How bad can a day be when it begins with a bracing cup of Detroit Journalist o’ the Year Ron French? I ask you.

Ron’s package on southeast Michigan’s foreclosure crisis drops today (and to be sure, if I squint I can make out another name on the byline — Mike Wilkinson). As usual, it bangs the hammer of justice on the anvil of truth, and always has another killer anecdote coming down the pike:

Derek Brown knew Detroit had a problem when a grocery clerk he knew quit his job to become a mortgage loan officer. “Everyone was selling mortgages. There were mortgage offices on every block,” said Brown, president of Quorum Commercial and past president of the Detroit Real Estate Brokers Association. “One day bagging groceries and the next day selling my mother a mortgage? What the hell is that?”

Yeah, what the hell is that? Well, I know what I’ll be doing for a big chunk of the morning. Unfortunately, for the rest of the day, I’ll be doing the deadline scramble, to keep my own house out of foreclosure. It’s all good — work = invoices = checks = happy Nance — but something has to take a back seat. So enjoy a few bloggage tidbits; I’m sure you folks will find something to amuse you:

I know someone who claimed to have weighed 14 pounds at birth. In case you’re wondering how big that is, here’s a handy picture. Of course, this mother of this baby had a C-section. The man I knew was born at home, in his parent’s tenement apartment in Chicago, because they couldn’t afford doctors and hospitals. Imagine squeezing that thing out your vagina without drugs and only a neighborhood midwife in attendance.

So that’s why the sink was draining so slowly: Torso found in east-side sewer. Just another day in the action-packed city.

A tech-support question for Appleheads: Some months back, I promised Alex I’d make him a custom “In-a-Gadda-da-Vida” ringtone for his phone. In the past I did this by biting a 30-second chunk of the track, saving it as a separate MP3, and e-mailing it away. (It is, in fact, how I got the opening guitar riff from “Voodoo Chile (Slight Return)” for my own pink Razr. Yes, I am insufferable.) However, the copy of the track I have from the iTunes Music Store doesn’t allow me to export it or change the file format at all. Can I assume this is part of Apple’s digital-rights management system? If so: weiners. I already spent 99 cents for the damn thing; why can’t I mess around with it a little? Also, please don’t tell anyone Alex likes Iron Butterfly, or they won’t let him in any of the gay bars anymore.

Dick Cheney successfully treated for irregular heartbeat. In related news, police report no progress on missing twin newborns at nearby hospital.

Why getting shot in the leg can be very, very dangerous: Because femoral arteries carry a lot of blood. RIP, Sean Taylor.

Finally, things found en route to other things — rap represented in charts and graphs:

How fitting, the weekend that Detroit takes its rightful place atop yet another list of Most Dangerous Cities — please, let’s save the “We’re number ONE!” chant for later in the morning, shall we? — that this story is the hey-Martha talker in our household:

The two gas stations had rivaled for years. They stood across an intersection from each other on Fort Street in Detroit, where even a penny’s difference was enough to lure customers.

And so came the price war: One station dropped a cent or two, and the other grudgingly followed.

But the seemingly petty back-and-forth escalated Friday, ending with a fatal bullet in BP station owner Jawad Bazzi’s head over what police say was a 3-cent difference in the cost of regular gas.

Nice bit of scene-setting there; that’s the story in a few sentences. But the details are so rich:

The two stations are holding firm at $2.96 a gallon, this when the prevailing price elsewhere in the area is in the $3.15-$3.20 range. From what little I know about gas-station economics, those are loss-leader prices; you’d best sell a lot of cigarettes to make up the difference. So it’s probably fair to assume the situation is tense already. And then the Marathon station owner, Hussah Masboath, drops the price to $2.93. Three cents! They might as well give it away free.

And then:

Bazzi walked across the street with a couple of employees to confront the Marathon owner and his posse.

“His posse.” I like how hip-hop slang is now creeping into sober newspaper reports.

The confrontation turned physical. Punches were thrown. A baseball bat appeared on the BP side, and connected with a Marathon employee. That’s when the gun was drawn. Two shots later, Bazzi, the BP owner, is dying on the ground. The police arrive, the Marathon station becomes a crime scene, and the yellow tape goes up and business is over for the day.

Are you ready for the punchline?

After the shooting, with the competing station closed, BP’s price per gallon increased to $3.09 for regular.

