Well, that was interesting.

[Koff.]

I expect we all know what we want to talk about, and the bar is open. A few thoughts:

* As always, things didn’t go entirely as planned for anyone. Angle, O’Donnell, Paladino, et al. Whatever coattails those stupid colonial-Williamsburg tea party outfits had, they didn’t extend all the way to the insane asylum.

* Still, very bad for Obama. This makes 2012 look pretty grim. On the other hand, don’t underestimate anyone or anything. For once, Maureen Dowd is instructive.

* The challenge, once you’ve gotten a job you’ve fought hard for, is to do it well. But I don’t believe for a minute the GOP intends to do any job in Washington other than making Barack Obama a one-term president. They don’t have a plan for health care; that’s been made abundantly clear over the past year. They don’t have a plan for the economy other than to cut taxes and blame the ensuing deficits on Obama. They don’t even have a legislative plan, other than to “cut federal spending,” except for Medicare, Social Security, defense, et al.

* Rand Paul — what a piece of work. Swaggering, arrogant, the contemporary embodiment of the mine owners who told their employees how lucky they were to get to shop in such a clean company store. Kind of an argument for battered wife syndrome at the state level.

* Dear Evan Joe Lieberman Bayh: Shut up.

* What is Michael Gerson so put out about? Tom Tancredo speaks for his people. As the lady in touch with Real America knows.

As for me, I need to pull together something for my other gig. Interesting results there — the moderate Democrat representing us in the Michigan House, the first one ever in the history of our district, kept his seat, and delivered a thumpin’ to his Republican opponent, in a year when something else entirely should have happened. Hmm. Of course, Rick Snyder won the governor’s office, as expected. Which means the tax incentives for filmmaking are dead. It was fun while it lasted, but it never lasts long.

Calvin Stovall is a former colleague of mine, now editor-in-chief of the Binghamton Press in New York. He recently lowered the Sword of Justice upon his newspaper’s comment sections. You think your life is sad and pathetic? Getta loada this:

We had to remove racist and insensitive comments on a story about the birth of the first baby of 2010 in Broome County, born to a black woman. Just Monday, I had staffers take down comments on a story about a motorcyclist killed in an accident involving a school bus and a minivan in Kirkwood.

During the past three weeks, I banned three people for life from our site because of abuses, including attacks on one another and racist comments. They returned to the site under different usernames. We confirmed who they were and blocked them again, and we will continue to do so until they get the message that they’re not welcome on our site.

First, imagine being the sort of person who feels the need to comment on a first-baby-of-the-year story. I’d imagine being banned for those shenanigans would be the Scorsesean camera-pulls-back moment that momentarily puts you outside your life and allows you to briefly observe it from, say, a high corner in your room: Yep, that’s me all right, rockin’ the Dell laptop. Boy, the way I type really rattles the card table, doesn’t it? And that bare lightbulb — none of those socialist twisty things for me! Kiss my ass, Mr. born-in-Kenya Obama!

(On second thought, you always run the risk that, once outside himself, your readers will like what they see.)

Internet eggheads are always telling lamestream journalists that they have to jump into their comment sections. Many of them run sites where the comment sections are kind of like our own here at NN.C, rich and smart and, to continue my oft-used Cheers metaphor, a place where everybody knows your name, there’s a fire in the hearth and the bowls of peanuts are always full and warm.

There’s another kind of bar out there. It’s where alcoholics line up to get a drink at the earliest possible opening hour. It smells bad, no one talks and the toilets frequently overflow. This is what newspaper comment sections are. I really can’t blame someone like Calvin, who has enough to do just getting the paper out, from wanting to engage with the sorts of pinheads who would, once banned from the worst bar in the world, try to sneak a way back in, re-registering under new user names, so that people can hear their thoughts on the skin color of the first baby of the new year.

Partly it’s a function of size — the more people you let in, the worse it gets. Our own community got some new members after the Goeglein affair, but I think the quality stayed high, even as some of our best people left (farewell and adieu, Danny, Marcia, Gasman, many others) and were replaced by newcomers. I sometimes find myself at a loss for words when people ask what this blog is about. Is it political? Sometimes, but that’s not its purpose. Pop culture? Same answer. Personal, a diary? Kinda, but not really, no. So what is it? It’s just a place where I drink my morning coffee and work the kinks out of my fingers, but even on days when I’m not particularly present, the best reading is in the comments.

