I wept because I had three inches of new, wet snow in my driveway, and then I met a man who had 12 feet of Pacific Ocean in his.

Pals, in 60 minutes I have a meeting with my partners, and I intend to arrive fully coffee’d and freshly showered. In the meantime, I have time to scribble a few lines, but all I really want to do is watch video from Japan.

The Beeb has a nicely edited highlight reel. I’m touched by the grocery-store employees whose first impulse is to try to protect the stock from falling off the shelves. We give our lives to our jobs and we take pride in even the smallest ones. We deserve a few benefits in the bargain, Gov. Walker, you jerk.

So let’s make this an open Friday earthquake tsunami weekend thread. I’ll start: I just checked my Twitter stream for good links, and found that once again, I’d been auto-subscribed to Twibbon, the slacktivist site of choice; it peddles dozens of add-ons to your profile picture, so you can demonstrate to your social networks what a good person you are. You will not be surprised to know there is already a Twibbon for Japan. Someone told me the other day these things are informally known as Dickbars. No surprise there.

Off to the shower. Have a tremendous weekend, all. Now to watch the Grim across the wide, wide ocean.

I like to think of myself as a tolerant person, if you define tolerant as someone who once decided it could never work out with a man because his grocery list contained the item parmashawn chese, but hung around for a few more months anyway. But hear me now and remember it later: If anyone in my circle spends $625 on “Modernist Cuisine”? You’re dead to me. (If you go through the Kickback Lounge, I will consider upgrading your status to Cold Shoulder.)

I’ve been reading about this five-volume, 40-pound, 2,238-page be-all and end-all of 21st-century cooking for a few days now — I guess the pub date was this week, although it should be noted it was self-published. The more I read, the more bugged I get. All reviews take the time to stipulate a few things:

1) This is a very ambitious work, and ambition should be honored;
2) The book(s) — shall we call it a “project,” or something else? — contain many astonishing and beautiful photographs;
3) If you have the will to dive in, there are diamonds there;
4) But not enough to justify the expense, work and other irreplaceable resources that went into producing the thing.

Ahem:

Descending this week on the culinary scene like a meteor, “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” is the self-published six-volume masterwork from a team led by Nathan Myhrvold, the multimillionaire tech visionary who, as a friend of mine said, “decided to play Renaissance doge with food.”

…Ultimately, it is a manifesto declaring that the new form of laboratory-inspired cooking — led by Grant Achatz in the United States; Heston Blumenthal in England; and Ferran Adrià, the father of this cuisine, in Spain — is a cultural and artistic movement every bit as definitive as Impressionism in 19th-century France or Bauhaus in early 20th-century Germany. It proclaims a revolution “in techniques, aesthetics and intellectual underpinnings of gastronomy.”

I read fast, and I had to go back and find the nettle in this opening passage, and it was this: tech visionary. Those guys? Can be real pains in the ass:

“Life has not been boring for me,” Nathan Myhrvold says. An overachiever’s overachiever, Myhrvold, 51, graduated from high school at 14, had two master’s degrees and a Princeton Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics by 23, worked alongside Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, and went on to earn hundreds of millions for Microsoft (and himself) as chief technology officer. Cashing out in 1999, he began pursuing his true passions by the armful: skydiving, car racing, scuba diving, volcanology, and UFOlogy, not to mention whole alternate careers as a wildlife photographer, dinosaur hunter, inventor (his name is on nearly 250 patents and counting), and author of the extraordinary new cookbook Modernist Cuisine.

Wow. Respect. Although one person’s overachiever’s overachiever is another’s dilettante, but never mind that. The guy has zillions and a coltish intellect; let him spend his money — and, again, this is his money he’s spending — on what he wants. He’s only in his early 50s. In his laboratory of wonder, he’s also pursuing big-think solutions to more serious, mundane problems (hospital infections, global warming). I guess everyone hopes for a line like this in their obituary:

His 1997 talk on dinosaur sex is the TED equivalent of Jimi Hendrix playing Woodstock.

All stipulated. There’s just something about five volumes, 40 pounds, 2,238 pages and a plexiglas cover, all in the service of a project that boils down to a foundational text for a silly style of cooking sought after and consumed by the tiniest handful of people in the world. Nathan Myhrvold has carved “The Last Supper” on the head of a pin. Whoop-de-do.

What style of cooking is this? That molecular gastronomy nonsense that’s always tripping somebody up on “Top Chef.” Foams and gels and puzzling techniques Julia Child would laugh at. Like this:

Among his favorite (recipes): scrambled eggs slow-cooked at low temperature in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag using a SousVide Supreme SVS-10LS water oven.

