Saturday night was out of the ordinary, for us — a choir concert for two middle schools and the high school they feed into. (Except that Kate will not go to that high school, but never mind that.) I suppose the intent was to show the whole vocal-music program from farm team to majors, and if so, it was impressive. I’ve always liked Kate’s choir and her teacher, but the high-school program is something else. I’ve not watched many episodes of “Glee,” but the little school’s nemesis, the well-funded, always-perfect Vocal Adrenaline? I saw them Saturday night.

The teacher has been there for a while, and is known for the rigorousness of her program, her high standards and her temper. A series of events a few years back led to the revelation of some ugly events in her personnel file — thrown staplers, verbal hectoring, the usual things you expect from a temperamental perfectionist — but an investigation by the state board of education left her in place. She had enormous support from the parents and her former students, but the damage was done. She was revealed as the Bobby Knight of show choir.

Now, I don’t know all that much about show choir, but I did a little reporting on marching band when I was in Indiana, and I suspect they’re the same. That is, they long ago stopped being about fancy marching during football halftimes and are now about intricate choreography, custom arrangements of current pop music and special effects, all displayed on a competitive circuit that’s unknown to virtually everyone who doesn’t have a kid participating. And those competitions are dominated by a handful of large, wealthy suburban schools with booster clubs that don’t mind paying top dollar for special-team coaching and flag-squad uniforms designed to sparkle just so under stadium lights. And other things. Lest you think I exaggerate, one proprietor of band-supplies store told me about an effect used by a Carmel school a year or two previous — a piece of fabric nearly the length of the field, called a “fly,” that required special equipment to launch. The thing was shot in the air, it gracefully unfurled just so, and it drifted over the field, hiding the band from the audience’s eyes for a few seconds before settling in a puddle on the other side. While the band was hidden, it was scrambling into a new formation, so that when the fly landed, ooh, look!

Rumored cost of the fly effect: $100,000. Ryan Murphy, the creator of “Glee,” is an Indianapolis native. While his fictional school is set in Ohio, their nemesis, Vocal Adrenaline, goes to Carmel High.

So, back to Saturday night. The middle-schoolers went first, the talent preview, the scouting report. And then it was time for all the high-school groups, and there were many — the Beginning Women, the Advanced Women, the Men’s Glee, the Pointe Singers — men’s, women’s, combined. (The concert ran for two hours. Tickets were $15, not including the afterglow at one of the nicer restaurants in town.)

Everyone was so good it made your heart ache. The women sang like angels, starting with a couple of numbers that showcased their control before breaking it up with a little musical comedy — “I Wonder if I Love That Boy Too Much,” a doo-wop number about stalking. (If it’s unfamiliar to you, that’s because it’s one of those numbers written for show choirs. Not so many current pop songs; sorry, Gleeks.) The boys’ big showstopper was “The History of Rap,” a medley that ran from the Sugarhill Gang through Jay-Z, and managed to get within sight of minstrelsy, but stopped short enough to remain inoffensive, if you’re not offended by nearly 30 boys, nearly all of them white, tho’in’ it down to “California Love.”

And the choreography! If you think it’s step-ball-change and an occasional grapevine move, well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Quite a bit. Which reminded me of another thing that came out during the state-board investigation — that practices routinely run from after school to 11 p.m. That the reaction among her boosters boiled down to, “What? You think this stuff comes easily?” says a lot about the state of these non-athletic extracurriculars, not just choir, but band, theater, and all the rest. The quality of the performance rises steadily; this was honestly as good as a lot of musical theater I’ve seen. The question is, are you willing to pay the price?

Kate likes choir, but she’s not taking it next year, and besides, her high school’s program is, frankly, not in this league. She’s going with music theory and will (I hope) learn composition. Which I also hope will serve her throughout her life.

I’m so late it’s not even funny. So a quick bloggage scan:

Tomorrow marks the fifth anniversary of the last time Clarence Thomas opened his mouth during Supreme Court oral arguments:

If he is true to form, Justice Thomas will spend the arguments as he always does: leaning back in his chair, staring at the ceiling, rubbing his eyes, whispering to Justice Stephen G. Breyer, consulting papers and looking a little irritated and a little bored. He will ask no questions.

Thanks, Bush 42! 41!

Another great Dear Sugar advice column you should read. Aimed at people in their 20s, but good advice no matter what the age.

Happy Valentine’s Day, all. I’m off to work like a field hand.

A number of people have sent me links to the various Harry Baals stories of recent weeks, perhaps in the belief that I had not heard of it. Readers, I have. I lived 20 years in Fort Wayne, and of course I knew we’d had a mayor in the past named Harry Baals, although I did not know he was the longest-serving in the city’s history, so there’s one thing I learned this week. Fort Wayne is not New York City, and Baals was no Fiorello LaGuardia, but it seems he needs some recognition.

