So, Ted Nugent will be attending the State of the Union address, as the guest of Rep. Steve Stockman, R-Crazytown. Good. Good, I say. In fact, I say gooooood, and rub my hands together like Montgomery Burns. Maybe Nugent will try to bring a machine gun into the House chamber, or wear camo, or poop his pants. At the very least, I expect him to do some brand-building of the sort he’s so well-known for. I expect nothing less than an outburst, or at the very least, some stupid statements afterward.

People keep trying to warn the crazy wing of the GOP, but they won’t listen. So, fine. Don’t listen, have fun with the Motor City Madman (although I think we should be cleansed of him now, and the nickname should really be switched to something Texan). Enjoy your twilight years.

I’m starting to feel the same way about popular criticism of the Catholic church, although HA HAW HE WEARS A DRESS hardly counts as such. I am no fan of Pope Benedict, the institution of the Catholic church, or all the trappings that go with it. The reasons go without saying, right? (Scrolling through the photo galleries yesterday, I was struck again by how much I despise the way the Vatican requires non-Catholic women like the first lady dress up in silly outfits just to be in the same room with the man.) We can all agree that if you’re not a Catholic, you owe the man no extraordinary respect or reverence, and if you are Catholic, I guess you owe him whatever your conscience or church says you do. But I grow weary of the standard tropes of papal disrespect — that he looks like the evil emperor in “Star Wars” or the sparkling observation that he wears a dress and Prada shoes, or that someone “just has a feeling there’s more to this,” i.e., the resignation, because surely “they” caught him in a “live boy/dead girl type of situation.” Stop. You look ignorant and silly. He’s an old man who’s going to die soon, and he cares enough about his job to leave it when he knows he can no longer do it. There are legitimate criticisms of the about-to-be-vacated papacy. Study up.

Boy, I’m feeling bitchy, aren’t I? Well, I’m hungry.

There’s also this (HT: MMJeff), a retired teacher’s lament of why so many high-school students, even bright, accomplished ones, are arriving at college unprepared to do college-level work, i.e. thinking. Please don’t dismiss it as the complaints of an overpaid, spoiled teacher wanking about No Child Left Behind. Read. I think this man speaks the truth:

In many cases, students would arrive in our high school without having had meaningful social studies instruction, because even in states that tested social studies or science, the tests did not count for “adequate yearly progress” under No Child Left Behind. With test scores serving as the primary if not the sole measure of student performance and, increasingly, teacher evaluation, anything not being tested was given short shrift.

Further, most of the tests being used consist primarily or solely of multiple-choice items, which are cheaper to develop, administer, and score than are tests that include constructed responses such as essays. Even when a state has tests that include writing, the level of writing required for such tests often does not demand that higher-level thinking be demonstrated, nor does it require proper grammar, usage, syntax, and structure. Thus, students arriving in our high school lacked experience and knowledge about how to do the kinds of writing that are expected at higher levels of education.

For a while now, I’ve been puzzling over a paradox in my own home: I have an A student who hates school. Hates it. Not one class has sparked her fire, although individual units in some classes — primarily science — have warmed her a bit. To her, school is a grind of boredom and homework. It’s easy, in these cases, to say a kid isn’t being “challenged,” and recommend a tougher course. Well, she’s in the tough courses, and all they are is boredom with more homework. I’m starting to think it’s not her, but the teaching, the testing, the endless hoop-jumping. By junior year of high school, which she starts next year, I was starting to look forward to it. There were interesting class discussions, projects that sent us down fascinating paths — you know the drill.

But I reflected, reading this, that NCLB has been a reality for my kid’s entire term in public education. And what was the impetus for it? Imposition of a business model on something that isn’t a business. You don’t make a decision in the business world without seeing the numbers, right? So test them! Then test them some more! And if they’re not learning, turn the whole enterprise over to the market, where the Invisible Hand will figure it all out.

