It’s been a top-rack sort of fortnight around here, which has nothing to do with booze. (Well, a little.) Rather, it’s what happens when everyone is on the go, few meals are being served, and the dishwasher’s top rack — where the glasses and coffee cups go — fills up quickly, and the bottom rack — where the plates and silverware goes — sits empty.

Also, the kitchen table is strewn with newspapers and favors from the auto-company holiday parties Alan’s been attending all week. Right now: The New York Times, the Detroit News, some sugared almonds and a CD of the guy who won one of “The Voice” competitions, who was also the entertainment at the party. Can’t remember his name. You’re not going to make me get up and check, are you?

[Pause.]

Chris Mann. I have no idea who he is.

And that’s one of the ways I keep track of things around here. There are days when I feel as though I could give you a snapshot description of every countertop, tabletop, closet and drawer in the house. I know the sound every appliance makes. I know how much laundry needs to be done and how soon we’ll need milk and orange juice. I’m not terribly organized, and I’m not the most efficient housekeeper out there, but I know my own house, the wages of years of working at home, spending long moments staring at a computer screen, trying to concentrate enough to come up with a new way to say the same old stuff.

And today I’m off. Burning up some v-days before the end of the year. I thought of making a quick run south to the Columbus Dispatch holiday party, but then Kate had her road test scheduled today, so that’s what I’ll do instead. Blogging in the morning for a change, seeing if it makes me any chattier, being all fresh and newly caffeinated ‘n’ stuff.

There’s about 10,000 words I could write about trying to teach a teenager a) stick-shift driving; and b) how to drive in combat conditions, which is what Detroit urban transportation is, but I’ll spare you. Tuesday, on my way home from Lansing, I was on the second-to-last freeway of the four numbered routes I take. I-696, the worst of the lot, four lanes of bumper-to-bumper, high-speed lunacy, the closest a civilian will get to driving the Brickyard 400. A Malibu drifted into my lane ahead of me, pretty far — both tires crossed the line. Then it overcorrected back and weaved into the lane on the other side. Classic drunk move. It was around 6:30 p.m., a little early for that, but what the hell, it’s holiday-party season. I saw my chance to pick up speed and pass before the driver came back into my side. Glanced over: A girl about Kate’s age, holding her phone directly in front of her face, with a passenger of the same age, doing the same thing. It’s days like this I want to grab my child, open the panel in her back, and dial back her age settings to 9 or 10 — before the teenage sullenness, before driver’s licenses.

Instead, I will bring you some bloggage:

What a week in the legislature. Assuming the gubernatorial John Hancock or non-veto, soon you’ll be able to take your gun to church. Quoth a supporter:

State Rep. Joel Johnson, R-Clare, called the bill a “pro-public safety bill” because it allowed gun owners to be an asset to public safety in volatile situations.

Yeah, baby! MMJeff, you’d best make that sermon sing, or we’ll be pulling out the shootin’ irons!

Also, the abortion restrictions passed, but not without compromise: You no longer have to give your aborted fetus a proper burial. And — compromise lives! — the bill that would allow your Catholic pharmacist to remain in prayer while you take your birth-control prescription elsewhere died on the vine.

They’re going for the citizenship thing on the voting form again, however.

A moment of silence, then a beep: The inventor of the bar code is dead.

And with that, I have filed 671 words that took me 30 minutes to write. I should do this morning thing more often. Happy Friday, happy weekend.

For those of you who’ve expressed concern about the comments, rest assured I hear you. There’s an expression about bad apples and barrels, but I don’t think it’s entirely true. I’ve seen with my own eyes how often one contrary voice, one bad attitude, one Mr. Grumpypants, can clear a room, an office, a blog comment section, the way a bad egg fart clears an elevator. So I feel your pain.

That said, I’m not banning anyone from the comments. At least not yet. I know that balancing voices in a comment section can sometimes be a tricky matter, because most of them aren’t balanced at all. Birds of a feather, etc., to add a second cliché to this entry.

