Tuesday morning comin’ down, in the form of what looks to be an all-day rain. After a brief cold snap we’re back into the 40s, and while the warmth is better than cold (I guess), it’s certainly dreary. Let’s pick an appropriate picture from the ol’ Flickr stream. Ah, here’s one:

Chili — with or without corn — will taste good today. Photo by J.C. Burns, nicked from his Flickr stream, used under a Creative Commons license. Let’s hop to the links, shall we?

Jim Griffoen at Sweet Juniper! on how they managed to sneak a bit of American toy kitsch into their neighbors’ perfect apartment. How perfect?

So we’ve got these wonderful German neighbors who are such sophisticated design nerds they make us look like Randy Quaid and his wife emptying our RV’s septic tank into the storm drain. One is a professor of architecture (and since most architects already try to look like Germans, you can imagine how ahead of the curve these two are). They have pretty much every piece of iconic midcentury furniture in their immaculate Mies van der Rohe townhouse. It’s like the furniture wing at MOMA.

We had a neighborhood garage sale a few months ago and when this family stopped at ours, the architect saw her four-year-old son having a blast while playing with some of my son’s old toys and she said with a delightful German bluntness:

“I see he likes these toys, but the design is not good and they would not really fit in our home.”

The New Yorker on Callista Gingrich. Fact I didn’t know: She writes children’s books! Well, of course she does, being a strict Catholic who spent her prime childbearing years in unmarried congress with a married man, only to win the big prize (the man) and discover it really wasn’t what she wanted anyway, but it came with a shitload of fancy jewelry and the chance to play Pretend Mommy with her children’s book-authoring career. Every self-respecting child I know would flee from her in terror. Well, book-signings are rare, anyway.

Finally, I am long overdue with this, which ran last week, when my friend Sammy Smith, spouse of J.C. Burns and likely the creator of today’s pot of chili, was settling affairs in Michigan following the death of her mother. She and her father (the Botanist) visited the Michigan Women’s Historical Center and Hall of Fame, and found a photo of then-governor Albert Sleeper signing the bill granting women’s suffrage while selected members of the gender “look on,” as the caption-writers always put it. One is Sammy’s great-grandmother. I like the picture because the women, dowagers all, look like they have the assembled power to stab the governor to death with their hatpins if he doesn’t come across.

Anyway, condolences to Sammy, and a good Tuesday to all.

Car prom! Took my camera! Let’s get started:

The North American International Auto Show is held in the vast space of Cobo Center, which may not be as vast as your city’s convention center, but is pretty big. The show runs for two weeks — the first couple of days is the media preview, followed by industry days, the Charity Preview (aka Car Prom) for one night, and then the show opens to the public, and once it does it’s no longer possible to be handed a flute of champagne by an Italian beauty at the Maserati space, which goes to show you the public always takes a screwing. But Alan worked a week’s worth of hours and then some in about three days, and deserved a pleasant night out. That’s what we got.

So let’s go to the show. Hi, Miss Michigan USA!

As you can see, some people took the black-tie designation seriously and some people went with the modern designation. Everybody looked fine, if a little Fellini-like under the lights. But no matter, the wine is flowing and let’s stop for loyalty’s sake at the hometown heroes, Ford.

That’s the 2013 Ford Fusion, one of the hits of the show. The auto writers called that grill “aggressive,” apparently because it protrudes a bit, which along with the squinty-eyed headlights gives it an aggressive, don’t-mess-with-me face, a new feeling for a mid-priced mid-size sedan. The female Ford car models, er, “product specialists” all wore those white dresses. They looked sharp.

Over to Lincoln. This is the MKZ concept, but mostly it’s just me trying to do something with all the shiny in the frame:

The Cadillac ATS:

They’re touting this as a competitor for the BMW 3 series, which made BMW scoff, I’m told. Whatever. I’d market it as a domestic-made luxury sedan for patriotic Americans who want to support the 99 percent. Domestic is back, baby.

