A good cup of coffee should be simple to make. Two ingredients, one of them water. And yet, it’s so easy to screw it up. Lately I’ve been following the advice of Spec. John Grimes in “Black Hawk Down,” who believed it was all in the grind — can’t be too fine, can’t be too coarse. Today, I got it right. Today, I am well-coffee’d.

I wish I’d written down the precise number of seconds I whirled those beans in the grinder. But then the perfect would be too attainable. Live in the now, Garth.

OK, so what’s going on in Cairo? Live feeds on CNN and MSNBC, the usual yapping blondes on Fox. I’ve given up trying to watch Al-Jazeera online; when I can connect, the plug-in crashes, but I usually can’t connect. The people I know who have a keen interest in overseas news all keep a second satellite dish aimed at their bird of choice. Fortunately, we have this thing called the written word, which I’ve always preferred to grainy satellite images, anyway. A former colleague of mine, Ash Khalil, is reporting from Cairo:

The first sign that things were about to tip badly into darkness came shortly after the Internet returned. I was in a taxi with a group of journalists heading to opposition leader Mohamed ElBaradei’s home on the outskirts of Cairo to attempt an interview. From the other direction came what looked like a 1,000-person march of pro-Mubarak supporters chanting slogans like “We love the president” and “He’s not going.” Many of the protesters were riding horses and camels — from the looks of them, many appeared to be tourist touts coming from the stables clustered around the Pyramids on the outskirts of Cairo. At the time, my colleagues and I thought it made for a great journalistic visual; we snapped a few pictures and furiously started scribbling in our notebooks. Within hours, those horses and camels had been used in a bizarre, medieval mounted charge into the unarmed civilians occupying Tahrir.

Attack camels. Now that would be something to see.

Actually, the entire Foreign Policy website is useful for Egypt news, with some nice photography, as well. I recommend this photo essay. Diplomacy is such a tricky art.

The NYT hasn’t slacked in its coverage, either:

The battle was waged by Mohammed Gamil, a dentist in a blue tie who ran toward the barricades of Tahrir Square. It was joined by Fayeqa Hussein, a veiled mother of seven who filled a Styrofoam container with rocks. Magdi Abdel-Rahman, a 60-year-old grandfather, kissed the ground before throwing himself against crowds mobilized by a state bent on driving them from the square. And the charge was led by Yasser Hamdi, who said his 2-year-old daughter would live a life better than the one he endured.

“Aren’t you men?” he shouted. “Let’s go!”

Whenever I read things like this, I wonder where I’d be if this were happening in my city. On the one hand, it’s easy to climb the cannon and shout charge! That great military mind, Ashley Wilkes, told Scarlett, “Fighting is like champagne. It goes to the heads of cowards as quickly as of heroes.” On the other hand, once the charge is under way, I guess you discover what you’re made of.

So. Severe clear here today, a day for mirrored sunglasses and the down parka. As difficult as it is to realize at the moment (11 degrees F), the earth is turning back toward the sun, and the signs are everywhere. I dropped Kate off for jazz-band practice this morning in daylight, if not quite the broad kind. Groundhog Day. And tomorrow is the first parent informational meeting for high-school registration. Mercy. How did that happen?

I’m off to Costco, dodging no impediment fiercer than the weather and Michigan potholes. In the meantime, much good bloggage:

Jim at Sweet Juniper found some ghost signs uncovered in a demolition, dug deeper, and turned up an interesting story about one of the companies:

In looking into the history of this company, I was surprised to learn of a controversy from a hundred years ago that largely mirrors many of the current concerns with the garment manufacturing industry and third-world sweatshops. It appears that many companies manufacturing clothes after the turn of the century—mainly those making clothes for sale through large catalog retailers or national chains—used deeply-discounted prison labor as part of their manufacturing processes.

Seventy-year-old Michigan farmer foils theft of anhydrous ammonia in the middle of the blizzard.

Forgot this yesterday, but Mark Bittman filed his first non-recipe column this week, and it’s a food manifesto for the future. He’s got a way with words:

Nearly everything labeled “healthy” or “natural” is not. It’s probably too much to ask that “vitamin water” be called “sugar water with vitamins,” but that’s precisely what real truth in labeling would mean.

Finally, one more reason to love “Mad Men.” You know how all the women look so great, and you ask yourself, “Why can’t I find a dress like Betty Draper’s?” Well, now you can.

Time for new contacts and the aforementioned sunglasses. I’m heading out.

Perhaps you’re wondering what the genesis of my problem is with Charles Pugh, current Detroit City Council president and former numbskull TV reporter in Fort Wayne. Reader, I’ll tell you.

Back in the 1990s-ish day, Pugh did a story on the well-known link between the Super Bowl and domestic violence. You remember that? Rising testosterone combined with cabin fever and erratic blood-sugar levels caused by weird snack foods and brought male tempers to a boil, and they bounced their wives all over hell ‘n’ gone. For a couple of years, this was an established fact that all the lifestyle sections and (especially) TV stations liked to make a fuss over around the end of January.

Only guess what? It wasn’t true.

