Guess what time we ate dinner tonight? Why, 8:30, which I think reclassifies it as “supper.” It couldn’t be helped — those weird bands of snow squalls that killed three people on I-75 in the morning continued all day. One minute you’d look out the window and it would be a regular old boring winter day, and the next it would be a spinning whiteout. A night to stay in, but Alan and Kate didn’t. (Bass lesson.) Hence, a late dinner.

Roast chicken, mashed potatoes and Mark Bittman’s spicy-sweet green beans. Pretty good feed for a snowy night.

The best thing I saw today was this, a Conor Friedersdorf piece on the problem with conservative cultural criticism. Roy Edroso has gone into this at some length, working from the assumption it’s difficult to consider art critically when you see it as merely another opportunity to propagandize. (I’m not going to look up links, sorry.) Truth be told, the one thing I tend to avoid, in political journals at both ends of the spectrum, is the arts coverage. The New Republic has had some good critics over the years, but ever since I sprained my eyes rolling them over a piece about “The Untouchables” in the Nation or one of those, I haven’t bothered.

It sounds like nothing much has changed:

There isn’t anything wrong with lamenting the effect songs like “Sex Room” might have on teens hearing it at their first dance. But how absurd to reduce rap to Ludacris and Sir Mix-a-Lot. And how impossibly, comically uninformed to assert that the entire genre is bereft of “human feeling.” Did the right learn nothing from its panicked, reductive reaction to Elvis Presley and the Beatles?

Friedersdorf is describing a National Review podcast featuring Mark Steyn, Jay Nordlinger and that old waste of space, Mona Charen. At one point they wonder why Kids These Days aren’t interested in the old standards. To which one can only say: Sheesh.

Much more amusing, in a good way, was the end of “30 Rock.” In honor of its last episode, a glossary of all seven years. I’d forgotten about many of these.

Oh weekend! Let me fall into your arms. I have plumb run out of gas.

Potpourri today, folks. I took a hot yoga class during today’s blogging time, and my chakras are too aligned to work up much of a head of steam over anything. Besides, we have some good stuff here, starting with…

Jim Nabors, out of the closet at 82. Well, good for him. It’s not like the whole world hasn’t known this for a while. It reminded me of when I first heard the rumor that Gomer Pyle was a ‘mo, as the nomenclature went among grade-schoolers, which I believe I was. The rumor mill said that Gomer had married Rock Hudson in a weekend ceremony.

How would that rumor have traveled in 1968 or so? It was before the internet. A long-distance call required a parental ruling, and certainly wasn’t so you could discuss Hollywood gossip with a distant cousin. There were showbiz scandal sheets, to be sure, but even then they stuck to language like “confirmed bachelor,” which would have flown over the heads of kids. No, it just arrived one day, entire, at the city pool: Gomer Pyle had married Rock Hudson.

Nearly half a century later, he married someone named Stan Cadwallader, in Seattle. Well, congratulations, gentlemen. Better to live in truth, however late in the game it comes.

And speaking of living in truth, may I just say I am growing quite weary of Downton Abbey? I can tolerate a whole damn lot from a TV show, but these soap-opera personality transplants are getting on my last nerve. In the first season, one reasonable criticism of the show was that Lord Grantham was too nice; a man of his station wouldn’t have had personal conversations with his footmen, any more than he would chat with his bedroom furniture. But it was tolerable, because otherwise? Not much of a show. So you can take that liberty, but you can’t decide, in season three, that the lord of the manner has to be a prick, so that we can set into motion plots 7 through 12. Stories flow from character. When the characters aren’t real? Lousy stories.

Also, either shank Mr. Bates in prison or spring him. This Nancy Drew stuff is the worst.

Two stories with a religious angle, one better than the other. The inferior one: Brooklyn and Saudi Arabia have something in common. Modesty police, only these are Jewish.

In the close-knit world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, community members know the modesty rules as well as Wall Street bankers who show up for work in a Brooks Brothers suit. Women wear long skirts and long-sleeved, high-necked blouses on the street; men do not wear Bermuda shorts in summer. Schools prescribe the color and thickness of girls’ stockings.

The rules are spoken and unspoken, enforced by social pressure but also, in ways that some find increasingly disturbing, by the modesty committees. Their power is evident in the fact that of the half dozen women’s clothing stores along Lee Avenue, only one features mannequins, and those are relatively shapeless, fully clothed torsos.