To be honest, while I love having my opinions affirmed and echoed and repeated back to me in different words as much as the next person, I can’t take too much of it. I lived for 20 years in a state where I frequently felt like a stranger, where you couldn’t put a bumper sticker making fun of Dan Quayle on your car without risking it being keyed. I liked and respected my neighbors (most of them, anyway) who disagreed with me on issues ranging from presidential politics to the cultural impact of “Dark Side of the Moon.” After a few years, I came up with a sentence that I would sometimes repeat as a mantra: Everybody arrives at this moment in time via a different path, and they may have drawn different conclusions along the way.

Also, I was a newspaper columnist, a job where your very own employer regularly runs letters from readers opining that you suck. So I’m sort of used to that.

Ultimately, I think most of our right-leaning commenters here offer a lot, because ultimately, they help make for a spicy mix. As I’ve said before, I think of our comment sections as sort of an idealized tavern, or maybe a cocktail party, with tables here and there, different conversations going on at each, people flitting between them, agreeing, taking offense, whatever. (Prospero, however, will always be the guy at the end of the bar, bellowing opinions and sometimes falling off his stool.) If someone here bugs you, I’d ask you to just slip past his or her name and really — don’t let it get to you. Because, ultimately, it all boils down to this.

Let’s keep having fun.

Speaking of our most prized commenters, I’m indebted, once again, to Jeff, for digging up this old story by Gene Weingarten, which I read and then forgot. Shouldn’t have forgotten this profile of a man who doesn’t vote, because he doesn’t give a rat’s ass:

We took a list of 90-odd names, eliminated those people who were not from battleground states (we wanted people with resonant nonvotes) and then started telephoning. To eliminate any bias in our choice, we decided to profile the very first person who agreed. The first name on the list, as it happens, was Ted Prus. Here is how the call went:

“Hi. This is The Washington Post. Are you registered to vote?”

“No.”

“Are you planning on voting?”

“No.”

“We’d like to write a long story about you. Would you be interested? It would make you famous.”

“You mean a famous idiot?”

“Actually, we’re not sure. There’s no guarantee one way or the other.”

“Sounds good.”

I guess I have to see “Zero Dark Thirty.”

What it’s like to be in a mass shooting. HT: Laura Lippman.

And tomorrow we start anew. On the downside of the week.

Everybody wanted to have their picture taken with the rats. I mean, who wouldn’t?

It was a cold morning, and I walked around a bit before noon. The debate was going on inside, the Capitol doors were locked, but the mood was pretty upbeat outdoors. Everyone had to know this was a done deal, but they were going to make a fuss just the same. Some people drove a long way:

I love those jackets. Maybe I should join the Steelworkers apprentice program. And now I wouldn’t have to pay dues.

Even the horses wore riot gear:

But there was no riot. The Americans for Prosperity got their tent pulled down, which I suspect is exactly what they wanted. And this happened:

I’d like to know what went on between the edits. Seriously, when I was there, it was a high-spirited, but not mean-spirited, crowd.

One of the big rats was moved to the top of the east-side steps.

But in the end, this was a total rout for the GOP. This Jonathan Chait piece gets to the heart of it, as does this Yglesias piece. And a few zillion more that you can easily find with a little Googling. In the meantime, I recommend this Gene Weingarten Sunday story on the ongoing — yes, still — case of Dr. Jeffrey MacDonald, he of “Fatal Vision,” “The Journalist and the Murderer” and many other articles and tomes. It’s a good read, pegged to the entrance of none other than Errol Morris on the scene, but the chat he did about it yesterday is better:

I remember the killings. I was an 18-year-old hippie at the time, roughly the same age as Helena Stoeckley. I didn’t do as many drugs as she did, but I did plenty, including mescaline, LSD, and heroin. When I read in the newspaper that Jeffrey MacDonald – still presumed an innocent victim – told police that his attackers had been vicious hippie intruders who chanted “acid is groovy – kill the pigs,” I knew he had done it. As did every hippie in every city who read that statement with any degree of analytical thought. No self-respecting killer hippie would ever have uttered, let alone chanted, that uncool, anachronistic thing as late as 1970. That was exactly what some ramrod-straight 26-year-old Ivy League frat-boy doctor who was contemptuous of the counterculture would have thought a hippie would say.

