Short week ahead, and I’m hosting Thanksgiving, so much to do. Expect outages ahead, or maybe just a lot of food pictures. I can’t believe how fast the weeks whip by. On Sunday, I scan the week ahead and before I know it, it’s Thursday and I’m pulling myself out of the pool, telling the old lifeguard-coach, “See you next week, Tim.” That’s when my weekend starts, mentally, although two days of work remain at that point. But the attitude is different, no longer a climb but a coast. And then it’s Friday, and I head out to meet pals at a venerable local watering hole. The view across the street:

The scenery around here isn’t for everyone, but it grows on you. The Instagram filters help, too.

I was trying to grab the neon, admittedly in hail-Mary fashion, but I like the way it turned out. Just a tetch of Hopper-ness.

The broad-daylight shot:

But Sunday comes along eventually, and only a short week ahead, but Monday will be a bear. So let’s do this thing.

I work with public-radio people fairly regularly, so this story — about the graying of NPR — struck me. It’s a mix of reactions, equally “that’s too bad, because younger people need to be listening” and “it’s their own damn fault.” The latter is mainly due to the fact one of the local public stations is still playing “Car Talk,” years after half the team died. This seems like the public-radio equivalent of classic-rock stations refusing to move on because the Stones still sound so good, right?

This drives me nuts, too:

Some of the other brand-name talent at NPR illustrates the situation: Talk-show host Diane Rehm is 79; senior national correspondent Linda Wertheimer is 72; legal affairs correspondent Nina Totenberg is 71, and “Weekend Edition Saturday” host Scott Simon is a relative youngster at 63.

I enjoy 25-50 percent of the aforementioned hosts. It’s true, though, that when I go to a book-signing or other event that features a public radio-popular personality, I frequently feel like the youngest person there.

Any other bloggage? If you missed this, which someone posted in the comments last week, don’t. It’s good.

As is this companion piece. They’re both about people voting against their own interests, both absolutely worth your time.

Me, I’m off to tackle Monday.

As it looks like we have another developing terrorism story abroad, and I know you’ll want to talk about it, I’ll keep this brief. No blog posted last night because I did The Most Detroit Thing Imaginable, i.e., attended a popup dinner thrown by an up-and-coming chef, in this case a Detroit sushi artist. The theme was a Japanese home-cooked fall meal. If you’re expecting the sushi rolls you buy at the grocery, no dice. There was a squash thing in a dashi stock, fried smelt and tofu with pickled onions, everything vinegar-y and tart. Then there was this:

Salmon in three states of curing — none, one-day, three-day. I’m sorry I didn’t get the picture before the wasabi doodle was smeared. As a pop-up is basically a religious ceremony, eating before one has done the traditional Photograpy of the Food is sort of like chewing your communion host. Trust: It was very good. And I ate the flower, too.

Then there was this:

Noodles with sea urchin and salmon roe, as rich as anything you might be served in Paris or New Orleans. Then a little dish of ice cream then home to an early bed, and– psyche! Of course we rolled into the Motor City Casino. But just for a nightcap, and I was in bed by 11.

Let’s all turn our gaze to Mali, and allow ourselves just this one glimmer of grim amusement, from our commander in chief, just four paragraphs, on his favorite Obama conspiracy theory, with a great walk-off quote.

Have a good weekend, all.

So today I awoke to an astonishing 57 degrees at 5:30 a.m. For November, that’s, well, astonishing. But then a front blew in and I walked to the parking garage in a driving rain. To wit:

I hope this isn’t the turning of my marvelous luck of late. I’m hoping it’s just a wet head.

So much has been going on the Syrian-refugee front, it’s hard to keep up. And it’s best I keep my mouth shut, as Michigan has been snatched up in this, and southeast Michigan in particular. So I’ll leave that to you people.

In the meantime, I leave you with an amusing column about Bobby Jindal, a great correction from the NYT (scroll to the bottom) and yet another suicide bombing. Because that’s the way of the world these days.

