Found this on YouTube the other day. The sound’s lousy, but it’s an action-based scene. You only have to watch the first 20 seconds:

I think Leo speaks for all of us who have ever been asked that question.

Slate had a piece earlier this week on the amateur street-fighting genre on YouTube. I clicked a few links, but found reading about them more enjoyable than watching them. Real violence, even captured in ShakyCam with Extra Graininess, packs a wallop that even Scorsese can’t touch. John D. MacDonald had a nice passage in one of his Travis McGee books about fistfights — that 99 percent of them end after one punch, with both guys astonished by the pain, one in his nose and the other in his hand. I don’t think I’ve ever thrown a punch at anyone. Once I swung a clipboard at Name Redacted in my college newspaper newsroom, and didn’t connect, although he richly deserved it. It was also the first time I’ve ever vaulted a table in one leap — I jumped from my seat in the copy-desk slot and cleared the desk like Bruce Willis. I wish I had a video. The fight ended with Redacted holding me at arm’s length while I waved my clipboard impotently. The tension was defused when everyone started laughing. All was forgiven, and he remains a friend. His wife is even one of our commenters here. And I think if I had hit him, and I could fill the jury box with other slot men, they wouldn’t even bother ordering lunch before they acquitted me.

Remember Danny DeVito’s line in “The War of the Roses?” Oliver, my father used to say that a man can never outdo a woman when it comes to love and revenge. Women retain a capacity for viciousness that probably goes back to the cave — it’s our genetic mandate to protect the kiddies, after all — and all I can say is: I’d really like to have a couple of those breakaway beer glasses like the one Leo uses so well.

Not much for you today, folks. I’m off to Christmas-shop, lunch, work, run errands and hunt down a 4-pin to 6-pin FireWire cable. But first, a shower. Make merry in the comments, if you like.

…I’m trying something different.

A friend wonders if I could increase my site traffic if I stopped including the entire post in my RSS feed. I said huh, I dunno, might be worth trying, so I am. For the record, I don’t care much about traffic at all — in all my enterprises, I remain stubbornly unambitious and opposed to financial success of any kind — but I’m curious what effect it might have.

It could go either way, a “feh, more nose-picking from Little Miss Boring, no need to see more,” or “let’s go over and click ALL her Google ads and make her rich.” I’ll be watching my analytics for a while. Let the experiment begin.

It goes without saying that if you really hate it, let me know. Reader service is what we’re all about her at NN.C.

Headlines that pretty much guarantee you’re going to read what’s underneath:

Missing college student led a double life as online porn star

There’s not a clause in that sentence that doesn’t say “hello, sailor.” “Missing college student” establishes the mystery and implies a deeper tragedy; she wasn’t just a young woman, she was a young woman with a bright future, because she went to college. “Led a double life” is wish fulfillment, as every one of us leads a double, triple, quadruple or perhaps quintuple life, if only in our heads. (At the moment, I’m Nancy Nall, Competent Mother, because I managed to get my kid off to school on time AND with a brown-bag lunch for the field trip.) And then there’s the payoff — “online porn star.” I love how stardom is guaranteed in pornography; it just wouldn’t have the same punch if it read “porn bit player,” would it? As far as I can tell from this story and the Google, this girl had a website where she displayed nude photos of herself (”I’m a spunky little teen with a super sexy side!”). This constitutes stardom in porn. Linda Lovelace wept.

Anyway, it sounds as though this woman’s college and acting career are both over:

Sander was last seen leaving a bar in El Dorado, about 30 miles from Wichita, with a man identified as Israel Mireles, 24, authorities said. Sander and Mireles had met that night at the bar, according to Watson.

After Mireles did not show up Saturday at his job at an Italian restaurant, his employer went to the motel room where he was staying.

“His motel room was found to appear in great disarray, and a large quantity of blood was found in the room,” Boren said. “Bed clothing was found to be missing. The police were called.”

I expect Geraldo Rivera is on the case. Not to make light of what is shaping up to be a tragedy, but young ladies, this is what you call a cautionary tale.