I was only 12, not a hippie (although an aspiring one), still innocent of the drug culture, but I recall having almost the exact same thought. An early sign of my ear for dialogue, I hope.

Yeesh, this was a long, tiring day, and all I want to do now is rinse it off, maybe with a glass of wine. I leave you with this:

One step forward into the new day, eh?

Edit: I hear the complaints about the comments of late. Considering responses. Please stand by.

I usually go to Lansing on Mondays, but I decided to go today this week. Apparently it’s going to be Michigan rock city; I may not even be able to reach my office — my parking space, anyway. If I can slip away, and get close enough, I might get some pictures. But I’m not optimistic. The state police seem to be loaded for bear. We’ll find out what democracy looks like.

There is so much to say about this, but for obvious reasons, I can’t say too much. My boss has compiled a few links, but there are many, many more you can find with a few keystrokes. One thing seems obvious: This is a political move, and a bold one. This Free Press editorial — 900 words and change — has a strange tone, like a wounded lover. You promised, and you lied to us! Very odd. But it gives you a sense of the emotional stew here, too.

For now, we must gird our loins for the morning. I made pie. And some soup. I’m calling it Beta Carotene Stew, made from oven-roasting a butternut squash, a fat sweet potato, a couple of carrots and, just for the hell of it and because I had them, a couple of apples. Cook down some onions in butter, add a bunch of curry powder, add the roasted stuff, get to work with the stick blender. Thin it out with vegetable broth and enjoy. It’s like eating a bowl full of vitamins. By tomorrow, I’ll be able to throw away my glasses.

So, some bloggage?

Some of you who visit don’t read the comments, so you may have missed Charlotte’s post about her grandmother, who died recently. Here’s your second chance.

I was also sorry to hear about the death of Bob Pence, a Fort Wayner who joined us here from time to time. I corresponded with him for a while, and I wrote a column about how the river was undermining Thieme Drive, where he lived. He had a sly sense of humor; by the time I met him, he’d been through a lot, including a cancer that nearly killed him. His website endures, however, and you can enjoy some of his photography, mainly of small towns in the Midwest and, um, tractors. He was a farm boy, and loved the equipment. He would have been fun to go through the Henry Ford with.

Time to gird my loins for Lansing. Fingers crossed it’s not too crazy, and if it is, that I get a coupe of decent pictures. Happy Tuesday, all.

I’m not sure what percentage of annual jewelry sales happen in December, but I’d be willing to bet it’s a lot. Between engagement rings and year-end bonus spending, the final quarter has to be critically important for any jeweler’s balance sheet. Hence the ads:

(B.C. Clark doesn’t have anything to do with what I’m going to talk about today. I just threw it in for Hank, who loves it so.)

No, I’m thinking about the female image in jewelry advertising, and the problem it poses for creative directors. Because here’s the thing: Generally speaking, you can’t afford fine jewelry until you’re a little older, but putting Mikimoto pearls on wrinkly necks isn’t going to sell too many of them. But if the model is too young, it just looks weird. Princesses can wear zillion-dollar necklaces when they’re 19. Everyone else should be at least 30. Which brings me to this girl:

She’s been in the holiday ads for a local jeweler — and nowhere else I’ve seen — for a few years now. When she started, she looked like the prettiest member of the Michigan State junior-varsity volleyball team, bedazzled for some rich creep, like the girls in some “Taken” fantasy. She still does, to my eyes. Do you think a girl like her would wear a snake around her neck? Someone that wholesome should be in pearls, or maybe a diamond pendant.

