The Motor Trend Car of the Year spent the night at our house last night. I had to move it to allow our backyard crew to get their truck in. It kept tickling my butt, until I figured out it was trying to tell me I hadn’t fastened my seat belt. That is all. No, wait: Alan sure likes that Underground Garage show on the satellite radio. And that is all.

The backyard crew are the guys who were installing the fence, and they finished today. Woot. We now have a fenced yard, a patio and a shit-ton of bare topsoil, which I’m anticipating will be a winter-long headache until we can get something planted in the spring. The timing wasn’t perfect, but now the heavy lifting is done, we’ve reclaimed a chunk of the yard from concrete, ripped out the rotten deck, aka the Grosse Pointe Home for Dying Possums and Nasty-ass Raccoons, and set the stage for a nice entertaining space next year. Here’s something Alan found while ripping out the deck:

Click to enlarge, if you like. After puzzling over it for a while, we figured it was probably a cat. Large eye sockets, the fangs, suburbia — it’s unlikely to be anything more exotic. Although it was just a skull, which makes me wonder where the rest of kitty might have gone. Nature is red in tooth and claw, even when we’re drinking cocktails six inches over its head.

So, some quick bloggage:

What if Hallmark made a horror movie? The trailer would look like the one for Mitch Albom’s new book — er, new novel.

You’ve heard of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald? Here’s an account of a century-old gale of November on the Great Lakes that gives you an idea of how fearsome a “white hurricane” can be.

And now we have arrived at the weekend. Let’s make something good of it.

On Sunday, trying to distract myself from the throbbing in my knee, I dialed up “How to Survive a Plague” on my iPad. A history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, aka ACT-UP, it first got on my nerves. My patience for ShakyCam is growing short these days, and apparently no one in the ACT-UP publicity crew owned a tripod.

But that was a quibble, and soon I was absorbed into the bad old years again, the mid-’80s, when gay men were falling ill and at first we didn’t know why, and then we did. And knowing didn’t make it better; there wasn’t a cure, there was barely a treatment and the incubation period was so long — it seemed if you’d been gay and sexually active for any length of time, you were doomed.

And one by one, they were. I lost two close friends, several more in the outer friendship circles. First they lost weight, then came the pneumonia or the Kaposi’s sarcoma, then came the spiral. “How to Survive a Plague” brought it all back, with the overlay of the birth of ACT-UP, which was pretty far from Columbus, Ohio at the time. They, as much as anyone, brought the anger the community was feeling into America’s living rooms, mainly through their outrageous protests. They carried giant condoms up the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They called Jesse Helms “that pig in the Senate.” They were rude and confrontational and made over-the-top demands. They insisted the FDA had drugs that could save them, but was holding back, or not trying to modify the agency’s long timeline for approval.

There’s a scene from a protest where a pharmaceutical company was invaded, an executive summoned forth, and a man hectors him at length: “You have my blood on your hands,” he shouts, and even now, knowing how absolutely justified ACT-UP was in their anger, this seems a bit much. Science has its own timeline. It doesn’t always match yours.

But there are other moments that bring the loss home — an ad executive talking about why we so want to blame people for mistakes they make while “being human.” That they have sex they shouldn’t, swallow drugs they shouldn’t, misbehave in ways that make the rest of us say, “See, it is your fault, after all.” When there is not a single one of us who isn’t guilty of being human. When we all misbehave, at least sometimes.

A lot of the ACT-UP protests set the tone for stuff I quickly grew tired of — the red ribbons, the quilts, all that awareness-raising. But it helped to be reminded, yet again, of what spawned it all, the incandescent anger felt by a community that found itself dwindling, young men dying at 26, 30, 42, the prime of their lives, and almost no one seemed to care.

In other words, Jesse Helms was a pig in the Senate. The Catholic church was preposterously wrong to suggest that condom use would lead to more cases, not fewer. ACT-UP’s tactics you can argue with. But they were right. The times cried out for a furious response. We all should have been acting up. I’m glad they did. Silence did equal death, in the movement’s famous T-shirt. They stood for life.

We haven’t discussed the shooting last Friday at the Los Angeles airport, at least not much. A publication I can’t quite get a handle on, nsfwcorp.com, which has a strange paywall system, is alone in pointing out how loud the anti-TSA clamor has been from both the left and the right, and how perfectly the LAX shooter seemed to be dancing to their drumbeat. I read their story today, but it’s back behind the paywall, and so alas.

