Was it just yesterday I went off on Rant 13B at lunch? That is, Why The Hell Is Facebook Worth $96 Billion? Probably. I deliver it roughly every other week. I don’t get it — a few ads on the sidebar for weight loss? How does it add up?

The only thing I can figure is, the data and privacy and all the rest of it we share with them, so willingly and unthinkingly, is worth a lot. A LOT.

Over time, I’ve been trimming my Facebook apps to the bare minimum I need to interact with people I want to interact with. I’ve had to resist stuff like Words With Friends, but given my problems resisting crap like Angry Birds, that’s probably a pretty good thing. But by doing so, I’ve been spared the mortifying — to me, anyway — updates I get on what everybody’s reading, delivered via “social reader” apps. Did I need to know my friend’s wife has a fondness for Kardashian news? No. Did Famous Journalist really check out a story about Kate Upton’s breasts? Shudder.

Still, there’s a sense, every time I run through my news feed, that I’m selling all my information short.

So it’s with joy, real joy, that I read that social readers are collapsing — the Washington Post’s, but also the Guardian’s and others. There’s a nominal explanation from the WashPost, something about Facebook modules, whatever they are, and I guess it’s plausible. But I can’t help but hope there’s something to it. I love the WashPost like few other newspapers– er, “content providers,” but there has to be a limit. I’ll register at their site, and they can presumably track what I’m reading there, but Mark Zuckerberg can kiss my bum. From casual observation, my opinion isn’t a minority view.

Sharing is one thing. Window-peeping is quite another.

Social media is essential for journalists, but man, I wish it weren’t.

Any “Mad Men” fans in da house? Of course there are. Any guesses as to what it cost to land the rights to “Tomorrow Never Knows” for last night’s episode? (And may I just say, what a great choice. My favorite on “Revolver,” and I didn’t know until today that the things that sound like seagulls in the first few seconds are actually tape squeals. Learn something new every day, etc.) A quarter-mil. Yikes.

We have a local story unfolding here, yet more of the endless corruption shenanigans in local government. Long story short: An overpaid county development officer left her job last fall, willingly, pocketing a year’s salary as severance, which would merely be wrong and appalling, except that the county is bankrupt and laying off less fortunate employees. A few raised a stink, which became a big stink, and throughout it all, this particular development officer has stuck her elegant nose in the air and refused to apologize for any of it, other than to say she deserved every penny because she worked so hard.

Over the weekend the Freep broke a story about some of the outside jobs she held, for alleged nonprofits that existed mainly to guide even more dollars into her overflowing pockets:

Turkia Awada Mullin had only one Cadillac, but she had two monthly car allowances to pay for it.

One was for $500 from her $200,000-a-year job as chief development officer of Wayne County. The other was for $500 or $600 — she couldn’t quite remember — paid by the Wayne County Regional Jobs and Economic Growth Foundation, one of several nonprofit groups Mullin headed in addition to her county job.

Did she really need $1,000 a month to run her car? Mullin was asked last month.

“I think it’s more than that with the mileage I put on it,” she said.

Poor, poor, greedy, greedy baby.

The tower of Monday has been scaled. Let’s hope the rest of the week goes more smoothly.

Man, this sketch by Ezra Klein, about the fallout of the very likely primary defeat of Richard Lugar, is depressing. If Lugar loses to the tea-partyin’ Richard Mourdock, here’s one likely scenario (assuming an Obama win in November):

Lugar loses and Mourdock wins the general election: This would be a signal that primary challenges remain a threat, and no Republican lawmaker can feel safe cutting deals or taking tough votes. This is a world where Republicans, having run and lost with a “Massachusetts moderate,” swear never to compromise on their principles again, and incumbent lawmakers realize that there will be a raft of primary challenges coming and so they had better spend the next two years shoring up their right flank. This is not a world in which you can imagine a ‘grand bargain’ getting done.

Lots of very casual observers might look at Michigan, where our attorney general and Republican-controlled legislature has recently gone crusading against two issues settled at the ballot in recent elections, and ask why. Why go after embryonic stem cell research, when it was overwhelmingly approved by voters in 2008? Why go after medical marijuana, approved by a landslide the same year? Because no one is listening to the people who voted, only the ones still making noise on the right. If there’s a bumper sticker for this chapter of the GOP history, it’s this: Don’t primary me, bro.

Tea Party Nation, what have you wrought?

Ugh.

