Hi there. I’m here, but not for long — hitting the road for the Buckeye State in a few. But I found a couple things in my perambulations over the last few days I thought you might want to read and discuss, while I check in from an undisclosed location from time to time.

First, our pen pal Hank Stuever files from “the beginning of the end of Mallworld as we know it,” a Black Friday essay on the long slow eclipse of shopping:

Certain Circuit City locations are marked for death here and there, and certain Ann Taylor Lofts are not responding to the corporate chemo, and the vacant Hecht’s box is still a forlorn husk at Westfield Wheaton Shopping Centre, its parking lot filled with empty school buses. Across the land, it’s heebie-jeebie vibes in the homogenous habitat. Bennigan’s, Sharper Image, Bombay Co., Linens ‘N Things, RIP. It’s a series of harbingers. It’s the end of things ‘N things.

Are you reading Roger Ebert’s blog? If not, you should. I’m embarrassed to say I’ve generally only followed links there when he’s talking about movies, but the guy has a wide-ranging and restless intellect, and writes about everything. But this piece, about having a Phantom of the Opera face (and some great memories of Gene Siskel), is superior. He is such a generous writer. I simply lurve him.

Oh, my goodness — the best rickroll EVAHR. You gotta love celebrities who can laugh at themselves. Although, honestly, isn’t it a bit of a stretch to call Rick Astley a celebrity? By the way, I always sort of liked that song. I always associate Rick Astley and Billy Ocean (”Get Outta My Dreams, Get Into My Car”) with aerobics classes in the ’80s. It must be linked with endorphins in my lizard brain.

Off to Columbus.

One of the things I like best about living in a metro area this size is the way the various ethnicities assert themselves. Columbus, while no tank town, is (or was) a place where a certain mushy pan-European generic culture stamps out the details of what it means to be, say, of Greek heritage (except during Greekfest). Fort Wayne’s foundation of German bloodstock eclipses all but a few other early-immigrant groups. (One of these is the Macedonian community, but they sort of stamped themselves out by invading the restaurant trade, where they proved excellent hosts mainly by offering what you like, not their own tastes.) The preceding is obviously a little like painting a portrait with a whitewashing brush, and I’ll disavow all of it soon enough.

But I’m always pleased to do my holiday shopping here and see details of old-country culinary culture I thought had been long-forgotten — Easter cakes made in the shape of a lamb, corned beef by the truckload for St. Patrick’s Day, paczki for Fat Tuesday, kosher-for-Passover Coca-Cola, tamales at Christmastime in Mexicantown. Of late the big meat mall at Eastern Market is selling chitterlings by the truckload. Every vendor is having a special, and hand-lettered signs are everywhere. (No one can agree on a spelling: chitterlings, chittlins, chit’lins, chittins.) It seems to be a seasonal thing, although whether it’s connected to Thanksgiving, Christmas or cold weather in general is hard to say. (I should learn to check the Google first — it is, indeed, a pan-cold-weather-holiday thing.)

I recall a passage from “Gone With the Wind” (the novel) where Scarlett, in the grip of post-war hunger at Tara, finds herself fantasizing over the bounty of years gone by, when at hog-killing time the results would be shared from the big house to the slave quarters. Obviously the white folks claimed the ham and bacon, but there was offal — the chitterlings, maws another other queasy-making parts — for the Negroes. It’s always interesting to me how many cultures still eat the foods of poverty and deprivation long after they no longer need to. (Someday I’ll publish this as a scholarly thesis called, simply, “Lutefisk: WTF?”) Personally, I think nothing short of starvation would get me to eat a pig’s intestines, but like Barack Obama and gay marriage, I’m always willing to be persuaded otherwise.

Thanksgiving is a great blank canvas for ethnic cuisine in general. I stood in line behind a black woman in September who was buying a bushel of assorted greens at a bargain prices, and told the seller she would cook and freeze it all for Thanksgiving. One of my favorite Sopranos episodes is the one where Paulie Walnuts lays out the typical Italian-American Thanksgiving feast, starting with antipasto, manicotti, “and then the bird.” So maybe chitterlings have a place there. All I know is, if you’re interested, they’re having lots of sales downtown.

Thanks for all the birthday greetings yesterday. The day was pretty average for my own natal day, which I’ve de-emphasized in recent years. I got a chocolate-raspberry cake, yum, and Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.” Which I asked for. A good day.

