A foggy day today, thanks to the unseasonable — newly seasonable, maybe — warmth. It grew thicker as I drove west, not the way it usually goes for us low-lying, water-adjacent east siders. My destination? Dearborn, city of magic, city of bilingual signage. I had an excellent interview for a story I hope I can share with you soon, and decided to take the long way home, down Michigan Avenue, another one of those Detroit thoroughfares that drops your jaw and goggles your eyes. Strip clubs, rim stores, burned-out storefronts that will be cleared in another couple decades or when Jesus returns, whichever comes first, unless it maybe goes a little longer. The fog made everything sort of extra-depressing, although the temperature made it impossible to be depressed. Fifty-seven on a December Monday? You usually say, “I’ll take it,” but truth be told, we don’t have much choice these days.

Which is sort of depressing.

I’m predicting a 2013 that is, meteorologically anyway, a repeat of 2012 — a warm winter, a blast-furnace summer, and another drought. (No, I am not a scientist. I am a crone, and I feel it in my witchy bones.) Alan had a sit-down with the manager of the city’s marina today, because he fears, rightly so, that the channel to it, and the slips within it, won’t be navigable by midsummer. We’ll see what comes of it. Meanwhile, low lake levels plague even those with shallow-draft boats. He was discussing it with another guest at a party we were at this weekend when a third piped up and said, hey, what about all this stuff he’d been reading about melting Arctic ice and rising sea levels?

Alan explained that, as Niagara Falls had not yet been overtopped, that wasn’t a problem for us. YET.

In the meantime, I will try to think about the Duchess of Cambridge’s Royal Crumpet in the oven. I’m ridiculously pleased to hear this, as the world always likes a new baby, and at least this one will be well cared for. Yesterday in comments we discussed hyperemesis gravidarum, her barfing complaint. I recalled a New Yorker story by Atul Gawande on the subject some years back, and whaddaya know, so did he. He posted a link to the story in the digital edition, which has apparently been unlocked for the occasion. Once you figure out the navigation it’s fairly easy to read. I hope our friend Cathy Cambridge isn’t feeling this lousy. This NYT explainer (thanks, Jolene) is shorter, and get the job done.

Which I guess ushers us into the bloggage, eh? Here’s the president introducing Led Zeppelin at the Kennedy Center Honors the other night. I’m always taken by his natural comic timing. He really has the gift.

And with that, I’m out and hope your Tuesday is worth it. Happy birthday, Kirk.

I haven’t dared look at my traffic numbers in…? How long? A long time. I’m sure they’re in the toilet, and have been for about a year, because one thing you can’t really do when you are a servant of two masters — i.e., a journalist with a day job — is be a fun ‘n’ lively blogger. Plus, I’m absorbed once again in how much I don’t know, an experience that I always find shuts me up for a while. Nothing like being stupid to make you want to stop digging your hole of ignorance.

And there’s the other thing: I now write at the end of the day, when I’m a lot lower on energy. So consider this a blanket apology for general lameness, and maybe in the new year I’ll try some new models that give you all the conversation pit you seem to enjoy, and give the lurkers and drive-bys a little more.

And leave me time to write some other things. Not sure what, but it’s something else I’d really like to do. This isn’t a book I’d like to write, but it’s an idea I had last summer, when I was talking to Tom Nardone, the Mower Gang guy. Sooner or later, you learn that Tom’s day job, when he’s not saving Detroit parks for children, is selling sex toys on the internet. He really has a great story about how he got into it in the early-early days of the internet, how he started as a middleman for anything a person might find embarrassing to buy in person. He and his girlfriend went through every drugstore, Walmart and Target they could find and made a list of anything a person might be embarrassed to lay in front of a human clerk. It was a list that ranged from Rogaine to Fleet enemas to Preparation H. The company they launched, PriveCo, would sell you this stuff over the internet, and their value-add was that you’d never hear from them again — no mailing lists, no you-might-be-interested-in-this, none of that. And it went pretty well for a while, until Drugstore.com came online and undercut them on everything and threw in free shipping to boot.