Because that is what the world has been waiting for: sous vide eggs.

Myhrvold made his fortune as Microsoft’s chief technology officer. Ha ha. In the early days of personal computing, when I had my first little laptop, I used to ask J.C. Burns what on earth was in MS Word that justified its $600 cost and bloated footprint on my 160-megabyte hard drive. “Lunch recipes,” he quipped, and it looks like he was right. This is what Myhrvold was thinking about when his underlings were giving the world Mr. Clippy.

Well, as Julia famously said, you are alone in the kitchen, and all that matters is what comes out of it. For people who already have thousands of dollars’ worth of high-tech gadgetry in place, maybe they’ll welcome a $625 reference work to tell them how to use it all. The NYT review acknowledges there is a great deal of very useful information between its many covers, but nearly all of it is for the professional, not the home cook. Maybe a restaurateur can justify the purchase. As for me? Eh, I’ll have a sandwich.

Bloggage for a fogbound Thursday here in Michigan:

Julianne Moore will play $P in the HBO adaptation of “Game Change.” Every time I think about dropping our subscription? They pull me back in!!! Who will play Barack Obama? On this, imdb is silent. Maybe Ms. Lippman knows.

As I believe I’ve mentioned approximately 7,000 times before, one of my several part-time jobs involves news research for the pharmaceutical industry, which every night exposes me to a fairly horrifying but still not widely reported story developing down in Dixie — legal pill mills operating out of storefronts, mainly in Florida, that push an appalling amount of prescription painkillers onto the street under the flimsiest pretense of medical treatment. It is the engine behind an explosion of addiction, overdose and death all over the country. Abuse of legal prescription drugs long ago outstripped that of heroin and other street drugs. It’s the reason pharmacists get ulcers and some are simply no longer carrying these hydrocodone-based potions; too many junkie stickups have taken their toll.

In its own way, the state has tried to tackle the problem; two years ago it created an office to maintain a patient database, in an effort to track obvious abuses. It didn’t fund the office, but y’know — details, details. Lately Purdue Pharma, the company that makes the most sought-after of these drugs, the notorious OxyContin, beloved by Rush Limbaugh and many others, offered $1 million to fund the database. This week, Gov. Rick Scott said, eh, no thanks. He wants to do away with the database entirely; it’s an invasion of patient privacy. Where does the GOP find these guys? I’m speechless.

OK, time to wind up and head out.

I got my paczki yesterday, in a distinctly un-Polish bakery down the main drag from my house. They’re as French as ooh-la-la, but if everybody’s Irish on St. Patrick’s Day, everybody’s Polish on Paczki Day, at least in Detroit. So I had one raspberry-filled paczek for lunch, and spent a couple of hours riding the sugar high at a reporting assignment, which ended in guffaws with a couple of real-estate agents. You think cops see a lot? Real-estate agents see everything, and what they don’t see, they hear.

“Someone called our office looking for 30 acres up north to grow medical marijuana,” one said.

“I saw an MLS photo once where someone left their artificial penis on the bathroom counter,” replied the other. I wonder if she said “artificial penis” because it sounds better than “dildo,” the way “handyman special” is an improvement on “a real dump.” She reads this blog, so hey, welcome! You know what she said about it? “You have such smart readers.” You bet I do.

I wondered if I could find the MLS photo of the artificial penis. I figure it has to be on a blog somewhere, so I Googled around a bit. Didn’t find it, but I did find this, via this page, which is another one of those places you should avoid if you don’t have about five hours to kill.

And now it’s Wednesday, when the week shifts into another gear. Office hours this week, so I have to get moving in about six minutes. Fortunately, we are bloggage-heavy today:

Ke$ha, the pop star who makes Madonna look like Maria Callas, has an unusual deal with LifeStyles condoms. Well, I wouldn’t touch her without a pair of gloves on.

This story broke yesterday morning and was updated through the day — a woman rushing to the hospital ended up giving birth in a car, pulled over on the shoulder of I-94. When it first appeared, that was about all the detail available, and the racist, vile comments started to pile up so fast the staff couldn’t delete them fast enough — another welfare recipient comes into the world in a rusty Pontiac with the muffler wired on, etc. At one point the story said 50 comments had been made, but you could only read about 10; the new Gannett website is whack and I’m not sure how it works, but I think the other 40 had been deleted, and the counter hadn’t caught up.

