Happy Halloween. It’s pouring rain and we’re supposed to take the boat out of the water today.

At least it’s not cold.

But we were out late last night — Devil’s Night, meh heh heh heh heh — and missed my blogging time. Just a couple things today.

First, some of you have probably heard about Movember, the annual prostate-cancer awareness event in which men spend the month growing mustaches, perhaps in the hope of turning a few worried and/or exasperated glances (“You, Bob? A pornstache? YOU?) into a productive discussion about a disease that kills roughly 30,000 men in the U.S. every year.

Well, this year NN.c has a preferred mustache, and if you are so inclined, you can give to Bernie Mulvey, who is my BFF’s brilliant son, a first-year med student at Wash U. in St. Louis. Here’s his donation page. Here’s his statement:

BY GROWING UNKEMPT, PATCHY FACIAL HAIR, I WILL SYMBOLIZE THE BODILY DISARRAY OF PROSTATE CANCER AND ITS TREATMENT. IN SOLIDARITY WITH CANCER PATIENTS, I WILL ENDURE ANY EMBARRASSMENT AND SOCIAL OR PROFESSIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF APPEARING UNTIDY AND PERHAPS UNHYGIENIC.

I’m sorry it’s in all caps. His mom’s an editor, and he should know better, but perhaps the topic REQUIRES THIS SORT OF EMPHASIS.

Anyway, the money will be pooled with other Wash U. first-year med students, and it’s worth it. Bernie adds, in upper and lower case:

For those of you weary of research philanthropy groups, fear not; the PCF spends over 75% of its money on the research it exists to support! Plus, your donation is tax deductible (and really, would you rather that money go towards the NSA reading your Facebook, or towards keeping people alive and well?).

So that’s today’s cause: Fighting the disease that killed Frank Zappa and Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

Here’s a snap from last night, Alan and Kate gazing upon the blazing carcass of a house in Detroit a bonfire:

Alas, the event at the Lincoln Street Art Park, aka the Ghetto Louvre, was rained out before we could see the dragon:

We saw it before at Maker Faire. Here it is, in action, defending the Detroit Institute of Arts.

With that, I must rush. Happy Halloween, and I hope all your trick-or-treaters are sweet as candy.

Well, this is hilarious: One of the stranger stories of the year here in Detroit appears to be rising to an even stranger climax. It’s the Packard plant, the second-most famous ruin in Detroit and certainly the most problematic. Vacant for more than half a century — it was abandoned the year before I was born, friends — it has become more of a mess and more dangerous every day since. When we moved here, it was still possible for brave souls to wander through it and take pictures, and dozens did.

Recently, it’s become even more of a free-for-all. A couple weeks ago, a website reported on a scrapping crew, using heavy equipment of all things, digging deeper into the plant than ever before, ripping metal from the reinforced concrete walls, piece by piece.

Inside the concrete labyrinth, we spied scrappers – long suspected to be the source of many Packard fires – stacking combustible objects like wooden pallets and sofas along beams supporting the metal-studded ceilings, waiting to be torched.

The plant is collapsing all around, and even drive-by photographers are being carjacked. It’s a nasty place. So. The 100-acre property came up for tax sale last week. Just a couple weeks ago, you could have picked it up for unpaid taxes, about $1 million. But anyone with eyes in their head and a room-temperature IQ could see it would take millions upon millions more just to tear down the buildings and clean up the site, much less redevelop it, in the midst of a miserable neighborhood on the blighted east side of Detroit.

So the auction started last Friday, and in the final hour, got weird:

An online auction for Detroit’s iconic Packard plant ended Friday with a ferocious bidding war and mystery winner from Texas who Wayne County officials say offered more than $6 million for the crumbling lot.

The county treasurer’s office identified the winner as Jill Van Horn of Ennis, Texas, a family practice doctor whose bid of $6,038,000 closed the property’s tax foreclosure auction at about 5:20 p.m. After opening at a mere $21,000 on Oct. 8, the high bid jumped from $601,000 to $5.5 million in the final hour, eventually creeping up to just above $6 million.

It’s as though someone paid $6 million for a case of cancer. Malignant cancer.