So now they deal exclusively in sex toys, but because Tom is a total mensch, they do it their own wholesome way. Every year they put up a table at the Dirty Show, an annual erotic-art show here in Detroit, and raise money for charity. One year they offered “take a ride on the world’s largest vibrator” for $3, last year it was a claw machine called Mr. Grab Ass. (The joystick control was an actual joy stick, heh heh.)

You can imagine what his office is like. And it’s in this bland light-industrial park, which is to say, it’s in a light-industrial park, period. All light-industrial parks are bland; it’s like their designs are a competition for the most boring architects in the world. You could locate the CIA in a light-industrial park, and no one would ever find it. As he was walking me out, he pointed out the building next door, which was equally boring and beige and surrounded by boxy shrubs and nondescript trees. His neighbor, Tom said, makes some sort of custom-fabricated hot rod parts, and is considered the best in the world at it. So just in this one corner of this one industrial park, you have dildos and hot rods.

“What other secrets are lurking in this neighborhood?” I asked. And that’s the book idea: Secrets of the Light-Industrial Park: Adventures in American Capitalism.

I don’t particularly want to write it. But who knows, maybe someday I will.

In the meantime, I’m collecting some thoughts on jewelry advertising this time of year. Later in the week.

Bloggage? “The Queen of Versailles” is on my watch-one-of-these-days list, especially so after reading Dave Weigel’s take on it. The story of how two Florida sharpies set out to build the largest residence in the U.S. gets sidetracked by something bigger, i.e., trouble in their time-share paradise:

The hard-selling Siegel employees try to convince their marks to buy time shares before said marks can do the math and realize the risks. We see one couple, both tattooed and glum-looking, grow more and more interested as they’re told that they can save thousands of dollars if, instead of booking motels every time they come to Vegas, they buy a time-share condo in the tower. Eventually, the husband pushes a credit card across the table. “I can’t believe we just did it!” he says, with little evident joy. He could do it because he had credit.

The Freep does a huge, year-end (i.e., awards-bait) project on the Packard plant here in Detroit. If you don’t want to wade through a million words, I can recommend the video, which is really well-done.

The WashPost has a great report on the Kennedy Center honors this year. Start at Led Zeppelin and follow the links to the rest.

The week begins! December already. How’d that happen?

It’s about that time…

One of my FB pals posted this trailer the other day. It’s for a documentary about Ginger Baker, the infamously crazy drummer for Cream. Very entertaining, it looks like, but language a little salty for most offices:

The New York Times review of “Beware of Mr. Baker” — hey, did I mention I was a Cream fan? — makes it sound right up my alley:

Right at the beginning of the new documentary “Beware of Mr. Baker,” the film’s director, Jay Bulger, is attacked by his subject, the rock drummer Ginger Baker. Not verbally attacked, mind you — though there will be plenty of that — but physically, with a metal cane that draws blood when applied to the bridge of the filmmaker’s nose. Mr. Baker, whom we will subsequently encounter in less agitated moods, is upset about the direction of Mr. Bulger’s project.

…Mr. Baker has never been, to understate the matter, an easy person to get along with, a point that “Beware of Mr. Baker” returns to as it follows him through four marriages, at least a half-dozen bands, roughly one million cigarettes and countless burned bridges. Animated sequences depict a ship, rowed by the drummer’s red-haired avatars, zigzagging the globe — from London to Nigeria to Los Angeles and other spots on the way to his current home in South Africa — leaving a trail of not entirely metaphorical smoldering wreckage.

People who are extremely gifted at something are often monsters, a theme that’s been explored about a million times but never seems to get old. But there’s something about drummers, too. Is it the constant banging that makes them nuts, or are nutty people drawn to bang on things? I have a good memory for odd fragments of this and that, and Roy Edroso once made a remark in passing about drummers, by way of noting the passing of James Brown:

All jokes aside, it has been my experience that the drummers who conform to stereotype are the ones who just can’t do anything else (just as it’s always the monomaniacal cooks who are the crazy ones) — but if they have anything besides paradiddles rattling around in their noggins, they are usually quite brilliant, and typically exacting when put in charge of group endeavors. The great drummers I’ve worked with — Andy Malm, Ray Sage, Sally Barry, Billy Ficca — all have wide-ranging interests and very short tempers. They love a groove, but they despise a mess.