Holiday-week bloggage:

Despite my brief sojourn as a sports copy editor, I didn’t know why so much attention was being paid to whether the disgraceful Lions would sell out Ford Field for their traditional Thanksgiving game. (That’s because my time reading sports copy ended when I stopped being paid to do so.) They finally did, barely, probably by handing out tickets to the homeless guys who panhandle on the freeway ramps. Now I know why: If they don’t sell out, there’s no TV broadcast, and that — the broadcast — is an important part of many Thanksgiving traditions, not only here but around the country. So, whew: We can still watch the Lions on TV tomorrow. At 0-11, they’re playing the Titans, who are 10-1. There was some hope Tennessee would win last week, so we’d get that symmetry thing going: 0-11 vs. 11-0. That would be the last symmetry such a matchup would yield, as the Lions suck so badly this year they need a new word for it, and the score will probably be 425-3. You can watch the game on TV, or let Detroitist live-blog it for you.

Maybe if he’d said “asshole” and “tyrant,” he could have killed the guy: Dubious Seattle Times story tries to draw a line between a heckler and the collapse last week of U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

Have a good weekend, all. I think I’ll take tomorrow and Friday off — unless the mood strikes me otherwise. I expect we’ll be seeing “Twilight” at some point, even though I’d rather take Kate to see “Milk.” Anyway, we won’t be seeing “Australia,” although I loved Hank Stuever’s capsule description via his Facebook status: “It’s a movie about Hugh Jackman’s chest, and some other stuff around him.” And what a chest!

Be thankful for something tomorrow. You know you have a long list.

Oh hai! It’s my birthday. I’m spending the morning renewing my driver’s license, and then shopping for Thanksgiving dinner. Y’all talk amongst yourselves, and maybe we’ll have some cake later in the day.

And this link’s for Jeff Borden.

One of my favorite things to pick up at Trader Joe’s is their carnitas-in-a-bag heat-n-serve deal. Nothing like putting that on a tortilla with a little chopped cilantro to make you feel you made the right choice. It was maybe the third time I did so before I thought, $5.99 is a ridiculous price to pay for two cups of stewed pork. So I resolved to make my own. I recalled a “Splendid Table” episode that spoke of the wonders of the pork shoulder, a poverty cut well-suited to slow-roasting. I went online, found the recipe — mmm, a “mole-inspired spice rub” — and set out for my own culinary adventure in make-your-own carnitas.

The first problem was with the “3-1/2-pound organic pork shoulder.” They must breed some wee little piggies for the organic trade, because at the Gratiot Central Market’s Temple o’ Pork, the very smallest pork shoulder I could find was eight pounds. Still, at $1.29 per, it only cost me $10 and change. If this thing dollars up, I’ll be way ahead. The recipe is maddening for someone as impatient as me — rub, entomb in a heavy dutch oven and cook for hours in a very slow oven — but now, at the three-hour mark, I’m starting to get some pretty good smells upstairs.

Yes, it’s another write-on-Sunday-for-Monday entry. School lets out at noon Tuesday; I expect the week to kick my ass.

After-dinner update: Mmmm, slow-roasted fatty pork. Poor people get all the good chow.

That’s one consolation, I guess. Although, even rich people have it rough these days. They’re scared, I tell you. Here’s Tom Friedman in Sunday’s NYT:

So, I have a confession and a suggestion. The confession: I go into restaurants these days, look around at the tables often still crowded with young people, and I have this urge to go from table to table and say: “You don’t know me, but I have to tell you that you shouldn’t be here. You should be saving your money. You should be home eating tuna fish. This financial crisis is so far from over. We are just at the end of the beginning. Please, wrap up that steak in a doggy bag and go home.”

Tom Friedman, one week (one! week!) previous:

Now is when we need a president who has the skill, the vision and the courage to cut through this cacophony, pull us together as one nation and inspire and enable us to do the one thing we can and must do right now:

Go shopping.

I am a happy and satisfied New York Times subscriber — at least as happy as I get with any newspaper — but I’m starting to get frustrated with this phenomenon of rich guys panicking. Ben Stein, same paper:

The problem now, as in 1929 to 1940, is that the economy is not functioning normally. It is shot through and through with fear, even terror. Worse yet, and unlike the situation in the Depression, government miscues have been only a part of the problem. This fear is so pervasive that it has brought the credit sector to a virtual shutdown, even to borrowers with good credit. At this point, the lending sector is so panicked — largely from the government’s inconsistent behavior and failure to rescue Lehman Brothers — that it is frozen. Not totally, but way too much for ease of lending and maybe even for the survival of a robust economy. And if a colossal worldwide deleveraging spreads to Treasury debt owned by foreigners, the situation will be deadly serious.