The Freep story, linked above, is better-written, but the News gets the name of the Marathon owner and this precious detail:

During the brawl, someone swung a baseball bat and the pole that Masboath used to change the numbers on his sign.

The pole! They didn’t even have time to put it away. Some stories you don’t read as much as watch unspool on your mind’s theater screen.

(Sigh.)

Could it have been a coincidence that, the day I finally got to see “Idiocracy,” I learn this unwelcome news?

As for “Idiocracy,” I have mixed feelings. There’s not much of a story there, the plot is thin; it really only exists to serve as an angry argument against stupidity. But who can’t be on board with that? I laughed out loud more than once; how can it possibly be worse than, say, “Deuce Bigalow?” This Esquire story gives you the gist of the film’s pathetic history, but I’d say you should see it just for the thousands of sight gags, throwaway lines and other details that will be with me for some time. (Let’s put it this way: I will never be able to watch “America’s Funniest Home Videos” with Kate again without thinking of “Ow My Balls!,” a big hit in 2505, apparently.)

As usual, YouTube is on the case. The movie’s setup is here.

An exhausting weekend, capped by Kate’s birthday party Sunday. I always think of the last eight weeks of the year as the Three Hurdles of Fall — Halloween, Dual-Birthday Fest and then the biggie, Christmas. I’m two-thirds done, but the last one is always the one most likely to send you sprawling.

On Saturday, a packed freeway sent me off onto surface streets, and for the first time since I’ve lived here, I saw the famed ruins of the Packard plant:

It’s one of the best-known urban-exploration sites in Detroit, because yes, folks, it is wide open, and people trek through it all the time. If you’re a Flickr member, search “packard detroit” in tags for a truly remarkable set of pictures. (No, I didn’t go in. I was alone, for one, and someone told me a story not long ago involving a photographer falling through a piece of rotted floor there and breaking both legs. I’d love to explain that one to my husband.)

Final bit of bloggage: A hung jury/mistrial for the cat assassin. With his peers hopelessly deadlocked at 8-4, the outcome prompted this comment from the defendant:

“I’m not surprised,” said the defendant, James M. Stevenson, founder of the Galveston Ornithological Society who was charged with one count of animal cruelty for shooting the cat last November with a .22-caliber rifle. “It reflects the attitudes of people in the United States — there are cat lovers and others who love biodiversity, including birds.”

I doubt he’ll be stashing his ammo in the future.

And so the week commences. Have a great one.

Hey, look everybody! It’s the Wayne County tax foreclosure list, in my Sunday paper!

I wonder how many pages sections it will be?

Wow, that’s a lot of foreclosures:

Hope you’re not on the list.

Yesterday’s surface-street trip through Detroit made me wonder if I’m the sort of person who gets a thrill from slumming. Isn’t it sort of ick to find ruin and degradation so interesting? Would I be so pleased to take the long way home if I had to do it on my bike, instead of in my nice safe car? Points to ponder. My gutters guy came by late in the afternoon, begging for work. He did our fall gutter blow-out last year, did a great job, and left not even a business card behind. I tried to find him in the spring, but the only thing I could remember about him was “John Friendly.”

That’s ridiculous, I thought. Johnny Friendly is the gangster boss in “On the Waterfront.” You must be getting that perimenopausal swiss-cheese brain thing. So I was thrilled when he knocked on the door last week with a flyer, which explained my confusion: His business name is John’s Friendly Tree Service, and he had indeed introduced himself the previous year as John Friendly.

“Like in ‘On the Waterfront,'” I said.

“I can’t believe you know that movie! That’s how I got my nickname!” he said. “No one knows that movie anymore.” Then he showed me the year’s big news in the Friendly household: a six-inch scar down the midline of his abdomen, next to a nickel-size hole: “Someone tried to rob me, and I wouldn’t give ’em my truck.” Wow. We agreed he’d clean the gutters in a couple weeks when the oaks were finished, and said goodbye.

It was a reminder that there’s a good reason not to drive through the city taking pictures, although to be sure, he was shot in Eastpointe, not Detroit. On the other hand, one reason the city doesn’t spook me (much) is, it’s just so empty. Not everywhere, of course; anyone who tells you downtown is a ghost town after 5 p.m. hasn’t been there lately. It’s not exactly Chicago, but it’s miles closer than it used to be. But the neighborhoods can have an eerie ghost-town vibe, especially in cold weather.

