The weather gave us a break the last couple of days. All my friends were making jokes on Facebook about that odd glowing orb in the sky. Ha ha. I took advantage and did my usual one-hour cruise from my house to Mariner Park in Detroit and back. No one was exercising their pit bull in the field, but the fishing plaza was full, as usual. Someone had their car parked with the doors open, playing old-skool:

You can see why it’s a popular place. The marina to the northeast is in Grosse Pointe Park’s Windmill Pointe Park, for my money the best of the six residents-only parks in the GP. I can’t go there without an invitation — when they say residents-only, they mean it — but I’ve been there enough to get, y’know, a feel of the place. It includes a pool, fitness center, movie theater, etc. Mariner Park doesn’t even have a bathroom, but I have never visited when people weren’t having a good time. People bring hibachis and coolers and sometimes cook the fish fresh out of the water. Hard to go wrong with that.

That whole area down there is great to explore. Much of it is standard dilapidated Detroit ghetto, but even here, it’s location, location, location, and there are many hidden gems down there. I gasped when I first saw this one, a little bit of Newport Beach in the frost belt. It’s on Harbor Island Road, a one-block stretch that is indeed an island, surrounded by canals, reachable by one bridge. The residents could probably gate it if they wanted. Most of it is far more modest housing than this, with a community garden at the end.

This city, it is a complicated place. Not everything is as it seems. I was pleased to get out and see a bit of it yesterday. Today it’s rainy and overcast again. Balls.

But get out I must, so I will leave you with some bloggage that will tie you up all day:

Nearly 100 fantastic pieces of journalism from 2010, much of which you probably missed. I know I did. Who can keep up with the information barrage? And still, somehow Kim Kardashian pushes her way through. Go figure. Anyway, quality stuff there. You’ll like something in it, I promise.

Is there actually a restaurant in Los Angeles called Pink Taco? And people eat there? Ew.

I didn’t watch the GOP debate last night. Did you? What did I miss? I’m intrigued by this frame grab; are they all pledging allegiance, or what?

That’s it for me, today. Sorry. Friday morning is as busy as Mondays lately. Have a great weekend.

Sorry, late start today. I spent my blogging time writing a column for my other site. It was on a plan to designate bike routes in Grosse Pointe — not paths, mind you, only a few signs and stripes on existing roads — that seems to have stalled. Nothing happens quickly here, but this is approaching ridiculousness. When Fort Wayne outpaces you, you are one foot-draggin’ place, cuz.

Amount of impact I believe this column will have: Zero.

That’s always been my impact as a columnist. It doesn’t bother me, and never has. One of the hazards of being a paid commentator, on anything, is that it doesn’t take much feedback to swell a person’s head, and once that happens, everything you write sounds like it’s being delivered in the Roman senate by some guy in a toga. Remember when Charles Krauthammer laid out a strategy whereby the Bush administration could walk back the Harriet Miers SCOTUS nomination, and three days later, they followed it pretty much like a road map? Remember how his prose continued to be lively, and he didn’t take himself too seriously?

Look, here’s a picture of him with the closest thing to a smile that ever crosses his face. You want to know how old I am? I remember when Charles Krauthammer occasionally filed a lighter piece about raising his son.

On the other hand, you could argue that failing to take myself seriously is what doomed my career. I remember once, sitting in my little semi-private cubicle at work, overhearing a copy editor making a service appointment in the next one over. She was working very hard to impress the person on the other end about how valuable her time was. That’s a phrase that has never crossed my lips — “my time is valuable, too.” (I will say, “life’s too short for this bullshit” from time to time, however.)

On the career front, since many of you expressed concern yesterday: Thanks for it. I batted out a quick 600 words on the Critical Mass ride yesterday and sold it to a local magazine. I also contacted a person who has used me in the past, having heard that she recently lost an assistant just as she’s embarking on a project that will require many fresh new words, and that’s looking good. And I heard from a few more folks privately. I’ll get through this, although I doubt my time will be all that much more valuable.

So let’s make a quick pass through the bloggage. We have some good stuff:

The Situation Room photo, analyzed like the May Day photograph. Thanks, Jolene.

Amazing: Buried in all that Wikileak information, this.

