Quite an evocative story from yesterday’s DetNews, in Neal Rubin’s column. I can’t decide if it’s a story about pluck, stubbornness or stupidity: A Detroit teacher has had 15 vehicles stolen in four years. Fourteen, actually — 13 Town & Country minivans and one Durango, twice. I’ll give her this much — this is one nice white lady who is not intimidated by the rough, tough city:

Another time, she found her Town & Country in some delinquent’s driveway near Vetal. When the police didn’t show any great interest in helping her get it back, she dialed her cell phone, which she had left in the console. The thief picked up. “I hope you like orange,” Fulton said, “because you’re going to be wearing an orange jumpsuit.” The kid jumped back into the van, drove it to Grand River Avenue and McNichols Road and crashed it into a tree. So maybe that wasn’t the best idea on her part, but at least she felt better for a little while.

The story goes on to point out that Chrysler lags other domestic carmakers in anti-theft protection. They do, however, offer lots of helpful advice:

After the most recent theft, she e-mailed Chrysler to ask why it didn’t do a better job stopping thieves. After 15 vehicles, she said, she was running out of patience. Someone named Jenny e-mailed her back. Among Jenny’s suggestions was to park in “lighted areas, garages or neighborhoods without a history of stolen vehicles activity, whenever possible.” “Great,” Fulton fired back. “Are you going to drive me to work?”

If the city survives, it’ll be because of women like this — always willing to buy American one more time. When Alan finally got his shotgun out of layaway, the gun shop owner was examining a new item of inventory, a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special, the standard-issue police service revolver for generations (at least until they started carrying semiautomatics, to keep up with the bad guys). It had “Detroit P.D.” stamped on the barrel, and he said, “I could put this up for sale and get a $300 premium from somebody in Los Angeles who wants to own a gun from the murder capital of the United States. But I won’t.” You said it, mister. Keep Detroit armed and strong.

Folks, as should be obvious by now, I got nuttin’ today. I see some of you are discussing the wind on the east coast in previous post comments. Well, before you had that wind, we had it, two nights ago. Let’s all offer good thoughts and support for NN.C’s neighbor and commenter JohnC, who’s probably wishing he’d cleaned out the garage and put the Cadillac away that night:

They were out of town at the time. I wonder if the car alarm continued for hours and hours.

Off to write words for money. Later.

(A small rant for the journalists in the room. The rest of you, go visit the LOL cats.)

Alan Mutter, who calls himself a Newsosaur, starts off our discussion with the proverbial “one wag” comment:

“How many people have to read a story before it goes in the paper?” asked a senior editor at a major metropolitan daily who is struggling to sustain the quality of his news report in an era of shrinking resources. “If we have to economize, the editing process is the place. Why do we have all these people processing stories after a reporter writes it? They are not producing anything that will get us traffic on the web.”

No, I guess they’re not. But they are saving your ass from getting it sued off. Also, from becoming a laughingstock. Also, from having your bargain-basement, straight-out-of-college reporting staff embarrass you in print by misspelling the mayor’s name. For starters.

When I read statements like this — As you can see from the chart* below, a half a dozen reasonably well compensated people – or more – are likely to lay hands on an ordinary story bound for the pages of the typical metropolitan daily — I always wonder what I did wrong. I’ve worked at two dailies, one large, one midsize that became small during my time there. First of all, we can quibble over “reasonably well compensated,” but we won’t. Half a dozen editors? On a good day, at full staff, for a Sunday front-page story, maybe. And where are these papers whose reporters can be trusted to put stuff in the paper without multiple layers of oversight?

* The chart has a typo. Snicker.

The following is the full text of a police story submitted to the metro desk at a major metropolitan daily, back when my one of my old pals worked there. (I had to go to the basement and go through old files to find it, so be grateful.)

A mad dog died and an East Side family was happy Monday night, police said.

A pit bull terrier had terrorized three girls and two women Sunday and forced the girls up on a kitchen table to flee from the animals snapping jaws, Anthony King, 30, of [address redacted] said Monday night.

