Finally, the Midwest is getting its very own snowpocalypse. The word went out over the weekend, prompting a stampede to groceries and liquor stores, so as to be fully stocked for the forecast foot of snow. Yes, a foot. Accuweather says it could be more. But Accuweather — feh. Scary maps, but two feet of snow? I’ll believe it when I see it.

Less hysterical forecasts say it will top out at eight inches. Eight inches or 12, we’re in for a screwin’. I plan to retain my equanimity. The snow will be followed by bitter cold and high winds. Yay, a blizzard. It’s times like this I’m glad I live in a city. Less panic buying in the groceries, for one thing, although I’m running low on bread and chances are, when I stop to get some today, all that will be left is Hillbilly brand high-fiber.

A forecaster — an actual meteorologist, not one of those TV guys, but someone who works for the National Weather Service — told me that forecasting is never more than an educated guess, and all the fancy technology has done is lengthen the guessing window, not improve accuracy. A three-day forecast then, a 10-day forecast now, but it’s still just a guess. I find that oddly comforting. In the meantime, I liked this map from the comments thread of that Gawker link, above:

How was your weekend? Mine was some work, some play, but I still feel like a dull girl today. Watched “The Wicker Man,” the original, not the Neil LaBute remake, and friends? That was some freaky shit. Full of ’70s hair, ’70s filmmaking technique, ’70s attitudes and, just for you gentlemen, a lengthy Britt Ekland nude scene. Photo at the link; I think that woman had the most perfect breasts in Christendom. Or pagandom. Or wherever. If you read past Britt’s boobs at that link, you’ll come across some plot spoilers. I had the advantage of knowing basically nothing about the film going in, beyond that it was remade by LaBute, Mr. Happy, and that the original had a cult following. I see why.

I wish I could see more movies that way — before I’d read a word about them. But if you have to parcel out your time, you really have to rely on reviews to decide what’s worth it. Roger Ebert’s review of “Monster” notes that he had no idea who was playing the lead until he saw her name in the credits. Oh, to have that sort of virginal experience with anything in pop culture these days. Can’t do it. Thanks in no small part to bloggers like me.

OK, so let’s get some bloggage down, so I can commence the week. We have a car theme going on today, what with Gene Weingarten’s cover story in the WashPost Sunday magazine yesterday. He took the Chevy Volt out for a several-thousand-word test drive. Because it’s Weingarten, and because it’s several thousand words, it’s about a lot more than the car, and worth a read.

And I hope the Wall Street Journal has left this link on the free side of the paywall, because it’s pretty doggone amusing, a review of the new Cadillac station wagon. I used to subscribe to Car & Driver for writing like this:

Let’s say you bought this car, a Cadillac CTS-V Sport Wagon, with a 6.2-liter, 556-horsepower Corvette V8, six-speed manual transmission, magnetorheological dampers (I’ll get to that), Michelin SP2 gumballs, 15-inch front Brembo brakes with six-pot calipers, and microsuede wrapping on the steering wheel and shifter. Well, first of all, you’d be one strange cat, which is to say, unusual. Notwithstanding any nitro-burning ice-cream trucks or flying boattail Rollses in your neighborhood, this wagon is about as esoteric an automobile as you’re likely to find. Statistically speaking, General Motors will sell exactly none of these cars, the Detroit equivalent of Zoroastrianism.

It gets better from there. But when you’re writing about a car that has a freakin’ G-meter in the instrument cluster, you better.

And with that, I must fly. Monday, etc. So we commence a snowy week. Let’s hope it lives up to the billing.

A final busy day in a very busy week means today’s entry is all caffeine and bloggage. Caffeine and bloggage, people! I know you’ll be OK with it, because when it comes to a discussion, you folks rock the house. I thought yesterday’s comment thread was tremendous, by the way; thanks to all who contributed. Besides, we have ourselves plenty to talk about today:

OID: Tow truck driver spots what he thinks is an abandoned car, calls police and waits for permission to hook it. Permission never comes. So he calls 911 with the same information, waits two hours, no one shows up. Then:

Two weeks later, on Jan. 24, after several calls from neighbors, a police officer finally came to the site. Inside the SUV, the officer found the body of James Mullen of Oak Park, riddled with bullets.

Well, good thing it’s winter.

I can’t tell you how often I read stories like this in the paper. Later on, a deputy chief describes the situation as “confusing.” I’ll say. So many unanswered questions. Were the windows tinted? Was the corpse in the driver’s seat, or stowed in the cargo area? Where, exactly, was the car parked? The story was based on testimony offered at a Board of Police Commissioners hearing, and I guess no one asked.

