A while back I believe I men­tioned that scrap­ping is so vir­u­lent here that busi­nesses have taken to secur­ing their rooflines — the fron­tier that must be crossed to get at the valu­able rooftop air con­di­tion­ers, with their coils of tasty, yummy cop­per — with razor wire. That was so 2006. Note the adap­ta­tion of this gas station/mini mart on the Grosse Pointe border:

A taste­ful cage. Adap­ta­tion! There’s hope for us yet.

In honor of Hell Week, more three-dot linkaliciousness:

First came the earth­quakes, great heav­ings of the earth the made a mock­ery of all man’s works. San­dra Bul­lock won the Oscar for wear­ing a blonde wig and sport­ing the worst south­ern accent since com­mu­nity the­ater. But mankind didn’t know it was doomed, that this truly was the first rum­blings of that rough beast, its hour come round at last, until sunspots drove all the Toy­otas crazy.

Roy Edroso is leav­ing New York for love. Best of luck, Roy. That must be some love to trade Brook­lyn for Bryan (Texas). He’ll still be blog­ging, at least until he gets shot in a bar for being a filthy hippie.

The New York Times busi­ness sec­tion takes a look at the sticky topic of fem­i­nine hygiene adver­tis­ing. Hmm. Well. OK:

Mer­rie Har­ris, global busi­ness direc­tor at JWT, said that after being informed that it could not use the word vagina in adver­tis­ing by three broad­cast net­works, it shot the ad cited above with the actress instead say­ing “down there,” which was rejected by two of the three net­works. (Both Ms. Har­ris and rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the brand declined to spec­ify the networks.)

“It’s very funny because the whole spot is about cen­sor­ship,” Ms. Har­ris said. “The whole cat­e­gory has been very euphemistic, or pater­nal­is­tic even, and we’re say­ing, enough with the euphemisms, and get over it. Tam­pon is not a dirty word, and nei­ther is vagina.”

I’d like to see the script that uses that word before I pass judg­ment. Vagina may not be a dirty word, but it’s cer­tainly an overused one. I’ve car­ried one around every day of my life, but it only took about 18 months from the day you started hear­ing it on broad­cast tele­vi­sion to get thor­oughly sick of it, espe­cially at an all-star event like a Joan Rivers roast. I’m with the screen­writer of “The Oppo­site of Sex” on that one:

Lucia: Vagina, vagina, vagina. Does that word do any­thing for you?
Bill Tru­itt: I don’t think it does much for any­one, gay or straight.

The ad exec­u­tive com­plains you can’t say “vagina” in a tam­pon ad, but I’m not sure I want to see it there. “Buy Tam­pax tam­pons! Your vagina will thank you!” (That could work, actually.)

J.C. was clean­ing out his video archive and sent this. Always nice to remem­ber the good times.

My friend Michael called mid-week to won­der if I’d be free for some cross-country ski­ing Sun­day. Sure. The tem­per­a­ture rose to 38 that day, and con­tin­ued balmy through yes­ter­day, so we melted down to a walk through Elm­wood Ceme­tery. It’s the old­est in the city. We were on the look­out for the titans — Cole­man Young, Rus­sell Alger, Sonic Smith. We found only Alger, but it was a lovely day and we weren’t really look­ing that hard. We did see the liquor king:

And the beer king:

There’s a group site for firefighters:

I didn’t know fire­men would seek com­mon bur­ial, but I sup­pose these were the men with­out fam­i­lies, or maybe the ones who thought no one could under­stand them like the guys. The emblem was a mys­tery to me, but Michael’s dad was a fire­fighter. He said they’re bugles, which were the “get out of the way” alarm, blown by the crews in the days before sirens. Learn some­thing new every day.

I’ll come back on my bike in the spring. This is a place to spend a morning.

The balmi­ness ended today:

Who wants to go skiing?

