Tomorrow is trash day, and this ugly mug will be going away. But I just wanted to show you the difference between tough, east-side Detroit squirrels and wussy Indiana squirrels.

On Halloween, many of our neighbors mentioned how surprised they were that we put our uncarved pumpkins out on the porch so early. Everybody said, “Newbies — they’ll learn.” As it turned out we didn’t, probably because this was a bumper year for acorns and the squirrels were otherwise occupied. Still, when we carved them on the 30th we could see evidence that ours had been nibbled on. Not badly enough to wreck them, but enough. The neighbors said we were lucky; everyone on the block has a story about setting a pumpkin out in mid-October and finding it, a week later, entirely penetrated and hollowed-out by marauding rodents. “I knocked on my window at one of them, trying to scare him away, and he just gave me the paw,” one said.

I left this one out to show what damage those mofos can do in just a few days. Actually, I have to admit I rather like the results; the faces the squirrels make are far scarier than anything we could carve.

In 1991, Alan and I went backpacking for 10 days on Isle Royale. We went “into” the country, as they say, and when we came out and picked up a paper it seemed the world had gone mad — there had been a coup in the Soviet Union, blacks and Jews were rioting in Crown Heights and a tree had nearly destroyed our friends’ house in Atlanta.

You know those great Atlanta neighborhoods with enormous towering oak trees? John and Sammy had one of those in their yard, a mighty white oak maybe a century old. A storm blew through, there was a big crash and John came out of his office and Sammy came out of the kitchen and they looked at one another over the trunk of the tree, which had thoughtfully come in almost exactly through the front door.

They made Page One of the Journal-Constitution.

The house was well-nigh totaled, but they elected to rebuild and add on at the same time, and now they have a beautiful house again, but Sammy tells me she no longer sleeps when the wind comes up, and neither do I. When the wind came up before dawn today, it had a note of fury in it, and when I finally got up I wasn’t surprised to hear there were tornados in southern Indiana about the same time. Lots of people dead, too.

Damn, it’s windy out. Blowing steady around 30, gusting to 40, says the weather buoy out in Lake St. Clair. I believe it.

When it gets like this at night I want to do one thing: Crawl into bed with Kate and/or pick her up and take her into ours. In this house, as in the last one, her bedroom is closest to the big tree on the front lawn. At least we’d die together, I figure.

The fall color took a big hit; at times this afternoon, it’s looked like it’s snowing leaves. I’m glad I got out and about in it these last few days, because it was spectacular. I’m not one for rhapsodizing over fall color. It’s like rhapsodizing over fireworks — ooh, that one’s pretty…ooooh, that’s the best ever. (A newspaper colleague of mine used to wonder, quite reasonably, why we bothered to send photographers to fireworks displays. We could recycle the previous year’s shots and not get a single phone call, he contended. In fact, we could probably rotate five or so fireworks pictures indefinitely. I think he was right.)

But the color this year was spectacular. Since this is my first autumn here I don’t know if this is just a great place for color or a great year for it. One newspaper perennial in September is to call up an extension agent and ask how the color will be. I always forget the combination of variables that promotes the most vivid color — wet spring/dry summer/early frost? Dry spring/hot summer/late-arriving rains? — but when it comes, I’m rarely disappointed by fall color. Some of the trees here are cherry-red, and there’s something about seeing that against a gray fall sky that’s just thrilling.

Oooh, that’s a pretty one….ooh, best ever. And so on.

One final note: The thing that makes the current gale — still going on — so strange is now warm it is. It’s coming straight out of the southwest, and the temperature’s in the 50s. We still haven’t had a frost yet, very unusual for this latitude. (But global warming is junk science, doncha know.)

You know what some people in the neighborhood are doing as I write this? Raking leaves. Maybe later they’ll all stand in a line facing into the wind and urinate into it. Both would be about as effective.

OK, then.

Just one bit of bloggage today: This. I don’t normally like blind links, but anything I could say about this one might wreck the kwazy surprise.

