Boy, I am out of it. I never realized the Vietnam vet spitting story had been pretty much debunked. Although it doesn’t surprise me, as the whole narrative was a little too tidy for real life: Recently discharged Vietnam vet, in uniform, comes home not to a festive parade, but to a cold, sterile airport. While walking through the airport, not a hero, but just another shlub between planes, a contemptuous fellow traveler, usually a woman, spits on him. Baby-killer! Etc.

I don’t just say this because I’m not a spitter, myself. I know spitting on another person is a time-honored insult, but it never occurred to me to do it, ever. (I like the gypsy custom of spitting on a person’s shadow, though; that’s kind of chilling.) To spit well takes practice; otherwise you’re left with drool all over your chin. Women don’t do that spit-a-hocker thing men do. I’d think even Hanoi Jane Fonda would rather fling a verbal insult than saliva, and face it: Most people just wouldn’t do that.

As for male spitters, there isn’t a riper opportunity for a butt-whippin’ than a filthy civilian hippie expectorating on a uniformed soldier. Most people are smarter than to invite a butt-whippin’.

If you’re an urban-myth spotter, though, you look for the consistencies, or inconsistencies, that make a story too good to be true. Jack Shafer in Slate explains:

While Lembcke doesn’t prove that nobody ever expectorated on a serviceman–you can’t prove a negative, after all–he reduces the claim to an urban myth. In most urban myths, the details morph slightly from telling to telling, but at least one element survives unchanged. In the tale of the spitting protester, the signature element is the location: The protester almost always ambushes the serviceman at the airport–not in a park, or at a bar, or on Main Street.

(And yes, boys and girls, I’m aware Bob Greene swallowed this gob whole and got another tiresome book out of it.)

Anyway, it hardly matters now. The spitting story is now part of the landscape, contrary to the best efforts of Jack Shafer and Jerry Lembcke. And now we have a whole new generation of wounded vets coming home (or not coming home), and the spitting story is always the subtext of the new welcome-home movement: Never again! Support the troops! No problem. I support the troops. But when you press people on what that means, actually, you rarely get a straight answer other than: Don’t spit on them. Agreed. No spitting.

I know I have some military readers, so let me ask this question, something I’ve always wondered about: Those care packages that various groups are always fund-raising for, or collecting for, or sending out — are they worth it? I ask because they so often seem compiled for a troop of hardscrabble mercenaries, not soldiers in the most technologically advanced, well-trained and generously funded fighting force in world history. If I were putting together a soldier care package, I’d try to put myself in a soldier’s shoes and imagine what I’d miss most about home. I’d include… something like… DVDs and video games; meaty letters including photos of lovers/spouses/children; digital cameras; a pint of excellent bourbon in unlabeled, non-breakable flasks; Tabasco sauce for MREs; maybe some discreetly packaged porno. But the ones that I see people sending include things like baby wipes, toothpaste and Kool-Aid. I always think, can’t they get adequately supplied with toothpaste and baby wipes any other way? What kind of Army can’t get its troops adequate wiping supplies?

Probably the same one that can’t get decent body armor. Never mind.

One of my old neighbors, a Marine and Vietnam vet, said a bottle of Tabasco was as highly prized as a bottle of scotch whiskey. He carried his at all times, like his rifle: This is my hot sauce. There are many like it but this one is mine, and better stay mine, if my comrades know what’s good for them.

Day three at home with my poor sick bunny. I’m racing to get a story done so that if I’m felled next, my calendar will be clear. Downside of freelancing: No paid sick days.

One bit of bloggage: Have you driven a Ford lately? No? Well, you can still buy Bill Ford’s house. One error Autoblog makes: You can’t have a “view of Lake Huron” from Ann Arbor. You can have a view of the Huron River, however.

Remember the Michigan county treasurer who lost $200,000 in the Nigerian e-mail fraud? The story gets worse.

Nursing sick children is part of the job description for parenthood, and mercifully, Kate is pretty healthy. Most of the time. Not now. She was down yesterday with a 100-degree fever, chesty cough, sore throat and general ickiness; I knew she was really sick because she didn’t move off the couch all day, mainlining “Suite Life of Zach and Cody” episodes for hours. My rule is: Don’t call the doctor until a change. This morning her fever was up to 103, a personal best for this kid. Called the doc. We’ll be going in later this morning.

I’m taking action on the diagnosis. Her voice sounds like it hurts to even whisper, so I was thinking strep throat, but the cough is wrong for that. Bronchitis, 5-2. Strep, 7-1.

