January is National Soup Month. Before it slips into the books, let’s recall a few of the month’s steaming pots here at the Nall-Derringer Co-Prosperity Sphere:

Sweet potato bisque: I happened to be at the Russell Street Deli, an Eastern Market institution known for its spectacular soups, the week before Christmas, when this was on the menu. It was…mouth-gasmic. It fogged my glasses and my mind. I tried to consider what the “Top Chef” judges call its “flavor profile,” but my tastebuds were happy-dancing so, it was hard to get them to settle down and give some sober feedback. It had many of the notes of a sweet potato pie — cinnamon, nutmeg, ginger — but was savory overall. I found a recipe online that seemed to come close, using buttermilk for the tang, and whipped up a batch. It was very good, but not as good as Russell’s. Three stars (out of four).

Curried butternut squash: An early improvisation, inspired by Mark Bittman. I make a version of this every fall, basically squash soup with curry and a tart apple thrown in the mix. For this, I left out the apple and added a can of coconut milk, and my friends? It was fabulous. I’m buying coconut milk every other week now. Four stars.

Cream of cauliflower: Another Bittman inspiration, brought on by the perennial January realization that I could eat a lot more vegetables if I tried. Sauté onion and garlic, throw in a whacked-up head of cauliflower, cover with broth, simmer to softness, puree and swirl in a half-cup or so of cream. Yum. Three-and-a-half stars.

Roasted garlic with white cheddar: I make this in the winter most years, but not for the last few. It’s an old Betty Rosbottom recipe, simplicity itself: Break up and peel two heads of garlic, cover with olive oil and roast in the oven for 40 minutes or so. Meanwhile, soften some leeks or onions or both, add a few potatoes, cover with broth, simmer simmer simmer, etc. When it’s soft, throw in the roasted garlic [EDIT: Remove the garlic from the oil first] and puree. Finish by stirring in a handful of grated white cheddar cheese. Serve with a green salad and crusty bread you can sop in the oil from the garlic roasting. Refrain from kissing for the rest of the night. Four stars.

Chili: Because if it’s winter in the Midwest, there will be chili. Everyone has their own favorite recipe. You don’t need to hear mine. Three stars.

No-cream of cauliflower and carrot: This was last night. I had a head of golden cauliflower teetering on the edge, so I made it the same way I did the other cauliflower soup, only I added a double handful of carrots and left out the cream and curry. Topped with some grated cheddar, cocked my shotgun, held it to the head of my daughter and forced her to choke down 10 spoonfuls or so, which she advised me were “gross.” Reader, it was not. It was delicious. Three and a half stars.

Note all the pureeing. You can do it in batches in the blender, but that’s a pain in the ass. Far better to spend $30 on what Emeril calls a “boat motor” and most cookbooks call an immersion blender. Mine broke last night, which seemed to be a fitting marker for the end of National Soup Month.

Although I will buy a new one this weekend. Because you really need an immersion blender. At least in our house.

Which takes us to the bloggage at the end of a cold but sunny week here in the Mitten:

You want to know why people hate lawyers? Try the NFL’s jerkishness in trying to stop New Orleans retailers from selling T-shirts and other merchandise featuring the fleur de lis and/or the phrase “Who dat?” One of my Facebook friends, Ray Shea, said it best:

The fleur de lis predates the existence of the NFL by more than two millenia. The fleur de lis has flown on flags over Lousiana for more than four centuries. Black and gold has been associated with the Zulu Social Aid and Pleasure Club for almos a century. The phrase “Who Dat” is more than a century old and exists in recorded New Orleans music since the 1930s.

The NFL is granted a temporary non-exclusive license to suck my balls.

Ray is an old friend of Ashley’s, and won my allegiance to the Saints the night the team beat Indianapolis, and he posted, “Who dat pushing Manning’s face in the turf? WHO DAT?” Indeed. Peyton Manning is a guy whose face can never be pushed into the turf too often.

