The Russian textbook I use is the same one my teacher used as a college student at Indiana University, c. 1960-something. The pattern sentences and reading describe not Russia but the Soviet Union, rich with nostalgia for anyone who lived through the Cold War. Everyone is always going from the library to the university, attending ochin interyesny lectzy or perhaps a zacyedanieh klooba, playing shakmatii or going to see “Lyebedinoye Ozero” at the Bolshoi. (Very interesting lectures, club meetings, chess and “Swan Lake,” for you Yanks.)

This week’s reading was about an Amerikanskii, Bob Cook, whose name transliterates amusingly as Kook, who visited Leningrad and stayed at the historic Astoria Hotel. Very nice, but very expensive, Kook tells his studentskii kloob. I’ll say. If I’m reading their website correctly, a deluxe room, double plus twin, perfect for our family when we travel, is 36,000 rubles per night, or — gasp! — $1,275. Don’t forget the 18 percent VAT, too, and buffet breakfast at $58 per person. I guess if I ever get there, it’ll be your basic Soviet-era concrete block guest house for the Derringers.

At this point we stopped the lesson and discussed the siege of Leningrad during World War II, one of history’s great stories of cruelty and endurance. Adolf Hitler planned to take the city, burn it to the ground, raze what couldn’t be burned and rename the city Adolfsburg. He planned to hold his victory party at the Astoria, and even printed invitations. Alas, Joseph Stalin had other plans, and the blockade and siege lasted 900 days. The dead numbered 1.5 million, most from starvation. Sydney, my teacher, met a woman who lived through it, who said they stripped the wallpaper in their home and and scraped off the paste to eat. The bread ration, given to only a few, was mostly sawdust. They ate rats on the street, their beloved pets, each other — cannibalism was common.

But in the end, Leningrad was spared, and today we can all visit the Hermitage, if we can afford to get there. Kook then traveled to Moscow, and we looked at photos of Krassny Ploschad — Red Square — and I wondered if I ever will get to see Lenin’s Tomb with my own eyes, lying in his own red square on Red Square. One of these days. By the way, the old Soviet version of Bloomingdale’s, GUM, which translates roughly to Universal Government Store, is now a shopping mall. Super-expensive in the New Russian style, konyechno. Here’s a joke about the New Russian style:

Boris Nikolayevich is walking down the street when he runs into his friend Andrei Ivanovich. “That’s a lovely tie,” Boris Nikolayevich tells his friend. “Thank you,” says Andrei Ivanovich. “I spent $900 on it in Paris.” To which Boris Nikolayevich replies: “You fool! You could have stayed in Moscow and paid $2,000.”

As you can tell, today I am empty of thought. Every time I open the newspaper, I scowl and think, what the hell are we doing in Libya?, but there are occasional amusements, like this. Apparently $P went to Israel and forgot to check a map:

Bethlehem was supposed to be her first stop of the day, according to a leaked copy of her schedule. But, after an uneventful drive from her hotel in nearby Jerusalem, her car stopped just short of the main Israeli military checkpoint outside Bethlehem, a Palestinian city in the West Bank, appeared to hesitate and then performed a u-turn.

Israeli military officials declined to comment on why Mrs Palin may have turned back, but the country’s defence ministry confirmed that she had made no formal request to visit the occupied West Bank – standard protocol for any foreign dignitary.

Oops.

You know you’re a joke when a business weekly makes fun of you. Congratulations, Hoosier tea partiers.

The Free Press informs me I’m paying the highest auto-insurance rates in the country. No surprise there — I just came through the six-month premium season here at NN.c Central, otherwise known six weeks in the Po’ House, but these numbers are stinky. A prototypical 40-year-old man with a clean driving record pays $2,541 a year? What does he drive, an Escalade with spinners? We pay about $2,000 a year for two cars and two drivers.

CNN beats up on Fox. For once.

Off to the showers for me. Have a great day.

The new governor of my native state, John Kasich, revealed his budget yesterday, and the news is familiar — a lot of what you like (education, libraries) gets slashed, a lot of things Republicans like (charter schools, “privatized” state institutions) get a boost, but most people take a screwing to some extent, and the bottom line is pretty much the same no matter where you stand. New Normal, folks.

Also, today, there was a story in the NYT out of Gallipolis, an impoverished little town on the Ohio River that was only on my radar screen during college, when I was a resident of southeastern Ohio. It was about what is increasingly the only avenue to the middle class available there — “government” jobs, that pay something above minimum wage and offer health insurance. The tale of the tape:

Now, as Ohio’s legislature moves toward final approval of a bill that would chip away at public-sector unions, those workers say they see it as the opening bell in a race to the bottom. At stake, they say, is what little they have that makes them middle class.

Gallipolis (pronounced gal-uh-POLICE) is a faded town on the Ohio River, one whose fortunes fell with the decline in industries like steel in bigger cities along the river.