OK, then. Speak­ing of ski­ing, I gather there was a hockey game last night, which “we” won, and as a result I am sup­posed to be exul­tant. Reader, I am not. I am weary­ing of the every-other-year we-fest that is the Olympic games. Excuse me: the (ket­tle drums go bum–bum–bum–bum; cue trum­pets DAAAH DAAAH DA DA DA DA DA, etc.) games of the 23rd Olympiad, or what­ever. I want some grumpier color com­men­ta­tors; I am sick of being told how proud I am of “Team USA.” I want some­one to ask, “Why do the snow­board­ers look like they put on all the clothes in the ham­per? Snow­cross? What’s next? Demo­li­tion derby?” This event always seems to go on four days too long. I know it’s com­ing when the voice of Mor­gan Free­man makes me want to throw things.

On the other hand, what else is there to do? It’s Feb­ru­ary. Any­way, Alessan­dra Stan­ley looks at the jin­go­ism angle today:

Even the calm, pro­fes­sional Bob Costas, who is the great excep­tion to the NBC rule of smarmi­ness, felt he had to explain him­self on Sat­ur­day night for enthus­ing about the unex­pected vic­tory — and infec­tious joy — of Mark Tuitert, a 29-year-old Dutch speed skater who sur­prised every­one, includ­ing him­self, by beat­ing the Amer­i­can Shani Davis in the 1,500-meter race.

“And this is to take noth­ing away from the inter­est in the States about Shani Davis and Chad Hedrick,” Mr. Costas said apolo­get­i­cally, “but what this means in the Nether­lands, I mean, this is their national pas­time, this is so huge there.” As Mr. Costas spoke about the new Dutch hero, the screen behind him car­ried a huge por­trait of Mr. Davis, who took the sil­ver medal.

Well, exactly.

Bloomberg fol­lows Rachel Mad­dow on the great under­re­ported story: Repub­li­cans who thun­dered against the stim­u­lus who now say, dude, where’s my stim­u­lus? (Qui­etly.)

And with that, I’m away. Mon­day waits for no one, even with five inches of snow in the forecast.

Late in the com­ments yes­ter­day, some­one asked me to share my parallel-parking secret. I’m happy to. In the inter­est of clar­ity, I will dis­pense with the stuff about safety and sig­nals and all that. You’re a grownup, you know how to drive. This is just about the raw tech­nique, OK?

1) Pull up even with the car ahead. About two feet away, more or less.

2) Look over your right shoul­der and back up straight until the parked car’s rear bumper is even with the roof sup­port behind your back seat. (This was eas­ier in the ‘70s when all cars were boxes, but the pro­por­tions are still there. When the bumper is just ahead of your rear tires, if that’s clearer.) Stop and crank the wheel all the way to the right.

3) Switch your focus to your driver’s side out­side rear-view mir­ror and start back­ing again. As soon as you see the curb­side head­light of the car behind, turn your wheel to the left two full turns.

At this point the tech­nique starts to vary depend­ing on your vehicle’s size, but after the two-turn move, keep turn­ing left while con­tin­u­ing to back up, and with any luck at all, you should find your­self par­al­lel to the curb well within the one-foot range. Eight out of 10 times it works for me the first time. When it doesn’t it’s usu­ally because I’ve rushed it. Rush­ing it is one of my big fail­ings as a human being. Now you know.

The biggest mis­take most peo­ple make is start­ing the turn into the space too soon. (If you have one of those cars with noth­ing behind the back seat, you might want to play around with this for­mula a bit, although it’s worked fine on hatch­backs I’ve owned.) Or they try to go in head-first — big mis­take. Take your time, leave your­self room, and don’t be intim­i­dated if you have to slow traf­fic for 12 sec­onds or so. It’ll wait.

Reverse all the motions if you’re park­ing on the left side of a one-way street, or in the U.K. or Japan.

By the way, I got 100 on the park­ing por­tion of my dri­ving test, way back in the year 16.