Of course, thinking of odds brings us to yesterday’s sad news, about Barbaro. Even with all that’s been written about the colt, there’s still a certain bafflement in some people — how can a horse die of a broken leg? Jane Smiley explains it elegantly in today’s WashPost:

A horse’s hoof is wondrous structure — the outside horn is lined with delicate membranes and blood vessels that feed and support the bones of the foot. The bones of the foot are analogous to a person’s fingertips, since a horse’s knee is analogous to a person’s wrist. The racehorse carries a thousand pounds at 35 to 40 miles per hour using a few slender bones supported by an apparatus of ligaments and tendons that have no analogues in human anatomy. Every part of the system depends on every other part. What happened to Barbaro was that the engineering couldn’t take it. When it was right, as in the Kentucky Derby, it was perfectly right, and when it became wrong, it became irredeemably wrong.

I knew Barbaro was doomed last weekend when I heard that 80 percent of one of his hooves had to be removed due to laminitis. That’s practically an amputation. The part that was removed is the part that grows back, but to do so would take more than a year, and this after 8 months in slings and casts and padded stalls. Even banking on the return a horse like this can bring at stud — and thoroughbreds breed live, no artificial insemination for them, so he’d have to be sound enough to cover the mare — it would be cruel to put him through that. He’s happier in horse heaven, where only people wear leather.

They had the Miss America pageant last night? In JANUARY? In VEGAS? For the SECOND year? (Man, I’m out of it.) Still, though, you have to laugh — what feminism couldn’t kill, reality TV slaughtered without a peep. The new action is in Miss USA, with its rehab-attending top Miss and MySpace-disgraced wannabe Miss. Now there’s a pageant for today’s world, ain’a? And to think, this used to be considered the contest for girls who were too dumb to say they advocated world peace. Huh.

So, the San Francisco Chronicle started this new podcast — “Correct Me if I’m Wrong,” reader voice mails shared with the world. The first one was genius. Not only do we have a reader who uses terms like “prolix” and “tautology,” he goes off on a rant that’s one for the ages (”Aren’t you there to ensure that the English language is not pissed on by your sub-editors?”), and the readers responded with remixes, mash-ups and ringtones made from it. I wish I’d saved some of my better reader VMs, but none of them are nearly as good as this one; I got grouchy bitching, mostly, including one from a man who lectured me for five minutes about why I wasn’t using my husband’s name. (Time stamp: 3:30 a.m., a nice way to ensure the writer won’t croon “chuck you, Farley” back atcha.) There was a guy who used to call the Columbus Dispatch city desk at night, utterly stone crazy, and rant about the Irish Republican Army (he was a fan) and dropping bombs down the Queen’s chimney (which he advocated). One night he called as we were leaving for dinner, so as an experiment, we laid the receiver down on the desk and went ahead and took our break. When we came back an hour later, he was still talking.

Pilotless aircraft! Pilotless aircraft! Don’t you check these things?!

Gary Kamiya weighs in on those pesky readers and all their opinions, here.

Off to the doc. Temp’s down to 99 and she’s feeling better, but we’re going anyway.

The terms of my ad agreement stipulate I cannot tell people to click on their links, and I’m not, but I do call your attention to them briefly today, and never again. You know how they work, right? Google’s servers sniff your page and figure out who might be reading it, then toss up some ads to suit what it thinks are their tastes. Once I searched Blake’s line “the moon like a flower in heaven’s high bower / in silent delight sits and smiles on the night” and got an ad for 1-800-FLOWERS. Proving, I hope, that computers have a way to go to catch up with us.

So I just loaded the page and got four — two for ice-skating, apparently prompted by my mention of Kate’s ice capades; one for Detroit home inspectors, perhaps because of my driving tour of Mexicantown; and finally, one for roll-off Dumpsters. Huh? Ah, this must be the reason: Yesterday came the news that Ford Motor Co. could not have lost more money last year if they’d set fire to the building and used a dump truck to drop $100 bills into the flames for 12 months straight.

This is going to be fun. This may be a new form of written performance art — the Google Ad Scramble. Let the games begin.

The New York Times has a story today that says female politicians are more likely, these days, to emphasize their maternity in selling themselves to the voting public, i.e., vote for me, I’m a mom. Hmm. The story goes into some detail about what a radical departure this is, as previously being a mommy was seen as a sign of weakness: For a long time women seeking high office, particularly executive office, were advised to play down their softer, domestic side, and play up their strength and qualifications. Focus groups often found voters questioning whether women were strong enough, tough enough, to lead. Huh. This just goes to show why I’m ill-suited for a career in politics, as it would be difficult to have one for very long before one developed an all-consuming contempt for voters.

Case in point: I once interviewed a woman at a rally for Dan Quayle. This was when he was briefly running for president, in 2000. “What do you like about him as a candidate?” I asked. “His marriage,” she said. “Go on,” I said. “Just…his marriage,” she said. Unspoken was her obvious contempt of the current occupant of the White House, who was also married, but who cheated on his wife. Quayle didn’t stay in the race long, and I assume this woman ended up voting for George Bush, who was also married. I wonder if she ever remembers this moment and feels like an idiot. My guess: No. One of the subsequent holders of Quayle’s foot-in-the-D.C.-door congressional seat is my old congressman, Mark Souder. He chickenhawked his way out of Vietnam as a conscientious objector and later was a strong booster of the Iraq war.