“Shot through with fear, even terror,” so he thought, what the hell, can a little more be all that bad? It’s always interesting to me how many different personas Ben Stein deploys in maintaining his fabulous career. In the pop-culture joke sector, he’s all about the voice and the “anyone? anyone?” gag. In the NYT, he’s the serious economist. And there’s always room for another face, as his role in “Expelled” demonstrates. But he’s a rich guy now, he’ll still be a rich guy if the whole economy falls into the toilet, and I wish he’d save the fear and terror for those who might actually be going hungry or turned out in the street if such a thing happens.

All I can say is, thank God for Gretchen Morgenson, who explains it isn’t necessarily “fear” that has frozen lending. After all, didn’t we all recently chip in $700 billion to get the system oiled again? Yes, but oops, there seems to be a hitch in the plans:

When the Troubled Asset Relief Program of the Treasury Department handed over $125 billion in taxpayer money to nine banks a month ago, they were supposed to lend to small businesses, home buyers and other worthy borrowers to keep the economy’s gears in motion.

At the time, the Federal Reserve Board and three bank regulatory agencies said: “The agencies expect all banking organizations to fulfill their fundamental role in the economy as intermediaries of credit to businesses, consumers, and other creditworthy borrowers.”

Alas, that admonition wasn’t accompanied by any real requirements to lend. When the Treasury gave taxpayer billions to the banks, it attached no strings. So is it any surprise that lending is tight?

But remember: It would be wrong to loan Detroit automakers 20 percent of that amount. Because some Senate staffer bought a Chevy Vega right out of college, and it went through oil like you wouldn’t believe.

So I guess we’re either screwed, or we’re not. I eat tuna fish in good times and bad, and I don’t think the solution is to stay home and wait for the inevitable. I always wondered, reading about apocalyptic events in history, how ordinary people weathered them, and the answer seems to be — they did what they always did. (There are exceptions. Pompeii comes to mind.) As for me, I’ll continue to buy local, put money into Salvation Army kettles, floss, pet my dog and only pull the covers up over my head when I’m really tired.

Cautionary note: I’m always confident and expansive after eating a good meal.

Some good bloggage for you today: A fascinating read in New York magazine on Bellevue, the city’s infamous psychiatric hospital. News peg: It’s on the verge of closing. (Now I’ll never get to check in in a straitjacket.) What does it take to get committed to Bellevue? A lot:

Bellevue is not for “some Upper East Side suicidal neurotic or whatever—they’d go to NYU Medical Center next door. Our patients were the ones with no money, no resources, and multiple stressors.”

That, or their behavior is so extreme—criminal or otherwise—that no other option presents itself. Merely wandering into the middle of Broadway while muttering incoherently? Probably not enough. “You know, the brilliance of the schizophrenics when they’re directing traffic,” says Covan, “is that they always direct it in the direction it’s already going, so their grandiosity is reinforced. But if they start to direct it in the opposite direction, or if they’re assaulting other people, or if you came in and said you really wanted to kill yourself, not just that you were thinking about it … You know, Bellevue is not the place for you if you’re just not feeling good today and you’re really worried about the stock market.”

Remember when I talked about seeing people in motorized wheelchairs driving on the city streets? I wasn’t kidding. Jim @ Sweet Juniper has photographic proof.

Finally, Mr. and Mrs. Coozledad are adding to their happy menagerie, newest member seen here. Actually, they’re getting two mules, and they don’t match. Coozle reports he’s learning to drive them, and their favorite command is whoa. As they are now the hands-down smartest critters on the spread, I expect his blog will be even more of a laff riot.

Ten o’clock already? Time to study Russian.

November is hog-killin’ time.

I have to leave bright and early for the auto shop, which recently stopped offering an Ethernet connection for customers chillin’ in the lounge. I’m taking advantage of this turn of events by taking my laptop and working on the sort of stuff that e-mail and Web access only gets in the way of, i.e., writing. Which means not much of a blog today, but I snipped a few zinnias to put in this simple little vase:

Howell Raines always did get on my last damn nerve. Aaron Barnhart lays out only one reason.

When someone remakes “Charlotte’s Web” with an R rating, the writer will go by one name, and it will be Coozledad.

There’s news, there’s non-news, and then there are headlines like this: The Duchess of Cornwall plans to take up pilates or Tai Chi. Can’t you hardly wait to know the rest?!?

And while we’re reading the Telegraph’s health page, ohmygod: Boy, 12, dies from heart failure after using too much deodorant.