Sometimes you can get away with a young model — it all depends on the context.

I swear, I could search “jewelry ads” in Google images all day. Some strange ideas out there.

Of course, women aren’t jewels, they’re people. Here’s my jewel, Sunday night:

I remember her first bass lesson, the teacher said, “You’ll look at a lot of butts.” He wasn’t much of a teacher, but he was right about that.

That’s at Cliff Bell’s, a local jazz club. The DSO program she’s in has a jam session every month there. Show up, bring your fake book, and dive in. it’s intimidating, but it works.

And now the week begins. On Tuesday, the state legislature will pass right-to-work legislation, capping one of the most extraordinary lame-duck sessions anyone can remember. Push aside the vitriol, and this column captures the sentiment of the moment. It’s going to be a bear; I hope I can see enough of it to get a few pictures.

In the meantime, a little bloggage:

A look at a bottom-ender, trying to make her way out. Another great Anne Hull piece from the washPost.

Have a great week, all.

A foggy day today, thanks to the unseasonable — newly seasonable, maybe — warmth. It grew thicker as I drove west, not the way it usually goes for us low-lying, water-adjacent east siders. My destination? Dearborn, city of magic, city of bilingual signage. I had an excellent interview for a story I hope I can share with you soon, and decided to take the long way home, down Michigan Avenue, another one of those Detroit thoroughfares that drops your jaw and goggles your eyes. Strip clubs, rim stores, burned-out storefronts that will be cleared in another couple decades or when Jesus returns, whichever comes first, unless it maybe goes a little longer. The fog made everything sort of extra-depressing, although the temperature made it impossible to be depressed. Fifty-seven on a December Monday? You usually say, “I’ll take it,” but truth be told, we don’t have much choice these days.

Which is sort of depressing.

I’m predicting a 2013 that is, meteorologically anyway, a repeat of 2012 — a warm winter, a blast-furnace summer, and another drought. (No, I am not a scientist. I am a crone, and I feel it in my witchy bones.) Alan had a sit-down with the manager of the city’s marina today, because he fears, rightly so, that the channel to it, and the slips within it, won’t be navigable by midsummer. We’ll see what comes of it. Meanwhile, low lake levels plague even those with shallow-draft boats. He was discussing it with another guest at a party we were at this weekend when a third piped up and said, hey, what about all this stuff he’d been reading about melting Arctic ice and rising sea levels?

Alan explained that, as Niagara Falls had not yet been overtopped, that wasn’t a problem for us. YET.

In the meantime, I will try to think about the Duchess of Cambridge’s Royal Crumpet in the oven. I’m ridiculously pleased to hear this, as the world always likes a new baby, and at least this one will be well cared for. Yesterday in comments we discussed hyperemesis gravidarum, her barfing complaint. I recalled a New Yorker story by Atul Gawande on the subject some years back, and whaddaya know, so did he. He posted a link to the story in the digital edition, which has apparently been unlocked for the occasion. Once you figure out the navigation it’s fairly easy to read. I hope our friend Cathy Cambridge isn’t feeling this lousy. This NYT explainer (thanks, Jolene) is shorter, and get the job done.

Which I guess ushers us into the bloggage, eh? Here’s the president introducing Led Zeppelin at the Kennedy Center Honors the other night. I’m always taken by his natural comic timing. He really has the gift.

And with that, I’m out and hope your Tuesday is worth it. Happy birthday, Kirk.

I haven’t dared look at my traffic numbers in…? How long? A long time. I’m sure they’re in the toilet, and have been for about a year, because one thing you can’t really do when you are a servant of two masters — i.e., a journalist with a day job — is be a fun ‘n’ lively blogger. Plus, I’m absorbed once again in how much I don’t know, an experience that I always find shuts me up for a while. Nothing like being stupid to make you want to stop digging your hole of ignorance.