The archives of American newspapers are full of blustery quotes by male politicians who vowed to “protect” America, as though they were out there patrolling Fallujah in a Humvee, not sitting in Congress risking no injury more severe than accidental stabbing with a ballpoint pen. Remember when that crazy man came into the Capitol building with a gun and started shooting? It was a few years ago; he killed two Capitol police officers. Who was the testosterone-drenched congressman whose response was to lock the office door and crouch behind the desk? Tom DeLay? I think so. I remember thinking at the time, maybe this will be the incident that finally makes us confront the disgraceful state of care for the mentally ill in this country; perhaps it will be led by Congress, whose home was shot up by a man whose most recent treatment was “Greyhound therapy” — the inside-baseball jargon for buying a troublesome nutcase a ticket to another town, where he can be some other locality’s problem. No. Instead the talk was immediately about the far more useful tactic of arming everyone, so that the next attack could be answered by a hail of bullets by brave armed citizens.

If this is what passes for strength in Washington, bring on the mommies. At least I know they’ve been thrown up on and changed about two million diapers. That’s harder than flapping one’s gums.

The bloggage:

Glory hallelujah, I never thought it would happen, and it has happened, and so it must be shouted to the heavens: I finally found a post-”Close Encounters” movie directed by Steven Spielberg that I actually like. “Munich.” Those who know me know this is a true milestone; I’m probably the most reliable Spielberg-hater in five counties. I’m still so stunned that I think I’m going to have to digest it for a few days before I can write about it. I just thought the date should be noted somewhere.

I don’t know why this is amusing, but The Sun has found topless photos/screen captures of all the nominees for Best Actress. (Probably NSFW, depending on where you W.) No, I know why it’s amusing: Because they asked, in the lead-in, who has the best “jubblies” on this year’s red carpet. Surprise of the bunch: Judi Dench. Yes, I said Judi Dench.

There are very few reporters who could write a first-person account of this personal problem — trying to get one’s passport renewed in a matter of days, after one has noticed its expiration and one has a non-refundable flight to Paris coming up — without sounding like an overprivileged twit. The phrase boo-freakin’-hoo comes to mind. And yet, most reporters are not Jon Carroll:

It was still dark outside. I sat on the narrow steps of the passport building. I guess I must have been looming in the gloaming, because I alarmed passers-by who suddenly rounded the corner and encountered my slumping form. I dialed the number on the window. I was placed on hold. I was on hold for quite a while. I began to realize that I looked a lot like an indigent person, huddled in a darkened doorway with an old cell phone pressed to my ear. Were a police officer to come along, what would I say? “I’m on hold with the State Department?” Yeah, I bet that works.

Forty-five minutes are up. Go have yourself a Monday.

I’m disappointed by the stupid soundtrack, but there’s still something about this that cracks me up:

Man wonders why AT&T truck has been parked in the alley for three days. Man looks closer. Man realizes AT&T worker — in orange vest and hardhat — is actually using the bucket truck to pick oranges off a neighbor’s tree.

Now see, if he were doing this in Iraq, we’d celebrate his entrepreneurial spirit.

Having never lived with a fruit tree, I’m of two minds. My friends in Florida say that once you get over the thrill of having a mango tree in your yard, after you make the first mango ice cream and mango chutney and mango smoothie and mango grilled with fish and so forth, you look up at the tree and realize: I’ve got about a million more mangoes to go, don’t I? And then you start praying an AT&T truck rolls down the street and steals a few, before they start to fall on the lawn and rot. The next thing you learn about fruit trees is, they really require a great deal of care to give fruit worth picking — thoughtful pruning and spraying and so forth, and if you don’t, pretty soon the apples get wormy, the peaches shrink to the size of golf balls and you start perusing garden catalogs online, using the search term “maintenance-free.”

On the one hand, I could see that AT&T guy as a blessing. On the other, it’s always courteous to ask before you pick. On the third hand, maybe he did ask; what does the guy with the video camera know, really? On the fourth hand, this is what journalism will look like in the future; this is “citizen journalism,” comrades. Enjoy the future!

Speaking of future journalism, here’s something else you’ll have to get used to — major metropolitan newspaper columns about anal sex, including a bulleted list of tips for how to make it work for you. I can only chuckle wryly, recalling the approximately 70 million times I had something excised from a story on the grounds that it was too spicy for our readers. I once wrote a fashion story about the strategic removal of pubic hair that, by editorial fiat, never once used the term “pubic hair.” I was scolded for trying to pull a fast one on a less dirty-minded editor by including the name of the rock band the person I was writing about played in (Catherine’s Horse). I recall the early days of the AIDS epidemic, when hours were spent in meetings, trying to draw a shaky line between the sexual practices that were most often involved in the disease’s transmission and the sensibilities of our readers, whom the editors all assumed were 70-year-old nuns, apparently. And now here’s a column about how to do one of these very same dirty deeds! I never thought I’d live so long.

