I gotta tell you, friends, this foundering cruise ship story is simply irre-freakin’-sistible. Bobbing in the Gulf of Mexico, just 150 miles from land, in a floating hotel with no air conditioning, overflowing toilets, little food and more than 4,000 fellow inmates? Kafka died too early. We now know what hell is.

I’m sure some of you are cruisers and some of you are happy cruisers. I’ve been tempted. I’ve heard many stories from friends returning home, all red-nosed and overfed, rapturous from a few days’ sailing. Every so often I mention it to Alan, and rarely get more than six words out before he throws in a few of his own, including claustrophobia, norovirus, drunken assholes and floating petri dish.

And when he puts it that way? It’s hard to argue.

Yet every year, cruisers cruise on. I remarked on Facebook that in a just world, this fate would befall the National Review cruise, the Kid Rock cruise or maybe a clothing-optional one. I don’t think it would be possible to entertain the United States more broadly and thoroughly than by putting Jonah Goldberg, William Kristol, John Podhoretz, James Lileks et al afloat in a crippled liner far from a friendly port — or maybe just off the coast of Havana. (MOVIE IDEA!!!!!) And from what I’ve read of the Kid Rock cruise (sold out this year, sorry), no one could really tell the difference.

I heard this afternoon they were within sight of land when the tow cable broke. That’s the point I would put a floatie around my waist, wave goodbye, hold my nose, jump overboard and start swimming. Or at the very least, lower a lifeboat.

OK, moving on: My employer, the Center for Michigan, is in the homestretch of a year-long effort to boost funding in our state for early-childhood education. We’ve written about it exhaustively, and things are looking up, as Gov. Rick Snyder and others are backing a $130 million cash influx for the program that serves low- to moderate-income families with young children. So I was fascinated to read this Gail Collins column, pegged of course to President Obama’s call for more preschool in SOTU, about what happened when Walter Mondale tried to do the same thing in 1971:

Mondale’s Comprehensive Child Development Act was a bipartisan bill, which passed 63 to 17 in the Senate. It was an entitlement, and, if it had become law, it would have been one entitlement for little children in a world where most of the money goes to the elderly.

“We came up with a lot of proposals, but the one we were most excited about was early childhood education. Everything we learned firmed up the view this really works,” said Mondale.

The destruction of his bill was one of the earliest victories of the new right. “The federal government should not be in the business of raising America’s children. It was a political and ideological ideal of great importance,” Pat Buchanan once told me. He was working at the White House when the bill reached Nixon’s desk, and he helped write the veto message. He spoke about this achievement with great pride.

I don’t want to break my three-paragraph rule, but this is one worth reading all the way through.

Here’s Jonathan Chait on a possible, but admittedly far-fetched, way the president’s plan could happen.

Continuing their march off the cliff, the Oakland County GOP — that would be the one in the big, dense-packed, affluent county northwest of here — bring in their big Lincoln Day speaker: Donald Trump.

Finally, because it’s the weekend, the most awesome goat video ever: Goats yellling like people. I laffed until my mascara ran.

Happy Friday all, and happy weekend.

I do apologize for flaking last night. I had an evening thing, followed by a drinks-with-someone-I-haven’t-seen-in-a-while thing, and by the time I got home it wasn’t going to happen. However, I had a great time catching up with my buddy, and so. I walked in the house in time to turn on the TV and see the most important news of the night — the crowning of Banana Joe as Best in Show at Westminster.

Sorry, I don’t do States of the Union; if I wanted to listen to speeches that long I’d move to Cuba. The next day’s news will give me the highlights and bullet points and spare me the million applause breaks. However, I do see that the Nuge was there, as promised, and from the photos, it looks like he wore one of his best outfits. I remember reading some Bush 43 hagiography about how deeply respectful the man was about the White House, because he enforced a suit-and-tie dress code in the West Wing, and conservatives believe in proper attire at dignified occasions and blah blah blah. I’ll be remembering Ted Nugent in his Wranglers the next time I hear that one.

Speaking of which, every time he opens his mouth, someone digs up the I-pooped-my-pants-to-avoid-the-draft interview. It’s been a long time since I read the relevant passages, and I did the other day. I don’t understand why it took me so long to see it, but this is obvious bullshit. I’ll bet anyone $50 that he had a pilonidal cyst, like Rush Limbaugh.

