I spent most of Friday doing something at the last minute. (So sue me, I have a journalist’s heart. We do things at the last minute.) Considering I was judging college journalism, that seemed fitting.

Fifty entries in an SPJ contest. I read every one. I liked many of them. When it came time to pin the ribbons, I felt the usual remorse that so many good entries wouldn’t go away with a prize. I expected all of this. What I didn’t expect was this: How little has changed. I’m not talking about the flag of The Post, my collegiate alma mater, still recognizable after, what? Thirty years of subsequent editorial staffs? (Admirable restraint, if you ask me. The first thing a new editor does in the real world is order a sweeping redesign. Ninety percent of the time, a criminal waste of effort.)

No, I’m talking about the form itself — the student newspaper. By this time, the new media should have swept college campuses. There shouldn’t be a student newspaper, but rather, a completely interactive platform-neutral information stream, processing all the important news on campus — in my day, record reviews, classified ads on apartments and two-for-one pizza coupons — into a seamless garment of data accessible on everything from a laptop to a phone, plus Twitter and Facebook and all the rest of it. Maybe, somewhere, that is the case. All I know is that I saw traditional news stories written in traditional ways, presented in traditional layouts on traditional ink-on-paper. It was more than traditional. In fact, it was retro: At one point, I beheld a headline with a kicker. You know what a kicker is? It’s the little mini-headline that runs over the main head, usually with a rule underneath, usually just a few words:

Swine flu sweeps freshman dorms; vaccination clinic announced. Kicker: ‘Sick as a dog’

I haven’t seen a kicker in professional journalism since Jim Barbieri was writing them at the Bluffton News-Banner. That is to say: A while.

There are two ways of looking at this. One, that colleges are seriously failing journalism students by keeping student papers around at all, like a school offering buggy whip-braiding classes in 1925. Or maybe, just maybe, the newspaper isn’t a terrible way to deliver news in any environment, but particularly on campus, where kids frequently find themselves with 20 minutes to kill between this and that, and a paper is not only an efficient delivery vehicle for the information those students might want, but actually, I dunno, something pleasant to pass the time with.

I’m holding with hope. It’s all I’ve got. Although a word of advice to student journalists: You can almost always make your stories shorter. You’re competing with Twitter, you know.

And now the weekend is over, and I’m facing a two-week sprint unlike many of recent years. Good news: It’s work, it’s paying work, and that’s good. Bad news: Might be spotty around here for a while. But you guys are good conversationalists; you can carry this dump for a few days here and there.

Let’s start with an underreported story, in my opinion: What if health-insurance reform dies, as so many seem to want? What then? The cost of doing nothing. Not cheering.

Or try this: A white sorority wins a step contest, traditionally an all-black show. What then? Metafilter has a nosegay of links, and from watching their performance, I’d say they brought it.

Dear Mr. President, Stop smoking. Try Chantix — I hear it works.

And that’s it for me today. We’ll see what tomorrow brings.

The temperature rose yesterday to a notch or two above freezing, then fell. A dusting of new snow arrived around nightfall. Fog covered everything until it froze, and that’s where it stands now — silver-plated world. Everything is white, not too cold, and the air is so heavy with moisture it can mean only one thing. One or two more inches coming up from the south; should be here momentarily. I’d like to take a walk in it. Maybe I will.

From Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules of Writing, No. 1: Never open a book with weather. Well, this isn’t a book. It’s the first draft of personal history. And I’m allowed to talk about the weather.

A job I wish I had: Smashing up the ice on the St. Clair River. Seriously. My favorite thing is when the spring rains come in cloudbursts, and the storm drain in front of my neighbor’s house clogs with spring tree-gunk, and I get to wade through the warm puddles with my rake and clear it. Actually piloting an icebreaker through a troublesome jam to send the backed-up water on its way? Bliss. It would be storm-drain clearance on steroids.

Nance’s Rules of Writing: Don’t use stupid, dated, not-very-creative-when-they-were-coined, let-alone-now catch phrases like “on steroids.”

OK, then. I don’t want to continue yesterday’s depressing discussion for too much longer — I mean, in a silver world, you want to be optimistic — but I caught part of “Fresh Air” yesterday, and it seemed to pertain, a little. Journalist David Weigel of the Washington Independent was speaking on the new right, the right on steroids, the super-righty right represented by the teabaggers and CPAC. You know CPAC — these are the folks who were making jokes about flying a plane into an IRS building and killing a 68-year-old veteran (two tours, Vietnam). And of course you know the Tea Party.