…Today, storefronts are mostly dark. About one in three people live in poverty. Billboards advertise oxygen tanks and motorized wheelchairs. Old photographs in a local diner look like an exhibit from a town obituary. The region has some of the highest rates of prescription drug abuse in the state, with more people dying from overdoses than car crashes, according to Ed Hughes, executive director of the Counseling Center in Portsmouth, about 55 miles west of here.

It’s a rural Detroit, in other words, with less violence but maybe more despair. The “lucky” people in the story, the ones where two people can stitch together a household income of $63,000, have two sons, one of whom is a Marine, the other just enlisted. You want to know who puts boots on the ground while the College Republicans fight the war of ideas? There you go.

Although the story mentions “decades of decline,” you could come away with the idea that Gallipolis was once a thriving little town. Not in my lifetime, I’d wager. The region has always been the poorest part of the state, and the middle class has never had a firm footing in the Ohio Valley, dotted with towns like this. One of my roommates in college dated a young guy who’d hit the lottery of well-paid labor — he was a coal miner. Union wages for some of the most dangerous work available, with three showers at the end of every shift, one at the mine, another at home and sometimes another at our apartment, and still he left black streaks on her sheets. Coal dust gets deep in your pores. (And, of course, your lungs.)

But the woman with the two sons works as a janitor at a state institution for the mentally disabled, and considers herself lucky to have her job, as otherwise she’d be doing what her neighbors do — working three part-time jobs with no insurance. Here’s a chilling statistic:

A third of all private-sector workers under 30 have no health insurance, up from 15 percent in 1988, according to the census data.

What are we going to do with these people? Keep drumming up wars for their sons to fight? Or keep pushing propaganda at them and hope they don’t change the channel?

Well. I don’t want to hang crepe all over the place. Maybe we should change the tone to one of righteous snark-fury. Linda posted this low in the comments yesterday, but I want to make sure everyone sees it. Ezra Klein on Evan Bayh:

But Bayh did not return to Indiana to teach. He did not, as he said he was thinking of doing, join a foundation. Rather, he went to the massive law firm McGuire Woods. And who does McGuire Woods work for? “Principal clients served from our Washington office include national energy companies, foreign countries, international manufacturing companies, trade associations and local and national businesses,” reads the company’s Web site. He followed that up by signing on as a senior adviser to Apollo Management Group, a giant public-equity firm. And, finally, this week, he joined Fox News as a contributor. It’s as if he’s systematically ticking off every poison he identified in the body politic and rushing to dump more of it into the water supply.

For those of you who didn’t know Bayh when he was human, it’s even more distressing, what a comedown this is. For a while, he was golden, the sort of New Democrat in the Clinton mold that you thought might lead the state into a more progressive future, and away from the rube bumpkins (is that redundant?) who ran things when I arrived. But sadly, no. A political friend once told me, “Evan Bayh proved that it’s not impossible for a Democrat to out-Republican a Republican.” Where did I read recently — was it here? — that he’s only waiting for his father to die before he actually declares himself a Republican? I don’t know what shape Birch is in at the moment, but I’d say if he’s sentient at all, he already knows.

OK, I have to leave you with at least one smile on a day where the skies are still gloomy (although it’s above freezing!) at 10 a.m. Here’s one:

Arianna Huffington’s journalism ethics — laughable!

Reading the paper in the morning is becoming a real challenge. Not the paper-paper, but…oh, how about the Freep? On a morning when nuclear disaster looms across the far Pacific, a Web headline:

Alice Cooper shocks at Rock and Roll Hall of Fame induction

I looked at that for a minute before clicking. Really, what could a 63-year-old Republican golfer do that would be considered shocking, even by the wet-behind-the-ears web staff? Appear before his monthly root touch-up? But I’ve heard Vincent Damon Furnier speak before; he’s a witty man who’s always in on his own joke. OK, you’ve got me. I’ll click.

Alice Cooper came into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame with a boa constrictor.

Cooper, also known as Vincent Furnier, wore a blood-splattered shirt and brought schoolkids along to sing “School’s Out.” It all seemed appropriate for a band that inductor Rob Zombie said invented the rock show.

That’s it? That’s the shock? A snake and a stain and a few kids? Kids sing on the original “School’s Out,” a hit delivered well past Alice Cooper’s prime, in my opinion. (I lost interest after “Love it to Death,” but all my peers found it.) Even at 14, I knew when I was being “shocked.” The last interview I heard with Furnier — I’m going to call him that, because Alice Cooper was the name of the band — he made a big deal out of putting one over on the squares, how parents were so terribly upset by him, but their kids knew it was just showbiz. For the record, I’d like to note that my parents were never upset by Alice Cooper, not even a little bit. I don’t think they were even aware of them. They followed the Don and Betty Draper model of adulthood, in the sense that they acted like adults and didn’t want to rap with me about what was goin’ down.

To my mind, Alice Cooper was the band made to order for Bob Greene. He went along on their 1973 tour, promoting “Muscle of Love,” an album I don’t recall making it into the collection of a single person I know. I bet whatever he wrote about them was really, really shocking.

