We all know what day it is. The outgoing president has been generous with his time this week, with his presser, various other interviews and one I’m halfway through on Pod Save America, the podcast that succeeded Keepin’ it 1600.

You can read/listen/watch those, or you can join me in Tom & Lorenzo’s retrospective of FLOTUS’ style, which I’m enjoying. Daywear, parts one and two, plus separate posts on the gowns and the coats.

So many pretty clothes to look at. I’m so sad. I’m going to look at the pretty clothes and try not to think of the incoming administration’s extended family trying to cadge free haircuts.

Here we go, America. Try to have a good weekend.

One of those days, folks. Long and not terrible, but one that didn’t yield much material. Did a radio thing at 9 a.m. about the governor’s state of the state address. Fortunately, the other guest had taken very detailed notes, and can say that Flint didn’t come up until 34 minutes in. My notes read, “says ‘shoutout’ incessantly.” Which he did, enough that I looked up “shoutout” on Google Ngram. It’s hiphop slang, now over deployed by our nerd governor.

Then I came in to the office. Had soup for lunch. Had soup for dinner. Didn’t get enough done; my bullet journal will scold me tomorrow.

But I got some bloggage! It’s a bit infuriating.

Another one of those Vox things — I voted for Donald Trump, and I already regret it. Oy, these people:

Since that 60 Minutes interview when Trump went back on his promise to investigate Clinton, I haven’t been able to look at him the same way. Witnessing his open admittance that he made promises simply because they “played well” during the campaign was disturbing. He has shown himself to be guilty of all of the same things he accused Hillary of — lying to the public, refusing to do press conferences, putting himself and his business interests above the American people.

Since the election, Trump has repeatedly spat in the faces of those that cast their ballots for him. I did not cast my vote for his Cabinet members, many of them rich millionaires and billionaires, despite Trump’s lambasting of Hillary Clinton on her association with Wall Street. I did not cast my vote for his sons who sat next to him during his meeting with tech titans, potentially representing the vast business interests of the Trump company that they now run. I did not cast my vote for Ivanka, whose clothing brand was working out an ongoing deal with a Japanese clothing company when she sat in on a meeting with her father and the Japanese prime minister. I did not cast my vote to enrich the very swamp that Trump promised he would drain.

Today’s talker will be this NYT piece on Rick Perry, which made the blood drain from my face:

When President-elect Donald J. Trump offered Rick Perry the job of energy secretary five weeks ago, Mr. Perry gladly accepted, believing he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry that he had long championed in his home state.

In the days after, Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor, discovered that he would be no such thing — that in fact, if confirmed by the Senate, he would become the steward of a vast national security complex he knew almost nothing about, caring for the most fearsome weapons on the planet, the United States’ nuclear arsenal.

Two-thirds of the agency’s annual $30 billion budget is devoted to maintaining, refurbishing and keeping safe the nation’s nuclear stockpile; thwarting nuclear proliferation; cleaning up and rebuilding an aging constellation of nuclear production facilities; and overseeing national laboratories that are considered the crown jewels of government science.

“If you asked him on that first day he said yes, he would have said, ‘I want to be an advocate for energy,’” said Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist who advised Mr. Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign and worked on the Trump transition’s Energy Department team in its early days. “If you asked him now, he’d say, ‘I’m serious about the challenges facing the nuclear complex.’ It’s been a learning curve.”

It’s fashionable these days to go around muttering “we’re so fucked,” and it’s easy to see why.

Finally, this Bridge story goes live at 6:20 a.m. Thursday, and I’m eager to hear what people think of it. It’s very strange, and there’s a twist at about the three-quarter mark that I’d rather not spoil until more people have a chance to read it. But I want to hear opinions.

Onward to the week’s downside. And…Friday.

As a card-carrying member of the evil media, I’ll acknowledge being a little out of touch, but there’s one thing you civilians do that has always bugged me. And that’s the insistence that when terrible crimes are committed, it’s somehow wrong to pay any attention to those who perpetrate them.