And there’s the other thing: I now write at the end of the day, when I’m a lot lower on energy. So consider this a blanket apology for general lameness, and maybe in the new year I’ll try some new models that give you all the conversation pit you seem to enjoy, and give the lurkers and drive-bys a little more.

And leave me time to write some other things. Not sure what, but it’s something else I’d really like to do. This isn’t a book I’d like to write, but it’s an idea I had last summer, when I was talking to Tom Nardone, the Mower Gang guy. Sooner or later, you learn that Tom’s day job, when he’s not saving Detroit parks for children, is selling sex toys on the internet. He really has a great story about how he got into it in the early-early days of the internet, how he started as a middleman for anything a person might find embarrassing to buy in person. He and his girlfriend went through every drugstore, Walmart and Target they could find and made a list of anything a person might be embarrassed to lay in front of a human clerk. It was a list that ranged from Rogaine to Fleet enemas to Preparation H. The company they launched, PriveCo, would sell you this stuff over the internet, and their value-add was that you’d never hear from them again — no mailing lists, no you-might-be-interested-in-this, none of that. And it went pretty well for a while, until Drugstore.com came online and undercut them on everything and threw in free shipping to boot.

So now they deal exclusively in sex toys, but because Tom is a total mensch, they do it their own wholesome way. Every year they put up a table at the Dirty Show, an annual erotic-art show here in Detroit, and raise money for charity. One year they offered “take a ride on the world’s largest vibrator” for $3, last year it was a claw machine called Mr. Grab Ass. (The joystick control was an actual joy stick, heh heh.)

You can imagine what his office is like. And it’s in this bland light-industrial park, which is to say, it’s in a light-industrial park, period. All light-industrial parks are bland; it’s like their designs are a competition for the most boring architects in the world. You could locate the CIA in a light-industrial park, and no one would ever find it. As he was walking me out, he pointed out the building next door, which was equally boring and beige and surrounded by boxy shrubs and nondescript trees. His neighbor, Tom said, makes some sort of custom-fabricated hot rod parts, and is considered the best in the world at it. So just in this one corner of this one industrial park, you have dildos and hot rods.

“What other secrets are lurking in this neighborhood?” I asked. And that’s the book idea: Secrets of the Light-Industrial Park: Adventures in American Capitalism.

I don’t particularly want to write it. But who knows, maybe someday I will.

In the meantime, I’m collecting some thoughts on jewelry advertising this time of year. Later in the week.

Bloggage? “The Queen of Versailles” is on my watch-one-of-these-days list, especially so after reading Dave Weigel’s take on it. The story of how two Florida sharpies set out to build the largest residence in the U.S. gets sidetracked by something bigger, i.e., trouble in their time-share paradise:

The hard-selling Siegel employees try to convince their marks to buy time shares before said marks can do the math and realize the risks. We see one couple, both tattooed and glum-looking, grow more and more interested as they’re told that they can save thousands of dollars if, instead of booking motels every time they come to Vegas, they buy a time-share condo in the tower. Eventually, the husband pushes a credit card across the table. “I can’t believe we just did it!” he says, with little evident joy. He could do it because he had credit.

The Freep does a huge, year-end (i.e., awards-bait) project on the Packard plant here in Detroit. If you don’t want to wade through a million words, I can recommend the video, which is really well-done.

The WashPost has a great report on the Kennedy Center honors this year. Start at Led Zeppelin and follow the links to the rest.

The week begins! December already. How’d that happen?

Man, you should see the moon right now, sailing over the eastern sky with its wingman, Jupiter. I’m told an eclipse is scheduled for later, but right now, I’m thinking sleep may get me before the show starts. I saw the moonset this morning on my way back from the gym, so I won’t feel bad about missing it. I’ve seen lunar eclipses before. Best ever: A summer night at Adrianne’s apartment in Fort Wayne, out on the third-floor deck. Warm night, reasonable hour for the show, and it never passed out of sight. Beginning, middle, end, wine, friends. Now that’s an eclipse.

