My doctor last week not only told me the bad news — my ouchy knee is probably arthritic — he said that making it less ouchy is in my hands. He prescribed ibuprofen in horse-size tablets, unspecified weight loss (“every little bit helps”) and strengthening exercises on the torture machines. All this by way of saying, you guys get the blow-off today, because I gotta go to the gym. The one closest to my house is not only highly recommended and reasonably priced, they’re having a “women work out free” promotion for the month of March, so I’m going to check them out before I sign anything.

Why, you ask, might a gym around here be willing to give away services free? Why, read on:

Ashley, let us clasp hands and hold them high! Wayne County, my county, the 313, lost 19,079 residents in 2005-’06, a full 89,000 since 2000, surpassed only by Orleans Parish, La., site of Hurricane Katrina! Anybody want to buy a house? Sinn fein!

Cathy Seipp doesn’t need another blogger standing in line to sing her praises; she doesn’t need anything now, having died yesterday of lung cancer, at 49. I hope she might find a glimmer of grim humor in the fact her lack of a smoking habit is the first phrase after her name in her obituaries, in the place where “Nobel laureate” or “designer of the space shuttle” would normally go: “Journalist Cathy Seipp, a non-smoker, died of lung cancer Wednesday, at 49…”

I didn’t know her. We corresponded a few times. Five years ago, I blogged a blackly humorous piece she did in Reason magazine, about the inability of public-education zero-tolerance nanny types to deal with not-particularly-complex subtleties of their students’ medical needs, which I thought was devastating. As she told the story, her daughter has a type of asthma where she needs to carry two inhalers at all times — one to be used immediately (as in, IMMEDIATELY) after an attack, another right after. She carried these in her backpack for years until a teacher spied her using them, and demanded that she adhere to the school’s official prescription-drug policy; that is, that they be kept in a locked drawer in the office, where they could be asked for under the proper procedures.

Obviously this is absurd. Asthma attacks come on swiftly and can be deadly; you’d think a simple explanation to school administration would suffice, but Seipp did what she was supposed to do — got a note from her daughter’s doctor that laid out the nature of her illness, and assured all that the girl had been properly trained in the use of the inhalers, and so forth and so on. Not that it did any good:

I spoke to Ivanhoe’s then-principal, Kevin Baker. He said I’d been “breaking the law” for five years by keeping the inhaler in the backpack instead of in the office, and that he would “confiscate” it if he found it there in the future. If the school had allowed this before, he said, it was an oversight. “So now what we need to do,” he explained, in a sing-songy, Romper Room voice, “is set up a series of intervention meetings to help you understand our concerns about you breaking the law.” My arguments about doctor’s orders went nowhere. “When your daughter is at school,” Principal Baker said, “I am the ultimate authority concerning her health.”

If that isn’t about the best capsule description of a certain type of public-school official, I don’t know what is. (My sister can tell a few more stories along these lines.) Seipp sent me a note, I wrote back, and that was pretty much it. As a media critic, she had few peers, and as an observer of Los Angeles, her hometown, she was always worth your time. She was conservative, but not in the amen corner; she wrote about her politics in an interesting way. (At first I didn’t understand why she wrote for those lemon-suckers over at the Independent Women’s Forum, but she was a freelancer, and now I am too, and so I understand perfectly now.) She was funny and smart, she was honest, she told the truth and, from the abundant testimony of those who loved her, she was a good mother and a fine and loyal friend. A life too short, but well-lived.

Back later.

Finally finished “The Looming Tower” and will take it back to the library, overdue [kicks dirt], tomorrow. I’ll be buying it in paperback, once it has “the Pulitzer Prize-winning bestseller” emblazoned across the cover. I think the Big P is a foregone conclusion, but I could be wrong.

The book tells, in great detail, the story of al Qaeda, Islamic fundamentalism and, in particular, Osama bin Laden. Chapter 1 has been excerpted widely, the story of Sayyid Qutb, an Egyptian fundamentalist generally believed to be the father of Islamism. He was only one of many Muslims to come to America (in the ’40s, sorry Dinesh) and find himself disgusted by what he saw — mostly women, enjoying freedom of all sorts. Oh wait, there was another camel’s nose of leftism in this stew, too:

Qutb was familiar with the Kinsey Report, and referenced it in his later writings to illustrate his view of Americans as little different from beasts — “a reckless, deluded herd that only knows lust and money.” A staggering rate of divorce was to be expected in such a society, since “Every time a husband or wife notices a new sparkling personality, they lunge for it as if it were a new fashion in the world of desires.” The turbulent overtones of his own internal struggles can be heard in his diatribe: “A girl looks at you, appearing as if she were an enchanting nymph or an escaped mermaid, but as she approaches, you sense only the screaming instinct inside her, and you can smell her burning body, not the scent of perfume but flesh, only flesh. Tasty flesh, truly, but flesh nonetheless.”

