The dead guy frozen in ice was found in the Detroit Public Schools book depository building. I should have picked up on this yesterday, but I was rushed and disorganized as usual, and it wasn’t until later that I remembered: This was the building whose contents and criminal decay were photographed by Jim from Sweet Juniper (and, to be sure, about a million other professional and amateur shooters, urban explorers, blight tourists and various slumming gawkers). He put together one of his typically thoughtful posts about it, which got Boing Boing’d, Fark’d, Metafilter’d and Web 2.0′d to a fare-thee-well, culminating in one photo running in Harper’s Magazine last year.

The post was also featured on some racist websites, used by its proprietors to show what happens when you let “them” run their own school systems, and Jim responded to that with a follow-up post that describes the building and how it got to the state it’s in. It’s pretty long, but it’s probably the best single explanation of how decay happens and why it persists in this city, and it boils down to: It’s complicated.

What’s most important for purposes of looking at the How and Why of the Dead Guy is probably the building’s most recent chapter, when it was sold to Manuel “Matty” Moroun, whose hip-pocket, one-phrase media description is usually “reclusive billionaire.” Moroun owns — yes, owns outright — the Ambassador Bridge across the Detroit River, which carries 70 25 percent of all the freight that moves between the United States and Canada. Some people think a crossing that important should be in the public’s hands — and if you’re thinking this sounds kind of like “Chinatown,” you’re not alone — and efforts have been underway on both sides of the border to bring this monopoly to a halt. Moroun is opposed to this, of course, and has taken steps to preserve his holdings, including buying key real estate parcels near the bridge, one of which is the building where the dead guy was found.

Moroun has no motivation to either demolish the building or even secure it. Like a lot of structures built around that time in this city, it’s solid to a fault. (You did know one of this area’s architectural innovations was the invention of reinforced concrete, didn’t you?) It would cost millions to demolish and he doesn’t need it demolished, and so, writes Jim:

So for seven years, Moroun’s company has held a permit for the demolition of the former Detroit Public Schools book depository, but he has done nothing but neglect the building. …Instead, because this is Detroit, it just sits there. It is left unsecured, open to scrappers, looters, crackheads, graffiti artists, suburban taggers, vandals, prostitutes, and local bloggers.

I imagine it’ll be secured now — at least for a while; the Freep today ran a photo of the perimeter fence being repaired. The Freep, having been beaten on this story, is pushing the city’s defense, which is: We responded to the 911 call and found nothing. Now that Kwame Kilpatrick, beneficiary of much Moroun campaign cash, is gone, city officials are blaming Moroun for the incident, for failing to secure the building. I’m sure this will still be playing out long after the dead guy is or isn’t ID’d and laid to rest in whatever potter’s field the city is currently using.

This is interesting: The News story today doesn’t mention Moroun at all. It, like yesterday’s story, was written by Charlie LeDuff, who also had a coup of sorts late last year, when he lured the reclusive billionaire from under his bridge for his first interview in forever. It was, not surprisingly, a pretty respectful one, and didn’t touch on this issue. (He does mention the building adjacent to the book depository, the infamous Michigan Central Station, which Moroun also owns. He claims he can’t tear that one down, because it’s a historic landmark. No word on whether that applies to the book depository, probably because it doesn’t.)

This is getting complicated. Like most things around here.

Anyway, there are many more links in the ones I’ve already given you. The link to Jim’s follow-up post is to all his depository-tagged posts, including the original. A quick Flickr tag search for “detroit book depository” will take you to hundreds of photos of the place. And for those of you puzzled over the headline for this post, it’s a reference to “So Much Water So Close to Home,” a Raymond Carver short story about the problem posed by a dead body. It was one of the threads in the movie “Short Cuts,” for you film buffs.

So. A little bloggage:

I suspect the maternity wedding dress is nothing new — what else is an empire waist for other than fetal concealment — but still, here’s a story about the latest styles.

And while we’re stealing links from Jezebel…now there’s a talent competition.

Why we have a health-care crisis in this country: Because there are doctors who will implant eight embryos in the uterus of a woman who already has six children. Remember that the next time your insurance premiums go up.

Have a good weekend, all. I hope to.

ADDED: Oops, almost forgot. When the Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at George Bush, Alan said, “You wait. They’re going to put up a statue of that guy.” Not quite, but close. Alan would like you all to know he told you so.