Once again, thanks to all you readers, silent and otherwise. I lift a glass to you, and the next round is on the house.

So, election day. I haven’t voted yet, but I will. There aren’t a ton of seats at play locally, but there are some — governor, state house and senate seats, and my local school board. The latter races have kept me hopping over at my other site, and just because there’s never enough to do that you can’t do a little bit more, yesterday’s police rounds were ridonkulous, a side effect of Halloween, I guess. Reading over my report, I’m kicking myself for not connecting the “29 minors” rousted from an underage drinking party to the Chilean miners, somehow — that could have generated some yuks. But in a week when the file offers you an actual scene from a Cheech & Chong movie, you take the low-hanging fruit.

So, off to the gym and the polls. No real bloggage today, but there’s this — the awful, no-good health care law that’s actually bringing health insurance to small-business employees.

Civic duty! Onward!

Halloween was forecast to be chillier this year than in years past, and I overbought candy. I forget how many bags, but it was two heavy sacks from Target, at least $50 worth. I had way, way too much, so I opened one bag and had three miniature Snickers. Kate had about that many miniature Reese’s. We both nibbled on the Starburst, for a grand total loss of maybe 2 percent in gross payload, maybe less.

Then I turned on the porch light at 5:30 p.m. Buzz Lightyear arrived at 5:40, and by 7:10 I was completely cleaned out. Every year, I forget how crazy it is. Hundreds of kids, easily. I enforced the one-to-a-customer rule almost unilaterally, with a few exceptions for exceptionally cute costumes. Didn’t put Screamin’ Jay Hawkins on the iPod speakers, as I had to start work at 6, so I sat on the porch in my lawn chair, laptop open, farming pharma-news, passing out candy. Because that’s how you gotta roll when you’re a work-at-home editor whose family deserted her on the one night of the year the doorbell will ring 200 times.

A few notes to consult for next year:

1) Buy more candy. There is no such thing as too much.
2) Snickers are totally over. One kid in 10 prefers them over Reese’s Cups. It’s time to admit to yourself why you buy them, you pig.
3) The two-bowl system — chocolate and fruit groups — is a winner.
4) It’s just not Halloween without Screamin’ Jay Hawkins.

A majority of our trick-or-treaters are “non-residents,” as polite people say in Grosse Pointe. There are more African Americans living here than there have been in the past, but not as many as we see on Halloween, and the circling cars dropping off and picking up kids sort of underline it. This happened in Fort Wayne, too, and it used to bug me. It doesn’t anymore. If your own neighborhood offers a paucity of candy, come on down to mine. All are welcome on my porch.

The stupidest story to turn up on the world’s Health pages last night: Avoid Halloween candy hazards, from the Los Angeles Times Online. No, it’s not about poison and razor blades; even the most dull-witted editors have stopped beating that dead horse. No, it’s about the hazards of “digestive upset,” “choking hazards” and “damage to orthodontia.” It contains some helpful tips you have probably never considered: “Feed them a healthy dinner before they go out so they’re not as tempted to snack,” and “Limit kids to about two pieces a day from their stash of goodies, or have them trade in their candy for a toy, book or family outing.”

As my husband often says, “Where would we be without newspapers to remind us to wear sunscreen?” The author of this groundbreaking piece, Alison Johnson, seems to specialize in this sort of thing. When I googled her name and home newspaper, the Hampton Roads Daily Press, I got another tips piece, on how to get through your child’s first haircut. Tip: Take a comfort item. (” If kids are nervous, let them hold a favorite stuffed animal, toy or blanket.” Forehead smack. I never would have thought of that!) Don’t miss the classic “how to eat to stay cooler,” either. Tip No. 1: Eat smaller, lighter meals.

Eh. On to the bloggage, it’s manic Monday:

The NYT explains Theatre Bizarre. Yes, the words “outré” and “leitmotif” appear.

Elizabeth Warren, Obama’s best hope to win back the masses. At least, NYMag seems to think so.