King said the neighbors dog had lurked in the basement apparently ate some drano and charged up the back stairs and into their second floor kitchen Sunday.

An autopsy showed the dog was mistreated and suffered stomach lesions, King said.

“The growling, foaming, spitting, dog chased the kids up on the kitchen table, 5th District Sgt. Joseph Hoellar said.

Like author Stephen Kings Cujo the King family feared the dog was rabid.

“We were concered the dog was rapid, King said.

Family members tricked the dog to go into a locked room while the family waited for police.

The dog went into a final fatal frenzy and when the officers arrived the dog died, Hoellar said.

King praised police who calmed his screaming children.

“The really calmed down the kids and handled the situation nice. The police were so wonderful and handled the situation so nice we want to give them some recognition, King said.

King said his wife, Priscilla, his mother-in-law and his three daughters aged, 4, 5 and 11 fled from the mad dog.

The dog owner was in a hospital and the wife of the owner apologized to the family, King said.

King praised officers Charleen Branski and Timothy Oddsen,

The end. An isolated case, you say. Perhaps. (As I recall, the reporter didn’t last very long. But, I remind you, he was hired in the first place. He’s probably teaching middle-school English now.) This is what he wrote, typos, unclosed quotations, semiliterate sentence construction and all. This is what he turned in to his editors, his my-work-here-is-done statement. This.

Not all reporters are this bad. But more are than you might think. In my experience, the number who check spelling, style, grammar, facts or anything else dwindle by the day. Their mantra is: That’s the desk’s job. Alan had a sorta-intern once (he was on staff, but spent a summer in Features refreshing his creative batteries) who, after being assigned a story on mud-racing, turned in a set of notes. Seriously: A SET OF NOTES, transcribed. Random impressions, a few quotes, incomplete sentences. And he worked on this story for a month.

I could go on: I once edited a first-person column describing a lesson on firing an AK-47. The writer referred to the thing throughout as a “gun,” to the stock as “the wooden part at the back of the gun” and the forestock as “a wooden handle in front of the trigger,” etc. And, let me remind you, I was the third person to handle this story before it went into print. I can only imagine the letters we would have gotten. (As for me, I sent an e-mail to the reporter, sketching out the venerable Marine parade-ground chant.)

I could go on all day, but like the growling, foaming, spitting, dog, you might fear I was rapid.

Mutter’s post goes on to point out:

While it would be heretical at most major news organizations to “railroad” stories from a reporter’s keyboard directly into print, several publications, including a few surprisingly large ones, are allowing reporters to point, click and post words and images directly to the newspaper’s website. If the work is good enough to slap on the web without further human intervention, why isn’t it good enough to go directly on a web press?

I see what he’s saying, but he’s making the wrong argument. Anyone who’s spent time in a newsroom knows that half the people with “editor” in their job title don’t edit much at all. They’re in charge of thinking outside the box, long-range planning, going to meetings, organizing the redesign of the obit page. (Rumor has it that when the new Gannett sheriff arrived at the Detroit Free Press, he regarded one of these souls across the table at a meeting and said, “Tell me again what your job is?” There’s a wakeup call.) For my money, you could can one-third to one-half the designers at any given newspaper, but they may have different ideas. Anyway, my point is: You don’t take eyes off the copy, especially when you’re originating the copy. Editing is quality control, and quality is all we have.

OK, rant over. March along with me: This is my rifle, this is my gun. This is for fighting, this is for fun…

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.

This is why I shut down my damn browser when I have work to do:

Because the news is always trying to distract me. Ahem:

A member of the City of Detroit’s pension board filed a police report Thursday against City Council President Pro Tem Monica Conyers, claiming she threatened him with a gun at a board meeting earlier in the week.

That’s the wife of U.S. Rep John Conyers, btw. And, in fairness, she said it was only a metaphorical gun:

“What she said was: ‘I’ve got a bigger gun than your gun, my husband,’ ” Riddle said. “She was talking about a political gun.”

And people wonder why I like it here. It’s Miami with snow!

