Sorry for being such a bummer yesterday, but stories like that strike a nerve. Years ago, a friend who worked in emergency medicine introduced me to a bit of their diagnostic jargon — DFM, or dumb fuckin’ mom. Despite a moderate episode of DFM, the child is expected to recover, although it is known to be a chronic condition. DFM is the cause of childhood caries, the cavities that can deprive a kid of baby teeth well before the permanent ones come in, usually thanks to a mom who poured Hi-C or Coca-Cola into a bottle. That’s at one end of the spectrum. At the other is DFM with extreme prejudice, which was certainly a contributing factor in the ghastly demise of that cursed little girl in Fort Wayne last week. Leave your children with Some Guy for a week? Sure, why not?

But let’s lighten the mood a bit today. I get the sense many of you are like me this week, at work or not, but likely spending a lot of time goofing off on your computers. Fortunately, I have much linkage to love today, so let’s get to it.

I found this CDC data set in a Nate Silver tweet; it’s about the percentage of American households with cellular-only coverage, and he mentioned it in connection with polling. Evidently many pollsters don’t use cell-only households in their canvassing, and it has bitten them more than once — the seemingly come-from-behind victory of Kwame Kilpatrick in his last Detroit mayoral election was attributed to unpolled cell-only voters, mostly young people, who gave him an easy victory in a race that was said to be too close to call.

We’re starting this discussion — cutting the land line — in our house, and are being held back by a few factors, including 911 service, the lack of significant cost savings and, of course, the necessity of covering that ugly wall jack in the kitchen once the phone is gone. J.C., my digital guru and mentor, went to a Google Voice landline setup a while back, and reports no problems. What say the NN.C hoardes hordes?

Kim Severson considers sorghum, that quintessential southron sweetener, in today’s NYT food pages. Southern cooking is so far outside my gene pool that I don’t dare to experiment, but this sounds interesting:

At Two Boroughs Larder in Charleston, sorghum sweetens semifreddo. In Atlanta, Richard Blais, a winning “Top Chef” contestant, serves tiny popped grains of sorghum as a bar snack at his restaurant, HD1. It tastes like a toasty marriage of kettle corn and puffed rice.

And at Lantern, in Chapel Hill, N.C., Andrea Reusing uses sorghum to bridge the South and Asia. She makes a Vietnamese-style sorghum caramel with fish sauce, lime and chiles to glaze pork belly, and coats spicy fried walnuts or pine nuts with sorghum. Her pastry kitchen turns out a five-spice confection like Cracker Jack using sorghum. It also goes into a gold rum cocktail infused with black pepper and vanilla bean.

Ten words you mispronounce that make people think you’re an idiot. Not long enough.

And finally, the List of Lists, the WashPost’s 2012 Ins and Outs! Yayyyyy. (claps wildly) Out: Pippa’s bum; In: Kate’s uterus. Beautiful.

Have a great day, all.

A story has been unspooling in Fort Wayne since Friday, and anyone who knows anything about such things suspected it was going to have a tragic ending. Late last night, it arrived — Aliahna Lemmon, 9, missing since Friday morning, was found dead, and the man she’d been left with, Michael Plumadore, was arrested. As frequently happens in these cases, everyone involved was poor, and every reported fact raised more questions than it answered.

The trailer park where everybody involved lived was said to be home to 15 registered sex offenders, which until recently included the missing girl’s grandfather, who died earlier this month. Plumadore had been the grandfather’s caretaker, and was staying in his mobile home. Plumadore had priors — I’d imagine a clean record in a place like this is as unlikely as finding an adult resident without a tattoo — but none of them were for violent felonies, so no worries, eh? The dead girl was said to have emotional problems, PTSD in some accounts, with no explanation of how a 9-year-old might come to develop a post-traumatic stress disorder. Until she was found, the girl’s grandmother had given numerous interviews saying she trusted Plumadore implicitly, although she admitted it was probably not a good idea for him to have left Aliahna and her sisters alone for half an hour Friday morning, when she likely disappeared, while he went to a nearby convenience store in search of a cigar.

Yes, that was his account of his whereabouts: Woke up, couldn’t get back to sleep, went out for a cigar, came home, smoked it and fell back to sleep for a few hours, and woke up to find the girl gone. He assumed her mother had taken her, although the sisters were still there. It was hours before anyone finally realized the girl was gone. And why was she staying with him? Because her mother had the flu, and her stepfather needed to sleep during the day, and who the hell knows? It was one of those stories you put down and ask yourself that if Jesus loves the little children, all the little children of the world, red and yellow black and white they are precious in his sight, why he lets so many of them arrive in a world where they are, objectively, fucked for life.