The silver horse’s ass is running for governor of Indiana. I’m sure he will bring his best radio voice to the job. Meanwhile, Gail Collins considers the current occupant of that office:

But about Mitch Daniels. The political world has been abuzz with speculation that he will run for president. Centrist Republicans loved it when he began urging the party to keep its eye on the deficit-reduction prize and stop obsessing about social issues. “Try to concentrate on making ends meet, which Washington obviously has failed to do for a long time, and have other policy debates in other places if you can,” he advised.

He then went home and announced that he would sign a bill to strip Planned Parenthood of Medicaid financing.

Good doggie!

OK, time to get out of here. Have a good half-day, all.

Bad news yesterday — both of the classes I’ve been teaching this year failed to fill for summer term, so I’m not exactly out of work, but my patchwork quilt of income sources just developed a large hole. My income stream lost a tributary, making it more of an income rill. (Rill: a small stream; a shallow channel cut in the ground by running water.) It’s not all that much money, but teaching was one of those things that tended to push other income-earning activities out of the way. In the spinning plates of my career, my freelance-writing plates are wobbling badly; now I have to run back there and give them another push. Just as I get them back up to speed, it’ll be time to teach again, assuming the courses fill in the fall.

Position wanted: Writer who knows what a rill is, plus facility with antique metaphors like plate-spinning and patchwork quilts, seeks paid employment. New and old-media expertise with portfolio that covers journalism to marketing, books to explainer copy in museum displays. Jane of all trades involving a pen.

Better get started on that Critical Mass piece.

Do you have Critical Mass in your city? Doing a little research on it the last few days, I’m amazed at the diversity of its impact. I first heard of it via Jon Carroll’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle some years back, and I gather the Bay area is where it was born. Much of cycling culture has its roots there, and Critical Mass rises out of a certain obnoxiousness born out of unpleasant encounters with cars. We can go back and forth on this and probably will, but it’s fair to say that in cities like San Francisco, or Chicago, New York and a handful of others, motorists and cyclists are the Israelis and Palestinians of transportation, and Critical Mass is a monthly intifada, a deliberate traffic jam of hundreds of cyclists moving through them on a rush-hour Friday, blowing lights, in yo face, saying, essentially, Fuck you.

My school of thought says obnoxiousness is no attitude for diplomacy, but I went on the Critical Mass ride anyway. I can explain rationalize: The Detroit ride is at 7 p.m., not 4:30, an hour when Friday-night Detroit is largely deserted. Our knot of 100 or so made for a pretty small peloton, and I’d be shocked if anyone in a car was delayed for more than one extra cycle of a traffic light.

And man, it was fun. Illegal fun, perhaps, but on the grand continuum of all the illegal fun being had in Detroit on the last Friday of any month, blowing through lights on a bicycle doesn’t even rate.

Breakin’ the law: It’s all relative.

So, bloggage:

I’m continuing to go through the bin Laden mop-up stories, and find nearly all of them fascinating. A sub-sub-ancillary story was the fake Martin Luther King Jr. quote, and this Q-and-A with the woman whose innocent Facebook status update started it all might be worth your time, if that sort of thing interests you. It only interests me in terms of my career as a tester of internet-related bullshit. I guess I’d be suspicious if anyone quoted MLK to me outside of the “content of our character” chestnut, but most of my Facebook friends know better.

I know one of our loyal commenters — I’m looking at you, 4dbirds — is a poker player. Getta loada this. We are all laid low by our vices, one way or another. (And may I just say? Why do lamestream media sites waste FTEs on internet-culture reporters, i.e., the person whose job it is to stay online all day long and report on the Shiba Inu puppies? They will never beat Adrian Chen at Gawker at this game. He is the Dexter Filkins of the internet.)

Eric Z. remembers another daring raid approved by a president — which didn’t go so well.

Ha ha. I promise, no Rickroll or Linda Blair devil-face at the end.

Finally, I keep forgetting to post this, which I shot with my now-obsolete HD Flip camera last weekend, at the Dorais Velodrome in Detroit, reclaimed from nature last summer by the Mower Gang. I could be wrong, but I suspect this was another renegade event, held in a city where doing these sorts of things is so, so easy. Which is one reason I love it. This was the “tiny triathlon,” three laps on the bike, one lap on foot, and finish through the flooded infield.

Off to earn a living. More or less.