P.S. The auto bailout worked. Why doesn’t anyone know this?

Finally, the Washington Post looks into the crystal ball, post marijuana legalization. Worth your time.

Me, I must run.

Take your seats, class. Pop quiz:

Here is a transcription of a Facebook posting made by Cliff McCance, a Midland, Arkansas school board member, as presented by CBS News.

For reference, here is a screen capture of the very same posting, as presented in the Advocate. I advise taking at least a peek at this, so you can see the picture of the guy posing with a largemouth bass. In Arkansas, I don’t think any other single image would so indelibly establish his good ol’ boy credentials.

What you’re looking at is a question news editors wrestle with often. The posting is riddled with errors. How many do you fix?

In this case, the mistakes are mostly missing punctuation, which is forgivable. At least, it’s something we have to tolerate, at a time when so many people “write” on tiny smartphone keyboards. My own smartphone is pretty smart, and automatically changes “Ill” to “I’ll,” which I’m grateful for 99 percent of the time. The other 1 percent I’m irritated, as I meant to write “Ill I am at the thought of eating pasta for the third night in a row.” But in general, it’s pretty damn smart. If only it had a caps lock key, so I could YELL MORE in my text messages to Kate. But I digress.

The biggest booboo was this: McCance wrote, “We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed thereselves because of their sin. REALLY PEOPLE.”

What do you do with something like that? Run it by itself, run it with the fancypants (sic), or fix it? I think you run it, but I’m unsure on the siccing, so to speak. McCance is, after all, on a school board. He sets policy governing education in his community. And he says “thereselves.” Among many other sins.

As I think I’ve noted here before, once upon a time Ohio had a good ol’ boy for governor, big Jim Rhodes, and the papers routinely polished his mangled Appalachian-inflected English. Before TV was most voters’ primary window onto a candidate, they could get away with it. Every time he said the name of our state — Ahia — my nerves would jangle, but you all know what an elitist I am.

Do you even notice McCance’s usage? Does anyone other than our little smartypants tribe care? I’m with Gin and Tacos. I think it’s ghastly.

It goes without saying that what McCance actually said was far worse, but he’s already resigned on that score, under the terrible withering gaze of Anderson Cooper. A.C. wields the gay Sword of Justice.

No jokes, please.

If it’s Wednesday, Thursday or Friday morning, I’m late for something. We’re pulling the boat today, I have a meeting, and I need to get dressed. So let’s go bloggage:

Coozledad had the last word in the last thread’s comments on this matter, and I think he said it succinctly and well: Pubic hair a deal-breaker? It’s a wonder fratboys get fucked anywhere outside the hazing room. Yes, exactly!

Have a great weekend and fun Halloween. And stay out of the Reese’s Cups!

Moe et al, take note: The New York Times has parachutes on the ground in Defiance, Ohio. I always wanted to see this, maybe in a movie: A gathering on the village green…the sound of a low-flying aircraft, all eyes look up and see THREE SKYDIVERS descending, and soon they land — a WRITER, a PHOTOGRAPHER and a MULTI-PLATFORM NEW MEDIA GRAPHIC ARTIST. As the trio gather their PARACHUTES, the townspeople approach. The WRITER steps forward and extends a hand.

Anyway, the Times is, was, in my husband’s hometown. I read him the headline, Democratic Ohio Town Loosens Its Party Ties and we both sort of scratched our heads. Defiance is Democratic? Maybe in the ’60s. Maybe when the UAW still had something to swing. But as far as I can tell, the little D is the textbook example of the Reagan-era strategy of the GOP — get working- and middle-class blue-collar types to vote against their own economic interests through strategic dog-whistle “values” issues. Despite a move toward blue in 2008, it’s still in no danger of holding a gay pride parade anytime soon. However, don’t let that get in the way of the temperature-taking:

Will Parker, 24, finished college in 2009 with a degree in marketing and communications. In six months of looking, he found no work here in his hometown and had to take a Web-page job in Columbus, 115 miles to the southeast, that he feels is a dead end. Mr. Parker voted for Mr. Obama and said he now felt “voter’s remorse” because “it feels like we’re creating a welfare state.”