Tonight: Cold. Catch you next time, Moonie.

I read something remarkable today, a conscientious objection to a book that’s been getting the full court press — “Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity.” It’s about children who are radically different from the parents who bore them, whether through disability or just difference. I’m not going to read it, having had Andrew Solomon’s earlier book about depression pushed pretty hard down my throat and just couldn’t last through it.

The thing I read today, in Slate, was a rebuke from the mother of a child with Down syndrome, but it’s not like every other similar essay you might have read. Cristina Nehring had her baby against all good sense (although without a prenatal diagnosis) and found her life upended, complicated by the fact her partner ran for the hills two weeks after his daughter’s birth. Nehring is honest enough to regard her life without the usual soft-focus adjectives, and has some rather startling insights:

Wherever she goes, she brings people together—imperiously gesturing to cantankerous couples to sit down together and lifting their palms onto each others’ thighs, reconciling warring classmates by joining their hands, and charming child-leery adults with flirty smiles and studious imitations of their idiosyncrasies. Her gifts are the opposite of my own: Where I am shy, she is bold; where I am good with (known) words, she is good with drama, dance, and music; where I am frightened of groups, she loves them, and the children in her preschool compete hard to sit by her side at lunchtime as the nurses in her hospital petitioned to be assigned to her room.

Am I “cheerily generalizing” as Solomon says of other Down syndrome parents, “from a few accomplishments” of my child? Perhaps I am. But one thing I’ve learned these last four years that possibly Solomon has not: All of our accomplishments are few. All of our accomplishments are minor: my scribblings, his book, the best lines of the best living poets. We embroider away at our tiny tatters of insight as though the world hung on them, when it is chiefly we ourselves who hang on them. Often a dog or cat with none of our advanced skills can offer more comfort to our neighbor than we can. (Think: Would you rather live with Shakespeare or a cute puppy?) Each of us has the ability to give only a little bit of joy to those around us. I would wager Eurydice gives as much as any person alive.

But that’s just the warmup:

It’s when Solomon turns to his own life after hundreds of pages of publicizing the diverse, disabled, and combative lives of others that his unreconstructed conventionality emerges most obviously—and his cowardice. When all is said and done, Solomon mainly wants to bank an A-1 baby. While quickly regretting the “economic privilege” required for the engineering of his perfect offspring, he becomes “extremely deliberate about the egg selection.” Having prepared the ground for his reproductive missions by marrying his partner in a “shot-gun wedding” at the ancestral estate of the late Diana, princess of Wales, Solomon sifts donor profiles, consults attorneys, and flies around the globe to negotiate optimal parenting conditions.

But when the boy is born and needs a not-uncommon 5-minute CT scan, Solomon is ready to flee. Not merely does he panic, but he finds himself “try[ing] hard not to love” his newborn and has visions of “giving him up into [the] care” of an institution. All this within moments of a very small question being raised about the perfection of his child. All this from the author of Far From the Tree.

Awaiting the birth of any child is a strange thing. Solomon’s book is in part predicated on this paradox that, in bringing children into the world, we’re committing to a lifelong relationship with a stranger. I remember trying, and failing, to buy baby clothes when I was pregnant. I couldn’t; it felt too much like clothing an abstraction. “I don’t know her yet,” I told people, and I hope some of them understood. (Fortunately, if you have generous friends, the drawers are generally full by the time the kid hits the ground.) But at the same time, I was committed to playing the hand I was dealt, even if all the cards were still facing down.

It’s really worth a read.

As is this, which raises the question: Why does anyone, anywhere, pay a second’s worth of attention to Donald Trump?

Donald Trump, the real-estate mogul and television personality, has taken aim at two high-profile charity leaders, criticizing them on Twitter for collecting too much in salaries and not spending enough on programs.