I’ve known a few people who grew up in conditions like this — rural and/or urban squalor, for lack of a better word, in houses where nobody cleaned or cooked or considered it odd that mom or dad or both were drunk all the time. Houses where grandpa is a sex offender, where mom is crazy, where you and your brother had to split a single pork chop but the dogs were all well-fed, because they were mama’s babies. Houses where your uncle or your dad’s army buddy tried to catch you alone in a room so he could push you up against a wall and ask if there was fur on that monkey yet. Houses where the TV was never turned off, ever, and you never saw a dentist and grandma smoked right next to her oxygen tank. And you know what? These people are heroes in the truest sense of the word. They battled great odds and emerged with a prize beyond rubies — a safe, sane, balanced middle-class life that they could bring their own children into and keep them from harm. Why aren’t we studying them in the world’s great universities? Why do we spend so much time lionizing frauds and con men and politicians and actors and other assholes, and not the few Aliahnas left behind who will survive their ghastly upbringings and prosper? Why aren’t we carrying them through the streets, or at least debriefing them to discover how, exactly, they slipped the noose of ignorance and poverty?

Just wondering.

I’m going to stop reading about this kid for a while. Not good for me.

UPDATE: Too late! She was clubbed to death with a brick, then dismembered.

And I’m sorry to bum you out, but these cases take it out of me.

And now here we are in the last days of the year. I’m counting down to my final day on the old job and first ones on the new, so of course I’m reaching for the most calming activity I know in times of stress — cleaning bathrooms. If I really hit a lick, I could get the whole house clean, but for now, I’ll settle for a couple toilets.

Bloggage?

Fascinating holiday-weekend reader from the NYT: The Empire State Building — and other tall skyscrapers around the country — find astonishing profits in their upper-level observation decks. Sixty million in profits in one year? Yikes. (As one who bought that ticket, a few years back? Not worth it. The wait was endless and the view? Eh. The Chicago skyscrapers are far better, and I concur with those who told me that the best bargain is the cocktail lounge a few levels down from the top, where you get the same view, free of charge, and with drinks.

And as it’s late, that’s about all I have. Hope the news at your end was better.

I’d been paying scant attention to the Ron Paul newsletter story over the past few days, but finally caught up last night with this Reuters piece, which, as in the Fuqua School case, we need to remind ourselves is not that far in the past — in this case, 1993. And in the letter over Paul’s signature:

Among other things, the articles called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a “world-class philanderer,” criticized the U.S. holiday bearing King’s name as “Hate Whitey Day,” and said that AIDS sufferers “enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.”

Oh.

The story includes a pdf of one of the solicitations for his investment counseling service. It’s a marvel of the form, and reading it took me back to my talk-radio days, when paranoia ruled the land and dark speculations on black helicopters and FEMA kept the phones ringing. Paul speaks of how new anti-counterfeiting measures in U.S. paper money was a plot to track good Americans with radio beams:

These totalitarian bills were tinted pink and green and brown, and blighted with holograms, diffraction gratings, metal and plastic threads, and chemical alarms. It wasn’t money for a free people.

This tone must work on somebody, because it’s widely pervasive in paranoia/fringe circles. There must be a lot of dementia patients out there who still have control of the checkbook.

Or maybe I just move in the wrong circles, and this stuff is simply more common than I think. The sitting secretary of state in Indiana, Charlie White, was ruled ineligible to hold office yesterday, clearing the way for the Democrat he defeated in 2010 to take the seat. I really know very little about this case — honestly, nothing — so you Hoosiers will have to bring me up to date. However, late last night, one of my Indiana Facebook people told me to check out Charlie’s father’s FB wall, where, in posts no more than an hour or two old, he was ranting about the “Jew judge” who presided in the case, as well as the Nigerian-born Democrat who wins his son’s seat by default. Today, all the posts were gone. (I’m sure he’s the victim of a cruel hacker.)

Bleh. It’s almost Christmas. Let’s clear our palates with…Festivus! We start with the airing of grievances. Caliban?

Srsly, happy Christmas to all. I shall be back Monday.

So this is it, then? Winter solstice? It doesn’t exactly feel like it — too warm — but given that it’s 8 a.m. and barely light, and that it’s raining and looks like it will be doing so for a while, then I guess this must be the place. Today the corner is turned. (Technically, not until 12:30 a.m. tomorrow, in my time zone, anyway.) Enjoy it, Argentina. Because we’re coming for that light. Starts now.

That last link is a sound clip, and somewhat NSFW, depending on your office. From one of my favorite movies-nobody-else-saw: “The Limey.” Roger Ebert gave it three stars, or a half-star less than what he gave “Horrible Bosses,” which was so bad I couldn’t even last through the DVD, and that’s saying something. It was amazingly crude, and do you know what it takes for me to say that? I, who once worked in newsrooms? How did we get to this point? One minute you’re laughing at the semen-as-hair-gel gag in “There’s Something About Mary,” the next a character in a Judd Apatow movie is dressing down another for shaving his balls in the bathroom and leaving the hair in the toilet, so that “my shit looked like a stuffed animal.” This was in “Knocked Up,” which later took a tonal shift to suggest the main character is positively changed by the presence of a child in his life. In other words, they girlied it up to make it suitable date-night fare, which suggests there are women out there who sat through the turd conversation en route to the baby-picture montage over the closing credits, and were pleased. What a world.

