I wish something had actually happened over the weekend that I could write about today. I wish I had been struck by a thought, learned a new skill, did something different or unusual. But no.

I did my weekend shopping. Here’s what I bought:

Underwear
Groceries
Gasoline
Spinach, asparagus, spring mix, eggs (I break out Eastern Market purchases separately from groceries, because I enjoy the shopping so much more). Also, bacon and fuckin’ sausage. Sausage in our house gets the obscene modifier due to a private joke that wouldn’t be funny to you.
Two movie tickets.

OK, there’s something — the movie tickets. Went with some friends to the Redford Theater, one of those restored movie houses with an in-house pipe organ. They show classic films, on film, and beg for your change at the concession stand so they can replace the carpeting. The show: “Easter Parade” with Judy Garland and Fred Astaire, one of those featherlight MGM musicals that everyone remembers in a pastel blur until you see it again. And you remember it for a while, until it all goes pastel again. Which isn’t to say it’s not enjoyable; watching Fred Astaire dance is one of those great gifts Hollywood gave the world, and Judy’s singing likewise. The second bananas, Ann Miller and a very young, pre-Kennedy pimp Peter Lawford are less memorable, but Ann got some great costumes and Lawford was…well, he was young and handsome.

Something I noticed this time: Judy has a song just for us.

Irving Berlin wrote “Easter Parade,” which I didn’t know. That means two beloved songs pegged to Christian holidays came from a Jewish American. I love this country.

I don’t love this weather. I can’t believe I bought sunscreen a month ago. Pout, pout.

Part of my mental malaise is due to the physical one moving through the household, and while I haven’t fallen to it yet, it seems like only a matter of time. Last week, I sat across a lunch table from a colleague who sounded like death. I thought frantic hand washing and squirts of sanitizer saved me, but then Alan succumbed on Friday. I promptly moved my pillows to the guest room, but it may have been too late. And this is a bad one. It’ll likely strike as soon as the weather warms.

Although that won’t be for another week. We might nudge 50 by Friday, but likely not.

This is all I do these days: Bitch about boredom and the weather. Well, next week starts [community-theater English accent] Game of Throoones.{/community-theater English accent]. It will be very different from “Easter Parade,” that’s for sure.

Hope you all had a wonderful Palm Sunday. Let’s see what the week again brings.

Where does the time go? When does the spring arrive?

I was struck by the comment discussion the other day about marijuana. I think it’s fair to say I won’t be touching marijuana until I need it for my terminal-cancer fight — either that, or a particularly stupid late-midlife crisis. As I told someone today, there seem to be enough substances in the world to make me stupid; why invite another?

Also, it hasn’t escaped my notice that marijuana today isn’t like the marijuana of yesterday. Which brings us to this Slate piece, about the unmet need for a weaker, ’70s-era marijuana. Because of old boomers, natch:

Marijuana is much stronger than it used to be. Lots of the strains for sale at medical marijuana dispensaries are approaching 25 percent THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the compound in the plant known for getting you wicked high. Sitting around a winter solstice bonfire in the Seattle area this December, I heard a woman in her 60s tell a story about her husband taking a tiny toke on a joint that was going around a dinner party, only to pass out in his chair. Another friend and her husband, in their 30s, decided to share a marijuana caramel after their daughter went to bed. They got way too stoned and entered a shared freak-out about how they would deal if she came out to ask for a glass of water.

An elder statesman of Generation X, comedian Louis C.K., has a bit in his Live at the Beacon Theater special about taking “big hits. Like big, 1970s, jean jacket, Bad Company hits” of modern, high potency dope, and then everything going terrifically terrible. “When I was a kid you could just smoke a joint for a while. Now you take two hits and you go insane,” he says. “It’s not doable anymore.”

Well, OK. I guess, if I were a dedicated drinker of two glasses of wine after work, and suddenly it was like drinking two glasses of grain alcohol, I might see this as a problem. But my impulse would likely be to quit drinking, or drink something else, but probably quit drinking.

Marijuana is now legal in Detroit, and medical marijuana is legal in Michigan, and one of the problems that comes with that is how you test for it when someone’s driving gets out of control. If we’re going to let this drug into the legal corral, then I don’t think it’s irresponsible to wish there were weaker varieties of it to be had. And not just for aging boomers who want giggle-weed instead of a sledgehammer to the forehead.

