For those of you asking, yes this stuff exists and yes you can buy it:

And that is Basset’s hand and he must have been bored up in that tree stand because he made several comments here and sent me this picture. It’s getting to where Da Yoopers’ version of deer season needs an update to feature Twitter and shaming photos:

Whatever else happened yesterday, I hope Basset got himself one. Although the weather is pretty damn perfect for spending another day out in it, if he’s so inclined.

I’m thinking a can of that deer pee would make an excellent mischief-making aid. I bet they sell a lot to frat boys exploring new frontiers in hazing.

Did anyone watch “The Dust Bowl?” I have to admit — sometimes Ken Burns gets on my nerves, but this one dragged me in. The photography alone was awe-inspiring; I simply can’t imagine what it must have been like, seeing one of those terrible clouds bearing down. If it’s on a replay anywhere near you, I recommend it. Steel yourself for many dead children, however. Not easy.

I have a feeling this week will be a pretty light-duty sort of stretch, but yes, there’s some bloggage:

The faces of medical marijuana.

Leslie Mann, the least-funny comic actress in Hollywood today. Nepotism is an irritating thing.

And that’s it for me.

I cannot write much today, for I fear I have been flattened by a cultural juggernaut. Kate’s birthday present from her aunt in Defiance was a ticket to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra Sunday afternoon, in Toledo. Of course we went, too.

Living in a lefty NPR cultural cocoon as I do, these things tend to take me by surprise. Terry Gross keeps me up on the latest interesting lesbian singer-songwriters, but a group that’s sold more tickets than the gross national product of Tanzania? I say, “Oh, is it a Russian thing? Sure, we’ll go.”

Truth be told, I wasn’t quite that ignorant, but I didn’t know much. Christmas. Synthesizers. That’s about it.

(Alan, too. We were eating lunch before he realized this wasn’t Mannheim Steamroller we were about to see.)

Three hours later, having had my hair blown back by something that resembled Emerson, Lake and Palmer meets Disney by way of the Super Bowl halftime show, I can say: Ignorant no more! Lasers, snow, a story hokey enough to embarrass Red Skelton read from the stage, more lasers, acrobatic fiddlin’, hair-flippin’ chick singers, hair-flippin’ male guitarists, a salute to the troops and am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah: FIRE. Tons of fire. And fireworks! The house lights came up in a haze so thick the smoke alarms kept going off, and I have to think someone was keeping the sprinkler system on manual override — otherwise we’d all have been soaked.

I’m no photographer, but one crappy cellphone shot from the cheap seats:

And while I’m sure Dave Weigel would never count them among his beloved prog-rock practitioners, you can’t deny the influence.

Walking out, listening to the chatter, I gathered many in the audience come to this thing every year. Well, the Rockettes can’t go everywhere.

And it was fun.

Otherwise, it was a good weekend. Birthdays — the world an always use a little more cake.

Bloggage? Sure, some:

“What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it?” — Garry Wills on guess-who.

I have nothing to say about Hostess, except that I don’t eat that crap myself. Twinkies. Bleh.

A short week for most of us, I expect. Enjoy it, whatever its length.

There was this woman who worked in Columbus for a time when I was there. Two women, actually. Both were young and quite pretty, which by newsroom standards made them practically Victoria’s Secret models. I think it’s safe to say both had their immediate (male) supervisors buffaloed, which is a little duh-you-don’t-say, but as someone who’s never been able to do that, it rankled a bit.

But only a bit. Both were far outside my orbit, so I was able to observe them both rather dispassionately.

Both were excellent at one key skill — seeming really busy. They bustled around, arms full of three-ring binders, pencils held in their mouths like a horse’s bit, hair prettily askew. They seemed barely contained. Oh my god I can’t believe how much I have to do, etc. They went to meetings. They leaned in close to talk to you. They contained multitudes. They vibrated with energy. (That men might find this attractive was something I’d never even considered until William Hurt essentially told Holly Hunter it was a huge turn-on in “Broadcast News.”)

