Pix ‘n’ linx goes into its second day with? More cars, with a little for you leg men:

This one’s called “I’ll take one in red,” by Thomas Hawk, used under a Creative Commons license.

Busy-busy day today, so let’s get right to the linkage:

As someone whose lizard-brain fears are heights and falling, I can say this is a death I wouldn’t wish on anyone. I wonder why he wasn’t harnessed.

Via LGM, a nomination for Worst Column of the Month (and setting a high bar for the rest of the year): Tim Tebow for President! Seriously:

Obama, and so too the Republican candidates for president, can learn a lot from what is going on in the Mile High City. Our economy, and this country, are struggling with huge deficits of confidence and faith. We need a leader who can bring us together, exude confidence in us as a team, and lead us to where we need to go in the 21st century. A leader who is willing to admit mistakes and approach politics not by pointing fingers or scoring points but by helping us all be better people.

Har.

The second part of the Bridge package on Michigan’s higher-ed costs is on the student-loan anchor. All here. All worth reading.

My day tomorrow has to be timed almost to the five-minute window, so that I can make it from a can’t-miss meeting in Lansing to Detroit in time for Car Prom. So after depriving us of a white Christmas and giving us 50-degree days in January, when does winter finally arrive in the Midwest? Guess.

Happy Thursday, all. The weekend is in sight.

So there I was at Staples, replenishing the manila-envelope and Sharpie supplies, when I passed an end-cap display for some sort of…camera? No, a camera system. For security? It’s running a demo loop, let’s watch: An attractive middle-aged woman climbs onto her elliptical trainer and starts working out, smiling down at the monitor, where she sees? Her teenage son, doing homework somewhere else in the house.

I was speechless. It didn’t take long, did it, for us to accept surveillance cameras not just in our public spaces, not just on light standards staring down on red-light runners, in virtually every corner of the world where they can be justified in the name of safety, but in our homes? It starts with baby monitors, I guess. Kate’s was probably the last generation to be surveilled by audio alone; it gentled my rattled new-mother nerves to know she wasn’t upstairs being eaten by a tiger.

(Later, I tried to chase down a story I heard through a remove or two, about an interoffice romance that had gone bad. She suspected he was up to something with another woman, so she hid a baby monitor in a little-used file drawer in his office, and put the receiver in her own desk. If it hadn’t been for a sudden burst of static one day, it might have gone on for some time.)

Then it was governors on cars; you could install aftermarket accessories that would reveal exactly whether she’d told her old man she was at the library, when she was really having fun fun fun at the hamburger stand. Then they were factory-installed, and we called it OnStar. What else? Keystroke monitors for computers. Constant text-messaging. (At least that’s voluntary.) And for every eye-roll you can think of, there’s a counter story, a case cracked because someone sauntered under a camera, or a stolen car recovered because OnStar was able to hit the kill switch, a kidnap victim able to get her hands on a cell phone and make a call.

Still. If I were that kid? I’d spray-paint the lens and tell mom to get a life.

So, what are you doing at the moment? I’m grading papers, cursing the adverb and looking to the bloggage. Which is?

A lyrical conundrum, solved: Steve Perry finally admits no, there is no such thing as “south Detroit,” as he sings in “Don’t Stop Believin’.” He does explain the origin of “streetlight people,” and as you might expect, it’s lame. As for SoDet (otherwise known as Windsor), he acknowledges it was a little poetic license. I recall how stunned I was to hear that there is no Gower Avenue in Los Angeles, as Warren Zevon’s chorus sang so wonderfully in “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.” It’s Gower Street, which just isn’t as lyrical. I don’t think I could do that. Accuracy is important.

Those of you who are higher-ed nerds — or who pay tuition in Michigan — might enjoy this project in Bridge, my new employer, by Ron French, comparing Michigan’s college costs to other states’. The results aren’t flattering.

I wonder if she’s selling her house in Arizona? Bristol Palin heads home.

Happy Wednesday, all. I think I might survive this week, but the jury’s still out.

Inaugural pix ‘n’ linx! Given the week’s theme in Detroit, let’s go with a car:

That’s the Smart concept, an “urban pickup.” Grabbed from the Flickr stream of Michelin Media, and used under a Creative Commons license.

The interior:

Would I want one? Hmm, prolly not. But I admire the thinking.