The lab the writer mentions in her opening paragraphs? I interviewed a guy who runs a similar facility here in Michigan. Sometimes when I’m bored, I go to their results page and read the names of the various batches. Girl Scout Cookies? Organic Amnesia? I’m always amused.

And so we come to the end of another week. I will break the tape with relief. I play you out with some bloggage:

Peggy Noonan asks if the GOP can recover from Iraq. After fretting over such casualties as the party’s “respect for economic stewardship” and “the political ascendance that began in 1980,” she remembers who actually fought this fiasco:

All this of course is apart from the central tragedy, which is the human one—the lost lives, the wounded, the families that will now not be formed, or that have been left smaller, and damaged.

A shout-out to the maimed at the two-thirds mark. Well, at least she didn’t forget entirely.

Tom & Lorenzo have been posting photos of the “Mad Men” cast as they appeared at their red-carpet premiere earlier this week. May I just say? If I’d been dealt the genetic hand January Jones was, I wouldn’t go out in public looking like this. Never mind the dress — which I don’t think is as awful as some — but yes, mind that hair. Does this girl not own a comb?

This is hilarious: Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum tried to craft a “unity ticket” to unseat Mitt Romney as frontrunner last year, but couldn’t agree on which one would be on top. Because unity.

Have a great weekend, all.

First day of spring. Ah, the sweet smell of …nothing green in the air. Not around these parts. The high temperature didn’t reach the freezing mark. The sun came out for a while, but worked only a half day. The birds have been singing their springtime songs for a few weeks now, but other than a few mild days here and there, the weather hasn’t caught up.

But there was this:

Tilted Axes, a strolling band of electric guitarists, organized by Patrick Grant, a Detroit-born-but-since-relocated artist. Each player carried a little Marshall amp the size of a cigar box, hanging from his belt. It wasn’t much of a procession, but it was fun, and you have to admire anyone willing to parade around in 27-degree weather just for the hell of it. Look at those sad little clumps of snow clinging to the base of the parking meters. That’s late winter in hell.

I know, I know — in four months I’ll be bitching about the heat. But right now it’s cold.

Here’s a remarkable piece, and I’m sorry my Russian isn’t good enough to translate directly, but I trust my source: It’s photos of bears huffing gas fumes, and showing the results, i.e., a bear sprawled in the snow, looking much like a homo sapien huffer. Is the need to alter our consciousness the same across all mammalian species?

As for the “50 most perfectly timed photos ever,” I suspect some ‘shopping. But some nice pix, just the same.

Since we’re doing videos, here’s a great one: Donny & Marie singing some Steely Dan:

How can I top that? Well, I have a big story dropping at 8 a.m. I’ll add the link when it does. Meanwhile, enjoy the downslope of the week. UPDATE: Why young people don’t vote in Detroit.

Oh, and thanks to Charlotte for finding this: Welcome to Michigan, Elaine Stritch. If I ever see her in a coffee shop over on the west side, I think I’ll scream. She is SO BEST.

Never underestimate the power of a good headline, I always say. Take the Daily Mail on Monday:

Why does the devil in ‘The Bible’ look exactly like President Obama?

This is what I get for watching “Girls.” I’m missing “The Bible,” but fortunately, I have Jeff watching for me. Of course I clicked the link; if the Brits know anything, they know how to get you to look at their paper. He didn’t look exactly like Obama, but yeah, there’s a resemblance — maybe if Obama gay-married Frank Langella and they genetically engineered a baby. Well, I’d expect nothing less from the Mark Burnett production house.

How about another from the U.K.? The Scottish Sun: Meet the woman with the world’s strongest VAGINA. Yeah, “vagina” in all caps, just in case we might miss it. How do they know how strong it is? She inserts an egg-like thingamabob up there, with a hook attached. She attaches dumbbells to the hook and holds them there, with the power of her ya-ya. There’s a video; never mind the content warning, everything is discreetly hidden from view. She’s Russian, and says she’s achieved this power after “20 years of vigorous training.” OK.