Danny wondered if I was planning to post today, or just lie around the house eating leftover V-Day cupcakes. The answer is: Get out of my face, Danny. I have four hours to write a story, shower, run downtown to check out a coffee table going up for auction tonight and strategize our bid (not to mention gird my loins against every gay couple in the tri-county area, because it’s mid-century and FABulous), pick up Kate, take the dog to the vet, primp for a girl’s night out, etc. But before I commence this whirlwind, I’m having a last cup of coffee and giving you something to hang your comments on, Danny, because that’s the kind of gal I am.

I always have a day like this after I’ve applied for a regular full-time job, which I did earlier this week. I’m not counting on hearing back from them, however, because one thing I’ve learned about myself in the last three years: I am box office poison. Like Joan Crawford.

In my pile of “stuff to write about eventually” is a copy of a book sent to me around Christmas by NN.C reader and sometime commenter, Michael Heaton. “Truth and Justice for Fun and Profit” is a collection of 20-plus years of columns and stories for The Plain Dealer, which you Midwesterners should immediately recognize as Cleveland’s daily newspaper (unless you’re from rural Indiana, and you know it as Wabash’s daily newspaper [no, it's not the Cannonball, although it should be], in which case you’d be wrong, because the Wabash Plain Dealer has the city in its name, whereas Cleveland’s daily is just: The Plain Dealer, and just in case you were wondering, yes that IS the best newspaper name ever).

Anyway, Heaton’s book isn’t the sort of thing you just pick up and read straight through, but it’s great kitchen material — pick a short piece and read it while you wait for the sauce to reduce. Although it has a way of making the sauce reduce too much, if you catch my drift. You can burn your cheese toastie getting through “In the Valley of the Lost Boys,” a magazine-length piece recalling the glory days of an old-school bachelor colony, falling to (what else?) real-estate developers.

The book mostly makes me wistful, though — writing like this is why I got into newspapers in the first place. It’s reminds me that once upon a time the Features section was where a good writer aspired to be, before corporate bozos turned it into a forgettable mishmash of smart-parenting thumb-suckers and 10-day-old Paris Hilton gossip roundups.

Oh, well. Plug delivered. Follow the On the Nightstand link for buying info. (And please, don’t be put off by the “Foreword by Joe Eszterhas” line on the cover. We won’t hold that against him. Besides, when the One Great Scorer comes to write against the man who gave the world Sharon Stone’s coochie on the silver screen, he’ll have to put one thing on the plus side: He came back to Cleveland.)

And if Michael ever reads this, he knows why I finally got around to writing about it today — his father, legendary PD sportswriter Chuck Heaton, died Thursday. Ninety years old, surrounded by family, he crossed the river under the best circumstances possible. Wherever he is now, I wonder if he’s privy to what’s going to happen to the business he gave his life to. I hope, if he has any say in the matter, it’s not all bad. Michael, my condolences. It’s never easy.

Off to my fun-filled day. You happy now, Danny?

Like many who plan to vote Democratic in the fall, I’m not an enthusiastic Hillary Clinton supporter. If she’s nominated, she has my support, but as I’ve stated before, I’d vote for a Paris Hilton-Wilmer Valderrama ticket over anyone the Republicans could possibly put up to the job. Just to, you know, send a message.

But speaking of messages, I’m also aware of what constitutes fair criticism of her, and what doesn’t. Like the black person who fails to be cheered by being called “articulate,” I know what hits me in the frontal lobes, and what’s tickling the medulla oblongata. I have a sense of humor, and I don’t think I’m overly sensitive. But to tell the truth, some of this shit is just getting on my last nerve. To make things easier and keep the tone light, let’s let Stephen Colbert ring ‘em up:

That On Notice generator is fun to play with. As most of them are.

I have three days of work to do in two, so I’m letting you folks carry the conversation today. I will make a small announcement: Kate and I will be in Fort Wayne the 22nd, that is, a week from tomorrow. Kate will be off with her posse, but I’ll be at liberty that night, staying with Alex out in beautiful suburban Leo. He suggested we hold an open-table meetup “somewhere we can smoke,” although, to be sure, I’d rather it be somewhere we can’t smoke, but I’m flexible. Anyone interested? I favor Henry’s (can’t smoke) or Beamers (can smoke), but what the hell — maybe we should go all out and rent an Eagles hall. Make it a real Hoosier evening.

