On Election Day, I woke up at my current ridiculous hour — 5 a.m. After I read the entire Internet and a chapter from Friday’s book-club selection (“The Leisure Seeker,” Michael Zadoorian) I laid in a puddle of self-loathing, watching a debate between my angel and devil. By now it was 6:45.

Hey, fatty. You should be exercising. This book isn’t that good.

But my knee hurts.

Your knee hurts because you don’t exercise. It’s a loop.

And then, just to make sure the angel and devil would be joined by a third visual cliché, a light bulb appeared over my head. (How did cartoonists illustrate “I just had an idea” before Thomas Edison? Candles?) I know: I will get up and walk briskly to my polling place! It’s not exactly an eight-mile run, but my knee hurts. It’s something. Better than nothing.

And so I got up and pulled on a few layers and headed out, looking frankly a little rumply and just-out-of-beddy. As I drew closer to city hall I reflected on the genius of this plan, as I’d be able to enter via a different door and bypass the sign-wavers in the parking lot, at least some of whom I’d know. Then I saw the parking lot. It was full. Those people couldn’t possibly all be waiting to vote, could they?

They could. And were. Even with more machines than I’ve ever seen, it was almost a 30-minute wait to vote. I filled out my ballot with grim purpose and started home, striving for a sweet spot for the footfall to not make every step say ouch. I detoured through the alley because of construction on a storefront, and saw what appeared at a distance to be a fried-chicken thigh lying near a dumpster. (I was behind the Chicken Shack.) As I grew closer, it revealed itself: A wallet.

A wallet with a credit card, and an EBT card, and a little bit of cash, and a driver’s license. I went around to the construction crew: Anybody here named Aaron? No. So I walked back to city hall and turned it in to the police. Regular readers who haven’t been bored into stupefaction may recall I lost my own wallet a few years ago, and it was delivered back to my door, intact, by a kind soul. This was not just a lost wallet, but a chance to repay a karmic debt.

I also found the guy on Facebook, and messaged him. Did what I can. When a guy’s getting food stamps, he can’t afford to lose his wallet.

I’m writing this while watching election returns come in, but it’s early. I have to be up at oh-dark-nothing to get to Lansing for the post-election stuff, and it’s likely I’ll be asleep by the time this thing is called, so this may have to be an open-thread day. Just in case there are a few of you who would like to discuss anything else, some conversation-starters:

A starving-dog story with a twist, involving the Detroit Bus Company, which I wrote about for Bridge a few weeks ago.

A few months ago, something took me into the vortex of Timothy Ferriss, author of the “four-hour” bullshit franchise. Want to get rich and not work too hard? Buy “The Four-Hour Work Week.” Did you know you can be fit and strong and have a six-pack? No? Why, you must not have read “The Four-Hour Body.” I hear that in the latter volume, Ferriss claims he can give a woman a 15-minute orgasm. Your initial reaction may be mine: Who the hell wants one of those? (I’m kind of with Woody Allen on the orgasm question — mine have all been right on the money.) Without having read the books, I feel I can safely say he’s full of shit, not just for the 15-minute orgasm claim, but also because it’s said that this man weighs his own feces for some health-related reason. So when I heard his latest book, some other four-hour thing, is not having a very easy time of it, all I could think was, it couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.

Finally, remember 2 Live Crew? “Me So Horny,” Tipper Gore, all that stuff? He’s settled down, as we all tend to do with age. What’s he doing now? Coaching high-school football. Interesting guy. Good story.

Now to schedule this post and wait for the news to roll in. Fingers crossed for all my votes, and yours, too.

UPDATE: OK, I’m still up. Mourdock just ate dirt in Indiana. I may need to survive on coffee tomorrow.

I have the bestest readers in the world. One of you guys — someone I’ve known since junior high school, who sometimes comments here as MarcG — read yesterday’s blog and got into his photo albums. Turns out Marc was one of the revelers up north a time or two. That balcony at the yacht club? He sent a picture:

And just so’s you can why all the girls thought Marc was just the cutest thing, even when he was a little overserved, here’s Himself:

Now he lives in Latvia. Take note, eastern European girls. And thanks for scanning your photos, Marc, so I didn’t have to.