One was working on a reporting project that was going to blow off lids. The other was launching a new section. Only the project landed with a dull, wet thud and the section editor ended up in the ER just hours before D-day, being treated for “stress” and seemingly clamped in a sustained anxiety attack.

I hadn’t thought of either of them in years, until I read this passage in a story about Paula Broadwell, posted yesterday in comments. Sorry for the length, but I need this whole passage to illustrate something.

One of Broadwell’s former professors at Harvard described her as a self-promoter who would routinely show up at office hours.

“It was very much, ‘I’m here and you’re going to know I’m here,’” said the professor, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of ongoing investigations. “She was not someone you would think of as a critical thinker. I don’t remember anything about her as a student. I remember her as a personality.”

The professor said when Petraeus chose Broadwell to write his biography, there was shock among the national security faculty at Harvard because “she just didn’t have the background — the academic background, the national security background, or the writing background.”

A second Harvard faculty member who knows Broadwell and Petraeus had similar misgivings.

At one point, Broadwell said she was leaving the doctorate track because she was over­extended and didn’t have time to complete the coursework, recounted the professor, who was not authorized to speak to the press.

Broadwell later complained that the writing project on Petraeus was not going well.

“She was a lot of talk but not a lot of follow-through,” said the second professor, who described Broadwell’s struggle to deliver on the biography as “deeply embarrassing” to the Kennedy School. “That is why she brought on a co-author,” Vernon Loeb, an editor at the Washington Post.

Stipulated: It is the height of shittiness to say stuff like this behind the cloak of anonymity, and all that “the sensitivity of the investigation” and “not being authorized to speak to the press” is just a fancy way of being shitty. But if any of it is to be believed, it appears Broadwell was cut from the same cloth as these other women, born cute and smart and energetic, a city girl who seemed to find out early how to open doors with just a smile.

Broadwell was by any measure a superachiever, but she wouldn’t be the first woman defeated by a long-form writing project.

You want to know the punchline of this one? Check it:

Nonetheless, Harvard embraced Broadwell as a distinguished alumna after “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus” became a New York Times bestseller this year. On Sept. 10, the Kennedy School included Broadwell on an alumni panel of accomplished public servants and the next day hosted a forum at which she discussed her book.

Fuckers. Speaking of lyin’ eyes.

So. The weekend awaits. A little bloggage before I go? Sure.

This has been around for a while, and I know I said I was moving beyond the election, but “Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people” is too good a rant not to take note of:

My wife and I are quite familiar with America’s healthcare system due to our professions, and having lived abroad extensively, also very aware of comparable systems. Your party’s insistence on declaring the private U.S. healthcare system “the best in the world” fails nearly every factual measure available to any curious mind. We watch our country piss away 60% more expenditures than the next most expensive system (Switzerland) for health outcomes that rival former Soviet bloc nations. On a personal scale, my wife watches poor WORKING people show up in emergency rooms with fourth-stage cancer because they were unable to afford primary care visits. I have watched countless small businesses unable to attract talented workers because of the outrageous and climbing cost of private insurance. And I watch European and Asian businesses outpace American companies because they can attract that talent without asking people to risk bankruptcy and death. That you think this state of affairs is somehow preferable to “Obamacare,” which you compared ludicrously to Trotskyite Russian communism, is a sign of deficient minds unfit to guide health policy in America.

Thanks, Eric Zorn.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must rest for a day of reportin’, writin’ and birthday-cake-bakin’ tomorrow. It’s a big day at our house, Nov. 16:

Hope your weekend is pleasant.

With all due respect to David Simon, I’m still paying attention to the Petraeus story. It’s not about where the general stashed his bayonet any more, if it ever was — it’s about total, jaw-dropping, WTFuckery like this:

In February 2010, a gossip column in The Tampa Bay Times reported that Mr. Petraeus and his wife arrived escorted by 28 police officers on motorcycles to a pirate-themed party at the Kelleys’ home, to mark Tampa’s Gasparilla Pirate Fest, an annual event.