I really don’t like this sort of thing. Really. The other story is far more interesting, and you may have seen it making the rounds: How in 1978, a Soviet scientific party stumbled upon a family living in squalid conditions, deep in Siberia, in full retreat from the world. Why? To protect their faith from Commies and Peter the Great, among other things. A great, fascinating read.

Enough potpourri for one day? It better be, because I’m about out of gas for the night.

Tuesday night

We’ll see how long this lasts. I was up at 5 a.m. today, out the driveway at 5:55 a.m., in Lansing for a half-day conference followed by the story-writin’, then home. Did I mention both legs of the drive were made in pouring rain and fog? Yes, and isn’t that fun, knowing that just at the end of your headlights might be the puddle that sends you hydroplaning, while enormous SUVs pass you — on both sides — at 80 or so.

The last part of the trip home, a Mercedes sat in front of me for six miles, right blinker on. Exited, turned left, merged left, merged right. Blink, blink, blink. My tension level was high enough at that point that I would have happily rammed the back of his car to shut the thing off.

The point is, man am I tired.

But I have fortified with pizza, wine and cake, and all is better. And now I’m thinking about what I read yesterday, from the AP:

PITTSBURGH (AP) — The breathtaking model on your magazine cover: Of course she’s not that thin and unblemished. That reality show you never miss? You’re shocked – shocked that its real-life drama isn’t 100 percent unscripted. And that diva who may or may not have mouthed the words to the national anthem to her own prerecorded voice? Yeah, well, so what? It was a big moment, and she wanted to sound her best.

In America these days, in countless tiny ways, much of what we see and experience isn’t exactly what it seems. We know it, too. And often we don’t care, because what we’re getting just seems to “pop” more than its garden-variety, without-the-special-sauce counterpart.

It’s not a dumb essay, but not a particularly smart one, either. Real life has become a cascade of unreal artifice? That’s a revelation that could only occur to the AP. Honestly, I can’t think of a single thing I care about less than whether Beyoncé was singing live at the presidential inauguration. Not one thing. Singing is a more physical act than most of us would expect, and cold air doesn’t go well with it. Even delivering a rocky note or three is asking to get yourself on Gawker or in the late-night monologues or whatever, and who wants to be known as the girl who was flat on the National Anthem on worldwide TV? So she faked it a little. (Or she didn’t.) It was still her.

If you want to talk about fakery in entertainment, then I want to talk about a show that’s becoming one of my very favorites, because it’s so real — “Enlightened,” a half-hour dramedy-ish thing on HBO. What’s it about? So much, and so little, but mainly, it’s about the way many of us work today.

(Somewhere along the way, it became Wednesday morning.)

It’s a tough sell, this show, as it’s hard to even describe. Season one was about the return of Amy Jellicoe, played by Laura Dern, to work at the soulless corporation that helped drive her to a nervous breakdown some months earlier. The pilot introduces Amy in recovery at a posh Hawaiian rehab facility, meditating on the beach, swimming with the sea turtles and returning to Riverside, Calif. a new woman — the sort who gets up in your face at the office coffeepot and says stuff like, “I am speaking to you with my true voice.”

But in the unspooling of the first season, and especially the second, we come to understand why Amy flipped out in the first place, and why her return, upon which she was immediately exiled to a weird new basement cube farm to work on a project called Cogentiva, is leading to an even bigger flip-out. Because this place may well be hell.

Take the name of the corporation — Abaddon. If you lack an encyclopedic knowledge of the book of Revelation, be advised that’s the name of a dark angel, king of an army of locusts. The company seems to make consumer goods that come in bottles; pre-breakdown, Amy worked in health and beauty, and is seen begging for a demotion to cleaning products to avoid the Cogentiva basement gig. (And because this is 21st-century America, there also seems to be a pharmaceutical wing.) Abaddon is housed in a glistening glass tower in one of those office parks that’s the same from Hartford to Cincinnati to Austin to Riverside, but like its namesake, it’s a destroyer — nominally of the environment, but mainly of the poor schmucks who toil behind those glass walls.

