What a week it’s been so far. Moe dies Saturday. On Monday, my car started missing; the verdict was bad ignition coils. Three hunnert dollars, ma’am. Bright side: This might be a recall issue, in which case I can expect reimbursement in four to six weeks.

Today I sat on my glasses. Bright side: I was just telling Kate I’m ready for new ones. I’ve had these for years, and they fit great and look great, but five years is enough for one pair of glasses, if you aren’t Elvis Costello. Still, is this a little too perfect? The last time this happened, I said, “I might be ready for one of those iPhones,” and that very day my pink Razr disappeared, never to be found again.

Meanwhile, I’m finishing a big project at work, and it is another horse-eating deal. Annd it’s the end of the term, and at the moment I feel like one of those marathoners who enters the stadium doing the hurricane walk. If I can get to the end of the week, all will be OK.

And if I can get through tomorrow, I’m planning to have two (2) craft beers after work. Maybe Oberon, if they’ve tapped it at one of my Wednesday places.

In the meantime, I beg your tolerance for a few more days. In return, I bring these tasty links:

A nice piece by Laura Berman in the DetNews about what many claim doesn’t exist: True hunger in the U.S. of A.

Hump day. Let’s get over it, eh?

It blew all day here, 25 mph steady and gusts a lot higher. Limbs down all over, power out to more than 50,000 customers. Knock wood and cast the evil eye aside, we weren’t one of them. Which didn’t stop me from having a fairly lousy day anyway, starting with an unexpected $300 car repair, continuing with blah-blah and salvaged only by dinner — grilled-asparagus omelets with gruyere cheese and a little slivered prosciutto. Both the cheese and the ham were odd-end leftovers. Black bean and roasted corn salad on the side, and a nice glass of wine.

And you know what? Nora Ephron is right: The best omelets are two whole eggs with a third yolk. Richer, but not too.

Remember when I said I’d be crushed for a few more days? I wasn’t kidding. Thanks anyway to my fellow Fellow Rob, who wrote yesterday to say, “your blog is still the shit.” He’s so nice. Take “the” out of that comment and it’s more accurate, but this too shall pass. I’d go dark for a few days, but I like to give y’all new threads to play in.

Any links? This:

Mrs. Romney goes shopping. In Palm Beach.

Mittens out-drawing Barry in Michigan, so far. Interesting map.

Happy Tuesday to all.

Driving to Lansing Friday morning, I found myself in an audio crisis. I can usually make NPR fill at least half the trip, but it’s pledge week. As a sustaining member, I opt out of the miseries of pledge week. Reached for my iPod, but ack! I’d left the earbuds at home, a hazard of dressing for work in the dark. Commercial radio it is, then. I stumbled across a wacky morning team, just as they announced they had a listener who believed she’d found the Word of the Day — some promotion, I expect. She was asked the word of the day, and answered “habitual.” Huzzah, she’s a winner, but wait, there’s one more hoop.

“Can you use it in a sentence?”

“I find chocolate habitual.”

“Very good! You win!”

Fortunately, I’m no longer driving this route at a full gallop, or else the twitching in my hands would have sent me off the road.

A pretty good story in today’s Freep, which qualifies as a unique take on the old problem of school safety. It considers a truly horrifying aspect of Detroit school life — the walk to school. I was telling my students the other day to try to keep fresh eyes, especially around Detroit, because it’s easy to start taking blight for granted, after you’ve seen it for a while. The photo gallery is an eye-popper.

On a lighter note, this amusing New York magazine piece on the artisanal artisanal-ness of Brooklyn. I recall exchanging an email or two with Roy after I stumbled across a Kickstarter for some outfit there, raising money to make artisanal soft drinks. Roy lived there at the time, and to my what-the-what question, he replied, “Not my part of Brooklyn.” Good to know.

Finally, I suppose most of you know by now that Moe, our comment-community member of four years, known in her analog life as Regina Cullen of Seattle, Wash., died over the weekend. In what has become a grim tradition here, J.C. has taken all her comments and collected them on a single page, which you can find here. (Link on the sidebar under Getting There from Here, along with those of Ashley Morris and Whitebeard.) It starts with her first appearance, Leap Day 2008, which we long-timers remember as Tim Goeglein Day. It ends, 2,204 comments later, on March 26 of this year. She was active and engaged, never self-pitying, throughout what must have been a long and very painful illness. She was posting on her Facebook page March 31 — a funny video of British animal voiceovers. The day before that, an excoriation of Mitt Romney’s contributions to the National Organization for Marriage. I think that was probably a pretty good distillation of Moe as we knew her — engaged with the nitty-gritty, but still up for a laugh. Our community will be poorer for her loss.