Thanks to Harrison for pointing out the day’s — and probably the week’s, month’s and perhaps the year’s — OID (only in Detroit) story:

Corpse found frozen in pool of water in abandoned Detroit building. Call to 911 gets results in…24 hours, give or take.

(Sorry I missed this, guys. My newsprint wasn’t delivered until late this morning.)

UPDATE: Gawker says snarky things about the story.

You’d think, with the heaps of frozen water in the yard, that moisture wouldn’t be a problem for a Michigan family on a day like today, but you’d think wrong. Winter is perverse that way. I’ve identified a large part of my physical misery as a lack of moisture, and am working to rectify it. If you’ve never awakened at 5 a.m. with parched nasal passages swollen shut and a mouth that feels like a cat peed in it, well, you’ve never lived in your average heated house in winter. There’s no furnace-linked humidifier in the world that can keep up with it, so you have to supplement — with vaporizers, saline nasal spray, industrial-grade moisturizers and other foofraw, trying to find some sort of equilibrium. It sucks. What sucks even more is knowing that by July, I’ll be bitching about the humidity along with everyone else.

Is there a place on earth where naked primates can live in comfort year-round? I read somewhere that some Caribbean island suspended daily weather forecasting because it was the same every single day except when a hurricane was in the neighborhood — highs in the low 70s, winds steady out of the west at 10-15 knots, slight chance of late-afternoon showers. Maybe that’s the place.

You want to see what winter can do to a girl? Watch the trailer for New in Town. Cold weather appears to have frozen Renee Zellweger’s face to the point she can only move her mean little mouth! (And it’s her skin that looks worst of all, at least in the trailer. When a movie can’t make Renee Zellweger look pretty, it’s time to investigate the straight-to-video option.)

OK, enough. It’s not so bad out there. We’re predicted to break the 20-degree mark today, woohoo. And a white winter is always a better than a brown one, so I’ll take it.

For the sake of relativity, Jeff TMMO posted a link in comments to the webcam at the South Pole. It’s -19 in what is, after all, high summer down there. No one will be joining the 300 Club today.

OK, then. Let’s talk fresh starts. Does anyone else find it ironic that Detroit’s ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, convicted felon, local disgrace and all-around shitheel, apparently has a job prospect after he’s sprung from the slam in a few days? With actual law-abiding working people falling like dead soldiers every day, you’d think the guy might have to spend some time swearing at Craigslist with all the rest of us, but no. The good news: It’s in Texas. A few more immigrants like him, and the Lone Star state will be the new Florida.

A little bit of bloggage today:

Watch the first clip. Are all pageant dads nancyboys? Is there some way to grow girl babies in wombtanks rather than make innocent women marry these guys?

You thought this blog had the stupidest comment about John Updike yesterday? Not even close.

Not much for you today, I know, and I apologize. But it’s off to Costco for me — we’re out of beer and wine. That’s a must-rectify situation in our house. So maybe later, eh?

I had Sunday lunch at Lance Mannion’s rooftop aerie in Fort Wayne many many years ago, back when Lance was an assistant professor teaching freshman English at Ball State. Among the guests were a couple of his colleagues, and one told a hilarious story that Lance now has zero memory of:

A third English department colleague was having lunch at a McDonald’s in Indianapolis. He had just bitten into his Big Mac when a woman approached him and said, shyly, “You’re John Updike, aren’t you?” The guy telling the story mimed the action perfectly — the sandwich held to his mouth, the glance up at the woman standing next to the table — and the English professor’s reaction, which was to put the burger down, wipe his hands on a napkin, chew a bit to clear his mouth and then reply:

“Yes. Yes I am.”

