Joe the Plumber shows his crack:

“I’ll be honest with you. I don’t think journalists should be anywhere allowed war. I mean, you guys report where our troops are at. You report what’s happening day to day. You make a big deal out of it. I-I think it’s asinine. You know, I liked back in World War I and World War II when you’d go to the theater and you’d see your troops on, you know, the screen and everyone would be real excited and happy for’em. Now everyone’s got an opinion and wants to downer–and down soldiers. You know, American soldiers or Israeli soldiers. I think media should be abolished from, uh, you know, reporting. You know, war is hell. And if you’re gonna sit there and say, ‘Well look at this atrocity,’ well you don’t know the whole story behind it half the time, so I think the media should have no business in it.”

Sarah Palin makes moose jerky:

“I did see that Tina Fey was named entertainer of the year and Katie Couric’s ratings have risen. And I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh I don’t know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration. That’s a little bit perplexing, but it also says a great deal about our society.”

I know people frequently fall apart when a microphone is on. I know not everyone is glib and polished and can reel off coherent sentences with subject-verb agreement at the drop of a hat. I know the rest of the world hears people like Palin and Plumber and thinks, “why, they’re just like me” and that anyone who would say otherwise is an elitist. OK. I’m an elitist. I’m old-fashioned enough to think the ability to express yourself clearly, on the page and in spoken words, is a basic skill everyone should have. But how is it possible that an adult who doesn’t have a gym membership is seen as lazy and unserious, but an adult who hasn’t read a book in the past year is simply busy and hard-working?

Palin is one of those public speakers who thinks extra syllables = extra smart. I know that a lot of people are capitalizing on, oh I don’t know, perhaps some exploiting that was done via me, my family, my administration. Remember the “use fewer words” resolution? Let’s see if we can boil this down, eh? [Cartoon device lowers over sentence, lights flash, smoke puffs. Device lifts.] “I was exploited.” See how easy?

Joe we can’t help. He’s just a moron.

Much work to do today — starting with shoveling snow, quel surprise — and not enough time to do it. So just a bit of bloggage:

Via Defamer, “Marley & Me” spoilers for those dim enough to not have figured out the ending.

After the Golden Globes I keep hearing that Mickey Rourke’s face is the result of his ill-starred boxing career. You know: He earned that face in the ring. Oh, I don’t think so. This man is a plastic surgery addict.

Hey, California! Join the club! Love, Michigan.

Off to fire up the snowblower. Today’s predicted temperature drop: 25 degrees. Groan.

I went to bed expecting a cold and woke up feeling more or less OK, so I’m hoping it’s an omen. Because wooee, we may have a fun few days coming up here. My press credential for the North American International Auto Show was approved, so I’ll be attending the press preview, starting Sunday. Look for updates here and at Grosse Pointe Today, which may be duplicates or may not. I have no specific plan for coverage; I plan to work via the time-honored but forgotten tactic of “letting things happen first, and then writing about them.” So we’ll see. I applied because, duh, this is a pivotal year for the industry that supports this company town, and I wanted to see how recent catastrophes affect the overall mood of the show, which in most years is celebratory.

The first year I went as a working journalist I spotted a common attitude among my colleagues — the supercool mask of Not Impressed. Chrysler is known for entertaining, attention-getting stunts during its press conferences, and that year it introduced a new Jeep, then drove it offstage, through the Cobo Center, smashed through the front window, drove it down the steps, across the street and up a specially constructed rocky-hill platform in front of the Pontchartrain Hotel. They put Angie Harmon, who had been in an earlier press conference, in the way of the Jeep as it blew through the convention floor, and she squealed as she ran out of the way. Later, I mentioned it to another reporter.

“Oh, that,” he said. “They did that 10 years ago.” Well, excuse me. Friends, I admit it to you now: I laughed. It was funny.

I expect a subdued show this year, but it will have to walk a careful line. The point of the show is optimism and salesmanship, but when you’ve taken a bunch of money from the taxpayers, it probably won’t pay to overdo the stunts, or even the liquor — some tightass Baptist southern-state senator might take offense. (In the past, most of the exhibitors have some sort of open bar for press-preview days. A drinking journalist is a happy journalist.) The Firehouse — the food-and-liquor trough across the street traditionally colonized by Chrysler for its diplomacy — is closed this year. And I doubt (muffled sob) there will be a cattle drive. Damnit. But we’ll see.

I’ll be packing the laptop, the Flip and the iPhone. So start watching your RSS feeds Sunday.

In other news at this hour, our longtime friend and reader Adrianne (aka Mrs. Lance Mannion, aka the Blonde) sends along a bit of humor from that fixture in every American newsroom, the amusing soul always described as One Wag. Adrianne works in the far far exurbs of New York City and as a perk of the job gets all the NY tabs delivered to her desk. She writes:

So here’s the front cover of the New York Daily News Thursday morning: “I gave her my kidney, she broke my heart” (and now I want my kidney back!) The story concerns a certain Long Island doctor, Dr. Richard Batista, who had donated a kidney to his wife, Dawnell, in happier days. Dawnell repaid the gesture by sleeping with her physical therapist. Now they’re in divorce proceedings, and he wants the kidney back. Barring that, he’ll take $1.5 million.