Speaking of luxury, this is a Maserati SUV which will be made in Detroit. Yup:

Side view at the link. I guess I was taken with yet another set of squinty headlights. Also the idea of a Maserati SUV. Someone call LeBron.

If Kate had rich parents, they’d buy her this for a Sweet Sixteen present:

Too bad for her she doesn’t. It’s one of the redesigned Beetles, made a little flatter and less cute, now with guitar-y rock’n'roll-osity. Maybe it’s because I remember the special-edition lemons of the ’70s — anyone for a blue-jeans Pacer? — but I think they’re all kind of silly. The King Ranch interior package for the Ford trucks and SUVs has been around for a while; some people found the cup holders a good place to leave their empties:

The many open vehicles made for a nice place to take a load off. I think this was a Mini Cooper I was sitting in:

Speaking of cute little cars, here’s the front end of that Smart pickup-truck concept from last week:

Look, it’s smiling at you! Aren’t you all ashamed of all the mean things you said about it? It’s like you were picking on a kitten or something.

A few odds and ends. I seem to recall one of you regulars is a foot man; here’s some eye candy for you:

I can’t remember if that was on a guest or one of the product specialists.

Black tie on the People Mover:

Finally, the afterglow at the Ren Cen, where the view from the glass elevator (how ’70s!) was of America Junior across the river:

Better pictures of the Charity Preview and the show in general are available at the Detroit News website. Especially this one.

And this is your correspondent, signing out:

But no, we have some bloggage first:

Joe Paterno speaks, to Sally Jenkins at the WashPost:

Paterno’s hope is that time will be his ally when it comes to judging what he built, versus what broke down. “I’m not 31 years old trying to prove something to anybody,” he said. “I know where I am.” This is where he is: wracked by radiation and chemotherapy, in a wheelchair with a broken pelvis, and “shocked and saddened” as he struggles to explain a breakdown of devastating proportions.

…How (Jerry) Sandusky, 67, allegedly evaded detection by state child services, university administrators, teachers, parents, donors and Paterno himself remains an open question. “I wish I knew,” Paterno said. “I don’t know the answer to that. It’s hard.” Almost as difficult for Paterno to answer is the question of why, after receiving a report in 2002 that Sandusky had abused a boy in the shower of Penn State’s Lasch Football Building, and forwarding it to his superiors, he didn’t follow up more aggressively.

It’s worth reading for the account of how he was fired alone.

Every audience-member’s nightmare — one’s cell phone goes off during a performance of the New York Philharmonic — turns the culprit into the culture-pages version of That Guy Who Cost the Cubs a Pivotal Game. You can see why he insisted on anonymity. I recall a profile of Wynton Marsalis from a few years back, which described a similar incident. Marsalis, without missing a note, picked up the tune of the ringtone, wove it into his improv and wove it back out to the exact point where it went off — the last two notes in “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You.” And that’s why he’s Wynton Marsalis and everyone else is just a player.

Oh, I can’t wait until campaign season ramps up, so we can see more ads like this. Evil French!

The week awaits. If you have the day off today, enjoy it.

Pix ‘n’ linx goes into its second day with? More cars, with a little for you leg men:

This one’s called “I’ll take one in red,” by Thomas Hawk, used under a Creative Commons license.

Busy-busy day today, so let’s get right to the linkage:

As someone whose lizard-brain fears are heights and falling, I can say this is a death I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I wonder why he wasn’t harnessed.

Via LGM, a nomination for Worst Column of the Month (and setting a high bar for the rest of the year): Tim Tebow for President! Seriously:

Obama, and so too the Republican candidates for president, can learn a lot from what is going on in the Mile High City. Our economy, and this country, are struggling with huge deficits of confidence and faith. We need a leader who can bring us together, exude confidence in us as a team, and lead us to where we need to go in the 21st century. A leader who is willing to admit mistakes and approach politics not by pointing fingers or scoring points but by helping us all be better people.

