I think one of the reasons I like Detroit is, it’s kind of like Anna Nicole Smith — an ongoing trainwreck that hit bottom long ago, but still wallows down there, enjoying the scenery. (No, that wasn’t a mixed metaphor. More of a pureed one.) Every day it reveals a new facet of its charm. For instance, snow removal. Or lack thereof.

The city provides — hold onto your hats — no residential snow removal. Seriously. Main arteries and business districts are plowed, but residential streets fend for themselves. Neighborhoods that still count a few members of the middle class in their number form associations and pay for plowing privately. Everyone else buys boots. In apocalyptic winters, whole streets can become impassible. My friend Ron did some stories about this a few years ago, and said the first thing that happens is, everyone passes the word when the mail will be arriving, and residents gather at the closest navigable corner. The mailman arrives, distributes the mail and leaves. If you miss it, come back tomorrow.

I seem to recall a fun fact from those stories: The city of Detroit owns approximately the same number of plowing vehicles as the city of Dallas. But I’m not sure about that.

Anyway, Kate and I headed out yesterday morning, not particularly early, to run some errands that took us into the city. My backstreet route to the freeway runs through three municipalities, the last of them Detroit. You know where the city limits are when the car’s back end starts to cut loose. Whee! City livin’!

Then we headed down to the Wayne State campus area, which, theoretically, should have been plowed, except it mostly wasn’t. We found a parking lot, locked up, and walked a block. Interesting to note how businesses were handling the crisis — a restaurant’s front walk was clear and dry, but the Islamic student center next door hadn’t been touched. Islam — a religion of peace, and also of warm climates. (Wait, what about the snow-scoured mountain passes of Afghanistan? They don’t plow up there.)

Oh, well. We got our work done and came home in substantially improved conditions. Enough snark. All the workers doing snow removal were wearing insulated Carhartt clothing, friend of cold-weather workers everywhere. (Outside magazine did a story a few years ago called “These Pants Saved My Life,” in which grateful Carhartt owners get together somewhere in Alaska to celebrate the life-saving insulating qualities of their clothing.) Many people don’t know Carhartt is a local company. The owner is a big jazz fan, and stepped in to save the Detroit Jazz Festival, via sponsorship by her privately owned record label. The world doesn’t need more rich people, but it could use more rich people with an interest in making the world richer, too. I love the way money works, how a sewer worker’s investment in coveralls eventually transmogrifies into music in Hart Plaza on Labor Day weekend.

The Free Press did an interesting story the other day on a talented funeral-home restoration artist, renowned for his ability to make the dead look like they’re just napping. It was by one of their best writers, and full of great detail, like how you patch a bullet wound to the forehead and what the artist likes to have on TV while he’s working (“Judge Judy,” “The Young and the Restless”). And then there was this, a reference to the blood-soaked ’80s:

In 1988, reputed drug kingpin Richard (Maserati Rick) Carter was shot and killed in his Detroit hospital bed. Richardson handled the body.

In a worn blue photo album kept at Peace Chapel’s west-side parlor, Richardson’s work is on display, if you can bear it. The book is a macabre and riveting collection of before-and-after shots, each with a story.

Maserati Rick’s image is in there, lying face up with his eyes closed on a gurney in an embalming room. The Polaroids suggest a miracle: One photo clearly shows a bullet hole in Carter’s forehead, just above the left eyebrow. The second shows the wound magically erased.

Maserati Rick was, further Googling revealed, the east-side king of crack, and was, indeed, shot to death in his hospital bed, where he was recovering from an earlier, unsuccessful assassination attempt. See, this is why I can’t watch those stupid CSI shows, Caruso or no Caruso. All the cases seem so needlessly complicated, when most crime is exquisitely simple. Miss him the first time, finish the job.

Did this entry begin with a theme? It seems to have lost the plot, so to speak.

OK, a quick bloggage recommendation: One of my great regrets is I never did anything this crazy/stupid when I was still young and unencumbered by responsibility: Cycling the Silk Road, in Slate. Link goes to first entry, subsequent ones linked at the bottom. (There are four.)

And now, I’m off to use my Valentine’s Day present. It’s hand-held and it vibrates. No, it’s not what you think. It’s better. At least, if it’s your job to clean the bathroom.