To kick off the linkage, a painful story to read about one of those guys. Everybody knows someone like this, a utility player at a company who doesn’t necessarily contribute to the bottom line, but supports those who do. In this case, he worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The rest you can read for yourself. Spoiler: It’s not a happy story. But it is important.

When Charles Pierce referred to our new super-PAC era as one of “fully weaponized money,” I think this is what he was talking about. Josh Marshall:

Last night I saw a link on Twitter to the news that Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino mogul had given $5 million to a Gingrich-backing SuperPAC to run a brutal series of ads against Mitt Romney in South Carolina. (The ad campaign will be based on snippets from a half-hour swift-boat style ‘documentary’ about Mitt’s time at Bain Capital.) I knew this was big if for no other reason than the fact that $5 million thrown at a relatively small state like South Carolina over little more than a week is enough to totally change the calculus of a race. …But there’s much more afoot here.

Beyonce, celebrity maternity monster.

Oh, and me, on the play the other night. Actually, on the guy who made it possible. We should all be so fearless.

I was driving home from the mall Sunday, thinking about driving. I was in the far-right lane cruise-controlled at 70, woolgathering about a lot of what we talked about last week — safety and road stress, mainly, but also how the hell I’m going to teach my daughter to navigate these crazy freeways. How hard it is to resist the velocitizing effect of your fellow travelers. How you should never, ever travel faster than you feel comfortable. How margins of error are so much shorter at higher speeds. I glanced in the rear-view, where a BMW grille was closing in at a terrifying pace. My foot, which had been resting ineffectually on the accelerator (cruise control, remember) twitched up reflexively, just as the Beamer blew past on my left and wove another stitch around and through the cars ahead before disappearing into the flow of traffic.

He had to have been going 100, if not more. I’m assuming it was an auto-show tourist of some sort or another. The same thing happened to us Saturday night around 11, only it was a Dodge with fancy LED taillights. I don’t know if it was a dealer or a journalist or a corporate test driver, Ryan-goddamn-Gosling or Michael-goddamn-Shumacher, but that is an ignorant, stupid thing to do on an American freeway, especially one demonstrably full of people who are doing everything except paying attention to what they’re supposed to be doing. But it’s auto-show week, and that’s what happens here.

I’ve driven fast enough times myself to know why people do it and how invincible you can feel in a new, well-made car with all the latest safety features, but treating I-75 like an F-1 proving ground has too many hazards to count, including something as simple as my automatic reaction to seeing a car roaring up from behind — to take my foot off the gas. A sudden decrease in my speed, a closing hole in the lane to the left, and we all might have ended up in a sheet-metal sandwich. (I wonder how I’d be described in the story/obit, “journalist,” “blogger” or the ignoble “area woman.”)

And it did seem the BMW driver knew what s/he was doing. It’s the multi-lane swerve-overs behind me that freak my cheese, as so much depends on the trustworthiness of your fellow motorist, and that is? Not bloody trustworthy.

While we’re on the subject, for those of you who didn’t follow the comment thread Friday, the story of the firefighter killed while changing a tire on the freeway — the very incident that started this train of thought — has taken a turn. Now it’s looking less like a tragic accident and maybe a staged one, but the investigation continues.

Hope your weekend was a fine one. We went to see a production of “The Tempest” at a local bar. It was fun, but I think I’ll blog about it over at 42 North in the next day or two. But this part is for you guys alone: The actor who played Caliban was a real scenery-chewer, and had a very funny bare-ass scene that left me thinking our own Caliban chose his handle well.

A little bloggage:

Rick Santorum quotes as New Yorker cartoon captions.

Mitt Romney and his Irish setter — the anecdote that won’t go away, by the writer who dug it up. HT: John Wallace.

Finally, some housekeeping: I think this week will be the one I’ll start experimenting with some shorter material. Classes start at Wayne today, and my life will hit another gear. I’m thinking writing posts on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and pix-with-linx Tuesday and Thursday. Not sure how it will shake out, but I want to put up a new post daily, but perhaps one that won’t take quite so much of my increasingly scarce free time.

We’ll see how it works out.

Tulips. In January.

I’ve written before about the terrifying conditions of a typical Detroit rush hour. I haven’t driven in every city in the U.S., but I’ve driven in a few, and the closest match I can think of is Chicago, where traffic flies along at an insane speed, bunched up so close you can smell the other drivers’ sweat, until it can’t anymore. Detroiters love driving, and driving fast. They bring a certain skill to the endeavor, but it only takes one jerkoff to make a mistake, and lo, there are many on the road on a typical rush-hour weekday.