I like how Adrianne has already internalized the language of the gossip pages, which you can see in her unselfconscious use of the phrase “in happier days.” This staple of the boldface names came up in Anne Tyler’s “The Accidental Tourist,” in a scene where Muriel writes a country song based on it. Funny I should mention country songs, because Adrianne continues:

I challenged Ken Hall, our editorial page editor and talented writer of doggerel, to come up with a country-western song about the doc’s ordeal. Here’s the result:

First she took my kidney, then she broke my heart
She messed around behind my back and tore my life apart.
She left a hole inside of me that’s very hard to fill
A million and a half bucks, now I’m sending her the bill

CHORUS:

She married me and promised that in health and sickness, too
We’d share it all – and she meant all – so what was I to do?
I should have known that first time when I saw her from afar
That she would be the kind of girl who always leaves a scar.

I’m not some kind of monster, no vampire, ghoul or ghost
No grave digger or gold digger, I feel quite free to boast
My friends all say I’m very nice, and not the nasty sort
But add up what I have in life and I’m an organ short

CHORUS

She might give me a hand? Who cares? Not what I want to hear
She needn’t stick her neck out, or even lend an ear
It’s not as if I’m looking for an arm, a leg and such
I only want my organ back, is that asking too much?

CHORUS

BraVO! I smell synergy here. If anyone wants to set the lyrics to music, I ask only a credit in the liner notes.

It’s a beautiful day with snow on the way. Best hit the retail sector for supplies and, just to be safe, Zicam.

I’m not an unqualified Christopher Hitchens fan, but I found myself nodding along with his column in the current Vanity Fair, pegged to the 20-year anniversary of the ayatollah Khomeini’s fatwa against Salman Rushdie’s “The Satanic Verses.” His nut sentence is this:

I thought then, and I think now, that this was not just a warning of what was to come. It was the warning. The civil war in the Muslim world, between those who believed in jihad and Shari’a and those who did not, was coming to our streets and cities.

It’s an interesting piece, and stirs a lot of memories; I haven’t given Rushdie much thought since he emerged from hiding a while back. I haven’t read him, and so my mixed salad of known-facts about the guy is mostly from Page Six — his apparently bottomless thirst for hot babes, plastic surgery on his droopy lids and, of course, what I remember from 1989. Pat Buchanan was one of the sneering conservatives who said, essentially, big deal, calling him a “trendy leftist” who would, “if the ayatollah has his way,” hear “the swish of a scimitar” before departing for eternity. The rest of the column was padded out with finger-wagging at a writer who dared to criticize a religion. Hitchens recalls that was a common reaction on the right, while on the left was mainly fear, until Susan Sontag wrangled PEN to his defense — and it took some wrangling. Arthur Miller is named by Hitchens as one of those who preferred to remain silent until shamed into speaking up.

I recall damp, tedious, writer-ly sort of protests, public readings of the book and one of those “I am Spartacus” displays for the cameras in New York City. I remember Lance Mannion, then my friend in Fort Wayne, said Bush the Elder should proclaim that any move on Rushdie would lead to us bombing Qom. (Lance, I confess: I was taken aback.) Mostly I remember being bewildered by any religion that could lead to those angry, screeching protests we saw around the globe at the time. Well, I guess we learned, didn’t we?

The most depressing thing about Hitchens’ column is how effective the fatwa was. Rushdie lives, to be sure, but others connected to the book were killed by Muslim lunatics, and even today, the mere threat of similar violence can loosen the sphincters of every editor and executive producer in earshot. I was writing my Big Long Essay About Newspapers at the time of the Danish cartoon blow-up. My ex-editor in chief was quoted by her editorial-page editor explaining her refusal to print the cartoons or let the ed-page editor link to them on his blog: “Just because you can doesn’t mean you should.” Oh, snap! Somewhere Ben Bradlee is jealous.

Well, anyway — a good read.

Sorry for the late arrival today. It was a sleep-deficit catchup morning, which means I’m already behind. While we’re on the subject of the media, however: I had to force myself to read this blog entry about a certain blonde huckster with a very large Adam’s apple and her battle with a quote-news-unquote department, but I’m glad I did, even though it’s a Department of the Obvious sort of thing. (The headline is “grow a backbone” instead of “grow a pair” because it’s from Conde Nast and some pottymouth blogger.)

Now, off to shovel snow. Lance Mannion, stop by to help! We’ll discuss Rushdie!

I was at Costco the other day, picking up a few items that, for our household, it always pays to buy in bulk — butter, beer and coffee. I couldn’t figure out why I kept saying “butter and beer” over and over in my head, and then I remembered:

For years, WBNS, the CBS station in Columbus, ran a public-affairs show in the after-dinner, before-prime time slot that existed before “Wheel of Fortune” and “Jeopardy.” This was back when the FCC required a certain amount of public-affairs programming, and WBNS filled its obligation in part with this show — “Juvenile Court,” later renamed “The Judge.” In a half hour, two juvie cases were dramatized, with actors from local community theaters. It was spectacularly minimalist staging, sort of a “Waiting for Godot” of justice. (I like to think they kept the scenery light to keep the actors from chewing it.) The scene was always the final disposition of a particular case, which meant the facts could be rattled off in a simple status report, and then the judge would speak to all the concerned parties before making a final ruling. Lessons would be learned about neglectful parents, straying children and the wages of divorce and other social problems.

