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

So I’m pro-Planned Parenthood.

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

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

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

So. Bloggage?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Off to work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fortunately, many linkies and much bloggage today:

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

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

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

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

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

Oh.

This is depressing. Pythons in the Everglades:

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

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

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

Where is cable news on that one, anyway?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Oh, and Roy covers the crazy Alinsky angle.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bloggage:

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Thursday to all.

Watchin’ the State o’ the Union, drinkin’ a second glass of wine, thinkin’ some thoughts. Among them:

Hey, there’s my congressman. Hansen Clarke. Big clapper. Well, it’s a big night for the D, on all fronts. We get major shoutouts in the SOTU, and the Tigers sign Prince Fielder. Here’s a rerun the Freep dug up from the vaults, about young Prince when he was a Little Leaguer in the Grosse Pointe Woods-Shores Little League. Note the photo. He has a great look in his eye, but clearly took that McDonald’s ad he did with his father to heart. On the other hand, one of the things to love about baseball is that some great players look like they enjoy an extra Pabst Blue Ribbon or three on the off days.

And it’s a good day for my darling daughter, entering the homestretch of midterms week. Today is history and gym. Yes, gym. They’ve been doing parts of it for the last week or so, and today is the 20-minute run, followed by the written test.

“A written test in gym?” her mother asked. “What sort of questions?”

“About stretching and stuff,” she said.

I hope she aces it. She doesn’t believe me when I tell her she’s getting off easy, gym-wise. Our system required .75 credits of gym to graduate, and every year was .25. You got senior year off, if you didn’t skip it chronically, which my friend Jeff did, to avoid getting his ass kicked for being an obvious homosexual. When they threatened to withhold his diploma, he signed up for six weeks of summer-school gym, which consisted of riding bikes and playing cards indoors on rainy days. No locker rooms, no ass-kicking, and the diploma arrived in August instead of June. I asked if he’d do it all again, knowing he missed “Pomp & Circumstance” at Vet’s Memorial and the all-night party.

“Absolutely,” he said.

Tells you everything you need to know about gym.

If she completes this year satisfactorily, Kate will never have to set foot in another high-school gym for anything but dances and pep rallies before graduation. So I hope she remembers how to stretch.

Bloggage? Oh, I’m sure we have some:

The SOTU featured warnings that “the middle class is under threat because of growing disparities between the rich and everyone else in America.” You don’t say. Did I link to that piece in last Sunday’s NYT, about Apple and its work at Foxconn, the Mordor-like Chinese factory where our favorite devices are born? No? You should read it, if you have the chance. It’s long, but like a horror movie, it’s hard to tear your eyes away. When Steve Jobs demanded an scratchproof glass screen for the iPhone, and demanded it be perfect in six weeks, they knew where to turn:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

…When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

That’s why the middle class is in trouble — because we cannot compete with slave labor, essentially. What? You don’t want to live in a dorm attached to your workplace (eight to a room) and be roused at midnight to work a 12-hour shift in the factory that was built by the government? Lazy, lazy, lazy.

I missed Our Man Mitch’s rebuttal last night. Was it any good?

This makes me immediately seek detox with celebrity gossip. Here’s a photo of Demi Moore, and even though it is only head and shoulders, shows the outsize-head-on-tiny-body prototype so common in movie stars. Bonus: Patton Oswalt’s tweet stream after being robbed of an Academy Award nomination.

Time for work. Hump day!

Pix ‘n’ linx on a night when it’s so windy I regret that I live under tall trees. Only on nights like this, but they happen often enough that I pass an uneasy night every few months. We are paying for yet another April-in-January morning — nearly 50 today. And now the warmth must be banished. In 35 mph gusts.

So let’s ask Flickr for “wind” in the Creative Commons area. This is nice:

Thanks, Richard White. That’s a lovely country you have there. (England.)

Now, some linkage:

New York magazine, in what we all hope is hyperbole, promises us the slimiest campaign season ever. It probably isn’t hyperbole. Oh, I can’t wait.

