Yesterday a flyer was pushed through the mail slot. Our neighborhood association will be having a residents-only trick-or-treat event “by popular request” a couple days before Halloween. Why? “To see our children and enjoy their costumes in a safer environment.” At the bottom, in small type: “This activity does not discourage participation in any other Halloween trick-or-treating traditions.”

Something you should know: We get lots of trick-or-treating tourists on Halloween. Of course it’s dangerous to make assumptions by the way people look and dress, I’d be willing to bet at least half of the kids who ring our doorbell are from either Detroit or other nearby, less-white communities. This bothers a lot of people. It used to bother me — back when it was the case in Fort Wayne — but I got over it. Essentially, all I really want is a costume and a smile. For this, you get a Reese’s Cup.

I read the flyer, and figured it out: Participate in the neighborhood t-or-t, then leave your porch light out on Oct. 31 and you can feel you served the local kids without having to serve the tourists. Alan read it, without me saying a word, and said the same thing. Kate read it, and reached the same conclusion. As it turns out, I have to be gone Halloween evening, and won’t be able to participate anyway, but now it’ll look like I’m participating in this stupid charade.

P.S. To my knowledge, no child — local or tourist — has ever been seriously hurt on Halloween since I’ve lived here.

This all comes as yet another kettle of shit bubbles in our local schools, over the question of “non-residents” sneaking into our schools. There are always a few caught and removed over the course of the year, although it’s usually a case of families moving in or out and being briefly, not chronically, in violation. This explanation never satisfies those who believe the district is crawling with illegals, so to speak, and starting this summer a group of these people have been insisting on tougher penalties. This plays into the hands of critics on the left and right, and frankly, makes the community look crazy and mean.

Which is my way of saying, sometimes I don’t like my neighbors very much. Not the next-door ones, but all the rest.

Getting ready to watch the de-bate — for some reason I feel like stressing the first syllable these days — and fixing a bowl of buttered popcorn. Ready for an extremely good and well-written, but utterly sad, story? It’s a 1995 flashback dug up by the Washington Post and pegged to the death this weekend of George McGovern. It’s about the death of his daughter, Teresa, of alcoholism. A cautionary tale, not recommended if you’re feeling fragile and sad today.

The Onion spoofs TED talks. And nails them.

Rest in peace, Russell Means.

Let me know how the debate went, eh?

I was up very early Saturday morning (PSAT chauffeur duty) and after dropping off the testees, thought I’d take the long way to the Eastern Market. It’s important to do that every so often — step out of your groove, that is — if only to foil kidnappers. I drove down Mack Avenue, which goes from Grosse Pointe through the worst of the abandoned east side, and deep in the latter region I passed a building with the brick facade painted black, yellow caution tape stretched here and there, and this painted over all: HAUNTED HOUSE.

You have to laugh. Much of the surrounding neighborhood resembles a haunted forest, but what the hell, why not add a house? Of course no one was there at that hour, but later that day Alan and I were coming back from our evening o’ fun, and decided to drive past. Smoke was rising from the site; is it possible someone actually torched it? As we got closer it was revealed to be someone cooking barbecue on the sidewalk, presumably for the patrons.

While I applaud the entrepreneurial spirit, you couldn’t pay me enough to go through that thing.

Our evening’s entertainment was this, a pop-up Euro-style biergarten, now in its second year of popping up. The beer was great, the bratwurst even better, and we ran into some people we know. Not a bad evening for about $30.

Pop-up businesses keep your city on its toes, and well-fed with barbecue. And brats.

Then, today, raking leaves. Because that’s what you do here in KeepUpYourLawnville.

Oh, and there was a pie. Apple, with Northern Spies. Which means that no matter what else happened over the weekend, it was a success.

I know we’ve gone over the Lance Armstrong story to almost an enervating degree, but I had the time to absorb this NYT story, about how the case against him was built, and it left me, once again, sort of agog at the guy:

Antidoping officials on multiple continents had pursued Armstrong for years, in often quixotic efforts that died at the wall of silence his loyal teammates built around him as the sport’s global king. Armstrong kept the dark side of his athletic success quiet, investigators and cyclists said, by using guile and arm-twisting tactics that put fear in those who might cross him.