Everybody watched it, and it taught me a lot. What “incorrigible” means. How an Appalachian accent is a predictor of bad behavior. How lower-class defendants address the court as “judge” while wealthier ones say, “your honor.” I still remember many of the cases, which became comedy material for my friends in our smartass teen years, in one smoky basement or another. One of its key phrases remained with us for years: “What’s the home investigation?”

This was the fulcrum on which the case turned, the signal that we had now reached the good part. I said before that all the parts were played by actors? All but one — the social workers, who always played themselves. I don’t know why: maybe it was a union thing. It gave the series some continuity, with the same half-dozen social workers appearing again and again. And they brought a certain verisimilitude to the proceedings. It would be hard for even Meryl Streep to duplicate that bureaucratic pinch-faced delivery, the monotonal reading of facts gathered in the home investigation, which apparently required all concerned to open their doors and let this dowdy woman with a clipboard come in and poke around.

There was one couple whose children were ruled incorrigible, and it came out in the hearing that they raised dogs, which they obviously preferred over their own offspring. We learned this because the home investigation showed that there was nothing in the refrigerator (they always looked in the refrigerator, always) but butter and beer, although there was plenty of dog food. The judge demanded an explanation. “Judge, them dawgs gotta eat,” the father said in his southern Ohio twang.

(Later in life I knew a woman raised in a home very much like this one, and I regretted all the jokes I’d had over that case. Evidently it’s no fun to watch the household budget go for puppy chow while you and your teenage brother split a single pork chop.)

Mostly the proceedings were amazingly true to life, i.e., pretty wooden and boring, although some directors tried to light things up a little. There was one case which required the teen girl at its center to break down halfway through and shriek, “I’m going to have a baby!” She got the line off at top volume, then bent over and buried her face in her knees. She had to do this because it was clear she was hysterical with laughter and couldn’t keep it together. She played the rest of the scene that way, clutching her knees, rocking back and forth, answering all further questions with nods or shakes of the head. No time to reshoot the scene, this was local TV.

Anyway, if any of this is starting to sound familiar, here’s why: Years after the series went off the air, it was revived to catch the wave of syndicated court shows. The single courtroom set was gone, and the show opened up to shoot scenes in the judge’s chambers and in various courthouse anterooms. The social workers were history, and while I’m sure the new actors were professionals, they didn’t do a much better job than the original amateurs. (Although, given the material? It’s a wash.) But “Judge Robert Franklin,” surely named for the county of his incarnation, was the same. I think he was on the take, because this humble public servant lived in a veritable plantation (note the uniformed servant in the doorway as he leaves for work):

Anyway. Aren’t you glad you followed this thread with me? Isn’t it just like being in a nursing home?

So, a little bloggage?

I suspect the home investigation in this case would turn up some real gems. How often do 6-year-olds miss the bus and decide to drive to school?

Reading the business pages these days is like reading the obituaries. Is life without luxury goods that unbearable?

Everybody has something to say about the dangling skier, but my contribution is this: digital cameras produce amazingly clear images these days.

Off to work. A good day to all.

It all started with a conversation with my sister, who used to sell telephone systems to big corporations and now sells antiques, in an antique mall and on eBay. She specializes in American glass — depression, carnival, that sort of thing. Mostly utilitarian items prized by collectors. Pretty things. Hostessy stuff.

One day I was watching her pack stuff for eBay shipping, and she said, “If you ever see a square cake stand at a garage sale or something, buy it. You can name your price.” The lesson sunk in, and a couple years later, I saw a square cake stand. This one, in fact:

This was at a Grosse Pointe estate sale, notorious for overcharging. It seemed someone had already named their price, and it was ridiculous: $90. But the thing was in mint condition, so I called my sister and described it. “That sounds like Fostoria American, and if it’s perfect, it’s worth a lot more than $90.” So I bought it. Checked eBay, and she was right: Fostoria American square cake stands with the rum well and in mint condition were selling for about $300 at the time. (Less now — recession — but still well over $200.) I considered giving it to her to sell, but thought eh, it’s pretty, and added it to my china cabinet, to stand as a memorial to the day a simple peasant woman got a bargain at a Grosse Pointe estate sale.

So this Christmas, we went to my sister’s, and guess what one of my presents was? Ten cake plates, in the Fostoria American pattern:

But wait, there’s more! Also, a Fostoria American cake knife:

I mention all this to underline something we all learn about ourselves sooner or later: One minute we’re the sort of girl whose most prized possessions are a hand-written letter from Warren Zevon, a signed copy of “Freaky Deaky” and a “Kind of Blue” CD, and the next you own a Fostoria American cake stand, matching plates and a knife. As David Byrne says, “And you may ask yourself, ‘how did I get here?'”

That’s how.

The thing most people don’t realize about certain cake stands is that you can invert them — the base is almost always hollow — and use them as a snack plate. The dip goes in the hollow base:

OK, then. Some bloggage:

Resolved:

Sit through internet ads that appear on real, need-the-money websites (which is to say, newspapers). No more “click here to skip.” Endure the stupid thing. On favorite blogs, click one or two of the ads every day. (Boy, are they stupid, too.)