I’m going to try to add more to this tomorrow, but for now, I’m a limp heap.

Man, you should see the moon right now, sailing over the eastern sky with its wingman, Jupiter. I’m told an eclipse is scheduled for later, but right now, I’m thinking sleep may get me before the show starts. I saw the moonset this morning on my way back from the gym, so I won’t feel bad about missing it. I’ve seen lunar eclipses before. Best ever: A summer night at Adrianne’s apartment in Fort Wayne, out on the third-floor deck. Warm night, reasonable hour for the show, and it never passed out of sight. Beginning, middle, end, wine, friends. Now that’s an eclipse.

Tonight: Cold. Catch you next time, Moonie.

I read something remarkable today, a conscientious objection to a book that’s been getting the full court press — “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.” It’s about children who are radically different from the parents who bore them, whether through disability or just difference. I’m not going to read it, having had Andrew Solomon’s earlier book about depression pushed pretty hard down my throat and just couldn’t last through it.

The thing I read today, in Slate, was a rebuke from the mother of a child with Down syndrome, but it’s not like every other similar essay you might have read. Cristina Nehring had her baby against all good sense (although without a prenatal diagnosis) and found her life upended, complicated by the fact her partner ran for the hills two weeks after his daughter’s birth. Nehring is honest enough to regard her life without the usual soft-focus adjectives, and has some rather startling insights:

Wherever she goes, she brings people together—imperiously gesturing to cantankerous couples to sit down together and lifting their palms onto each others’ thighs, reconciling warring classmates by joining their hands, and charming child-leery adults with flirty smiles and studious imitations of their idiosyncrasies. Her gifts are the opposite of my own: Where I am shy, she is bold; where I am good with (known) words, she is good with drama, dance, and music; where I am frightened of groups, she loves them, and the children in her preschool compete hard to sit by her side at lunchtime as the nurses in her hospital petitioned to be assigned to her room.

Am I “cheerily generalizing” as Solomon says of other Down syndrome parents, “from a few accomplishments” of my child? Perhaps I am. But one thing I’ve learned these last four years that possibly Solomon has not: All of our accomplishments are few. All of our accomplishments are minor: my scribblings, his book, the best lines of the best living poets. We embroider away at our tiny tatters of insight as though the world hung on them, when it is chiefly we ourselves who hang on them. Often a dog or cat with none of our advanced skills can offer more comfort to our neighbor than we can. (Think: Would you rather live with Shakespeare or a cute puppy?) Each of us has the ability to give only a little bit of joy to those around us. I would wager Eurydice gives as much as any person alive.

But that’s just the warmup:

It’s when Solomon turns to his own life after hundreds of pages of publicizing the diverse, disabled, and combative lives of others that his unreconstructed conventionality emerges most obviously—and his cowardice. When all is said and done, Solomon mainly wants to bank an A-1 baby. While quickly regretting the “economic privilege” required for the engineering of his perfect offspring, he becomes “extremely deliberate about the egg selection.” Having prepared the ground for his reproductive missions by marrying his partner in a “shot-gun wedding” at the ancestral estate of the late Diana, princess of Wales, Solomon sifts donor profiles, consults attorneys, and flies around the globe to negotiate optimal parenting conditions.

But when the boy is born and needs a not-uncommon 5-minute CT scan, Solomon is ready to flee. Not merely does he panic, but he finds himself “try[ing] hard not to love” his newborn and has visions of “giving him up into [the] care” of an institution. All this within moments of a very small question being raised about the perfection of his child. All this from the author of Far From the Tree.

Awaiting the birth of any child is a strange thing. Solomon’s book is in part predicated on this paradox that, in bringing children into the world, we’re committing to a lifelong relationship with a stranger. I remember trying, and failing, to buy baby clothes when I was pregnant. I couldn’t; it felt too much like clothing an abstraction. “I don’t know her yet,” I told people, and I hope some of them understood. (Fortunately, if you have generous friends, the drawers are generally full by the time the kid hits the ground.) But at the same time, I was committed to playing the hand I was dealt, even if all the cards were still facing down.

