There’s only one thing, really, to talk about up top today: I’m doing an appearance on a local radio show this morning — one of those three-journos-crack-wise-about-the-week’s-events deals — but today we have a unusual third: Gilbert Gottfried. At least, he’s booked. Who knows if he’ll show up?

If you’re interested, you can listen live here. It’s around 10:40 or so, I believe, but I’ll be getting there around 10:30. If you miss it, there will surely be a podcast somewhere.

We will not be doing the aristocrats joke. It’s public radio, after all.

Otherwise, I’d talk about that live “Sound of Music” thing, but I fear I’ve been struck dumb.

For the rest of you stuck living in the frigid west, upper Midwest and elsewhere in the cold front, stay warm. I have the weekend ahead.

You won’t last long in my business if you let the news of an average day get you down (she said, snapping the brim of her fedora, the one with the PRESS card sticking out of the hatband), but man, this one? Was a total downer:

CHICKAMAUGA, Ga. — Deanne Westbrook had tried everything to keep her husband, Ronald, in the house.

He was 72. Alzheimer’s had erased much of his talent for music and flying airplanes.

No one is sure how, in the frigid hours before dawn last Wednesday in this small north Georgia community near the Tennessee border, Mr. Westbrook ended up nearly three miles from home with a handful of other people’s mail, jiggling Joe Hendrix’s doorknob.

Mr. Hendrix, 34, stepped onto his porch with a Glock pistol in his hand and his fiancée inside on the phone with a 911 dispatcher. He fired four shots. One hit Mr. Westbrook in the chest.

Yes, another American has stood his ground, and bravely defended his home. You can read the rest of the story. Joe Hendrix feels really bad about what happened. It says he’s under investigation, but you don’t have to be much of a bettor to figure he won’t be charged with anything. This is Georgia, where gun ownership is a civic religion, and anyone who rattles your doorknob at 4 a.m. is asking to be ventilated.

I just keep coming back to what, precisely, goes through a man’s head when stuff happens — admittedly scary stuff — at 4 a.m. and there’s a loaded gun in the house. I’ve often told Alan that I would happily watch a thief take anything he might want from our house and wouldn’t feel the need to shoot anyone. If he moved on one of us, sure. But even a doorknob-rattle is only a doorknob-rattle, as long as the rattler stays on the other side of the door. More:

Sheriff Wilson said he wished Mr. Hendrix had just stayed inside. But he knows it was a tense situation.

“When you listen to the 911 calls, it’s evident to me that there was fear displayed at least by the female who lived there,” he said.

As Mr. Westbrook came around a corner of the house, Mr. Hendrix took his gun and repeatedly called for him to identify himself, he told the police. Then he fired the shots. Mr. Hendrix told investigators that Mr. Westbrook continued to approach him, so he fired the shot into his chest.

I guess fear is an unpredictable thing, but this is a 72-year-old man we’re talking about.

I don’t know how you hear a rattle at 4 a.m. and immediately think SERIAL KILLER COME TO DO ME HARM, but maybe I do. Maybe that’s the prevailing myth of the country at the moment. It’s the story we’re told in every crappy crime show and every lousy movie. I’m not much of a Michael Moore fan, but he sees things. The parts in “Bowling for Columbine” where he fingered media-generated fear as the motivation for all this strapping up? That was dead-on. Of course he screwed it up later in the movie, but he got that right.

So let’s move on. To Katie Couric, helping reverse the gains of medical science. Here’s the promo for a recent show on the HPV vaccine:

The HPV vaccine is considered a life-saving cancer preventer … but is it a potentially deadly dose for girls? Meet a mom who claims her daughter died after getting the HPV vaccine, and hear all sides of the HPV vaccine controversy.