An enterprising Washington Post reporter asked to see the data, and it turned out the whole contention was based on one study, and the authors of the study said the data had been misreported and twisted by people with an ax to grind. You can read the whole story at Snopes, if you’re so inclined.

Anyway, at least two years after this, after it had been discussed and put through the usual journalistic mea-culpa wringers, Pugh did a story for his station about how domestic-violence shelters are flooded with black-eyed women on Super Bowl Sunday. I think even his sources knew it was b.s., but hey — publicity! And so the one woman who appeared on camera was careful to say she noticed an uptick in services “during football season,” which also covers a lot of other stressors, including the start of school, cold weather, the holidays, and well, you get the idea. I wrote a note to the news director and Pugh himself, asking for an explanation, and discovered what it feels like to shout down a well. Neither responded. What is TV, anyway? Just a few moments in time that no one even gives their full attention to. La-di-da.

So last night I’m doing one of my jobs, gleaning the fields for stories about health care, and what do I turn up but this:

When fans flock to the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium on Super Bowl Sunday, few will be thinking about anything other than touchdowns and tailgates.

But nearby, in hotels, motels and on street corners, Texas authorities say a “dark side” will exist, one where children are sold for sex by pimps. And those sex traffickers are descending on the area.

“People are thinking of the Packers and the Steelers and the game on the field, having a good time and Super Bowl commercials. Most don’t think about a 12-year-old being forced to dance naked,” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told ABC News.

And this:

ATLANTA — Pimps will traffic thousands of under-age prostitutes to Texas for Sunday’s Super Bowl, hoping to do business with men arriving for the big game with money to burn, child rights advocates said.

And this:

While football fans are eagerly anticipating the Feb. 6 Super Bowl showdown in Dallas, some state officials are gearing up for the big game’s dark side: the surge in human trafficking that tends to accompany major sports and entertainment events. “What we’ve learned is that sexual trafficking, sexual exploitation of children in particular, is all about supply and demand,” says Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. With more than 100,000 fans descending on Dallas, that demand is going to be great. There is a “looming potential explosion of human trafficking around the Super Bowl,” says Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is expecting hundreds of girls and women to be brought to the area.

The second story, from Reuters, is instructive. I’m going to do something I don’t normally do — quote more than three paragraphs or so, just so we can go through it and see if we can spot all the weasel words and agenda-laden sources. This entire story rests on two rickety legs, “child rights advocates” and the Texas attorney general. Ahem:

As the country’s largest sporting event, the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers will make the Dallas-Fort Worth area a magnet for business of all kinds.

That includes the multimillion dollar, under-age sex industry, said activists and law enforcement officials working to combat what they say is an annual spike in trafficking of under-age girls ahead of the Super Bowl.

“The Super Bowl is one of the biggest human trafficking events in the United States,” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told a trafficking prevention meeting in January.

Wow, really? Tell me more:

Girls who enter the grim trade face a life of harsh treatment and danger, according to a Dallas police report in 2010. Few who emerge are willing to speak about it. Tina Frundt, 36, is an exception.

Now married and living in Washington D.C., Frundt was lured into sex work at 14 after she fell for a 24-year-old who invited her to leave home in 1989 and join his “family” in Cleveland, Ohio.

That family consisted of the man and three girls living in a motel. When Frundt declined on the first night to have sex with her boyfriend’s friends they raped her.

“I was angry with myself for not listening to him, so the next night when he sent me out on the street and told me … (to earn $500) I listened,” she said in a telephone interview.

Frundt paced the streets for hours and finally got into a client’s car.

When she came home in the morning with just $50, her pimp beat her in front of the other girls to teach them all a lesson and sent her back onto the street the next night with the warning not to return until she had reached the quota.

The scenario was repeated night after night as Frundt’s pimp moved his stable across the Midwest. Any sign of rebellion led to further beatings. Escape seemed out of the question.

“I was a teen-ager in a strange town with no money and no place to go,” she said. She finally escaped by getting arrested.

Frundt’s story is terrible, for sure. Notice it has nothing to do with the Super Bowl.

There’s some more stuff about how awful a teen prostitute’s life is, and then we’re back to the news peg:

“At previous Super Bowls, pimps hired cab drivers to turn their vehicles into mobile brothels,” said Deena Graves, executive director of child advocacy group Traffick911.

Up to 10,000 adult and under-age girls have come to previous Super Bowls, said Jerry Strickland, communications director in the Texas attorney general’s office, who acknowledged that precise figures are hard to gauge.

“The statistics are a moving target. They (under age sex workers) can’t be counted in turnstiles like ticket holders,” he said in an interview.

Can you give us a specific, Deena Graves? One arrest made in one of these moving brothels? One cab driver who took the cash to turn his rear-view mirror up? At least Jerry Strickland seems to know he’s carrying his boss’ water. Note the “up to 10,000 adult and underage girls,” which is sort of amusing. When Detroit hosted the Super Bowl five years ago, there were public and private parties galore, and you have to figure at least some working girls were there; I know I was told high-end strippers were happy to come and work as Jenna Jameson’s lingerie models at the party she threw. But “up to” is a wonderfully elastic term, and by saying that number includes adults, well, you’ve sort of muddied your own story. Anyway, it’s not like they can be counted with turnstiles! Onward:

Law enforcement agencies and advocacy groups rescued around 50 girls during the previous two Super Bowls, said Graves. Six were registered on the Center for Missing and Exploited Children website. One had been trafficked from Hawaii.