And from the USADA report released last week:

On July 23 in the 18th Stage at the 2004 Tour de France, (Filippo) Simeoni (who testified against Armstrong’s doctor) joined a breakaway. However, Armstrong rode him down and threatened if Simeoni did not return to the peloton Lance Armstrong would stay with the break and doom it to failure. As a consequence, Simeoni retreated to the peloton. There was no potential sport or cycling advantage for Armstrong’s maneuver. In fact, it was dangerous and impetuous, as Armstrong rode away from his supporting teammates to catch Simeoni, wasting valuable energy and unnecessarily incurring greater risk of a mishap while riding without assistance.

As Simeoni and Armstrong fell back to the peloton, Armstrong verbally berated Simeoni for testifying in the Ferrari case, saying, “You made a mistake when you testified against Ferrari and you made a mistake when you sued me. I have a lot of time and money and I can destroy you.” Armstrong was captured on video making a “zip the lips” gesture which underscored what Armstrong had just said to Simeoni about how Simeoni should not have testified against Dr. Ferrari.

This sounds like the behavior of a Mafia enforcer. And yet, I’m still hearing what a good, if flawed, man he was. I’m sure he did it all for the love of cancer patients.

Something for Jeff and Brian — a man who actually saw Abraham Lincoln shot at Ford’s Theater, appearing on “To Tell the Truth.”

His dream was to be an architect. He settled for carpentry. And earlier this year, he was the one who alerted the city that they might have a collapsing grocery store on their hands. A sweet story about an ordinary guy. It put me in mind of the assistant manager at a movie theater who, during the freakish F4 tornado in Van Wert, Ohio, a few years ago, had the presence of mind to scope out the building, correctly identify the strongest part (the bathroom), stop the movie, herd everybody into the bathroom with only moments to spare, and all survived. (In fact, he was the only one with an injury of any kind — a cut on his arm. A couple of cars ended up in the seats where everyone had been sitting. A hero who woke up that morning and probably thought, “Hmm, what a warm day for November.”

Finally, paranoia in Northern Michigan.

Happy week, all. Two weeks until the election.

I don’t know about you, but clicking the link to Felix Baumgartner’s historic skydive today was either the best or worst thing I did Sunday. Unlike some people, my cable internet came through and I had a clear, glitch-free picture the whole time. I checked in at about 6,000 feet and really couldn’t turn away.

By the time they reached this moment…

…my heart was in my mouth. When I stopped to consider the scientific value of such a stunt — and at this point, I’m going to call it a stunt, unless someone corrects me — I was distracted by the amazing photography. The balloon was literally a shiny object, and watching it grow larger as the air pressure abated only increased the drama. The description of the thing was “an inflated dry cleaning bag that would fill the Los Angeles Coliseum,” and it looked so utterly fragile. I guess I was utterly suckered in that sense.

I don’t know how important this exercise was. I’ll take Red Bull at its word that the data the mission gathered was important, but I don’t think this was another Mars Rover, either. Joe Kittinger was a nice touch. His gentle reminders to Baumgartner to reply to each directive gave the final moments of the flight some extra drama. What if he hadn’t answered back, or had a panic attack? Would it be possible to talk the guy down when he’s 24 miles above the earth?

Baumgartner’s stab at Neil Armstrong’s speechifyin’-in-a-sentence was a little lame, but that might be because once he let go of the capsule and fell into the void he disappeared from sight so quickly I gasped. Two seconds and he was a dot. Now there was a visual. In space, no one car hear you scream, but I think they must have heard me.

Watch for yourself. That’s pretty dramatic.

Did I just fall for a worldwide free-media publicity barrage for a vile soft drink? You tell me, but I enjoyed it.