The woman, needless to say, was delighted. John Updike! Eating at a McDonald’s in Indianapolis! What are the odds? About the odds of a man misidentified as a famous writer being an actual English professor with a deep familiarity with that writer’s work, that’s what, because he carried on a conversation with the woman for several minutes. She said things like, “I know most critics say (this book) is your best, but I always liked (that book) better,” and he replied, slyly “This is just between us, but (that book) is my favorite, too.” It turned out she had a copy of one of his novels with her, and presented it for signing, which he did, along with a warm personal note. By the time she excused herself, I’m sure she felt she’d had a Celebrity Brush With Greatness for the record books, the sort of thing you hope for when you spot one of your heroes out in the wild and almost never have. Now that we’ve entered a time when everybody has a blog, I’m Googling “‘john updike’ + mcdonald’s + indianapolis” to see if maybe that woman is sharing the story, but so far the only references I get are to Lance’s blog, when I prompted him to tell the story a few years back, and my own, when I alluded to it. It’s sort of suspicious that Lance had no memory of this story; I recall it bringing the house down that day, and now I’m wondering if it’s just a figment of my imagination. No. My imagination isn’t that inventive.

Some prime bloggage today. I have something you journalists are going to love. The rest of you will love it, too:

Rotary-dial phones! Those old modems with the cups! You’ll notice one of the participating papers was the Columbus Dispatch — that’s because the service provider for all this was Compuserve, based there. I can still summon the sight of the copy editor whose job it was to handle the upload, and Kirk will remember his name, but I don’t. I sent this to someone this morning, who replied: It’s like a slasher movie; THE INTERNET’S IN THE HOUSE!!!! GET OUT!!!! IT WANTS TO KILL YOU AND YOUR PROFESSION. Man, I’ll say.

Eric Zorn at the Chicago Tribune sends me a lot of love, and I don’t send enough of it back, but it’s not guilt that prompts me to recommend his bloggage of Blago, which has been truly inspired — from an over/under estimate on use of the word “people” in a particular interview (he set the bar at 23, which turned out to be waaaaay low, as the guv dropped the p-bomb 73 times), to this analysis of yet another set of pet phrases. This particular public embarrassment was made for blogging, and you could do far worse. Go see Eric today.

In the Department of Other Shoes, I hesitate to link to this because it won’t mean anything to readers outside of Detroit, and those who know about it don’t need the prompt, but: As usual, the sex scandal is only the appetizer for the money scandal, as we are finding out in regard to city administration. This place makes Chicago look like Minnesota.

Short shrift today, but we’re in the midst of another snowstorm — it does, literally, look like Minnesota at the moment — and I have to go deal with it. New question: Will the snowblower fling the dog poo from the driveway, left there because the snow’s too deep for the little guy to find his usual grassy spots? I’ll keep you posted.

It’s a big country, and what happens in one part of it doesn’t always make the front pages in another part. So those of you who live along the Mexican border will have to tell me — is the criminal unrest in Chihuahua and Sinaloa making the American papers down there? Because my night job involves farming news with the search term “drug,” I read something almost every night that makes my jaw drop and skin crawl.

Drug-trafficking organizations are warring for control in these and other Mexican states, and the corpses pile up like cordwood. The WSJ reports the body count for 2008 was 6,616, and 354 for the first three weeks — yes, weeks — of 2009. These aren’t just-business Mafia-style hits of a couple slugs to the head, either. In fact, many victims lose their heads entirely, a favorite way to send a message. The same WSJ story said one police commander’s head was left in a cooler in front of his police station, with a calling card from one of the cartels. Bodies routinely show marks of torture, and no one is immune — women and children are regular targets. Reuters moved a story last night about the appeal of the drug lifestyle to the poor but beautiful girls of Sinaloa, where beauty pageant audiences are filled with drug lords shopping for girlfriends. Sometimes, the story said, they take them directly from the runway to a life of indolent luxury:

Such high-profile murders did not deter 18-year-old beauty pageant winner Emma Coronel from marrying (high-ranking drug lord Joaquin) Guzman, who is three times her age, in a lavish secret ceremony in 2007, not long after he escaped from the prison where he and Hernandez were lovers.

Culiacan residents say they sometimes spot Coronel at the salons that do eyelash implants and decorate false nails with garish designs or photos of loved ones. Local reporters say her parents feel like they’ve won the lottery.

