Big big news in Michigan today: The pets are having an uprising.

I don’t mean to be flip. Three people are dead in two separate dog-maulings. I mentioned one yesterday — a four-month-old baby killed by a Rottweiler. Worse was one that followed, in which two adults were killed by the same pack of roaming curs in an adjacent rural county rapidly going exurban.

Here’s the story; note the photo. I wonder what that sign means, the “if you don’t like it, go away” part. Clashes between long-established rural concerns and newly arrived suburbanites have been going on for years, but it usually involves issues like hog-farm smells or slow-moving combines on rural section roads. Even country people would consider the maintenance of a free-roaming pack of killer dogs to be a bit un-neighborly, but you never know. There’s a strong streak of antisocial libertarianism that runs through rural Michigan, of the fuck-you-it’s-a-free-country variety. Remember, Tim McVeigh spent a spell here, along with his close pal, Thumb native Terry Nichols.

That said, I know nothing gets a posse of farmers to take their rifles from the wall faster than a wild dog pack. Freedom’s one thing, but livestock-killin’s taking money out of pockets. I guess the question to raise is whether two people constitute livestock.

Man, I’m under-caffeinated today. The thing about sleep deprivation is, it builds up. I once heard Bob Edwards interview an expert in these things, who studied people who had jobs that put them out of sync with normal circadian rhythms. It was really more of a conversation, as Edwards was one of those people whose alarm is set for 1 a.m. By Thursday, he said, he was snapping at people for the crime of having squeaky shoes. Dr. Frank once observed that he’d gotten three voice mails overnight from a cardiologist friend doing the all-night on-call shift, an action-packed one in artery-clogged Indiana. The 1 a.m. call was merely terse and grouchy, the 3 a.m. message clouded with increasing shittiness, and by 5 a.m. the voice was screechy and enraged — and these two were fast friends.

I get bitchy, too, but more often I just get tired. If I were that cardiologist, I’d be trying to insert an angio balloon into the patient’s appendix.

So let’s call this a draw and skip right to the bloggage. New chick-blog for bookmarking: I Am Bossy, which I only discovered this week, after Weingarten linked to her ever-so-helpful tampon test (note: safe for fainthearted males; all fluids are a color other than red). Just earlier that day I had been admiring the Simply Vera by Vera Wang ad insert in my morning newspaper, thinking maybe I’d mosey over to Kohl’s and see if anything caught my eye, and then Bossy just…destroyed it. In a highly amusing fashion. I wonder how I’d look in that Liberty Bell cozy.

Fidel Castro writes a newspaper column, and fellow columnist Eric Zorn has a few questions. No. 4: Is he able to take one of life’s minor indignities or insults — a crooked crease the dry cleaner left in the pants of his camouflage suit, say — and spin it into a 700-word tirade on the overall decline of society? I can!

Finally, if you missed it in the comments of the previous post, our own Brian Stouder vexes the help in Logansport, Ind., via that community’s splendidly named Pharos-Tribune.

I’m awake now. Just in time for lunch.

Remember Fred Goldman, Ron’s dad? He certainly won’t let O.J. Simpson forget about him. A great WashPost story about the case that won’t go away. Fascinating forensic-accounting detail:

Lawyers (Goldman has) hired simply cannot find Simpson’s money — though tax returns they obtained in 2002 and 2003 show he was making nearly $400,000 per year. His pro football and acting pensions are protected from seizure. He lives on a nice street in Miami, he takes his children on vacations to the Bahamas, in large part, Goldman’s attorneys say, by a complicated scheme of refinancing loans on his home, using that money for living expenses, while having the payments back to the mortgage company protected by law.

Worth your time.

I was right to sit out 9/11. No one gives a shit where anyone was, how they felt, what was running through their minds. Do they? I certainly don’t, although for those of you who collect such things, I’ll keep it brief: Getting ready for work; shocked; and pissed that it took NPR so long to get their act together. There’s nothing like driving to work, knowing the country is under attack in at least two cities, and hearing Garrison Keillor’s “Writer’s Almanac” on your preferred news source.