I don’t think it’s possible to express how little I’m interested in fighting the Mommy Wars again. Seriously. Do not want. To fight this. As wastes of breath go, only discussing which candidate you’d like to have a beer with ranks lower.

Been there, done that. Absolutely an argument without a point that brings out the worst in everyone. Won’t do it, can’t do it. Whatever works in your family is the right way to do it. Shut up about my choice, and I’ll shut up about yours.

And with that — a few thoughts about women and politics — it seems appropriate to segue into the news of the day, which is that our own Moe appears to be leaving us. See details on her blog. I’m frankly astonished. She’s been such a vivid, opinionated part of our community, and among her Facebook circle, and has been posting — not about her illness, but about the world outside of it — with regularity until just the last couple of days.

It seems the best thing to do now is simply wish her well as she starts the next part of her journey.

But also, some links:

Rep. Benishek’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad town-hall meeting:

At one point, the discussion turned to health care reform. Benishek, who served as a medical doctor before he was elected to Congress in 2010, was thrust onto the national stage after his predecessor Bart Stupak cast the deciding vote in favor of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. He told the audience that the United States has the best health care system in the world, before he was literally laughed at by several attendees.

“We have the highest life spans in the world,” argued Benishek. Several women in the audience quickly pointed out that in fact, many countries with universal health care place higher than the United States in terms of life expectancy, including Canada, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. The United States ranks 50th, just behind South Korea and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I don’t believe that’s true,” said Benishek. “How can you not know that, you’re a medical doctor?” one woman replied.

John Edwards’ terrible, horrible, no good, very bad life:

No one close to Edwards disputes the obvious: The unrelenting quiet is an indication of just how far he has fallen. Especially around Chapel Hill and the Edwardses’ former home in nearby Raleigh, several longtime friends privately say that they want nothing to do with him; that they felt personally betrayed by his persistent lies during the period when he desperately sought to cover up his affair.

The antipathy toward him around these parts shows no signs of abating. He spends considerably less time in popular Chapel Hill haunts that once — in his days as a stunningly successful trial lawyer and overnight political star — accorded him golden-boy status. At Spanky’s restaurant, near the University of North Carolina Law School (where he and Elizabeth met in a class), his portrait has been removed from the wall, replaced by one of Elizabeth. Three years ago, with the scandal at its height, he ate lunch with an elderly couple at crowded Foster’s Market, a popular cafe in town where he looked at ease in Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt. As he left, patrons hissed at him. “It was more than audible; it was loud,” a witness recalls. “He kept walking toward the door as if he didn’t hear or see anything.”

The end of the stick shift as we know it? Or maybe not. From my hubs’ section.

And with that, let’s all hold a good thought for Moe, eh?

Somehow it became known that our little Kate had never seen “Titanic,” and I told her it was time, and so we paid our money, unpacked our 3D glasses, and settled in for “Titanic 3D: The Sinkening.” Like Edelstein, I liked it better this time, and I can’t say why.

No, I can: I liked it better because I’m 15 years older and no longer think it’s worth wasting energy disliking it. And having endured the Ballad of Jack and Rose part once, I’m free to waste my mind’s back channels wondering what I would do in a similar situation. Don’t we all hope we’d be heroes? That we’d make sure the right people got into the boats, and we wouldn’t be horrible, and we might even go down with the ship (and a brandy in hand, like Benjamin Guggenheim)? With one’s mind so engaged, I was less bothered by Billy Zane’s character calling Rose’s Monet canvases “finger paintings.”

The film does have one indelible image, for me — the debris field of corpses, floating in their life preservers, their cries gradually going out, like candles.

Friends, I am crushed on my other fronts, and will be for another week. After that? Smooooth sailing. (I hope.) Can you forgive a few more days of lameness? Because I don’t have much more. There’ll be dibs and dabs, but for now, for me, it’ll be work and iPad solitaire until I fall into a heap.

May Day, we’ll have a parade.

Yeesh, what a cold, miserable day. Please, never mind that I didn’t wear a coat. It’s mid-April, and I’m done with coats. A sweater was it, then, which underlined the misery, but I didn’t have to be outdoors long, and ah well — you have to go through a few of these days every spring, and Tuesday was one of them.