OK, first: Will? If you’re looking for work in marketing and communication, you’re looking in the wrong place. Generally speaking, towns of fewer than 20,000 souls don’t support much work in that field, even less so in recent years. Even Fort Wayne saw the loss of small ad shops and related jobs in the post-internet crash, as business consolidated in places like Chicago. If you desire that small-city lifestyle, Will, you should have picked a different major, and if you feel you’re in a dead end at 24, you lack imagination. Among many other things.

The rest of the story has that cognitive dissonance I hear so often these days, people who think that stimulus-funded bridge being built down the street is a great idea, but OMG health care! “Rammed down our throats,” was the phrase employed by, get this, an insurance agent. Yes, a woman who sells insurance frets about a bill that requires Americans to buy insurance. She’s probably worried about the death panels. They also dislike the bank bailout, but that of General Motors, which provides the highest-paying jobs in town? Mumble, mumble.

And this?

Local suspicion of government has also been fueled, (Mayor) Armstrong said, by a costly federal mandate to build a sewage system to protect the Great Lakes, requiring huge increases in local water rates.

Good lord, they were talking about that in Fort Wayne — upriver on the same waterway that flows through Defiance — when the first George Bush was president. This is the separation of storm and sanitary sewer lines, an expensive but necessary process brought to a crisis in many Midwestern cities by booming housing development through the ’80s and ’90s, all these new subdivisions flushing their toilets into inadequate, outdated systems that sent excrement into the rivers every time it rained. Let my husband offer an eyewitness report:

“We used to fish for carp off the bridge by my mom’s house and watch turds, rubbers and tampons float by.” This is when he was a boy. Damn President Obama for making us stop doing that!

Anyway, as this liberal-media report clearly indicates, the people of our nation’s heartland have turned against our president:

Karl Kissner, the restaurant’s owner, may represent a more vocal and influential attitude in Defiance. He calls himself a Democrat but says he did not vote for Mr. Obama, and his opposition to the administration has deepened.

A Democrat who didn’t vote Democratic in 2008? ‘Round these parts, we call those folks Republicans. But then, I don’t work for the New York Times.

Discuss. There’s a pretty good Metafilter thread about the same story, here.

Bloggage? Sure. Jim Griffioen at Sweet Juniper, along with his wife, have a knack for making the cutest Halloween costumes for their kids. But this one is extra-cute in situ: Ladies and gentlemen, Robocop.

And let’s leave it at that. I’ve reached the point of mega-saturation with politics at the moment, and would rather think of cute kids in Halloween costumes. Have a great day — I’m off to Wayne State.

The weather forecast today, as indicated by the Yahoo weather app on my phone, is a series of horizontal lines. That indicates wind. Big wind. Wreck-of-the-Edmund-Fitzgerald windy. Four-to-six-foot-waves windy. Windy, I tell you. (I tried to embed some Gordon Lightfoot music for the occasion, but the stupid code didn’t work. I have better things to do than flyspeck HTML. Or PHP. Or whatever it is. Just hum along in your head: The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down, of the big lake they call Gitche-gumee…) I’m just grateful we’re not pulling the boat today. Here are the forces at work, if you like:

Me, I have another stuck-inside-all-day on tap, but I’m going to try to get outside for at least a while. Maybe get hit by some flying branches.

Which may be preferable to being a MoveOn.org supporter in Kentucky these days. Good lord, what is wrong with people? I already see a cultural divide between even the description of this event was — lefties are calling it a “stomping,” with right-wing blogs favoring “stepping.” I call it aggravated stepping, and that stupid geezer and his stupid friends ought to be charged; that is simply beyond the pale. Is this what it’s come to? Is this how the teabaggers take their country back?

By the way, there was more than one camera at that event, and one got clear images of one of the assailants. I expect he’ll skate, too — him and his “don’t tread on me” button, that is. Ha ha.

The more I watch that video, the more irritable I get, and I need to go pick up Alan at the Subaru shop. Let’s all take a happy pill and look at some snapshots from Basset’s housewarming, with some before shots thrown in to get a sense of the scope. I envy his first-floor laundry.

Back later.