Note:

During my years in the classroom I tried to educate other adults about the realities of schools and students and teaching. I tried to help them understand the deleterious impact of policies that were being imposed on our public schools. I blogged, I wrote letters and op-eds for newspapers, and I spent a great deal of time speaking with and lobbying those in a position to influence policy, up to and including sitting members of the US House of Representatives and Senate and relevant members of their staffs. Ultimately, it was to little avail, because the drivers of the policies that are changing our schools—and thus increasingly presenting you with students ever less prepared for postsecondary academic work—are the wealthy corporations that profit from the policies they help define and the think tanks and activist organizations that have learned how to manipulate the levers of power, often to their own financial or ideological advantage.

I’ll leave you with that. Time to brew a pot of coffee, see if I can’t improve my outlook.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m thinking I should be doing our taxes. It’s a perfect do-the-taxes day — not lovely enough that I should be outside, cold enough that inside chores are called for, and taxes are the ultimate inside chore. And yet, I’m not doing the taxes. I did organize the tax-document box, which is considerably easier now that I’m no longer freelancing. So yay me.

Instead, I’m thinking about naked Lena Dunham.

I’ve become a reluctant fan of “Girls,” the HBO series about 20something New Yorkers learning about life and love, at least that tiny slice of life and love as its experienced in hipster Brooklyn. All four of the titular cast members are the privileged daughters of wealthy artists and/or media figures, although I’m not sure you can call the former drummer for Bad Company, father of cast member Jemima Kirke, an artist. But what the hell, let’s go along with it.

Because these girls (the actors) were born into money and fabulousness and now have achieved the next level of money and fabulousness with cable-TV success, and because the show is a pretty accurate reflection of a certain sort of demographic (theirs), only they’re pretending to be poor and salad days-y, it can be a challenge to watch, much as it may have bugged the servants to watch Marie Antoinette pretend to be a peasant at Versailles. Everyone is hyperarticulate and crazy and impulsive and does stupid self-sabotaging shit, and it took me a long time to admit that what’s discomfiting about it is, it’s true.

And Dunham is naked in this thing. A LOT. The sex scenes are excruciating, in the way that watching actual sex is discomfiting and movie sex isn’t. The clothes come off with considerable trouble,
one party frequently looks to be having a terrible time, and Dunham cares not a whit that she’s overweight, pear-shaped, small-breasted and pretty much the polar opposite of what we consider suitable for public nudity. This is a little weird at first, but you get used to it, much as you got used to the idea that three of the “Sex and the City” quartet routinely had sex with their bras on.

She’s naked so often, in fact, that it borders on gratuitous, and that’s a word I don’t use lightly. Last week, the show petered out on Dunham’s character lounging in her tub, singing “Wonderwall” to herself, when Kirke’s character shows up. These girls love to bathe together, and it’s pretty clear Kirke is going to climb in, but not before Dunham rises to her knees, so we can get a shot of her breasts again. Alan, who likes boobs as much as the next guy, actually said, “Noooooo!”

Dunham’s wardrobe is also terrible. I’d love to see T-Lo take it on — beyond the red-carpet stuff they’ve already done, that is.

More on naked Lena.

Hope y’all had a good weekend, and if you were snowed upon, that it was pretty and not too awful. Some bloggage:

Tonight is the Grammy awards. I’ve always hated the Grammies, for reasons explained here. A sample:

1989’s Record and Song of the Year went to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” a T-shirt slogan of a song that has aged as well as a beer koozie that says, “Is that your final answer?” It beat Anita Baker’s “Giving You The Best That I Got,” Steve Winwood’s “Roll With It, ” Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror.”

The Michigan GOP gets on Wayne LaPierre’s train. I’m totally sure an armed, 110-pound female teacher will somehow never be surprised and disarmed by, say, a 220-pound high school linebacker who needs a weapon, quick.

Another homeowners’ association horror story, featuring two equally loathsome parties bent on mutual assured destruction. Enjoy, Jeff!

And let’s all have a good week.

I have to be honest: I’ve been through so many snow-teases that I tend to ignore them. Now I’m looking at a radar image that shows snow falling all over the Mitten, but not here. Maybe it’s coming this way, maybe it isn’t. I’m going to bed and saying the hell with it.