Seriously, I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard people claim that it was wrong to put O.J. Simpson on the cover of some newsmagazine, or Tim McVeigh, or anyone other than, oh, Osama bin Laden. (Funny how this rule is suspended for certain terrorists.) Sometimes this goes to extremes; one of the best criticisms I read about the Oklahoma City memorial was that McVeigh is barely mentioned, and his cause not at all. We wouldn’t want to offend the families of victims, who don’t want to see him mentioned.

How such an unspeakable tragedy can happen in a vacuum escapes me. And I don’t think O.J. killed his wife and another man to get on the cover of Time magazine. But that’s how people think, and all I can do is argue.

This came up because Alan and I watched “Tower” on Saturday, an interesting and excellent documentary on the sniper shootings from the University of Texas tower in 1966. (Last year was the 50th anniversary.) The film uses actors, and the animation technique known as rotoscoping. This gives you the effect of hearing young people describe a 50-year-old incident, which gives it a sense of immediacy. It also covers up for the lack of contemporary footage – contemporary with 1966, that is. There’s some of that, but it being the era before cell phones and video, there’s not enough to make a whole movie from it.

But here’s what’s missing: Charles Whitman. I believe his name is mentioned once, and there’s zero discussion of his motivations, admittedly oblique. So what? So this: As these hideous incidents pile up, an amazingly consistent throughline is emerging – domestic violence. In fact, Whitman’s first act, before he climbed the tower, was to kill his wife and mother-in-law.

So when you say you don’t want to “glorify” killers, consider what else you’re doing, i.e., turning your back on knowledge that may be valuable in the future.

Last year I did a story on human trafficking, and one of the advocates made a comment that’s stuck with me; that is, that human trafficking is, in terms of public awareness and understanding, approximately where domestic violence was 30 years ago. The better we understand the link between domestic and mass violence, the better prepared we’ll be to put a stop to the next one.

But we can’t do that if we act like it’s somehow wrong to talk about the men — and it’s always men, at least so far — who perpetrate these things, that won’t happen.

Just sayin’.

It’s a good movie. On iTunes. Recommended.

Man, this week started at a gallop, and it’s still galloping. Worked last night, worked a little tonight, gonna work on the usual schedule all week because you all know what comes on Friday, right?

And today I drove back and forth to Ann Arbor. In a driving rain. I listened to a Chapo Trap House podcast, a Pod Save America podcast, and missed the day’s big news – the pardon commutation of Chelsea Manning’s sentence. What should we think of this?

The Obamas have started their move, evidently.

And that’s all I got. Back to work.

The North American International Auto Show Charity Preview is, I am obliged to say, the single largest charity event in the metro area, and raises a small fortune for its various beneficiaries – $5.2 million this year. They do it by not spending much at all — the drinks are included with the $400 ticket price, and I was shocked this year that I was actually able to nab one. In previous years it seemed like they had one bar and a case of mediocre champagne. This year there were multiple bars, and mediocre red and white wine, plus beer. But that’s fine, because it’s for charity, and as they always say, the stars are the cars.

Eh, not so much this year. It was a pretty underwhelming show, which you can see as a just a fallow year or maybe a tipping point. The big talker this year was Ford’s embrace of “mobility,” the buzzword for the city of the future — light rail plus buses plus ride-sharing plus driverless cars plus bikes plus, oh yeah, your own two feet. This is how we’ll get around in denser environments, and for those of you who insist on living elsewhere? Here’s an SUV. So let’s get to the pictures, shall we?

The underwhelming stuff is in the lobby outside the show hall. The guy pimping this whatever-it-is roped me in with an air of desperation. It’s one seat wide, no back seat, and it gets 85 miles per gallon. He told me that three times. Whatever, dude. I can’t imagine how it handles, but it’s your car for getting to the light-rail station, maybe.