As recently as Jan. 3, 2005, I worked for a newspaper where, on orders from the corner office, the word “butt” was verboten. Not two years later, butt-f*cking. It is to laugh.

(A friend of mine tells me a story about how her syndicated column, which on this day discussed the merits of sucking fat about of one area of the body and injecting it in another, caused a stir with editors. Why? Because she wrote that fat was sucked from one’s “butt,” and oh my we can’t say that, can we? She was encouraged to substitute the word “hips” instead. I tell you this so the next time you see a story about “hips-f*cking,” you’ll know what it’s about.)

OK, bloggage: Here in southeast Michigan, I wake up every day and open my newspaper with a certain wreck-on-the-freeway fascination, because it appears that our free-fall to the bottom of the economic barrel is not over. Our unemployment rate is over 7 percent and the state is bleeding population in an arterial spray. The day before yesterday came the news that we lead the nation in home foreclosures. (Guess what our rate of increase between 2005 and 2006 was? Here’s a hint: Nationally, it was 42 percent. Give up? OK. In Michigan, it was…drumroll please…127 percent. Yes! Michigan is in the house! Or out of the house! Whatever.) Yesterday came the news that Ford Motor Co. could not have lost more money last year if they’d set fire to the building and used a dump truck to drop $100 bills into the flames for 12 months straight. And today comes the story I’ve learned to look for in the days immediately following these gloomy announcements. I reproduce the headline here because it didn’t disappoint:

Ford CEO says bonuses needed to retain talent

This happened after the Delphi bankruptcy filing last year, too. The company announced it was cutting the rank-and-file’s pay by 50 percent, but paying seven-figure bonuses to certain members of the management team so they wouldn’t leave. A reasonable person might say, “So? Let them leave. Don’t they share responsibility for this debacle?” Well. To read these stories, not only is this a stupid question, the sort of thing only a blue-collar numbskull would ask, it shows your utter lack of understanding of how business works. Said the CEO:

“Now we are in a tough situation right now, and we are in a turnaround situation, and we need the absolute best, skilled and motivated team in all of the positions. That is the way we are looking at it, is to make sure that we are paying for performance, even though it is really a turnaround situation. We need that performance … more than ever.”

It’s times like this I regret not going to business school.

First, a little light housekeeping: I’m adding some Google ads to the site. From time to time over the years, people have asked me whether I’d consider hosting advertising here, and my answer was always bafflement: Who in their right mind would advertise here? In the six years I’ve been wasting time on this lunacy playing around with this blog, I’ve never really strayed far from the original idea, which is: Daily life, with links. That’s all. If people want to stop by and read, or participate in the discussions, I’m flattered to pieces, but really, if there was ever a blog about nothing, this is it.

However, even nothing has its readers. I added Google ads to my poor, neglected Grosse Pointe Today site when I launched it last fall. Even with haphazard updating and constant excuse-making from its proprietress, I checked my account status the other day and discovered I’d made, lord almighty, $19. Why, that means NN.C could conceivably make, oh, $60 in the same time period. As my friend the Other Alan used to say, “If you saw $60 lying on the ground, would you pick it up?” Of course I would. Google ads are text-based and unobtrusive and do not feature dancing silhouettes or punch-the-monkey games or, my new bete noire, those rollover-and-it-speads-like-a-stain things.

So we’ll see how it works out. Trial basis. Etcetera.

Content will remain status quo. As tempting as it might be to become Perez Hilton.

Another housekeeping note: I’m going to start limiting the time I spend writing here, and dammit, there’s nothing you can do to make me feel guilty about it. All that means is, I’m limiting myself to 45 minutes a day to put together a main entry, and if nothing good emerges in 45 minutes, then I’m going to go bake brownies or something. “But Nance,” you might be asking. “Frequently I read what you post here, and it’s nothing good. Are you saying you spend more than 45 minutes on it? If so, what a waste of time.”

I’m saying it’s none of your damn business. Just that I have to devote more time to paying work, exercise and keeping the dust bunnies from taking over the living room, not to mention my oft-laid-aside fiction writing, which is this year’s do-it-or-drop-it long-term project.

Perspective. It’s all about perspective. I actually considered taking a hiatus, and then realized that’s probably not doable, either. For whatever reason, I seem to need to write this thing more than anyone wants to read it.

OK, then. Bloggage: Fans of this week’s On the Nightstand pick will want to read the NYT’s interview with Jim Harrison today. The picture alone is worth the click-through; if I can live like he does and look no worse at age 69, I’d say that was a fair deal.