Anyway, John Friendly was tapioca for the week, and asked if he could do the gutters now, get half his money, then come back after Thanksgiving and do them again for the other half. We negotiated a price, and I paid him the full amount up front. “I appreciate this,” he said. “I’m broke.”

I said, “I’m a writer. We invented broke.” Coming from someone living in a nice house, I’m sure it sounded just about as repellent as it reads on the page. But I know a thing or two about cash-flow problems. Anyone willing to work as hard as John Friendly will be OK, as long as he doesn’t get shot again.

Today is Birth Day, Alan’s and Kate’s twin natal celebrations. We got up early and opened presents at the breakfast table. This year’s theme: Fleece. Kate’s been craving a pair of Uggs, the sheepskin boot that’s all the rage wherever there are chilly toes. Ugg is also the sound you make when you look at the price tag, but I found Acorn makes a seam-for-seam duplicate for one-third the price with only one major difference: it doesn’t say Ugg across the heel. I discussed it with her before I bought them, and told her to expect some blonde tootsie would point this out, and she should be prepared. She said she was ready, but then they came out of the box and …didn’t fit. Looks like baby inherited her mother’s sense of humor, nonchalant attitude toward homework and a boatlike shoe size.

So, let’s get bloggin’:

Are you there, God? It’s me, Mitch: Albom does what only he can do — commune with the dead and assure us that, yes, there is almost certainly high-def TV in heaven. Or maybe something better! Mind your tooth enamel and blood sugar as Mitch talks to Bo Schembechler. (Thanks to a merciful God or perhaps an editor who took his supplemental testosterone this week, Bo doesn’t talk back.)

Detroitblog turns up another gem in a city full of them: The world’s coolest music teacher. It says he’s willing to take on a few more students. Maybe I should call him, if only for the bragging rights of taking piano lessons from a guy who played on “Goin’ to a Go-Go” and “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg.”

It’s funny how, even if you don’t follow baseball, the best baseball announcers insinuate themselves into your life, somehow, maybe by coming out of a thousand summer radios or your dad’s TV on warm nights. One of the best, Joe Nuxhall, is dead. He and Marty Brennaman were inseparable from the Cincinnati Reds, especially in that team’s pre-Marge Schott glory days. RIP.

Sorry I’m late today. Early meeting, then I took the long way home. Here’s a picture from the drive:

Just another Mack Avenue business. It inspires more faith than another barbering place close by, which advertised a “tatoo artist” on-site. Nothing like getting permanent ink from someone who can’t spell.

So since we’re already behind here and I still have 900 words to write for some actual damn money, let’s make this quick, a little platter of hors d’oeuvres for you folks today. (Slight tangent: I began my career covering the occasional society event, and typing briefs promoting them in advance. As a result, I never have to look up the spelling of “hors d’oeuvres.”)

First, reader mail that didn’t appear in the comments, from me ol’ semi-roommate Borden in Chicago:

I am one of many who interviewed Paul Tibbets, while a lowly suburban reporter in Columbus. He was speaking on a non-Hiroshima topic, an American Airlines jetliner had crashed in Chicago (circa 1977) and I got Tibbets to speculate on the cause of the crash, which was amazingly prescient. The only way to put the jetliner into its death spiral –captured on photographic film– was if the mounts of one jet engine loosened and the engine flipped, resulting in powerful thrusts in both directions and leading to a horrible swirl to the ground. Not sure if a cause was revealed by NTSB, but Tibbets had the engineer and pilot insights and I’ll bet he was correct. One macabre touch: the American Airlines flight was outfitted with cameras allowing passengers to watch their takeoffs and landings on their monitors. Can you imagine the horror–as the cabin turned upside down– of glancing at a monitor and seeing the ground coming up fast?

Yeesh.

John Scalzi finally got to the Creation Museum, and it was worth the wait: Imagine, if you will, a load of horseshit. Stop by now to join the 500-plus comment thread. Web journalism at its best.

Whatever else the writers’ strike is accomplishing, it’s certainly improving YouTube. Evidence here and here, and probably a million other places.

It’s deer season! The Freep is running a virtual buck pole. Many gross pictures.

Off to earn some money. Carry on.

What is it about putting pen to paper that brings up the bile?

