The last month has been pretty rough, thanks for asking. I spent some time in SF trying to help my son, who is grown or says he is, and when I wasn’t looking at apartments and talking to other concerned parties I caught up on my movies.

My wife hadn’t wanted to see Up in the Air, in part because she has had to lay a few people off recently and was looking for something more like escape at the cinema, so I went alone and found myself wondering: what the hell? I mean, if I had seen the flick with no expectations or advance hype I might have reacted differently. But the National Board of Review named it picture of the year. Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner won a Golden Globe for best screenplay. It’s on the short list for a best-picture Oscar. Are we talking about the same movie?

For the dozens of you who haven’t seen the movie, I will try to avoid spoiling any plot points. Though honestly, if you can’t see the twists of this flick coming, you haven’t been to the movies in the last 2o years. No, it doesn’t have the phony, staged-home feel of Nancy Meyers’ It’s Complicated, or mushy new age undertow of Avatar. But if you have seen any romantic comedy in which the hero (or sometimes heroine) has a sudden, and rather out-of-character, change of heart  — going from selfish prick to St. Francis of Assisi in the last act — you’ve seen this movie.

Much has been made of Reitman (who also directed) and his decision to use recently laid off people to play the folks who George Clooney’s character sacks for a living. And yes, that’s a nice touch, if a little gratuitous (“Hungry freaks, daddy!”). Maybe that’s why so many critics fell so hard for this rather predictably redemptive rom-com: because they’re all worried about their jobs and thinking that could be them up there on the silver screen! After all, my old colleague Glenn Kenny got a role in Steven Soderbergh’s Girlfriend Experience. Everyone needs a Plan B.

Now that Janet Napolitano has admitted that perhaps the system did not, in fact, work when a nutso Nigerian boarded a Detroit-bound plane in Amsterdam on Christmas, we no longer have to revise our understanding of the terms “system” and “work.” It is clear now that having even your own father rat you out (as the banker dad of Umar Farouk Abdulmattalub did when he called the American Embassy in October, saying explicitly that he thought his son had turned terrorist in Yemen) is not enough to get you banned from travel to the US.

It is also clear that Christmas Day — not just an occasion for shopping but one of the holiest of Christian holidays — is treated no differently by the Transportation Security Administration than any other day. And people named Umar Farouk Abdulmattalub are treated no differently than passengers named Sean Keith Elder.

Not that I’m suggesting profiling —  heaven forfend. And I am well aware of the delicate balance that exists between the need for security and the right to privacy etc. As a TSA official lamented to the New York Times, “You are second-guessed one day and criticized another.” But unless by system we mean passengers voluntarily wrestling bomb-throwers to the ground, we need to revise our safety standards.

Having just flown across the country (and bracing for myself for the return flight this weekend) I, like you, have wondered how they could possibly make the experience any more uncomfortable and humiliating. But I don’t actually lump security checks in with charging for food and luggage. I think it just needs to be consistent.

Napolitano, who is probably as qualified to be head of Homeland Security as Tom Ridge was, is getting her lumps now. Her boss has already had a hard year of learning how far buck-passing will get you. The size of the watch list was a political football when Bush was president (remember when they wouldn’t let Sen. Edward Kennedy fly because he had the same name as some suspected terrorist?), and now Obama would like to pass the whole controversy — along with Iraq, Afghanistan and host of other headaches — back to the previous administration. Just as GWB did when he suggested that 9/11 was Clinton’s fault for having not taken out Bin Laden earlier.

But you get the credit and the blame for the things that happen on your watch. Even if that watch is stopped and only right twice a day.

Now that Joe Lieberman has replaced Tiger Woods as the most hated man in America, it’s time to contemplate the fickle hand of celebrity. Joining us in our deep thoughts on the subject, in which someone must quote Andy Warhol, is public scold and media conscious Neil Gabler, who weighs in with an essay on the whole Tiger thing in this week’s Newsweek. 

Oh you don’t know Newsweek? It used to be a respected newsweekly, Avis to Time’s Hertz, though generally less cheesy and more idiosyncratic. Until this year when in a moment of magazine harakiri it redesigned itself into obloquy. The idea seemed to be to make the magazine more relevant in this internet age when people need a newsweekly the way they need cassette tapes. But with its we’re-a-monthly-disguised-as-a-weekly mindset the new Newsweek looks as hip as Ozzie Nelson with set of bongos. Magazine designers I know have described its redesign as a fiasco of New Coke proportions, but maybe you hadn’t noticed. 

