I read “Wired” in paperback, Bob Woodward’s book about John Belushi’s life and death, but it was many years ago. My impressions, after all this time, are mostly about the reaction to it among Belushi’s circle. They went along the lines of who is this serpent we have clutched to our bosom, and I admit — this was sort of amusing to see. I think Judy Belushi, the man’s widow, actually said in an interview that she thought she was hiring Robert Redford from “All the President’s Men” and instead got this Judas, this betrayer in human form.

The other thing I remember is that Woodward was a terrible writer. His description of the cheezborger-cheezborger sketch read like description for the blind; in recent years, as I’ve become acquainted with his nasal Chicago voice, I hear it in my head that way. A customer asks for french fries but is told the diner only carries chips, which causes the cry to echo among the countermen: “No fries, chips!”…

Twitter says there are already some people taking issue with this piece by Tanner Colby, who wrote the same book, only the one authorized by Judy Belushi. He takes issue with Woodward’s account, and while it’s been a lot of years since I read it, I have to say, some of these examples ring true:

The wrongness in Woodward’s reporting is always ever so subtle. SNL writer Michael O’Donoghue—who died before I started the book but who videotaped an interview with Judy years before—told this story about how Belushi loved to mess with him:

I am very anal-retentive, and John used to come over and just move things around, just move things a couple of inches, drop a paper on the floor, miss an ashtray a little bit until finally he could see me just tensing up. That was his idea of a fine joke. Another joke he used to do was to sit on me.

When put through the Woodward filter, this becomes:

A compulsively neat person, O’Donoghue was always picking up and straightening his office. Frequently, John came in and destroyed the order in a minute, shifting papers, furniture or pencils or dropping cigarette ashes.

Again, Woodward’s account is not wrong. It’s just — wrong. In his version, Belushi is not a prankster but a jerk.

I’m familiar with reporters like this, who think their only job is to stick to the absolute letter of the fact, draw only the most obvious conclusions. The Jack Webb School. Just the facts, ma’am. Nothing like this:

Like a funhouse mirror, Woodward’s prose distorts what it purports to reflect. Moments of tearful drama are rendered as tersely as an accounting of Belushi’s car-service receipts. Friendly jokes are stripped of their humor and turned into boorish annoyances. And when Woodward fails to convey the subtleties of those little moments, he misses the bigger picture. Belushi’s nervousness about doing that love scene in Continental Divide was an important detail. When that movie came out, it tanked at the box office. After months of fighting to stay clean, Belushi fell off the wagon and started using heavily again. Six months later he was dead. Woodward missed the real meaning of what went on.

Stenography has its limitations? You don’t say.

Oh, I’m so enjoying this Kwame story. The feds released some videos today, including one of a sludge-company executive putting a case of Cristal in Bernard Kilpatrick’s car. Because nothing gets it done like $2,500 worth of champagne.

Hank didn’t think much of the Dick Cheney autobiography, but I can’t get over the photo of the newly slim prince of darkness that accompanies his review. Now that is a face. Dunno quite what kind, but there you go.

I hope I sleep better tonight than I have been. A friend is advising klonopin. I’m sort of tempted, but I should probably give liquor a chance, first.

I’ve been a reporter off and on for more than 30 years, but one thing I’ve never done is stand outside a courthouse and yell “how do you feel” to people leaving. Despite what you might think, I’m not in the minority.

That said, there are always exceptions.

That’s Charlie LeDuff asking about “babies,” by the way. Not a fan.

So, the Kwame Kilpatrick verdict was all the news today. If you live here, you already know all you want to know about it, and if you don’t, there’s a story in a nearby newspaper, most likely. But only this blog will draw your attention to the former mayor’s remarkable fashion choices, obscured but still viewable in this photo: A horizontal-striped shirt and a plaid tie. I didn’t even know you could buy a horizontally striped man’s shirt.

They bundled KK off to the Graybar hotel pretty quick. THat might be the last fashion choice he makes for a good long while.

Oh, am I whipped. Can I cut to the bloggage?

How’d you like to take a wild Justin Verlander pitch to the junk?

Much more than that, I haven’t got. Bleh.

When I go to the market on Saturdays, I generally confine myself to the sheds and the Gratiot Central Market, aka the Meat Mall, across the freeway. But recently someone said I had to check out Saad’s, a halal meat place a block or two away, and so this week I did.