So you may have to sit through an ad for the Economist to read this NYT story about a new wrinkle in foreclosure culture: Roving bands of skaters chasing the ultimate skater perk — a nice dry pool:

Across the nation, the ultimate symbol of suburban success has become one more reminder of the economic meltdown, with builders going under, pools going to seed and skaters finding a surplus of deserted pools in which to perfect their acrobatic aerials.

In these boom times for skaters, Mr. Peacock travels with a gas-powered pump, five-gallon buckets, shovels and a push broom, risking trespassing charges in the pursuit of emptying forlorn pools and turning them into de facto skate parks.

Hey, I saw “Dogtown and Z-Boys,” so I know this could well have some legs. But this smells like one of those bogus-trend stories to me. In fact, a large chunk of the story is about pool builders and real-estate developers who are looking at a fraction of the orders they had a year ago. The fact teased in the photo caption — that skaters are coming from as far away as Europe and Australia to skate American pools — is entirely hearsay, too. Still, not a bad read.

Also, not for the faint of heart: Another excellent dissection of the collapse of yet another criminally managed bank — WaMu. Sooner or later we’re going to get wise and put someone like Kerry Killinger before a firing squad. Until then, he has his millions. Un-fucking-believable.

So have a good week. Today’s Holiday Photo is from Bill, who comments here as Bill, taken last summer in Alaska when he was stalking Sarah Palin on vacation:

I think I’ll go make a cake. Later.

Much talk, hereabouts, about this story from the Weekly Standard, by Matt Labash. The cover features a photo of the Michigan Central Depot, the most infamous abandoned building in Detroit. Guess what the story’s about? If you answered, “the decline and fall of what was once North America’s great industrial city,” pat yourself on the back. You’re on your way to earning a full scholarship to journalism school.

It’s long, and if you don’t want to read it, here are the Cliff’s Notes: Labash sets off to spend a week in our fair city. Packing for the trip, he meets unnamed people who give him him pithy quotes:

Before I’d left, I’d asked an acquaintance if he was from Detroit. “Indeed I am,” he said, “Give me all your f–ing money.”

Ha ha. He arrives and hooks up with Charlie LeDuff, a Detroit News reporter with a rather maniacally cultivated image as an eccentric renegade. (Of which I will speak no more, as conflicts of interest exist in the household.) The first part of the article is a full-on kneepads job on LeDuff, who muses that he was put in his current position by God. Then Charlie tells him to grab his coat, and they’re off to cover Charlie’s beat, which he describes as “the hole” — “forgotten people in forgotten places.” Labash recounts some of Charlie’s greatest reporting hits — the Dr. Kevorkian profile, the repo-man profile, the exhuming-the-dead piece — before sliding into the stock parachuted-in, out-of-town-journalist’s tour of the usual suspects and venues. Adolph Mongo, L. Brooks Patterson, Martha Reeves. They meet the latter at the Hitsville USA Motown museum; now there’s a place you don’t read about very often, eh? And they drop in on a firehouse that recently lost a beloved brother to a collapsing roof while fighting an arsonist’s fire in an abandoned house, surely the worst possible circumstances for such a death to occur. The Detroit fire department’s problems are a true shame upon the city, and Labash doesn’t fail to fully note it.

It’s a good piece, well-written and very readable, but it’s only a better version of dozens that came before it, and the fact it appeared in a conservative policy review, at this particular point in time, suggests a strategy underneath it all. Rod Dreher, faithful doggy that he is, catches the scent immediately:

I wondered over the holiday why it is that it’s correct to believe that New Orleans should be saved, even though it has many of the same endemic and seemingly unsolvable problems as Detroit, and faces one Detroit doesn’t: the likelihood (say some scientists) that it will all sink between now and 2100. Anyway, why is it correct to believe that it’s our moral duty as Americans to “save” New Orleans, whatever that means, but Detroit — well, it can keep going to hell, because what can anybody do with a city so far gone?

In the comments he answers his own question:

People who wish to save New Orleans generally argue that N.O. is so important culturally and otherwise to America that we can’t let it waste away. More pragmatic voices argue … that the city is in a nearly impossible position geographically, and that had Katrina not happened, it was still an economic sinkhole, with high rates of crime, illiteracy, welfare dependency, corruption and all the same demons that haunt Detroit. But there’s nothing romantic at all about Detroit.

In other words: Because I like New Orleans, and I don’t like Detroit. Do I need to mention where Dreher hails from? Yes, Louisiana. But of course that has nothing to do with why New Orleans should be helped, and Detroit written off. It’s all about culture and romance.

But you see what he’s done? He’s conflated Detroit, the city that’s been in a death spiral since the late ’60s, with Detroit, shorthand for the domestic automotive industry. When any fool could tell him they are two very different things. Unfortunately, any fool doesn’t write for the Weekly Standard, or any of the other publications who have sent less talented writers to essentially draw the same wrong conclusion. For those of you who may be newcomers here: The problems of Detroit-the-city are related to the auto industry, but not in the obvious way. The city is full of monuments to automotive wealth and largesse and history, but the truth is, outside of the GM corporate offices downtown, most of what we think of as Detroit-the-car-business is located outside of Detroit-the-city. Maybe all of it, at least in terms of major plants and production facilities. The GM Tech Center is in Warren. Chrysler’s in Auburn Hills, Ford in Dearborn. The plants are all over the place (and around the country). There are abandoned factories in the city, but they’ve been so for decades. If you want to cover what’s happening to southeast Michigan as a result of the auto industry’s problems, you need to go to the suburbs — Wayne, Wixom, Dearborn, Auburn Hills, Grosse Pointe, Livonia…all of them, really.