How was your weekend. I went to a battle of the bands. Last year:

This year:

They lost their singer, gained a lot of confidence and finished third, which was pretty impressive. I think those judges in the middle were checking out the guitarist’s stems. I didn’t offer any wardrobe advice, but I did tell her the black dress made her look nice, and when you’re in showbiz, even church-basement showbiz, you should do your best in that department.

It didn’t hurt that they rocked it. Beyond that, I’ll say no more. I already edge close enough to toddlers-and-tiaras territory as it is.

Beyond that, it was just a swell couple of days. Long bike ride, Eastern Market, pleasant weather, a Tigers game. And they won.

How about you?

Good lord, is this weather for real? Ninety degrees on the freeway Thursday afternoon, not much cooler under the trees. Vicious wind, of course — we’re all waiting for the inevitable thunderstorms, and Friday? High of 70. For the Tigers game.

My boss Derek says, “You don’t get gentle showers anymore. Everything’s a cloudburst.” Word.

So. I’ve been more or less deprived of one of my scab-picking pleasures of late. I don’t think Mitch Albom has written more than a dozen columns since last Thanksgiving. He surfaced at one point and said something about finishing a book. He weighed in on Words With Friends and dashed off a few sports columns. But the ones I consider my joy and duty — the Sunday op-ed front-page thumbsuckers about the good ol’ days or kids these days, the ones I hate-read with such gusto — those have been scarce. Until this past Sunday, when he unearthed Ernie Harwell’s rest-deprived bones yet again, by way of announcing his play about the Tigers legend would be returning for a second summer run:

There’s a scene in the play “Ernie” in which the actor playing Ernie Harwell re-enacts the way he broadcast minor-league baseball games in the 1940s, when there was no money to send him on the road.

Blah blah blah about the ticker-tape feeding the radio play-by-play — you saw it in “Bull Durham” — and then this:

When asked what he did if the ticker-tape machine broke, Ernie replies that sometimes he’d make up a distraction, like a dog running on the field. And he’d have that dog racing back and forth, eluding escape, until the machine was fixed.

Of course, when the ballplayers came home, their wives would ask, “What happened to that poor dog?” And they’d say, “What dog?”

The audience always laughs. It is a sweet moment. A reminder of a simpler time, when broadcasting was about imagination — for both the listener and, at times, even the announcer.

“It is a sweet moment.” OK, sure. Then we get a Bob Greeney detour into the NFL Draft broadcast, of which Mitch disapproves, because it’s not sweet and narrated by an old Georgian, and finally we get to paragraph 13:

The play about Ernie, which I was honored to write at his request, reopens this week at the City Theatre in downtown Detroit, across the street from the Tigers’ ballpark.

Shucks, people. He didn’t want to write it! Ernie asked! Would you have turned him down? But really, what an amazing trick. He starts out relating a “sweet moment” in “the play ‘Ernie'” and only mentions it’s actually his own play after a couple hundred words. But he’s not done:

It is rare that a stage play runs for long in our city, rarer still that it returns for a second season. It’s extremely rare that people view it multiple times. I think the reason folks return for “Ernie” is the same reason we couldn’t wait to hear him talk about “the voice of the turtle” when he opened his broadcasts every season. It meant renewal. It meant familiarity.

Because it couldn’t possibly be you, could it, Mitch?

I hope this means the little man is back. It would be such a long summer without him.

So, a little bloggage?

In the words of young Alvy Singer, upon meeting Joey Nichols: What an asshole.

My colleague Ron had some good stuff in Bridge this week, on schools’ failure to adequately prepare students for college, although if you ask me, it ain’t the schools’ fault. (Hi, mom ‘n’ dad.) And Peter Luke had a good column about the difference between Michigan Democrats and Republicans that contains a few striking parallels between the two parties in other venues, as well.

A great read about the power of one dedicated nerd against an archivist who went very, very wrong.

And speaking of archivists, another good one.

The auction of “The Scream” makes some people want to do the same. Jerry Saltz:

With dapper white men and tall, thin white women making little finger signals while holding phones, speaking to strangers in Dubai or Russia or Beijing or Mitt Romney’s garage, the painting was sold “to an unknown telephone bidder” for $119.5 million. Thus, a great work of art that had been all but lost to us, hanging in a private Norwegian home for more than a century, made a brief public appearance and then was sold off to another private owner, probably to disappear for another 100 years. We will likely never see this work of art again in our lifetimes. The Scream is a part of art history and should hang in a public collection, probably in Norway, and not just decorate a California den or a dacha in the Ukraine, waiting to be fodder for the next auction. (Needless to say, no museum was in a position to spend that kind of money.)