There you have it, America: The seeds of al Qaeda were planted when some hussy fluttered her eyelashes at this uptight Egyptian. You just never know, do you?

That’s only the appetizer, though. The soul of the book is the twin tales of two fascinating men, John O’Neill and Osama bin Laden. The O’Neill story has been told before, about the singular FBI agent whose train wreck of a personal life did not overshadow the fact he was about the only soul in the FBI who knew just how bad al Qaeda was. He finally left the Bureau in frustration, taking a job as chief of security for the World Trade Center. He started just days before Sept. 11, 2001, the day he died.

Bin Laden’s story was less familiar. I knew the outlines and quite a few facts, but I never got the whole picture until this book, and the picture is pretty banal: Bin Laden is — remains — a rich kid, one of those rich kids whose character is shaped by what he never had to do, that is, go out and earn a living. And so he became a leaf in the wind, an Arab Kennedy cousin of sorts, blown here and there by the whims of whatever caught his fancy at any given moment.

You’ve known these guys; the American version is more likely to be into heroin, or sustainable organic agriculture, or blue-green algae as the health cure doctors don’t want you to know about, but s/he’s as rigid as his al Qaeda brethren are on the subject of jihad. Bin Laden served as the proprietor of the death-to-the-infidel hangout, doling out cash to his entourage the way the American rich kid doles out drugs. He flits from project to project, swanning around Afghanistan during the Soviet occupation with his ragged band of would-be martyrs, hoping to die for Allah. The Afghans thought what you’d imagine, that they were amateurs and pikers, but hey, they all had fat wallets.

In other words, Bin Laden was an overprivileged punk. They’re the dangerous ones.

I learned a lot I either never knew, or knew and forgot. For instance: When Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait, Bin Laden went to the Saudi king and begged him not to allow the Americans in. He said he — he and his Afghan “veterans,” his hand-picked mujahideen — would protect the oil fields in this holiest of Muslim lands. Really? said the king. And what will you do when he flings some chemical bombs at you?

“We will fight them with faith!” Bin Laden replied. The Saudi king was unimpressed and put his money on Team America. Infidel!

As amusing as this exchange is, it underlines something important: Bin Laden hated Saddam Hussein. Hated his secularism, his hedonism, his un-Islamic showboating. So of course we invaded Iraq.

“The Looming Tower” is a mesmerizing read, but also a depressingly familiar story, about the damage done by people who claim to be acting on behalf of God. When I was doing my journalism fellowship a few years back, two of our overseas fellows were from the Middle East, one Israeli and one Palestinian. Both were extremely secular. At a restaurant one night in Ann Arbor, the waitress arrived at the table with four plates of sandwiches, and delivered them to the wrong people. As we passed them around, I joked that the bacon cheeseburger couldn’t be Adi’s, the Israeli’s — so traife. It’s the sort of joke I make with my Jewish friends all the time, some of whom keep kosher and some of whom don’t, but all capable of smiling at a weak jest about dietary laws. He actually was offended. Why would I assume he was one of those Jews, the observant ones? He really wanted to know; he couldn’t believe I’d even think such a thing about him. It was a reminder that in a part of the world where most of the problems have their roots in religion, that being religious is a political act in and of itself. I guess I’m taking note of the obvious, that Sammy Bin L. has more in common with religious lunatics in this country than he does with an old thrill-rapist like Saddam. But if you really want to see the influence of this country’s God-botherers wane, there’ll have to be a lot more blood on the floor. I guess I’m saying, count your blessings.

Bin Laden turned 50 a couple weeks ago, still presumably alive, still living in something approaching comfort if not total freedom. He got away with 9/11 because we underestimated him. He continues to live as a free man because we continue to do so.

Bloggage:

The WashPost gives us a nice profile of Felicia Pearson, aka Snoop, the little assassin on “The Wire.” Like Pearson herself, it’s not what you think it is.

Now I have to go; today is the dog’s annual vet visit and I must collect the vile stool sample. I like our vet. Last year he showed me his photo album of strange animal rescues he’s participated in. (He’s on call for tranquilization and/or euthanization services.) There’s a buck with what looks like a 10-point rack being fished out of Lake St. Clair in the midst of a sailboat race, coyotes and foxes of all sizes and predicaments, and of course the savage feral dogs of Detroit. There are no boring jobs, only boring people.

Later.