Friday morning

And as suspected, we had about two inches overnight. Two. And there’s a snow day, in a district that was notorious for years for one thing — no snow days, ever. So here we are, the snow needs a-blowin’, and what do I have? A lot of good links.

Dave Kindred on the last days of Muhammed Ali, not in the sense that he’s on his way out (although he could be), but on the last days of all great boxers. I will say this: There’s something about boxing that inspires great sportswriting. It’s a dying sport, although it may well prevail, simply by flying below a certain radar. I hear a lot these days about football, that it’ll be gone in a generation because of the head-injury issue. You don’t hear that about boxing, perhaps because there are fewer people involved, and fighters are frequently bottom-of-the-barrel types who don’t practice their sports under the auspices of a college or university. Frank DeFord, the Sports Illustrated sage, famously washed his hands of boxing a while back, although I’m sure he’d be proud to have an essay this good published under his byline. Your good read for the day.

Everybody posted that Funny or Die parody of the “God made a farmer” ad, but just in case you missed it, you can find it here.

Gene Weingarten on how the internet is changing writing. My favorite:

3. The Rise of the Sillyble, or extraneous syllable. In pre-Internet days we saw this with the pointless tacking on of “ir” to “regardless,” creating a brand-new word meaning, uh, “regardless.” The Web has accelerated this process. “Preventative” has just about overtaken “preventive,” to mean “preventive.” “Orientate” is moving up on “orient” to mean “orient.” There is work yet to be done, though: The Web reveals that “ironical” has just begun its assault on the summit of Mount Ironic. We wish it Godspeed.

Thanks, Charlotte, for finding this, because I might have missed it: The guy who lives in the old Packard plant.

I wanted to send someone a clip from “Babe: Pig in the City,” a favorite from Kate’s young years. I couldn’t find it — it’s the one where the pink poodle says her humans had cast her aside for someone younger and prettier — but I did find this AVClub essay about the film. I remember at the time of its release, how badly it flopped, and how one critic observed, wryly, “You don’t hear the word ‘dark’ used often in discussing children’s films.” And yet, it is so wonderful, in so many ways. I just loved it.

Finally, while I don’t approve of the legal strategy of suing a hosting company over objectionable internet content, I’m glad someone is taking some kind of action against the purveyors of so-called revenge porn. It beats a bullet, anyway.

Off to fire up that blower. Have a good weekend, all.

Sorry no blogging last night. Other stuff, etc. So it’s linkalicious Thursday today.

It’s been a tough week in many ways, and I don’t think anyone is having a particularly good one. So I was in the right mood to read this short essay, on a particular passage from William Blake. Blake is one of my favorite poets, and the author of this piece was interviewed on the radio this morning, so I’ll take it as a sign. Won’t take long.

David Brooks on data. It’s not as awful as you might expect, but I confess, when I read this passage…

Over the next year, I’m hoping to get a better grip on some of the questions raised by the data revolution: In what situations should we rely on intuitive pattern recognition and in which situations should we ignore intuition and follow the data? What kinds of events are predictable using statistical analysis and what sorts of events are not?

…my immediate answer to the question is, “when David Brooks has a book of sweeping generalizations about people he knows little about, to flatter the self-perceptions of his smug readership, that’s when!”

From the Now I’ve Seen Everything file: Drive-through Ash Wednesday. Just give me the bullet points and the smudge — I’m in a hurry!

Good day to all. Snow expected here, but not as much as some places. The air smelled a little springlike today, but I’m sure it’s just the moisture bearing down on us. We shall see.

For my money, the story of the day is the discovery of Richard III’s corpse under a parking lot in Leicester, England. That the rudely stamped king, whose (literary) last words are among the most famous in Shakespeare’s canon — “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!” — should end up with thousands of their modern equivalents parked on his bones for years upon years? That’s what you call irony.

I’m the least-sensitive person in the world when it comes to human remains. Treat them with respect, surely. Treat them according to the wishes of the deceased and survivors, yes. But if someone wants to be carved up for dog food? No problemo, dude — once the lights go out, we’re mainly a waste-disposal problem. But I hope Richard III gets a comfortable place with a proper marker. He got one of the great plays, and I’ve always counted him among the top two or three villains on my bookshelves.