Lately a website run by the city asked for suggestions on what to name its new city/county office building, currently called Renaissance Square, although elderly residents persist in calling it “the ol’ Wolf & Dessauer,” after the department store that was an institution for so long. Nothing institutional changes quickly or easily in Indiana, but sometimes it can change with a certain amount of style, or try to. And the option to change the name of Renaissance Square to the Harry Baals Government Center has been the runaway favorite since the question was posed a few weeks ago, and in the last days, since the story went national? As of last reload, it now has 21,410 votes. Its closest competitor, another wiseacre choice (“the Thunder Dome”) has 1,774, and the one after that, which doesn’t seem to have any hidden testicle or action-movie jokes in it, the Chief Little Turtle Center, stood at 866.

What were we just saying about our inner 15-year-old? You don’t have to tell me there are plenty of snickering jokesters in the Fort. Baals has had some official honor for a while now; there’s a street named after him, although it begins and ends in a city park, so no one has to put it on their nice letterhead or anything. The street signs are stolen so often that in recent years the replacements have read “H.W. Baals Drive.” And as I recall, one of the city’s brewpubs has had a Harry Baals Irish Stout on the menu, and that sound you hear is the rumbling of Harry turning in his grave whenever its name is invoked, because of course Baals is a German name, and he would probably prefer a lager.

The story finally broke out this week because the city announced it didn’t care how many votes the proposed new name got, the building was not going to be named for Harry. Here’s a glimpse of what drove me insane about life there: The deputy mayor, when pressed for a reason by a TV reporter, said that Baals was mayor of the city, and the building would be for both city and county offices, and it wouldn’t be properly respectful of our rich heritage in the county, blah to the blah, etc. I like to think that in Detroit, someone would go on the record saying, “No, we’re not going to name our building after testicles. Grow up.”

But then, of course, the reporters had a sturdy news peg, and a great headline — City scratches Harry Baals, etc. — and it went straight to the late-night talk-show monologues, and that brings us to today. I guess I should take a position, and it’s this: Name the building for Harry. Open a shop in the lobby selling every kind of branded tchotchke anyone can think of — T-shirts, beer-can cozies, keychains, whatever. Trademark everything. Play it cool here, if you like; a simple HARRY BAALS GOVERNMENT CENTER is fine, no need to roll in the gutter, as much as you might be tempted to go with I WENT TO THE HARRY BAALS GOVERNMENT CENTER AND ALL I GOT WAS THIS LOUSY TEABAG.

I remind you the Lansing Lugnuts turned around with a renaming, and the revenues brought in by their branded merchandise were nothing to sneeze at. In fact, I think they’re a business-school case study now. The New Normal in government is, if there’s a revenue stream, stick a straw in it. They’d be fools not to.

And it’s not like there isn’t a precedent right down the road in Muncie. Ball State University was named for its benefactors in the home-canning company (now expanded into “one of the world’s leading suppliers of rigid metal packaging products and services, primarily to the beverage and food industries”). While there’s a fair amount of snickering over Testicle Tech and certain cheers at the football games, everyone’s learned to live with it.

So now that we’ve dispensed with that [brushes off hands], here’s the whiteboard in the classroom where I held office hours yesterday:

I can make out “open = freedom = puppies = milk = America!” and that note at the lower left is intriguing, “gubmint motors” balancing with “Eminem imported from Detroit.” I’m sorry I missed this lecture. Sounds like it was a good one.

So, bloggage? Sounds like CPAC was a hoot. Someone called Dick Cheney a war criminal? I assume that unwise soul was hustled out for some waterboarding. Roy tried to blog it for a while (scroll down) but finally decided life was too short. Can’t blame him. Donald Trump showed up? Are you kidding me?

Not much else, but here’s something I found via Hank, the sort of personality profile every newspaper with ambition used to run all the time, now confined to a few of the bigs and writer’s paradises like St. Petersburg: Meet the sheriff who has appointed himself the country’s smut police.

And with that, I think I’ll head on out. Have a great weekend, all.

In the case of resigning fit fun classy guy Rep. Chris Lee, I think I have nothing to say. Except maybe, this: Are we all 15 years old inside? Does our emotional development in adolescence stay with us forever? It’s like a grain of sand in an oyster, only instead of giving you a pearl, you get those Blackberry/mirror self-portraits: Here I am flexing the guns. It’s appalling.

And may I just say this? I have never, at any stage of my life, found politicians attractive at all. Show me a girl who sleeps with elected officials, I’ll show you a real sicko. Rock stars I understand. John Boehner? No.

Day two of Too Early to Blog week is today. Fortunately, I have collected much linkiness.

