The astronaut story is Page One all over the planet, as you had to figure it would be. The diaper detail clinched it, as did, well, the fact she’s an astronaut. Decades of careful indoctrination have led us to believe that if you are trained to drive a space shuttle, you have the presence of mind not to delaminate over a kinda-sorta love affair.

Ah, well. We may make it to Mars in my lifetime, but we will never come close to discovering the fathomless mysteries of the human heart. Talk about a final frontier.

The astronaut is out on bail at the moment. I hope she’s on suicide watch as well.

Speaking of fathomless mysteries, the book I finished this week, “The Return of the Player,” is hilarious, every bit as funny as “The Player,” but everyone who’s read Michael Tolkin knows to expect that. Near the end the protagonist, Griffin Mill, has a soul-searching conversation with Bill Clinton on Martha’s Vineyard, and the former president tells him:

Like it nor not, there are things learned in bed, and only in bed, that can move a man or woman to something great within themselves. Promiscuity can focus the senses, the faculties of mind and insight. Very few of the people who make a dent on history can get enough of such wisdom from only one bed. And that’s what the American people understand, and in a moment of panic and weakness I didn’t trust them. America has one heart. The American people said all of that to me with every poll that showed them enraged with my enemies. I let them down by not respecting their intelligence. Give them as much of the truth as the world can stand without needing more, get that out of the way, and you deflate your enemies because they’ll be screaming at the American people for not being shocked. And who really wants to be screamed at? I may be depraved, but I, William Jefferson Clinton, am the pure product of America, and the truth is, so is everyone else.

A liberal fantasia, sure, but as a statement of principles, I’ll take it over Ted Haggard’s I am 300 percent heterosexual claims anytime.

The great unreported story of the ex-gay movement: The wives. (At least the ones who aren’t lesbians themselves.)

OK, then. Back to normal, today. The temperature is expected to soar into the teens, school is back in session and I have precisely one day to enjoy the peace and quiet, because tomorrow we’re having some painters come in and rip our lives to shreds. For this, the last difficult painting job in the house, we’re splurging on a pro. It’s the foyer/upstairs hallway, which involves one of those tricky all-the-way-to-the-ceiling-of-the-staircase deals. The household control freak is allowing it, but I’m sure he’ll go around and get all those switchplate screws lined up to 12 o’clock afterward, because otherwise he couldn’t sleep at night. And he’s already done a minor reno ahead of them, removing the ’50s-style doorbell chimes from their alcove, so as to make an “art nook” instead.

“Are you sure you’re heterosexual?” I asked.

He didn’t reply, “300 percent!,” for which I am very grateful. He just kept spackling.

When all this is over, we will have finally driven out the color oatmeal, once the dominant shade of our little GP castle. I can tolerate it on the walls, but when people use it on ceilings I put my foot down. An oatmeal ceiling feels like a Michigan winter sky. Death to oatmeal.

Bloggage today? Not much. I’m a tapped-out soul today, but I will second Lance’s recommendation of Newcritics as a fine new culture blog worth a check-out by all.

Oh, OK, there’s this: I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC … in Japanese! And the best Mac/PC ad yet: Cancel or allow. Requires QuickTime, natch.

Jeez, what a bunch of wusses:

The South Lyon Community Schools and Brighton Area Schools were the only districts open in Metro Detroit today as winter keeps the region in its icy grip and students are not happy about it.

Parent Tina Rochowiak said she kept her son home Monday but sent the senior to class today at South Lyon High School. She said her son text messaged her and said students have gathered in a commons area and are refusing to go to class.

Melissa Meister, South Lyon Community Schools’ assistant superintendent of administrative services, confirmed that the students had gathered and said the matter was being addressed. Meister could not say how many students were protesting.

The school is heated. The buses were all running fine. I presume the commons area where the protest happened was heated, too.

Kids these days. But worse, of course, is the parental reaction:

Rochowiak said the district could have let students stay home today without impacting their studies.

“They are ridiculous,” she said. “I kept him home yesterday because I thought it was absolutely ridiculous. Winter is almost over. Give them a break. It is just dumb.”

Thank God my parents weren’t this silly.

A question for the rest of you suffering through this cold snap: Do you wear long underwear? I do. I’ll show it to anyone who asks, too. My January/February life got measurably better when I came to terms with winter and started wearing long underwear.

I used to own a red wool/flannel union suit from L.L. Bean (in fact, it could be this one), until I washed it wrong and it lost its shape. I liked it because you could throw it on with a pair of jeans on a Saturday and, theoretically at least, go out and run errands. If you got too hot, you could unbutton a few buttons at the top, for that Northern Exposure Vixen look. Yes, it was utterly unfashionable and fairly ridiculous, but man oh man, it did the job. I bought it after a winter trip to the Upper Peninsula, where everyone has one or two.