“Even one rescue is considered a success,” said Frundt who now advocates for exploited girls and has founded a girls’ treatment center and a safe house for girls in Washington D.C.

Finally, a link between the game and the crime. Too bad it’s vague and utterly unverifiable. “Around 50” during two previous games? Was that 25 per game, or 50 each year? How many were rescued by law enforcement, and how many by those convenient advocacy groups? Six were registered, only we can’t tell you who they are, alas, as sex-crime victims.

Finally, the feel-good ending:

To fight the trade, authorities, child welfare advocates and the airline industry are collaborating.

Representatives from American Airlines, Delta, United, Quantas and American Eagle are holding a training session to help them spot signs of trafficking. Nancy Rivard, president of Airline Ambassadors International, will also work with another 100 flight crews to distribute materials on flights.

Some 67,000 people signed a petition on www.change.org opposing sex trafficking as part of a campaign by Traffick911 called “I’m Not Buying It!” that is supported by 60 nonprofits and faith-based groups.

That campaign has also attracted heavy hitters like Dallas Cowboy Jay Ratliff, a three-time Pro Bowler, who made a public service announcement entitled “Real men don’t buy children. They don’t buy sex.”

Ratliff, who himself has two daughters, is recruiting other National Football League players for the campaign.

“You hear of sex trafficking overseas,” he wrote in an email from Hawaii where he is playing in the Pro Bowl. “But you never imagine it is happening in the United States.”

Training will happen. A petition has happened. A PSA has happened. And the Texas AG will be on the alert.

Please note that I am not questioning whether trafficking in underage prostitutes happens. We know it does. I am questioning whether it has any connection whatsoever with the Super Bowl. Why not the U.S. Open, or the Olympics, or the All-Star Game? Those events all bring large numbers of out-of-towners into a strange city to watch sports; are they less likely to get their freak on with a 16-year-old captive? What is it about the national pro football championship game that tempts so many to hitch a ride on its coattails? Is it something about the violence on the field, or the ridiculous, dead-of-winter, what-else-is-there-to-write-about hype that covers everything from advertising to the food pages (super dip ideas for your super spread!) that makes those left out want to latch on to the media gravy train?

I don’t mind a story on how to make a cheese ball in the shape of a football. But this sort of thing pisses me off. We’ve been burned once by this sort of piggybacking. If I were the NFL, I’d be throwing flags all over the place.

Speaking of which, this was also a health story last night:

Suffering an emotional loss in the Super Bowl may be hazardous to a fan’s heart health, a new study suggests.

Oh, bollocks it is.

Little Miss Grumpy, sitting here waiting for her snowstorm. Pantry is stocked, snowblower is gassed, bets are laid. Kate’s taking 12 inches, I’m going for eight, even though we’re in the purple band (forecast of 12+ inches) on the maps. We both think there’ll be a school cancellation. She still has to do her homework. Because I hope she’ll get good grades and grow up to be something other than a credulous journalist.

So I’m waiting for Snotorious BIG. Photos tomorrow, I hope. Have a good one, all.

A final busy day in a very busy week means today’s entry is all caffeine and bloggage. Caffeine and bloggage, people! I know you’ll be OK with it, because when it comes to a discussion, you folks rock the house. I thought yesterday’s comment thread was tremendous, by the way; thanks to all who contributed. Besides, we have ourselves plenty to talk about today:

OID: Tow truck driver spots what he thinks is an abandoned car, calls police and waits for permission to hook it. Permission never comes. So he calls 911 with the same information, waits two hours, no one shows up. Then:

Two weeks later, on Jan. 24, after several calls from neighbors, a police officer finally came to the site. Inside the SUV, the officer found the body of James Mullen of Oak Park, riddled with bullets.

Well, good thing it’s winter.

I can’t tell you how often I read stories like this in the paper. Later on, a deputy chief describes the situation as “confusing.” I’ll say. So many unanswered questions. Were the windows tinted? Was the corpse in the driver’s seat, or stowed in the cargo area? Where, exactly, was the car parked? The story was based on testimony offered at a Board of Police Commissioners hearing, and I guess no one asked.

Some of you got to this yesterday, but I’m just now reading about $P’s comment about the “Sputnik moment” passage in the SOTU speech, and I’m, well, speechless. Combined with Michele Bachmann’s retelling of our founders’ commitment to diversity, I’m wondering if this particular wing of the right-wing dog-and-pony show isn’t some sort of performance art piece. Nothing else explains it.

We won’t have Mike Pence to kick around, come primary season. Alas, Hoosiers, you’ll still be stuck with him.