Har.

The second part of the Bridge package on Michigan’s higher-ed costs is on the student-loan anchor. All here. All worth reading.

My day tomorrow has to be timed almost to the five-minute window, so that I can make it from a can’t-miss meeting in Lansing to Detroit in time for Car Prom. So after depriving us of a white Christmas and giving us 50-degree days in January, when does winter finally arrive in the Midwest? Guess.

Happy Thursday, all. The weekend is in sight.

Inaugural pix ‘n’ linx! Given the week’s theme in Detroit, let’s go with a car:

That’s the Smart concept, an “urban pickup.” Grabbed from the Flickr stream of Michelin Media, and used under a Creative Commons license.

The interior:

Would I want one? Hmm, prolly not. But I admire the thinking.

To kick off the linkage, a painful story to read about one of those guys. Everybody knows someone like this, a utility player at a company who doesn’t necessarily contribute to the bottom line, but supports those who do. In this case, he worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The rest you can read for yourself. Spoiler: It’s not a happy story. But it is important.

When Charles Pierce referred to our new super-PAC era as one of “fully weaponized money,” I think this is what he was talking about. Josh Marshall:

Last night I saw a link on Twitter to the news that Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino mogul had given $5 million to a Gingrich-backing SuperPAC to run a brutal series of ads against Mitt Romney in South Carolina. (The ad campaign will be based on snippets from a half-hour swift-boat style ‘documentary’ about Mitt’s time at Bain Capital.) I knew this was big if for no other reason than the fact that $5 million thrown at a relatively small state like South Carolina over little more than a week is enough to totally change the calculus of a race. …But there’s much more afoot here.

Beyonce, celebrity maternity monster.

Oh, and me, on the play the other night. Actually, on the guy who made it possible. We should all be so fearless.

Early in the Iowa caucusing, and I’m watching the live coverage. Why?

1) Because it’s too early for “Downton Abbey,” “Game of Thrones” or the Westminster Dog Show.
2) Because I’m so giddy at having a fairly typical American weeknight — drive home, dinner, a second glass of wine — that it just seems the thing to do.

Although jeez, it’s excruciating. Is American broadcast media ever worse than when it’s devoting all its attention to something of very little real consequence that won’t actually throw off any news for a few hours yet? It’s like watching someone toast an ant on a sidewalk with a magnifying glass. All agree that if Romney loses tonight, it’s a terrible setback for his campaign. Feh. They said Newton was done when he went on that Greek cruise and all of his top staff quit. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Eh, time for a Sopranos episode on demand. That’s why we have premium cable.

Oh, and “Southland” isn’t back yet, either. But soon. It’s not the best cop show ever, but it’s better than most, and I find myself oddly drawn in by Regina King and Michael Cudlitz. The latter plays a hard-working, first-class police officer with a painkiller addiction. Addict antiheroes are all the rage these days — hello, Nurse Jackie — and I’m not sure why, as drug addicts can be some truly despicable people, or rather, they’re people who do some truly despicable things. Both Cudlitz’ John Cooper and Edie Falco’s Nurse Jackie play competent, highly decent people who just happen to suck down Vicodin and Oxycontin like it’s going out of style. While I have to admire the writers’ impulse to dramatize a growing social problem, please — Cooper or Jackie need to be stealing a little more from their own family members, and a little less rough-around-the-edges.

Back to the caucuses.

Ron Paul is leading.

Have a nice year, GOP.

Bloggage?

Dan Savage is running out of patience with some of these people. You know it.

Keith Olbermann, cratering again? Oh, probably.

Is Stephen Glass forgivable? Hey, if Tim Goeglein is, I don’t see why not.

Man, all this pheasant and champagne and pie and the rest of it has taken a toll. I feel like crap, not in an I’m-getting-sick kind of way, more like an I’m-missing-the-gym deal. But I refuse to be one of those Jan. 1 newbies. (You like that logic? I’m missing the gym, but I won’t go to the gym. Because.) I considered my non-gym options and did something insane: I went for a walk.