Then about noon a fuller story was posted. The woman is married. To a doctor, who wasn’t with her because he’s doing his residency in New Jersey. And she’s Muslim. She had the guts to allow photography, although of course she was fully covered in the usual fashion. Cute baby, proud mother, married parents, what’s the problem? The comments took a turn from welfare and wired-on mufflers to terrorism and cracks about honor killings (“I sure hope the EMS “guys” were all female. Otherwise, this woman is in big trouble.”). If I worked for a newspaper nowadays, I’d find it hard to concentrate on anything other than hating my readers.

But not everyone in the world is awful, and that’s why we close with this wonderful short essay about who helps you when you need it. May I just say, nothing in this story surprised me one bit. “Today you, tomorrow me.” It washes a lot of rancid comments away.

Remember, one day we’ll all be dust. The important part is what we did beforehand.

I had to keep checking the top of this story, so sure was I that I knew the author. The byline says Benjamin J. Dueholm, but I could have sworn it read Mild-Mannered Jeff.

It’s a thoughtful look at the work of Dan Savage, the alt-weekly sex columnist, who in recent years has branched out from refereeing bedroom disagreements to offering broader advice on what constitutes an ethical life. The premise of the story is that Savage has become an ethicist for the modern American age, in which no one is surprised (or should be) by sexual behavior, but is struggling to fit our new understanding into old frameworks. Here’s the nut, to this editor’s eye:

Half my mail at ‘Savage Love’ is from straight men and women who want to be reassured that their kinks—from BDSM to cross-dressing to fucking animals (!)—are normal,” Savage wrote in 2007, echoing a note of exasperation he has sounded a few times over the years. Savage has made clear he is not primarily interested in adjudicating whether people’s bedroom proclivities lie on the safe side of normality. …For him, what’s most important is that abandonment of inhibition should never entail an abandonment of personal responsibility.

That’s what makes him the right man for the job. Leave kinks aside for the moment. (Please.) Just as medical technology gallops ahead of our moral and ethical structures — does the surrogate mother get a card on the first Sunday in May? does the sperm donor owe anything to the children he helped create? — so too has our own behavior. Most adults with a functioning brain have figured out who the real beneficiaries of female virginity-until-marriage were, what’s really behind homophobia, but they’re uncomfortable with throwing all restraint out the window. Savage looks for an underlayment of basic human decency:

In ways that his frequent interlocutors on the Christian right wouldn’t expect, Savage has probably done more to uphold conventional families than many counselors who are unwilling to engage so frankly with modern sexual mores. “A successful marriage is basically an endless cycle of wrongs committed, apologies offered, and forgiveness granted,” he advised one very uptight spouse, “all leavened by the occasional orgasm.”

The reason I mention MMJeff is because it turns out the writer is a Lutheran minister. (Not that I would *ever* confuse Jeff with a Lutheran, perish the thought! It just had a certain clerical tone.) And he gets to my misgivings about Savage lower in the piece:

If there is something to treasure in the old, traumatized ideal of lifelong monogamy, it’s not that it demeans sexual fulfillment. Rather, it’s that monogamy integrates sexual fulfillment with the other good things in life—having someone to pay bills and raise children with, having a refuge both emotional and physical from the rest of the world. It is an ideal that is powerful even when it is not fully realized (as it rarely, if ever, is), not a contract voided by nonperformance. A worldview in which sex is so central to life that it may be detached from everything else and sought apart from every other ingredient of happiness presumes a world in which happiness itself can be redefined—in which people can be retrained in what they expect and accept from one another. To approach the libertarian ideal of human relationships, emotional shock therapy of the sort contemplated by AHND will be required. The promised land of natural, ethical, autonomous sexuality lies across a desert of self-mortifying trade-offs between sexual fulfillment and all the other joys and comforts of life.

Well-said. And that’s enough quoting from the copyright for one day. Worth your time.

What a day yesterday was. I spend a couple hours of Monday morning going around to our police stations, checking the blotters for GrossePointeToday.com’s public-safety report, easily the most popular feature of our site. And may I just say, all it takes is about a month of that to disabuse a person of any fantasies she might have had about living with a better class of people. (For the record, I never had any in the first place.) Most don’t make the roundup, as I define “public safety” as that which affects the safety of the public as a whole, but occasionally I’ll throw a domestic assault in, particularly if a weapon is involved. My favorite of this week was a woman who reported a “belated” assault, i.e., one that happened sometime before she sobered up and realized someone had punched her on the chin. The report described two black eyes, but noted those were from plastic surgery she underwent sometime before she went drinking and ran into an old boyfriend, her presumed assailant, although she wasn’t sure, because she couldn’t really remember anything. Some people live exciting lives, but mostly they lead drunken ones. Take alcohol out of the world, and people would find fewer reasons to beat up on one another. I’m sure we’d find another excuse pronto, however.