Today was, shall we say, not a top-tenner. Out the driveway bright and early, arrived in Lansing at 8 a.m., only to discover the internet was out. You don’t know how much you use the internet until it’s not around anymore. Derek went off to work at home, and Ron and I sat around reading “limp iPads,” as they call those paper things with news printed on them, until it became clear the ‘net wasn’t coming back anytime soon. So we both went home, only I had to drive 100 miles back in the other direction. I was back in my kitchen by noon, and celebrated having evaded the I-96 sniper twice in one day by having a cup of leftover chili and putting my feet up to read the news. Ninety minutes later, I woke up. That hardly ever happens, but when it does, it’s unnerving. My last conscious thought was how good a nice hot cup of chili feels in your tummy on a chilly day. I think the sniper was the least dangerous thing on my commute today.

After that, I sent 400 emails, give or take. If you got one, rest assured I gave it my full attention.

So, today? It’s the big day. Let’s make this a what-happened-at-your-polling-place thread. (Of course, pipe up if Llewd’s scrotum turns up.) I hit my absolute limit yesterday, and after one cycle through the NPR headlines, opted for “Birth of the Cool” on the drive. Played it twice. Great album.

This seemed to be the alternative.

November seems to have made its entrance — gray skies and 40s for the foreseeable future. And, of course, daylight saving time bid us farewell, which means black skies outside at dinner time and sigh oh well.

I spent part of the weekend cleaning the basement. Didn’t get it all done, but enough that I felt progress happened. One of the boxes I pushed into the maybe-get-rid-of pile was one of Alan’s 45s. Before any of you squawk, rest assured he already did, and they’re going back on the shelf to never be listened to for another decade. I know I could dig up an adapter and play them on our turntable, but I’d have to change them every 2:30 minutes, and that gets old.

We also have quite a few 78s, and those have never been played in my presence. They were Alan’s dad’s, a collection he started before going off to fight for his country. During his absence, he always said, his brother Dick took the best ones and “traded them for some hillbilly records.” I pulled a random folder off the shelf; it says “record album” on its front, and that’s why we call them that — they once were stored in sleeves in these books, just like photos.

Opened the cover: “St. James Infirmary” by Cab Calloway & His Orchestra. There were a few of Harry James, playing with that special young singer, Frank Sinatra. I wondered where we’d find a modern turntable that would spin that fast, and remembered my all-time favorite 78 rpm memory.

[Zoom in on spinning record label, soften focus; harp glissandos.]

A bunch of us are in the Upper Peninsula, at my friends Paul and Mark’s cottage. Technically, we’re down the path at the Les Cheneaux Yacht Club, which is a big boathouse with a second floor. We’re the only ones there. There’s a balcony that overlooks a big bay, and out to Middle Entrance, where the big lake starts and there’s nothing to see but water and horizon forever.

We’re here, in fact, and if you look in the satellite view, I put the pin at the end of the dock, but we’re in that building. Zoom out and see the vast lake, imagine half a dozen young people in that club, late at night, probably a little buzzed because that’s what we did at night up there. We’re sitting on the balcony in the inky night, the weak radio station has dissolved into static, and someone mentions there’s a Victrola in the room behind us. An original, probably been there since that was the only way to hear recorded music. Paul cranks it up, and puts on the first record he grabs — “Deep in the Heart of Texas,” warbled by some cowgirl singer, maybe even Dale Evans herself.

The song starts to unfold, with all the pops and low-fidelity fiddles and guitars, the girl’s voice over all of it. We’re happy, clapping along where you’re supposed to: The stars at night are big and bright clap clap clap clap deep in the heart of Texas. They can’t possibly be as bright as they are here, miles and miles from anything brighter than a few weak streetlights. And in spite of being with my friends and 23 years old, and half-drunk and healthy and all the rest of it, I get a little chill. The old-timey sound of the music seems so lonely all of a sudden, reminds me how big the world is, how far away Texas is, how isolated we are in this U.P. summer colony, not even close enough to the nearest neighbors to disturb them with our singing and clapping.

It’s the music that’s doing it. I’d like to hear it again, but it wouldn’t be the same. There’s probably an audio filter I could run a contemporary copy of “St. James Infirmary” through, like an aural Instagram, that would instantly make it sound like it was sung into an enormous microphone and recorded on a wax cylinder.

That night in northern Michigan was about 30 years ago. And I just wrote about it on the Internet, linking to a Google map of that very place. Strange.

[Harp glissandos; sharpen focus on middle-aged woman holding a duster in a basement]

I put the records back. One of these days, maybe. A mix tape: The Best of Alan’s Record Box.

How was your weekend? Two more days, and we can start talking after the election.

Any last words?

I was up to my nostrils in the Truth Squad today, but enough noise came through the static to bring me the mini-story — micro-story — of Nate Silver.

I’m a big fan of Silver, not because he’s a lefty, but because he has a pretty spectacular track record. A short one, yes, but pretty impressive. He doesn’t get excited by much other than data. So of course some people hate him.