Of course, the concern is that this level of violence, so close to the U.S., could easily cross the border. (Needless to say, we’re the destination of the cocaine, heroin, methamphetamine and other drugs being produced in Mexico, and these operations are well-established here.) A NYT story earlier this week offers this stark contrast: El Paso, Texas, is considered the third-safest city in the United States, while Juarez, right across the Rio Grande, had 1,550 drug-related homicides last year. The story said the Bush administration had a plan to send more agents and troops to the region, should the fighting spill over to the American side. But fans of “The Wire” and public-policy debate will appreciate this blackly comic detail:

The conflict in Juárez has led some in El Paso to propose radical solutions. In a symbolic resolution of support for Juárez, the El Paso City Council recently voted unanimously to ask Washington to consider legalizing drugs as a way to end the violence. “We think it should at least be on the table,” Councilman Beto O’Rourke said. On Monday, the Council backed down after the mayor vetoed the resolution and local members of Congress warned that the Council’s stance might imperil federal aid.

The council said: “Think about it.” Congress said: “Don’t even.”

That Wall Street Journal story quotes Gen. Barry McCaffrey, the former drug czar, from his assessment of what Mexican police are up against:

“The outgunned Mexican law enforcement authorities face armed criminal attacks from platoon-sized units employing night vision goggles, electronic intercept collection, encrypted communications, fairly sophisticated information operations, sea-going submersibles, helicopters and modern transport aviation, automatic weapons, RPG’s, Anti-Tank 66 mm rockets, mines and booby traps, heavy machine guns, 50 cal sniper rifles, massive use of military hand grenades, and the most modern models of 40mm grenade machine guns.”

And my ex-congressman thinks the answer to this is: A wall. Good luck with that.

Well. Didn’t want to bring you guys down on a spectacularly bringin’-down sort of day. Seventy-five thousand jobs lost, justlikethat, yesterday. I tried to tally up how much of our discretionary spending could be curtailed in the very likely event we’re included in the carnage before year’s end, and came up with: Not bloody much. Cable, cell phone, gym membership, a few meals out — it doesn’t add up to more than a couple hundred bucks a month. The fixed costs aren’t lavish — our mortgage payment wouldn’t get us a two-bedroom apartment elsewhere in town, but they are fixed. You gotta have a roof and a couple meals a day, after all. I keep reading about how this is all the fault of “our” greed and “our” unwillingness to live within our means, but I’m not the one with an $87,000 rug or a frequent-flyer account at Hermes, so please — include me out.

I’m telling you: President Obama? A few public floggings? Would guarantee you not only a second term, but perhaps a rollback of the 22nd amendment and probably a jeweled crown.

Ah, I’m just another whiner in a nation full of them. We send our good thoughts to Deborah, our NN.C community member, facing a big announcement in her own office today. Fingers crossed all over for her.

Have I crushed your spirit yet? I don’t mean to. Every so often you look around and see the funniest things. In these long, dark winter evenings, Kate and I have taken to watching “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy” again, a reprise of her third-grade year, before Zack and Cody co-opted her. (Also, my former colleague Lynne McKenna Frazier was on last week, and though she didn’t win, I send her belated congratulations on making the cut and answering some toughies.) Last night the winner on “Wheel” was a gay man, accompanied in his victory dance by “my fiancee, Chuck.” It was so sweet and normal you couldn’t help but smile.

In the darkness, we see shafts of light. The days are getting longer. More layoffs ahead, but maybe we’ll survive it after all.

Off to the gym to sweat it all out.

Interesting story in the NYT yesterday with an irresistible headline: The Talented Mr. Madoff. With no new developments to add, the story took a look at the psychology of the man; it took a stab at the parts of the story that are interesting to me, and those are the parts that would be in the novel, not the Fortune magazine postmortem:

“Some of the characteristics you see in psychopaths are lying, manipulation, the ability to deceive, feelings of grandiosity and callousness toward their victims,” says Gregg O. McCrary, a former special agent with the F.B.I. who spent years constructing criminal behavioral profiles.

Mr. McCrary cautions that he has never met Mr. Madoff, so he can’t make a diagnosis, but he says Mr. Madoff appears to share many of the destructive traits typically seen in a psychopath. That is why, he says, so many who came into contact with Mr. Madoff have been left reeling and in confusion about his motives.

“People like him become sort of like chameleons. They are very good at impression management,” Mr. McCrary says. “They manage the impression you receive of them. They know what people want, and they give it to them.”