I wrote most of what follows over the weekend. So much of it seems dated already; that’s what big news does. However, I will not consider the events of Sunday the way Wolf Blitzer says I should — that I will “always remember” where I was when I heard the news. Great googly moogly, how does anyone stand CNN anymore? There should be room on the dial, shouldn’t there, for one cable network that plays things more or less down the middle, that spares us Lawrence O’Donnell and Megyn Kelly, where producers understand there’s nothing wrong with pictures that don’t have people yakking over them, that when you have nothing to say, sometimes it’s best to say nothing? (Don’t tell me to watch C-SPAN. Please.)

I understand 45 minutes is a long time to vamp in TV time, but there’s a way to do it without making viewers want to kill you, and there’s something about the way Wolf Blitzer does it that makes me insane. It’s some combination of the droning monotone and the expressionless face and the way he doesn’t move more than a millimeter in any direction. He’s the worst of Larry King combined with the sort of faux-seriousness that threatens every anchor, and when you’re paid like these folks, that’s a constant threat. Who would shower that many millions on someone who wasn’t serious?

Yes, yes, the channel-changer. I switched over to David Gregory on NBC. And used the mute function until the big moment.

Let’s gather a little bit of related bloggage, then:

Many excellent tick-tocks out there on the raid. I read this one this morning, but it’s NYT, and you might have used up your monthly access. The WashPost has its own lavish package, and they’re all over the place out there. I think the most important details are these:

1) Some cave, buddy. When it came time to settle in for the long haul, a dialysis patient can’t stay just anywhere.
2) None of this dead-or-alive stuff:

The code name for Bin Laden was “Geronimo.” The president and his advisers watched Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, on a video screen, narrating from his agency’s headquarters across the Potomac River what was happening in faraway Pakistan.

“They’ve reached the target,” he said.

Minutes passed.

“We have a visual on Geronimo,” he said.

A few minutes later: “Geronimo EKIA.”

Enemy Killed In Action. There was silence in the Situation Room.

Finally, the president spoke up.

“We got him.”

And finally,

3) Where did you get that blazer, Hillary? I’m not much of a tweed girl, but that one’s working for you.

They celebrated bin Laden’s death in Dearborn yesterday.

The Free Press has gone mad. For the last hour, this Mitch Albom column has been the top story on their web package on you-know-what. Yes, a man has died, and Mitch has written about it — I know, crazy! This is what the column says: Nothing. It has many short sentences. It reports what Mitch felt when he heard the news. Amount of reporting it contains: Zero. Eat your baby food, readers.

And now, the weekend’s bloggage:

Predictably, the president killed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. You can find the video everywhere; I put this clip on while I got dressed yesterday, followed by this one. There were so many great lines, but this one was my favorite, aimed at Donald Trump:

But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example — no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil’ Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.

There will be some who will point out that Obama undoubtedly had professionals write this for him. True. So does Jon Stewart, so does David Letterman, and yet these are obviously funny people. You could hand the same script to Mitch Daniels, and I doubt he could sell it. But Obama has such a natural ease about him, he makes it work. There was a moment last year when he singled out Michael Steele in the crowd:

I saw Michael Steele backstage when we were taking pictures — AKA Notorious GOP. Michael, who knows what truly plagues America today — taxation without representin’. My brother. I did a similar routine last year, but it always works.

I’d bet a C-note the “my brother” was pure ad lib. And that got the biggest laugh.

So how was your weekend? Mine was pretty fine. Friday night I did the Critical Mass ride. I’d like to tell you all about it, but as it was winding up it occurred to me I should try to pitch it as a story somewhere, and the very next day I read something in the Wall Street Journal, the Bible of the wealthy and successful, that said trying to cut costs was a losing, depressing game, that if you want more money, you should earn more money. OK, sold.

The ride was fun, though, and moved quite a bit faster than I anticipated. Once I got comfortable with the pace and my place in the crowd, I tried to look around a bit. Most of the neighborhoods were familiar, but individual streets were new. We rolled through southwest Detroit and Mexicantown, and passed a tiny tool-and-die shop, about the size of my house, the smallest I’ve ever seen. One garage door in front, a people door next to it, and not much more. Probably employed fewer than a dozen people, tucked into a streetscape like any other neighbor. Maybe some of the employees walked to work. Gone for what looks like decades now, its facade bleached with time. And there are hundreds like it all over town. People forget it wasn’t just the Big 3 that employed people around here, it was these little widget factories, gone, gone, gone.

And you thought only the American media were this silly:

From the moment Pippa arrived at Westminster Abbey, clad in an audaciously simple cowl-necked ivory sheath that skimmed like a glove over her slender yet shapely figure, the nation swooned; you could almost hear the collective male gasp every time she bent to straighten Kate’s dress.