I’m vamping here because I don’t want to read any more about Japan for a while. It’s making me very sorry I read Martin Cruz Smith’s novel “Wolves Eat Dogs,” in which Moscow militia investigator Arkady Renko follows a case to Chernobyl. I’m sorry I remember so well the passage where a scientist there tells the story of the night the reactor blew at a drunken party:

In a second the reactor coolant began to boil. The reactor hall started to pound. An engineer hit the panic switch for the control rods, but the rod channels in the reactor melted, the rods jammed, and superheated hydrogen blew off the roof, carrying reactor core, graphite and burning tar into the sky. A black fireball stood over the building, and a blue beam of ionized light shot from the open core. Fifty tons of radioactive fuel flew up, equal to fifty Hiroshima bombs. But the farce continued. Cool heads in the control room refused to believe they had done anything wrong. They sent a man down to check the core. He returned, his skin black from radiation, like a man who had seen the sun, to report there was no core. Since this was not an acceptable report, they sacrificed a second man, who returned in the same fatal condition. Now, of course, the men in the control room faced their greatest test of all: the call to Moscow.

It should be noted that no black fireballs have appeared in Japan, but I have to wonder about the 60 workers left behind, trying to cool this thing off. I wonder if this is a suicide mission. I note that the power company’s apology is being parsed in Japan, making me sorry I don’t understand all the nuances of the apology in Japanese culture. I should have paid more attention during our Japan worship/paranoia phase back in the ’80s.

So let’s go bloggering, eh?

Evan Bayh signs with Fox. I’m so totally, totally surprised! I saw him on the network news a few days back; he and his wife were in New Zealand when the earthquake hit there. Susan looked sort of puffy. Not fat-puffy, or crying-my-eyes-out-from-fear-of-aftershocks puffy, but more like my-life-sucks-and-I’m-self-medicating-with-box-wine puffy. She was always his greatest asset, a warm and funny charmer to balance his robotic affect; what happened, Hoosiers?

Does anyone have a more contemporary photo of Owsley Stanley? Although kudos to the NYT for this hit of microdot:

Mr. Stanley, the Dead’s former financial backer, pharmaceutical supplier and sound engineer, was in recent decades a reclusive, almost mythically enigmatic figure. He moved to Australia in the 1980s, as he explained in his rare interviews, so he might survive what he believed to be a coming Ice Age that would annihilate the Northern Hemisphere.

And after he got there, I guess he just liked the weather.

And that’s it for me, pals. A swell Tuesday to all.

Some years back, Alan and I saw Bill Maher’s Broadway show in New York. He spent a few minutes talking about people whose response to 9/11 was to put American flags on their SUVs. This was, “literally, the least you could do,” Maher said.

This was 2003, before Facebook and Twitter and the rise of what we’ve come to call slacktivism. It was before People magazine could write a story like this and not have heads explode across the country:

In the wake of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan Friday afternoon – which triggered a 10-meter tsunami and a lingering threat as far west as the California coast – celebs have taken to Twitter to reach out after what may be the biggest such disaster on record to strike the country

(It ended like that, too. No period. Like a tweet, sorta.)

I guess this is what constitutes “reaching out” these days — reaching for your iPhone and pecking out a text message. This was Lea Michelle’s contribution:

So devastating to hear about the huge earthquake & tsunami Japan. My thoughts and prayers are with everyone there.

This makes putting a flag on your car look like a two-year hitch in the Peace Corps. You actually have to go to a store or corner gas station or whatever, select and pay for the flag, figure out the plastic clip thingy, affix it to the car and take it down when it’s torn to ribbons.

Ah, well. This all seems like a very small thing after an event that actually changed the coastline of Japan — it’s now “wider,” the earth’s axis shifted by 6.5 inches. You read stories like that, and you realize we are all just ants crawling around on a picnic blanket, and every so often someone shakes the blanket.

Tiny, insignificant ants.

That’s a cheerful thought for a Monday, wouldn’t you say? How about a change of subject? A few people have sent me the “Michigan is screwed” video that’s been going around, Rachel Maddow breaking down the details of new GOP Gov. Rick Snyder’s budget plan, spinning it as an evil plot to not just smash unions, but be the flying wedge of a Republican takeover of EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING I TELL YOU, until one day in the near future it is complete and Snyder peels off his face to reveal that of a SkyNet commander, OUR NEW ROBOT OVERLORDS.

Well, that’s one way to spin it.

Every fact in that report is correct. What it lacks is context. It is true that Snyder’s budget — still in proposal form, still not enacted — raises taxes on the poor and elderly and strips business taxes to the lowest in the Great Lakes region. What Maddow doesn’t tell you is the first is the loss of an earned income tax credit averaging $432 a year, and that Michigan is among a dwindling handful of states that doesn’t tax pension income. If all you do is benchmark the practice, it’s probably time for Michigan to join the rest of the country.