First Tunisia, now Egypt. I have nothing to contribute to this discussion, other than to recall a story from the dark ages of journalism, when second-tier diplomats would make the rounds of newspaper editorial boards, for coffee and discussion about foreign policy, with an eye toward guiding the opinion-mongers in their opinion-making. I know — crazy, right? Anyway, if the diplomat was important enough, and there was a chance he’d say something newsworthy, sometimes a reporter was invited to sit in, because hey, you can’t ask an editorial writer to do a news story. It’s beneath their dignity. This was in Columbus, by the way.

So one day some Israeli undersecretary stops by, and my colleague Ted draws the reporting duty. The discussion was about negotiations with Egypt. Anwar Sadat had just been assassinated, and succeeded by someone named Hosni Mubarak. The editor of the paper, a twinkly pipe-smoking gent already coasting toward retirement, had a question for the diplomat.

“What about this McBurke? Can he bring peace?”

The Israeli blinked a time or two, trying to remember when the Egyptians had installed a Scotsman in the president’s office. “What? Who?”

“McBurke,” the editor pressed. “The new president.”

But the diplomat was diplomatic. “Oh, you’re speaking of Mr. Mubarak,” he said, and the moment passed, but Ted told us all about it. All the young people, whose brains had not yet started farting at inappropriate moments, got a good laugh out of it. This was when Bob and Doug McKenzie were doing their “Great White North” routine all over, and so we decided the Egyptian Scot’s first name should be “Hoser” and ever since, I’ve thought of the president of Egypt as Hoser McBurke. The other day I heard a statistic that half the Egyptian population had never known another president.

Boy, do I feel old.

Have a great weekend, all.

Jeff TMMO has asked me to address the big news from last night, although it was really the big news from Monday: Mark Bittman is dropping his Minimalist column from the NYT, but starting an op-ed and magazine gig with the same paper, moving on from recipes to ruminations and analyses of U.S. food policy.

Jeff seems to mourn the loss for the food pages. I’m thrilled for the other sections’ gain.

I guess I should have mentioned it sooner, but as owners of the two Bittman cornerstones — “How to Cook Everything” and “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” — I have paid less attention to his column, save for those “101” blowouts he does from time to time, the 101 salads piece, or the make-ahead Thanksgiving dishes, or whatever. I learned what I needed to learn about cooking from Bittman a while ago, and I think he’s going to be a wonderful voice on the opinion pages.

In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and predict that within five years, Bittman will win a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He’s that good, and besides, the ranks of commentators in the dailies has grown so thin, the juries will be desperate to hand one to a fresh new voice. When Kathleen Parker and Leonard Pitts win the Big P, you know it’s time.

And judging from the lively discussions we have in this space about food, food policy, eating and all the rest of it, he’ll have no shortage of thought-provoking material. I can’t wait.

Meanwhile, what about the other news last night? I’m talking about Chris Matthews yelling at some Tea Party d’bag over their shameless use of Michele Bachmann to deliver their propaganda last night. While I congratulate Matthews for being one of the few journalists (on TV, anyway) who actually tells people they’re not answering the question he asked, all his spluttering isn’t going to change anything or anybody, so maybe the answer is to not pay attention to Michele Bachmann. Works for me.

And the Oscars! Nothing really really surprising there, was there? Brian took umbrage over Hailee Steinfeld being nominated for best-supporting when she was clearly in a lead role, but that’s the way Oscar rolls. Promising ingenues who hit one out of the park in their first role are almost always supporters, especially if they’re minors. It’s the Rookie of the Year prize, and all you have to do is think of all the people who have won it who never did work of the same caliber again. There was Haing Ngor (“The Killing Fields”), who wasn’t even an actor; Marlee Matlin (“Children of a Lesser God”), who still acts, but whose work is strictly at the TV-drama skill level, and, of course, Mo’Nique. I just hope the Oscars aren’t a total walkover for “The King’s Speech” this year. A very fine film, but there were many others, and those big consensus winners don’t age well. When was the last time you saw “Gandhi” on cable and stopped to watch even a minute of it? Or “Out of Africa,” for that matter? (Actually, I will watch “Out of Africa,” but only for Meryl Streep. Robert Redford is laughable.)

A quick pass by the bloggage before our mortgage man stops by. We’re refinancing our house, and I need to limber up for signing my name 400 times.

Via Lawyers, Guns and Money, a site you can waste a minute or an hour on: Better Book Titles.

I’ve been giving Tom & Lorenzo a lotta love of late, but what the hell, they’re on a hot streak, like today’s Dress Libs with Zooey Deschanel.

Someone should do this with “It’s the End of the World as We Know It:” A visual map of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Actually, someone should do a master’s thesis on the pop-culture afterlife of songs like this. Exhibit A, of course: the Rickroll.

Finally, today is my state’s 174th birthday, or so one of my tweeps tells me. Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam, circumspice. Happy birthday to the pleasant peninsula.

Off to flex my fingers. Good day to all.

As longtime readers of this zillion-word narrative of my boring life know, at one point I worked as a copy editor, one whose shift started at 5 a.m. I read the sports copy for an afternoon newspaper, which meant I often had to trek back to the sports department to ask stupid questions and make ignorant suggestions. (“Can we get rid of one of these basketball pictures? We have three wads of armpit hair on the sports front.” Answer: Of course not. It’s Indiana, silly.) Anyway, the sports-department TV was tuned to one of the ESPN channels, and at that point of the very early morning, they showed reruns of Jack LaLanne.