So, Richard Lugar made his first speech since leaving office. I don’t think anyone will be surprised by any part of it, although I’m sure the usual suspects will do their RINO RINO RINO ululations:

Republican opposition to the nomination of former Sen. Chuck Hagel of Nebraska as President Obama’s secretary of defense is “another example of the politicization of national security policy,” Lugar said.

Hagel’s “main transgression is that he is a Republican who has questioned policies that are sacred among most conservative senators,” Lugar said. “These include whether the surge in Iraq was worth the lives lost, whether the current high levels of defense expenditures make strategic sense, whether nuclear forces can be reduced further and whether there are non-military options in dealing with Iran.”

Some conservatives “regard his independent thinking as political blasphemy for which he should not be rewarded,” Lugar said.

Hoo-boy, them’s fighting words. Well, Richard Lugar need fight no more.

How about a change of tone? An amusing blog item I stumbled across today, via Nancy Friedman, contains a roundup of amusing neologisms, including “despertainment,” “dwell time” and “fart patio,” the latter a bit from “Portlandia” (clip within). I’m not the world’s biggest Portlandia fan, but having had raw food inflicted upon me within the past year, I thought this sketch was pretty dead-on, and the fart patio idea is genius.

Finally, whenever one grows envious of the New York City intellectual life (and in this case, its extension into New England), read this review of Jamaica Kincaid’s new novel, look at your ordinary partner sitting there scratching his or her belly, and count your blessings. It is Valentine’s Day, after all.

As I was out and about last evening, a SOTU open thread.

Unless, of course, you’d like to catch up on some of Coozledad’s back numbers:

So a couple of years ago, we moved an old iron bedframe from the “guest bedroom” upstairs into my studio downstairs. The studio has a large woodstove that will heat most of the house on the coldest of days if you are willing to forgo about half your normal intake of breathable air. The problem with antique iron beds is they have all been previously owned by powerfuckers or jackknifed by large cornfed women during a home childbirth. My wife and I were denied the opportunity to even try and shred it because it was already the goddamn bridge at San Luis Rey.

And then it takes a turn! Read.

We’ll see if Wednesday goes better.

So, Ted Nugent will be attending the State of the Union address, as the guest of Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Crazytown. Good. Good, I say. In fact, I say gooooood, and rub my hands together like Montgomery Burns. Maybe Nugent will try to bring a machine gun into the House chamber, or wear camo, or poop his pants. At the very least, I expect him to do some brand-building of the sort he’s so well-known for. I expect nothing less than an outburst, or at the very least, some stupid statements afterward.

People keep trying to warn the crazy wing of the GOP, but they won’t listen. So, fine. Don’t listen, have fun with the Motor City Madman (although I think we should be cleansed of him now, and the nickname should really be switched to something Texan). Enjoy your twilight years.

I’m starting to feel the same way about popular criticism of the Catholic church, although HA HAW HE WEARS A DRESS hardly counts as such. I am no fan of Pope Benedict, the institution of the Catholic church, or all the trappings that go with it. The reasons go without saying, right? (Scrolling through the photo galleries yesterday, I was struck again by how much I despise the way the Vatican requires non-Catholic women like the first lady dress up in silly outfits just to be in the same room with the man.) We can all agree that if you’re not a Catholic, you owe the man no extraordinary respect or reverence, and if you are Catholic, I guess you owe him whatever your conscience or church says you do. But I grow weary of the standard tropes of papal disrespect — that he looks like the evil emperor in “Star Wars” or the sparkling observation that he wears a dress and Prada shoes, or that someone “just has a feeling there’s more to this,” i.e., the resignation, because surely “they” caught him in a “live boy/dead girl type of situation.” Stop. You look ignorant and silly. He’s an old man who’s going to die soon, and he cares enough about his job to leave it when he knows he can no longer do it. There are legitimate criticisms of the about-to-be-vacated papacy. Study up.

Boy, I’m feeling bitchy, aren’t I? Well, I’m hungry.

There’s also this (HT: MMJeff), a retired teacher’s lament of why so many high-school students, even bright, accomplished ones, are arriving at college unprepared to do college-level work, i.e. thinking. Please don’t dismiss it as the complaints of an overpaid, spoiled teacher wanking about No Child Left Behind. Read. I think this man speaks the truth:

In many cases, students would arrive in our high school without having had meaningful social studies instruction, because even in states that tested social studies or science, the tests did not count for “adequate yearly progress” under No Child Left Behind. With test scores serving as the primary if not the sole measure of student performance and, increasingly, teacher evaluation, anything not being tested was given short shrift.