By the time Friday’s royal wedding service was halfway through, Pippa’s crepe-covered derrière was “trending” wildly on social media site Twitter, and by the day’s end there were three separate Facebook pages dedicated to praise of her posterior – with the “Pippa Middleton *** Appreciation Society” leading the panting field. Many other admirers, however, had eyes only for the tantalising glimpses of cleavage afforded by her dress’s teasing neckline.

Donald Trump is no cause for anyone to gloat:

What Trump actually stands for is an exaggerated sense of victimhood. This is the theme that unites his personal style with the political views he has thus far expressed. Are you tired of being pushed around? Are you tired of our country being pushed around? Trump’s political acuity lies in his ability to take these grievances and turn them into politics. His foreign policy views in essence consist of a pledge to bully other nations. China is “decimating our country.” OPEC is imperiling the economy. And ungrateful Libyans and Iraqis are trying to build a society from oil that is rightfully ours. (“We won the war. We take over the oil fields. We use the oil.”) When Bill O’Reilly, in an interview with Trump, seemed taken aback by the idea that we could simply force OPEC or China to do our bidding, Trump appeared surprised that anyone could view international relations as anything more than a contest of machismo. “The messenger is the key,” Trump told O’Reilly. “If you have the right messenger and they know how to deliver the message … you’re going to scare them, absolutely.”

(Via Zorn. I need to be more scrupulous about my HTs.)

For you Hoosiers, a less butt-kissy look at Mitch Daniels as a probable presidential candidate.

Finally, the president wasn’t the only one who looked impressive last Saturday night. Has there ever been a first lady this lovely? Don’t think so.

I had a whole post set up to go this morning, but let’s hold it for a day and declare today the Mission Really Accomplished thread. Living in a big fancy house in Pakistan, getting dialysis? Mark my words: When the truth is well and truly known, it’ll turn out he was dimed out by a pissed-off maid, or some other servant.

Up early to take Kate to school, thought I’d check in with our London desk. The new Mrs. Windsor is just emerging from Westminster Abbey. Look, she’s wearing a dress from David’s Bridal! Love the veil. Very simple, very I’m-not-a-virgin-but-let’s-pretend-just-for-today. But what’s this? It’s CNN, and NO ONE IS TALKING. This may be a miracle. Call the Pope.

It looks like everything went well, then? It seems… OK, here comes the talking. Oh, God, Piers Morgan, lord save us. The dress is Alexander McQueen, not David’s Bridal. I guess that’s not a surprise. Some woman is going on like an idiot about it. It’s a very nice dress, to be sure. I don’t get the equestrian rig. The bride and groom are riding in an open carriage, with no driver, but drawn by a pair of horses, one of which has a rider. I’ve never seen that. What do they call that? He’s posting the trot, and everyone else is sitting it. But they’re still yakking about the dress and “pageantry.” Well, this is certainly a pageant. Shut up, Piers. Let Anderson do the talking. He’s the perfect guy for this job.

I think I’m going to have to move to the web for the details …oh, here they are. They’ll be the Baron and Baroness of Carrickfergus! Let’s sing it together, shall we? The sea is wiiiiide, and I cannot cross oooo-ver… Fortunately, we have satellites now, and we can watch live from our living rooms.

That’s a very pretty dress, but I don’t see the McQueen there. I guess it’s all in the fit and details, but it’s pretty understated for a royal wedding. No Diana here, except for maybe the tiara. Kate’s not even wearing her hair up. How long did it take her to get dressed? Half an hour, tops.

OK, a closeup of the vows. That’s a designer gown. You don’t get a bodice fit like that off the rack.

Something else I learned today: Kate’s sister is named Philippa, Pippa for short. I’ve always wondered how English girls get called Pippa. Now I know.

It looks like it was a pleasant enough affair. Very 21st century. I turned on BBC America for the last half-hour of my shift last night, and it was All Diana, All the Time. Every time I think I’ve forgotten her brother’s awful funeral speech, there he is again — a gehl who was beloved by the wehld. I’ve been on Team Camilla for a while, especially today in her sombrero hat. You can tell she’s dying for a gin and tonic.

We’ve been waiting for a new generation, and I guess it’s here. Many baby princes and princesses for you, Baron and Baroness Carrickfergus.

