My Russian teacher and I were marveling at the news during the last winter Olympics, that the next one would be in Sochi. It’s a resort at a fairly southerly latitude, for starters, and, well, it’s Russia. The country has galloped ahead on the usual emergent-economy trajectory, but an Olympic Games is a herculean task to mount, and this isn’t China.

Turns out we might have been on to something:

Some journalists arriving in Sochi are describing appalling conditions in the housing there, where only six of nine media hotels are ready for guests. Hotels are still under construction. Water, if it’s running, isn’t drinkable. One German photographer told the AP over the weekend that his hotel still had stray dogs and construction workers wandering in and out of rooms.

My favorite is this:

My hotel has no water. If restored, the front desk says, “do not use on your face because it contains something very dangerous.”

That’s from Stacy St. Clair of the Chicago Tribune.

I wonder if any of us really realizes how much safer our so-called nanny state keeps us, by insisting on things like animal control and water purification. I remember when we were in Argentina a decade ago — hardly a third-world country — and coming across broken sidewalks, which may or may not be under repair. No orange cones, no caution tape, just whoopsie daisy, there’s an 8-inch drop.

We should let the market decide whether water is safe to splash on your face, don’t you think?

So. I was driving to Ann Arbor today, listening to Tom Jones’ version of “Sixteen Tons,” and it reminded me of something I read a while ago — that Jones is married to the same girl he chose back in the hometown, pre-famous days. A quick Google, and what do you know: They’ve been married since before I was born:

“We grew up together, come from the same place, have the same sense of humour. That has a lot to do with it. How do you walk away from somebody that you get along so well with? What’s the point?

“And we do still have a lot of laughs together. The first thing my wife asks me when I get home is: ‘Have you heard any good jokes lately?’”

It doesn’t exactly sound like passion — he admits to having had many infidelities and a long-term affair with Mary Wilson — but after all this time, more of a tea cozy of a marriage, warm and comforting and familiar. She looks like an ordinary girl from Wales who married a handsome boy and then found herself being swept up by his crazy career.

Remember: The only two people qualified to judge the quality of a marriage are the people in it.

Guess what we’re doing tonight? Waiting for snow. Yes! Snow! Quite a lot of it, too, although not as much as some. Then another deep freeze.

At least it’s a short month.

OK, I’m declaring it. The worst of the cold is over. Has to be. On Friday it will be 30 degrees. It will also be the last day of January. As my friend Mark used to say, “If you get to February, it’s practically over.” That’s not true, Groundhog Day foolishness to the contrary, but it’s close enough to true that you can fool yourself about it for a while. Then it’s Valentine’s Day, the traditional time to have an ice storm at this latitude, and then it’s just a fortnight until the shortest month of the year is over, and it’s March. First St. Patrick’s Day, then the first day of spring really arrives, along around the three-week mark. Then opening day, the first green mist on the trees.

Of course, this being Michigan, there will be a few snows in there, too. Last year I had my eye surgery on May 2. The spring leading up to it was awful, and the warmth arrived just as I was spending five days staring through my padded toilet seat.

So: Just (potentially) three more months of winter! But you see how I chopped it up like that? It’s just a series of fortnights and little mini-holidays.

But the -7 bullshit of this morning? OVER. So let it be written, so let it be done.

Seems like a day for a You Fuckers roundup. I was in a toleratin’-it mood until 3 p.m., when I called the bakery to find out what was left before I trudged over there, and discovered the entire place had been cleaned out. Time for some fuckers.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the jihad against Wendy Davis, aka “Abortion Barbie,” who is said to have slept her way into marriage to an affluent man, who then had to “raise their kids alone” while she went off to Harvard Law school. The slut! How dare she…do what conservatives counsel poor women to do, i.e., boost her socioeconomic status through marriage? Well — it shouldn’t surprise you to learn this — it turns out that it’s not entirely true. So: Fuckers.

And then there’s the National Review, specifically Kathryn Jean Lopez, abortion warrior, and this thing. I think Roy Edroso said it best: Put the family through hell with your ghoulish wingnut theology, then weep crocodile tears over them. Fuckers.

