One last Halloween picture, with your indulgence:

A true pumpkin artist merely removes the parts of the pumpkin that don’t belong. Note: I am not a pumpkin artist. But when I saw the scar on this one, I knew it belonged in front. My thought was to incorporate it in a tribute to Michael K. Williams, everybody’s favorite “Wire” villain, but…well, I’m no pumpkin artist.

Just got back from the costume parade at Kate’s school. Your correspondent’s eyewitness report: No obvious baby-tart costumes, one borderline, no big deal. Overwhelmingly, it was cute kids having a cute time on a nice day. Among the highlights, Nancy Drew:

Ever-popular in Detroit, sports and rock ‘n’ roll:

A whoopie cushion:

One of the better baby costumes I’ve seen — li’l rock lobster:

Happy Halloween!

Inspired by the Encyclopedia of Immaturity, Kate wanted to carve a barfkin this year. Of course I said yes.

The costume? She’s a hippie.

On Christmas last year, my brother got, well, drunk. Which, I hasten to add, is OK, because he hardly ever does that, and because he let me drive him home, and that led us to the strange night in Obetz where we met the dog sitting at the bar.

Anyway, my Christmas present to my brother that year included a couple of CDs. One was a Robert Goulet collection, selected for one song — “Come Back to Me,” one of those Broadway B-sides I remember hearing a thousand different singers performing on the Merv Griffin Show. And part of being a happy drunk that Christmas night included him playing that song over and over. So now, with Goulet’s obituaries in the papers and the tributes pouring in, I’m not thinking of “If Ever I Would Leave You.” I’ve got three or four lines stuck in my head:

Don’t get lost in Korvette’s
Don’t get signed by the Mets
Take a train, take a plane,
Don’t give up cigarettes,
Come back to me…

There’s nothing like a great baritone, is there? Sigh.

I liked him in “Atlantic City,” m’self.

Off to carve pumpkins. Come back for pictures.

Why I will never stop reading newspapers: Because blogs will never greet me over my morning coffee with a headline like this:

Police: Drunken dad called drunken mom to pick up son

YPSILANTI — Police detained a Northville couple after a wife who drove to pick up her young son when her husband was stopped for drunken driving showed up even more intoxicated than he was, police alleged.

Given that no one was injured, I can enjoy this story guilt-free. Every part of it tickles me, from the Ypsilanti dateline — as funny place names go, Ypsi is pretty good, although run-of-the-mill compared to, say, Rancho Cucamonga — to the dry, pro-forma “police alleged” at the end. [Pause.] You say there’s nothing funny about two children being driven around by drunken parents? You say the rest of the world doesn’t exist for my entertainment?

Way to rain on my parade.

Things I learned while looking up links: There’s a video online called “Living the Dream in Rancho Cucamonga” — Windows Media Player and broadband connection recommended. (If I were writing a novel set there, I’d call it “East of Pomona.”) Also, Ypsilanti was named for Demetrius Ypsilanti, hero of the Greek war of independence. A bust of him stands at the base of the Brick Dick.

Aren’t you glad you stopped by?

My plan today was to bitch about Alice Waters. She is promoting a new book, and getting on my last nerve. Farhad Manjoo in Salon sums up my objections in a nutshell:

Though I have eaten some of the best food I’ve ever encountered at her Berkeley restaurant Chez Panisse, and though I have generally tried to live by the gastronomic principles that she’s become famous championing, and though I believe that the world would be better off in nearly every way if more people listened to her, there is a limit to what can be expected of us — of me! — and I wanted to tell her, Alice Waters, you just want too much.

Alice Waters is not content for you to simply eat organic produce. No, no. It’s got to be organic and local and seasonal, and really, for it to be any good at all, you have to get it from the farmer who pulled it out of the earth. And ideally that farmer would be a friend of yours. You and he would discuss the soil and seasons and his search for heirloom varieties, and he would give you tips for your own garden, where, of course, you’d spend many of your weekends.