I was struck by the portion of the interview where Terry Gross asked Weigel about what the teabaggers believe about the financial meltdown that started the cascading economic catastrophes of the past two years. He said they blame the whole thing on Barney Frank, Chris Dodd and the Community Reinvestment Act, which is both not surprising and pretty depressing. I’ve said this before and it didn’t originate with me, but this is what we’re moving toward — a media landscape where not only spin varies from outlet to outlet, but the very facts themselves. Wall Street is not underregulated; Barney Frank is the problem. And vaccines cause autism, of course they do.

Here’s the other thing that struck me: How the sorts of wackos I used to hear on my radio show(s) back in the day — the freakazoids who stayed up all night at the card table under the bare light bulb, writing their single-spaced manifestos or letters to the editor or whatever, who would call and rant about the Bilderbergers and the Federal Reserve and the loss of the gold standard and (my personal favorite) Ezra Pound, that genius — these folks are now being welcomed into the mainstream conservative movement. And they have some new entertaining ideas, about the president’s birth certificate and death panels and so on. And a new spokesgal, who is much prettier than they are.

How comforting.

I ran into one of these guys one day, at Best Buy. I thought it was brave of him to introduce himself, although I probably should have recognized him from his public-access TV show. We chatted a bit. He was pricing camcorders, but dammit, none of them had the feature he needed. Which was?

“Night vision,” he said.

His public-access show was entertaining. This is how he gave web addresses: “H, T, T, P. Colon. Backslash, backslash. T-R-I-P-O-D. Dot — this is a period — C-O-M. Backslash. Tilde. This is the key to the left of the numeral 1, but you have to shift…”

Anyway, they were joking from the CPAC podium about Joseph Stack, the IRS bomber. Had to check to make sure it wasn’t Grover Norquist at the controls, ha ha. Imagine the reaction if– oh, why bother even bringing it up? The liberal media, etc. etc.

I’ll say this: I’m really glad I don’t live in Indiana anymore. I’m sure these folks are all over the place. I see two Don’t Tread on Me flags waving in the neighborhood here, but it’s not a friendly place for the most part, so I don’t feel like I have to smile at them or anything.

Ach. We need to go out with some levity. How about this essay on Rielle Hunter’s “quiet dignity.” Not talking to the media about your stupid life choices qualifies as quiet dignity now? Evidently:

In the early days, Americans came to think of her in the sleaziest terms: the former party girl who used sexual wiles and New Age mumbo jumbo to steal Elizabeth’s husband. Most self-respecting women would feel compelled to say something, anything, in their own defense. And most modern mistresses would do much more than that. A fame-chasing Rielle would have come forward in the first days of her sex scandal, even if it meant defying John’s wishes. She would have talked and talked as the interviews declined in influence, the sad journey from Barbara Walters to Billy Bush. By now she’d have finished her book tour. We’d see her hawking an Internet sex column or sharing Twitpics of Quinn to thousands of followers.

Or maybe, just mayyybeee, she’s holding out for the big payday. Just a thought. Maybe the quiet-dignity meter was recalibrated while I was worrying about the Tea Party, but in my experience, a person who has it doesn’t say things like this:

That same spring, Rielle came to dinner at my home in New York. The Edwardses had just announced that Elizabeth’s cancer was back and was incurable, engendering a national outpouring of support. That didn’t stop Rielle from explaining to the group at dinner, which included journalists from other national publications, that Elizabeth had gotten cancer because she was filled with “bad energy.”

OK, then. Back to the sweatshop! Copy due in two hours!

My friend Michael called mid-week to wonder if I’d be free for some cross-country skiing Sunday. Sure. The temperature rose to 38 that day, and continued balmy through yesterday, so we melted down to a walk through Elmwood Cemetery. It’s the oldest in the city. We were on the lookout for the titans — Coleman Young, Russell Alger, Sonic Smith. We found only Alger, but it was a lovely day and we weren’t really looking that hard. We did see the liquor king:

And the beer king:

There’s a group site for firefighters:

I didn’t know firemen would seek common burial, but I suppose these were the men without families, or maybe the ones who thought no one could understand them like the guys. The emblem was a mystery to me, but Michael’s dad was a firefighter. He said they’re bugles, which were the “get out of the way” alarm, blown by the crews in the days before sirens. Learn something new every day.

