One of the miracles of the age is this: I’m sitting in a bar, writing on my stupid blog. Do I look like a yuppie douche? Probably. But I’m having a nice Czech lager, the day is done, and there’s very likely a shwarma in my future. Which is to say: Who cares?

Wednesdays are becoming my second-favorite night of the week. I drop Kate off at the Max for three and a half hours of music instruction, and I claim the evening for myself. I could go home and catch up on “Top Chef,” wherever it is in its cycle, but I think I prefer the bar.

So, I read this today, about Patch, the hyperlocal AOL experiment that’s sweepin’ the nation, or swept it for a while. We have one here. GrossePointeToday.com competes with it, to the extent we can, with students and volunteers. Our local Patcher does a good job, which I tell anyone who will listen. Our brand is different, and I tell people that, too. But I really, really don’t want to see this:

Patch has implemented a new “One Team One Goal” strategy, with a budget that effectively eliminates anywhere from 50 to 100 percent of freelance dollars, depending on the Patch region and how the supervising editor and regional ad director choose to allocate dollars.

The editorial emphasis is now on “easy, quick-hitting, cookie-cutter copy,” including mandatory “Best Of” features (i.e., best coffeeshop, best burgers, etc.) that compel businesses and readers to visit and participate in the Patch directories. (Each Patch has a directory of local businesses, organizations, churches, etc.)

I’ve noticed that here — a few months back, the local Patch stopped working quite so hard to cover the news and instead started demanding we weigh in on who has the best pizza/hamburger/bar food in eastern Wayne/Macomb counties. Why is it so hard to sell people what they need, and so easy to give them what they want? And I’m not even sure they want it. Who would?

On a lighter note, Romenesko also had more of a give-’em-what-they-want feature — words only journalists use. Such as? “Fled on foot,” for one. I love that one. Everyone should flee on foot more often.

Have we already skipped to the bloggage? Perhaps. How about this, which is by far the most interesting angle on the Pete Hoekstra spot yet: The creator of that ad is the evil genius behind the infamous Carly Fiorina demon sheep spot. Well, that explains a lot.

Via Hank, the answer to the question: What would Thomas Kincaid paint if he were locked in Room 101 for a year and force-fed Glenn Beck recordings, “Clockwork Orange”-style? This.

ANIMALS TALKING IN ALL CAPS. BECAUSE.

A final note: Some of you who’ve been reading here for a while know I have a little cyber-friendship with Amy Welborn, formerly of Fort Wayne, now of Birmingham, Ala. You might also know that Amy had a tragedy three years ago, when her husband, Michael Dubruiel, died unexpectedly, a few months after they made their move.

Amy has published a book about the experience and its aftermath, a sort of “Year of Magical Thinking” with more religion and a trip to Sicily. I downloaded “Wish You Were Here” for my iPad, and have been reading in it over the past couple of days and enjoying it very much. Maybe you will, too, and if you do, you order it via the Kickback Lounge.

With that, let’s start the coast downhill to the weekend, shall we?

On a good day, I can travel between Grosse Pointe and Lansing in one hour, 40 minutes. Yesterday was a good day in the morning, less so in the afternoon. I spent what seemed like forever traveling just a couple of miles, while watching my very accurate miles-remaining gauge drop from 10 to zero. Which meant an early freeway exit for fuel, which meant Connor between Warren and Mack and the sort of fueling experience I don’t get in my neighborhood, i.e.:

I’ve never seen one of those locking frames before. It seems to be there to keep rampaging scrappers from, what? Stealing the innards of a gas pump? I’m mystified. Someone already got the face plate for the receipt printer. It was the kind of place you don’t let your guard down, although at 5 p.m. or so, it’s not that bad. Bought 13.85 gallons. My tank holds 14. Close call.

I’ve said it before: Detroit really resets your bad-neighborhood meter. This was near the soup kitchen where I volunteered in the after-school program a couple years ago, near this guy, near the corner where I saw a dead pit bull lie in the street literally for weeks, being run over and over and over, until it was little more than a leathery patch. Never was cleaned up. It snowed deep again, and I never saw it again. Probably the plow ground it into atomic particles, and that was that.