But the real meat of her report is the part about state officials being able to swoop into any municipality or school district and stomp it to pieces under their jackboots, a fate she implies is right around the corner for any number of cities and towns — the part about the sign on the outskirts with “founded in 1872” being made obsolete is a bit much. This part of the plan is only the beefing up of the state’s existing emergency financial management law. Stephen Henderson, a Freep columnist — and no conservative — provides context:

For years, local governments and school districts have been able to walk right up to the brink of financial disaster without any intervention from the state. So when state officials do rush in, they face horrific conditions with too few options for balancing the books.

That’s why cities such as Pontiac have made so little progress getting costs under control even with emergency financial management. It’s why Robert Bobb can’t do what the accountant in him knows needs to be done to fix Detroit Public Schools. And it’s why officials in Hamtramck were just a few months ago begging the state to let the city go bankrupt so drastic steps could be taken.

The state’s current rubric for dealing with financial emergencies is weak to the point of flaccidity. Legislators are right to firm up the consequences of inaction.

He goes on to say that wiping out elected officials and smashing existing contracts goes too far. But he’s right that for now, there’s too little sanction placed on cities that screw up.

There’s a great deal of discussion about the budget proposal in the state now. Much of it — led by Mitch Albom, Rochelle Riley and a few other high-profile Michiganders, along with many of my friends — is about the loss of the generous film tax credits, which would undoubtedly take all the air out of the movie and TV production going on around here. That concerns me, but frankly, that’s not my ox being gored. I’ve long thought the amount we’re handing out is unsustainable over the long haul, or even the short one, although I’m sorry to see it go.

What’s far, far more worrisome to me is are the proposed, and enormous, cuts in education funding — primary, secondary and higher — as well as municipal revenue sharing, which will have a far greater impact on our way of life than whether the next Mitch Albom film project is shot in Detroit or not. Virtually all education monies in Michigan come from the state, following an overhaul in the 1990s designed to fix inequities. I frankly can’t believe this isn’t getting more attention, but then again, Albom has no children.

The forces of all the affected constituencies are girding for the battle ahead — the AARP, Michigan Municipal League, Albom and his fearsome quiver of dramatic repetition, et al. One of my local school-board members has written a bit about these issues on his blog, including the emergency financial manager proposal, and the school-funding issues. (I suspect he’s very proud of the latter entry, which works on a Winnie the Pooh metaphor. Michiganders, show your luv with a click.)

I guess it’s all in how you look at things. It could be worse. We could live in Japan.

Manic Monday — must run.

I wept because I had three inches of new, wet snow in my driveway, and then I met a man who had 12 feet of Pacific Ocean in his.

Pals, in 60 minutes I have a meeting with my partners, and I intend to arrive fully coffee’d and freshly showered. In the meantime, I have time to scribble a few lines, but all I really want to do is watch video from Japan.

The Beeb has a nicely edited highlight reel. I’m touched by the grocery-store employees whose first impulse is to try to protect the stock from falling off the shelves. We give our lives to our jobs and we take pride in even the smallest ones. We deserve a few benefits in the bargain, Gov. Walker, you jerk.

So let’s make this an open Friday earthquake tsunami weekend thread. I’ll start: I just checked my Twitter stream for good links, and found that once again, I’d been auto-subscribed to Twibbon, the slacktivist site of choice; it peddles dozens of add-ons to your profile picture, so you can demonstrate to your social networks what a good person you are. You will not be surprised to know there is already a Twibbon for Japan. Someone told me the other day these things are informally known as Dickbars. No surprise there.

Off to the shower. Have a tremendous weekend, all. Now to watch the Grim across the wide, wide ocean.

I like to think of myself as a tolerant person, if you define tolerant as someone who once decided it could never work out with a man because his grocery list contained the item parmashawn chese, but hung around for a few more months anyway. But hear me now and remember it later: If anyone in my circle spends $625 on “Modernist Cuisine”? You’re dead to me. (If you go through the Kickback Lounge, I will consider upgrading your status to Cold Shoulder.)

I’ve been reading about this five-volume, 40-pound, 2,238-page be-all and end-all of 21st-century cooking for a few days now — I guess the pub date was this week, although it should be noted it was self-published. The more I read, the more bugged I get. All reviews take the time to stipulate a few things:

1) This is a very ambitious work, and ambition should be honored;
2) The book(s) — shall we call it a “project,” or something else? — contain many astonishing and beautiful photographs;
3) If you have the will to dive in, there are diamonds there;
4) But not enough to justify the expense, work and other irreplaceable resources that went into producing the thing.

Ahem:

Descending this week on the culinary scene like a meteor, “Modernist Cuisine: The Art and Science of Cooking” is the self-published six-volume masterwork from a team led by Nathan Myhrvold, the multimillionaire tech visionary who, as a friend of mine said, “decided to play Renaissance doge with food.”