Of course, today we have miracle fabrics, and I have graduated to Patagonia Capilene separates, medium-weight. I wear them — bottoms mostly — anytime the temperature dips into the teens. Dog-walking is misery without them; going out in jeans alone exposes half your body to the elements with only a thin layer of denim between them. We top-load our winter dressing because, as we’re reminded by helpful newspaper tip boxes every year, you lose heat through your head. OK, so wear a hat. But don’t forget your butt, either.

I bought Kate a pair for last Christmas. To date, she has worn them only on her head, for laughs. She’d rather die that put such a thing on her body.

I should probably have waited another 20 years. That’s how long it took me to come around.

One more tip: Lands End, L.L. Bean and lots of other mail-order houses offer flannel- and fleece-lined jeans and chinos this time of year. They are…heavenly.

This concludes today’s edition of Too Much Information.

Day two of the no-school freeze-out. Hey, that’s OK — I have nothing important to do, just report a story and get into my essay-writing head for something that’s long overdue. And someone’s calling for a get-acquainted professional chat, so I have to sound wise and with-it and all the rest. That should be easy to do with squealing cabin-feverish children stampeding through the house.

Something else I’d really like to do this week, while conditions are right: Go for a walk on the lake. Nothing crazy or stupid, just a little shoreline amble to see the majesty of winter whipping through the Great Lakes. With subzero temperatures at night and nothing above the mid-20s forecast for the rest of the week, conditions should be ideal. If I fall through a soft spot and die, please don’t read this at my funeral.

Bloggage:

Of course it’s cold, but be strong: You could live in Washington D.C. Everything’s relative — nothing like a few subzero days to make 20 degrees feel positively Floridian — but man, getta loada this:

The National Weather Service said today could be the coldest day in Washington since Jan. 10, 2004, when the mercury dipped to 8, which was the chilliest reading in the past decade. Such conditions can cause frostbite and hypothermia, forecasters said.

Well, yes, I guess that’s true. But wearing clothing (see above) can be really effective against such threats. Read the story, anyway; the word “cold” or “coldest” appears 14 times, mostly in quotes where people express the idea that it is, indeed, cold outside. This is why reporters hate to write weather stories.

Zero-gravity catfight! What happens when two astronauts vie for the romantic attention of a third? Me-ow!

A screen capture of my current desktop widgets. Note the weather radar and the current temperature, bottom left. That cotton ball over western Michigan has been there for days (lake-effect snow, for you non-Midwesterners.) Don’t you wish you lived here?

And so it begins: After a solid week of nursing Kate’s flu, including a full-blown relapse beginning Friday evening that was pretty much a rerun of the first three days, I woke up today to:

1) No school. Temps at minus-2 now, with wind chills fierce enough to frighten even Michigan school superintendents.

2) A tiny, unscratchable tickle in the back of my own throat. It’s too early to say what it is, but it’s safe to say it’s nothing good.

Will I allow this to keep me down? Maybe. We’ll see.

Well, by kickoff time I had allowed my usual who-gives-a-fig attitude toward the Super Bowl to veer into full-blown Colts-hatin’ — and I only watched 45 minutes of the pre-game, but that was enough to tire of the “Peyton Manning: god-king or world-conquering titan?” hagiography. (Football coverage: Where if too much is too much, even more is even better.) Of course it was not to be, but the first quarter was enough to take a little wind out of the sails, so to speak. By then I had to get dinner on the table and was restored to agnosticism. Great halftime show. Love that Prince. Then I went to work, and the rest of the game passed unseen by me. Vince IM’d to say he thought the suicidal robot was in bad taste, considering the current state of the auto industry. Otherwise, that was the extent of my personal post-game.

There’s was this, though: During the pre-game CBS showed a split-screen image of Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith, to underline that one of them would be the first African-American head coach to win a Super Bowl championship. And then the announcer used a word. I always think of it as the flip side of “articulate,” which Joe Biden got caught applying to Barack Obama last week. The word?

“Dignified.” Really. “One of these two dignified men…” Good lord. Doesn’t anyone have an ear for language anymore?

For the record, I wrote the “articulate”-as-insult column at least a decade ago; apparently Joe Biden didn’t read it. But “dignified” is right up there, too. Do white head coaches get called dignified? No. They’re sober, serious, composed, leaders. Dignified is what we call black people who have already proven they’re articulate. Yuck.

On to the bloggage:

I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC… with British accents.

Dan Savage’s whopping fine screed about Mary Cheney. Profanity alert, probably needless profanity, but it needed to be said. I think we pay attention to the culture war because it’s a cartoony, easily understood alternative to the real one. Which grows ever more unbearable.

