We fin­ished pho­tog­ra­phy on our stu­dent film Sat­ur­day. It was 27 degrees, and we all stood around blow­ing on our fin­gers to keep blood cir­cu­lat­ing for the last shots. Our bat­ter­ies kept fail­ing in the cold, and at one point I took a near-dead one and stuck it in my bra on the chance a lit­tle warmth might bring it back to life. When we needed it later, it had mirac­u­lously recov­ered to near-full capac­ity. Make of that what you will, but I feel jus­ti­fied in claim­ing my breasts can now gen­er­ate elec­tric­ity. I think I’ll put it on my resume.

Good thing we fin­ished, though, because this was Sunday’s weather:

You need a day like this every so often, an excuse to stay inside and gather link­age for your stu­pid blog. Let’s make it an all-bloggage Mon­day morn­ing, because it’s win­ter break and I’m not fully awake yet.

Sunday’s fields were rich and fruit­ful, start­ing with a story that got barely briefed in the local fish­wrap but, thank­fully, much wider cov­er­age in the Wash­Post — the hor­rific mul­ti­ple fatal in Prince George’s County, Mary­land. The Fast and the Furi­ous meets … real­ity, I guess. Peo­ple have been ille­gally rac­ing cars as long as there have been cars, but when I started read­ing the story, I assumed it was an out-of-control racer who spun into the crowd, not a bunch of peo­ple stand­ing in the mid­dle of the road, neatly screened by tire smoke. What a night­mare.

There seems to be a bit of this going around — ille­gal rac­ing end­ing in mul­ti­ple funer­als, that is. I was never a gear­head, and the only place I ever saw this sort of drag-racing hap­pen was on a freshly paved but still unopened part of a new free­way in Colum­bus, just days away from its ribbon-cutting. (Ohio read­ers? It was Rt. 315, and now you know the truth: my mid­dle name is Methuse­lah.) It was motor­cy­cles, and I’m not even sure any­one was rac­ing, just wind­ing it out in a con­ve­nient place. Still: shud­der.

The Wash­Post also pro­vides a won­der­ful, funny sum­ma­tion of the Detroit may­oral scan­dal, by ex-Freeper Neely Tucker. He reprints a num­ber of the text mes­sages in ques­tion, and now seems as good a time as any to point out what’s bugged me about this since the begin­ning: How com­plete they are. With the excep­tion of the inescapable LOLs, even fig­ur­ing the par­ties had devices with QWERTY key­boards, they don’t sound like the way two peo­ple who know one another well — excep­tion­ally well, in this case — actu­ally text-chat with one another:

CB: “I’m feel­ing like I want another night like the most recent Sat­ur­day at the Res­i­dence Inn! You made me feel so damn good that night.”

Some­how, she neglected to give the street address. It’s like bad expos­i­tory dia­logue in a movie.

Which is a good tran­si­tion to Gene Weingarten’s col­umn, yes, also in the Wash­Post (my new favorite Sun­day paper), writ­ten entirely on his cell phone:

on the few occa­sions i do text mes­sage, the only con­ces­sion i make is that i dont use cap­i­tals or apos­tro­phes or ques­tion marks or hyphens because they take an extra key­stroke and when one is typ­ing with ones thumbs one wants to con­serve key­strokes. it pains me to real­ize that mankinds sig­na­ture anatom­i­cal adap­ta­tion, the one that dis­tin­guishes us from the lowly beasts, has been pressed into ser­vice for such a moronic chore. its like using a stradi­var­ius to ham­mer a nail.

so, tex­ting is stu­pid. but do you want to know what is stu­pider. to get this col­umn pub­lished, i have to email it to myself every 30 words.

A man I could love (and who bears a strik­ing resem­blance to Detroit’s mayor, at least in that hat), Patrice O’Neal, says he likes to eat like Caligula:

I made thigh-meat gumbo with some kiel­basa. For some rea­son, when the recipe calls for chicken breast, I use thigh. I’m a thigh-meat dude. Thigh is just the best meat — I don’t get chicken breast. I think it’s a pub­lic­ity stunt that we’ve con­vinced peo­ple it’s deli­cious. Chicken is legs and thighs — they’re juicy.

Are you lis­ten­ing, James Lileks? Unlikely.

Barack Obama made me a mix­tape. What has Barack Obama done for you lately? HT: Eric Zorn. Keep reload­ing for end­less fun.

Finally, a house­keep­ing note: I’m get­ting spam-bombed. At least two dozen spam com­ments a day are slip­ping the main net and land­ing in the mod­er­a­tion queue, which is not a huge headache, but since they come to me as e-mail first, it’s just a pain. So we’re going to start clos­ing com­ments after one or two weeks, since the vast major­ity of the spam attempts are sent to old threads. This means approx­i­mately noth­ing to 99 per­cent of you, but if you’re the sort who likes to catch up every six months, you may not be able to join the con­ver­sa­tion. Send an e-mail instead.

Go com­mence the week. I need about a mil­lion cups of cof­fee first.