Here’s something I noticed a while back: How often the characters in the books I was reading were independently wealthy. Even serious novelists, with aspirations to Pulitzers and Nobels, and yes, I’m looking at you, Jim Harrison, seem to throw in a lot more heiresses and early retired tycoons than the average person might know in real life. It’s an easy way around a problem for writers trying to create fiction about the way we live today; most of us spend most of our waking hours at work, and much of our work sucks ass. I recall reading an interview with Mike Judge, around the time he was trying to sell “Office Space” in Hollywood; none of these zillionaire, Harvard-educated studio heads could understand why the story’s main character didn’t just quit his job and get a better one. They couldn’t wrap their heads around the fact there are millions of Americans who toil for corporations like Abaddon or Initech, in suburban office parks, and that many of them are quietly being driven insane by their jobs. But the next job is likely to be just as crazy-making, maybe even in the same office park, so why give up the seniority and accrued vacation days?

“Enlightened” brings us into this world, this real world, better than anything I’ve seen since, well, “Office Space.” It’s sharper, meaner but also kinder, if that’s possible. Even the bad bosses are simply the overseers for the unseen slavers in the corporate suites.

And if that isn’t a pivot, from Tuesday to Wednesday, from the AP to HBO, from Beyoncé to Laura Dern, well slap my face and call me Streamy McConsciousness. But right now, I have to get to work.

I don’t know how far news from Detroit travels, but this particular news is odd enough that it might have reached your corners.

For months now, the city’s been wrangling over the fate of Belle Isle, its island park, which is beautiful and unique and, like so many of Detroit’s assets, too expensive for the city to maintain. The sane answer — which the city council, in its insanity, has opposed so far — is to turn it over to the state to manage on a long-term lease, accompanied by serious infrastructure investment and a nominal entry fee. (Ten dollars a year, which would also include admission to all other state parks.)

A second idea was floated last week, and oh, but it’s a doozie: A group of rich men, including a former president of Chrysler, the former head of the state chamber of commerce, a former Senate candidate and a local political consultant, want to buy the island from the city. Buy it for $1 billion, after which they would turn it into the “Commonwealth of Belle Isle,” a Randian wet dream of income tax-free city-state living. Not just anyone could live there; you have to buy your way in:

Under the plan, it would become an economic and social laboratory where government is limited in scope and taxation is far different than the current U.S. system. There is no personal or corporate income tax. Much of the tax base would be provided by a different property tax — one based on the value of the land and not the value of the property.

It would take $300,000 to become a “Belle Islander,” though 20 percent of citizenships would be open for striving immigrants, starving artists and up-and-coming entrepreneurs who don’t meet the financial requirement.

You can read more at the link, but that’s the gist. And no, even among an invitation-only audience of their peers, the idea mostly didn’t go over well. Although there were plenty of crazy dreamers who clapped very loudly:

But the Commonwealth of Belle Isle idea found several supporters, too, among the invited guests at the DAC. John Rakolta, chairman and CEO of the Walbridge construction firm based in Detroit, said the Lockwood vision could produce $20 billion in new investment and create 200,000 jobs in the city in 10 years, although he admitted the numbers were just guesses.

If I weren’t so certain the parties behind this don’t understand the idea of performance art, I would swear this was a piece of it, a little bit of wackiness for everyone to chuckle over on the next National Review cruise. And I thought it would sink quickly, but I overlooked one detail in that first story. This:

(One of the organizers), the former chairman of the Michigan Chamber of Commerce and current board member of the free-market-oriented Mackinac Center for Public Policy has written a self-published book about the plan called “Belle Isle: Detroit’s Game Changer.”

I figured that of course this would be a tract of some sort, filled with patriotism and flag-waving and Rand-iness. But no. IT’S A NOVEL. Or a novella, I guess — 140 pages or so set years into the future, when… oh, let Jeff Wattrick at Deadline Detroit sketch it out. It sounds FABulous:

The plot, set 30 years into the future, involves a visit to the pleasant island community of Belle Isle by Joe, a 6’2″ blond-haired, blue-eyed Syrian-American doctor and Detroit native who now lives in Damascus. Joe’s high school best friend, Darin, is kind of Belle Isle’s Wizard of Oz. He’s portrayed (heroically) as a cross between Robert Moses, Thomas Jefferson, and the president of the Del Boca Vista Phase Two condo association.

Both characters are fastidious middle-aged men who take pride in their appearance and watch what they eat. Darin, we learn, used to help girls shop for clothes in high school.