As frequently happens to journalists when they fall under Waters’ spell, though, he’s quickly changing his tune, even after the kitchen goddess says things like, oh, “I am disappointed because (none of the presidential candidates) is talking about food and agriculture,” and then adds that food is:

…the No. 1 issue. Not one of 10. This is No. 1. It’s what we all have in common, what we all do every day, and it has consequences that affect everybody’s lives. It’s not like this is the same thing as crime in the streets — no, this is more important than crime in the streets. This is not like homeland security — this actually is the ultimate homeland security. This is more important than anything else.

In case you people who don’t live in the market basket of America are wondering how you’re supposed to eat in the winter if you’re confined to local produce, the answer is: Root vegetables. Although Waters makes it sound so wonderful: There are turnips of every color and shape!

Yes, well.

We ate from the “100-mile menu” in Stratford last weekend, and lo it was good. But it was also harvest season. I don’t care how many shapes and colors turnips come in. They’re still turnips. I’m not giving up my supermarket just yet.

OK, this isn’t going well. Let’s cut to the bloggage:

It sounds silly, but I’ve read of this happening at least twice before: Hunter shot by dog.

I’m going to Kate’s school Halloween parade tomorrow. I’ll let you know whether the Baby Ho-bag costume story is manufactured for your holiday horror or dead-on. I suspect the former.

More to come later. When I’m awake.

It’s pretty clear our wonderful little dog is losing his hearing. He responds to sharp hand claps or stomps on the floor, but not much else. I’ve considered he might be indulging in the traditional right of the elderly — selective hearing — but increasingly it seems he just doesn’t. The other day I took him for a quick walk when we were traveling, and as we circled around back to the car, the sight of Alan made him put his ears up, in a “that shape looks familiar, but I just can’t place it” sort of way, so I suppose he doesn’t see too well, either. Ah, the depredations of age. On the other hand, he still has a lust for life, and an interest in his environment, only now he relies on his sense of taste; if I let him, he’ll lick my hand for 20 minutes straight. I’m grateful shorts season is over, because for a while this summer, he was fond of tasting all our guests as they stood in the foyer, and let me tell you, it takes a serious dog person to put up with that for very long.

Needless to say, I won’t be taking him to Partridge Creek, the latest open-air mall to open in the neighborhood, which advertises itself as dog-friendly. (The billboards feature a dog with its head out the window of a car, with the legend, “Are we there yet?”) I was there today, and wondered about the wisdom of both the policy and the sorts of people who think it’s a good idea to take a giant Labrador retriever to a packed pedestrian space for no good reason other than that you can. I suppose the idea was conceived as a way to attract the Paris Hilton purse-dog contingent, but yesterday there were at least a dozen enormous breeds on display, including a few excitable specimens that really should have been somewhere else. I suppose it’s possible the owners were training their dogs to be around big crowds, but when I see an 80-pound Lab barely controlled by a 150-pound man — man in a semi-crouch, holding the leash with both hands, spluttering impotently at the pooch — I’m not reassured. Either get a collar that works, a trainer with a clue, or leave the beast at home.

Not much of a weekend, otherwise. Wrangled the last of Kate’s Halloween costume, took a couple long naps, sat poolside during a kid’s birthday party — the usual. Rented “Knocked Up” on Friday with great anticipation of yet another Apatow sweet-raunchfest, and came away disappointed. It was too long by many minutes and lurched jarringly from comedy to not-comedy. I found myself snapping my fingers for a cut, but then, am I a genius director? No, I’m just the person who has to sit through a two-hour-and-14-minute sex comedy that had not enough of either. I hope “Superbad” is better.