Sorry about no post yesterday. That will happen from time to time. The new job, and commuting, and teaching has me pretty strung out. Know, my little peaches, that you’re always on my mind, but there’s always something else to do. The Center for Michigan has a feature called Truth Squad, a Politifact-like feature, and yesterday I TS’d the Pete Hoekstra Debbie Spend-it-now spot — it’ll be here pretty soon, if not by the time you read this. There’s always something to do, somewhere.

That’s a good thing, I hasten to add.

So, some links?

I liked Dogs Against Romney on Facebook because I found them amusing, but they are filling up my feed with pitches to buy bumper stickers and T-shirts, and I may have to unlike. One joke can stretch pretty far, but you have to be decent about it. Still, credit where it’s due. It’s a good one.

One of those stories that makes you wish the internet would disappear.

And now I think I’ll watch “Southland.” Just…because.

I gotta admit: I was encouraged by the centurions.

When Madonna made her Super Bowl halftime entrance on a stage being towed by an army of Roman soldiers, I thought perhaps a miracle had happened, and she had developed a sense of humor about herself. It was a witty comment on the field as the arena of gladiatorial battle; of herself, as a man-eater who could only be satisfied by an army of ’em; of, I dunno, the episode of “Rome” where Cleopatra travels about in a giant house being toted by a few dozen Nubians, while their princess lolls inside, smoking opium.

And then the show started, and oh well.

The sound was bad, but that happens in fast-changing live shows. The dancing was robotic, but that happens when everyone is hired for their robotic nature, so as not to distract from the star. And the music! Madonna’s greatest hits. Sure, of course. Because what she’s really promoting is her new movie, which no one wants to see. Madonna has been looking for her post-pop career for longer than she was fully present as a pop star, but she always ends up having to add the pop-star thing, contribute a song to the soundtrack so at least it’ll be eligible for one little award. And now, to get people to see “W.E.,” she’ll do the Super Bowl halftime show and give some interviews.

I read one the other day. She was asked about Wallis Simpson and Edward VIII’s Nazi sympathies. She denied they had any. Oh? How did she figure that? “Research,” she flatly stated. There’s not one substantive piece of evidence to prove they were Hitler-lovers, so that’s that.

Well, there’s that famous photo, and her friends’ and contemporaries’ accounts of her belief that Herr Hitler would put things right, and make her queen, once he got Europe under his boot. But of course Madge would be a Wallis fan, because they’re both such rebels! They don’t care what society thinks! They’re headstrong, too tempestuous to tame! And so on. Which is why I don’t have much hope for whatever she does next. Because she takes herself so, so seriously, with the Grande Ladye faux-British accent and always referring to herself as an “ah-tist.”

What she needs is a sitdown with Bette Midler. They’ll get along, and Bette will set her straight. Bette puts her background singers in mermaid tails and does a wheelchair dance routine. Bruce Vilanch writes her material. I’ve loved Bette since…well, since I first laid eyes on her, but especially since she came to sing at a Rolling Stone anniversary thing, maybe the 10-year party, and did what she does best: Walk into a place taking itself far too seriously and get them to stop. I remember she sang a song and then looked down at Sonny and Cher, sitting ringside. “What’s the matter, Sonny?” she asked. “Never seen a woman with bazooms before?”

Bette is about 66 now, still killing it (when she wants to), and is perfectly positioned to be Madonna’s life coach, and last best hope to find a career doing anything other than another lip-synched medley of greatest hits. If the first piece of advice she offers is “hire Bruce Vilanch,” we can at least thank her for that.

Other than that, it was a good Super Bowl, I guess. Liked the Chevy Silverado commercial best, but thought the rest were mostly meh. Clint Eastwood did his little Chrysler sermonette; I think that campaign is now officially played. You have the bookends now; let’s let it go. By next year, we’ll either have a new president (who thinks Chrysler would be better off lying dead on the ground, some private-equity vultures picking over its parts) or four more years of Obama. The case for the bailout has been made. Stop making it.