Con men are a staple of fiction, and having never met one myself (other than the usuals — bosses promoted beyond their abilities, etc.), I take a writer’s word about what’s involved in the game. And so reading about Madoff sent me to my paperback-pulp bookshelf, where I found “Bright Orange for the Shroud,” and yes, folks, it’s time to get acquainted with ol’ Travis McGee again. On the trail of the crew who fleeced an old friend of a family fortune in a perfectly legal real-estate scam, he comes across their offices in a bland Florida complex, and meets the head of the gang. Together they admire Debra, his lovely assistant and protege. Even though Travis’ friend was a fat pigeon, like all good professionals they’ve got another one in the pipeline. The boss explains:

By falsifying records, bribing minor officials, making some careful changes in old group pictures — school and church — and with the help of some brown contact lenses, some minor changes in hair and skin texture we have given Debra an iron-clad identity as a mulatto, as a pale-skinned girl who actually did disappear at fourteen. This curious revelation has come as a horrid shock to her young husband of four months, and an even worse shock to her wealthy father-in-law, the ex-governor of a southern state, a fevered segregationist, a man with political ambitions. The positive rabbit test — also faked — is bringing things to a climax. The fat settlement is for divorce, abortion and total silence.

I suppose the biggest con in this is how John D. MacDonald flatters his readers into sympathizing with the crooks. A neat trick in 1965.

But that wasn’t the revelation of the business section this week; rather, this Ben Stein column was. I confess: I’ve been a reader of Stein’s since the 1980s, and my newspaper’s editorial page had a subscription to the American Spectator, which has been running the creepy Ben Stein’s Diary for years. All Stein columns are a version of Ben Stein’s Diary, and all Diary entries are roughly the same: Stein describes his life as a C-list actor in enervating detail that somehow matches his famous voice, with regular stops to marvel at how lucky, how fortunate, how unbelievably blessed he is.

When his days weren’t concluding with dinner at Morton’s, they ended with a description of Tommy, his adopted son (“We’re so blessed to have Tommy. Every day we thank Tommy’s birth mother for choosing life…”). Even at the gamboling-puppy stage of childhood, Tommy sounded like the world’s biggest spoiled brat, begging his dad, always successfully, for one indulgence after another, about which Stein sometimes pauses to feel bad, but never very long. He’s happy to be a rich Republican and to buy things for his boy. If it made Tommy happy, that was good enough for Ben.

Well. Now it’s 2009, and some chickens are ringing the doorbell at Stein’s multiple fabulous homes, asking where they’ll be roosting:

…my handsome son, age 21, a student, has just married a lovely young woman, 20. You may have seen on television the pudgy, aging face of their sole means of support.

I have been pondering what advice to give them about money. What I keep coming up with is this: Do not act like typical Americans. Do not fail to save. Do not get yourself in debt up to your eyeballs. Work and take pride and honor from your work. Learn a useful skill that Americans really need, like law or plumbing or medicine or nursing. Do not expect your old Ma and Pa to always be there to take care of you. I absolutely guarantee that we will not be. Learn to be self-sufficient through your own contributions, as the saying goes.

…I wish I could teach that work ethic to those close to me. I wish I could teach them that money is a scarce good, worth fighting for and protecting. But I very much fear that my son, more up-to-date than I am in almost every way, is more of a modern-day American than I am. To hustle and scuffle for a deal is something he cannot even imagine. To not be able to eat at any restaurant he feels like eating at is just not on his wavelength. Of course, that’s my fault. (I have learned that everything bad that happens anywhere is my fault.) And I hope to be able to leave him well enough provided for to ease his eventual transition into some form of self-sufficiency.

The rest of the column’s even worse, if you can imagine. Actually, this has been a theme in the column for some weeks now, how “we” have gotten in over our heads through our profligate spending, etc. While I won’t argue with the broad outlines of this, I’d hope a writer who dares to call his column Everybody’s Business could spare a thought for those of us who have never set foot in Morton’s, who put large down payments on our houses and never once refi’d for vacation cash, who didn’t cave in (and, apparently, continue to cave) to our bratty children’s every whim, who saved and worked and who find ourselves equally screwed. What’s Tonto’s line? What do you mean “we,” white man?

I don’t generally wish ill on people I’ve never met and who’ve never done a thing to me, but I’m really hoping Tommy Stein meets reality one of these days, and that he skins his knee on it.

Now I’m off to study my Russian. Yes, that’s me — talented writer and editor, journalist with multimedia skills, working to add yet another skill to my repertoire, not that it will matter. No one’s hiring. Tommy Stein will always be better off than me.