My second-favorite: A three-year-old boy found wandering near a major intersection, a full three blocks from his home. He’d been turned out into the yard by one of the adults in his short but unfortunate life, who was allegedly watching him from inside and couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten out, although, said adult noted, this was the fourth time he’d done so. “He’s a runner,” another caretaker reported. Can’t hardly blame the kid. I’d run, too.

Please note that I’m using “favorite” ironically here. Man hands on misery to man, etc.

Yeesh, it’s getting late. Best hop out of here before the day slips away. It’s Fat Tuesday — Paczki Day here in Detroit. I might stop somewhere around here for one later, although it’s decidedly not part of my diet at the moment. Wherever you are, I hope Mardi Gras finds you.

Friday’s workout didn’t go well. Running on fumes, I felt the way Hunter Thompson described himself in “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas” — much inappropriate sweating. Yes, you’re supposed to sweat while you exercise, but not this much. Went home, showered, ran this errand and that, couldn’t regulate my thermostat, caught a chill. And then, Saturday morning, it was official: Sick. Oh, well. It’s been stalking me all winter; might as well get it over with.

At least it happened on a weekend. I had planned to go to Eastern Market, maybe call a friend for lunch, walk the Dequindre Cut and hope for spring. Instead I slept and whined and slept and finished Major Pettigrew. By late afternoon, I felt better, well enough to rise and grocery shop and blah blah blah, but I’m cautiously optimistic this may have been a 24-hour thing. One day of having one’s clock cleaned, rather than the two-week cold so many of you have been struggling with? I’ll take it.

Among the other things we had to take on Saturday — heavy rains (would have washed out any recreational stroll) followed by snow. Another two inches. Sigh. I think I bear up under winter’s assault like a trouper, but by March I’m thinking about crocuses and daffodils. A gardener once told me to plant peas on St. Patrick’s Day. Are you kidding me? It was a good day to stay in bed.

Major Pettigrew was an absolute joy, by the way. I’m looking forward to the book-club discussion Friday.

Which seems as good a transition as any into the iPad. Unlike many Appleheads, I don’t spring for every new gadget that comes along, but it seems I spring for quite a lot of them, eventually. In the world of Appleheads, this represents enormous restraint. I’m still hanging onto by nearly three-year-old iPhone with no plans for an upgrade, but the new iPad is sorely tempting me. It seems like so much machine for a mere five bills, and I can think of a million places I would use it, rather than shlep my laptop around. I figure it’s only a matter of time, which then raises the question of e-books. I don’t want to go all Andy Rooney here — he already did — but it seems these will be inevitable, and I might as well get with the program. As I always embrace technology with ambivalence, I expect my e-book collection will be as whack as my MP3 collection, which started out being strictly upbeat workout music and oddities I might throw into a home movie soundtrack, and now is, frankly, an embarrassment. I don’t want to wipe out on my bike and have the EMTs pluck the earbuds from my cooling ears to hear “Brand New Key.” But, in that strange way that the delivery device always changes that which it delivers, so too will e-readers change publishing. I had coffee with an author friend the other day, who reported that her author friends, the ones who write niche products like spanking stories and other erotica, are enjoying a boom in sales. You can hide anything in a Kindle, it seems.

And as I recall, another author friend says the Kindle is great for hot new books you want to read in, but not necessarily read through — think “Game Change” and other texts-between-covers that really should be long magazine articles. For ten bucks, you can Kindle ’em, scan ’em and forget ’em. Lots of magazines cost five bucks these days; is that so much more?

Do you sense I am trying to talk myself into something here?

Maybe Connie or one of you librarians can enlighten me: How does e-pub work in lending? How do you “borrow” an e-book? Do you get a time-limited license that expires after two weeks? What are the copyright protections like, or do we now expect authors to write free, too?

Manic Monday, so let’s go bloggage-ing:

We’re No. 1! My very own congressional district — Michigan 13 — was at the absolute bottom of the heap in this fascinating but irritatingly vague map of “the nation’s well-being.” How did yours do?

Planning for life after Glenn Beck, on Fox.

Echoing Gene Weingarten: A fart joke in Dennis the Menace! (And, as he points out, you shoulda seen the first draft.)

Gotta run. Enjoy Monday, all.