What does everyone think? Or am I the only one. I fly infrequently enough that I don’t share in the anger, but it does seem like overkill — the scan, the shoeless shuffle, all of it. There must be a better way to do airport security.

Not much bloggage today, but a good Bridge package drops that might be of interest outside Michigan, about legacy costs for retiree pensions and health care that cities are simply not prepared to meet. Part one is here. It’s happening everywhere, maybe in your town, too.

Otherwise, the week is coming to its denouement. Knee feels better, and let’s hope it continues to do so.

I don’t know whether to be cheered or depressed by the Richie Incognito/Jonathan Martin story. On the one hand: How disgusting, that Incognito, this hulking goon, could have gotten away with bullying his teammate for so long:

Martin, a classics major who attended Stanford and is the son of two Harvard graduates, left the Dolphins last week after an episode in the cafeteria in which teammates stood as Martin sat, the last in a string of perceived slights. Incognito, a 30-year-old veteran with a reputation for dirty play and a history of rough behavior, was suspended indefinitely by the Dolphins late Sunday while the team and the league investigated the matter.

Their unfolding saga is forcing the National Football League to uncomfortably turn its gaze toward locker room culture and start defining the gray areas between good-natured pranks and hurtful bullying.

The story’s your basic train wreck, how two linemen, one intelligent and sensitive and one nasty and cruel, ran into one another in the locker room and everywhere else.

Incognito — what a name — resembles, in so many ways, every significant bully I’ve ever known. Stupid, brutal, user of dumb hashtags:

“Enough is enough,” he wrote to ESPN’s Adam Schefter in one (tweet). “If you or any of the agents you sound off for have a problem with me, you know where to find me. #BRINGIT.”

So all of that’s depressing, even though there’s a certain dog-bites-man element to learning that the super-macho NFL has a bullying problem. What’s heartening is that somewhere along the line, this sort of thing became unacceptable. And that sportswriters are now writing things like this:

Own it. Even now, even after the extent of Incognito’s viciousness has been revealed through voice mails and texts to Martin, there are NFL personnel people telling reporters, like Sports Illustrated’s Jim Trotter, that it’s a man’s game and Martin failed to handle it like a man. According to these unnamed men, Martin should have manned up and handled the situation face-to-face, with his fists if necessary.

You know — like a man.

Seriously, though, did these men’s men read the things Incognito reportedly said to Martin? Don’t we encourage people not to deal with the deranged, to let the professionals handle it? Does anyone believe Incognito would be cowed by a confrontation?

To blame Martin is to ignore reality and uphold the twisted norms of the misguided subculture that allowed this type of environment to persist and — dare we say — thrive. It’s also a willful refusal to connect the threat of violence to the reality of our gun-soaked, disrespect-me-and-pay-the-price ethos that has people like Aaron Hernandez sitting in jail.

So. Good knee news, bad knee news: The joint is enormously improved. I can walk with one crutch, and a cane would be even better. Slowly, up and down the block Wendy and I go, but we go. The bad news? My family practitioner thinks I have ACL damage — “it feels loose,” he said, after manipulating it into several positions, a couple of which made me wince, a couple more that didn’t. So, you veterans of the knee wars know where it goes from here. MRI next week, a visit with the orthopedist, and then we discuss our options, if there are any. Just keeping you posted.

Is it only Wednesday? How is that possible?

So, yesterday I spent mostly in bed, swallowing ibuprofen, changing ice packs and making phone calls. Which means little to report. Knee is still an open issue; I see the doc today.

But one of the things I ran across was this terribly sad story about Newtown, Conn., one year after the shootings at Sandy Hook Elementary. It’s not just sad in “The Sweet Hereafter” sense, but also in the peculiar American custom of how we divide the money raised to compensate victims of a crime like this. I promise you, if all you take away from this is the difference between “the 26,” “the 12” and “the two,” it’s worth your time.

Theres also this, by John Carlisle, a Freep column worthy of his grittier Metro Times roots, about a community of squatters trying to create a utopia in one of the very worst — seriously, among a city packed with awful neighborhoods, this one is a top-fiver — neighborhoods in Detroit.

