since the 1930s.

The NFL is granted a temporary non-exclusive license to suck my balls.

Ray is an old friend of Ashley’s, and won my allegiance to the Saints the night the team beat Indianapolis, and he posted, “Who dat pushing Manning’s face in the turf? WHO DAT?” Indeed. Peyton Manning is a guy whose face can never be pushed into the turf too often.

I just surfed through Memorandum to see what’s going on in the world of politics, and found this headline: Palin to Obama: Stop the fingerpointing. And with that, irony died once again and I officially declared the weekend under way.

So enjoy yours.

You have to be careful, though. I sometimes call my iPod my musical id, because when I started buying music online, I flocked to the shameful hit singles I’d been turning up on the radio all these years, but only when I was alone in the car. Songs I was too cool to like, or songs that were the one decent track made by Disappointing Artist X. I wouldn’t buy DAX’s album, but 99 cents seemed to be the right price point to buy the one or two Madonna songs I enjoy (“Don’t Tell Me,” “Ray of Light”), or Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue.” You have earbuds in all the time anyway, so it’s not like anyone knows you’re a secret Eminem fan.

And then digital music became the only music to buy, you hook the iPod to your stereo now, and so I have an iPod cluttered with crap, and more than 1,000 songs to sort into “earbuds only” playlists, lest one pop up at a dinner party and embarrass me. (I downloaded Chakakas’ “Jungle Fever” after watching “Boogie Nights,” OK? And I regret it! I always fast-forward past it!)

I don’t want the same thing to happen with my e-reader. Yesterday I asked Laura Lippman what’s better for her, as an author — ink on paper or pixels on a screen — and she mentioned the obvious use for Kindles, et al:

I use it primarily for travel and I stock it with B-reads, things I don’t care about owning in hardcover format.

In other words, pretty much the way I used my iPod at first.

I also asked Hank Stuever about this, and he got his own blog post out of it, and you should go read that, too.

It’s the newspaper model I’ll be watching most closely, of course. These are my people, they provide my health insurance, and I have a stake in seeing them survive. Late in Hank’s post, he quotes a lovely paragraph from another essay about newspapers, about the authentic experience of actually holding and touching your authentic experiences. I keep coming back to the 3A Tiffany’s ad, running daily in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, upper right-hand corner of the page since forever, and how much I look forward to seeing it every day. The other day it was the engagement-ring ad, four big Tiffany solitaires tumbled in a row. I always take a minute and appreciate it. I will never own a Tiffany’s solitaire. I don’t particularly want one. But it’s a beautiful photo, and I allow myself a few seconds of mild envy, the way if you were walking past Tiffany’s in New York, you might stop to look in the windows, like Audrey Hepburn.

Over to Facebook. Upper-right-hand corner: If you are a 52-year-old driver from Michigan, your car insurance rates can be as low as $14.98 a month. Click to learn more. Earlier today, it told me 52-year-old women could get a free pair of Uggs for participation. Click to learn more. I’ve asked this question a thousand times, and no one can give me a good answer: If all the college-educated eyeballs are online, if the smartest and the wealthiest people are looking at computer screens all day and most of the night, why are the ads the equivalent of the free Amish fireplace?

Oh, and as to the name of the iPad: Are all you people children? When did Beavis and Butthead join the focus group? Do you snicker when you hear “helicopter pad” or “note pad” or “pad Thai?” Maybe because I was always a tampon girl, and grew up in the era when menstrual pads were called “sanitary napkins,” one of the great euphemisms of its day, I don’t immediately associate the word “pad” with menstruation. Grow up.

I also thought Barry’s speech last night was pretty damn good. I liked how he called out the party of No. Fuck you, Sammy Alito, you smug piece of shit. And great job on that GOP response — find the XY equivalent of Martha Coakley, flank him with a black woman and an Asian man, and have them nod and clap on cue. Way to bring it, you soulless toads. I’m sticking with Barry.

OK, then: Yesterday’s work spilled over into today, so I’d best hop to it.

If the facts of the case turn out to be anything like the allegations of the case, it’s pretty clear what happened here: A stupid, heedless young man, drunk on attention and looking for a followup to a coup that landed him on all the big Fox talk shows, made the mistake of assuming that because he’s smarter than a criminally dumb Acorn office worker, he’s smarter than everyone. You have to admire his logic: I was on “Fox & Friends,” ergo, I am smart. In a better world, his ridiculous pimp outfit alone would have gotten him laughed out of anything other than a Halloween party; instead, he got a hidden-camera scoop. And so he learned the lesson every reporter learns after his or her first big story: Sooner or later your editor is going to wander past your desk, stop and say, “So, what do you have coming for tomorrow?”