Thanks to Hank for finding this fine appreciation of “Broadcast News,” pegged to the Criterion Collection DVD release. It rolls around from time to time on cable, and I usually stop to watch at least a few minutes. It’s amazing how much worse the journalism it predicted turned out to be, but as a romantic comedy, it’s hard to beat.

An acquaintance of mine bought this book for her son, and said so far she’s found four typos in it. So far.

Dunno why I’m including this, except that I like to see animals doing what they’re best at, and in slo-mo high-def video? It’s kind of mesmerizing.

If today’s office hours are anything like yesterday’s, look for me in comments.

As usual, or rather, as is too often the case, I’m overbooked. For the next two days, I have committed to getting downtown in a state of bodily cleanliness and mental alertness by 10 a.m., which means this must be wrapped in the next 12 minutes, and pals? I don’t have much.

Figures, as I don’t feel as though I’ve left my house for anything other than a chore or a dire errand in days. It’s 7 degrees at the moment, which doesn’t exactly invite going out for a ramble.

But go out I must, and it’ll be good to get the blood circulating and see some new faces. In the meantime, I have some bloggage:

Sally Jenkins, WashPost sportswriter, takes a look at the just-completed Super Bowl and says: Enough. And says it well:

A tipping point was reached with this Super Bowl, for me. It was the screwed-over anger of those 1,250 people without seats that did it. Those travel-weary, cash-whipped fans paid small fortunes to go to the game, only to discover their stubs were no good, because fire marshals declared some sections unsafe. All of a sudden the whole thing seemed offensive. It was just too much.

For absurdity, how about those four Navy F-18s flying over the stadium – with its retractable roof closed? Everybody inside could only see the planes on the stadium’s video screens. It was strictly a two-second beauty shot. Know what it cost taxpayers? I’ll tell you: $450,000. (The Navy justifies the expense by saying it’s good for recruiting.)

Mark Bittman, after last week’s manifesto, presents the accompanying slogan: Eat real food. I am so glad I don’t watch Oprah. This would drive me insane:

Ms. Winfrey, who has been on more diets than the rest of us combined, challenged her staff to “go vegan” for a week. Intriguing, except her idea of surviving without meat and dairy — no explanation given for why we should go from too much to none — is to fill your shopping cart with fake versions of both, like meatless chicken breasts and dairy-less cheese.

Finally, what does it say about the newspapers in Fort Wayne that this week’s Richard Lugar talker, linked all day yesterday on memeorandum, was produced by one of the city’s anemic TV news departments? It contains snark material…

Lugar’s spacious Washington office is so covered with books that it looks like a library. The bookshelves are a testament to Lugar’s longevity.

(Wrong verb, trite modifier, etc. etc.)

…and the usual Hoosier politics jaw-droppers. Brian, I assume this Pat Miller is the radio host?

“[We’re saying to Lugar] thank you for what you’ve done. We respect you greatly as a person and for what you’ve done in the past. But to go forward, we feel it’s going to need to be a different candidate,” Tea Party activist Pat Miller told NewsChannel 15 in January.

I expect so, and having suffered through pieces of his show from time to time, I recall a host so dumb he made Mike Pence look like NPR material. That’s saying something.

So now it’s been 12 minutes, and I have to get away. Let’s hope for more tomorrow. Thanks, as always, for stopping by.

There was another estate sale last weekend in Grosse Pointe, a big one in a big house, with the magic words in the ads that always brings the stampede: “Manolo Blahnik, Jimmy Choo.”

There are two kinds of estate sales around here: The kind where someone died, and you’re asked to take your pick of the old-lady furniture after the heirs have stripped off all the Chippendale and Stickley. Sad, tired, dusty and pee-smelling, these sales are hardly ever worth my time, although if you like small appliances from the ’50s, you can pick up a trinket or three. And then there are the ones sometimes called “moving sales,” where the sellers are much younger, the stuff newer. I always assume it’s a bankruptcy sale. Not much of a stretch.

But old or young, I can’t help but construct elaborate narratives in my head about the family whose stuff I’m considering. The woman’s clothes are a size six, but her shoes at 10s? Model type, obviously, tall and lanky. Walk through the library, inspect the books on the shelves: lots of chick lit and biographies of sports figures? She sat home reading many nights while he entertained clients at Wings games. The kitchen has a six-burner stove fit for a restaurant, but looks brand-new? She heated Lean Cuisine after he came home and said he’d already eaten in the grill room at the club. (Was that someone else’s perfume on him? Why did he pull away from a kiss?) They keep witless, inspirational knickknacks scattered around, river stones engraved breathe or believe, little needlepoint pieces propped against a desk lamp: Follow your heart. Their artwork is so bland it blends with the wallpaper, although it’s priced very high (probably because of the frame).

I do all this to make myself feel better, of course, although lately I look at these 6,000-square-foot showplaces and think what the heating bill must be in January.

