Some roadside history you may enjoy, like a big, crudely drawn hotdog. Go HERE.

Many years ago, in the Mayan capital: a wealthy man is surveying his room of slave-scribes, all of whom have been calculating the calendar into the future. They have no idea why they have been set to this task, but their lot is not to question. It is tedious work, but full of mysteries; no one quite understands why their master wants a list of all the three-day weekends, for example. SO I CAN PLAN A BARBEQUE, he shouts. What does that mean? Today he strides around the room with his usual imperious swagger, peering at their work, correcting mistakes – one slave put “thanxsquvng” on the second week in November, whatever that was, and he was beheaded on the spot – and when he is done, he asks how far they’ve gotten. He does this every day.

“December 21, 2012” says Tectoquixtal, whose name means “Urine of Jaguar.”

The master nods, as if he expected nothing less, then turns and leaves the room. Tectoquixtal watches him cross the street – and can barely believe his eyes when his master is struck by a spear thrown from the nearby practice range. It catches him in the chest, and he drops without a sound.

Tectoquixtal looks down at his work, the date Dec. 21, 2012, and thinks, well, screw this, then.

That may be as good an explanation as any other, I suppose. I don’t care why the Mayan calendar ends, and have no anxieties. Had not intended to see “2012,” since Emmerich’s movies post- “Independence Day” have been dumber and dumber. (“ID” was implausible enough, but as a big loud action thing, it was fun.) But the child was at a sleepover and my wife wanted to see it, so we went. I was dismayed beyond measure to find out it was 2 hours and 38 minutes long – when you add previews, you’re talking three hours. Sigh. Well.

One of the previews made me cringe: Hugh Grant and either Sarah Jessica-Parker or John Kerry as a couple on the ropes who have to enter witness protection as a married couple. I would rather be tased in a bramblebush than see that. The other movie was “Avatar,” which of course looks great but smacks of another industrial-sophisticated-civilization mean, tree-dwelling dragon-riders noble. We’ll see.

Sensing that audience might have a limited attention span, and wanting to show the movie more than once a day, the theater had cut back on the previews, and that’s fine. Three’s about right. Four makes you annoyed with the fourth one. Five make you want to scream.

Oh, the movie? People are insulating themselves from snob-smack by saying “it’s actually not that bad,” and I understand; I thought the same thing. In retrospect I realize is it AWESOME even if it turns into “The Poseidon Adventure for the last three hours of its 47-hour running time. I don’t mind big noisy stupid things-blow-up movies; I liked the first Transformers, loathed the second, enjoyed ID4, wanted to take an ice pick to everyone involved in “The Day After Tomorrow,” loved the first half of “War of the Worlds,” and so on. “2012” is really “When Worlds Collide” without the other planet, for reasons that are obvious towards the end. The acting isn’t all ham and cheese; the editing isn’t cut-a-second Michael Bay-style retina-jackhammering, and the special effects – well, that’s what we go for. The end of LA is probably the most remarkable piece of urban destruction committed to the screen.

Okay, it’s not awesome. It relies on preposterous coincidences and fortuitous skills, it suffers from Danny Glover who manages to avoid both gravitas and intelligence as the President, it reprises the nail-biting “we’re flying away as the runway is destroyed” idea about three times to many, it wants you to believe that a fully-laden Russian cargo yet can drop into a shallow trench with an airspeed of 6, maybe 7 knots, but still pull up in time to carrying its precious cargo to the third act, and – worst of all – it’s full of moments where people make speeches, emotional speeches, about, you know, emotions, at a time when the clock says SEVEN SECONDS UNTIL AIRBORNE CHUNKS OF HAWAII FALL ON OUR HEADS. Most of the “real” people, the little folk who aren’t part of the government conspiracy, don’t react the way normal people would react. The end of the world has a rather small psychic footprint, it seems.

One of the more irritating things: John Cusack’s character is a sorta-failed guy whose hot wife divorced him and took up with a shallow boob-enhancement doctor, and they have two kids he takes on a camping trip. Anyone want to guess? You, in the back there.

“Uh, a winsome little girl who loves her dad, and a sullen older boy who acts distant and resentful?”

Very good! You’ve seen the movie. Or did you just see “War of the Worlds,” which had the same idea? It’ll be a movie that breaks all the rules when the heroes comprise an intact, stable, well-adjusted family. Could even be a family where dad goes to work at a job and mom stays home with the kids, because I’ve heard that actually happens. (If you’re joining this site late in the game, and want to take me to task for proposing such sexist tripe: I was a stay-at-home dad, and am still the primary bus-picker-upper / drive to karate-piano-choir / make the lunches / etc guy. So chill.) While we’re at it, we’ll know someone’s breaking all the rules when the President is a white guy. Your first thought upon seeing Danny Glover: that’s not the President. Morgan Freeman is the President.