Not part of the roundup: Madonna, what are you doing? Asks Lindy West.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

I realize we’ve been doing a lot of weather-bitching this winter, but this week we have coming up is going to test us all. After seven days of miserable cold, it warmed up just enough to dump a few more inches of snow on our heads and today and tomorrow? Single-digit highs, subzero low, and fuck you too. Will there be school? Don’t know yet. Will there be misery? Almost certainly. Will there be the small compensation of the abatement of my cold? Based on today’s tissue consumption, don’t think so.

I know, I know, in a few weeks this will all be over. Maybe a few days. Still.

Bitching complete. At least on that score.

Watched “Mitt” this weekend. It didn’t make me like him any better. In fact, it rather made me like him less. At one point, he ticks off the terrible taxes that a small business owner has to pay — federal, FICA, state, real estate, etc. “It goes to the government,” he said. Of course, these are taxes we all have to pay, too, only I’ve found it helps if you think of “the government” as an imperfect structure that inspects our food, repairs freeway overpasses, educates children and, of course, funds our never-ending supply of military operations around the globe. Pay a teacher a salary, and you know what he does with it? He buys houses, cat food and shoes. It’s an economy.

Now if you want to see money fly away and never been seen again, see what Bain Capital does with its profits. I also got peevish during the family’s final meeting before the concession on election night, and Mittens made a little speech about how the country was headed for a big-government tipping point within five years and, essentially, all is lost. Only a man who grew up the son of a major automotive executive and governor, educated at the finest schools money can buy, someone who beamed from Harvard straight into management consulting, whose wife was able to say with a straight face that they knew hard times because sometimes they had to “sell stock” to cover the bills, among about a million other instances of aggravated cluelessness — only he could get away with that and not have everyone else in the room pelt him with dinner rolls.

I also saw “Captain Phillips,” which was pretty good, an action movie with a conscience. Maybe when I don’t feel like my head is full of gunk, we can talk about that one.

For now, a skip to the bloggage:

Thanks, Dexter, for digging up this photo gallery from a California trail cam. It’s nice to see a place not covered with snow.

Your Italian extra-virgin olive oil is 69 percent likely to be not Italian, not extra virgin, and maybe not even olive oil.

Finally, as bad as it is where you are, take heart if you don’t have children in Louisiana public schools. Appalling. Infuriating and appalling.

A good week to all. Let’s hope it’s warmer by the end of it.

Neil Steinberg had a great blog yesterday, about his intention to see the entire Ring cycle at Chicago’s Lyric Opera in 2020. For you non-opera fans, this is the four-part, 15-hour magnum opus of Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Niebelung,” the most operatic opera of all. Staging it is the Mt. Everest of opera, and watching it is pretty much the same. In Chicago…

The first opera in the cycle, “Das Rheingold,” will be staged in the 2016/17 season, with the other three, “Die Walkure,” “Siegried” and “Gotterdammerung” performed in each subsequent season, with the whole megillah, as Wagner definitely would not say, being performed — three complete Ring Cycles — in April, 2020.

Mark your calendars.

What I liked about it, though, were his observations on Big Works, and why they’re still important:

…like a mountain, a massive work calls to you. Not by its pure massivity, mind you. There are plenty of works that are long, multi-part 19th century romance novels and such, that have fallen into deserved obscurity.

But certain long works endure into our Twittery time, not because they’re big, but because they’re also good. Very good, wonderful, something that becomes clear when you gird your loins and finally sit down and read them. If they weren’t, they’d be forgotten. People don’t hold onto these things because they should, but because they have to. War and Peace is the template for every Barbara Cartland novel that followed. It isn’t tedious — well, much of it isn’t — but filled with love and conversation, with blood and battle, with war and, umm, peace. It’s a great book. That sounds obvious, but so many years of it being a “great book” sometimes obscure that. Tolstoy knew his stuff.