I’ve started taking a writing workshop, down at Wayne State. It isn’t precisely what the doctor ordered, oriented more to freeing the writer within than I’d like. (My inner writer has been free for some time, running around the pasture kicking up her heels; what she needs is some work under saddle.) But it’ll do. It’s two hours a week when I have to concentrate on something other than the things I’ve been concentrating on, and the course description contains my favorite words in the world: free and open to the public.

The teacher and I have some differences of opinion, primarily regarding the value of longhand. For years now, I’ve been doing all my writing at a keyboard, to the point that my handwriting muscles have atrophied. I pick up a pen to write checks and grocery lists; even my sympathy notes are done on the laptop. (As a consolation prize, I try to make them long and meaty, letters rather than notes. There’s something about the lines “Dear Bob, so sorry for your loss. You have my condolences” that, when written on a computer and printed out, really says “You shouldn’t have.”)

However, this teacher believes we get in touch with a different part of our creative selves when we compose by hand. I can agree with that — it’s the part that says “ouch.” He gives us short assignments we’re supposed to write in class, in our notebooks. Last week my hand felt like a claw by dismissal time, so this week I switched to a No. 2 pencil, figuring less pressure would help. It didn’t, at least not much. I pared my scratchings down to my journalist’s combination of shorthand, abbreviations and the sort of incomprehensible scribblings we hope will protect us in court if our notes are ever subpoenaed. And so I have a legal pad that contains a two-page reverie on Ohio State football fans that I could only reproduce at gunpoint.

This is the thing about writing, though, the really cool thing — you start out thinking you’re writing about one thing, and then you start writing about something else. Your brain gets out the way of the mystical bond between your fingers and your subconscious. (Some call this “losing the plot.” I prefer to tart it up with b.s. about the creative process.) So I wrote the sentence, “Columbus is the sort of place where a man named Gray can name his daughter Scarlet Ann and nobody considers this child abuse.” It made me think of when I first heard this story — when I was just starting my career in Columbus. Mr. Gray was a lawyer, I believe, and baby Scarlet Ann would be an adult by now. Whatever happened to her, I wonder? Did she grow up to become S. Ann Gray or did she fully embrace her dad’s egomania in making an infant a reflection of his sports-team loyalties? If I were a betting man, I’d take the latter option. Every little girl wants to make her daddy proud.

(Why should no one be surprised Mr. Gray was a lawyer? Discuss.)

Parenthood and sports made me think of the earlier comments this week about the new basketball uniforms, which made me think of a funny line from the Poor Man, from years ago, in an entry called “Fashion Victims of the ’80s.” No. 9, Larry Bird:

Super-short green shorts split up to the waist are a notoriously hard look to rock, and Larry Bird was uniquely unqualified to pull it off. Unafraid to show all twelve feet of his milky-white thighs on the basketball court, Bird topped the ensemble off with knee socks, Chia-hair, and a permanent milk mustache.

Of course, Larry would have looked even worse in those baggy shorts. Most white guys from French Lick, Indiana would, I expect.

You see how this works, you amateurs? You start out talking about Columbus, and end up at Larry Bird. And you make your readers suffer along with you! This is why blogging is such a runaway success.

Speaking of which, I was checking my incoming links the other day, and found a blog I was unfamiliar with, Englishgirl in Indiana. Whaddaya know, it’s run by the folks who bought our house in Fort Wayne. She links to photo albums of family events, and I ignored the people in the pictures to concentrate on what I’m really interested in — what they’ve done to our house. They refinished the floors! They look fabulous. They painted the dining room yellow! It looks fabulous. I’m wondering why I didn’t paint the dining room yellow. I’m so pleased our old house fell into the hands of someone who loves it as much as we did. I’m still forging my relationship with my new one, and while I like it more every day, I say with real regret that I miss my Fort Wayne eaves. I used to leave my upstairs windows open all summer long and now I have to run around like a commando every time a drop of rain falls. The Committee to Bring Back Eaves — this is my new cause.

Have we meandered enough? Does this entry make as little sense as possible? Good. On to the bloggage:

In re Fox’s attempt to make “conservative” humor, Roy Edroso points out the difference between art and propaganda.

Henry Allen, one of my writing idols, makes a point about the Walter Reed fiasco that hasn’t been made yet: It has something to do with the difference between enlisted soldiers and officers.

I am shocked, shocked to hear Newt Gingrich has a wandering pecker and the soul of a hypocrite.

Gotta go bust some scum. Guests for dinner tomorrow.

This is Kenny. Say hi to Kenny. (Hi, Kenny. You are a cutie pie.) Kenny is about to move in with my friends Mark and Judy. All this talk of dogs this week prompted them to send a baby picture. Always happy to put your dog pix on the internets, folks. Especially when they’re of Kenny.