Not a ter­ri­ble day yes­ter­day. Had lunch out, in a restau­rant, with a wait­ress, rather than the usual standing-up-at-the-sink model of the work-at-home free­lancer, so that was a plus. The snow was pretty and more or less entirely cleared by the time I set out, another big win, as the kids say. I found a park­ing spot on Wood­ward directly in front of the place, which I backed into with great smooth­ness and elan. And then I came home to dis­cover my health insur­ance is hold­ing me respon­si­ble for a por­tion of the cost of the flu shots I received a few weeks back, to the tune of $.01.

I know how these things hap­pen. Com­put­ers can’t judge. All they see is, if you owe, you get a bill. And I owe a penny.

I’m ignor­ing it, by the way. I plan to wreck my credit score over this. Or else I’ll spend 42 cents to mail them a penny, so they can then reply that they don’t accept cash pay­ments. When ele­phants fight, it is the grass that suffers.

So, a lit­tle blog­gage? Sure, why not:

Jim at Sweet Juniper once observed that one of the cool things about Detroit is, fre­quently there’s nobody around to tell you you can’t do some­thing. A cou­ple of my film­mak­ing friends went out dur­ing the snow­storm and dis­cov­ered how true that is:

My role as a par­ent requires me to dis­ap­prove of this behav­ior, although I am relieved to see Sean put on a hel­met and wrist guards (guf­faw) before snow-surfing behind a car with another car fol­low­ing closely behind, and then run­ning a stop sign. Doesn’t the Detroit ghet-toe have a mar­velously creepy feel­ing at 1 a.m.? And no, I don’t know what that strange cut­away at the 30-second mark is.

While we’re post­ing video, here’s one Hank found, from the fit­tingly named web­site, I Love Local Com­mer­cials. Although I think that lady buck is actu­ally a donkey:

Yes, I saw the newly released 9/11 pho­tos. I don’t know what there is to say about them other than, that sure was a bad day.

It’s been a great week for weather clichés. Here’s one Alan hates: “the white stuff.” Which leads me to won­der: Dur­ing the Dust Bowl years, did mete­o­rol­o­gists call for “the brown stuff?”

OK, I’m flail­ing. Have a good day, all.

I’m mov­ing to Coozledad’s veg­e­tar­ian farm.

The Ice House wasn’t hav­ing a very good day. The sun was out, and the tem­per­a­ture was on its way up to a high of 36 or so, and the roof was melting:

Appar­ently this has been a prob­lem all along. The hipsters-in-charge weren’t too happy about the unco­op­er­a­tive weather. The bus and tarp were along the south­ern expo­sure, try­ing to block the sun from the very nice ici­cles. Oth­er­wise, they were hold­ing up OK:

I can never resist the Tri-X set­ting on the new cam­era for long:

Over­all? Eh. It’s an inter­est­ing achieve­ment, but ulti­mately — ice on a house. Per­haps I lack imagination.

Yeesh, what a week. You should not be sur­prised to hear that cur­rent events have schaden­freude thick in the air in Michi­gan. One of my Twit­ter fol­lows is retweet­ing every Toy­ota joke that comes down the pike. My favorite is the new Toy­ota mar­ket­ing slo­gan: “There’s no stop­ping us now!” They make good cars; they’ll pull through, but stuck accel­er­a­tors are scary things, and han­dling a PR dis­as­ter like this is not for the weak of stom­ach. Ay yi yi, but being No. 1 is sud­denly seem­ing a hol­low victory.

They may think dif­fer­ent in Sil­i­con Val­ley, but man­u­fac­tur­ing is not for the faint of heart. A mil­lion wid­gets that can fail you any num­ber of ways, and now all this soft­ware. Alan was hav­ing a prob­lem with the throt­tle on his Sub­aru a few months ago, and asked the dealer to check it out. The diag­no­sis? Some old code in the com­puter. No won­der the best mechanic I knew in Fort Wayne can’t work on his own car anymore.

