So, the White House will have a victory garden, a bit of news appropriately released on the first day of spring. Glad to hear it. I’m looking forward to seeing how it turns out — I’ll go out on a limb here and predict “spectacularly,” mainly because I’m not in charge — but I’m particularly interested in seeing the shapes it makes the president’s enemies contort themselves into, given their calm, considered reaction to the Special Olympics joke and the Wednesday night cocktail parties.

The main story has a map graphic, and I’m puzzled by all that lettuce. Even a thin family like the Obamas can’t eat that many salads, and lettuce will be a non-starter in a D.C. climate once the summer really settles in. My guess is, this is the initial planting map, and there’ll be quite a bit of modification down the road.

It so happens I’m thinking similar thoughts here at Casa de NN.C. We are infamous for our concrete back yard, but we do have a little tillable patch at the back of the lot that could be put into use as a garden. It would involve taking out a tree, not a big one, but it’s the stuff that would come after that discourages me. I’ve written before about the incredibly aggressive animal population here, probably a direct result of Detroit toughness in general. Squirrels here can be reliably counted on to strip tomato plants clean. The rabbits carry switchblades. My victory garden would have to be fenced and possibly roofed with chicken wire to discourage looting by the animal kingdom.

And any garden produce we grew ourselves would take away from my weekly trip to the Eastern Market, the most pleasant errands of the warm season. So maybe not. The tree lives another year.

The Obamas’ garden will feature hyssop, notable for being the designated paintbrush used to mark the Israelites’ homes with blood during the first Passover, in Egypt. This is clearly a coded message to Obama’s followers to prepare for the Great Purge of Conservatives; I’ll be starting some in a container as soon as the threat of frost abates.

They’re also growing collards. Rush Limbaugh can get some laughs out of that one.

The map doesn’t show, but the story states, that there will be two beehives “for honey,” which strikes me as a bit showy. For pollination, sure, but as we’ve discussed here before, growing your own food and being a locavore tiptoes dangerously close to being a boring jerk sometimes, and I hope the Obamas don’t use their private beehives to lecture their guests about the top notes of the local honey. (That said, I bought a small jar of local honey last summer at the market, in part because the label amused me — “Detroit honey” sounds more like a variety of heroin to my ear — and because I wondered if it would glow in the dark. The whole metro area has seen so much old-school manufacturing over the last century that it’s safe to assume every square inch of soil contains more heavy metal than Ozzfest. And yet, I still eat it, because I assume it coats the innards against more exotic invaders.)

On my season-opening bike rides last weekend, I checked out my friend Steve’s place. Steve used to write a gardening column for the paper in Fort Wayne, and has tilled every inch of his own yard, right down to the park strip. He’s generous with the bounty; a local dog-walker has his permission to take one leaf of Swiss chard every week to feed her iguana. Most of his stuff is behind fences, but the park-strip plot is still there, heaped with compost and waiting to be tilled. He rotates, like a good organic farmer, so I don’t know what’s going in that spot this year. I’m hoping for heirloom tomatoes. Or maybe some hyssop.

What’s in your garden?

There was a terrible accident not far from here Monday, up in Macomb County. A gutter-level alcoholic with a BAC at nearly three times the legal limit drove her van into a car full of teenagers waiting to make a left turn. All the kids — four of them, ages 15 to 19 — died, and the drunk received only minor injuries. They charged her with four counts of second-degree murder, a wise choice under the circumstances.

Every day, the story seems to get worse. We’ve known for a while now that the driver, a woman named Frances Dingle, had been drinking “at a party” earlier in the evening, and had been warned not to drive, but did so anyway. Today we learn that the “party” consisted of a confrontation with a man whose fiancee was drinking with Dingle, and he took her keys, and she tore the mailbox off his house, and, and, and.

The picture was of a stratum of society where alcohol use more closely resembles what goes on in a drug house. When I was pregnant I did a little reading about fetal alcohol syndrome, after reading a truly mind-blowing — and utterly irresponsible — passage in Newsweek magazine that said, “even a ‘hooray, we’re pregnant’ glass of champagne” can have a negative effect on a fetus. I’d read “The Broken Cord” a few years earlier, Michael Dorris’ heartbreaking memoir of trying to get help for his FAS-afflicted son, born on an Indian reservation. I was puzzled, then and now, why it took so long to diagnose the boy. Alcohol has been a part of human culture for so long, surely someone had noticed the link between women who drank heavily during pregnancy and the mentally retarded babies they gave birth to. Which led to me the “gin babies” of Victorian England, and gin in general during that era, which was a substance we’d recognize more readily as crack cocaine.

I’ve been around drinkers and drunks all my life, but few like the ones described in recent stories about the accident, or the father in “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio,” whose model was to come home with a bottle of Kessler’s and a six-pack, and sit at the kitchen table taking it like medicine, growing meaner by the minute. No tipsy cheer or social lubrication for these folks, just pound pound pound, and then oblivion.