I just surfed through Memorandum to see what’s going on in the world of politics, and found this headline: Palin to Obama: Stop the fingerpointing. And with that, irony died once again and I officially declared the weekend under way.

So enjoy yours.

Well, I’ll get an iPad. Eventually. Not this year, but maybe next, when the hard drive gets bigger and the price drops and I start doing all my work in coffee shops. If nothing else, it seems to be the e-reader that might tip me into e-reader territory, not that I’ve been waiting for one. But, you know, I like to keep up. And if the iPad and other tablet devices throw a lifeline to newspapers, then I’ll feel obligated.

You have to be careful, though. I sometimes call my iPod my musical id, because when I started buying music online, I flocked to the shameful hit singles I’d been turning up on the radio all these years, but only when I was alone in the car. Songs I was too cool to like, or songs that were the one decent track made by Disappointing Artist X. I wouldn’t buy DAX’s album, but 99 cents seemed to be the right price point to buy the one or two Madonna songs I enjoy (“Don’t Tell Me,” “Ray of Light”), or Lou Gramm’s “Midnight Blue.” You have earbuds in all the time anyway, so it’s not like anyone knows you’re a secret Eminem fan.

And then digital music became the only music to buy, you hook the iPod to your stereo now, and so I have an iPod cluttered with crap, and more than 1,000 songs to sort into “earbuds only” playlists, lest one pop up at a dinner party and embarrass me. (I downloaded Chakakas’ “Jungle Fever” after watching “Boogie Nights,” OK? And I regret it! I always fast-forward past it!)

I don’t want the same thing to happen with my e-reader. Yesterday I asked Laura Lippman what’s better for her, as an author — ink on paper or pixels on a screen — and she mentioned the obvious use for Kindles, et al:

I use it primarily for travel and I stock it with B-reads, things I don’t care about owning in hardcover format.

In other words, pretty much the way I used my iPod at first.

I also asked Hank Stuever about this, and he got his own blog post out of it, and you should go read that, too.

It’s the newspaper model I’ll be watching most closely, of course. These are my people, they provide my health insurance, and I have a stake in seeing them survive. Late in Hank’s post, he quotes a lovely paragraph from another essay about newspapers, about the authentic experience of actually holding and touching your authentic experiences. I keep coming back to the 3A Tiffany’s ad, running daily in the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, upper right-hand corner of the page since forever, and how much I look forward to seeing it every day. The other day it was the engagement-ring ad, four big Tiffany solitaires tumbled in a row. I always take a minute and appreciate it. I will never own a Tiffany’s solitaire. I don’t particularly want one. But it’s a beautiful photo, and I allow myself a few seconds of mild envy, the way if you were walking past Tiffany’s in New York, you might stop to look in the windows, like Audrey Hepburn.

Over to Facebook. Upper-right-hand corner: If you are a 52-year-old driver from Michigan, your car insurance rates can be as low as $14.98 a month. Click to learn more. Earlier today, it told me 52-year-old women could get a free pair of Uggs for participation. Click to learn more. I’ve asked this question a thousand times, and no one can give me a good answer: If all the college-educated eyeballs are online, if the smartest and the wealthiest people are looking at computer screens all day and most of the night, why are the ads the equivalent of the free Amish fireplace?

Oh, and as to the name of the iPad: Are all you people children? When did Beavis and Butthead join the focus group? Do you snicker when you hear “helicopter pad” or “note pad” or “pad Thai?” Maybe because I was always a tampon girl, and grew up in the era when menstrual pads were called “sanitary napkins,” one of the great euphemisms of its day, I don’t immediately associate the word “pad” with menstruation. Grow up.

I also thought Barry’s speech last night was pretty damn good. I liked how he called out the party of No. Fuck you, Sammy Alito, you smug piece of shit. And great job on that GOP response — find the XY equivalent of Martha Coakley, flank him with a black woman and an Asian man, and have them nod and clap on cue. Way to bring it, you soulless toads. I’m sticking with Barry.