The tweets pointed to “reports” about the financial practices of the United States Fund for Unicef and the American Red Cross and have been widely shared by some of Mr. Trump’s 1.9-million followers.

The problem is that the figures are false.

You don’t say.

I’m not so naive as to believe Trump actually does his own tweeting, but I’d think Mr. Yer-Fired could hire a smarter social-media slave.

Speaking of things that aren’t surprising, Florida GOP leaders come clean:

A new Florida law that contributed to long voter lines and caused some to abandon voting altogether was intentionally designed by Florida GOP staff and consultants to inhibit Democratic voters, former GOP officials and current GOP consultants have told The Palm Beach Post.

Finally, a person earning $65,000 a year in Fort Smith, Ark., has more disposable income than a New York City resident earning a quarter mil.

Which sort of wraps up the no-surprise roundup. Hope your Thursday contains no unpleasant ones.

Our windows have been grimy for a while, and I’ve been trying to think of a solution that would involve me waking up one sunny morning to discover they were clean and shiny, one that wouldn’t require the household’s primary breadwinner to climb a ladder to the second floor. And lo, one was revealed to me when I saw a guy washing windows at the house across the street. He was obviously not the owner, and my steel-trap mind made the deduction — he was a window-washer.

A couple of phone calls later, he and his partner arrived at the house today, on a fine sunny morning. Washer No. 1 was morbidly obese. Washer No. 2 was older and walked as though he needed double hip replacements. The thought of either one on a ladder was a little heart-clutching, but as it turned out, they used their stealthy technique of “doing the outside from the inside” and managed to avoid it. Their copious compliments on our decorating choices made me feel a little better about them; everyone enjoys flattery. They got it all done and at the end, made a pitch for an every-six-months visit, which I guess I’ll go for, because who doesn’t want someone else to do that chore.

“All our clients are getting old,” Hip-Replacement Guy said. “The last one said she couldn’t see the dirt anymore, so why bother.”

I’ll take your place, old lady. I will keep this duo squirting and polishing into 2013.

If the stray dogs and cats of the world ever figure out what a soft touch I am, they’ll all develop hip problems and come a-calling.

A fascinating story to kick off the bloggage today, which it took me all day to read in bits and pieces — “The Lying Disease,” about a phenomenon I’ve read about before, but not in such detail. That is, Munchausen syndrome by internet. That is, people who fake illness on the internet. Fascinating, and another big swing for the fences by The Stranger. Gotta love an alt-weekly that still kicks it ol’-skool.

For you Michiganians, especially those with kids in schools, Bridge has a nice little package on the school-choice plans being rolled out this month. How choicey are these choices? Pretty choice-er-iffic:

Imagine a world where your teenage son chooses high school courses like picking dishes in a cafeteria – a serving of Advanced Placement chemistry in the white collar enclave across the river, Spanish online at the dining room table, an English class at the local community college, band at his home school.

Now imagine that same world, but where schools act less like cafeterias and more like department stores. Billboards promote quick high school math credits at an online branch. A new charter school operating in the old Sears building offers iPads to the first 100 students who enroll. Your son’s home public high school drops its football team in a downsizing caused by lost revenue from plummeting enrollment.

More here, and still more here.

Great moments in mugshots, local version.

Great Lakes at record lows. Arizona? If you ever entertained any thoughts about that trans-national water pipeline, better give ’em up now.

And now it’s Wednesday, and the week struggles over the hump, dragging me along. These post-holiday weeks are a bitch, ain’a?

There was this woman who worked in Columbus for a time when I was there. Two women, actually. Both were young and quite pretty, which by newsroom standards made them practically Victoria’s Secret models. I think it’s safe to say both had their immediate (male) supervisors buffaloed, which is a little duh-you-don’t-say, but as someone who’s never been able to do that, it rankled a bit.

But only a bit. Both were far outside my orbit, so I was able to observe them both rather dispassionately.

