Sunflowers. In sun.

I love news stories that really challenge my expectations, and this one certainly did:

A day after the state announced a streamlined process for getting a voting-only ID, long lines at some PennDOT offices forced patrons to wait for hours on Wednesday.

“I’ve been here for two-and-a-half hours,” said (Elsie) Torres, who ultimately waited more than three hours to receive her ID.

Other patrons who spoke with this reporter at the PennDOT center at 8th and Arch streets said that they had to wait between one and four hours to get an ID that will allow them to vote Nov. 6 under a new state law.

Poor people lead difficult lives, and the idea of spending three hours of a single day standing in line to get…an ID? Is pretty amazing. We’ll see how this election goes. But when this happens, people willing to get back up after being knocked down, it’s heartening. This stuff is important.

Although I hate that “this reporter” usage. If you can’t go full first-person and say “me,” just say they spoke to the Associated Press. At least, that is this reporter’s position.

And speaking of poor people, did anyone see Frontline this week? “Dropout Nation” was a stab right in the heart, a look at four high school students in a single high school at high risk for not finishing. It’s a school in Houston where kids are mostly poor and mostly non-white, and most of the teachers we see aren’t. But they are heroes, professionals who give their students everything. The students are truly tragic characters, born two miles from the racetrack when everyone else is assembling on the starting line, failed by every significant adult in their lives. (Some even before they’re born. Who names a girl “Sparkle,” for cryin’ out loud?) You can watch the whole thing at the link. It’s long, but I recommend it.

Eh, if I get through this week it’ll be something of a miracle, but I’m lurching toward the finish line.

So let’s get there, eh?

Thank Coozledad for today’s entertainment; he sent me this a while back. It’s Elvis Costello, performing at the White House two years ago:

Enjoy the delightful four and a half minutes, and you will enjoy it. It got me thinking about…well, about a lot of things. First thing: Who determines who plays at the nation’s No. 1 venue? I’m not naive enough to believe it’s entirely up to the First Family; it’s surely a combination of their preferences, the WH social secretary, and some constellation of other parties weighing in. Timing certainly plays a part, don’t you think? There’s a time when the performer who was once rebellious and not suitable for a presidential audience suddenly becomes so. There’s a time when the cellist is ready for his Lincoln Center honor. But surely the First Family has something to do with it.

So. Today, a thought experiment, and I encourage you not to yield to the easy temptation of snark. Suppose Romney wins the election. Who plays in his White House? Who will be the first performers we’ll see in the East Room with Mitt and Ann in the front row center?

I’m honestly curious. It occurs to me that, for all I know about the Romneys, I have no idea what stirs his soul, besides dressage and his church. Do Mormons have a pop-music vein worth tapping?

I ask this in part because I read this story earlier tonight, about Romney’s church activities in Massachusetts. Another few thousand words that tells you a lot but, in the end, only makes the picture murkier.

On to the bloggage:

This is, what, Jimmy Hoffa’s ninth or tenth possible final resting place? They won’t find him there, but if they do, oh how sad that would be. A driveway in Roseville? (Trust me: It ain’t much.) If he can’t be in the end zone at whatever NFL stadium he’s supposedly in, at least let him be buried under the I-696/75 interchange, which is the last place I heard (on inside information, natch).

OID: Leg on a stretcher. Fake leg. Still.

Finally, one for you Vietnam vets. The napalm girl, later. Beautiful.

For someone who spends as much time as I do online, I frequently find online research…enervating. That means “causing one to feel drained of energy,” in case you’re one of those “it kind of sounds like ‘invigorating,’ so close enough” people. Tabbed browsing is a wonderful thing, but every so often you look up and discover you have four windows, each with eight tabs open, and half you can’t even remember why they were important.

And then you get an email that says, check out this other thing. Soon: Three more windows, nine more tabs each.

Believe it or not, this is actually an improvement. I used to print everything. Back when someone else was buying my ink and paper, yes.

It’s interesting how we adapt to these things. A giant pile of papers on your desk used to be the sign of a serious person. I kept every letter a reader wrote to me for years and years. When I went on maternity leave (12 years after I started the job), I finally decided I could pitch that stuff. Friends, I regret to tell you that the Brian Stouder papers went with them, but if we don’t have them anymore, well. That’s what happens.

Today, I carry it all with me. Downside: If my laptop ever gets ripped off, I am screwed nine ways from Sunday.

(But yes, I back up. And I use the cloud. So it’ll take a laptop theft and a thermonuclear pulse to really screw me.)