That said, I grew up during the Golden Age of Disaster Movies, and this thing is state of the art. Rather amusing ending, too. Oh, that’s where we’re going? There? Cripes. You can drop me off here, thanks.

That was the weekend, more or less – Friday I did all the updates for the site while listening to old radio (finally found some of Jack Webb’s early comedy show; surprisingly anarchic and almost, err, post-modern in its ridicule of the medium’s conventions), then watched some of Sam Raimi’s “Drag Me to Hell.” Not a big horror fan, but I like Sam Raimi’s patented blend of shocks & gags, and supposedly this was a return to his roots. Perhaps it is; I lost interest. Saturday, the aforementioned movie. Sunday, I did the Minnesota Youth Symphonies concert at Orchestra Hall. Great show. So was the one outside the Hall:

One man sitting on a bucket, singing. Heard him from a block away. He was great.
Twenty-four second video. You can give him that, can’t you? If the video doesn’t play, go HERE.

(Note to anyone using the low-light feature on the Kodak Zi8: turns any shot into ShakyCam.)

Later: Matchbook Monday, of course. See you soon.

And so a strange week – long, but brisk in tone – winds down to the hallowed Friday. In my world this means a few key traditions: after work, piano; after piano, pizza; after pizza, a nap in which I sink ten fathoms deep; then the pleasures of working all night on the website and watching movies and not having to write anything for the next day. Plus a wee nip of the bourbon. Or, after a week like this, six Golem fingers.

Thursday was a four-video day, but switch me with wet birch if I ever complain: it’s just talking. The real work is done by the people who set it up, film it, light it, edit it, and all the rest. Talking is talking. I will be talking again on Sunday night, for the first Minnesota Youth Symphonies concert, and will have the inevitable report, indistinguishable from its 30 + predecessors. Thirty Orchestra Hall concerts MC’d! Again, I’d be more impressed if I did something like, you know, perform. But I talk.

Talking is the easy part. It’s always been the easy part. Writing is also easy, but slightly less easy as talking. The difficult part of the day is not sinking into the Slough of Carelessness, and letting all the obligations and duties float past while I twirl in the eddies.

So, a couple of things.

One: I will be pushing this each week, perhaps on Friday: the Qor. It’s a site for which I write essays with pictures, with more to come. If you like the Bleat, you’ll like this – but unlike the Bleat, you get lots of other professional writers as well. Yes, it costs money. You can try it for a month to see if you like it. The Qor is designed to appeal to people who want a civil place to enjoy quality writing, without trolls or polarizing polemics or the chattering visual distractions of pages that load with flash ads containing 50 blinking characters advising you about mortgage rates in your state. The purpose of the site is to pay writers for writing on the web – a novel concept in some quarters! Your patronage and subscriptions provide the money that goes to the writer. Everybody wins. Give it a look!

Feedback is appreciated, so the folks who run the site can serve you better.

I’ll mention this once a week. I have three pieces up so far – the big conclusion of the Rushmore trip, a piece on country cemeteries, and one on parents and piano recitals. I like what I write for this site, and I hope you do too.

Two: I’m putting the updates in this post, because A) I have no time tonight to go on and on about this and that, since I have another column to do, and B) we’re talking a big, big update. Eleven pages, the first part of the Comic Sins ad section. This time: MUSCLE ADS. I paid no attention to these as a kid, because I knew I was in the target market, being flabby and lazy. There was absolutely no way I would get to Atlas status by sending away for a book, and I didn’t want to do it. Sounded like work. Later I would join a gym and start lifting, but that’s another story – perhaps in my autobiographical account of how I wrecked a nerve in my right leg and scraped my elbow-bones against something-or-other to the point where it hurt to lift my voice, let alone a dish taken from the cupboard, but I’m all better now. I’m about four weeks away from a ruinous crash diet to get re-ripped but that’s another matter. I still don’t believe any of these ads. You may enjoy them as much as I enjoyed writing the overheated copy, though; if nothing else, it’s a reassurance that the Comic Ads project is still a going concern. In 2010 weekly updates of miscellaneous ads will be a permanent Wednesday update.

Yes, I do plan this site that far in advance. As I have said, coyly, from time to time: you have no idea how much stuff I have in the pipeline.

And there’s 100 Mysteries! Number 58 is here. So that ought to hold you. There’s also a startribune.com column – check the front page – where the Patty Melt issue is beaten to death.