I’ll come back on my bike in the spring. This is a place to spend a morning.

The balminess ended today:

Who wants to go skiing?

OK, then. Speaking of skiing, I gather there was a hockey game last night, which “we” won, and as a result I am supposed to be exultant. Reader, I am not. I am wearying of the every-other-year we-fest that is the Olympic games. Excuse me: the (kettle drums go bum-bum-bum-bum; cue trumpets DAAAH DAAAH DA DA DA DA DA, etc.) games of the 23rd Olympiad, or whatever. I want some grumpier color commentators; I am sick of being told how proud I am of “Team USA.” I want someone to ask, “Why do the snowboarders look like they put on all the clothes in the hamper? Snowcross? What’s next? Demolition derby?” This event always seems to go on four days too long. I know it’s coming when the voice of Morgan Freeman makes me want to throw things.

On the other hand, what else is there to do? It’s February. Anyway, Alessandra Stanley looks at the jingoism angle today:

Even the calm, professional Bob Costas, who is the great exception to the NBC rule of smarminess, felt he had to explain himself on Saturday night for enthusing about the unexpected victory — and infectious joy — of Mark Tuitert, a 29-year-old Dutch speed skater who surprised everyone, including himself, by beating the American Shani Davis in the 1,500-meter race.

“And this is to take nothing away from the interest in the States about Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick,” Mr. Costas said apologetically, “but what this means in the Netherlands, I mean, this is their national pastime, this is so huge there.” As Mr. Costas spoke about the new Dutch hero, the screen behind him carried a huge portrait of Mr. Davis, who took the silver medal.

Well, exactly.

Bloomberg follows Rachel Maddow on the great underreported story: Republicans who thundered against the stimulus who now say, dude, where’s my stimulus? (Quietly.)

And with that, I’m away. Monday waits for no one, even with five inches of snow in the forecast.

Johnny Weir, his Wikipedia bio (locked to further editing until “disputes are resolved,” hmm) tells us he is a Russophile who taught himself to speak and read Russian. Well, that explains a lot — why his name is written on his skates in Cyrillic letters, why he speaks to his Russian coach in Russian, why his signs of the cross just before performing have a certain Orthodox flavor to them, perhaps even why, when he looks at the ceiling and gives thanks for not turning his triple Axel into a spinning buttfall*, you can clearly read his lips saying, “спасибо” — “spasibo” for those of you who don’t have the Cyrillic keyboard set installed, or, in ‘merican, “thanks.”

* “spinning buttfall” — phrase attributed to Dave Barry

I love Johnny Weir. I love how people want to ask him if he’s gay. Why do you even need to ask? Isn’t it obvious? Although it’s true, in a world where gay people have joined the mainstream and a fair number of them look, speak and act just like us, that some are still unnerved by how unlike-us he is. You’re not one of them Anderson Cooper-type queers, are you, you can sense them asking. Well, hell no. He’s fierce! He’s fabulous! When I look at him, I think of the line from “Little Big Man,” after Dustin Hoffman has returned to the Indian tribe of his boyhood and re-met Little Horse, his very sensitive chum with the great feathers: He had become a “heemanee” for which there ain’t no English word. Johnny Weir is a heemanee; there is no English word.

Anyway, I thought he got robbed. I was really pulling for him, and I thought he put on a fine show, and yes, I speak as one of those every-four-years skating fans, which is to say, I can’t tell a triple Axel from a triple toe loop, although I think I finally know a triple Lutz when I see one — the knee sticks out. Both the Lutz and the Axel are named for the skaters who first did them. And that’s about what I know. But that’s OK, because Scott Hamilton and Dick Button are both excellent color commentators. I encourage you to read this story on Button, the transcript of an NPR story that aired a couple days ago. Button’s opinion on Weir is one I can respect (the fierce costumes and “conservative” skating are like “two feet going off in opposite directions,” and hence the low scores).

When Button leaves us, I hope Weir gets that job. We need a heemanee’s take on the figs.

OK, then. I’m writing about figure skating to avoid writing about Angry Joe Stack, the kamikaze pilot. The question now seems to be whether the attack was or wasn’t terrorism. Hmm. I’m going to stake my position out thusly: It depends. The attack is roughly parallel to what Tim McVeigh did in OKC, with one major difference — I don’t think Stack identified himself as part of a movement, although lord knows there are many more out there exactly like him. McVeigh’s attack wasn’t a suicide bombing because he hoped to do it again. He thought he had compadres out there who would join him in his helter-skelter homemade revolution. (He did and he didn’t, and I recommend “American Terrorist,” out of print but still widely available from used bookstores and presumably your public library, as the best single book on the subject. No flashy theories, no big-journo showboating, just dense with facts by two plodding, diligent reporters.)