Some of you got to this yesterday, but I’m just now reading about $P’s comment about the “Sputnik moment” passage in the SOTU speech, and I’m, well, speechless. Combined with Michele Bachmann’s retelling of our founders’ commitment to diversity, I’m wondering if this particular wing of the right-wing dog-and-pony show isn’t some sort of performance art piece. Nothing else explains it.

We won’t have Mike Pence to kick around, come primary season. Alas, Hoosiers, you’ll still be stuck with him.

First Tunisia, now Egypt. I have nothing to contribute to this discussion, other than to recall a story from the dark ages of journalism, when second-tier diplomats would make the rounds of newspaper editorial boards, for coffee and discussion about foreign policy, with an eye toward guiding the opinion-mongers in their opinion-making. I know — crazy, right? Anyway, if the diplomat was important enough, and there was a chance he’d say something newsworthy, sometimes a reporter was invited to sit in, because hey, you can’t ask an editorial writer to do a news story. It’s beneath their dignity. This was in Columbus, by the way.

So one day some Israeli undersecretary stops by, and my colleague Ted draws the reporting duty. The discussion was about negotiations with Egypt. Anwar Sadat had just been assassinated, and succeeded by someone named Hosni Mubarak. The editor of the paper, a twinkly pipe-smoking gent already coasting toward retirement, had a question for the diplomat.

“What about this McBurke? Can he bring peace?”

The Israeli blinked a time or two, trying to remember when the Egyptians had installed a Scotsman in the president’s office. “What? Who?”

“McBurke,” the editor pressed. “The new president.”

But the diplomat was diplomatic. “Oh, you’re speaking of Mr. Mubarak,” he said, and the moment passed, but Ted told us all about it. All the young people, whose brains had not yet started farting at inappropriate moments, got a good laugh out of it. This was when Bob and Doug McKenzie were doing their “Great White North” routine all over, and so we decided the Egyptian Scot’s first name should be “Hoser” and ever since, I’ve thought of the president of Egypt as Hoser McBurke. The other day I heard a statistic that half the Egyptian population had never known another president.

Boy, do I feel old.

Have a great weekend, all.

I didn’t see “Waiting for Superman,” although I followed the chatter about it. The story had considerable buzz going into its fall release; Roger Ebert wrote a rave from Sundance last year, and it continued from there. The documentary film, about several poor families desperate to get into a handful of outstanding charter schools, had The Answer to awful urban school systems, and it was? Yes, charter schools. Also, taming the terrible teachers’ unions. And so on.

And then it was snubbed for an Oscar nomination. Hmm. On the one hand, that’s not that surprising. Documentarians — who decide which films will get the five coveted slots — are a notoriously petty and jealous crew, and while things have supposedly improved since 1995, when “Hoop Dreams,” the best documentary of that or any year, was denied a nomination, it’s safe to assume jealousy and pettiness wasn’t driven from the system entirely.

But it turns out the problems go a little deeper than that:

(Director Davis) Guggenheim edited the film to make it seem as if charter schools are a systemic answer to the ills afflicting many traditional public schools, even though they can’t be, by their very design. He unfairly demonized Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, and gave undeserved hero status to reformer and former D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. Guggenheim compared schools in Finland and the United States without mentioning that Finland has a 3 percent child poverty rate and the United States has a 22 percent rate.

One scene showed a mother touring a charter school — and saying things such as, “I don’t care if we have to wake up at 5 o’clock in the morning in order to get there at 7:45, then that’s what we will do” — that turned out to be staged; she already knew her son didn’t get in, according to The New York Times.

Interesting. My problems started with the story about how the film came to be, how Guggenheim would drive past the lousy Los Angeles public school that his children would attend if they weren’t the offspring of a wealthy filmmaker — of course they attend private schools — and be struck by how terrible and depressing the school looked, and wondered why that was. That the answer he came up with is, “because they have terrible teachers, who are protected by a powerful union” is understandable, although I wonder how much consideration he gave to the idea that one reason the schools suck is that Guggenheim’s children don’t attend.

What ails our public schools is a complex problem, and complex problems don’t have simple solutions, but for my money, there’s something so repellent in this sort of (literal) drive-by analysis it makes it hard to listen. I’ll give a more respectful ear to someone like Sandra Tsing Loh, who had the same feeling looking at her own local public school, but coped by actually enrolling her daughters, rolling up her cuffs, and wading into the pond herself.

My own child goes to public school, but a suburban one, so I don’t really have skin in the game, either. But at least I’d never say there’s a single answer to a problem as big as this one, and I wouldn’t stage a scene in a film to prove it.