By the time I got there, all the shoes had been snapped up. The furniture was meh and there wasn’t even much in the kitchen. There was some corporate-branded swag in an upstairs bedroom, and a little Googling revealed the owner was a high-ranking executive for the swag-brander, and that the brander was struggling. Bankruptcy? Still possible, but given the way of the world it’s also entirely possible they’re just selling it all and relocating somewhere warmer and sunnier, where they’ll restock with all new river stones and Jimmy Choos and semi-literate sports bios. My guess is, they’ll land on their feet. The rich so often do.

Today’s interlude in lack of character and schadenfreude concluded, let’s take a look at the bloggage, shall we?

Jim at Sweet Juniper has an excellent post on dealing with his inner food snob. At least he acknowledges he has one. The worst ones just judge, judge, judge.

In the Department of Animal Justice, one of my former colleagues Facebooked this oddity, about a man who bled out after being sliced by a fighting cock. I’d heard of the practice of attaching sharp blades to a rooster’s spurs to make the game bloodier and deadlier, and while it’s possible to enjoy this particular outcome, I was more interested in how, exactly, one arms a rooster. Google led me to this photo-heavy blog about cockfighting in the Philippines; gory and distasteful pictures, but fascinating just the same.

I’d like it on the record: I couldn’t care less where Keith Olbermann will be working next.

Something I don’t want to read as my daughter enrolls to take biology next year.

Off to work.

I guess everybody wants to talk about last night’s Chrysler ad. OK. Let’s all watch it first; this looks like a nice HD version:

Wow. This is probably the seventh or eighth time I’ve watched it, and it keeps getting better. The opening shots are of the Rouge complex, the vast field of ominous smokestacks on the south side that you see from I-75 as you enter the metro area. It is not a pretty sight. It’s the sort of thing that if you were, say, a middle-aged woman coming to town on a house-hunting trip with your husband and little girl, preparing at midlife to pull up stakes and start over in a new city, and the day was gray and cold anyway, and suddenly the freeway starts to rise and you’re looking down at a place that looks like a set for a dystopian sci-fi flick featuring killer robots and toxic-avenger zombies — if you were that person, you might wonder what you’d gotten yourself into. (Not that I would know anything about that.)

Not only that, but the scene was shot in winter. No Pebble Beach ocean vistas or green mountain switchbacks or Bonneville salt flats with picturesque dust clouds, just bare trees, leaden skies and those clouds that roll in at Thanksgiving and don’t roll out until Easter except for once in a while in winter, when they are replaced by single-digit temperatures. Yep, this is the industrial Midwest, all right. The people we see on the street — Door Man and Dapper Man in Crosswalk — are African-American, as is the Fist. But not everybody. Look, a pretty skater. Are those real Lions doing roadwork? Can’t say. But it’s snowing, it’s cold, the manhole covers can’t contain the steam that rises up from below.

Is this hell? No, it’s Detroit. (And it’s a lot cooler.)

Now we see more of the car, because of course this is a car ad. If you’re an Eminem fan, or even know his face, you’ve already figured out who’s driving. After all, that’s his music on the soundtrack, along with…is that a gospel choir? Oh, man, they are going to go right up to the edge, aren’t they? And then here we are at the Fox — great marquee message, just fabulous — and yes, that is a gospel choir. Careful, Marshall, gospel choirs have been the ruin of many pop artists; they must be handled like plutonium, careful careful…

“This is the Motor City. And this is what we do.”

Perfect. In another venue, it would have played as bombast, but this is the Super Bowl. It’s where bombast goes to recharge itself, after it’s tired from visiting with Rush Limbaugh and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. This is where Apple dared to compare itself to George Orwell, where the Budweiser Clydesdales honored 9/11 victims, where a former presidential candidate made a joke about getting a boner for Britney Spears. You can’t go too far here, or if you can, no one has done it yet. And you came a little close, but not really. And you did it with such style. Ten out of 10. I hope the car’s half as good. You’re certainly going to sell a shitload of them here.

I hope this doesn’t signal the moment when Detroit Chic suddenly goes mainstream. If it does, I hope I can sell my screenplay first.

Elsewhere on the ad front, I can’t really speak with authority, as I only had the game on for background noise and didn’t watch all that closely. But, in general:

Darth Vader/Passat — very cute. However, I really wish I hadn’t read this obnoxious blog post about it first.

Groupon — ooh, edgy! I feel provoked! It’s so provocative! Actually, I’m not sure I trust Groupon anyway. I’ve used them once, for an opera ticket last fall, and felt I got what I paid for, i.e., a terrible seat for half price. But the half off stuff just seems wrong. From what I’ve heard, you offer at least a 50 percent discount, and then split the rest with Groupon, which means your discount is now 75 percent. I suppose the idea is to bring in new business, but I suspect it also brings in chintzy customers who tip for shit. Someone else, enlighten me.

