Man, Detroit is a trip sometimes. Big story today in the News, about the train wreck waiting to happen with the city’s absentee ballots. It’s the usual misery:

Among findings by News reporters were ballots cast by people registered to vote at abandoned and long-demolished buildings; a master voter list with 380,000 incorrect names and addresses — including people who have died or moved out of the city; and a practice of hand-delivering ballots from senior citizens and disabled voters that were filled out in private meetings with Currie’s paid election workers. If the mayoral race came down to a close vote demanding a recount of absentee ballots, the result could be chaotic.

But this is the we’re-not-in-Kansas-anymore graf:

Currie refused to explain any of the problems uncovered by The News or outlined in court cases. She, along with her deputy, Vernon Clark, denied there are any problems with the vote in Detroit.

“Prove it,” Currie said. “P-R-O-V-E.”

Long weekend, although productive. Alan got the garage rearranged and I got a jump on the basement. (It was Take Responsibility for a Domestic Dumping Ground Saturday here, evidently.) Then we picked up Kate at yet another birthday party — they never end — and headed off to the little d, Defiance, Ohio, for the annual Halloween parade.

I can report: It was long (90 minutes), but there were marching bands, Shriners in Corvairs and much candy to be had. And while there were too many boring entries, at one point I saw a man approaching at the front of yet another unit, blowing a ram’s horn.

“This is what? Defiance’s newest synagogue?” I asked. Hardly. It was some evangelical Christian fellowship, which irritated me. Give the Jews back their shofar and get your butt out of the Halloween parade, I say. If you’re not willing to march in a devil mask and show you have an actual sense of humor, vamoose. But it was late in the parade and that might have been the 40-degree temperatures talking.

Also, I couldn’t help but notice how many home health-care equipment services there are in Defiance. (Their entry tended to be people riding motorized scooters in formation.) But then, we were surrounded by smokers — even outside, it was like sitting in a bar — and so oxygen delivery is probably a stable business.

So, the bloggage: Ali, bomaye! On this date in 1974, Muhammed Ali beat George Foreman in Kinshasa, Zaire, aka the Rumble in the Jungle. Not only that, it sparked a great documentary, “When We Were Kings,” which I can’t recommend highly enough.

Neglect your website for a while, and your karma comes looking for you. People start sending you things that remind you how kind the universe can be, sometimes.

Behold, my very own Nancy doll, seen here with her accompanying signed, suitable-for-framing Nancy comic strip. The doll is signed, too, although you can’t see that (you have to push up her dress; yes, she’s wearing undies). Thanks to regular reader and sometime commenter First-Time Caller, who is also Lance Mannion’s sister-in-law, and a very nice person who is evidently acquainted with Guy Gilchrist, who inherited the strip from the ghost of Ernie Bushmiller, or some such.

I’m so touched. My very own Nancy! I plan to cuddle her whenever I need an idea. I’m surre she’ll bring me luck.

Thanks, First-Time Caller.

So we’re having an exciting election season here in the the GP Geto, aka Da Woods. By “exciting,” I mean “contested.” That doesn’t happen much here, I gather. Not only does the 15-year incumbent mayor face a challenger, there are something like three candidates running for a single open council seat. The mayoral challenger came to a neighborhood picnic last summer, so I got a sense of her, but everyone else is terra incognita.

Of course, as a newcomer and a journalist, I’m looking forward to coverage in the local weekly. Two weeks ago, they informed us the endorsements would be coming in the following issue, and then dropped this bomb: “It’s our policy to endorse incumbents except in extraordinary circumstances.” Ohhh-kay. That’s helpful.

So the endorsements came out, and guess what? There were no extraordinary circumstances. Of the three rookies shooting for the open seat, their pick was the guy who most reminded them of the incumbents. What’s worse, in dismissing the mayoral challenger they made vague reference to an incident that happened some years back, with little explanation of the event and none of the context.

Because no one ever moves here, I guess, and so no need to give any background.

Thank God for the Free Press. All you gotta do is explain it.

And as “contested” as things get here in the ‘burbs, it’s nothing compared to Detroit. You want to know what the race card looks like? Like this.

If you grew up in central Ohio, I guarantee that you read the headline for today’s entry with a little swing in your head. That’s because it was part of a jingle for a local carpet store: Call Mr. Edwards, call Mr. Edwards, call Mr. Edwards — at Rite Rug! It ran for years and years and years on Columbus TV and radio stations, the singers always kicking in at the very end of the ad, followed by the phone number.

(Here’s how old I am: When I first heard this commercial, the number was CApitol 8, etc. If I sat and thought about it for a while, I could probably remember the last four digits.)