Otherwise? Open thread. I must now limp to the kitchen and make some coffee.

Some years back — 2000-ish or so — I had an assignment to interview two brothers from Fort Wayne who were both living in Israel during one of the intifadas. Because of the time difference and their schedules, it was easier for me to call them from my home phone before 8 a.m. than from the office. I figured I’d expense the bill, until it arrived. About 60 minutes total talk time was something like $180. And while it would have felt good to stuff that one down the paper’s maw, I figured it was worth another phone call.

Good news! If I signed up for international calling, the $5 extra fee would be waived for this month, and I could cancel it after the following month’s bill. And as a welcome-to-the-world gift, the two calls to Jerusalem would be knocked down to reflect the international-plan rate, and cost more like $15. Sign me up, then! I canceled the plan after the interval and saved the paper $160.

That’s when I knew land lines, and long distance, were over. Skype hadn’t come along yet, but broadband was spreading like wildfire, and there were all sorts of ways to talk as long as you wanted to anyone with a computer, free or close to it. The days of “phone’s for you! Hurry, it’s long distance!” were past sundown.

So a few months ago we canceled our land line, and in the process, the cable company accidentally shut off our HBO, too. I called to get it back on, and the guy in the call center apologized profusely and said he’d throw in the premium channel of my choice free for the next three months, just so no hard feelings. We opted for Showtime.

We knew it would be going away sooner or later, and Friday night, the first of the month, alas, Showtime was but a disappointing screen telling us to contact the cable company to get this exciting channel. Oh, well; we’ll miss “Masters of Sex” — love that Lizzy Caplan. Switched over to HBO. No HBO. Got on the phone. The operator was apologetic, and by way of keeping us very, very happy, turned on HBO AND Showtime, threw in a bunch of sports stuff and knocked $10 off our bill, for a year.

I expect, at the end of the year, we’ll get another blandishment to get us to stay a little longer.

Cable is over. But you knew that.

You know what else is over? The bicycling season. We’ll have some warm days here and there, but for all intents and purposes, Halloween is the last day for this latitude. At the beginning of the season, I said I would ride 1,000 miles this summer. After a month or two it became obvious I wasn’t going to make it, but I thought I’d keep trying. And what do you know? I logged 870 miles, and that’s with a cold spring, eye surgery, a vacation and other distractions. Started April 5, last rode a significant distance Oct. 15. Not too terrible.

Riding season is over for another reason — SAD FACE :(. Today I took a bad step off the stairs and hyperextended my knee badly enough that, a few hours later, I’m fearing the worst. I still can’t put any weight on it, and I’m fortunate to have some old crutches around, because without them, I’d be immobile. I’ll see the doc tomorrow if it doesn’t improve overnight. For now, ice, elevation and 800 mgs of vitamin I. Fingers crossed.

It couldn’t have happened on a worse day, as I was just about to go outside and help Alan with one of our infamous home-improvement projects, on the last day of his vacation. This is a patio we’re building, and there were six yards of topsoil that had to be wheelbarrowed out of the driveway.

He’s out there doing it now, in full darkness. My body serves me well most days, but it has terrible timing for its mishaps. Fucking stairs.

Here’s to a good week with good medical news.

Chardapalooza.

I’d just answered the door for the zillionth time (our neighborhood saw diminished turnout, but even so, enough that I didn’t get a five-minute break for two hours), treated some miscellaneous kids and one of Kate’s middle-school friends, who came to the door dressed as a slutty nun (why, God? Why?) and a woman emerged from the murk.

“Can I use your bathroom?” she asked. Well, this was a first. In her favor: She didn’t look crazy. I considered the golden rule. The weather was rainy and windy; it would be miserable to add a full bladder on top of that.

I showed her in. She slipped off her shoes and was in and out in a trice. I’m sure she felt treated.

It wasn’t a terrible Halloween, even with the weather. We still got rid of all the candy, save two Reese’s Cups, which I’ll put in Kate’s lunch tomorrow. And since All Souls’ Day will fall on Saturday, here’s a picture from five years ago, which I ran across while doing some memory-laning:

I took this in the oldest part of an old Polish cemetery, and it seemed to say everything about what happens after we leave the earth. People mourn, they put you in the ground, and eventually, the ground itself forgets you’re there.