It’s really worth a read.

As is this, which raises the question: Why does anyone, anywhere, pay a second’s worth of attention to Donald Trump?

Donald Trump, the real-estate mogul and television personality, has taken aim at two high-profile charity leaders, criticizing them on Twitter for collecting too much in salaries and not spending enough on programs.

The tweets pointed to “reports” about the financial practices of the United States Fund for Unicef and the American Red Cross and have been widely shared by some of Mr. Trump’s 1.9-million followers.

The problem is that the figures are false.

You don’t say.

I’m not so naive as to believe Trump actually does his own tweeting, but I’d think Mr. Yer-Fired could hire a smarter social-media slave.

Speaking of things that aren’t surprising, Florida GOP leaders come clean:

A new Florida law that contributed to long voter lines and caused some to abandon voting altogether was intentionally designed by Florida GOP staff and consultants to inhibit Democratic voters, former GOP officials and current GOP consultants have told The Palm Beach Post.

Finally, a person earning $65,000 a year in Fort Smith, Ark., has more disposable income than a New York City resident earning a quarter mil.

Which sort of wraps up the no-surprise roundup. Hope your Thursday contains no unpleasant ones.

Our windows have been grimy for a while, and I’ve been trying to think of a solution that would involve me waking up one sunny morning to discover they were clean and shiny, one that wouldn’t require the household’s primary breadwinner to climb a ladder to the second floor. And lo, one was revealed to me when I saw a guy washing windows at the house across the street. He was obviously not the owner, and my steel-trap mind made the deduction — he was a window-washer.

A couple of phone calls later, he and his partner arrived at the house today, on a fine sunny morning. Washer No. 1 was morbidly obese. Washer No. 2 was older and walked as though he needed double hip replacements. The thought of either one on a ladder was a little heart-clutching, but as it turned out, they used their stealthy technique of “doing the outside from the inside” and managed to avoid it. Their copious compliments on our decorating choices made me feel a little better about them; everyone enjoys flattery. They got it all done and at the end, made a pitch for an every-six-months visit, which I guess I’ll go for, because who doesn’t want someone else to do that chore.

“All our clients are getting old,” Hip-Replacement Guy said. “The last one said she couldn’t see the dirt anymore, so why bother.”

I’ll take your place, old lady. I will keep this duo squirting and polishing into 2013.

If the stray dogs and cats of the world ever figure out what a soft touch I am, they’ll all develop hip problems and come a-calling.

A fascinating story to kick off the bloggage today, which it took me all day to read in bits and pieces — “The Lying Disease,” about a phenomenon I’ve read about before, but not in such detail. That is, Munchausen syndrome by internet. That is, people who fake illness on the internet. Fascinating, and another big swing for the fences by The Stranger. Gotta love an alt-weekly that still kicks it ol’-skool.

For you Michiganians, especially those with kids in schools, Bridge has a nice little package on the school-choice plans being rolled out this month. How choicey are these choices? Pretty choice-er-iffic:

Imagine a world where your teenage son chooses high school courses like picking dishes in a cafeteria – a serving of Advanced Placement chemistry in the white collar enclave across the river, Spanish online at the dining room table, an English class at the local community college, band at his home school.

Now imagine that same world, but where schools act less like cafeterias and more like department stores. Billboards promote quick high school math credits at an online branch. A new charter school operating in the old Sears building offers iPads to the first 100 students who enroll. Your son’s home public high school drops its football team in a downsizing caused by lost revenue from plummeting enrollment.

More here, and still more here.

Great moments in mugshots, local version.

Great Lakes at record lows. Arizona? If you ever entertained any thoughts about that trans-national water pipeline, better give ’em up now.

And now it’s Wednesday, and the week struggles over the hump, dragging me along. These post-holiday weeks are a bitch, ain’a?