OK, then: Yesterday’s work spilled over into today, so I’d best hop to it.

I can’t get over the known facts of this (like a good journo, I say: alleged) wiretapping attempt in Louisiana. Every part of it is a forehead-smacker, up to and including the priceless detail that this escapade is, hello, a felony, meaning right-wing hero James O’Keefe is now in very very big trouble. Which doesn’t make it any less funny.

If the facts of the case turn out to be anything like the allegations of the case, it’s pretty clear what happened here: A stupid, heedless young man, drunk on attention and looking for a followup to a coup that landed him on all the big Fox talk shows, made the mistake of assuming that because he’s smarter than a criminally dumb Acorn office worker, he’s smarter than everyone. You have to admire his logic: I was on “Fox & Friends,” ergo, I am smart. In a better world, his ridiculous pimp outfit alone would have gotten him laughed out of anything other than a Halloween party; instead, he got a hidden-camera scoop. And so he learned the lesson every reporter learns after his or her first big story: Sooner or later your editor is going to wander past your desk, stop and say, “So, what do you have coming for tomorrow?”

O’Keefe appears to have been lining up his second act when he and his buddies were arrested, “wearing jeans, fluorescent green vests, tool belts and hard hats.” Because that would fool anyone, right? Everybody needs a hard hat to work in an office phone closet.

I used to work with a bulldog of a reporter who once tried to sneak into a hospital ER — a homicide scene — wearing a white lab coat and carrying a clipboard. He was thrown out almost immediately, but it scored big A-for-effort points with the bosses and people called him “doctor” for a while afterward. It’s funny how disguises work: Badly, most of the time. You can go to the uniform-supply store and stock up, but you almost always get important details wrong. You forget the way nurses put stickers on their name tags. You wear the wrong shoes. (Maybe you’ve been watching “House” and assume all female physicians wear stilettos and plunging necklines, like Dr. Cuddy.) You forget to erase the expression from your face and give off a nervous vibe. There’s a reason good actors make good money. A believable impersonation is no small achievement.

That this ridiculous caper was attempted in the company of the son of a U.S. attorney only makes it funnier. Things may look grim for Democrats in 2010, but as long as there are young men like James O’Keefe in the world, we’ll always have entertainment.

A tangent, but it just popped into my head: I remember, in the film “Crumb,” a scene where Robert Crumb goes out making sketches of the little infrastructure details in American cities. He was about to move to France, and wanted to get them down so he wouldn’t forget to put them in the backgrounds of his drawings — high-tension wires, street lights, fire hydrants, concrete blocks at the end of parking places, all visual clutter we see-but-don’t, and only notice when they’re missing. That’s what people forget when they’re trying to be someone else.

A few years ago, I looked up from my desk in the newsroom to see Sen. Evan Bayh walking past, en route to a meeting with the editorial board. He is exactly what he appears to be in his photos — tall, slim, blonde*, blandly handsome in that vote-for-me kind of way. His suit fit him well without being overly European. If Hoosiers can be Brahmins, that’s what he looked like. Behind him scurried a number of aides, the lead one carrying all the hardware; his pants sagged from the weight of the multiple cell-phone holsters, pagers and PDAs he carried, this being before the era of consolidation in a single device. The way his navy-blue blazer stuck out at strange angles at his waist — that was the detail a costume designer trying to duplicate the look for a movie would struggle with. But it was the detail that established his station in life, the way Bayh’s slim weightlessness distinguished his own.

And with that, a discussion of misbehavior and one of the aide’s burden, we can segue neatly to the wisps of John Edwards’ dignity, blowing in the wind now that his own factotum is turning on him:

According to Young, (Reille) Hunter called him in May 2007 to say she was pregnant. Young says that when he informed Edwards, the senator told him to “handle it,” to which he replied: “I can’t handle this one.” Young writes that Edward unloaded on Hunter as a “crazy slut,” said they had an “open relationship,” and put his paternity chances at “one in three.” Young says that Edwards asked him for help persuading Hunter to have an abortion. Young writes that Hunter believed the baby to be “some kind of golden child, the reincarnated spirit of a Buddhist monk who was going to help save the world.”