And this:

In the phone call to authorities, Jill Kelley, a party hostess and unofficial social liaison for leaders of the U.S. military’s Central Command in Tampa, cited her status as an honorary consul general while complaining about news vans that had descended on her two-story brick home overlooking Tampa Bay.

“You know, I don’t know if by any chance, because I’m an honorary consul general, so I have inviolability, so they should not be able to cross my property. I don’t know if you want to get diplomatic protection involved as well,” she told the 911 dispatcher Monday.

And this, this and this:

I can’t get over that head-tilt thing. Spy magazine once published a montage of photos of Ivana Trump, who, whenever a camera was aimed at her, would push her knees together and swivel one calf out to the side. Of course you want to show off your good side, but please.

Throw in the shady charity, and you realize this whole thing could have been touched off by a parking ticket. It was just waiting to fall.

Any links today? Why…no, I don’t think so. Just the usual phoned-in crap. Have a nice day.

Every year around this time, my friend Connie, who curates a monthly short-film fest, devotes one month’s program to zombies. Tonight was Zombie Night, and I went. One hour and 40 minutes of splattering, moaning and head-smashing. And that was just the audience. Ha, a joke. But seriously — making a film might make you a filmmaker, but it doesn’t make you a good one. I grew very weary of guns and guts, although there were some nice moments — a couple playing bedroom games, a little girl who cooks a meal (or ten) for a visiting ghoul. The point is, some people simply love zombies. And for that, many makeup artists will have long careers.

But I am weary. And I would like to go to bed. So here is a link or two, eh?

Best restaurant review I’ve read since maybe ever, of Guy Fieri’s 500-seat Times Square hog trough. I don’t want to spoil it for you — just read.

One of my former neighbors in Fort Wayne is a tattoo artist, emphasis on the artistry. Although I’m never going to get one myself, his work always seemed a cut above to me. The shop he co-owns with his brother has a new website, and as good as Dominick’s work is, his brother’s is amazing. If I could be assured my skin would never stretch or sag in any way, I’d consider getting that Bettie Page somewhere. And that’s the highest praise I’m capable of.

Time for bed. Night, all.

On edit: I forgot to include this appalling story, about a woman who died in an Irish hospital for want of the D&C that would have cleared the doomed, 17-week fetus she was in the process of miscarrying. I know the election’s over and the idiots lost, but let’s be reminded once more that these things happen all the time, and to refuse a woman in this position is the most repulsive sort of “pro-life” advocacy.

I’m not normally in town on Mondays, but I was this week, which happened to intersect with THE DARKEST SHAME OF MY LIFE, the every-other-week visit from my cleaning woman. Neither one of us wants me here while she’s working, and somehow I ended up at the newly opened McDonald’s in my neighborhood. They promised, when it was on the drawing board, that they wanted it to become a Starbucky gathering place, with free wifi, so I figured I’d take them up on it.

How many here have ever put on the paper hat of McDonald’s? I know, it’s a visor now, but it was a paper hat when most of us here were likely to work there. Working at Mickey D’s is the classic American first job, and I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve known who earned their first paychecks dishing up fries. I’m now mellow enough that I don’t mind little mistakes in my orders, figuring they’re payback on the millions of mistakes I’ve made in my own work.

This McDonald’s is in Detroit, and of course Detroit is an African-American city, so most of the kids working there are, as well. Also, Grosse Pointe kids get their first jobs clerking for Supreme Court justices or caddying for General Motors board members. Today, this crew is being overseen by a middle-aged woman, black, a clone of every other manager or assistant manager in every other McDonald’s in this part of the world.

When my friend Deb’s son was getting his training at his local McD’s, one of these women came into the room where they were learning the closing procedure and food-handling procedure and all the rest of it. It’s a lot for a 16-year-old to take in. She was carrying a tray filled with french fries. “MAC-Donald’s kicking y’all’s butts yet? How about something to eat.”

The woman Monday afternoon was shepherding her young workers with that mix of absolute authority and indulgent maternal instinct so necessary in this particular environment. One blocked an aisle I was trying to walk through, and she barked, “Make ROOM for this lady — she’s a customer!” before turning back to the kid she was sitting down with.