The first thing they teach you about alcoholism is that booze is booze, and that even if you drink high-dollar stuff, or just beer, or just wine, or always among others and never alone, or never before 5, or whatever, you’re exactly the same as the guy who drinks hair spray. Maybe you’re better-dressed, or better-employed, but at the end, your poison is his poison. It just tastes a little better.

I keep imagining Frances Dingle’s life, the bouts of homelessness, the shattered relationships, the push-me-pull-you of cycling through rehab to drunk tank and back, the final decision to get into her huge van and push it to freeway speeds down a crowded thoroughfare. She hit the median strip at around 60, the cops estimate, which launched it airborne and into the little Chevy Cobalt full of kids. They didn’t have a chance. Doesn’t sound like anyone did.

[Pause. Claps hands together.] OK! Happy time now!

Via the Boston Globe’s excellent Big Picture blog, Scenes from a Recession.

A while ago Ruth Marcus was rooting for Caroline Kennedy to be a U.S. senator…just because. Because it would be sooo cool. Today? Leave AIG alone!

Gawker says the former leader of the free world got dissed with his book advance. What about the people who have to read it, eh? What about them?

My new standard of excellence is Five Lester Freamons. Thanks, NYMag!

Oop, almost time for Flex Appeal at the gym. Later, all.

I didn’t learn of Natasha Richardson’s skiing accident until late yesterday, which I think is healthy — not the accident, but the fact the news was out in the world for hours before I looked up and saw it. (I was listening to Gretchen Morgenson on “Fresh Air.” Stream here, for the brave. The show’s about AIG, and warning: May cause head injuries from smashing one’s head against the desk. Short version: The bonuses are the least of it.)

Anyway, back to the unfortunate actress. I’ve written before at how the digital gossip network, or “press,” for a better word, is a true throwback to an earlier time in journalism. I’m amused by how they mimic the most breathless prose of the old tabloids — “we can now exclusively reveal…,” “told this reporter in a runway chat at the Golden Globes…,” etc. Now it seems they have another claim to the grand press traditions of the olden days. Get it first, worry about accuracy later.

Scanning the reports via Wesmirch, in the space of 15 minutes I was led to believe we’d be seeing Ms. Richardson tread the boards again after a reasonable recovery interval, no she’s brain dead, no she’s not brain dead, yes she has swelling, no she’s in a medically induced coma, whoops she’s dead, no she’s not, etc.

Latest reports are that she’s brain dead, again, but by now, who would trust anyone? Here’s to leaving family tragedies to the families involved, and typing up a sedate death notice later, based on a press release.

Besides, if you’re reading the news for entertainment, the gossip pages can’t beat the police blotter. Nothing like a drug addict for laffs:

That December morning, acting on a tip that Keith (who is on probation), had been seen using heroin, the probation officer demanded that Keith report to a nearby drug-screening clinic in 20 minutes, prepared to pee in a cup.

Keith knew his own urine wouldn’t pass muster. To leave the clinic without handcuffs, he’d need to cadge some untainted pee from a friend. And of course he’d need a Whizzinator.

You have to laugh at people who can split hairs about the relative purity of a bag of dope, yet somehow believe that giving a urine sample through a dildo will fool a probation officer who deals with junkies all day. The Whizzinator ruse is predicated on the idea that cops are so mortified by the chore of monitoring urine drops that they will look away during the collection process and not see such a lame-ass gambit. Of course, some junkies make it so easy:

Sold on the Internet for about $300, the Original Whizzinator comes in five flesh tones. I tracked Keith down after several law enforcement sources told me he had made the critical mistake of using a Whizzinator designed for a somewhat darker-skinned individual.

A very funny story. Go read.

OK, then. How was your St. Patrick’s Day? Mine was lovely, in the sense that it didn’t snow, and I was able to get out and lift a single glass (work night) of Belgian lager in celebration. Yes, Belgian — our friend John C. was spinning Irish tunes (in the sense that “clicking the trackpad” now substitutes for turntables) at the Cadieux Cafe, our local Belgian bar. They were having corned beef and cabbage, but I opted for a Belgian Dip instead, and relearned the lesson I always manage to forget between trips to the Cadieux — nutmeg is a Belgian cook’s favorite spice. I’m not opposed to nutmeg per se, but believe it belongs in cookies and cakes, not mashed potatoes and roast-beef sandwiches.

Still, the Belgians do have a way with pomme frites, I must say. And while the traditional March 17 beer choice is Guinness, I opted for Stella Artois and go ahead, abuse me for it. I cannot stomach that dark stuff without bringing on the sort of biliousness and farting that prevails in, I’m guessing, the Limbaugh household. It’s not for mixed company.