What did you think? Of all of it?

Everybody’s thinking Super Bowl food.

For the record, I’ve never had an abortion, but my wedding was performed by a minister whose day job was executive director of our local Planned Parenthood office, and he asked that, in lieu of a fee-for-service, we make a comparable donation to the cause. I did so without hesitation, and I will in the future, because the first birth control prescription I ever filled was written by a PP doctor. And because I did that, and kept doing it, I never had to deal with the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy.

So I’m pro-Planned Parenthood.

I’ve always been suspicious of the Susan G. Komen people, on the other hand, for reasons many of you have thrashed out in comments in recent days — I always thought they were more about marketing their pinkness than anything else. I don’t like the phrase “for the cure,” as it should be pretty clear by now that cancer will likely never be “cured” in the strict sense of the word, although treatments continue to improve and we know so much more about the disease that we may well get pretty close to the ideal. And one of the things we know is that one key to surviving breast cancer is early detection, and the nominal money Planned Parenthood gets from the Komen organization (not enough to pay the Komen CEO’s salary for two years) goes for breast-cancer screening.

Being wealthy women, I wonder if the Komen folks have considered how many women use the services at Planned Parenthood as pretty much the beginning and end of their primary care. You may not be able to afford a doctor and a mammogram, but if you show up at PP, they’ll at least give you a pelvic and breast exam and pap smear, free or close to it. And yes, surely PP will get enough to make up the loss this year, but what about next year, and the year after that?

So much has been written about this in the past few days, and I know I’m late coming to it. But women’s health — and especially the right of women to make decisions about their lives and reproductive health free from meddling from state legislatures, federal-court judges and the pink-ribboned busybodies in Dallas — is very important to me. Not one more penny for the pink from me. Don’t show me your pledge sheet for your walk/run/whatever for the cure. I cut off United Way in Fort Wayne for precisely this reason some years ago. Planned Parenthood was there for me when I needed them, and I think I need to be there for them now. It’s really that simple.

So. Bloggage?

Another good Bridge yesterday, with another installment in an ongoing project, following a number of families who were cast adrift by welfare reform in Michigan last year. You can read the stories there, but this was the angle I found most interesting:

…In 27 of Michigan’s 83 counties, the number of welfare cases is the same or higher than before the time limit was instituted.

Meanwhile, welfare cases in the state’s most populous county – Wayne County – are down 27 percent. In that one county alone, 8,621 families fewer families are receiving cash assistance.

Here’s another way to look at it: Of all families who have stopped receiving welfare checks since September, 54 percent live in Wayne County.

Wayne County = Detroit, in case you haven’t figured that out yet.

A little D-centric, but funny just the same, “Our How-To Guide For Making A Hardscrabble, Gritty, Post-Industrial Documentary About Detroit,” by the folks at Changing Gears. Well, there are a lot of them out there, and they all follow a pretty predictable model.

I hesitate to post this, but what the hell: The homicide investigation in Grosse Pointe ran straight off the rails night before last, with reports the husband maintained an S&M dungeon in the basement of one of his buildings. I disapprove of this sort of reporting — I try to be Dan Savage-like in my tolerance of other people’s intimate lives, but I couldn’t stop laughing yesterday about the reporter’s ominous lead-in to this piece, in which he gravely revealed the husband asked his playmates to call him “Master Bob.” This guy needs a new master name. How can anyone say “Master Bob” with a straight face? Master Roberto, Master Heinrich, Master Rudolfo, yes. Master Bob, Master Jim, Master Wally, no.

Off to work.

Kate’s band had a gig last night. It was a Groundhog Day Eve event at one of the city parks. It was the usual clusterbump — the organizer thought “a PA system” referred to the one with speakers in the ceiling. Scott thought he could use the music school’s electronic drums, and he could, but we had to go fetch them. And then we got set up, and looked around. They thought it would be like the elementary school ice-cream social they played last spring, but it turned out to be even younger kids and a table of developmentally disabled adults. They were the final act, after the nature presentation on groundhogs.