“Do you know your schedule?” she asked him.

“Um, yeah,” the kid said. Pause. “I think.”

“Tell it to me,” she ordered.

“Saturday, 3-9,” he tried.

“And Sunday?”

“The same?”

“That’s right, honey. You’re doing good.”

It cannot be easy to run one of these places. You’re always hiring, always training, always ready to step in when one of your teenage workers decides not to show up on Saturday, having not yet learned the courtesy of two weeks’ notice. The owner of Zingerman’s once described dishwashing positions as something that change on almost an hourly basis, and any restaurant owner too good to handle that duty isn’t long for the business. You don’t have that problem at McDonald’s, but you better not be too proud to make coffee and shake salt over the fries.

I passed the time writing a letter of recommendation for one of my former students, now trying to get into Berkeley’s documentary program. The advantage of dealing with digital files is, the selection committee won’t be able to see grease smears on the paper.

The kid who took my order was obviously a greenhorn, but like I said: No biggie. The time to worry is when people who are plainly overqualified for the work start turning up behind the counter. During the absolute worst of the recession, I had my bags at Trader Joe’s packed by a guy who took enormous care to use every inch of space wisely. I walked out with two perfectly balanced bags and thought God, I hope this man didn’t go to engineering school.

So. How was your Monday? I see the Petraeus story is getting weirder (and more understandable) by the day, now that we know it features that fixture of Washington scandal — a man sending around shirtless photos of himself:

A federal agent who launched the investigation that ultimately led to the resignation of Central Intelligence Agency chief David Petraeus was barred from taking part in the case over the summer due to superiors’ concerns that he had become personally involved in the case, according to officials familiar with the probe.

New details about how the Federal Bureau of Investigation handled the case suggest that even as the bureau delved into Mr. Petraeus’s personal life, the agency had to address questionable conduct by one of its own—including allegedly sending shirtless photos of himself to a woman involved in the case.

May I just offer this word of advice to the men of the world — from Detroit judges to U.S. Congressmen — who feel compelled to send seminude photos of yourself to women you want to bag? Don’t. It doesn’t work. Women appreciate a nice-looking man, sure, but our brains don’t really work like that. Yours do, but not ours. Send a funny note instead, or an iTunes mix, or whatever. She’ll thank you, and you’ll be less likely to end up famous for the wrong reason.

On a more serious note, a Q&A with an expert on education policy worldwide. We’re doing it wrong:

When we think about market mechanisms in education, we think about managing consumer demand. It’s all about school choice.

And then you look at Shanghai, which also believes in market mechanisms, but has a totally different strategy. They operate on the supply side. What Shanghai has done is create incentives to attract the most talented teachers into the most challenging classrooms. And to get the best principals into the toughest schools. It’s the same kind of philosophy, based on market mechanisms. But they turned the problem on its head and achieved a remarkable improvement in educational outcomes.

Having dispensed with Monday — during which Sunday’s 70-degree temperatures fell 35 degrees — Tuesday is looking far better. Let’s hope so.

I don’t hang out in Grand Haven on a Sunday afternoon in November just for grins. Kate is preparing for an adventure — three weeks in Europe next summer with the international program at her summer camp. Not a bad deal, touring the Continent, playing jazz, staying with the locals. For us, it means a number of weekends between then and now being her Sherpas for the required rehearsals. After we dump the amp and the instrument — and the musician — we are at liberty. And on a lovely, warm day.

So we went to the water:

And then we went to the woods:

This was all within the same state park. Pure Michigan. About a minute after I took that last picture, two sizable does bounded across the path in front of us, having a little frolic before gun season opens Thursday.

And then we had lunch at a nice little diner in Grand Haven, which had that empty look tourist towns get in the off-season. We went into one store and the owner nearly tackled us, introducing us personally to every item of inventory. We escaped with one jar of blueberry jam. Eight bucks. So who won that one? I’d say the guy who got $8.