Love that weasel word: “Potentially.” More:

On the anti-vaccine side: Couric’s guests included a mother whose daughter died of undetermined causes 18 days after getting the vaccination; another mother and her daughter, who came down with a hodgepodge of symptoms that sound an awful lot like depression a few days after the vaccine; and Dr. Diane Harper, a skeptic of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s push to vaccinate all girls and who is careful to avoid obvious untruths but has been criticized for her involvement in the anti-vaccination movement. On the pro-vaccination side, Couric only hosted one guest, Dr. Mallika Marshall, a ratio that wildly underplays how dominant the pro-vaccination opinion is in the medical profession. Marshall was only given a few minutes to state that vaccines are safe and that the side effects mentioned by other guests were probably unrelated to the vaccine. Unfortunately, Couric and her producers allowed these facts to be totally overshadowed by the heartrending tales told by the two mothers.

I think we need something a little more fun. Lions examine a remote camera somewhere in Africa. Great pix.

And now, let’s get through to the weekend.

I remember, years ago, in search of a holiday column, I contacted a local Vietnam vets group to see if there were any families of POW/MIAs in the area. They directed me to a couple in Decatur, south of Fort Wayne. Just a few minutes into the interview, I knew this was a bad idea. I asked them to describe the circumstances of their son’s disappearance, and the mother said he’d been crossing a rain-swollen river with his platoon, stepped in a deep hole, floundered, went under and wasn’t seen again.

“And they’re carrying him as missing in action?” I asked, incredulous.

“His body was never found,” she explained. So they kept holding out hope that someday, somehow, he’d be coming home.

We talked a little more, I excused myself and left. Those poor people, I thought, driving home. But surely they know he’s dead. Surely. Where else would he be?

I didn’t know then, and only recently learned, of the governmental flim-flam known as the MIA. Rick Perlstein:

When downed American pilots were first taken prisoner in North Vietnam in 1964, US policy became pretty much to ignore them ― part and parcel of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s determination to keep the costs of his increasingly futile military escalation in Southeast Asia from the public. Then, one day in the first spring of Richard Nixon’s presidency, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird announced the existence of from 500 to 1,300 of what he termed “POW/MIA’s.” Those three letters — “MIA” — are familiar to us now. The term, however, was a new, Nixonian invention. It had used to be that downed fliers not confirmed as actual prisoners used to be classified not as “Missing in Action” but “Killed in Action/Body Unrecovered.” The new designation was a propaganda scam. It let the Pentagon and State Department and White House refer to these 1,300 (later “1,400”) as if they were, every one of them, actual prisoners, even though every one of them was almost certainly dead. “Hundreds of American wives, children, and parents continue to live in a tragic state of uncertainty caused by the lack of information concerning the fate of their loved ones,” Secretary Laird said. That was part of an attempt to manipulate international opinion to frame the North Vietnamese Communists (against whom, of course, America was prosecuting an illegal and undeclared air war against civilians) as uniquely cruel, even though fewer men were taken prisoner or went missing in Vietnam than in any previous American war. (From 1965 through 1969, they were tortured, at least if you believe American prisoners at Guantánamo Bay were tortured; the techniques were essentially the same.)

Isn’t that appalling? I keep thinking of that poor couple sitting in their little house in Indiana, holding out hope that their baby, gone 15 years by that point, might still be alive, somewhere halfway around the world.

Dunno why I’m leading with that today. It just popped up in one of my feeds and it reminded me of Mr. and Mrs. Sad Hoosier. It’s not a day for me to be sad — I am making a Christmas miracle happen for a pregnant friend who is off in lonely Arizona, craving a particular brand of artisanal jalapeño/cherry salsa available only around here. I saw it on the shelf at the market Saturday and picked up two jars. Her only instruction will be to pay it forward, somehow. I suppose, if the salsa disagrees with her fetus, she may pay it forward literally. If you’re in the desert southwest and a beautiful brunette with a slight baby bump presses a jar of it in your hand, be not afraid! It’s just your own Christmas miracle.