And that was the weekend. We saw “The Perks of Being a Wallflower,” which Kate said was the best movie she’d ever seen, so I guess that’s an endorsement. My former student Dustin had to work, but at least he got a good story out of it:

Some of the concertgoers at a late-season Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson concert at DTE Energy Music Theatre will have the chance to compare the venue’s acoustics to those at the Oakland County Jail.

Later on, Rob Zombie is quoted, and referred to on second reference as “Zombie.” Excellent.

Oh lord, another Monday. Let this week pass smoothly, please. Hope yours does.

Yeesh, what a weekend. Highs and lows. We cleaned more of Riverfront-Lakewood Park. (High.) A crazy man in the park snatched up Alan’s chainsaw, leading to a few tense moments. (Low.) Went downtown for the Dlectricity, an after-dark festival of outdoor art installations, all incorporating light. (Big high.) Shoveled another dead squirrel over the fence at my backfence neighbor, who has taken to plinking at them with a BB gun. (Big low.)

Is Mercury in retrograde? No.

This was the second squirrel. This guy sits out there with a BB gun and uses them for target practice. Which would be OK — I don’t really worry about squirrels — but this is the second one to fall into my yard. The first one hit the driveway, and either died on impact or was dead on arrival. This one managed to make it to my back steps where I nearly stepped on him on my way out to do yard work. He was heaving his last breaths and did not appear to be going peacefully.

I scooped him up with the shovel and carried him to the fence. The guy was standing in his back doorway, aiming directly at me.

HEY, I GOT A DEAD SQUIRREL HERE AND THIS ONE IS YOURS, I yelled, and dumped it over the fence into his yard. He said something like OK and skittered back into his house.

I get that squirrels can be destructive and eat your tomatoes and all, but good lord, if you can’t kill them immediately, don’t even try.

Dlectricity was sublime, though. It’s done in other cities, but it was the first one for Detroit, and man, it was cool — projections on the side of buildins, LED-clad robots rolling around, a light-up bike parade and all sorts of stuff. Perfect for a fall weekend, and Woodward Avenue was thronged. My favorite was three women dancing in unison in a storefront window, in front of film projections. Take that, Art Prize.

I warm up to crazy-ass modern art, the older I get. The more it bugs newspaper editors, the better I like it.

So, some bloggage? This is a concise but on-point comment about something we touched on last week: Germany as a player in the world economy, and what we might learn about it.

Tim Burton’s career arc: What went wrong?

I got some pears at the market, along with my brussels sprouts. I think I’m going to make at least one of these salads. For the millionth time, thanks, Mark Bittman.

A good week to all.

Been holding off on these; they just don’t taste like anything but cool weather to me. Alas, their time has come. Four bucks per stalk.

Added: A terrible photo of a typical street-vendor item. I see this stuff everywhere. Every so often I read a column by some earnest doofus, wondering why African Americans don’t vote Republican more often. Really? Really?

A few weeks ago, a bunch of us went for our annual bike ride to the Hare Krishna mansion for dinner. We detoured through Riverfront-Lakewood Park in Detroit. It was a mess — overgrown, strewn with trash, scary-looking. You can’t tell from this view:

But if I’ve set up the map correctly and you’re seeing the satellite view, you can see two boats, dumped there on the grass. One is just off the driveway, another at the northwest corner of the parking lot. Both have been stripped of every piece of sellable hardware, and graffiti artists have tagged them the S.S. Kwame (the former mayor now on trial for racketeering), and the Carlita (his lovely wife).

This got a big chuckle from the group, and we didn’t give much more thought to it until a few days ago, when my friend Laurie saw this column in Crain’s Detroit Business, comparing and contrasting Riverfront-Lakewood, the adjacent Angel Park and Grosse Pointe Park’s Windmill Pointe Park. They stand three abreast down the Lake St. Clair/Detroit River junction, although Windmill Pointe is behind a tall chain-link fence. (Residents only.)

She posted this on Facebook, and a member of the city staff piped up and said the Detroit parks are basically on triage, and that these two have been more or less abandoned. If you care so much, he wrote, why don’t you clean it up yourself?

Laurie thought about it for a while and said, “Well, OK.”