Bipedal motion! What a crazy idea. I made it crazier yet — I didn’t use my iPod. Just me and my thoughts, and feet moving back and forth. Yesterday I walked about two miles and felt like someone had taken a ball-peen hammer to the bottoms of my feet, and yes, I was ashamed. Today I walked three and a half, and felt much better. Just needed to get the kinks out. I made both walks errands: Have a destination, get something done along the way. Yesterday I gave blood. Today, went to the library to return a DVD. (“Meek’s Cutoff,” don’t bother.) Things I noticed:

Couple of squabbling blue jays;
About a million storefronts I hadn’t seen up close;
The world. All snowy ‘n’ cold ‘n’ stuff.

When did we decide whatever was on our smartphone screens was so goddamn interesting? What if they’d told us the truth back in first grade, when we were first promised personal jetpacks? You won’t get that, but you will get a computer smaller than a deck of cards that you will carry in your pocket, one that will facilitate instant communication with the rest of the world. You will mainly use it to play Angry Birds and see what a celebrity is eating for lunch.

OK, enough. It was a good day. But tomorrow everything hits another gear. Today is the Iowa caucuses, and we’ll have lots to talk about In the meantime…

Dave Barry’s Year in Review. The same year after year, but always good for a chuckle or three.

My old News’n'Sentinel colleague Ash Khalil has a new book out. Unlike Herr Goeglein’s, I think I’ll read this one.

Eric Zorn notices two apocalyptic pronouncements from GOP candidates and wonders, hyperbole or hysteria? What’s scary is how many people agree with them.

Anyone want to make predictions on Iowa results?

Sorry for being such a bummer yesterday, but stories like that strike a nerve. Years ago, a friend who worked in emergency medicine introduced me to a bit of their diagnostic jargon — DFM, or dumb fuckin’ mom. Despite a moderate episode of DFM, the child is expected to recover, although it is known to be a chronic condition. DFM is the cause of childhood caries, the cavities that can deprive a kid of baby teeth well before the permanent ones come in, usually thanks to a mom who poured Hi-C or Coca-Cola into a bottle. That’s at one end of the spectrum. At the other is DFM with extreme prejudice, which was certainly a contributing factor in the ghastly demise of that cursed little girl in Fort Wayne last week. Leave your children with Some Guy for a week? Sure, why not?

But let’s lighten the mood a bit today. I get the sense many of you are like me this week, at work or not, but likely spending a lot of time goofing off on your computers. Fortunately, I have much linkage to love today, so let’s get to it.

I found this CDC data set in a Nate Silver tweet; it’s about the percentage of American households with cellular-only coverage, and he mentioned it in connection with polling. Evidently many pollsters don’t use cell-only households in their canvassing, and it has bitten them more than once — the seemingly come-from-behind victory of Kwame Kilpatrick in his last Detroit mayoral election was attributed to unpolled cell-only voters, mostly young people, who gave him an easy victory in a race that was said to be too close to call.

We’re starting this discussion — cutting the land line — in our house, and are being held back by a few factors, including 911 service, the lack of significant cost savings and, of course, the necessity of covering that ugly wall jack in the kitchen once the phone is gone. J.C., my digital guru and mentor, went to a Google Voice landline setup a while back, and reports no problems. What say the NN.C hoardes hordes?

Kim Severson considers sorghum, that quintessential southron sweetener, in today’s NYT food pages. Southern cooking is so far outside my gene pool that I don’t dare to experiment, but this sounds interesting:

At Two Boroughs Larder in Charleston, sorghum sweetens semifreddo. In Atlanta, Richard Blais, a winning “Top Chef” contestant, serves tiny popped grains of sorghum as a bar snack at his restaurant, HD1. It tastes like a toasty marriage of kettle corn and puffed rice.