So what’s on the bloggage tray today?

After I die, I hope someone is around to write something like this about me. A wonderful appreciation of the unsung heroes of newsrooms — the copy editors. An early spotter of talent in our own Hank Stuever, in fact.

When Viagra came on the market, lots of people knew it would be used in ways many of us never expected, but maybe not like this.

I saw a story last night on the AP wire that said Donald Trump, swiftly approaching She-Who stage in my book, made a “profanity-laced” appearance in Vegas, to a wildly adoring audience of morons. It being AP, none of the profanities were detailed. This being Gawker, they were:

On taxing Chinese goods: “Listen you mother fuckers we’re going to tax you 25 percent.”

Sorry to end on such a vulgar note, after opening with royalty, but what can I say? I am an American.

Happy weekend, all.

The governor unveiled his “plan to reinvent Michigan’s educational system” this week. I’ll give this to Rick Snyder — for a Republican, he sure does love big government.

There have been several unveilings in recent weeks, a veritable night at a strip bar, very top-down, delivered with a subtext of I hate to do this, but you’ve demonstrated you’re incapable of managing these things on your own. He’s tied state revenue-sharing with municipalities — an important source of money for cities and towns, getting more important by the minute as tax revenues continue to fall — to the municipalities’ success at instituting so-called “best practices” in their management, as defined by the state.

To some extent I’m sympathetic. So many things in the state no longer work; it’s time for some fresh thinking. I’m not even bothered by the beefed-up emergency financial manager law, currently being distorted by none other than Rachel Maddow on a regular basis. The Grosse Pointes, as I’ve told you before, are comprised of five municipalities that are home to fewer than 48,000 souls, and we have a preposterous duplication of services. Five police departments. Five street departments. Five parks departments. And so on. We share a library and school system, but any discussion of sharing the rest is tied up in a snake’s nest of status and class anxiety, mixed in with the pervasive fear of Detroit that overarches everything — I mean everything — that happens here. To whatever extent Snyder can use the current crisis to force at least some common-sense efficiencies is fine by me.

However, if this is an in-for-a-dime, in-for-a-dollar deal, my guess is the self-described tough nerd, a moderate Republican who ignores the dog-whistle social issues that inflame the rest of the party, is going to find himself at a loss for support for his latest plan. As I said before, this week’s unveiling is education. You have to go way down in the press release — past the nod to early-childhood and the anti-bullying and the “easy-to-understand dashboard” (huh?) to find this nugget:

One of the most innovative departures from the way schools are funded now is to develop what the governor calls an “Any Time, Any Place, Any Way, Any Pace” learning model in which funding follows a student rather than being exclusively tied to a school district.

…The governor also proposed giving parents more options by ensuring every school district participate in “Schools of Choice.” Under the governor’s proposal, residents of a local district will still have the first opportunity to enroll, but schools will no longer be able to refuse out-of-district students.

In other words: Every kid is a walking voucher. In the whole state. Education funding in Michigan is already tied to enrollment; state aid to education is doled out on a per-pupil basis. I’ve mentioned before that Michigan has so-called schools of choice, open-enrollment districts, but the question of whether or not to become one has been up to local boards. Hungrier districts have voted themselves open, but districts like Grosse Pointe’s — and other generally affluent, high-achieving areas — have done anything but. In fact, the No. 1 dog-whistle issue surrounding schools here is “residency,” the belief of some parents that Grosse Pointe’s peaceful, functional schools are being invaded by usurpers with no legal right to attend. I can’t wait to cover the board meetings that will address this issue, should it come to pass. I will pack a lunch.

But what I find most interesting about all of this is: Snyder is a Republican. Republicans supposedly believe in a less top-down government, more local control. Right? That’s what they keep telling me, anyway. They certainly believe in vouchers. He’s calling their bluff. To paraphrase the great star of that party: How’s that tough-nerdy thing workin’ out for ya?

Brian Dickerson, the Freep columnist worth reading, addressed all this in an excellent piece last month:

I wonder how some of those same small-government Republicans would react if a governor with different priorities used the same tools to reward local governments who provide subsidized day care or penalize those who failed to subsidize public transportation. I hear there are federal lawmakers as confident about what makes sense in the realm of health care as Snyder is about what makes sense in the realm of employee compensation.

It’s not the size of the government that matters so much as who is pulling the levers and to what end. And if politics teaches us anything, it’s that one man’s best practice is another man’s socialism.