I don’t want to bug out early, but I must. Another redonku­lous day ahead, capped by yet another middle-school dance. I haven’t heard any Lady Gaga in a week — this’ll do me good. A lit­tle blog­gage before I go:

A woman who col­lects Play­boy mag­a­zines. Because why not?

Not every­one work­ing at a news­pa­per is mis­er­able. My old col­lege class­mate Mark just spent a month in Afghanistan for the Min­neapo­lis Star-Tribune, and came back with one of those great old expen­sive series news­pa­pers do so well. Part 1 com­mences here.

For you writer fans, a new inter­view with Mar­tin Amis.

Christo­pher Beam looks at that weird sheep ad. EDIT: Bad link fixed. Sorry. And thanks for the heads-up.

And I’m off to the shower.

If luck smiles on my sched­ule today, I hope to make it over to the Detroit Ice House. The man­agers of the project haven’t announced its loca­tion yet, so I won’t, either. But I know. It’s dif­fi­cult to keep an aban­doned house that has been care­fully cov­ered with ice much of a secret. They’ve sur­rounded the place with police tape, so the snow doesn’t get dis­turbed before the offi­cial project pho­tographs are taken. Or so I’m told. It’s close enough for a quick lunchtime hop, and by then the tem­per­a­ture should be high enough that things should be a lit­tle drippy. High pres­sure promises preser­v­a­tive tem­per­a­tures until the big reveal.

There are enough of these guer­rilla art projects going on around here — a pre­vi­ous cadre of hip­sters painted aban­doned houses, from roof to foun­da­tion, includ­ing win­dows, in shades of safety orange and green — that I won­der if we’re on the tip­ping point of becom­ing a play­ground for this sort of thing. I once wrote that only in Detroit could a bar­tender become a real-estate devel­oper, but now it’s even eas­ier. In “The Farmer and the Philoso­pher,” the short film we saw the other night, Toby Bar­low remarks that Detroit is a pretty big can­vas. True dat. But I share Jim Griffioen’s oft-stated con­cern that poverty porn is not, in the end, a good thing, and attach­ing a food drive and other do-gooding to a project, while cer­tainly wor­thy, can’t make it entirely right.

But I’ll reserve judg­ment until I see it. One of the very few con­ser­v­a­tive cri­tiques of art I agree with is the idea that art shouldn’t have to come with a big expla­na­tion text, that when an artist has to post a sign­board telling the viewer what he was after and whose blood the red paint sig­ni­fies, the work has already failed. The Ice House may or may not “ref­er­ence the con­tem­po­rary urban con­di­tions in the city and beyond,” as its blog states, but I do look for­ward to see­ing it.

Which is a very long-winded way of say­ing, “I know what I like,” so there it is.

On Sat­ur­day, I’ll check out the Belle Isle Ice Tree, which makes no claims about urban con­di­tions, other than, “Cold enough for you?”

I need to get out of the house, any­way. I’ve reached the stage of win­ter where feel­ing bad is a loop: I feel bad, so I skip workouts/eat too much/don’t get out­doors enough, which leads to more of the same. I should change my name to Ursa and just hiber­nate the sea­son away, but then, who would dig up stuff to show you every day? Like…

Oh, the things you miss when you don’t watch Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had Jon Stew­art on? And Stew­art said Fox has “taken rea­son­able con­cerns about this pres­i­dent …and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next com­ing of Chair­man Mao”? I’d have paid to see that.

You’ve seen the generic TV report and the generic blog post. Here’s the generic Oscar-nominations story. If every­one is hip to this, why do these things keep get­ting done? (Thanks, Vince.)