Once again, another entry approaches the 700-word mark without having a direction, a point or much of anything else to recommend it, other than a Whizzinator. And to think I was looking at my site stats the other day and thinking 1,000 page views a day was a worthy goal to reach for this month. (It pretty routinely bumps around in the 950 range, and if there’s anything we’ve learned from the business community of late, it’s to always be striving.) Alas, it will have to wait for a day when I’m not rewriting memos. And so, with that lame excuse, I turn things over to you guys. You are the wind beneath my wings.

Some years ago, when my parents were downsizing from a three-bedroom house to an assisted-living apartment the size of a box stall, it was my job to dispose of my father’s vast wardrobe. He kept a nominal suit, handful of ties and a couple of dress shirts, and I had to get rid of everything else, which included all sorts of interesting treasures like Bally loafers and Irish wool trousers the thickness of a wetsuit. This was at the very dawn of eBay, so please spare me the “you could have made a FORTUNE” comments. Believe me, I know.

There were a lot of ties. Many, many ties, most of them first-quality. (My dad had friends in the rag trade, and he was a loyal customer.) I offered some to the men in my office, who were already into the casual-Fridayization of the newspaper business, so I didn’t get rid of many there. (In my time in newsrooms, I watched the default men’s turnout go from jacket and tie to shirt and tie to collared shirt with no tie to polo shirt to plain T-shirt to Mustard Plug T-shirt — worn with Teva sandals, the better to show off your grimy toenails.)

But there was one that I held onto. It was green with very small blue shamrocks, perfect for St. Patrick’s Day in a corner office. Silk, classy, nothing about Erin-go-braless or kiss-me-I’m-Irish. I gave it to the most Irish American I know, Dr. Frank Byrne. His mother was Italian, but all her genes were recessive — he has the mop of prematurely gray hair and the ruddy complexion, a sister on the New York City police force and a degree from Notre Dame. They don’t come any more Irish than Frank. He accepted the tie with far more gratitude than the small gesture was worth, and every year at the time it’s like 5,4,3,2,1 and my e-mail beeps, and whaddaya know, here it is. Subject line: Got your Dad’s tie out & ready to go for St Patrick’s Day! Text: Thanks again.

No problem. My dad’s been dead since 2003, but his ghost still walks every year on March 17. And he was no more Irish than Tony Soprano.

Bloggage:

People tell me that after you live here for a while, you get used to stories like this, but I haven’t, yet: A Detroit city councilman — one of the good ones, one of the sane ones — has defaulted on his mortgage. Detroit is a city where everyone lives pretty close to one sort of edge or another, but it was this detail that dropped my jaw:

Kenyatta and his wife walked away from a monthly tax, insurance and mortgage payment of $2,600, one year before the interest would jump to 11.625 percent from 6.625 percent and the payment would hit $3,600. Kenyatta said that even though his monthly payment has remained the same for years, he felt it made no sense to remain in a house whose value had plummeted to $100,000.

The $100K figure is less than half the 2004 purchase price, but that wasn’t the jaw-dropper for me: The guy makes $81K as a councilman, a post he could, presumably, hold for life. But the bank wouldn’t let him renegotiate his ARM. Frankly, I don’t blame him. Now that bank owns a house that will likely stand empty for months or years, losing value with every passing day, because they wouldn’t give the guy a break on a 11.6 percent mortgage. Screw. Them.

This is a popular attitude today, of course: Contempt for our financial institutions. Elsewhere in the DetNews, a business columnist reminds us of a lesson about the sanctity of contracts:

Contracts? Sacred? Unbreakable? Tell that to autoworkers whose union cut a deal with Detroit’s automakers only to see the Bush administration, Team Obama and ranting members of Congress from both parties demand those contracts be torn up in exchange for a $17.4 billion federal lifeline.

Tell that to bondholders of General Motors Corp. under relentless pressure to swap two-thirds of their debt for shares in the automaker and risk bankruptcy. Tell that to CEOs at GM and Chrysler LLC now working for $1 a year and flying commercial. Or to employees whose bonuses are gone. Or to suppliers whose “contracts” aren’t worth the paper they’re printed on.

Contracts matter in Bailout Nation or they don’t. And either the lenders of last resort — you and me, Congress and the Obama White House — can demand shared sacrifice from those who managed their firms into the ground or they can’t.

But, but…the UAW has good health insurance! How much can the American taxpayers be expected to endure?!

Eh, what do I know? It’s garbage day, everything’s at the curb, and I just saw the third scrapper cruise the block, looking for a little metal to scrounge. Because we live so high on the hog here in southeast Michigan.

Elsewhere? When Richard Cohen went wrong, he went wrong in a big way. Today: Sympathy for Jim Cramer. Because how could a man who tells everyone he knows everything be expected to know anything?

Once upon a time, the new NYT conservative columnist was a young man at Harvard. And, apparently, a real jerk. Michael Kinsley piles on, with stem cells.