Honestly, I shouldn’t be surprised that troll-bait like this keeps getting published, but being of perhaps a too-Panglossian temperament (at the moment, anyway), I am. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the war on men:

The so-called dearth of good men (read: marriageable men) has been a hot subject in the media as of late. Much of the coverage has been in response to the fact that for the first time in history, women have become the majority of the U.S. workforce. They’re also getting most of the college degrees. The problem? This new phenomenon has changed the dance between men and women.

…To say gender relations have changed dramatically is an understatement. Ever since the sexual revolution, there has been a profound overhaul in the way men and women interact. Men haven’t changed much – they had no revolution that demanded it – but women have changed dramatically.

In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.

Granted, this was on the Fox News website, which ain’t exactly the New Yorker. Granted, it’s post-election, when everyone is looking for things to fight about. But still, I read this and think, Really? Really?

There’s a whole mens-rights subculture on the internet that laps this stuff up like a kitty does cream. They’ve been around for a while. You know those dating services you see in the back of sketchy magazines offering Philippine and Russian brides with “traditional” ideas of how husbands should be treated? Meet their clients.

Truth be told, I’m wasting time thinking about this nonsense to avoid thinking about the garment-factory fire in Bangladesh — over 100 dead and has anyone compared it to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire yet? Because they should. Having spent at least part of the weekend looking over the wares available at local shopping malls — marveling that year after year, Forever 21’s clothes seem to get even cheaper — it does give one pause. Slate has been running excerpts now and then from Elizabeth Cline’s “Overdressed: The High Cost of Cheap Fashion,” and I’m thinking it’s time for a change. While I love a good cheap T-shirt as much as the next girl — and acknowledging it’s impossible to find domestically made clothes consistently — buying shit with Made In labels like this is sort of like buying cocaine. There’s a cheap high, and then you’re left with the realization that you’re supporting an icky industry.

So, it’s Monday and as usual, my day has been long and my patience is short. How about some easy bloggage?

A two-minute roundup of the best lines from “Liz & Dick.”

And with that, I’m making an exit. TV to catch up on, y’see.

I feared a lonesome Thanksgiving this year. Various obligations required us to stay here, and everybody else to stay where they were, and so it would just be the three of us on our own — along with all my dead Catholic relatives who frowned on small families (not that many, really). We considered even going out to eat, but those options were a) limited; and b) gross. So I bought a turkey breast, planned a tiny little feast, and waited for it to arrive.

And we had a pretty much perfect holiday. It was helped along by the weather, which was in the high 50s under blue skies. With the whole day to kill — the first rule of Nance’s Thanksgiving is that the food is served at the dinner hour, not at midday — we threw the bikes into the cars and headed for Belle Isle.

(Kate loves her leather jacket, yes.)

This wasn’t exercise as atonement for gluttony, but just a lazy lap of the island, with many stops for photography and sightseeing. Do you ever think we’ll build public works in this country with lovely designs details again? This is the lighthouse at the northeast end:

The teenager is into photographing graffiti these days, so of course we had to stop at the abandoned zoo…

…before winding up close to where we began, at the Scott Fountain.

You might see it bubbling away when the Pistons’ season extends past the freezing season. The networks have it in their beauty-shot bumper file; the fact the team plays about 40 miles away doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

And then it was home to watch the Lions lose and make all the chow. We ended the evening watching “Almost Famous” en famille. And if that isn’t a great holiday, I don’t know what is.

The warm feelings must have lasted, because at 9:30 a.m. Friday I found myself doing something I haven’t done in years, maybe decades — setting out to shop on Black Friday. No door-busting — I’m not insane — but just a stroll around the mall to sniff the air and see what the nation’s mall-based retailers thought worthy of my attention. Parking was a breeze. The place wasn’t even that crowded, although if you were fool enough to go into one of those 50%-off-everything-before-noon stores, you could find yourself waiting in line 40 minutes to try on a sweater.

What did I find? That malls are about as useful to me on Black Friday as they are the other 364 days of the year. But I did enjoy reading the windows, seeing if Bebe is still selling the Russian-prostitute look (yes), whether Macy’s is still inferior to all the stores it gobbled (yes), whether you can still find the horse picture (yes). The horse picture, you ask? Look around any fashion-marketing campaign, and sooner or later you’ll see a picture of a model in an elaborate evening gown, posing with a horse. I’ve never understood this picture; what is it saying? Someone call for a horse? or I told the stableboy I wanted to go riding in the morning, and what happens? I dress for dinner and there’s a knock on the damn door. or Would you walk this beast back to the barn? The path is muddy and these are $700 shoes.