LaLanne died yesterday, and like many people, I was astounded. I thought he’d live forever. He’s been old for decades now — 96 at the time of his exit — and it seemed every year, you could find a three-paragraph story about his latest birthday-celebration stunt, some act of defiant fitness. I recall one year he swam a considerable distance in the Houston Ship Channel, towing a large vessel behind, although a quick Google doesn’t turn anything up, other than the amusing detail that the Houston Ship Channel has a clogged artery (a beef-tallow spill), and LaLanne died of something else entirely (pneumonia). It should have been a lightning strike, or maybe shot by a jealous husband he had cuckolded.

It would appear it’s my memory that’s faulty; according to his obits, the swims took place in California:

At 60 he swam from Alcatraz Island to Fisherman’s Wharf handcuffed, shackled and towing a 1,000-pound boat. At 70, handcuffed and shackled again, he towed 70 boats, carrying a total of 70 people, a mile and a half through Long Beach Harbor.

Impressive. Anyway, on those early-morning rambles down to argue with the sports editors, I was struck by two things about LaLanne’s fitness show — his old-fashioned wardrobe (that stretchy one-piece thing and the shoes that looked like ballet slippers) and his modern technique. Exercise has trends and fashions like everything else, and I’ve been around long enough to see them come and go and sometimes come again. (The medicine ball is back, but deep knee bends are probably gone forever, replaced by the squat.) Sometimes what LaLanne did on those shows look suspiciously like Pilates (new), which is sort of like isometrics (old). He was also a big believer in push-ups, currently enjoying a renaissance as perhaps the most important single exercise anyone can do, at any age. I don’t know if he ever used the words “core” or “abs,” but he seemed to understand that staying fit doesn’t require much more than a little bit of time, every day, that the most important thing you need is persistence and that a firm midsection will serve you no matter what your sport, from running to swimming to sitting behind a desk.

Jack LaLanne — now juicing carrots and towing ships in the next world, reunited with Happy, the white German shepherd.

So, how was your weekend? We went to the Detroit News Christmas party. Srsly. The way the story went, somehow December got away from everyone, and the next thing you knew, the company had run out of dates for a pre-holiday party, so they opted for a post-holiday one. I thought maybe they’d dispense with the theme, but no — there was a tree, and Christmas gifts, and snowflake sweaters and a holiday singalong. Plus karaoke. Every department had to come up and do a number. We left after an assistant managing editor and mild-mannered designer (or editor or something) teamed up for “Rapper’s Delight,” the whole thing, and crushed it, they were so good. Always leave a party on a high note. That was a high note. Reminded me of the time a similarly mild-mannered guy from my last newsroom stood up at a karaoke party and performed “Baby Got Back” better than Sir Mix-a-Lot. And the time before that, when one of those guys who works the overnight shift and nobody knows very well, the guy who gets called Boo Radley behind his back, did the same thing, only with “Friends in Low Places.” Karaoke makes a lot of people miserable, but for some? It’s like a telephone to their soul.

We also went to the movies. A.O. Scott is absolutely right about “Somewhere,” which I enjoyed very much, although I’d love to see the script. All 22 pages of it.

Roger Ebert quotes a film editor on why 3D sucks. I’m in full agreement, but my argument is simpler: Because so many of the films made in 3D suck.

Manic Monday awaits. Outta here.

A deer came to an unfortunate end at Eminem’s house this week, after it failed to clear an iron-picket fence and presumably died in a highly unpleasant bleed-out while hanging from it. (Extremely graphic photo here; you’ve been warned.) A perfunctory Freep story says the singer “is expected to have the meat processed and given to a family in need.”

“Winter’s Bone” notwithstanding, there may be a few needy families in the metro area who still possess the knowledge to prepare venison, but I’m betting their numbers are dwindling by the year. We’ve been over this ground before here, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth noting again — cooking skills correlate to income, and until we untie them, I think we’ll continue to have an obesity problem. (Let’s leave out the upper class for now, the people with showplace kitchens who can’t make a peanut-butter sandwich.) Mark Bittman once bravely let a video crew into his small New York apartment and showed them where he makes his own personal foodie magic — in a spartan space, with few tools, very limited storage, not even much of a refrigerator. It can be done. But if you’re smart enough to know this, you’re far less likely to be needy, these days.

May I just say, also, to those who are considering the racial angles to all this, that every week at the Eastern Market I see obviously smart shoppers, many of them African-American, buying the raw ingredients for some serious dinners, much of it southern-style, bushels of mustard or collard greens, every edible part of the pig, chickens by the score. These people aren’t needy, but I’d wager many of their recipes were born from neediness — not much else explains chitterlings, in my opinion — so I know the skills are out there. But they’re fading.

That deer obviously died in agony. I thought adrenaline was bad for the taste of game, or is that an old wives’ tale? Basset’s our resident deer hunter, maybe he can say.