I need to read a great work this summer. So much depends on translation, though, and how do you choose the right one? I started “Dr. Zhivago” when I found a copy at a vacation house we rented years ago, but absolutely couldn’t penetrate it. Just show me one hint of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, I kept thinking. Nothing doing.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. So many great books have been adapted into something else, and necessarily sliced down to a shadow of their original selves. We need to approach them as something completely new. On the other hand, Steinberg does a nice job explaining why the Ring is pretty much the single source for all opera jokes in pop culture; it is where the fat lady sang, after all.

OK, a quick cut to the bloggage, because this has been one long icy-lumpy-fuck week:

Columbusites! Remember Larry’s bar on High Street? Here’s a lot of old pictures from the place. I wasn’t a regular, but I loved that place.

I just found this, but it MUST BE SHARED. Of course Wendy’s day-care center posts daily photos; how else would her humans get through a day without her? (This is from Monday, obvs.)

Finally, can the Marlise Munoz case in Texas get any worse? Hard to imagine. How awful.

Let’s all have a good weekend.

I don’t want to continually moan about the weather, but it’s fairly moan-worthy. Last night we were all watching “Silver Linings Playbook” when Wendy slipped out of the room for about two minutes, then slipped back in. I went upstairs after the big dance number and found a puddle on the bathmat, next to the toilet. Hey, it was 4 degrees! And everybody else goes in this room!

Dogs. Right now, she’s snoozing on Kate’s lap. Scorin’ some cute points.

So, a while back I saw a piece on how badly stories about the Affordable Care Act are being reported in the nation’s hinterlands. I thought of that when I read this story, here in Michigan, this week. It informs us that the family, the Daverts, every one of whom is disabled, “fall within a niche that makes the Affordable Care Act more of a burden than a blessing. Now, they say, they’ll be paying nearly $8,000 more per year for medical care after being denied coverage through Obamacare.”

The father has cerebral palsy; the mother and their children all have osteogensis imperfecta, which leaves them with very fragile bones. The adults get disability, and I can’t believe they earn much. Michigan did Medicaid expansion, but (the mother) “went on to say that her family is not eligible for Medicaid because they come from a working background.” What?

Read the details, and what it appears happened is, they tried to insure their children separately, probably unnecessarily — because I can’t believe they aren’t Medicaid-eligible, and/or the kids aren’t covered under an S-CHIP plan — and fell into a morass that many people are trying to extricate them from. I’m very confused, as the mother says the kids are CHIP insured, but it “only assists in matters directly linked to their bone disease.” This makes no sense.

But hey, let the quotes roll:

Despite their quandary, the Daverts say they are not seeking handouts or anything of the sort from the public. Rather, they’re seeking to let others know what can befall them.

“We’re coming forward to educate the community, that if these kinds of costs can be imposed on our family, it can be imposed on any family,” Missy Davert said. “A word of caution is to take notice and if they do think the system is unfair, to speak out.

“It’s frustrating to me. It seems more and more our government has become a controlling power when the power is supposed to be with the people. I’m not saying this law isn’t good for some people. I’m really happy for those people (being helped), and I’m not trying to take away what they’ve gained, but it’s also hurting many people.”

Toooo perfect, those quotes.

This is the week that will never end. I had a dental cleaning today that felt like a jackhammer, I got 427 emails and 398 of them seemed to be cross-talk. But a few good interviews, and those are always good. A little bloggage:

The 25 most common passwords. One is, yes, “password.”

A little more about the Florida movie-theater shooting.

The cold seems to be in retreat. Fingers crossed.

So I had a follow-up visit to my ophthalmologist today, just to see if the eye was healing the way it should. (It is.) Scanning the thousand-year-old periodicals in the waiting room, I opted to check email instead, via my phone. The first ad Facebook served me was for Starling Eyewear, makers of funky reading and sunglasses.

This could have been a coincidence, but I don’t think so. Because I was thinking about glasses and hey, look! An ad for glasses.

This happens often. A friend of mine stopped in a store on the way home from lunch, and when he returned to his desk, why look, here’s an ad for the store on his social media page.