“I feel like we’re in a Seinfeld episode,” Kate said.

“More like a Fellini movie,” I corrected.

But they did fine, even it was a little strange, their alt-rock repertoire with the little kids and the adults and the guy in the groundhog suit. But there was cake — how bad could it be? They finished the show with three verses of “I’m a Little Groundhog.” You don’t know that one?

I’m a little groundhog, furry and round
I’m coming out to look around
If I see my shadow, down I go
Six more weeks of winter, oh no!

I have it on video. I’ve been warned that if I put it on the internet, I will never be forgiven. Can’t really blame her.

So, happy groundhog day. Six more weeks of winter? We haven’t had six weeks of winter, period. Another ridonkulous day of above-40s temperatures, and the daffodils are now a full inch above ground. I’m thinking this is maybe it.

So, some bloggage?

Is there anything to say other than this? Don Cornelius is dead. One more line dance, for old time’s sake:

Happy Thursday, whether your groundhog sees its shadow or not.

Sorry nothing new on the ol’ blog yesterday. I was knackered Monday night, and woke up Tuesday to discover the local homicide investigation had reached a higher gear. Alas, I had a full day at Real Work planned, and had barely arrived in Lansing when Alan called.

“A producer from Nancy Grace wants to talk to you about being on the show,” he said. Oh, wonderful.

I put it up for a vote in the office. The consensus was I needed to find out what the appearance fee was. My thinking was that I hadn’t washed my hair in two days, and there was no way I was TV-ready. But I have a weak spot for producers, who have to do the hard work of dialing for guests, and figured she was at least due a return call. I wondered if the producer was doing oppo research and had perhaps noted that I’d called her boss a “blonde harpy” at some point in the past. Or, if she’d simply searched the name, might have find that a certain commenter who goes by the name “caliban” had disparaged the blonde harpy about 10 million times. N.G. is really not my cup of tea, but I thought it might do GrossePointeToday.com some good, and what the hell? I called.

Nancy wanted me to do a phoner for about an hour, on “fear in the commmunity” after the murder. Hmm. I could probably do that. I might be on for a minute, no one would see my hair, and I could write while I was sitting on hold. Like a fool, I said OK, I’d do that.

“Let me talk to my boss,” the producer said. “We might be changing direction.”

Five minutes later, the direction had changed and no one cared about the community’s fear, because now it’s looking like the hubs is maybe just a little dirty. I said I understood, hung up and thought: whew. Tonight I watched the show and thought: Double whew. What a bunch of barking jerkoffs. Also: That is one super-soft lens they reserve for the star. Not since Liz Taylor’s “White Diamonds” ad have I seen one quite that forgiving.

It was a long day. When I got home there was a message on my home machine from CNN. Screw it. They nabbed the Patcher instead. Just as well. My hair is still dirty.

Fortunately, many linkies and much bloggage today:

We had a good Bridge yesterday. I especially liked this piece on “amenity-driven growth,” or Why Companies Keep Relocating to Chicago, Even Though the Taxes are High, aka (for you Fort Wayners) the Navistar Conundrum.

There was also a good two-story package on the (tentative) return of Michigan manufacturing, the overview and the detail piece, on a domestic ski maker.

Via Hank, a look at an all-white production of “Hairspray” in Plano, Texas. Wait, you’re thinking; isn’t “Hairspray” about white and black kids? How would you do that? With great defensiveness, it turns out:

Didn’t any black kids audition? No, said Rodenbaugh, it’s hard to recruit black kids to PCT because there aren’t that many in Plano. (African-Americans make up less than 8 percent of the Plano, Texas, population of 259,841, according to the most recent census numbers.)

So why do a show with black characters in it if you know going in that you won’t have any black kids to play them? Rodenbaugh had several answers about how much the kids wanted to do Hairspray, how they weren’t going to bow to “political correctness” and how “the parents expect this.”

Oh.