The rest are a blur. No, I remember the Kia Optima, the epic journey. That was worth the time.

So. Another Monday, under a Monday-in-Detroit kind of sky. It’s been snowing on and off for three days, and finally, I feel like we have enough. I’ll feel differently in another month, but for now, the blanket seems just about right.

And now I have to get to work. Not in a Diego Rivera-mural sort of way, but in my own fashion. I risk repetitive strain injury! My collar is…well, at the moment it’s a turtleneck. Have a good day, all.

While the rest of you were discussing Mrs. Obama’s closet yesterday, I should have mentioned a couple of resources I depend on for all my Michelle Obama closet criticism needs.

There’s Tom & Lorenzo, of course, about whom I’d like to know more (even more than their about us link), if only to know how they seemingly are able to look at and absorb every single dress made by every single designer in the world, so that when Shelley O, as they call her, wears a Rachel Roy dress to the State of the Union speech, they have a post up within hours with multiple views of the dress — runway and in the wild — and something to say about it that’s actually worth reading. Because of their exhaustive coverage, I’ve learned that Shelley frequently has her pieces altered to show off her best features, changing a neckline or sleeve or hemline. I wonder who does that for her, and where she finds the time for all those fittings.

And lest you think they’re in the bought-and-paid-for left-wing media cabal of bum-smoochers, they don’t pull their punches when they don’t like something. Which gives them credibility, in my book. Besides the First Lady, they also offer the same bitchery/air kissery for red carpet looks of all occasions. Unlike the magazines, they ignore the paparazzi shots of starlets schlepping Starbucks cups between yoga classes, confining their criticism to those occasions when people who are paid to look good are on the job, which I think is very fair. Anyway, a daily stop for me.

Another is the Michelle Obama Look Book, from New York magazine’s website, which needs some housekeeping — it’s still labeled 2010. They have no criticism, just photos, but they do include those chopper-to-residence walk photos that are simply part of the presidential portfolio. If you want to see how a well-dressed woman looks when she’s not dressed up, it’s useful.

Mary Elizabeth Williams took a stab at saying the obvious — she can’t please everyone — this week in Salon, which featured another slideshow, every one of which I’d seen, but included a picture of Sasha and Malia, prompting a my-how-they’ve-grown from me. (Malia is now almost as tall as her mother.) It also contains a huge error that I can’t believe no one has fixed by now; Azzedine Alaia did not design Elizabeth Hurley’s safety-pin dress. Apparently the huge Versace buttons and Versace credit on their very own link eluded the copy editors.

And if you Google around a bit, you can find dozens of sites that do the same thing, including Mrs. O, as well as reams and reams of commentary like this.

To which I just added 443 words. Talk about unnecessary.

However, that will have to be my 443 words today. Not one but two early meetings, followed by another trip to the Subaru dealer in Ferndale for the endless soap opera of Alan’s Catalytic Converter Follies. You don’t want to know. So I have to fly early today. Have a great weekend, and maybe, if it’s not too brutally cold, I might find time for some Saturday morning marketing around here.

A good cup of coffee should be simple to make. Two ingredients, one of them water. And yet, it’s so easy to screw it up. Lately I’ve been following the advice of Spec. John Grimes in “Black Hawk Down,” who believed it was all in the grind — can’t be too fine, can’t be too coarse. Today, I got it right. Today, I am well-coffee’d.

I wish I’d written down the precise number of seconds I whirled those beans in the grinder. But then the perfect would be too attainable. Live in the now, Garth.

OK, so what’s going on in Cairo? Live feeds on CNN and MSNBC, the usual yapping blondes on Fox. I’ve given up trying to watch Al-Jazeera online; when I can connect, the plug-in crashes, but I usually can’t connect. The people I know who have a keen interest in overseas news all keep a second satellite dish aimed at their bird of choice. Fortunately, we have this thing called the written word, which I’ve always preferred to grainy satellite images, anyway. A former colleague of mine, Ash Khalil, is reporting from Cairo:

The first sign that things were about to tip badly into darkness came shortly after the Internet returned. I was in a taxi with a group of journalists heading to opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei’s home on the outskirts of Cairo to attempt an interview. From the other direction came what looked like a 1,000-person march of pro-Mubarak supporters chanting slogans like “We love the president” and “He’s not going.” Many of the protesters were riding horses and camels — from the looks of them, many appeared to be tourist touts coming from the stables clustered around the Pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo. At the time, my colleagues and I thought it made for a great journalistic visual; we snapped a few pictures and furiously started scribbling in our notebooks. Within hours, those horses and camels had been used in a bizarre, medieval mounted charge into the unarmed civilians occupying Tahrir.

Attack camels. Now that would be something to see.