Another was in Ann Arbor, and thought hey, maybe we should see a movie. Punched “American Hustle” into his phone and was told, It’s playing right down the street, and the show starts in 20 minutes. Want to buy tickets?

This is what I’ve come to call the Benevolent Internet, referenced yesterday in connection with the sale of the Nest thermostat company to Google for more than $3 billion. Do you want a helpful machine in your pocket to read your mind and tell you those pants you were admiring are on sale? Or, looked at from another angle, would you like to tell Google how warm you keep your house, even when you’re not in it?

You might think that’s none of Google’s business, but they just spent $3 billion to make it their business.

When I was looking at the very first Macintosh computer in the mid-’80s, my mother wondered what I might use it for. I told her there’s a program that, once you input all the contents of your cabinets and refrigerator, suggests things you might make for dinner based on what you have on hand. She said, “That’s what I do every day of my life, only I do it in my head.”

I use the internet for work, which means I go to a lot of pages I’m not particularly interested in, but need information from. My Amazon “recommended for you” page is a mess, because I look up books I wouldn’t take free of charge if they were offered as fireplace kindling. I sometimes browse $4,000 dresses on Nordstrom’s site, just to see what a $4,000 dress looks like. I root around Tumblr because teenage girls are fond of it, and I know a few of them. I think it’s my responsibility to know what pro-ana and fitspiration is. I shudder to think what the cloud of my surfing would look like, and who might be interested in it.

Not long after I took my job in Fort Wayne, they instituted a drug-testing program for new hires. The editor proclaimed he wasn’t in favor of this, that it was imposed from above, and it wouldn’t necessarily be a deal breaker for the right candidate. “What you do on your own time is your own business,” he said. What a concept.

Now, what you do on your own time is the wealth creator for all those Silicon Valley fortunes.

I don’t want to sound paranoid, but this is making me edge in that direction. And I’m a person who lives pretty out loud already.

I think I’ll compromise by putting a sticker on my webcam. I never use it anyway.

OK, some bloggage:

I am absolutely no fan of Chris Christie, but enough with the fat-shaming, OK? On the other hand, maybe the problem is just that he lacks confidence. (Link fixed.)

Conan O’Brien, joker.

And me, I’m outta here.

I love eavesdropping. It’s my favorite vice, and I will do it without apology anywhere I can get away with it. The other day, at the bread store, a single clerk was left in charge as yet another impending winter storm sent half the world out for French toast supplies. Fortunately, the two college-age women ahead of me in line were chatterboxes.

“They get mad because I don’t want to get up at 7 a.m. on my vacation and go work out with them.”

“You work out with your parents?”

“They made us all do it, starting when we were kids. They also tell me the calorie content of every single thing I put in my mouth. Sometimes my mom freaks out because she thinks she’s getting fat, so she goes on these juice cleanses. I want to tell her, ‘Mom, if you’d lay off the wine and chocolate, you wouldn’t have to do that.'”

Oh, this is good stuff. Go slower, clerk. I want to hear more of this. And I did. Mom and dad went to Hawaii the year they both turned 50, a trip they called “Hawaii five-oh.” When they retire, they’re moving to Italy. At least that’s what they say now. It might be Hawaii. Anyway, the daughter is in some sort of professional program where client confidentiality is important, but her mother “makes her” talk about her cases, which she then aired at the Christmas dinner table.

(This last made me feel a lot better about eavesdropping.)

Then it was on to her roommate, who is the world’s biggest slob — she spills chili all over the stove, cheese all over the carpet, and never cleans them up. Also, she’s neurotic about men. “She’s always crying, and then they’re lying together on her bed watching TV.”

After a good 10-minute wait in line, it was finally her turn. She got a loaf of pumpkin bread. Lots of calories in that one.

So. It’s auto-show week, which means Alan left the house at 5:15 a.m. and hasn’t been seen for the last 14 hours — at least by me. The end of the week brings car prom, and I expect to be doing another photo …something from the big night. I actually got an email about this today; called it a “fan favorite,” in fact. Fans, you can see better pictures at the dailies’ websites, but I’ll do what I can.