Let’s get through the end of the week, and keep your powder, and heads, dry.

Let’s make this a quick one today. I’m tired and need some light lifting. But I don’t want to let another day pass without showing you who stopped by Jeff TMM’s back yard a few days back:

I count eight points on that bad boy, how about you? A trophy on any hunter’s wall. But I’m rooting for him to make it through another season.

The other day I showed up for my Monday boxing class, and was the only one there. No biggie, it just means a private session with the trainer, always a good thing. Traffic was light on the way to work, at a time slot where it’s never light. And even Alan came home early on Monday, reporting that news didn’t happen because the auto plants were closed and everyone was on light duty. Why? Gun season opened over the weekend.

It’s a big deal in Michigan. In West Virginia, it’s a school holiday, or so I’m told.

What is there to report?

Charlie Sheen has HIV, and has spent millions, he says, keeping it quiet over the last four years. I guess it was to preserve his reputation, because it’s so sterling.

Ben Carson is hung out to dry by an advisor, quoted by name, in the New York Times. And what an advisor to choose in the first place. Later, doc.

Paris isn’t over, and now it’s Germany. Ai-yi-yi.

With that, let’s drag ourselves through hump day together.

Monday was the birthday twins’ special day, so Kate came home over the weekend to eat cake with her father. We drove her back on Sunday and ate at a fairly awful Chinese restaurant in Ann Arbor before dropping her at her dorm. But! It was a worthwhile experience, because we sat next to a table of athlete/frat bros, and eavesdropped shamelessly on their conversation, which ended up being about women, of course.

What women are 10s? they discussed. The main point of contention seemed to be whether Victoria’s Secret models were 10s by default, having been admitted to the most exalted realm of female pulchritude, or whether there were gradations of heat within the Victoria’s Secret pantheon.

“They’re, like, the primo examples of humanity,” one protested. Another was pickier. Heidi Klum, well past her VS years, was a permanent 10, a hall-of-fame 10, but the rest of them? They would have to apply one by one.

The Derringers sat with ears cocked like cocker spaniels, listening to this. The best entertainment is our fellow human beings.

Which is why today’s bloggage kicks off with examples of humanity at its most confounding, including a man who paid $718,000 to a series of psychics, because he was lonely:

He knew none of it made sense: He was a successful and well-traveled professional, with close to seven figures in the bank, and plans for much more. And then he gave it all away, more than $718,000, in chunks at a time, to two Manhattan psychics.

They vowed to reunite him with the woman he loved. Even after it was discovered that she was dead. There was the 80-mile bridge made of gold, the reincarnation portal.

“I just got sucked in,” the man, Niall Rice, said in a telephone interview last week from Los Angeles. “That’s what people don’t understand. ‘How can you fall for it?’”

This, on the other hand, is a scary-as-hell story about how life and law enforcement works in the Deep Souf’, and how it led to the death of a little boy in the proverbial hail of gunfire.

And with a shift, we pivot to a topic near and dear to my heart: The meeeeedia. Which, it would seem, is getting tired of being a punching bag. In three pieces:

One:

There absolutely is room for debate about the proportionality of coverage of an incident like this compared to something like the Paris attacks that happened on Friday, but to say that the media don’t cover terrorism attacks outside of Europe is a lie.

They do.

But as anyone working in the news will tell you, if you look at your analytics, people don’t read them very much.

Two:

We live in a world now where no one wants to pay for news. Newspapers are struggling, and foreign bureaus have been shuttering for years. Many of the buzzy new media sites don’t have foreign bureaus or even much original reporting from overseas (with a handful of notable exceptions, and good on them). Publications are increasingly dependent on freelancers abroad, who do their work for low pay, with virtually no institutional resources behind them, often at significant personal risk. To suggest that “no one” is reporting on Beirut, on Garissa, on Baghdad is an affront and an insult to the great many professionals who put their lives in jeopardy to do just that.