I’m watching Alex Gibney’s latest film, which debuted on HBO Monday night — “Mea Maxima Culpa: Silence in the House of God.” It’s about priestly sex abuse, of course, a story that no matter how many times it’s told, only becomes more awful to hear. The crux of this narrative is about a long-time abuser at a residential school for the deaf in Wisconsin, and the details are both uniquely horrible and entirely, depressingly familiar — the church’s dithering and inaction that allowed offenders to operate for years. One of the many villains is the Pope himself, whose office handled all these cases and, again, did little to punish, deliver to secular justice, or even take seriously many of them.

A worldwide, decades-long criminal conspiracy. That will never be punished.

While we’re tearing down the once-elevated, let’s finish with this snarky riposte to that Paul Harvey “so God made a farmer” commercial at the Super Bowl:

God said, “I need somebody willing to get up before dawn and call his state senator to complain about expensive new slurry pit legislation, spend all day with his ag lobby board strategizing about more laws against private raw milk sales, take that state senator out for steak and wine at dinner, and then go to town and stay past midnight at a meeting of the school board at the school he wants to eliminate with a voucher program.” So God made a farmer.

Oh, and you Beyoncé haters out there? Silence! She was fierce. One of my Facebook network was whining about how the rich cultural tradition of New Orleans was ignored, blah blah blah. I say, you want a show? Hire a show woman. And we got ourselves a show, even though the singing was a little breathy. Eh, happens.

Tuesday. This week is feeling long already.

How fitting that the same weekend the White House releases a photo of the president shooting skeet, the Washington Post publishes this fine Joel Achenbach profile of a gun nut, and yes, I respect our gun rights and so on, but this particular shoe fits:

(Rob) Farago didn’t used to be a gun guy. He was a car guy. He had a popular blog called the Truth About Cars. He sold it in 2009 and searched for a new consumer topic, landing on guns.

He bought his first gun a week before the debut of TheTruthAboutGuns.com. He took a firearms class. He filled out the paperwork and went through the background check to get a permit to carry a gun. He now owns 18 guns.

“Once you put a gun on, you gain situational awareness,” he says. After he bought his first gun, he says, “I felt grown up. It was like a coming-of-age thing. I felt like an adult.”

This guy, mind you, is 53 years old. But he didn’t “come of age” until he bought his first of 18 guns, maybe, what? Three years ago?

There’s lots more in the piece. It’s good to know guys like this think of people like me, who would not shoot an armed robber in a convenience store, who would not even shoot a person I caught stealing my damn TV set, as “sheep.” (They, of course, are “sheepdogs.”) And do check out this passage, when Farago goes out to eat with his buddy, another gun guy:

A couple of hours later, the two men dig into dinner at a swank Italian restaurant, both of them choosing chairs that let them face the entrance.

“Look at the way Robert and I are facing,” Kenik says. “Crime happens everywhere. There’s no place to feel safe.”

“That’s your opinion,” Farago says, distancing himself a bit.

“It’s in the back of my mind,” Kenik says.

No, I think it’s in the front of his mind. Show me a guy who feels he has to walk locked and loaded into an Italian restaurant in Providence, R.I., sit facing the door and give himself little tinglies thinking about his “situational awareness,” and I’ll show you a guy who’s going to shoot someone sooner or later, and probably sooner.

It’s more fun to laugh at how one little picture of the prez engaging in a gentlemen’s sporting activity sent the wingers into enough of a tizzy as to give Roy’s weekly roundup of the right blogosphere enough material to let him coast for a month.

Well, it was a bad weekend for shooters all around. Am I the only person who read that story and came up short with the news that the shooter, a Marine suffering from PTSD, was taken to the gun range by the deceased, who specialized in helping soldiers with PTSD. Why? Because firing guns is a good treatment for PTSD? I’d think yoga and long hikes in the great outdoors would be more effective, but what do I know?