A little disjointed today, I know. Sorry. I’m off to the gym, to take up the burden I dropped last week.

A few years ago I took a left when I should have taken a right in the library stacks and found myself standing in front of a shelf lined with CEO autobiographies. You remember when these were all the rage, back in the ’90s — a heavily Photoshopped cover featuring the author, looking wise/heroic/approachable, a stupid title (“Winning,” “The Art of the Deal,” “The Road Ahead”), and page after page of utterly unreadable writing. I selected a title; it was Jack Welch’s “Jack: Straight From the Gut,” opened it at random and started to read. I found myself in the middle of an account of playing golf with Greg Norman. I waited to see what this might have to do with either business or Jack’s gut, and was not satisfied; it was the equivalent of being seated next to the world’s most boring man at a dinner party. An hour later, I put this fascinating volume back on the shelf with a screenplay idea germinating:

It would be about a recently laid-off worker at a large corporation who accidently kidnaps the CEO of the same company. (Yes, accidently — it’s a comedy.) Unable to release the little tyrant without consequence and unsure what do with him until he figures things out, the ex-worker holds him prisoner in his basement and makes him read and explain passages from his own CEO book. He has the book because it was given to him as part of his severance-package paperwork. A drone at one of these companies told me once that he knew all the big company news 18 hours before it happened, because his department had to prepare the media kits and other related ephemera. In my movie, our hero would be handed a folder as he leaves the meeting where the layoffs are announced, emblazoned, “So You’ve Been Laid Off…” and Dear Leader’s book to help the newly unemployed find the strength to go on. And of course our CEO knows how to goose sales of his own book with bulk orders.

I thought there would be nothing funnier, in a bleak way, than hearing this sort of paint-peelingly bad prose read aloud by the “author.” There would be a Ransom-of-Red-Chief subplot where the disappearance of the CEO actually makes the company’s stock price rise, and, well, my mental outlining sort of hit a wall around the middle of the second act, so this is yet another idea that will remain unwritten. It would have to be a period piece now, as no one would buy the idea of CEO as anything but scoundrel. Too bad, because I fear it will lead to a lot of stupid action thrillers like “The International” instead of the black-ass comedies the current situation requires. If you can’t laugh, what can you do?

This is probably why my eye was snagged by a Facebook posting my pal Lance Mannion made over the weekend, a column from The Agonist about Jack Welch’s new idea, which you should not be surprised to learn, differs from his old idea. I haven’t read anything about this elsewhere, so I’m not sure where it’s coming from, but it is amusing, if true: Old Jack believed in something called “rank and yank,” where every year all employees in all departments in GE were ranked from top to bottom, and the bottom 10 percent severed. Having a bad year? Too bad; you’d really be happier elsewhere. New Jack now believes employees are part of a CEO’s “main constituencies,” not Fisher-Price figures to be plugged in and out of holes at will:

When have you ever heard a CEO say his main constituency is his employees? This is radical, dangerous, and heretical thinking. It comes after a quarter century in which companies all across the industrial world have treated their employees like cattle. Employees are utterly expendable in this world. They can be fired, dismissed, laid off, made redundant, riffed, downsized, or whatever convenient euphemism management may use, entirely at the whim of the company. Performance, experience, or years at the company are meaningless in this environment.

But I don’t want to spoil it for you. Go read.

So, how was your weekend? Mine was divine, pretty much, if you consider the first yard work of the year divine, which I do. I filled half a dozen of those brown paper bags with winter lawn detritus, but the place still looks basically the same. I did find those crocuses hiding under the leaves, though, so that’s good. (And yes, they’re crocuses. The daffodils are nearby, however, and coming up, too.)

Not much bloggage today, but:

I found this link during my drug-searching the other night and tossed it in the to-be-blogged file. I just want to throw it out there:

The aerial assault on cocaine is wiping out everything — apart from coca plants.

The counter-drugs strategy of the United States is clearly failing. U.N. figures cited in this week show that the cultivation of coca, the plant from which cocaine is derived, has surged in the Andes. The most dramatic rise has been in Colombia, the only country in the region that allows the use of pesticides to eradicate coca leaf – a policy promoted and funded by the U.S..

I recently received a disturbing email from southern Colombia warning that the fragile Amazonian soil could “soon be turned to desert.” They were the words of a Catholic priest, so I rang a church worker whose parish lies deep in the Amazonian state of Caqueta. Military planes targeting coca farms, funded by the US, had been spraying mists of pesticides over food crops, grazing animals and even areas where children were playing, she said: locals were complaining of breathing problems and rashes; “strips of skin” have been peeling off cows, and chickens have died; and maize, yucca, plantain and cacao crops have wilted and shrivelled. “We fear there will soon be a very serious food shortage in the region,” she said.