Quite an evocative photograph in the Daily Telegraph this weekend. I love pictures like this, which flip the perspective from the usual view; there was one of Ryan White, the grade-school AIDS patient, back when he won the right to go to school — this skinny little boy facing a wall of photographers and reporters. How do you feel, Ryan? Great, thanks. I’ve never been 100 percent proud of my business. That was one of the bad days.

The news peg is, what? The president is seen interacting with an iPad, I guess. But the story is in those faces, especially of the two young women. I don’t know about you, but it would freak my cheese to see that sort of thing on a regular basis, which I imagine he does. That’s when you need a good consigliere, or a good wife, or someone who knows you as you and can tell you who you really are. Which doesn’t necessarily mean you’re not still going to start believing what you see. No wonder Bill Clinton stumbled.

So. I’m starting to wonder about the Washington Post op-ed operation. I’m wondering about all of them, actually, but this Charles Murray troll bait over the weekend got on my nerves. I guess it was supposed to be funny (although there’s not a wink or smidge of self-awareness anywhere in it), or maybe publishing it was just supposed to be buzzy — there are close to 800 comments on the thing, so hey, mission accomplished.

Toward the end of the piece, Murray lays out the failings of the fancypantsers in a series of paragraphs which I won’t make you read; fortunately Gawker has boiled it down to a list. A few key questions:

Do you have any idea who replaced Bob Barker on The Price Is Right?
Have you ever watched an Oprah show from beginning to end?
Have you ever read a “Left Behind” novel? Or a Harlequin romance?
Would you be caught dead in an RV or cruise ship?
Have you ever heard of Branson, Missouri?
Have you ever attended a meeting of a Kiwanis Club or Rotary Club?

My answers: No, no, hell no, sure why not, of course and yes. I once opened a Left Behind book in the library, to see what the fuss was about. I couldn’t get 12 pages into it, although I skimmed some of the rest, just to make sure it sucked all the way through. It did. So here’s a message from an elitist aimed at all you proles: Your taste in literature sucks. If you’re spending time in Branson when you could be in Vegas, you’re a fool. I have a secret wish to take a cruise vacation — at least if I could locate my deck chair far from the proletariat — but I could never persuade my husband to accompany me. (He’s an elitist with claustrophobia.)

Here’s Murray’s concluding paragraph. You tell me if he’s trying to be funny:

The bubble that encases the New Elite crosses ideological lines and includes far too many of the people who have influence, great or small, on the course of the nation. They are not defective in their patriotism or lacking a generous spirit toward their fellow citizens. They are merely isolated and ignorant. The members of the New Elite may love America, but, increasingly, they are not of it.

The isolated pot calls the ignorant kettle black? That’s rich, pals.

How was your weekend? Mine felt…productive, I guess. Got my exercise, restocked the pantry, did the laundry, neatened this and tidied that. Watched some catchup on “Boardwalk Empire,” which I am loving. A few weeks back, on one of the elitist NPR shows I love to listen to, “Sound Opinions” I b’lieve, the show’s music director was a guest. He talked about finding songs of the period (1920s) and re-recording them with contemporary artists. Last week’s episode closed with Loudon Wainwright III singing “Carrickfergus,” the old Irish ballad which is probably not of the 1920s, but dovetailed perfectly with the episode’s subject matter — the first St. Patrick’s Day in Atlantic City post-Volstead Act. It was so sad and beautiful I’ve been humming it ever since, because if there’s anything an elitist like me enjoys, it’s having a song in my head that’s not by Toby Keith.

OK, I’ll stop now.

BLoggage? Oh, surely you’ve seen Pictures of Muslims Wearing Things by now, but just in case you haven’t… Very funny.

And that’s it. Must commence Monday madness. I hope your own is tolerable.

It seems a week doesn’t go by without the New York Times doing a story on Detroit. I don’t think it’s ever been something I didn’t know about already, but that’s the Times’ job — to be the gatekeeper and curator of Our Vast Interesting Nation for its readers. To the extent that they’re trying to dispel the image of Detroit in the right-wing media, i.e., Detroit is a place where women have sex with pit bulls in dank drug houses (thanks, Weekly Standard!), I approve.