There was another guy on local TV in Columbus, who pitched for Giant Don’s Furniture Warehouse. My dad sold furniture (wholesale; he was a manufacturers rep), so I paid particular attention to these. I wondered why dad’s sales pitch never included ponies, which you got if you bought a “living-room suit,” or a second room of furniture for only NINE CENTS. That’s right, I said NINE CENTS.

Well. Wherever you grew up, you can describe the local commercials. So I was interested in this WashPost story on how even locally produced commercials are fading away.

Homegrown commercials — for personal injury lawyers, vocational schools, regional car dealerships and the like — are still numerous, of course, but a disappointing sobriety and professionalism has crept in over the years.

I was particularly sorry to read that one of Kate’s favorites is, alas, not local:

And then there’s a whole group of commercials that only look local. Those Empire Carpet ads with the lost-in-time jingle (”800 . . . 5-8-8, 2, three-hundred! Em-pire. Today!”) and the amazingly antiquated animation come from a company based in the Chicago area that uses the same ads in more than two dozen cities.

Deliberately badly made, local commercials have a way of scorching their way into your brain, either through horror or repetition. When Columbus got cable (and our household didn’t), we were introduced to Kash Amburgy, of Kash’s Big Bargain Barn, South LEB-A-NON, A-hi-a: “Remember, if Kash don’t sell, Kash don’t eat!” We made a pilgrimage there when I was in high school. A lesser Amburgy gave us a plastic bicentennial candy dish, in honor of our long trip. (If he knew why we were so giggly, he didn’t let on.)

The story’s a great read, but I have to say, some local TV ads endure in their horrifying glory. You need to see some of Geoffrey Feiger’s ads to believe them. And the other personal-injury lawyers who advertise are pretty amusing, too. I never knew dog-bite settlements were such big business here.

Mr. Edwards has a website now. Share your local-TV stories in the comments.

One final note: I HAVE to shop at this place:

Among other images, Ranger Surplus uses a brief stock clip of a nuclear explosion in its commercials. Its spokesman, Captain Happy, wears sunglasses and a Smokey the Bear hat and reminds viewers “to carry a knife. . . . You’ll never realize its many uses until you have one on you!”

The chain’s unusual ad slogan — “This store is the cat’s ass” — was a bit of a fluke, says Kramer. A customer uttered it spontaneously during the taping of a testimonial ad five years ago, and it stuck. Now it’s a badge of honor, appearing on T-shirts and bumper stickers. “People stick their heads in the store and shout it out,” says Kramer proudly.

Well, I would, too.

Let’s check the weather forecast for today. Was it overcast, chilly and spitting rain? Check. Was there a brisk wind blowing out of the northeast with regular leaf-scattering gusts? Check. Did the mercury barely top 50? Oh, yes.

Well, sounds like a great day to take the boat out of the water, then!

So that’s what we did. Truth to tell, it wasn’t too bad. We are outdoorsy people, and a spitting, chill rain is nothing. We sucked it up and froze to death. And at the end of the day the Mary M was dismasted, stripped of its fittings, put on a cradle and ready to be tarped and tucked away for a long winter’s nap.

Next spring: A new name. The leading candidate: Lush Life.

I noticed lots of boat names today. Motion Granted — unimaginative lawyer at the helm. D-i-i-i-i-g! Hello, fellow jazz fan. And, of course, more evidence lots of people in the world hate their jobs: Therapy. Quittin’ Time. And, of course, Blowin’ Deadline.

So that was today: Chapped hands, wept-off mascara and cocktail-party-level sociological observations.

The other day, at a photo shoot, I kicked back with the photographer’s new issue of Esquire, and read most of the story referenced here. Yes, it was called “Idiot America,” and I put it down thinking “I wish I’d read this in a newspaper, but of course that will never happen, because newspapers don’t want to offend anyone, especially people who would be considered idiots under the terms of this article.”

You should read it. It’s about evolution, sorta.

Late news tonight: Rosa Parks has died, proof that big things frequently start small. RIP.

One of my old N-S sources/connections/lunch dates checked in via the comments on the N-S piece, below. Hey, Pete! Good to see you here. I haven’t seen him in years, and he brought up one of the single most amusing stories that either of us lived through. He was an actual participant; I just read about it in the paper and laughed my butt off.

Pete was an officer in a service club that planned to bring a circus to Fort Wayne in 1986 — the Toby Tyler Circus. Their posters said, “a tradition since 1881,” which, I contend, might lead a reasonable person to believe the Toby Tyler Circus had been in more or less continuous operation for a century. In fact, the Toby Tyler Circus had been around for about five minutes, and laid claim to “since 1881″ on this basis: The book “Toby Tyler, or Ten Weeks With a Circus,” about a little boy who runs away to join one, had been published in 1881.