If you want to feel better, though, here’s Gabrielle Giffords finishing the town meeting she started a little over a year ago, and didn’t finish. I love her bad-guys-don’t-get-to-win spirit. This is a great country.

Duff McKagan — yes, that one — on the SOPA affair:

The legislation’s meant to combat theft of creative works like movies and music from overseas web sites. But when I turned to the Twitter and Facebook, I saw an overwhelming dog pile of support against the bills. Excuse me, but where were you all when piracy started to decimate the music industry? Why didn’t you take a stand against that? Those free records felt good, huh?

The fury from the Internet class is that the broad language in the pieces of legislation will be bad for start-ups, might prevent the next YouTube, or give the government the ability to take down a whole site because of one link to copyrighted works. In short, they’re opposed to the legislation because they think it will be bad for the Internet business.

Bad for business. Anti-piracy legislation could be bad for the Internet business. It almost takes my breath away. Internet piracy has claimed half of the recorded music business, and made the prospect of making a living as a musician harder for artists of all rank and file. Why didn’t Google, or Facebook, or Wikipedia ever stand in solidarity with musicians, actors, and writers – most of whom have never known fame and fortune – as their works were stolen with no recourse on their sites?

You gotta admit, the guy has a point. Barn doors and horses and all that, but someone needs to say it.

And now it’s, what? Tuesday? Is that all? Seemed like a long Monday. Let’s hope it speeds by.

So, Joe Paterno is dead.

[Pause.]

He got off easy. He died surrounded by family and the echo chamber that allowed him to leave the world secure that even if he “wishes he’d done more,” what could he have done, anyway? He’s an old man. He’d never heard of that “rape and a man” thing. He’s olllld. Stop picking on him. He’s a national treasure and he lives in the same house he bought as a newlywed and he walks across campus and he endowed a library and he’s Joe Pa.

Trials, and investigations, and more probing questioning, might have turned up a few things that wouldn’t have gone over well. When you say you “wish you’d done more,” Mr. Paterno, when exactly did you reach that conclusion? In 2002, 2003, or last November?

When I heard the news this morning, I posted a tweet that said only, “JoePa beats the rap.” One of you who saw it replied at some length via Facebook. I’ll let you read it and tell me what you think:

One that was self-inflicted, and deeply deserved.

I don’t even pretend to be unbiased about this. I was sexually abused when I was a kid, and like this situation all of the adults who could have done something pretended that it didn’t happen. But that was in the 1970′s and what my family did was more or less the societal norm for the time. Yes, they should have had the backbone to confront it head on instead of letting me sort it out for myself at age ten, but they at least had that fig leaf of an excuse.

Paterno doesn’t get that pass. McQueary came to him in 2002 and told him he had seen Sandusky RAPING a boy in a Penn State locker room shower. Paterno was then 75 years old and he had never heard about molestation or even gay sex between consenting male adults? Like hell. You can’t spend one week, let alone five decades, in male team sports without getting a thorough description of how male-male sex works. To believe that Paterno was able to morally guide his teams for decades on drugs, cheating and sportsmanship but he didn’t know that some sick men like to stick their pee-pees in boy’s behinds (Paterno wanted to act like he was an infant on the subject so I’ll put it in terms he might have preferred) – is to be delusional. He knew what McQueary meant. You can not be a functioning adult – or a parent – and not be aware of child molesters and what they do.

Not acting on what McQueary reported was bad enough, but what was worse is that everyone – Paterno, McQueary, the AD and president – did not lift their eyes even a millimeter to see all of the other ways Sandusky could be destroying the lives of many boys. They knew he ran a home for troubled boys. They continued to allow him to run his youth football camps at Penn State. What were they thinking? That fucking a ten year-old in a semi-public place was a fluke? That just because he took extraordinary measures to have access to young boys it wouldn’t happen again?

They were wrong.