Neither Joe nor Darin appears to be married now or have children. If either was ever married, or currently has a romantic partner, it is a secret kept from readers. This is particularly odd considering the novel basically consists of conversations between the two long-time friends who, it is explained, have rarely kept in touch over the last 20 years. In their time together never once do they say anything about their personal lives.

Perhaps, like many a confirmed bachelor, these men are simply married to their work. Affairs of the heart are handled are handled with, let’s call it, discretion.

A homoerotic self-published novella written by a former head of the state chamber of commerce! I literally clapped my hands at this news. I can’t WAIT to read it.

There’s more, so much much more, at the Deadline Detroit link. I’d happily quote it all, but let’s give DD the traffic, eh? The account of the “Italian gray stone pavers” in the foyer of the Belle Isle condo make it worth the price of purchase. (Although I plan to steal one.)

I had something else to blog about today, but I’m going to hold off — tomorrow promises to be brutal, and I’ll need a cushion at day’s end. And now if you’ll excuse me, I’m off to watch Sunday’s “Downton Abbey,” which I DVR’d. I hear Lady Sybil’s baby is being born tonight! That’ll be such a fun episode!.

Good Tuesday, all.

As I go through my day and have ideas or find links I might want to write about, I throw them in a draft post here. I’ve only accidentally published it once. Most days, there are at least a few ticklers by the time I sit down to write. Today, it’s this:

Brooks column

And that’s it. I assume it’s David Brooks, but I have no idea which one, or what would have moved me about it — scanning his recent archive, all I thought was, nope, not that one. Perhaps this suggests my opinions about this and that are fleeting things. They are. One of my most shameful moments as a monger of opinions was the day a reader approached me at an event to tell me he’d really liked that thing I wrote about something, two years ago.

“I wrote about that?” I said. “I can’t remember.”

He was crushed. “You seemed very emotional about it, too,” he said. Honestly, I couldn’t remember one detail from it. And you know what else? I didn’t care enough to go spelunking into the archive to discover what I was so het up about, either. It’s times like that when you remember what happens to old newspapers, shrug and maybe add, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

An so, with that in mind, I read this column in the Detroit News, editorial-page editor Nolan Finley misting up over the coming loss of his office space:

For me, The News building is furnished with memories. I’ve spent my entire adult life here. I know it the way a farmer knows his fields. I’ve been in its newsroom for every historical moment of the past four decades, and most of the mundane ones as well. It’s where I’ve met the people who shaped my career and where I bid many of them farewell. I’ve seen it gutted and restored. I’ve known it when it was too small to hold all of the people we needed to put out a newspaper and when it became so big for the staff on hand you could hear echoes.

It is what we used to call in the south The Home Place.

Excuse me, I feel the need for a little musical accompaniment here. Beyond that, not much more.

But that’s just me. I may feel differently tomorrow.

A far tougher read was in the NYT — Sunday’s magazine cover story, on a developing strategy in prosecuting child pornography offenders — making those found in possession of illegal images pay financial restitution to victims who can be identified — whether they had anything to do with taking them. The story focuses on two women who were abused by relatives, men who photographed the acts, which became among the most-downloaded illegal images in the child-porn portfolio. Both women have received substantial sums over the years, and a recent higher-court decision affirms the strategy is legal and so it will likely continue. But just to read about what these women went through in the first place, and how long it’s taken them to even partially recover (they are, as Marcellus Wallace said after a similar assault, pretty effin’ far from OK), all one can think of is: It’s not enough, it’ll never be enough. I also noted that one of the pedophiles charged with paying was a former vice president with a major pharmaceutical company. Having spent five years or so clipping stories about the lavish compensation packages in that industry, all I could think was: She should have asked for more.

And because we seem to be crepe-hanging today, let’s take a moment to consider the staggering death toll in a Brazil nightclub fire over the weekend. We have nothing to brag about on this score, except maybe comparatively; American public facilities have had and likely will continue to have tragedies like this. But it reminded me of something I noticed in Argentina few years back — how so many of the safety measures we take for granted here are virtually non-existent elsewhere in the world. Sidewalk repairs would appear out of nowhere without so much as an orange cone of warning, that sort of thing. Maybe this is just yet another reminder of the terrifying speed at which fire can move, and why it’s always wise to note the exits before you step into a crowded room.

But that’s a journalist talking, a long way from the old home place. Have a good Monday.

I came across the term “paddy wagon” in this Atlantic piece about the Stonewall uprising today, and it sent me spinning back to the era of extreme political correctness in American newsrooms, which is to say, the ’90s.