To be sure, though, there was little enough of that. More common, today, was the rueful conservative, like, ohhhhh, Jonah Goldberg:

“Remember 9/11!” once looked like it was going to be a battle cry for the ages up there with “Remember the Alamo!” Now, the only aspect of 9/11 that is acceptable on a bipartisan basis is sadness. Obviously, with that much carnage and suffering there’s a place for the sadness. But why only sadness?

If I had said in late 2001, with bodies still being pulled from the wreckage, anthrax flying through the mail, pandemonium reigning at the airports, and bombs falling on Kabul, that by ‘07 leading Democrats would be ridiculing the idea of the war on terror as a bumper sticker, I’d have been thought mad. If I’d predicted that a third of Democrats would be telling pollsters that Bush knew in advance about 9/11, and that the eleventh of September would become an innocuous date for parental get-togethers to talk about potty-training strategies and phonics for preschoolers, people would have thought I was crazy.

For the record, I know a lot of Democrats, and to my knowledge, none of them think Bush knew in advance about 9/11, although the whole country knows he got a fairly specific memo on the subject a month ahead of time, if that’s what you mean. And I apologize for getting a haircut on the Date That Changed Everything, but my roots were getting embarrassing. By the way, how many people do you know can even tell you the date the Alamo was attacked?

Then there’s James Lileks:

It seemed right away like it would be a big war, three to four years – Afghanistan first, of course, then Iraq, then Iran. The idea that it would have stalled and ended up in diffuse oblique arguments about political timetables would have been immensely depressing. There was a model for this sort of thing, a template. Advance. But that requires cultural confidence, a loose agreement on the goals, the rationale, the nature of the enemy and the endgame. We don’t have those things. Imagine telling someone six years ago Iran would be allowed, by default, to make nuclear weapons. They would wonder what the hell we’d done with half a decade, plus change. What part of 25 years of Death to America didn’t we get, exactly?

Wha-? I missed this memo. I thought the idea was to invade Afghanistan and get Osama bin Hidin’ dead or alive. “Then Iraq, then Iran?” I must have been reading different newspapers. “The idea that it would have stalled and ended up in diffuse oblique arguments about political timetables would have been immensely depressing.” Well, hell yes, but you skipped another immensely depressing part — that before the arguments were about “political timetables,” they were about the massive botching of the job and the refusal of anyone in the administration to take any responsibility for it. And now we’re stuck with a chattering class of neocons stateside who act like a pissy girlfriend who says, “I shouldn’t have to tell you what you did. You should know.”

Ned Flanders manque Rod Dreher:

God, it’s hard to remember how scared we all were then. And that’s nothing to apologize for. Nothing like that had ever happened to our country, at least not the mainland. None of us had any idea what was coming next. …

It was a magnificent feeling we all shared, that national unity in the days and weeks after America was attacked. We all knew it couldn’t last, I guess, but didn’t you think, or at least hope, that something had changed forever, and for the better? As long as America was a victim, we were united domestically, and the world was on our side. When we decided to fight back, that ended that. We fought back foolishly, to be sure, and as Jonah notes, President Bush handled the politics of this thing badly. Big mistakes have been made. We all know that. We all live with that.

He’s big on this, telling others how “we all” feel or felt about whatever. I’m reminded of Tonto — what do you mean “we,” white man? And what’s this “magnificent” stuff? All this revisionist history! I recall a world that stood with us pretty much up until we started rattling sabers at Iraq. I guess that falls under the umbrella of “the politics of this thing,” the stuff that was “handled badly.” Well, when you put it that way…

Enough. Fortunately, we have Britney Spears to distract us. Something we can all enjoy together, as a nation. It’s a magnificent feeling:

Hoping to solve the mystery of how Britney Spears, a seasoned performer with many memorable faux-lesbian and python-related VMAs performances to her credit, came to prance across that Las Vegas stage as listlessly a past-her-prime, breakfast-shift stripper who’d just been shot in a fishnetted haunch with an elephant-grade tranquilizer dart…

“Breakfast-shift stripper” — if that doesn’t make milk squirt out your nose, nothing will.