Although I hope “Bad Santa” comes around on one of the cable channels in the next few days. Because that was one that did crudity right. More or less.

Excuse me, we have a correction: Technically the winter solstice is at 12:30 a.m. tomorrow, I’m told. In my time zone anyway.

I’m still waiting for the coffee to kick in, so how about a picture I stole from a total stranger’s Facebook?

That’s our own MMJeff on the left. I guess he brought the gold to the infant Jesus, although think, Jeff: If you were traveling by donkey, preparing for the flight into Egypt, would a ginormous candlestick be a practical gift? Still, nice that you played your part in the living Nativity — you really are a Boy Scout, aren’t you? There was one last weekend at the church next to my Kroger store. The camel-wrangler wore the traditional burnoose over jeans and sneakers, and took a few calls on his cell phone while children petted his dromedary. If the wise men lived at this latitude, they would most definitely wear sweatshirts beneath their kingly finery.

Shoes are always the Achilles heel of the period costume. At how many renaissance faires have I watched knights and ladies touring the grounds in Tevas? The Johnny Appleseed Festival in Fort Wayne featured electricity-free carnival rides — I always liked the wind-up spinning thing — run by people wearing Nikes. The true non-farb Civil War re-enactor pays through the nose for a pair of true Civil War-era reproduction boots, which did not come in left-right configurations until afterward.

So, speaking of movies: Alan and I have finally accepted the inevitable, and are doing the years-overdue adult chore of writing our wills. We had the signing at the lawyer’s office yesterday. Without going into too much none-of-anyone’s-business detail, I was delighted to learn that the living trust we’ve set up features a “stuff” section, designed to dispose of particular valuables and/or personal possessions, should that be important to us. We can hand-write our wishes there, amend and cross them out, which strikes me as a very cinematic thing to have in one’s safe-deposit box. The first person I knew in life who had a significant relative die came back from the funeral with the disappointing news that wills aren’t all they’re cracked up to be in the movies. There was no dramatic reading in a lawyer’s office with the women all dressed in black, clutching hankies in their grief. There was no itemized list of goodies, with flowery legal instructions about their disposition, just some version of “I leave all my stuff to X, Y and Z,” and they can sort things out.”

I may, just for laffs, fill out this section with a list of identical distributions, all but the last one crossed out, to suggest a mercurial temperament I simply don’t have.

OK, so, bloggage:

The tea party takes the reins of power: The queer-bashin’ Troy mayor’s path through public service continues to be rocky, and this time it has nothing to do with her I-heart-NY tote bag. She and her confederates defeated a long-planned transit hub in that city earlier this week, by a 4-3 vote, bucking the wishes of the business community, which turned on her with a vengeance this week. The project came with $8 million in federal aid, but they reasoned that with the government drowning in debt, they must do their part, and said no thanks. The Chamber of Commerce was furious — do you know how hard it is for a suburban mayor in Oakland County to piss off a chamber of commerce? — and yesterday a remarkable letter leaked from a government-affairs manager from a major automotive supplier, saying he would put the word out in the business community that they “no longer consider the City of Troy for future site considerations, expansions or new job creation.” Wow.

The mayor, for her part, claims she’s heard “nothing but congratulations and accolades.”

Cathy Cambridge falls out in a black evening dress, looks smashing. I kind of wish she’d put her hair up for events like this, however, if only so we can ogle the rocks.

Perhaps some of you followed the link to the latest story about embarrassing College Republicans yesterday; I think Cooz posted something in comments. A roundup here, at Romenesko’s site. A student tweeted something offensive about the president: My president is black, he snorts a lot of crack. Holla. #2012 #Obama. You know what bugs me most about that? That stupid holla. Y’know: I’m a racist, but I still want to use hip-hop slang.

OK, the Great Christmas Cleaning Project begins. Holla!

Someone in one of my social networks posted a quote — “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” — and attributed it to Plato. Even allowing for translation from ancient Greek, that doesn’t sound like Plato’s territory (like I would know), but it sent me in search of the original.

For those of you who care, I have been deploying this aphorism with greater frequency of late; life with a teenager will do that, especially when they get wound up about their persecution by this or that teacher, or the relative weirdness of this or that classmate. I hate to get all Hallmark on her, but it’s a useful observation that you don’t know what’s going on in another person’s life, that sometimes it expresses itself in persecution or weirdness, which underlines what I think should be the central message of parent to child at this time in their lives: It’s not about you, and it’s hardly ever about you, so chill.