I don’t like the term “politically correct” anymore, because it’s been twisted so from its original, ironic usage, not to mention utterly co-opted by people who use it as a code for “I’m a jerk.” (Really, if someone says to you, “I’m not what you’d call politically correct,” isn’t that precisely what they’re saying?)

But there was without a doubt a time when it looked like we might lose terms like “paddy wagon,” “gypped” and other American slang to those who would rinse the language of even its pastel color, not to mention coherence. I mean, everyone knows what a paddy wagon is, right? A “prisoner transport vehicle” might be anything.

I try not to get too excited about these things anymore. Language is elastic, and some of this stuff is, to be sure, offensive, even obscene. You let in paddy wagon and pretty soon someone thinks “n*gger-rig” is just fine, too. But in general, I give this a pass, and I’d be willing to bet a show of hands among people under 40 would reveal precious few who can even tell you a) “paddy” is slang for an Irishman, and b) the wagons got that name because they were so often filled with brawling Irish drunks.

I’ll go almost as far with “gypped.” I had no idea it referred to gypsy scams until adulthood, but given how often I’ve read press releases from law enforcement, warning business and home owners about scams being perpetrated by “travelers,” I can’t say the term doesn’t have at least some legs. But OK, if you want, it’s now “swindled.”

What else? I recall being lectured about the use of the syllable “jap” in a story slug — i.e., the file name. If you’re like me, sometimes you shorten words in file names. SALESPROJ, maybe, or VACAYEXPNS. But woe fell upon the wire editor who shortened an account of the Sino-Japanese trade talks to SINOJAP.

Also, we were instructed not to ever use the word “gay” to describe a homosexual female. She would be, of course, a lesbian. But could you say, “The move was applauded by gay people across the country?” You could not. The move was applauded by gays and lesbians.

“Can I say lesbians aren’t funny?” I asked my boss, who was gay, once, just to bait him. I was writing about the spectacular tanking of Ellen DeGeneres’ sitcom after she came out. What had been a pleasant little half-hour about a woman running a book store turned into a weekly lecture about gay rights — er, rights for gays and lesbians, and also bisexual, transgendered and questioning persons.

“Sure,” he said. I now regret that column. Wanda Sykes is a funny lesbian. So is Tig Notaro, and so are many others. I’d also like to say the only person who made that string of individual categories work in a sentence was Lady Gaga.

What happened to ease up on all the oversensitivity? Something happened around 9/11 — all of a sudden people were running around talking about bombing Afghanistan back to glass. You started hearing “c*nt” on premium cable. A whole new crop of insult comics made objecting to “paddy” and “gyp” sound like squalling over using the wrong fork at dinner. And with the collapse of the newspaper business, well, who had time to worry about that?

Speaking of what gets in the paper, I guess Kirk wasn’t working this particular night.

And with that, we have pivoted to the bloggage at the end of a very long week. I don’t have much, but I have this silky video of a skateboarder navigating a decayed but oddly beautiful Detroit. Or maybe that’s just the Portishead talking.

Enjoy your weekend. I plan to.

So, I forgot to mention that on my way to Lansing Tuesday I was, as usual, listening to NPR, and I heard this story by Wade Goodwyn, reporting form Texas on the reaction to the inauguration.

It being Texas, of course it wasn’t a happy-type story. This part didn’t surprise me:

GOODWYN: Burke said he wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but he was not expecting a vigorous defense of liberal ideals.

BURKE: I thought he would go ahead and have a little more of, let’s go ahead and work together as a team, and get America back on the right track. However, he doesn’t appear to have that kind of agenda. It appears to be, let’s go ahead and see if we can go ahead and whip everything our way, and make it a socialist state.

Yes, because sober bipartisanship worked very well the last time.

But this part chapped my ass:

GOODWYN: Down the street, Republican precinct chair Ann Teague is still not sure Obama is constitutionally qualified to take the oath of office.

ANN TEAGUE: We never saw a birth certificate. We never met any of the professors who went to school with our president.

And because I didn’t hear Goodwyn say, “Lady, you’re crazy, and I’m sorry to have bothered you, but I’m getting out of this nuthatch,” followed by a click and a few seconds of dead air, I have to ask:

How much longer are these people going to get a respectful ear?