Crazy Agnes of God believed she was carrying the Almighty’s baby. Crazy new-age girls believe they’re Buddha’s baby mama. It’s all crazy, and it’s all cringeworthy, through and through.

Guerrilla bridge-makers step up to do what city won’t. I’m intrigued to learn this pipe has been leaking across a New York City sidewalk for “years” — I thought that only happened in Detroit. Down near Alan’s office a couple years back, a broken water main leaked into the street for months on end before it was repaired, and the city’s jury-rig for the winter was to come down from time to time and dump a load of salt on it, simultaneously appalling and funny. When we went to Buenos Aires, I noticed how broken sidewalks and other pedestrian hazards were far less likely to be cordoned off with tape or marked by cones. Walk at your own risk! It’s a dangerous world out there.

And I must turn to work. Enjoy Hump Day, however you spend it.

* Hoosier readers object to the designation of Bayh as a blonde, and after examining the photo record, I think they’re right. I always picture him as sort of an ashy dark blonde in my head, but now his hair is dark brown. He’s almost certainly covering the gray; maybe going darker is more believable than keeping him light. Whatever, only his hairdresser knows for sure. Corrected.

Factoid of the day, unsourced, from a newspaper account of Detroit’s experience during the Great Depression:

But poverty had not diminished moral rectitude: a man who had accepted a charitable donation of a shirt returned the diamond cufflinks he found in the cuffs.

I’m the kind of sap who would do this. I’m guessing the man who donated the shirt would not.

This is me writing from Kate’s orthodontist’s office, saying hey, guess who overslept this morning? Open thread until whenever I get it together.

I had to go to the Apple store this weekend. Mail continued to give me problems, and it finally reached the point where I realized this might be the irregular-shaped mole of my OS, and it was time for a biopsy. The Genius fixed it with some diagnostic this and that, then noticed a cracked top piece on the laptop. It’s no biggie, I’ve been living with it for months, it doesn’t affect anything but the appearance. But the Genius said he’d replace it under warranty. Like the diagnostic and repair, free o’ charge.

This laptop is now…four years old? Maybe three. At least three. I’ve never paid for anything that went wrong with it. Do their warranties ever expire? I asked Alan when I got home. He said I must be in the computer as a Mac slave/superplatinum customer, or just a blogger who always writes about how good their service is. Whatever. Literally: Works for me.

This was the outdoor “lifestyle center” mall, the one in Macomb County, the dog-friendly one. I frequently leave shaking my head over the tragedy surely waiting in the wings. Dogs are like children; it only takes a few misbehaving ones to ruin the experience for everybody. I know the way you teach dogs to behave in public is to take them out in public, but if you weigh 98 pounds and your dog about the same? You better be carrying a cattle prod, lady.

It’s startling to turn the corner in a store and see an afghan hound standing there looking at you, too. But as long as he’s a good boy, no biggie.

While I was there, I stopped in Sur la Table in search of martini glasses. I’m commencing my cocktail education with a new shaker I bought for us this Christmas, and my first project — pomegranate martinis — is coming along, but I lack the stemware for the right presentation. S-la-T has martini glasses, oh goody, and they’re only…$10? A piece. No. They’re also way too big; I want a martini to be relaxing at the end of a long day, not a sledgehammer. So I was interested in this Atlantic piece on the trend toward giant cocktails. Thank God I don’t make enough money to hang out in places like this; I’d be broke and on Skid Row by now.

Although…there was a place in Athens, Ohio that advertised “Texas cocktails” in the mid-’70s. Mr. Magoo’s. It also had a dance floor and played disco music, which was the craze elsewhere but totally uncool in hippieish Athens. The Arab and Iranian guys went there, hoping to pick up one of those famously easy American girls. They never looked comfortable with a fishbowl-size drink in their hands. I wonder if those cheap, rotgut G&Ts ever led to Islamic regret the next day. Is the Pope Catholic? Etc.