Needless to say, the hole in the sky closed up nicely, and we got…choose your verb. Slammed, dumped on, buried, pounded, whatever. I’d say maybe six inches on the ground, which was getting off easy in terms of this storm. The Fort got close to a foot, Indy a little more.

Needless to say, school’s out. All they’re missing is the all-day (no, I’m not kidding) Valentine’s Day party, so no biggie.

But I have to hit the road in a bit, so I’ll leave you with a few conversation-starters:

Why No One Reads Newspapers, chapter I-can’t-remember-what: Because, with a straight face, we repeat advice like this:

AAA Michigan suggests you stay bundled up while driving and keep these items in your ride during the winter months. The items include ice scraper and brush, coffee can furnace, tools and flashlight, sand or cat litter, food and blankets, jumper cables, first aid kit, cell phone, flares or reflective triangle and a shovel.

Note “coffee can furnace” hiding in the middle of that list, like we’re not going to notice it. Some people can make a case for packing some of that crap, although the only people I know who carry sand are pickup drivers who use bags of it to weigh down the rear wheels. If you need to travel in the remote country, sure, carry a collapsible shovel. If you’re crossing the Rockies via back roads, some Balance bars might come in handy. But for most of us, a cell phone and a snow scraper do just fine. I’ve pushed and/or rocked myself out of deep, icy ruts without kitty litter approximately a million times. And the last time anyone jump-started my car, we had a tiff over whether it’s universal knowledge that the red cable always goes to the positive pole on the battery. (I say yes; he claimed ignorance; a fuse paid the price.)

But the coffee can furnace — that’s a new one. As usual, it raises more questions than it answers. What do you burn in it? (Old parking tickets.) Where do you vent it? (The sunroof.) What do you use it for? (Cooking squirrels you catch in snares fashioned from useless jumper cables.) Now that’s some useful information.

And for those of you who enjoyed the “CSI:Miami” ham-fest the other day, you’ll love this just as much. Note, please, the critical role played by the Sunglasses of Justice. I think they actually trigger the critical event in the clip. He takes them off, the device is armed; he puts them back on, kaboom. Those are some crazy sunglasses:

OK, this is weird: It’s after 2 p.m., and so far, not a flake. See that hole in the precipitation over Detroit? I live under that hole. All around us are blizzard warnings, and I could walk down my driveway in strappy sandals and while my toes would get cold, they wouldn’t get snowy.

It’s kind of freaky, really, and I see it happen all year long. Banks of precipitation march east, get to I-94 and break up into nothing much.

Detroit: Where even the snow is afraid to go. I like it.

It’s coming from the south. Beware! Beware!

Because I stupidly scheduled an orthodontist appointment for Kate on the same day her school is having something called NEAP testing — and you know how cool and laid-back educators are about standardized testing, especially in a soft real-estate market — I have to spend the morning on the phone, throwing myself at the mercy of secretaries who all run their lives more competently than I do.

(UPDATE: I’m wrong. It’s NAEP testing.)

Also, we’re expecting five to eight inches of snow today. Also, I have a deadline that’s now in the rear-view mirror. Also, I need to go to the library, and also, I need to do a rewrite/polish on a radio essay. Also, I’m getting my hair cut, although maybe not, depending on the orthodontist situation.

Fortunately, Neely Tucker showed up for work today. Read this, chuckle, and recall the good parts all day. My favorite:

Is there one among us who, at least once in this life, does not want to throw everything out the door and sprint to the Disco Ball of the Brain, where there are big white piles of dopamine, where a hot and sweaty Barry White is always on stage, thumping out “You’re My First! My Last! My Everything!” And there’s that new girl in class! Scantily clad! She’s on the floor, beckoning you! Yes, Bubba, you! Out you go, and she’s saying your name and her hand slips to the small of your back, and this is going to last FOREVER AND EVER!

Here it goes, a long time ago, Abelard and Heloise, two of history’s most famous lovers:

Abelard to Heloise: “So intense were the fires of lust which bound me to you that I set those wretched, obscene pleasures, which we blush even to name, above God as above myself.”

She to he: “Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purest, lewd visions of the pleasures we shared take . . . a hold on my unhappy soul.”

HONEY! BABY! SWEETIE! CALL ME!