I remind you, Ann Teague isn’t some lunatic raving on the street, but a precinct chairman. Which isn’t exactly the equivalent of chief justice, but for cryin’ out loud. If the Republicans want to know why so many people think they’re doomed to a future on the margins, if they wonder why they’re so often called racists, well, say hello to Ann Teague.

Or say hi to Bill Clayton, alderman of Rapid City, South Dakota, who, when a reporter asked him how he planned to vote on an upcoming property-tax increase question, replied by asking her how she planned to vote in the presidential election.

And then he said, “Should we deport you back to Kenya with Obama?”

He finally apologized, and by “finally,” I mean, this incident happened last August. He says he’s not a birther anymore, and that he didn’t realize he was speaking to an African American. Hallelujah, he saw the light.

When the GOP comes down on him with hobnail boots, him and the scores of others out there who are embarrassing the sane factions of the party, then maybe we can talk. I’ll not hold my breath.

So, I know we have a few librarians in the crowd. Did y’all see this sweet little story in the NYT, about the American Girl doll available for lending at a branch of the New York Public Library? Gotta love this lead:

After one visit, she returned with her hair in dreadlocks. Another time, her long blond locks were primly fashioned into a traditional bun. One day, she came back wearing a uniform of the exclusive all-girls Brearley School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

These have been the many phases of Kirsten Larson, an American Girl doll who sat on a shelf in the Ottendorfer branch of the New York Public Library, in the East Village, until a resourceful children’s librarian began lending her to girls, many of whose parents, because of financial or feminist reasons, resist buying the dolls.

I’d love to have seen photos of the dreads, but oh well. I found the librarian whose idea this was on Facebook and messaged her, offering her at least two American Girls from our basement-bin collection, but haven’t heard back. I’m sure she’s been inundated with donations by now, but honestly, I can’t see the Grosse Pointe Public Library doing such a cool thing, if for no other reason that far fewer families have “financial or feminist” objections to the pricey playthings. But I would love for our AGs to see a second life as New York City girls. If any of you librarians are willing to take Marisol Luna (who, as a Latina, garners diversity points) and the other one, the blonde, let me know.

Some good bloggage today:

How the pro-life movement bears at least some blame for rising rates of single parenthood, aka the Bristol Palin effect.

My husband’s office is moving. Eventually.

I literally marked my calendar: “Mad Men” is back April 7.

A good Thursday to all.

Yeesh, there are dates when the commutes to and from Lansing goes swimmingly, and those when it doesn’t. Today: Not one of those days, although not that anything awful happened. A chain-reaction accident on 127 clogged us for a while. And then it was a fairly eventful day, and a drive home enlivened by fun with Voice Control, my primitive iPhone’s early version of Siri:

“Play songs by Lady Gaga.”

PLAYING SONGS BY LADY GAGA.

And so on. (Nothing like Lady Gaga for a boring drive.)

“Play songs by the Rolling Stones.”

PLAYING SONGS BY NEIL YOUNG.

“No, play songs by the Rolling Stones.”

PLAYING SONGS BY RUFUS THOMAS.

It’s sort of fun, actually. Sometimes I listen to Mitch Albom’s radio show. I wish Mitch would figure out what he wants to do with the rest of his life, because this is two of his many media outlets where he mostly seems to be doing it with half his enthusiasm tied behind his back. But let’s speak no more of him.

This was the subject of the press conference — the release of the Center for Michigan’s year-long community engagement project, asking the public what it wants from its public schools. What it wants is, by and large, not what the legislature wants to make state policy. Oh, it’ll be an interesting budget this year.

And with this lameness, I leave you with my final words of the day: Pizza, wine, zzzzz.

Well, that was a nice inauguration, don’t you think? The first family looked smashing, the speech was bold, nobody fell down the steps, Antonin Scalia wore a funny hat and am I forgetting any high points?

I watched it on my iPad, propped up against the lamp while I worked on the other screen. It took a while to find the right channel, so to speak, one that wouldn’t require me to download a new app or listen to a bunch of people blabbering about how many words have been in an assorted selection of inaugural addresses. Finally, thank you New York Times — their live feed was just a running camera, no commentary. It was great; why don’t more channels try this revolutionary strategy? Because then Wolf Blitzer might not be worth a jillion dollars a year, I guess.

Since this is a day with a ton of coverage, let’s go with an all-inauguration bloggage menu, and whatever I missed, you can throw into the comments.