Tomorrow will be warmer. Winter is going.

Which seems a nice transition into the new season of “Game of Thrones.” I’m watching, yes, although this is the beginning of the long slog of the middle of “A Song of Ice and Fire.” I petered out somewhere toward the end of “A Storm of Swords,” and there’s still another doorstop of a volume before “A Dance of Dragons,” and guess what? Winter has not yet come, although it’s autumn, and the book after that one is, I believe, “The Winds of Winter,” and there’s another book beyond that, and yikes, I just don’t have time. Catching up via HBO seems the most prudent course of action. If anything, the visuals are even more arresting than last season — the budget must have gotten a boost — but I remember this passage of the story as mostly about rain and blood soaking into the mud of Westeros, along with the usual dragons and ice-zombies and the like.

And speaking of dragons, we saw “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” over the weekend, which settled any question I might have had about that series — ick. It was competently done, even beautiful in that David Fincher-esque way, but I’ve had it with perverts, rapists and fucking Sweden. Also girls on motorcycles, coffee, mysteries outlined via charts on walls and Rooney Mara. Where are the romantic comedies of yore, I ask you. I just scanned the trailers of coming attractions on the Apple movie-trailers site, and didn’t see a single thing that looked like much, and quite a bit that looked like dreck. “That’s My Boy,” in fact, might be the worst of the lot.

Back to novels for the summer, I fear.

So. Sayonara, Ricky Santorum. It’s a sign of this crazy year that he lasted this long, but there are many others. Here’s a column from the Indianapolis Star about Richard Mourdock, who is challenging Richard Lugar in the primary and just might win:

In politics, there are partisans who truly believe in and fight for their principles and policy ideas as they seek to craft solutions to big problems. And then there are people like Mourdock — unbending ideologues who believe the only acceptable outcome to any argument is a complete victory by their side. In a diverse nation, such victories are largely impossible. And, so, under this type of thinking nothing gets done.

That’s your choice, Hoosiers.

Hell, let’s look at the wind map instead. Very soothing.

Happy Wednesday. Think I might take Kate to see “Titanic 3D,” if she’s up for it. Our hearts will go on.

Monday, Monday (da dahh, da da dah dah). So much to do (da dahh, da da dah dah). Instead have some links, while I go take a shower so I can leave at 6:30 a.m. for Lansing, and here my singalong collapses somewhat. Fortunately, the links aren’t terrible:

Laura Miller at Salon stretches a bit to link Thomas Kinkade to George W. Bush, but not too-too far — they both peddled kitsch, after all. I didn’t know — or rather, I knew and then forgot — that the painter of light showed evidence of a serious drinking problem, and his premature death may well have been a result of same. His empire of kitsch seemed to be in financial trouble, but that’s nothing new; as a feisty interior decorator back in FW told me years ago, “Once he started whoring himself out on QVC, it was all over.” The story contains a link to a 2001 Susan Orlean profile of Kinkade. She visited the Knight Wallace Fellows my year, and revealed she’d made a bet with him, that “a major American museum” would have a show of his work “in (Kinkade’s) lifetime.” It was for a million dollars, too. I guess this means Orlean wins, but I don’t know how she’d collect. Anyway, it sounds like there’s not much left in the kitty.

People have known it’s possible to hack those flashing highway signs for some time. Someone hacked one on I-94 night before last to read, “Trayvon (is) a (big racial slur that sometimes trips internet filters).” What a world.

How my colleague Ron French almost killed Mike Wallace (sort of). A good one.

Finally, a supercut of various famous actors’ first screen appearances. Because why not.

By the time you read this, I’ll be sleepin’. Or drivin’. Happy Tuesday to all, and let’s hope it goes fast.

We’ve been having some terrible restaurant luck lately. The last couple of Easters, we have been meeting Alan’s sister for a meal halfway between our places, i.e. Toledo. The place we went last year went out of business, and this year’s choice, a boîte in the hipster district called Manhattan’s, should do the same. I hope they serve a great cocktail, because their brunch was an overpriced festival of disappointment. Fortunately, Toledo has a fine zoo, and that’s where we spent the afternoon, looking for the meerkats but not finding them — their exhibit was being remodeled. We did see the baby elephant, whose name is Louie. And the usual complement of beasts large and small. Alan was in search of the monkey house of his childhood memories, and we finally found it. It had been renovated into a food court, and the old cage-type setup is perfect for housing junk food-eating people, if you ask me.

Maybe Manhattan’s should investigate a rehab.