Further, most of the tests being used consist primarily or solely of multiple-choice items, which are cheaper to develop, administer, and score than are tests that include constructed responses such as essays. Even when a state has tests that include writing, the level of writing required for such tests often does not demand that higher-level thinking be demonstrated, nor does it require proper grammar, usage, syntax, and structure. Thus, students arriving in our high school lacked experience and knowledge about how to do the kinds of writing that are expected at higher levels of education.

For a while now, I’ve been puzzling over a paradox in my own home: I have an A student who hates school. Hates it. Not one class has sparked her fire, although individual units in some classes — primarily science — have warmed her a bit. To her, school is a grind of boredom and homework. It’s easy, in these cases, to say a kid isn’t being “challenged,” and recommend a tougher course. Well, she’s in the tough courses, and all they are is boredom with more homework. I’m starting to think it’s not her, but the teaching, the testing, the endless hoop-jumping. By junior year of high school, which she starts next year, I was starting to look forward to it. There were interesting class discussions, projects that sent us down fascinating paths — you know the drill.

But I reflected, reading this, that NCLB has been a reality for my kid’s entire term in public education. And what was the impetus for it? Imposition of a business model on something that isn’t a business. You don’t make a decision in the business world without seeing the numbers, right? So test them! Then test them some more! And if they’re not learning, turn the whole enterprise over to the market, where the Invisible Hand will figure it all out.

Note:

During my years in the classroom I tried to educate other adults about the realities of schools and students and teaching. I tried to help them understand the deleterious impact of policies that were being imposed on our public schools. I blogged, I wrote letters and op-eds for newspapers, and I spent a great deal of time speaking with and lobbying those in a position to influence policy, up to and including sitting members of the US House of Representatives and Senate and relevant members of their staffs. Ultimately, it was to little avail, because the drivers of the policies that are changing our schools—and thus increasingly presenting you with students ever less prepared for postsecondary academic work—are the wealthy corporations that profit from the policies they help define and the think tanks and activist organizations that have learned how to manipulate the levers of power, often to their own financial or ideological advantage.

I’ll leave you with that. Time to brew a pot of coffee, see if I can’t improve my outlook.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m thinking I should be doing our taxes. It’s a perfect do-the-taxes day — not lovely enough that I should be outside, cold enough that inside chores are called for, and taxes are the ultimate inside chore. And yet, I’m not doing the taxes. I did organize the tax-document box, which is considerably easier now that I’m no longer freelancing. So yay me.

Instead, I’m thinking about naked Lena Dunham.

I’ve become a reluctant fan of “Girls,” the HBO series about 20something New Yorkers learning about life and love, at least that tiny slice of life and love as its experienced in hipster Brooklyn. All four of the titular cast members are the privileged daughters of wealthy artists and/or media figures, although I’m not sure you can call the former drummer for Bad Company, father of cast member Jemima Kirke, an artist. But what the hell, let’s go along with it.

Because these girls (the actors) were born into money and fabulousness and now have achieved the next level of money and fabulousness with cable-TV success, and because the show is a pretty accurate reflection of a certain sort of demographic (theirs), only they’re pretending to be poor and salad days-y, it can be a challenge to watch, much as it may have bugged the servants to watch Marie Antoinette pretend to be a peasant at Versailles. Everyone is hyperarticulate and crazy and impulsive and does stupid self-sabotaging shit, and it took me a long time to admit that what’s discomfiting about it is, it’s true.

And Dunham is naked in this thing. A LOT. The sex scenes are excruciating, in the way that watching actual sex is discomfiting and movie sex isn’t. The clothes come off with considerable trouble,
one party frequently looks to be having a terrible time, and Dunham cares not a whit that she’s overweight, pear-shaped, small-breasted and pretty much the polar opposite of what we consider suitable for public nudity. This is a little weird at first, but you get used to it, much as you got used to the idea that three of the “Sex and the City” quartet routinely had sex with their bras on.

She’s naked so often, in fact, that it borders on gratuitous, and that’s a word I don’t use lightly. Last week, the show petered out on Dunham’s character lounging in her tub, singing “Wonderwall” to herself, when Kirke’s character shows up. These girls love to bathe together, and it’s pretty clear Kirke is going to climb in, but not before Dunham rises to her knees, so we can get a shot of her breasts again. Alan, who likes boobs as much as the next guy, actually said, “Noooooo!”

