It’s been a jolly morning. I got that rare treat from my family — sleeping in on a school day. Alan woke up chirping at 6:55 a.m., so I let him feed the livestock, etc. Then I open the laptop for my morning run and find this gem, from Roy:

If Obama gets the nomination, we’ll get Willie Horton II (and possibly III, IV, and infinity); if Clinton gets it, the position papers of the opposition will resemble the taunting letters-to-the-editor of serial killers of prostitutes, and if Edwards wins they will all be written by the Club for Growth and Mr. Burns from “The Simpsons.”

It gave me the familiar feeling of laughing through tears, because I thought what I always think: Is there any way ink-on-paper opinion-mongering will ever catch up with the web? (Answer: No.) But at least I was laughing. And then Amy, careful reader of the morning fishwrap in my ex-home, sent this, from the (Fort Wayne) Journal Gazette:

Input gathered at two public forums will help the Three Rivers Festival eventually become a nationally recognized event like Mardi Gras, Burning Man or Taste of Chicago, according to Shannon White, the festival’s executive director.

I can see it now: Two San Francisco hipsters, planning their summer. “If we do it right, we can make the Three Rivers Festival in July, and still have plenty of time to recover before Burning Man on Labor Day weekend.” The non-profits there haven’t lost their sense of humor, at least in public statements.

Whew. OK. Friday. Around 10 last night, the rain stopped, the wind picked up and the temperature started to fall. It’s now 19 degrees, and we’re promised single digits, maybe even below, over the weekend. Think I’ll shoot some video down at the lake. The ice probably won’t be safe, but it’ll be pretty. Hard to imagine the death grip of winter was once so predictable here that rumrunners made winter ice part of their business plan. It’d have to be a long, deep cold snap before I’d set foot on river ice, and we just don’t have those anymore.

Cold snaps, while miserable and sometimes terrifying, do give you good stories. I endured the back-to-back horrors of the ’76-’78 winters in college in southeast Ohio, normally a place touched by the balmy breezes of the south — forsythia in February is more or less par for the course there. But for one awful week, I walked to class in minus-20 temperatures, and that’s without the wind chill, a truly baffling weather glitch. One year, early in my Indiana residency, I went to Michigan City for Super Bowl weekend, in similar cold. The car-starting chore was story enough, but the thing I remember about that night, driving home, was the otherworldly city as I pulled into town. It was early on a Sunday night, but the streets were deserted (and not just because people were watching the game). The discharge from thousands of furnaces billowed up as plumes of vapor, and the salt-stained pavement looked like the road to hell. (I’m on the ice side of the fire/ice question, yes.)

I spotted a lone figure, the only human being I’d seen outside for miles, trudging up a driveway in the distance. As I caught up, I could see it wasn’t a residential house, but a massage parlor. I’m sure the girls were working that night, loneliness being perhaps the one thing that could drive a man outside in weather like that.

Tell me a cold-weather story, while I warm my hands over the keyboard. And have a good weekend.

Scenes from a very modern 18-hour visit between friends:

The kitchen table is strewn with sections from two newspapers, three laptops (one of them the kind with widdle bunny ears), an iPhone, two venti Starbucks cups, my Flip video camera, two Gorillapods and, I dunno, maybe a salt and pepper shaker. “Sometimes I’m reading a paperback, and I try to flick the page with my finger,” says Sam. Not the way you flick a mosquito off the page. The iPhone flick. “Did you see these e-mails from Leslie?” she asks John, looking up from the iPhone. “Already answered,” he replies, not looking up from the laptop.

This is how we interact these days. John shoots a little video of Sam reading the e-mail and shows it to me, because I was sitting next to her when she did so, and I guess I might like to see it from another angle. Sam takes a picture of our stained-glass panel for her iPhone wallpaper. Then she takes a picture of the dog. Then we all realize what we’re doing, and go for a walk.

“Put on hats, it’s cold outside!” a passerby scolds us. Apparently the multiple weather widgets installed on every single electronic device on the kitchen table failed to warn us that it was 30 degrees. So we stop at Starbucks for more venti cups and a warmup. I tie Spriggy’s leash to a post outside. Sam takes a picture of him through the window. Good. He hasn’t had his picture taken in five or 10 minutes, and two or three soft-hearted ladies have petted him on their way in. No wonder his self-esteem is so toweringly high.