As they say in the editorial-board meetings: Indeed. (Puff, puff, exhales pipe smoke.)

Today is the last hard-workin’ day of my week, with tomorrow dedicated to some cultivation of future work (as well as my yard, which could use some underbrush-raking). Nevertheless, how about some fresh links?

Bad news out of the South, of course. I don’t know about you, but I doubt I could watch this hellhound bearing down on me and hold my camera steady. I’d be making for someone’s basement. That was an F4, we’re told; the scale goes up to F6, although a 6 is formally described as “inconceivable.”

Wherever you are, I hope you’re safe.

The faces of ignorance and racism: The birther hall of fame.

A few months back, I had Elif Batuman’s “The Possessed” on the nightstand, one of the year’s delights — a collection of essays about Russian literature and the lunatics people who love it. Batuman is still writing. She’s still great.

Off I go. Happy Thursday to all.

Oh, look: The long form is here! This will certainly put an end to birther foolishness once and for all. Let’s check… oh, let’s just drop in on a random site to see how the reaction is. How about Facebook?

Must have taken all this time to “produce” it.

OK, well, that’s not a surprise, is it? Now we can move on to the Afterbirther* movement, who will clamor for a sample of the president’s placenta, as well as a small amount of amniotic fluid, just to put the question to rest once and for all.

* “Afterbirthers” — an Onion story. But you believed it, for a minute, didn’t you?

Because yesterday was a killer and today will be the same, how about some good odds, ends and bloggage? Yesterday it occurred to me my phone might work better if I stripped out some of the old crap cluttering up the innards. I trashed most of the pictures. Here’s one I deleted — my husband with a pair of underpants on his head:

He doesn’t normally wear underpants on his head, but the metadata on the photo tells the story: Taken April 16, 2010. He was scraping and painting the boat bottom, an annual chore. He puts blown-elastic boxer shorts on his head to keep the paint dust out of his ears. If anyone at the boat yard thinks it’s odd, they don’t say anything.

It isn’t just Michigan that lost ground in the 2000s. A Dayton Daily News project looks as the “lost decade” in numbers, and they’re pretty scary:

Since 2000, Ohio’s total annual private payroll dropped by $22 billion, the examination found, a devastating economic implosion that hit every aspect of Ohio’s economy — from grocery stores, restaurants and retail to government budgets and beyond. As one telling indicator, the Ohio Department of Education said the proportion of youngsters receiving federally subsidized school lunches has reached a record high of four for every 10 students.

It’s the same old story:

Driving the lopsided trade is that the Chinese value their currency far below its true value, under-pricing U.S. goods. And that’s not all. Protracted trade disputes that threaten even more local jobs have ensnared key Miami Valley industrial employers such as NewPage and AK Steel.

“I have told one Chinese delegation after another that we don’t like the fact that you manipulate your currency,” (Gov. John) Kasich said in his State of the State address. “And it will stop.”

Really? It will? Send me a postcard.

I don’t follow sports much, although I should, given the amount of public money showered on these zillionaire team owners. But I appreciate a good sneery rant as much as the next gal, and this one, about Frank McCourt, former owner of the L.A. Dodgers, is pretty good:

Frank McCourt bought the Dodgers, a team he couldn’t afford, using money he didn’t have. In a deal that only could’ve happened in the 2000s, McCourt got a $145 million loan from Fox—the Dodgers’ previous owner—to purchase the team, using his parking lots in Boston as collateral. (McCourt defaulted on the loan, and Fox sold the lots.) The team, meanwhile, accrued more than $400 million in debt from 2004 to 2009. In perhaps the most egregious example of McCourt-style accounting, the owner charged his team rent to play in its own stadium, with the proceeds being used to pay the family’s personal bills.

In other words, Frank McCourt was just like every other rich jerk in recession-era America, not to mention the owners of the Mets and the Rangers. The Dodgers fiasco has allowed me to see the greed that caused the financial crisis up close. I don’t have massive investments, and I sold my house before the market crashed. Luckily, I didn’t have a ton to lose in this recession. Instead, I watched someone gamble hundreds of millions that weren’t his, on a baseball team I love, and come up snake eyes.