A lot depends on how those others react to this, and we’ve seen from past events that frequently one crazy asshole with a big idea gives a lot of other crazy assholes the strength to carry out their own big ideas. I know this sounds muddled, but all I can say is, like pornography, I know terrorism when I see it, and while I see some of it here, it doesn’t appear to be clear-cut. It will likely lead to more security in government buildings, however, which are already secured to the point of a Detroit liquor store. Expect paying a call on the Social Security or IRS or even the post office to become even more of a pain in the ass.

This is maybe more of a question for Pilot Joe, but I wonder what sort of attention general aviation gets from law enforcement these days. I wonder what’s stopping the Black Sunday scenario. It would appear the answer is: Not much.

With that, I’m sure I’ve irritated enough of you that it’s time to make an exit. Still much to do today. Much to do over the weekend. Much to do, period.

Yay, Mitch Albom is reporting from Haiti.

Will there be stupid one-sentence paragraphs?

Do you even need to ask?

Who will be in the photos?

Could it be Mitch Himself?

Again: Grow up.

Actually, in mellow moments, a state of mind I strive to reach more frequently, I wonder if Mitch is the world’s happiest man these days. I wonder if, as so often happens in life and three-act screenplays, whether the brass ring he was chasing hasn’t revealed itself to be cheap paint covering zinc and not that shiny at all. I had a drink not long ago with someone who admired Albom’s early work in Detroit, and says he really was a different guy, once upon a time. He had wit and style and — this is key — enough of a bad-ass inside him to occasionally be naughty. Then he saw the opportunity to cash in by warming hearts. There’s always a buck to be made in the heart-warming trade. Ask the people who make greeting cards and much of the advertising inflicted upon us during events like the Olympics. In Mitch’s case he made many, many bucks, and now look what’s become of him.

If I went to Haiti, I’d hire the roughest, toughest fixer I could find and ask to be taken on the Full Carnage Tour. I’d want to see voodoo ceremonies and makeshift hospitals and squatters living in rubble piles. Mitch has to go to the Caring and Sharing Mission, where he will write about the Noble Poor, Who Are Down But Not Out, Because They Have Love. Just a scan of the subheads makes your teeth hurt:

“Seeing the miraculous,” “Feeling joy and pain,” Doing what we must” — has a story ever announced itself to be more joyless? Could there be a single thing in there you feel you haven’t read before? Haiti is poor. Haiti is tragic. Haiti is our responsibility. Haiti is yet another opportunity for Mitch to warm your heart and tell you again what you already knew — it’s bad, but others are on the case, fighting the good fight, and yes, you can write them a check — while simultaneously throwing in little details of what a good guy he is:

It does not take long to settle in here. I put down my bag, blow up an air mattress and place it on the floor of the pastor’s quarters. That’s it.

Millionaire Mitch sleeps on the floor. That’s how poor Haiti is.

I wonder if, late at night in his counting-house, surrounded by his treasure chests full of gold or bales of cash or in his cashmere underwear personally woven by his investment advisor, if he ever looks out the window at the moonlight on the snow and thinks, This job used to be more fun. When your whole life is one long Good Deed, when you walk into every public event with that half-smile of smug self-effacement (yes, it exists), when you sit behind a microphone and say things like, “No, no the real heroes are the people who do this work every single day. I’m just the guy who tells the rest of you about them” — is there ever a small voice inside that says, You are so, so full of shit. Go ahead, tell them that, Mr. Modesty.

No, I didn’t think so, either.

Here’s my heart of hearts speaking: When I learned Warren Zevon was a friend of this man, my opinion of Warren fell by 37 percent. That’s saying something.

Oh, well. There are still honest writers in the world. Roger Ebert responds to the Esquire piece. Says he’s not really dying all that fast, and that his cholesterol is excellent. Which is sort of funny, when you think of it. Ebert gets the Tom Sawyer experience of attending his own funeral and hearing what all his friends have to say about him. What a lucky guy.

The man who made his bones wearing a stupid bow tie, name-dropping philosophers and making a who-farted expression on a thousand Sunday-morning news-chat shows says loathing for Sarah Palin is born of “snobbery.” Now that’s bein’ ballsy, George Will!