Oy, the week limps toward its end. I remain a Word Machine, makin’ words for dolla bills, y’all, although my invoice appears to have cooled on the client’s desk, this time. I’m assuming I got caught between billing cycles, because these are stand-up people, but still — I’m starting to see why “cash flow” is something of an oxymoron in freelancing. It’s like standing in front of a faucet that sometimes gushes, and sometimes just coughs a little. “Flow” is an aspiration, not a reality. For me, anyway.

I finally caught “Michigan vs. Ohio State: The Rivalry” on HBO. Not terrible, not even half-bad, but it failed to get at what I maintain — [brandishing index finger to make a windy point] — is the essential truth of this matchup, i.e., its one-sidedness. At least one Michigan sportswriter saw it as “more tailored to a Columbus setting,” and he’s right — there’s more of this story in Ohio than in Michigan, because there’s more to film in Ohio than in Michigan. Buckeyes simply care more, a lot more, about this rivalry than Wolverines do. Saying so would have diminished the premise of the film, however, and the nuts and bolts of why that is true doesn’t lend itself to a slow-tempo violin-solo versions of the fight song, all that sports-film crapola about tradition and trophies and bragging rights.

If I were making a list, I’d start with the differences between Columbus and Ann Arbor — one a large city that lives and breathes Buckeye football because for decades it was the quite literally the only game in town, the other just a college town. The whole state of Ohio is invested in the Buckeyes to some extent; it’s the only Big Ten school in the state, the flagship school of the public-university system, the giant diploma factory in the middle of everything. The University of Michigan competes for gridiron loyalty with Michigan State, just for starters. Ann Arbor’s closest large city, Detroit, supports four major-league sports, with media attention divided between them. And here’s something no one in Columbus wants to hear (they will cut you off if you even bring it up, trust me, I know): Michigan maintains at least two other major football rivalries, with Notre Dame and Michigan State. Admittedly neither is as big as Ohio State, but they have their partisans, and that divides attention somewhat. On UM/OSU game days, you can always find a few extra Spartans flags flying around my neighborhood, as the third constituency roots against the Arrogant Assholes, as Ann Arbor is known hereabouts.

In Columbus, they have Hate Michigan rallies on campus that would make Joseph Goebbels spin in his grave. If they have them in Ann Arbor, I missed them the year I was there. Maybe among the Greek constituencies. But not at the Michigan Theater, where they were probably showing some art film that week.

That was 2003 by the way. Michigan won.

(Oh, and by the way: Several of the talking-head interviews in the film were shot at Wallace House, the clubhouse for my beloved J-fellow program. All the Michigan interviews with the gleaming woodwork and a tasteful flower arrangement out of focus in the background? I suspect this is the Mark of Birgit, the program administrator.)

OK, back to work. And bloggage:

If you live outside the area and haven’t been reading the foreclosure series in the News this week, I can’t blame you, even though the story is a national one, albeit extra-bad here at Ground Zero. Parts two and three concentrated on what you don’t hear about so much — the outright fraud and criminal activity involved in this disaster. It’s easy to say, “Well, people should have known what they were getting into,” but when what they were getting into involved a quitclaim deed slipped into a pile of documents and signed by an old poor lady, touching off the outright theft of her house, well, that’s a different thing, isn’t it?

Today’s installment starts with the Full French, a one-two punch:

As Michigan’s foreclosure crisis was growing in the fall of 2006, state legislators jumped into action.

They took money away from the state office that investigates mortgage fraud.

Take that, libertarians.

Finally, I don’t want to forget this before the week slips away: On Monday, the NYT did a story on the foundry in India where Con Ed, the electrical utility, gets its manhole covers. There were many photos, which weren’t pretty: Workers stood barefoot and shirtless, waiting to receive molten metal in buckets, which were then hand-carried to molds. The temperatures were punishing. The conditions, 19th-century. DetNews columnist Laura Berman used the story as a peg to write a column about East Jordan Iron Works, which makes manhole covers in northern Michigan under, as you might expect, drastically different conditions.

Globalization isn’t something you can argue with; it’s simply a fact of the world’s economy. But I’m grateful for stories like both of these, which remind us all that we do things differently here, and for good reasons, and that it’s not a bad thing. Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong. safe. safer.