Diane Ravitch, who has forgotten more about education policy than all of us combined will ever know, took the film apart in the New York Review of Books last fall. She didn’t pull punches:

The movie asserts a central thesis in today’s school reform discussion: the idea that teachers are the most important factor determining student achievement. But this proposition is false. Hanushek has released studies showing that teacher quality accounts for about 7.5–10 percent of student test score gains. Several other high-quality analyses echo this finding, and while estimates vary a bit, there is a relative consensus: teachers statistically account for around 10–20 percent of achievement outcomes. Teachers are the most important factor within schools.

But the same body of research shows that nonschool factors matter even more than teachers. According to University of Washington economist Dan Goldhaber, about 60 percent of achievement is explained by nonschool factors, such as family income. So while teachers are the most important factor within schools, their effects pale in comparison with those of students’ backgrounds, families, and other factors beyond the control of schools and teachers. Teachers can have a profound effect on students, but it would be foolish to believe that teachers alone can undo the damage caused by poverty and its associated burdens.

But the political right loves “choice,” vouchers and the like, and hates teachers’ unions, so I expect we’ll carry on in this vein for a while. A friend of mine teaches in a Detroit charter. She says there are teachers who have been there a decade who are still not earning $50,000 a year, a nice bread-and-water wage level that should please those who think teachers are overpaid. I wonder what that’s done to the test scores.

By the way, Michigan has a modified level of school choice. Districts can choose to open themselves to non-residential enrollment, and students bring their per-pupil financial allotment with them. School districts advertise on TV — it’s freaky. Ours isn’t one of them, and our teachers are unionized and the highest-paid in the state. And it’s a first-class district. Why do you think that is?

Today is office-hours days, so skedaddle I must. A little bloggage before I go:

Rabbis tell Rupert Murdoch to make Glenn Beck put a sock in it with all that Nazi bullshit. Good for them.

Dennis Kucinich sues his country when he accidentally gets an olive pit in his sandwich. Why doesn’t he just get the tooth fixed with his no-doubt-top-drawer dental insurance and settle for an apology? Just a suggestion.

One of my filmmaking friends is celebrating a birthday today — happy birthday, Dan Phillips — and just updated his Facebook status: What better way to celebrate than to be on set doing what I love to do — cutting off someone’s legs. I can think of no better note to finish on. Happy Thursday, all.

Jeff TMMO has asked me to address the big news from last night, although it was really the big news from Monday: Mark Bittman is dropping his Minimalist column from the NYT, but starting an op-ed and magazine gig with the same paper, moving on from recipes to ruminations and analyses of U.S. food policy.

Jeff seems to mourn the loss for the food pages. I’m thrilled for the other sections’ gain.

I guess I should have mentioned it sooner, but as owners of the two Bittman cornerstones — “How to Cook Everything” and “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” — I have paid less attention to his column, save for those “101” blowouts he does from time to time, the 101 salads piece, or the make-ahead Thanksgiving dishes, or whatever. I learned what I needed to learn about cooking from Bittman a while ago, and I think he’s going to be a wonderful voice on the opinion pages.

In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and predict that within five years, Bittman will win a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He’s that good, and besides, the ranks of commentators in the dailies has grown so thin, the juries will be desperate to hand one to a fresh new voice. When Kathleen Parker and Leonard Pitts win the Big P, you know it’s time.

And judging from the lively discussions we have in this space about food, food policy, eating and all the rest of it, he’ll have no shortage of thought-provoking material. I can’t wait.

Meanwhile, what about the other news last night? I’m talking about Chris Matthews yelling at some Tea Party d’bag over their shameless use of Michele Bachmann to deliver their propaganda last night. While I congratulate Matthews for being one of the few journalists (on TV, anyway) who actually tells people they’re not answering the question he asked, all his spluttering isn’t going to change anything or anybody, so maybe the answer is to not pay attention to Michele Bachmann. Works for me.

And the Oscars! Nothing really really surprising there, was there? Brian took umbrage over Hailee Steinfeld being nominated for best-supporting when she was clearly in a lead role, but that’s the way Oscar rolls. Promising ingenues who hit one out of the park in their first role are almost always supporters, especially if they’re minors. It’s the Rookie of the Year prize, and all you have to do is think of all the people who have won it who never did work of the same caliber again. There was Haing Ngor (“The Killing Fields”), who wasn’t even an actor; Marlee Matlin (“Children of a Lesser God”), who still acts, but whose work is strictly at the TV-drama skill level, and, of course, Mo’Nique. I just hope the Oscars aren’t a total walkover for “The King’s Speech” this year. A very fine film, but there were many others, and those big consensus winners don’t age well. When was the last time you saw “Gandhi” on cable and stopped to watch even a minute of it? Or “Out of Africa,” for that matter? (Actually, I will watch “Out of Africa,” but only for Meryl Streep. Robert Redford is laughable.)