I hate it when a story emerges that requires me to sud­denly read a mil­lion words to get up to speed, and sev­eral hun­dred of the words involve morons whin­ing that they should have to pay for some­thing and why can’t they just steal it the way they did in the good ol’ days, but that seems to be what the Amazon/MacMillan fight last week­end seems to be. For those of you who weren’t tuned in, it involves a price war over e-books that broke out in the wake of the iPad announce­ment. Ama­zon is using cheap e-books to sell Kin­dles, and MacMil­lan is try­ing to hold the line on sell­ing its inven­tory at a loss, for obvi­ous rea­sons. Here’s Vir­ginia Postrel at the Atlantic with some­thing of an overview. Here’s John Scalzi on Amazon’s screwup. And here’s Scalzi again, being funny, on the many, many stu­pid things peo­ple are say­ing in the wake of last week’s events, includ­ing (in so many words), “it’s not like writ­ing a book is that hard” and “I won’t pay for any­thing I can steal with impunity.” (I’m think­ing this is maybe the only thing you need to read about this.)

May I add one more thing? All those peo­ple say­ing, “E-books are great, because then the last bar­rier stand­ing between the ded­i­cated ama­teur and his vast read­er­ship will fall to pieces” are invited to sign on as slush pile read­ers any any pub­lisher within dri­ving dis­tance. And please, in keep­ing with your views about the real work of pub­lish­ing, work for no pay. Report at the end of one week. Yes.

Oh, and while we’re at it? I read this thing in Slate about YouTube’s penny-ante rental pro­posal to help little-seen inde­pen­dent films get a lit­tle more-seen, offer­ing feature-length films online for $3.99, and I see that the com­ments have already started:

“The begin­ning of the end,” wrote one user in com­ments; “i thought the pur­pose of youtube was to watch videos for free.” Another wrote that “Youtube is seri­ously [sic] sell­ing out,” appar­ently unaware that YouTube, in fact, already sold out to Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Only in a world where peo­ple think noth­ing of pay­ing $4 for a cup of cof­fee could they balk at the idea of pay­ing a penny less to watch a movie.

OK, now I’m inspired. I’m going to get dressed, floss the spinach out of my teeth — healthy break­fast, step one to improv­ing one’s per­spec­tive on win­ter — and off to the Ice House! You enjoy Thursday.

A great time was had by me at the Mit­ten Movie Project last night (and prob­a­bly at least some oth­ers). The monthly fes­ti­val of short films fea­tured the director’s cut of “The Mes­sage,” our Decem­ber 48-hour chal­lenge short, and please don’t laugh — unlike most director’s cuts, this one really was bet­ter than the orig­i­nal. (Yes, of course it grew. By two minutes.)

The Mit­ten is curated by one of our pro­duc­ers, Con­nie Mangilin, who keeps a relent­lessly upbeat atti­tude about film in Michi­gan, large and small. She fre­quently works on the large pro­duc­tions, in part to finance her par­tic­i­pa­tion in the small ones. Know­ing how much work goes into even a very small one, it’s always amaz­ing to see how many peo­ple even bother to do it, and grat­i­fy­ing that so many do it well.

(Of course, many do it not-well, too, but now that I’ve done this a time or three, I can almost always see what the prob­lem was, and for­give them for it. When you can’t pay peo­ple, you get peo­ple will­ing to work for noth­ing. When they are actors, it’s a coin flip. Ama­teur actors are more likely to have grat­ing upper-Midwest eeac­cents that can reduce even well-written dia­logue to cole slaw. And nearly all of them are young and most are arty hip­ster types, which becomes a prob­lem when you’ve writ­ten a role for, say, a gang­ster. A word to direc­tors: Putting sun­glasses on a guy with a soul patch and a vis­i­ble pierc­ing doesn’t make him look par­tic­u­larly threat­en­ing. He just looks like an arty hip­ster douchebag. By the way, many pro­fes­sional actors have voice prob­lems, too. Brad Pitt is from Nebraska south­ern Mis­souri, but has a per­sis­tent con­tem­po­rary burr in his voice that works in the “Oceans” movies but sounds ludi­crous in many roles, par­tic­u­larly as Achilles.)