This is depressing. Pythons in the Everglades:

…In the southernmost part of the Florida Everglades, things have taken a really wild turn. Pythons and anacondas are eating everything. The most common animals in Everglades National Park — rabbits, raccoons, opposums and bobcats — are almost gone, according to a study released Monday.

The snakes are literally fighting with alligators to sit atop the swamp’s food chain. In October, a 16-foot python was found resting after devouring a deer.

Almost all the rabbits and raccoons, gone? How is that even possible?

Where is cable news on that one, anyway?

Strange, how outside stimuli insinuate themselves into your dreams. I have an alarm clock that flashes before it buzzes, and it works well except when it doesn’t, i.e., when I’m facing the wrong way, or actually, you know, asleep.

Friday morning I had a vivid dream of being in a dark room, watching a slide show — the old-fashioned Kodak Carousel kind. Slide, brief moment of darkness, slide. I thought, freaky slide show. Then, this isn’t a slide show. The clock was blinking. For how long? Maybe 15 seconds.

Sometimes Kate says she wants a career that involves work with the human brain. Maybe she’ll be the one to figure it out.

Another too-short weekend. Last week’s homicide investigation looked like it was building toward an arrest (the husband), then didn’t. The police around here may work seven days a week, but they only answer phones on a M-F business-hours schedule, and when they do, rarely say anything. A lack of information is as bad as too much of it, and Facebook rushed into the vacuum, with the locals piling pig-ignorant comment upon half-wit observation, until I couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve been waiting my whole life to get a John Cheever reference into a column about Grosse Pointe, and whaddaya know: That day has come.

Do we learn anything as we go through this life? I have a policy I adopted around the age of 30, when the first marriages among my peers were cracking up, and it is: No one is qualified to judge a marriage other than the people in it. A corollary: Every single person in the world has it in them. Which is? Something extraordinary, on either side of the darkness/light divide. I think this is what makes life interesting and unpredictable — every day, we can be Lenny Skutnik or Some Guy Who Kills His Wife. I don’t know if this guy here in Grosse Pointe killed his wife, but I know that I’m not fit to say he’s simply incapable of such an act, because he comes from a good family and was a Rotary Club president and raised money for the poor of Detroit. More facts needed. I hope we learn them eventually.

We seem to have skipped to the bloggage already. So, then:

From Coozledad, a rabbit that herds sheep. Great video, love the music and it’s a reminder of why the border collies in “Babe” called the sheep morons.

Eric Zorn at the Chicago Tribune has been bird-dogging the Emmanuel Goldstein Saul Alinsky disinformation campaign, and has a couple of posts with more linky goodness than you could read in a month. Here’s the biggest one. In another, Zorn wonders:

Is Gingrich the historian really frightened of the influence of a man who devoted his life to helping poor folks find their political voice?

I doubt it. To me, this looks like the ultimate cynical tribute to Alinsky — the dark, repetitive intonation of a name that sounds vaguely foreign and Jewish in order to rile folks up with yet another gaseous myth.

I think he’s right. “Saul Alinsky” is the Barack Hussein Obama of this campaign cycle. What I don’t understand is why Gingrich’s patron, Sheldon Adelson, is OK with it. My guess is, he floats above anti-Semitism at this station of his life.

Oh, and Roy covers the crazy Alinsky angle.

And with that, I must run. The week is front-loaded, but should ease a bit by Wednesday. Here’s hopin’. I hope yours is good.

I was down at Wayne today when my colleague and GPT partner Ben Burns wandered in. I asked him whether his Little League coaching career had intersected with Prince Fielder’s time in the locals. It had.

Fielder — although I guess you’d call a 12-year-old kid by his first name, wouldn’t you — was a head taller and two kids wider than every other player there, and could hit anything, Ben said. He knocked everything over the fence, to the point that one day Ben called for an intentional walk, generally frowned upon in Little League, but hell, it’s not every day you face a future MLB star.

Fun fact: When Prince was 12, he was messing around in Tiger Stadium with his dad and hit one into the stands. Fair.

So, bloggage?