Dunham’s wardrobe is also terrible. I’d love to see T-Lo take it on — beyond the red-carpet stuff they’ve already done, that is.

More on naked Lena.

Hope y’all had a good weekend, and if you were snowed upon, that it was pretty and not too awful. Some bloggage:

Tonight is the Grammy awards. I’ve always hated the Grammies, for reasons explained here. A sample:

1989’s Record and Song of the Year went to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” a T-shirt slogan of a song that has aged as well as a beer koozie that says, “Is that your final answer?” It beat Anita Baker’s “Giving You The Best That I Got,” Steve Winwood’s “Roll With It, ” Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror.”

The Michigan GOP gets on Wayne LaPierre’s train. I’m totally sure an armed, 110-pound female teacher will somehow never be surprised and disarmed by, say, a 220-pound high school linebacker who needs a weapon, quick.

Another homeowners’ association horror story, featuring two equally loathsome parties bent on mutual assured destruction. Enjoy, Jeff!

And let’s all have a good week.

I have to be honest: I’ve been through so many snow-teases that I tend to ignore them. Now I’m looking at a radar image that shows snow falling all over the Mitten, but not here. Maybe it’s coming this way, maybe it isn’t. I’m going to bed and saying the hell with it.

Friday morning

And as suspected, we had about two inches overnight. Two. And there’s a snow day, in a district that was notorious for years for one thing — no snow days, ever. So here we are, the snow needs a-blowin’, and what do I have? A lot of good links.

Dave Kindred on the last days of Muhammed Ali, not in the sense that he’s on his way out (although he could be), but on the last days of all great boxers. I will say this: There’s something about boxing that inspires great sportswriting. It’s a dying sport, although it may well prevail, simply by flying below a certain radar. I hear a lot these days about football, that it’ll be gone in a generation because of the head-injury issue. You don’t hear that about boxing, perhaps because there are fewer people involved, and fighters are frequently bottom-of-the-barrel types who don’t practice their sports under the auspices of a college or university. Frank DeFord, the Sports Illustrated sage, famously washed his hands of boxing a while back, although I’m sure he’d be proud to have an essay this good published under his byline. Your good read for the day.

Everybody posted that Funny or Die parody of the “God made a farmer” ad, but just in case you missed it, you can find it here.

Gene Weingarten on how the internet is changing writing. My favorite:

3. The Rise of the Sillyble, or extraneous syllable. In pre-Internet days we saw this with the pointless tacking on of “ir” to “regardless,” creating a brand-new word meaning, uh, “regardless.” The Web has accelerated this process. “Preventative” has just about overtaken “preventive,” to mean “preventive.” “Orientate” is moving up on “orient” to mean “orient.” There is work yet to be done, though: The Web reveals that “ironical” has just begun its assault on the summit of Mount Ironic. We wish it Godspeed.

Thanks, Charlotte, for finding this, because I might have missed it: The guy who lives in the old Packard plant.

I wanted to send someone a clip from “Babe: Pig in the City,” a favorite from Kate’s young years. I couldn’t find it — it’s the one where the pink poodle says her humans had cast her aside for someone younger and prettier — but I did find this AVClub essay about the film. I remember at the time of its release, how badly it flopped, and how one critic observed, wryly, “You don’t hear the word ‘dark’ used often in discussing children’s films.” And yet, it is so wonderful, in so many ways. I just loved it.

Finally, while I don’t approve of the legal strategy of suing a hosting company over objectionable internet content, I’m glad someone is taking some kind of action against the purveyors of so-called revenge porn. It beats a bullet, anyway.

Off to fire up that blower. Have a good weekend, all.

Sorry no blogging last night. Other stuff, etc. So it’s linkalicious Thursday today.

It’s been a tough week in many ways, and I don’t think anyone is having a particularly good one. So I was in the right mood to read this short essay, on a particular passage from William Blake. Blake is one of my favorite poets, and the author of this piece was interviewed on the radio this morning, so I’ll take it as a sign. Won’t take long.

David Brooks on data. It’s not as awful as you might expect, but I confess, when I read this passage…

Over the next year, I’m hoping to get a better grip on some of the questions raised by the data revolution: In what situations should we rely on intuitive pattern recognition and in which situations should we ignore intuition and follow the data? What kinds of events are predictable using statistical analysis and what sorts of events are not?