So last Saturday we rode our bikes down to do some reconnaissance. And what did we find? About a dozen people who live nearby, a bunch of mowers, a dozen stuffed garbage bags and a party going on. They hadn’t read anything in Crain’s. They just wanted to reclaim the park. And they’d made quite a dent, but it was a pretty huge job for just a few people. “If only we could get this place mowed,” one woman said. It turns out we could help with that. Remember the Mower Gang?

They showed up last night, at least 20 of them, on a variety of riding mowers, including the new Husqvarna donated by the company, who’d heard of their good work on behalf of the city’s beleaguered parklands.

These guys cook with the awesome sauce. In about two hours, they had that park mowed flat and were working on the Kwame and the Carlita. One guy had a Ford F-450 dually, and on the first try to dislodge Kwame from its years-long mooring place, snapped the tow strap. I got the feeling a guy who owns a truck that big doesn’t take failure lightly. He turned it around and pushed that goddamn boat a few times, and then someone got a chain, and before long he had towed it into the parking lot.

(Carlita came along a little more peacefully. A guy with a saws-all sliced that girl right down the middle. We’re hoping that lets the city pick it up easily.)

There’s still a lot to be done. The trash is pretty bad, and a few years’ worth of bait cans and tequila bottles can’t be picked up in a couple of hours. We’re going back on Saturday, maybe with a chain saw to get the last of the mulberry trees that are growing up through the seawall.

But even if we don’t, people can spend the last few pleasant weeks of the year in a pretty nice waterfront park. (You can click any of those photos and see them larger.)

So there’s that. Now it’s almost 11 p.m., and I just watched the debate. Sorry, but I think Obama was a little weak. Not a disaster, but he wasn’t on. We’ll see how the rest go. Meanwhile, some bloggage? Sure:

Our reader, and occasional commenter, Cathy D. had her phone stolen at a dinner Saturday night. She deactivated the phone, but the thing still works as a wi-fi device, and over the weekend discovered the thief was taking pictures, probably unaware they were being automatically uploaded to her Dropbox account. So now she has pictures of the thieves, but the recovery is still not happening. The local teevee station tries to get things moving.

Another amazing portrait of one of Detroit’s amazing characters by Detroitblogger John.

Like his house, some find Migo an unpleasant presence. He doesn’t wash, and he smells like it. He has an opening in his neck from throat cancer surgery, and to talk he presses a finger into the hole to create a hoarse, raspy voice underlined by an air-gasping wheeze when he breathes.

He’s bitter and complains about most things. And every minute or so, he turns his head and spits out a batch of syrupy drool. Sometimes it falls to the pavement, sometimes it drips onto him. He’s a spectacle.

And he simply doesn’t care. He’s had it.

“You can’t be decent,” he sneers. “You don’t want to be decent because these people are not decent. I say fuck it.” He pauses to spit again. Then he says, “I’m sorry. I don’t like to use bad words.”

That’s almost a perfect description. The only change I’d make is to delete “air” from the first paragraph.

Well, if he wants to go look at the river this weekend, he won’t have to battle tall grass to do it.

Sunflowers. In sun.

Such a lovely surprise this weekend: “Detropia,” a new documentary about our troubled neighbor, which played to a nearly packed house Saturday night hereabouts.

I understand this is of limited interest to those who don’t live nearby (or in similar cities), but for those of you who like film, documentaries, or who have any sort of connection to this place, I do recommend it. With some caveats.

They are: This isn’t a “news” documentary at all, more like jazz — meditations on a mood, improvisations on a theme, observations rather than commentary, although of course you’re free to fill in the blanks, and in fact are encouraged to.

The takeaway is that Detroit is the industrial age’s coal-mine canary, and that no one has sufficiently answered the question of what comes next. You may or may not agree, but the question — posed by one of the Detroiters whose activities serve as a through-line — is worth asking.