(Please note: His eyes aren’t really that creepy-looking. My Photoshop red-eye removal technique is pathetic.)

One of our number here — I think it’s Brian — wants me write more about “The Looming Tower,” the current On the Nightstand selection. Patience, Brian. I’m not finished with it yet, although I’m finding it fascinating and really should make a run at polishing it off this weekend. In the meantime, I’m savoring the details of Osama bin Laden’s road to piety, which at some point included a shift to playing soccer in long pants. A few more inches, a beard and a skullcap, and Sammy bL will find Ohio State University’s new basketball uniforms entirely pleasing to Allah. As it is, the hemline of those shorts would pass muster in the strictest academy for Catholic girlhood. Isn’t fashion funny?

Note the uniform allows for “personalization” among players. “Uniform” and “personalized” would seem to be in opposition to one another, but I never claimed to understand sports.

I’m tapped out of amusing anecdotes about life in the snowy Midwest (two inches last night, temperatures expected to push 50 by the weekend — winter’s back is to the wall, but not yet broken), so let’s make this an all-bloggage Wednesday:

Everybody loves a right-wing man in uniform, particulary when he goes on Fox News, but I love a right-wing man in uniform when he has a colorful past as a gay-porn star known as “Rod Majors.” It’s Corporal Matt to you, however. Link is safe (links from that link are decidedly not), and scroll down for bonus photo of Ann Coulter posed with a real you-know-what. His high-and-tight haircut doesn’t look like it requires the styling attention of John Edwards’, however, so we know who the real faggot is.

Odd Detroit factoid: The bridge to Canada, which carries one-quarter of U.S. trade with the Great White North, is owned outright by a single individual who doesn’t like to answer questions about it. Jack Lessenberry thinks the newspapers should pay more attention to this intriguing fact. Me, too.

Showerward, ho.

Big news in the D over the weekend — the suburbs, actually. A woman’s been missing for three weeks. Her husband said they had an argument, and the last time he saw her she was walking down their driveway to climb into a dark-colored sedan. This was February 9. He waited five days to report her missing, and then it started — an ex-girlfriend came forward with e-mails from the husband, saying he suspected his wife was having an affair, then the creepy interviews with media outlets where he referred to her in the past tense, before going all teary and begging her to come home.

Well, you don’t have to be an ace criminologist to suspect how it would turn out, although even ace criminologists probably didn’t expect a weekend like this one. The police searched the house Friday night, and in pretty short order found a woman’s torso in the garage. They turned around to say, “Hey, care to explain this?” but hubby had vanished into the gloaming. The following day was spent following the twin threads of the Search for More Body Parts and the Search for the Husband. They found the former (strewn around the proverbial nearby wooded area) before the latter, but by daybreak Sunday he’d been collared; they tracked him like an animal to a state park up near the Mackinac Bridge. He was found, hypothermic and frostbitten, huddled under a fallen tree with no coat or shoes. He confessed from his hospital bed, and will likely be cleared for travel in a day or two.

Anyway, reading all this exciting news in the paper Sunday kept me from Mitch Albom’s column longer than usual. But there it was, and so I read:

There is a dog show in Detroit this weekend, and 60,000 people are expected to attend, and 3,000 dogs, and 163 breeds, and we won’t even count the plastic bags and scoopers.

Hey, I went to that dog show. I read on:

And at some point during the show, as thousands of spectators cheer, the prized pooches will walk alongside their owners, in lockstep, in gentle canter, paws bouncing as if on marshmallows, coats groomed, heads erect, spines straight.

One sentence, and I can pick a nit in nearly every phrase. First nit: Most dog shows are not Westminster, in Madison Square Garden, but in vast convention-center spaces like Cobo, in Detroit. There are many rings scattered throughout this space. There have to be, as at last count the AKC recognizes something like 80 million distinct breeds. Anyway, the breed judgings tend to be attended by one of two groups — fierce partisans for the Bouvier des Flandres and exhausted spectators looking to take a load off their feet before checking out the Dog House Bakery, purveyor of gourmet treats for your best friend. A couple dozen, not thousands, and the standard expression of enthusiasm is applause, not cheering.

I attended one group class — the toys. Maybe 100, 150 people were strung along the outside of the ring paying attention to the events within. Most didn’t cheer. I guess, if you add up all the classes in all the rings, at least a couple thousand people actually cheered, but most watched with an expression suited to one of the two groups mentioned above. P.S. The Pomeranian won.

Next nit: Check the dictionary definition of “lockstep.” It means to march as close as possible to the person in front. Open up the definition a little, and I’d accept using it to mean walking in stride with someone next to you. In any event, it doesn’t describe how dogs walk next to handlers, because one party has two feet and the other has four.