In the past, I would trot off to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, a copy of which I own. Because I am crazy, and because I used to leaf through it when I was bored and stuck for inspiration. For the hell of it and the pre-internet thrill of it all, I just did. Not in there, which shoots the Plato attribution all to hell. So I turn to the mighty internet, and quickly bog down in the Straight Dope discussion boards, where smart people who know everything gather, and have already taken this one apart.

Not Plato. Probably Ian MacLaren, a Scottish author who left us in 1907.

It took more legwork, but part of me misses reference books. Dictionaries, thesauruses, reference grammars, Bartlett’s Familiar, etc. (Not “The Elements of Style.” I read Strunk & White, but I never picked it up again, and writers who hold it up like a beacon through the murky, wordy darkness get on my last goddamn nerve. It’s usually some twit in a bow tie. A useful text if you want to write like E.B. White, but not everyone does.) I miss them like I miss smoking — as a writer’s procrastination device. Stuck? Lean back, light a cigarette, think for a couple minutes. Or select one of your tomes and leaf through it for a minute or two, in search of le mot juste. In fact, there’s a book by that very title, Le Mot Juste, to help you find just the right foreign word or phrase to punctuate your essay. For writers who cannot afford George Will’s quote boy, it’s nice to have.

Perhaps my all-time favorite was “An Incomplete Education,” now in its umpteenth edition, which is a veritable internet full of interesting things you should have learned by now, but probably didn’t. The section on world religions alone is worth the cover price if, like me, your catechism class didn’t cover Zoroastrianism.

All are more or less obsolete in the age of Wikipedia and a billion websites as close as your laptop.

Do you have any favorite reference volumes? That you still use?

I’m running late today, so let’s get to the bloggage:

A nanny by profession, a photographer in her off hours, but she collected some amazing snaps from the streets of Chicago in the 1950s. Vivian Maier, the posthumous tribute.

Something I miss about being a columnist — pulling any old thing out of your ass, and getting it published:

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

Yes, it’s Condi-mania! Oh, and yes, nowadays I pull any old thing out of my ass and publish it, but I no longer get paid for it. Big difference.

I’ve become a fan of Ken Jennings’ Twitter stream. Yes, the “Jeopardy” champion. And you would, too:

BREAKING: Tim Tebow currently in the locker room watching a Bergman film, smoking Gauloises, contemplating “God’s awful silence.”

My phone just autocorrected “dreidels” into “strudels.” Strudels! That is just insult to injury.

Funny guy. OK, gotta run. Have a good one, all.

As no one has ever been able to explain how the use of a neti pot differs significantly from a kinder, gentler waterboarding, I’ve never been tempted to use one. I’ve never had sinus problems, and I was one of those kids whose day at the pool could be ruined by getting water up my nose — it really is one of my least-favorite physical sensations. I understand many of you may well swear by pouring gently warmed saltwater into your nasal passages as the first step on the road to a happy nose, and to you I say: How nice. But get that thing away from me.

So when, settling in for my shift of harvesting health-care news last night, I clicked onto Google’s health page and saw a headline reading, Improper use of neti pots linked to deaths, and read this showstopper of a lead —

BATON ROUGE, La., Dec. 18 (UPI) — Louisiana health officials warn the improper use of neti pots is linked to two deaths in the state caused by a so-called brain-eating amoeba.

— I felt vindicated. Although, in fairness, when you read the story, it sounds like it’s more about the poor quality of tap water in Louisiana than anything else. The brain-eating amoeba in question mainly infects swimmers in warm water in places like Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and please, hold your Cletus jokes. The fact this stuff can live in warm tap water would make me hesitant to take a damn shower in bayou country without seeing a microbiology report from the local treatment plant.

And people make jokes about Detroit’s tap water. (Which is actually pretty good.)

With that, Monday begins. Stand by for news! But first, some bloggage:

Retiring Sports Illustrated super-photographer Walter Iooss Jr. tells a few stories on his way out, including this one about LeBron James:

LeBron became a villain to many after The Decision. I’ve seen a lot of entourages, but none like his. In July 2010 I got an assignment from Nike to shoot LeBron right after his TV special announcing his move to the Heat. We rented the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, where the Lakers and the Clippers used to play, and there were 53 people on my crew-including hair and makeup artists, production people, a stylist. I had $10,000 in Hollywood lighting. It was huge. When LeBron arrived, it was as if Nelson Mandela had come in. Six or seven blacked-out Escalades pulled up, a convoy. LeBron had bodyguards and his masseuse. His deejay was already there, blasting. This for a photo shoot that was going to last an hour, tops.

And that is how a monster is made. If you like sports, or just have time to kill today, it’s worth digging up the whole story at SI. I once knew a photographer who admired Iooss, and he taught me how to pronounce the name — yose, rhymes with dose.