First, the good news: Our Body: the Universe Within isn’t particularly gruesome. Anyone who’s suffered through an R-rated horror movie has seen far worse. (Hell, I’ve taken grosser things out of a supermarket chicken.) Nor is it disturbing; if you’ve studied an anatomy textbook you’ve already seen it all, and besides, they ease you into it — your first body is a skeleton. Who hasn’t seen Mr. Bones a million times? True, this skeleton has a nose — odd, that — but still, he’s as much a Halloween decoration as a freak show.

The skeleton is posed sitting on a chair, contemplating a skull on a table in front of it. And so we have our theme.

The rude way to describe “Our Body” is to call it a freak show, and at its basest level, that’s what it is. There’s nothing really new here; like I said, it’s all in “Gray’s Anatomy,” and the cadavers could probably be recreated by Hollywood special-effects artists. What makes this a big-ticket exhibit is the fact these are real bodies, were real people. That’s the freak; that’s the hook.

I guessed I skipped the CCD classes where we got the Catholic take on the body, because I don’t have a shred of sentiment about human remains. Once life ends, all that seems necessary to me is that what’s left behind be treated with respect, and according to the wishes of the deceased, or the survivors. A Tibetan sky burial doesn’t seem any better or worse than the standard embalming/two days’ calling/funeral/burial/cement vault ritual of American death. Both my parents were cremated and I expect to be, too, but I understand it’s not for everyone. A woman once told me her grandmother lost a leg to diabetes some time before she died, and spent her final months fretting that she might spend eternity in Heaven with one leg.

I suppose the bodies in “Our Body” are treated respectfully. You’re not allowed to touch them, and the guides make a speech about no photos and so forth. The attitude of the attendees is pretty hushed and quiet, exacerbated by the darkness of the space — only the displays are lit.

But there were odd moments, too. The first woman you encounter is posed with her heels raised, as though in high-heeled shoes, and she’s holding a shopping bag in her hand (huh?). Enough small detail of the original corpses remain — ragged fingernails, eyelashes, pubic hair — to remind you that these are not special-effects dummies, but real people, and that raises more questions than it answers. We were told, going up in the elevator, that “all the bodies are from China,” and “all gave their permission, or their families did.” And that’s it, and sorry, that’s not enough for me. I wanted to know what this man did for a living, how tall this woman was. Did she have children? Did he smoke? Did she like to wear high heels? Did they know exactly what they were agreeing to when they donated their bodies to science? And the fact China has an atrocious human-rights record? This doesn’t bother anyone? James’ comment in the previous thread about “flayed political prisoners” could just as easily be true as not.

But I tried to put as much of this out of my mind, and just appreciate the miracle of our bodies (which, by the time you’re my age, have become somewhat less miraculous). The arrangements of muscles over bone, the elegant detail of a flayed hand, the traceries of nerves and ligaments — this all had the power of fine art, and it was easy to see it as such. There were poster-size cards telling us of the first physicians to use dissection to understand anatomy (the Egyptians) and who set the discovery on the back burner for a few hundred years (the Catholic church, ca-ching!). For all the warnings about “intensity,” I found it more interesting than anything else.

I lingered over two cases in particular — one showing the blood vessels, and only the blood vessels, of the lungs, and another showing the blood vessels, and only the blood vessels, of the entire body. The latter was particularly striking, a human-shaped cloud of red cotton wool; I looked at it for a long time, tracing major blood vessels as they branched into smaller and smaller ones, finally becoming a tangle of capillaries. And then I started thinking: How’d they do that? How do you dissect a body in such a way that you can extract only the circulatory system, seemingly without major damage?

I asked an attendant at the exit, who had the answer: First a polymer solution, dyed red, is pumped in at the carotid artery, until it permeates the entire body, at which point it is allowed to harden. The body is then dipped in an acid solution until all the flesh, all the bone, all the viscera, is eaten away and only the plastic-preserved blood vessels remain.

Now I really wonder who agreed to this.

There was a second part of the exhibit on another floor, which broke tissue down to its microscopic elements. This was also where two of the truly bothersome (for me) parts were displayed. One was a 15-foot long case in which an entire body had been cut horizontally into one-inch sections (like you’d chop a carrot for a salad) and spread out, so you could look at each layer, a human CAT scan. After all the slicing and dicing upstairs, it just seemed redundant. And in another case was an entire human skin, all in one piece (slit up the back), tanned and preserved.

“Hmm,” I said to the woman next to me. “‘Silence of the Lambs.'” “I was thinking ‘Texas Chainsaw Massacre,’ myself,” she replied.