Actually, the entire Foreign Policy website is useful for Egypt news, with some nice photography, as well. I recommend this photo essay. Diplomacy is such a tricky art.

The NYT hasn’t slacked in its coverage, either:

The battle was waged by Mohammed Gamil, a dentist in a blue tie who ran toward the barricades of Tahrir Square. It was joined by Fayeqa Hussein, a veiled mother of seven who filled a Styrofoam container with rocks. Magdi Abdel-Rahman, a 60-year-old grandfather, kissed the ground before throwing himself against crowds mobilized by a state bent on driving them from the square. And the charge was led by Yasser Hamdi, who said his 2-year-old daughter would live a life better than the one he endured.

“Aren’t you men?” he shouted. “Let’s go!”

Whenever I read things like this, I wonder where I’d be if this were happening in my city. On the one hand, it’s easy to climb the cannon and shout charge! That great military mind, Ashley Wilkes, told Scarlett, “Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes.” On the other hand, once the charge is under way, I guess you discover what you’re made of.

So. Severe clear here today, a day for mirrored sunglasses and the down parka. As difficult as it is to realize at the moment (11 degrees F), the earth is turning back toward the sun, and the signs are everywhere. I dropped Kate off for jazz-band practice this morning in daylight, if not quite the broad kind. Groundhog Day. And tomorrow is the first parent informational meeting for high-school registration. Mercy. How did that happen?

I’m off to Costco, dodging no impediment fiercer than the weather and Michigan potholes. In the meantime, much good bloggage:

Jim at Sweet Juniper found some ghost signs uncovered in a demolition, dug deeper, and turned up an interesting story about one of the companies:

In looking into the history of this company, I was surprised to learn of a controversy from a hundred years ago that largely mirrors many of the current concerns with the garment manufacturing industry and third-world sweatshops. It appears that many companies manufacturing clothes after the turn of the century—mainly those making clothes for sale through large catalog retailers or national chains—used deeply-discounted prison labor as part of their manufacturing processes.

Seventy-year-old Michigan farmer foils theft of anhydrous ammonia in the middle of the blizzard.

Forgot this yesterday, but Mark Bittman filed his first non-recipe column this week, and it’s a food manifesto for the future. He’s got a way with words:

Nearly everything labeled “healthy” or “natural” is not. It’s probably too much to ask that “vitamin water” be called “sugar water with vitamins,” but that’s precisely what real truth in labeling would mean.

Finally, one more reason to love “Mad Men.” You know how all the women look so great, and you ask yourself, “Why can’t I find a dress like Betty Draper’s?” Well, now you can.

Time for new contacts and the aforementioned sunglasses. I’m heading out.

Hate to say it — I was really looking forward to a true blizzard — but what hit last night wasn’t anything close. Total snowfall of maybe four or five inches. Lots of wind, which made driving difficult, but the apocalyptic scenario promised all week fizzled. When will I learn? Take the forecast, divide by two. I did just check the weather radar, and there’s another big blob moving through at the moment, so we’ll get more, but the worst is over, and it wasn’t all that bad.

I did finally get enough sleep last night, with Kate being off school. Our district is infamous for never calling snow days, but they did today.

So now I’m drinking coffee and reading about Egypt. Also, thinking about my Arab students at Wayne State, who have been one of the great pleasures of this job. Many of them could easily make the grade at places like Michigan, but I suspect they come from conservative families who wouldn’t allow their sons — but especially their daughters — to leave home for a college dormitory. So much the better for me. I discovered a kindred spirit, i.e., a fellow Mitch Albom non-fan, in one, a girl who wants to be a sportswriter. Big hockey fan. She goes to Red Wings games in a jersey and matching hijab.

I just sent her this story, which I posted on Facebook last night. Delta airlines just did a special edition of their in-flight magazine all about the wonderfulness that is Detroit, a real boosterama of in-flight journalism. When I saw it was a million pages and stressed such unknown, uncovered stories as the blooming artists’ community and film industry, I gave it a pass. So I’m grateful someone else didn’t, and found the part where Albom is asked what he loves about the city, and he replies:

“I can walk into a coffee shop and see people reading my work or clipping columns to mail away, to give their loved ones a piece of home. As a newspaper columnist, there is a real sense of the community embracing you as one of their own wordsmiths — and that’s one of the reasons I’ve never left.”

This is an old theme with our boy, and he’s written several astonishing columns pledging he’ll never leave because you love me so much!!!! (Meanwhile, people who work close to him will tell you he’s looked many times for his next local fan club, but can’t find one worthy of him, i.e., a media market with four pro teams, a sizable newspaper and a radio station that will host his show and meet his salary demands, which speaks very well of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, in my opinion.) Anyway, let me see the hands of anyone who believes Mitch Albom has ever walked into a coffee shop and seen a single soul “clipping columns to mail away.” He’s not even trying anymore, but I don’t think they put the A-team on this project in the first place, as just this brief, four-question visit with Mitch includes a usage error (Detroit is “family-orientated”) and misspells the name of Joe Louis Arena.