My new job requires twice-weekly days in Lansing, and Thursday was one of them. I left extra-early, with the aim of getting to the office shortly after 8 a.m. I switched on the radio once I reached cruising speed, and the first traffic bulletin informed me westbound 696 was closed at Orchard Lake Road, after an accident involving a pedestrian. Poor bastard, I thought. And then: WAIT. CLOSED? I’LL BE PASSING THAT EXIT IN 10 MINUTES. Or rather, I wouldn’t be passing it, but would instead be neck-deep in stopped traffic, being shunted off at some surface street on the far west side, with no idea how the hell I’d ever find my way back to I-96. I’ve been a work-from-homer for so long the whole west side of the metro is terra incognita. What to do? What to do? The I-75 interchange was seconds away. I took it south and executed a move I’m christening the Davison evasion, hopping onto this little-traveled spur of a freeway, a mere five miles or so in length, that connects I-75, the Lodge and a little more in both directions, but mainly exists to remind old-timers that no one really needs to get from one side of Highland Park to the other in three minutes, unless they’re running from muggers. Maybe you old-timers know the use for the Davison, but it was certainly welcome Thursday morning.

A helpful illustration for you out-of-towners.

The guy who died was an Ann Arbor firefighter. That’s the worst thing about freeway commutes — it’s so unnerving and stressful that you remember a well-executed evasive maneuver rather than the fact a man died. It’s the chariot race, for sure.

At this spot, there’s a sign posted on one of the ramps that says, “Follow the signs, not your GPS.”

Lotsa ramps.

Bloggage?

Picking on Rick “Dead Man Walking” Santorum seems a bit of a waste of time, but what the hell, Charles Pierce does it so well.

America loves Skrillex? Not according to my daughter.

And I’m so tired I’m off to bed. Enjoy the weekend, all.

The newly elected mayor of Troy, a suburban community here in the Metro, presided over only her third city council meeting last night, but the first one to be packed to the rafters with angry residents and, no doubt, a fair number of outside agitators. Over the weekend, a Facebook status update from earlier in the year, when she was Private Citizen Janice Daniels — and may I just say, that would be an excellent business card to have, don’t you think? “Private Citizen (Your Name Here)?”

Anyway, here’s what P.C. Daniels wrote:

I think I am going to throw away my I Love New York carrying bag now that queers can get married there.

As you might expect, attention has lingered on the “queers” part, but I’d like to consider the rest of this simple declarative sentence for a bit. I know nothing of her background, although we can certainly assume she was at least considering a run for office in June, when this appeared. She should have been measuring her comments at the very least, but this is Facebook, and if there’s one thing that social network does, it’s winnow. I have hundreds of friends, but it’s fair to say that the ones I see in my daily stops there are pretty much like me. I see a million versions of the hot viral video being promoted by people like me. I know what the hot story being pushed on PeopleOfMyPoliticalPersuasion.com. After a while, I could be lulled into believing the whole world agrees with me, and before you know it, I’m posting about the queers.

Daniels is a political novice and a favorite of the local tea party, so it’s fair to say she’s maybe not totally sophisticated about these things, and her half-assed, unenthusiastic walkback has only made it worse:

She’s pointed out that the offensive Q word is “in the dictionary,” and that she still has the tote bag (“It was a joke”), all the while clinging to her “principle” — that “marriage should be between a man and a woman.”

Although Daniels has apologized weakly several times, always with caveats, she has yet to suggest she actually understands how she offended real people who live, shop and work in Troy and who are her constituents.

…Maureen McGinnis, the mayor pro tem, said City Council members had received hundreds of emails, including those from people who said they wouldn’t shop in Troy stores or eat in Troy restaurants.

Daniels received them, too, she said, “but I also heard from people who said they want to move to Troy.”

But let’s get back to the original statement; gays can get married in New York, and the only thing you can come up with as a protest is to throw away a branded “carrying bag?” And you actually own one in the first place? That’s sort of embarrassing. It’s like saying you’re protesting Arizona’s immigration laws by boycotting Road Runner cartoons, and then, when called on it, protesting that there are cacti in the background, so, y’know, get it? GET IT?

On the other hand, this is a Facebook posting. What hath Sarah Palin wrought?