Now, for some bloggage? From the Department of Kids These Days, the sad tale of the Delta Chi fraternity at Central Michigan University. The frat was suspended for four years last fall, after an incident at a party the previous spring. And what happened? This:

She woke up around 4:30 a.m. “with a man on top of her,” according to the email. The student said she could not recall anything that happened after midnight and she only had one drink at the party. The email states that similar events happened to four other women who were at the party.

The assaulted woman’s phone disappeared during the party, but it is unclear whether it vanished before or after she blacked out.

The phone was used to take nude photos of her and of male genitalia. The images were later emailed to the woman’s parents and posted to her Twitter account.

There’s a punchline, though. One of the women — there were several — involved in the complaint heard from one of the guys in the frat:

One of the women received a text message from the Delta Chi man under investigation that read, “thanks for ruining my life,” according to the police report.

Yeah, poor kid. Who raises these boys?

I asked for a Nest thermostat for Christmas, but Alan said it was too expensive for what it does. I said fine, then give me one that actually fucking works. (Our allegedly programmable thermostat? Didn’t.) I got one. It’s not as sexy as the Nest, but it works. The Nest was sold to Google today for $3.2 billion, yes billion. And now I’m sort of glad I didn’t get one:

Nest is billed as a thermostat and smoke detector company, but it’s really in the data-collection business. Once Nest’s sensor-equipped devices are in a user’s home, they can pick up all kinds of information — when people enter and leave, when lights are turned on and off, how patterns of energy use change throughout the day — and use that information in various ways. Google has long been interested in this kind of data collection and use — in 2011, it shut down a pilot project called PowerMeter that tracked energy use in the home and suggested ways to be more ecofriendly. But it never had its own proprietary devices to put in people’s homes. Now it does.

Yich. I’ve had a post percolating in my head on the Benevolent Internet vs. the Evil One. I’m thinking this is part of it. Of course, I also just bought a Google Chromecast today, to get some use out of an under-utilized TV in the bedroom. So I haven’t gone totally NSA-paranoid. Yet.

And so the week gets under way. I hope it’s not snowing where you are.

It took close to two hours to drive to Ann Arbor today, usually a 50-minute jaunt. The roads would be fine, and then they wouldn’t be, and then traffic would back up, and then you’d be cruising along, thinking you could nudge it up a bit, and realize whoa! Black ice!

But then it warmed up, and the trip home was much more reasonable. And the phenomenon I spoke of earlier this week came to pass: It was 15 degrees, and felt really nice out. I left the Parka of Misery unzipped, and took Wendy for a walk afterward. She flatly refused to go out with me early this morning, when it was -1 or so.

By the weekend, it will be well above freezing, and raining — only a 50-degree difference in a week. Michigan weather.

So let’s round up some linkage today, shall we?

What’s the matter with Kansas’ schools? asks an op-ed in the NYT. See if any of this sounds familiar:

Kansas’ current constitutional crisis has its genesis in a series of cuts to school funding that began in 2009. The cuts were accelerated by a $1.1 billion tax break, which benefited mostly upper-income Kansans, proposed by Governor Brownback and enacted in 2012.

Overall, the Legislature slashed public education funding to 16.5 percent below the 2008 level, triggering significant program reductions in schools across the state. Class sizes have increased, teachers and staff members have been laid off, and essential services for at-risk students were eliminated, even as the state implemented higher academic standards for college and career readiness.

Parents filed a lawsuit in the Kansas courts to challenge the cuts. In Gannon v. State of Kansas, a three-judge trial court ruled in January 2013 for the parents, finding that the cuts reduced per-pupil expenditures far below a level “suitable” to educate all children under Kansas’ standards.

…Rather than comply, Governor Brownback appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court. A decision is expected this month.