“In gentle canter”? Even a nodding familiarity with four-legged locomotion would indicate dogs show at a trot. And what’s a “gentle” canter, anyway?

“Paws bouncing as if on marshmallows.” This, my friends, is the kind of wordsmithery that lands you at the top of the bestseller list for months at a time.

“Coats groomed” — yes, as opposed to those come-as-you-are dog shows.

“Heads erect, spines straight” — Note, please: A dog has four legs. This means its spine is on a plane perpendicular to ours, and so straightness has no relevance here. Dogs can’t exactly slump the way we do, although sometimes, when they’re tired, they’ll lower their heads, so he gets points for noting that a dog in the show ring keeps its head erect.

Because I am a masochist, I skimmed the rest of the column. It was about Mitch training his dog. Piercing insight: It turns out that when you hire a trainer, he doesn’t actually train the dog, he trains you to train the dog. What’s up with that!

OK, enough. I — we — enjoyed the dog show. Kate brought a friend, and the two oohed and ahhed over the teensy-weensy ones; apparently the toy dog you carry in a purse is all the rage with little girls. When I was her age, I read all the Albert Payson Terhune books and dreamed of owning a collie like Lad or Lady, so I don’t count this as progress.

I paid close attention the the Parson Russell Terriers, of course. Contrary to what you might have heard, a Parson Russell is not a Jack Russell, but the compromise in a bitter dispute over whether the JRT is the result of careful husbandry or just a naughty little mutt. When my own naughty little mutt was a pup, I quickly developed an eye for the breed, and it’s funny: They all looked different, and yet, they were unmistakably Jack Russells. Long coat, short coat, long legs, short legs — they all just had the look. (I think it was in the straightness of the spine.) This was before they were recognized by the AKC, and nowadays the Parson Russell has a standard and is much easier for civilians to pick out in a crowd.

I petted two. Both were adorable. One was terribly shy, not a good thing in a terrier. Not surprisingly, she was a washout in the show ring. Still, adorable.

I left thinking our next dog will not be something you carry in a purse, but not a collie, either. (Ack, the grooming. How did these dogs get bred in a country with so many burrs?) Probably another terrierist. Alan’s thinking a border terrier — he likes that little otter face. I’d be happy with a shelter critter. But not for a while. The one we have still has some life in him, the naughty little mutt.

Bloggage:

In Fort Wayne my New Yorker used to arrive on Thursday (it’s published Monday), but here it comes on Saturday, so I was late reading Seymour Hersh’s “The Redirection.” Not recommended for the easily upset. Hersh says we’re preparing for the war to spread into Cambodia Iran, among many other things:

One contradictory aspect of the new strategy is that, in Iraq, most of the insurgent violence directed at the American military has come from Sunni forces, and not from Shiites. But, from the Administration’s perspective, the most profound—and unintended—strategic consequence of the Iraq war is the empowerment of Iran. …After the revolution of 1979 brought a religious government to power, the United States broke with Iran and cultivated closer relations with the leaders of Sunni Arab states such as Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia. That calculation became more complex after the September 11th attacks, especially with regard to the Saudis. Al Qaeda is Sunni, and many of its operatives came from extremist religious circles inside Saudi Arabia. Before the invasion of Iraq, in 2003, Administration officials, influenced by neoconservative ideologues, assumed that a Shiite government there could provide a pro-American balance to Sunni extremists, since Iraq’s Shiite majority had been oppressed under Saddam Hussein. They ignored warnings from the intelligence community about the ties between Iraqi Shiite leaders and Iran, where some had lived in exile for years. Now, to the distress of the White House, Iran has forged a close relationship with the Shiite-dominated government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki.

Oh, joy.

Note: The headline for today’s post is not a Honeymooners reference. Have a nice day.

We have two items on the agenda today:

1) Set the speed-dial on stun, start firing at 10 a.m. and, insha’Allah, score tickets to the Iggy Pop concert at the Fox Theatre in April, and;

2) Drive to Fort Wayne. Kate’s been clamoring for a trip to see her old friends there, and we finally got it together. I intend to collect on payment for that big editing job I did back around Christmas time, the payment being: Dinner. I told my host to choose a venue suitable to the quality of the work, which means we might end up anywhere from Joseph Decuis to Coney Island. It’ll be a short stay — 36 hours at the most — so I doubt I’ll be picking up the tab for all comers at Henry’s, but one of these days, Alice…

(Acknowledgement of The Truth Department: Detroit is a coney-crazed town, and its Mosque No. 1, so to speak, is a greasy little place downtown called Lafayette Coney Island. It’s open all the time, a great stew of humanity, with swarthy countermen and that ineffable Billy Goat vibe. At bar-closing time, it resembles the set of a Fellini movie. But I ate there exactly once, and feared for my health. I still have yet to find a coney here that’s the equal, taste-wise, of Fort Wayne’s Famous. So I wouldn’t mind eating there at all. They serve Cokes in the little 6.5-ounce bottles. Mmm.)