Anyway, after sketching out some truly ghastly sounding drink-and-drown tankards, Wayne Curtis notes:

Small cocktails were favored for a simple reason: they stay chilled from beginning to end.

Well, yeah. I mean, you can always have two.

These martini glasses could hold most of a can of Diet Coke. I’ll keep looking.

Some good bloggage today. Jim at Sweet Juniper has been silent of late, entirely understandable:

I think living in Detroit and watching “The Road” in the middle of January is not a good idea.

Yeah, me neither. Funny essay, though.

Also, a Michiganian with a master’s degree and a fancy resume finds work in Florida — at Publix.

Finally, I think I’m going to have to back the Saints in the Super Bowl. Sorry, Indiana, although not really, because with my support, they are destined to lose. You’re welcome.

And so Monday hits the ground running. Enjoy yours.

We’ve had a few sunny days this week, sunny and warmish, so of course these must be paid for in blood, and today is the payback — cloudy with a chance of leaden. I started to go for a third cup of coffee and reminded myself to let the first two do their thing before I making the call on a potential stomach-sourer. But if there was ever a day for it…

Despite the sunshine, yesterday sucked the big one all around, didn’t it? The Supreme Court decision promises to be a shit tsunami; about the only good thing I can see coming out of it is the final stripping away of all that who-me?-a judicial-activist? posing by Roberts, Alito, et al.

Actually, I can see other good outcomes, too. If there’s one thing journalism has taught me, it’s this: You never know. You really don’t. Anything can happen to anyone, anytime. One or two election cycles jam-packed with corporate-sponsored lying could lead to a great populist revolt in this country. Scalia could drop dead, with Clarence Thomas throwing himself into the grave right behind him. (“Papa!”) I have faith the Obama administration is not over, not by a long shot.

For now, I’m choosing to be optimistic. It’s really the only one for a day like this.

I have to be out of the house in just a few minutes, so let’s just go to the bloggage and let you guys take it away, eh?

Farewell, Beckham. Tbogg’s dog died yesterday, too.

Via Hank, a conservative dares to speak truth to the conservative movement.

Sometimes, when your side loses, it helps to imagine the opposition in its underwear. Or in other situations where you just know they wish there hadn’t been a camera around. This picture (the festive clambake one, that is; scroll down) has been around forever, but in light of yesterday’s events, let’s make  sure it lives another day, eh?

And now I’m off.

The horse-eating project I’m working on involves some historical research, which involves dusty old records, which involves going down to the historical branch of the Detroit Public Library and summoning boxes out of storage. The librarians turn them over with a pair of white cotton gloves, which you are expected to wear when you handle anything within. It’s hard to type in them, however, so there’s a lot of on-and-off when you’re taking notes.

I’m generally not sentimental about ephemera. I can think of nothing less worth having than an autograph. And yet there’s something about holding a piece of letterhead embossed Sullivan & Cromwell, 45 Wall Street, New York, New York. Just a piece of paper, and more than 50 years later, and it still screams white shoe. As does the signature: J.F. Dulles.

A couple years ago, I interviewed a graybeard from our legal community. What’s changed since you started practice in 1969? I asked. The work, not so much, he said; it’s still about money and how it’s divided, and it always will be. But the pace, the old days of chin-scratching and deliberation — that’s gone forever. A client would call with a question, and you’d tell him he’d be hearing from you. Then there was time for thought, and research in libraries, notes on a legal pad. Then you summon the secretary, dictate a letter, maybe revise the letter, type it in duplicate or triplicate, put it in the outgoing mail, onion-skin copies for the file. At every step in the process there was time to change your mind, consider further, refine. No one expected a reply sooner than the next day’s mail, and that was considered a blistering pace. Thought percolates, reduces, strengthens its flavors.

No more. Funny that we have a slow food movement, a slow travel movement, but slow thought is considered lazy. Dude, I saw that on Twitter like, two hours ago.