A copy editor at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel inserts a rock ‘n’ roll reference that will be understood by a tiny fraction of the readership:

LAWYERS: Walker camp sues election board
VOTES: 500,000 recall signatures claimed
AND MONEY: Huge dollars flow to governor

Kim Jong Il is dead, which means it’s time to take another look at this remarkable photo, and marvel at the people who have enough time on their hands to produce videos like this, which we are encouraged to snicker at while we wait for the mood to darken as new instability encroaches upon the Korean peninsula. (Even if you disapprove of the joke, some amazing visuals.)

Finally, we have some news today.

I got a job. A full-time, actual j-o-b with bennies and everything. It’s been fun freelancing and odd-jobbing, but it was time for a change, and the change is a pretty great one — I’ll be a staff writer with The Center for Michigan. It’s a think tank. But it’s not a sinecure, that word that so often walks hand in hand with it. Maybe some day I’ll have a think-tank sinecure, but the Center for Michigan calls itself a “think-and-do” tank, which means work beyond just thinkin’. They are nonpartisan and “radically centrist,” and reject the usual institutional model of pounding out position papers for the benefit of one party’s intelligentsia, but are instead focused on being a bottom-up voice for the majority of Michigan residents who don’t fall into standard left-right slots. You can read more about what they’re about here.

I think it’s going to be a pretty good gig. I’ll be doing project reporting for their online publication, Bridge, as well as bringing a new voice to 42 North, their blog. Which brings us to this blog.

I always knew this place would be a problem for some employer, somewhere down the line. Editors don’t exactly want to own your thoughts, but they don’t like the idea of you expressing them anywhere other than in pre-approved spaces. It’s just the way it is. But over the years and with the help of everyone here, I’ve managed to attract and hold a respectable number of eyeballs for a blog that isn’t about anything in particular, and that has value these days, too. So, for now, NN.C will go on. I may throttle back on frequency a bit — perhaps three writing posts a week, and two photos-plus-links, not sure. (I still have to — wait for it — think about it some more.) I’ll be teaching two classes at Wayne this term, in addition to my new duties, so time will be short and valuable. I will be linking to my work over at the Center, of course. If you want to see NN.C continue, the best thing you can do is take the time to click there and astound my new bosses with my Venus flytrap-like drawing power.

All this begins after the first of the year. New year, new job, new directions. I think it’s gonna be a good one.

Christopher Hitchens has left for the undiscovered country. Like many of you, I found him maddening at times, and his advocacy for the Iraq war was insane. It goes without saying that his boosterism of that tragedy was a grave mistake, but he was frequently a contrarian, and even though a lot of his writing on that subject made me think he was simply a faltering alky with a clever pen, you could never write him off. He was too smart and his writing too entertaining for that. What can I say? I respected the talent and the work ethic. He was writing for publication to the very end.

And I’ll give him this: He opened my eyes about Mother Teresa. His attacks on her frequently turn up in the one-paragraph summations of his life — her name was in her lifetime and even after her death shorthand for selflessness and God’s love embodied in human form, a living saint, but once you looked past the surface, you had to admit he had a point. Here’s the short version of his argument, and here’s the shorter one: Mother Teresa and her order exalted suffering, and provided “comfort” to the dying of Calcutta, but refused to take any active steps to prevent it in the first place, or even to treat it beyond prayer and a little brow-mopping. They’d pick a dying man up out of the gutter and bring him inside, but give him a shot of morphine? No. (Christ didn’t get any morphine.) When they did administer drugs, her untrained, ignorant nuns didn’t follow standard medical protocols — reusing needles, etc. Meanwhile, she flitted around the world for photo ops with monsters like Charles Keating and the Duvalier family, serving as sort of a moral money-launderer.

(He wrote a book about this, if you’re interested.)

It’s hard to get more contrarian than that, but he managed. A part of me thinks he became a warmonger simply because he wanted to be the guy everyone paid attention to at parties.

For a lighter version of the man’s work, I recommend his first-person account of getting a “crack, back and sack” wax, from Vanity Fair some years back:

Here’s what happens. You have to spread your knees as far apart as they will go, while keeping your feet together. In this “wide stance” position, which is disconcertingly like waiting to have your Pampers changed, you are painted with hot wax, to which strips are successively attached and then torn away. Not once, but many, many times. I had no idea it would be so excruciating. The combined effect was like being tortured for information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly) sandpaper handjob. The thing is that, in order to rip, you have to grip. A point of leverage is required: a place that can be firmly gripped and pulled while the skin is tautened. Ms. Turlington doesn’t have this problem. The businesslike Senhora Padilha daubed away, took a purchase on the only available handhold, and then wrenched and wrenched again. The impression of being a huge baby was enhanced by the blizzards of talcum powder that followed each searing application. I swear that several times she soothingly said that I was being a brave little boy … Meanwhile, everything in the general area was fighting to retract itself inside my body.