We had a good Bridge yesterday. Ron’s piece on the loss of skilled public employees in Michigan was great — you never think of stuff like that until you read something like this:

Michele Glinn loved her job, and she was good at it. As the only Ph.D toxicologist working in the Michigan State Police toxicology unit, she analyzed blood samples for alcohol and other drugs — and crisscrossed the state testifying in court.

Frustrated by unpaid furlough days, a shrinking staff and a negative public perception of state employees, Glinn sat down at her computer one day last fall and sent her resume to an employment search firm. “I got a call from the headhunter the same day,” Glinn recalled. “Two days later, I had a phone interview; a week later, I was in St. Louis being offered a job on the spot.”

Her U-Haul crossed the state border in November, leaving Michigan with no one who can provide expert testimony for the prosecution in alcohol and drug cases. “The state has no one to answer scientific questions,” Glinn said. “That’s a public safety issue.”

I had a piece on the guy who does the Pure Michigan parodies.

I was thinking the other day about maybe getting an iPhone 4S — the talking one. But maybe? No:

But not in every way. Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.

To make your wish her command, Siri floods your cell network with a stream of data; her responses require a similarly large flow in return. A study published this month by Arieso, an Atlanta firm that specializes in mobile networks, found that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S uses twice as much data as does the plain old iPhone 4 and nearly three times as much as does the iPhone 3G. The new phone requires far more data than most other advanced smartphones, which are pretty data-intensive themselves, The Post has reported.

I refuse to be a data hog just to have Siri type my text messages.

I thought the weekend would never come, but it’s here, it’s here! Enjoy yours. I’m hoping to get to the market — it’s been a while. Maybe a picture? Here’s hoping.

Today was one of those days I was, as the kids say, so not looking forward to — breaking news happening in Grosse Pointe at a time when I can’t cover it, because I work for someone else now. However, when God gives you a job, he also opens a window, and through it can crawl a great student who, when you text him Breaking news. Call me, sets your phone a-jingling in about 60 seconds and then, when you explain that a local resident has been found dead in her car in Detroit, says, “I’ll brush my teeth, and then I’ll head down there.”

All of which makes me say: I am SO glad you’re here.

Seriously. It’s a tragedy, but when you have a competent person to help you carry the load, that’s all you can say. Journalists have to write a lot of stories we wish hadn’t happened. The good ones can get it down with minimal trauma to all.

Journo-peeps? If you have an internship to offer, you could do worse than Dustin Blitchok. He gets it.

Yeesh, what a day. Homicide, class and a full day for the Center. I don’t know about you, but when night fell, I dropped Kate at her Wednesday-night music lesson and went directly to the jazz club/restaurant a few blocks away, ordered steak and eggs and had a wonderful dinner all by my lonesome.

Eating alone with something to read: One of the great pleasures of my adult life. I’m such an eavesdropper.

So, a pic for today? How about Michigan, as seen from space?

Did you know Michigan has more coastline than California? It’s true.

The bad news: It’s frequently heaped with snow. Still.

Bloggage:

It’s sad when a famous person goes crazy, but when an obnoxious famous person goes crazy and refuses to shut up, that’s en-ter-tain-ment:

Victoria Jackson doesn’t want to meet at her house. “The Nation of Islam wants to kill me,” she explains apologetically in her inimitable shrill voice. Instead, she picks up a reporter at a Miami-area strip mall. Her weathered Honda Civic is adorned with “Nobama,” Marco Rubio, and Tea Party bumper stickers, and inside, it smells like it’s been fumigated with sweet incense.

She hurtles through intersections and down side streets, holding a Flip cam to her face with her left hand. Steering with elbows and the occasional pinkie, she opens a Bible inscribed with her name and quotes Scripture. Then she turns the camera on a reporter riding shotgun, whom she suspects is a socialist. “Don’t you think that some people are on welfare from cradle to grave,” she demands, ploddingly, “because the government is encouraging them never to work?”

Why did I ever take Lifehacker off my bookmarks? They know everything.

Farewell to the anonymous internet. Oh, Google. Why?

Happy Thursday to all.