The first payment was due today, but given the sum involved, the treasurer said the doctor could have some extra time. First the doctor’s team announced they planned to take this ruin and turn it into a a factory to make manufactured homes. And then, as things tend to do around here, things got even weirder:

Wayne County officials expect to see money Wednesday from a Texas doctor who won a tax-foreclosure auction for the Packard Plant, but acknowledge they’re concerned about a statement released by her staff that likened Detroit’s potential to hydroelectric power.

“It is the process that allows us to transform the lake from a canoeing and fishing kind of place into an energy producing kind of place,” reads a three-page statement from Dr. Jill Van Horn’s staff that was released to the media on Tuesday. “Detroit’s assets, like energy, also have dormant value.”

“Dr. Van Horn’s prophecy was to resurrect Detroit by providing eduction, jobs and vocational training to the city’s residence, simultaneously unplugging the financial arteries of the city,” the statement read.

Prophecies. Anyone who could possibly be bored here simply isn’t paying attention.

You can read the whole statement at the last link. It’s worth it. And a great bonus: A drone-cam tour of the plant, with a Marvin Gaye soundtrack. Even more worth it.

At first I didn’t like it when our neighborhood in Fort Wayne got Halloween tourists on trick-or-treat night, but I got past it. Now I’m pro-candy, pro-Halloween, until it runs out and the porch light goes out. Some people need to mellow out.

Eric Zorn on the weirdness of modern car keys. Want an extra? That’ll cost you $650.

And that’s it for a Wednesday. If I can get over the hump, anything’s possible.

Now that the weather’s turned chilly, Wendy has turned into a lapdog. Nothing makes her happier than being permitted to jump up and make herself comfortable on a lap, outstretched legs or — this is a me-only privilege — stretched way out on my belly, with her nose tucked under my chin. It’s so cute you’d die. And sometimes it’s comical, as when I went out to call Alan for dinner Sunday and found him in his recliner, dog in place, her chin on his chest, both looking peaceful and cozy, except one was snoring and the other just looking sort of content.

I’ll let you figure which was which.

I love it. Spriggy never was up for snuggling. He always had to be unencumbered and ready to spring into action, just in case someone rang the doorbell.

So it was a dog-on-lap sort of weekend — cold and blustery on Saturday, autumn chill Sunday. The crap-reduction project continues apace, although most of the crap reduced this weekend was soap scum. I let the cleaning lady go, and am back to doing it myself for the first time in more than a year. New miracle product: Barkeeper’s Friend. The liquid kind. It KILLS soap scum.

But I got a few bags carried out, did some Swiffin’, put some sweaters into the get-outta-here pile. Rowed 4,200 meters on the erg Sunday. Saw “Cloud Atlas,” which seemed far, far longer (and was). And then Sunday afternoon brought the news of Lou Reed’s death. I knew to wait for Roy Edroso’s take, and of all that I read, it’s the best. Five tight paragraphs — the world’s blatherers could take a lesson.

Bloggage? I has it:

There was a homicide at a bank drive-through on Friday, the victim trapped in his hot-pink BMW with the “ask me about my grandchildren” front license plate. I offer it mainly for the chilling photo of the bullet-starred window and this quote, from a witness who heard the shots and immediately dropped to the ground: “I grew up on the northwest side of town,” he said. “It’s a natural reaction.”

What was the thief after? He didn’t jack the car, or even rob the victim, who was an older man known to rarely carry more than $20 or $30 at at ime.

Speaking of chilling, another homicide from last week, this one near Boston, a 14-year-old alleged to have killed his math teacher with a knife, and get this for a killer detail:

WCVB-TV, an ABC affiliate, citing unidentified sources, reported that the suspect killed Ms. Ritzer with a box cutter and then went to the movies, seeing Woody Allen’s “Blue Jasmine.”

Fort Wayne peeps: Joseph Paul Franklin is set to be executed in a few weeks, whom the world mainly knows as the would-be assassin of Larry Flynt, but you locals remember as doing the same to Vernon Jordan in your fair city. And yeah, he did it:

He now regrets shooting Jordan. Although a federal jury acquitted him of shooting Jordan, Franklin admits he, indeed, shot the civil rights leader. “I’ve got a lot of respect for him now,” he said.