But here’s something else: No one in Detroit-the-city is asking for over-and-above salvation from the likes of Dreher. Like every other city in the country, it angles for handouts from Uncle Sam, but the idea that there’s a push on for the city to be “saved” is absurd. Its problems are many and complicated, not all self-inflicted but certainly self-propagating. However, it has been so for 40 years and will likely be so for another 40. After four years of living just outside its eastern border, I can tell you I don’t really understand the place and probably never will, but I have come to like it very much and even love it, as ugly and blighted as it is. It is a city with a heart that continues to beat in a terribly diseased body, and you have to respect any place that just flat refuses to die.

Dreher claims to have read and enjoyed all of Labash’s piece, but he doesn’t mention this part, which quotes Adolph Mongo, generally described as a “political consultant,” but as with many Detroiters, that’s not all of the story. He doesn’t pussyfoot around:

When white politicians want to get elected around here, explains Mongo, “They don’t say ‘n—-r’ anymore, they say ‘Detroit.'” And so, while the Big Three have been running away from Detroit for years, they “got a rude awakening when they went to D.C.” Mongo holds that when congressmen associate automakers with Detroit, what they’re intending to associate them with are all the inept black people who come from there. Or as he puts it, when they say “ ’Detroit,’ they really said, ‘they the new n—–s.’ Welcome to the club.”

Yup.

Finally, because Dreher identifies himself as a Christian and writes for a religious blog, I’d ask him this: Since when did romance and culture become the criteria for determining who should be helped? Both Detroit and New Orleans are full of people, or as Dreher’s religion would describe them, souls. Are Louisiana souls more worthy of help than Michigan’s? I guess so. And finally finally, if he’s going to put NOLA culture up against Detroit’s, I hope he brought his lunch, because Detroit is going to eat it. I suspect he’s one of those guys who puts on his Meters CDs a few times a year and says all that bon temps roulez shit to his kids, while up here in Gritty City we’re incubating the next Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Eminem, White Stripes, Don Was or the-list-goes-on. Here’s a video taste of one show last summer. (Admittedly, an extraordinary one. Don Was is like a magnet of cool. I still can’t believe I missed it.)

So. Rant over. But it put me in such a mood! So let’s close out with a brief bit of bloggage, once again from Roger Ebert — a collection of his best zingers through the years, nearly all of them from pans:

I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny. — Response to Vincent Gallo’s hex to give me colon cancer

This film obtained a PG-13 rating, depressing evidence of how comfortable with vulgarity American teenagers are presumed to be. Apparently you can drink shit just as long as you don’t say it. — “Austin Powers II”

At first I thought it was presumptuous to select your own best lines — isn’t that the reader’s job? — but I soon found myself laughing so hard I couldn’t read them aloud to Alan. So I guess I trust his judgment.

Oops, one more: The best single story about Caroline Kennedy’s ambitions, and oh my, it’s satire:

Caroline Kennedy would like to be considered Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2009 and has let the magazine’s editor know of her interest in the honor, aides to Ms. Kennedy confirmed today.

Off to shop for my holiday dinner. Among about a million other chores. Huzzah.

When the bad news piles up, it’s tempting to brood, but today let’s give ourselves a break, shall we? All is not lost. There are even pleasures to be had in bad times, as last night, on the phone with my sister, when she let loose with a short list of punishments she’d like to see visited on Bernard Madoff:

…and I’d like to see them go into his closet. I’d like to see his shoes auctioned off. I’d like to see him in jail. Not a good jail, but a really, really bad one…

Me: The Wayne County Jail!

Yeah, that’s a good one. And I’d like to see his kids go there, too. And his wife, and…

Actually, I think the Scourging of the Wall Streeters would not only be a totally excellent reality show, I think that if Barack Obama made it a centerpiece of his inaugural ball, we could go ahead and start carving him on Mt. Rushmore now.

So let’s pause and just throw a little credit and praise around the room, shall we? Let’s start with this week’s Metro Times, where the horribly bylined “Detroitblogger John” has another gem, about one of the many Detroit storefronts that have become private hangouts. It’s one of the unique features of this city, with so many empty buildings and cheap real estate, that it costs practically nothing to claim a little commercial space as your own. I first noticed this when I wrote a (very bad, but that wasn’t entirely my fault) story on one of the city’s bid whist clubs, where members gather twice a week to play cards. The MT story is on the Chip-in Sportsmen’s Club on Seven Mile, home to a group of retired autoworkers who’d rather hang with their friends than hang at home, and are willing to pay a modest fee to do so:

Dues are $35 a month, plus $6 for Mega Millions lottery tickets bought by the club. Members are entitled to a key and free access anytime, including two private parties a year. They throw a Christmas Eve bash and a fish fry now and then, and grow a garden out back, giving the vegetables to folks in the neighborhood in the fall. On warm summer afternoons they’ll line chairs out front and watch as traffic passes by and the day winds along.