I’ve been looking for an unadulterated version of this short film for years, and this is the closest I’ve come — Motown must keep their vaults pretty well. I think it might be from “Standing in the Shadows of Motown,” but having never seen it all the way through, I’m not sure. I think of this clip whenever I see a hip-hop video shot in some Fabulous Ruin around here. That’s now, but this was then:

Many many many many years ago, I wrote a column for my ex-employer about makeshift memorials. If it wasn’t the hot new trend that was sweepin’ the nation, it was the first I noticed it. There was a little cross that stood along the bike path I used, periodically refreshed by its tender; it marked the place where a jogger had been killed by a teenage motorist. The dead man’s wife said she felt closer to her late husband there, where he died, than in the cemetery where his body lies, the conventional place for mourning.

At the time, “makeshift memorial” hadn’t entered the lexicon. With the exception of crosses like this, and the elaborate ghetto murals/shrines to fallen gangbangers (which earnest grad students told us were rooted in various ethnic heritage rituals), they were only starting to pop up in the wider culture. But when they did, it didn’t take long. Two kids die when their car fails to beat a train at the crossing? Their friends flock to the spot and leave beer bottles, cigarettes and teddy bears.

Some memorials had a little higher profile. Some, higher still.

As a square ol’ suburban American who religious training was traditional and conventional, I fall in The Onion camp:

To cope with this incalculable loss of life, within hours of the accident, the citizens of Mound City responded with a spontaneous outpouring of crappy mementos. Despite the presence of such disturbing reminders of the crash as tire marks, headlight shards, and blood-stained pavement, Mound City residents have come here day after day, adding more tacky shit to the steadily growing pile.

But I’m open-minded about it. There is no correct way to grieve. Young people in particular are always astonished by their first brush with unexpected death, and as traditional religious rituals fall by the wayside, so too do the long-established ways of mourning. They want to stand in front of a pile of crap with a candle in a paper cup, hold hands and cry. As I recall, Ashley wrote me a nice note after Dale Earnhardt died, explaining rather succinctly why people do these things, and why there’s nothing to sneer at there. My position stands on two legs: a) I think it’s wise that there be a statute of limitations on how long a memorial can be maintained, especially if it’s on public land; and b) you won’t catch me dead at one, especially for a professional athlete. But if it helps you get over it, fine.

Remember the gas-station owner shot to death last week? He has one. But note, also, this detail:

It’s been six months since a pregnant woman and her three young children died in an accidental fire at their home in the 3400 block of Lane in southwest Detroit. But the cards, Mylar balloons and stuffed animals remain.

Most of the toys are now a ghastly gray, from months of exposure. The 3-foot-high Spider-Man is still visible, as is the Winnie the Pooh. The single-family home has never been boarded up, and its front door is missing. “I want this gone. I really do,” said Robert Santos, who lives down the street and knew the family who died in the blaze sparked by a back porch grill.

It’s not the vacant, derelict house he wants gone — Santos said he’s used to those in the city — but rather the toys left in tribute.

“Every time I go by, I’m reminded of how those children died. There should be some limit on how long this can go on,” Santos said. “I want my wound to close.”

Cemeteries exist for a reason other than protection of public health. Compartmentalization isn’t always a bad thing.

A personal note: Let’s all hold hands and think positive thoughts about Alan’s car, which of late has expectorated — with great, rifle-shot sound effects — two spark plugs (from the same cylinder). We’re hoping the repair on this 12-year-old Subaru will be of the cheap variety and not the $1,800 new cylinder head, because even though we’ve pretty much planned on a new car purchase sometime in 2008, it’s still 2007 and would be a major pain in the ass to swing at the moment. These old Japanese pluggers just keep rolling along; let’s hope this one will roll a few more months.

Speaking of ridiculous expense, my husband has also informed me he wishes to take up sport shooting in the new year, and wants to buy a shotgun. A cool pump-action model like the one on the cop shows, that I can conceal in the folds of my overcoat and use to rob liquor stores? I asked eagerly. No. Some boring over-under Browning from the used market that, properly maintained, will hold its value for many years. Damn. I’ve wanted one of those Remingtons ever since our next-door neighbor in Fort Wayne used his to scare off someone trying to jimmy his front door at 2 a.m. one summer night. “That sound the slide makes when you rack it, it’s like no other,” he said, smiling at the memory of footsteps fading away at high speed.

Well, if nothing else, I want The Back-Up. Ah, not with children in the house. Probably a gun safe and multiple trigger locks.