Wandering back to 9/11…I give a lot of people a lot of slack for almost everything that was said between 9/11 and, say, New Year’s. It was a crazy time for everyone. There was a certain LarryCurlyMoe-ness in the air, only not funny. In one of Alan’s late father’s expressions, no one knew whether to shit their pants or wind their watch. I recall horrible things being said right out loud, and slightly less-horrible things being published in the newspaper. There was a Friday morning, probably the first Friday afterward, when I was sitting in the newsroom near the police scanner, and about every five minutes a call came in to check out some swarthy person seen walking down someone’s street — and this in Fort Wayne, Indiana. If anyone knew what the hell was happening, they weren’t telling. Emotions were high. My BFF Deb and I had a trip to Florida planned for that December, a four-day spa getaway at The Breakers in Palm Beach she’d won in a contest, and she said she thought maybe we should donate it to a firefighter’s widow, because would we even be able to enjoy ourselves? (Reader: We didn’t give it away, and we did enjoy ourselves.)

I wasn’t feeling too good myself. But I got over it. A lot of people got over it. If, six years later, we haven’t made 9/11 a national day of remembrance, all I can say is: The president told us to go shopping when the wound was raw.

Ech. Enough. How about some fun bloggage?

The new Thin Thighs in Two Days: A Clean House in 19 Minutes. Sure.

For once in my life, I’m out in front of a trend, although it would be stretching reality to call me a Spokes-Model:

Meet the beautiful bicycle girls of New York, a breed that bears little resemblance to the hard-charging, Spandex-short-wearing species of 20 years ago. Those women were athletes, pumping the pedals, fighting to win. Getting somewhere. Today’s girls—and one always thinks of them as girls, even if they’re well into their 40’s—are more meandering, their long legs flashing along the pot-holed alleys of SoHo and the boutique-lined bike lanes of the West Village. Eco-conscious and ethereal, they wear flowing frocks and gigantic sunglasses but never helmets. Their hair flutters in the breeze as they leave a trail of swooning male pedestrians in their perfumed wake. They’ve been known to weave up the Brooklyn Bridge, holding up traffic as they absent-mindedly chomp on almonds, steering through a stop sign while texting on their BlackBerries.

Local celebrities like the actresses Naomi Watts and Chloë Sevigny and the Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen have all championed living the green life in this most public and only incidentally calorie-burning way. “I go every day to work on my bike,” Ms. Bundchen told the Daily News a couple of years ago. “It’s faster than a car, and cheaper.”

So I’m not in New York, lack flowing hair, almost always wear a helmet, never bike in a dress and don’t text while riding. And I’m not a celebrity, actress or Brazilian supermodel. Otherwise, this fits me to a T. (I do have big sunglasses. Ray-Bans.)

So if you see me, wave.

I have a busy morning today, followed by an exhausted afternoon, and so you may have to take a little less today. This is an anniversary, of course, but I decline to participate in the national introspection. If you’re looking for bloggage to discuss, here’s a good start: The formerly friendly Canadian border, gone, gone, gone.

Dick Law of Gibraltar can remember boating across the Detroit River to Crystal Bay in Canada as a young man and seeing the customs officials go by and simply wave.

But beefed-up border security from customs officials, the Coast Guard, county sheriffs and local police have complicated what once was a simple trip to Ontario waters across from Grosse Ile.

As of Jan. 31, Americans will be required to carry a passport or similar document to return from Canada, a requirement formerly reserved for overseas travelers. Customs officials plan to phase in the requirement until the public becomes more aware, but it’s expected to increase the time it takes to cross the borders.