I don’t know how credible this account is. The author has a book coming out. She confuses pesticides and herbicides. [ADDED: No, she doesn’t. See comments.] The sourcing could be better. But doesn’t this just have the ring of truth? The United States has a cocaine problem, so our response is to dump poison from airplanes over Colombia? Why is our foreign policy so boneheaded, so often? A question for the ages, or maybe just Monday. And so another week begins.

It’s another front-loaded day, and I’ve already frittered away a chunk of precious blogging time figuring out why our internet was down and the dishwasher stopped mid-cycle last night. (Best Holmesian conclusion: Some sort of power surge/interruption. Elementary, my dear Watson.) So today will be nasty, brutish and short, but if you’d like a suggestion for discussion, how about the slice-and-dice Jon Stewart did on Jim Cramer last night? You can find it in segments at the Comedy Central site, and part one is on YouTube here. FiveThirtyEight has already done the housekeeping, putting them all under one post, here.

It was an act of heroic journalism. Yes, journalism. Yes, heroic. I’ve used that word a few times in recent months, mostly in reference to the financial reporting on NPR, but these are times that call for heroism, and one of the few bright spots is that periodically a hero will emerge.

Now I have 25 minutes to make myself presentable and drive three miles across town. Have a good weekend, all.

There’s so much strange crime in Detroit. Just last week the local constables broke up a champagne-theft ring, or at least its best customer. The police tracked a particularly selective shoplifting ring from the Kroger in Grosse Pointe to a party store in Detroit, which was buying stolen meat but mostly champagne from the thieves. The Kroger manager said he’d make a pass through the wine aisle, and come back five minutes later to find the shelf carrying the $50-a-bottle stuff stripped bare. Even in the Pointes, that’s not normal demand.

These stories interest me because they reveal a set of coping skills I lack. If you presented me with a scenario where I was a) broke; and b) addicted to drugs; then told me I had to get enough money for my fix before, say, noon, it would never occur to me to steal champagne. (I’d nick wallets from purses in the grocery store instead. I’m amazed at how many women leave their purses unattended in shopping carts while they squeeze the Charmin.) Every so often I see one of those oft-e-mailed pieces about the skills required for poverty, how to get free meals and cheap clothing and a month of free rent, that sort of thing. I inevitably fail. I just don’t know enough about the ghetto economy.

One of my Facebook friends posted this story, about the vindication of tightwads in today’s economy. The lead anecdote was about one Amy VanDeventer, who describes herself as “neurotic” about saving money, to the point where she now banks half of each paycheck, up from 25 percent a year ago. She does this by, among other things, repurposing her children’s bagel scraps for pizza toppings and slicing up lotion bottles to get that last little bit. My Spidey sense started to tingle, because I’ve known women like VanDeventer, and I knew it was only a matter of time before I found the telling detail, and whaddaya know, here it is:

VanDeventer was drying her hair in front of a fan after her portable hair dryer broke — until her friends bought her a new one.

I’ve got news for Amy: She’s not frugal, or even a tightwad. She’s a miser. Big, big difference.

People who practice frugality find happiness in simplicity. Misers bring the nastiness. They think an ugly sweater from the 80 percent off rack is better than a pretty one that was only 50 percent off. They’d not only rather eat hamburger than steak, they can’t even enjoy steak, even when you’re picking up the check, because you’re spending money they would have saved. It makes them miserable, all that waste. And waste is everywhere.

I once asked a miser how her vacation went. She said Great! and told me about the clerk at the McDonald’s on the turnpike who got confused and gave her change from a $20, instead of the $10 bill she’d been handed. “So it’s like I made money on it!” she said. Frugal people eat at McDonald’s; misers exult over an error that probably got the clerk fired at the end of the day.

A woman banking 50 percent of her take-home pay who won’t spend $19 at Target on a new hair dryer is not a person to be admired. Of course you may disagree, but that’s how I come down on it.

I’ve worked for newspapers, so I know a thing or two about making do with less. One year I turned off my furnace on March 1, because I couldn’t afford heat. (A valuable early-life lesson: It’s worth the $50 annual American Express fee for a couple of years, if it teaches you to never charge more than you can pay off in any given month.) I wasn’t starving, and I wasn’t poor, but there were times when things ran out or broke and didn’t get replenished or repaired because there just wasn’t any money for it. No biggie. And yes, I too rinse out my shampoo bottles to get the last couple of hair-washes out of it. I can get every drop out of the ketchup bottle. That’s just called Being Midwestern.

Little about the past 20 years has been so disgusting to me as the conspicuous consumption we’ve gawked over. From Donald Trump and his gold everything to “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,” from designer jeans to designer sunglasses to designer baby clothes to designer kitchen utensils, from eight-year car loans to thousand-dollar senior proms — it’s all vile, and the sooner we flush it from the culture, the better. Let’s bring back “vulgar,” and paste it on those who deserve it. But hoarding money can be a sickness, the same way hoarding animals or household goods is. It’s one thing to buy the dark-meat chicken on sale, but it’s quite another to reuse your coffee grounds four times.