Finally, the holidays are coming, which means Mitch Albom is in fundraising mode, and writing self-promoting columns about it. This latest one is very strange, detailing an event that will honor retiring Tigers manager Jim Leyland and Judge Damon Keith of the federal bench, who are white and black, respectively, and the event is called “Detroit Legacies: In Black and White.” Hmm, OK. And why should you buy a ticket?

Tickets are just $40, and everyone attending will be given an autographed copy of my new novel, “The First Phone Call from Heaven,” a small way for me to thank my city.

And this blog, my friends, offered free and digitally autographed with my very own name, is a small way to thank you. Let’s have a good week.

It takes all kinds, but for me? Small towns have always given me hives. I’m happy to drive through them and stop at the local antique store or whatever, but to live in one? Not for me. I need a decent library, a movie theater where I can see something first-run, a bookstore or two and — very important — a surprise around the corner once in a while.

So it’s always bugged me how small towns always have the benefit of this chin-chucking, patronizing and completely false presumption of innocence. Looks like Michael Schaeffer agrees with me:

Last Sunday, a New York Times reporter visited Maryville, Missouri to report on the existence of a grave threat to the town’s bucolic, Real-America essence: “Ever since The Kansas City Star ran a long article last Sunday raising new questions about the Nodaway County prosecutor’s decision to drop charges against a 17-year-old football player accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl, the simplicity of small-town life here has been complicated by a storm of negative attention.”

Leaving aside the dubious victimology—poor Maryville, battered so cruelly by the dark-hearted Kansas City media and their relentless “negative attention”—the paragraph also represents a great big logical problem for anyone who read the Star story, or even the 20-odd inches of stellar Times copy that followed the clunky lede: The whole point of a story of rape allegations dismissed by a political-prosecutorial complex intimately connected to an accused assaulter’s state-legislative relative is that… Maryville never featured any of that simplicity in the first place!

It’d be easy to beat up on a reporter who was tasked with following a competitor’s story and slipped into cliché. In fact, the reductio ad Rockwell is a common tic of journalistic visits to small towns, especially those put on the map by infamy. And it’s one that really ought to stop. Decades of culture wars have left us with a set of social rules where it is largely OK for rural types to slander their citified co-citizens (cf. Sarah Palin, small-town mayor and “Real America” stalwart) but where urbanites can’t dis the country folks without being deemed elitist (cf. Barack Obama, Chicagoite and “cling” apologizer).

Oh, yeahhh. Small towns, we are frequently told, are wonderful places to raise children — as though no one in a large city ever successfully launched their offspring into the world. They’re close, loving and supportive — something no urban neighborhood is possibly capable of. Everyone knows your business? That’s love, child, love and concern. Spare me. Srsly.

So, was it necessary to kick off the blog with such rancor? Yes, so I could properly contrast it with this OID story, about as OID as they come, really — a carjacking, a “good Samaritan” in pursuit, a shootout and a second carjacking, all in the neighborhood of one of my bike routes this summer:

A good Samaritan who chased down a carjacking suspect on the city’s east side Thursday morning ended up being seriously wounded in a gunfight with the suspect after the stolen vehicle was ditched into a canal of the Detroit River.

Sharlonda Buckman, a 2013 Michiganian of the Year and chief executive officer of Detroit Parent Network, stopped about 8 a.m. Thursday at a BP gas station on the 10700 block of East Jefferson Avenue to buy some aspirin when she said an armed man forced her from her 2011 Chevrolet Traverse.

…Three men nearby witnessed the carjacking and came to Buckman’s aid, with two giving chase to the suspect. Police say one unnamed man, who was driving a 2009 blue Ford Focus, shot at the suspect with his licensed firearm after the suspect let the SUV sink into a Detroit River embankment near the Edison Boat Club.

I put good Samaritan in quotes because it’s pretty obvious this situation, bad as it was, only worsened when the guys in the Focus came to her aid. And after the good guy and the bad guy exchanged gunfire? The bad guy stole the good guy’s car, too.

The Freep’s story had the better headline: Detroit police: Man carjacks woman, sinks SUV, shoots witness

Granted: Not an often small-town occurrence. But it makes the big-city papers more interesting.

Well, here we are at the end of the week. It’s looking up, now that I’ve met a new eye doctor who is going to carve that cataract out of my eye and — he says — improve my vision significantly. What joy. I tell you, if you’d told me on New Year’s Day that my 2013 would contain a chilly spring, a lovely summer and two eye surgeries, I’m not sure what I’d have said. But I guess I’ll get through it. Not much of 2013 left.