I swear, the Brits put out the best newspapers, page for page, in the free world. I can’t believe I get to read them every day through the magic of the internets. Cold comfort at a time when my retirement portfolio is withering like a beehive hairdo on a 90-degree day, but we take it where we can get it, right?

You all have a good Friday, and be kind to one another — we’re all going to be standing in the same bread line someday, and we’ll have plenty of time to fight then.

There’s so much going on hereabouts, and so many good things I want to direct your attention to, that today will be an all-bloggage entry. Maybe we should make Thursdays the ADHD edition on a semi-permanent basis, eh? On with it, then:

One of the best meals of my life was in a long-dead restaurant in Columbus called L’Armagnac. It was in a converted house somewhere in a gentrifying neighborhood, and some weeks later I had occasion to see the kitchen on a reporting assignment. It was very easy to see the kitchen because it was the size of a broom closet — not much bigger than the one in my apartment, in fact. And yet, magic happened there, and happened on a scale large enough to share with several dozen people every night, and the only real accommodation anyone had to make was scheduled seatings and prix fixe. So I was amused to note this NYT blog piece called Mark Bittman’s Bad Kitchen, Bittman being everyone’s favorite food columnist. (Really. His recipes are worth the NYT subscription price alone.) Anyhoo:

Q: Okay Mark. What’s a popular food writer like you doing in a kitchen like that?

A: I got a bunch of e-mails that say, “Can you believe all this stuff about your crummy kitchen?” But the whole idea is that you don’t need a fancy kitchen. You don’t need fancy equipment, and you don’t need fancy recipes. When I show people my kitchen, they believe it. But I hate my kitchen also. I bump my shins on the dishwasher. There is not enough room to put stuff. It’s a terrible stove. It’s a terrible dishwasher. I don’t have room for the pots I’d like to have. I’ve cooked in much worse, though. I’m used to it. Someday I’ll grow up and get a real kitchen.

Q: So why do so many people think a nice kitchen will solve their cooking woes?

A: Maybe it’s like what you said. You use your crummy kitchen as an excuse not to cook. Maybe it’s like saying, “I can’t exercise in the winter because I don’t have an elliptical trainer.” I once cooked for six months in what amounted to a basement with a hot plate, microwave and a refrigerator and sink.

Sorry if you’re OD’d on the current crisis, but you’re not going to be reading this stuff in your local papers, and some of it is good:

Pete Karmanos — local hero, hereabouts — takes on Alabama’s most irritating senator:

The intent of this letter, however, is not to take you to task for the inaccuracy of your comments or for the over-simplicity of your views, but rather to point out the hypocrisy of your position as it relates to Alabama’s (the state for which you have served as senator since 1987) recent history of providing subsidies to manufacturing. During the segment on Meet the Press, you stated that:

“We don’t need government — governmental subsidies — for manufacturing in this country. It’s the French model, it’s the wrong road. We will pay for it. The average American taxpayer is going to pay dearly for this, if I’m not wrong.”

I trust it is safe to say that when you refer to “government subsidies,” you are referring to subsidies provided by both federal and state governments. And if this is in fact true, then I am sure you were adamantly against the State of Alabama offering lucrative incentives (in essence, subsidies) to Mercedes Benz in the early 1990s to lure the German automobile manufacturer to the State.

As it turned out, Alabama offered a stunning $253 million incentive package to Mercedes. Additionally, the State also offered to train the workers, clear and improve the site, upgrade utilities, and buy 2,500 Mercedes Benz vehicles. All told, it is estimated that the incentive package totaled anywhere from $153,000 to $220,000 per created job. On top of all this, the State gave the foreign automaker a large parcel of land worth between $250 and $300 million, which was coincidentally how much the company expected to invest in building the plant.

[Insert Nelson Muntz HAW-ha here.]

One of my favorite — OK, my absolute favorite — local blogger is Jim Griffioen of Sweet Juniper, who covers Detroit, urban wastelands, parenthood and stay-at-home fatherhood from a perch somewhere near Lafayette Park. His piece on the events of this week is worth a read because it’s beautifully written, and because it captures the ambiguity so many of us feel about the situation:

I take pictures of the sad state of Detroit partly because I know there are people out there who can hardly believe places like this exist in their own country. From our greatest, most unique cities to our blandest, most generic suburbs, things have been pretty nice for a long time. It is easy to forget how our once-great economy was built (or what happened to the places that built it). Now it has been pointed out that this robust economic juggernaut we’ve believed we were for the last several years hasn’t actually been wearing any clothes. And winter is here.

