My Russian teacher and I were marveling at the news during the last winter Olympics, that the next one would be in Sochi. It’s a resort at a fairly southerly latitude, for starters, and, well, it’s Russia. The country has galloped ahead on the usual emergent-economy trajectory, but an Olympic Games is a herculean task to mount, and this isn’t China.

Turns out we might have been on to something:

Some journalists arriving in Sochi are describing appalling conditions in the housing there, where only six of nine media hotels are ready for guests. Hotels are still under construction. Water, if it’s running, isn’t drinkable. One German photographer told the AP over the weekend that his hotel still had stray dogs and construction workers wandering in and out of rooms.

My favorite is this:

My hotel has no water. If restored, the front desk says, “do not use on your face because it contains something very dangerous.”

That’s from Stacy St. Clair of the Chicago Tribune.

I wonder if any of us really realizes how much safer our so-called nanny state keeps us, by insisting on things like animal control and water purification. I remember when we were in Argentina a decade ago — hardly a third-world country — and coming across broken sidewalks, which may or may not be under repair. No orange cones, no caution tape, just whoopsie daisy, there’s an 8-inch drop.

We should let the market decide whether water is safe to splash on your face, don’t you think?

So. I was driving to Ann Arbor today, listening to Tom Jones’ version of “Sixteen Tons,” and it reminded me of something I read a while ago — that Jones is married to the same girl he chose back in the hometown, pre-famous days. A quick Google, and what do you know: They’ve been married since before I was born:

“We grew up together, come from the same place, have the same sense of humour. That has a lot to do with it. How do you walk away from somebody that you get along so well with? What’s the point?

“And we do still have a lot of laughs together. The first thing my wife asks me when I get home is: ‘Have you heard any good jokes lately?’”

It doesn’t exactly sound like passion — he admits to having had many infidelities and a long-term affair with Mary Wilson — but after all this time, more of a tea cozy of a marriage, warm and comforting and familiar. She looks like an ordinary girl from Wales who married a handsome boy and then found herself being swept up by his crazy career.

Remember: The only two people qualified to judge the quality of a marriage are the people in it.

Guess what we’re doing tonight? Waiting for snow. Yes! Snow! Quite a lot of it, too, although not as much as some. Then another deep freeze.

At least it’s a short month.

For a few weeks now, I’ve had a draft on my WordPress dashboard that reads “crudity Seth MacFarlane all horror movies.” I don’t think it’s going to get written. As I recall, I started jotting notes while watching the first 20 minutes of “Ted,” the film MacFarlane wrote and directed, but realized if I was going to say anything intelligent about it, I’d have to watch the rest of it, and I couldn’t do that.

It occurs to me that, day after day, Mondays are the hardest to come up with something to say here. Not much happens to me on a Monday, unless you could two gingerly minces around the bock on the treacherous icy lumpy fuck, as well as a few phone calls and 12 million emails. I have but two things to offer today, one stolen from Eric Zorn’s link roundup, but a subject I’ve always wondered about: How do they make the yellow first-down line in televised football? Like this.

And here’s a seven-minute Philip Seymour Hoffman highlight reel, with NSFW language but some of his most memorable scenes:

I loved “The Savages.” Think I’ll Netflix it tonight, if it’s Netflixable.

For now, eh, a weak effort and I’m out.

I guess I’ll be watching the Super Bowl tonight — confession: Sometimes I knock out Monday’s blog on Sunday afternoon — but I’ll be thinking about Philip Seymour Hoffman, whom I suspect was just Phil to his friends. (The three-name thing is probably a quirk of the Screen Actors Guild, because there was already a member named Phil Hoffman. Same with race horses.)

Anyway, I agreed with this observation by David Weigel, that what made Hoffman so great was his versatility:

He was the rare actor who could be cast in a key role without giving away what kind of character he was playing. …You see James Woods in a movie, you know he’s going to end up wearing the black hat. You saw Hoffman — and you had no clue.

That’s right. Lots of people mention “Capote,” but that one didn’t stick with me; it was so much about the voice. Truman Capote was sort of a human cartoon, and as with any cartoon, it’s mostly painted in primary colors.