…my immediate answer to the question is, “when David Brooks has a book of sweeping generalizations about people he knows little about, to flatter the self-perceptions of his smug readership, that’s when!”

From the Now I’ve Seen Everything file: Drive-through Ash Wednesday. Just give me the bullet points and the smudge — I’m in a hurry!

Good day to all. Snow expected here, but not as much as some places. The air smelled a little springlike today, but I’m sure it’s just the moisture bearing down on us. We shall see.

My shocking-and-mocking meter must need recalibration. I saw this story — about a prankster/conceptual artist/asshole who posted a sign reading “Arbeit macht frei” on an overpass in the abandoned Packard plant and I wasn’t outraged, insulted or wounded. I just thought “jerk, or jerky artist, or mean jerk.”

For those of you not up on your history, the phrase in its original context:

That’s Auschwitz, if you can’t tell. It means “work will set you free.”

No one has taken the credit/blame for the Detroit installation, but my money’s on hipster dildos who are either trying to be provocative or just liked the idea of the words on an archway leading to a crumbling ruin. Not well thought-out, but what do you want?

The reaction, however, was a bit much:

Stephen Goldman, executive director of the Holocaust Memorial Center on Orchard Lake Road in Farmington Hills, was appalled by the message.

“It’s offensive on a number of levels,” Goldman said. “Metro Detroit has one of the largest Jewish communities, and largest survivor communities in the country.

“It’s a mocking message from when Jews saw that message over the gates of concentration camps, and then learned what was going to happen after passing under that gate.”

OK, with you so far. Then…

Goldman also sees it as an insult to the auto industry.

“Does it mean that working in the auto plants is the same as working as slaves in a concentration camp?” Goldman said. “Yes, the Packard Plant is a derelict facility, but so are the concentration camps still in Europe, although some serve as museums.

“Slave labor is insulting, and this is an insult to the auto industry.”

Oh.

Moving on! I was paying some bills today, checking out my online banking for the first time in a while. Hmm, when did I spend $125 at a Sunoco station? In, whu-? Brooklyn? THAT Brooklyn? And I spent $125 there yesterday, too? And the day before that?

Yep, my debit card had been hacked. For a four-figure sum. I’ll get it all back — so the bank lady said — but it was something of a shock, particularly as I’d spent much of New Year’s weekend strengthening all my passwords, making them as firm and unbreakable as Popeye’s biceps. I used Farhad Manjoo’s method, and while this didn’t include a password crack, it was still ironic.

The good news is, I still have some money left, and my account isn’t frozen, although my debit card is toast. Back to buying things with checks and that other funny, paper-based method known as cash.

I always wanted to write a story about paying every bill I had with cash for, say, a month, just to see if it made me spend any differently. Over the years I’ve gradually transitioned into debit-plastic for everything, and online for everything else. My mother used to remark on the separate line at her credit union on payday, for those who were literally cashing their entire paycheck. Who would do such a thing? I wondered. “Installers,” she said. (She worked for the phone company.)

Alan’s parents paid all their bills in person every month. It was an outing — go downtown, buy groceries, pay the electric bill. They didn’t get a checking account until he went to college. It was a common behavior at the time for working-class people. Then all the working-class people got credit cards and home equity lines of credit, and you know how that worked out.

OK, a li’l bloggage?

Tom & Lorenzo give the little girl with the hard-to-spell name who was in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” a baby WERQ for her outfit at the Oscars nominee luncheon. It’s the purse that sells it.

Interesting essay on guns, from NYMag.

And now it is Wednesday. Let us get over the hump in one piece.

For my money, the story of the day is the discovery of Richard III’s corpse under a parking lot in Leicester, England. That the rudely stamped king, whose (literary) last words are among the most famous in Shakespeare’s canon — “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” — should end up with thousands of their modern equivalents parked on his bones for years upon years? That’s what you call irony.

I’m the least-sensitive person in the world when it comes to human remains. Treat them with respect, surely. Treat them according to the wishes of the deceased and survivors, yes. But if someone wants to be carved up for dog food? No problemo, dude — once the lights go out, we’re mainly a waste-disposal problem. But I hope Richard III gets a comfortable place with a proper marker. He got one of the great plays, and I’ve always counted him among the top two or three villains on my bookshelves.