A quick pass by the bloggage before our mortgage man stops by. We’re refinancing our house, and I need to limber up for signing my name 400 times.

Via Lawyers, Guns and Money, a site you can waste a minute or an hour on: Better Book Titles.

I’ve been giving Tom & Lorenzo a lotta love of late, but what the hell, they’re on a hot streak, like today’s Dress Libs with Zooey Deschanel.

Someone should do this with “It’s the End of the World as We Know It:” A visual map of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Actually, someone should do a master’s thesis on the pop-culture afterlife of songs like this. Exhibit A, of course: the Rickroll.

Finally, today is my state’s 174th birthday, or so one of my tweeps tells me. Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam, circumspice. Happy birthday to the pleasant peninsula.

Off to flex my fingers. Good day to all.

I’m getting to the “Downton Abbey” episodes a bit later than the rest of the world, but I am getting to them. I’ve never been much for these upstairs-downstairs British house dramas, but the ground has to be fertile for the seed to grow, and I guess that’s finally happened. You have to run a modest modern household of your own to appreciate how much work goes into it, even with today’s considerable labor-saving devices. To think what it must have taken to keep a pile like Downton operable as a habitable home, much less what kept it from falling to rubble, is mind-boggling.

The number of scurrying serfs required to keep its fires burning, its beds made, its kitchen turning out meals, its ten thousand chandeliers dusted and its inhabitants properly dressed is mind-boggling. (Although we only meet a few, the Granthams being a modest family. Or maybe the production budget only allowed for a cast of 20 or so.) Of course they all have complicated lives outside of their work, and the family itself is going through the things families went through in the Edwardian era, what with the need to get their daughters well-married and their estate properly passed down, all while the modern age lurks just offstage, the way the ’60s loom in “Mad Men.”

But being a woman, and the mistress of NN.C Abbey here in Michigan, I’m most interested in the domestic details of clothing and housekeeping, the way the ladies dress for dinner, what everyone eats. You needed a valet or maid just to attend to all the details of your wardrobe, to lace your corset or fasten your cufflinks or attach the stiff collar to your stiff shirt, so you can sit at the head of your table like a penguin and preside over dinner. I read once that true upper-class people call tuxedos “dinner jackets,” because that’s what they are.

I notice you don’t see the laundry being done. If you want to keep me awake at night, whisper in my ear that in my next life, I might be reincarnated as a laundress. I’ll stare lasers into the ceiling. The main character in the novel “The Girl With a Pearl Earring” was a laundress in the large and child-heavy household of Johannes Vermeer, and the paragraphs of description of the daily chores involved made my hands ache with sympathetic pain — the washing, the scrubbing, the rinsing, the starching, the bleaching, the wringing, the hanging, the ironing, the folding. My earliest memory of a washing machine at our house was one where you had to move the clothes over, a few at a time, into the spin-extractor, and yet, my mother did it happily. She also owned a washboard for problem cases, and I think she knew what the alternative was.

So far, my favorite moment is the old cook, trying to tell young Daisy, the kitchen maid, that Thomas the footman is not for her. Thomas is gay, and the cook tries to tell her a half-dozen ways, but Daisy, besotted with his attention, can’t hear her. “He’s not a ladies’ man,” the cook says; she’s a rougher sort, but apparently sodomite and buggerer aren’t in her vocabulary. And of course I love anything that drops from Maggie Smith’s mouth. She plays the dowager countess, and she gets all the best lines.

I can’t believe it’s only four parts, and we’re almost there! But a second season is on tap. So in that spirit, and because it’s Burns Day, let’s start the bloggage with a story about haggis. Mmm, gray food served in offal — my mouth is watering.

Although, when you think about it, what we eat isn’t much better. What’s the difference between what you put in homemade tacos and what Taco Bell calls “taco meat filling?” You probably don’t want to know. And in the right frame of mind — i.e., after a beer or three, during a blue moon — I’ll actually eat this stuff. Maybe I should stick to the vegetarian options.

The predates “Downton Abbey” by a few years, but I bought this book a while back — “What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew” — and enjoyed it immensely. It’s an explanation of Victorian England that concentrates on the little details of daily life, including maybe the biggest one: Why have a Downton Abbey at all? (Answer: To have a home base for fox-hunting, and an escape from plague season in London.)

Now I must fly. But first, was Trent Reznor really nominated for an Oscar? If so, I hope he wins. The score in “The Social Network” was outstanding, and I’m not a score-noticer by any stretch.

Good Burns Day to all. I’m headed for Taco Bell.