This is, in rough outline, what happened in Michigan over the last four years — education spending cut (among other trims) to finance a business-tax cut, that is. Per-pupil spending is still far above what it is in Kansas, a jaw-dropping $3,838. A reader comment on the piece explains some nuances:

Governor Brownback is ultra conservative. He wants a strong educational system in Kansas. What he is doing is simply shifting the tax burden from the general fund to local school districts. For years, the wealthy districts have been subsidizing the poorer (more rural with a lower tax valuations) ones. I’ve always been in a poor area, so we have benefitted from our wealthier cousins in Kansas City and Topeka for a long time. That was nice, but now the per student cost is VERY high in some of these areas for the state to fund and the wealthier districts are paying an inordinate amount of money to fund the others. What the new finance formula will do is simply cause a consolidation of more rural school districts, creating a larger tax base to fund the new districts. I think that we will see more distance learning in some of the larger (geographically speaking) districts to reduce transportation costs. Local property taxes will have to be increased to fund those districts. It’s like business. Everything comes at a cost. This is simply a tax shift; not an end to public education in Kansas.

Wasn’t an end to exclusively local funding of education the result of years of reforms in the 1990s? States realized they were sitting ducks for a civil-rights lawsuit, seeing as how their constitutions guaranteed “free and appropriate” education for all citizens (that’s Michigan’s language) and children in wealthier areas were getting far better educations than those in poorer ones. Now feel bad for wealthy districts for “subsidizing” poorer ones, which should just go ahead and consolidate more. Get on the bus, kids! What’s a one-hour commute? You can do your homework.

Let’s lighten the atmosphere a bit, shall we? How about Gwyneth Paltrow’s January cleanse?

“Our winter detox has looser guidelines and restrictions than ones we’ve done in the past but here is what we’re avoiding: dairy, gluten, shellfish, anything processed (including all soy products), nightshades (potatoes, tomatoes, peppers and eggplant), condiments, sugar, alcohol, caffeine and soda.”

Looser guidelines? Just don’t eat anything.

I haven’t read the excerpt from the Roger Ailes book yet, but I suppose I have to. UPDATE: Read it. Highly recommended, especially for you newspaper journos, past and present. It’s about when Ailes bought the small paper serving his exurban community, and proceeded to become the publisher from GUESS WHERE.

And now, on to Thursday.

It’s only a local story now, but I don’t want to let another day pass without noting that yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the Nancy Kerrigan knee-whacking by agents of fellow figure skater Tonya Harding. It happened in Detroit. (Natch!) The national championships were at Cobo Hall that year, prior to the Olympic Games in Lillehammer. Just to recap:

I know it’s uncharitable of me, but in the fullness of time, I’ve come to terms with my dislike of Nancy Kerrigan. Not that I was on Team Tonya or anything, but Kerrigan, with her sense of regal entitlement, just chapped my ass. A beautiful girl, a fine skater, but her snitty display after she missed winning the gold medal to that pixie in pink fluff, Oksana Baiul, sealed the deal. “I was flawless,” she pouted, perhaps the original #firstworldproblems complaint.

(May I just pause for a moment and demand that you click the Oksana Baiul link and watch the ENTIRE slider? You must. We’ll wait.)

Granted, by her biography, Kerrigan seems a straight shooter. She’s been married to her agent for years, has three children, works for charity, pays her taxes. And to be sure, being kneecapped and subsequently under a relentless spotlight could push anyone off the rails, and she stayed on them. Harding, on the other hand, never even came close to fulfilling the promise that made her a serious threat to toothy Nancy. Her gold skates always reminded me of the gold trim packages that were popular on cars around the same time — very big-pimpin’ ghetto fabulous.

But I’ll admit to being blindsided by her popularity with working-class people. My friend Deb once overheard a couple of women from the Harding demographic expressing great admiration for the scrappy triple-axel jumper, adding, “I cannot STAND that Kristi Yamaguchi.” People who’ve been screwed over tend to remember who did the screwing, and many of them looked like the ethereal, unflappable ice queens we watch every four years. When Harding asked for a do-over during her long program I knew she was toast; the Kristis and Nancys of the world don’t break their laces in competition.