So let’s kick off the bloggage with a Fort Wayne theme. Hoosiers of the 3rd congressional district, this is your congressman, a man who claims 65 percent of all drug-related ER admissions are for marijuana use.

Man, I’m tired of people tailgating me, too. But I stop short of gunfire.

Do we want to wait until they develop weapons of mass destruction? Or do we want to nip this chimp thing in the bud? Your call, America. Bonus amusement: The landmark observation also supports the long-debated proposition that females — the main makers and users of spears among the Senegalese chimps — tend to be the innovators and creative problem solvers in primate culture.

I’m not laughing at Britney anymore. If only she could sing, you could call this breakdown the Full Judy Garland. (Here we see the female chimp using a crudely fashioned spear.)

Ever wonder just how the camera adds 10 pounds? Slate’s bird-dogging that one:

Bad lighting, mostly. The flat, even illumination on the red carpet makes it hard for the camera to capture dimension, unlike in a photo shoot with flattering soft lights. Cast from an angle, light creates shadows that sculpt the face and body by hiding unwanted flesh. Softer lights can hide wrinkles and smooth out the skin for women, while harsher lights on male faces exaggerate lines for a chiseled look. Without the aid of shadows, however, light exposes the imperfections of the face and body and makes the resulting image bigger and flatter. That’s why everyone avoids white dresses—which cast fewer shadows under even lighting—except the thinnest actresses, like Nicole Kidman.

Off to bird-dog Iggy! Back after the weekend.

Louis Farrakhan is coming back to Detroit, the birthplace of the Nation of Islam. His face is emblazoned on billboards at several major freeway interchanges, advertising his talk this weekend at Ford Field. Interesting to note how the dailies are playing it; Farrakhan’s pretty sick now (cancer) and there’s speculation this will be his last major speech. Anyway, he and the Nation of Islam have lost their mojo, and his ability to shock anyone probably peaked in the ’90s. Whatever appeal Islam had for African Americans ebbed in the wake of 9/11 and the Iraq war, but Farrakhan’s still swingin’, so he’s news.

The Freep played its advance with Farrakhan as toothless-lion-in-winter, emphasizing the Nation’s Detroit roots and its appeal to non-Muslim blacks. Farrakhan and his group “have been accused of anti-Semitism, a charge the Nation denies.” Hmm. Because, you know, just because you call Judaism a “gutter religion” doesn’t make you an anti-Semite. I once heard Farrakhan claim he couldn’t be anti-Semitic because he loved the Semitic peoples of the Middle East — you know, the Arab ones, the same ones who happily sold native Africans into slavery for centuries, and the ones practicing genocide in Darfur.

The News at least bothered to ring up the Anti-Defamation League for a comment. Both stories emphasized the good the Nation has done in the black community, and good is truly the word for it, when you can inspire people to stop taking drugs and take care of one another. Still, it’s hard to see the difference between the Nation and the Promise Keepers, offering salvation with one hand and a whole list of people to hate (Jews, gays, crackers) with the other.

Man, I had one of those epic sleeps last night — 9 hours, more or less, and after two cups of coffee I still can’t wake up. Had vivid dreams that I can’t remember, except that one featured my old colleague Mike Dawson, Emma’s ex-husband. He wandered through one of my dreamscapes, like Abraham Lincoln and that beaver. I will remember Mike forever for his killer impersonation of Deion Sanders speaking at the Fort Wayne Prayer Breakfast a few years back. Sanders, in the usual manner, laid out the depths of his degradation before his religious redemption: “You don’t know what it’s like to have one…two…three women…in the bed…and still not be…SATISFIED.” I’m sure that was a jolt to the spine of all the Lutherans in the audience.

OK, since this entry is clearly going nowhere, let’s go to bloggage:

Once women watched Diane Keaton in a movie and said, “I want her wardrobe.” Now they say, “I want her kitchen.” Inevitable, probably.

When my friend Debi moved from Michigan City, Indiana up the coastline to Milwaukee, I attended her going-away party. There were lots of jokes and jests that suggested she was leaving Paris for Mayberry — that her old hometown was an oasis of culture and that the Dairy State was full of obese cheese-eaters, hats with earflaps and alcoholism. I remember thinking this was not only stupid but wrong, but every so often I read a story under a Wisconsin dateline that makes me think those Hoosiers were on to something.