A short bit of bloggage: My ex-colleague Mike Harden did a moving column many years ago about a kid who needed human growth hormone injections to overcome a pituitary problem and give him something approaching normal height by adulthood. I recall that, at the time, HGH had to be gathered from cadavers, making it scarce and dear. The injections were very painful, and the kid fought them like a tiger. Now it’s synthetically grown in labs, much more available and less expensive. And now people like Debbie Clemens allegedly take it, to look good in a bikini. Is this a great country, or what?

OK, time to shut down the browser and get some real work done. Carry on.

How do I love the Westminster Kennel Club show? Too many ways to count. It’s the first real sign of spring. Light in the sky at 7 a.m., dogs on TV 13 hours later. The dogs are gorgeous and strange and exotic and kissable. And, of course, the people.

I’m about a decade behind Christopher Guest in making that last observation, but who cares? Is there anything more wonderful than the odd lot of screaming queens, fat ladies, patricians, showbiz hangers-on and the badly dressed weirdoes who populate a dog show? I could barely take my eyes off the judge in the Working group, who reminded me of a friend’s grandmother (that would be the indomitable Cor, for those of you who’ve known me a while) in every detail from her arthritic walk to her croaky voice.

And, of course, the right dog won.

Back in the day, when I subscribed to the Chronicle of the Horse, I always looked forward to the special hunting issue, in which every working pack of foxhounds in the country was listed in a directory. It was there I learned about an even more obscure sub-niche of the sport, practiced mainly by ex-foxhunters too creaky to jump four-foot fences all morning anymore — beagling, or rabbit hunting, on foot, with packs of beagles, sometimes bassets. There was something so sweet about these groups of spry seniors in green wellies, with their ragtag packs boiling around their feet, ready for a fine afternoon’s tramp across the swampy fields, listening for the hound music. Everyone associates beagles with Snoopy, but that’s what I think about.

Good dog, Uno.

Big day today, so bloggage:

Officer Rivieri has a bad day. In that uniform, with that widdle car, I’m not surprised he feels the need to get a little macho sometimes.

Covering baseball — or any professional sport — isn’t all beer and skittles, or even franks and beans. But on the day we got four inches of snow, it’s possible to look at a dateline and sigh, just a little.

OK, off to the silicon mines. Daydream about warm vacations, if you like.

For the making-of featurette* included with our student-film project, I shot a little video with my Flip:

I call your attention to our awesome camera dolly, a DIY project made from PVC pipe and skateboard wheels. Our director is friends with the folks at InZer0, a local sci-fi series/maybe-a-movie production, and borrowed it from them. It knocks together with a rubber mallet (or your shoes), and the stand slides noiselessly. With it, we were able to do a cool little tracking shot of our talent, Teresa, walking down a hallway, checking doors on either side, with nary a bobble.

As a compromise with the Hollywood version, it’s pretty adequate to our uses.

I have a memory of one of my showbiz-nerd friends telling me the first Steadicam rigs cost $100,000, so I went online in search of other cheap compromises for low-budget filmmakers. Not surprisingly, there are zillions. I think I know what the universe is trying to tell me: It’s time to indulge my long-held dream of producing pornography with real scripts, and a real story. Something to keep ‘em in the seats after, you know.

See the dolly shots and the dolly track — in Genesis’ “Invisible Touch” video. Not made from PVC, because it’s Genesis.

(*Note: There is no making-of featurette.)

Bloggage: Just the other day I asked Kate if she’d like to play hockey. Now, I’m thinking she might be better off playing, oh, chess. Oh, and in re: our earlier discussion about the relativity of luck? Check this out — a guy gets hit in the neck with a skate in a freakish accident, severs his carotid artery, leaves a red smear across the ice to remind everyone in the arena of their own mortality, and guess what his doctors say? This:

Vascular surgeon Richard Curl, who assisted Noor, said the cut was about an inch-and-a-half deep and also as wide. Doctors were astonished the skate blade did not hit any other arteries or veins or cause any further damage.