Bloggage:

Roy rounds up the Hillary’s-a-dyke innuendo — this week’s, anyway.

Why are you so awesome, Rudy? Giuliani has a superfan, too.

Sometimes I write the copy for my sister’s eBay auctions, but I can’t touch how people sell shit on Craigslist: For an electric wine-bottle opener (yes, they exist), opens a bottle in seconds, allowing you to spend more time with your guests. Because that’s really a problem at most social gatherings, isn’t it?

Back later, peeps. Still on deadline.

How bad can a day be when it begins with a bracing cup of Detroit Journalist o’ the Year Ron French? I ask you.

Ron’s package on southeast Michigan’s foreclosure crisis drops today (and to be sure, if I squint I can make out another name on the byline — Mike Wilkinson). As usual, it bangs the hammer of justice on the anvil of truth, and always has another killer anecdote coming down the pike:

Derek Brown knew Detroit had a problem when a grocery clerk he knew quit his job to become a mortgage loan officer. “Everyone was selling mortgages. There were mortgage offices on every block,” said Brown, president of Quorum Commercial and past president of the Detroit Real Estate Brokers Association. “One day bagging groceries and the next day selling my mother a mortgage? What the hell is that?”

Yeah, what the hell is that? Well, I know what I’ll be doing for a big chunk of the morning. Unfortunately, for the rest of the day, I’ll be doing the deadline scramble, to keep my own house out of foreclosure. It’s all good — work = invoices = checks = happy Nance — but something has to take a back seat. So enjoy a few bloggage tidbits; I’m sure you folks will find something to amuse you:

I know someone who claimed to have weighed 14 pounds at birth. In case you’re wondering how big that is, here’s a handy picture. Of course, this mother of this baby had a C-section. The man I knew was born at home, in his parent’s tenement apartment in Chicago, because they couldn’t afford doctors and hospitals. Imagine squeezing that thing out your vagina without drugs and only a neighborhood midwife in attendance.

So that’s why the sink was draining so slowly: Torso found in east-side sewer. Just another day in the action-packed city.

A tech-support question for Appleheads: Some months back, I promised Alex I’d make him a custom “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” ringtone for his phone. In the past I did this by biting a 30-second chunk of the track, saving it as a separate MP3, and e-mailing it away. (It is, in fact, how I got the opening guitar riff from “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” for my own pink Razr. Yes, I am insufferable.) However, the copy of the track I have from the iTunes Music Store doesn’t allow me to export it or change the file format at all. Can I assume this is part of Apple’s digital-rights management system? If so: weiners. I already spent 99 cents for the damn thing; why can’t I mess around with it a little? Also, please don’t tell anyone Alex likes Iron Butterfly, or they won’t let him in any of the gay bars anymore.

Dick Cheney successfully treated for irregular heartbeat. In related news, police report no progress on missing twin newborns at nearby hospital.

Why getting shot in the leg can be very, very dangerous: Because femoral arteries carry a lot of blood. RIP, Sean Taylor.

Finally, things found en route to other things — rap represented in charts and graphs:

The real 8 Mile Road, Detroit

How many times have I said reading a daily newspaper in Detroit is hardly ever boring?

Two years ago, 1-year-old Deante Reid died in his parents’ care — and, to avoid funeral costs, his parents tried to cremate him in a barbecue grill, the boy’s mother told police. But the bones wouldn’t burn completely, so the couple hid what was left of the baby in the ceiling of a home on Dickerson in Detroit.

Jesus Christ. The story gets worse: The authorities found about the barbecue because they’re investigating the abuse of another kid in the same family. Burns.

Shudder.

Well, don’t want to bring you down too early on Monday. I’m writing this on my birthday, a big birthday, one that ends in a zero. It doesn’t make me happy — I don’t feel 50, although I’ve looked it since 40 or so. And while I’m happy to be 50 in the 21st century, when 50 is the new 35, nothing really changes. Women are invisible past 50. Nature is a bitch. Cronehood is scant compensation, but what the hell, we all can’t be Charlotte Rampling.

Self-pity over. I’m glad to be alive, even in a world where people barbecue their children.