I don’t wish to start every report here with a weather report, but it is currently 10 degrees and we’re not expected to see 20 again until Wednesday. Might be time for my winter walk on the lake this weekend. We haven’t had a great deal of snow yet, and last weekend I walked a couple loops at Lake Front Park and watched a guy running his golden retriever out on the ice. He was on skates, taking advantage of the vast stretches of mostly clear ice to keep pace with the galloping dog, which had just enough snow under its paws to run without slipping. It looked like a lot of fun.

Downside of a cold snap: The cold. Upside: The sunshine. Caribbean-blue skies at the moment. Good thing I bought some fleece-lined jeans this year. My ass and thighs carry plenty of natural insulation, but I can always use a little more.

Some bloggage to ease into the weekend:

James Wolcott, his usual fine self, on political entertainments, from Stewart to Palin. A taste:

Think back on the Iraq war and the W.M.D.’s, the Terri Schiavo circus, the iguana contortions of John McCain under the guise of maverick integrity, the Wall Street meltdown and bailout—TV satirists and late-night hosts drove much deeper nails into the marrow of what was happening than the editorial pages of The Washington Post, that prison morgue of Beltway consensus. A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.

Many laff lines, including the best single description of Glenn Beck in the flesh I’ve yet read:

Round and beige, he resembles one of the squeamish pod sperm awaiting launch instructions upstream in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.

Only in Detroit: Two scrappy babes overcome a would-be car thief and try to perform a citizen’s arrest, getting zero help from the Detroit police. A Wayne State patrolman finally came to the rescue. Bonus weirdness factor: One of the scrappy babes is named “Officer.”

John Dingell, gunning to be the Strom Thurmond of the House, announces his intention to try for a 30th term. We’ll see. Redistricting will come between then and now, and Republicans control the Statehouse top to bottom.

OK, time to put on the fleece jeans and tackle a very cold day. Have a great weekend.

Michelle Obama — Shelley O to her fans, like Tom & Lorenzo — wore a bangin’ dress to last night’s state dinner (pix at the link). And, whoa, it was Alexander McQueen?!?!?? I am impressed. I like the way she lopped those sleeves off; a woman who does her weight-room work the way Shelley O does has every right to display the First Guns* at every opportunity. Like Tom and Lorenzo, I’m not wild about the one-shoulder thing, but Alexander McQueen’s aesthetic — or that of his successor, as McQueen checked himself out of the game last year — is all about not doing the expected thing. And she looks amazing. (*Witticism by T&L, in a previous post about Shelley O’s wardrobe.)

I know we went through the whole first-lady-and-her-designer-friends scandal once before, with Nancy Reagan, who admitted to accepting high-end gowns as gifts from her very dear air-kissing pals and not declaring it on her taxes. I assume Mrs. O pays something for her wardrobe, but I honestly don’t know what that might be — the economics of haute couture has never been clear to me. Generally speaking, the more famous the body in the gown, the less it pays, usually zero. One red-carpet photo of an Oscar nominee in a recognizable designer dress translates to hundreds sold at full price to the wives and mistresses of Russian oligarchs, Mexican drug lords and hedge-fund billionaires. But it would look bad, very very bad, if the FLOTUS was working the same deal as Sandra Bullock. What does a custom-altered Alexander McQueen gown even cost? I’ll just throw a wild guess out there: $15,000. If someone knows, chime in.

Which brings us to an interesting thing I found yesterday: The 10 most expensive gifts given to the president in 2009. Diplomacy is a tricky art; when heads of state meet, they are expected to tote some host-and-hostess gifts along, but many of these sound ghastly. Topping this list is, natch, Saudi Arabia:

“Large desert scene on a green veined marble base featuring miniature figurines of gold palm trees and camels; large gold medallion with the Royal seal in a green leather display box; large brass and glass clock by Jaeger-LeCoultre in a green leather display case.”

The Chinese were almost as bad:

“39” x 49′” wooden framed and matted fine silk embroidery depicting a portrait study of the First Family.”

The English and the Italians did better, and the Pope gave a whole gift bag, including a silver keychain. I’ll let you explore for yourself. Gawker mined the list for the cheapest gift, and came up with a $75 bottle of olive oil offered by Mahmoud Abbas of the Palestinian Authority. That’s a great deal more than I ever paid for olive oil in any quantity, so I’ll reserve judgment. But some of the gifts are wonderful, and if I were the president, I’d be tempted to load a few of them into the moving van when I leave, especially the “Orange Batavus ‘Holland on the Hudson’ bicycle with an extra bike seat,” from the Netherlands. The Dutch make wonderful bicycles.

And Silvio Berlusconi is a virtual department store of gifty wonderfulness. Alan will like this one: “Two men’s Belstaff jackets; one women’s Belstaff jacket.” You know who wears Belstaff jackets? George Clooney, that’s who.

Well, spelunk away. It’s an interesting document.

Before I leave, a correction/clarification from yesterday: Syphilis doesn’t cause hair loss, but a pre-antibiotics treatment for it (mercury) does. The merkin allegedly evolved to cover the effects of hair loss, as well as to cover the odd chancre. You can find any number of sources for this sort of thing, but as always, the Straight Dope is a nice one-stop choice.