“Luck,” was a factor, according to Noor.

Thought for the day: Everything is relative.

Eric Zorn interviews his old college buddy Gerry Prokopowicz about the latter’s new book, “Did Lincoln Own Slaves?” A sample:

Q: Given that the Q&A format is often recognized by discerning readers as evidence of a lazy writer who doesn’t want to struggle with transitions, why did you choose that format for your book?

A: I got it from your columns.

You know how Michael Moore is, like, fat and evil and a propagandist and not interested in the truth at all? You know? I’m sure his ideological opponents will show the proper way to do things when “Expelled,” their documentary on intelligent design, debuts later this year. They sure got off to a good start with PZ Myers. What’s the ninth commandment again? I always forget.

Finally, Wireblogging continues over at The New Package. Come join the discussion.

More coffee, shower and work, in that order. Be still, heart.

This isn’t a lesson you have to be a writer to learn, but just in case you haven’t, let me lay it out for you:

One person’s poetry is another’s profanity. Context is everything. It’s stupid to argue why black people can call one another nigga and white people can’t. The language you use at the bar, at the frat house, at your grandmother’s dinner table, at church, at the office is likely going to vary widely.

So get over whether or not David Shuster got a raw deal from his employer over using the phrase “pimped out” to describe what Chelsea Clinton’s parents may or may not be doing in re: their daughter. He perhaps thought he was being hip and young and with-in and down with the kids, and Hillary Clinton objected. This cannot possibly come as a surprise to anyone with half a brain. You say tomato, I hear to-mah-to. Let’s chalk the whole thing up to experience.

To be sure, popular discourse has become much more, er, popular in the last 20 years. Again, you don’t need me to tell you this. It’s not necessarily a bad thing. There are situations where, “boy, is that guy a brainless schmuck” is far more eloquent and to-the-point than “Mr. Shuster displays a shocking lack of couth,” but while “schmuck” is a wonderful word, it means “penis” in Yiddish, and if you start throwing it around like confetti, sooner or later you’re going to meet someone who’s offended by it.

As a woman of five decades, I’ve never been entirely comfortable with the casual use of the word “pimp,” if only because it’s the first syllable in “pimple,” and the fewer of those in the world, the better. But really, what a repulsive image to aspire to, that of a badly dressed man who sexually exploits women for profit. I’ll accept the word as a synonym for cheap flashiness, as well as a crude synonym for “to aggressively market for money,” but otherwise, it’s just sort of gross. And again: Context is everything. “The Daily Show” can do a story on FLIFs and no one bats an eye, but if you’re supposedly a legitimate cable-news talent, you’d better not go there. Or maybe you can go there in 2009, but not 2008. Or on Tuesday, but not on Monday. I imagine I’ll live to see the day Anderson Cooper can call the president a douchebag on the air, but it hasn’t arrived yet. (Not that Anderson would say such a thing; he’s too well-bred.)

So let’s retire the discussion before it gets tiresome. Oops: Too late.

Final note: Guess who said, in 1998, “Why is Chelsea Clinton so ugly? Because her father is Janet Reno.” Answer: You’re soaking in it!

OK. I’m writing this on Sunday. At this very moment, I’m supposed to be on Belle Isle, shooting the final scene for our video class project, but we cancelled. The temperature is 7 degrees and the wind is blowing at, no kidding, 45 miles per hour. It seemed cruel to make two nice actors, not to mention everyone else in the class/crew, torture themselves in such conditions, particularly given the compensation everyone’s getting, which is: Nothing, plus a sandwich. So we’re shooting the indoor scenes later in the afternoon and will pick up Belle Isle when nature stops being such a cruel mistress. That’s showbiz.

But this leaves me more than the usual bit of time to scrape up some bloggage for you pimps, and here you are:

If that damn German polar bear gets any cuter, I’m moving there.