We need something, we decide. Maybe…a bottle of wine and a bunch of snacks. Also, a two-pound salmon filet and something from the deli called “Michigan black bean salad.” Cucumber, dill, Greek yogurt, a baguette, and we’re good to go.

Does the iPhone ring during dinner? Of course it does. I wait for John to say, “I’ll call you back after we finish eating,” but he doesn’t, because it’s a semi-emergency, the call is coming from Sam’s brother, stuck in an airplane on a runway at Hartsfield in Atlanta for going on three hours, and he wants to alert the media. Does John have a number at CNN? he wants to know. “How strange that you’re in Atlanta, where we live, but we’re in Detroit, but anyway you’re in the plane and can’t get out,” John says, before giving him the number. I kept waiting for him to check the weather, like the guy in the commercial, who used his iPhone to liberate a similarly imprisoned flight. It wouldn’t do any good, because the reason the flight is sitting on the ground is terrible weather in Atlanta. It’s snowing there, which we learned from an earlier phone call from John’s brother, who also lives there.

I wonder where this salmon came from, I thought. I hope not China.

Anyway, the dinner was delicious. We watched Jon Stewart dismember Jonah Goldberg, put all the devices to sleep and/or charge, and went to bed ourselves.*

This morning I read, not online, a NYT review of a book called “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” It begins:

In “Against the Machine,” the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic Lee Siegel pays a visit to Starbucks. He sits down. He looks around. And he finds himself surrounded by Internet zombies, laptop-addicted creatures who have so grievously lost their capacity for human interaction “that social space has been contracted into isolated points of wanting, all locked into separate phases of inwardness.” How long until they wake up and smell the coffee?

Mr. Siegel’s field trip illustrates several things, not least that Starbucks is today’s most hackneyed reportorial setting. His outing captures a vision of connectivity that is the precise opposite of what it appears to be. For him the semblance of a shared Starbucks experience masks endemic computer-generated isolation, a condition that has prompted psychic and ethical breakdowns that go well beyond the collapse of community.

He should have come for dinner last night. The salmon could have fed another easily, and maybe he would have had some suggestions for Sam’s brother to call. Then she would have taken his picture.

Bloggage:

Does Lee Siegel read Bossy? I’d like to hear what the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic (can I get that job? Because I’ve got the skilz) has to say about her brand of humor writing, which combines the elements of photography, colored type, italics, strikethroughs and Photoshop-with-arrows to tell a story about her slippers which makes you glad you spent 45 seconds hearing about. Why can amateurs figure out the unique syntax of the web, and college-educated professional journalists can’t? Put that in your venti Starbucks cup and drink it, Lee Siegel.

Whenever I see a picture like the one with this story, I remember the federal judge in Columbus, Ohio, who ejected a female lawyer from his courtroom in the 1970s for the crime of wearing a pantsuit. The old geezer’s dead now, but I wonder what he’d think of a 75-year-old lawyer with his gray hair tucked into a neat braid at the back of his head. Note that he got charges dismissed against his client, who was a candidate for tar and feathers last year, when she was accused of hanging up on a boy who called 911. Well-played, sir. A little Googling reveals the same lawyer was instrumental in reviving the career of Andy Bey, which earns him a place in jazz heaven, no matter how long his ponytail is.

You know how you know you’re really, really old? When you see a gossip item that begins like this –

Bye-bye, Justin Bobby! Audrina Patridge has a new beau.

– and you not only have no idea who the people are, you don’t even have the slightest itty-bittiest ghost of a hint of a desire to know who they are, and what’s more, you know that even if you bothered to find out, in the name of keeping up with what the kids are into these days, you know that both people will be over by the time you can Google the names. You just have a sixth sense about these things.

* Some events reported out of order, but all events actually happened.

I was the 143rd voter in my precinct at noon Tuesday, but my ballot was 105, which I assume means I was the 105th to ask for the Republican version. From this, we can extrapolate that the GOP will outpoll the Democrats by a 105-38 margin, and that the next president will be a Republican. Probably Romney.

Hey, just testing my punditry skills, in case anyone wants me to go on CNN.