Yesterday’s highlight: I met Detroitblogger John, the genius writer behind the stories at Detroitblog and their dead-tree versions in the Metro Times. (The former publishes more pictures; the latter pays him money, so I always click both.) I’ve known his name for a while, having wheedled it out of a filmmaker working on a documentary based on one of his stories. (This one.) I looked him up online, saw that he’s employed as an editor at a newspaper concern that never, ever publishes stories like the ones he writes, and took momentary pleasure in my accurate guess when I first stumbled across his work online — newspaperman. I don’t know much, but I know a prose style.

I didn’t try to contact him otherwise, having once exchanged an e-mail with him in which he said he keeps an anonymous byline because of his employer’s prickliness about freelancing. Besides, I’d already expressed my fangirl love; what else would there be to say?

But yesterday, when I walked into my department chairman’s office and found him talking to someone, and was introduced to John Redacted, the first thing I did was to blurt out, “I know your secret!” What a tool. I could share a cab with Colin Firth and never feel the need to tell him how much I love him. But writers? I lose all self-control.

“I think most people know by now,” he said. Well, that’s good. A man deserves credit for great work. I gather that he’s reached a rapprochement with his employer over the freelancing, but chooses to keep his profile low. Wise.

Then I asked something that’s been knocking around my head for some time: “Do you think Jay Thunderbolt would be amenable to having a spec screenplay written about him?” Cuz, you know, nothing is quite as visual as a six-foot-five-inch chain smoker whose face droops to one side and always wears a black suit with a bulletproof vest underneath. And runs a strip club out of his house. He already looks like a taller, younger, more facially paralyzed Christopher Walken.

“Sure,” he said. “He’s all about self-promotion.”

Don’t none of you folks steal my idea. Although I’m surely not the only one to comprehend his awesomeness. I was trying to find that story a couple weeks ago, I ran across another — apparently MTV did a piece on him for one of their series. Money quote from the show hosts:

“The thing about Jay is he probably hasn’t left Detroit in 30 years. He hasn’t flown in, God knows how long. When we booked him a flight his first question was, ‘How many of my guns can I bring?’ His second was, ‘Could you get me a smoking seat?'”

When you’re as awesome as Jay, you don’t need to leave Detroit. The party comes to you.

So that was yesterday. It also included a bowl of carrot-ginger soup from Russell Street Deli. Win-win.

Before I leave today, I have an RFK — request for kindness. Or to make it even more low-pressure, call it a request for karma, or even a DOYITAWC (direction of your interest to a worthy cause). One of our number, who comments from time to time as Velvet Goldmine, has a daughter who’s been invited to a National Youth Leadership Forum program at Yale this summer. It’s pricey, a deposit has to be sent pretty soon, and the money isn’t in this month’s budget. VG — I don’t think she’d mind if I told you her name is Melissa, and she’s the sister-in-law of my trusted friend Lance Mannion — is in a cash pinch. I told her that if she had a PayPal account, I’d send her a few shekels, and I just did. If you feel like sending a few of your own, the linked e-mail is qwerty1017 at ay-oh-ell dot you-know-what. (You can figure that out, right?) One of the great things about PayPal is, you can send any amount. I look at this as the online equivalent of a kid knocking on your door selling candy bars to finance a band trip. I always give those kids a fiver or so, so why not someone in Connecticut?

I stress that this isn’t an endorsement, I’m keeping no records, everything is between you and VG, and if you’d like to ask her any questions privately, you can send her an e-mail.

And is that all? I think that is all. Have an outstanding weekend. We’re expecting freezing rain!

I really need to stop being outraged at this stuff, but I can’t help it, I am: Mike Huckabee is the latest — and most high-profile to date, unless I missed somebody — Republican to push the line that Barack Obama is a Kenyan alien.

Earlier this week, he told a radio talk-show host:

“One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American,” said the Fox host. “If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”

He also mentioned Obama’s removal of a loaned bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the Oval Office and called it “a great insult to the British.” (He didn’t mention that Obama replaced it with one of Abraham Lincoln, who just might have more resonance for an African American president, but oh well — he is from Arkansas.)

These remarks, reflecting a stunning ignorance in a man who considers himself presidential timber, set off the usual whirlwind of blah-blah, which set off the usual response — it’s all the media’s fault, because he clearly “misspoke” and meant to say Indonesia.