Speaking of movements, the NYT Thursday Styles section, home of bullshit trend stories of all sorts, has a story today on what you might call the slow blood movement, i.e., freezing your ass off. Today, a clot of the impoverished, the self-righteous and the just plain whack who endure, nay embrace, a life without furnaces.

I’ve read so many of these I can recite them in my sleep, but here’s a theme I see more often these days:

Attitude, not clothing, is what thaws Daniel McCloskey and his roommates in Pittsburgh. Last year, Mr. McCloskey, 22, bought two poorly insulated turn-of-the century clapboard houses for $41,000 in the Lawrenceville neighborhood there, and turned them into a writer’s retreat he named the Cyberpunk Apocalypse Writer’s Co-op. …Mr. McCloskey offers monthlong residencies to emerging writers, which is to say a free room in the house at the back. There is a furnace, but his finances are low and mostly it stays off. …Mr. McCloskey warms himself up by spending time in coffee shops, he said — “an hour will do it” — and by maintaining an upbeat demeanor. Doesn’t his girlfriend, with whom he shares a drafty attic room, get grumpy?

“What makes her grumpy is using resources,” he said. “We’re all about staying positive.”

Ah, yes: “Using resources.” Way to sell a greener America, Daniel’s girlfriend — champion a lifestyle of miserly one-downmanship (“I keep my thermostat at 55″ “Well, I don’t have a thermostat”) that turns on the embrace of a miserable lifestyle and fingerless gloves. Also, rationalization:

If it’s 20 degrees outside, as it was last week, it might be 15 indoors, so Ms. Gallagher will stoke the fire and go for a long walk; when she returns, the room can be 50 degrees, and 60 by bedtime, though it slides precipitously toward freezing as she sleeps. “The main reason why I do these winter trips,” she said, “is that when your house is 15 degrees, the only problem you have is getting warm. Focusing on survival is right up there with a Zen retreat when it comes to clearing the mind.”

It’s not the cold that’s the problem. It’s you that’s the problem.

For the record, I think most American houses are overheated, and that a chilly nighttime temperature is actually conducive to better sleep. But I like toilets that flush and prefer to focus my mind on work, not survival.

Eh. It’s their house, after all.

OK, now to commence eating the horse. First, a workout to strengthen the body. And one bit of bloggage: Man buried in Haiti rubble survives with help of his iPhone. He was rescued 65 hours later. I imagine he amused himself in the interim playing Wurdle.

This seems to be going viral — I read it on Facebook, where it’s now being talked about more or less openly — and it deserves, nay requires, its own entry:

The John Goodman character in “Treme,” the upcoming David Simon series for HBO, finds his roots in our very own Ashley Morris. One of his friends is opening the bag based on this photo, which makes it sort of obvious. Ashley was a Saints fan, as we all know.

The confirmation I got warns it’s more of an “inspired by” character, rather than a “based on,” but I for one can say that if I hear Ash’s great FYYFF rant coming out of the mouth of John Goodman, I can die happy.

Premiere is April 11. Can’t. WAIT.

I was googling “Brothers & Sisters,” the TV show, trying to find something I once read about it. I tried to watch that show and gave up after about half a season, when it became clear the writers were never going to give up this maddening music-cue thing they do.

The show is your basic prime-time soap, with comic elements. Whenever a comic scene commences, however, the sound editors insert this giggly little piano/string thing, the universal music code for “French farce scene about to commence! Get ready to laff!” I remember a couple years ago, reading an interview with some network executive who said it was necessary to telegraph every punch that way, because they’d given up the idea of any viewer giving any TV show their complete attention, and they didn’t want someone to look down at their laptop during a serious confession-of-infidelity scene and look up to find a zany oops-we’ve-been-caught-having-sex-in-the-cloakroom scene. Too jarring. And so tonal shifts are underlined, perhaps so viewers know they’re watching broadcast TV, not HBO.