One is inventiveness and thrift. The other is a lack of generosity. Remember the woman with the ointment and the alabaster jar.

Howzabout some bloggage, then?

Of course, I will probably be rethinking miserliness in the very near future.

Roy watches PJTV so we don’t have to. Given the show in question was all about Going Galt, he should get a medal.

Roger Ebert on eroticism in the movies. Not sex, eroticism.

Off to work, so I can afford my coffee.

It seems to me there are two narratives to the mortgage crisis. The first one is about the deadbeat who bought a $750,000 house in the suburbs, either with a liar loan or just because they are Stupid About Money. The stories of these elegant Mediterranean mini-manses with their green pools, perhaps littered with trash from the eviction, arouse every contemptuous emotion we have.

This one is popular among many Republican pundits. I don’t need to tell you why — it underlines their bedrock beliefs of personal responsibility and the blamelessness of the holy market, which knows all and is perfect. It puts blame for the disaster not on a corrupt system (except for that part that passed the Community Reinvestment Act), but on millions of individual shoulders, but, it goes without saying, never their own.

There’s a second mortgage narrative unwinding, however. It’s starting to get its share of attention, a bit of it this weekend, in a NYT magazine cover story and in a longer piece from the Associated Press. The magazine story is about Cleveland, the AP’s about Detroit, but the datelines are interchangeable — both stories apply to both cities. If all you read is the first narrative, you might not know that the crisis hit the inner city particularly hard, maybe harder than it hit the suburbs, and with more devastating fallout. You might not know that the stupid decisions made by individuals were aided and abetted by aggressive salesmanship on the part of the mortgage industry, whose representatives cold-called and went door-to-door with pitches that promised poor people $8,000 cash in hand by the day’s end if they’d sign here and here, initial here, and sign again here.

Many of these transactions were outright fraud. I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard a version of this story:

Waver Brickhouse, gray-haired and soft-spoken, has come undone twice during the nation’s housing crisis. In 2005, she fell behind on her mortgage payments and turned to a so-called rescue firm, which, court papers allege, tricked her into signing away the deed to her Brooklyn home. She says the company, Home Savers Consulting, secretly sold her home, with the help of a mortgage from IndyMac Federal Bank, and ran up huge new debts.

You wouldn’t think it would be possible to steal a house, would you? And yet it happens all the time.

Fraudulent or not, what’s happened as a result of all this vigorous capitalism has been devastating to poor neighborhoods. Detroit’s problems haven’t been getting much ink because Detroit was on the ropes before it all began, but I’m telling you what I’ve seen with my own eyes: While many of these neighborhoods were poor before subprime came to town, they were still neighborhoods. They were hanging in there. Houses were shabby but occupied. Today virtually every neighborhood in the city is dotted with what, if they were trees, would be called “standing dead” but in the real-estate world is called “O.V.V.” — open, vacant and vandalized.

Last year, a friend of mine wrote about the proliferation of $1 houses in Detroit. His editors weren’t convinced it was much of a story, but it was picked up by blogs all over the world, and for weeks, months afterward, his phone rang regularly with calls from potential “investors.” One gentleman called from Australia. “I don’t see how I can possibly lose,” he said. A house for a single dollar? It’s like finding gold on the ground. Ron said he tells these folks that a $1 house will require thousands in repairs, usually comes with thousands in unpaid back taxes, and frequently has judgments from the city to either improve or face court-ordered razing. Here’s one of Cleveland’s housing investors, from the Times magazine story:

So much here defies reasonableness. It’s what (city councilman Tony) Brancatelli keeps telling me. A few months ago, he met with Luis Jimenez, a train conductor from Long Beach, Calif. Jimenez had purchased a house in Brancatelli’s ward on eBay and had come to Cleveland to resolve some issues with the property. The two-story house has a long rap sheet of bad deals. Since 2001, it has been foreclosed twice and sold four times, for prices ranging from $87,000 to $1,500. Jimenez bought it for $4,000. When Jimenez arrived in Cleveland, he learned that the house had been vacant for two years; scavengers had torn apart the walls to get the copper piping, ripped the sinks from the walls and removed the boiler from the basement. He also learned that the city had condemned the house and would now charge him to demolish it. Brancatelli asked Jimenez, What were you thinking, buying a house unseen, from 2,000 miles away? “It was cheap,” Jimenez shrugged. He didn’t want to walk away from the house, but he didn’t have the money to renovate. The property remains an eyesore.

And so we come to the next chapter in the decline: The arrival of the flippers, the would-be landlords, the investors. The AP story is hopeful, but points out how many of these people aren’t even Americans. Like Ron’s Australian caller, they don’t see how they can lose:

“Do the math, you can buy and rehab a home for $20,000, then rent for $900 a month,” he said. “Three to four months of the year, rent is going to pay the taxes.”