Off for more coffee. Back later, maybe.

I think one of the reasons I like Detroit is, it’s kind of like Anna Nicole Smith — an ongoing trainwreck that hit bottom long ago, but still wallows down there, enjoying the scenery. (No, that wasn’t a mixed metaphor. More of a pureed one.) Every day it reveals a new facet of its charm. For instance, snow removal. Or lack thereof.

The city provides — hold onto your hats — no residential snow removal. Seriously. Main arteries and business districts are plowed, but residential streets fend for themselves. Neighborhoods that still count a few members of the middle class in their number form associations and pay for plowing privately. Everyone else buys boots. In apocalyptic winters, whole streets can become impassible. My friend Ron did some stories about this a few years ago, and said the first thing that happens is, everyone passes the word when the mail will be arriving, and residents gather at the closest navigable corner. The mailman arrives, distributes the mail and leaves. If you miss it, come back tomorrow.

I seem to recall a fun fact from those stories: The city of Detroit owns approximately the same number of plowing vehicles as the city of Dallas. But I’m not sure about that.

Anyway, Kate and I headed out yesterday morning, not particularly early, to run some errands that took us into the city. My backstreet route to the freeway runs through three municipalities, the last of them Detroit. You know where the city limits are when the car’s back end starts to cut loose. Whee! City livin’!

Then we headed down to the Wayne State campus area, which, theoretically, should have been plowed, except it mostly wasn’t. We found a parking lot, locked up, and walked a block. Interesting to note how businesses were handling the crisis — a restaurant’s front walk was clear and dry, but the Islamic student center next door hadn’t been touched. Islam — a religion of peace, and also of warm climates. (Wait, what about the snow-scoured mountain passes of Afghanistan? They don’t plow up there.)

Oh, well. We got our work done and came home in substantially improved conditions. Enough snark. All the workers doing snow removal were wearing insulated Carhartt clothing, friend of cold-weather workers everywhere. (Outside magazine did a story a few years ago called “These Pants Saved My Life,” in which grateful Carhartt owners get together somewhere in Alaska to celebrate the life-saving insulating qualities of their clothing.) Many people don’t know Carhartt is a local company. The owner is a big jazz fan, and stepped in to save the Detroit Jazz Festival, via sponsorship by her privately owned record label. The world doesn’t need more rich people, but it could use more rich people with an interest in making the world richer, too. I love the way money works, how a sewer worker’s investment in coveralls eventually transmogrifies into music in Hart Plaza on Labor Day weekend.

The Free Press did an interesting story the other day on a talented funeral-home restoration artist, renowned for his ability to make the dead look like they’re just napping. It was by one of their best writers, and full of great detail, like how you patch a bullet wound to the forehead and what the artist likes to have on TV while he’s working (“Judge Judy,” “The Young and the Restless”). And then there was this, a reference to the blood-soaked ’80s:

In 1988, reputed drug kingpin Richard (Maserati Rick) Carter was shot and killed in his Detroit hospital bed. Richardson handled the body.

In a worn blue photo album kept at Peace Chapel’s west-side parlor, Richardson’s work is on display, if you can bear it. The book is a macabre and riveting collection of before-and-after shots, each with a story.

Maserati Rick’s image is in there, lying face up with his eyes closed on a gurney in an embalming room. The Polaroids suggest a miracle: One photo clearly shows a bullet hole in Carter’s forehead, just above the left eyebrow. The second shows the wound magically erased.

Maserati Rick was, further Googling revealed, the east-side king of crack, and was, indeed, shot to death in his hospital bed, where he was recovering from an earlier, unsuccessful assassination attempt. See, this is why I can’t watch those stupid CSI shows, Caruso or no Caruso. All the cases seem so needlessly complicated, when most crime is exquisitely simple. Miss him the first time, finish the job.

Did this entry begin with a theme? It seems to have lost the plot, so to speak.

OK, a quick bloggage recommendation: One of my great regrets is I never did anything this crazy/stupid when I was still young and unencumbered by responsibility: Cycling the Silk Road, in Slate. Link goes to first entry, subsequent ones linked at the bottom. (There are four.)

And now, I’m off to use my Valentine’s Day present. It’s hand-held and it vibrates. No, it’s not what you think. It’s better. At least, if it’s your job to clean the bathroom.

Needless to say, the hole in the sky closed up nicely, and we got…choose your verb. Slammed, dumped on, buried, pounded, whatever. I’d say maybe six inches on the ground, which was getting off easy in terms of this storm. The Fort got close to a foot, Indy a little more.