Besides — [jarring change of mood; distraction by shiny object] — I got a cool present. I knew it was cool when I couldn’t even play with it the whole first day because Kate was downstairs with her friends, making a series of experimental films involving mutant werewolves and delinquent teenagers. As soon as I retrieve it from the werewolves, I think it’ll be a nice new resource for NN.C. More to come.

So how was everybody’s weekend? Good, I hope. I celebrated my impending midcentury doom by giving blood Friday. I mean, why not? I’ve always been a blood donor; all anyone has ever had to do is ask. This was my 49th unit, and yes, I noted the symmetry. I started when I was young and healthy in Columbus, Ohio, and have seen quite a few things change since then. Image-wise, blood products have gone from being the very stuff of life to agents of contagion more akin to toxic waste. The usually put a sticker on your shirt as you’re leaving, something like, “Be nice to me! I gave blood today.” If they were redesigning the stickers today, they should say, “Bow down before me! I have no communicable diseases, nor do I take Plavix, coumadin or Accutane and to my knowledge have not had sex with a man who’s had sex with another man since 1977.”

I’ve learned that the blood you give isn’t immediately rushed across the street to be infused in an accident victim; sometimes it’s exported to another part of the world. Blood is a commodity, and the Red Cross treats it as such, and you shouldn’t be shocked or offended to learn this. Remember those horrible pictures of 9/11, of all the emergency medical personnel lined up in ambulance bays, waiting for injured that never arrived? Remember how America responded? (The ones without stupid blogs, that is.) Feeling helpless in their living rooms, watching the carnage on TV, they went down to their local blood banks and donated a pint, blood that was, quite frankly, of no use to the thousands who died that day. Blood has a shelf life; gallons had to be discarded, rivers of blood now soaking into bio-waste landfills. Lesson: Think before you give.

Of course, there’s always a need. Most blood stays in the communities where it’s collected. Every year it gets scarcer, and once you’ve donated blood in the 21st century, you understand why. When I started donating in the late ’70s, the questions were about hepatitis and recent vaccinations, and the nice nurses touched you with their bare hands. Within a few years, they started asking about AIDS and HIV, and everyone wore latex. A few years later, they instituted a private-moment interlude in the interview, when you could slip behind a screen and put an anonymous bar-code sticker on your chart that told the computer what you were too embarrassed to tell the nice nurse — that you were an IV drug abuser or a catcher at last Saturday night’s bareback anal-sex orgy.

Friday was my first donor appointment in four years. The last one, in 2003, was memorable because it was in our office, and was marked by two faintings (Emma’s husband swooned, and Emma, watching, swooned in sympathy. Or maybe it was the other way around.) and a set-to between a gay editor and the bureaucracy of the American Red Cross, who found his protestations of rigorous HIV testing, safe-sex practices and mutual monogamy unconvincing, and rejected him permanently. This year, I was told by a gruff nurse to read the manual before I even signed in.

“I’ve got some experience with this,” I said. “Is there anything new?”

“The FDA requires us to make you read the manual,” she replied.

OK. The manual: Do you feel well today? Are you prone to fainting spells? Had a recent tattoo? Positive drug test for HIV? All familiar questions, then a new medical horror: Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease or Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease Variant. Had a dura mater transplant lately? God, no. Cancer? Chemo? Infections? On to the contraindicated drug list, which had grown by a page, now encompassing many of the wonder drugs advertised on prime-time television. Insulin from bovine sources, blood thinners, acne drugs linked to birth defects. I began to wonder if this was worth it for a couple of cookies, a glass of orange juice and a free blood-pressure check.

It took 45 minutes to get through the screening. After that, the needle stick was a relief.

The whole operation was understaffed, and I didn’t have the usual post-donation experience of being walked to the canteen by an old man who keeps a firm grip on your elbow, lest you pass out. They waved me over to the Lorna Doones with a gesture and told me to call if I developed any alarming symptoms or recalled a previously forgotten interlude with a Village Person. The experience was, like so many things these days, not what it used to be.

So be nice to me. I put up with a lot of shit to keep the country’s blood supply safe.

Bloggage:

Meet a 3-year-old drum prodigy. Does he have a website? But of course. Sounds like his career’s well underway, which is good, because his parents have enrolled him in a school that will require many record sales to meet the tuition bill.