The new rules will be backed up with more spot checks. Law said boaters near Gibraltar face a gauntlet of law enforcement from U.S. or Canadian customs agents, the Coast Guard, the Wayne County sheriff and local police from Gibraltar and Grosse Ile.

It isn’t just boaters, either. They’ve started putting portable toilets along the approaches to the crossing at Port Huron. Live near a border? What’s it like where you are?

Back later today, in one form or another.

The subprime meltdown is at its hottest in southeast Michigan. Pigass stupid borrowing/criminally fraudulent lending was robust here even before the auto industry began its downsizing over the last 18 months. Tens of thousands have taken the money and many of them are trying to run, but find themselves tethered to their house in an area where for-sale signs sprout like dandelions on every block.

This isn’t news. I’m just trying to give you some background.

(Obligatory it’s-all-about-me note: As of last week I thought that if circumstances forced us to sell tomorrow, we’d take a $30K bath on what we paid two and a half years ago. Then I walked the dog past a lovely comparable house a block away that’s been on the market a while. “New pricing!” the sign said. I glanced at the sales flyer in the box, and revised our potential loss upward to $50K. It’s only a loss when you sell, I know. Still. Unnerving.)

Me ol’ pal Ron had a story in Saturday’s paper that should have surprised no one, but set in stone a grim truth: We’re number one! No. 1 in subprime lending in 2006, and No. 1 in foreclosures:

About 55 percent of mortgage loans made in 2006 in Metro Detroit were subprime loans, carrying interest rates at least three percentage points higher than that of prime loans—double the national average. Laredo, Texas, had the second-worst rate, at 52 percent. The news is even worse in Wayne County, where nearly two of three home loans were risky, high-cost loans.

One local-jargon note: “Metro Detroit” is the local-media term for “everybody in the area,” and includes the affluent suburbs. “Wayne County” is mostly occupied by Detroit, with a handful of better-off communities — Dearborn and the Pointes, to name but two. Two-thirds in Wayne County isn’t surprising; 55 percent in the metro area is.

So what you have is the regular subprime meltdown that the whole country is experiencing, along with the market losses you’d expect in an area losing thousands of jobs. If you live in the Sunbelt, go ahead and kiss that giant electric bill you got last month. It’s probably a lot less than $50K.

But as you go further into the story, interesting details emerge. There’s a quote from a mortgage executive:

The foreclosures caused by questionable loan practices are likely to continue for another year, as adjustable rate mortgages spike, Glanz said. “Were there abuses? Yes. Could they have gotten financing someplace else (at better rates)? Maybe. (But) people did sign up for those loans.”

In other words: Tough luck, but you asked for it. But note the next passage:

One such family is Jerome and Alice Wilder, who live in a tidy home on Waltham Street in Detroit. The couple and their 4-year-old son, Jahari, had a fixed-rate mortgage on the home they’ve lived in since 1999. A mortgage officer repeatedly called their home in 2004, saying he could lower their house payments and get them thousands of dollars in cash if they refinanced.

“He kept calling and calling,” Jerome Wilder said. “He said, ‘I know you can use the money—Christmas is coming up.’ “According to the truth-in-lending statement prepared by the mortgage officer, the Wilders’ home payment would be $504 a month at initiation, and would rise no higher than $569. Despite the broker’s reassurances, the family’s house payments reached $900 a month by 2006.”It’s the most elaborate con game you’ve ever seen,” Jerome Wilder said. “I feel like I was taken for a ride.”

The Wilders’ home was sold at a sheriff’s auction in March, and the family is scheduled to be evicted later this month.

Obviously, the Wilders were defrauded. It’s a truth-in-lending statement, after all, not lies-in-lending. Where is the eager prosecutor bird-dogging the scoundrels who led them into this? Second-to-last graf:

ACORN officials have asked the Michigan Attorney General’s Office to investigate mortgage fraud in Metro Detroit, and several bills have been introduced in the Legislature to clamp down on predatory lending.