And I also renewed my passport. For the next two or three weeks, I will be unable to leave the United States. Be advised, just in case you were going to surprise me with a trip to Paris or something.

Meanwhile, we have some bloggage:

There was a great “Fresh Air” on the so-called personhood movement a few days back, and today, the great Dahlia Lithwick weighs in:

So pause for a moment with me to ponder what it means that some of the greatest civil rights battles of our era are being fought to extend personhood into the weeks prior to viability and the years after incorporation? What does it mean for actual human “personhood”—as well as for reproductive rights and corporate control—that, if the far right succeeds in stretching these two legal fictions to their illogical extremes, American “personhood” will begin at conception, diminish somewhat at birth, and regain its force upon incorporation?

Good questions.

As you may know, a federal judge ruled today that Detroit’s bankruptcy can go forward, which means — well, it means a lot of things, but the biggest is that pensions for public workers are not, as previously believed (and the state constitution says), untouchable. Lots of states have similar constitutions. We’ll see how that goes.

It’s Wednesday already? It is. I hope yours is good.

My sister-in-law came for the holiday with a belated birthday present for her brother: a CD with scans of the photos their father took when he was a soldier. He was a parachute infantryman, really in the shit as they say, but as we all know, sooner or later things began to break the Allies’ way, and among the spoils of war was a Leica camera he took from a German officer, seen here:

(The camera, not the officer. That’s Roger, who would have been my father-in-law if he’d lived long enough to see us married.)

He carried it through the south of France as troops liberated the region in August 1944. First, the bad guys:

I guess that’s a bunker of some sort. I can only guess at the construction materials, but it must have been a headquarters, don’t you think, with that insignia?

Anyway, up through France they marched. Cannes:

And Nice:

This is what being greeted like liberators looks like:

And no one cares if you take a souvenir or two:

I’d love to know where that flag ended up. Alan says his dad came home with his dog tags and little else. The camera went to an officer, I know. He must have sent the photos ahead somehow.

Quiet day today, not much to report. The coffeemaker broke — on a Monday morning, no less — but we had a backup. Staff call, phone calls, a lingering queasiness that tells me I should really go easier on the rich food, at least over a four-day weekend.

But there is some bloggage:

The perpetually wrong Jennifer Rubin thinks Hillary Clinton can be toppled by? Anyone? Yes, Caroline Kennedy. Your laff of the day.

This is Tippy the fainting squirrel.

Finally, the Amazon drones story. I was astounded to see how much attention it was getting today, especially when I heard people discussing it a year ago at the Detroit policy conference. The problems seem so enormous I don’t know how they can be overcome easily, starting with cost. I seriously doubt free shipping is going to be an option here, so what, exactly, might you order from Amazon that you would need in half an hour that would be worth the price of getting it air-dropped? An engagement ring? Olives for your martini? Beyond that, there’s the distance-from-warehouse detail. Drones are very clever little flying machines, but they are short-range solutions. Across town might work, but I can’t send one down to Coozledad’s farm with a bottle of bourbon strapped to its belly (as much as I might like to). A good deal if you live near a “fulfillment center” (and look how many there are in labor-compliant, low-wage states like Indiana and Kentucky) but not so much for everybody else.

Besides, everyone knows what drones should be used for: Taking pictures of Tina Turner’s wedding.

Happy Tuesday.

I found this via Tumblr, so the usual cautions about authenticity apply, but what the hell, it’s worth sharing. This is a purported listings page from an unnamed New York newspaper in November 1963. The hell with JFK — talk about mourning a lost world:

This, pals, is why I regret never living in New York City. Imagine an entertainment buffet spread with everything from Bill Monroe to Miles Davis to Sam Cooke to Bob Dylan. I looked it over twice before I noticed Stiller and Meara hiding in the cracks.