I don’t have any links today, because I’m lazy. Didn’t sleep well last night, rained all day — I’m headed for bed. Have a great weekend, all.

Happy Halloween. It’s pouring rain and we’re supposed to take the boat out of the water today.

At least it’s not cold.

But we were out late last night — Devil’s Night, meh heh heh heh heh — and missed my blogging time. Just a couple things today.

First, some of you have probably heard about Movember, the annual prostate-cancer awareness event in which men spend the month growing mustaches, perhaps in the hope of turning a few worried and/or exasperated glances (“You, Bob? A pornstache? YOU?) into a productive discussion about a disease that kills roughly 30,000 men in the U.S. every year.

Well, this year NN.c has a preferred mustache, and if you are so inclined, you can give to Bernie Mulvey, who is my BFF’s brilliant son, a first-year med student at Wash U. in St. Louis. Here’s his donation page. Here’s his statement:

BY GROWING UNKEMPT, PATCHY FACIAL HAIR, I WILL SYMBOLIZE THE BODILY DISARRAY OF PROSTATE CANCER AND ITS TREATMENT. IN SOLIDARITY WITH CANCER PATIENTS, I WILL ENDURE ANY EMBARRASSMENT AND SOCIAL OR PROFESSIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF APPEARING UNTIDY AND PERHAPS UNHYGIENIC.

I’m sorry it’s in all caps. His mom’s an editor, and he should know better, but perhaps the topic REQUIRES THIS SORT OF EMPHASIS.

Anyway, the money will be pooled with other Wash U. first-year med students, and it’s worth it. Bernie adds, in upper and lower case:

For those of you weary of research philanthropy groups, fear not; the PCF spends over 75% of its money on the research it exists to support! Plus, your donation is tax deductible (and really, would you rather that money go towards the NSA reading your Facebook, or towards keeping people alive and well?).

So that’s today’s cause: Fighting the disease that killed Frank Zappa and Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

Here’s a snap from last night, Alan and Kate gazing upon the blazing carcass of a house in Detroit a bonfire:

Alas, the event at the Lincoln Street Art Park, aka the Ghetto Louvre, was rained out before we could see the dragon:

We saw it before at Maker Faire. Here it is, in action, defending the Detroit Institute of Arts.

With that, I must rush. Happy Halloween, and I hope all your trick-or-treaters are sweet as candy.

Well, this is hilarious: One of the stranger stories of the year here in Detroit appears to be rising to an even stranger climax. It’s the Packard plant, the second-most famous ruin in Detroit and certainly the most problematic. Vacant for more than half a century — it was abandoned the year before I was born, friends — it has become more of a mess and more dangerous every day since. When we moved here, it was still possible for brave souls to wander through it and take pictures, and dozens did.

Recently, it’s become even more of a free-for-all. A couple weeks ago, a website reported on a scrapping crew, using heavy equipment of all things, digging deeper into the plant than ever before, ripping metal from the reinforced concrete walls, piece by piece.

Inside the concrete labyrinth, we spied scrappers – long suspected to be the source of many Packard fires – stacking combustible objects like wooden pallets and sofas along beams supporting the metal-studded ceilings, waiting to be torched.

The plant is collapsing all around, and even drive-by photographers are being carjacked. It’s a nasty place. So. The 100-acre property came up for tax sale last week. Just a couple weeks ago, you could have picked it up for unpaid taxes, about $1 million. But anyone with eyes in their head and a room-temperature IQ could see it would take millions upon millions more just to tear down the buildings and clean up the site, much less redevelop it, in the midst of a miserable neighborhood on the blighted east side of Detroit.

So the auction started last Friday, and in the final hour, got weird:

An online auction for Detroit’s iconic Packard plant ended Friday with a ferocious bidding war and mystery winner from Texas who Wayne County officials say offered more than $6 million for the crumbling lot.

The county treasurer’s office identified the winner as Jill Van Horn of Ennis, Texas, a family practice doctor whose bid of $6,038,000 closed the property’s tax foreclosure auction at about 5:20 p.m. After opening at a mere $21,000 on Oct. 8, the high bid jumped from $601,000 to $5.5 million in the final hour, eventually creeping up to just above $6 million.

It’s as though someone paid $6 million for a case of cancer. Malignant cancer.