One of our stops Saturday was the American Apparel store, where I offered my child as a model. Ha ha kidding — I was really on my never-ending quest for a simple, well-cut, white T-shirt made of fabric thick enough you can’t read your watch through it. The verdict: The search goes on. But hey, I found a scoop-neck, cap-sleeve specimen seemingly spun by anorexic spiders for the low low price of $30. Forget reading your watch through it; you could have read the box scores from the agate page through it, which I suppose is the point, but jeez, it’s a damn T-shirt. HOW HARD IS IT TO GET THIS ITEM CORRECT? It’s like a cup of coffee. Two ingredients, an infinite number of ways to screw it up. This should be a Project Runway assignment. A grateful nation would make the winner rich.

Bloggage:

I was thinking if I were Mitch Albom’s editor, how easy my work would be. Take today’s. It begins:

When did adults start dressing for Halloween?

I’d write, “About 30 years ago, by my reckoning. Thanks for noticing, but see if you can’t do better by deadline. — Ed.” Then a big red X through the next 600 words, and careful placement in the middle of his desk.

Only it doesn’t work that way, not anymore. I doubt Albom has a desk in the newsroom, and anyway, no editor bosses him around, and anyway, he has an excuse — his other Sunday column, the one in Sports, lets everyone know just who has the biggest d–, er, book sales in the newsroom, who’s been on Oprah, and who better look the other way when three out of four nine out of ten nearly all the Sunday Metro columns are lame-ass. (Cf: iPods: What’s up with that? or School shootings: What’s up with that?)

Ah, well. I’m not one to talk, am I?

Here’s a somewhat meatier story, an oldie but goodie: Mark Jacobson’s 2000 profile of Frank Lucas, currently being played by Denzel Washington in “American Gangster.” Many choice passages, much rich detail, lots of heroin.

Finally, Fox Business anchor or porn star? I only got 50 percent right on this quiz. It’s that difficult.

There’s a new series of TV ads for the iPhone running lately, in which ordinary folks stand up in front of a piece of black seamless paper and tell stories about how much they love their you-know-whats, sometimes supported with anecdotes. One features an airline pilot, who talks about how one of his flights had been condemned to a three-hour delay because of weather. “Three hours for a flight that would take one hour and 40 minutes,” he said, knowingly. Oh, man. We’ve all been there.

So, bored, he turned on the iPhone and checked weather.com, where he discovered the weather was actually clearing at the flight’s destination. He called the tower, told them the good news, and whaddaya know, they were cleared for takeoff p.d.q. Go buy an iPhone!

I didn’t greet this news with optimism, as it evidently informs us that a U.S. airport has fewer weather-prognostication tools than the Weather Channel, proprietors of weather.com. I think if most of us realized, on a daily basis, how much all the rest of us are flying by the seat of our pants, so to speak, we’d never leave the house. And yet the world soldiers on.

But the ad was on my mind when I read a non-irritating David Brooks column today, “The Outsourced Brain.” Brooks is at his best on this sort of neutral ground, and he makes an interesting observation — that the beauty of this new information age isn’t how it adds to our store of knowledge, but subtracts from it, by freeing us of having to remember a bunch of stupid crap. After noting his increasing reliance on his car’s GPS system, he writes:

It was unnerving at first, but then a relief. Since the dawn of humanity, people have had to worry about how to get from here to there. Precious brainpower has been used storing directions, and memorizing turns. I myself have been trapped at dinner parties at which conversation was devoted exclusively to the topic of commuter routes.

My G.P.S. goddess liberated me from this drudgery. She enabled me to externalize geographic information from my own brain to a satellite brain, and you know how it felt? It felt like nirvana.

Through that experience I discovered the Sacred Order of the External Mind. I realized I could outsource those mental tasks I didn’t want to perform. Life is a math problem, and I had a calculator.

Until that moment, I had thought that the magic of the information age was that it allowed us to know more, but then I realized the magic of the information age is that it allows us to know less. It provides us with external cognitive servants — silicon memory systems, collaborative online filters, consumer preference algorithms and networked knowledge. We can burden these servants and liberate ourselves.