Primary Day in Michigan was a big fat anticlimax, unless you were at the auto show Monday, which hosted the big three GOP contenders, plus Joe Lieberman, carrying John McCain’s coat. Connecticut for Lieberman for McCain: it has a real ring to it. But in the end, of course it was Romney’s show, seeing as how he was the only one who spent more than $1.98 and actually bothered to rent a local hotel ballroom for the victory speech. There’s something about seeing the candidates concede Michigan from South Carolina that really says “your primary was a joke,” isn’t there? (Jack Lessenberry over at the Metro Times put it more starkly: “Kazakhstan has better elections.” At least for Democrats.)

There were some chuckles, but they were so far inside as to be practically non-existent. The NYT’s county-by-county map is interesting, in that “uncommitted” carried the Democrats’ day in only two outposts — the thinly populated mystery spot of Emmet County, at the very tip of the mitten, where only 1,222 Democratic ballots were cast, but 49 percent of them went for U.N. Committed, and the Communistic pinko liberal People’s Republic of Washtenaw, which should not be counting on a warm hug from President Hillary, by God.

(As for what it says that the New York Times offers the best graphic representation of what’s happening in a state 500 miles away — that’s a question I’ll leave for you folks.)

Sorry I took the day off yesterday. I was walking into walls and not getting my calls returned. Also, I needed my roots touched up. Let me make it up to you with bloggage:

Ever wonder what a commune for crunchy-con buttheads would look like? Alas, county commissioners shot down this half-baked Hoosier version of Seaside, Florida. I think it would be a great setting for a murder mystery, however. Be my guest, Lippman. Maybe the next time Tess Monaghan takes a road trip, she can check out the corpse found in the dumpster behind Little Blessings Midwifery. Via The Good City. (Just an aside: What is it with these folks and chickens? They all want a backyard henhouse, or will until they learn just how early roosters get up in the morning. You should hear my vet talk about Grosse Pointe’s wild pheasant population, and the cocks that start crowing at 3:30 a.m. in midsummer. Only they don’t say cock-a-doodle-do, which is annoying enough at that hour; “it sounds like fingernails on a blackboard.” Ah, country life.)

Where did you first read about Truck Nutz? Here, that’s where. And four years ago, no less. (Sorry, the photo’s been lost to the ages. Here’s a replacement. I highly, highly recommend Nut Galleries one and two.) Now the Virginia legislature wants to ban them. For the children, of course.

Speaking of lame-ass punditry. I think Matthew Yglesias nails Tim Russert pretty well, in Washington Monthly.

Why the English are better than us: Because even their trashy tabloids, reporting bizarro police/court news, can use the word “remonstrate” in copy without fear that their idiot readers won’t know what it means.

Now I have to clean my house. John ‘n’ Sam arriving in about five hours. Friends! Adults to talk to! I may faint.

Just a reminder: Wireblogging continues over at The New Package. Discuss the lost race of statuesque blondes, if you go that way.

HT: Talking Points Memo

Man, I wish I had a credential for the auto show. I wish I’d seen this up close and personal:

Somewhere in the middle of that herd is the 2009 Dodge Ram pickup. Although the stunt was a hoot, the Freep said the press had a hard time concentrating on the truck. As the press conference commenced, the milling herd found its own fun “mounting each other.” Flickr photog Vigo74 has a nice set here.

I’m glad NAIAS is going on this week, because the primary, just a day away, isn’t doing much to hold anyone’s attention, or even catch it. The GOP is said to be in a tight three-way race, with McCain perhaps holding a margin-of-error edge over Huck and Mitt. Michigan is supposed to be Romney’s walkaway, but as more than one Michigander has noted, all the people who remember George Romney fondly are now registered voters in Arizona and Florida. Slate’s Daniel Gross points out that Romney 2.0, besides being an expat, also represents everything a contemporary Mitten Stater should despise — a free-trading, private equity-lovin’, Muslim-hatin’ empty suit in a state that’s been badly bruised by the first two and currently holds the nation’s largest concentration of assimilated Muslims who don’t like being lumped in with Osama bin Laden. He’s also not only Romney 2.0, he’s a carbon copy of Dick DeVos, a rich-kid son of privilege (Amway) who tried to sell the same message to Michigan last year and got his head handed to him.

We’ll see. Maybe the Democratic vote-for-the-worst crossover will amount to something. I said last week that I’m a crossover voter of long standing; in Indiana, the only way to feel not totally irrelevant in many contests was to vote in the Republican primary, and I did so, many times. Some people think this is wrong, but I never lost a moment’s sleep over it, as I know in my heart that if the tables were turned, those folks would do it to the Democrats in a nanosecond. No prisoners, not this time.