This Deadspin thing sums it up pretty well. As does this New Republic thing. (Link fixed.) Apparently there’s some pushback to Silver’s consistent projection — for months now — that Barack Obama has a 79 percent chance of being re-elected. It’s gone up and down a few points, but the race has never been nearly as close as the horserace narrative would have you believe. At least in the electoral college. The popular vote will be close, but close enough for hand grenades, anyway.

What his model comes down to are probabilities:

That probabilities do not ensure outcomes—something every blackjack player who has busted while hitting against a face card has long known—has escaped Silver’s detractors. Brendan Nyhan at CJR and Ben Jacobs at Daily Download have emptied an ample volume of bullets into this barrel of fish. Ezra Klein put it succinctly: “If Mitt Romney wins on election day, it doesn’t mean Silver’s model was wrong. After all, the model has been fluctuating between giving Romney a 25 percent and 40 percent chance of winning the election. That’s a pretty good chance!”

But Silver and his defenders have run aground on the same problem sports statisticians used to face: the failure of laymen to grasp the difference between predictions and probabilities. “The criticism of Nate is that he’s predicting something, when he’s trying to explain that’s not what he’s doing at all,” said Dave Cameron, a baseball statistician at FanGraphs who briefly worked with Silver at BP. “He’s putting the odds on something.” Cameron added, “It is kind of like what we do in baseball. We recognize there are multiple outcomes. A utility infielder can hit a home run off [reigning Cy Young winner Justin] Verlander. It’s just not probable.”

Romney could still win. But — Silver’s model says — it’s just not as likely.

Now, a waltz through the bloggage:

Sixteen storm tales from Sandy

A kale salad recipe. Because kale is the new spinach, right?

And I should have one more, but honestly — I’m so out of gas they need another word for it. Have a great weekend, all.

Halloween fell on a Wednesday this year, which is the night I take Kate downtown for her music-lessonin’, and I take myself out for a midweek drink. People think of Halloween in Detroit in terms of arson and mayhem, but there’s also this:

And that can only mean?

JUGGALOS:

Right outside where I was planning to eat dinner, too. No problem — I’ve been doing this long enough I know the alternate parking places. So I parked, fed the meter, and took a few snaps:

The pizza has something to do with the band, but frankly, I’m afraid to Google it. On the whole, though, they’re nice kids. I asked before every picture. People are nice when you ask. Note the license plate — South Dakota.

And face it: Nobody takes the trouble to get dressed like this and doesn’t want people to pay attention.

Whoop-whoop! Fam-i-ly! Fam-i-ly!

You can watch this, if you really want to know more. A rare short documentary that’s worth the 24 minutes or so it takes to watch.

And that’s about all I have today. Juggalos. Oh, here’s Tom Nardone, the head of the Mower Gang, on Conan last night. A little late for pumpkin-carving, but not a bad segment.

The days tick ever-closer to election day, when my life will get a lot easier. Yours too, I suspect.

The week is on a downslope. Enjoy it.

Happy Halloween. Here’s a new wrinkle in election-related mailers:

All those people are our neighbors. Why would the Americans for Limited Government (a Koch-supported group, incidentally) be interested in telling us whether they voted in the last two presidential-election cycles? Beats me. I asked someone who has forgotten more about politics than I’ll ever know, and he said it’s a new thing — shaming, basically, as a get-out-the-vote tactic. Research shows that you can goad some people to the polls if they feel their neighbors are getting a similar report about them.

I suspect this tactic works best in white suburbia.

Of course we both voted in 2004, but not at this address.

I’m still sort of agog at the damage left behind by one faltering hurricane. I keep reading that the cleanup could take “days.” I look at photos of flooded subway tunnels and think, “try ‘weeks.'” One of you engineers — heh — needs to enlighten the group: What’s the effect of seawater on railroad electrical systems? It can’t be good.

Anyone have both a) power; and b) a good storm story to tell? I talked to someone today who spent the storm in a Washington D.C. high rise, and said the wind was terrifying. I don’t doubt it.

But life goes on. And it demands bloggage:

An elegant essay on the Minnesota marriage vote, calling on that northern-plains archetype, the Norwegian bachelor farmer:

My late uncle bachelor farmer had a bachelor farmer pal, whom I’ll call Bob. My uncle and Bob were the best of friends for more than 50 years. Every winter, when no work could be done on their farms, the two took long road trips and saw America. When they got too old to farm, they traveled more. When they got too old to travel and live alone on their farms, they acquired adjacent rooms at the nursing home in town. They died within months of each other at that home.