There are eight known victims of Jerry Sandusky, I guarantee there are a lot more who won’t come forward. Paterno, McQueary, and the PSU admins involved knew about this for at least nine years, possibly longer, and they did nothing. I suspect because they didn’t know how to stop Sandusky without killing themselves professionally and the football program, but their motives are irrelevant. They could have stopped a serial child molester, and all of them made a conscious decision not to. They didn’t rape those kids, they just made it possible for Sandusky to do it.

Since this broke I’ve heard a lot of sportswriters say that this was “difficult” because you had to consider Paterno record outside of covering up a molester in his program. I think that’s kind of the ultimate real-life “Otherwise, what did you think of the play, Mrs. Lincoln?” moment, and I think that moral character is defined when it’s tested.

But if you want to make that claim, then you also need to look at the reach of what Sandusky did and Paterno enabled.

I am exceptionally lucky. I didn’t turn to alcohol or drugs to cope with this and, most gratefully of all I didn’t become an abuser myself. For years I was terrified that I would this to a child someday. In my late 40′s, I have a good marriage to an amazing woman. I have friends, and I have peace.

But it wasn’t until my late 30′s that I stopped having flashbacks where I would taste his cock in my mouth. (I would apologize for the language but this was an assault. I need for you to feel it like a punch so you can understand what these kids will go through.) I went from being a kid who they wanted to bump up two grades to not caring. I became a clown and that was helpful in other ways, but it’s not going to get you into college. I learned how to deal with any problem I’d face on my own, at the expense of never making myself fully vulnerable to anyone. There’s nothing anyone can do to destroy me – because I won’t let you get that close. That’s how I’ve found peace.

Some of Sandusky’s victims won’t be as lucky. Thirty years from now some of them will be addicts, some will be alcoholics, some will be abusers and molesters themselves. The ones who are lucky will patch together something that works for them without hurting anyone else. It will get smaller in their mirrors but it will never fully disappear.

It may not be as personal for someone who hasn’t gone through this, but putting that aside I can’t understand how attachment to a college sports program can trump even an academic understanding of what molestation is and what it does to its victims, and how those two things should be prioritized. And I live in Bloomington freaking Indiana – I know something about iconic coaches, winning programs, and how people lose their shit when both end badly. But Bob Knight never hurled a flower pot at a kid, and Woody Hayes didn’t swing at a ten year-old. Is the infatuation with adults playing a children’s game so great that not even covering up for and enabling a molester doesn’t deserve a hearty “How fucking dare you?” If this doesn’t cross the line, what would?

If you made it this far, thanks for reading. And rot in hell, Joe.

That’s pretty powerful, don’t you think? We have a long history in our culture of not speaking ill of the recently dead, and I’m not so cross-eyed on this subject that I can’t see that Paterno did good things along the way, and not all of them in coaching football. I know we all hope we won’t be judged by the worst thing we’ve done in our lives, but I also agree with our commenter — character is defined when it’s tested. Paterno was tested, and failed. By failing, he almost certainly enabled Jerry Sandusky to abuse other boys. All the endowed libraries in the world won’t balance that scale.

Another writer says much the same thing.

I should say, finally, that I’m not smug about this. But I’m not blind, either. I only hope that when the chips are down, I’ll be able to do the right thing. It’s not easy for anyone.

[Pause.]

So, with that, some bloggage?

The great Emma Downs on a rift between bookselling brothers:

At one time, Sam and Joel Hyde were more than brothers. They were business partners, co-owners of Hyde Brothers Booksellers, the dusty, crowded and cozy used bookstore on Wells Street.

The partnership lasted 10 years and both Sam and Joel describe the parting as amicable. But it was also fraught with long discussions about what Sam owed Joel and vice versa. The process of divvying up the store’s inventory alone was a slow process, Sam says.

At one point, Joel asked Sam what he would pay for the paperbacks Joel was leaving behind.

“Nothing,” Sam said.

And the discussions would start all over again.

It’s a good read no matter where you’re from, but better if you’ve shopped at the original Hyde Brothers. Thanks for the find, Brian.