It should be illegal to be this dumb, let alone hold public office.

OK, the hour is growing late, and I have some work to do. A little bloggage:

Longtime readers know I like to use Bob Greene as a punching bag, but he actually did do a few pieces I liked, almost all of them for Esquire magazine. (Whenever I meet an otherwise bleh writer with one great platform, I always assume it’s the editor’s credit.) In one, he signed up to take the Scholastic Aptitude Test. It turns out anyone can take the SAT, if they pay their money and otherwise follow the rules. As I recall, he aced the verbal and tanked the math. I’d like to see more school board members, policymakers and other civilians try something like that, or, even better, take their state’s own standardized test, which one brave-but-anonymous soul did, described in this WashPost column. His report?

I have a wide circle of friends in various professions. Since taking the test, I’ve detailed its contents as best I can to many of them, particularly the math section, which does more than its share of shoving students in our system out of school and on to the street. Not a single one of them said that the math I described was necessary in their profession.

Y’don’t say.

Time to cut things short and get moving. The week is now fully under way. Hope yours is going well.

I bet this is great after dark.

Roe vs. Wade became the law of the land my sophomore year in high school, and for a few years before that, abortion was legal in New York. In my young adulthood, I knew lots of women who got abortions, a few who elected to become single mothers, but none who bore children and gave them up for adoption. It’s possible there were some who spent extended vacations with Aunt Jane in Kansas and came home with stretch marks, but if so, they never talked about it.

For women of my generation, giving up a baby for adoption was something that mainly happened in weepy movies of the week or, later, in nightmare scenarios like the Baby M surrogacy case or — dare we mention it? — the Baby Richard case in Chicago. (A moment of silence, please. OK, that’s enough.)

Around the same time the adoptees’ rights movement began to gather steam. I recall reading many, many an internet posting by people who’d been adopted under the old systems of Secrecy Unto Death, advocating and sometimes suing for access to their files, demanding information about their birth parents. And I read an equal number of personal stories by all involved, most of which worked out but a few that didn’t. There was one about a woman who’d conceived as a result of rape, and opened her door one day to find a young man there, informing her he was her son. The happy endings were bolstered by a changing cultural environment that had stripped the shame from unwed pregnancies, and the coverage was almost always on the mother-and-child reunion, the adoptive parents relegated to paragraph five, sometimes with an indirect quote: “Samantha said her adoptive parents have been ‘totally supportive’ through the process.”

All of which I mention only because I’d forgotten how rife with drama the whole process was — is — until I read this fascinating story about the secret love child of Loretta Young and Clark Gable. Judy Lewis died last week at 76. I’d never heard of her, and the story of how she came to be — borne in secrecy, shuttled around to foster homes and institutions until she was a year and a half old, at which point Young “adopted” her publicly. She was kept in the dark, despite volumes of Hollywood gossip, until she was 31, when she confronted her mother and heard the truth.

The photo is arresting; Lewis is the spitting image of Gable, and even had his protruding ears — until they were surgically altered at age 7, probably to tamp down the snickering about their resemblance to you-know-who’s.

I’m not much for genetics, even as accumulating science tells me I’m wrong. It treats people like show dogs, and, medical issues aside, implicitly disparages the extraordinary bonds forged between non-genetically related people. But I have come to understand people’s deep need to know who they are and where they came from. And I feel for Lewis, who was apparently the last person in Hollywood to know who her real parents were.

So, it’s an office-hours day, and time for bloggage:

The Publishers Weekly blog has named the latest winner of Worst Book Ever — “Microwave for One,” a 144-page cookbook by Sonia Allison. Whatever harm has been done by the book is entirely redeemed by that burgeoning new art form, Amazon customer reviews:

It used to be that I got home from work and the only thing I’d want to put in my mouth was the cold barrel of my grandfather’s shotgun. Then I discovered Sonia Allison’s Chicken Tetrazzini, and now there are two things.

I don’t watch much local TV news, so those of you who do have to school me on this. Is this sort of thing, a report by former Detroit News reporter Charlie LeDuff, the way it’s done nowadays?

This is the second piece I’ve seen by LeDuff, and he actively cultivates this NewzKlown act. The hip waders, the smirks and asides, all of it. Is this TV news now? If so, I’m glad I don’t watch.

My, but time is fleeting. Must run. Thursday already! You lose a day to electricity failure, and the week gets shorter.

The season begins.