Be good, all. it’s a new week, the sun is out, and although it’s very cold (6 degrees), I’ve had two cups of coffee and feel ready for anything. Onward to the new verbs, and the new year. Let’s talk about something other than Bill Ayers today, eh?

I don’t have anything else on my mind today, so I call your attention to two recent NYT stories with one thing in common — very cold water.

The first is about winter surfers on Lake Superior, people who greet the season with the infamous gales of November and spend the rest of the winter in dry suits and petroleum jelly, waiting for the Minnesota surf to come up and a singular experience to unfold:

By noon, a foot of snow was on the road, flakes blowing sideways in winds gusting up to 45 miles an hour. But a dozen surfers were suited up and in the water, paddling out with their heads down, over waves and into a whiteout, disappearing into an abyss.

The other story is about the scene at the Russian Orthodox Epiphany, when its members mark the end of the Christmas season by cutting cross-shaped holes in the ice of local rivers and ponds and then plunging in for a little new year’s baptism, described as:

…the trance-like preparation, the electric shock of the water and the 20- or 30-second wait for a feeling he described as “nirvana.”

In more proletarian parts of the country, this is sometimes called a polar-bear swim. I did it one year. Fort Wayne holds its official dunking in one of the filthy rivers, but my friend Mark the Shark started his own tradition at his lake house two counties away, and the idea of plunging into cleaner water finally convinced me to give it a try.

MtS is a somewhat disorganized person. The first year, he sent a notice to the local newspaper about the upcoming event, then forgot about it until New Year’s Day, when his wife looked out the window and said, “There are a whole bunch of cars pulling into the driveway. Do you know anything about that?” The first year’s swim attracted about five plungers, including Mark and his son, and many more spectators.

The following year was more organized, and the weather more dramatic — an early cold snap iced up the lake and laid several inches of snow everywhere. I called in the morning and asked what the plans were for making the hole. “Oh, I thought I might call the fire department, see if they could send over somebody with a chain saw,” Mark said. (This was two hours before the announced plunge.) Alan rolled his eyes and retrieved our Kubota from the basement, and he handled the chore. We learned how you cut a hole in ice big enough for a bunch of people to stand around while a bunch more people jump in — you saw grave-size pieces, then push them under the ice sheet with a pole. It made the fringe nice and stable. At one point Alan looked down and saw a very sleepy frog swimming near the surface; perhaps the noise of the saw awakened him from hibernation. A bunch of Amish people showed up to gape, and afterward we had mini quiches and mulled wine in the warm living room.

The following year was the one I finally got wet. It wasn’t as cold — the water was open — and I simply resolved not to think about it. Came to water’s edge wrapped in a towel, dropped it, thought BANZAI and dunked. It wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d feared. I once went into northern Lake Huron in October, and that was worse — I remember my limbs twitching as all the blood made a speedy exit for the core, a freaky feeling. But the New Year’s plunge was almost pleasant, and had that baptismal effect that leads to the nirvana the Russian guy was after. You emerge feeling not half-dead, but alive and awake in a whole new way. I didn’t even take the warm shower afterward, because I already felt as clean as virgin bride.

I sometimes wonder, as the population moves south, if our fear of cold doesn’t increase by the year. People who think nothing of driving 85 miles an hour on the freeway quiver at the thought of a “dangerous” Minnesota winter. We’re in the midst of a tough one here, and I have done my share of bitching about it. But I’ve also noticed I do most of my bitching from inside the warm house, and once I’ve resolved to do whatever task is out there, and dressed appropriately, and actually walked outside into the great frozen maw, it’s not so bad at all. Sometimes I even get sweaty.

Today’s high: 39 degrees. Tomorrow’s high: 15.

Back to the mangle. And the bloggage:

Roger Ebert writes about Steak & Shake with the glee of a (formerly) fat man:

My Steak ‘n Shake fetish is not unique. On an early visit to the Letterman Show, during a commercial break, I said to David:

“I hear you’re from Indianapolis, home of the head office of Steak ‘n Shake.”

“In Sight, It Must be Right,” he said. Our eyes locked in unspoken communion.

“Four Ways to Enjoy,” I said.

“Car, table, counter, or TakHomaSak,” he replied.