As longtime readers of this zillion-word narrative of my boring life know, at one point I worked as a copy editor, one whose shift started at 5 a.m. I read the sports copy for an afternoon newspaper, which meant I often had to trek back to the sports department to ask stupid questions and make ignorant suggestions. (“Can we get rid of one of these basketball pictures? We have three wads of armpit hair on the sports front.” Answer: Of course not. It’s Indiana, silly.) Anyway, the sports-department TV was tuned to one of the ESPN channels, and at that point of the very early morning, they showed reruns of Jack LaLanne.

LaLanne died yesterday, and like many people, I was astounded. I thought he’d live forever. He’s been old for decades now — 96 at the time of his exit — and it seemed every year, you could find a three-paragraph story about his latest birthday-celebration stunt, some act of defiant fitness. I recall one year he swam a considerable distance in the Houston Ship Channel, towing a large vessel behind, although a quick Google doesn’t turn anything up, other than the amusing detail that the Houston Ship Channel has a clogged artery (a beef-tallow spill), and LaLanne died of something else entirely (pneumonia). It should have been a lightning strike, or maybe shot by a jealous husband he had cuckolded.

It would appear it’s my memory that’s faulty; according to his obits, the swims took place in California:

At 60 he swam from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman’s Wharf handcuffed, shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat. At 70, handcuffed and shackled again, he towed 70 boats, carrying a total of 70 people, a mile and a half through Long Beach Harbor.

Impressive. Anyway, on those early-morning rambles down to argue with the sports editors, I was struck by two things about LaLanne’s fitness show — his old-fashioned wardrobe (that stretchy one-piece thing and the shoes that looked like ballet slippers) and his modern technique. Exercise has trends and fashions like everything else, and I’ve been around long enough to see them come and go and sometimes come again. (The medicine ball is back, but deep knee bends are probably gone forever, replaced by the squat.) Sometimes what LaLanne did on those shows look suspiciously like Pilates (new), which is sort of like isometrics (old). He was also a big believer in push-ups, currently enjoying a renaissance as perhaps the most important single exercise anyone can do, at any age. I don’t know if he ever used the words “core” or “abs,” but he seemed to understand that staying fit doesn’t require much more than a little bit of time, every day, that the most important thing you need is persistence and that a firm midsection will serve you no matter what your sport, from running to swimming to sitting behind a desk.

Jack LaLanne — now juicing carrots and towing ships in the next world, reunited with Happy, the white German shepherd.

So, how was your weekend? We went to the Detroit News Christmas party. Srsly. The way the story went, somehow December got away from everyone, and the next thing you knew, the company had run out of dates for a pre-holiday party, so they opted for a post-holiday one. I thought maybe they’d dispense with the theme, but no — there was a tree, and Christmas gifts, and snowflake sweaters and a holiday singalong. Plus karaoke. Every department had to come up and do a number. We left after an assistant managing editor and mild-mannered designer (or editor or something) teamed up for “Rapper’s Delight,” the whole thing, and crushed it, they were so good. Always leave a party on a high note. That was a high note. Reminded me of the time a similarly mild-mannered guy from my last newsroom stood up at a karaoke party and performed “Baby Got Back” better than Sir Mix-a-Lot. And the time before that, when one of those guys who works the overnight shift and nobody knows very well, the guy who gets called Boo Radley behind his back, did the same thing, only with “Friends in Low Places.” Karaoke makes a lot of people miserable, but for some? It’s like a telephone to their soul.

We also went to the movies. A.O. Scott is absolutely right about “Somewhere,” which I enjoyed very much, although I’d love to see the script. All 22 pages of it.

Roger Ebert quotes a film editor on why 3D sucks. I’m in full agreement, but my argument is simpler: Because so many of the films made in 3D suck.

Manic Monday awaits. Outta here.

A deer came to an unfortunate end at Eminem’s house this week, after it failed to clear an iron-picket fence and presumably died in a highly unpleasant bleed-out while hanging from it. (Extremely graphic photo here; you’ve been warned.) A perfunctory Freep story says the singer “is expected to have the meat processed and given to a family in need.”

“Winter’s Bone” notwithstanding, there may be a few needy families in the metro area who still possess the knowledge to prepare venison, but I’m betting their numbers are dwindling by the year. We’ve been over this ground before here, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth noting again — cooking skills correlate to income, and until we untie them, I think we’ll continue to have an obesity problem. (Let’s leave out the upper class for now, the people with showplace kitchens who can’t make a peanut-butter sandwich.) Mark Bittman once bravely let a video crew into his small New York apartment and showed them where he makes his own personal foodie magic — in a spartan space, with few tools, very limited storage, not even much of a refrigerator. It can be done. But if you’re smart enough to know this, you’re far less likely to be needy, these days.