We entered at Kia, which unveiled a new fancy-schmancy thing, seen here. I think it’s called a Stinger:

If you’re thinking, yes, the world’s been waiting for a better Camry, then you must be living in my head. But hey, it’s a Kia. And it’s very red and shiny. This, elsewhere in the Kia space, was my fave:

Now those are some damn snow tires. About three or four days a year, I could use the hell out of those.

This matte paint is a trend, I gathered. That’s a vintage …Challenger body (I think) with a brand-new performance engine in it. For the boomer who has everything:

I’m including this picture of a Chrysler concept van for Brian Stouder, and I think he knows exactly why:

It’s actually kind of cool. Called the Portal. It’s a concept, so all the cool shit will be stripped off if it ever hits the road, but that’s why we love concepts.

The Volvo moose. I think it’s promoting their accident-avoidance system:

Here’s something I’m glad we are finally speaking plainly about. Quien es mas macho?

Finally, the new dress. Don’t like this picture; I don’t know what told me to stand with my feet like that, but it’s this year’s model, and probably next year’s, too:

It is always fun to dress up, but man — wearing heels for just a few hours is like getting shitfaced drunk — my feet have a 24-hour hangover at a minimum. (And yeah, I should really have an evening sandal; didn’t get to that chore this year.) Maybe next year I should go floor-length and wear some Chuck Taylors underneath.

And that’s all for 2017, folks. Be safe out there and watch out for the autonomous cars.

I’ve been a scarce girl this week, haven’t I? Sorry about that, but it’s been a bit busy around here. Also, last night I was doing research for a story. More on that when it drops.

It so happens I wrote the last entry just a couple hours before the urine-soaked mattress hit the fan, so to speak. I’ve been wrestling with my thoughts on that issue ever since, and I think they come down like this: The link above, to a NYT story, is probably how I would have handled it if I were editing this thing. That is to say, talk about the bigger story, that there is such a dossier, and that it was circulating, and the basic facts of what it is said to contain, because otherwise it makes no sense to readers. You have to have a sense of the stakes. Would I have included the part about Natasha, Olga and the extra orders of Aquafina sent by room service to the Ritz Carlton presidential suite? Eh, probably not.

But I’m glad someone did, even though it’s a very risky move; after all, Peter Thiel could decide he is displeased and fund another lawsuit in a friendly jurisdiction. There is something distasteful about the idea that this dossier had been leaked all over D.C., was something everyone was talking about, and yet that information couldn’t be shared with the American public. Once it goes to Congress it’s Game Over as far as keeping a lid on anything. I respect the role of gatekeeper and I think the gate needs to be kept, but maybe not in this case. It is, as they say, extraordinary. These are extraordinary times. We are flying blind, without a map, and one engine is on fire. We are going to have to make a lot of stuff up as we go. That’s just the way it is.

Life is now a “Black Mirror” episode, isn’t it? And this is Season 1, Episode 1, only with Russian hookers.

One amusing detail I gleaned from this river of sludge: I think it was the Daily Beast that, in one of its subheads or other teasers to this story, said the president-elect hired “sex workers.” The dossier said “prostitutes.” You have to be fairly well-versed in sex-work vocabulary to know that “prostitute” is not their preferred description. “Sex worker” is. I laughed, anyway.

So, for bloggage? I don’t have much, but there’s this, a piece done mostly by my colleague Mike, with some help from me: County maps of where the ACA/Medicaid expansion has been most-used. Please to not guffaw when we note that these were places that went hard for Trump.

Tomorrow is the auto prom. I will wear a red dress and take some pix for ya. See you after the weekend.

As a car-show widow for the last few days, I invited a friend over Monday night for dinner and a movie – “Bright Lights,” the Carrie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds HBO documentary that was rushed into release after you-know-what.