Detroitblog publishes in the Metro Times, and later in the day posts the same story on his own website, with additional photos. So, in keeping with what we’ve been talking about of late, read the story on the MT link above, and then, if you like, check out the extra pix here.

Everyone must be in a mellow mood today. Check out the Bush twins in People, via New York magazine:

People: Barbara, Jenna, any advice for Sasha and Malia Obama?
Jenna: Well, they’re a lot younger than we are, cuter than we are. We’re old news.
Barbara: Even the puppy is going to be cuter.

A puppy cuter than you, Barbara? It doesn’t exist!

No, wait: It does.

Finally, let’s forget our economic troubles and turn our focus to something that really matters — redecorating the White House — especially when it gives us an excuse to link to this picture:

Kids, the ’60s were real, and they happened for a reason. See above.

Off to relieve stress. Back later.

Seventeen degrees as I write this. It seems it’s been 17 degrees forever, except for earlier this week when it was 38 degrees and raining. Did I mention I bought some cool-weather cycling gear, and tried it out when it was briefly not 17 degrees? I discovered my personal threshold of misery was 40 degrees — anything above, and I could handle it. It hasn’t been that warm since Halloween.

Because I know that my readers come here for a weather report, that’s why.

You know the worst part of being chronically sleep-deprived? The constant failure. You make a to-do list of, say, five items, and you’re lucky if one gets done. You just don’t have the energy. Today, for instance, mine has three: Take dog to groomer, work out, write three script pages. Just watch me fail to do at least one, and maybe two. The first only requires me to stumble to the corner, but who knows? It’s 17 degrees outside! I may not make it. Besides, there’s all sorts of stuff to read on the internet today, like hot details on the “Twilight” sequel. I did my parental duty on that score last weekend, and took Kate to an afternoon matinee that still cost $9.50 for an adult ticket. It was…well, it was competent, assuming the director’s intent was to produce 100 minutes of teen entertainment that looked great and contained many smoldering glances.

When I go to these things, I think of my friend Adrianne, aka Lance Mannion’s Blonde, whose father dutifully took his children to every “Planet of the Apes” movie when they were growing up. He would buy everyone some popcorn, escort them to a row, take up the end seat and promptly fall asleep. In the great tradition of children everywhere, Adrianne and her siblings had no idea how agonizing these films were to their father, until years later he let loose with his mockery of the final installment. “Ape has killed ape!” he intoned, capturing the moment when the arc finally came back down to earth, when the apes realized they had become the humans they’d spent all that screen time conquering. (This would be “Battle for the,” etc. title in the series, for you cineastes.) In the tradition of Adrianne’s father, I kept my snide remarks to one, whispered in Kate’s ear in the early moments of the film, “Whoever has the teeth-whitening contract for this high school is doing a great job.” The rest of my petty observations — if she’s so in love, why does Bella always look constipated? why do the vampire teens go to high school if they don’t have to? why doesn’t the same school change its name to Diversity High and get it over with? wait, her mother has a 17-year-old daughter and she’s married to a minor-league baseball player? let’s see more of this cougar! — I kept to myself. This movie wasn’t made for me, it was made for Kate’s demographic, and she liked it well enough, although even she said, aftereward, “Bella doesn’t smile very much.” That’s my girl.

If Alan had come along, I might have slipped out and gone down the hall to see “Milk.” A friend of mine used to do that — get his kids settled, then say, “Daddy’s going to see ‘First Blood’ now. You wait for me outside when the movie’s over.” A simpler time.

So, we have a few odds and ends to get out of the way, then? We do:

My local papers get on my nerves plenty, but at least they have a few good writers. It’s hard not to read the rest of a story that starts like this…

On third thought, Wayne County Probate Judge David Szymanski has concluded maybe it wasn’t a great idea to jail a woman for writing about her court case on a Web site.

…and continues with this…

Szymanski jailed Anderson, 59, twice Monday after she refused to shutter the site, which she has used as a pulpit in her tangled battle with her brother over the care of their elderly mother. The battle has extended to the mother’s ailing, 17-year-old cat, Toupee (who has his own, first-person column on the Web site).

Judges hate gadflies. Not to mention cats with columns, evidently.

It’s that time of year again: “A Christmas Story” cast, 25 years later. Ralphie in particular has aged well, and Scut Farkas continues to terrify. Thanks, Dexter.

Finally, in the last, desperate days of my time at The News-and-Sentinel, the staff was showed some market research that said, basically, that our readers were dumbasses who thought local television — yes, those even dumber dumbasses — did more in-depth and follow-up reporting. This is preposterous on its face, and it’s probably good that I wasn’t doing the questioning, as I might have been tempted to ask the respondents a further question: “On a scale of 1 to 10, just how stupid would you say you are?” The only reason we could see for this is that TV marketing people said so, constantly: Now with more in-depth reporting to serve YOU, etc. This led to us adopting a bunch of standing column sigs that read FOLLOW-UP ON THE NEWS and IN-DEPTH REPORTING. I only wish I were kidding. But since this next item involves my N-S ex-colleague Dorsey Price, let’s dust off the sigs and call this…

FOLLOW-UP ON THE NEWS

You remember Dorsey’s son Derek, who made the incredibly cornball video, in pursuit of a pile of college cash? And who asked us to vote for him, because the cash went to the video that got the most popular support? He won! We can’t say what the NN.C bump may have had to do with it, but $20,000 is $20,000, so who cares? The money, by the way, came from iCorn. Which is? Ahem: At iCORN we’ve created a new way to select and purchase seed corn and soybean seed….your way and on your schedule. iCORN is now starting their 9th year of business providing high-yield potential corn and soybean genetics with the latest traits.