Back to the mangle for me, folks.

The holiday bollixed up my Monday chores and I have to slice one item from the list. Folks? It’s you. Sorta. I leave you with this long, long, long NYT examination of the Tea Party movement, which you may discuss, if you like. I’m not entirely sold on it; there are too many passages like this, that meander on and on, making some pretty sweeping assertions without any actual human beings offered as proof:

They are frequently led by political neophytes who prize independence and tell strikingly similar stories of having been awakened by the recession. Their families upended by lost jobs, foreclosed homes and depleted retirement funds, they said they wanted to know why it happened and whom to blame.

That is often the point when Tea Party supporters say they began listening to Glenn Beck. With his guidance, they explored the Federalist Papers, exposés on the Federal Reserve, the work of Ayn Rand and George Orwell. Some went to constitutional seminars. Online, they discovered radical critiques of Washington on Web sites like ResistNet.com (“Home of the Patriotic Resistance”) and Infowars.com (“Because there is a war on for your mind.”).

Many describe emerging from their research as if reborn to a new reality. Some have gone so far as to stock up on ammunition, gold and survival food in anticipation of the worst. For others, though, transformation seems to amount to trying on a new ideological outfit — embracing the rhetoric and buying the books.

But it generally tracks with what I’ve observed anecdotally, and it underlines a fear I’ve had for a while, i.e., that someone from this gang is going to make an attempt on the president’s life:

…in Indiana, Richard Behney, a Republican Senate candidate, told Tea Party supporters what he would do if the 2010 elections did not produce results to his liking: “I’m cleaning my guns and getting ready for the big show. And I’m serious about that, and I bet you are, too.”

Here’s where Richard Behney stands, by the way. He hasn’t a chance of being elected to anything, but funny how his story — jus’ a plumber/entrepreneur who enjoyed sittin’ on the back of his truck at the end of the day, talkin’ about life — is pretty much a word-for-word match to the typical teabagger profiled in the Times piece.

This part tickled me:

(Ron) Paul led Mrs. Southwell to Patriot ideology, which holds that governments and economies are controlled by networks of elites who wield power through exclusive entities like the Bilderberg Group, the Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations.

These folks used to call my radio show, many years ago. They’re Jew-haters to the last man. Maybe Joseph Sobran has a future in journalism after all.

OK, now I must away. Tomorrow should be better. Alan’s off this week, and we’re thinking of going to Windsor for dim sum, like the effete yuppies we are. Is dim sum worth traveling for?

I think I weigh 300 pounds today. Our weekend was a mad dash to Chicago to see friends, and so it consisted of five hours in the car, one hour in hotel, two or three hours of dinner, sleep, two or three hours of breakfast, five more hours in the car. There wasn’t time for anything else, but it was good, if you like eating and driving, and I always like the first and usually like the second. If nothing else, it’s good to see a beautiful, thriving city from time to time.

We crossed the Mitten on a winter weekend because our friends from Turkey are back in the States for a while. Fatih was a Knight-Wallace Fellow and his wife, Idil, was the smartest of the spouses. She learned Russian in eight months while we were there, yes, zero to fluency in eight months. She thought she should learn because of all the Russians in Istanbul these days, and also they were planning on having a baby soon, and Russians are the go-to nannies, the way West Indies natives are in New York City. She did indeed get pregnant in Ann Arbor, had some minor complications that made her doctor forbid her from long plane trips in the third trimester, so they stayed an extra couple months and had the baby in Michigan. When they returned, Idil interviewed nannies in Russian.

Fatih told me that for something like $300 a month, you can hire a college-educated Russian woman — if you’re lucky, even one with an M.D. — to be your nanny. “Wouldn’t a woman with a medical degree feel a bit overqualified for child care, and perhaps resentful?” I wondered.

“No, you want one with an advanced degree so you know she’s not a prostitute,” he said. Oh.

So now Idil is pregnant again, and they’ve elected to give birth in the States again. To take advantage of the Greatest Health-Care System in the World? No. So that their daughters will have matching passports. Good thinking. We always knew Idil was smart. Between learning Russian and otherwise exploring Ann Arbor, she took some grad-school entrance exams, too, just for the hell of it. She got a perfect score on the math sections, and close to perfect on the writing. That really bugged her. “What is a nine-letter English word that means ‘talkative’?” she asked.