Goofy internet memes, GIFs, etc., compiled by New York magazine. Most fairly dumb.

Not dumb, but fun: The Washington Post puts two funny Style reporters to work on the inevitable inaugural-ball roundup. The Running of the Balls was a game between the two of them, to hit as many balls as possible in a single night, with rules about when they could leave and how they could score. That’s one thing the WashPost has always had going for it — they think of new and different ways to cover the same old stories, and have a blast doing it.

Charles Pierce, down in the cheap seats.

T-Lo on Shelley O’s day outfit, and by the time you read this I’m sure they’ll have something to say about the red Jason Wu gown of Monday’s night commander-in-chief ball. So check back. Here’s a separate post on the coat. What coat? THE COAT.

(I’m watching the Obamas dance as I write this, and while I don’t want to pile on the losers, I’m looking at Jennifer Hudson sing “Let’s Stay Together” and trying to imagine what the Romneys would have danced to.)

The speech sort of stunned me — I wasn’t expecting it to be that powerful. James Fallows on some of the literary allusions. The line about Stonewall! Half the country has no idea what he was talking about, I’d bet. It’s time they learn.

What did I forget? What did you like?

The cost of a single ticket to the North American International Auto Show’s Charity Preview, aka the Charity Preview or Car Prom, is $300, of which $290 is tax-deductible. That means the event is only spending about $10 per head, in the form of inexpensive champagne in plastic flutes, which is almost impossible to get. Not that anyone complains — it’s supposedly the biggest one-night money-raiser in the world, and a night when you can wear black tie. Or just fall out in random sparkles and, y’know, whatever floats your boat:

Alan gets a ticket as a reward for having spent nearly every waking hour at work for the past week; he worked all last weekend, left the house Monday at 6 a.m. and didn’t return until 11:30 p.m., and — you get the idea. It was a busy week, and the pregaming started at a local hotel bar, after which we went down to Cobo on the People Mover.

I think it’s the lighting that makes everyone look a little glittery and hallucinogenic. That shade of purple could go on a subcompact, but I think I noticed her because she wasn’t in black. Formal events are starting to look like dressy funerals.

This is my fourth auto show, and second charity preview, and while I spent my time climbing in and out of cars, I was mainly looking for people. I think I’d like this woman; it takes confidence to swig beer out of the bottle while wearing formalwear.

This was a Chevy Spark, and OH MY GOD I JUST NOTICED THAT WOMAN THROUGH THE WINDSHIELD. CARRYING A PARASOL.

A pickup bed makes a handy place to drop your evening bag for a moment.

But Nance, I hear you saying, what about the cars? Did you see any cars? Of course I did. Here’s the Hot Wheels edition of the Chevy Camaro:

Because once an American male gets a job, someone will try to sell his childhood back to him. And here’s a Mercury Lincoln concept; can’t remember what selection of letters and numbers:

Let’s see what we can see when the open side rotates around on the turntable.

See that thing between the back seats? It’s a refrigerator. There’s a famous anecdote about some executive at one of the Big 3, crowing that the American car industry forced cup-holders upon BMW and Mercedes. Wait until they learn they’re falling behind on the Refrigerator Gap.

Here’s the Cadillac version of the Volt, with the usual furiously changing video wall exploding behind it.

“I don’t care if you always wanted one, Bob, if it doesn’t have hat storage it’s a deal-breaker.”

Finally, the car everyone was talking about. Detroiters care deeply about the Corvette. Yeah, yeah, iconic American muscle car, but seriously. I would drive a Corvette if I were, ohhhh, a Hollywood-based screenwriter surrounded by Priuses and BMWs, but I would do it just to bug people. That’s a lot of money to pay to be a jerk, but it might be worth it.

There are approximately a million other pictures of the new out there, so let’s crop the car out and just take a look at the crowd. Nice gams on the product specialists, eh?

Farewell from the Motor City. My feet hurt.

In bloggage today, a great read for Inauguration weekend from the WashPost — one town (Fremont, Ohio) divided red and blue. It captures the crazy paranoia and depression everyone who doesn’t live in a navy-blue state has seen with their own eyes.

The Obamas at the halfway point: How the change has gone.

Baby farm animal power rankings. I’m on team baby goat.

It’s going to be a crazy week around these parts. If I don’t show up one day, no need to send the search parties. I just have a busy few days ahead.