Amy Winehouse is Judy Garland, 2007 version. What the hell is that hanging down between her legs? A tampon string?

More later, but less of it. I have so much work to do this week I’ll barely have time to make videos. There’s a problem to have, eh?

This will be the last post before the holiday, because I will be a proverbial one-armed paperhanger until Friday, no, Saturday. I have moved-up deadlines on my writing projects, and my regular news-farming gig continues, because we cover the whole world, and Thanksgiving is not a worldwide holiday (but should be). Plus I have to make a pie and a Waldorf salad (secret ingredient: Cool Whip) and some tasty fresh rolls and that green-bean thing from yesterday. Alan trudged out of the house with one of those “don’t expect me before spring thaw” grunts, which every newshound knows as the thousand-yard Thanksgiving-week stare. I talked to another old newshound yesterday, who wisely took the week off, only to receive an emergency call from the newsroom to inform her one of her sub-editors had an alcoholic breakdown at the morning news meeting, just FYI.

I think all of us who are journalists in the audience can understand how that happens.

But still, I’m taking the time to be thankful, because I am, and because gratitude is a virtue, and virtue is my middle name. Also, because the longer I sit here blogging, the longer I can put off all that crap in the first paragraph.

So let’s get started with just a few of the things I’m thankful for this weekend:

…that my kid had a sleepover last night, and I slept until 9! hours and 22! minutes! into November 21. Virtually unprecedented.

…that it’s finally raining, even though it’s possible the rain will turn to snow and turn all our plans to shit. Still. Water in the streets means water in the lake, and just hearing the pitter-pat of rain on the skylight reminds me of how long it’s been since I heard it last.

…for my web host and great old friend and online guru, J.C. Burns, who has designed and encouraged and hosted and troubleshot this site since January 2001, at a total cost of $0.00 to yours truly.

…for all my great commenters, and for what they’ve taught me about the nature of online communities. I wish we could have some sort of slammin’ party at some equidistant point from all of us, but it would probably be someplace in South Dakota.

…for all the links on my blogroll, many of them tended by writers who daily remind me why the newspaper business is in such a state. (Please, stop before I lose my health insurance.)

Ah, the hell with gratitude. Gratitude is for losers. On to the useful bloggage!

My brother-in-law has used this method to carve the family poultry for years, ever since he saw Bryant Gumbel demonstrate it on the Today show. It works like a charm. Although, for reasons of better stories to tell down the road, you may prefer the comedy-of-errors method:

“One year the turkey took a long time to cook and I went to carve it after about 13 beers,” said Maurice Landry, who lives near Lake Charles, La. “The way I remember it, I bore down to take off the leg and the whole thing went shooting off the platter and knocked over the centerpiece.”

A question often asked in our household: Where would we be without newspapers to remind us to wear sunscreen? I just asked Google to rustle up that other dead-tree holiday staple — how to eat healthy at Thanksgiving. Immediate result: 398. More sure to come.

Detroit’s Metro Times throws bait in the water — 100 Greatest Detroit Songs Ever! — and, as usual, gets it all wrong. Why? There’s not a single song by J. Geils on it, even though the best live album in modern history was recorded here. And you can’t find “Panic in Detroit” anywhere. David Bowie is no local, but it’s a great song just the same.

OK, one-armed paper-hanging must commence. See you back here on Friday, mos’ likely. Happy Thanksgiving!

Because we are People of the Border Zone, one of our projects this year was getting everybody’s travel documents up to date. Kate got her first passport, Alan got his expired one renewed, and I merely hectored everyone to get pictures and birth certificates and get their butts down to the post office. (I have six years left on mine.)

They keep telling us that any day now, we won’t be able to cross the Canadian border without one, only they keep extending the deadline, due to onerous delays at the passport office. NPR had a story a few months ago, interviewing panicky people holding non-refundable tickets to France but no passport, and they applied four months ago. (To these people, I say: Apply in Detroit. Ours arrived in three weeks.)