My favorite Hoffman roles are far darker, with “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead” at the top of the list; he plays a traitorous son who betrays his parents for money, a real train wreck of a guy, but as with all his roles, he half makes you root for him. There’s a scene in that one where he visits a high-end drug house — drug apartment, this being Manhattan — that serves as an oasis for well-to-do users. You pay not only for the dope, but for the shooting services and a room to nod in. We see him stretched out on the bed in his underwear (Hoffman had no vanity about his lumpy body), staring at the ceiling with dope eyes, and honestly, it’s all I could think of when I heard the news.

But there was also “Boogie Nights” and “Magnolia” and “The Big Lebowski.” He played a feckless WASP in “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and a WASP-hater in “Charlie Wilson’s War” — see his big scene in the Dave Weigel link, above. Also, “The Savages” and “Moneyball,” and he was the only thing that made “Pirate Radio” worth two hours of your time. Like Chris Cooper, he brought authority to his parts. I saw Cooper play, in the course of a few years, an oil wildcatter, a horse trainer, an FBI agent and an orchid thief, and if I’d met him on the street outside the theater showing “Seabiscuit,” I’d have asked him how to get a horse to bend to the right. Put Hoffman in a baseball uniform, and oh, hey, I didn’t know you were manager of the Oakland A’s, Phil.

Goddamn fucking heroin.

Anyway: Twelve great Hoffman performances, with video clips. David Edelstein on the actor and the man. Feel free to add your own.

Remember when Super Bowl halftime shows were put on by Up With People? Deadspin remembers.

Meanwhile, it looks like another character-builder of a week. It snowed half the day Saturday, then switched to rain, a lot of it. The new wet snow, the melting of the old stuff and the rain left huge slushy puddles everywhere, and then what happened? The temperature dropped, and will stay low all week. Which means what we thought was icy lumpy fuck? This is icy lumpy fuck. It’s awful.

But every day, the days get longer. And now it’s February. Onward.

I read Rebecca Burns’ interesting explication of Atlanta’s snowpocalypse, which is also a criticism of sprawl and bad urban planning, while I was sitting at the car-repair place. My car has entered its nickel-and-dime years, but as long as the nickels aren’t too numerous, I figure it’s worth hanging on to.

It was a long repair, though, and stretched over the lunch hour. While the garage is smack in the middle of a highly developed stretch of strip malls, it appeared the only non-fast food option was a pizza joint about half a block away. I zipped the Parka of Tribulation (its rebranded name; I think it sounds more biblical than “parka of misery”) and headed out.

Good lord, but walking in St. Clair Shores is a royal-ass pain. It’s one of those suburbs with older roots, but that really blossomed in the glorious age of the automobile. Why would anyone walk anywhere when you can get into your shiny chariot of freedom and drive? Last summer, when I needed to get there after a two-day repair, I decided to ride my bike — it’s only a few miles. But there simply wasn’t a way to do it that didn’t involve taking a road that would be risky to life and limb. So I ended up going all the way on the sidewalk (Harper Avenue, for you locals), which I absolutely hate to do, but why not? It’s not like anyone walks on them.

Certainly they’re not all cleared of snow, as I discovered today. Between the biting winds, the snow piles and the agog looks of passing motorists — looky there, someone’s walkin’ — I’d had just about enough of my winter stroll almost as soon as it started.

But the car steers correctly now, at least. Just in time for another snow squall. More coming, too.

New Orleans in two weeks. It’s going to be in the 70s there this weekend.

Wendy’s having a fierce chew at my feet as I write this, really working her Nylabone down to a nub. It seems to scratch a deep itch for her. The world is more hospitable to her now that the temperature has risen above 20 degrees. We took a longer-than-normal walk today and she enjoyed every step.

I don’t have much more. How’s your weekend looking? Kate will be starting another physics project — a cardboard boat — and there’s a party in Detroit for Ragnarok. I’ve been told it’s mainly an excuse to burn shit, so I’m really looking forward to it. The weather says it’ll be snowing. Quel surprise.

Have a great one, everybody. It sure took us long enough to get here.

I’m trying to avoid sugar these days. Not going paleo or low-carb, I’m eating fruit and occasional yogurt and, OK, dessert if someone sticks a piece of cake under my nose. But I’m trying to hold the line on the winter pudge that inevitably piles up this time of year, and it seemed the easiest way.