Anyway, everyone who lives here and pays even minimal attention knows the Slows Barbecue story. I see the piece also dug up that obscure, underexposed source, Toby Barlow. But it’s nice to see Supino’s Pizza getting some love — I like to stop here on Saturdays from time to time, but since I’m almost always alone, I have yet to try their signature pie, the Bismarck, which features an egg cracked over the top just before it goes into the oven. They don’t sell that one by the slice. One of these days.

Next stop for the NYT will doubtless be Saturday’s Halloween party at Theater Bizarre; fingers crossed they overcome the downside of success before that. Which is? What else?

Organizers say the city is demanding they get a temporary liquor license to give away beer to patrons — and fear inspectors will issue more requirements in days leading to Saturday’s affair.

Alan and I went to one of their summer events a couple years ago, and I was delighted to see Detroit police officers mingling through the crowd, which was peaceful and fun-loving. This Saturday-night party is truly one of a kind, and it would be a tragedy to see it shut down over this. (Hear that, Republican readers? I am coming out against regulation.) Watch the video at that link. That gives you a good sense of the place.

What else is going on this weekend? Elsewhere in the same story:

On Tuesday, the City Council denied a permit for a Highland Park company that has operated a “haunted bus tour” for a month through East Robinwood near Woodward. Organizers from Creative Images and Things acknowledged the desolate, burned-out street made a perfect stage for the 15-minute tours that include fake zombie attacks. But council members worried about a lack of streetlights — and the city’s image.

“I just think it sends the wrong message at this time,” council President Charles Pugh said.

For the record, I disapprove; most of the houses on this street are abandoned, but not all of them, and the poor souls who are stuck here deserve better than to have a bunch of suburban d-bags rolling through in buses, not to mention the fake zombies. (This is the street, by the way; Jim at Sweet Juniper put together a panorama that gives you an idea.) However, Charles Pugh’s silly comment almost makes me want to take the opposite view.

This has been a long, exhausting week. I know I say that every week, but this week is super-duper long and extra-schmextra exhausting. Productive, though — that always mitigates things. But I’m ready for the weekend. Let’s see what sort of bloggage we can dig up:

Scott Lemieux on Juan Williams. Key passage:

For the role of being a Washington Generals Potemkin “liberal” on Fox News, his former NPR affiliation, lazy sub-mediocrity and uncritical immersion in shallow center-right conventional wisdom are major assets.

Exactly right, and this is why, while I disapprove of the current practice of booting pundits for not being perfect, I can’t get upset about this one. Williams never dispensed a single comment, anywhere, that I found insightful or even interesting. Booting Dave Weigel from the WashPost was a loss. This? Not so much.

CDC finds regional disparities in teen-pregnancy rate. Bottom line:

Whatever the reason, the regional disparities are stark. In Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont, for instance, 2008 birth rates were less than 25 per 1,000 teens aged 15 to 19, CDC found. In the same year, Arkansas, Mississippi, New Mexico, Oklahoma and Texas all had rates topping 60 per 1,000 teens.

Mississippi had the country’s highest rate (65.7), CDC says, while New Hampshire had the lowest (19.8).

Leslie Kantor, national education director of the Planned Parenthood Federation of America, said the report “makes it crystal clear that the teen birthrate is lower in states that provide students with comprehensive, evidence-based sex education.”

I think there’s more to it than that, but it’s interesting just the same.

Clarence Thomas’ old girlfriend says he loved the porno. Shocked, shocked, etc.

The weekend awaits, eventually. Hope yours is great.

The news would be easier to keep up with if it would just stay put. The missing banker I keep referring to? He’s a local resident who disappeared from his office in Macomb County a month ago, an office found “in disarray,” one of those cop/journalist words no actual human being ever says. It was a Sunday night, too, so he was alone there, just another CEO banker burning the midnight oil at his flatlining bank. This, the bank’s precarious status, was seen as interesting, as were rumors of a gambling problem (denied by family). The usual barstool detectives weighed in. In my mind, the possibilities boiled down to two obvious ones — he drained the accounts and fled for a country with no extradition treaty, or else flung himself off a bridge.