So how was everybody’s weekend? Mine was eventful. I started a class in video editing at the Detroit Film Center. Of eight people in the class, five are journalists looking to update their skills; here’s guessing our group project will turn out to be a documentary of some sort. We watched some student shorts to get ideas, two of which were portraits of crazy people. There’s a time in your life when the ravings of people off their meds are interesting, but that’s in my personal rear-view mirror. I guess making short films about people who claim to get sustenance from drinking their own urine beats burning them at the stake or making them saints, however.

Friends, I have a week of furious work, with houseguests in the middle. Expect short shrift, but expect something. I’m still showing up this week, but you may have to carry the conversation.

For those of you wondering why I’m not writing more about the Michigan primary, coming up in five days, the NYT’s Nick Bunkley explains on the paper’s Caucus blog:

Because Michigan’s Jan. 15 primary violates Democratic National Committee rules, Senator Barack Obama and John Edwards withdrew from the state’s race, leaving Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton as the party’s only major candidate on the ballot. (Mrs. Clinton has pledged not to campaign here.)

The alternative, for Edwards/Obama supporters, is to choose “uncommitted,” which sort of takes the oxygen out of a campaign: Vote for no one! I’m still undecided, but considering a GOP crossover to vote for McCain. He’s a grumpy old fart, but at least he thinks torture is bad.

Talk about setting the bar kinda low.

My local-local paper, tool of the management class that it is, goes all the way parochial and endorses local favorite Mitt Romney. Don’t think so. Mitch Harper once related a quote he attributed to LBJ former Ohio Gov. Jim Rhodes, who reportedly said Mitt’s dad, George, “couldn’t sell pussy on a troop ship.” The apple did not fall far from the tree.

About that endorsement — something about it smells canned to me. I googled random phrases with no luck, but I’m still thinking it was e-mailed whole from Fortress Mitt. It’s fluently written, for one thing, and reads like a campaign speech, heavy on bumper-sticker phrases and glibness: “In 2002, Romney was elected Republican governor of liberal Massachusetts. In just one term, he eliminated a $3 billion budget gap inherited when he took office by eliminating waste, streamlining government and offering economic reforms that stimulated economic growth in the state.”

See what I mean? Just a bit script-y.

A situation like Michigan’s, where the viable candidates are off campaigning in other states and a Yellow-Dog D like me is doing the primary crossover, leads to some strange moments. Dennis Kucinich made a big splash in Troy this week:

They treated him like a rock star, screaming in adoration and repeatedly giving him standing ovations when he said he would call for the removal of all troops from Iraq within three months of taking office, and advocated impeaching vice president Dick Cheney and President George W. Bush and charging them with crimes after they leave office.

Imagine what they’d have done if he called for a public execution. They’d have lifted the little guy up and carried him around the room. Or maybe all that yelling was for his wife.

Kos thinks Mitten State Dems should vote for Romney, but not because he streamlined government and raised five sons. A pretty basic argument:

Meanwhile, poor Mitt Romney, who’s suffered back-to-back losses in the last week, desperately needs to win Michigan in order to keep his campaign afloat. Bottom line, if Romney loses Michigan, he’s out. If he wins, he stays in.

And we want Romney in, because the more Republican candidates we have fighting it out, trashing each other with negative ads and spending tons of money, the better it is for us. We want Mitt to stay in the race, and to do that, we need him to win in Michigan.

In any event, crossing over and voting for candidates I don’t endorse is a very familiar experience for me. It’s just like living in Indiana.

So, with that, then, let’s get to the bloggage:

“The Bucket List” looked like a p.o.s. from the get-go, but it does give us the pleasure of reading Roger Ebert’s withering pan. Ebert knows a thing or two about how people with cancer really experience life:

I’ve never had chemo, as Edward and Carter must endure, but I have had cancer, and believe me, during convalescence after surgery the last item on your bucket list is climbing a Himalaya. Your list is more likely to be topped by keeping down a full meal, having a triumphant bowel movement, keeping your energy up in the afternoon, letting your loved ones know you love them, and convincing the doc your reports of pain are real and not merely disguising your desire to become a drug addict. To be sure, the movie includes plenty of details about discomfort in the toilet, but they’re put on hold once the trots are replaced by the globe-trotting.