Some of the people saying let them fail about Detroit’s automakers are the very same people who had no problem with the $700 billion bailout of the very “industries” responsible for the sudden evaporation of so many billions of dollars in equity and credit. I would like to show them the state of this city and ask them to think about how much worse it (and hundreds of other cities reliant on the auto industry) will get if any of these three employers were suddenly unable to pay their employees or suppliers. This isn’t Manhattan. We’re not talking about Goldman Sachs associates suddenly not being able to pay the mortgages on their $350,000 parking spaces in Tribeca for the Ferraris they bought with their 2006 bonuses. We are talking about the lifeblood of a region that has already suffered so deeply, and I can’t believe how many people are speaking so flippantly about allowing this great American industry to die.

I’m no apologist for the Big Three or their ridiculous missteps and lapses of judgment. But I do care about the regular people who work for these companies and who played no role in those poor decisions. Where is the compassion?

Jim used to live in San Francisco. Ahem:

They say a sustainable model for future economies will trend away from globalization and be based more on localization. The yuppies and hippies have sort of turned that into “I am better than the white trash at Wal-Mart because I buy my eggs from Farmer Brown the next town over,” but that doesn’t mean a movement towards more local economies is without merit. For Detroiters, of course, it is hard to separate all this talk of “buy local” economics from the misery of the auto industry, and not be frustrated with those Prius-driving yuppies in the Pacific Northwest calling for the death of this massive American industry while patting themselves on the back for buying butter made from the milk of organically-fed Oregon cows. It’s not a simple matter, and hopefully if there is some sort of “bailout” there will be plenty of strings attached: perhaps this could be an opportunity to start transforming manufacturing in the United States to a sustainable model that strengthens our economy and provides jobs here rather than just strengthening the portfolios of a privileged few at the expense of so many. But calling for the death of this American industry is callous and shortsighted, and I would add that slowly turning into a nation where no one knows how to make anything but hamburgers and silkscreened t-shirts can’t be good for national security.

Oh, and speaking of San Francisco, where else could a letter to the editor this stupid originate?

Missing from both Detroit’s pleas for a bailout and the national discussion of its pros and cons is any acknowledgment that the American taxpayer continuously subsidizes the automobile industry through the financing of local, state and federal roads.

If car companies were suddenly forced to acquire the land and maintain the infrastructure that its products need to function, the real cost of a car would be beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest people, and our national economy would come to a standstill until another form of transportation were subsidized and developed to take its place.

Whether General Motors is “too big to fail” and therefore deserves a bailout ignores the fact that the company, along with every other carmaker in the world, is subsidized by our tax dollars. Giving the automakers more for abusing their unique standing hardly seems appropriate.

Do we need a palate-cleanser? We do:

Jon Carroll quotes an amazing fact about Tom Friedman:

The Nov. 10 issue of the New Yorker had a long and quite balanced profile of Friedman by Ian Parker. This paragraph caught my eye:

“A few years ago, the Friedmans bought a seven-and-a-half-acre plot in Bethesda, Maryland. They tore down the existing house, built an eleven-thousand-square-foot replacement, and planted 200 trees. (In a note at the end of [his new book] ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded,’ where Friedman explains his own ecological circumstances - geothermal heating, solar panels - he invites readers, perhaps unwisely, to regard his real estate move as an act of rescue: He writes that he and his wife bought the land ‘to prevent it from being developed into a subdivision of a dozen or more houses,’ which could sound like someone buying a lot of champagne to protect society from cork-related injuries.) Here, the Friedmans have started an art collection on a theme of reading, writing and the media, which includes a book by Anselm Kiefer and a bench by Jenny Holzer.”

“Perhaps unwisely” — snerk.

Finally, some comedy. One of the many, many shameful things about the way the city of Detroit rolls is the bloated Executive Protection Unit, the police-department detail that protects the mayor. The most recent former occupant of that office apparently looked into the mirror every morning and saw not a college football player going soft in the middle, but a TOTAL BADASS who needed muscle to get through his day without someone busting a cap in his ass. People said the EPU was staffed by his high-school classmates and was just another form of featherbedding, which isn’t hard to believe. Anyway, someone I know attended a Democratic fundraiser in Grosse Pointe Farms last year, and said the talk of the party was the way the governor, this 110-pound blonde lady, made a quiet entrance, her security consisting of one state highway patrolman, followed a few minutes later by Kwame Kilpatrick’s posse in two SUVs. (Because the Farms is a place where you take your life into your own hands after dark, I guess.)