The walk in the woods was calming. I’m trying to stop slicing off piece after piece of schadenfreude pie, but man, is it good, and every time I see Karl Rove’s face, I must read whatever type surrounds it. But I think I’m done now. (Please, I’m so full. No more pie.) But please, don’t offer my any more. I’m not safe around that stuff.

Instead, how about a good old people-suck story about hazing? It’ll strip your good feelings about your fellow man, I guarantee.

What news I did read this weekend was about Cloak and Shag-Her, to use the NYPost’s outstanding headline on day one of the Petraeus story. When Alan told me this woman was push-up girl, much became clear. Someone tell me: At what age do men stop chasing poontang over a cliff?

Have a good week, all.

His sister said he always wanted to drive it.

I have a long post I’ve been throwing links into a pile for, but I keep getting beaten to the punch by people who are smarter and actually do this for a living. Both Dick Morris and Haley Barbour came out in the last two days with their own personal theories of how the president won re-election, and boy, is he a lucky guy:

Haley Barbour, who served as Mississippi governor when Hurricane Katrina hit his state, asserted Thursday that “Hurricane Sandy saved Barack Obama’s presidency.”

“It broke the momentum that Romney had coming in to the end of October,” the former chairman of the Republican National Committee told TODAY’s Matt Lauer.

He at least gives a nod to the country’s changing demography, before course-correcting:

But the more proximate cause of my error was that I did not take full account of the impact of hurricane Sandy and of Governor Chris Christie’s bipartisan march through New Jersey arm in arm with President Obama. Not to mention Christe’s fawning promotion of Obama’s presidential leadership.

It made all the difference.

Neither has a shred of data to support these contentions. This is just one of those Things They Know By Virtue of Being Lavishly Paid Sages.

The biggest lesson of this week has been: Don’t trust guys like this. I have a feeling there will be a lot of contracts quietly expiring once the spotlights dim. The new negotiation will be, “Dick, can you do math? No? Good luck with the rest of your career.”

There’s a sub-theme here, too — that demography is the new decider. And while it has a lot of truth to it, it’s subtler than a few glib talking points. I think, of all people, John Cook at Gawker sort of nails it here:

One of the reasons the right-wing “brown people won” argument is so irksome is the implication that nonwhite votes don’t really count in the way white ones do. That white people vote based on logic and argumentation, and are persuadable, but nonwhites just press the “D” button and wait for their Obamaphones. That appealing to white votes and nonwhite votes are fundamentally different things. We would have won—we had more votes, but they had the blacks. What are you gonna do?

This is vile. All votes are the same. Persuading an African-American to vote for increasing taxes on the wealthy is precisely the same as persuading a white voter. Every Latino who cares about the treatment of illegal immigrants in this country and so voted for Obama did so for the same reason I did. There’s no difference between us. But the giddiness among the left over the racial coalition Obama built sometimes strikes me as uncomfortably close to eliding that fundamental equality, and regarding nonwhite votes as gimmes that don’t require persuasion. And it subtly ghettoizes those nonwhite voters, splintering issues of national importance into slivers of self-interest. Obama didn’t win because Latino voters want immigration reform. He won because more Americans want immigration reform than don’t.

Matt Yglesias plays variations on the theme:

Pundits are quickly turning to immigration to explain the Republicans’ Latino problem and to offer a possible cure, but the reality is that the rot cuts much deeper. The GOP doesn’t have a problem with Latino voters per se. Rather, it has a problem with a broad spectrum of voters who simply don’t feel that it’s speaking to their economic concerns. The GOP has an economic agenda tilted strongly to the benefit of elites, and it has preserved support for that agenda—even though it disserves the majority of GOP voters—with implicit racial politics.

He goes on to discuss Sonia Sotomayor, who some National Review wag suggested should pronounce her name “Soda-meyer” like an American, dammit.

Well. It’s the end of the week. Let us all let the weekend cleanse away its grime, bank its passionate fires, and ease us into Middle Fall and the inevitable run-up to the holidays. Let me leave you with a link you house-freaks should like — the rescue of a great Detroit house, lavishly illustrated with photos.