Anyway, Gabler says it’s okay that we’re fascinated with celebrity after all and that the 15-minute fame of Tiger’s mistresses fulfills some national blah blah. Honestly, I haven’t finished the piece, partly because I hate looking at the magazine so much, but also because I have never forgiven Gabler  for his slightly hysterical argument — advanced in the 2000 book Life: The Movie — that the then-new virtual realities of video games and yes, the internet would destroy life as we knew it. (Unlike the virtual realities of, oh, the novel, the opera, the soap opera…) That and the fact he wrote such a long book about Walter Winchell, a villain of Lieberman like proportions who history has for the most part forgotten. 

I guess Tiger owes Joe one. Maybe he can loan him one of his bimbos. The most depressing thing about l’affaire Woods to me was not the epic nature of his infidelity (I didn’t know his “character” enough to expect otherwise, did you?) but the routine sameness of the women he cheated with. Honestly, I can’t tell them apart, and I suspect he couldn’t either. Maybe that was the point. 

I’m not being fair in my analogy, I know. Tiger just screwed his wife, and his own career as a spokesman for anything, uh, wholesome. Lieberman, by flip-flopping on an early Medicare buy-in and rendering the health care reform bill that will come out of the Senate fairly toothless, has fucked us all over. And made a million bucks from the insurance industry. Way to go, Joe!

I don’t think of the Frank Miller comics, or the 2005 film based on them, when I hear the words Sin City, as much as I liked the latter. No, my mind is rather musical (ie, an old jukebox of countless, and in some cases useless tunes) so I always think of the Flying Burrito Brothers song of the same name: “This old town’s full of sin/It will swallow you in…”

Until I read an edifying explication of the recording of the album from which that song came (The Gilded Palace of Sin, by Bob Proehl, part of the 33 1/3 series of album books) I had thought that city was Vegas, and the millionaire trying to hide from the Sodom outside was Howard Hughes. According to Proehl, the song’s authors, Gram Parsons and Chris Hillman, were actually talking about LA and some corporate music biz type, though the outcome was the same: “On the thirty-third floor/A gold-plated door/Won’t keep out the Lord’s burning rain.”

Setting the Old Testament imagery aside for a moment, I think this song speaks to our fascination with Tiger Woods and his seeming endless parade of mistresses. Reactions may be split along gender lines, with more women thinking him a pig and also wondering how he could be so stupid (the voice mails, the emails,the pancake house) and more men being unsurprised by the accusations, if not the number of women involved — and also wondering how he could be so stupid. 

But I think where we come together as a nation, where this story scratches some collective itch, is in its element of comeuppance. Tiger (and when you have a name like that, don’t leave it on your girlfriend’s answering machine) is in a class of his own as an athlete and a celebrity — but all that privilege won’t keep TMZ et al from camping in your driveway. The bombardment of info that comes with each bimbo eruption is the modern equivalent of the Lord’s burning rain. And collectively I think we love it that no one escapes. 

In many regards it’s timeless. Take this quote from mistress no. 5, the pancake serving, and seemingly spankable Wendy Lawton, from today’s News of the World: “I knew he was married, but whenever he had come into the restaurant with his wife he looked so miserable… Tiger just used me as his sex toy. I thought I meant something to him, but all he cared about was lust.”

Maybe we just like to hear the same story over and over.

Have you noticed how the biggest stories of the week had to do with crashing?

First there were the gate-crashers at the White House, who have parlayed what might have been a publicity stunt into even more publicity: an appearance on the Today Show this morning, another on Capitol Hill soon. 

Then there was Tiger Woods mysterious car crash in Florida, which may or may not have had something to do with revelations about a mistress in Manhattan. Anytime you mix prescription drugs, a woman wronged and a nine-iron, fire hydrants aren’t safe.

But tonight we saw crashing of a different sort: during Obama’s speech at West Point, the camera (on PBS anyway) kept panning the cadets at the Eisenhower Hall — many of whom were caught cat-napping as the  president spoke. 

Was Obama boring? I thought it a pretty no-nonsense speech, one that tried to remind people of why we’re there in the first  place and that tried to lay out a realistic scenario in which we exit somewhat intact. There were a few flourishes at the end, reminding Americans of the awfulness of the Taliban and our shared belief that people deserve better. But it was not a barn-burner, or a flag-waver, of a speech. But that’s not why they slept. 

The cadets dozed because they got up at five in the morning, to be honest. That and the fact that they already knew what the headline was (30,000 more troops) and what it meant to them: don’t make any big plans before 2011. Now get some rest. You’re gonna need it.