Anyway, our two newest passports are cutting-edge technology — e-passports. They have a chip inside so the U.S. government can track our movements around the globe, or something. Also, they appear to have Added Patriotism for Extra Glares at the Border. Really. The new design, which debuted earlier this year, is called “American Icons,” and looks like it was brainstormed in Vegas. The timeless plea of diplomacy — The Secretary of State of the United States of America hereby requests all whom it may concern to permit the citizen/national of the United States named herein to pass without delay or hindrance and in case of need to give all lawful aid and protection. — has been moved from the ID pages to the inside front cover, and now the ID facing page carries the preamble to the Constitution, watched over by a fierce carrion-eater.

Behold:

(It’s times like this I’m sort of sad Ben Franklin failed in his bid to get the wild turkey named as America’s official ornithological symbol. That would be a sight to see.)

Most of any passport is the blank visa pages. In mine, there’s a subtle pattern of state seals. In the new one, it’s where the “American Icons” theme really shines. Mt. Rushmore, the Liberty Bell, a steamer on the Mississippi, a farmer plowing with oxen. I think they should have embedded that chip with a little MIDI version of the National Anthem that would play when you open it, like a birthday card. It really would have nailed the theme. An NYT story on the redesign gets the design flaw exactly right:

“It is like being given a coloring book that your brother already colored in,” said Michael Bierut, of the design firm Pentagram in New York City. A passport, not unlike a scrapbook, gets its allure from gradually accruing exotic stamps, with the blank pages holding the promise of future adventure, he and other designers said. But they find that the new jumble of pictures detracts from that.

I crossed the Canadian border in 2004 with my fellow J-fellow, Jay. (Say that last phrase 10 times fast. It’s fun.) Jay was a producer for “Nightline” and had a passport worthy of an international man of mystery, with stamps from Arabic and Turkish and Cambodian border crossings, while mine had a single dumb mark from Heathrow. And now that would be dwarfed by the enormous heads on Mt. Rushmore.

Might as well stay home.

Since it’s Thanksgiving week, how about a recipe in lieu of bloggage today? Sure, you’d like that.

I know a lot of people out there have competing constituencies sitting around the table on the big day, everyone from adventurous foodie snobs to dug-in traditionalists, and nowhere do the two styles clash more obviously than over the green beans. The first group wants to tart up the dish with sesame oil or some other exotic flavoring, while the latter wants the kind made with cream of mushroom soup and fried onions. The following dish pleases everyone; it contains a major note of the Campbell’s version (onions), but substitutes a tangy sweet-and-sour sauce that’s much lighter. You can also make most of it ahead of time, and just add freshly cooked beans right before serving. It’s from Betty Rosbottom’s American Favorites cookbook, and Betty is, for my money, the best food writer you never heard of. A friend of mine, also a food writer, says, “I’d eat fried gravel if Betty had a recipe for it.” So buy the book, and enjoy…

Green beans with roasted onions

4 medium onions
2 T. unsalted butter
salt and pepper
1 cup chicken broth (can use reduced sodium, fat-free, whatever)
2 T. red wine vinegar
1 T. plus 2 t. sugar
2 pounds tender green beans, trimmed on the diagonal

Preheat oven to 450.

Peel onions without removing roots. Halve onions lengthwise, cutting through center of root. Cut each half into eight wedges, keeping some of root with each wedge, so wedge holds together.

Spray a large, flameproof baking pan with nonstick cooking spray. Arrange onion wedges, slightly overlapping, in pan. Dot with butter, season generously with salt and pepper. Bake until onions are browned and tender, 50-60 minutes, checking after 40 minutes, as ovens can vary.

When onions are cooked, remove from pan and set aside. Place pan over high heat and add broth, vinegar and sugar. Whisk constantly, scraping up brown drippings into sauce. Cook until sauce reduces to a thick syrup, about 4 to 5 minutes. Return onions to pan and toss in thickened sauce. Remove from heat. (Can be prepared one day ahead. Cover and refrigerate. Reheat, stirring, over medium heat when needed.)

When ready to serve, cook beans in a large pot of boiling, salted water until just tender, about eight minutes. Drain well. Season with more salt, if needed. Mound beans on a warm serving platter, and arranged warm browned onions on top.

(That’s the official text. My notes: My onions usually cook in half an hour, not 50 minutes. I’ve never succeeded in getting the sauce to reduce to a thick syrup in under 20 minutes, but it doesn’t really matter — it tastes great even if the sauce is thin. Also, although the onion slices look great when they’re bound by the roots, that, too, is mainly a presentation thing. If yours fall apart, never worry.)