Which is about as lame an excuse as they get, given the elaboration on the details about Kenya — even in Arkansas public schools, I don’t think they teach that the Mau Mau rebellion happened in Indonesia — and even if you take him at his word, how does five years of a childhood constitute “growing up” anywhere? Granted, Hawaii is such an exotic, foreign place, you can’t blame an Arkansan for getting confused.

The smart money is on this being dog-whistle politics, that Huckabee in no way misspoke, that he’s just letting the base know that he’s down with the program. And if that’s true, then no one — no voter, and certainly no journalist — owes Huckabee anything resembling respect anymore. Only shunning, and maybe not even that, will work on this sort of moronic, racist idiocy. Yes, racist. Yes, Mike Huckabee, you are a racist. A big, dumb racist. Racist McRaciston, the governor of a state with a large black population, has thrown in with racists. Own it.

Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. Where does this stop? WHERE?

Let’s switch to hockey, shall we? I expect this story will pick up steam hereabouts, or maybe not: Bob Probert, legendary hockey goon of Chicago and Detroit, died last summer of heart failure, but carried within his brain evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, doubtless the result of the head trauma he endured both on and off the ice:

Probert’s posthumous autobiography, “Tough Guy,” gleefully offers details of his 3,300 career penalty minutes — fifth in N.H.L. history — and recounts so many brawls with enforcers like Tie Domi and Marty McSorley that it requires 11 pages to list them all. He scored 163 goals in his career from 1985 through 2002, for the Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Blackhawks, but was so known for his fighting that a 2007 Hockey News poll rated him the greatest enforcer in hockey history.

Probert drank heavily beginning in his youth in Windsor, Ontario, and he used cocaine to the point that he served 90 days in a Minnesota prison and was suspended by the N.H.L. multiple times, including for the entire 1994-95 season. His police record included driving citations, bar fights and assaults on police officers. While boating last July 5 on Lake St. Clair, near his home in Tecumseh, Probert collapsed and died of heart failure, including an 80 percent blockage of the left coronary artery.

Many athletes later found with C.T.E. — whose test for abnormal protein deposits in brain tissue can be administered only after death — presented symptoms like drug abuse, impulse control and impaired memory only in the years before they died, suggesting that the disease contributed to it.

So the trauma created its own loop, I guess — head trauma leads to poor impulse control which leads to more head trauma. This is a story that started small, with a few studies mostly covered by the prestige papers, and mostly off the sports pages, but is picking up steam over the course of the last few years. The suicide of former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson — who is said to have shot himself in the heart to preserve his brain for postmortem research — pushed it higher, and I imagine this finding will, too.

Ironically, I remember reading this story a couple of years ago as the Stanley Cup playoffs got under way, “Why the Red Wings don’t fight,” about how the North American game is changing to a more European, less pugilistic model. Fewer goons, better skating.

Do click that first link on the Probert story, and check out the photo, and the look on the kid’s face. There’s the problem in a nutshell. Oh, and I did the math — 3,300 penalty minutes translates to 55 hours.

OK, we’ve done infuriating and depressing. Can we take a run past something fun?

I’m tapped out for funny, but here are a couple shots of Christina Hendricks in a low-cut dress. (Yes, Rob Daumeyer, that’s a big WIN!!!!!) I actually love the first dress (what I can see of it, anyway), but think it would look better with a double strand of pearls rather than that big honkin’ heart, but that is the product after all. (And I am old.) My jewelry box seems to be missing a giant crown of oak leaves; I’m glad someone has stepped in to fill the gap.

Onward into a cold, cold March morning.

I’ve never watched an episode of “Two and a Half Men” in my life and my interest in the second generation of the Actin’ Sheens is pretty much nil, but I gather Charlie Sheen’s public meltdowns are the best thing to happen to guerrilla humor since Sarah Palin.

No sooner had I chuckled through the Sheen Family Circus yesterday than I was alerted to Charlie Sheen in New Yorker cartoons. This story has developed quickly enough — sorry, you couldn’t pay me enough to watch him on “20/20” — that half the lines are going over my head. There are people who have the industrial-strength new-media skilz to monitor two dozen websites and Twitter feeds, but I’m not among them. Not if I’m going to have time to browse Cute Overload once in a while.

But I did take a few minutes and watch most of the clip at this Salon link, mainly because the headline irritated me; whatever else Charlie Sheen is, he’s not “frightening.” The haggard face, the cigarette in the teeth — he reminds me of the guys I used to meet in those summers during college, when my friends and I would go to different apartment-complex pools during the day. (We didn’t know anyone who lived there. That was sort of the point.) I bet he has a funny name for his penis. I bet he calls it “little Elvis” or “the Highlander.”