I never knew anyone who admitted to having syphilis, although there was one fellow in my circle who picked up gonorrhea, from a brief fling with a young widow, who was working out her grief through promiscuity. I hope he learned his lesson, although he never visited a doctor and self-medicated with an antibiotic course smuggled out the back door of a pharmacy where he knew the owner.

What I learned today before breakfast: “A night in the arms of Venus leads to a lifetime on Mercury.” Ahem:

Though no proper studies were done to prove it, mercury may have been an effective, if rather brutal, way of treating syphilis. It was administered in multiple ways, including by mouth and by rubbing it on the skin.

One of the more gruesome methods was fumigation, in which the patient/victim was placed in a closed box with their head sticking out. Mercury was placed in the box and a fire was started under the box which caused the metal to vapourise.

Aren’t you glad you live in the modern age?

Work beckons. More coffee beckons. Thursday — the most sleep-deprived day of my week.

I hate those weekends when you spend all your time indoors, but it was one of those weekends when it had to be done. The teaching chores had to be done, and hallelujah, I got ’em done. And I also did the laundry and the grocery shopping. The house is still a wreck, but we all have clean underwear and something to eat.

And while it may be a holiday for you, it’s not for me. I’m heading out in a bit for my usual manic Monday, taking a few minutes to drink some coffee and listen to a speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. Did you know Grosse Pointe was the site of one of his last speeches before his assassination? It was, in March 1968, and after a few years of saying, “I should check out the online resources on that,” I’m finally doing so. The local historical society has a page devoted to the event, which packed the local high-school gym with 2,700 souls, who by and large treated him well and warmly, if you can ignore the many hecklers, clearly audible on the tape. They were from a group called Breakthrough. If you look at their materials, their main objection to King was that he was soft on communism: “He has taken up the banner of the Viet Cong by calling for an end to the War in Viet Nam on Communist terms.” One loudly denounced him as a “traitor” before walking out — “dramatically,” the newspaper found it necessary to note. At one point, King even turns over his microphone to a Navy vet for a brief rant about anti-war protestors. The script could have come from the blogosphere, c. 2003.

But the parts that really sting, 43 years later, are passages like this: “There is no more dangerous development in our nation than the constant building up of predominantly negro central cities ringed by white suburbs. This will do nothing but invite social disaster.”

Dr. King, you were right. But I don’t think, if we had it to do over again, that anyone would do anything different. Anyway, worth a listen for King scholars, armchair or otherwise, and a break from that other speech you hear so much at this time of year. (Brendan Walsh, one of our local school board members has a few thoughts on it, here.)

Bloggage:

I’ll have a filet o’ fish: Canoeing through McDonald’s. In Australia, where else?

Just a reminder to those of you who have struggled with infertility: Children are not distributed by a benevolent and loving God to those who most deserve them. In fact, sometimes it seems the opposite is true.

There was some chatter about the new Miss America yesterday in comments over the weekend. Talk about an event that’s passed its prime; who even knew it was on? Fortunately we have Tom and Lorenzo to break things down, at least. Shocker of the event: The new Miss is only 17? I didn’t think that was possible under pageant rules, but then, I didn’t think having it in Vegas was possible under pageant rules, either. Anyway, she seems like a nice girl. I look forward to a year of not knowing her name.

So, then, time for me to shove off.

I hope someone here has noticed that I’ve said not word one about Ted Williams until now. I’ll admit to having passed the link along in the first day of his story, but it was in a private e-mail, to a radio person whom I thought might appreciate the essential weirdness of it back when it was fresh. But after that, I held my tongue, because I saw how many people in my Facebook network were posting the clip from the Columbus Dispatch, and I knew what would happen.

I knew Williams would be an overnight sensation. I knew someone would give him a big break. He would be taken in, cleaned up and hustled off to the Today show to warm hearts. He’d be Cinderfella for a week, a month, a… no, just a week. A week is all we can spare a story these days. A week is the new month, a month is the new year. A year is, well, who cares? These days years run forward and backward and probably into a fourth and fifth dimension.

After a week, he would fade away, but until then, I wasn’t going to say a word. Because? BECAUSE THIS GUY IS HOMELESS. DO YOU THINK HE BECAME HOMELESS BECAUSE HE FORGOT TO PAY THE RENT? Also, because even a sane, well-balanced person would go crazy under such treatment, being the week’s designated heartwarmer. Gabby Giffords’ aide, Daniel Hernandez, is this week’s. He seems like a nice young man. FOR NOW.

Williams imploded right on schedule. He turned himself in to a rehab facility — on television! — for none other than Dr. Phil. I assume it’s the standard 28-day residential program. Whew. Now I don’t have to think about him for a month.