I suspect he’s correct. I’ve already noticed the dulling of some of my once-ninja skills in some of these areas. I never used to forget a phone number; I could probably still tell you the numbers of my best friends in junior high school. Nowadays I know my own, and that’s about it, but it’s OK, because they’re all in my phone’s memory, and I don’t need to. I worry more about the loss of geographic knowledge, as geography is more important than any of us think, and not just in the is-Maple-north-or-south-of-Twelve-Mile sense, either. People evolved to be connected to the earth, their own particular patch of it, and being able to delegate it to a GPS unit doesn’t strike me as a huge improvement. Plus, jeez people, do we really need another electronic device to get distracted by?

I keep a compass on my kitchen table’s lazy susan, to remind me which way is north. Every house I’ve lived in until now was oriented square — north out the back door, south out the front, etc. Everything in GP is at an angle. Drives. Me. Nuts.

Bloggage? I got no bloggage for you today, people. Let’s play a game — you leave the bloggage for me to be amused by. And have a great weekend.

NN.C regular Ashley Morris has been in the midst of some family hell these last few days. You’re comparing it to your family hell, which may range on the scale from My Mother Doesn’t Appreciate Me to My Sister-in-Law Always Drinks Too Much, Then Gets Bitter With Everyone.

Well, Ashley’s family hell sort of extends the scale. His sister/mother died. What’s a sister/mother, you ask? Ask Jack Nicholson. It’s what happens when a teenage girl has a baby, and her mother says, “I’ll raise the boy as my own. We’ll pretend you’re his older sister. Meanwhile, you get your shit together.” I don’t actually know if Ashley’s mother/grandmother said this to her daughter, but she should have, because things didn’t turn out so well for her, and she was found dead in her apartment last week.

So Ashley goes to clean things up, and finds…well, let him tell it:

Turns out my mother/sister OD’d. Spoons and lighters everywhere. About 300-400 syringes all over the floor. Residue of OxyContin in the spoons and on the tables. And a big 2 gram package of heroin on the counter.

I called the cops who found the body, and asked them what to do with the heroin. They said I could bring it in to the station.

Go read the rest. I offered him complicated condolences last week. I’d say complicated isn’t really the word for it.

Hour Detroit, the magazine I work for most regularly these days, doesn’t put its content online, so I have to find other links to tell you about a short piece I have in the current issue, about this office at the GM Tech Center in Warren.

Go ahead, click. Marvel. Then come back.

It was designed by one legend, Eero Saarinen, for another, Harley Earl, GM’s first vice president of design, the man generally acknowledged to have brought real style to the product line for the first time. It was the crown jewel in the Tech Center campus, completed after World War II and also designed by Eero Saarinen, along with his father, Eliel. The press materials GM gave me described it as “the most luxurious and romantic office ever built,” and in 1956, it probably was. It has doubtless been usurped by some Nouveau Gilded Age bozo’s realm, but it still looks totally cool and utterly modern.

Partly it’s because mid-century modern is back in a big way, but also because someone had half a brain and declined to do any major modifications over the years. The furniture’s been reupholstered here and there and carpet and drapes replaced, but otherwise that’s the same undulating wall of cherry strips and aluminum extrusions, the same built-in sofas and credenzas, and perhaps best of all, the same high-tech gadgetry.

Note the dials and gizmos behind the desk. They can do everything from open the door remotely — a big power play when the big boss remains seated behind the desk, very “show yourself out, then” — to control the lights and sound system. Just behind the pen set in this picture is the desk lamp, tucked away flush in the desktop. Press a button and it rises, unfolds and turns on. The current occupant of the office, GM VP/design Ed Welburn, demonstrated it, and it’s so mechanical — it rises and descends on what looks like bicycle chain. There’s a TV across the room that can be revealed the same way.