The film was just fine, an enjoyable tour through the past and present of both women, along with Fisher’s brother Todd, who comes across here as an amiable fellow who mostly escaped the family curse, but never learned it’s not appropriate to wear a baseball cap with black tie. The clan is (was) obviously close and loving, while at the same time a bit tetched in the head, as they say, but that’s showbiz. There’s marvelous, well-preserved archival footage of Carrie and Todd as children and teens, perhaps some of it from the famous MGM publicity apparatus. The various glimpses of magazine covers and newspaper clippings give younger viewers a hint of how ferocious that was at guarding and cultivating a very particular image of the various show ponies in the stable. The studio ran your life. Lots of people were happy it did. (As for me, I want to know where I can find the black-and-white dress Debbie wore in the birthday-party clips.)

Of course, the reality was as squalid as it appears to be now. Eddie Fisher not only left Debbie for the sexiest dish in town (Liz Taylor), he was shooting methamphetamine, which he referred to as “vitamin shots.” (It was very likely supplied by a studio doctor.) A brief scene of him at what had to be the very end of his life was painful to watch. And while the kids grew up with every advantage, as we like to say, it’s hard not to see how doomed they were, especially the pretty daughter called onstage at 14 by her mother to sing — we see a weird version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” — as part of mom’s cabaret act.

Carrie Fisher was renowned as a great writer and wit, and the latter is on full display here. She’s also an interior decorator nonpareil, and I would watch another documentary where the camera just poked around her house for a while.

But people, I gotta tell you: If you wanted a clearer, more sobering case against a life of smoking, drinking and related drug abuse, you couldn’t do better than Carrie Fisher. That fresh-faced gamine who played Princess Leia was only a year older than me, but you could hardly see the plucky leader of the rebel alliance in anything but her quick wit. The smoky-lens eyeglasses seemed to be hiding something, her hair was thin (I know she took medication to stabilize her mental illness, and I know it has side effects) and her lovely face looked badly used by too much ill-advised plastic surgery. Required to exercise under the gaze of a trainer for a part in the latter-day “Star Wars,” she struggles on an elliptical like someone far further down the road. We often refer to Hollywood as the beautiful people, but there has to be a better way to grow older.

This seems a good place to drop in this wonderful moment from “Postcards From the Edge” – Shirley MacLaine in the closest thing to a Debbie Reynolds impersonation you’re likely to find on YouTube.

Just a bit of bloggage today: A useful, deeply reported profile of Jared Kushner from New York magazine. The family history alone is fascinating.

Finally, a simultaneously hilarious and infuriating piece by Neal Pollack on the trials of educating one (1) kid in modern America. At least if you aren’t wealthy:

The school gave him math homework where the first problem was “1-0,” even though he already knew long division. And his teacher sent home an information sheet that began “To many times, their are students who …”

We pulled him out after two weeks, instead enrolling him in a “progressive” charter school that was only a 15-mile drive from our house. This school, located in a former mental hospital at the edge of a toxic waste dump near the airport, was so radical that it didn’t have a principal. Parents ran everything. The cinderblock buildings didn’t get washed very often. Supplies were in short supply. They combined fourth and fifth graders into the same class, which led to bullying problems. We spent three hours a day in the car, hauling Elijah back and forth.

At the end of the first semester, in lieu of a Christmas concert, the students performed a winter solstice dance in the midst of a freezing, stick-strewn field, like something out of a Lars von Trier film. My wife and I looked at each other and said, “no more.”

The kids I tutor in the after-school program where I volunteer frequently work from typo-strewn materials, too. Charters, almost to a person.

OK, good midweek to all.

Our outstanding webmaster J.C. has done the thing he’s done for a number of our late commenters — made a separate comment thread for Maggie Jochild’s contributions. It being January and all, it has me thinking of whether I should shut down the blog before this becomes a weekly occurrence, and all that’s left is for some 25-year-old reporter for a yet-to-be-founded website by an as-yet-unborn tech guru to do a story on this curiosity that’s been publishing regularly since 2001.

Old people! They’re so funny!

Maggie was a wonderful writer. I read a few of her poems here. I think that’s the best tribute you can pay to a writer — keep reading them. You’re never really dead until no one remembers you anymore. Reading is remembering.