Much of blogdom is discussing this story today, about a scandal at, yes you are reading this correctly, the World Bridge Championship. While receiving their trophy, one member of the U.S. women’s team held up a homemade sign reading, “We did not vote for Bush.” For this, the bridge world is bombing them with e-mails slinging around such terms as “treason” and “sedition.”

Not so many are talking about this story, also from today’s NYT, about the trial of an admitted cat-assassin in Galveston, Texas. The area is a huge draw for bird-watchers, and the accused runs a bed-and-breakfast catering to those tourists. He used a .22 rifle to bump off a stray that he said was preying on endangered piping plovers. The cat was not a stray, claimed a toll taker on the bridge under which the cat lived. The toll taker said he was feeding the animal, and had even strung cat toys from the bottom of the bridge.

Can anyone guess some of the language deployed by the two sides in this case? “Murderous fascist,” “diabolical monster” and “terrible menace” are but a few examples. (Note: The first two were cat-lover terms for the accused; the latter was how the birding world thinks of cats that hunt.)

Granted, we are talking about some highly eccentric people here — bridge-players, bird-watchers and cat people. Still.

While the agencies charged with protecting our national security were maneuvering for access to your cell-phone bills, something was going on in their own damn office in Detroit:

A Lebanese immigrant, Nada Nadim Prouty…well, let the dry language of journalism tell the story. It makes it so much more amazing:

According to court records, Lebanese-born Prouty gained U.S. citizenship in 1994 through a fraudulent marriage, joined the FBI’s Washington Field Office as a special agent in 1999 and joined the CIA in June 2003.

Prouty is related to Talal Chahine, a former Metro Detroiter now on the lam in Lebanon. He’s under indictment for tax evasion on a rather breathtaking scale; he owned a chain of successful Middle Eastern restaurants called La Shish, and allegedly funneled a large chunk of his profits to Hezbollah back in the old country. And guess what Prouty used her FBI clearance for? To sneak a peek at the agency’s files on the very same outfit.

The Free Press wins understatement of the year honors for describing it as “an embarrassing breach of national security, and clarifies:

Although there is no evidence that Prouty was a Hizballah operative, the episode raised questions about how she cleared multiple federal background investigations to acquire U.S. citizenship and land jobs at two of the nation’s most sensitive intelligence agencies without someone discovering that she had engaged in marriage fraud to become a citizen.

We had a seminar speaker during my year in Ann Arbor, someone from law enforcement, who had a very low opinion of the FBI. I’m beginning to see why.

The La Shish chain is still open, operating under some sort of court-approved arrangement while its owner rediscovers his native tongue. I’d like to eat there, but if I did, the terrorists would win.

Both stories make for interesting, if jaw-dropping, reading. Never underestimate the value of a native Arab speaker who looks good in a pantsuit. Apparently she has the ability to cloud men’s minds.

Ahem:

Paul Tibbets is dead. I predict a Bob Greene column in the next few days, remarking on how reclusive the man was, and how rarely he gave interviews (except to BOB). Note: I’ve read at least half a dozen of these rare Tibbets interviews over the years. And I haven’t even been looking for them.

Well, I was half right. The column appeared as expected, in the New York Times, but didn’t mention his reclusiveness. Although, of course, it leads with an anecdote illustrating their special relationship:

My mother, who is 88, told me last month that it had been a long time since she’d seen Paul Tibbets in the Bob Evans restaurant on the east side of Columbus, Ohio. She thought this was odd; she ate lunch there so often, and he ate lunch there so often, that his absence worried her.

As the Bob genre goes, this is lacking is sucktasticness. There’s the blah blah rehash of what’s already been gone over for decades, the soldier-who-did-his-duty nod of the baby boom to the greatest generation*, the banal you-are-there details only Bob could provide:

On the road, I would see him make up his hotel room or clear his plates in a restaurant. When I would tell him that other people would do that, he would say that no able-bodied man should expect another person to do this work for him.

Bob’s signature purple prose isn’t as evident in this one. He’s either improving, or has a better editor at the Times. I only found one example of why-say-it-once-when-you-can-say-it-twice Boblines:

On this Veterans Day I will think about the men and women in their 70s and 80s whom I would see when I was with Mr. Tibbets. These were soldiers and sailors, now grown old, who had expected to be sent to Japan for the land invasion, and perhaps die on those shores.