Otherwise, a fine weekend. One of my Facebook network, a professional photographer, posted a socko picture he took early Saturday morning, one he said he’s been trying to capture for four years. If you live around here, you know this weekend was exceptionally clear, and the moon was full Friday night. Another one.

That was a hell of a “Mad Men” last night, ain’a? I’m impressed by how well they’re conjuring the ’60s so far this season. Say “the ’60s” and it’s easy to default to hippies. It’s much more, and we forget how the drumbeat of urban violence really began to get loud around this time. Discuss, if you’re so inclined.

As many of you know, eight years ago I was fortunate enough to be a Knight-Wallace Fellow at the University of Michigan, a sabbatical year for mid-career journalists. The fellowship was named for its major benefactors; the Knight was the foundation, and the Wallace was Mike, who died this weekend. He came to town every year, to meet the fellows and hobnob around his alma mater, where he was much-loved and respected. He didn’t come our year, however. Charles Eisendrath, the fellowship director, apologized on his behalf: “The bad news is, Mike had to cancel. He’s crashing deadline on a story. The good news is, he’s 86 and crashing deadline on a story.”

And so I didn’t lay eyes on him until a few years later, when he came in for a reunion to celebrate some milestone or another. I didn’t talk to him, as he was the sort of guy who is surrounded by people clamoring for his attention, and what do you say to Mike Wallace? That was great, when you nailed that guy that time, maybe. I haven’t watched “60 Minutes” in years, and when I have, I’m struck by what a throwback it is, but the fact remains, it’s a classic, and classics don’t change because everything else does. For many, many years, it was the gold standard, and Wallace was the most important reporter they had. I’m sure, in the days to come, some bold gnat will sneer about his early days as a pitchman for Fluffo shortening, or some vapid actress interview, but the fact remains, when it counted, he cast a long, long shadow.

An all-links Friday update? Sure, works for me. Opening Day was clear and sunny and beautiful, but damn cold. I was standing on a corner waiting for a light to change near Wayne State, and the wind gusted in my face, and what did I do? I moaned. It’s April. Time for crazy weather to stop this shit and start being spring. Those two weeks of summer were a cruel taunt. Easter Sunday will be rainy and barely 60. But it’s time to strip the cover off the boat and get this show on the road, eh?

Best Tumblr I’ve seen in a while: Texts from Hillary.

But still, my fave is Animals Talking in All Caps.

It’s a tough town: Second law-abiding Detroiter in a week shoots and kills an intruder. Any more of this, and the ghost of Charlton Heston will come to town.

Are any of you even at work today? Happy Passover, and a somber Good Friday. And who’ll be watching “The Ten Commandments?” I will.

Today, a question for the room: Have you ever eaten a spear of asparagus right out of the ground? Snapped it off and ate it as you wandered through the rows? You should try it sometime, if you ever get a chance; it’s like a whole different vegetable, as tender at the base as it is at the tip. No bitterness, no stringiness. I’m thinking these rabbits are onto something. Maybe we should all get on all fours and graze a bit.

No, I haven’t been smoking weed or anything. John and Sam, aka J.C. and Sam, have been in Lansing for the last few weeks, helping Sammy’s father start his journey down the ghost road. That journey having commenced over the weekend, I stopped by on my way out of town yesterday and beheld his legendary garden — he was a botanist — which will be on its own this season, although I’m sure the neighbors will enjoy the strawberries and raspberries and other perennials. We enjoyed the raw asparagus. Man, what a revelation.

And if you had spent most of the day in Excel training, that’s what you’d remember about the day, too.

Excel: I know it’s a titan of software. I know it makes data analysis possible in ways undreamed of by data nerds in times gone by, but when the most common thing you hear in several hours of training is, “Excel will trip you up,” maybe there’s a little feature-not-bug thing going on. I use Numbers, m’self. It does everything Excel does — except for something called “pivot tables,” and may I never learn what those are — and looks prettier.

And other than that, it was a lot of driving. But a beautiful day.

Bloggage?

Sure: Lots of women get abortions at 24 weeks, because they “had to have a career.” A dispatch from the right-wing propaganda war, “October Baby.”

It’s simply appalling how long it’s taken Detroit’s city council to come to terms with reality, but it finally did. I’ve started making screen captures of Charles Pugh’s glasses — he wears a different pair every day. I’m thinking it’s a metaphor.

And now I’m off to my warm, soft bed. Downside of the week, y’all.