And at Lantern, in Chapel Hill, N.C., Andrea Reusing uses sorghum to bridge the South and Asia. She makes a Vietnamese-style sorghum caramel with fish sauce, lime and chiles to glaze pork belly, and coats spicy fried walnuts or pine nuts with sorghum. Her pastry kitchen turns out a five-spice confection like Cracker Jack using sorghum. It also goes into a gold rum cocktail infused with black pepper and vanilla bean.

Ten words you mispronounce that make people think you’re an idiot. Not long enough.

And finally, the List of Lists, the WashPost’s 2012 Ins and Outs! Yayyyyy. (claps wildly) Out: Pippa’s bum; In: Kate’s uterus. Beautiful.

Have a great day, all.

A story has been unspooling in Fort Wayne since Friday, and anyone who knows anything about such things suspected it was going to have a tragic ending. Late last night, it arrived — Aliahna Lemmon, 9, missing since Friday morning, was found dead, and the man she’d been left with, Michael Plumadore, was arrested. As frequently happens in these cases, everyone involved was poor, and every reported fact raised more questions than it answered.

The trailer park where everybody involved lived was said to be home to 15 registered sex offenders, which until recently included the missing girl’s grandfather, who died earlier this month. Plumadore had been the grandfather’s caretaker, and was staying in his mobile home. Plumadore had priors — I’d imagine a clean record in a place like this is as unlikely as finding an adult resident without a tattoo — but none of them were for violent felonies, so no worries, eh? The dead girl was said to have emotional problems, PTSD in some accounts, with no explanation of how a 9-year-old might come to develop a post-traumatic stress disorder. Until she was found, the girl’s grandmother had given numerous interviews saying she trusted Plumadore implicitly, although she admitted it was probably not a good idea for him to have left Aliahna and her sisters alone for half an hour Friday morning, when she likely disappeared, while he went to a nearby convenience store in search of a cigar.

Yes, that was his account of his whereabouts: Woke up, couldn’t get back to sleep, went out for a cigar, came home, smoked it and fell back to sleep for a few hours, and woke up to find the girl gone. He assumed her mother had taken her, although the sisters were still there. It was hours before anyone finally realized the girl was gone. And why was she staying with him? Because her mother had the flu, and her stepfather needed to sleep during the day, and who the hell knows? It was one of those stories you put down and ask yourself that if Jesus loves the little children, all the little children of the world, red and yellow black and white they are precious in his sight, why he lets so many of them arrive in a world where they are, objectively, fucked for life.

I’ve known a few people who grew up in conditions like this — rural and/or urban squalor, for lack of a better word, in houses where nobody cleaned or cooked or considered it odd that mom or dad or both were drunk all the time. Houses where grandpa is a sex offender, where mom is crazy, where you and your brother had to split a single pork chop but the dogs were all well-fed, because they were mama’s babies. Houses where your uncle or your dad’s army buddy tried to catch you alone in a room so he could push you up against a wall and ask if there was fur on that monkey yet. Houses where the TV was never turned off, ever, and you never saw a dentist and grandma smoked right next to her oxygen tank. And you know what? These people are heroes in the truest sense of the word. They battled great odds and emerged with a prize beyond rubies — a safe, sane, balanced middle-class life that they could bring their own children into and keep them from harm. Why aren’t we studying them in the world’s great universities? Why do we spend so much time lionizing frauds and con men and politicians and actors and other assholes, and not the few Aliahnas left behind who will survive their ghastly upbringings and prosper? Why aren’t we carrying them through the streets, or at least debriefing them to discover how, exactly, they slipped the noose of ignorance and poverty?

Just wondering.

I’m going to stop reading about this kid for a while. Not good for me.

UPDATE: Too late! She was clubbed to death with a brick, then dismembered.

And I’m sorry to bum you out, but these cases take it out of me.