Now you know.

Time to leash the dog and check one item off the list. Have a good one.

As we are boat people, I know what a bailout is, literally. A wave swamps the boat and all hands grab buckets. I don’t have to explain what bailing is, do I? If no more waves come and your captain knows what he’s doing, eventually the vessel finds an even keel again and all is well. If not, well…I hope you’re wearing your life jacket.

I thought of this when I recalled some of my earliest conversations with my friends here in Detroit, when I expressed wonder or frustration at the business practices of General Motors, Ford, Chrysler et al. The company was inevitably described as a battleship, an aircraft carrier, or some other very large seagoing vessel. And then they would add, “It can’t change direction quickly. But it can take a few hits and go through rough seas without too many problems.” I suppose that makes the credit crisis a Japanese torpedo hitting broadside. I hope $15 billion will buy enough buckets.

I mention this because Freep columnist Brian Dickerson makes a few good points regarding Detroit topic No. 1 today:

The primary reason to be skeptical is that the congressional enforcers tasked with holding Detroit’s feet to the fire have done a glaringly atrocious job reforming their own, ahem, industry. The same lawmakers lambasting the auto industry for promising its retirees more benefits than it can afford continue to promise their own constituents more benefits than the U.S. Government can afford. The same Congress that wants to crucify the Detroit Three for their preoccupation with short-term profits is notorious for strategic visions that extend only to the next election.

Um, yeah. But let’s not think about that now. You all want to talk about the Illinois governor, right? Rod Blago-unspellable. I’d like to talk about him too, but my mouth is so agape after hearing all the ugly details that I fear my only contribution would be buh-buh-buh. Even by the standards of the Illinois governorship, this resets the scale. Whoever said, yesterday, that the guv is stupid? I think that’s right.

Anyway, I have a doctor’s appointment early today, so I must away. Talk, instead, about Hank Stuever’s simple thesis:

We live comfortably, if strangely, in a pseudo-Sapphic era in which seemingly every college woman with a MySpace page has kissed another girl for the camera; but for men who kiss men, it’s still the final frontier.

So, James Franco, what was it like to kiss Sean Penn in “Milk?” (And no one seemed to ask him the question I want to know: What’s it like to kiss a heavy smoker these days? It’s been so long since I did that, I totally forget.)

I’m off to get prodded. Into the shower.

For years, I’ve thought of Caroline Kennedy as my doppelganger, if you stretch the term a bit. On most counts we have nothing in common — she’s rich, skinny and has excellent bone structure, while I’m none of those things. But we are almost exactly the same age; I was born two days before she was, on the date that would become her baby brother’s birthday three years later. (More proof that there’s nothing else to do in February.) So I’ve always taken a certain interest in Caroline, the way a changeling might watch the one having the life that was obviously stolen. Caroline summered on the Cape; I, at the city pool. Caroline went to Harvard; I enrolled at Ohio University. Caroline got a mega-rich stepdaddy with a yacht and the sort of inheritance that provides one with a comfortable life of wealth on Park Avenue, spent raising children and doing Good Works; I got…well, I got what I got. I’m not complainin’. I’m just sayin’.

By the way, an aside: My Caroline scholarship foundation text is this, a cookbook that came to the newsroom a few years back, and which I immediately nicked for myself. It’s part memoir, part recipe collection, written by Marta Sgubin, the woman who was Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis’ cook and later, nanny to Caroline’s family. The recipes are better than you think, but the anecdotes will make you want to chew your leg off. Thanksgiving, for instance, spent at Jackie’s Virginia hunt-country house, where everyone arises early for the Thanksgiving Day foxhunt, then home for a light lunch of minestrone soup before the banquet later in the day. Changeling! Changeling! This was supposed to be my life, dammit. (Thanksgiving is also when Caroline and John Jr.’s birthdays are celebrated; Caroline always wanted chocolate roll, a recipe I never tried.)

Anyhoo.

So of course I’ve been following the discussion of whether Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg — which she’s never called, by the way; did she stop using her married name? — should inherit Hillary Clinton’s New York Senate seat. And while I’ve never begrudged my doppelganger anything, from the summer vacations on Skorpios to cinnamon toast made under the broiler, by a goddamn servant, after sledding in Central Park, I’m putting my foot down on this. And it’s not class envy, but simple justice: No Senate seat for the martyred president’s daughter. Got that, Gov. David Paterson?

Others have made the case against her with clarity and bullet points. Jane Hamsher:

Her leadership could have been really helpful when we were trying to keep the progressive lights on and getting the stuffing beaten out of us by a very well-financed right wing for the past eight years. But when things were tough, she was nowhere to be found.