TV time. Who’s watching “Rome” this season? (Silence.) Thought so. So let’s start the one-sided discussion!

There’re a lot of nits you can pick with any depiction of ancient Rome. Some aren’t worth picking anymore — I’m fully willing to believe that everyone in the eternal city spoke with a British accent — and some still have some life in them. I’m puzzled, watching this show, as to how they could spend a nine-figure sum and still not have one scene with more than 20 actors in the frame. (I guess they blew their production budget on that silly gladitorial contest between Titus Pullo and six or seven unfortunate would-be executioners last season. Although HBO probably could have financed that entirely by selling T-shirts with “XIII” on them in its immediate aftermath.)

The central storytelling trick of the show — two fictional soldiers who wander, Zelig-like, through the well-known historical events of Rome — is still amusing, never more so than in the episode dealing with the birth of Cleopatra’s son by Caesar. Cleo’s back this season, pressing her case for the boy to be legitimized, laying the groundwork for the seduction of Mark Antony, which should be about as difficult as falling off a log; Antony’s the King of Goats and Cleo’s about as hot as hotties come. I’m noticing the profanity has been upped in this season, which is sort of disappointing, but it’s given me a whole new oath to swear by, thanks to the King of Goats: “on Juno’s c*nt.” And Atia’s whispered parting shot to Cleo is a keeper: “Die screaming, you pig-spawned trollop.” It’s a little strange to see Lucius Vorenus turning into Al Swearengen crossed with Tony Soprano, but I guess even high-quality HBO series have to have a little synergy with one another.

Is my 45 minutes up? It is. Time to walk the dog and hit the shower, in that order. Hope I don’t meet anyone important on the first errand, although it is about 18 degrees at the moment — it’s pretty unlikely.

A few people in the comments the other day were discussing how they learned to skate, on farm ponds, without supervision, with a casually tended fire for warmth. Ah, memories. Monday I took Kate and another friend to the park to skate again. This was the third consecutive day, and watching them, I was left with the feeling that most of what adults do for kids in this area is unnecessary. On Saturday, in her lesson at the indoor rink, they practiced jumping — not figure-skating jumps, but just little hops. The hops were tentative and lots of kids fell. Yesterday, at the outdoor ice at the park, one kid dragged a large stick out onto the ice and they all made a game of lining up to jump it. With every pass, their jumps got higher and more confident.

Then an adult came out and dragged the stick away. Because, you know, it’s unsafe to have obstructions on the ice. But it did its work. By the time we went home, Kate and three other kids had made a game of skating fast to fire snowballs at one another. She was keeping up with the hockey players. Not with their agility and fast changes of direction, but that’ll come next week, I expect.

I should have skipped the damn lessons and saved myself $100.

So. I need to get out of the house more, so yesterday I got out of the house. Clear to lovely Dearborn I went, for an interview. You know you’re in Dearborn when the signs switch to Arabic. Cooling my heels in the reception area of my subject’s office, a woman click-clacked through the lobby in stilettos. I looked up; she was dressed in tunic, pants and a hijab. That’s a hard look to rock, but rock it she did — I think the stilettos were key. That, and the confidence. Wear your clothes, don’t let them wear you. She had that part figured out, Islamic constraints or not.

On the way home, the on-ramp to I-94 was closed, so I opted to stay on U.S. 12, Michigan Avenue, and just see what I could see, in this case, urban decay infused with that unstoppable Motown pulse. (This makes no sense, but if you came here, you’d understand.) Soon the bilingual signs gave way from Arabic to Spanish, my stomach started to growl, and I knew what was coming next — carne asada tacos in Mexicantown with lots of cilantro and onions. I hate to say it, for fear of bringing on another rage explosion from my nastier commenters, but if recent immigration from south of the border did nothing but vastly improve the menus in Mexican restaurants, I’d call it an even trade. My favorite taqueria doesn’t take plastic, and I was down to my last $3, so I turned on to Vernor to look for a bank. Block after block — no banks. I decided to settle for a Quik-E-Mart with a high-fee ATM — none of those, either. Lots of Payday Loans and check-cashing joints, though. And people. This part of the city may be poor, but it is populated. Finally found a bank branch with a non-usurious ATM, back down to Taqueria Lupita and the lunch special.

Lupita’s sits in a strip with several other restaurants, one of which was named a “best of” in a magazine roundup I helped write last summer. We ate at the best-of place, and to say it was disappointing in comparison was an understatement. It was full of gringos, however, whereas at Lupita’s at least half the customers are speaking Spanish. When in doubt, choose the latter.