We complain that we don’t see the reporting we want. But aside from an outraged Facebook status, many of us in the U.S. don’t actually seem to want the kind of reporting we claim to value — we’re overwhelmingly not paying to subscribe to the outlets that do good, in-depth reporting about places around the world. Aside from when tragedy strikes, we’re not sharing articles on Beirut or a city we’ve never heard of in Kenya nearly as often as many of us are sharing pieces about Paris, or even 10 Halloween Costumes for Feminist Cats.

And three:

Since college students are free to vent what they feel about the media, it’s only fair that the media return the favor.

So allow me, based, not on biases absorbed from my parents along with my Maypo, but on actual experience, teaching college courses, including one at Loyola.

College kids don’t know shit. The average college student couldn’t find his ass with both hands and a map. I once taught a journalism course for the State University of New York’s Maritime College. At the end of the final exam, I prefaced the extra credit questions with, “A journalist should have a rough idea of what is going on in the world.” One question was: “With the collapse of the Soviet Union, one Communist super power remains. What is it?” Some students guessed “Cuba.” Others, “Iraq.” Some didn’t even hazard an attempt.

That should give you enough to chew over for a Tuesday. Me, I’m back at work.

Like a lot of you, I have a love-hate relationship with social media — Instagram, Twitter, but mostly Facebook, which is the 900-pound gorilla of social media. Just when I think, hope, that Facebook has peaked and I can leave this party sooner rather than later, I see the referral traffic from Facebook for the publication I work for has only grown. For many people, Facebook is the main portal to the internet, how they get their news, how they communicate with friends far and near, an ever-changing TV channel tuned to You, starring Your Friends, reflecting Your Excellent Opinions. In my business, you can’t ignore that.

Things I love: Keeping up with all your vacations, meals, children, sunsets, etc. I genuinely enjoy these, because you people live lives far better and more fun than mine.

Things I hate: Seeing how the ever-running Facebook newscast of events like Friday’s go, because people? Y’all suck as editors. When bombs explode, when many people die, when we are shocked by breaking news, there seems to be a way these things unfold.

First, there’s the great Profile Pic Transformation. Once these were grassroots efforts, now they’re one-click deals offered by Facebook. Change your profile picture to the French tricolor. Change your profile pic to the gay-rights rainbow. Change your profile pic green (I think that was for the Arab spring). Or find an image of your own and change it to that. Why? To “support” the French, because apparently without this gesture, they might think the whole world is yawning over a rock club stacked deep with corpses. They might feel, y’know, unsupported.

Then the memes arrive, the quotes and jokes and zingers rendered in the display-size fonts, maybe with photos, suitable for sharing on your Facebook wall. Because my friend circle is lefty-heavy, I see these most often; they come from groups like Occupy Democrats and so forth, but I see them on the other side, too, from Tea Party Patriots, a group with an apparently limitless supply of eagle photos, always combined with their equally limitless supply of flag photos.

Then the inevitable grief-shaming starts. You can’t feel X about Y unless you also feel X about Z. It is accompanied by the bullshit, the clickbait stories that get hastily thrown up and turn out to be utterly wrong, but they’re satisfactory to read in some way: The refugee camp at Calais is burning, the Eiffel Tower has gone dark, etc., none of which happened. I used to make it a point to fact-check “news” stories people post that are total crapola, but stopped when most people either shrugged or otherwise said, “Eh, it’s still a good story.” And that is how Mitch Albom continues to thrive, year after year.

I believe facts matter, that emotions may be part of a story but should never be the whole part; there’s a reason the “how do you feel” question is the ultimate mocking reflection of (especially TV) clueless news gathering. But apparently I’m in a minority here.

But then, always, comes a story like this: A “mystery pianist” showed up at the site of the rock-club massacre to play John Lennon’s “Imagine.” Because isn’t that what the world needs now? To sit and imagine a world that not only will never come to pass, but probably shouldn’t, because what kind of world would it be without countries, religion, greed, hunger, the ideas of heaven and hell? I’ll tell you: Boring. Go get a lobotomy if that’s the world you really want, but I prefer the what’s-around-the-corner craziness of reality. But check out that pianist, or rather, who’s closest to him — photographers with expensive cameras, i.e, professionals. Behind them, the phones-held-high ranks of the hoi polloi, doubtless thinking, I can’t wait to post this on Facebook.