Links-a-plenty, today:

I swear, I’m going to stop reading The Poor Man for the Golden Winger and Keyboard Kommandos and start reading it for the occasional mixed grills of links. Is Bill Frist’s family biography actually called “Good People Beget Good People”? Evidently. The reader reviews are hilarious:

This is a fascinating study of the extraordinary mix of in-breeding, animal sacrifice, and corruption required to produce the world’s worst human being. Coming from a family of mildly despicable cheats, the Frists had a leg up on normal human beings…but it still took an enormous amount of laboratory work and careful training to produce not just a self-involved twit but an unspeakable monster.

Snork.

The News reminds us that we’re creeping up on the 30th anniversary of? (Cue the Gordon Lightfoot tune!) Yes, the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald. You’ll recall, from having the song burned into your memory that the “musty old hall in Detroit” where they prayed, was the Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral — hence, Ground Zero for the remembrances. Evidently they still ring the bell 29 times, “for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald,” plus one more time for all sailors lost in the Great Lakes.

But the man who made the wreck famous around the world won’t be there: Yet Lightfoot, who has attended memorial services in Michigan in the past, believes out of respect for the family members that it’s “time to put this ship to rest,” according to his business manager in Toronto, Barry Harvey of Early Morning Productions.

I have a friend who lives up there in the U.P., in the Les Cheneaux islands. The islands are an archipelago in northern Lake Huron; the name means “the channels,” and the area provides inland-type boating waters. Not that night — November 10, 1975. My friend said the waves in the channel that runs past their cottage were so high you didn’t dare cross it even in a fairly sturdy Chris Craft, and this was water you could ski on, most days. It was a weak version of a hurricane that night, only with snow.

I don’t read The Corner for a number of good reasons. Roy Edroso reminds me why.

And now to work.

Remember when sneakers came out with those twinkly lights in the soles, and before they went to the market they belonged in — toddlers and pre-schoolers — for a while actual adults wore them? OK. Some years ago, in Fort Wayne, police were chasing an armed robber who was wearing those things. He tried to foil his pursuers by jumping out of his car and making his escape cross-country through a recently harvested farm field. After all, it was dark! He could just slip into the inky rural night and be gone!

Oops.

From the same file: Criminals whose fashion choices trip them up. In this case, literally.

Whoever said funerals were for the living sure got that one right. Rosa Parks’ was carried on live TV today, and the last time I checked — about 5:30 p.m. — it was still going on.

It started at noon.

Bill Clinton was one of the first speakers. He said he couldn’t stay for the rest of the service because he had to go back to New York and work on getting poor people better health care, and that’s something Mrs. Parks would have approved of. He got a big round of applause. That guy kills me; he has the most effortless people patter I’ve ever seen. I think most of what makes Republicans hate him so much is because — follow me closely here — he’s so likable.

I personally like him because he doesn’t say “tair” instead of “terror,” but that’s me. Actually, I’m feeling rather nostalgic about the whole Clinton era. My job was secure, my bosses were pleasant, my house payment low. At the beginning of it, I married Alan. In the middle of it, a charming little baby appeared in my life. At the end, the new millennium arrived with thrilling fireworks around the world and for a while you could almost believe things were going to stay swell for a good long while.

Just confirms my initial impulse of pessimism in all things. Sooner or later, it’s welcome to the suck.

I owned Knight Ridder stock in the Clinton era, too — a lot of it (for me, anyway). It was never a great performer, but I got it at a 15 percent employee discount and bought it through payroll deduction, so it piled up. I sold every last share to buy this house, which has no doubt declined in value since the papers were signed and Economic Apocalypse Soon opened in the Metro Detroit area. Maybe the bad blood of KR seed money cursed the place, I dunno. But of course it’s something I wish I still owned, because things may well get interesting for KR very soon:

With many Knight Ridder employees still emptying their desks in the wake of the latest round of layoffs, company executives found themselves faced with potential pink slips of their own this week, courtesy of the company’s biggest shareholder, Private Capital Management. PCM warned the Knight Ridder board Tuesday that if it fails to take its advice and sell the company, PCM will likely lead an effort to get rid of current board members and executives and sell off Knight Ridder assets to the highest bidder.

In other words, it’s possible that, for the first time ever, it might pay pretty well to own KR stock — and if you’re an employee, that’s good, because you may need to sell it soon.

One thing the last few years have taught me: Never, ever say “it can’t get any worse.” It can always get worse. And frequently does.

But I don’t want to bring you down. Let’s leap to the bloggage:

One man’s fashion misstep, recounted amusingly on eBay. And apparently the auction made the seller famous.