So, bloggage:

Christopher Hitchens is something of a self-parody these days, and while this piece in Slate doesn’t mention Islamofascism or Bill Clinton or any of his other well-worn topics, it’s b.s. just the same: In the matter of Michael Devlin and his captive boys, blame the neighbors. After noting Devlin’s adherence to the old psycho cliché (the quiet psycho who kept to himself), he adds:

Of course, as the story necessarily went on to say, the good people of this section of Kirkwood, Mo., are now slightly kicking themselves for failing to spot their neighbor’s uncanny ability to produce full-grown male children without having a woman on hand.

Of course, if Devlin had moved into Hitchens’ neighborhood and come home with a pubescent boy, things would have been different:

I live in an upscale building that abuts a not-quite-so-upscale neighborhood, and when I heard blood-chilling female screams one night, I know I had the (Kitty Genovese) story in mind as I caught up a kitchen knife and ran downstairs. I was almost abashed by the number of my fellow residents outside on the street before me. (The assailant ran off, and we were able to comfort the girl until the cops came—and more than one person alluded to the Genovese case.) But to find that you have been passively watching a crime, or crimes, in slow motion, must make you feel stupid as well as cowardly. This might help explain the slightly plaintive and defensive tone adopted by some of the local Kirkwoodians, such as the lady I cited above who had moved there just to avoid this kind of unpleasantness. “A lot of us are down on our luck and living paycheck to paycheck,” observed Harry C. Reichard IV, who occupied the apartment above Devlin’s. “When you’re just trying to survive, you don’t pay a lot of attention to people around you.” This justifiable emphasis on one’s own priorities extends apparently even to the avoidance of idle gossip—as in, “I see the guy downstairs has just had another teenager.”

Hmm. Well. Good for Hitchens, running to the damsel’s aid with a kitchen knife. Note that no one in Devlin’s neighborhood heard any boys screaming, however. They just noticed that he had one, and then he had another one. I guess Hitchens doesn’t get into the lousy neighborhood next door very often, because if he did, he’d know that neighbors with ever-changing household demographics are as common as rain.

I’ve spent much of my adult life not just abutting “not-quite-so-upscale” neighborhoods, but living in them. Once I stupidly wondered aloud why, when I got a wrong-number call, the person on the other end so often opened with “Who’s this?” I say “stupidly” because I was sitting with someone who worked in the juvenile-justice system, and he rolled his eyes. “Don’t you know anything?” he said, explaining that his clients overwhelmingly lived in households where someone was always moving out or in, where every couch was someone’s bed, where the person who answered the phone might be mom, uncle, uncle’s friend Ed, mom’s boyfriend Skeeter, etc. “Who’s this” was a necessary salutation when you heard an unfamiliar voice on the other end.

In Fort Wayne we had a house around the corner from us, a three-bedroom of maybe 1,500 square feet, with 16 people living in it. They were very discreet, probably because someone was fraudulently using Section 8 housing vouchers, and you never would have known there were so many people under one roof, but if you counted noses, there were 16 noses.

And Hitchens disapproves of Devlin’s neighbors, who, when they saw another boy around, failed to investigate? Some people really do live on the right side of the tracks.

Remember how I said this was the Winter That Wasn’t? Well, it’s winter now. Here’s a picture of our boat slip. In five more months, there’ll be a boat there.

I took Kate and a friend to the park today, because finally there was ice to skate on, and skate they did. Every time she puts her new skates on, she gets better at it; it’s a pleasure to watch, at least until the wind off the lake strips off all my mascara and I have to step inside the rec center to warm up a bit. There were two teenage girls in there with their mother, complaining that there was snow on the ice and why wasn’t anyone shoveling it off?

“It’s just a dusting, really,” I said, gesturing to the several skaters already out there, gliding around unimpeded. They glared at me. OK, don’t mind me. The fancy-shmancy private-school indoor rink a couple miles away opens to the public every Sunday for two hours; I’m sure they’d be more comfortable there anyway. I went back to watching Kate and her friend write their names in the ice and felt grateful they won’t be teenagers for a few more years.

I guess when they are, I’ll be back to watching them the way I did when they were toddlers, but in this nice in-between period I was free to take a little stroll along the lake, which was just like “Stranger Than Paradise,” only with maybe a little more blue and gray in the shot. I couldn’t really take the time to frame it because the wind was pretty strong and my eyes kept tearing.

I admit to getting tired of it by March, but all things considered, I sorta like winter.

And now it’s Monday, yet another of the days that make me suspect the Grosse Pointe Public Schools hate working parents — it’s an in-service day for teachers, so no school. Last week was the MLK holiday. Next month will be a one-week winter break, followed six weeks later by spring break. It’s hard to imagine that two weeks ago I daydreamed of going back to work in an actual office, with adults and everything. Not until it’s legal to kennel 10-year-olds. (You can kennel infants and toddlers, but once they grow up a little, the deal’s off.)