Just two bits of bloggage left, then:

Ezra Klein on Obamacare chutzpah.

And Coozledad posted this in yesterday’s comments, but it bears repeating, as a North Carolina party hack explains just what the voter ID law there is all about.

I can’t keep up with all these stupid aggregators lately. BuzzFeed, HuffPost (yes, not entirely an aggregator) and the most irritating of all, Upworthy. I couldn’t quite figure Upworthy for a while — it’s hard to give anything focused attention in the age of Nobody Reads Anything — but eventually it bored through my inattention. It’s a prissy little pass-along deal, which its homepage banner makes clear: Things that matter. Pass ’em on. The person who always sends you Elizabeth Warren fanboy/girl stuff probably found a lot of it on Upworthy.

Anyway, Upworthy recently ran a…cute feature about Detroit’s bankruptcy. It’s not journalism, but more of a nothingburger illustrated with funny, funny GIFs. Way up at the top of the page, note the credit: “made possible by the AFL-CIO.” I don’t have anything against the AFL-CIO, but what this post is peddling is the Maddow version of why Detroit went bankrupt, which involves a) an eeeevil Republican governor; b) revenue sharing; and of course, c) the emergency manager, who is known in this world as the “local dictator.”

It’s not a fact-free version, but it is enormously lacking context, as well as a lot of other facts. But this is common; even among people who do read stuff, they are increasingly likely to like only their own media, who feed them this stuff. The right wing has their own version of why Detroit happened, and it boils down to a) Dumbocrats; b) Coleman Young and c) Dumbocrats.

So I’m grateful to Jeff Wattrick at Deadline Detroit, who put up a counterpoint to Upworthy, also with funny funny GIFs, that’s just as lively and fun to read, only is a lot closer to the whole truth.

And isn’t Upworthy. So there’s that.

I hate to link to Steinberg two days in a row, but I liked his sane take on the recent news that Jews were headed for extinction — at least the secular-leaning Jews most of us know:

So recognizing my own bias, why care? It isn’t as if there is an intrinsic need for a small Jewish minority to question mainstream beliefs anymore. We set the example, now exit the stage, to join the Shakers. Other faiths will step up. The Muslims are doing a fine job as the new minority American faith on deck, and they can complain about crosses in the public way as loudly as Jews did. Societies now has gays to test how much it really believe in tolerance of fractional minorities.

And there will always be some Jews. A core of Jewishness, kept alive by the hermetically sealed world of the Ultra-Orthodox and the Hasidim. Their society is designed to endure—that’s where the whole non-change thing comes in. Sure, we smirk at them for the black hats and wigs and 17th century traditions. But they know that if you swap your heavy black coat for a smart Calvin Klein jacket, you’re halfway a Unitarian. As long they exist, there will be a steady stream of secular Jews dribbling away from them, like the tail of a comet.

Mighty level-headed, I’d say.

Very different, but equally worth your time, is this startling obit for Erin R. Wagman:

Erin Wagman, also known as Erin Borgmann, died of acute alcohol poisoning on October 19, 2013 in Rapid City. She was 42 years old. She died alone.

A writer’s first job is to tell the truth. Someone did.

I think the fall is sapping my energy. It was cold, honestly cold, this morning and I’m not sure I’ve entirely recovered. We’ll see about tomorrow.

John Dunivant, the creative force behind Theatre Bizarre, has been quoted calling the once-a-year Halloween party an immersive, participatory art installation, and I think he’s exactly right. Wealthy people attend parties like this — with elaborate decorating, entertainment and the like — all the time, but all it takes is a $70 ticket in the fall, and anyone can become a part of this show, now in its third year at Detroit’s Masonic Temple.