When Kwame left the mountain headfirst earlier this year, there was some local comment that now would be an excellent time to dissolve the EPU as well. Not so fast:

City Council President Monica Conyers took along two police officers from the Executive Protection Unit last weekend to a National League of Cities conference in Orlando, Fla., which some colleagues say is a misuse of taxpayer dollars. Police spokesman James Tate confirmed the trip and said police have escorted Conyers during other jaunts out of town since she became president in September.

Of course, the best part is always the justification:

“She is next in line to be the mayor,” said Conyers’ spokeswoman Denise Tolliver, who added that Conyers took two officers because one requested that a partner come to share the duties. “She absolutely needs that security. She is a woman. She can’t protect herself in many instances. You have to be concerned with her safety.”

Let me just go on the record as saying that if any female can protect herself, it’s Monica Conyers, who can’t even check into a hotel without the police being called. Anybody who would mess with her deserves whatever they have coming.

Now I’m off to exercise until I look like a drowned rat. Mmm, sexy.

UPDATE: Wait! One more. Staffers at the Longmont Times-Call in Colorado have a unique opportunity to make some extra cash this Christmas: Working as valet parkers at the publisher’s holiday bash. If this isn’t the bottom, it’s hard to know what is.

I’ll say this for living in America’s most-loathed city (suck it, New York! we rool!) — local-media coverage of the auto-industry crisis is a cut above. You can’t really feed slogans and warmed-over talk radio calls to an informed audience, and so we’re spared “but if they’d only make cars people want, none of this would be happening.” For the most part.

My favorite of these is: America doesn’t want SUVs. Ha. Now they don’t. They don’t want them when gas is $4 a gallon. But until gas got that high, they wanted lots of them. Did everyone sleep through the ’90s and the first half of this decade? People not only wanted SUVs, they wanted them in all sizes, shapes and colors. They wanted big ones (Suburbans). They wanted little ones (Escapes). They wanted their Japanese brands tricked out to look more SUV-like (hello, Honda CRX). They wanted fancy-schmancy luxury SUVs (Escalade, Navigator). They wanted cheap ones for the entry-level market (Hyundai, Kia). Did O.J. Simpson flee in an Accord? I must have missed that.

Even now, they still want so-called crossovers, SUVs that drive and handle more like cars — Buick Enclave, Ford Edge, etc. You can pick many, many fights with the U.S. auto industry and make many, many good arguments against the government helping them, but you can’t change the facts to suit your prejudices, and the fact is, the Big Three invented the SUV, and for a very long time, the SUV was very, very good to the Big Three. So please shut up about that.

(On some right-wing blog I can’t remember, I heard the most stupido argument of all: The companies didn’t want to make SUVs, but were forced to by their onerous UAW contracts, which required them to make the highest-profit-margin vehicles possible. These people really live in their own fantasy world. I don’t want to wake them up. They’re like sleeping babies.)

Here’s the other thing you don’t hear so much here: Those greedy autoworkers. How dare they want stuff like health insurance and pensions. We really are crabs in a bucket, aren’t we? Again, go ahead and make informed remarks about certain work forces having to face the reality of higher co-pays and cost-sharing. But unless you’re willing to give up your own company-paid health insurance in solidarity, kindly shut up about it. Non-union GM retirees lost their health-care bennies earlier this year — replaced by a whole $300/month subsidy to buy private insurance in that marvelous free market, and good luck with that if you’re a cancer survivor or have heart disease. Spare a kind thought for them, eh?

What we’re seeing in Detroit is the death of the well-paid working class, and if that makes you happy, go be happy about it. Asshole.

Anyway, speaking of cars nobody wants:

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times.

For now, the port itself is the destination. Unwelcome by dealers and buyers, thousands of cars worth tens of millions of dollars are being warehoused on increasingly crowded port property.

And for the first time, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Nissan have each asked to lease space from the port for these orphan vehicles. They are turning dozens of acres of the nation’s second-largest container port into a parking lot, creating a vivid picture of a paralyzed auto business and an economy in peril.

But…but…people want Toyotas! How can this be happening?

It is more unusual to see a lot at the California port filled with thousands of unsold Mercedeses, most of them gathering dirt on the plastic white film that protects their hoods and trunks. Some appeared to have been stashed at the port for several months.

Last week, Mercedes delivered around 1,000 more cars to Long Beach on the Grus, a 580-foot container ship.