Both were excellent at one key skill — seeming really busy. They bustled around, arms full of three-ring binders, pencils held in their mouths like a horse’s bit, hair prettily askew. They seemed barely contained. Oh my god I can’t believe how much I have to do, etc. They went to meetings. They leaned in close to talk to you. They contained multitudes. They vibrated with energy. (That men might find this attractive was something I’d never even considered until William Hurt essentially told Holly Hunter it was a huge turn-on in “Broadcast News.”)

One was working on a reporting project that was going to blow off lids. The other was launching a new section. Only the project landed with a dull, wet thud and the section editor ended up in the ER just hours before D-day, being treated for “stress” and seemingly clamped in a sustained anxiety attack.

I hadn’t thought of either of them in years, until I read this passage in a story about Paula Broadwell, posted yesterday in comments. Sorry for the length, but I need this whole passage to illustrate something.

One of Broadwell’s former professors at Harvard described her as a self-promoter who would routinely show up at office hours.

“It was very much, ‘I’m here and you’re going to know I’m here,’” said the professor, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of ongoing investigations. “She was not someone you would think of as a critical thinker. I don’t remember anything about her as a student. I remember her as a personality.”

The professor said when Petraeus chose Broadwell to write his biography, there was shock among the national security faculty at Harvard because “she just didn’t have the background — the academic background, the national security background, or the writing background.”

A second Harvard faculty member who knows Broadwell and Petraeus had similar misgivings.

At one point, Broadwell said she was leaving the doctorate track because she was over­extended and didn’t have time to complete the coursework, recounted the professor, who was not authorized to speak to the press.

Broadwell later complained that the writing project on Petraeus was not going well.

“She was a lot of talk but not a lot of follow-through,” said the second professor, who described Broadwell’s struggle to deliver on the biography as “deeply embarrassing” to the Kennedy School. “That is why she brought on a co-author,” Vernon Loeb, an editor at the Washington Post.

Stipulated: It is the height of shittiness to say stuff like this behind the cloak of anonymity, and all that “the sensitivity of the investigation” and “not being authorized to speak to the press” is just a fancy way of being shitty. But if any of it is to be believed, it appears Broadwell was cut from the same cloth as these other women, born cute and smart and energetic, a city girl who seemed to find out early how to open doors with just a smile.

Broadwell was by any measure a superachiever, but she wouldn’t be the first woman defeated by a long-form writing project.

You want to know the punchline of this one? Check it:

Nonetheless, Harvard embraced Broadwell as a distinguished alumna after “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus” became a New York Times bestseller this year. On Sept. 10, the Kennedy School included Broadwell on an alumni panel of accomplished public servants and the next day hosted a forum at which she discussed her book.

Fuckers. Speaking of lyin’ eyes.

So. The weekend awaits. A little bloggage before I go? Sure.

This has been around for a while, and I know I said I was moving beyond the election, but “Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people” is too good a rant not to take note of:

My wife and I are quite familiar with America’s healthcare system due to our professions, and having lived abroad extensively, also very aware of comparable systems. Your party’s insistence on declaring the private U.S. healthcare system “the best in the world” fails nearly every factual measure available to any curious mind. We watch our country piss away 60% more expenditures than the next most expensive system (Switzerland) for health outcomes that rival former Soviet bloc nations. On a personal scale, my wife watches poor WORKING people show up in emergency rooms with fourth-stage cancer because they were unable to afford primary care visits. I have watched countless small businesses unable to attract talented workers because of the outrageous and climbing cost of private insurance. And I watch European and Asian businesses outpace American companies because they can attract that talent without asking people to risk bankruptcy and death. That you think this state of affairs is somehow preferable to “Obamacare,” which you compared ludicrously to Trotskyite Russian communism, is a sign of deficient minds unfit to guide health policy in America.

Thanks, Eric Zorn.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must rest for a day of reportin’, writin’ and birthday-cake-bakin’ tomorrow. It’s a big day at our house, Nov. 16:

Hope your weekend is pleasant.