What a baby. I’ve had many waxes in that area, and it’s not THAT bad. Take two Tylenol half an hour previous and lay off the caffeine for a while. Excites the nerve endings.

I have to get moving, so let’s hop to the bloggage:

I’ve noticed that with the Republican fringe’s insistence on repeating the old “40 percent of Americans pay no income tax at all” line — which is another way of saying 40 percent of Americans are too poor to owe anything — has come a refreshing new attitude among its low-level pundits, a willingness to scold the impoverished for their circumstances. We might call this the Are There No Workhouses school, and encompasses the Gene Marks piece discussed earlier here, “If I Were a Poor Black Kid.” Yesterday our own Jason T. pointed me to this graybeard’s reminiscence in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which begins:

Nobody scolds the needy anymore.

Can you guess what he then proceeds to do? Yes! Scold the needy! You’ve read many versions of this before, a why-in-my-day-by-cracky lament that if you’re not starving or if you have a cell phone or cable TV, you can’t really consider yourself poor. He points out a couple cases of people who have no cause to complain over having to downgrade from ground sirloin to ground chuck, etc. I always want to ask these folks why they have problem with the poor living better than they did a century ago, but never mention how the rich have similarly upgraded. Wealthy people live like pashas today; how many of you grew up, as I did, next door to a doctor, who lived in a pretty standard three-bedroom house? Today that would be the size of his ski condo. His third home.

Finally, because I know we’ve noted this before, more carnage in Waterloo: A cop shot, his killer dead. You have to check out the mugshot of the guy, with what looks to be a Chinese character tattooed on his face. Guess what he was wanted for? Anyone? It starts with M.

OK, must run. Have a great weekend.

Happy Christmas, the war is over.

Thank you, George W. Bush, et al, for this suckhole of American blood and dollars. It took as long as World War II and the Civil War laid end-to-end. (Not as long as Vietnam, though!) We removed a dictator, killed tens of thousands of civilians and tried to impose Maryland’s motor-vehicle codes on Baghdad traffic jams. We made millions more for Blackwater, er, Xe, er, Academi. Sent a few more items onto the underground antiquities market. Inspired some truly awful pop music. Spread our special kind of American magic, broke a few pots, and now, we’re outta there.

God bless Pottery Barn, for giving us the central metaphor for this particular adventure.

Many great books have come out of this war, I’ll say that. Fiasco, The Good Soldiers, and the one from which I learned that wonderful detail about Maryland traffic laws, Imperial Life in the Emerald City, which I highly recommend. Just the first chapter will cross your eyes and boil your blood, detailing how we went into a Muslim country on the grounds of helping them shed a dictator and establish democracy, then set up our command center with imported workers who dreamed up Barbecue Night in the mess hall. Yes, a celebration of pork in a Muslim nation. So the Americans don’t get too homesick.

I recall relocating to Ann Arbor in late summer 2003. Fort Wayne was dotted with yard signs, provided by the local GOP office, reading GOD BLESS OUR TROOPS. In A2, the signs read NO WAR. A useful reminder that I was not alone in thinking this as a bad idea from the get-go.

What are your war memories, from early-middle-late stages of it? I recall friends who stopped speaking, a few who simply grew obsessed. Alan put himself on the shit list for saying, in a story meeting, that it was dumb to pretend the war was over just because GWB had pronounced mission accomplished; we’ll be there for years, he said. Scowls from the managing editor.

I recall being hopeful this idea would work, but believing it would likely not go anywhere near as well as we were promised. When the only guy who’s actually been a wartime soldier says we shouldn’t be hasty, I’m inclined to believe that guy. Not Dick Cheney.

OK, time for some bloggage:

In keeping with our war theme, a short film that I worked on is doing a Kickstarter for festival entry expenses. There’s a 5-minute video at this link, which includes a trailer with a lot of the visual FX our very talented team created, as well as stills from the production. This was a micro-budget deal, in the very low four figures, most of which went for a two-day insurance policy so we could use SAG actors. (You might recall our lead, Scott Norman, in his gripping part as That Guy Who Got About Three Lines in a “Detroit 187” cold open.) Worth watching for the fabulous-ruins shots alone.

Perhaps security cameras will make stealth campaigns like this beside the point, but who cares, because I love them anyway: The yarn bomber of Ann Arbor.

Last week I queried my Facebook circle about what is an appropriate holiday-season tip for a newspaper carrier. I guess now I should make sure I’m dealing with the right people, eh? (I think I am. None were this tacky about sticking their hands out.)

And now Thursday awaits. Enjoy yours.

Eight-thirty in the morning, looks like another all-day rain, and if you’re shopping for Murk, well, we’re selling Murk today, cheap. I just raised the blinds all the way, and I can still hardly see across the room. The earth needs its rest this time of year, and we shouldn’t argue. We should all go back to bed, but that’s not the way the world works. Whimper all you want. No one is listening.