Was everyone’s Thanksgiving wonderful? Ours was just fine, if a little repetitive of last year’s. I was looking up a green bean recipe I like at this time of year, and a menu fell out of the book — exactly the same one I’ve been making for a while now. Oh, well. With a table set for only four, two of them picky eaters, what’s the point of adventure? That’s what dinner parties with friends are for.

The rest of the weekend was devoted to lazing on the couch watching Netflix, errands and the usual. Kate and I went to the DIA for a few hours on Friday, to tell “The Wedding Dance” we would always love it, even if it’s sold to Rupert Murdoch. Watched a couple of movies I would likely not have seen without streaming — “What Maisie Knew” and “The Panic in Needle Park,” which I was astounded to learn was written by Joan Didion and her husband. I cannot tell a lie: I love many, many things about the 1970s, and its strong tradition of antiheroic cinema is one of them.

So, then, some bloggage:

Today’s NYT ran a smoochfest on Jim Delany, whom I didn’t know about. Evidently he’s the guy responsible for the Big Ten conference being little more than a “brand.” Rutgers? Maryland? Now in the Big Ten? Fuck that noise. I prefer the Grantland take on this development:

In ways that matter to college administrators, Delany is a genius: The Big Ten Network is a money-making machine, and the conference actually made more money last year than even the SEC. Last fall, when I spent a day with the Indiana football program, they informed me that they’d been able to upgrade their facilities almost entirely with money procured from their Big Ten Network share. But that’s what makes this so frustrating for those of us who actually give a damn about the product: Speaking to Rittenberg, Delany appeared to characterize the conference’s football woes as a short-term concern, as something that could be attributed to an influx of new coaches and the consequences of immoral behavior at Penn State and Ohio State. He made no real acknowledgement of the long-term statistics, of the Big Ten’s 34-52 bowl record since 2000, of the fact that the Big Ten has won 37 percent of its nonconference games against nationally ranked teams since Ohio State won the national championship in 2002. The top of the conference is largely shaky, and the bottom has never been worse: I imagine Purdue and Minnesota and Illinois would struggle to finish .500 in the MAC.

Anything else? Yes, these rather astonishing-not-astonishing charts, about who uses marijuana and who gets busted for it, via Ezra Klein.

Finally, a fine piece by John Carlisle, former Detroitblogger, now roving columnist for the Freep. It’s about a community of legal scrappers in one of the most cursed neighborhoods in Detroit, who eke out a living digging holes in a now-vacant scrapyard, seeking out the long-buried bits of metal there. If you’re thinking, “why, that sounds like something you’d find in the Third World,” join the club. I was struck by the comments, which swung between that sentiment and a certain witless, attaboy-to-the-bootstrappers attitude, which ignores the fact the bootstrapping isn’t leading anywhere. Unless it’s to another generation of metal men:

Domenic Anderson used to follow his dad down here and watch him dig.

“Everybody would sit there, dig, get along,” he said. “All the grown-ups would be doing their own things, running their own crews out of here, making their own money.”

Now he works here, too. He stood on a dirt mound next to his twin brother, David Anderson. The 19-year-old brothers live just down the street and work in the lot six days a week. They’re rough edged and dirt streaked, and they share a distinct southwest Detroit accent and a kind of small-town genuineness.

For them, it’s not just work; it’s also their social life. Most of the neighbors moved away long ago, so there weren’t many kids to play with when they were younger, and there aren’t many to hang out with now that they’re older.

People around here like to say that we’re America’s future, so hey — look forward to it.

And so the long slog toward the holidays commences! Can you feel my excitement?

Made in Detroit. No frills, reasonably priced. You can have it in any color, as long as it’s black. The Type A, natch. #ohhenry

From the look of the comments Tuesday, the holiday weekend is starting early, so I’m wondering if anyone is even reading. So what the hey, let’s call it a weekend. I hope you all have a great one, wherever you are. I notice it’s snowing in Ohio, storming in the south, and pretty much more of the same here — cold and overcast.