Via Hank, a great read that should be subtitled: You want the glamorous life of an author? Enjoy one writer’s remembrance of his Uncle Bill, who published 25 books you’ve never heard of:

Bill took great delight in turning any family occasion into a debacle, which I appreciated, kind of:

Florida, 1968–Family vacation. We climb a tower at a scenic overlook. When everyone else is climbing down, Bill grabs me by the ankles and hangs my scrawny, seven-year-old ass, Pip-like, above the Everglades. When I scream and squirm like a psychotic shrimp, he tells me now you know what it feels like to be scared.

Extremely entertaining read, with much truth within.

Tom & Lorenzo on another Michelle Obama outfit, but you should click through for the photos of Malia at the White House Egg Roll, who is apparently growing into a willowy beauty with an inseam as long as her father’s. When did these children do all this growing, says the woman who just went through three years of iPhone photos.

Finally, for you Detroiters: There’s a Critical Mass bike ride Friday night IF IT EVER STOPS RAINING, followed the next day by races at the Dorais Velodrome, both of which I plan to attend IF IT EVER STOPS RAINING. Details here.

But I don’t think it ever will. Stop raining, that is. On to the Mangle. Happy Wednesday, all.

Mitch Albom has a new play opening this week. The Free Press assigned a reporter, and another reporter, but of course no Albom media event would be complete without a contribution from the man himself.

He modestly says “Ernie” is a wonderful play. Srsly. He really does say that:

You start with stories. His humble roots. His speech impediment. The time he got Babe Ruth to sign his shoe. You move through his World War II service, his early career, his relationship with JackieRobinson, Willie Mays, then on to Detroit, the 1968 champions, the Jose Feliciano brouhaha, the 1984 World Series. You explore his firing from the Tigers, his fondness for Tiger Stadium. And you layer the whole thing with one of the great love stories in baseball, Ernie and Lulu.

And you find there is a beautiful play there, a man about to make his farewell speech at a ballpark, wondering how he could be worth such a fuss.

As usual, this is all played in the key of aw-shucks, all I did was write it all down:

The show runs until June, but already in preview performances, it is amazing how people gasp a little when they hear Will speak like Ernie, how they laugh, nod and even cry at familiar stories, and how, when Ernie talks of his lifetime honeymoon with his wife, they all sigh at the same time.

The first time I read about “Ernie,” I declared that I’d rather be locked in for the overnight shift in a daycare center full of crack babies and poisonous snakes than see this. Add “and 14 little dogs that do nothing but bark-bark-bark,” and you’ve got it about right.

The theater where this sapfest is booked is across Woodward Avenue from Comerica Park, and showtimes are scheduled to coordinate with home game starting times. So you can catch “Ernie,” and then, face still wet with tears, cross the street, pass the statue of Ernie near the main gate, and catch a game.

If Ernie Harwell was really half as humble and self-effacing as Albom and others make him out to be, he is rolling in his grave. As one of my Facebook friends commented, Albom has made more money off dead guys than Yoko Ono.

Next on the agenda: Bread, water and a healthy bowl of high-fiber gruel — a Michigan legislator gets into the spirit of the age with proposed legislation that the state’s foster children should be clothed solely in the castoffs of others:

(State Sen. Bruce) Caswell says he wants to make sure that state money set aside to buy clothes for foster children and kids of the working poor is actually used for that purpose.

He says they should get “gift cards” to be used only at Salvation Army, Goodwill or other thrift stores.

“I never had anything new,” Caswell says. “I got all the hand-me-downs. And my dad, he did a lot of shopping at the Salvation Army, and his comment was — and quite frankly it’s true — once you’re out of the store and you walk down the street, nobody knows where you bought your clothes.”

Caswell is 61. He “never” had anything new. So why should anyone else? Look what it did for him: He graduated from Michigan State! Actually, his Wikipedia bio is intriguing. Graduated high school in 1967 and went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, leaving after two years to finish undergrad at MSU, before re-enrolling and finishing with a master’s in 1976. Nowhere in there do I see the name of a certain southeast Asian country that begins with the letter V. Hmm.

So, it was a weekend for entertainment catch-up. Watched “Game of Thrones,” part 1. This one’s going to be difficult, I can see — I’m already sorting characters by hair color. You can tell the producers had the same idea, giving one brother-sister pair identical shades of peroxide-white, and another familial unit a uniform strawberry blonde. Thank heaven, as I’m certainly not going to catch their names as they fly by, each one ending in -ian or -aeus. What is the appeal of fantasy, I ask you fans out there. Escapism? Must be, although each novel I’ve picked up loses me in endless tangles of family trees, and I always have to check the map on the endpapers to orient me in space. “Game of Thrones” helpfully does this in the credits; although after one episode all I really know is: Winterfell is in “the north” and north of Winterfell is “the Wall,” behind which are monsters and dire wolves. I wonder how many fantasy readers know the dire wolf was a real species of the Pleistocene era. Lived in these parts, even. A 250-pound wolf. Now that would have been a sight to see.