Speaking of which, a change of subject is in order. Here are some tracks I found in my driveway after a very light snow last week:

Through some Googling, I learned this was a bounding animal, but the prints are way larger than you generally find on the suburban prairie. They were about two inches in length, which is how they caught my eye in the first place. The tracking guides suggest “members of the weasel family” as typical bounders, but again — unlikely this far from water. Thoughts?

Last bits of bloggage? Here’s John Carlisle on a typical crowd at a Detroit City Council meeting, bringing the crazy with both hands.

A cold, snowy week awaits. Let’s see how we can get through it.

Potpourri today, folks. I took a hot yoga class during today’s blogging time, and my chakras are too aligned to work up much of a head of steam over anything. Besides, we have some good stuff here, starting with…

Jim Nabors, out of the closet at 82. Well, good for him. It’s not like the whole world hasn’t known this for a while. It reminded me of when I first heard the rumor that Gomer Pyle was a ‘mo, as the nomenclature went among grade-schoolers, which I believe I was. The rumor mill said that Gomer had married Rock Hudson in a weekend ceremony.

How would that rumor have traveled in 1968 or so? It was before the internet. A long-distance call required a parental ruling, and certainly wasn’t so you could discuss Hollywood gossip with a distant cousin. There were showbiz scandal sheets, to be sure, but even then they stuck to language like “confirmed bachelor,” which would have flown over the heads of kids. No, it just arrived one day, entire, at the city pool: Gomer Pyle had married Rock Hudson.

Nearly half a century later, he married someone named Stan Cadwallader, in Seattle. Well, congratulations, gentlemen. Better to live in truth, however late in the game it comes.

And speaking of living in truth, may I just say I am growing quite weary of Downton Abbey? I can tolerate a whole damn lot from a TV show, but these soap-opera personality transplants are getting on my last nerve. In the first season, one reasonable criticism of the show was that Lord Grantham was too nice; a man of his station wouldn’t have had personal conversations with his footmen, any more than he would chat with his bedroom furniture. But it was tolerable, because otherwise? Not much of a show. So you can take that liberty, but you can’t decide, in season three, that the lord of the manner has to be a prick, so that we can set into motion plots 7 through 12. Stories flow from character. When the characters aren’t real? Lousy stories.

Also, either shank Mr. Bates in prison or spring him. This Nancy Drew stuff is the worst.

Two stories with a religious angle, one better than the other. The inferior one: Brooklyn and Saudi Arabia have something in common. Modesty police, only these are Jewish.

In the close-knit world of ultra-Orthodox Judaism, community members know the modesty rules as well as Wall Street bankers who show up for work in a Brooks Brothers suit. Women wear long skirts and long-sleeved, high-necked blouses on the street; men do not wear Bermuda shorts in summer. Schools prescribe the color and thickness of girls’ stockings.

The rules are spoken and unspoken, enforced by social pressure but also, in ways that some find increasingly disturbing, by the modesty committees. Their power is evident in the fact that of the half dozen women’s clothing stores along Lee Avenue, only one features mannequins, and those are relatively shapeless, fully clothed torsos.

I really don’t like this sort of thing. Really. The other story is far more interesting, and you may have seen it making the rounds: How in 1978, a Soviet scientific party stumbled upon a family living in squalid conditions, deep in Siberia, in full retreat from the world. Why? To protect their faith from Commies and Peter the Great, among other things. A great, fascinating read.

Enough potpourri for one day? It better be, because I’m about out of gas for the night.

As I go through my day and have ideas or find links I might want to write about, I throw them in a draft post here. I’ve only accidentally published it once. Most days, there are at least a few ticklers by the time I sit down to write. Today, it’s this:

Brooks column

And that’s it. I assume it’s David Brooks, but I have no idea which one, or what would have moved me about it — scanning his recent archive, all I thought was, nope, not that one. Perhaps this suggests my opinions about this and that are fleeting things. They are. One of my most shameful moments as a monger of opinions was the day a reader approached me at an event to tell me he’d really liked that thing I wrote about something, two years ago.

“I wrote about that?” I said. “I can’t remember.”