…Ultimately, it is a manifesto declaring that the new form of laboratory-inspired cooking — led by Grant Achatz in the United States; Heston Blumenthal in England; and Ferran Adrià, the father of this cuisine, in Spain — is a cultural and artistic movement every bit as definitive as Impressionism in 19th-century France or Bauhaus in early 20th-century Germany. It proclaims a revolution “in techniques, aesthetics and intellectual underpinnings of gastronomy.”

I read fast, and I had to go back and find the nettle in this opening passage, and it was this: tech visionary. Those guys? Can be real pains in the ass:

“Life has not been boring for me,” Nathan Myhrvold says. An overachiever’s overachiever, Myhrvold, 51, graduated from high school at 14, had two master’s degrees and a Princeton Ph.D. in theoretical and mathematical physics by 23, worked alongside Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, and went on to earn hundreds of millions for Microsoft (and himself) as chief technology officer. Cashing out in 1999, he began pursuing his true passions by the armful: skydiving, car racing, scuba diving, volcanology, and UFOlogy, not to mention whole alternate careers as a wildlife photographer, dinosaur hunter, inventor (his name is on nearly 250 patents and counting), and author of the extraordinary new cookbook Modernist Cuisine.

Wow. Respect. Although one person’s overachiever’s overachiever is another’s dilettante, but never mind that. The guy has zillions and a coltish intellect; let him spend his money — and, again, this is his money he’s spending — on what he wants. He’s only in his early 50s. In his laboratory of wonder, he’s also pursuing big-think solutions to more serious, mundane problems (hospital infections, global warming). I guess everyone hopes for a line like this in their obituary:

His 1997 talk on dinosaur sex is the TED equivalent of Jimi Hendrix playing Woodstock.

All stipulated. There’s just something about five volumes, 40 pounds, 2,238 pages and a plexiglas cover, all in the service of a project that boils down to a foundational text for a silly style of cooking sought after and consumed by the tiniest handful of people in the world. Nathan Myhrvold has carved “The Last Supper” on the head of a pin. Whoop-de-do.

What style of cooking is this? That molecular gastronomy nonsense that’s always tripping somebody up on “Top Chef.” Foams and gels and puzzling techniques Julia Child would laugh at. Like this:

Among his favorite (recipes): scrambled eggs slow-cooked at low temperature in a vacuum-sealed plastic bag using a SousVide Supreme SVS-10LS water oven.

Because that is what the world has been waiting for: sous vide eggs.

Myhrvold made his fortune as Microsoft’s chief technology officer. Ha ha. In the early days of personal computing, when I had my first little laptop, I used to ask J.C. Burns what on earth was in MS Word that justified its $600 cost and bloated footprint on my 160-megabyte hard drive. “Lunch recipes,” he quipped, and it looks like he was right. This is what Myhrvold was thinking about when his underlings were giving the world Mr. Clippy.

Well, as Julia famously said, you are alone in the kitchen, and all that matters is what comes out of it. For people who already have thousands of dollars’ worth of high-tech gadgetry in place, maybe they’ll welcome a $625 reference work to tell them how to use it all. The NYT review acknowledges there is a great deal of very useful information between its many covers, but nearly all of it is for the professional, not the home cook. Maybe a restaurateur can justify the purchase. As for me? Eh, I’ll have a sandwich.

Bloggage for a fogbound Thursday here in Michigan:

Julianne Moore will play $P in the HBO adaptation of “Game Change.” Every time I think about dropping our subscription? They pull me back in!!! Who will play Barack Obama? On this, imdb is silent. Maybe Ms. Lippman knows.

As I believe I’ve mentioned approximately 7,000 times before, one of my several part-time jobs involves news research for the pharmaceutical industry, which every night exposes me to a fairly horrifying but still not widely reported story developing down in Dixie — legal pill mills operating out of storefronts, mainly in Florida, that push an appalling amount of prescription painkillers onto the street under the flimsiest pretense of medical treatment. It is the engine behind an explosion of addiction, overdose and death all over the country. Abuse of legal prescription drugs long ago outstripped that of heroin and other street drugs. It’s the reason pharmacists get ulcers and some are simply no longer carrying these hydrocodone-based potions; too many junkie stickups have taken their toll.

In its own way, the state has tried to tackle the problem; two years ago it created an office to maintain a patient database, in an effort to track obvious abuses. It didn’t fund the office, but y’know — details, details. Lately Purdue Pharma, the company that makes the most sought-after of these drugs, the notorious OxyContin, beloved by Rush Limbaugh and many others, offered $1 million to fund the database. This week, Gov. Rick Scott said, eh, no thanks. He wants to do away with the database entirely; it’s an invasion of patient privacy. Where does the GOP find these guys? I’m speechless.

OK, time to wind up and head out.