By now it was time to rejoin my daughter’s field trip, which had been doing a hands-on activity in another room. They were into their free-time exploration, and were mostly planning what sort of gift-shop plunder they’d beg for. I looked at their twitchy little selves and was grateful there were no children’s bodies in the exhibit.

(Correction: There were fetuses and a few newborns said to have “genetic diseases” that presumably led to either stillbirth or early death. But no fourth-graders, thankfully.)

Sorry for no regular update today. We had one of those last-minute changes of plan this morning, and somehow I ended up shuttling Kate on a school field trip to the Detroit Science Center and staying most of the day. (And giving up a pair of FREE Red Wings tickets for tonight. In some area households, making such a sacrifice for a sick kid is something you remind them of for 10 years at least.)

Low point: Listening to her hack up a lung most of the way there and back, mitigated by the fact most other kids in the group were doing the same thing.

High point: I saw the bodies exhibit. Which I’d like to tell you about, but not now. My feet are tired, and I keep thinking about them being sawed off and donated to science. Check back later.

I don’t have a personal Molly Ivins story, but I remember one from a magazine profile of her, long ago: She was a national correspondent for the New York Times, charged with roaming the western United States and filing those quirky sorts of stories they find so amusing in New York. One was about a chicken-slaughter in some dusty burg, and it was a turning point in her career. Oh, look — it made her NYT obituary:

Covering an annual chicken slaughter in New Mexico in 1980, she used a sexually suggestive phrase, which her editors deleted from the final article. But her effort to use it angered the executive editor, A. M. Rosenthal, who ordered her back to New York and assigned her to City Hall, where she covered routine matters with little flair.

The phrase was “gang pluck.” As I recall the anecdote, this sent Rosenthal into a towering rage, and the ensuing scolding was something to see. Rosenthal, trembling with anger, leaned across the table and thundered, “You were trying to make the readers of the NEW YORK TIMES think of the phrase gang fuck, weren’t you, Molly? Weren’t you? The readers of the NEW YORK TIMES?!?”

I don’t recall what Ivins said in reply, if she said anything; that’s the sort of thing you just have to endure. But in retrospect,it says something about both of them: Molly Ivins knew something that A.M. Rosenthal did not, i.e. how to turn a phrase. (Also, how to have a sense of humor.)

While the NYT has employed some fine writers, Ivins was never cut out to be one of them, so of course she didn’t really come into her own until she was back in Texas. Everyone talks about her regular skewering of the Shrub, i.e. the 43rd president, but I always thought her best work were her deadpan accounts of doin’s in the Texas legislature, a repository of crooks, weirdos, stuffed shirts, shitheads and others so strange it makes, say, the Indiana General Assembly look like the House of Lords. Reading her columns was like sitting with a great, funny friend in the observation gallery, while she pointed out people on the floor below and told you great stories about them.

I recall one vividly: The Texas legislator who had to attend a function in San Francisco in the early days of the AIDS epidemic. So terrified was he of catching something that he called the front desk of the hotel and asked for extra shower caps, which he wore on his feet. While showering.

I look at Ivins’ work then and I think: So ahead of her time. Note this paragraph from the Times obit:

But the (Dallas Times Herald), she said, promised to let her write whatever she wanted. When she declared of a congressman, “If his I.Q. slips any lower, we’ll have to water him twice a day,” many readers were appalled, and several advertisers boycotted the paper. In her defense, her editors rented billboards that read: “Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?” The slogan became the title of the first of her six books.

You wonder, looking at that phrase, what was so awful about it, other than it was rude and funny. This was in the mid-’80s, before right-wing talk radio and blowhard cable slugfests, when newspaper humor was Art Buchwald and Erma Bombeck and Andy Rooney, and political humor was Mark Russell and the dopey Capitol Steps, and the only people allowed to be rude and funny were the cast of “Saturday Night Live,” and that was mainly about doing impersonations and coining catch phrases.

You wonder why newspapers lost their audience? Because Molly Ivins was considered the outer limits. (Although, to be sure, the Dallas Times Herald went ahead and folded in 1991, with Ivins on staff. Ultimately, it comes down to this: I don’t know anything.)

If you haven’t read the comments from the previous thread, do so. Low down, LA Mary tells some stories about her time working for Ivins as an assistant. Lucky girl. Or read the WashPost obit, here. Better yet, read both.

Bloggage:

I once knew a man who claimed to have been 13 pounds and change at birth, and judging from the size of him in adulthood, I believe him. But it gets better: His parents were so poor he was born at home, in a Chicago tenement. (I’ll bet that labor and delivery kept the neighbors up.) But he has nothing on Super Tonio, born in Cancun, weighing 14.5 pounds at birth. A moment of silence for his mother’s birth canal, please.

Kate went back to school today. Fingers crossed for no bounceback.