He was crushed. “You seemed very emotional about it, too,” he said. Honestly, I couldn’t remember one detail from it. And you know what else? I didn’t care enough to go spelunking into the archive to discover what I was so het up about, either. It’s times like that when you remember what happens to old newspapers, shrug and maybe add, “I am large, I contain multitudes.”

An so, with that in mind, I read this column in the Detroit News, editorial-page editor Nolan Finley misting up over the coming loss of his office space:

For me, The News building is furnished with memories. I’ve spent my entire adult life here. I know it the way a farmer knows his fields. I’ve been in its newsroom for every historical moment of the past four decades, and most of the mundane ones as well. It’s where I’ve met the people who shaped my career and where I bid many of them farewell. I’ve seen it gutted and restored. I’ve known it when it was too small to hold all of the people we needed to put out a newspaper and when it became so big for the staff on hand you could hear echoes.

It is what we used to call in the south The Home Place.

Excuse me, I feel the need for a little musical accompaniment here. Beyond that, not much more.

But that’s just me. I may feel differently tomorrow.

A far tougher read was in the NYT — Sunday’s magazine cover story, on a developing strategy in prosecuting child pornography offenders — making those found in possession of illegal images pay financial restitution to victims who can be identified — whether they had anything to do with taking them. The story focuses on two women who were abused by relatives, men who photographed the acts, which became among the most-downloaded illegal images in the child-porn portfolio. Both women have received substantial sums over the years, and a recent higher-court decision affirms the strategy is legal and so it will likely continue. But just to read about what these women went through in the first place, and how long it’s taken them to even partially recover (they are, as Marcellus Wallace said after a similar assault, pretty effin’ far from OK), all one can think of is: It’s not enough, it’ll never be enough. I also noted that one of the pedophiles charged with paying was a former vice president with a major pharmaceutical company. Having spent five years or so clipping stories about the lavish compensation packages in that industry, all I could think was: She should have asked for more.

And because we seem to be crepe-hanging today, let’s take a moment to consider the staggering death toll in a Brazil nightclub fire over the weekend. We have nothing to brag about on this score, except maybe comparatively; American public facilities have had and likely will continue to have tragedies like this. But it reminded me of something I noticed in Argentina few years back — how so many of the safety measures we take for granted here are virtually non-existent elsewhere in the world. Sidewalk repairs would appear out of nowhere without so much as an orange cone of warning, that sort of thing. Maybe this is just yet another reminder of the terrifying speed at which fire can move, and why it’s always wise to note the exits before you step into a crowded room.

But that’s a journalist talking, a long way from the old home place. Have a good Monday.

So, I forgot to mention that on my way to Lansing Tuesday I was, as usual, listening to NPR, and I heard this story by Wade Goodwyn, reporting form Texas on the reaction to the inauguration.

It being Texas, of course it wasn’t a happy-type story. This part didn’t surprise me:

GOODWYN: Burke said he wasn’t sure exactly what to expect, but he was not expecting a vigorous defense of liberal ideals.

BURKE: I thought he would go ahead and have a little more of, let’s go ahead and work together as a team, and get America back on the right track. However, he doesn’t appear to have that kind of agenda. It appears to be, let’s go ahead and see if we can go ahead and whip everything our way, and make it a socialist state.

Yes, because sober bipartisanship worked very well the last time.

But this part chapped my ass:

GOODWYN: Down the street, Republican precinct chair Ann Teague is still not sure Obama is constitutionally qualified to take the oath of office.

ANN TEAGUE: We never saw a birth certificate. We never met any of the professors who went to school with our president.

And because I didn’t hear Goodwyn say, “Lady, you’re crazy, and I’m sorry to have bothered you, but I’m getting out of this nuthatch,” followed by a click and a few seconds of dead air, I have to ask:

How much longer are these people going to get a respectful ear?

I remind you, Ann Teague isn’t some lunatic raving on the street, but a precinct chairman. Which isn’t exactly the equivalent of chief justice, but for cryin’ out loud. If the Republicans want to know why so many people think they’re doomed to a future on the margins, if they wonder why they’re so often called racists, well, say hello to Ann Teague.