Anyway, I think my student will get a kick out of that.

OK, it’s time to go outside and get a-blowin’. I think I spent 14 hours at or near a keyboard yesterday, and frankly, I’m real damn sick of it. A swell day to you, whether you’re digging out or digging in.

Perhaps you’re wondering what the genesis of my problem is with Charles Pugh, current Detroit City Council president and former numbskull TV reporter in Fort Wayne. Reader, I’ll tell you.

Back in the 1990s-ish day, Pugh did a story on the well-known link between the Super Bowl and domestic violence. You remember that? Rising testosterone combined with cabin fever and erratic blood-sugar levels caused by weird snack foods and brought male tempers to a boil, and they bounced their wives all over hell ‘n’ gone. For a couple of years, this was an established fact that all the lifestyle sections and (especially) TV stations liked to make a fuss over around the end of January.

Only guess what? It wasn’t true.

An enterprising Washington Post reporter asked to see the data, and it turned out the whole contention was based on one study, and the authors of the study said the data had been misreported and twisted by people with an ax to grind. You can read the whole story at Snopes, if you’re so inclined.

Anyway, at least two years after this, after it had been discussed and put through the usual journalistic mea-culpa wringers, Pugh did a story for his station about how domestic-violence shelters are flooded with black-eyed women on Super Bowl Sunday. I think even his sources knew it was b.s., but hey — publicity! And so the one woman who appeared on camera was careful to say she noticed an uptick in services “during football season,” which also covers a lot of other stressors, including the start of school, cold weather, the holidays, and well, you get the idea. I wrote a note to the news director and Pugh himself, asking for an explanation, and discovered what it feels like to shout down a well. Neither responded. What is TV, anyway? Just a few moments in time that no one even gives their full attention to. La-di-da.

So last night I’m doing one of my jobs, gleaning the fields for stories about health care, and what do I turn up but this:

When fans flock to the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium on Super Bowl Sunday, few will be thinking about anything other than touchdowns and tailgates.

But nearby, in hotels, motels and on street corners, Texas authorities say a “dark side” will exist, one where children are sold for sex by pimps. And those sex traffickers are descending on the area.

“People are thinking of the Packers and the Steelers and the game on the field, having a good time and Super Bowl commercials. Most don’t think about a 12-year-old being forced to dance naked,” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told ABC News.

And this:

ATLANTA — Pimps will traffic thousands of under-age prostitutes to Texas for Sunday’s Super Bowl, hoping to do business with men arriving for the big game with money to burn, child rights advocates said.

And this:

While football fans are eagerly anticipating the Feb. 6 Super Bowl showdown in Dallas, some state officials are gearing up for the big game’s dark side: the surge in human trafficking that tends to accompany major sports and entertainment events. “What we’ve learned is that sexual trafficking, sexual exploitation of children in particular, is all about supply and demand,” says Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. With more than 100,000 fans descending on Dallas, that demand is going to be great. There is a “looming potential explosion of human trafficking around the Super Bowl,” says Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is expecting hundreds of girls and women to be brought to the area.

The second story, from Reuters, is instructive. I’m going to do something I don’t normally do — quote more than three paragraphs or so, just so we can go through it and see if we can spot all the weasel words and agenda-laden sources. This entire story rests on two rickety legs, “child rights advocates” and the Texas attorney general. Ahem:

As the country’s largest sporting event, the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers will make the Dallas-Fort Worth area a magnet for business of all kinds.

That includes the multimillion dollar, under-age sex industry, said activists and law enforcement officials working to combat what they say is an annual spike in trafficking of under-age girls ahead of the Super Bowl.

“The Super Bowl is one of the biggest human trafficking events in the United States,” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told a trafficking prevention meeting in January.

Wow, really? Tell me more:

Girls who enter the grim trade face a life of harsh treatment and danger, according to a Dallas police report in 2010. Few who emerge are willing to speak about it. Tina Frundt, 36, is an exception.

Now married and living in Washington D.C., Frundt was lured into sex work at 14 after she fell for a 24-year-old who invited her to leave home in 1989 and join his “family” in Cleveland, Ohio.

That family consisted of the man and three girls living in a motel. When Frundt declined on the first night to have sex with her boyfriend’s friends they raped her.

“I was angry with myself for not listening to him, so the next night when he sent me out on the street and told me … (to earn $500) I listened,” she said in a telephone interview.

Frundt paced the streets for hours and finally got into a client’s car.

When she came home in the morning with just $50, her pimp beat her in front of the other girls to teach them all a lesson and sent her back onto the street the next night with the warning not to return until she had reached the quota.