My befuddlement must have been evident when I walked in and looked around a blank anteroom, because a kindly girl directed me: Take a number, and step through the plastic flap door to do my shopping. It was a little like Dorothy leaving the house after it’s landed in Oz. I don’t think I’ve seen a retail arrangement quite like it. You shop amid a row of hanging carcasses — lamb, they looked like — with open cases offering meat in every imaginable cut and preparation, from frozen pre-marinated shwarma to beef skin and goat heads, complete with eyeballs, not to mention bins of tripe, frozen and carved into blocks. Women in headscarves and men in skullcaps gathered great shopping bags full of product; I have to assume they were restaurateurs, stocking for the week ahead. But I didn’t laugh out loud until I saw this:

Sharifables. Halal Lunchables. I’m always cheered by stuff like this. It suggests we have more in common than not. Even Mecca-Cola, born out of an explicit desire to buy non-American, pro-Palestinian products, doesn’t seem all bad. We have different faiths, but we all enjoy a refreshing cola beverage from time to time.

I’d wandered in thinking I might get the ingredients for a nice lamb stew, but left without buying anything. I think I need a more sedate experience. Still glad I went, though. I hope Stephen Colbert learns about Sharifables soon:

Meanwhile, a sad story unfolded elsewhere in Detroit. I’m sure any of you who have dealt with mental illness can understand how this happened:

Kelly Pingilley was trying to make sense of the voices in her head when she went looking for answers on the Internet.

She stumbled upon a website promoting a religion that believes in UFOs, vampires, conspiracy theories and doomsday prophecies.

Pingilley was drawn to the writings of time travel and people’s thoughts being controlled by cell phone towers, friends said. With the teachings feeding into her delusions, Pingilley’s behavior grew increasingly erratic.

The woman killed herself late last year. Lots of good detail. This one jumped out at me:

Kellie Pingilley declined to say why the family failed to get help for her granddaughter’s apparent affliction.

I really hope they did what they could. It’s a terrible situation to have to deal with. I hope they did something. But what makes this story interesting is the fact the reporter reached the crazy person who clicked with this other crazy person, and then said, when all this was explained to her, “Some stuff was pretty out there. It was just crazy.”

Good to know.

And now another week lies ahead. Let’s hope for a good one.

Something a little different from the buskers, today. That washtub bass sounded pretty sweet.

Sometimes I think I do little more in this space than bitch about something I read someplace else, but I yam what I yam, and having standards isn’t a bad thing. (Is it?)

So I’m reading around this morning and see a Kevin Leininger column on, of all things, raw milk. I worked with Kevin long enough, and know his hobbyhorses well enough, that as soon as I saw the subject, I had a pretty good idea what the story would be, and sure enough, I was right:

Got milk? Mark Grieshop and Troy Fisher do, and thanks to the growing interest in natural and organic foods their “raw milk” business is booming despite government regulations and warnings to the contrary.

Yep, it’s evil big guv’mint holding the little dairy farmer down, when all he wants to do is sell a product that can make you seriously ill. Can you believe it?

I’ve argued with raw-milk people in the past, and I’m willing to leave it at a draw: You can drink raw milk if you like, as long as you’re fully informed about the risks. The problem is, the people who sell it won’t do that, and too often they’re helped along by people who write stuff like this:

“I wouldn’t drink raw milk from an ordinary dairy farm, either,” said Grieshop, who stressed that Pasture’s Delights and other farms that produce raw milk for human consumption are careful to prevent harmful bacteria while preserving the bacteria, enzymes and nutrients that promote good health and can make the product safe even for some people with lactose intolerance.

I’ll take them at their word and assume they’ve vaccinated against brucellosis, but I’d demand a lot more reassurance that they “prevent harmful bacteria,” and as for making a product that contains lactose by its very definition “safe for some people with lactose intolerance,” all I can do is roll my eyes. Of course, Alan points out often that most food allergies are self-diagnosed, so I guess it’s possible.

So let’s move on, eh?

I read this review (nothing much), but it led me via this turn and that to this other thing, just a Deadspin blog post, but something I’ve believed for a while — “It’s not OK to be shitty.”

I bring all this up because I think we’re starting to care more about popularity and financial success than legitimate quality. All right, so that’s hardly news; that’s always been the case, as a general rule, for most of humanity’s reign. But now the smart people are doing it: People who should know better. I’m talking about you, dear reader: You, me, all of us.

You see this everywhere, from box office results to online pageviews to Nielsen ratings to freaking Twitter followers. More people watch the NFL on television than any sport so therefore IT IS THE BEST SPORT. You have fewer Twitter followers than the person you’re criticizing? YOU’RE A HATER. You don’t like that album that went platinum? YOU JUST JEALOUS. BuzzFeed has put a bunch of pictures of kittens together in a way that is easily passed around by idiots? THEY HAVE FIGURED OUT THE INTERNET THEY ARE SUCH BRILLIANT PACKAGERS OF CONTENT THE FUTURE OF MEDIA. We have become a culture that, because we can quantify things in a way we’ve never been able to before, are acting as if those numbers are all that matter.