Have a great day. Mine will be a busy one.

How fitting, the weekend that Detroit takes its rightful place atop yet another list of Most Dangerous Cities — please, let’s save the “We’re number ONE!” chant for later in the morning, shall we? — that this story is the hey-Martha talker in our household:

The two gas stations had rivaled for years. They stood across an intersection from each other on Fort Street in Detroit, where even a penny’s difference was enough to lure customers.

And so came the price war: One station dropped a cent or two, and the other grudgingly followed.

But the seemingly petty back-and-forth escalated Friday, ending with a fatal bullet in BP station owner Jawad Bazzi’s head over what police say was a 3-cent difference in the cost of regular gas.

Nice bit of scene-setting there; that’s the story in a few sentences. But the details are so rich:

The two stations are holding firm at $2.96 a gallon, this when the prevailing price elsewhere in the area is in the $3.15-$3.20 range. From what little I know about gas-station economics, those are loss-leader prices; you’d best sell a lot of cigarettes to make up the difference. So it’s probably fair to assume the situation is tense already. And then the Marathon station owner, Hussah Masboath, drops the price to $2.93. Three cents! They might as well give it away free.

And then:

Bazzi walked across the street with a couple of employees to confront the Marathon owner and his posse.

“His posse.” I like how hip-hop slang is now creeping into sober newspaper reports.

The confrontation turned physical. Punches were thrown. A baseball bat appeared on the BP side, and connected with a Marathon employee. That’s when the gun was drawn. Two shots later, Bazzi, the BP owner, is dying on the ground. The police arrive, the Marathon station becomes a crime scene, and the yellow tape goes up and business is over for the day.

Are you ready for the punchline?

After the shooting, with the competing station closed, BP’s price per gallon increased to $3.09 for regular.

The Freep story, linked above, is better-written, but the News gets the name of the Marathon owner and this precious detail:

During the brawl, someone swung a baseball bat and the pole that Masboath used to change the numbers on his sign.

The pole! They didn’t even have time to put it away. Some stories you don’t read as much as watch unspool on your mind’s theater screen.

(Sigh.)

Could it have been a coincidence that, the day I finally got to see “Idiocracy,” I learn this unwelcome news?

As for “Idiocracy,” I have mixed feelings. There’s not much of a story there, the plot is thin; it really only exists to serve as an angry argument against stupidity. But who can’t be on board with that? I laughed out loud more than once; how can it possibly be worse than, say, “Deuce Bigalow?” This Esquire story gives you the gist of the film’s pathetic history, but I’d say you should see it just for the thousands of sight gags, throwaway lines and other details that will be with me for some time. (Let’s put it this way: I will never be able to watch “America’s Funniest Home Videos” with Kate again without thinking of “Ow My Balls!,” a big hit in 2505, apparently.)

As usual, YouTube is on the case. The movie’s setup is here.

An exhausting weekend, capped by Kate’s birthday party Sunday. I always think of the last eight weeks of the year as the Three Hurdles of Fall — Halloween, Dual-Birthday Fest and then the biggie, Christmas. I’m two-thirds done, but the last one is always the one most likely to send you sprawling.

On Saturday, a packed freeway sent me off onto surface streets, and for the first time since I’ve lived here, I saw the famed ruins of the Packard plant:

It’s one of the best-known urban-exploration sites in Detroit, because yes, folks, it is wide open, and people trek through it all the time. If you’re a Flickr member, search “packard detroit” in tags for a truly remarkable set of pictures. (No, I didn’t go in. I was alone, for one, and someone told me a story not long ago involving a photographer falling through a piece of rotted floor there and breaking both legs. I’d love to explain that one to my husband.)

Final bit of bloggage: A hung jury/mistrial for the cat assassin. With his peers hopelessly deadlocked at 8-4, the outcome prompted this comment from the defendant:

“I’m not surprised,” said the defendant, James M. Stevenson, founder of the Galveston Ornithological Society who was charged with one count of animal cruelty for shooting the cat last November with a .22-caliber rifle. “It reflects the attitudes of people in the United States — there are cat lovers and others who love biodiversity, including birds.”

I doubt he’ll be stashing his ammo in the future.

And so the week commences. Have a great one.