I love how Bob feels the need to underline that people in their 70s and 80s are “now grown old.” As a reiteration of what we’ve read a dozen or more times since Tibbets died, it’s just average. What is happening? Is Bob getting better? Ah, that question is answered in the tagline:

Bob Greene is the author of “Duty,” a book about his father and Paul Tibbets, and the forthcoming “When We Get to Surf City.”

Ohhh-kay.

* A peculiar sub-genre Joe Queenan summed up, and dismissed, in a sentence: “I want to spend the whole of my youth reading books deploring the moral bankruptcy of my parents’ generation, then, when I am in a position to inherit their life savings, ostentatiously cover the coffee table with stacks of kiss-ass, My Pop the War Hero-type memoirs praising their extraordinary valor.” — from “Balsamic Dreams”

So how was your weekend? Mine was fine. I see Norman Mailer died. Roy Edroso has his quibbles with the NYT obituary, but I found it alternately delightful, fascinating and repellant, and it pulled me through to the end. I thought it was a fair portrait of a man who could be called, quite truthfully, both an irresponsible asshole and one who never wasted a day. I ran hot and cold on his writing, but now that I think about it, I haven’t read much — “The Executioner’s Song,” “An American Dream,” parts of other novels, a bit of journalism and some essays here and there, including “The White Negro.” I have a general rule that I try to follow when considering the work of artists like Mailer, that they should be judged by their art, not by their lives, and that if you must judge them, it should be by the standards of the times they lived in. It’s particularly hard to separate the man from his output in this case, however — they were too closely intertwined. Much of Mailer’s poor behavior was, regrettably, standard-issue intellectual-class mulishness for the time, which doesn’t make it any better, just more understandable.

But running through the story of his life is another strong theme, and the flip side of his more regrettable antics — fearlessness. Mailer never shrank from anything, it would seem. If one wishes he’d chosen his battles better — Jack Henry Abbott, anyone? — you can’t really fault him for getting out there and taking his shot. I heard an interview with him on NPR, around the time “The Spooky Art,” his book on writing, was published. Still haven’t read the book, but listening to him talk about writing, what it takes, what it gives back, what it means, was rapturous. An Amazon.com reviewer sums it up pretty well:

Mailer is like a great coach in this book, inciting the reader to be braver, to work harder, to want more, to cultivate appetite and a certain recklessness that is an antidote to what he calls the “paranoid perfection” imbued by writing programs. I think Anne Lamott’s Bird By Bird is a kinder, gentler counterbalance to Stormin’ Norman’s inspiring hectoring to step up to the plate–in life and in writing–and is also an excellent book on writing. Where Lamott is compassionate, gentle, a chamomile tea-offering, hand-holding tutor, Mailer is a grizzled veteran exhorting us to throw ourselves into the mix, to take chances, to aspire to more than we may ever achieve.

That’s good advice for anything, including life in general. On that note, I’ll quit the blogging for today and go throw myself into the mix, thinking of Mailer. (I have to drive to Ypsi. Hope the Mailer in me doesn’t have an accident.)

A letter from the Department of Silver Linings:

RENO, Nev., Nov. 5 — As his wedding day approached last spring, Marshall Whittey found that his money could not keep pace with the grandiosity of his plans. But rather than scale back, he chose instead, like millions of homeowners across the country, to borrow against the soaring value of his home.

He and his bride, Holly Whittey, exchanged vows on the grounds of a sumptuous private estate in the Napa Valley. They spent their honeymoon at a resort in Tahiti.

But now, in an ominous portent for the national economy, Mr. Whittey has grown tight with his money. His home is worth far less than it was a year ago, and his equity has evaporated. And like many other involuntary adopters of a newly economical lifestyle, he can borrow no more.

I’ve become accustomed to reading bullshit like this about hedge fund zillionaires, money managers and other solid-gold-toilet vulgarians, but anyone want to guess what Mr. Whittey does for a living? He’s a sales manager at a flooring and tile company. In an area with a building boom at full steam, I’d imagine he knocks down a good buck, but not enough to afford his pimptastic wedding without tapping the home-equity ATM. In his attitude toward money, I expect he’s like a lot of people in that part of the country, where benjamins are like buses — there’s always another one coming along. And I hesitate to say he deserves what he’s getting, since all he’s getting at this point is a rather easy lesson in how to economize, far easier than many of us have gotten over the years. May I see the hands of everyone who’s had to economize in order to eat at some point in their careers? Yes, I thought so. This bozo — and many other bozos like him — are only living without restaurants.