If you read only one election story this week, let it be Jane Mayer’s piece on how voter fraud, so rare as to be…well, very rare, found its way onto the national radar screen.

Finally, what sort of person sits inside during a weather emergency spewing misinformation into the ether? This guy.

Wednesday already? If you say so.

Well, hello, Sandy.

Monday was a difficult day all around — an over two-hour drive home (90 minutes in ideal conditions) thanks to a freeway wreck, but I was lucky, because I missed the snare on the morning commute, when a scare over the I-96 shooter shut down the road entirely. And then the misery started, with the howling wind, the rain and a DVD player that at first balked at season one of “Homeland,” the one bright spot to the day.

We got it worked out, but to say I slept fitfully was an understatement. So a few links, and let’s start mainlining coffee.

I hope those of you who were closer to the storm — we were about 650 miles from the eye, mind you — are safe and sound today. During my long bout of insomnia last night I kept refreshing the NYT and Twitter, blanching at the awfulness, waiting for one of the three oaks within crushing distance of my house to give up the ghost.

Storms, snipers, malfunctioning digital technology. Hello, America. Stand by for news!

This has been one of the strangest races of the season, one where you’d think you’d have more of, well, a race. Instead, Pete Hoekstra is phoning it in and counting down the days until Debbie Stabenow hands him his hat and sends him back to Washington not as a senator, but more likely a lobbyist:

After initially balking at running against Stabenow, Hoekstra jumped into the race and immediately stirred controversy with a Super Bowl ad that accused Stabenow of excessive government spending. The ad, which some saw as racially insensitive, featured a Chinese-American actress speaking in broken English. It seemed to cost him some support.

Since then, the campaign has been largely quiet, rarely making headlines. No debates. And rare public appearances except in television ads.

While trailing in the polls, Hoekstra spent the last weekend of September in Israel to study the upheaval in the Middle East rather than campaign.

I remember when the Labor Department tried to tighten up regulations to protect children working on farms, and the pushback suggested they’d just told an army of apple-cheeked Amish children that they could no longer gather eggs in the henhouse. Nope, it was more about keeping them from being crushed to death in silos. Too bad they let themselves be pushed back.

A story we’ve all heard too much of, but here’s a little more: How small media kept the Lance Armstrong story alive when the big guns were all wearing yellow bracelets. And prevailed. (Note: Link fixed.)

The WSJ and NYT have their paywalls down during the storm. Take advantage by reading this non-storm story, about? The difficulty of making red and blue find a little purple:

In past election years, about a quarter of her clients wouldn’t date a member of the opposite party. Now it is three-quarters, (a matchmaker) says.

Finally, before I go, of course it was too bad about the Tigers. But let me ask the question being asked all over Detroit today: If we had won that series, and spent the night running through the streets, setting fires and what-have-you, we all know what the headlines would say. So why, in San Francisco, do these folks get to be “high-spirited fans?” Just wondering.

I didn’t go to TEDxDetroit this year, after attending the one two years ago. It was, shall we say, a mixed bag. Upside: Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. Downside? Hard to say. Maybe the woman who’d opened a fitness studio where they did aerobics to Bollywood movie-soundtrack music. That’s it? That’s the “idea worth spreading?” You can do aerobics to the “Slumdog Millionaire” score? Ohhh-kay.

But in the end, I think it was this:

I guess everyone who owns a smartphone has a love/hate relationship with it, but this was an eye-opener for me. I couldn’t imagine speaking to an audience where two-thirds were staring down at a screen while I was supposedly the object of their attention. And it’s encouraged! You’re supposed to be tweeting it, the official hashtag is announced, and everyone’s tweets fly by on the screen behind the speaker. I guess this is how it’s done now, but it would make me nuts.

Anyway, two people I’ve interviewed recently were speaking at TED this year, and it was held Friday, so I dipped in and out of the live stream. The first person I heard was described as an “awesomeness expert” who would instruct attendees in “how to be awesome.” Everyone had some snarky detail added to their introduction; one, named Charlie, got a Charlie-bit-my-finger joke, delivered in a British accent. I couldn’t help but notice how many “social media experts” work for firms that appear to have been named by a child — Tiny Fish Partners, or Sleeping Dog Design. (No wonder “Mad Men” is such a hit. Adults! Wow!)

As it turned out, both guys I tuned in for were good, and both told large chunks of stories they told me, so there you have it: If you were reading Bridge, you knew all this stuff weeks ago.