So I was looking for that interview, and got distracted by reveries of the Allman Brothers, who — you younger folks might not know this — had a monster album in the ’70s called “Brothers and Sisters,” which combined with “music” would of course turn up in any Google search. And by then I had forgotten that one of the things I wanted to say was, nobody has any attention span anymore, because they’re always multitasking.

There was a trainer at my gym who liked to combine the ab work in his classes with “Whippin’ Post,” which I always thought was appropriate.

Which sort of brings me to this story from the New York Times’ Department of News You Already Knew, about how kids today are addicted to the internet. As an abusive parent in this regard, defined as “one who declined to buy the data plan for her child’s cell phone, and who also activated the parental controls feature of the computer’s OS,” I read with keen interest:

Those ages 8 to 18 spend more than seven and a half hours a day with such devices, compared with less than six and a half hours five years ago, when the study was last conducted. And that does not count the hour and a half that youths spend texting, or the half-hour they talk on their cellphones.

“I feel like my days would be boring without it,” said Francisco Sepulveda, a 14-year-old Bronx eighth grader who uses his smart phone to surf the Web, watch videos, listen to music — and send or receive about 500 texts a day.

It’s the texting that makes me insane. A true moderate, I equipped Kate with the moderate plan — 1,500 per month, which feels like all the goddamn texts any normal person would need, don’t you agree, my fellow geezers? Well, you should pay closer attention to your kid, who thinks nothing of texting “yo” or “‘sup?” or “hey” nine million times a day, and I am not kidding. Objecting to this is like saying with all this long hair, you can’t tell the boys from the girls.

I told her if she went over 1,500, I was taking it out of her hide. And no data plan until she gets a job.

After all, I don’t want to happen to her attention span what’s happened to mi– Shiny object! New tab in Safari! Tangent! So let’s go straight to the bloggage, eh? (I pronounce that blo-GAHGE, by the way, from the original French.)

Detroitblog finds a sterling example of that unique American character — the graphomaniac. (Look it up if you don’t know what it is. Why do you think we have tabbed browsing and the internet at our fingertips, fool? If this were a TV show, I’d be playing stern music right now.) Don’t miss the guy’s website.

It so happened I was at John King Books, Detroit’s spectacular used-books treasure house, looking for a couple of volumes that will aid in my horse-eating project mentioned last week. You want to know where graphomaniacs’ work goes to die? Check the local-history shelves at your own town’s version. They are distinguished by their lengthy subtitles (“Officer Down: One Man’s Heroic Crusade Against a Corrupt Police Force and Its Enablers Among the Legal Community, Particularly the Prosecutor’s Office — You Wouldn’t Believe”) and their equally lengthy dedications to the many kind helpers they had along the way to publishing their opus, which no publisher would touch, because it’s simply too hot.

There’s one at my local car wash, or was the last time I visited. I love this car wash, which takes advantage of the few moments you will spend there to push every imaginable sort of impulse purchase at your face. Greeting cards, scented cardboard air fresheners, bulk lots of utility towels, one-size-fits-most floor mats, laminated study guides for everything from the SAT to the periodic table — I have barely scratched the surface. But there, on a table next to the window where you watch them finish your inside windows, is a little pile of books. Self-published, natch. Title: “My Wife Has Cancer.” I can’t bear to pick it up. I hope it was therapeutic for someone.

An odd and an end from yesterday: You Cincinnatians, does Zino’s still have the greatest pizza in the world? We used to drive down from Columbus for that stuff. It’s the big red onions that does it. And Bob (not Greene) wondered if the Kim who commented yesterday had a last name beginning in L, because if so, he thought they knew each other? She does; you do. Contact me privately if you want to catch up.

It’s a new medium, so the growth curve is spectacular: The Chinese folks who brought you the animated Tiger Woods story tackle the Leno-O’Brien-NBC story. And it is awesome. If I were a young journalism student, this is what I’d be studying.

And now, to commence what is, theoretically, my work. If I don’t get distracted.