The person doing the math is from England, who thought “it would be quite good fun to have a look,” and ended up buying six houses, with plans for “many more.” Well, I wish him luck. The story points out he’s not buying the $1 OVV’s, but decent places in still-stable neighborhoods. However, it’s hard to keep an eye on a real-estate empire from across the pond, and I think he may be overestimating the rental market in a metro area about to lose not just its biggest employer, but its bedrock industry. I heard an estimate over the weekend that if GM and Chrysler go under, we can expect a 25 percent unemployment rate in Michigan. Which officially clears the betting table, I’d say. I don’t see how he can possibly lose.

Come the apocalypse, I’m moving to the Upper Peninsula, where I will bitch about winter eight months out of the year, instead of my customary five.

Anyway, there’s your official Depressing Modern Life update. How about some grim humor?

Alcohol: Cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems. Especially when combined with firearms.

And now, felled as I was by the grippe this weekend, I’m going to bed for a brief spell. Carry on in my (koff, croak) absence.

A couple years ago, perusing Google Analytics in a fit of procrastination self-improvement, I noticed I had a single reader in Iceland. I wondered, in the following day’s entry, if it was a real person or a robo-server checking in from Reykjavik. I’ve always had a fascination with Iceland, and once seriously considered taking a two-week solo vacation there, touring the volcanic plains on Icelandic ponies. It never happened, but I still think that if I’m ever fit enough to travel 25 miles per day by horseback at a brisk tolt, and at peace with three meals a day of mutton, I’m gonna do it, just you wait.

The following day I received a note from a man with the initials H.K., announcing himself as my regular reader in Iceland. Signs and wonders of the internet age.

Anyway, I mentioned Iceland again yesterday, linking to Michael Lewis’ marvelous dissection of the financial meltdown there, in Vanity Fair, which you should read, because it is one interesting piece of journalism. This choice passage sums it up nicely:

(A) hedge-fund manager explained Icelandic banking to me this way: You have a dog, and I have a cat. We agree that they are each worth a billion dollars. You sell me the dog for a billion, and I sell you the cat for a billion. Now we are no longer pet owners, but Icelandic banks, with a billion dollars in new assets.

It was almost that simple. And crazy.

Anyway, what did I find in my e-mail yesterday but another note from H.K., still reading us after all these years. He asks that I not use his full name, because there are only 300,000 Icelanders and everyone knows everybody else. His account of how the financial crisis played out there is so interesting I think it deserves wider distribution. And so:

As a long time reader and (maybe) still your only Icelandic reader I feel the need to send you a e-mail every time you mention Iceland on your blog. Searching for the last (and first) letter I wrote to you and seeing that it was from the spring of 2007 made me almost miss those golden days at the height of the madness back home in Iceland. I say almost because although everybody was spending money and trying to make themselves believe that they were happy, things were truly fucked up.

But as I said, I’m one of the lucky ones. I love living here in Copenhagen and I haven’t been so happy in years. Without this recession I would never have dared to move out my comfort zone back home and now I live in a big global city and have a great job (which I hopefully will not get laid off from).

File that one under So You Think You’ve Got It Tough.

Here’s a passage from the Lewis article that stayed with me:

Here is yet another way in which Iceland echoed the American model: all sorts of people, none of them Icelandic, tried to tell them they had a problem. In early 2006, for instance, an analyst named Lars Christensen and three of his colleagues at Denmark’s biggest bank, Danske Bank, wrote a report that said Iceland’s financial system was growing at a mad pace, and was on a collision course with disaster. “We actually wrote the report because we were worried our clients were getting too interested in Iceland,” he tells me. “Iceland was the most extreme of everything.” Christensen then flew to Iceland and gave a speech to reinforce his point, only to be greeted with anger. “The Icelandic banks took it personally,” he says. “We were being threatened with lawsuits. I was told, ‘You’re Danish, and you are angry with Iceland because Iceland is doing so well.’ Basically it all had to do with what happened in 1944,” when Iceland declared its independence from Denmark. “The reaction wasn’t ‘These guys might be right.’ It was ‘No! It’s a conspiracy. They have bad motives.’” The Danish were just jealous!

The Danske Bank report alerted hedge funds in London to an opportunity: shorting Iceland.

I guess you can’t really fault the Danes; they tried to deliver the message. But when the message was ignored, they did what investors do: Positioned themselves to profit. You knew durn well I was a snake before you brought me in.

A wee bit of bloggage:

I don’t know if you non-subscribers can read this WSJ story, but here’s hoping. And here’s the nut graf:

Marketers, politicians and consumers like to imagine a world of solar panels, wind turbines and cars fueled by wood chips. But none of that gadgetry packs the here-and-now punch of a decades-old option: plugging leaky homes with a caulk gun.

It’s like finding out your mother was right when she said to eat your vegetables.