May I just say, also, to those who are considering the racial angles to all this, that every week at the Eastern Market I see obviously smart shoppers, many of them African-American, buying the raw ingredients for some serious dinners, much of it southern-style, bushels of mustard or collard greens, every edible part of the pig, chickens by the score. These people aren’t needy, but I’d wager many of their recipes were born from neediness — not much else explains chitterlings, in my opinion — so I know the skills are out there. But they’re fading.

That deer obviously died in agony. I thought adrenaline was bad for the taste of game, or is that an old wives’ tale? Basset’s our resident deer hunter, maybe he can say.

I don’t wish to start every report here with a weather report, but it is currently 10 degrees and we’re not expected to see 20 again until Wednesday. Might be time for my winter walk on the lake this weekend. We haven’t had a great deal of snow yet, and last weekend I walked a couple loops at Lake Front Park and watched a guy running his golden retriever out on the ice. He was on skates, taking advantage of the vast stretches of mostly clear ice to keep pace with the galloping dog, which had just enough snow under its paws to run without slipping. It looked like a lot of fun.

Downside of a cold snap: The cold. Upside: The sunshine. Caribbean-blue skies at the moment. Good thing I bought some fleece-lined jeans this year. My ass and thighs carry plenty of natural insulation, but I can always use a little more.

Some bloggage to ease into the weekend:

James Wolcott, his usual fine self, on political entertainments, from Stewart to Palin. A taste:

Think back on the Iraq war and the W.M.D.’s, the Terri Schiavo circus, the iguana contortions of John McCain under the guise of maverick integrity, the Wall Street meltdown and bailout—TV satirists and late-night hosts drove much deeper nails into the marrow of what was happening than the editorial pages of The Washington Post, that prison morgue of Beltway consensus. A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.

Many laff lines, including the best single description of Glenn Beck in the flesh I’ve yet read:

Round and beige, he resembles one of the squeamish pod sperm awaiting launch instructions upstream in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.

Only in Detroit: Two scrappy babes overcome a would-be car thief and try to perform a citizen’s arrest, getting zero help from the Detroit police. A Wayne State patrolman finally came to the rescue. Bonus weirdness factor: One of the scrappy babes is named “Officer.”

John Dingell, gunning to be the Strom Thurmond of the House, announces his intention to try for a 30th term. We’ll see. Redistricting will come between then and now, and Republicans control the Statehouse top to bottom.

OK, time to put on the fleece jeans and tackle a very cold day. Have a great weekend.

Michelle Obama — Shelley O to her fans, like Tom & Lorenzo — wore a bangin’ dress to last night’s state dinner (pix at the link). And, whoa, it was Alexander McQueen?!?!?? I am impressed. I like the way she lopped those sleeves off; a woman who does her weight-room work the way Shelley O does has every right to display the First Guns* at every opportunity. Like Tom and Lorenzo, I’m not wild about the one-shoulder thing, but Alexander McQueen’s aesthetic — or that of his successor, as McQueen checked himself out of the game last year — is all about not doing the expected thing. And she looks amazing. (*Witticism by T&L, in a previous post about Shelley O’s wardrobe.)

I know we went through the whole first-lady-and-her-designer-friends scandal once before, with Nancy Reagan, who admitted to accepting high-end gowns as gifts from her very dear air-kissing pals and not declaring it on her taxes. I assume Mrs. O pays something for her wardrobe, but I honestly don’t know what that might be — the economics of haute couture has never been clear to me. Generally speaking, the more famous the body in the gown, the less it pays, usually zero. One red-carpet photo of an Oscar nominee in a recognizable designer dress translates to hundreds sold at full price to the wives and mistresses of Russian oligarchs, Mexican drug lords and hedge-fund billionaires. But it would look bad, very very bad, if the FLOTUS was working the same deal as Sandra Bullock. What does a custom-altered Alexander McQueen gown even cost? I’ll just throw a wild guess out there: $15,000. If someone knows, chime in.

Which brings us to an interesting thing I found yesterday: The 10 most expensive gifts given to the president in 2009. Diplomacy is a tricky art; when heads of state meet, they are expected to tote some host-and-hostess gifts along, but many of these sound ghastly. Topping this list is, natch, Saudi Arabia:

“Large desert scene on a green veined marble base featuring miniature figurines of gold palm trees and camels; large gold medallion with the Royal seal in a green leather display box; large brass and glass clock by Jaeger-LeCoultre in a green leather display case.”

The Chinese were almost as bad:

“39” x 49′” wooden framed and matted fine silk embroidery depicting a portrait study of the First Family.”