Curtains, hair, underwear. Go HERE. Minor errors in text on first page; will fix.

Ersatz anchormannery, empty violence, cheap emotion: another day. The first was the workaday part, and it was fun. Love my job, as I keep saying. Would like to keep my job, too; we’re having more cutbacks. Went into the boss’s office this morning, said I was just there to see my manager squirm trying to make reassurances he knew he couldn’t back up, and had to qualify without depleting morale. (I like to say subtexts aloud.) The most enjoyable part of the day wasn’t work, but planning work – we’re going to do a shoot at the Mall of America, in the big rotunda, with an enormous video screen. It’s about two stories tall, if I remember. How can I not love this job?

Empty violence – well, that would be Wolfenstein. (This is about gaming, so skip to the next bolded paragraph if you please.) There’s apparently some controversy about the new Call of Duty game, where you have the opportunity to kill innocent civilians while you’re in deep cover as part of a Russian terrorist cell. I’ve written a million times on the shoot-the-nurse demerit present in nearly every game of my 20s and 30s; the nurse was a character who ran from side to side while you were taking out Central American drug lords and their minions – yes, it was the 80s, and true to our Miami Vice roots, we named the boss “Calderone” – but if you hit the nurse, you paid a price. Same with Duke Nukem, which some ill-informed scolds knocked because it let you shoot up a strip club. No, no. You shot anyone but the alien-morphed pig-cops (don’t ask) you paid a price. The games train you not to shoot civilians, or at least they did. This one is different, but knowing what i know about the franchise, it’s not amoral. It’s horrible, yes, and if it was an acclaimed television show there would be Serious Discussion about the moral complexities of engaging in a terrorist activity in order to protect your ability to stop the terrorists from nuking a city. Since it’s a game, people think it’s training sociopaths. (Grand Theft Auto is another issue.)

I had no such problems today, since I was up against supernaturally-enhanced Nazis. The game is also coded so you can’t shoot civilians. It also has helpful Nazis who shout “I’m pinned down! I’m reloading!” so you know where they are. Anyway, I get in a half-hour of gaming every other day, for six weeks, once a year. If that. Not enough.

Cheap emotion. Or maybe not. Earlier today I shot a tweet into the air by mistake; it was supposed to be a DM, and it made it sound as though I did not cry when they played the bagpipes at Spock’s funeral. I think you know me well enough by now to know that’s simply not the case. Probably doesn’t reflect well on me to say I tear up at sci-fi movies that have aliens fired into terraformed planets in a phaser casing, because that seems like a rather specific set of circumstances with few analogs in the real world. But all movies are fantasies; you identify with characters and situations because they embody things you’ve felt, or wish to. Doesn’t matter if it’s a Vulcan or a homely shopgirl in 1962 London, does it? It’s not good if you can only find empathy in fictional situations, but it’s not good if you find empathy in every real situation, because then you’re overwhelmed. We filter, and we go to movies to disable the filters and purge the things that slosh around in our hearts and our heads. We give ourselves license to react to fictional particulars, if only to assure ourselves that our day-in-day-out distance from general realities doesn’t make us dead-hearted people who walk around smothered in an emotional Snuggie. Which may or may not be the case; your mileage may vary, to stack up the cliches.

Anyway. The original tweet was in response to someone about to watch “Up,” and I asked if she’d seen it in the theaters. The audience had been quiet during the first 20 minutes, and the scenes that set forth the backstory felt like a hammer to the sternum. And it was all make-believe, times two – not just a movie, but one conjured from bits and keystrokes. But that’s the thing about Pixar movies; they’re all the more real for being all the more artificial. Over the last three nights I picked away a “Wall-E,” just to get ready to see “Up” again, and like many movies, I had it going on one screen while I did something else on the other. But each night I found myself stopping what I was doing, and just watching. This from a guy who’ll play the “Andromeda Strain” movie as background music every year or so.

It holds up; in fact, it gets better. Its construction and pacing seem better every time I see it; the first 20 minutes are still genius. We’ve become so accustomed to digital trickery that the idea of making heroes – or villains – out of machines who speak but one or two words is taken for granted. We’re so used to brilliant animation that the utter uniqueness of what we’re seeing doesn’t completely register. One more cool thing in a world of cool things. By then you’re so trained in the language of this particular miracle you understand why the tilt of his eyes and the posture of his body means he’s been re-infused with a soul – and it’s only afterwards that you realize it’s almost an analogy for the entire body of art computers have made possible.