When I owned a horse, I learned that wearing a white T-shirt to the barn directly increased the chance he would sneeze on me. An evening gown probably would have provoked a fecal explosion.

And now the week begins anew. I’m writing this on my birthday (Sunday) and I accept all your tributes, those already offered and the ones you forgot. Not you — the other guy.

So, bloggage?

I’ve been quiet on the subject of Black Friday doorbuster madness, ever since reading Hank Stuever’s “Tinsel” and realizing how many people shop BF sales because they have more people on their lists than their budget will accommodate. Now, we can take apart the whole idea of over-shopping, but for now, I choose to simply abstain from getting all hot and bothered over it. Still, when someone posted the worst of the BF Walmart mosh pit videos scored with heavy metal, I gotta tell ya — I laffed.

My insomnia had me up at an insane hour Sunday, and I think I read the whole internet, from Kim Kardashian’s butt to this George Will column. I haven’t bothered to see what this braying ass has to say about anything in quite a while, so I’m not sure what I expected, but I guess I wasn’t surprised:

In any case, the crisis of Hostess Brands Inc., the maker of Twinkies, involves two potent lessons.

First, market forces will have their way. Second, never underestimate baby-boomer nostalgia, which is acute narcissism. The Twinkies melodrama has the boomers thinking — as usual, about themselves: If an 82-year-old brand can die, so can we. Is that even legal?

Oh, very droll. That, right-chere, is what you call SPARKLE.

Finally, I’m sorry to say that Angel, the rescue pup referenced in the Thanksgiving post, didn’t make it, and died that very day. Andi, however, continues to thrive. I know a few of you kicked her some money, so you should know her ribs are disappearing, and it looks like she had a very good Thanksgiving indeed:

Let’s lurch on into the holidays together — I hope the mellowness of the weekend continues all the way through.

He was singing “Hail to the Victors,” and closed with a raspberry to “those cheaters, Ohio State.”

Here’s something to be thankful for: Remember Andy Didorosi, and the scrawny pit bull he found on the street a few days back? Probably not, because I underplayed the link here, so here’s the nutshell:

Andy is a guy I wrote about for Bridge. He got this crazy idea to open a bus company in Detroit, and that’s what he’s doing — shuttling barflies around on the weekends, keeping a few drunk drivers off the road, hosting a rolling party. So the other night, he finds this starving dog huddled by the side of the road. He tempted her onto the bus with a can of Alpo and started the work of figuring out what could be done for her. If you follow that first link, you’ll see she had a very tough few days — having recently given birth (puppies likely stillborn), she had mastitis, intestinal blockages and was starved down to bones and hide.

But they got her taken care of, and now she seems to be on the road back to health, gaining weight and strength. She’s Andy’s dog now. Her name? Andi.

Besides spreading the news within his own social network, he attracted some attention from the Free Press, which did a story. Now, you journos in the audience know that nothing opens readers’ wallets like a dog story, and the reporter included a link to the Paypal donation address. He ended up collecting several thousand more than he could possibly spend on Andi’s care, especially now that she’s out of the woods.

Last night, it came up on my Facebook — a new rescue. Those of you who aren’t on FB might not be able to see that page, which is about Angel, a dog even more abused and close to the edge than Andi. She needed emergency surgery tonight, and the last time I checked, it looked like she’s very close to death, but who knows? Andi was pretty sick a few days ago.

When a lot of people drop $7,000 and change into your bank account, you have to do the right thing. I’m glad Andy’s doing it.

And now that it’s Wednesday? I’m thankful the holiday is nigh. I’m getting the Friday after Thanksgiving off for the first time in years, and friends? I’m looking forward to it.

No links today, and happy Thanksgiving to all. I’ll be back Monday, unless I see some good photo posts between then and now.