I don’t want to be cruel here. I know people do a lot of these things because they feel they have to do something, and sometimes this is all there is for an average person to do. For much of my career, when terrible news happens, I’ve been called to work. I’ve spent hours in newsrooms while terrible news clips played over and over on the TVs, and all around were editors and reporters, working the phones, tearing up pages, subbing in new photos and headlines. Action is a useful way to deal with the shock of shocking events, and getting a decent quote from some Mideast specialist to throw into a story about to leave the floor feels more useful than hitting a Share button.

But the term “slacktivism” exists for a reason, too. Hey, I support the French, too. (I better; I drink enough of their damn wine.) France, tell me what you need from me and I’ll do it if I can. I bet you need more than my face under the tricolor, but if that’s what you want, OK, sure. On the whole, though, I bet you’d rather I open another bottle of wine. Keep the economy going.

This, exactly.

Disclaimer: If you did the French-flag thing to your Facebook profile picture this weekend, of course I’m not talking about you. You are an angel.

I’d give you some bloggage, but there is so, so much to read at the moment, and many of you have been posting all weekend in the comments of the last post.

Don’t miss Charles Pierce, certainly.

When 9/11 happened, I said that it took some real balls to climb upon a pile of 3,000 corpses to flog your unrelated political opinions, but since then it’s a fairly regular occurrence, as Frank Bruni points out.

Not Paris-related, but something I meant to post last week but neglected to, in my fog of late-week fatigue: A look back at a 1988 Free Press profile of then-unknown Ben Carson. With links to the original piece. Enjoy.

And let’s hope for a less Facebook-worthy week, shall we?

Like many of you (I hope), I’ve been whipsawed by the events at the University of Missouri this week. Every time I feel somewhat heartened by a student body that has managed to look up from its phones and get exercised about something important, they do something to make me think they’re only the left’s version of the tea party, angry and intolerant and unrealistic and unbending.

Lately I’m thinking the latter. There’s the professor shutting down the photographers with a call for “muscle,” the Mao-esque list of demands, all of it. Today the campus virtually shut down because some cowardly dipshit was on Yik Yak calling down thunderbolts of violence. Stop acting like such fucking morons, you morons.

It’s depressing. But every movement has its embarrassments. This is just the left’s turn.

It’s a Wednesday (Thursday as you read this), and despite some storm clouds on my fair brow over Missouri, it’s been a pretty good week. I’m (so far) evading the cold that felled Alan earlier a few days ago. Getting stuff done. Thinking of the future, a rare treat in anyone’s work schedule — mine, anyway. I dare not say I am crushing it, because that would invite bad karma, but things are going well. How often do I say that?

Hardly ever.

A little bit of bloggage, then:

I have felt this way for many years: It’s wrong, and unhealthy for everyone, to pay too much attention to your children and not enough to your marriage — if you are married. See what you think.

Interesting take on Missouri-related issues by Jonathan Chait.

Do the One Million Moms even exist? Neil Steinberg considers their, er, influence.

Outta here. The downslope of the week, already.

The best thing about “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” is that it doesn’t rhyme, which means you can plug any old lyrics in there and sing it loud in the shower: And we went to the drive-through, but they didn’t have Bud, so we took home two cases of Molson’s. If this takes a bit of the gravity out of what’s supposed to be a sad remembrance, well, I apologize. I’ve heard that damn song too many times to be moved by it anymore.

I believe Kayak Woman, who occasionally comments here, was listening to shipping radio traffic that night with her family, and remembers when the Fitz went silent. Maybe she’ll drop by and tell us.

But that’s all you’re getting from me on this anniversary, even if it is a nice round number.