“Specializing in Selected Foods…”

“…with a Desire to Please the Most Discriminating.”

“Thanks for Your Liberal Patronage…”

David didn’t blink an eye or miss a beat. We had both obviously memorized the original menu. “…signed, A. H. (Gus) Belt, founder,” he said, and we shared a nod of great satisfaction.

I love S&S, too. I allow myself about one milkshake a year, and I never regret it.

The Prayer of the Mac User is basically the text of this story.

Science pokes its head out into the sunlight.

And I must edit a big wad of copy. So have a great day, and stay warm.

Forget Michelle’s dresses. You really want to know where Aretha got her hat, and today we have the answer: Mr. Song Millinery on Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. The phones started ringing within moments of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and the details are this — you can buy versions of the hat in 15 colors for $180, but the original is “exclusive to” Aretha, and you probably expected that, didn’t you?

The Free Press story goes into greater depth about millinery designer Luke Song, son of a Korean immigrant, whose humble storefront conceals a business with national, and now international, range:

Mr. Song Millinery’s clientele is 90% African-American, churchgoing women, Song said. His wholesale business supplies hats to shops in other cities with large African-American communities, and the merchandise sells especially well in California, Houston and Dallas. He designs 100 hat styles every six months.

…By Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Song had sold hundreds of hats. A store in Dallas had sold 500 more, and the material was running out.

“People are calling from England, asking for the hat,” said Luke Song, who designed Franklin’s chapeau. “I’m shocked. I had no idea. We did not expect this.”

He should have. Aretha looks about five minutes away from a major coronary, but she can still sing a song, and she can definitely rock a hat. This is a black city and a church-going city, which means it’s a hat city; I told Alan I knew we had moved to Detroit when I noticed our local Macy’s had a men’s millinery department.

(Men have their own version of Mr. Song — Henry the Hatter, also downtown, where Kid Rock buys his lids. I urge you not to click that link unless you have about an hour to kill. The Borsalinos alone — oy. I reread an Elmore Leonard novel during the most recent cold snap; a Borsalino appeared in one scene. The character called it a “Bosalini.”)

Anyway, I call your attention to this for two reasons — just in case you want to buy Aretha’s hat (even though I suspect that ship has sailed), and to introduce you to the comment section that the blogger Detroitist calls the Free Press Klavern, the chorus of ugly, anonymous racists who can always be counted on, in any story featuring black people, to make ignorant-ass comments like this:

Jig up your own songs-not ours.

I used to wonder why the paper didn’t moderate their comment queues better, and someone told me it’s a legal thing — if they make any attempt to treat the comments as actual content and not as randomly sprinkled turds, they open themselves up for a lawsuit. Doesn’t make sense to me, either, but hey. Anyway, there’s page after page after page of them. Warning: at the bottom of every page is picture of Winkin’ Sarah Palin:

Which seems like a good transition to the bloggage, which today includes The Poor Man’s Golden Winger Awards, and they include a reference to None Other. So it fits.

You really don’t need to read more than the lead –

A dive team in Port Huron is fishing a car out of the Black River today after a man who drove onto the ice accidentally locked his keys in the car, and the running engine melted ice beneath it.

– to get the awesomeness of this story, but there’s the link, anyway.

Bye, Caroline. You’re free to go back to being deeply private, and I can’t help but think that’s a good thing. Someone who can’t even make up their mind about quitting is clearly not cut out for the hurlyburly:

After frantic talks between the governor’s operation and Ms. Kennedy’s camp Wednesday evening, Ms. Kennedy appeared to waver on whether to withdraw, and was preparing a statement reasserting her interest in the job. But just after midnight, she decided to make clear she was taking her name out of consideration and released the statement saying so.

The Hoosier dropped the ball, but the refs allowed a do-over. I just find this story hysterical.

And that’s it. Short shrift today, but I have to get back to the gym before they forget my face. Have a swell day, all.

In the grand tradition of self-delusion looking at the bright side, let’s take a look at an interesting story from today’s Free Press:

Stacy Sloan, director of culinary education at Holiday Market’s Mirepoix (mihr-PWAH) Cooking School, says that because of the dismal economy, she had expected sales for this year’s cooking classes to be flat or worse.

But the opposite has happened.