I was talking about this with my wife, how I’m just a blubbery sucker for Pixar, and she said that there’s a loneliness at the heart of their characters, sometimes. Indeed: Wall-E is plucky & cheerful, but horribly lonely; whoever figured out the little scene where he rocks himself to sleep at the end of his day should get laurels and a lifetime of champagne. “Up” puts it up front. “Toy Story 2” has that rip-out-your-heart song by the doll who was left under the bed when her girl grew up and forgot her. “Monsters Inc,” less so – everyone’s well-adjusted, except for the evil lizard – but Sully’s scene at the end is pretty much every parent’s dream, a trip back to toddlerhood.

Maybe that’s why I don’t mind that they’re making “Cars 2.” Slogan: “Because we don’t need to rip your heart out every summer, do we?”

Well, it’s late, and I’ve given up the evening’s ration of TV to natter on about this. So: which movies made you tear up? Manly sniffles count.

See you soon.

If I can sum it up: the whistles indicate factories; the envelopes are pay envelopes. It’s 1932, and employment is up Up UP! So buy a tuxedo!

So: what the devil are they trying to sell?

Natalie was fine today. Bored with the flu. Bored with sitting on the sofa. Bored with drawing cats. Bored. Dead bored. She’s so over the flu – literally, as well Since she had no fever, we went to her piano recital, with the understanding the instructor would wipe the keyboard after she was done. She’d been practicing her new composition for months, and had another new piece that was leagues above anything she was doing last year, so we weren’t going to miss this – and it’s not like she’s sneezing or runny-nosed. We would hustle her in, have her play, then leave.

But first, the tradition of Perkins. Before every recital, we go to Perkins, and laugh over the games provided for the small fry. Always the same, with different themes. Same weird anthropomorphic desserts, lorded over by Jeff the Chef. This theme was “music,” so “tic tac toe” was “mic tac toe.” I explained this didn’t work. That would be Maik-tac-toe, not mick-tac-toe. She agreed.

Examined the menu; looked for the patty melt. They did not have a patty melt. Well, they moved the patty melt to its own page, then: something that would honor its unique place in comestible lore. But there was no patty melt page. There was a new type of melt that had bacon and onion rings – and came with fries. Also sauce. This would not do.

“You didn’t cancel the patty melt, did you?” I asked the waiter.

He said it was gone.

They say you see the flash of the atom bomb before you feel the heat and the wind. This was like that.

“Gone?”

“Believe me, you’re not the only one,” he said.

“Gone?”

“It’s not on the menu,” he said, “but they can make you one.” He said this sotto voce, as if giving me the password that would get me to the Underground.

I said I would have one. I would show them the errors of their way. Perhaps someone back in the kitchen would say YES when the order came through: another one who’s not going to take it from the Man, man.

Another waiter came over.

“The patty melt will be on the next menu,” he said.

“So they realized their grave mistake?”

“Guess so.”

“We can still make one now,” said my waiter.

“Yes,” said the other waiter, adding: “we got the rye in today.”

So they got new rye but it’s not on the menu. Don’t you guys UNDERSTAND? They will use the low consumption rate on the rye to validate their decision to take it off the menu! WE’RE BEING PLAYED, ALL OF US!

Natalie had the breakfast, since she hadn’t eaten in days. I had the patty melt.

It was okay.

When the waiter came by to ask if we wanted anything else, I said nope, off to the piano recital. He said he used to play piano, but now played synths. Really? What kind of music? Trance, he said, his inflection apologizing in advance for using a word I probably didn’t know, me being, well, dad-demographic and all that. I said I loved trance. Really?

“Ever hear of Armin Von Buuren?”

Sure. Three clicks of the iPhone, call up the playlist. He whips out his iPhone and shows the wallpaper: Armin!

“I was this close in a concert.”

“Cool!”

He writes down his myspace page; it’s here. Kid plays Christian Trance, a genre you probably haven’t heard. News to me. Anyway, nice guy; wish him well. He was very good with customers, especially the elder versions.

Everyone should work in a restaurant when they’re young. Nothing teaches you about people, workplaces, businesses, and the public, like a restaurant. I still think my entire professional outlook is predicated on getting a tip in 30 minutes. Ever work in a restaurant? Some people remember it as drudgery and hellishness defined; I suppose it depends. For me – two Pizza Hut stints, then the glorious run at the Valli – it was the best lesson in The World I’d had.

Later this morning: Out of Context Ad Challenge. I’ll be back on NewsBreak, if you care. Was scheduled for Thu-Fri, but asked to be bumped up in case I get the flu.

Because I hear there’s something going around.

With Louise Brooks. Prepare to meet some . . . interesting faces. Go HERE.

Will the Guardian find a new and uncomfortable way to enter the building? Click HERE.