I know you will be as astonished as I am to learn Jack Nicholson plays a crusty old fart, and Morgan Freeman a wise old man. What a way for Jack to end his career, with crap like this. He wasn’t even that great in “The Departed.” Maybe these guys should retire.

Our friend, neighbor and sometime commenter here, JohnC, makes it onto the Prairie Home Companion site with a short essay about loving and hating the Red Sox with his grandma. Among other things.

Thank you, Fark, for finding stuff like this:

BREMERTON — The 27-year-old Poulsbo woman told police officers she promised sexual favors to a man if he bought her alcohol early Wednesday morning. But after getting two bottles of inexpensive fortified wine, she used one to hit him in the forehead.

He had it coming, I’d say.

Friday! Friday! Friday! Have a good one.

I’ve got a jam-packed morning, leading into a less-packed afternoon, and then a jam-packed evening. So I’m leaving you, my chatty friends, with an open thread to keep you all amused. I don’t have much in the way of conversation-starters, but how about this? For the first time in a very long time — it feels like…four years — I’m spending more time watching cable TV news than I usually do, by a factor of Quite a Lot.

And you know what? Every year, it gets worse. It’s like there’s no bottom.

Jack Shafer notes the peculiar ubiquity of CNN’s lame-ass slogan. Start there, and discuss.

And now, off to Wayne State, where for some reason, a class of journalism students wants to hear what I have to say. I’ll school ‘em, by God.

One question: If the digital new media is supposed to be exploding all the old rules and not following any of the new ones, why do so many of its writers sound like Perry White dictating to the cigar-chomping rewrite man?

In Touch can exclusively reveal what actually happened after Britney Spears checked into LA’s Cedars-Sinai Medical Center last week.

A source exclusively tells PageSix.com that Brit’s dad, Jamie, is the one who sounded the emergency on the red Phil phone once he learned his daughter was checking out early.

TMZ has learned Eminem was rushed to the hospital over the holidays.

OK, two out of three of those are old media with websites. But TMZ is new-media all the way, and they do it too. I guess it’s all Drudge’s doing, with his stupid fedora and Walter Lippman affectations. It’s amusing how well that old rat-a-tat-tat passive-voice stuff holds up, isn’t it? And how ironic that it’s used so often on gossip sites, where the news couldn’t be less consequential. By the way, is anyone ever not “rushed” to the hospital? “Eminem was driven to the hospital at a leisurely pace, observing all legal speed limits.” Don’t read that much, do you?

Enough woolgathering. I’m late getting started today because I had my tit in a wringer. Literally, more or less — mammogram time. You have to schedule those so far in advance it’s impossible to coordinate it with one’s less-ouchy days on the calendar, but I was as stoic as I could be. The rule of mammography is squeeze, squeeze, squeeze a little more and then one last big squeeze until the patient yelps, and then you take the picture. The technician gave me a little lecture on the importance of maximum compression (not while I was compressed, thankfully) — the flatter you can make everything, the better “doctor” is able to see what’s going on. Fair enough.

Because this was a digital picture, I was able to look at them immediately afterward. I once had a hairdresser (straight, male) whose wife called her breasts “the hanging bags of fat,” a term that’s stuck with me, and I think about it whenever mammography time rolls around, seeing them squashed under my chin and doing my deep breathing to keep from yelling.

Today I thought about a writing class I took once, led by a real blowhard, who was trying to impress upon us the importance of le mot juste, just the right word. He was doing it with a long story from Arthur Koestler’s novel “Darkness at Noon,” about two men being held in the same prison. They were on opposite sides of a wall, and couldn’t see or hear one another, but over time they started communicating using a tap code. One man is describing an old lover’s “breasts like champagne glasses.” The way the blowhard told this story was excruciating, going on and on about the tap code and how agonizingly slow it was as a means of communication, kind of like this story, and then he gets to the punchline, “breasts like champagne glasses.” And he looks around the room and beams, because isn’t that just the most incredible phrase to describe a pair of perfect breasts?

I sat there blankly, picturing the old granny in those Playboy cartoons. Because, to me, a champagne glass looks like this:

About two seconds later it occurred to me he was thinking of this:

Which just goes to show le mot juste is never entirely juste. But the granny is probably more comfortable during her mammograms than the saucer-boobed girl.

Have I lowered the tone? Good. Now to the bloggage:

New Hampshire proves you can never count a Clinton out. Discuss.