And now here we are in the last days of the year. I’m counting down to my final day on the old job and first ones on the new, so of course I’m reaching for the most calming activity I know in times of stress — cleaning bathrooms. If I really hit a lick, I could get the whole house clean, but for now, I’ll settle for a couple toilets.

Bloggage?

Fascinating holiday-weekend reader from the NYT: The Empire State Building — and other tall skyscrapers around the country — find astonishing profits in their upper-level observation decks. Sixty million in profits in one year? Yikes. (As one who bought that ticket, a few years back? Not worth it. The wait was endless and the view? Eh. The Chicago skyscrapers are far better, and I concur with those who told me that the best bargain is the cocktail lounge a few levels down from the top, where you get the same view, free of charge, and with drinks.

And as it’s late, that’s about all I have. Hope the news at your end was better.

I’d been paying scant attention to the Ron Paul newsletter story over the past few days, but finally caught up last night with this Reuters piece, which, as in the Fuqua School case, we need to remind ourselves is not that far in the past — in this case, 1993. And in the letter over Paul’s signature:

Among other things, the articles called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a “world-class philanderer,” criticized the U.S. holiday bearing King’s name as “Hate Whitey Day,” and said that AIDS sufferers “enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.”

Oh.

The story includes a pdf of one of the solicitations for his investment counseling service. It’s a marvel of the form, and reading it took me back to my talk-radio days, when paranoia ruled the land and dark speculations on black helicopters and FEMA kept the phones ringing. Paul speaks of how new anti-counterfeiting measures in U.S. paper money was a plot to track good Americans with radio beams:

These totalitarian bills were tinted pink and green and brown, and blighted with holograms, diffraction gratings, metal and plastic threads, and chemical alarms. It wasn’t money for a free people.

This tone must work on somebody, because it’s widely pervasive in paranoia/fringe circles. There must be a lot of dementia patients out there who still have control of the checkbook.

Or maybe I just move in the wrong circles, and this stuff is simply more common than I think. The sitting secretary of state in Indiana, Charlie White, was ruled ineligible to hold office yesterday, clearing the way for the Democrat he defeated in 2010 to take the seat. I really know very little about this case — honestly, nothing — so you Hoosiers will have to bring me up to date. However, late last night, one of my Indiana Facebook people told me to check out Charlie’s father’s FB wall, where, in posts no more than an hour or two old, he was ranting about the “Jew judge” who presided in the case, as well as the Nigerian-born Democrat who wins his son’s seat by default. Today, all the posts were gone. (I’m sure he’s the victim of a cruel hacker.)

Bleh. It’s almost Christmas. Let’s clear our palates with…Festivus! We start with the airing of grievances. Caliban?

Srsly, happy Christmas to all. I shall be back Monday.

So this is it, then? Winter solstice? It doesn’t exactly feel like it — too warm — but given that it’s 8 a.m. and barely light, and that it’s raining and looks like it will be doing so for a while, then I guess this must be the place. Today the corner is turned. (Technically, not until 12:30 a.m. tomorrow, in my time zone, anyway.) Enjoy it, Argentina. Because we’re coming for that light. Starts now.

That last link is a sound clip, and somewhat NSFW, depending on your office. From one of my favorite movies-nobody-else-saw: “The Limey.” Roger Ebert gave it three stars, or a half-star less than what he gave “Horrible Bosses,” which was so bad I couldn’t even last through the DVD, and that’s saying something. It was amazingly crude, and do you know what it takes for me to say that? I, who once worked in newsrooms? How did we get to this point? One minute you’re laughing at the semen-as-hair-gel gag in “There’s Something About Mary,” the next a character in a Judd Apatow movie is dressing down another for shaving his balls in the bathroom and leaving the hair in the toilet, so that “my shit looked like a stuffed animal.” This was in “Knocked Up,” which later took a tonal shift to suggest the main character is positively changed by the presence of a child in his life. In other words, they girlied it up to make it suitable date-night fare, which suggests there are women out there who sat through the turd conversation en route to the baby-picture montage over the closing credits, and were pleased. What a world.