Note: ACORN, or the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now. I first became acquainted with this group as a young reporter, when they came to Columbus to agitate for the homeless (I think). You could call them the quintessential so-called outside agitators, sending reps from the national organization to town to set up a local chapter with local leaders, and then call the whole thing “grass-roots.” At the time they were easy for the power structure to ignore, and I don’t know if that’s changed at all. I’d feel a lot better if that sentence said, “The mayors and city councils of 23 separate communities have asked the Michigan Attorney General…” But I’ll take action wherever it comes from, even ACORN.

I know what some of you are thinking: The Wilders had it coming, somehow. They didn’t read their closing papers, or something. Well, I didn’t read my closing papers either; if I had, my real-estate closing would have taken three days instead of 45 minutes. I looked over what I could beforehand, and took the word of the people who handed us the papers and explained what each one was. I was vastly reassured that I was dealing with reputable people, and that I was agreeing to a boring old 30-year, fixed-rate loan, given to people with excellent credit scores, and not something we bought after a phone pitch. I had faith in good faith. Maybe I should dig them up and reread them.

I remember ads that ran on TV during the subprime boom. One featured a jolly black couple whose nice lender helped them get out from under all those credit-card bills, lowered their payments, and freed up enough cash to buy an above-ground pool. I wonder what apartment they’re living in now.

OK, Monday bummer over. On to the bloggage:

Here’s one for Ashley, who played to be heard when he was in a marching band:

The joke about black-college football games in the South is that the crowd patterns are the reverse of the norm. The fans talk, flirt and eat during the first two quarters, then return to their seats to scrutinize the marching bands through their eight-minute shows at halftime. …

In 1989 the Prairie View drumline introduced a new drums-only feature sequence, which usually includes a kind of circus gymnastics: throwing drums around, drummers carrying one another upside-down by the calves, walking and playing in pairs like a push-me-pull-you. And in 1994 the Box began rotating sections of its drumline during the routine, so that snare drummers weren’t always up in the front.

Amid the rampant trash-talking between supporters of different black college bands, Prairie View’s pioneering of this modern drumline feature seems to have become accepted history.

“If any other band tells you that they started that,” said Skip Wilson, an alumnus of the Box who now helps direct it, “I’ll eat a bug. And I’ll let you choose the bug.”

You mean they’re not in your ass? Your politics are all in your head:

Exploring the neurobiology of politics, scientists have found that liberals tolerate ambiguity and conflict better than conservatives because of how their brains work.

In a simple experiment being reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, scientists at New York University and UCLA show that political orientation is related to differences in how the brain processes information.

Previous psychological studies have found that conservatives tend to be more structured and persistent in their judgments whereas liberals are more open to new experiences. The latest study found those traits are not confined to political situations but also influence everyday decisions.

All I see are…shades of gray!

Well, it’s Monday. It’s fittin’.

If you watch only one Luciano Pavarotti YouTube post today, make it this one, via Lance.

I used to think that conservatives felt about Bill Clinton the way I felt about Ronald Reagan. Close, but no cigar. Now I think conservatives felt about Bill Clinton the way I feel about the current crop of GOP presidential contenders, but my contempt eclipses theirs by the white-hot fury of 10,000 suns. Or maybe eight suns, or however many of these clowns are running at the moment. They make Reagan look like Winston Churchill.

And I didn’t even watch the debate last night. Roy did, thank God: Tell me: are all of these things animated Ralph Steadman cartoons? I was more vexed by the appearance of Fred Thompson, announcing his candidacy for leader of the free world on the goddamn Tonight Show. If you didn’t already have the idea this man is an unserious, profoundly lazy lightweight, well, I don’t know how it could be any clearer. The viral-video crap, the I’m With Stupid fundraising, the wahl-I-guess-I-best-mosey-on-down-and-file-for-president public bullshitting — the fact this man is an instant top-three frontrunner says everything about the intellectually bankrupt GOP these days.