I had to stop working out as often as I had been when I blew out my knee, and the good news is? Haven’t gained back any of the 15 I lost over the summer. Yay, me. Twenty to go.

However: GOD, SUGAR IS WONDERFUL AND I MISS IT SO. I come from a long line of Germans, and we love our pastry and whipped cream and pie and ice cream and yes, even cheap-ass cookies like Oreos and the ones made by Keebler elves and especially those sold by Girl Scouts. I bought some Meyer lemons the other day. Normal people do that and think about cocktails and salad dressings. I thought of a Meyer lemon cake in one of my Chez Panisse cookbooks, and it took all my willpower not to make one.

Although I might this weekend.

How do people not get a sweet tooth? And once they have one, how do they let it go? I’ve heard people say it takes anywhere from a couple-three days to six weeks to stop craving sugar at the end of every meal, but all I can say is, it ain’t easy. I pour myself a big glass of water for dessert. I drink a cup of coffee. I leave the kitchen. And if I wait long enough, the protein of the meal works its way into my bloodstream and I stop thinking two little squares of dark chocolate would really hit the spot. But it takes a while.

Some people say, “I don’t crave sweets, but I just love bacon.” I love that, too. Bacon is sugar-cured, you know, most of it, anyway. Even if it weren’t, I reject the either-or nature of being either a fat or a sweets person. The two complement one another — whipped cream is sweetened fat, cake is sweetened fat, and sugar alone is sort of gross. As the kids say, it’s all love.

Don’t give me that crap about flour being sugar, too. It’s a carbohydrate, but unless it has raspberry jam slathered on it, it doesn’t hit the spot.

I’m not sorry. I’m just bereft.

It’s winter, hibernation season. All I want to do is eat a big piece of pie — maybe two — and crawl into bed with a couple good books. There to read and doze and let visions of sugarplums dance in my head.

So. A few words about sugar at midweek.

A little bloggage?

Guess who’s going to be in Chrysler’s Super Bowl ad? Bob Dylan.

Speaking of sugar, it’s the Uncle Sugar bounce!

And now I’m done. Good Thursday, all.

OK, I’m declaring it. The worst of the cold is over. Has to be. On Friday it will be 30 degrees. It will also be the last day of January. As my friend Mark used to say, “If you get to February, it’s practically over.” That’s not true, Groundhog Day foolishness to the contrary, but it’s close enough to true that you can fool yourself about it for a while. Then it’s Valentine’s Day, the traditional time to have an ice storm at this latitude, and then it’s just a fortnight until the shortest month of the year is over, and it’s March. First St. Patrick’s Day, then the first day of spring really arrives, along around the three-week mark. Then opening day, the first green mist on the trees.

Of course, this being Michigan, there will be a few snows in there, too. Last year I had my eye surgery on May 2. The spring leading up to it was awful, and the warmth arrived just as I was spending five days staring through my padded toilet seat.

So: Just (potentially) three more months of winter! But you see how I chopped it up like that? It’s just a series of fortnights and little mini-holidays.

But the -7 bullshit of this morning? OVER. So let it be written, so let it be done.

Seems like a day for a You Fuckers roundup. I was in a toleratin’-it mood until 3 p.m., when I called the bakery to find out what was left before I trudged over there, and discovered the entire place had been cleaned out. Time for some fuckers.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the jihad against Wendy Davis, aka “Abortion Barbie,” who is said to have slept her way into marriage to an affluent man, who then had to “raise their kids alone” while she went off to Harvard Law school. The slut! How dare she…do what conservatives counsel poor women to do, i.e., boost her socioeconomic status through marriage? Well — it shouldn’t surprise you to learn this — it turns out that it’s not entirely true. So: Fuckers.

And then there’s the National Review, specifically Kathryn Jean Lopez, abortion warrior, and this thing. I think Roy Edroso said it best: Put the family through hell with your ghoulish wingnut theology, then weep crocodile tears over them. Fuckers.

Not part of the roundup: Madonna, what are you doing? Asks Lindy West.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

While we’re on the subject of olive oil, I actually have a couple of bottles around the place at the moment. My cheap-o go-to is Costco’s big bottle. I think it’s around $12. But while doing my final holiday shopping, I saw Colavita on sale in the Eastern Market, for about $10. Bought some. I thought I’d compare labels:

Costco: “Produced from Italian-grown olives.” Colavita: “Premium world selection.” They went to the trouble of putting a hang tag on the neck of the bottle. You can read it if your eyes aren’t too bad — it’s the United Nations of blends.