Liberals are sabotaging RedState’s website. (I think.) Jon Carroll explains.

And now, I’m going to write something someone might actually pay me for. Carry on.

Here’s one for you Hoosiers, via reader Ann Fisher, who spotted it on a Chicago-area food board:

I have in-laws who live in Fort Wayne. Every time we go there, we are treated to “beef” and noodles. I thought it was just a family recipe, but when I was in line at the Meijer’s, an 80 yr old woman informed me they were also having beef and noodles for dinner. I asked if it was a regional specialty, and she wasn’t sure, but told me it was a good way to feed a family of nine (!)

The thing is, it’s pretty vile stuff. I have a feeling, after some research, that it’s a drastic perversion of “Amish beef and noodles” from the Amish in that area. Only because both dishes are intended to be served over mashed potatoes. Nothing like a double dose of carbs. But get this. My in-laws serve it with a side of (drumroll) white bread rolls! 3 starches in one sitting!

I believe the iteration of this recipe that I was served consisted of *cans* of a beef product, possibly Hormel. I didn’t want to go into the kitchen to find out, after the dog-food like aroma wafted out. The noodles are actually kind of nice, thick, german spaetzely things. Thus my question- anyone know of this dish, and what brand the noodles are that are generally used? They are maybe 2 in long and 1/4 in diameter, kind of chewy.

There’s so much to love in that post. The assumption that Hoosier beef and noodles must be a perversion of the more authentic Amish dish, assumptions of Amish authenticity being rampant in Chicagoland. (Trust me, honey: The Amish invented canned beef. These people don’t have refrigeration, remember. You wouldn’t believe some of the crap they eat.) The “dog-food like aroma.” The utter bafflement at its presentation, ladled over mashed potatoes. But hey, nice noodles. Where do you buy them?

I can answer her question right off the bat: You don’t. Those kind of noodles you make, but it’s pretty easy. You don’t need a pasta machine, just a rolling pin, a flat surface and a knife. My Jay County-raised neighbor used to make killer chicken and noodles, and she thought making noodles from scratch was about as difficult as opening a carton of milk. As for the triple-starch presentation, all I can say is, if you spent the morning baling hay and were about to spend the afternoon stacking it in the barn, all those carbs would burn off by 2 p.m. and your stomach would start on the protein. The first and only time I ate noodles over potatoes I was doing the rigorous duty of writing a newspaper column, and the effect was soporific. Within 90 minutes I slipped under my desk for a 20-minute nap, and the residue of that meal I carry on my hips to this day. The problem with country cooking is the problem with evolution — it takes a long time for the diet to catch up to the fact you left the farm two generations ago, hence the ample bottoms you see in Indiana, and all over the midwest, for that matter.

As for canned beef, I cannot say. Beef and noodles, in my experience, is usually made with braised chuck or round or another inexpensive cut suitable for the rural proletariat. But it could very well be canned, too. Your in-laws may consider fresh beef something to be reserved for special guests, not Chicago foodies.

The post concludes with a link to the Allen County Public Library’s photo archive, where we see this peculiar local dish being served in a firehouse. This makes me nervous. What if the alarm went off 90 minutes after lunchtime? You’d never be able to rouse the firefighters from their carb coma. Your house would burn down while the safety forces slept off the potatoes.

I know I’ve said this before, but when I was doing talk radio? The most calls I ever got on a single topic? Was on noodles and potatoes, served together.

OK, then.

I have to admit, I feel sorry for Hilary, and it has nothing to do with the tears. Via LGM, I found this, where Kerry Howley draws the obvious conclusion:

Add to this useful list of the worst jobs in the world: consultant to any candidate with breasts. Show emotion and you’re weak; show strength and you’re a collection of servos. Respond to attacks with emotion and you’re “angry.” Respond with equanimity and you’re cold and distant. Shy from war and you’re too feminine to lead; embrace it and you’re the establishment’s whore. And the worst thing you can do? Acknowledge, in any way, shape, or form, the existence of sexism in these United States.

Word.

Since LSU pned the Buckeyes last night, this seems appropriate: Retired , 73-year-old cop kicks butt of armed, road-raging driver. The driver had a .357. The geezer, a cane. And it happened in? Slidell, Loozieanna.

Day two of the January heat wave threatens to drown us under torrents of rain, but what the hell. It’s still above 50 degrees. Have a great day, all.