Needless to say, it’s huge. Earl was a big man with a big job, and he needed a big space. Welburn’s more average-size, and said you can get a sense of his predecessor’s outlines from the scale of everything — even the concept cars that Earl showed off at car shows were made for a big man with big feet. Of course, everything was bigger, then, including the future. It’s hard not to pick up that sense of IGY-type optimism from just spending a little time in this way-cool space.

My story was pegged to a major Saarinen exhibit that opens next month at Cranbrook. The PR guys who showed me around the Tech Center said the place had recently had Pentagon-level security, but was easing up a bit (although employees are still forbidden to carry camera phones in certain parts of the complex). I felt lucky to see it — the VP’s office was only one of the many design delights of the place.

Oh, and back to the first link: Make sure you scroll down to see the black-and-white photo of the then-Masters of the Universe out on a hunting expedition in northern Michigan. The picture includes not only Earl and Bill Boyer, another GM heavyweight of the time, but also Arthur Godfrey and ol’ blood-and-guts Gen. Curtis LeMay. One look at this crew and you know that whatever their flaws, they probably got those two deer the old-fashioned way, and no one got shot in the face.

Now, if you can, buy the magazine. Old media supports new media, you know.

Bloggage:

Attack of the giant turkeys. Really.

Alan’s been tuning up his dad’s thousand-year-old .22 rifle, downloading ancient manuals online, disassembling it, cleaning it. Finally he took it to a state-owned rifle range in Oakland County and tested his aim. I’d say he did pretty well for an amateur who hasn’t picked up a firearm in years:

It’s times like this I’m glad I live with a man, competent in the manly arts and all that, able to defend our home from an onslaught of squirrels, rabbits and other small game. (And believe me, around here, I think it’s entirely possible.) Then I walked through the living room and saw this:

For your information, Alan selected every item on the top of that bookcase. The “little book” on the right is an art object made by one of our neighbors in Ann Arbor and was a Christmas present in 2003; the vase on the left is Pewabic and was a Mother’s Day* gift in 2005. The little Navajo turtle pot in the middle was found by Alan at an auction last summer. He thought the bottom was getting scratched by sitting directly on the wood, so this weekend he wandered into a shop in Stratford and bought that carpet scrap, part of an antique Persian, or so the saleslady said. “It’s Persian, but it sort of looks Navajo,” Alan replied. I looked at this arrangement and said:

“You know how I know you’re gay? Because you not only bought the pot and the carpet scrap, but when you put them together you placed the pot on the scrap asymmetrically.”

“I’m rebelling against my childhood in Defiance, Ohio.”

Defiance is a very symmetrical place, to be sure. Still.

Well, we heard from Danny, in the comments in the post below. For those of you who didn’t see it, it’s here. He’s safe for now, but as we all know, the area’s still terribly dangerous. Good thoughts, prayers and positive vibes — whatever your preference — to Danny.

However, no tragedy is so great it has no comic relief. I’m glad to see other people’s kids are like my kid:

The police in the afternoon escorted some residents in northern San Diego to retrieve medicine and urgent belongings. Of course, that definition was flexible.

“Bongos? Why the heck are you bringing bongos! We don’t need bongos!” Gerald DaSilva shouted to his daughter as they raced in and out of their relatively undamaged house and loaded their pickup. “Look at all this stuff — CDs, magazines, come on, what is all this stuff? Get your phone chargers.”

Ever think of what you’d grab if you had to flee with one carload? It’s a worthwhile exercise, both in idle woolgathering and for future disaster planning. For me, in order: kid, dog, art, letters. All the rest is replaceable.

In other news at this hour, it should be obvious I got nothin’ today. Well, I got this:

“Albus Dumbledore” is an anagram of “Male bods rule, bud!” (Thanks, Vince!)

Any astute reader would have seen that one coming a mile away. More later.

* CORRECTION: It was an anniversary gift. “I don’t give you Mother’s Day gifts. You’re not my mother!” He’s right. I was confused.