And yes, I know that even Mr. Whittey’s pain is real to him, and the decline in his fortunes is shared by everyone, and that money he spends so foolishly every day supports real, non-foolish people in his chain of connections. Still: Cry me a bloody river.

Girlfriend is surly today, isn’t she? Not really. Just under-caffeinated and under-showered. So let’s make this quick, since it’s a bloggage-rich day:

I was having a major walking-into-walls day yesterday, so the news of the Robertson/Giuliani alliance circled my head for a while before coming in for a landing. My reaction was to quote well-known Hoosier sage John Mellencamp: Nothing matters and what if it did? As usual, Roy puts it better.

Fred W. McDarrah died Tuesday. If the name means nothing to you, it’s because you weren’t reading the Village Voice in its glory years, when McDarrah was a staff photographer. I was a subscriber, but I’d never heard this story:

As Mr. McDarrah’s renown as a Beat chronicler grew, his second, inadvertent career took shape. One day in the late 1950s, according to several news accounts of the period, a breathless Scarsdale matron phoned him at his office. Did Mr. McDarrah know where she might rent a real live Beatnik, not too dirty, to read poetry at a party she was giving?

Mr. McDarrah, who by this time knew hundreds of Beatniks (a few scrubbed and all needing cash), happily complied, and a going concern was born. Shortly afterward, he placed the following advertisement in The Voice:

add zest to your tuxedo park party … rent a beatnik. completely equipped: beard, eye shades, old army jacket, levis, frayed shirts, sneakers or sandals (optional). deductions allowed for no beard, baths, shoes, or haircuts. lady beatniks also available, usual garb: all black.

Calls flooded in. For $15, The New York Mirror reported in 1960, the client got one Beat and a half-hour of poetry. Two hundred dollars bought three Beats, who read poetry, answered questions, played the guitar and, of course, the bongos. Mr. McDarrah, who took a small commission and let the artists keep the rest, supplied Beats for school groups, photo shoots, meetings and catered affairs in and around New York for about two years, till the early 1960s.

As an agent, Mr. McDarrah was careful to protect the talent from the clientele. He would not procure lady Beats for bachelor parties. Nor would he rent a Beat of any kind to a children’s party. He once turned down a request from a scoutmaster looking to hire, for a speaking engagement, any Beatnik who was a former Eagle scout. (Mr. McDarrah’s refusal in this case may have owed simply to the sheer impossibility of filling the order.)

Necessity is the mother of invention: The anti-rape device. Ouch! Women seem to be showing their teeth all over lately, most notably in Seattle, where a woman bit off her ex-boyfriend’s lip while they were kissing, then spit it on the floor, where it was found covered in cat hair. And in Fort Wayne, a gal named Constance got right to the point:

An argument between a man and his girlfriend of nine months turned so heated Wednesday morning that the 49-year-old woman is accused of biting the man’s groin area and refusing to let go, according to a probable cause affidavit.

Constance Marie Manning, of the 7200 block of Hickory Creek Drive, is also accused of striking her boyfriend with a dog figurine – causing it to break – and chasing him with a kitchen knife.

You know what makes that story funny? It’s not Connie McToothy, but the reporter who thought to include that detail about the dog figurine’s fate, and set it off with em dashes. Our local weekly’s reporters are constitutionally incapable of translating police-report language into English, and so every drunk-driving arrest is reported thusly: “The officer noted a strong odor of intoxicants coming from the driver’s facial area.” We look for this priceless phrase every week, and we’re rarely disappointed.

And finally, two more YouTube links I forgot yesterday:

Via Ashley, the New Orleans story, in 65 seconds, performed by smart kids.

Ken, I’ve contracted something: Barbie breaks the bad news.

Fun fact to know and tell: If bottom slime isn’t washed off with a hose when the boat is still wet, you’ll be removing it inch by inch with a chisel all winter. Note: This is not our boat. It’s a big gaudy fishing rocket with triple 300 hp outboards. Shudder.