And with that, the week begins. Sorry to bum you out so early, but I’ve spent the last two hours reading nothing but apologias for kindly Grampa Joe. Not here you won’t.

In the interest of being anti-SOPA but pro-intellectual property respect, no photo today, because I don’t think the Associated Press allows wholesale reproduction without a license. A link, then, to L.L. Bean’s answer to the comical automotive corporate mascot: the Bootmobile.

I want one.

Linx ‘n’ pix today, then. What do we have?

Speaking of SOPA, looks like young Ben Quayle was a co-sponsor. Apples, trees, and what they say about them.

I thought Sally Jenkins’ piece about Joe Paterno was a bit much, but I wasn’t half as offended as this guy was. By that I mean, I know Paterno (and his handlers) were playing the Poor Sick Old Man card, but I didn’t think Jenkins was playing it, too. (I’ve been far more offended by her close relationship with Lance Armstrong.) YMMV, as we say on the Internets.

No dispute about this, though: Sports Illustrated’s piece on the Thrilla in Manila, unearthed from the vault this week in honor of Muhammed Ali’s 70th birthday. Fabulous.

PJs in public — threat or menace? Menace!

Happy Thursday, all.

After yesterday’s overcast start, the day brightened into something a little less leaden. The sun was safe behind many veils of clouds, but the rain stopped and what ho, I have an interview at the coffee shop on the corner? Think I’ll wear my raincoat in this mild, 50-degree weather. I called my editor in Lansing after I got home. It was 52 here, but 100 miles to the west, 32. And sure enough, soon the sky darkened again, the wind changed from southwest to northwest justlikethat, rain blew horizontally for a while and tomorrow it’ll be winter again. Highs in the 20s.

Do I start every blog with a weather report? Yes, I do. I am a Midwesterner, after all.

And at the moment I’m a Midwesterner with just two squares of a Green & Black white-chocolate bar left, the spoils of a splurge trip to Whole Foods Saturday. Whole Foods in Ann Arbor, I should add — a childhood friend was passing through, and thought she’d give me a shout, see if I was up for lunch. These days, I have a refuse-no-friends-who-are-passing-through policy, especially when I haven’t seen them in years. You never know when you’ll get another chance.

So we went to Zingerman’s Roadhouse. It was an episode of “Portlandia” come to life, with the waiter introducing himself, sketching out the restaurant’s philosophy (“comfort food and barbecue”), its policy on sourcing (local, of course) and then expressing his deep delight that he would get to break my friends’ Z-cherry, so to speak. All of this would be intolerable if Zingerman’s didn’t dollar up on the hoof so well. You pay through the nose, you put up with this seemingly endless bullshit, but when the food arrives, there is nothing to do but say, “This may be a side dish of macaroni and cheese priced at $7.50, but if there’s a dish of macaroni and cheese worth $7.50? It tastes like this.”

Cindy ordered the go-go grilled cheese sandwich. She asked if she could change the cheeses. But of course. Could she maybe have some cheddar with a little Maytag bleu? Certainly, our waiter said, adding:

“How old?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How old on the cheddar?” There was a choice. One year, two years, or five. She asked for the one-year vintage. It was an excellent sandwich, and the mushroom soup was even better.

I had lentil soup, with a side of sauteed spinach. I’m going through a big sauteed-spinach phase. So easy. Buy it by the bag, prewashed, throw a little olive oil and garlic into the pan, get it going, toss in the greens and wait until they wilt down into iron-rich deliciousness. Sometimes I have it for breakfast, with a poached egg. Florentine, but without the mornay sauce. Popeye never asked for mornay sauce. It gives me the strength of 10 old bags.

Weather and food. Yep, that’s about right.

Fortunately, we have much good bloggage today:

First, quite the arresting slide show of the Italian cruise-ship disaster. Alan tells me they actually drifted to that position so close to the rocks, but I’m not sure. This overhead view plainly shows barely submerged rocks. How much pinot grigio was this captain drinking? The first rule of marine navigation: If you see rocks sticking out of the water, don’t drive the boat there. (It’s possible that’s some sort of lens flare or other trick of the light. Still. Awful close to those rocks, cap’n.)