And here I thought Costco was the cheater, because they started using green-tinted bottles a few months ago.

And now you know. This is what we get up to in the deep freeze.

It was actually a pretty productive day, all things considered. It was also one of those days when a shower seemed like a big accomplishment. If you’ve ever been a work-at-home employee, you know what I mean. I was awakened at 3:30 a.m. by a text message from the city, telling me we’d received three inches overnight, and the plows were being rounded up. Gee, thanks. I tried to get back to sleep, but didn’t do much more of it. I blew the snow for Kate and Alan. Made a bunch of phone calls. Read some stuff, wrote some stuff, made a late-afternoon Kroger run, and the whole place was like the Crips and Bloods — not enough carts, not enough checkout lines, malfunctioning scanners, a ridiculous mess in the parking lot.

School is called off for tomorrow. I am looking forward to sleeping late.

And if it isn’t glaringly obvious by now, I have very little to offer today. There is…

…Ross Douchehat, living up to the name.

Meanwhile, it’s going to 10 below tonight, and I still have to do some dishes.

Tuesday.

I realize we’ve been doing a lot of weather-bitching this winter, but this week we have coming up is going to test us all. After seven days of miserable cold, it warmed up just enough to dump a few more inches of snow on our heads and today and tomorrow? Single-digit highs, subzero low, and fuck you too. Will there be school? Don’t know yet. Will there be misery? Almost certainly. Will there be the small compensation of the abatement of my cold? Based on today’s tissue consumption, don’t think so.

I know, I know, in a few weeks this will all be over. Maybe a few days. Still.

Bitching complete. At least on that score.

Watched “Mitt” this weekend. It didn’t make me like him any better. In fact, it rather made me like him less. At one point, he ticks off the terrible taxes that a small business owner has to pay — federal, FICA, state, real estate, etc. “It goes to the government,” he said. Of course, these are taxes we all have to pay, too, only I’ve found it helps if you think of “the government” as an imperfect structure that inspects our food, repairs freeway overpasses, educates children and, of course, funds our never-ending supply of military operations around the globe. Pay a teacher a salary, and you know what he does with it? He buys houses, cat food and shoes. It’s an economy.

Now if you want to see money fly away and never been seen again, see what Bain Capital does with its profits. I also got peevish during the family’s final meeting before the concession on election night, and Mittens made a little speech about how the country was headed for a big-government tipping point within five years and, essentially, all is lost. Only a man who grew up the son of a major automotive executive and governor, educated at the finest schools money can buy, someone who beamed from Harvard straight into management consulting, whose wife was able to say with a straight face that they knew hard times because sometimes they had to “sell stock” to cover the bills, among about a million other instances of aggravated cluelessness — only he could get away with that and not have everyone else in the room pelt him with dinner rolls.

I also saw “Captain Phillips,” which was pretty good, an action movie with a conscience. Maybe when I don’t feel like my head is full of gunk, we can talk about that one.

For now, a skip to the bloggage:

Thanks, Dexter, for digging up this photo gallery from a California trail cam. It’s nice to see a place not covered with snow.

Your Italian extra-virgin olive oil is 69 percent likely to be not Italian, not extra virgin, and maybe not even olive oil.

Finally, as bad as it is where you are, take heart if you don’t have children in Louisiana public schools. Appalling. Infuriating and appalling.

A good week to all. Let’s hope it’s warmer by the end of it.

Neil Steinberg had a great blog yesterday, about his intention to see the entire Ring cycle at Chicago’s Lyric Opera in 2020. For you non-opera fans, this is the four-part, 15-hour magnum opus of Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Niebelung,” the most operatic opera of all. Staging it is the Mt. Everest of opera, and watching it is pretty much the same. In Chicago…

The first opera in the cycle, “Das Rheingold,” will be staged in the 2016/17 season, with the other three, “Die Walkure,” “Siegried” and “Gotterdammerung” performed in each subsequent season, with the whole megillah, as Wagner definitely would not say, being performed — three complete Ring Cycles — in April, 2020.

Mark your calendars.