Years later, Harding would be arrested — what a surprise — for assaulting her husband with a hubcap. Alan and I were in the car when this news was reported, and the DJ puzzled aloud for some time about the strangeness of the weapon. A hubcap? Really? Finally, Alan snapped at the radio: IT WAS AN ASHTRAY, YOU IDIOT. Indeed.

The years haven’t been kind to Harding, but we all could have predicted that. Kerrigan, on the other hand? Still a great looker.

So. The polar vortex is still howling outside, and Kate has a second day off school, nearly unprecedented here. If you do, too, here’s some bloggage:

First, a story that may be of interest to Jeff the mild-mannered, from Bridge, about a growing pushback to zero-tolerance disciplinary policies in public schools. It includes this nod to mediation, i.e., “restorative justice:”

Under this approach, a trained mediator convenes a group that includes the offending student, the teacher, those harmed in the incident and the parents or siblings of the student. The idea is to encourage students to accept responsibility for their actions and learn from the experience.

“Kids have to come face-to-face with the people they harmed. This is aligned with conventional discipline,” he said.

Sower said it has proven to reduce suspensions and expulsions, but is only being used in a handful of Michigan districts.

It’s a good story, as is the sidebar, about a kid caught in this Kafkaesque whirl.

More sneer worthy is this piece from the Atlantic, where former GOP strategist Frank Luntz calmly measures out the rope and then hangs himself. He’s depressed, see, and has been since the 2012 election:

It was what Luntz heard from the American people that scared him. They were contentious and argumentative. They didn’t listen to each other as they once had. They weren’t interested in hearing other points of view. They were divided one against the other, black vs. white, men vs. women, young vs. old, rich vs. poor.

…Luntz knew that he, a maker of political messages and attacks and advertisements, had helped create this negativity, and it haunted him. But it was Obama he principally blamed. The people in his focus groups, he perceived, had absorbed the president’s message of class divisions, haves and have-nots, of redistribution. It was a message Luntz believed to be profoundly wrong, but one so powerful he had no slogans, no arguments with which to beat it back. In reelecting Obama, the people had spoken. And the people, he believed, were wrong. Having spent his career telling politicians what the people wanted to hear, Luntz now believed the people had been corrupted and were beyond saving. Obama had ruined the electorate, set them at each other’s throats, and there was no way to turn back.

Luntz is dealing with his depression by moving to Las Vegas, where he expects to be “intellectually challenged” again. I just sprained my eyeballs.

With that, I guess we’re back in the groove. Happy Tuesday, all, and let’s get this new year rolling.

I warn you that the following contains elements of many of my least-favorite things, including nostalgia, crotchetiness and mountains-from-molehills. But some things need to be said.

A story on the WashPost website used the word “astonishing” to describe the subzero temperatures that are expected to last two days, tops, in much of the country. That just goes to show you who took the buyouts — anyone with a memory from before 1980, or even later than that. Granted, subzero has become a rare thing, even in southeast Michigan, but the idea that it’s astonishing is silly.

By my recollection, growing up in Columbus, Ohio, every winter contained at least one bitter cold snap. Columbus didn’t get a ton of snow, but I learned the phrase “Alberta clipper” early in life, and a 10-below night or two, or three or four, was simply part of a typical winter. I remember an early meteorological observation, when they would finally pass: Jeez, 25 degrees feels practically balmy. And it did.

Then came the mid-’70s. Two of my three college winters were some of the worst in Ohio history — ’76-’77 and ’77-’78. Everyone remembers the big blizzard of 1978, and it was certainly memorable, but it bigfooted recollections of the prior year, which should not fade so quickly.

Athens is in southeast Ohio, in the Appalachian foothills, and typically features winters that are more about chilly rain than heaps of snow. Spring comes early; forsythia sometimes bloom in late February. But these two years, the conditions, day after day, were more like you’d find in Minnesota. Snow fell in heaps, but mostly, it was cold.