Is this too much of a memento mori to kick off the week? I hope not. Don’t want to be one of those people who complains chronically about winter and gray skies and all that. Friday night I went out with a friend and he told me a wonderful story about an edible (that’s medical-marijuana lingo for weed you don’t smoke), a 300-pound security guard in a Santa hat and an assault rifle. I chuckled well into Saturday over that one; it was one of those stories that tells me I’m in the right place, gray-bowl skies and all. There’s a certain kind of hijinks that only certain cities produce.

We were in a bar, a new one for me and nearly new for him. The bartender had been a witness in a high-profile murder case a few years back, and the experience had left her shaken — or “deeply shaken,” as the newspapers inevitably put it. But she had valuable evidence to offer: How the accused, her landlord, had shown up at the apartment building the night of the crime and made a big show of sweeping the parking lot — an activity he had never done before, at least in her tenure — and introducing himself by name to everyone who walked by. That is to say, he was establishing his alibi. He might have gotten away with it if he had spent a little more on a hit man; the one he hired (for something like $1,500 and the title to a used Cadillac) walked into the police station a few days after the crime and confessed. He still might have gotten away with it if the police had been successful in sending the hit man away as a crank, which they tried to do.

It was a mess. But a juicy story.

So that was Friday. Saturday was the usual blur of chores, and here I sit for the next few days, a virtual widow as Alan deals with his Hell Week, i.e., the Detroit auto show. The gala is next Friday and I will take some snaps, I promise. Got a new dress, too. Red.

I won’t be getting one of these. But it might make useful protective coloring if you have to travel through hostile territory in the next four years.

The other thing that’s getting me down is what’s happening Jan. 20. The dread is starting to catch up, because every day I see awful things in the news and I wonder why my street isn’t filled with people screaming as a result. I recall also feeling this way during the financial crisis, which was a useful lesson: When momentous events happen, life as it’s lived on a daily basis doesn’t change abruptly, until it does. I read this piece on Jeffrey Beauregard Sessions, our soon-to-be attorney general, and felt icy dread inside. If you click through, WTF with those women in those dresses, and one of them is… black? Really? They found an African-American woman to put on plantation drag complete with parasol? Maybe I’m missing something.

Not all the news is terrible today, though:

Martin Shrekli was kicked off Twitter on Sunday. https://t.co/69rkmDxcIP pic.twitter.com/Mv8HdSsDRj

— CNN (@CNN) January 8, 2017

Got to sit down with my bullet journal and make a plan for what will be a pretty busy-ass week. Also, I’m gonna vacuum. Enjoy the remainder of the weekend and Monday, all.

Well into the cold snap today, I bought a pair of clever lights that go on your bike shoes like spurs. I ride less than I used to, in part because I have these premonitions that I’m going to be flattened by a car. So anything that can move and lights up and flash and perhaps tear a driver’s attention away from his or her phone? I’m all for that stuff.

At this time of year, it sometimes seems we’re never going to see bike season again. I bought those lights because I believe in spring, dammit. Also because they were only $10, and accepted ApplePay.

Winter is a series of milestones, like a drunk walking home, lurching from parking meter to lamppost. I’m already seeing pitchers-and-catchers-report numbers here and there. In one month, I’ll start noticing that the days are in fact growing longer. Then snowstorms will give way to freezing rain, then the first false hope of an early spring, then spring itself.

There’s a screech owl hanging in my neighborhood. It’s pair-bonding season, and it’s been raising a ruckus all night, calling to its mate, or potential mates. It’s a wonderful sound, and I wish I could throw a window open to listen to it, instead of catching it in snatches through the double-pane windows, or when taking the recycling out.

Which strikes me as a better use of my time than worrying about what the people of Mt. Airy think of the rest of us. Y’all chewed this one over in comments, and parts of it are appalling, but I can’t deny this made me laugh:

A group of developers has been working on a project to redevelop an old mill, Morrison said, but the proposal has moved slowly because of resistance from residents. Similarly, Vann McCoy, who runs a whiskey shop called Mayberry Spirits, said that residents recently opposed a traffic roundabout because there is no traffic circle visible on “The Andy Griffith Show.”