Back to the humor. This is sort of second-rate, but it contains at least one new fact (to me) — the Plaza Hotel has an Eloise suite. Of course they would, but the thought of Charlie and his goddesses partying there is rahther sobering, as Eloise might say. This who-said-it quiz provided one of my rare humiliations in the area of online quiz-taking (I am an Oxford don of online quizzes. Go on, Pew Center, try to stump me!).

Is this sort of bad behavior really so different from previous episodes of bad behavior? Then why are so many people who clearly have better things to write about writing about it? Why am I writing about it?

I liked this comment at Walter Kirn’s blog:

Like Hugh Hefner. Sheen’s flashing, haunted eyes, the nodding head, the sidelong, you-better-believe-it-pal, meaningful looks at his interviewers, all remind the spectator of the panhandler, the street hustler, the drunk tank cell mate, the it’s-reeeally-heavy-maa-an tedium of the Dennis Hopper character in “Apocalypse Now.” And finally, the drunk ranter in every bar in every town. Yeah, pal, you’re brilliant. You’re really special. And you know things ordinary mortals don’t. I gotta go now. We see our reduced selves and recoil.

He left out the way he rattles a rocks glass before he tries to drain it of the last few drops. That’s another thing those guys would do on their poolside chaises.

And Ken Levine’s post isn’t hugely insightful, but kudos for this shoutout to “A Face in the Crowd,” the closest thing to a literary reference you find in showbiz, most days.

My word counter says we’re at 500 on the nose, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

This story was done by one of my students. I pass it along because until I moved to Michigan, I’d never seen a hookah lounge before, let alone one in a strip mall called Off the Hookah. This one sounds like a sports bar for Arab men.

Clint Eastwood is directing a script about J. Edgar Hoover, starring Leonardo DiCaprio. So there. Soooo. Theerrrre.

Oh, and note the lead in that story, which admittedly is from E! Online and not the New Yorker. I think Hank Stuever once noted that stories about movies featuring gay characters always feature a passage about kissing — what was it like to kiss another man, Leo? Was it difficult? How did you prepare? As though a simple kiss is the equivalent of losing 60 pounds and shooting a lengthy scene in which one swims a river of shit. No one ever asks that of the hookers who bang Charlie Sheen.

If you’re not reading the NYT’s Disunion blog, you should be. We’re only a few weeks away from the attack on Fort Sumter.

And is that it? I think it is. Off to the gymnasium.

Breakfast: One scrambled egg, some of last night’s leftover oven-roasted potatoes with garlic, one tablespoon of salsa, all wrapped in a tortilla. The black-coffee portion of the meal is still in progress, but I hereby pronounce this breakfast an unqualified success.

Protein at every meal is my goal for the spring. Lately I’ve been corresponding with an urban farmer who lives a couple miles from me, on the other side of Mack Avenue (i.e., Detroit) and keeps a flock of ducks. She sells fresh duck eggs whenever you feel like stopping by, for 50 cents apiece. My bravery in all things culinary wavers a bit here. My reading tells me they taste the same as the chicken variety, with more nutrients; is this true? I never ate eggs until I was in college, when a boyfriend who had been a grill chef at Perkins introduced me to western omelets. I think I’ve been a trouper since then, but there are two kinds of people in the world — those whose breakfasts run to fruit-yogurt-juice and those who are eggs-meat-potatoes, and I’m in the first camp. Eggs are for lunch.

I’m going to get some duck eggs, although mostly I just want to see her flock. There are so many urban farmers in Detroit now it’s no longer a novelty, but I love animals and I love ducks. Jim at Sweet Juniper has friends deeper in the city who keep goats and chickens, and there’s a high school for girls who have children — do we even bother to call them unwed mothers anymore? — that has at least one horse, along with a garden plot that earns them real money. Parts of the city look like rural Mississippi during the Depression, only with curbs. Crazy town.

Speaking of protein, the Free Press has gone so Gannett of late that I’ve practically stopped reading it, but this story caught my eye today — about scientific research on underwater rock formations in Lake Huron, concentrating on a now-submerged land bridge that arcs across the lake between Alpena, Michigan and Amberley, Ontario. Scientists suspect the formations were man-made, and served as Ice Age caribou hunting blinds. Imagine what it took to bring down a caribou with the tools of the era. Alley Oop, you have my respect.

Meanwhile, the graphic with the story has a big boo-boo in it, describing the land bridge as 10 feet wide. No. Ten miles. Details, details.