The English and the Italians did better, and the Pope gave a whole gift bag, including a silver keychain. I’ll let you explore for yourself. Gawker mined the list for the cheapest gift, and came up with a $75 bottle of olive oil offered by Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. That’s a great deal more than I ever paid for olive oil in any quantity, so I’ll reserve judgment. But some of the gifts are wonderful, and if I were the president, I’d be tempted to load a few of them into the moving van when I leave, especially the “Orange Batavus ‘Holland on the Hudson’ bicycle with an extra bike seat,” from the Netherlands. The Dutch make wonderful bicycles.

And Silvio Berlusconi is a virtual department store of gifty wonderfulness. Alan will like this one: “Two men’s Belstaff jackets; one women’s Belstaff jacket.” You know who wears Belstaff jackets? George Clooney, that’s who.

Well, spelunk away. It’s an interesting document.

Before I leave, a correction/clarification from yesterday: Syphilis doesn’t cause hair loss, but a pre-antibiotics treatment for it (mercury) does. The merkin allegedly evolved to cover the effects of hair loss, as well as to cover the odd chancre. You can find any number of sources for this sort of thing, but as always, the Straight Dope is a nice one-stop choice.

I never knew anyone who admitted to having syphilis, although there was one fellow in my circle who picked up gonorrhea, from a brief fling with a young widow, who was working out her grief through promiscuity. I hope he learned his lesson, although he never visited a doctor and self-medicated with an antibiotic course smuggled out the back door of a pharmacy where he knew the owner.

What I learned today before breakfast: “A night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury.” Ahem:

Though no proper studies were done to prove it, mercury may have been an effective, if rather brutal, way of treating syphilis. It was administered in multiple ways, including by mouth and by rubbing it on the skin.

One of the more gruesome methods was fumigation, in which the patient/victim was placed in a closed box with their head sticking out. Mercury was placed in the box and a fire was started under the box which caused the metal to vapourise.

Aren’t you glad you live in the modern age?

Work beckons. More coffee beckons. Thursday — the most sleep-deprived day of my week.

I hope it’s a testament to the spirit of this blog that I made a big fuss over its ninth anniversary, in 2009 2010, and completely forgot its 10th, which happened last Friday. The traditional tenth anniversary gift is tin. I’ll take mine in the shape of a horn. A tinhorn, my dictionary tells me, is a petty braggart who puts on airs and pretends to be richer and more important than s/he is. That’s pretty much the definition of this blog, ain’a?

Anyway, I don’t mention this to set off a round of congratulations, but because I stumbled across this Crain’s Chicago Business story about the phenomenon of blog disillusionment, people who started with great enthusiasm and soon found themselves running out of things to say. This guy, for instance, thought he could get a book deal:

He founded Modern Craft in 2007 and spent seven to 10 hours a week on the blog. It received 800 to 1,500 views per post, a respectable number for an independent blog. But it launched the career not of Mr. Harbison, but of the artists he featured. While they signed deals with Target, Urban Outfitters and Chronicle Books, he got virtually nothing, save for a spread featuring him and his mid-century Evanston home in ReadyMade magazine.

“I could see it happening, but it wasn’t happening for me,” Mr. Harbison says.

Sorry, dude. Harbison went back to work at what he does best — designing his own line of textiles and canvas bags. Others featured in the story did the same, jumping in with great enthusiasm, keeping things at a high boil for a few weeks or months, and then petering out. They’d run out of things to say, it was harder than it looked, they’d grown in a different direction. And one more ghost ship is abandoned to drift along the currents of the internet, its comment section filling with spam, until one day the URL isn’t renewed and it becomes an Estonian porn site. (Don’t laugh — this happened to one of the most obnoxious radio talk-show hosts in Fort Wayne, one of Brian Stouder’s lip-flappers. One day it’s pictures of his daughters and recipes for mashed potatoes made with cream cheese, the next it’s sluts in blue eyeshadow putting something other than mashed potatoes in their mouths. It has since gone back to a placeholder, but for a while there — woo.)

Back to the story:

The feeling that nobody’s reading can cause bloggers to quit. “It’s discouraging, if that’s the reason you’re blogging,” says Liz Strauss, a Chicago-based professional blogger, web strategist and founder of SOBCon, an online business conference.

Ms. Strauss, who maintains three blogs, began in 2005, when she was one of 12 million. Now, to stand out in a sea of 31 million, “it’s no longer OK to be a mommy or daddy or business blogger,” she says. “The more narrowly you define your niche, the more visible you become.”

I’ve heard this before. I think it’s crap. How much more narrowly defined could this blog be? “One writer’s daily download,” is how I describe it when asked, and yet still, is Amy Adams playing me at the cineplex?

The only reason to blog is if you have something to say. Your readers will find you, or they won’t. And you’ll probably make more money making textiles and canvas bags.