Yes, basic cooking classes at this specialty market in Royal Oak are full, mainly with students who have never cooked for themselves before, and are using the recession as a motivation to eat out less and eat in more. The other day I was stopped outside Kroger by a market researcher, who offered me $10 for a five-minute interview on video; one of her questions was whether I’m eating out less. I said not really, that one pitfall of recessionary economies is their self-perpetuation, as people curtail their spending and by doing so make the situation worse. But I certainly understand the impulse, and to the extent it gets a few more adults comfortable around knives, cutting boards and saute pans, so much the better. There’s something amusing about seeing people learn the simplest things. Last quote:

“You can start out with a roast chicken as one meal and make other meals from it,” he says.

I imagine this guy, getting this idea, bathed in pure white light. I’m glad my mother was cremated, so I can’t hear her rolling in her grave.

But seriously: Home cooking = good. I’ve been doing my nightly news-farming for three years now, and one story I’ve seen grow from nothing in that time to something that alarms even me is the contamination of the U.S. food supply. We’re under another salmonella cloud, this one from peanut butter. Here’s what I find interesting: Most super-market peanut butter is fine, provided you’re not buying in five-gallon buckets. It’s the peanut-butter products that are transported in tanker truck-size loads that are the problem, which is why the recalls are for things like those neon-orange snack crackers you buy from vending machines, and not the jar of Crunchy in your pantry.

It’s best, if you eat processed food, not to think too much about it. I think I’ve told Alan’s many entertaining stories of his college years, spent working in various food-processing plants before. What they’ve done is made him unwilling to eat certain brands of canned soup and frozen pizza. Other people I’ve known have worked everywhere from commercial dairies to candy factories, and none of them eat the stuff they used to make, either. Best line, from my ex-candy making friend: “Chocolate is the opposite of scotch. You’ve got to learn to dislike it.”

But salmonella’s only the beginning. The other day I bought a package of ground chuck for the Derringer family’s dirty little dinner secret: Family Taco Night. As it was going over the scanner I noticed a package sticker I hadn’t read: Product of U.S.A., Canada and Mexico. Ewww. (I made sure that stuff was well-frickin’-done, believe me.) Globalization and open markets mean your supermarket snack cake may be made from ingredients gathered around the world, many in countries where food-safety regulation is, um, flexible. How did melamine get into the food supply? Chinese entrepreneurs found it raised protein levels while costing less than actual protein, with poisoning being merely an unfortunate side effect. This sort of corner-cutting is an established business practice in the Asian economy. Bon appetit.

I see Mark Bittman has a new book out, and unlike the more abrasive Michael Pollan and elitist Alice Waters, he seems to have an actual understanding of how average Americans actually live their lives. The diet he advocates — less crap, more plants — is one most people can manage, if they have rudimentary cooking skills. To the extent these classes are helping make that happen, huzzah.

I’m off to learn Final Cut Pro — be there soon, Rob — so here’s a bit o’ bloggage:

I see quite a few snarkers took note of Dick Cheney’s wheelchair and made the usual jokes, most of them about Dr. Strangelove. They’ve got it all wrong. This is the cultural reference you’re looking for:

Rich jerk suicide watch: Another one, this one a so-called Celtic Tiger. Tigers elsewhere call him a pussy denounce him as unworthy of big cat-hood.

What do you get when you knock on the door of a house with a “fresh coons” sign in the yard? Why, you get a recipe:

“You soak him in vinegar and water, soak it four, five hours, and that get the wild game taste out of it. After that you cut him up just like you cut up a rabbit, then you preboil it about a half-hour, let the water jump about a half-hour, then take him out, put him in a pan like that, get your seasoning on, then you put him in the oven, just like you do a roast.”

Yes, folks, it’s another gem from Detroitblog. (BTW, I can’t tell you how many reporters of my acquaintance would have failed to write down the best line of that passage — “let the water jump about a half-hour.” Poetry.)

It’s the first day of the rest of the Obama administration. Mark it however you will.

I have nothing to say today, but I’m sure you do. Let’s make it an open thread for the last day and the first, to discuss the inauguration, open to NN.C-ers of all races, creeds and political parties.

Tomorrow the re-education camps will open, and some of us will just quietly disappear. But today, on this day of celebration? Everyone gets a pony:

Photo by Andy Piper; used under Creative Commons license, via Flickr

So have at it!