So, bloggage:

A young man was released from prison here last week. I wasn’t here for the full length of this story, but I gather it went like this: Nathaniel Abraham, at 11, was the youngest person in Michigan convicted of homicide, back in 1997. He was released from prison last week, the day before his 21st birthday. For his final court date, he chose an understated, I’m-ready-to-go-straight costume — an ivory suit with pink pinstriping, accented with pink shirt and pink alligator shoes, a matching fedora, the whole ensemble topped with a rabbit-fur coat.

Of course, in Detroit, a city where racism is the bass note of every song we hear, from hip-hop right down to the Muzak in grocery stores, this image was greeted with …not quite hysteria, but the sort of calm, reasoned discussion you see on lunatic-politics discussion boards. From across the metro area, a million voices rose as one and shouted: Pimp.

But at least it gave the columnists something to gnash over. This one includes a photo. This one doesn’t.

Eric Zorn had one of his very entertaining, supremely time-wasting Lank of Linkin’ roundups today, including this entry: Before you click on The Beast’s annual list of 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2006 (raw language warning), see if you can guess who’s number one from these excerpts: “… nakedly self-serving … has so successfully snowed America that he could go around kicking puppies all day and he’d be applauded for his authenticity. In reality (he) is as phony as slimeballs come.”

I guessed Donald Trump. It wasn’t him (although he was on the list, at No. 21). I must be losing my touch.

And now Monday begins in earnest. I guess we’ll go skating again.

If I could turn back the hands of time, as Tyrone Davis sang, there isn’t a whole lot I’d change. A few boyfriends would remain strangers, I would have paid closer attention in high school Russian class, I would have taken more chances. But for someone whose big mouth has gotten her into so much trouble, I don’t regret all that much. The remarks that were hurtful, yes. The ones that gave voice to a truth everyone in the room was thinking but which were impolitic to give voice to, not really. Every step on that road took me to this spot on the road, or not exactly on the road, more like off in the ditch, spinning my wheels, shrieking to passing traffic, “Sure! That road seems like the one you should take! But beware! Beware!” — I don’t mind this spot too too much. All part of the journey, etc. Soon the tow truck will arrive, or maybe it won’t, maybe I’ll start walking, and…

OK. Abandon metaphor.

My point: If I had it to do over again I wouldn’t have chosen journalism. Time Inc. laid off nearly 300 people yesterday, eliminated three bureaus. Yes, yes, the next Britney Spears story in People may not have five reporters, what a tragedy, etc. I don’t want to sound any big themes about journalism here; in a lot of ways we made our bed and now we’re lying in it, only it turns out it’s no longer a bed but just this sort of narrow cot, and people keep falling out, and…

Abandon metaphor.

What particularly cheeses me is the timing. Speaking out of pure selfishness, this could not come at a worse time. For me, anyway. Too young for retirement, too old to make a graceful sidestep into another field, it seems that those of us who were drawn to journalism by its two great movements of recent memory — New Journalism and Woodstein-style investigation — are now in the worst possible position. Tough times may make tough people, but they also shred a few in the bargain. Again, speaking selfishly, those 289 jobs eliminated yesterday represent 289 lives turned upside down, and not all will be righted. Yes, it happens in every industry. No, I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m just taking note.

Pout, pout, pout.

I remember, many years ago, my newspaper sent a couple of reporters to some training sponsored by our parent company, Knight Ridder. They came back with their heads spinning; some Free Press people were at the same session, bitching about their latest degradation — the paper would not employ stenographers to transcribe taped interviews. How were they supposed to do their jobs, etc. I feel like Scarlett O’Hara, starved to a ravenous husk, remembering the antebellum tables groaning with food as she’s puking up that radish in the Twelve Oaks garden.

As God as my witness, I’ll never…well, I’d better get to work.

But first! Bloggage! Because that’s why you come here, right? A few snarky remarks, a report on how we’re doing in the D, maybe a dinner menu, and then some tasty linkage, after which we turn the floor show over to the commenters. See? We evolved a new form of journalism, justlikethat. Let’s make it pay for the proprietress, and we’ll all be happy. I will, anyway.

Salon reports on the latest alt-foods craze — raw milk. One of my college boyfriends rented a place in the country for a while, next door to a dairy farm, where he bought gallons of raw milk for something like a buck or two. I mentioned this in passing to my mother, who nearly leapt from her chair in alarm, then commenced telling a hair-raising tale about a girl she knew who got undulant fever (medical name: brucellosis, for you Zevon fans) from drinking unpasteurized milk. She made me promise never to touch the stuff, and I did. It was an easy promise to make, as what little I’d had so far was sort of like drinking liquified butter. In the Salon story, people say raw milk keeps them away from sweets. I’ll say — liquified butter will do that.

It made good coffee cream, I’ll allow. Still: Thank God for Louis Pasteur.