Among the high­lights last night: “The Farmer and the Philoso­pher,” a short about Toby Bar­low, author and Detroit ad man, and Mark Cov­ing­ton, the inspir­ing soul behind the Geor­gia Street Com­mu­nity Col­lec­tive, a recla­ma­tion of a bat­tered neigh­bor­hood on the east side. A long-overdue note: Sweet Juniper has fea­tured the GSCC a time or three, and when I men­tioned it here some months back, one of you fab­u­lous NN.C read­ers hit their Pay­pal but­ton and donated $50. I learned of this some­time later, and while I know who­ever did it wasn’t look­ing for credit (at least, I assume so — I don’t know who it was), here, have some: CREDIT.

Another fave was “Dr. Reddy,” a goofy story about a bad doc­tor but an awe­some karaoke singer — in Tel­ugu! Dr. Reddy was played by an actor — sorry, I didn’t get his name — who has actu­ally worked in var­i­ous Telugu-language films; it’s the one spo­ken in south­ern India, and the videos play­ing dur­ing his karaoke per­for­mance fea­tured him­self in a big Bollywood-style song-and-dance num­ber. And the karaoke takes place in a biker bar, so what you end up with is a sort of Pee­wee Herman-goes-to-Hyderabad-via-Sturgis thing. That’s entertainment.

And then there was our film, with extra footage that wouldn’t fit into our 48-hour time limit. One of these days we’ll get it up on Vimeo and you folks can watch it. One of these days.

Until then, there’s a poster:

The exis­tence of this poster just cracks me up. Both my co-writer Ron and I plan to hang it in our houses to impress our eas­ily impressed friends. And if it isn’t a final­ist in the com­pe­ti­tion (we find out any day now) I will stain it with bit­ter tears.

So, then, blog­gage? There must be some:

I was struck by this pic­ture of she-who, pre­sum­ably taken on the set of some Fox News show. She may not have the Fox Lips yet, but she def­i­nitely has the Fox Paren­the­ses, the styling of the hair into punc­tu­a­tion marks fram­ing the face. For some rea­son this is the pre­ferred hair­style of TV news, mostly on blondes, but now on the world’s most famous right-wing brunette. I think we’ve seen the last of the messy updo, boys; if that’s your favorite look, hang on to your pic­tures and be care­ful how often you kiss them. I pre­dict we’ll start see­ing a lot more caramel-colored high­lights in the future, too. Just be advised.

Hmm, Hoosiers: Dan Coats to take on Evan Bayh? We’ll see. Non-Hoosiers: The for­mer Sen. Coats was one of the bird­brains behind the Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Decency Act, an early attempt at reg­u­lat­ing smut on the inter­net, a stag­ger­ingly dimwit­ted piece of leg­is­la­tion that was over­turned by the Supreme Court unan­i­mously. When you can get Jus­tice John Paul Stevens and Jus­tice Antonin Scalia to agree on some­thing, you know you’ve got a hit on your hands.

And that’s it for today, folks. Let’s hope for a bet­ter tomorrow.

Alan and I are hav­ing one of our occa­sional squab­bles (“The Atlantic is a bet­ter ocean! The Pacific is a bet­ter ocean!”) over the lede on this story:

DETROIT — The 911 call came at 6:35 p.m. on Aug. 28 from a car that was speed­ing out of con­trol on High­way 125 near San Diego.

The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: “We’re in a Lexus … we’re going north on 125 and our accel­er­a­tor is stuck … we’re in trou­ble … there’s no brakes … we’re approach­ing the inter­sec­tion … hold on … hold on and pray … pray …”

The call ended with the sound of a crash.

The story is about Toyota’s sudden-acceleration prob­lem, of course. The dri­ver is described as an “off-duty Cal­i­for­nia High­way Patrol offi­cer.” We both agree that when one is in a car with an appar­ently stuck accel­er­a­tor, the first thing to do is shift into neu­tral. How­ever, I main­tain that any­one in a high­way patrol would have advanced train­ing in high-speed dri­ving and would know this in his bones, and if he didn’t do so, there must have been a rea­son — per­haps the car couldn’t be shifted into neu­tral at speed, I dunno. He main­tains I am “over­think­ing” it, and the guy just pan­icked and forgot.