I’m thinking I’m going to make gingerbread later today. Not for gingerbread houses, but Nick Malgieri’s basic gingerbread, a tea cake that goes great with applesauce. Recipe’s in one of his books and not online, where the archive is cluttered with gingerbread men and cookies and other Christmas-y stuff. I should get with the program, but I choose not to.

What a great discussion you guys had yesterday about the Fuqua School. Like Kim, the era of Massive Resistance was mainly unknown to me, too, and the principal’s we-wuz-robbed letter on the school website is laughable. The psychology of racism — or any other shameful matter — is interesting to me. For years here in the Grosse Pointes, a system of institutionalized racism carried out by real-estate agents effectively kept the area not just white, but the right kind of white. There was a story about it in a 1960 edition of Time magazine, on the web but only fully available to subscribers, or you can read a summation at the bottom of this story by yours truly. Private investigators were employed by something called the Grosse Pointe Property Owners Association to vet potential homebuyers:

The three-page questionnaire, scaled on the basis of “points” (highest score: 100), grades would-be home owners on such qualities as descent, way of life (American?), occupation (Typical of his own race?), swarthiness (Very? Medium? Slightly? Not at all?), accent (Pronounced? Medium? Slight? None?), name (Typically American?), repute, education, dress (Neat or slovenly? Conservative or flashy?), status of occupation (sufficient eminence may offset poor grades in other respects). Religion is not scored, but weighed in the balance by a three-man Grosse Pointe screening committee. All prospects are handicapped on an ethnic and racial basis: Jews, for example, must score a minimum of 85 points, Italians 75, Greeks 65, Poles 55; Negroes and Orientals do not count.

The Time story went on to note that the Pointes were already home to several of the Detroit area’s more prominent Italian-American gangsters; maybe they squeaked through on the “sufficient eminence” clause. And in 1960, the system had its defenders:

The questionnaire and scoreboard, says Grosse Pointe Realtor Paul Maxon, “have been very successful, have kept property values up, and are approved by at least 95% of the people out here.” The whole idea of the system is to keep out people who tend toward “cliqueishness,” “Old World customs,” and “clannishness,” e.g., “an Italian fruit vendor.” Furthermore, real estate men point out that Grosse Pointe has a number of Polish, Greek and Southern European people scattered throughout the suburbs. Says Realtor Maxon: “I am sure Albert Einstein would have been accepted here.”

This was 50 years ago, and the Realtor’s comments are true today, although I’d hope the percentage of approving residents has fallen. But there are still many who would, in their heart of hearts, love to see some sort of screening system that would guarantee them better neighbors, like one of those infamous New York City co-op board that pokes through all your financial statements and club memberships before granting you the privilege of buying an apartment.

But racism persists, here and everywhere, sometimes in shocking displays. The local newspaper will sometimes note, in crime stories, that “the 16-year-old juvenile, a Detroit resident, was released to his 32-year-old mother.” A story last year about a teenage girl, “a Detroit resident,” who stole a car at knifepoint from another girl her age, a Grosse Pointer, outside her father’s office, was illustrative. Of course they didn’t need to note that the thief was black and the victim white, but just in case the reader was particularly dumb, the reporter quoted extensively from the thief’s written statement, a tragedy detailed in run-on sentences, misspelled words, and incorrect declension of the verb “to be.” I’m sure many readers had a yuk over that one.

Running a little late on time here, so let’s hop to the bloggage:

A sneakily seductive essay from Salon in which the author details his term selling high-end housewares in Los Angeles, naming names all the way through:

Bridget Fonda, who had married film composer Danny Elfman and had stopped appearing in movies, shopped there compulsively. I have vivid memories of loading cumbersome decorative pots into the trunk of Elfman’s Maserati. Zach de La Rocha, the former frontman of Rage Against the Machine, apparently had a lot of time on his hands, too, because he drove his cool Mercedes over all the time and drank coffee at the cafe attached to the store by himself. He looked desperately bored and was always alone. Nicole Richie was not alone when she came to the cafe, nor was Kevin Costner. Victoria Beckham wore her sunglasses indoors, throughout lunch. David Schwimmer came a few times, alone, and was precisely as bitter and patronizing as you’d expect him to be. Gary Oldman was completely banal, just a middle-aged man shopping for furniture with his impossibly gorgeous 20-something lady friend.

But that’s not what makes it. It’s the sly observations on how you sell to these folks.

Damn security cameras! Why we need tabloids in the world.

How do you hold a job with the same company for 65 years? A retiring 83-year-old offers some tips:

“You do the best you can,” Simler says. If you can’t get something done today, she continues, make sure to finish it tomorrow. Don’t give up. Enjoy the people you work with. And if you find a job you like, keep it.