Although I hope “Bad Santa” comes around on one of the cable channels in the next few days. Because that was one that did crudity right. More or less.

Excuse me, we have a correction: Technically the winter solstice is at 12:30 a.m. tomorrow, I’m told. In my time zone anyway.

I’m still waiting for the coffee to kick in, so how about a picture I stole from a total stranger’s Facebook?

That’s our own MMJeff on the left. I guess he brought the gold to the infant Jesus, although think, Jeff: If you were traveling by donkey, preparing for the flight into Egypt, would a ginormous candlestick be a practical gift? Still, nice that you played your part in the living Nativity — you really are a Boy Scout, aren’t you? There was one last weekend at the church next to my Kroger store. The camel-wrangler wore the traditional burnoose over jeans and sneakers, and took a few calls on his cell phone while children petted his dromedary. If the wise men lived at this latitude, they would most definitely wear sweatshirts beneath their kingly finery.

Shoes are always the Achilles heel of the period costume. At how many renaissance faires have I watched knights and ladies touring the grounds in Tevas? The Johnny Appleseed Festival in Fort Wayne featured electricity-free carnival rides — I always liked the wind-up spinning thing — run by people wearing Nikes. The true non-farb Civil War re-enactor pays through the nose for a pair of true Civil War-era reproduction boots, which did not come in left-right configurations until afterward.

So, speaking of movies: Alan and I have finally accepted the inevitable, and are doing the years-overdue adult chore of writing our wills. We had the signing at the lawyer’s office yesterday. Without going into too much none-of-anyone’s-business detail, I was delighted to learn that the living trust we’ve set up features a “stuff” section, designed to dispose of particular valuables and/or personal possessions, should that be important to us. We can hand-write our wishes there, amend and cross them out, which strikes me as a very cinematic thing to have in one’s safe-deposit box. The first person I knew in life who had a significant relative die came back from the funeral with the disappointing news that wills aren’t all they’re cracked up to be in the movies. There was no dramatic reading in a lawyer’s office with the women all dressed in black, clutching hankies in their grief. There was no itemized list of goodies, with flowery legal instructions about their disposition, just some version of “I leave all my stuff to X, Y and Z,” and they can sort things out.”

I may, just for laffs, fill out this section with a list of identical distributions, all but the last one crossed out, to suggest a mercurial temperament I simply don’t have.

OK, so, bloggage:

The tea party takes the reins of power: The queer-bashin’ Troy mayor’s path through public service continues to be rocky, and this time it has nothing to do with her I-heart-NY tote bag. She and her confederates defeated a long-planned transit hub in that city earlier this week, by a 4-3 vote, bucking the wishes of the business community, which turned on her with a vengeance this week. The project came with $8 million in federal aid, but they reasoned that with the government drowning in debt, they must do their part, and said no thanks. The Chamber of Commerce was furious — do you know how hard it is for a suburban mayor in Oakland County to piss off a chamber of commerce? — and yesterday a remarkable letter leaked from a government-affairs manager from a major automotive supplier, saying he would put the word out in the business community that they “no longer consider the City of Troy for future site considerations, expansions or new job creation.” Wow.

The mayor, for her part, claims she’s heard “nothing but congratulations and accolades.”

Cathy Cambridge falls out in a black evening dress, looks smashing. I kind of wish she’d put her hair up for events like this, however, if only so we can ogle the rocks.

Perhaps some of you followed the link to the latest story about embarrassing College Republicans yesterday; I think Cooz posted something in comments. A roundup here, at Romenesko’s site. A student tweeted something offensive about the president: My president is black, he snorts a lot of crack. Holla. #2012 #Obama. You know what bugs me most about that? That stupid holla. Y’know: I’m a racist, but I still want to use hip-hop slang.

OK, the Great Christmas Cleaning Project begins. Holla!