And then I real­ized that this is just about the five-year anniver­sary of our move to Detroit, and we must be natives for sure now, because we are argu­ing about cars.

Every­one in that Lexus died, by the way. This just under­lines why I am bound and deter­mined that Kate learn to drive on a stick shift, and I don’t care if she burns out a clutch doing so; dri­ving a man­ual requires you to pay more atten­tion to the task at hand. And there’s another reminder: When we moved here, Kate was in sec­ond grade. This time next year, she will be months away from get­ting her learner’s license. Of course Michi­gan teens can start dri­ving under super­vi­sion at 14 years, eight months. Utter insan­ity, but that’s how an auto­mo­tive state rolls. I’m sure kids in Ken­tucky and Vir­ginia were expected to start smok­ing at 12, once upon a time, to help the state’s economy.

First of Feb­ru­ary, today. This is always around the time I notice the light is chang­ing, not so much the time the sun shines but the angle — ask a sci­en­tist why, I pre­fer the poets. The same thing hap­pens the first week in August, when, on lower-humidity days (it never quite gets “low” here), the sun seems dis­tinctly autum­nal. As any ground­hog will tell you, there’s a lot more win­ter ahead of us, but today, you can see the high-water mark. And it’s dry.

Both bits of blog­gage are old, but not every­one has time to read the inter­net every day. So here goes:

A Texas politi­cian declines to seek news­pa­per endorse­ment, and the news­pa­per calls this a “major rebuke.” Ha. Endorse­ments are one of those holdovers from not just an ear­lier time, but a way-way ear­lier time, and flat-out refuse to die. The best guessti­mates I’ve seen is that in a hotly con­tentious pres­i­den­tial elec­tion year, all the news­pa­per endorse­ments in the coun­try might have an influ­ence over 10,000 votes, tops, and that’s being gen­er­ous. Locally, who knows, but the fact that can­di­dates work so hard to get them, and make such a fuss when they do or don’t, always struck me as sort of pathetic.

Endorse­ments are based on editorial-board inter­views with can­di­dates, fol­lowed by a dis­cus­sion. The pub­lisher usu­ally wins, and the pub­lisher is usu­ally either a pro-business con­ser­v­a­tive and some­times a generic center-left lib­eral. A windy, bor­ing edi­to­r­ial will be pub­lished, using the royal “we.” (I some­times won­der if that royal we isn’t why edi­to­ri­als are so bor­ing; a pre­vi­ous ed-page edi­tor of in Fort Wayne referred to the board as “the page” or “this page,” and solicited columns from “friends of the page,” which is how they were des­ig­nated: Bob Butthead, Friend of the Page. I once asked why they didn’t ask oth­ers to be Ene­mies of the Page, a far cooler col­umn head if you ask me, but as usu­ally hap­pens when you’re deal­ing with peo­ple who con­sider them­selves not an I but a We, it didn’t go over well.

Any­way, the whole editorial-page struc­ture — Hear Us, Voice of This August Insti­tu­tion — was blown out of the water by the inter­net, but many of them haven’t got­ten the news yet. And so: “Major rebuke.” Now there’s a col­umn I’d read: By Major Rebuke, Enemy of the Page.

And speak­ing of media insti­tu­tions that refuse to change, even while the foun­da­tions are washed out from under them, Char­lie Brooker on how to report news, TV-style. A YouTube link, but funny and worth your time. Wasn’t I just talk­ing about this the other day? If only I’d taken the time to make the video.

Manic Mon­day is already under­way, a day with a per­pet­u­ally stuck accel­er­a­tor. Ciao for me, and off to rounds ‘n’ Russian.

Fac­toid of the day, unsourced, from a news­pa­per account of Detroit’s expe­ri­ence dur­ing the Great Depression:

But poverty had not dimin­ished moral rec­ti­tude: a man who had accepted a char­i­ta­ble dona­tion of a shirt returned the dia­mond cuf­flinks he found in the cuffs.