Or say hi to Bill Clayton, alderman of Rapid City, South Dakota, who, when a reporter asked him how he planned to vote on an upcoming property-tax increase question, replied by asking her how she planned to vote in the presidential election.

And then he said, “Should we deport you back to Kenya with Obama?”

He finally apologized, and by “finally,” I mean, this incident happened last August. He says he’s not a birther anymore, and that he didn’t realize he was speaking to an African American. Hallelujah, he saw the light.

When the GOP comes down on him with hobnail boots, him and the scores of others out there who are embarrassing the sane factions of the party, then maybe we can talk. I’ll not hold my breath.

So, I know we have a few librarians in the crowd. Did y’all see this sweet little story in the NYT, about the American Girl doll available for lending at a branch of the New York Public Library? Gotta love this lead:

After one visit, she returned with her hair in dreadlocks. Another time, her long blond locks were primly fashioned into a traditional bun. One day, she came back wearing a uniform of the exclusive all-girls Brearley School on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

These have been the many phases of Kirsten Larson, an American Girl doll who sat on a shelf in the Ottendorfer branch of the New York Public Library, in the East Village, until a resourceful children’s librarian began lending her to girls, many of whose parents, because of financial or feminist reasons, resist buying the dolls.

I’d love to have seen photos of the dreads, but oh well. I found the librarian whose idea this was on Facebook and messaged her, offering her at least two American Girls from our basement-bin collection, but haven’t heard back. I’m sure she’s been inundated with donations by now, but honestly, I can’t see the Grosse Pointe Public Library doing such a cool thing, if for no other reason that far fewer families have “financial or feminist” objections to the pricey playthings. But I would love for our AGs to see a second life as New York City girls. If any of you librarians are willing to take Marisol Luna (who, as a Latina, garners diversity points) and the other one, the blonde, let me know.

Some good bloggage today:

How the pro-life movement bears at least some blame for rising rates of single parenthood, aka the Bristol Palin effect.

My husband’s office is moving. Eventually.

I literally marked my calendar: “Mad Men” is back April 7.

A good Thursday to all.

Well, that was a nice inauguration, don’t you think? The first family looked smashing, the speech was bold, nobody fell down the steps, Antonin Scalia wore a funny hat and am I forgetting any high points?

I watched it on my iPad, propped up against the lamp while I worked on the other screen. It took a while to find the right channel, so to speak, one that wouldn’t require me to download a new app or listen to a bunch of people blabbering about how many words have been in an assorted selection of inaugural addresses. Finally, thank you New York Times — their live feed was just a running camera, no commentary. It was great; why don’t more channels try this revolutionary strategy? Because then Wolf Blitzer might not be worth a jillion dollars a year, I guess.

Since this is a day with a ton of coverage, let’s go with an all-inauguration bloggage menu, and whatever I missed, you can throw into the comments.

Goofy internet memes, GIFs, etc., compiled by New York magazine. Most fairly dumb.

Not dumb, but fun: The Washington Post puts two funny Style reporters to work on the inevitable inaugural-ball roundup. The Running of the Balls was a game between the two of them, to hit as many balls as possible in a single night, with rules about when they could leave and how they could score. That’s one thing the WashPost has always had going for it — they think of new and different ways to cover the same old stories, and have a blast doing it.

Charles Pierce, down in the cheap seats.

T-Lo on Shelley O’s day outfit, and by the time you read this I’m sure they’ll have something to say about the red Jason Wu gown of Monday’s night commander-in-chief ball. So check back. Here’s a separate post on the coat. What coat? THE COAT.

(I’m watching the Obamas dance as I write this, and while I don’t want to pile on the losers, I’m looking at Jennifer Hudson sing “Let’s Stay Together” and trying to imagine what the Romneys would have danced to.)

The speech sort of stunned me — I wasn’t expecting it to be that powerful. James Fallows on some of the literary allusions. The line about Stonewall! Half the country has no idea what he was talking about, I’d bet. It’s time they learn.

What did I forget? What did you like?