Let’s pick an American newspaper at random. (Spins in circle, points finger at…The Columbus Dispatch.) “Bill would allow school safety levies.” OK, well — legislatures are notoriously difficult to brighten up, unless they’re fighting with canes on the floor. (Or fighting about vaginas.)

The problem with headlines (these days) is SEO. To attract search-engine interest — absolutely essential in this day and age — heds have to be dumb, obvious and boring. The Obama/Satan and strong-vagina stories had the advantage of being lurid stories where even dumb, obvious headlines couldn’t be boring. Although I’d like to try; I bet a few copy editors could muck those up. Groups claim depiction of demon resembles prexy, perhaps, or Russian woman lifts weights — intimately. Prexy is a great headline word, along with solon. And “intimate” has been standing in for dirty, dirty sex for a long time now.

And now here we are, and here are some less-alluring heads on some fare more interesting stories, eh?

The WashPost on the peculiar trend of “Moorish American nationals” squatting in unoccupied homes. This seems to be an African-American thing, but I recall a rural white version from my Hoosier days. I think they called themselves “sovereign citizens” and did much the same thing, declaring their homes tiny little nations.

Last year, the Michigan legislature repealed the motorcycle helmet law. Twelve months later, motorcycle deaths up 18 percent. Alan and I drove behind a couple riding a motorcycle through Grosse Pointe. Both unhelmeted, although the woman was wearing a straw hat with fluttering ribbons she was clasping to her head with one hand, the other wrapped around the man’s waist. She seemed to think she was the cutest trick in shoe leather, and she was. I hope she never does it again, however.

If, like me, you were bothered by the knee-jerk criticism of Rob Portman over his turnaround on gay marriage, please read this, about Debbie Stabenow’s personal stake in better mental health care. I take turnarounds however they come; we are all human, and shaped by the events in our lives.

And with that, I approach the hump of Wednesday.

Rain, cold, snow, sleet. More of all on the way. Open thread, while we wait for spring.

Sorry. I had an all-day meeting Monday and I learned to play Texas Hold’em. It made me miss five-card draw.

If you don’t spend your late-winter Sundays rooting through the comments on posts here, then you’ll want to read this Yahoo Sports piece on the Steubenville rape case. Unlike the entirely predictable outrage from the usual suspects, this gets to the heart of the matter:

The boys drank. They drove around. They went to each other’s houses until 2, 3, 4 in the morning. They exploited permissive parents who let the party continue. They, according to so many locals, knew there were bars that would serve them, liquor stores that would supply them and adults who would look the other way. They were football players being football players.

They slept wherever and whenever they crashed, preferably with some girl. Any girl.

They were allowed the freedoms of young adults, yet lacked the maturity to handle that freedom.

I expect we’re all aware of towns like this; there are probably hundreds of them from sea to shining sea, and not necessarily in forgotten places like Steubenville, where it seems journalists are required to note that the team “serves as a point of pride for the city dealing with economic hardship after the collapse of the steel industry.” Rundown ex-steel towns are like this. Affluent suburbs are like this. Big cities. Small towns. And it’s not just football. Hockey, baseball, just about any sport played by young men draws these insane adult cults of enablers who set up situations like this. It only takes a spark. There are lots of those.

A couple years ago there was a minor dust-up in GP, a failed coup against one of the coaches, engineered by parents who felt their boys weren’t getting the playing time they deserved. One was said to be gunning for his kid to break a pass-receiving record, and felt the coach was holding the kid back. It died down pretty quickly, but it made me think of the stories Kirk would tell about Art Schlichter’s dad, back when his son was playing high-school ball. We all know how that story turned out.

Every so often I read that football will soon cease to exist, because of the head-injury issue, that in a couple decades we won’t believe we ever let young men smash their heads against one another with such dire potential consequences. I don’t believe it. It will always live in places like Steubenville, and a lot of others, too.

So.

How was your weekend? The sun came out Sunday, and I dragged Alan out for a walk up and down the Dequindre Cut, a pleasant but chilly two-mile stroll. We were practically the only people on it, which always leaves you feeling a little weird, even on a Sunday, in Detroit. However, there was at least one security guy patrolling and, this being Detroit, there’s an emergency call station about every 50 feet, and no, I’m not kidding.