A woman from People magazine interviewed for a journalism fellowship the year after my class, and her idea for the year was outstanding — spend it researching and writing a book about people who become accidental celebrities. Overnight sensations. At the time, the Elizabeth Smart case was in the news, and she mentioned that family as the textbook case for the total weirdness that can overtake a person thrust into the public eye with no active effort on their part. Remember how strange that case was? How many press conferences the parents called, how generously they provided hours of video footage of their home movies, how welcoming they were to any old news crew that wanted to drop in and poke around their two artfully decorated houses? They were the first people I’ve seen in a while who could outlast a crowd of reporters; it seemed they never said, “OK, one more question and we’re going to wrap it up.”

And then when Elizabeth was found, they got right back into the groove — more press conferences, no question left unanswered. It was merely strange until I read that Elizabeth had asked to audition to play herself in the TV movie about the case. At the time, a smart person could speculate pretty accurately what went on during her captivity, and it was confirmed in her recent court testimony about it: She was raped daily for nine months. And she wanted to relive it on a film set, shot by shot. Clearly, this publicity stuff is powerful medicine.

But back to Williams. He admitted to “problems with drugs and alcohol.” And yet some producer thought he’d make for a few minutes of warm hearts.

Who are these producers, and how old are they? Eighteen?

And so another week lurches to a close. I’m hoping next week will be calmer, as I don’t have too many of these in me. How about a little bloggage?

We haven’t had an OID (only in Detroit) story for a while: It’s auto-show week, and during that time all the companies have fleets of cars not just under the exhibit lights of Cobo, but out on the streets as well. One of BMW’s haulers was loading high-end Beemers onto a truck outside the Book Cadillac Hotel when he was distracted for, he estimates, 60 seconds. Oops.

We’ve all seen the best-of lists for 2010, so now it’s time for the worst-of. NYMag considers the movies. Admittedly, No. 1 was easy to predict, but it was nice to see “Black Swan” made the list, too.

Amy Chua, the crazy Chinese mother, finds the “I was drunk” excuse of the media age: It was the editing. Thanks, Moe, for digging this one up.

Whatever you do, don’t do it there: The peculiar slight of adultery conducted in [ominous chords, organ sting] the marital bed.

This weekend looks like heaven to me. Enjoy yours.

Earlier this year Last year my friend Clark had an idea for a short documentary film — a day in the life of a Detroit street dog. He said he’d brought it up before among our little guerrilla tribe, and no one liked it, but I loved it. Immediately I started imagining how we’d do it: We’d need some sort of ride-along expert, either a vet or (the guerrilla, zero-budget solution), a vet student, preferably someone with access to the specialized equipment you’d need, including drugs. We’d need a radio-collar system to keep track of whatever dog we settled on as our star. We’d need at least one but preferably several small, wearable video cameras, like the new GoPro, along with specially fitted harnesses for the dogs to carry them on their chests. And we’d need a crazy crew who wouldn’t mind working all night in some of the city’s worst-of-the-worst neighborhoods, probably following our subject on bicycles, carrying equipment in backpacks. We’d have to be our own security, which would mean no security.

It’s still a great idea. But after several fruitless phone calls to the city and the Michigan State vet school, along with a back-of-the-envelope budget estimate, I decided it wasn’t going to be done by us.

It’s not going to be done by the Discovery Channel, either. The channel applied for and was approved for a tax credit for nearly $560,000 to make a series called “A Dog’s Life,” about guess-what:

Besides using crews to film the dogs, the project would attach small cameras to the animals to capture Detroit life from a dog’s-eye view.

Bad news for the Discovery Channel: The city turned them down for permits, saying such a portrayal would be bad for the city. Note to the Discovery Channel: Try Flint. They’re hungrier, and unless I miss my guess, the problem is just as bad there. My vet, who works as the on-call professional for animal emergencies for several different police agencies, said the problem was always bad, and became critical when the foreclosures started; people would simply turn their animals out to fend for themselves. Weird breed mixes are a common sight in the city. Most have at least some pit bull in them, but you really do see all kinds — Wendell, Sweet Juniper’s dog, was a resident of the Detroit streets before he was adopted, and he looks pretty close to purebred German shorthair. Jim has written several times of what an enthusiastic bird dog he is on the neighborhood’s pheasants, so it stands to reason.

Filming them is still a good idea, and it can be done for a lot less than a million bucks. Fly under the radar, and you don’t need permits.

OK, this is the second-to-last day of Hell Week, i.e., the first week of classes at Wayne. I have to hit the shower, the gas station and probably several other places before heading downtown, so quick bloggage:

I only caught the end of the president’s speech in Tucson last night, but before it was over I predicted it would drive conservatives crazy, and whaddaya know?

Good gravy, this flooding in Australia is positively Biblical.

I’ve been reading some of the inside-baseball mea culpas and discussion over the early misreporting from Tucson this weekend, and it strikes me as a huge waste of time. Every study I’ve read says people want news NOW, and don’t mind if early reports in a breaking situation are wrong, as long as they’re corrected quickly; in fact, they expect it. Reporting Gabrielle Giffords to be dead, and then correcting it a few minutes later, doesn’t strike me as an egregious mistake after a woman’s been shot in the head point-blank. It happened with Jim Brady during the Reagan assassination attempt, and it’ll happen again.

What do you civilians think? As for me, I think I need a shower. Later, all.