One scene features the UAW local president laying out the harsh reality for a room full of workers at one of the surviving plants, American Axle. It is a take-it-or-leave-it shit sandwich of 20-30 percent wage cuts across the board, and these are not good jobs in the first place — the top tier is around $18 an hour (down to $14), with the $14-per-hour folks knocked down to $11. The union moves to not even consider the offer, and it passes unanimously. The plant closes, a foregone conclusion.

I looked at these men and women, and thought, for the millionth time: What are we going to do with you? These aren’t lazy people. They want to work. They need to be paid a living wage. Twenty-two grand a year for life in an axle plant? Are you kidding me?

We say this over and over and over: Not everyone is cut out for higher education, but everyone can work. But where will the laid-off American Axle workers find it?

They are the 47 percent. By now, anyway. Neither presidential candidate has a concrete plan for their future. The Germans still have a healthy force of factory workers, don’t they? How do they manage it? (Don’t answer, I know. They take education and training a lot more seriously than we do.)

All is not grim. There’s a marvelous character, Tommy Stephens, a retired teacher who runs a blues club in a particularly bombed-out neighborhood, a stone’s throw from the urban farm site I wrote about earlier this year, although it’s a club in the street corner-in-Detroit sense, not, say, the House of Blues. But Stephens is funny and smart and won’t give up, and in that sense is the reason I like this screwed-up place so much.

Anyway, recommended.

And just in case you find all that too depressing, there’s this, from the Atlantic, on the booming startup culture downtown. It won’t be enough to save all 139 square miles, but it’s something.

So, bloggage:

Boy, is this story depressing:

A lot of voters are lukewarm about the guy they support, but they are white hot about the guy they loathe.

“If they had Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama running, Barack Obama would be my last pick,” says Ray Morrison, 70, a retired steelworker and truck driver who lives on a country road west of the city. “If you want to know the true story about Obama, you have to watch Fox a little bit. I hate him.”

Here’s Cheryl Doran, 50, a waitress at the family restaurant Naples, speaking of Romney: “I think he’s the devil. I have no use for him.”

Al Fenner, 68, a bishop in the Shepherds Walk mission downtown, doesn’t think the president is “all-American” and believes that Obama once said that “he would stand more with the Islamic rather than with the American way.” Asked to cite a specific instance of Obama saying that, Fenner answered: “Go on YouTube and find it. I would not quote it if it were not true.”

I assume he’s talking about this, which I’ve seen referred to over and over again in the last few weeks. “But he’s a Muslim! He admits it!” etc. Watch the video, and you can see this admission in much the same way you see the cast of “Mad Men” sing along with Rick Astley.

Well, we still have five or six weeks to go, so why dwell? Hope your weekend was great. My apple pie turned out just fine.

A smaller, but still outstanding, apple crop.

Bridge has been running occasional stories about public servants — or workers, or tax-sucking leeches, depending on your political frame of mind — who aren’t elected. Yesterday’s was about a prison guard, and I learned that as bad as all of the jobs I’ve had in my life have been, at times? They haven’t been as bad as this:

A prisoner goes on “stool watch” when he’s suspected of smuggling in drugs by swallowing a balloon containing a controlled substance. The inmate is forced to sit on a special stool that has a bag below it to catch the inmate’s feces so it can be checked for the drugs.

Repulsive mental picture to the contrary, I’m pleased to learn this, as it gives me a new term for something that will almost certainly be unpleasant:

“No, I can’t go to dinner tonight. Waiting to hear back from the client on that thing last week. You know, stool watch.”

“Getting a test back today in Chem. Total stool watch.”

You can tell it’s almost the end of the week, can’t you? Feelin’ a little hit-the-wall here. All things considered, I’d like to watch a little of “Full Metal Jacket” and drift off to sleep. Love that Lee Ermey.

So, a little bloggage:

Charles Pierce on the new season of “Treme.” (He likes it.)

OID: Stay away from this place, Mr. Funny Car. Just keeeeep driving.

A friend of mine had severe performance anxiety while trying to produce a sperm sample for in vitro fertilization. Tells a funny story about it. Kinda like this one.

And now if you’ll excuse me? I’m going to go pass out.