Friday’s workout didn’t go well. Running on fumes, I felt the way Hunter Thompson described himself in “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas” — much inappropriate sweating. Yes, you’re supposed to sweat while you exercise, but not this much. Went home, showered, ran this errand and that, couldn’t regulate my thermostat, caught a chill. And then, Saturday morning, it was official: Sick. Oh, well. It’s been stalking me all winter; might as well get it over with.

At least it happened on a weekend. I had planned to go to Eastern Market, maybe call a friend for lunch, walk the Dequindre Cut and hope for spring. Instead I slept and whined and slept and finished Major Pettigrew. By late afternoon, I felt better, well enough to rise and grocery shop and blah blah blah, but I’m cautiously optimistic this may have been a 24-hour thing. One day of having one’s clock cleaned, rather than the two-week cold so many of you have been struggling with? I’ll take it.

Among the other things we had to take on Saturday — heavy rains (would have washed out any recreational stroll) followed by snow. Another two inches. Sigh. I think I bear up under winter’s assault like a trouper, but by March I’m thinking about crocuses and daffodils. A gardener once told me to plant peas on St. Patrick’s Day. Are you kidding me? It was a good day to stay in bed.

Major Pettigrew was an absolute joy, by the way. I’m looking forward to the book-club discussion Friday.

Which seems as good a transition as any into the iPad. Unlike many Appleheads, I don’t spring for every new gadget that comes along, but it seems I spring for quite a lot of them, eventually. In the world of Appleheads, this represents enormous restraint. I’m still hanging onto by nearly three-year-old iPhone with no plans for an upgrade, but the new iPad is sorely tempting me. It seems like so much machine for a mere five bills, and I can think of a million places I would use it, rather than shlep my laptop around. I figure it’s only a matter of time, which then raises the question of e-books. I don’t want to go all Andy Rooney here — he already did — but it seems these will be inevitable, and I might as well get with the program. As I always embrace technology with ambivalence, I expect my e-book collection will be as whack as my MP3 collection, which started out being strictly upbeat workout music and oddities I might throw into a home movie soundtrack, and now is, frankly, an embarrassment. I don’t want to wipe out on my bike and have the EMTs pluck the earbuds from my cooling ears to hear “Brand New Key.” But, in that strange way that the delivery device always changes that which it delivers, so too will e-readers change publishing. I had coffee with an author friend the other day, who reported that her author friends, the ones who write niche products like spanking stories and other erotica, are enjoying a boom in sales. You can hide anything in a Kindle, it seems.

And as I recall, another author friend says the Kindle is great for hot new books you want to read in, but not necessarily read through — think “Game Change” and other texts-between-covers that really should be long magazine articles. For ten bucks, you can Kindle ’em, scan ’em and forget ’em. Lots of magazines cost five bucks these days; is that so much more?

Do you sense I am trying to talk myself into something here?

Maybe Connie or one of you librarians can enlighten me: How does e-pub work in lending? How do you “borrow” an e-book? Do you get a time-limited license that expires after two weeks? What are the copyright protections like, or do we now expect authors to write free, too?

Manic Monday, so let’s go bloggage-ing:

We’re No. 1! My very own congressional district — Michigan 13 — was at the absolute bottom of the heap in this fascinating but irritatingly vague map of “the nation’s well-being.” How did yours do?

Planning for life after Glenn Beck, on Fox.

Echoing Gene Weingarten: A fart joke in Dennis the Menace! (And, as he points out, you shoulda seen the first draft.)

Gotta run. Enjoy Monday, all.

I really need to stop being outraged at this stuff, but I can’t help it, I am: Mike Huckabee is the latest — and most high-profile to date, unless I missed somebody — Republican to push the line that Barack Obama is a Kenyan alien.

Earlier this week, he told a radio talk-show host:

“One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American,” said the Fox host. “If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”

He also mentioned Obama’s removal of a loaned bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the Oval Office and called it “a great insult to the British.” (He didn’t mention that Obama replaced it with one of Abraham Lincoln, who just might have more resonance for an African American president, but oh well — he is from Arkansas.)

These remarks, reflecting a stunning ignorance in a man who considers himself presidential timber, set off the usual whirlwind of blah-blah, which set off the usual response — it’s all the media’s fault, because he clearly “misspoke” and meant to say Indonesia.

Which is about as lame an excuse as they get, given the elaboration on the details about Kenya — even in Arkansas public schools, I don’t think they teach that the Mau Mau rebellion happened in Indonesia — and even if you take him at his word, how does five years of a childhood constitute “growing up” anywhere? Granted, Hawaii is such an exotic, foreign place, you can’t blame an Arkansan for getting confused.

The smart money is on this being dog-whistle politics, that Huckabee in no way misspoke, that he’s just letting the base know that he’s down with the program. And if that’s true, then no one — no voter, and certainly no journalist — owes Huckabee anything resembling respect anymore. Only shunning, and maybe not even that, will work on this sort of moronic, racist idiocy. Yes, racist. Yes, Mike Huckabee, you are a racist. A big, dumb racist. Racist McRaciston, the governor of a state with a large black population, has thrown in with racists. Own it.

Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. Where does this stop? WHERE?

Let’s switch to hockey, shall we? I expect this story will pick up steam hereabouts, or maybe not: Bob Probert, legendary hockey goon of Chicago and Detroit, died last summer of heart failure, but carried within his brain evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, doubtless the result of the head trauma he endured both on and off the ice:

Probert’s posthumous autobiography, “Tough Guy,” gleefully offers details of his 3,300 career penalty minutes — fifth in N.H.L. history — and recounts so many brawls with enforcers like Tie Domi and Marty McSorley that it requires 11 pages to list them all. He scored 163 goals in his career from 1985 through 2002, for the Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Blackhawks, but was so known for his fighting that a 2007 Hockey News poll rated him the greatest enforcer in hockey history.

Probert drank heavily beginning in his youth in Windsor, Ontario, and he used cocaine to the point that he served 90 days in a Minnesota prison and was suspended by the N.H.L. multiple times, including for the entire 1994-95 season. His police record included driving citations, bar fights and assaults on police officers. While boating last July 5 on Lake St. Clair, near his home in Tecumseh, Probert collapsed and died of heart failure, including an 80 percent blockage of the left coronary artery.

Many athletes later found with C.T.E. — whose test for abnormal protein deposits in brain tissue can be administered only after death — presented symptoms like drug abuse, impulse control and impaired memory only in the years before they died, suggesting that the disease contributed to it.

So the trauma created its own loop, I guess — head trauma leads to poor impulse control which leads to more head trauma. This is a story that started small, with a few studies mostly covered by the prestige papers, and mostly off the sports pages, but is picking up steam over the course of the last few years. The suicide of former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson — who is said to have shot himself in the heart to preserve his brain for postmortem research — pushed it higher, and I imagine this finding will, too.

Ironically, I remember reading this story a couple of years ago as the Stanley Cup playoffs got under way, “Why the Red Wings don’t fight,” about how the North American game is changing to a more European, less pugilistic model. Fewer goons, better skating.

Do click that first link on the Probert story, and check out the photo, and the look on the kid’s face. There’s the problem in a nutshell. Oh, and I did the math — 3,300 penalty minutes translates to 55 hours.

OK, we’ve done infuriating and depressing. Can we take a run past something fun?

I’m tapped out for funny, but here are a couple shots of Christina Hendricks in a low-cut dress. (Yes, Rob Daumeyer, that’s a big WIN!!!!!) I actually love the first dress (what I can see of it, anyway), but think it would look better with a double strand of pearls rather than that big honkin’ heart, but that is the product after all. (And I am old.) My jewelry box seems to be missing a giant crown of oak leaves; I’m glad someone has stepped in to fill the gap.

Onward into a cold, cold March morning.

Oh, well, isn’t this special? The SPJ, that would be the Society of Professional Journalists to you civilians, thought it necessary to say something about the Buffalo Beast’s exquisite prank, played on Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, earlier this week. You probably read about it yesterday: A reporter — with whom I’m unfamiliar, but described elsewhere as “gonzo” — called Walker’s office posing as David Koch, known Tea Party moneybags, and proceeded to lead the guv around by the nose for 20 minutes or so.

Walker didn’t say anything all that terrible. He agreed that some Fox News MSNBC babe was “a nice piece of ass” and said sure, he’d love to be flown out to California after all this blows over and be shown a good time, but that’s about it. The greater crime, as Ezra Klein points out at the link above, is how easy it is for some rich guy to get the guv on the phone in the midst of a crisis, when members of the Wisconsin legislature can’t.

But you can read all about that elsewhere. I’m amused by the SPJ, which saw the need to scold an alternative weekly, one that has always been open and transparent about its politics, for some sort of ethical lapse. I don’t recall SPJ scolding Fox News for the ass-kissing coverage it gave James O’Keefe and his Costume Party Players during their ACORN and Planned Parenthood stings, and honestly, I don’t see much difference here. The Buffalo Beast site has been down since the story broke; I imagine their servers weren’t manned by J.C. Burns, and hence couldn’t handle the load. Whatever. The content has been duplicated around the web, and the call itself is on YouTube, so there you are.

Another day, another lonely vigil in Room 575, waiting for my students to come by for some guidance. I picked Room 575 today over the journalism library; less comfortable chairs, better view. I’m five floors above the Lodge freeway, the noise from which penetrates even the concrete block construction way up here. To the south, the Motor City Casino and Ambassador Bridge; to the east, the smokestacks of the Rouge Complex; below, a whole lotta snow. We got another inch overnight, and I guess we’re expecting another 1 to 3 tomorrow. February is beating on us fo’ sho’, but I can handle it as long as it stays above 20 degrees. My misery escalates sharply sub-20. Yours would, too.

Did Rick Santorum actually defend the Crusades this week? What the–? Are you kidding me? Note the first comment below that story:

You know, I listen to right-wing catholic radio (Relevant Radio), and I hear this sort of thing all the time.