I read and liked — and blogged about — the NYT op-ed that most likely prompted this book contract, so I guess I’d better read the book, too. Paul Clemens’ “Punching Out: One Year in a Closing Auto Plant” sounds worth the time, even though, as the critic points out, it’s not so much about a closing auto plant as a closed one, being disassembled by specialized crews and shipped, piece by piece, to countries where the labor doesn’t expect quite the wages they do here.

I was struck by the numbers; at one point he notes that this plant, Budd Detroit Automotive Plant, Stamping and Framing Division, employed 10,000. That was the figure that the International Harvester factory in Fort Wayne once employed, back when it was the biggest employer in town. It closed in 1980, an event that seared the city’s consciousness the way World War II did my parents’ generation. One-quarter of the city fell into a slide it never recovered from, a disaster that affected uncounted businesses and families. Detroit is a much larger city, of course, and Budd was only one player, and nowhere near the largest. All over the city are plants like it, and many more that are considerably smaller, the mom-and-pop tool-and-die shops, the widget factories, whatever. Many are being disassembled the same way this one is. We live in interesting times.

Oh, but let’s close on a high note, shall we?

Bloggage:

What Roger Ebert will miss about Regis Philbin, a YouTube bouquet. Philbin really has the gift of not taking himself too seriously. He could teach his co-hosts a thing or three.

Gene Weingarten made reference to this yesterday: Kate Winslet admits to wearing a merkin for a brief scene in “The Reader.” An old story, but when it comes to merkins, you can never be overinformed.

I was more struck by the question that prompted it, from a reader:

I saw the show “Hair” at the Kennedy Center some weeks ago, and while I liked it more than disliked it, one thing in particular bothered me.

Directors, costumers, set design etc. try so hard to put an authentic feel to a show, and yet this show, about free love, about community, about the Vietnam war, and famously about full frontal nudity…didn’t show one follicle of pubic hair. Really? Was it too much to ask the actors to let it grow out for the run of the show? So anachronistic, it took me out of the moment.

Man, it would me, too. Really? That’s bad direction, if you ask me.

And now the coffee has fully engaged, so it’s time to get dressed, get showered, and get to work. Not in that order.

Of all the things we can worry about today, I’m choosing this: What is Baby Doc doing back in Port au Prince?

I admit to a small interest in the former Haitian dictator. I was a Vanity Fair subscriber in the mid-80s, when Jean-Claude Duvalier and his wife, the scarily beautiful Michéle, ruled over the island with a sort of heedless hauteur and corruption, and the magazine published several long articles about their last days, which I always thought sort of clever of the editors — you had a story that was legitimately important in terms of world affairs, but with all sorts of gossipy details about the people involved. This is from Michéle’s Wikipedia entry and the usual cautions apply, but it’s of a piece with much of the reporting of the time:

Mrs. Duvalier’s family amassed wealth at an unprecedented rate during the later part of Jean Claude’s dictatorship. By the end of his fifteen-year rule, Duvalier and his wife had become famous for their corruption. The National Palace became the scene of opulent costume parties, where the young President once appeared dressed as a Turkish sultan to dole out ten-thousand-dollar jewels as door prizes, while the homeless were encouraged to watch the festivities on televisions that had been set up in the parks where they slept.

Alas, the Duvaliers have since divorced, and any entertainment in Baby Doc, the Sequel will have to be provided by someone else.

I recall, during the expulsion of the Duvaliers in 1986, an audio clip on NPR of the howling crowds outside the presidential residence. One shrieked that Michéle was a layz-byan and a voodoo priestess. Wouldn’t surprise me. It would certainly beat sex with Baby Doc, one of those unfortunate disappointing sons inevitably described as “pudgy.”

And that has been your Inane Ruminations on Deposed Dictators for Tuesday, brought to you by Masterpiece Classic, now showing “Downton Abbey” on a PBS station near you. Check local listings.

I hate the beginning of the week. Monday is insane, Tuesday is mostly insane. It’s not until Wednesday that I can finally relax, get a workout in and maybe do a little writing for myself. So let’s skip to a brief bit of bloggage today. Drumroll for the..

Born this way blog. Just outstanding.

Other heart-transplant candidates join a long waiting list. Dick Cheney merely decides whether he wants one. Then he sends out for a young man to be freshly slaughtered. Civilized by popular demand: Then he consults his doctors to see if he might be a candidate for such a procedure, and joins a list to wait weeks, months or longer for a donor heart, all the while promoting awareness of the organ shortage and encouraging others to discuss the option with their loved ones, and sign the back of their driver’s licenses to indicate their willingness to donate, should the occasion arise. And all of his friends get together and hold a spaghetti dinner and silent auction at the VFW*, raising $800 toward the roughly $787,700 procedure.

* Venue suggested by Sue.

Now, commence chattering about the goings-on at Downton Abbey. I have some copy to move.