“A year ago, I was looking into buying one of these for my wife,” said Kurt Garland, the terminal manager overseeing the unloading of the white, silver and black sports cars, sport utility vehicles and sedans. “Now I’m not. I’m saving money, paying bills, hunkering down.”

Oh, the poor economy is to blame. Not those Mercedes SUVs nobody wants.

(Yesterday I wrote on my Facebook status that I felt “amorphous anger.” I’m starting to see why.)

So let’s lighten up, a bit, shall we? I hope somewhere out there in the ranks of working screenwriters, someone is crafting a script about pirates, and not the ones in the Caribbean. If you can’t get a movie out of Somali hijackers, rocket-propelled grenades, hijacked Saudi oil tankers and the Indian Navy (!!!They have one??!!), you’re not worth your union dues. Or you’re just not reading the newspapers. (I heard on NPR the other day that all the coastal fishing villages in Somalia have become pirate dens, and that all the women want a pirate boyfriend. Well, duh.)

My Great Books discussion group meets in three hours, and I still have a few pages of the reading material to get through (”The Man Who Would Be King,” if you’re interested), so let’s wrap it up with just a bit of bloggage:

One of the reasons I sometimes curse Roy Edroso is, he got me hooked on reading Rod Dreher, and a more entertaining correspondent of Wingnuttia you will not find. What I like about him is his lack of filters; so much of what he writes seems to come directly from an id-well in his brain, and so you’ll sometimes see, in the space of 36 hours, a plea for us to be kinder to one another (”because we’re all carrying a great burden”) and then a denunciation of a bride who wants her wedding dress to show a special tattoo as a slut. It’s so amusing.

Anyway, lately he’s all het up about the Prop 8 backlash in California. “Gay mob assaults peaceful Christians,” he shrieked on Monday, embedding a video clip that showed the reaction when a group of Christians went into the Castro, the most famous gay neighborhood in the whole frickin’ country, to try to pray the gay away. Astonishingly, it wasn’t friendly. I know, I’m as shocked as you are.

The next day, he called for all of us to “stand by the Mormons,” because “a friend” tells him:

Things are pretty grim. On the ground pastors are worried, and for my Mormon friends it is very bad. No LDS person in their right mind who is not a man of courage would announce his church affiliation without knowing it to be safe.

Safe? From what? Disapproval? An argument? I must have missed the invasion of Salt Lake City by the drag-queen army. Even his Beliefnet commenters were unimpressed:

Yeah, it’s like Darfur out there what with all the pogroms and midnight roundups and mass executions of the Mormons out there.

Oh, well. On to Rudyard Kipling. I’m calling it the white woman’s burden.

Perhaps in preparation for the Great Delamination, I went through one of my periodic stints of tree-shaking yesterday, scanning Monster, CareerBuilder and Craigslist for any freelancing opportunity I might be unaware of. I found one asking for freelance writers willing to turn out five 400-word pieces per week, for $2 per.

I e-mailed and asked for clarification. Surely, I asked, that $2 figure was a mistake?

No, it wasn’t, came the reply: “These are very simple articles that won’t require any research,” and that was the going rate. Two thousand words = $10.

I’m consistently amazed by the economics of this thing. To this day, when there’s a big layoff at a newspaper or some other catastrophe in the life of someone who writes for a living, someone will pipe up in the comments on a blog somewhere: They should start a blog and join an ad network, and then they’ll be working for themselves. Win-win!

Meanwhile, Bossy, who gets 10 times the traffic I do — yes, 7,000 to 9,000 uniques a day — can’t make a living from her blog. (Even though she brought this reader great pleasure with her examination of “Something’s Gotta Give,” a film that made me insane, for many of the same reasons. I mean, sure, playwrights have kitchens like that. If their name is Neil Simon.)

Meanwhile, journalists, would you like to be insulted? Take note of the TypePad Journalist Bailout Program. Subhed: “Because your Tumblr and Tweets, while clever, will not pay your bills.” Here’s the bailout: If you’re a recently severed journalist, TypePad will give you a free pro blogging account and access to their ad network, which “pays a lot more than simple Google text ads,” a retail value of about $150. After that, it’s all up to you! Take flight, little journalist! And if you learn that your TypePad blog, “while clever,” will not pay your bills, either, perhaps Starbucks is hiring.

Mommy’s in a bad mood today. Mommy thinks she should go lift weights.