See you all Monday.

I remember working early the morning after George W. Bush was re-elected. I was on the copy-desk rim, as they say, and the editor-in-chief was consulting with the design editor over the front-page design. Once upon a time on mornings like this, editors looked over their underlings’ shoulders as the finishing touches were being done on the main story. But by 2004, it was all about design, er, “presentation.”

The presentation that day featured a giant, enormous, sea-to-shining-sea headline that said, simply, W. Only huge:

W.

But a lot bigger. It looked like a propaganda poster, which is sort of what it was.

That was a fairly shitty period in my life — back in Indiana after my magical year in Ann Arbor, working a job I didn’t want, thanks to the very woman who was standing next to my desk cooing over this stupid headline. George W. Bush had been returned to office, even though the war he started was going about as badly as these things can go, having done so in part by painting an actual Vietnam veteran as some sort of hybrid coward/rich punk, which is sort of hilariously ironic when you think about it.

I recall reading the page proofs that morning with a grim, sour cloud hanging over my head. But even though Twitter didn’t exist then, and Facebook was only a kooky toy for those with a harvard.edu email address, I can’t imagine going online and posting some of the histrionics I’ve been reading today.

Please, don’t make me go looking for links. I’ve been dipping in and out all day — Facebook, Twitter, blogs, comments here and there. The country has been delivered into the hands of the Muslim enemy, and the end of freedom is nigh and I hope you all enjoy your free stuff, freeloaders. And so on. I had a few chats through the course of the day that sum up how I feel today, but you probably heard the gist if you paid any attention to the news today.

We’ll see.

I was in Lansing all day working on Bridge’s day-after package, and I am — I know I say this every day lately — a bit wrung out. I’ll be popping in and out with some of the things that came up over the course of this crazy last few weeks for a while, I think. For now, let me share some of the very fine links I saw today, on this day o’ many links.

I think this was the best of the bunch, about how the right-wing echo chamber collapsed in upon itself and created its own reality, which wasn’t, um, reality:

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because Romney supporters like Jennifer Rubin and Hugh Hewitt saw it as their duty to spin constantly for their favored candidate rather than being frank about his strengths and weaknesses. What conservative Washington Post readers got, when they traded in Dave Weigel for Rubin, was a lot more hackery and a lot less informed about the presidential election.

Conservatives were at an information disadvantage because so many right-leaning outlets wasted time on stories the rest of America dismissed as nonsense. WorldNetDaily brought you birtherism. Forbes brought you Kenyan anti-colonialism. National Review obsessed about an imaginary rejection of American exceptionalism, misrepresenting an Obama quote in the process, and Andy McCarthy was interviewed widely about his theory that Obama, aka the Drone Warrior in Chief, allied himself with our Islamist enemies in a “Grand Jihad” against America. Seriously?

Conservatives were at a disadvantage because their information elites pandered in the most cynical, self-defeating ways, treating would-be candidates like Sarah Palin and Herman Cain as if they were plausible presidents rather than national jokes who’d lose worse than George McGovern.

More on the same theme, from Andrew Sullivan, not one of my faves, but he makes some good points here, but note where he pulls out the out-of-context quoting of an Obama statement.

Can we get a little crazy up in here? OK, here’s David Gelernter. Two paragraphs, and he manages to demand we REPLACE OUR SCHOOLS AND COLLEGES NOW. Doesn’t he work for Yale?

Gerrymandering made visible. I live in one of these districts now. It doesn’t make me happy.

The poisonous right wing:

But even a clumsy candidate might have beaten Obama if not for a simple factor that could not be overcome: the GOP’s growing extremism. The Republican strategy of making the election a referendum on the president’s handling of the economy was perfectly sound. The problem was that the Republican Party couldn’t pass the credibility test itself. For many voters disenchanted with Obama, it still was not safe to vote for his opponent.

Yeah.

More tomorrow, when I’ve had seven whole hours of sleep. Until then, enjoy drunk Diane Sawyer.