I dunno, I liked it. I’ve mentioned before that when I first got here, I ran across the Mitch Albom radio show and was pleasantly surprised by it — his regular-guy persona played pretty well on the radio, and I know that might be more of a reflection of the toxic mire of his on-the-air colleagues, but whatever. Nowadays, though, he’s just like what the post describes: “The Newsroom” isn’t a bad show like the critics say, they’re just jealous of Jeff Daniels’ success. “The Bucket List” is a great movie because lots of people liked it. And so on.

Keep your standards. They matter.

Which brings us to the final bit of chat today, a really good Ta-Nehisi Coates piece. I don’t want to give it away, but I’ll say this: I was slow to warm to T-N C when I first started reading him, but once I did, I really did. Also, the ending is great.

So with that, I leave you to your weekend. This week felt long, but I got a lot accomplished. Hope you did too.

Radio stations are so well-branded these days — you don’t hear call letters, just whatever their marketing name is — that it was literally years before I realized one of my favorites is actually in Canada. First it was a temperature reported in Celsius, then an ad for a tire store in Windsor, then, just the other day, a news report.

Of course I listened. I love Canadian accents:

“Windsor police released figures indicating they used less violence subduing criminals in 2012. Officers used their batons and Tasers in 10 percent fewer incidents…”

Batons and Tasers? The Detroit River is less than half a mile wide between the city it shares a name with and Windsor. And yet? It might as well be a thousand miles. I wonder if Detroit police even gather data on baton and Taser usage. It’s not like they shoot people willy-nilly either, although it happens.

How is it possible for a country to be so close, and yet so far away, in so many ways?

I have no answers. I barely have bloggage:

Roger Ailes, swell guy:

Not long ago, on a ball field near his place in Garrison, NY, his nephew accidentally hit a baseball through the window of a 2012 Prius parked in a church lot. The owners were Koreans who didn’t speak much English, and they were extremely agitated. “It’s just a damn window,” Ailes told them. “I’ll pay for the damn thing.”

The owner was indignant. “We pray, you curse,” he said.

“Fine,” said Ailes. “Then let’s pray over the fucking window. Maybe that’ll fix it.”

“It was a 10-minute incident that I turned into an hour,” Ailes said when he told me the story. “Hell, it’s lucky they didn’t recognize me. It could have turned into a goddamn international scandal. But I told them I was sorry ” He laughed. “Damn it, though, I was kind of glad that it was a Prius.”

There are a lot of places a person might stash a revolver in a pinch, but this one beats all.

Another Waterloo criminal goes down in history. I remember when this crime happened. I swear, that town is going to have to get some new signs for the city limits.

Sorry for lameness. I’m just bushed.

It’s a good thing we all communicate through the written word here, because Hugo Chavez died today, and I’ve already decided the first person I hear call him “Oo-go” is going to have to go. Will have to oo-go.

This is just my personal prejudice. Carry on.

My favorite Chavez story isn’t a story at all, but a picture, of him on a rope line of sorts. A woman is coming forward to shake his hand with a baby on her breast. V-neck pulled down, kid in one hand, the other outstretched to her president. He’s not looking anywhere but at her smiling face. Hey, a kid’s gotta eat.

Guys, I have little to say today, even though was a good one. Got out for two whole hours in some fine late-winter sunshine, strong enough that it actually warmed my face as I drove. You know spring is on its way when that happens.

And scanning around for bloggage, I don’t even have much of that. How about a piece of graffiti I ran across last week? From the p.s. off to the side — “she said yes!!! March 2012” — it’s a bit dated, but it’s interesting that in a year, it hasn’t been defaced yet. True love!

Someone mentioned in comments yesterday the main thing that struck me about that WashPost story I linked to, about the man who shot and nearly killed his wife, and what happened to the family afterward: He fired a shotgun at his wife in front of their children, and he only spent a few hours behind bars?

The pertinent passage:

In the days after the shooting, Fran was in and out of surgery. And she decided not to press charges. She wanted Ken to get a job and pay child support, she says now, because that would most help the children. “I had six children. I couldn’t work.”

For the attempted murder of his wife, Ken Vessels spent a couple of hours in jail.

This was in 1964. Please remember this when someone brings up the good old days. Today we find it astonishing that such a thing could happen, but speaking as someone who did some reporting on domestic violence when it was taking its turn in the spotlight, I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised. This was Louisville, Ky., after all. And it could have been anywhere.

Every so often I get tired of reading improving fiction, serious newspapers and Gawker, and reach for one of my treasured John D. MacDonald paperbacks. On Sunday, I chose one at random off the high shelf — “A Purple Place for Dying.” Published in 1964, it’s the third of the Travis McGee series. I’ve read the whole string, most more than once, but I always manage to forget enough of the plot(s) in between to make the rereads interesting. MacDonald was a Harvard B-school graduate and is especially good when he’s plotting out business swindles, which appear in a lot of these novels. It’s too bad he died before our contemporary era of high finance; I’m sure he would have had a ball with it.