Great idea to spice up your social life: Detroit’s Guerilla Queer Bar, a movable feast that, once a month, descends unannounced on a different nightspot. In January, they chose Carl’s Chop House, one of those ol’-skool downtown steakhouses that’s been dying since forever. Earlier in the month, the owner went before city council and asked to take the place topless. From this week’s Metro Times:

The bar area is packed, with the customers laughing and bartenders hopping, filling drink orders and collecting tips. The piano player is in full swing, making the trip from Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition” to Matchbox Twenty and back again, with a brief stop at Billy Ocean’s “Caribbean Queen.” Carl’s ambience is so varnished-wood-and-carpet, it’s kitsch. If you haven’t been, it’s worth a trip. Except for the addition of a dance floor in the main dining room, the place hasn’t changed much since the days when Jimmy Hoffa would cut deals in the conference room upstairs.

What a great idea. What will those creative queens think of next? Quick, buy modern furniture.

You know how your mom told you to always wear clean underwear, so the people in the emergency room wouldn’t think you were trashy? She didn’t know the half of it. Bonus giggle: The name of the club.

Groan: Work. And so the week commences.

Well, it only took three years, but I guess I’m a real Detroiter now. Behold, what I parked next to at Starbucks yesterday:

When we moved here, people said we’d see this sort of thing all the time — mystery cars obscured with tape or fool-the-autofocus camouflage, models ready for road-testing but not the showroom. But this is the first one I’ve seen. (I really need to get out more.) It hardly looked cherry, but couldn’t have been more anonymous. The interior was terra incognita as well:

I didn’t recognize the badge on the steering wheel, but — and this is a key part of the experience — I was soon joined by another Starbucks customer, who was about to pull out of the lot, but re-parked to get out and check out the mystery car, too. And he knew everything. “That’s a BMW,” he said. Never mind the badge, “that’s the iDrive.” No clue. So he explained the iDrive, with which he was well-acquainted; he did everything but offer a supplemental reading list. This is standard local small talk, and on the whole, I prefer it to chatting about the weather. Someday we’ll have to get JohnC to talk about standing around the grill while the burgers cook at a backyard party, arguing over whether Billy Batts was driven to his funeral in a Bonneville or a Grand Prix. This is not worth arguing, as the record clearly shows it was a Grand Prix.

Anyway that’s a Toughbook on the console, powered by the cigarette lighter, wires running to a mystery port between the seats. And that’s your correspondent reflected in the window. Always happy to bring citizen journalism to my readers from sea to shining sea.

Alex noted something I was marveling at yesterday — that you never know what will get people chattering, and apparently, asking about everyone’s fun with prescription drugs is one of those all-skate topics. He suggested perhaps sex or rock ‘n’ roll for a follow-up, but I don’t have it in me. Besides, it’s snowing again and I’d like to go out and enjoy the pretty part of winter.

Do we have bloggage? We have some:

Brian Stouder recommends this story about a narrow escape from the tornadoes earlier in the week, says it passed his lump-in-throat test. I’ll leave it up to you to measure it against your own. What I’m always amazed by, in these situations, is how people rise to the occasion. A few years ago, an F4 hit Van Wert, Ohio, just as a small crowd of young people were leaving an afternoon movie. The manager saw it coming, turned around, herded everyone into the bathrooms — the only cement-block part of the structure — and there they crouched while the wind destroyed the entire building. Here’s where everyone had been sitting only a couple minutes earlier. And all survived, uninjured, except the manager himself, who had a cut on his arm. He hadn’t had any special training in evacuation procedures or where the safest part of the building was; he just thought fast. What if the movie had gone five minutes longer? What if it had been little kids instead of teenagers? What if the crowd had been bigger? What if?

A young Vince Vaughn fights a ‘roid-raging Peter Billingsley in an after-school special. Yes, that Peter Billingsley. Ralphie.

Prostitution, drinking, drugs and having Tom Sizemore as a boyfriend is tough on a girl’s looks. Ask Heidi Fleiss. And check out her co-pilot.

So, Mittens is on his way home, but was it good for the Mormons?

Friday on my mind, folks. I’m outta here.