And that was the weekend, although it also featured scallops, and that was very good. Pan-seared with lemon sauce, creamed spinach and oven-roasted potatoes, and “Sleepwalk With Me” afterward on the TV box. Roger gave it 3.5 stars, his readers, 3. I’m with the readers, but it was nice to see Lauren Ambrose again. The story is autobiographical, with the star, Mike Birbiglia, telling a story from his own life. Birbiglia is an average-guy shlump and Ambrose is a ginger-haired goddess, so it was strange to see him onscreen, falling out of love with a woman who so outclasses him in the looks department, but there you are. Hollywood has been asking us for years to swallow the idea that the hot young starlet of the moment wants to fuck, oh, Jack Nicholson, to use but one example out of zillions.

That’s one thing I loved about “About Schmidt,” one of Jack’s more recent films — for the first time since he hit 50, he was given a female partner his own age. She dies in the first 15 minutes, but while it lasted it was shocking.

So, bloggage:

In case you missed Basset posting this in the comments Friday, this is the Democratic candidate for a U.S. Senate seat in Tennessee. Yeah, this guy:

And with the election just days away, he has not actually put that sign in a yard. Instead, it resides inside candidate Mark Clayton’s pickup. “VOTE FOR,” the sign says. The rest is hidden by the seats.

“Jesus did not have a campaign staff. And he had the most successful campaign in human history,” Clayton said recently, when asked if all this adds up to a winning run against incumbent Sen. Bob Corker (R). Jesus “didn’t even have pictures or a Web site.”

This may be America’s worst candidate.

Clayton, 36, is a part-time flooring installer, an indulger in conspiracy theories — and for Democrats here, the living personification of rock bottom. In a state that produced Democratic icons including Andrew Jackson and both Al Gores, the party has fallen so far that it can’t even run a good loser.

I’m late getting to this, but last week saw the death of Emanuel Steward, Detroit’s legendary boxing trainer. As I’ve mentioned here about a million times, I’m a latecoming boxing fan, and have come to appreciate “Manny’s” incisive commentary during many Saturday nights spent with HBO. Among his insights, according to the NYT: “You can’t feel quick in black shoes.”

Meanwhile, his sister says she has her “ass-kicking boots on,” and is stripping his gym of everything, including the ring, to “safeguard his legacy.” How leaving his fighters with no place to train does that, I’m not sure.

One more week until the election is upon us. Let’s see what it brings.

Oh, it can be so, so fun to lurk on Mark Souder’s Facebook page. (My former congressman, for you casual readers. Until he was caught having carnal knowledge of a staffer in an Indiana state park.) As I think I mentioned in the comments yesterday, after the Mourdock rape comment hit the internet, I thought I’d drop by to see what he thought of all of that. A near-perfect answer, he opined.

(I had a colleague at my first newspaper job who loved that verb — opine. I think it fits here.)

The next day, when it was clear this was playing as one more stand-up act in the GOP Rape Follies, I went back to see how he was taking things. Post? Deleted. Oh, well.

Now he’s back, furious — sorry, very angry at President’s cheap shots and acting like Letterman Show is for literate people — at the liberal media, which is bias.

Just a hunch, but I think he’s going to be really pissed in another couple weeks.

A political observer of my acquaintance is very calm about all this, and likes to point out the demography of it all — the far-right wing of the GOP is being finished off by the grinding millstone of time. Gay marriage? Compare and contrast the opinions of those under 40 and over 60. Did you see “2016?” How many of the heads in the theater had a full head of hair that wasn’t gray? Which is not to say it’s all going to be sunshine and roses for the left, or moderates, going forward. But I can’t help but think one thing that has Souder, the ultimate “gray-faced man with a two-dollar haircut,” to borrow Tina Fey’s already-classic phrase, so pissed is that no one is buying this bullshit anymore. No one is twisting anyone’s words because this is what these guys really believe. You don’t get a rape pass if you get pregnant afterward in their world; you get a precious little baby.

Take that how you will, Hoosiers. He gets elected, he’ll be voting on a Supreme Court nominee or two.

Oh, is it Friday already? I took a break this afternoon to take a bike ride that seemed longer due to a) extended sloth in September and October; and b) lots of wind. It was 75 Thursday, but that wind is bringing something else our way. Tomorrow’s high will be 20 degrees colder. But even with a chill in the air, we will be that much closer to Election Day, after which things at our shop will slow down considerably. So there’s that.

Any bloggage? I loved “Cloud Atlas” like few other novels in recent memory, but I can’t decide whether to see the movie. Sounds long and maybe not as good. If anyone sees it this weekend, report.

And have a great weekend. Cold and rainy though it may be.