What I liked about it, though, were his observations on Big Works, and why they’re still important:

…like a mountain, a massive work calls to you. Not by its pure massivity, mind you. There are plenty of works that are long, multi-part 19th century romance novels and such, that have fallen into deserved obscurity.

But certain long works endure into our Twittery time, not because they’re big, but because they’re also good. Very good, wonderful, something that becomes clear when you gird your loins and finally sit down and read them. If they weren’t, they’d be forgotten. People don’t hold onto these things because they should, but because they have to. War and Peace is the template for every Barbara Cartland novel that followed. It isn’t tedious — well, much of it isn’t — but filled with love and conversation, with blood and battle, with war and, umm, peace. It’s a great book. That sounds obvious, but so many years of it being a “great book” sometimes obscure that. Tolstoy knew his stuff.

I need to read a great work this summer. So much depends on translation, though, and how do you choose the right one? I started “Dr. Zhivago” when I found a copy at a vacation house we rented years ago, but absolutely couldn’t penetrate it. Just show me one hint of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, I kept thinking. Nothing doing.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. So many great books have been adapted into something else, and necessarily sliced down to a shadow of their original selves. We need to approach them as something completely new. On the other hand, Steinberg does a nice job explaining why the Ring is pretty much the single source for all opera jokes in pop culture; it is where the fat lady sang, after all.

OK, a quick cut to the bloggage, because this has been one long icy-lumpy-fuck week:

Columbusites! Remember Larry’s bar on High Street? Here’s a lot of old pictures from the place. I wasn’t a regular, but I loved that place.

I just found this, but it MUST BE SHARED. Of course Wendy’s day-care center posts daily photos; how else would her humans get through a day without her? (This is from Monday, obvs.)

Finally, can the Marlise Munoz case in Texas get any worse? Hard to imagine. How awful.

Let’s all have a good weekend.

I don’t want to continually moan about the weather, but it’s fairly moan-worthy. Last night we were all watching “Silver Linings Playbook” when Wendy slipped out of the room for about two minutes, then slipped back in. I went upstairs after the big dance number and found a puddle on the bathmat, next to the toilet. Hey, it was 4 degrees! And everybody else goes in this room!

Dogs. Right now, she’s snoozing on Kate’s lap. Scorin’ some cute points.

So, a while back I saw a piece on how badly stories about the Affordable Care Act are being reported in the nation’s hinterlands. I thought of that when I read this story, here in Michigan, this week. It informs us that the family, the Daverts, every one of whom is disabled, “fall within a niche that makes the Affordable Care Act more of a burden than a blessing. Now, they say, they’ll be paying nearly $8,000 more per year for medical care after being denied coverage through Obamacare.”

The father has cerebral palsy; the mother and their children all have osteogensis imperfecta, which leaves them with very fragile bones. The adults get disability, and I can’t believe they earn much. Michigan did Medicaid expansion, but (the mother) “went on to say that her family is not eligible for Medicaid because they come from a working background.” What?

Read the details, and what it appears happened is, they tried to insure their children separately, probably unnecessarily — because I can’t believe they aren’t Medicaid-eligible, and/or the kids aren’t covered under an S-CHIP plan — and fell into a morass that many people are trying to extricate them from. I’m very confused, as the mother says the kids are CHIP insured, but it “only assists in matters directly linked to their bone disease.” This makes no sense.

But hey, let the quotes roll:

Despite their quandary, the Daverts say they are not seeking handouts or anything of the sort from the public. Rather, they’re seeking to let others know what can befall them.

“We’re coming forward to educate the community, that if these kinds of costs can be imposed on our family, it can be imposed on any family,” Missy Davert said. “A word of caution is to take notice and if they do think the system is unfair, to speak out.

“It’s frustrating to me. It seems more and more our government has become a controlling power when the power is supposed to be with the people. I’m not saying this law isn’t good for some people. I’m really happy for those people (being helped), and I’m not trying to take away what they’ve gained, but it’s also hurting many people.”

Toooo perfect, those quotes.

This is the week that will never end. I had a dental cleaning today that felt like a jackhammer, I got 427 emails and 398 of them seemed to be cross-talk. But a few good interviews, and those are always good. A little bloggage:

The 25 most common passwords. One is, yes, “password.”

A little more about the Florida movie-theater shooting.

The cold seems to be in retreat. Fingers crossed.