The scenario was repeated night after night as Frundt’s pimp moved his stable across the Midwest. Any sign of rebellion led to further beatings. Escape seemed out of the question.

“I was a teen-ager in a strange town with no money and no place to go,” she said. She finally escaped by getting arrested.

Frundt’s story is terrible, for sure. Notice it has nothing to do with the Super Bowl.

There’s some more stuff about how awful a teen prostitute’s life is, and then we’re back to the news peg:

“At previous Super Bowls, pimps hired cab drivers to turn their vehicles into mobile brothels,” said Deena Graves, executive director of child advocacy group Traffick911.

Up to 10,000 adult and under-age girls have come to previous Super Bowls, said Jerry Strickland, communications director in the Texas attorney general’s office, who acknowledged that precise figures are hard to gauge.

“The statistics are a moving target. They (under age sex workers) can’t be counted in turnstiles like ticket holders,” he said in an interview.

Can you give us a specific, Deena Graves? One arrest made in one of these moving brothels? One cab driver who took the cash to turn his rear-view mirror up? At least Jerry Strickland seems to know he’s carrying his boss’ water. Note the “up to 10,000 adult and underage girls,” which is sort of amusing. When Detroit hosted the Super Bowl five years ago, there were public and private parties galore, and you have to figure at least some working girls were there; I know I was told high-end strippers were happy to come and work as Jenna Jameson’s lingerie models at the party she threw. But “up to” is a wonderfully elastic term, and by saying that number includes adults, well, you’ve sort of muddied your own story. Anyway, it’s not like they can be counted with turnstiles! Onward:

Law enforcement agencies and advocacy groups rescued around 50 girls during the previous two Super Bowls, said Graves. Six were registered on the Center for Missing and Exploited Children website. One had been trafficked from Hawaii.

“Even one rescue is considered a success,” said Frundt who now advocates for exploited girls and has founded a girls’ treatment center and a safe house for girls in Washington D.C.

Finally, a link between the game and the crime. Too bad it’s vague and utterly unverifiable. “Around 50” during two previous games? Was that 25 per game, or 50 each year? How many were rescued by law enforcement, and how many by those convenient advocacy groups? Six were registered, only we can’t tell you who they are, alas, as sex-crime victims.

Finally, the feel-good ending:

To fight the trade, authorities, child welfare advocates and the airline industry are collaborating.

Representatives from American Airlines, Delta, United, Quantas and American Eagle are holding a training session to help them spot signs of trafficking. Nancy Rivard, president of Airline Ambassadors International, will also work with another 100 flight crews to distribute materials on flights.

Some 67,000 people signed a petition on www.change.org opposing sex trafficking as part of a campaign by Traffick911 called “I’m Not Buying It!” that is supported by 60 nonprofits and faith-based groups.

That campaign has also attracted heavy hitters like Dallas Cowboy Jay Ratliff, a three-time Pro Bowler, who made a public service announcement entitled “Real men don’t buy children. They don’t buy sex.”

Ratliff, who himself has two daughters, is recruiting other National Football League players for the campaign.

“You hear of sex trafficking overseas,” he wrote in an email from Hawaii where he is playing in the Pro Bowl. “But you never imagine it is happening in the United States.”

Training will happen. A petition has happened. A PSA has happened. And the Texas AG will be on the alert.

Please note that I am not questioning whether trafficking in underage prostitutes happens. We know it does. I am questioning whether it has any connection whatsoever with the Super Bowl. Why not the U.S. Open, or the Olympics, or the All-Star Game? Those events all bring large numbers of out-of-towners into a strange city to watch sports; are they less likely to get their freak on with a 16-year-old captive? What is it about the national pro football championship game that tempts so many to hitch a ride on its coattails? Is it something about the violence on the field, or the ridiculous, dead-of-winter, what-else-is-there-to-write-about hype that covers everything from advertising to the food pages (super dip ideas for your super spread!) that makes those left out want to latch on to the media gravy train?

I don’t mind a story on how to make a cheese ball in the shape of a football. But this sort of thing pisses me off. We’ve been burned once by this sort of piggybacking. If I were the NFL, I’d be throwing flags all over the place.

Speaking of which, this was also a health story last night:

Suffering an emotional loss in the Super Bowl may be hazardous to a fan’s heart health, a new study suggests.

Oh, bollocks it is.

Little Miss Grumpy, sitting here waiting for her snowstorm. Pantry is stocked, snowblower is gassed, bets are laid. Kate’s taking 12 inches, I’m going for eight, even though we’re in the purple band (forecast of 12+ inches) on the maps. We both think there’ll be a school cancellation. She still has to do her homework. Because I hope she’ll get good grades and grow up to be something other than a credulous journalist.

So I’m waiting for Snotorious BIG. Photos tomorrow, I hope. Have a good one, all.