When his corpse was found by duck hunters a few days ago, floating in the lake not far from his office, the bridge theory gained credence. The autopsy revealed …something. No blunt-force trauma, probably drowning. It’s hard to find evidence on a body that’s been in the water for a month. I know it’s his job, but the medical examiner had my sympathies.

The family said they wanted a second autopsy, their legal right if they were willing to pay, and they were — they have the means. So the body is turned over to the m.e. in Oakland County, and what’s this? Why, it’s a bullet hole in the base of the skull. Back into the water the sheriff’s department goes, and what’s this? Why, it’s a .38-caliber handgun belonging to the deceased, not six feet from where the body was found.

This story has officially outpaced the efforts of a small hyperlocal website to keep up with it, just when it becomes really interesting. This is why we still need newspapers, folks.

I don’t expect it will do much for Oakland-Macomb relations, either. The wound was detected, the sheriff said, using a “sophisticated X-ray machine” that spotted the bullet fragments, a machine the Macomb m.e. did not have. Way to rub it in, richer county. Also, the sheriff is running for county executive, and this is an October surprise he doesn’t need. Finally, it raises the obvious question: Who killed the banker? He or she has had a month head start on the forces of justice. I expect all of this is being discussed in newsroom meetings all over the metro. Well, as I said, we just don’t have the boots.

Fortunately for bloggers, however, today is rich in material. Bob Guccione died, I see. In Plano, Texas. What the hell was he doing down there? Seeking out the sun like a lizard, maybe? Or just looking for cheaper housing:

The dissolution of the Guccione empire took years. A $200 million Penthouse casino in Atlantic City never materialized, and he lost much of his investment. A $17.5 million movie containing hard-core sex scenes and graphic violence, “Caligula,” was shunned by distributors, and Mr. Guccione lost heavily. He once hired 82 scientists to develop a small nuclear reactor as a low-cost energy source, but it came to nothing and cost $17 million.

The government took chunks of his fortune. In 1985, the Internal Revenue Service demanded $45 million in back taxes. In 1992, he had to borrow $80 million for another tax bill. In 1986, after a scathing federal antipornography report, Penthouse was withdrawn from many newsstands and circulation revenues — a major source of income — fell sharply.

The trend accelerated in the 1990s as Internet pornography grew increasingly available. Mr. Guccione responded with more explicit sexual content that drove advertisers and vendors away, limiting many sales to pornographic bookstores.

…Mr. Guccione, who developed throat cancer in 1998, sold artworks, media properties and his Staatsburg estate as revenues dwindled and debts soared. Penthouse posted a $10 million loss in 2001, General Media filed for bankruptcy in 2003, and he resigned as chairman and chief executive of Penthouse International. Creditors foreclosed on the Guccione mansion, and he moved out in 2006.

I saw the skeleton of the Atlantic City casino when I was there to cover the Miss America pageant one year. It was stalled at the ironwork stage, and every beam was branded with the Penthouse key logo. It loomed over and beside and around a tiny, shabby little house, one of those infamous old cusses who simply will not sell at any price.

The story went that construction stalled when a libel judgment Guccione won against Larry Flynt — something like $75 million, the highest ever awarded at the time — was appealed and knocked down to something closer to $1.98. Now there was a story, unfolding in a Columbus courtroom in 1979. The paper still didn’t have its act together, and it was covered by the usual courthouse reporter with no great fanfare. Hunter Thompson could have gotten a book out of it. I remember going over to J.C. Burns’ mom’s apartment (she lived three doors down from my parents) to visit one night, and she was laughing over it so hard she had tears running down her face. Her comedic sense was obviously more developed than the metro editors at the Dispatch, and could see there was something hysterically funny about one pornographer suing another pornographer for damaging his reputation. At one point Guccione took the stand and wept over the offense done to “the woman I love,” Kathy Keeton, his life and business partner, who sat at the plaintiff’s table knitting throughout the trial.