I’m watching Alex Gibney’s latest film, which debuted on HBO Monday night — “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God.” It’s about priestly sex abuse, of course, a story that no matter how many times it’s told, only becomes more awful to hear. The crux of this narrative is about a long-time abuser at a residential school for the deaf in Wisconsin, and the details are both uniquely horrible and entirely, depressingly familiar — the church’s dithering and inaction that allowed offenders to operate for years. One of the many villains is the Pope himself, whose office handled all these cases and, again, did little to punish, deliver to secular justice, or even take seriously many of them.

A worldwide, decades-long criminal conspiracy. That will never be punished.

While we’re tearing down the once-elevated, let’s finish with this snarky riposte to that Paul Harvey “so God made a farmer” commercial at the Super Bowl:

God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn and call his state senator to complain about expensive new slurry pit legislation, spend all day with his ag lobby board strategizing about more laws against private raw milk sales, take that state senator out for steak and wine at dinner, and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board at the school he wants to eliminate with a voucher program.” So God made a farmer.

Oh, and you Beyoncé haters out there? Silence! She was fierce. One of my Facebook network was whining about how the rich cultural tradition of New Orleans was ignored, blah blah blah. I say, you want a show? Hire a show woman. And we got ourselves a show, even though the singing was a little breathy. Eh, happens.

Tuesday. This week is feeling long already.

How fitting that the same weekend the White House releases a photo of the president shooting skeet, the Washington Post publishes this fine Joel Achenbach profile of a gun nut, and yes, I respect our gun rights and so on, but this particular shoe fits:

(Rob) Farago didn’t used to be a gun guy. He was a car guy. He had a popular blog called the Truth About Cars. He sold it in 2009 and searched for a new consumer topic, landing on guns.

He bought his first gun a week before the debut of TheTruthAboutGuns.com. He took a firearms class. He filled out the paperwork and went through the background check to get a permit to carry a gun. He now owns 18 guns.

“Once you put a gun on, you gain situational awareness,” he says. After he bought his first gun, he says, “I felt grown up. It was like a coming-of-age thing. I felt like an adult.”

This guy, mind you, is 53 years old. But he didn’t “come of age” until he bought his first of 18 guns, maybe, what? Three years ago?

There’s lots more in the piece. It’s good to know guys like this think of people like me, who would not shoot an armed robber in a convenience store, who would not even shoot a person I caught stealing my damn TV set, as “sheep.” (They, of course, are “sheepdogs.”) And do check out this passage, when Farago goes out to eat with his buddy, another gun guy:

A couple of hours later, the two men dig into dinner at a swank Italian restaurant, both of them choosing chairs that let them face the entrance.

“Look at the way Robert and I are facing,” Kenik says. “Crime happens everywhere. There’s no place to feel safe.”

“That’s your opinion,” Farago says, distancing himself a bit.

“It’s in the back of my mind,” Kenik says.

No, I think it’s in the front of his mind. Show me a guy who feels he has to walk locked and loaded into an Italian restaurant in Providence, R.I., sit facing the door and give himself little tinglies thinking about his “situational awareness,” and I’ll show you a guy who’s going to shoot someone sooner or later, and probably sooner.

It’s more fun to laugh at how one little picture of the prez engaging in a gentlemen’s sporting activity sent the wingers into enough of a tizzy as to give Roy’s weekly roundup of the right blogosphere enough material to let him coast for a month.

Well, it was a bad weekend for shooters all around. Am I the only person who read that story and came up short with the news that the shooter, a Marine suffering from PTSD, was taken to the gun range by the deceased, who specialized in helping soldiers with PTSD. Why? Because firing guns is a good treatment for PTSD? I’d think yoga and long hikes in the great outdoors would be more effective, but what do I know?

Speaking of which, a change of subject is in order. Here are some tracks I found in my driveway after a very light snow last week:

Through some Googling, I learned this was a bounding animal, but the prints are way larger than you generally find on the suburban prairie. They were about two inches in length, which is how they caught my eye in the first place. The tracking guides suggest “members of the weasel family” as typical bounders, but again — unlikely this far from water. Thoughts?

Last bits of bloggage? Here’s John Carlisle on a typical crowd at a Detroit City Council meeting, bringing the crazy with both hands.

A cold, snowy week awaits. Let’s see how we can get through it.