Doghouse Riley, Indianapolis resident, recounts an interview of Ol’ Bassetface by ex-Fort Wayner Karen Hensel, whom I know as a nice person, two-time Peabody winner, faithful Republican, and probably not NPR material, at least not with questions like this: Your producer from Law and Order said when you walk in the room people want to “stand and salute”. Is there anything similar between you and the tough guy we know from Law and Order? Yeesh.

Life is still in its post-summer transition of boredom, so not a lot to report today. The dryer’s fixed. Parts: $80. Husband who can disassemble an unfamiliar machine, repair, vacuum out 16 years of accumulated lint and reassemble it: Priceless.

If you’re in an environment where George Carlin’s language won’t offend anyone, here’s something I found while digging for that Thompson clip. Some of my best friends smoke cigars, but still: Amusing.

Finally, Bob Sievers died this week. That’s a name that won’t mean much to many of you, but to people from Indiana, it’s like hearing that the Pope finally checked out. Sievers was the host of a long-running morning show on WOWO, Fort Wayne’s booming clear-channel (note lower case, not the corporation) radio station. He and co-host Jay Gould ran “The Little Red Barn” about the way you’d expect — with an unbelievably cornball opening theme song, carried through as the framework of the show, Bob and Jay doing a radio show from the barn, feedin’ the chickens and settin’ on a hay bale to interview a county extension agent about long-term weather expectations vis-a-vis spring planting. However, it’s a measure of the sincerity and good humor both brought to the task that the show was simply irresistible. Years after teenagers and parents had separated into armed camps, each with their own morning radio shows, whole families were still tuned to WOWO during the Little Red Barn, peacefully enjoying two of the great radio voices of our age.

The station, now a fairly noxious all-talk format, has a tribute page up. Go there if only to experience the theme song, and stay for the Sievers interview, where you can get a sense of the Voice, diminished by age but still the Voice. (Bonus: A great Elvis story in there, too.)

I knew Bob a little, and can tell you he was everything he appeared to be on the air: An absolute charmer. He got fourscore and ten, and made every one count.

I don’t know about you, but this happens to me all the time — I’m going out, I think I look to-tally hawt, I open the door, photographers raise their cameras to capture the moment, and dang, I forgot my pants, AND my panties, yet again.

The best part of that story? Where it describes Britney’s “ample bottom.” I just like to say that phrase for fun. Our friends across the pond speak the same language, but so much more skillfully.

Sorry for launching today with a Britney Spears ample-bottom item. The Committee started at 7 a.m., directly across from my bedroom window. Today is the day the teacher assignments arrive by mail, which means the phone will ring nonstop from 10 a.m. until mid-afternoon, as the entire incoming fifth-grade class calls to triangulate their first-day outfits. (Last year we were out when they arrived. Came home to find the phone blinking: “You have…seven…new messages.”) I have to work my special kind of magic on four separate stories today, and none of this is helping. Why Nance, you’re saying, it sounds like you’re setting us up for another four-paragraph link dump. Not exactly. I’m just grumpy.

Actually, I was thinking about Larry Craig again, as much as I’d like to put him from my mind. I was thinking back a few years, when conservatives were simmering with anger over where Bill Clinton was putting his dousing stick, and claiming that, because of him, they had to explain oral sex to their children, who then went right out and practiced on one another. Well. Because of Larry Craig, I now know more about foot-tapping signals and wide stances than I ever, ever wanted to know, and I’m a gay-friendly sort of gal. Can I blame this on Craig? Because I want to.

Best rejoinder to the Clinton-made-my-kid-do-it line, from Roy: If he really is responsible for a rise in oral sex, I vote we put him on Mount Rushmore. Of course, this was after a conservative tried to blame Clinton for an increase in mouth cancer. Please.