And people think city folk are smug.

You want some comic relief? Years ago, someone persuaded me to subscribe to Quora, sort of an ask-the-crowd-anything service. I mostly ignore it, but I get regular emails, and this one was pretty amusing. Someone asked

If you had to choose between Donald Trump and Barack Obama to adopt your kids, who would you trust the most to look after your kids?

You’ll never guess who won that one. But some of the answers are funny.

OK, then. This week is short, but it is long, if you catch my drift. I plan to limp through the weekend on fizzy water and protein. Have a good one.

I woke up this morning to wind — the flap of the bathroom vent…flapper, or whatever you call it. The housing timbers creaking. The sense of a new chill in the air, even as you can’t actually feel it, snug in your bed.

And sure enough, the temperature had fallen 20 degrees overnight. Plus the wind. It happens. January. Time to dig in. Except all the snow melted when it was in the 40s for the last few days.

Fortunately, I got up early and put some short ribs in the slow cooker. I set it on Low but still came home seven hours later to find them press seriously cooked down almost to goo. Delicious, delicious, mouth-melty goo, perfect for a night like this.

Without a glass of wine, but I don’t even miss it. (Too much.)

A day at the office today. I like those; it’s good to be around people, even without my Aeron. No food truck, though, and with the wind and the 20-degree temperatures, we ordered in Jimmy John’s, aka the world’s most boring sandwich, redeemed by delivery. I got mine as a lettuce wrap, for extra disappointment. Really hope they bring the food truck back, soon.

So now it’s Wednesday night, I’m on the couch trying to think of something to blog about while letting “The Big Short” run in the background. Just glanced up to see this quote on the screen:

“Everyone, deep in their hearts, is waiting for the end of the world to come.”

― Haruki Murakami, 1Q84

Which of course made me think of the upcoming inauguration. Then I looked at the NYT home page. Saw this:

Who looks at that second bullet point and doesn’t just let one’s eyes glide away? Four years of this ahead. May we live in interesting times.

No wonder the world went apeshit over Mariah Carey last weekend. Something else to think about.

Read Jon Carroll today. He doesn’t have any great ideas, but it’s something to read.

Sorry to read about Maggie Jochild in the comments yesterday. I honestly consider it an enormous tribute that other writers show up to read here, and she’s a Writer. From her own Twitter bio:

Third generation lesbian, 6th generation Texan, radical poet pacifist novelist disabled optimistic freakishly-good memory strong strong strong

Let’s hope so.

How does the song go? “How dry I am,” something like that. Approaching the 48th hour of alcohol-free living, I’m starting to feel more or less like a teetotaler, even though I slept horribly last night. A nice early bedtime doesn’t pay off if you wake up at 1 a.m. and don’t get back to sleep until after 3. But that will pay off in a good sleep tonight, I devoutly hope.

HBO has some sort of series up on its streaming service – “Risky Drinking,” or some such. It’s not as good as it could have been, but the 20 minutes or so I watched wasn’t bad. Subject: Problem drinkers. Spoiler: There are a lot of them out there. My main takeaway was how many adults old enough to know better still drink like college students, with the multiple rounds of Fireball shots, the mixing of beer and vodka and all sorts of vile crap, all served in plastic cups in horrible bars.

My second takeaway is that there’s nothing more boring, and intolerable, as a drunk. I’ve known a few, and that glassy-eyed stare they get brings back unpleasant memories.

I respect you recovering alcoholics in the readership, for sure. I only wonder what is so appealing about drinking that much in the first place. All addictions are ugly, but they start out in something like beauty, at least for the addict.

The barfing always turned me off.

Not much bloggage today, because I worked and didn’t do much sniffing around the internet. But there’s this: Intellectuals for Trump. Yep.

Happy Tuesdaying, all.