However it is wherever you are, I hope your bird is juicy, your stuffing tasty, and your gravy free of lumps.

To discuss: A drive-by shooting in Amish country. Of a horse.

Well, it was a pretty quiet birthday. Leaden skies, unreturned phone calls, email. At the end of it, I played the ultimate working-mother card: The rotisserie chicken. What on earth is happening with rotisserie chickens these days? They’re the size of pigeons. You’re lucky to feed three people with one of them, and the third person is a teenager who picks.

I tried to get a fryer at the market a few weeks ago. The poor things were so thin you could see the pinkish flesh through the skin.

“Find me one that didn’t die of starvation,” I asked. It’s my standard quip. It never works. They all died of starvation. And yet, the lure of “Amish chicken” is powerful in an urban environment. I once heard one young man tell another that the Amish just do chicken better. This while standing over the case featuring the scrawny ones.

“The Amish do chicken exactly the same as everybody else,” I told him. He wasn’t having it, but I know whereof I speak. Not organic, not hormone-free, not running around a barnyard snagging bugs and grubs before being humanely beheaded on a tree-stump chopping block. Just a smaller sort of poultry operation, but hey — it ain’t Tyson.

But the rotisserie chicken was tasty, if not large enough. Mashed potatoes plus oven-roasted carrots with black sesame seeds. Leftover birthday cake. Good enough for a Monday.

And now “Boardwalk Empire” and the realization, once again, that all the allegedly high-quality Sunday-night TV is getting on my nerves. “Homeland” is a joke. “Masters of Sex,” which started strong, has stagnated into the same half-dozen or so themes over and over — Sex is science, sex is emotion, sex follows a script, sex never follows a script, blah blah blah. Will Dr. Masters overcome his emotional repression? Will Virginia Johnson get the respect she craves? We interrupt this repetition to display Lizzy Caplan’s naked breasts again. We interrupt those breasts to show you the saucy blonde secretary’s breasts again. And so on.

Also, I’m tired of these allegedly period shows dumping 21st-century language and attitudes hither and yon when it suits the writers. The previews for next week show one character raging, “I’m just an organ donor to you people,” a neat trick for 1959 or thereabouts, when organ transplantation was in its very earliest days and the phrase “organ donor” was hardly in common usage.

So, some bloggage before we start the runup to the holiday? Sure:

The Hollywood Reporter blows the lid off “No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture,” with mixed results. I don’t think anyone can help but feel for a tiger that nearly drowns making “Life of Pi,” but it’s hard not to chuckle over a paragraph like this:

… a chipmunk was fatally squashed in Paramount’s 2006 Matthew McConaughey-Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedy Failure to Launch.

Not the chipmunk! Fatally squashed! The problem is, it brings out the way we really do put animals on a hierarchy. Mammals over fish, some mammals over other mammals.

Remember the Columbus Dispatch bike blogger hit by a car earlier this month? He’s awake and blogging again. But a long way from OK. Shudder.

So, happy Tuesday? Happy Tuesday.

Hey, whaddaya know. Now it’s my turn:

Today’s the day, but we celebrated last night in the usual fashion. My present this year was a pair of L.L. Bean moccasins, lined with shearling just to be extra-fancy. Dog-walking boots for every kind of weather.

Oh, and a waffle iron. But that’s more a house present.

Otherwise, a nice weekend. Kate and Alan worked for hours on a project for her physics class. The task was to construct a catapult that would fling a marshmallow 5 meters and land in a bucket. If you know Alan, you know this required multiple trips to the hardware store, math, power tools, drilling, testing, tape measures, more testing and, of course, marshmallows:

My job was to purchase the marshmallows. Wendy handled fielding the ones that missed the bucket. Given the rules — exactly five meters, one marshmallow, landing in the bucket — I feel bad for the kids who don’t have a handy dad. You can make one with a shoebox, rubber bands and a tongue depressor, but it won’t go five meters.