Because we were in Detroit, we missed Ryan Gosling, who apparently was in Grosse Pointe at the same time. He’s directing a movie. Dunno if he’s staying around there, or shooting, or just wanted a Starbucks and happened to be nearby. The story says Christina Hendricks is one of his actors. Woot. I’d much rather see her buzzing around the Pointes, and I know a lot of men would, too.

Speaking of Joanie, the season 6 promo photos, in living color.

I’m sort of sad Hunter Thompson is dead, because he would have done a great job at CPAC. Roy’s clip roundup will have to do.

And now it is Monday. Sigh. I hope your week goes quickly, if you want it to.

One thing I love about Detroit: All these ethnicities have their own food traditions. And they’re all sold in the markets.

The press introduction of Detroit’s emergency manager was today. For you out-of-towners, it’s the law in Michigan that whenever a unit of local government meets a certain threshold of financial distress, the governor may appoint an emergency manager who has special powers to clean up the mess. So far, this has been deployed infrequently, but Detroit is by far the biggest city to be EM’d.

This is by no means a surprise — it’s been in the works forever, with constant maneuvering to stave it off. The city council has been rattling sabers for at least that long, with the volume set to Screech for some members. One warned of civil unrest, for instance, and defended a protest tactic that’s popped up in the last couple days: Flying wedges of cars throttling freeways down to very slow speeds. Because there’s no tactic for getting the public on your side like making people late.

But finally today, the governor introduced the man for the job, a bankruptcy specialist from D.C. with deep Michigan roots, and held a press conference. I listened to it on the radio. Kevyn Orr came across as personable, highly qualified and — very important — optimistic. Such a change of pace, an upbeat attitude about this civic disaster. So I’m feeling good about this, even though this is going to be a bloody damn job and still likely to be impossible.

Oh, well. As the city motto says, “We hope for better things.”

Today’s Our Bloody Nation story comes from upstate New York, where a mass shooter shot a bunch of people and then fled, barricading himself before being shot and killed by police. The final victim:

A police robot equipped with a camera was ready, but its use may have been limited because the gunman’s hiding place was littered with debris.

So a tactical dog named Ape, equipped with a camera, went into the building first on Thursday, followed by agents with the State Police and the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Ape, a Czech German Shepherd, was shot in the chest just as he breached the doorway.

Ape didn’t make it. One of the women in our Lansing office has a Czech German Shepherd puppy, and boy, is that dog adorable. Of course, all puppies are adorable. Poor Ape.

I’ve been purposely avoiding all this Lean In crap, because I’ve lived through about nine million women’s-career-book publicity blitzes in my life, and I have a feeling this one won’t change anything. But I did think this column, taking issue with Sheryl Sandberg’s book, was very good.

All this talk about the new pope inspired me to seek out the craziest Catholic website I have EVer seen, Tradition in Action. I suggest you start at the Cultural section, but clear your calendar first. That thing is a serious wormhole.

You could be there all weekend. See you Monday, then. And beware the Ides of March.

Long-time readers may remember that a decade ago (argh) I spent a year at the University of Michigan on a sabbatical journalism fellowship, and part of that experience was a week in Argentina. Buenos Aires, specifically.

Relax. I didn’t meet the Pope or anything.

But we did have one seminar, as a group, with the Madres de Plaza de Mayo, the mothers of the men and women who were disappeared during the Dirty War of the 1970s. It was a difficult session, what with the awful personal stories and the long translations; a couple of our group were leaking tears by the end of it. During the question period, I asked whether any of them had gone to the church for help. They sat up. The church was a part of it!, they said. The military leaders considered themselves quite humane and sophisticated, because they offered their victims final absolution before they were taken up in the planes to be pushed out over the River Plate.

So when you tell me the new pope is an Argentine and a septuagenarian, my first question is, what did you do in the Dirty War, father?

As frequently happens, the answer isn’t simple or easy. Well, it’s not my church anymore. And I do wish him well. He sounds like he has a lot going for him.

I’m working on not caring about things I’m not required to care about. This is a start.

Not much bloggage today. Google Reader, adios.

I can’t wait to not see “Spring Breakers.” I hope Kate feels the same way.

Charlie LeDuff in a spot of bother. I predict it will blow over like a 20-minute shower.

This week feels 10 days long already. I hope yours is going swimmingly.