My early warning was sometime in November. I’d slept over at my boyfriend’s, arose woefully underdressed for the overnight snow, and arrived in my first class shivering in a cardigan sweater and clogs, of all things. But the real fun came after Christmas break. My winter-quarter schedule arrived, and I made the mistake of lamenting that the late-morning and early-afternoon classes I’d requested had all been switched to 8 a.m. sections. My father mocked me for thinking this counted as a hardship. He had no idea.

The subfreezing cold settled in by early January and didn’t let up for weeks. And merely subfreezing were the good days. Many days dawned with the temperature well below zero, right around the time I was, yes, walking to those 8 a.m. classes. I recall that was the year I gave up what was then the standard Ohio University student winter protection — hooded sweatshirt, Levi’s jacket, down vest — for a full-on parka. Everybody wore the same footwear, hiking boots from the Rocky boot company in nearby Nelsonville. You could get a pair at the factory for about $20; they came with bright-red laces. Their Vibram-sole prints were what you saw as you trudged around the freezing landscape, head down to keep the latest snowfall out of your eyes.

I have many memories of the trials of those two winters, which have become misty and water-colored, the way memories do. Here’s one: The public-works staff in Athens were stretched thin. This was highly unusual weather, and over time, snow and ice built up thick on the brick streets, like a layer of asphalt. Working late at the student paper one night, we heard heavy equipment and came outside to find backhoes and front-end loaders taking advantage of the car-free streets to break up the ice. It was a pushback of brute strength against a winter that felt like it was doing the same. The grave-size pieces were dropped into waiting dump trucks, which trundled down to the river to deposit it onto the frozen riverbed. I was taking Russian at the time, and wondered if this was how they did it in Moscow.

Here’s another: Walking up Jeff Hill, the steepest on campus, on a brilliant morning when the temperature was somewhere around 20 below. Breathing was painful, but the very air itself seemed to sparkle, a phenomenon pointed out to me by Peter King, now the big-shot sportswriter, who gamboled by huffing out great gusts of air and watching the condensation shatter into crystals.

Somewhere around that time, Frank Reynolds took to ABC’s evening news to report that some scientists feared we were entering a new ice age. Yep. I saw it with my own eyes.

All of this was endured without the many conveniences of more recent years. Cars with front-wheel drive were a novelty, and four-wheel drive was confined to specialty vehicles. Even the rear-window defroster was rare. I pushed so many stuck cars, I can’t tell you. Those were also the years I learned to attach jumper cables and how to rock a car out of a parking place. Miracle fabrics like polypropylene and Thinsulate were unheard-of, and fashion went by the wayside. It was hardly a haute couture era among college students anyway, but the weather did away with any impulse toward individuality. We plodded around campus in our red-laced boots and puffy parkas, as uniform as North Koreans.

And this, I remind you, all happened in southern Ohio. Alan, who went to school in the northwest corner of the state, recalls those winters as the ones in which his father nearly lost his feet to frostbite when his diesel Rabbit gelled up out in the country, and as the time when he had to explain (to an el ed major, ha ha ha) that no, putting a blanket on a car battery wouldn’t keep it warm overnight. A friend remembered a girl in her dorm who raced to the health center with frostbite on her earlobes, and was told that while not wearing a hat or earmuffs had probably contributed to it, her biggest mistake was wearing 14K-gold earrings in 20-below weather — gold is an excellent thermal conductor, after all.

Climate change has accustomed us to superstorms, tornados half a mile wide, a hurricane season from hell, but it has blunted the common experience of winter at this latitude. Two years ago, I saw the first daffodils starting to push through the soil in January, a phenomenon I find far freakier than a couple days of bitter cold. People my age around Detroit talk about skating to Canada when they were children. Henry Ford drove one of his cars around a racecourse on the Detroit River ice. Bootleggers routinely ran trucks back and forth across the frozen waterway. All of these things would be exceedingly rare today.

So when you’re enduring the misery of the next few days, think back to those two tough years, when the Ohio River froze (and Jerry Springer was mayor of Cincinnati!!) and a coal strike made us wonder if we’d ever see a well-lit room again (at least in coal country). Friends, we used to be stronger. We still can be. Bundle up.