Meanwhile, speaking of sadnesses, I suggest you set aside some time and read this long, but very fine, piece on Airbnb and the company’s simultaneously seductive and maddening DNA. Here’s the lead; it’s hard to stop from here:

The rope swing looked inviting. Photos of it on Airbnb brought my family to the cottage in Texas. Hanging from a tree as casually as baggy jeans, the swing was the essence of leisure, of Southern hospitality, of escape. When my father decided to give it a try on Thanksgiving morning, the trunk it was tied to broke in half and fell on his head, immediately ending most of his brain activity.

I was in bed when my mom found him. Her screams brought me down to the yard where I saw the tree snapped in two and his body on the ground. I knelt down and pulled him up by the shoulders. Blood sprayed my blue sweatshirt and a few crumpled autumn leaves. We were face-to-face, but his head hung limply, his right eye dislodged, his mouth full of blood, his tongue swirling around with each raspy breath.

…“Tell me each time he takes a breath,” the 911 dispatcher said in my ear.

…“It’s only a matter of time until something terrible happens,” The New York Times’s Ron Lieber wrote in a 2012 piece examining Airbnb’s liability issues. My family’s story — a private matter until now — is that terrible something.

Just a quick swing through the links today, because I have a lot to do, work-wise.

How often do you get asked to donate to GoFundMe, Kickstarter and other online money-raisers? I think the etiquette is still not established, and, like Airbnb and its liability issues, we’re figuring it out as we go. This piece reflected a lot of my feelings at the moment.

Something Jolene posted yesterday, but worth a boost: Kentucky, which has benefited more from Obamacare than any other state, just elected a governor who has pledged to wreck it. How’s that going to work?

Finally, because I work in the nonprofit sector now, nonprofit pickup lines.

Later, taters.

Many years ago, during one of the anniversaries of Neil Armstrong’s trip to the moon, the newspaper I worked for invited readers to share their own memories of the historic occasion. We printed them all, even though they could not have been even remotely accurate.

That’s because many of the readers recalled incidents like this: “I was in kindergarten, and we were all taken to another classroom, where a TV was set up, and we watched it together. I still get chills, thinking about Armstrong taking that first historic step.” Couldn’t have happened, because the moon walk happened in July, when kindergarteners are almost entirely not attending school, and at close to 11 p.m. Indiana time (might have been 10 p.m., not sure what the time-zone situation was then), when they definitely wouldn’t have been. I was 11 going on 12, and I missed the first steps because I couldn’t stay awake. (I call my tale “The Lark’s Lament.”)

It was an early lesson in the fallibility of memory. So even though I consider Ben Carson not even remotely presidential timber, OK, I’ll give him a pass on somehow believing that Gen. William Westmoreland or someone close to his rank offered him a full ride to the U.S. Military Academy, as recounted in one of his books:

“That position allowed me the chance to meet four-star general William Westmoreland, who had commanded all American forces in Vietnam before being promoted to Army Chief of Staff at the Pentagon in Washington, D.C.,” he wrote. “I also represented the Junior ROTC at a dinner for Congressional Medal of Honor winners, marched at the front of Detroit’s Memorial Day parade as head of an ROTC contingent, and was offered a full scholarship to West Point.”

As has been pointed out since Politico broke this story on Friday, there are some couldn’t-have-happened problems with this story. Westmoreland’s schedule says he was playing golf in suburban D.C. that day, although he did come to Detroit a few months earlier, and Carson could have been at that event. But the events of 1969 can seem distant indeed. He may well have heard “you’re a promising young man, Ben. Why, you’d probably be a shoo-in at the Point, and you know, everyone who attends gets a scholarship.” And heard it as, “We’re giving you a scholarship to West Point because you’re so special,” which is how it’s presented in the book. I don’t care what anyone says, in our culture “you’re/I’m getting a scholarship” is seen as a reward for achievement or potential, and saying so is drawing attention to it. Just getting into West Point is an accomplishment on a par with cracking an Ivy or other top school, and saying you’ve been admitted, or to any service academy, is enough; no one gets “a scholarship,” in this sense because everyone gets a scholarship.