I don’t doubt it. Detroit must have a right-wing Catholic radio station somewhere; I should listen more often. The last time I was stuck on a long car trip with the AM set on scan, I picked up a crazy Catholic station where the discussion was of Marie Antoinette. She was no let-them-eat-cake fashion plate, noooo, but a devout, holy, Catholic woman who has suffered the worst rap in history. Google “was marie antoinette a good catholic” and one of the first hits is this review of the Sofia Coppola film. Roger Ebert may be the master of the form, but there’s something to be said for film criticism that contains passages like this:

I didn’t plan to watch this movie. I was invited by two ladies more to chauffeur them through a difficult traffic section than anything else. One of the ladies planned to write the solicited review. But since the movie was obsessively sex-centered with embarrassing allegations against King Louis XVI, she didn’t feel comfortable writing it. So I assumed the task.

I recommend that site, if you have about nine hours to kill. You probably didn’t know there was a Catholic way to sneeze, did you? Or that a devout person might need instruction on how to eat alone. Also, fast food is Protestant.

OK, the students are starting to arrive, so time to Publish and run. Publish! Run!

Sorry I’m late today — I had to leave early, and here I sit, in the journalism library at Wayne State, waiting for my little lambs to come see me. Been here one hour. One student. They must all be at the pro-Libyan democracy demonstration, going on as we speak.)

Which means time to blog a bit.

Is it possible for me to love Mark Bittman more? Every week, a new pleasant surprise. Today’s: How to Make Oatmeal…Wrong. It’s about McDonald’s efforts at health-washing their breakfast menu:

The oatmeal and McDonald’s story broke late last year, when Mickey D’s, in its ongoing effort to tell us that it’s offering “a selection of balanced choices” (and to keep in step with arch-rival Starbucks) began to sell the cereal. Yet in typical McDonald’s fashion, the company is doing everything it can to turn oatmeal into yet another bad choice. (Not only that, they’ve made it more expensive than a double-cheeseburger: $2.38 per serving in New York.) “Cream” (which contains seven ingredients, two of them actual dairy) is automatically added; brown sugar is ostensibly optional, but it’s also added routinely unless a customer specifically requests otherwise. There are also diced apples, dried cranberries and raisins, the least processed of the ingredients (even the oatmeal contains seven ingredients, including “natural flavor”).

A more accurate description than “100% natural whole-grain oats,” “plump raisins,” “sweet cranberries” and “crisp fresh apples” would be “oats, sugar, sweetened dried fruit, cream and 11 weird ingredients you would never keep in your kitchen.”

It so happens I had oatmeal for breakfast today. I added two tablespoons of brown sugar and a handful of dried cherries. I guess that leaves out the 11 weird ingredients, but it made for a tasty breakfast. I feel a little bad for Mickey D’s, as they’ve gradually become my ubiquitous fast-food joint of choice. (My fast-food weaknesses are sorted into ubiquitous and special-occasion choices. Ubiquitous are the ones that are on every other corner. Special occasion is Steak & Shake.) I’ve come to far prefer it over Wendy’s, certainly. If I don’t have time to eat and am in sight of the golden arches, I get a crispy-chicken snack wrap, basically a single fried chicken finger wrapped in a tortilla with a little lettuce, cheese and ranch dressing, 340 calories that, along with a Diet Coke, suits me just fine. Sometimes I add a small order of fries, and call it lunch. What’s appalling to me is that it’s marketed as a snack in the first place. With a small fries, it’s knocking on the door of 600 calories, which is a perfectly fine lunch for anyone trying to stay under 2,000 for the day, which includes most people (or should). McDonald’s seems to be trying to make their menu a little less burger-centric, and I appreciate it.

Still, $2.38 for a bowl of oatmeal is highway robbery; I don’t think my beloved snack wrap is that much. One of the things Bittman touched on in his first column was a need to teach cooking skills to generations of Americans who’ve lost them along the way. Bittman is absolutely right that if you think you don’t have the time or skills to prepare oatmeal for yourself in the morning, you are seriously not understanding the nature of oatmeal, and McDonald’s will profit on your ignorance. Profit handsomely. Charging $2.38 for oatmeal and a little diced dried fruit is like charging $20 for a day’s worth of air.

What did you have for breakfast? Although now I’m thinking lunch.

Something found en route to looking up something else, and I’m sensitive to those of you who have topped out with $P news, because this is genuinely amusing and maybe interesting: Sarah Palin has created a sock puppet on Facebook to “like” herself. “Lou Sarah,” no photo available, confines his/her Facebook activity to commenting favorably upon, and otherwise boost, Sarah Palin’s Facebook presence. As a Wonkette commenter said, “Will the circle jerk remain unbroken?”

Newt Gingrich believes in a forgiving God. He’d better.

Finally: Rahm Emanuel, now hizzoner. Let the tired Chicago corruption jokes fly.