Needless to say, school’s out. All they’re missing is the all-day (no, I’m not kidding) Valentine’s Day party, so no biggie.

But I have to hit the road in a bit, so I’ll leave you with a few conversation-starters:

Why No One Reads Newspapers, chapter I-can’t-remember-what: Because, with a straight face, we repeat advice like this:

AAA Michigan suggests you stay bundled up while driving and keep these items in your ride during the winter months. The items include ice scraper and brush, coffee can furnace, tools and flashlight, sand or cat litter, food and blankets, jumper cables, first aid kit, cell phone, flares or reflective triangle and a shovel.

Note “coffee can furnace” hiding in the middle of that list, like we’re not going to notice it. Some people can make a case for packing some of that crap, although the only people I know who carry sand are pickup drivers who use bags of it to weigh down the rear wheels. If you need to travel in the remote country, sure, carry a collapsible shovel. If you’re crossing the Rockies via back roads, some Balance bars might come in handy. But for most of us, a cell phone and a snow scraper do just fine. I’ve pushed and/or rocked myself out of deep, icy ruts without kitty litter approximately a million times. And the last time anyone jump-started my car, we had a tiff over whether it’s universal knowledge that the red cable always goes to the positive pole on the battery. (I say yes; he claimed ignorance; a fuse paid the price.)

But the coffee can furnace — that’s a new one. As usual, it raises more questions than it answers. What do you burn in it? (Old parking tickets.) Where do you vent it? (The sunroof.) What do you use it for? (Cooking squirrels you catch in snares fashioned from useless jumper cables.) Now that’s some useful information.

And for those of you who enjoyed the “CSI:Miami” ham-fest the other day, you’ll love this just as much. Note, please, the critical role played by the Sunglasses of Justice. I think they actually trigger the critical event in the clip. He takes them off, the device is armed; he puts them back on, kaboom. Those are some crazy sunglasses:

As some of you know, my night editing gig involves surfing the English-language media from pole to pole, looking for stories of interest to our corporate clients. Regrettably, the company hasn’t yet lassoed the Playboy Enterprises account. And so the time I spent reading the Anna Nicole Smith obituaries was stolen time. But it was unavoidable. She was on front pages all over the world.

At one point the New York Times had a story up that I’m kicking myself for not nabbing in some form, as I should have known it wouldn’t last. Sure enough, an hour later the story had a second byline on it and had been stripped of its mocking tone, a subtext that was positively bread-and-circuses. Smith, a bimbo with the figure and IQ of a Holstein, was presented as a figure of wry amusement whose early death was somehow just part of her long-running comedy act: Thank you and good night! There was one line in particular that smacked me between the eyes: “When she was a teenager, she married Billy Smith, a 16-year-old fry cook whose specialty was chicken.” The rewrite put the period after “fry cook.”

But I had to wait until this morning to find the obit I was looking for, predictably in the Washington Post. After noting that Smith was a type of woman whose name we don’t even use much anymore — courtesan — Philip Kennicott writes:

Our continuum of sexual alliances runs from the happy marriage of loving equals, on one end, to prostitution — the pure exchange of sex for money — on the other. The trophy bride, the marriage of youth and beauty to age and power, is the closest we have to the category of the courtesan — but it involves the collective pretense that it isn’t only about money. To see the old category of courtesanship in operation today, you have to travel to poor places around the globe, where sex, love and sometimes marriages are negotiated between wealthy westerners and local girls without either party acknowledging the idea that the exchange is commercial.

The courtesan was rich but not on her own terms, an object of scorn but not completely disreputable, a living reminder of an economy of sexual exchange that we like to pretend doesn’t exist. When Anna Nicole Smith, a voluptuous 26-year-old Playboy Playmate, married an octogenarian oil-rich billionaire, she crossed a line, assuming too high a place in our supposedly mobile society. After her elderly husband died a little over a year later, she stood to inherit $474 million (still in legal dispute), and her name became shorthand for marital opportunism. Her husband went down in the books as the most ridiculous of old goats — but he was dead and beyond the reach of our scorn. Anna had her second and third acts, on television and shilling for diet pills, but none of these chapters ever did much for her dignity.

This is the one you need to read, top to bottom.

But if you’re looking for something snarkier, you could hardly find a better roundup than Defamer’s, which chose to remember the late starlet-or-whatever by rooting through a year’s worth of Anna Nicole posts. My favorite: Anna Nicole Smith’s Wedding-at-Sea Downgraded to Floating Commitment Ceremony. I mean, just cuz it’s funny.

I’m going to go put in my contacts, get out my super-duper sunglasses and go take my lake walk before I chicken out or spring arrives. Photos, maybe, later.