Final word on the subject: A clip from Little Britain, which I’ve never heard of but perhaps should have. Via TPM.

So now, bloggage:

Who says Republicans can’t smile in this difficult time: Karl Rove’s ride, pimped. It’s a little juvenile — i.e., entirely in keeping with the White-House-as-frat-house culture of the capital these days — but at least no nations were invaded.

Jeez, let’s cut this mudbath short, eh? The clanking outside is making me INSANE. Better to go run bike errands and get it out of my system.

Two years ago, Hurricane Katrina did her best to destroy a great American city. (I know I’m going to get a raft of shit from Ashley for that, because he contends that what did New Orleans in wasn’t the storm, but the crappy levees, but let’s at least agree that the storm had something to do with it, OK?)

In the time since, I’ve had a variety of reactions to the rebuilding effort, but ultimately I come down with Ashley and his profane cri de coeur, FYYFF. It might not make sense to rebuild a city below sea level, but lots of cities flood — Fort Wayne, Indiana, to name but one — and when those places go underwater all we hear about is improving the dikes and giving the Army Corps of Engineers another chance with the riprap and bulldozers. Anyone could argue New Orleans has been more important to the country than the Fort — first night baseball game notwithstanding — and deserves better than the endless incompetence at all levels of government they’ve had to suffer since.

It’s complicated, I know. But since we’ve decided to shit rather than get off the pot, let’s get the shit built.

David Mills at Undercover Black Man marked today with a link to the Dixie Cups’ version of “Iko Iko.” My version of the song is called “Jockomo,” by James Sugarboy Crawford; I think I burned it off a disc that passed through my life, something called “The New Orleans Sound.” (iTunes tells me I also toasted “I’m Gonna Be a Wheel Someday” and “A Certain Girl,” by Bobby Mitchell and Ernie K-Doe, respectively, from the same record. If you’re taking notes.) I don’t generally share music here; I believe in copyrights (most days). Sugarboy Crawford claimed to never have seen a dime from Jockomo/Iko Iko. I can’t even tell if he’s still alive. Maybe Ashley knows. If so, I’d be happy to Paypal him $20. The link will be deleted after 24 hours, anyway. If you get here late, well, that’s the fate of New Orleans if we don’t get moving.

The title of this post comes from a piece of art Ashley’s displaying on his site today.

Enjoy Sugarboy. He played with a group called His Cane Cutters. Clever.

UPDATE: John points, in comments, to this excellent 2002 interview with Crawford. Amazing what could end a career back then:

Sugar Boy and his band were on their way to a job in North Louisiana in 1963, when state troopers pulled him over for the then-crime of being a black man in a flashy brand-new automobile. One of Louisiana’s “finest” took exception to Sugar Boy’s attitude and proceeded to pistol-whip him on the side of the road. Sugar Boy spent three weeks in the hospital and was incapacitated for two years. He attempted a comeback, but after 1969, he confined his singing to church. He then went to trade school and learned to become a building engineer.

This week the Committee is outside a) sawing concrete; b) putting the concrete chunks into a truck; c) pouring new cement and, I don’t know, probably d) sacrificing 20 pigs to the gods. And this morning I have to a) rewrite that memo (for the third time); and b) interview a lawyer. What could make this morning worse? I dunno, maybe reading about Larry Craig’s bathroom habits. (Did the “wide stance” detail turn your stomach, too?)

I’ll be back later this afternoon. In the meantime, take a wide stance over a little bloggage:

Quote of the day: “The real question for Republicans in Washington is how low can you go, because we are approaching a level of ridiculousness.” — Scott Reed, GOP strategist. What it is, dude.

Climate change? What climate change? Lake Superior at record-breaking lows. If you don’t think this affects you because you live outside the Great Lakes basin, think again.

On the recommendation of MichaelG in the comments below: Everything you always wanted to know about restroom sex. Maybe more.

Off to tackle my workload.