Did we mention Abelard was castrated as a result of their affair? And Heloise went off to a convent for the rest of her life? That they named their child “Astrolabe”? What people! What passion! What the hell were they thinking?

Actually they weren’t, and neither are you, not really, when you fall passionately in love.

Word, bro. Later.

This is a company town, maybe the biggest one in the country (and the sickest), and everything is about cars. And so, at the Motown Winter Blast, people actually stood in line for the chance to sit in a Corvette made of ice.

(Overheard: “Don’t put your tongue on the windshield.”)

I have a busy day today, capped by daylong snow, which would normally be delightful if I didn’t have to drive to Royal Oak. Tomorrow will be busy too, with even more snow — five to nine inches, bless my soul — and so, while I may not make it back, if I do I’ll have lots of stories to tell, no doubt.

In the meantime, console yourself with bloggage:

Yes! Yes! Yes! Someone finally states the obvious: Wind-chill is a crock. I can be more tiresome on this subject than a whole bottle of Ambien, but it’s nice to be right:

As the use of equivalent temperatures spread, people started to notice inconsistencies between real temperatures and their wind chill counterparts. For some reason, a day spent in a minus-40 wind chill was a lot easier to handle than a minus-40-degree day with no wind. Around 2000, two researchers—Randall Osczevski in Canada and Maurice Bluestein in the United States—began looking closely at this problem. Before long, they discovered that the adapted Siple-Passel equations grossly overestimated rates of heat loss.

Just since I’ve been paying attention, wind-chill figures have gone from something that’s only reported when it seems to apply, i.e., when the wind is blowing, to (new this year, in my experience) reported as the “effective” temperature. That is, I open my newspaper and read, “Today it is, effectively, 6 below zero.” Oh, I don’t think so. I know six below. Six below is a friend of mine. And you, 12 degrees with an occasional 15-mile-per-hour gust, are not six below. Besides, isn’t the wind chill what it “feels like” on exposed flesh? So put on some gloves, dummy.

Wind chill now has an evil hot-weather cousin — the heat index. Not crazy about it, either, because if nothing else, the reverse of “put on some gloves” doesn’t always work.

So that ought to set you up for some fun bitching today. If not, enjoy this, a montage of Horatio Caine and the Sunglasses of Justice:

Not quite noon, facing southeast, near Ford Cove, Lake St. Clair. Temperature: around 20F. Others in evidence: Some ice fishermen and guys trimming trees on the Ford estate. Ice: Firm but a little chatty in places; I played it safe.

As some of you know, my night editing gig involves surfing the English-language media from pole to pole, looking for stories of interest to our corporate clients. Regrettably, the company hasn’t yet lassoed the Playboy Enterprises account. And so the time I spent reading the Anna Nicole Smith obituaries was stolen time. But it was unavoidable. She was on front pages all over the world.

At one point the New York Times had a story up that I’m kicking myself for not nabbing in some form, as I should have known it wouldn’t last. Sure enough, an hour later the story had a second byline on it and had been stripped of its mocking tone, a subtext that was positively bread-and-circuses. Smith, a bimbo with the figure and IQ of a Holstein, was presented as a figure of wry amusement whose early death was somehow just part of her long-running comedy act: Thank you and good night! There was one line in particular that smacked me between the eyes: “When she was a teenager, she married Billy Smith, a 16-year-old fry cook whose specialty was chicken.” The rewrite put the period after “fry cook.”

But I had to wait until this morning to find the obit I was looking for, predictably in the Washington Post. After noting that Smith was a type of woman whose name we don’t even use much anymore — courtesan — Philip Kennicott writes:

Our continuum of sexual alliances runs from the happy marriage of loving equals, on one end, to prostitution — the pure exchange of sex for money — on the other. The trophy bride, the marriage of youth and beauty to age and power, is the closest we have to the category of the courtesan — but it involves the collective pretense that it isn’t only about money. To see the old category of courtesanship in operation today, you have to travel to poor places around the globe, where sex, love and sometimes marriages are negotiated between wealthy westerners and local girls without either party acknowledging the idea that the exchange is commercial.