People sometimes express amazement at the shenanigans of the Detroit City Council. No way do members show up in tiaras, call one another “Shrek” and play not the race card, but the whole race deck, you might think. Well, you’d be wrong:

On a dizzying day that ended with the threat of a court fight to block the regionalization plan, Councilwoman Barbara-Rose Collins launched into a tirade Thursday. She lambasted the media and suburban officials, said council members have been called “crazy, stupid monkeys in a zoo” and said the deal follows a history of European settlers who pillaged, raped and slaughtered indigenous people.

The 17-minute speech was capped by cheers and ended with Collins leading the council and 40 spectators in the song “Onward, Christian Soldiers.”

And there’s video!

Finally, Lance Mannion delivers a writing lesson. Beautifully.

So here it is Friday, and we’re having some unseasonable warmth — in the low 50s already, headed another 10 degrees higher. All this talk of the northern latitudes has me thinking of midnight suns and the necessity of enjoying gifts like this while they last. So adieu for the weekend, and let’s hope for a little bit of springtime, for H.K. in Copenhagen and all the rest of us.

Sometimes by Thursday I am all current-evented out. Which is to say, I can’t take any more. As you might expect, this is happening more of late. Fortunately, the New York Times is thinking of people like me, and so on Thursday it is possible to open your paper, discard the bad-news sections unread, and turn directly to Thursday Styles, where daffiness abides.

Today’s enormous cover art was the left-hand photo in this series, which I will describe for those too impatient to click: A model strides scowling down the Milan catwalk, wearing a red cardigan sweater of the sort preferred by your grandmother, accompanied by mud-brown wool short-shorts and “strapped-on leather waders.” Yes, boots that rise to mid-thigh, which must be secured with garters and a belt, like stockings. This outfit was by Miuccia Prada, and reporter Cathy Horyn observes:

What Ms. Prada’s remarkable collection offered was something that has been lost to other values — and that is intimacy, real contact with people’s lives.

Yes! Yes! This is precisely what has been missing from the Italian fashion houses of late — real contact with people’s lives, who are clamoring for some leather waders worn with grandma sweaters.

When I tell people this, they never believe me, but Kirk can back me up: I was once a fashion reporter. A terrible one, granted, but for a couple years in the 1980s I attended New York runway shows and filed reports from Halston’s aerie. (It was always called that — an aerie — and fashion writers are nothing if not followers.) Somewhere in my album is a surreptitious snapshot of Liza Minnelli sitting ringside. I found that despite the twice-a-year trips to New York, and the shoulder-rubbing with Liza, I just couldn’t get into it. The clothes were ridiculous (with some exceptions, like Halston), and it struck me that I simply couldn’t sustain the level of bullshit necessary to do it well, or even correctly. I respect the art and the artists, but when it came time to describe the collections as intimate or overdone or whatever, I was just pulling adjectives out of my ass.

Writing about fashion is a lot like writing about wine. You read these descriptions of chardonnay — “lustful, with strong top notes of apple and ligonberry, and a bang-up finish of nearly astringent balsam and juniper” — and it’s the emperor’s new clothes, it really is.

Something else I noticed: Every single fashion designer, and I mean every single one, dressed in Levi’s and black turtlenecks, or Levi’s and white buttondowns, or Levi’s and T-shirts. Mostly Levi’s 501s. And everyone in New York just dressed in black.

But I still like to read the reports from the runway shows. Because you never know when you’re going to need some leather waders.

Elsewhere in Styles was a mournful account of a vanishing life at the Apthorp, a place whose existence I learned of from Nora Ephron, who wrote a New Yorker essay about her time there. The Apthorp is a sprawling apartment building known for its enormous apartments, most of which have been rent-controlled or rent-stabilized. As I recall, Ephron’s apartment was five bedrooms and more square footage than my house, and she paid something like $2,000 a month, which even then was a tiny fraction of its market price. Lately the building has been snarled in financial problems, but pause for a moment to appreciate “a lone outpost of the kind of bohemian family life that renters could once have there.” How bohemian? The family at the center of the story pays $2,850 for “a 3,300-square-foot four-bedroom with black and green marble fireplaces and several crystal chandeliers, is freshly painted in a shade of white that makes it seem even bigger, reflecting the light that pours in through oversize windows.”

Welcome to reality, folks.

Thus heartened with scorn and schadenfreude, I feel ready to start my day. But first, some quick bloggage:

Thanks to Dexter for reminding me that “Breaking Bad,” yet another of the AMC series, starts its second season Sunday. I wrote about the show last year, just as the first season was wrapping up, just in case you want to, you know, make a few notes.

I haven’t gotten all the way through it yet, but it’s a great read so far: Michael Lewis reports on the financial crisis in Iceland, where speculation has, basically, collapsed the entire economy.

And with that, I run off to the gymnasium to grapple with the medicine ball and Indian clubs. Have a good day.