Eh. I’m happy with my Coozledad original.

A great weekend, all.

As I may have mentioned about a million times before, I like to take a little midweek me-time at a bar near Kate’s Wednesday-night activity. I drop her off for three hours of musical instruction, and I go to the Park Bar for a wrap and two beers. I take my iPad. I read, I write (rarely), I people-watch.

This week was the first time I’d stopped by since Opening Day. Today’s was an afternoon game, but a few hardy souls were still pounding shots and being incredibly loud when I arrived at 6. One woman had tucked her shot glass into her cleavage and telling her friends that she was ABOUT TO BE FORTY-THREE, AND GODDAMNIT, I THINK I’M BETTER THAN EVER.

John Mellencamp interrupted on the sound system. They joined together like a pack of coyotes:

SO LET IT ROCK, LET IT ROLL, LET THE BIBLE BELT COME AND SAVE MY SOUL. HOLD ONTO SIXTEEN AS LONG AS YOU CAN. CHANGES COME AROUND REAL SOON MAKE US WOMEN AND MEN. Then she took out her shot and downed it.

It was sort of annoying, and then I reflected that the library doesn’t serve Stella Artois and I was the odd one out.

Hoosiers, is it true? Is it true Dick Lugar isn’t long for this world? He was always the Republican I never minded voting for, and not because he’s some flaming liberal. You couldn’t help but respect his intellect, which informed his positions, more than you can say for most politicians, especially more contemporary ones.

And while we’re on the subject of politics, here’s James Fallows on current events:

Mitt Romney informs us that the raid that took out Osama bin Laden one year ago was no big deal, because “even Jimmy Carter would have given that order.” …Jimmy Carter is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy who spent ten years in the uniformed service of his country. As far as I can tell, this is ten years more than the cumulative service of all members of the Romney clan.

Why, yes. Yes, it is.

Finally, do I have to have an opinion about Barack Obama, boyfriend? Because I’d prefer not to.

The downslope of the week! How wonderful.

I don’t recognize the church of my youth. This version is the one that appears in movies where nuns and priests never smile, have filthy secrets and abuse children. Only this woman, a teacher in a Fort Wayne Catholic school who asked the wrong boss for a few days off, isn’t a child:

During the meeting, Kuzmich told Herx repeatedly she was a “grave, immoral sinner,” and that should news of the treatments get out there would be a scandal, according to court documents.

Emily Herx’ grave sin? Trying to conceive through in-vitro fertilization. She asked for time off to have the procedure done. For which, this representation of Christ on earth, Rev. John Kuzmich, told her she was a grave, immoral sinner.

I’m reaching the point where I not only will never rejoin the church, I can’t believe I ever even considered it. Dear Pope Benedict, please enjoy your smaller, purer church. I hope no more members disappoint you.

By the way, I predicted the inevitable Kevin Leininger column defending Kuzmich a few hours ago. I think it’ll be in Saturday’s paper. We’ll see.

It’s been a day for jaw-droppers. For the last few months, a coalition has been gathering signatures, trying to put repeal of the state’s emergency-manager law on the state ballot this fall. They gathered 100,000 more than what they needed, and presented them to the state board of canvassers, which yesterday deadlocked on accepting them, because — get this — the font on the petitions was the wrong size. It had to be 14 point, and there were even printers who testified it was 14 point, but the font was Calibri, which is thinner, and sometimes looks smaller. Too bad! A tied board means it doesn’t pass, and the room erupted — see this nice photo in the News.

Next stop: Court.

Finally, a nice Brian Dickerson column on the final-final denouement of the Case of Little Leo Ratte and the Overzealous Child Protective Services. It’s a good story, and I think we discussed it when it happened: Pop-culture-sheltered U of M professor takes his little boy to a Tigers game and buys him a bottle of lemonade, not knowing that Mike’s brand is the kind with alcohol in it. A security guard sees the boy sipping from it, alerts the fuzz, and the family is swept up in a Kafkaesque nightmare of foster homes, court orders and the like. The family is on the brink of pushing through a law to keep this from happening again. More power, etc.

Finally, another great Sweet Juniper on the fauxtopias of suburban Detroit. Highly recommended.

Happy weekend, all.

I really need to keep up on the rest of the paper. As many of you know, I ignore the sports section. Sorry, sports fans, but it’s just too late for me. I read world/nation, metro, business and arts. There are many fine sportswriters in the world and I look them up when I can, but keeping up is something I don’t have time for.