Sometimes when you follow all the little links at The Poor Man, you wind up in the strangest places. If you’re not feeling queasy at the moment (I was when I read this, alas), page through the Hall of Fame. My favorite is the Hook ’em Horns guy, which sort of captures, in one picture, my feelings about Texas.

I have the beginnings of a raging head cold. I’m going to bed early with a mug of Throat Coat. Carry on.

Apparently the bugaboo of “info” is kicking back a lot of comments in the newspaper survey thread. I also heard from someone who got booted for “online.com.” Try “data,” or do the filter-busting trick of “1nf0” or some such.

Sorry about this.

Thanks to all who are participating in the newspaper-readership survey, below. After reading most of the responses to John Scalzi’s, I can’t say any part of it was all that shocking, but some parts were surprising. The no-more-trash argument against dead-tree versions of the paper never occurred to me, and I am a person who risks a hernia every time I take my recycling to the curb. I guess I’ve been living with newsprint piles so long they’re just part of the furniture.

Here’s what I fear losing when the print newspaper goes away — the surprise. There’s something about the experience of holding broadsheet in your hands, turning the pages, scanning the story array, lingering here, passing by there. I read the Sunday paper on the living room couch and Alan reads it in a family-room easy chair. The rooms are adjacent, and we sometimes talk back and forth about this story or that. The breakfast table gets a bit crowded sometimes, but I simply can’t imagine eating breakfast without a paper. What — you make conversation at that hour? Before the coffee? Don’t think so.

And then there’s the surprise, the hey-Martha story, the I-didn’t-know-that story. Some people find being confronted with material they’re not interested in is a waste of time. I don’t. There’s always something there that I didn’t know I was interested in, and it turns out I was.

I recall a conversation, some years back, with someone rhapsodizing over how wonderful it will be when the electronic newspaper becomes, basically, a clipping service, customized for every reader. All the stories will interest you! How wonderful!

Well, maybe not. When Google comes up with an algorithm for the surprise story, I’ll bite. Until then, I’m taking my chances on the newsprint.

I confess: I’ve been watching HBO’s “Rome.” You need to say it like the actors, though, with a British accent and that extra-long O: I’ve been watching “Roooome.” And Roooome is growing on me.

It took me a while to get into, but it’s paying off. I needed to do some outside reading, but I get it all now, I think: Most of the characters are based upon real people, but the two central ones — a pair of soldiers named Lucius Vorenus and Titus Pullo — are not. They sort of amble through the narrative like Zelig, turning up at key points in Roman history, as in episode 2, called “How Titus Pullo Brought Down the Republic.”

But that was nothing compared to Ep. 8, “Caesarion,” in which T.P. is presented as a good bet for father of Cleopatra’s son, ostensibly by Julius Caesar. Of course this was preceded by some hot Roman soldier-on-Egyptian princess loooove action (otherwise it wouldn’t be HBO, you know). Titus Pullo is quite the jolly hunk, and I’m beginning to understand the eternal erotic appeal of leather miniskirts — on guys, anyway.

They kind of stack the deck in T.P.’s favor, though — he gets all the good lines. Buying a prostitute for a young charge’s first time, he balks at the price, then pays it, saying, “The girl better f*ck like Helen of Troy with her ass on fire, or I’ll know the reason.”

Drop that one at your next cocktail party.

John Scalzi did this over on his site, out of curiosity, he says. Well, the next big writing project I have to do involves this very topic, so I’ll do it for every journalist’s favorite reason: To avoid doing the work myself.

Kidding. I’m actually curious, too. So here we go:

1) Do you subscribe to a daily newspaper? (If you have an online subscription that you pay for, include that, too, but tell me if it’s online.)

2) Why or why not?

3) If you don’t subscribe, what could get you to do so? If you do, what would make you drop your subscription?

Leave your answer in the comments. (This is actually tangential to what I’m writing, but it’s still interesting to me.)

Oh, and my answers:

1) Yes, the WSJ and NYT daily. I read the hometown papers online and buy them on the newstand on the days I’m out.

2) Because I’m a reader of all things, including blogs.

3) I’d drop both if either daily-delivered paper made significant cuts — that is, cuts I would notice — in their coverage.

Fuller discussion to follow.