So a little bloggage:

While Mitch Albom was pretending to be Woody Guthrie in the paper — a new low for phoning it in, I might add, and I don’t even want to think how much he makes — he was actually down in Florida hangin’ with his cool celebrity friends at the Miami Book Fair. (See video.) I also wouldn’t rule out the idea that he’s using makeup (man-kup?) or, possibly Botox. There’s something odd about the way his face moves, or doesn’t move.

Finally, a favor for a friend, another former colleague:

My oldest son Derek is a graduating high school senior, and he has been nominated to participate in a video scholarship contest. The scholarship could net him a nice chunk of college cash. ($20,000 to the first place winner). He created what I think (father or not) is the best on the site (certainly the “corny”-est), but the contest is decided solely upon popular vote, not on quality or creativity. (which right now seems to mean which student can get the most people to vote, and vote, and vote … oh yeah, and vote as many times as they can) … between now and November 28th.

The video is here, and it is indeed corny — I say that with love, because corniness seems to be the point. The scholarship is offered by King Corn, so no matter how you feel about high-fructose corn syrup, you can point your browsers in the direction of a good cause. You can vote as often as you like, and you don’t have to sit through the whole video to do so. And certainly, his dad is going to need all the college-finance help he can get, seeing as how he works in journalism.

An interesting cri de coeur in the Free Press Sunday — it was the lead story on the front page, this column by Susan Tompor, headlined, “I never knew Detroit was a dirty word.” It’s a good column, although I think anyone who honestly didn’t know Detroit was a dirty word in the rest of the country needs to get out of town more. I recommend it to you because it’s a pretty fair ground-level look at public opinion around here:

Each night when I go home and turn on the television, I find myself insulted by the righteous tone on cable or the networks. Look, I’ve always understood that many people do not like American cars or union workers or car company CEOs.

I didn’t know that some really, really hate us — and couldn’t care less if one or two or three Detroit carmakers up and dies. So we’d have hundreds of thousands of people suddenly unemployed. And the response is: Who cares?

That shouldn’t surprise anyone, really. I’ve written about this phenomenon before — I call it distancing. It’s a human trait, after a disaster, to look for differences between thee and me, so we can tell ourselves this would never happen to us. It’s actually easier to say “who cares” than to face the fact it might actually come true, and how we all might cope. I seem to recall, during the early-80s recession, when unemployed Michigan autoworkers were pouring into Texas in search of any sort of work, the natives sneeringly referred to them as “the black-tag people,” after the license plates then in use. I also remember a bumper sticker: “Let ‘em freeze in the dark.” How I am looking forward to revisiting those happy days.

Let me say only this: I hope the Michiganders keep their deer rifles handy when they head south.

I’m writing this on Sunday, because Monday is going to be busybusybusy and I have the time now. Guess what’s happening outside? Fat fluffy flakes, that’s what. The whole mitten is covered in precipitation, most of it the freezing kind. And so it begins. Someone once told me more babies are born in November than any other month, a statement I could probably verify somewhere if I cared enough (but I don’t). There’s certainly nothing much to do in February, but I always link my birthday month to outright suckage, the real cruelest month. The only thing that saves it for me is Thanksgiving, which, as Jon Carroll points out, is a holiday that requires nothing of us but gratitude and approval of roast turkey. No problemo for either of those.

I’m not the only one with a November birthday, of course:

That was a lovely cake for Kate and Alan. Thanks to Jeffrey Steingarten, Joy of Cooking and the NYT for the recipe; it’s not the “birthday cake” recipe here, but the buttermilk-layer variety with chocolate-satin frosting.

The sweetness of another year, honored, the sweetness of the one to come, hoped-for. That’s what that cake was about. We’ll see what Congress thinks.

Oh, and as bad as it gets here, this was the view from Ricardo’s back yard Saturday. Here’s hopin’ for higher humidity, California:

UPDATE: Just got an e-mail from our frequent commenter (and my neighbor) JohnC, who recommends this Mark Phelan column from today’s Freep, and adds:

Couple other thoughts.

1. The main competitors of GM, Ford and Chrysler are already heavily subsidized by their governments in the form of universal health coverage. (Note: NOT socialized medicine, as some would have you believe, but guaranteed health coverage, in a private system, for all. ) This knocks at least $1,500 PER CAR off the overhead for foreign auto makers. The fact that the United States is the only industrialized country in the world that does not have universal health coverage is not only mind-boggling, but crippling to our industrial economy.

2. After Sept. 11, the economy, including the auto industry, went into a tailspin. You will recall that the airline industry was quickly bailed out by the government. The automakers, led by GM Chairman Rick Wagoner, rejected suggestions that they seek government help and instead lowered their prices to drive sales.