This was a sure sign of trouble. Unfortunately, it’s one nobody saw until it was too late.

The Toby Tyler Circus was traveling east, and leaving a trail of unfortunate incidents in its wake, stories our very bright and enterprising police reporter, David Allen, noticed on the wire when it was still near the Illinois line. There was a bleachers collapse, show cancellations, the sorts of things that, if they involved more bare breasts, might have made a halfway decent episode of “Carnivale.” Unfortunately, they just made hay for David, who started writing stories taking note of the approaching, delaminating circus, which was scheduled to play in Fort Wayne in just a few days.

These stories, as you might imagine, didn’t please the service club or the people who were in charge of making sure the show went on safely — police and fire officials, who began telling David they were sure interested in inspecting the circus’ equipment and permits and all that stuff. Meanwhile, the venue that was supposed to host this affair decided you know, we don’t need this trouble and cancelled their reservation. This was, like, the day before the show.

The circus arrived in town, trailed by David, the fire marshal, various other authorities and, of course, Pete. The road manager/ringmaster kept saying, “Don’t worry, the show will go on! We’re a circus, we make people happy! It’s our tradition!” Which I think is when the “since 1881″ business was revealed, but I’m not sure. (I’m relying on my memory, and my 20-year-old impression was, the whole business played out like farce.)

The circus spent the morning shuttling around town, authorities in tow, getting booted from this place and that, increasingly desperate, until finally they were knocking on doors out in the country saying, “Can we borrow this field?” (David was actually filing updates on this breaking story; we were an afternoon paper, after all, and the show was supposed to be that night.)

At one point someone said yes, which led to perhaps the best single quote of the story, the year, and maybe ever:

“I got a call from my tenants this morning and they said there were a couple of midgets in the back yard putting up a big tent.”

I think it was then — when the landlord came over and evicted the midgets, when the ringmaster finally faced the truth, when Pete and his service club finally grasped just how bad a horse they had bet on — that the circus was finally shut down, although all they did was move on to the east and the next gig.

I think David wrote at least one more story, quoting a couple of homeless guys who were hired to do setup in the next town down the road and never got paid. He kept a Toby Tyler Circus poster up next to his desk until he left the paper five years later. I met Pete shortly thereafter; he mentioned his work with the service club. “You mean the ones who had the fiasco with the circus?” I asked. He was not amused. Over time, I got him to admit it was at least a legitimate story, although it took forever.

And just to show you how years can pass and nothing changes, there’s this: In 2004, when the Fellows visited Toronto, Alan and Kate and I made a side trip to Niagara Falls. (I’d never been there, and the Turks in the group were all going, in part to see a great North American natural wonder and in part to see the site of the Marilyn Monroe movie “Niagara.”) While there I picked up a $3 booklet in the gift shop, about people who’ve gone over the falls in barrels and other conveyances. I became convinced — still am — that there’s a great, great movie to be made about these people, and remembered that a Detroit-area man had been the last one to go over the falls. In fact, he’d been the only person to survive a falls plunge with no protective equipment. He later more or less admitted he was trying to commit suicide, but in the immediate aftermath acted like he’d planned the whole thing.

After we got back to Ann Arbor I looked up the stories about him, then did further Googling. When the spotlight shifted away he was still an unemployed metro Detroiter, but like so many falls daredevils before him, he was able to trade his foolhardiness for a little lasting notoriety and a job.

As “world’s greatest stunt man.” With the Toby Tyler Circus.

Which is still having PR problems. Although only God knows if it’s even the same one.

Sorry it’s been a little spotty around here. Much work. I don’t think it’s a good idea to talk about work here — one of the things I’m being paid for is not to scoop my own employers — but it’s fair to say this: I’m doing lots of work for magazines, and with their long lead times, this means it’s Christmas in my head. Talk about rushing the season. I’ve been thinking of chestnuts roasting on an open fire for days and days, and we haven’t even carved the pumpkins yet.

Things will ease up soon. In the meantime, tell us a circus story.

Sorry for no new entry today. On Thursday, I shoved a 2,200-word bolus of type into the outbox, so as to clear my desk for the weekend’s work of preparing a 3,500-word bolus of type to be delivered Tuesday latest. Honestly, I just wasn’t in the mood to spend another minute staring at a screen.

(Again, do not construe any part of this as a complaint. I’m billing more in six weeks than I did all year. I might have to pay quarterly income taxes.)

Instead of staring at a screen, I stared at “The Wheelman,” which I picked up on the recommendation of Ms. Lippman and am thoroughly enjoying, even though the author appears, from his photo, to be about 12 years old.