Now that the Democras are in power, she’d like to come in at the top. We have absolutely no idea if she’s qualified, or whether she can take the media blast furnace of being a Kennedy in public life. She’s certainly shown no appetite for it in the past. She’ll have a target on her back and if she can’t take it, if she crumbles, she will become a rallying point that the right will easily organize around.

The woman has never run for office in her life. We have no idea how she’d fare on the campaign trail, or how well she could stand up to the electoral process. She simply picks up the phone and lets it be known that she just might be up for having one of the highest offices in the land handed to her because — well, because why? Because her uncle once held the seat? Because she’s a Kennedy? Because she took part as a child in the public’s romantic dreams of Camelot? I’m not quite sure.

Richard Bradley, who mixes in a little personal score-settling:

Kennedy would become senator simply by doing something at which she has long excelled: working the phones with powerful people who take her calls because of her last name. And though such talents aren’t irrelevant to a senator’s job—and though Kennedy has long experience fulfilling ceremonial obligations, another senatorial duty—they are far from sufficient. Sometimes a senator has to get her hands dirty.

Disclosure: My view of Kennedy is shaped by personal experience. Before my book “American Son,” about working with John Kennedy Jr. at George magazine, was published in 2002, surrogates of Caroline tried to prevent its publication. They failed, but it was ugly stuff. If Caroline Kennedy didn’t know the specifics of their efforts—which ranged from threatening my original publisher to planting negative stories about me in the media—she certainly knew of their existence. How do I know? Because I told her, in letters to which she never responded.

Michael Wolff sees it as a fait accompli, and shrugs:

The fact that she has never had a job, other than as a retailer of sentimental poetry, and keeper of the flame, and occasional figure-head on commissions and committees, is beside the point. What she has is glamour—true, old-fashioned, gives-you-a-little-buzz glamour—which is quite remarkable, given the oddness, ungainliness, and general lack of sociability of the latter-generation Kennedys.

…Assiduously courted by benefit committees and PR types, she’s a china doll. A kitschy presence. In real life, she is said to be rather droll and, even, quite captivating on the subject of her bizarre family (come on, they are bizarre) and unimaginable life. So much so that it is a kind of perk of power and status to get near to her at a dinner party or benefit gala and receive a small tidbit, an insight or witty view, about what it is really like to be a Kennedy.

Whereas Ruth Marcus in the Washington Post merely embarrasses herself, and ho ho, she’s got a doppelganger, too:

On the question of Caroline Kennedy for Senate, my head says no, on balance. My heart says yes! Yes! Right now, as you might guess from the hedging on the former and the exclamation points on the latter, my heart is winning.

…What really draws me to the notion of Caroline as senator, though, is the modern-fairy-tale quality of it all. Like many women my age — I’m a few months younger than she — Caroline has always been part of my consciousness: The lucky little girl with a pony and an impossibly handsome father. The stoic little girl holding her mother’s hand at her father’s funeral. The sheltered girl, whisked away from a still-grieving country by a mother trying to shield her from prying eyes.

In this fairy tale, Caroline is our tragic national princess. She is not locked away in a tower but chooses, for the most part, to closet herself there. Her mother dies, too young. Her impossibly handsome brother crashes his plane, killing himself, his wife and his sister-in-law. She is the last survivor of her immediate family; she reveals herself only in the measured doses of a person who has always been, will always be, in the public eye.

Oh, shut UP. Of all these, I think Bradley gets closest to the truth: She shouldn’t be a senator — a representative of the people, after all — because she doesn’t particularly like people. If she did, she might get out and about among them once in a while. Of course, we all know she’s been dealt a different hand, and for a daughter of Jack Kennedy, getting out among them means paparazzi, blind items in Page Six and other pains in the neck. On the other hand, her brother had all the same burdens, and carried them with evident grace. Both siblings got law degrees, but only John actually practiced law. Caroline got a big apartment on the upper east side, wrote a couple of unreadable books and, in the cliché phrase, “zealously guards her privacy.” Again, under the circumstances, these are entirely defensible decisions for a woman to make. But there have to be consequences, even for a Kennedy. And sorry, you don’t get to simply waltz in and claim a prize like this, because why, exactly? Your uncle is dying and the United States Senate has a Kennedy affirmative-action spot?

This is still America. In your world, you can become one of the incoming president’s “dearest friends” simply by picking up a phone. But to be a member of the Senate, you still should have to shake a few unwashed hands. Sorry, you don’t qualify.

So, a little bloggage before I go out in the chill freezing rain for the one thing that can get me out in the chill freezing rain: We’re out of coffee.

I can’t find it now, so no link, but I was surprised by some of the blog reaction to the SUV prayer services in Detroit stories yesterday. Commenters in particular seemed appalled that cars were brought into the church itself, on “the altar.” You’d think even if you haven’t been in a church lately, you’d know that when you read this phrase — “the 8,000-member Greater Grace Temple” — we’re not talking altars as they’re commonly understood. These folks are Pentacostals, anyway, and don’t do altars per se; it’s the One True and related outfits that make a big fuss over altars and chalices and genuflection. The SUVs were on a stage. Get over it. (Which reminds me: Apply for credentials for the auto show in January. Should be interesting.)

Mother of the Year, Detroit-style.

Coozledad got his mules. My money’s on Jane putting a hoofprint on his ass before they reach an understanding.

A break in the rain! I’m off.