OK, it’s Easter Monday, which means it’s still a quasi-holiday here in holiday-mad Michigan, but I have work to do just the same. Happy week to all, although with rain in the forecast nearly every day, we’ll have to see about that.

If you live to the east of me, and the weather we had last night is headed your way, let me just say this: I hope you enjoy rain. It looks as though most of it is off to the south now, the dregs of the system. Maybe a little over central Pennsylvania and… what do they call that big westerly chunk of New York state? The Something Tier, as I recall. You folks there? Bring an umbrella.

It arrived last night after midnight, loud enough that I relocated far from the skylight I normally work under, as the sound effects were like being parked next to a jackhammer. Another tip: If you’re ever tempted to buy a house with a skylight in the bedroom? Don’t do that. There’s a place for skylights, and I love mine, but it’s not over your bed, and not because of leaks. Maybe if you’re an alcoholic, and every night’s rest is aided by bourbon, you can sleep through even an average rain shower pounding on glass five feet above your head. But everybody else should leave skylights for the rooms where you’re not trying to rest.

That said, how was everybody’s Tuesday? Once again, I’m impressed by how well you guys can carry the ball when I’m unable. I was unable yesterday because this is spring break, and I’m celebrating by catching an extra 45 minutes of sleep or so, which cuts into my blogging time on days when I have to get down to campus by 10 a.m. When I saw how late spring break was going to be this year — it’s always wrapped around Easter in our district — I dropped any thought of travel. A mid-April spring break would surely mean a string of days in the 70s here, while the Florida people would swelter in the already unbearable heat of a fast-approaching summer.

No such luck. I guess. That’s what feeding your envy will get you.

So, today, instead — let’s graze a bit. First, a tip for those of you browsing the video selections: “Night Catches Us,” a lovely little film I caught early last evening after finding it at the library. “Criminally overlooked,” says Slate, and I’d say that’s about right. I’m interested in low-budget films that tell urban stories for my own selfish reasons, and this one was such a pleasant surprise. Set in the summer of 1976, it’s the story of an ex-Black Panther home for his father’s funeral, and the way the events of the past won’t let go of the present. Those particular events — the brief flowering of the black power movement before it collapsed into lawlessness — are public record, although like so many of these things, certain people prefer very particular sets of facts about them. What’s wonderful about Tanya Hamilton’s script is that it doesn’t shrink from the pain, while still acknowledging the things about the Panthers that were good and hopeful, even if they didn’t last. And what’s wonderful about her direction is how she makes all this work tonally, how she plays everything restrained and sad while still maintaining the energy. For once, a movie where people talk and act approximately the same way they talk and act in the real world.

Which might be why it was criminally overlooked, but hey, I’m doing my part. Word of mouth, word of blog, whatever. Oh, and a tip of the hat to the great soundtrack, by maybe the only band that can evoke both ’60s soul and contemporary hip-hop with equal command — the Roots.

A few weeks ago I mentioned the prescription-drug problem, only now starting to be acknowledged by those outside the regions it has most damaged — Appalachia and Florida and points between. How’s this for a statistic?

Nearly 1 in 10 babies born last year in this Appalachian county tested positive for drugs. …In Ohio, fatal overdoses more than quadrupled in the last decade, and by 2007 had surpassed car crashes as the leading cause of accidental death, according to the Department of Health.

That’s from a NYT piece datelined Portsmouth, Ohio, and no, it’s not a pretty picture, but that’s life in Appalachia. It’s never been easy there, but it’s been better than it is now, when there were still jobs in mining and light industry. No more of that. Might as well get high.

The other night I surfed briefly past a Barbara Walters special on the royal wedding that was so stupid it made my brain hurt. It reminded me how careful you have to be about your royal-wedding news. I trust Christopher Hitchens won’t let me down.

Finally, I just registered with Byliner, the latest savior of long-form journalism, to read Jon Krakauer’s piece on the “Three Cups of Tea” guy. I’ll let you know how it turns out. For now, gotta run.