I thought for a minute. “Garrulous,” I said. She smacked her forehead as though she’d forgotten who George Washington was. Their 5-year-old speaks four languages fluently. She’s going to need dual citizenship, once she grows up to take over the world.

You’ll want to watch out for her. She’s blonde like her mother, a Tatar.

There’s nothing like spending time with ambitious international cosmopolites to make you feel dumb. We went to breakfast with the Bordens and Carpenters, and mostly talked sports and music, but it was smart sports-and-music talk. I learned about Bill Wirtz from Borden, and more from Wikipedia:

Wirtz died at Evanston Hospital on September 26, 2007, following a brief battle with cancer. …During a tribute and moment of silence for him during the Blackhawks home opener on October 8, 2007, the Chicago crowd displayed their displeasure with Wirtz’s operation of the organization by booing the proceedings.

Man, hockey fans can be tough.

And of course this weekend we watched a bit of the Olympics. I have very few strong feelings about the winter games, except that all that trick skiing is silly, but then, luge is pretty silly, too. Speed skating is my life’s great missed opportunity; it’s the one sport I’m truly fascinated by. (I followed the clap-skate discussion closely, a few years back.) Very Hans Brinker.

And, of course, the speed skaters have Stephen Colbert on their side.

In some ways I hate February in Olympic years; there’s too much on TV. This week, I’m going to have to choose between Westminster and the games. I hope nothing good in Vancouver is opposite the terrier group.

So how was your weekend? Bloggage? Not much:

The Alabama shooting case gets ever-weirder. Hello, Professor Crazypants.

With that, I’m off.

Late in the comments yesterday, someone asked me to share my parallel-parking secret. I’m happy to. In the interest of clarity, I will dispense with the stuff about safety and signals and all that. You’re a grownup, you know how to drive. This is just about the raw technique, OK?

1) Pull up even with the car ahead. About two feet away, more or less.

2) Look over your right shoulder and back up straight until the parked car’s rear bumper is even with the roof support behind your back seat. (This was easier in the ’70s when all cars were boxes, but the proportions are still there. When the bumper is just ahead of your rear tires, if that’s clearer.) Stop and crank the wheel all the way to the right.

3) Switch your focus to your driver’s side outside rear-view mirror and start backing again. As soon as you see the curbside headlight of the car behind, turn your wheel to the left two full turns.

At this point the technique starts to vary depending on your vehicle’s size, but after the two-turn move, keep turning left while continuing to back up, and with any luck at all, you should find yourself parallel to the curb well within the one-foot range. Eight out of 10 times it works for me the first time. When it doesn’t it’s usually because I’ve rushed it. Rushing it is one of my big failings as a human being. Now you know.

The biggest mistake most people make is starting the turn into the space too soon. (If you have one of those cars with nothing behind the back seat, you might want to play around with this formula a bit, although it’s worked fine on hatchbacks I’ve owned.) Or they try to go in head-first — big mistake. Take your time, leave yourself room, and don’t be intimidated if you have to slow traffic for 12 seconds or so. It’ll wait.

Reverse all the motions if you’re parking on the left side of a one-way street, or in the U.K. or Japan.

By the way, I got 100 on the parking portion of my driving test, way back in the year 16.

Not a terrible day yesterday. Had lunch out, in a restaurant, with a waitress, rather than the usual standing-up-at-the-sink model of the work-at-home freelancer, so that was a plus. The snow was pretty and more or less entirely cleared by the time I set out, another big win, as the kids say. I found a parking spot on Woodward directly in front of the place, which I backed into with great smoothness and elan. And then I came home to discover my health insurance is holding me responsible for a portion of the cost of the flu shots I received a few weeks back, to the tune of $.01.

I know how these things happen. Computers can’t judge. All they see is, if you owe, you get a bill. And I owe a penny.

I’m ignoring it, by the way. I plan to wreck my credit score over this. Or else I’ll spend 42 cents to mail them a penny, so they can then reply that they don’t accept cash payments. When elephants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

So, a little bloggage? Sure, why not:

Jim at Sweet Juniper once observed that one of the cool things about Detroit is, frequently there’s nobody around to tell you you can’t do something. A couple of my filmmaking friends went out during the snowstorm and discovered how true that is:

My role as a parent requires me to disapprove of this behavior, although I am relieved to see Sean put on a helmet and wrist guards (guffaw) before snow-surfing behind a car with another car following closely behind, and then running a stop sign. Doesn’t the Detroit ghet-toe have a marvelously creepy feeling at 1 a.m.? And no, I don’t know what that strange cutaway at the 30-second mark is.