But what I really like the early McGee series for is its look at women. McGee is a little ahead of his time in many ways. He’s a tender lover and seems to have truly catholic taste in women; I always admire how often his heroines are described as having lumpy noses or stumpy legs or other flaws, but are still sexy. One of the biggest reasons books are abandoned in my house is too-perfect characters, especially in a physical sense. I put John Sandford down forever when he described a central character as having olive skin and pale blue eyes. Pick one, I thought, rolling my eyes. Oh, and she had long legs, too.

But MacDonald was also a writer of his time, and shows it. Women are brought to ecstasy by missionary-position intercourse, period. They don’t menstruate or get pregnant, with one notable exception. They’re married at 18 and washed up by 30 — you know the drill. But in “A Purple Place for Dying” I noted, again, how casually men speak of punishing their women physically, and how no one says anything about it.

An important character in “Purple” is bumped off in the first 20 pages. In the ensuing ones, her husband casually refers to “making steam rise on that cheating tail of hers.” She’s described as “not being able to sit down without whining” after a fight. There’s a reference to “a grade A thrashing, which she deserves.” And so on.

No one says, “Hm, maybe you shouldn’t do that.” It’s just what powerful men do to their women.

“Mad Men” gets criticized a lot, sometimes fairly, sometimes not, but they introduced a new generation to what sexism really was, once upon a time. It wasn’t about getting your bottom pinched. Sometimes it was paddled.

Some bloggage:

The 38 best local-news captions of all time. Warning: BuzzFeed link.

Speaking of “Mad Men” — look at little Sally Draper, all grown up.

Two more minutes of goats yelling like humans.

And with that, I’m off to my deep, soft, warm bed.

For the longest time, seeing a person riding a bicycle in the depths of winter meant one thing to me: Chronic drunk driver. That is, someone who has offended so many times their license has been suspended and sacramentally burned, whose insurance agent blocks their calls and whose face is deeply lined with the toll of ten million drinks, not to mention the lash of the winter wind as they pedal to the package store in 15-degree weather.

(In Indiana, these guys were also allowed to ride mopeds. I once passed one hauling a case of Old Style strapped on the back. Actually, I saw this a lot of times.)

But lately, bike culture has taken its rejection of the motor to new lengths. I now see people winter riding in expensive outerwear that only slightly blurs the contours of their impressive leg muscles. These people are not alcoholics, just tough-ass cyclists.

It snowed overnight when we were in Chicago, a heavy, wet one, but we still saw many cyclists out there plowing through it. Full-face masks are pretty standard, and one guy had added skier’s goggles.

I see them in Detroit, too, but not so many. One of the bars I visit regularly keeps a large rack outside, and it’s been stowed for the winter. (Either that, or stolen for scrap. You never know.)

There’s a guy at the Eastern Market who sells sprouts year-round. A few weeks back he showed up with a Dutch grocery bike crossed with a limo — solid metal body with a long front section where he can store his toddler, all encased in sturdy clear plastic. A trailer hitch on back is for the produce trailer. Saturday he didn’t have it.

“Where’s the limo?” I asked.

“My wife needed it for a doctor’s appointment,” he said. “She has the boy with her.”

I wondered if she might be feeling too poorly to pedal to the doctor in 25-degree weather. Oh, she’s not sick, he said. Only pregnant. Due in three weeks. I didn’t ask about how they were planning to get to the hospital, as I suspect it’s not part of their plan.

They’re the couple with the baby in this story. One-fifth of an acre in the most bombed-out part of east-side Detroit.

I think I’ve said before my misery index is 40 degrees, and my cycling hiatus is November 1, give or take, through the ides of March. I did a 60-minute spinning class today, in an effort to start feeling it again. This might be a new-bike year.

So, today’s bloggage? The Florida sinkhole story is the latest testimony to the essential weirdness of the Sunshine State. It’s good to know that whatever happens in Detroit, Florida always has a countermove.

After Dad Shot Mom, a story in the WashPost Sunday magazine, and the headline says it all.

And since I don’t have any more links to throw at you, some photos, from Rob Kantner, one of my Facebook friends, who lives north of here. The first is jet engines purchased in South America by one of his clients, slated for recycling:

Next, what was found living in one of them, after its arrival in Michigan:

A northern caiman lizard, most likely. But do you realize what this means? This is the snake in the carpet urban legend! Redeemed!

Have a good week, all. Hope it’s lizard-free.

Haven’t done one of these for a while. Today’s theme: The good ol’ days.

Me: So what does sassafras tea taste like?

Seller: About what you’d expect.

Me: So …boiled bark?

Seller: Yeah.

No sale, but amused.