I’m the kind of sap who would do this. I’m guess­ing the man who donated the shirt would not.

Shortly before the blue moon, I shared a pitcher of Blue Moon with a new acquain­tance, who keeps a foot in pub­lic pol­icy. We dis­cussed the com­ing shit­storm, which in politer com­pany is known as “the finan­cial bind local gov­ern­ments find them­selves in as sharply falling property-tax rev­enues mean cur­tailed ser­vices, increased taxes/fees and pain all around, or all of the above.”

On the way home, I reflected once again that if Barack Obama’s first offi­cial act after chang­ing out of his inauguration-day tuxedo was to erect pikes up and down Wall Street and start dec­o­rat­ing each with a sev­ered head of a for­mer mas­ter of the uni­verse, we’d be talk­ing about repeal­ing the 22nd amend­ment today. (I’d travel to New York just to take a pic­ture of Angelo Mozilo’s.)

One of these days when the tem­per­a­ture rises above freez­ing, I’m going to do a short picture-taking tour of my sur­round­ings. Every so often it strikes me how water­shed moments very rarely hap­pen the way they do in the movies, with fancy cam­era move­ments and a pul­sat­ing score under­neath to cue you to the drama. You still get up every day, brush your teeth, make cof­fee. Peo­ple rarely riot in the streets. It’s bleak out there, but it ain’t “The Road,” not yet. It’s in how one day you’re in the pas­sen­ger seat instead of the driver’s, so you can watch the store­fronts as they flash by, and notice how many are empty, how the For Sale or Lease signs have been there so long they’re now sun-bleached. It’s in how you notice the house down the street, bear­ing the unmis­tak­able look of aban­don­ment, sud­denly sprouts the realty sign of a firm that han­dles only fore­clo­sures, and that’s no good, but! There are painters wok­ing in there! And the dead tree in the front yard is gone! And wow, maybe it did actu­ally sell, but the next sign is, For Rent. And that’s hope­ful, right, because no one has scrapped it yet.

Every­body is see­ing coy­otes, not just the guy who jogs at 2 a.m., and I find myself get­ting all Eugenides, won­der­ing if they’re a metaphor, like the dying elms in “The Vir­gin Sui­cides,” only no, the dying ash trees are the metaphor, right? They’re the auto-industry metaphor; the coy­otes are the subprime-meltdown metaphor.

For­give me. I think I shouldn’t have had that glass of wine on an empty stom­ach. But some­thing is hap­pen­ing here, the bedrock is shift­ing, has shifted, and no one really knows what comes next. All any­one knows is, we were the first state to enter the reces­sion, and will likely be the last to climb out. We’re the new Mis­sis­sippi. May you live in inter­est­ing times, as the Chi­nese say.

Actu­ally, I’m opti­mistic. Who isn’t, in Jan­u­ary? There’s some­thing tied to throw­ing out the tree, I think, that feel­ing of light and space again. As Bossy once said, it’s like get­ting another room in your house. One-word res­o­lu­tion: Fin­ish. Sev­eral things, actu­ally, but that’s what ties them all together. Happy new year to all.

So let’s kick off the blog­gage with some sup­ple­men­tal read­ing, the Wash­Post ins-and-outs list, done this year by not-Hank, but still funny: Ripped abs/Ripped jeans. I’m there.

Every­thing you ever wanted to know — and a lot you didn’t — about War­ren Beatty’s love life. More than 12,000 women, by his biographer’s esti­ma­tion, and “that does not include day­time quick­ies, drive-bys, casual grop­ings, stolen kisses and so on.” Noted.

Finally, the ground beef story that will push you to veg­e­tar­i­an­ism, or else toward my KitchenAid meat grinder. Pity it ran dur­ing the slow­est news day of the year.

THe first manic Mon­day of the new year. Off and running!