Ah, the melancholy of a boatyard in autumn: Carhartt padded jackets have replaced shorts. The waterfront restaurant is closed for the season. There’s not a girl in a bathing suit, or a girl, period, in sight. (Except me. And as a female long past my sell-by date, it’s a scientific fact that I am, in fact, invisible.) Instead of boats passing up and down the channels, it’s forklifts and jeeps with winches and the shrink-wrapping crews everywhere. And us. Another fall, another day spent watching Alan yank repeatedly on an outboard starting rope. If I had a dollar for every yank I’ve seen the course of our relationship, I’d be blogging from my luxury houseboat tied up at Pier 66, Barbados.

The details are boring — hell, the whole day was boring, or would be to you guys. As for me, I did my part, and once we got the motor running again, the day went smoothly. I’ve learned, during these routine mechanical failures, to remain implacable while Alan howls obscenities at the sky. (If I had a dollar for every one of those, I wouldn’t be blogging at all. I’d have my houseboys taking dictation.) I think before I make a stupid suggestion (“Are you sure there’s enough gas?”). And I appreciate my surroundings.

There was less to appreciate this year. Sorry, Gov. Richardson, but not only can you not have any Great Lakes water because we don’t want to give you any, there’s not much left. Lush Life was sitting on the bottom when we left our slip for the year, and though a strong push freed her — thank God; I can only imagine the obscenities that little development would have required — that’s what you call a pretty low ebb. Granted, the water’s always down in fall, and Lake St. Clair is shallow enough that a stiff west wind can drop the water on the American side by a few inches, this is close to unprecedented. I hope we get shitloads of rain and snow this winter, because I don’t fancy poling.

In other decline-of-the-American-empire news, we’re also running out of gas. The price jumped by 30 cents a gallon mid-week, pushing us over the $3 mark. The local Fox affiliate did a story. I’ve mentioned before that I prefer Fox’s local news because it’s so unabashedly interested in the knuckle-dragger market that, perversely, it makes it easier to endure. The Fox story consisted of interviewing drivers as they gassed up at $3.25 prices, and adding another voice of the common man to the anvil chorus, doncha know. Why did they suppose prices were so high? As one, they answered: “The economy.”

No one mentioned the price of crude, the drop in interest rates, inflation. Not that you’d expect people interviewed at a Detroit gas station to be Alan Greenspan, but even the distant ringing of a clue would have been refreshing. But they all said “the economy,” and they all said it exactly the same way: “It’s the economy,” suggesting someone was asking a leading question, or maybe they were just that dumb. Anyway, the story wasn’t on for very long — nothing is, because the audience has the attention span of toddlers at a birthday party. And then it was on to a shocking armed robbery of a convenience store caught on tape. In Dallas.

Sometimes it’s fun to be a misanthrope. Sometimes sucking the gall-soaked rag of bitterness tastes pretty good.

Or maybe I just need some more coffee. And a shower. And a million phone calls, and some office-straightening. So, on to the bloggage:

This may be of interest only to journalists and media nerds, and its backward-running narrative makes it hard to follow, but if you have the time, it’s a wry giggle. Short version: Wall Street Journal runs an editorial that insinuates union officials live high on the hog and need more congressional oversight. As part of the argument, they toss off an astonishing figure: That one “Jimmy Warren,” treasurer for the United Steelworkers and AFL-CIO, earns a salary totaling $825,262. Wow. Having recently learned that Ron Gettelfinger, president of the United Auto Workers, knocks down around $150,000, this seemed, well, high. It also seemed high to the steelworkers’ media-relations people, who’d never heard of him. Turns out Jimmy Warren is a treasurer in a local in Alabama, and makes $8,252 and…anyone? Yes, and 62 cents, making the fat salary quoted by America’s leading financial newspaper a rather comical and gruesome error of misplaced decimal points. What’s more, the wrong-o figure came from a Human Events website on the “highest-paid union bosses,” which includes officials from such proletarian, blue-collar labor outfits as the players’ organizations for the NBA, MLB and NFL, the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild, etc. And Jimmy Warren is still on the list. Oh, well. Mistakes happen. Picky, picky.

Paul Tibbets is dead. I predict a Bob Greene column in the next few days, remarking on how reclusive the man was, and how rarely he gave interviews (except to BOB). Note: I’ve read at least half a dozen of these rare Tibbets interviews over the years. And I haven’t even been looking for them.

OK, outta here. Have a great weekend.