The courtesan was rich but not on her own terms, an object of scorn but not completely disreputable, a living reminder of an economy of sexual exchange that we like to pretend doesn’t exist. When Anna Nicole Smith, a voluptuous 26-year-old Playboy Playmate, married an octogenarian oil-rich billionaire, she crossed a line, assuming too high a place in our supposedly mobile society. After her elderly husband died a little over a year later, she stood to inherit $474 million (still in legal dispute), and her name became shorthand for marital opportunism. Her husband went down in the books as the most ridiculous of old goats — but he was dead and beyond the reach of our scorn. Anna had her second and third acts, on television and shilling for diet pills, but none of these chapters ever did much for her dignity.

This is the one you need to read, top to bottom.

But if you’re looking for something snarkier, you could hardly find a better roundup than Defamer’s, which chose to remember the late starlet-or-whatever by rooting through a year’s worth of Anna Nicole posts. My favorite: Anna Nicole Smith’s Wedding-at-Sea Downgraded to Floating Commitment Ceremony. I mean, just cuz it’s funny.

I’m going to go put in my contacts, get out my super-duper sunglasses and go take my lake walk before I chicken out or spring arrives. Photos, maybe, later.

Someone mentioned bunny-boiling in a comment thread recently, and what do you know, HBO had “Fatal Attraction” on last night. I watched until the turn of the second act, which is when the movie loses its guts and falls into disarray. (If nothing else, studying screenwriting has given me a whole new vocabulary to use in a pretentious manner. If you’re wondering, I mark the second-act turn as either Anne Archer’s car accident or the subsequent confrontation between Michael Douglas and Glenn Close in her apartment. That’s when the escalating action of the story reaches a climax, and you know the rest is inevitable.)

It’s a movie that, ahem, touched a lot of nerves 20 years ago. I tried to watch it dispassionately, and came away thinking that it’s two-thirds of a pretty fair movie. Nice performances all around, with the usual Adrian Lyne sexual shenanigans, in which people are so hot for one another they do it on the kitchen counter, instead of walking 12 feet to the nice comfortable bed. But what really struck me were the phones.

If “The Departed” was a movie whose plot rested on the capabilities of cell phones, “Fatal Attraction” was set solidly in the former era. Every phone is the same type — your basic AT&T touch-tone desk model — and if nothing else, Lyne knows how to make a ringing phone into a harbinger of doom. Glenn sits on her bed and stabs out Michael’s number, over and over, this apparently being before the invention of the Redial button. Nothing is cordless; when people are called to the phone they walk across the room to pick it up. The receivers have weight, and when they’re slammed down, you can feel it. It’s hard to remember, but once upon a time you could have a movie character beaten with a phone and it would actually look like it hurt.

Glenn is harassing Michael by telephone, calling him and calling him and hanging up when his wife answers and then calling some more. When was Caller ID invented, you wonder. I know a guy who broke up with a girl not too long after this movie came out, and he had to use Call Block to keep her from ringing him at 2 a.m., so she spent an entire night going from gas station to gas station, calling him from pay phones. Which could be a pretty dramatic scene in a movie, when you think about it. Hollywood never closes one door, telephone-drama-speaking, without opening another.

P.S. Anyone thought the scene in “The Departed” where Matt Damon sends a text message from a phone in his pocket without anyone knowing was unbelievable — has never seen a teenager send a text message.

Since everybody’s talking about NASA and sex (kinda), one more from YouTube. A journalist friend writes:

While researching the diaper issue, I stumbled across this NASA video showcasing a new type of robotic skin that can prompt a robot to move away from an astronaut during a spacewalk. NASA used a ballerina to show how sensitive the stuff was. It pulled the video from its website in 2005, however, when somebody pointed out the phallic nature of the device.

It’s like something you’d see in a taxpayer-funded conceptual art festival that’s got the GOP all het up:

T-minus 36 minutes until the arrival of painters. Time to reach deep into the blogger’s bag of tricks and pull out this two-bagger until the day settles into a more predictable rhythm — that is, YouTube. (And a YouTube clip I stole from The Poor Man, for a theft/YouTube double. And yes, yes, mixed metaphor. Kiss my butt.)

I don’t know what I like best about this: The cigarette, the way the giant head enters stage left, or the recollection of the cultural moment in the ’70s when Telly Savalas was considered a hottie.

Back later. Enjoy. And hey — who loves ya, baby?