Years ago I read a story about some ancient human remains found in the Pacific Northwest — Something Man — that are unmistakably Caucasian in nature, challenging the belief that Indians were the first to migrate into North America across the Bering land bridge. The remains were being fought over, with Indians wanting to reclaim them for reburial, and the scientific community, which wants to study them more and maybe recast some theories. The story broke down the sides into approximate camps, with the most troublesome being, essentially, Indian religious fundamentalists, who didn’t want the corpse studied at all, because their version of history is the only one they accept — that they’ve always been there, that they were the first ones there, and the rest of you just shut up. The piece included the comments of a prominent Native American mocking the whole idea of the Bering land bridge, finding it a little too conveeeenient, this idea that the ocean was once dry in a particular place. I guess he’s an Indian fundamentalist, but for my money, I’d rather imagine that land bridge arcing across the lake with its caribou blinds, and the desperate search for protein and nutrition that only required me to consult my refrigerator this morning.

So, bloggage?

Change the names, it’s all the same — lunatic known for his bullhorn protests at something called the Southern Decadence Festival is busted jerking off in a public park.

More $P sockpuppetry. This just gets funnier by the day.

The best picture on the Internet, via the WashPost’s Style Tumblr. Related (to protein and Internet pictures, which brings us full circle): Al Qaeda attacks America with photo of piglet wearing boots. Via the Onion News Network, natch.

I’m off, all.

I kept the Oscars on while I worked last night, because it’s the sort of thing you don’t need to watch-watch, or even pay much attention to. Every time I looked up, Anne Hathaway was in a different dress and James Franco was all but squinting at the teleprompter. I happen to like both of these folks, and I take it from the Twitter traffic that everybody thinks they really sucked. I disagree. Franco sucked (and I loves me some Franco). Hathaway’s only sin was trying too hard. But she was amazing to look at — all those dresses! all that hair! — and in a traditional matchup like that, it would be her only job. Look lovely, and occasionally zing. But she sparkled and zinged enough for the both of them.

I didn’t understand that Hugh Jackman thing. Was it some reference to last year? Because I forgot last year already. The Oscars are always highly forgettable, especially the singing and dancing parts. Here’s what I remember from previous years: Jon Stewart saying, “The score is now Martin Scorsese zero, Three-Six Mafia one.” Rob Lowe and Snow White. And a few acceptance speeches. That’s about it. So I don’t understand the annual whining that the show was too long, too serious, too dull, whatever. It was ever thus, and likely always will be. Let’s prize this opportunity to look at Hollywood unmasked, and revel in all the people who call themselves “artists” with a straight face. And let’s check out Hathaway’s Oscar dresses, shall we?

Tom & Lorenzo counted eight, enough to “rival a Cher Farewell Tour,” and I’d be hard-pressed to find fault with any of them. My favorite was the shiny cobalt column, but that might be my favorite color ever, and if anyone can rock shiny cobalt, it’s a slender strand of a woman with classic brunette coloring. I didn’t know this whole lineup was put together by Rachel Zoe; this may require me to change my opinion of her.

Looking at the pictures, you know what else I noticed? She had red fingernails when she arrived, and nude ones after the show started. So besides the eight costume changes and four hairstyle changes, she also had time for someone to blow through her dressing room with a bottle of acetone. Meanwhile, James Franco evidently smoked a doobie. The girl always works harder.

My single favorite award? David Seidler, 73, the oldest person to ever win for original screenplay. My role models these days are mostly old men, but I think it’s a mark of maturity that I’d rather be Seidler than Hathaway.

Manic Monday, so a quick trip to the bloggage:

Mitch Albom disapproves of Kim Kardashian. Says she does nothing to earn a reported $65 million last year. Oh, I don’t know. I think she works harder getting dressed and staying in shape for her many public appearances than Albom did on that lame-ass column.

Man, the Onion has been on fire lately. Marauding gay hordes react to lack of DOMA enforcement:

“It was just awful—they smashed through our living room window, one of them said ‘I’ve had my eye on you, Roger,’ and then they dragged my husband off kicking and screaming,” said Cleveland-area homemaker Rita Ellington, one of the latest victims whose defenseless marriage was overrun by the hordes of battle-ready gays that had been clambering at the gates of matrimony since the DOMA went into effect in 1996.

Also: Open-minded man grimly realizes how much life he’s wasted listening to bullshit.

Finally, our own Brian Stouder, guest-blogging at Fort Wayne Observed. If you want to know how to live life as a parent of a child at an “urban” high school, well, he shows you how.

Gotta run, kittens. More tomorrow.