While we’re posting video, here’s one Hank found, from the fittingly named website, I Love Local Commercials. Although I think that lady buck is actually a donkey:

Yes, I saw the newly released 9/11 photos. I don’t know what there is to say about them other than, that sure was a bad day.

It’s been a great week for weather clichés. Here’s one Alan hates: “the white stuff.” Which leads me to wonder: During the Dust Bowl years, did meteorologists call for “the brown stuff?”

OK, I’m flailing. Have a good day, all.

Kate got a snow day today. I’m flabbergasted. The superintendent here is notorious for never closing school; you look at those “you know you’re from Grosse Pointe if” things on Facebook and they all say, “…you hate Suzanne Klein because you never got a snow day.” From where I sit, it looks as though we got five or six inches, remarkable only because it’s taken this long to arrive. And they cancelled school. This is surely a sign of the apocalypse.

Frankly I don’t blame her for being a hard case. All schools are local here. There are no buses. And half the student body has at least one parent who drives a hulking SUV that could scale Mt. McKinley (at least, that’s what the commercials imply). Plus, duh, it’s Michigan. I tell her she doesn’t want the Fort Wayne model, which was to cancel or delay schools at the first sign of a cloud crossing the sky, which makes all the kiddies happy until the end of the year rolls around, and the days have to be made up. Knowing what happens around here at year’s end — in which learning basically ceases after Memorial Day, replaced with a round of picnics, parties and in-class movies — I wonder why state legislators even bother fussing about this stuff.

So, anyway, snow day. I made chili last night. Used my own chuck (ground by moi), added a basket of corn muffins. There are lots of leftovers. Stop by.

Which reminds me of a story someone once told me: A couple of his acquaintance gone to see Branford Marsalis perform in (I think) Bloomington, Ind., and as they were leaving, walked past the stage entrance, where Marsalis was hanging around, talking to the fans. Little by little the crowd dwindled until it was Marsalis and this couple, and he said, “So, what’s a good place to eat around here?” They suggested a few places, and then the man added, “My wife made a pot of chili before we left. It should be pretty good by now. You’re welcome to join us.” Marsalis said OK, that sounded good, and they drove him home with them, and then back to the tour bus. I’m not sure what to make of this story, other than a) the Marsalises are jes’ plain folks; and b) one should never underestimate a touring musician’s longing for home cooking. I think it’s probably a little of both.

Does Branford’s more famous brother still do his great radio show? I forget the name of it, but it should have been called “Master Class with Wynton Marsalis.” I would catch it on Columbus’ public-radio station when I was traveling there often on Friday evenings. It was a really engaging lecture with lots of records, aimed at that precise point where a trained musician would learn something new from it, but an untrained listener could easily follow it, too. He’d tell you why Thelonious Monk was important, play a record, explain why he was a great composer, play a record, drill down into particularly engaging key changes, play a record, etc. By the end of the hour you felt a) entertained; and b) smarter. That’s a hard line to walk.

Add me to the I Hate Facebook club. If it weren’t for the fact many people consider FB my de facto e-mail account, I’d drop it entirely. They’ve retooled it yet again, and it’s the usual train wreck — reload your home page three times, and you’ll get three different news feeds, and one of them will be from two days ago. I think what they’re struggling with is success. I now have nearly 300 “friends,” many of whom I couldn’t identify in a police lineup, but are still pretty good FB players, in that they post good links and can be funny in a status-update line. Other people are far better friends in real life — my best friends, in fact — but lousy on FB, and somewhere there’s an algorithm that will let you sort them out, but Facebook hasn’t figured it out yet. What I need to do is sit down with all my 300 and do a great big cull. I did a targeted one over the weekend and friends? It felt good.

Bloggage? Oh, not very much:

I thought this Henry Paulson book excerpt from over the weekend was remarkable in the story it told about John McCain’s spectacularly dumb move in fall 2008, but the intro was one of those “huh?” moments:

With the stock market in freefall and the country headed for a crippling economic recession, Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson proposed the $700 billion Wall Street rescue plan to Congress on Friday, Sept. 19, 2008. By the following Monday, the Troubled Asset Relief Program was meeting resistance on all sides. Mr. Paulson’s next few days, marked by little sleep and no exercise, were frantic with meetings and private phone calls on behalf of the legislation.