Alan and I attended in 2011, skipped last year and went back Saturday, sort of spur of the moment. We wore the same costumes as last time — those masks were too good not to wear a second time — but the growth in the event was noticeable. They were awarded a $100,000 Knight Foundation arts grant this year, and it looks like it went into the event. Six floors, dozens of acts, ranging from freak-show stuff (suspension artists) to fun-show stuff (burlesque) to your basic local rock bands. And lots of atmosphere, mostly Dunivant’s own artwork, including his wonderful carnival banners, which set the tone:

Theatre Bizarre is staged like a gone-to-seed ’30s carnival, before they became family-friendly. So, fire:

Spanking:

My date, standing against one detail of many in the overall decor:

Click any of those pictures to enlarge. A short video gives you a glimpse of just one room. There were many, many more:

I think my favorite this year was the burlesque. These aren’t pole dancers gyrating through three songs and twerking for tips, but intelligent, amusing, self-aware acts performed by women who owe more to their yoga instructors than their plastic surgeons. For example: One dancer hit the stage covered with pink balloons, wearing a pinhead mask. After a few opening moves, the music changed to “The Stripper,” she extracted a pin from her head, and broke the balloons, one by one, in time with the music.

And Roxi D’Lite was there. She was the main draw on the burlesque stage, and gives a pretty good explanation of TB at that link.

You can find people all over Detroit who mourn the old Theatre Bizarre, when it was an entirely underground, renegade event held in a bombed-out neighborhood by the fairgrounds. One told me how “sad” it was to attend at the Masonic. Well, I guess everyone has their own definition of that word, but based on what we saw this weekend, I’d say success has hardly spoiled them.

Otherwise, it was a fine weekend. Saw “Carrie,” made my first butterflied roast chicken, did laundry — the usual. And now it’s Monday again, another trudge ahead of us. Let’s pick up our burdens joyfully, eh?

I’m thinking just “Saturday morning” today. Hope yours is going well.

The Tour de Troit was pretty cool, and if Saturday’s picture looks muddy and pixelated, well, I apologize. I tried to fix the tiny picture — bug in WordPress for mobile devices, IMO — and it ‘sploded. Oh, well. It’s not like there aren’t 90 zillion other pix out there if you feel like searching #tdt2013 in the usual social networks.

More than 6,000 riders, we were told. You’d think riding in a group that size, it would be difficult to go off course, but somehow we managed. Don’t look at me, I was just following the people in front of me when suddenly there was a SCREEEECH of brakes and a very pissed-off driver what-the-hell’d us as we rolled through an intersection. An intersection without the usual police, corking it. And hey, there weren’t any at that last intersection, either, were they? A bunch of us stopped and consulted with the map, and a bunch more took out their phones and stared at those, and we managed to cobble together a way back to the route. It involved taking a group of three dozen or so down Woodward, a daunting proposition for some people who thought they’d be riding in a tunnel of police protection, but we got everybody back to the group, and now a few out-of-towners will have a better story to tell.

Afterward, there was beer and food and music. I observed a man at the next table learn that you are supposed to take the corn husk off before you eat a tamale. (“That’s nothing,” said Alan. “I’ve seen Hispanic people learn that lesson.”) A chilly morning turned into a glorious afternoon, one of those days when you’re happy to be right here, right now.

Then I took a nap. Because of the beer.

The weekend didn’t go so well elsewhere. I’m reading about the Kenyan mall attack now, one of those events you’re frankly amazed doesn’t happen more often. I am, anyway. Terrorists are fond of bombs, but there’s nothing like a few well-trained, or even adequately trained men with guns to do maximum damage in the right environment. If only all those shoppers had been armed! I’m not saying we wouldn’t get our hair mussed. But I do say no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops.

And if you haven’t seen it yet, you should check out this remarkable NYT photo blog of the massacre, with pictures taken by a staff photographer who was actually in the mall at the time of the shooting.

Speaking of shooting, I also strongly recommend this piece from the WashPost, about the life of shooting-rampage survivor, and of their loved ones. It is, what’s the word? Oh yeah: Searing.

“Thoughts and prayers and it ends there,” said Lori Haas, whose daughter was shot and injured at Virginia Tech. “I can’t do anything anymore with thoughts and prayers.”

“I’m learning that you have to be brutal with these people,” said Patricia Maisch, who wrestled away a magazine clip and disarmed the shooter at a 2011 event in Tucson where Gabrielle Giffords and 18 others were shot. Maisch took out a picture she carried of the six people killed at that event and set it on the table. “Now I show this to people and start getting graphic,” she said. “This is not a pretty death like you see on ‘NCIS’ or ‘Law and Order.’ This is six people murdered on the sidewalk on a beautiful Arizona day.”