So it was that I learned that a Los Angeles Laker named “Metta World Peace” elbowed an opponent during a game the other day and was ejected. Shouldn’t there be some explanation of the name? Wait, there was explanation of the name? Back when it was changed? From who? Ohhhh, Ron Artest. That guy. He started the brawl at the Palace. And now he’s calling himself World Peace, but I don’t get the Metta. Can anyone explain this? He sounds like he’s still a long way from peaceful.

During my time on the sports copy desk — a six-month stretch that will provide me with a lifetime of boring dinner-party stories — I came to think of basketball as Armpit Season. Picture after picture of armpits. It got old.

In ten days, I’m going to a Tigers game, however. Because free tickets + warm spring night (I hope) = awesome.

Bloggage tonight? Yeah, some:

A stupid Kathleen Parker column. (Yeah, what else is new, right?) A funny Charles Pierce comment on it.

David Simon has a blog (a website, anyway). E-i-e-i-o.

It took some hard pushin’, but I birthed ‘nother project for Bridge. Public-employee pensions, woo, but it’s over. I spent a chunk of today reporting a much lighter piece, and once the end-of-the-term grading is done, I’ll have a much lighter step to match.

Parts one, two, three, four.

And in the meantime, all I have to do is kill dozens of comments out of my email, not from Bridge readers but from Mlive, the newspaper/digital platform where we share our content. Apparently there are people in the world who have nothing better to do than snipe back and forth on newspaper comment boards.

Life is too short for that, but maybe not when your main point consists of honk and the person you’re arguing with says honk-honk.

Good lord, but there’s some bloggage to get to today, so let’s.

This was destined to go viral the minute the judge said, “Hot dog!” So enjoy. (You can’t see his hot dog.)

A naked man runs through my neighborhood. And I MISSED IT. Streaking isn’t back; he’s just a meth casualty released from the psych ward too soon.

Frank Rich on something that isn’t exactly news, but a decent primer on the sugar daddies swinging their moneybags in the current election.

And speaking of public-employee pensions, David Von Drehle tells a story better than I ever could — Rhode Island’s.

Off to edit some copy.

I sent Coozledad an Electric Six T-shirt and all I got was this beautiful watercolor of his pet crow, which Alan just brought back from the framer today:

A terrible photo, I know. Alan wanted to wait until daylight, but I insisted. Here’s a decent detail shot, from Cooz’s own blog. It’s just spectacular, and I’m amazed he’s this generous. I think I’ll send him an old ratty hoodie next, in the hope he’ll reply with some diamond earrings or something. We’ll walk it around the house for a week or two, until the crow tells us where he wants to hang (as long as it’s out of direct sunlight, or close to a bathroom).

This almost counters the news that we lost yet ANOTHER commenter, albeit one of the less-chatty ones — JayZ(the original), who, we learned from Bill, “passed away suddenly in France on Easter Sunday.” May I just say? That’s a line I’d like to see in my obituary someday, if that’s even possible.

I really don’t know what to say about that, other than I’m sorry.

And now it’s week’s end, “30 Rock” night, and I’m having a brownie and a second glass of wine, because why not? Tomorrow I’m going to hit the gym and it will surely hit me back, but I don’t care.

Bloggage?

Professionalism ain’t what it used to be.

The flight path of the pilot whose plane augured in to the Gulf of Mexico today. Lost pressure, blacked out, adios — it’s the same thing that happened to Payne Stewart’s plane a few years back. Arresting to see the final tracings.

Keep talkin’, liberal man. I’m sure it’ll do a lot of good.

Me, I’m going to bed. Have a great weekend, all.

I don’t think it’s possible to express how little I’m interested in fighting the Mommy Wars again. Seriously. Do not want. To fight this. As wastes of breath go, only discussing which candidate you’d like to have a beer with ranks lower.

Been there, done that. Absolutely an argument without a point that brings out the worst in everyone. Won’t do it, can’t do it. Whatever works in your family is the right way to do it. Shut up about my choice, and I’ll shut up about yours.

And with that — a few thoughts about women and politics — it seems appropriate to segue into the news of the day, which is that our own Moe appears to be leaving us. See details on her blog. I’m frankly astonished. She’s been such a vivid, opinionated part of our community, and among her Facebook circle, and has been posting — not about her illness, but about the world outside of it — with regularity until just the last couple of days.