Words to live by. Whether it’s murky or sunny where you are, I hope your Wednesday is a good one.

If any of you are looking for a good way to make green beans — and who isn’t? I ask you, who isn’t? — you can’t do much better than Mark Bittman’s spicy-sweet take on this most mundane vegetable. I know I’ve mentioned it here before, but I just made them for the third time, and was reminded again how good they are. They do depend on you being the sort of person who has almonds on hand, and dried chilies, but if you’re not, it’s worth adding both to your shopping list. They’re that good.

(And if you don’t have almonds around but you do have pine nuts, try the garlicky variation using pine nuts. I plan to, next time, now that I’ve used up the last of the almonds.)

And that is today’s installment of What Did You Have For Dinner, which I was reminded last week is perhaps a too-common topic around here. Well, hell. I can’t sparkle every day, and sometimes that’s the most interesting thing to happen in my rather sedate life. I’m writing this Sunday night to get a jump on Monday’s grind, and for now, at least, all is right with the world, which is a trite way to say I got the laundry done, Sunday dinner made/served/cleaned up after, and I more or less know what the week to come will bring. Plus, the full moon is rising in a clear sky, and I can see it from where I sit. Little things.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, I made that French pork stew BobNG suggested last weekend, and it was great. I liked the prunes, Alan didn’t, but we both agreed it was the fresh tarragon that put it over the top. Again, not something most people keep on hand, but worth a trip to the fresh herbs section of your grocery. It’s a very good recipe.

Which then reminds me that the poobahs at Cook’s Illustrated — where the French pork stew came from — were on “Fresh Air” last week, and gave a delightful interview about what it’s like to run a test kitchen. They said the biggest challenge is people who don’t follow the recipe, substituting this for that and then complaining it didn’t work. There was an anecdote about a man who whined about a chicken recipe that had required about half an hour of heat — the worst chicken he’d ever had, he said, before adding that he hadn’t had any chicken, and had substituted shrimp. Oh. Well. Cook’s is known for testing recipes dozens of times to get the very best one, and I’m indebted to them for solving my au gratin potatoes problem once and for all. Mine always turned out runny, but not anymore. The secret: Half-and-half, and start them on the stovetop before they go into the oven. Yum.

Have I bored you senseless yet? Good. Then let’s go to the bloggage:

I listened to Hank regarding “All-American Muslim,” and haven’t been watching:

Though there will be occasional arguments and mini-crises that come along whenever you put any human beings on TV and then tell them to pretend the camera crew is invisible, “All-American Muslim” is mainly an act of public relations, going out of its way to avoid becoming “The Real Housewives of Dearborn.”

What I said up there about having a rather sedate life applies to most people, and you don’t have to live here, or in any metro area where Muslims reach critical mass, very long before they start to blend into the scenery. But that wasn’t enough for the Florida Family Association, which started an email campaign to lean on its biggest advertiser, Lowe’s, which folded like a cheap tent, although now that there’s been some loud pushback, they’re doing the dither, in a Facebook statement:

“Lowe’s has received a significant amount of communication on this program, from every perspective possible. Individuals and groups have strong political and societal views on this topic, and this program became a lighting rod for many of those views. As a result we did pull our advertising on this program. We believe it is best to respectfully defer to communities, individuals and groups to discuss and consider such issues of importance.”

How special. How respectful. In my winding path through the web many days, I’m amazed at how the Islam-exists-to-destroy-us meme flourishes on right-wing sites, and there’s simply no doubt in my mind that a North Carolina-based corporation is a particularly ripe target for the various “family associations” out there stirring the pot. Too bad, as they led the way with bilingual signage, and seem to at least acknowledge a rapidly diversifying nation, although maybe they think it only exists among contractors.

Oh, and speaking of bigotry, the case of the gay-hatin’ Troy mayor seems to be finding another gear. She’s already showing signs of fatigue — she’s tired, and she doesn’t feel well — and the Chamber of Commerce, generally the squarest, dullest people in any town, does not like this woman, especially now that gay groups are calling for shopping boycotts. (Troy is home to the area’s swankiest mall, which may be too big to dent, but maybe not restaurants and smaller stores.) One of their leaders was on a local radio show this week telling listeners the voters were victims of their own apathy, and elected a tea party ignoramus because they didn’t do their homework. The one quoted in the linked story is similarly dismissive. This woman may crumple yet.

And as always, when I read stories like this, I reflect that I never thought I’d live long enough to see gay people throw weight around like this, but whaddaya know? Progress is possible after all.

Among the many things I feel no obligation to pay the first bit of attention to, I’d put pro football in the top five. However, I understand that there’s this quarterback out there named Tim Tebow, and he’s doing something newsworthy? In matters like this, I rely on the guys at LGM, and of course TBogg.

OK, time to get out of here. The week lies ahead of us. Let’s embrace it.