The precipitating event of the book is a bank robbery. I love bank robberies, at least fictional ones. There’s something about a stick-up that just makes sense — you have the money, I need money, give me your money. The FBI is always issuing press releases whenever there’s a string of bank robberies in any given neighborhood, telling the public what a terrible idea it is. If their statistics tell the truth, it is — the average amount taken in most bank heists is shockingly low. On the other hand, the risk is pretty low, too. You’ve got security cameras, sure, and the prospect of Leavenworth in your future, but tellers don’t resist the way, say, liquor-store owners do. If it weren’t for the dye packs, everybody’d be in the business.

Anyway, “The Wheelman” is worth your time. I’m also reading Nick Hornby’s “A Long Way Down,” which is light as a feather, but in a good way.

Last night’s dinner was a rare failure. I had a hankering for a simple, cool-weather repast of beans and rice. Normally I reach for the ever-popular frijoles negro, but I had a bunch of dried cranberry beans and thought, what the hell. I started cooking with visions of a sort of chuck-wagon cowboy bean throwdown, and instead ended up with something that had way too many hot peppers and was otherwise oddly underflavored. It tasted like so many tailgate-party-style chilis I’ve tried, where in lieu of thoughtful tasting and season correction, the cook just tries to make the top of your skull lift off.

But the beer was cold and afterward I sat there, mouth aflame, hands on fire, and thought about hot peppers.

I thought about how careful you have to be when you’re working with them. I never scrape the seeds out with my fingernails, lest some of that capsaicin stuff get in my nail beds. If I throw the leavings down the disposal, I always step back when I turn it on, having gotten a faceful of low-grade pepper spray more than once.

But mostly, if you don’t wear gloves — and I never wear gloves, I never remember to buy them — you have to be careful what you touch afterward. Here’s a short list of things you shouldn’t touch after handling hot peppers, without at least one and preferably several sudsy hand-washings in between:

1) Your eyes;
2) Your nose;
3) Definitely your genitals;
4) Your lips;
5) and anywhere else the skin is a bit on the thin or membranous side.

I was discussing this with another hot-pepper lover. I told him about an embarrassing event involving contact lenses which left me writhing on the floor and red-eyed for days. He told me about going to the bathroom, taking out his unit and screaming in pain. But the best story was the time his wife turned from dinner preparations to nurse the baby, reached down to help the child latch on, and touched both her own areola and, of course, the infant’s mouth.

“That was a very noisy half-hour,” he said.

Hot peppers — all peppers, really — are otherwise a superfood. Oprah says so.

I said I thought the workload would ease up by Friday. News flash: It won’t. The momentum will carry me through next week, but that’s good. Work = money (eventually…theoretically) = a merry Christmas, a warm house, spring property taxes and a wolf kept from the door. As a character in a novel I can’t remember said, if you think a belching smokestack is ugly, try one with nothing coming out at all.

A little bit o’ bloggage: In the course of Googling something, by way of looking for something else entirely, I stumbled across a blog of someone’s fabulous Knight-Wallace Fellowship year. Not mine, silly, but Julia’s, who’s not a fellow but a spouse. It’s amusing to read, as I recall every emotion. And it’s good to see they’re keeping the standards high, as when Paul Rusesabagina stopped by Wallace House for lunch and a little chat. (The Flickr photos suggest Charles is holding everyone to a higher dress-code standard this year.)

Rusesabagina no doubt came because the fellowship includes a Rwandan journalist, Thomas Kamilindi, whom I was privileged to meet late in the summer. He told his story to the group earlier this month. A wrenching one, as you might imagine:

But there was a lot Thomas didn’t tell us that I later discovered on my own. A liberal Hutu married to a Tutsi, Thomas had been forced – during his time at the radio station – to broadcast the very hate messages he abhorred, the messages that incited hate and violence against the “cockroaches,” as the Tutsis were called. He didn’t mention that he narrowly escaped death on more than one occasion, that he has had a loaded pistol held to his temple and was saved when an officer who recognized him happened by. He didn’t mention that while he was at the Hotel, he actively tried to get word of the massacre out to the White House, the Elysees Palace and human rights organizations. He didn’t mention that he gave an interview to French radio from the hotel, an act which resulted in the government sending a soldier with the express mission to kill Thomas. (He was spared when, by happenstance, the soldier turned out to be a childhood friend.) And he didn’t mention that while he and his wife and younger daughter survived the massacre, their five-year-old daughter – who was visiting with her Tutsi grandparents at the time – did not. In a BBC interview, he says:

“It is very difficult to put my life experiences behind me and to forget. I and my wife live with it all the time. It is part of me. Sometimes I shut myself in a room and cry when I think about my first born, my little girl Mamee. It’s difficult when you know you were about to be killed and you survived but your child was killed”.