I forget what the insult was. Probably one of Flynt’s aggressively stupid humor pieces, like the one about Jerry Falwell, memorialized in “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” God knows what the jury was thinking, but the story went that the Gooch, flush with the anticipation of all that cash, decided to get in on the Atlantic City gambling boom when it was still young. Alas, it didn’t work out. Lots of stuff didn’t work out. Funny how rich men go crazy — a nuclear reactor? Eighty-two scientists? Imagine getting that job, telling your family: “We’re moving to New York to build a small reactor for a guy who publishes a skin magazine, family! Let’s get packing!”

And then there was “Caligula,” proof Guccione, like all pornographers, also sought the holy grail of respectability — a dirty movie that would keep ’em in their seats after they got what they came for. (Or came what they got for. Whatever.) It didn’t turn out that way, and is generally acknowledged as one of the world’s most expensive all-time stinkers. A few of us saw it one night, in some down-at-the-heels art-movie house in Columbus. There’s a scene where a female character masturbates by pedaling some sort of exercise bicycle that propelled a wheel of feathers that hit her in the happy place. It raised some question in my mind about the technology available in ancient Rome for such a thing, but oh well. I really can’t do better than this archival Time magazine piece on the fiasco, which contains gem after gem after gem:

Where (original screenwriter Gore) Vidal was liberal with sex scenes, Brass has been profligate: there are enough orgies to satisfy even Guccione, and phalluses in all sizes decorate walls, dinner plates and nearly everything else—with naked girls taking up the spaces in between. “To the Romans,” notes (star Malcolm) McDowell, “sex was like driving a car.”

Poor Malcolm McDowell. He later said the movie served as a lesson in the career dangers of doing nudity early in one’s career; you become the guy who can always be counted on to “take his kit off.”

Well, then. There’s so much good bloggage today, all of it from the NYT, which is sort of a carnival of Grim today:

In Indiana, Baron Hill could well be going down for daring to state heresy: Climate change is real:

A rain of boos showered Mr. Hill, including a hearty growl from Norman Dennison, a 50-year-old electrician and founder of the Corydon Tea Party.

“It’s a flat-out lie,” Mr. Dennison said in an interview after the debate, adding that he had based his view on the preaching of Rush Limbaugh and the teaching of Scripture. “I read my Bible,” Mr. Dennison said. “He made this earth for us to utilize.”

Blackwater will likely get away with it. With everything.

Does your kid play football? Check his helmet to see if it’s “certified” by a group consisting of helmet manufacturers. Yes, your kid can get a concussion from the Invisible Hand.

Well, I’m thoroughly propagandized. Off to Wayne State.

Good lord, how does this happen? Up at 7 a.m., make lunch for my kid, slurp coffee, post story on other site, pimp it out via social media, slurp more coffee, check schedule for today (haircut ‘n’ color, office hours), realize I have eight minutes to update my beloved little blog. Where I actually have some readers.

Sigh.

Well, I don’t think I need much more than eight minutes today, because what I really want to talk about is Mrs. Clarence Thomas, Ginni to her pals, and her — what’s the word? — gall. Unmitigated gall. Or maybe recklessness, calling Anita Hill at 7 a.m. on a Saturday to leave one of those passive-aggressive phone messages we’ve all gotten from time to time. A few things I find interesting about it:

1) The time stamp. You don’t call someone’s office at that hour expecting to get a human on the other end. She meant to leave a message. I guess she did.

2) Nineteen years later, she wants to “extend an olive branch,” she said in a confirming statement to the New York Times. The original story that went up last night said she wants to “get passed what happened,” later corrected to “past” without the (sic), so it’s possible it was the Times’ error, although I think not. Pointing this out is just mean, one of my infamous snarky comments, I hasten to add.

3) Although. She wants to “reach across the airwaves and the years?” What the hell does that mean?

4) TBogg may be on to something when he joked that “breakfastinis” were involved with this. I wouldn’t be surprised.

5) Her husband looks like he’s been living on a diet of church-basement casseroles for 20 years. Just sayin’.

6) The best single comment I’ve read on this is Scott Lemieux’s:

What’s perhaps most remarkable is that Ginni Thomas has been pickled for so long in the winger echo chamber that she seemed to take for granted that everyone, including the woman her husband treated inappropriately, would share her conviction that her husband was a victim subject to some kind of gross injustice.

Now you all add your own. My eight minutes is up. Have a great day, all.