So that was my day. That, and talking on the phone, mostly leaving messages. So you can imagine why, at 5:15, I contrived an errand involving mailing two letters and buying two lemons at the grocery down the street. (Veal scallopini.) Just to have a chance to move arms and legs in something resembling exercise.

Which is my way of saying I don’t have much today. Tomorrow will be better. But a little bloggage:

Bridge is running a big package yesterday and tomorrow, about the need for more and better early-childhood education. Everyone agrees it’s a great investment with big payoff down the line, and yet? Thirty thousand kids don’t get it. Go figure.

We were talking about the German industrial sector the other day? Here’s something about that, from Slate.

And with that, I’m out of gas. A good day to all.

Jeez, what a long day. Out of the house at 6:30 a.m., back up the driveway at 6 p.m. It would have been 5:40, but two wrecks on the freeway necessitated a detour. A quick break to water the drooping plants, change clothes, throw together an entirely improvised pasta — fresh mooz, cherry tomatoes, basil and garlic — then back out the door for a town hall in my very own.

There’s a tax increase on the fall ballot, split into two parts. I was undecided going into the meeting, but the city made a pretty good case. As you might imagine, there is fierce opposition, not all of which is hysterical and tea party-ish. So this is how the meeting ran: The city manager stood up and gave a little welcome, then introduced the comptroller, who ran through the PowerPoint. Then he introduced all the city department heads, the mayor and council, directing them to seats at tables that ran along the perimeter of the room.

“Feel free to ask any questions of these people, and we’ll stay until we’re all done. Just approach whoever you like,” he said.

An old man sitting in front of me stood up and bellowed, WE WANT OUR QUESTIONS ANSWERED!

“Ask whatever questions you like,” the manager said. “That’s what these people are here for — the mayor, the council. Go ahead.”

But of course the old man — and many others — didn’t want questions answered, they wanted to stand behind a microphone and yell. One passed out a flyer demanding CUT THE FAT in all caps. A woman walked to the front of the room and started screeching about duplicate services and so forth. The more she screeched, the more people left.

As crowd control goes, it was a stroke of genius. You can tell the city manager has a background in law enforcement.

The thing is, the opposition has a point: There is a certain amount of fat in the budget, if you consider $150 to buy pizza for poll workers on election days fat. But even if you make them brown-bag it, and sweep up a few thousand more here and there, it’s not going to be enough to make the nut. I walked in undecided, left decided. The yelling didn’t help.

So, on the verge of collapse, I will say this: I watched “Treme,” and lo, it was good. For more, I’m sure Back of Town can catch you up. Oh, and while we’re on the subject, Prospero, read this. (Link is fixed.)

Such a lovely surprise this weekend: “Detropia,” a new documentary about our troubled neighbor, which played to a nearly packed house Saturday night hereabouts.

I understand this is of limited interest to those who don’t live nearby (or in similar cities), but for those of you who like film, documentaries, or who have any sort of connection to this place, I do recommend it. With some caveats.

They are: This isn’t a “news” documentary at all, more like jazz — meditations on a mood, improvisations on a theme, observations rather than commentary, although of course you’re free to fill in the blanks, and in fact are encouraged to.

The takeaway is that Detroit is the industrial age’s coal-mine canary, and that no one has sufficiently answered the question of what comes next. You may or may not agree, but the question — posed by one of the Detroiters whose activities serve as a through-line — is worth asking.

One scene features the UAW local president laying out the harsh reality for a room full of workers at one of the surviving plants, American Axle. It is a take-it-or-leave-it shit sandwich of 20-30 percent wage cuts across the board, and these are not good jobs in the first place — the top tier is around $18 an hour (down to $14), with the $14-per-hour folks knocked down to $11. The union moves to not even consider the offer, and it passes unanimously. The plant closes, a foregone conclusion.

I looked at these men and women, and thought, for the millionth time: What are we going to do with you? These aren’t lazy people. They want to work. They need to be paid a living wage. Twenty-two grand a year for life in an axle plant? Are you kidding me?

We say this over and over and over: Not everyone is cut out for higher education, but everyone can work. But where will the laid-off American Axle workers find it?

They are the 47 percent. By now, anyway. Neither presidential candidate has a concrete plan for their future. The Germans still have a healthy force of factory workers, don’t they? How do they manage it? (Don’t answer, I know. They take education and training a lot more seriously than we do.)