Maybe you didn’t know that; that’s OK. Maybe he felt the need to say so because some people might not understand this. Hmm, OK, but say so — it only takes a phrase: “Like all West Pointers, I’d be attending on a full scholarship.” It’s even somewhat possible that Carson himself doesn’t understand how West Point works, but if that’s the case, what the hell is he doing running for president? That’s a basic-knowledge fact that someone who aspires to be commander in chief ought to know.

There’s this phrase you might have heard about, IOKIYAR — it’s OK if you’re a Republican. Imagine if a Democrat had said something like this, and imagine whether the defense would be as staunch. My God, John Kerry was mocked by some of these people for merely claiming service in Vietnam. Carson is being treated as a hero for not setting foot in the place.

So. How was your weekend? Mine was fine. Fall has settled into that late-season period where 95 percent of the leaves are down and nearly all the outside chores are done, and all there is to do now is untangle the Christmas lights and maybe squeeze a book or two in before the holiday whirl starts. We had our gutters cleaned by the guys who come around this time of year offering to do so. I didn’t know Alan had hired them until I was standing naked in the bathroom and saw one climb on a ladder past my window. Hey, guys! I have no idea whether he saw me or not.

So, bloggage:

Move on, nothing to see here, says Ben Carson. You understand, right?

So let’s get this week going, then.

When I was a lucky lass of roughly 25 or so, I had a friend from junior high who lived in Paris, and I went to see him for a couple weeks. We got along like we’d been besties since only yesterday, and had a marvelous visit. But bathrooms were a problem.

I don’t think I had an entirely comfortable elimination the whole time I was there. The bathroom in his apartment was tiny, the shower and toilet in the same enclosure — the toilet paper lived under a watertight plastic hood. But that was luxury compared to the repulsive facilities in the little cafes and so forth that we frequented. Some were literal holes in the floor over which you squatted. A crude seat was considered quite fancy.

When I returned home, everything looked gray and ugly and like a tire store, but at least the bathrooms were clean and roomy. So when you talk bathrooms, I always think of that time in Paris. Also, about how most of us use bathrooms.

Bathrooms were the undoing of the Houston equal rights ordinance, we’re told:

(What) was clear was that a monthslong effort by social conservatives to repeal the ordinance and reframe the issue had paid off, through tactics likely to be used again in similar battles around the country.

Through speeches, yard signs, T-shirts, banners and ads on TV, the radio and the Internet, they zeroed in on the measure’s gender-identity protections and focused the debate on a narrow issue whose very relevance was disputed by political rivals: bathrooms, and access to them.

This reframing cast the issue as a matter of public safety, with claims that the measure would allow men who were dressed as women or who identified as women to enter women’s bathrooms and attack or threaten girls and women inside. The measure’s critics called it the Bathroom Ordinance and simplified their message to five words: “No Men in Women’s Bathrooms.”

Women’s bathrooms aren’t like men’s — there are no urinals. We walk in, choose a stall, close the door and do our business. I suppose it’s possible to be assaulted in one, but a very unlikely place to inflame the lust of anyone, much less a man who’s living as a woman. Locker rooms? I’ll give you that one, but again, my experience with them was that hardly anyone used the showers, except maybe after swimming classes, and then we wore our suits. There’s a taboo against nudity in locker rooms among teenagers, and unless it’s changed, it’s quite strong. I’ve been naked in adult locker rooms about a million times, but in high school I was an expert at changing behind a tiny towel. I bet you were, too.

Why don’t any voters think of these things when they consider stuff like this? Transgender people have a way to go before they’re fully accepted, but when they walk into bathrooms, they’re the ones at risk, not the rest of us.

By all means, though, keep clutching your pearls, guys.

This week has seemed about a million days long, but it’s just about over. I hope you all have a great weekend.