Ansel Adams I ain't

Look, my photograph of this morning's public-transit meltdown on Jenifer Street is featured atop the Daily Page!

Also, check out my Daily Page article for today, an autobiographical response to Madison Repertory Theatre's new play, Bad Dates.

Blight

Shame got the British out of India, and perhaps it also can help beautify Madison's east side, one eyesore at a time. The local news site dane101.com has issued a very specific plea to some very specific Jenifer Street denizens: Remove the pile of trash that's in front of your house. Perhaps a call to the landlord also would help.

Peeyew

There's one custom of the analog age I hope never makes it to the Internet: Scented perfume ads. I rip them out of magazines on sight -- or, more accurately, on smell -- but that doesn't keep them from contaminating my reading material. The new New Yorker has scented ads from both Versace and Polo, and the two are canceling each other out in a particularly rancid way. The magazine smells awful, and so do my hands where I touched it, and so, now, does this apartment. Someone, please help me wash off the stink of middlebrow culture.

Good word

"While every community has its quirks, every newspaper has its quirky people. Many of them are on the copy desk. We're the ones who scream 'pleaded!!!' at the TV when a newscaster talks about how someone has 'pled' guilty to a crime. We're the ones who would have boycotted the O.J. special not because it was an affront to taste and humanity, but because the title, 'If I Did It, Here's How It Happened,' was grammatically incorrect. We're the ones who know that Dr paired with Pepper has no period and that Bobby Knight was the coach at Indiana University, not the University of Indiana."

-- Jane Burns (no relation)

Shaky

After watching Sunday's match between da Chicago Bears and the New England Patriots, I have to conclude: This Bears team does not have it. I, and Bears fans much more fervent than I, hoped this would be a championship season, and there have indeed been spectacular moments. But great athletes -- Tiger Woods, say, or Brett Favre -- come through in the clutch, and in the clutch on Sunday, the Bears faltered. With just over a minute remaining, the Bears needed to score a touchdown to win. Instead, quarterback Rex Grossman threw long for an interception. And that was it.

Still, I continue to enjoy my Bears-watching this fall. The Bears may not quite be champions, but they don't suck.

Don't you forget

I just had a great idea, inspired by all the hoopla surrounding Emilio Estevez and his new Robert Kennedy biopic: a Breakfast Club reunion movie. Gather up Estevez, Ally Sheedy and all the others (except Paul Gleason, who played the mean principal and died earlier this year) and conceive of some set of circumstances that would bring them all together again. The obvious one is a class reunion, assuming they're all in the same class. Then just get them stuck for eight hours in an airport lounge somewhere, and you've got your movie.

I don't think The Breakfast Club holds up all that well in retrospect, but when it came out in 1985, I found it genuinely exciting. I was a lad of 14 and, like the teenage characters in the film, I lived in a permanently baffled state and tried my best not to let it show. I especially enjoyed the smug Judd Nelson character, and to this day favor dark overcoats like the one he wore, though it's been years since I had a Marlboro habit.

The year 2010 will be the 25th anniversary of the release of The Breakfast Club. This project is a no-brainer (why do I suspect I'm not the first to think of it?). Have your people call my people.

Good word

"Meryl Streep knows everything. At least she made me think she does."

-- Garrison Keillor