You maybe see why this year is a hard one to recover from. For just about everyone.

Not much tonight. I have a long slog at the keys tonight, part of tomorrow and maybe into Thursday, but after that, sunshine should break over the land and all will be good once again.

“It’s all good.” There’s an expression that would sound stupid coming from my mouth. Yours too, prolly.

I have a blanket policy toward all telemarketers — please put us on your no-call list — but I make an occasional exception for market researchers, if I have time. How can I complain about the market if I don’t make myself part of the solution, I figure. Just enough time passes between market-research surveys that I forget how horrible the last one was. Tonight they were seeking my thoughts on food shopping, something I am well-stocked with. And so it began, after a promise it would take no longer than 8-12 minutes:

First, there were some who’s-on-first moments when I tried to explain that I didn’t patronize one store exclusively: “I go to Costco for non-perishable staples, Nino Salvaggio for specialty meats, cheeses and vegetables and Meijer for everything else.”

“That’s Cosso, C-O-S-O?” he asked. Hoo-boy. I should have just hung up. After I finally hung up, having rated all three stores in approximately 2,936 different areas (and yes, “deli prices” and “deli service” were two different ones, and “friendly checkout experience” was included), I checked the timer on the phone: 13 minutes, 5 seconds. Liar!

Once one of these clowns asked me if a particular brand of cheese led to good feelings in general or good feelings about my family. I asked if I could choose “give me a break, it’s Monterey jack, not single-malt Scotch” as a response. Alas, no.

Then, as if to mock me, came the robot call for Deadbeat Michelle, who used to have my phone number. It comes at least twice a week. It is entirely automated, and appears as “out of area” on the caller ID. I cannot ignore it because a) the editors at my best-paying client and b) my dear friend John, also have “out of area” displays (it seems to be related to VOIP). There is no key to press for “you have the wrong number.” And so we endure.

A bit of bloggage: When I was an adult who worked in an office with smart, witty people, I loved going to lunch with them. Joel Achenbach says lunch ain’t what it used to be. Noted.

Once more into the breach, then.

Quite an amusing story in the News today, a variation on a timeless theme in suburbia: There goes the neighborhood:

GROSSE POINTE — When Joe Rippolone parked the lime-yellow fire truck on the cobblestones in front of his century-old carriage house on Washington Road, his well-heeled neighbors did not know quite what to make of it.

“Well, I’m from the Bronx,” Rippolone says in his own defense. “I guess I’m used to doing things a little bit different.”

I encourage you to click through to the picture. The Clydesdale is hilarious. I guess I’m going to have to put Washington Road on my bike-riding route and see this for myself.

Now, there are two schools of thought on the neighbors’ decor: My Property, My Rules vs. Keep Up Your Lawn. The MPMR folks, when not filing fevered blog posts about “post-Kelo America,” are busy defending their right to paint their goddamn houses purple, and if you don’t like it, well, don’t look at it. Sometimes they do.

The KUYL types worry about every little detail of your property. (They don’t worry about their own; that’s your job.) Sometimes they live in communities where a committee led by bitchy queens decides what sort of window treatment you can use, because while they may not come into your house, they can see the backside of your drapes from the sidewalk, and they don’t like them.

I sit between the camps. If I were renting, I’d probably be happy to live in the MPMR neighborhood, on the very real chance the neighbors would be more fun, or at least interesting. If I were buying, I’d go with KUYL and turn the basement into a freak pad. The latter would be a better investment.

MPMR people like to think of themselves as proud individualists, flinty libertarians, the sort of people who made America great. Frequently this is a self-delusion covering for the fact they’re really too lazy to cut the grass more than once every six weeks, move the moldy couch off the porch and the auto parts off the front steps.

KUYL are incredibly sensitive to perceived changes in property values. They’re like a herd of nervous gazelles, ready to bolt at the first sign of trouble, in this case, the dandelions on your lawn. They like to “encourage neighborhood pride” by giving out monthly awards for Best Use of Geraniums (Window Box Division).

Oh, well. I could go on all day. I think the best single comment, though, was on the DetNews comment boards, and it captured a certain GP je nais sais quoi perfectly: It’s in bad taste. Period. And it would be in bad taste in any neighborhood in any city, except maybe Warren.

Also, that “the plumber husband of Henry Ford’s great-great-grandaughter” would be a great name for a band.

Share your tales of MPMR/KUYL types in the comments, if you wish.