My education sources keep telling me the lecture is dead. It’s not only not dead, it’s pretty lucrative — if you’re the lecturer, anyway:

In official Washington, there is an afterlife, and it’s a crowded, cacophonous place. Called the public speaking circuit, this D.C. Elysium is bound by the same transactional laws as the realm that preceded it. But instead of political parties, it is governed by speakers bureaus that promise visibility to those who sign up. In the past 30 years, a proliferation of bureaus has promoted, booked and enriched former lawmakers, candidates, consultants, Cabinet members, political reporters and gadflies.

“Let’s say you are secretary of something — there are two ways you are going to make a really good living: a lobbyist or a speaker, or a combination of the two,” said James Carville, the political consultant and a client of the Washington Speakers Bureau.

The bulls got out at Coozledad’s place again. Spoiler: Purley was OK after his encounter with the truck. I’m so glad, as Purley is the cutest bull ever. You let Mrs. Gingrich set eyes on him, and he’ll be a character in her next children’s book.

Me, on one side effect of the college competition — the common-app crush.

For once, a photo I find more interesting than Tom & Lorenzo. Spike Lee is a Christian now? Mariah Carey looks drunk, but considering she showed up in a version of the same dress that other lady did, maybe she had a reason. And yeah, Shelley shut it down. She looks better every year.

And with that, the hump day commences. Not you, Purley! Down, boy.

Tuesday morning comin’ down, in the form of what looks to be an all-day rain. After a brief cold snap we’re back into the 40s, and while the warmth is better than cold (I guess), it’s certainly dreary. Let’s pick an appropriate picture from the ol’ Flickr stream. Ah, here’s one:

Chili — with or without corn — will taste good today. Photo by J.C. Burns, nicked from his Flickr stream, used under a Creative Commons license. Let’s hop to the links, shall we?

Jim Griffoen at Sweet Juniper! on how they managed to sneak a bit of American toy kitsch into their neighbors’ perfect apartment. How perfect?

So we’ve got these wonderful German neighbors who are such sophisticated design nerds they make us look like Randy Quaid and his wife emptying our RV’s septic tank into the storm drain. One is a professor of architecture (and since most architects already try to look like Germans, you can imagine how ahead of the curve these two are). They have pretty much every piece of iconic midcentury furniture in their immaculate Mies van der Rohe townhouse. It’s like the furniture wing at MOMA.

We had a neighborhood garage sale a few months ago and when this family stopped at ours, the architect saw her four-year-old son having a blast while playing with some of my son’s old toys and she said with a delightful German bluntness:

“I see he likes these toys, but the design is not good and they would not really fit in our home.”

The New Yorker on Callista Gingrich. Fact I didn’t know: She writes children’s books! Well, of course she does, being a strict Catholic who spent her prime childbearing years in unmarried congress with a married man, only to win the big prize (the man) and discover it really wasn’t what she wanted anyway, but it came with a shitload of fancy jewelry and the chance to play Pretend Mommy with her children’s book-authoring career. Every self-respecting child I know would flee from her in terror. Well, book-signings are rare, anyway.

Finally, I am long overdue with this, which ran last week, when my friend Sammy Smith, spouse of J.C. Burns and likely the creator of today’s pot of chili, was settling affairs in Michigan following the death of her mother. She and her father (the Botanist) visited the Michigan Women’s Historical Center and Hall of Fame, and found a photo of then-governor Albert Sleeper signing the bill granting women’s suffrage while selected members of the gender “look on,” as the caption-writers always put it. One is Sammy’s great-grandmother. I like the picture because the women, dowagers all, look like they have the assembled power to stab the governor to death with their hatpins if he doesn’t come across.

Anyway, condolences to Sammy, and a good Tuesday to all.