O’Keefe appears to have been lining up his second act when he and his buddies were arrested, “wearing jeans, fluorescent green vests, tool belts and hard hats.” Because that would fool anyone, right? Everybody needs a hard hat to work in an office phone closet.

I used to work with a bulldog of a reporter who once tried to sneak into a hospital ER — a homicide scene — wearing a white lab coat and carrying a clipboard. He was thrown out almost immediately, but it scored big A-for-effort points with the bosses and people called him “doctor” for a while afterward. It’s funny how disguises work: Badly, most of the time. You can go to the uniform-supply store and stock up, but you almost always get important details wrong. You forget the way nurses put stickers on their name tags. You wear the wrong shoes. (Maybe you’ve been watching “House” and assume all female physicians wear stilettos and plunging necklines, like Dr. Cuddy.) You forget to erase the expression from your face and give off a nervous vibe. There’s a reason good actors make good money. A believable impersonation is no small achievement.

That this ridiculous caper was attempted in the company of the son of a U.S. attorney only makes it funnier. Things may look grim for Democrats in 2010, but as long as there are young men like James O’Keefe in the world, we’ll always have entertainment.

A tangent, but it just popped into my head: I remember, in the film “Crumb,” a scene where Robert Crumb goes out making sketches of the little infrastructure details in American cities. He was about to move to France, and wanted to get them down so he wouldn’t forget to put them in the backgrounds of his drawings — high-tension wires, street lights, fire hydrants, concrete blocks at the end of parking places, all visual clutter we see-but-don’t, and only notice when they’re missing. That’s what people forget when they’re trying to be someone else.

A few years ago, I looked up from my desk in the newsroom to see Sen. Evan Bayh walking past, en route to a meeting with the editorial board. He is exactly what he appears to be in his photos — tall, slim, blonde*, blandly handsome in that vote-for-me kind of way. His suit fit him well without being overly European. If Hoosiers can be Brahmins, that’s what he looked like. Behind him scurried a number of aides, the lead one carrying all the hardware; his pants sagged from the weight of the multiple cell-phone holsters, pagers and PDAs he carried, this being before the era of consolidation in a single device. The way his navy-blue blazer stuck out at strange angles at his waist — that was the detail a costume designer trying to duplicate the look for a movie would struggle with. But it was the detail that established his station in life, the way Bayh’s slim weightlessness distinguished his own.

And with that, a discussion of misbehavior and one of the aide’s burden, we can segue neatly to the wisps of John Edwards’ dignity, blowing in the wind now that his own factotum is turning on him:

According to Young, (Reille) Hunter called him in May 2007 to say she was pregnant. Young says that when he informed Edwards, the senator told him to “handle it,” to which he replied: “I can’t handle this one.” Young writes that Edward unloaded on Hunter as a “crazy slut,” said they had an “open relationship,” and put his paternity chances at “one in three.” Young says that Edwards asked him for help persuading Hunter to have an abortion. Young writes that Hunter believed the baby to be “some kind of golden child, the reincarnated spirit of a Buddhist monk who was going to help save the world.”

Crazy Agnes of God believed she was carrying the Almighty’s baby. Crazy new-age girls believe they’re Buddha’s baby mama. It’s all crazy, and it’s all cringeworthy, through and through.

Guerrilla bridge-makers step up to do what city won’t. I’m intrigued to learn this pipe has been leaking across a New York City sidewalk for “years” — I thought that only happened in Detroit. Down near Alan’s office a couple years back, a broken water main leaked into the street for months on end before it was repaired, and the city’s jury-rig for the winter was to come down from time to time and dump a load of salt on it, simultaneously appalling and funny. When we went to Buenos Aires, I noticed how broken sidewalks and other pedestrian hazards were far less likely to be cordoned off with tape or marked by cones. Walk at your own risk! It’s a dangerous world out there.

And I must turn to work. Enjoy Hump Day, however you spend it.

* Hoosier readers object to the designation of Bayh as a blonde, and after examining the photo record, I think they’re right. I always picture him as sort of an ashy dark blonde in my head, but now his hair is dark brown. He’s almost certainly covering the gray; maybe going darker is more believable than keeping him light. Whatever, only his hairdresser knows for sure. Corrected.