All is not grim. There’s a marvelous character, Tommy Stephens, a retired teacher who runs a blues club in a particularly bombed-out neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the urban farm site I wrote about earlier this year, although it’s a club in the street corner-in-Detroit sense, not, say, the House of Blues. But Stephens is funny and smart and won’t give up, and in that sense is the reason I like this screwed-up place so much.

Anyway, recommended.

And just in case you find all that too depressing, there’s this, from the Atlantic, on the booming startup culture downtown. It won’t be enough to save all 139 square miles, but it’s something.

So, bloggage:

Boy, is this story depressing:

A lot of voters are lukewarm about the guy they support, but they are white hot about the guy they loathe.

“If they had Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama running, Barack Obama would be my last pick,” says Ray Morrison, 70, a retired steelworker and truck driver who lives on a country road west of the city. “If you want to know the true story about Obama, you have to watch Fox a little bit. I hate him.”

Here’s Cheryl Doran, 50, a waitress at the family restaurant Naples, speaking of Romney: “I think he’s the devil. I have no use for him.”

Al Fenner, 68, a bishop in the Shepherds Walk mission downtown, doesn’t think the president is “all-American” and believes that Obama once said that “he would stand more with the Islamic rather than with the American way.” Asked to cite a specific instance of Obama saying that, Fenner answered: “Go on YouTube and find it. I would not quote it if it were not true.”

I assume he’s talking about this, which I’ve seen referred to over and over again in the last few weeks. “But he’s a Muslim! He admits it!” etc. Watch the video, and you can see this admission in much the same way you see the cast of “Mad Men” sing along with Rick Astley.

Well, we still have five or six weeks to go, so why dwell? Hope your weekend was great. My apple pie turned out just fine.

A smaller, but still outstanding, apple crop.

Bridge has been running occasional stories about public servants — or workers, or tax-sucking leeches, depending on your political frame of mind — who aren’t elected. Yesterday’s was about a prison guard, and I learned that as bad as all of the jobs I’ve had in my life have been, at times? They haven’t been as bad as this:

A prisoner goes on “stool watch” when he’s suspected of smuggling in drugs by swallowing a balloon containing a controlled substance. The inmate is forced to sit on a special stool that has a bag below it to catch the inmate’s feces so it can be checked for the drugs.

Repulsive mental picture to the contrary, I’m pleased to learn this, as it gives me a new term for something that will almost certainly be unpleasant:

“No, I can’t go to dinner tonight. Waiting to hear back from the client on that thing last week. You know, stool watch.”

“Getting a test back today in Chem. Total stool watch.”

You can tell it’s almost the end of the week, can’t you? Feelin’ a little hit-the-wall here. All things considered, I’d like to watch a little of “Full Metal Jacket” and drift off to sleep. Love that Lee Ermey.

So, a little bloggage:

Charles Pierce on the new season of “Treme.” (He likes it.)

OID: Stay away from this place, Mr. Funny Car. Just keeeeep driving.

A friend of mine had severe performance anxiety while trying to produce a sperm sample for in vitro fertilization. Tells a funny story about it. Kinda like this one.

And now if you’ll excuse me? I’m going to go pass out.

Didn’t you guys start to talk yesterday about how to report race in crime stories? This is the rule I’ve always followed, which may or may not be the rule anymore. I’ve been gone from institutional daily journalism a long time.

The rule is: Don’t report race unless it’s important to the story, which can vary. When a suspect is at large and might be a threat to others, someone another person might see and report to police, by all means do so. The problem comes when the description is something impossibly vague like “a white man wearing blue jeans” or “a black man of medium height.” In the case of the two Grosse Pointe girls who were robbed, the description was pretty thorough, and included height and weight, clothing and, yes, race. The guy was armed and had escaped into the neighborhood. Totally defensible to use his color in the story.

Otherwise, if you wouldn’t write that someone was robbed by a person with red hair, I leave it out.

Others don’t follow the same rules. Our weekly newspaper here will sometimes write, for instance, “The 16-year-old was released to his 32-year-old mother.” Ooh, very subtle, just in case you didn’t catch on to the fact the perp was, how you say, not from around here. The worst of all was when they transcribed the written confession of a teenage female car thief, semiliterate spelling, fractured usage and all. It was repulsive, but I’m sure their readership got a real yuk out of it.

Meanwhile, here was the story TV did.