With a 10-year-old in the house, “American Idol” is simply an element that we must live with, and the lack thereof would make life impossible, kind of like oxygen. Eric Zorn tried to put up his dukes against the juggernaut of humiliation that is the early episodes, but on this, I’m more with Jody Rosen at the Slate AI blog, who points out “you couldn’t help but suspect that most of the ‘bad’ singers were actually savvy performance artists, angling for a few minutes of airtime.” Yup. And there were teachable moments, just the same; Alan told Kate the moral of this story is, “Always wear a bra.” How true that is.

Do you hate Pachelbel’s Canon in D? Rob Paravonian does.

UPDATE: And while I was feeling sorry for myself a little while ago, I forgot to thank my lucky stars that while I may not work for the New York Times, that also means I’ll never have to write a story like this:

For some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.

“We called Viking over the holidays every year,� Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.

I mean: Whew.

One of those names from the past that only comes up every decade or so came up last night. Whatever happened to, etc.? We recalled that this person had been involved in an interoffice romance, which led to a particularly tawdry interoffice breakup, the sort of incident that makes managers long to be in the rank and file again.

(There’s one of these in every management career — when you have to tell people it’s not their work that’s the problem, it’s their b.o. Or their whack-ass meltdown over a love affair gone wrong. Whatever.)

Alan said, “She’s the reason companies have no-fraternization policies.” Yep. I never worked for one of those companies myself; if I had I’d be married to someone else today, if I were married at all, and Kate wouldn’t exist. Newsrooms, well-known as turkey pens of coltish intellects, weird hours, incompetent management, triple homicides on deadline and other spicy ingredients, are notorious for breeding office love affairs. I think of the journalists I know, and most are/were married to people they met at work, some serially, which is to say first this person from work, then that person from work. This can get complicated, oh yes it can. Office divorces and/or affairs have sold more quitting-time beers than Budweiser.

I met and married my husband through work, but even after the I-dos, we played it cool. Alan hated talking about domestic matters out in the open. He didn’t even want me to ask what he wanted for dinner. All around us were couples who held hands on the way to the Coke machine, or wives who marched over to collect hubby’s paycheck the minute it was distributed on payday. I’m sure he considered it a huge success when we threw a party and one of his own staff members was amazed to discover I lived in the same house, that we were in fact married and had been for about five years.

(Actually, I considered it a success, too, since it seemed to indicate I was such a boring person no one even bothered to gossip about me anymore.)

I hesitate to bring up this topic, not because everyone has a story, but because everyone’s story is better than mine. Maybe Alex will tell us about the security camera that in one of his former workplaces captured an episode of oral love between a man and a woman who thoughtfully removed her dentures for the occasion. Maybe Kirk will tell us about the couple who was caught not only having an extramarital interoffice affair, but writing a pornographic novel with bondage themes in what they thought was a secret corner of the newsroom computer system. (I pinned down one of the bosses who read this treasure and said I’d be willing to do just about anything to see a sample chapter. He said, “It wouldn’t be a fair trade. It wasn’t nearly as good as it could have been.”) And then there was the young reporter who slept with an older colleague on his living-room couch after an impromptu party when his wife was away, gave him crabs, caused a crisis in his marriage (to say the least) and then later, when the parasites had been routed and the wounds had finally started to scab, showed up at another party where the wife was in attendance, along with her children. “Mommy,” said the little boy. “I saw that lady lying down with daddy on our couch once.” (That story may be somewhat apocryphal, but it still cracks me up.) Or the obsessed Glenn Close wannabe who demanded her lover, as the price of dumping her, insert a secret message to her in his newspaper column. She said this would be their secret. It remained secret for approximately as long as it took to survive editing and get onto the press. As the papers arrived in the newsroom, she showed it around, pointing out how the first letter in every paragraph spelled out, “I love you Joanie.”

None of those stories are mine, in the sense that they didn’t happen at my workplace, but were shared over beers later. It’s amazing to me that I heard them all and still sought out and married a colleague. It’s not like we weren’t warned.

So, bloggage:

You know how you get those e-mails from Nigerian scam artists asking for your help in removing $6 million from the national treasury, offering a 30 percent reward and asking only that you put up some of your own cash as security? You know how you ask yourselves, “Who could ever be so stupid as to fall for this?” We have an answer: The treasurer of Alcona County, Michigan.

Today’s forecast calls for a chance of snow in Michigan. Unless, of course, it gets rerouted to southern California again. Jeez, I remember being in LA once when it rained, and it had the same effect on traffic as eight inches of snow does here. I can’t imagine what actual snow does to the place. Besides freeze the oranges.

Whenever I hear a nitwit like Dinesh D’Souza pushing his latest book, I think to myself, “Maintain your sense of humor.” However, it’s difficult. Fortunately, we have Stephen Colbert to shore us up in the difficult moments.