I know many, many people who consider a daily workout necessary to remain on top of their game, mentally. I know I feel better when I exercise than when I don’t. It’s also the first thing to fall off the schedule when I get busy. I think it’s remarkable that the editor of this piece, in sketching out the condition of Henry Paulson during a truly scary stretch in his work history, would single out the fact it cost him his workout. If I’d learned that he still made time for the treadmill while the world’s financial system was teetering on the brink, I’d be pissed. Thoughts?

First Toyota, now a Honda recall? The Detroit auto executives must feel like a boxer on the mat at 7 on a 10-count, looking up through the blood and sweat to see their opponent suddenly suffer chest pains.

Betty White’s Super Bowl ad is giving her a little career lift. Ha ha. It’s funny to see the old-bag veterans of Mary Tyler Moore’s show get a second, third or maybe fifteenth wind. Cloris Leachman was all over Comedy Central for a while, working blue-blue-blue at some roast a while back. She called up some young hunk and planted a soul kiss on him, and don’t think that didn’t rock the house. There’s nothing funnier than a horny old lady, as Betty already knows from having chased Lou Grant back in the day.

And with that, I think I’m out of here. Happy snow day, all.

I think I just shot my writing time firing off a thousand-word memo to the students staffing GrossePointeToday.com. It started off as a general guide to covering small city councils, and, as usual, became something else. When something starts with “be on time” and ends with a little story about how I overcame my fear of the New York City subway system, I know I’ve lost the thread. Ah, well. Someday, kids, I’ll be famous, and that memo will be worth something. If I can stop writing memos long enough to get anything else done, that is.

I’ve got about a million things on my mind at the moment, so let’s fall back on that time-tested trick of lazy columnists everywhere — the three-dotter. I called it Items in Search of a Column when I was doing that sort of thing, but I’m repudiating all ties with my former employer, having learned yesterday that they laid off the last remaining full-time staff photographer, along with two other people, late last week. (What’s more, they called the guy in from his vacation to fire him.) A newspaper without photographers, yes. Reporters now carry point-and-shoot cameras and take their own pictures, the standard bush-league model. When I joined that outfit, it was a year off of winning a Pulitzer Prize and, needless to say, writers wrote and photographers photographed. But that was a long time ago.

I’m changing my resume, anyway. New item: 1984-2004: In a coma. It would be less embarrassing.

…For the record, while I only heard it from an adjacent room, it sounded like the Who sucked eggs at the Super Bowl. If nothing else, it inspired my daughter to ask, “Why do only old people perform at halftime?” Alan: “Because the last time they let young people do it, Janet Jackson showed her boobie.” She did like the laser light show, but for the love of Mike, can we book someone other than the Motown All-Stars or some other geezer outfit for 2011? Just a thought.

…More bad news from my hometown: Casa d’Angelo on Fairfield is closing its doors. “Declining revenue,” etc. Today’s story says it’s a domino effect following the closing of a nearby hospital SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO, and the emphasis should tell you what I think of that one. Well, it’s their business, they can do what they want. But it’s a loss for the neighborhood that will no doubt be cheered on by the knuckle-draggers, who have been trashing Fort Wayne’s south side as long as I can remember. They think it’s unsafe, which struck me as ridiculous then and even more so now that my bad-neighborhood meter has been recalibrated to Detroit standards. I used to despair that Hoosiers would rather buy a new house in a subdivision exactly like every other one than a craftsman bungalow for half the price in my neighborhood. Looks like nothing has changed.

…Does anything ever change? Sometimes I wonder.

…My cheer at the Saints victory, which was previously predicated on the simple thrill of seeing a feisty underdog defeat their smug betters, escalated to joy upon watching this video. The fact it irks knuckle-draggers who resent the conflating of a football team with the social upheaval of Hurricane Katrina is just the whipped cream on my sundae.

…I hate the new Facebook, whatever it is at the moment. Someone asked the other day if I’d pay for Facebook. Most days, I’d pay to be forcibly disconnected from it. Even as I continue to use it, yes.

…Jezebel on unretouched Madonna. Thanks, LAMary. I find these photos as impossible to resist as chocolate cream pie in the refrigerator, something Madonna doubtless hasn’t tasted in decades.

And with that, it’s into the shower with me. Sorry for the scrambled eggs, but we have a snowpocalypse under way, and I need to run my errands early.