The first payment was due today, but given the sum involved, the treasurer said the doctor could have some extra time. First the doctor’s team announced they planned to take this ruin and turn it into a a factory to make manufactured homes. And then, as things tend to do around here, things got even weirder:

Wayne County officials expect to see money Wednesday from a Texas doctor who won a tax-foreclosure auction for the Packard Plant, but acknowledge they’re concerned about a statement released by her staff that likened Detroit’s potential to hydroelectric power.

“It is the process that allows us to transform the lake from a canoeing and fishing kind of place into an energy producing kind of place,” reads a three-page statement from Dr. Jill Van Horn’s staff that was released to the media on Tuesday. “Detroit’s assets, like energy, also have dormant value.”

“Dr. Van Horn’s prophecy was to resurrect Detroit by providing eduction, jobs and vocational training to the city’s residence, simultaneously unplugging the financial arteries of the city,” the statement read.

Prophecies. Anyone who could possibly be bored here simply isn’t paying attention.

You can read the whole statement at the last link. It’s worth it. And a great bonus: A drone-cam tour of the plant, with a Marvin Gaye soundtrack. Even more worth it.

At first I didn’t like it when our neighborhood in Fort Wayne got Halloween tourists on trick-or-treat night, but I got past it. Now I’m pro-candy, pro-Halloween, until it runs out and the porch light goes out. Some people need to mellow out.

Eric Zorn on the weirdness of modern car keys. Want an extra? That’ll cost you $650.

And that’s it for a Wednesday. If I can get over the hump, anything’s possible.

This is how the people who bought the newspaper I used to work for in Fort Wayne are running things now:

On their birthday, Fort Wayne journalists get a little — and I do mean little — gift from Fort Wayne Newspapers CEO Mike Christman: It’s a $1.25 vending machine token.

This is offered via a three-sentence email, one of which is “Happy birthday!” The token isn’t even delivered to your mail slot; you have to come down to HR to pick it up.

I’ve worked with some cheapskates in my life, but this might be a cake-taker. People will cut your pay, trim staff, fire staff and basically squeeze until the people left fully understand the new reality, and then? Flip ’em a few quarters and wish them a happy birthday. You can almost admire it.

My prediction: The management is hot on the trail of who leaked their birthday letter to Romenesko.

I don’t have much today, alas. It’s shaping up to be one of those weeks. But I do have some bloggage:

I’ve gotten back into the habit of checking in with Gin & Tacos regularly, and was struck by this piece. The writer, a college professor, notes:

Post-1980 America is a land in which it is impossible to engage in a discussion about a System with college-aged people without inevitably and almost immediately devolving into mini-soliloquies on Good and Bad choices. Why have so many kids? Why did he start drinking? And they signed a contract without reading the whole thing! Everyone knows not to do that.

This is what I mean when I describe college students, when I’m forced to generalize, as extremely conservative. They aren’t necessarily hardcore political conservatives in the context of Washington politics, but they have thoroughly internalized the message that their parents and the media have been hammering them with since birth: everything that happens to you is your fault. There are no innocent victims of anything. This is a coping mechanism / cognitive bias called the Just World Phenomenon, wherein people victim-blame as a means of coping with the random cruelty of the world. Rather than accept that horrible things happen to good people – and, thus, that a horrible fate could befall them at any moment – people choose to retreat into the comforts of believing that everyone Had It Coming.

I always call this “the distancing,” everyone does it, and the best you can do is be self-aware enough to know when it’s happening. There’s an element in it of the dust-up over Emily Yoffe’s rape-prevention advice. You saw it during Hurricane Katrina, where everything bad that happened in the Gulf of Mexico was because a) it was stupid to build a city there; and b) those people should have left anyway.

Anyway, an interesting observation.

I read this story in the Sunday NYT magazine, but I should have read it online, as the bells-and-whistles presentation of this account of international conflict in the South China Sea is truly remarkable. (Not recommended for slow connections or anyone using Internet Explorer 6, heh.) I was pretty outspoken in the ’80s and ’90s about not letting the design tail wag the content dog, but every so often it all comes together, and it’s worth the effort. If you want to know what longform journalism will be in the 21st century, look here.

Here’s a story by me; the tea party at the local-local level.

OK, I have to be off. Sorry for the late arrival. We’ll try to do better tomorrow.