“Bloody and scared,” said Bill Badger, who was shot in the back of the head that day.

“Oh, and by the way, loved ones aren’t lost. They are killed,” Haas said.

“Murdered,” said Roxanna Green, whose 9-year-old daughter was murdered at the event in Arizona.

“I just want to shake people,” Badger said. “If this was some disease . . . we’d be in a national emergency.”

“You’d see planes dropping medicine,” Maisch said. “Instead, it’s another day. It’s nothing.”

Also searing, but in a very different way: “Tomato Can Blues,” also from Sunday’s NYT, a story about a mid-Michigan loser MMA fighter and the tangled web he wove along the way to faking his death and holding up a store called, I am not kidding, Guns & Stuff.

It’s an entertaining kind of searing. I kept imagining Bunchy Donovan as the tomato can, and if you get that reference, fine, and if not, I’m not going to explain it.

And so the week begins. May yours be filled with smooth sailing and apple cider.

Tour deTroit. Over 6,000 cyclists. Fun.

The Free Press did its readers a real service over the weekend. Though we might wish they’d cashiered Albom, they actually did something better, publishing a comprehensive, no-stone-unturned, no-urban-legend-unaddressed report on why, precisely, Detroit went bankrupt. It’s a fascinating document, but thousands of words long. If you’re a resident, it’s essential reading. If you’re a municipal finance nerd — a surprising number of them are out there — ditto. If you just appreciate finding answers that aren’t easy, can’t be summarized in a tweet or a few minutes on some cable-news yak show, you might also benefit from it. If there are three essential paragraphs, it’s these:

When all the numbers are crunched, one fact is crystal clear: Yes, a disaster was looming for Detroit. But there were ample opportunities when decisive action by city leaders might have fended off bankruptcy.

If Mayors Jerome Cavanagh and Roman Gribbs had cut the workforce in the 1960s and early 1970s as the population and property values dropped. If Mayor Dennis Archer hadn’t added more than 1,100 employees in the 1990s when the city was flush but still losing population. If Kilpatrick had shown more fiscal discipline and not launched a borrowing spree to cover operating expenses that continued into Mayor Dave Bing’s tenure. Over five decades, there were many ‘if only’ moments.

“Detroit got into a trap of doing a lot of borrowing for cash flow purposes and then trying to figure out how to push costs (out) as much as possible,” said Bettie Buss, a former city budget staffer who spent years analyzing city finances for the nonpartisan Citizens Research Council of Michigan. “That was the whole culture — how do we get what we want and not pay for it until tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow?”

Compare it, if you read, to these two smug pinheads — one Manhattan Institute, one Wall Street Journal editorial board — discussing former mayor Coleman Young (who singlehandedly CRUSHED DETROIT) somewhere in the WSJ video studio, where evidently the standards for on-camera performance fall well short of, say, Fox News.

Finally, in one of the surest demonstrations of the value of most internet comment sections (not this one!), the very first one that appeared on this one, after I waded through thousands of words of exhaustively researched reporting? “Unions = Corruption = Democrats = Detroit. Stop O-bomb-a!”

Zing.

So. How was your weekend? Mine was pretty good. We had two 17-year-old houseguests, the son of one of my Fort Wayne friends and one of his friends. They came to town to play in a tournament of Magic, the Gathering, which is a card game so nerdy one of the boys said he’s heard tournament organizers ask players to please consider their personal hygiene before sitting down at the table. (I sliced a pungent onion for the crock pot Sunday morning, Kate made a face and he said he’d been smelling so much B.O. recently he didn’t even notice.) It was great to have teenage boys around, if for no other reason than they always clean their plates. Always. And these two made their beds, too.

Took a 20-mile bike ride. Watched “Scanners” with the boys. Made pulled pork (the onion). It was a good one.

So, bloggage?

I liked Joyce Maynard’s take on J.D. Salinger, enough that if Prospero feels like going into a towering snit about her not being fit to wipe his boots or whatever, he — or anyone else who raises this point — is welcome to kiss my nether regions. A 53-year-old who woos an 18-year-old “woman” is a creep, pure and simple.

The Ralph Lauren spring 2014 collection, via T-Lo. Blackwhiteblackwhiteblackwhite then WHOA, COLOR.

I hope a grand week awaits us all.