I can’t tell you how much I despise this sort of thing — the stupid hand gestures, the weird delivery, everything, including the obligatory exchange with the anchor at the end, which might as well run:

“Now I am asking you a question we both already know the answer to, in an effort to show you have deep knowledge of this situation.”

“And I am answering, both of us fully aware I’ve never set foot in this place in my life.”

Every crime story about this place has to talk about how peaceful it is, how unexpected the crime is, and of course, how the sucking maw of Detroit lurks just around the corner. It’s our cow picture, the cow picture being the standard photo of Columbus that ran for years with every single national-media story about how the city was starting to really come on strong. There’s a place at the end of the street where I grew up, where Ohio State University has some farm fields for the ag school. Sometimes they graze dairy cattle there, and when the air is clear, you can sometimes catch a nice pic of a cow in the foreground and the city’s skyline behind.

The cow picture. Because Columbus is shedding its cowtown image! Get it?

Oh, well. Moving on.

Anyone heard of Art Prize? It’s a festival held every year in Grand Rapids, where public art is installed all over the city for a few weeks, and the public votes on it. I’ve never been, and honestly, when I first heard about it, I imagined a lot of earnest crap and/or hostile Richard Serra stuff.

Looks like I was wrong. I love the taxidermy piece, and of course the wooden bicycle. Might be worth a road trip.

Time for bed. Hope your day was fine. Mine was busy.

An actual hour to spare at the end of the day? Well, then, it must be time to jump into something I signed up for months ago — “A History of the World Since 1300,” the Coursera offering I thought I’d take a whirl at.

It is, I figure, the closest I will ever get to Princeton.

Also, I’m writing more about education these days, and online education is a comer. One principal I talked to says every kid in school today should take at least one online class, because that is the future. Who am I to deny the future? Hello, Coursera.

The first shock, however, was as old as 1975, when I first went through the checkout line at the College Book Store in Athens, Ohio: The textbook was something like $80. But you people have been particularly wonderful about using the Kickback Lounge lately, and I have enough Amazon credit built up that it became a what-the-hell purchase. It arrived today, and it’s a very nice textbook, I guess, which is my way of saying: I hope I can sell it in December.

Today’s lecture was in four parts, which is unbelievably convenient, as I was able to watch one part during lunch, another couple before and after my shower, and the last one while I made dinner. “People and Plunderers” was the title, beginning with the concept of wealth and ending with Genghis Khan. Professor Jeremy Adelman is a smooth-lecturin’ Canadian who uses words like “portmanteau” and if he’s unnerved by talking to a camera instead of a classroom amphitheater (because there is no way this isn’t one of those giant classes), he gives no sign.

Because you guys helped pay for the text, I’ll keep you updated on my progress. For now, I need to read Chapter 11.

I have 70,000 classmates, by the way. Are you one of them?

Actually, Genghis was a good end to the day, which wasn’t one of the best in recent memory. Besides the usual annoyances, there was the external stuff — the enervating public discussion about the 47-percent story, plus an armed robbery in Grosse Pointe that…well, I need a new sentence for this. Tell you what: I’m going to italicize all the words that make this story a migraine headache:

On Sunday morning, two young girls, 14 and 11, were walking home from church when they were accosted by a man who shoved one to the ground, showed a gun and stole her cell phone before running off. Oh, and did I mention this? The girls were white, and the man, in addition to being 250 pounds, was black.

Which means that any story about this event will grow repulsive comments like metastasizing cancer, each tumor more irregular around the edges than the last. But because this is Grosse Pointe, it can’t stop there. This was the follow by one of the largest news outlets in the state, yes, which saw fit to mention that the father of one of these girls showed up at the GP city council meeting the following night and had the gall, can you imagine, to call Detroit “a third world country.”

The incident is causing concern among residents of the community, a city that stands in stark contrast, both demographically and economically, to its neighbor Detroit.

Really? There’s a blinding observation for the second paragraph of your story, bub.

Yech, sometimes I think I should have stayed in Columbus. Or moved to San Diego.

So let’s move on to the bloggage, most of which was made obsolete by the terminal velocity of the Romney story. But there was one passage in the David Brooks column that I think needs to be put in neon somewhere:

The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.

But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities — so they can play travel sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.

People are motivated when they feel competent. They are motivated when they have more opportunities. Ambition is fired by possibility, not by deprivation, as a tour through the world’s poorest regions makes clear.

And what the hell, here’s The Onion: Romney Apologizes To Nation’s 150 Million ‘Starving, Filthy Beggars’

Outta here, pals. I have stuff to read. Happy hump day.