It seems the best thing to do now is simply wish her well as she starts the next part of her journey.

But also, some links:

Rep. Benishek’s terrible, horrible, no good, very bad town-hall meeting:

At one point, the discussion turned to health care reform. Benishek, who served as a medical doctor before he was elected to Congress in 2010, was thrust onto the national stage after his predecessor Bart Stupak cast the deciding vote in favor of the Affordable Care Act in 2010. He told the audience that the United States has the best health care system in the world, before he was literally laughed at by several attendees.

“We have the highest life spans in the world,” argued Benishek. Several women in the audience quickly pointed out that in fact, many countries with universal health care place higher than the United States in terms of life expectancy, including Canada, Sweden, Norway and the Netherlands. The United States ranks 50th, just behind South Korea and Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“I don’t believe that’s true,” said Benishek. “How can you not know that, you’re a medical doctor?” one woman replied.

John Edwards’ terrible, horrible, no good, very bad life:

No one close to Edwards disputes the obvious: The unrelenting quiet is an indication of just how far he has fallen. Especially around Chapel Hill and the Edwardses’ former home in nearby Raleigh, several longtime friends privately say that they want nothing to do with him; that they felt personally betrayed by his persistent lies during the period when he desperately sought to cover up his affair.

The antipathy toward him around these parts shows no signs of abating. He spends considerably less time in popular Chapel Hill haunts that once — in his days as a stunningly successful trial lawyer and overnight political star — accorded him golden-boy status. At Spanky’s restaurant, near the University of North Carolina Law School (where he and Elizabeth met in a class), his portrait has been removed from the wall, replaced by one of Elizabeth. Three years ago, with the scandal at its height, he ate lunch with an elderly couple at crowded Foster’s Market, a popular cafe in town where he looked at ease in Bermuda shorts and a T-shirt. As he left, patrons hissed at him. “It was more than audible; it was loud,” a witness recalls. “He kept walking toward the door as if he didn’t hear or see anything.”

The end of the stick shift as we know it? Or maybe not. From my hubs’ section.

And with that, let’s all hold a good thought for Moe, eh?

Yeesh, what a cold, miserable day. Please, never mind that I didn’t wear a coat. It’s mid-April, and I’m done with coats. A sweater was it, then, which underlined the misery, but I didn’t have to be outdoors long, and ah well — you have to go through a few of these days every spring, and Tuesday was one of them.

Tomorrow will be warmer. Winter is going.

Which seems a nice transition into the new season of “Game of Thrones.” I’m watching, yes, although this is the beginning of the long slog of the middle of “A Song of Ice and Fire.” I petered out somewhere toward the end of “A Storm of Swords,” and there’s still another doorstop of a volume before “A Dance of Dragons,” and guess what? Winter has not yet come, although it’s autumn, and the book after that one is, I believe, “The Winds of Winter,” and there’s another book beyond that, and yikes, I just don’t have time. Catching up via HBO seems the most prudent course of action. If anything, the visuals are even more arresting than last season — the budget must have gotten a boost — but I remember this passage of the story as mostly about rain and blood soaking into the mud of Westeros, along with the usual dragons and ice-zombies and the like.

And speaking of dragons, we saw “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” over the weekend, which settled any question I might have had about that series — ick. It was competently done, even beautiful in that David Fincher-esque way, but I’ve had it with perverts, rapists and fucking Sweden. Also girls on motorcycles, coffee, mysteries outlined via charts on walls and Rooney Mara. Where are the romantic comedies of yore, I ask you. I just scanned the trailers of coming attractions on the Apple movie-trailers site, and didn’t see a single thing that looked like much, and quite a bit that looked like dreck. “That’s My Boy,” in fact, might be the worst of the lot.

Back to novels for the summer, I fear.

So. Sayonara, Ricky Santorum. It’s a sign of this crazy year that he lasted this long, but there are many others. Here’s a column from the Indianapolis Star about Richard Mourdock, who is challenging Richard Lugar in the primary and just might win:

In politics, there are partisans who truly believe in and fight for their principles and policy ideas as they seek to craft solutions to big problems. And then there are people like Mourdock — unbending ideologues who believe the only acceptable outcome to any argument is a complete victory by their side. In a diverse nation, such victories are largely impossible. And, so, under this type of thinking nothing gets done.

That’s your choice, Hoosiers.

Hell, let’s look at the wind map instead. Very soothing.

Happy Wednesday. Think I might take Kate to see “Titanic 3D,” if she’s up for it. Our hearts will go on.