I think there are lots of non-handy dads in Grosse Pointe. One thing I’ve noticed, when I look at estate sales — the more expensive the house, the fewer the tools. And more sporting goods. Many, many more of those, skis and boxing gloves and hockey sticks and high-end bicycles and boat stuff and horse stuff. But rarely so much as a hammer. You hire that shit done.

Otherwise? I watched “Olympus Has Fallen,” and marveled once again at a few things:

1) Great actors can go a long way toward rescuing a dumb script.
2) American movies are just ridiculously violent. Torture and gunplay is really baked into our bones.
3) There’s a reason Melissa Leo is nearly unrecognizable. She probably insisted on that dark wig to conceal her identity.

So, bloggage? Here’s something I wrote, a little different sort of thing for Bridge, for a slow holiday week. Hit it and keep me employed.

We did this — mulch nearly all our leaves — this year, to cover the bare topsoil in the still-unfinished back yard, and hopefully spare us a winter of muddy dog footprints throughout the house. Interesting that policy is nudging homeowners in that direction now:

In the past few years, lawn signs have sprouted in this Hudson River village and across Westchester County, proclaiming the benefits of mulching the leaves in place, rather than raking them up and taking them away. The technique involves mowing the leaves with special mulching blades, which shred them into tiny bits. That allows them to quickly decompose and naturally feed lawns and shrubs.

Officials are encouraging the practice for its cost savings: Westchester spends $3.5 million a year on private contractors who haul away leaves in tractor-trailers and bring them to commercial composting sites in places like Orange County, N.Y., and Connecticut. At the same time, environmental groups and horticulturalists are praising the practice’s sustainability, devising slogans like “Leave Leaves Alone” and “Love ’Em and Leave ’Em.”

The new film “Philomena” tells the story of Philomena Lee and her search for the child she gave birth to in one of those notorious Irish slave-convents, a story I’d been unaware of until reading the pre-release publicity. Here’s a Guardian story about the book the film is based on. It is breathtaking to think this happened in my lifetime. Just awful.

Now, I’m off to have a happy birthday. For you, just another Monday.

So this is how life slows down in the fall: One day you’re riding 10 or 15 miles a day, grilling out, drinking beer, and the next? Icing your knee and watching “Vanilla Ice Goes Amish” on HGTV. Although frankly, after my drive home from Ann Arbor early this evening, I feel like watching Vanilla Ice for the rest of the winter. As long as there’s wine.

I’m simply not a safe driver after dark anymore, at least until this cataract is fixed. I figured I’d be fine, as 90 percent of the trip is familiar freeway and reasonably well-lit. But then it rained, and the world became one of shiny surfaces and reflected headlights and murk. Murk murk murk. What’s the worst thing you can see in white-knuckle murk? How about Mr. Low-Impact Man, riding a bike down this exurban road, in the rain, with one weak-ass light on the back and no reflective clothing. Y’all know I’m a cyclist, but sometimes my people piss me off.

It took about 90 minutes to drive 45 miles. Never again. At least not until Dec. 19, the day after my cataract surgery.

Cataracts. Knees. Hello, grandma.

I actually feel pretty good. You should hear my medical history. One long chorus of “no” on every chronic condition, topped off with “none.” (For “what prescription medications do you take?”) NONE.

So. Guess what Kate asked for (and received) for her birthday?

Everything old is new again. Although I think what she likes best is that most of the other kids are not into vinyl. And in case you think you’re keeping up because you’re into vinyl, too, know this: When we were in Fort Wayne, Kate’s friend gave her a recording by one of her favorite local bands. On cassette. Somebody is always hipper than you.

Not much bloggage today; I’ve been writing for two days, and feel a little empty. But there’s this:

Dexter gets his wish; Prince Fielder is out at home.

I just channel-surfed past the last two minutes of “Glee.” How long has it been this bad?

The weekend can’t get here soon enough. Enjoy yours.