Strange, how outside stimuli insinuate themselves into your dreams. I have an alarm clock that flashes before it buzzes, and it works well except when it doesn’t, i.e., when I’m facing the wrong way, or actually, you know, asleep.

Friday morning I had a vivid dream of being in a dark room, watching a slide show — the old-fashioned Kodak Carousel kind. Slide, brief moment of darkness, slide. I thought, freaky slide show. Then, this isn’t a slide show. The clock was blinking. For how long? Maybe 15 seconds.

Sometimes Kate says she wants a career that involves work with the human brain. Maybe she’ll be the one to figure it out.

Another too-short weekend. Last week’s homicide investigation looked like it was building toward an arrest (the husband), then didn’t. The police around here may work seven days a week, but they only answer phones on a M-F business-hours schedule, and when they do, rarely say anything. A lack of information is as bad as too much of it, and Facebook rushed into the vacuum, with the locals piling pig-ignorant comment upon half-wit observation, until I couldn’t take it anymore. I’ve been waiting my whole life to get a John Cheever reference into a column about Grosse Pointe, and whaddaya know: That day has come.

Do we learn anything as we go through this life? I have a policy I adopted around the age of 30, when the first marriages among my peers were cracking up, and it is: No one is qualified to judge a marriage other than the people in it. A corollary: Every single person in the world has it in them. Which is? Something extraordinary, on either side of the darkness/light divide. I think this is what makes life interesting and unpredictable — every day, we can be Lenny Skutnik or Some Guy Who Kills His Wife. I don’t know if this guy here in Grosse Pointe killed his wife, but I know that I’m not fit to say he’s simply incapable of such an act, because he comes from a good family and was a Rotary Club president and raised money for the poor of Detroit. More facts needed. I hope we learn them eventually.

We seem to have skipped to the bloggage already. So, then:

From Coozledad, a rabbit that herds sheep. Great video, love the music and it’s a reminder of why the border collies in “Babe” called the sheep morons.

Eric Zorn at the Chicago Tribune has been bird-dogging the Emmanuel Goldstein Saul Alinsky disinformation campaign, and has a couple of posts with more linky goodness than you could read in a month. Here’s the biggest one. In another, Zorn wonders:

Is Gingrich the historian really frightened of the influence of a man who devoted his life to helping poor folks find their political voice?

I doubt it. To me, this looks like the ultimate cynical tribute to Alinsky — the dark, repetitive intonation of a name that sounds vaguely foreign and Jewish in order to rile folks up with yet another gaseous myth.

I think he’s right. “Saul Alinsky” is the Barack Hussein Obama of this campaign cycle. What I don’t understand is why Gingrich’s patron, Sheldon Adelson, is OK with it. My guess is, he floats above anti-Semitism at this station of his life.

Oh, and Roy covers the crazy Alinsky angle.

And with that, I must run. The week is front-loaded, but should ease a bit by Wednesday. Here’s hopin’. I hope yours is good.

I was down at Wayne today when my colleague and GPT partner Ben Burns wandered in. I asked him whether his Little League coaching career had intersected with Prince Fielder’s time in the locals. It had.

Fielder — although I guess you’d call a 12-year-old kid by his first name, wouldn’t you — was a head taller and two kids wider than every other player there, and could hit anything, Ben said. He knocked everything over the fence, to the point that one day Ben called for an intentional walk, generally frowned upon in Little League, but hell, it’s not every day you face a future MLB star.

Fun fact: When Prince was 12, he was messing around in Tiger Stadium with his dad and hit one into the stands. Fair.

So, bloggage?

We had a good Bridge yesterday. Ron’s piece on the loss of skilled public employees in Michigan was great — you never think of stuff like that until you read something like this:

Michele Glinn loved her job, and she was good at it. As the only Ph.D toxicologist working in the Michigan State Police toxicology unit, she analyzed blood samples for alcohol and other drugs — and crisscrossed the state testifying in court.

Frustrated by unpaid furlough days, a shrinking staff and a negative public perception of state employees, Glinn sat down at her computer one day last fall and sent her resume to an employment search firm. “I got a call from the headhunter the same day,” Glinn recalled. “Two days later, I had a phone interview; a week later, I was in St. Louis being offered a job on the spot.”

Her U-Haul crossed the state border in November, leaving Michigan with no one who can provide expert testimony for the prosecution in alcohol and drug cases. “The state has no one to answer scientific questions,” Glinn said. “That’s a public safety issue.”

I had a piece on the guy who does the Pure Michigan parodies.

I was thinking the other day about maybe getting an iPhone 4S — the talking one. But maybe? No:

But not in every way. Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.

To make your wish her command, Siri floods your cell network with a stream of data; her responses require a similarly large flow in return. A study published this month by Arieso, an Atlanta firm that specializes in mobile networks, found that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S uses twice as much data as does the plain old iPhone 4 and nearly three times as much as does the iPhone 3G. The new phone requires far more data than most other advanced smartphones, which are pretty data-intensive themselves, The Post has reported.

I refuse to be a data hog just to have Siri type my text messages.

I thought the weekend would never come, but it’s here, it’s here! Enjoy yours. I’m hoping to get to the market — it’s been a while. Maybe a picture? Here’s hoping.

Car prom! Took my camera! Let’s get started:

The North American International Auto Show is held in the vast space of Cobo Center, which may not be as vast as your city’s convention center, but is pretty big. The show runs for two weeks — the first couple of days is the media preview, followed by industry days, the Charity Preview (aka Car Prom) for one night, and then the show opens to the public, and once it does it’s no longer possible to be handed a flute of champagne by an Italian beauty at the Maserati space, which goes to show you the public always takes a screwing. But Alan worked a week’s worth of hours and then some in about three days, and deserved a pleasant night out. That’s what we got.

So let’s go to the show. Hi, Miss Michigan USA!

As you can see, some people took the black-tie designation seriously and some people went with the modern designation. Everybody looked fine, if a little Fellini-like under the lights. But no matter, the wine is flowing and let’s stop for loyalty’s sake at the hometown heroes, Ford.

That’s the 2013 Ford Fusion, one of the hits of the show. The auto writers called that grill “aggressive,” apparently because it protrudes a bit, which along with the squinty-eyed headlights gives it an aggressive, don’t-mess-with-me face, a new feeling for a mid-priced mid-size sedan. The female Ford car models, er, “product specialists” all wore those white dresses. They looked sharp.

Over to Lincoln. This is the MKZ concept, but mostly it’s just me trying to do something with all the shiny in the frame:

The Cadillac ATS:

They’re touting this as a competitor for the BMW 3 series, which made BMW scoff, I’m told. Whatever. I’d market it as a domestic-made luxury sedan for patriotic Americans who want to support the 99 percent. Domestic is back, baby.

Speaking of luxury, this is a Maserati SUV which will be made in Detroit. Yup:

Side view at the link. I guess I was taken with yet another set of squinty headlights. Also the idea of a Maserati SUV. Someone call LeBron.

If Kate had rich parents, they’d buy her this for a Sweet Sixteen present:

Too bad for her she doesn’t. It’s one of the redesigned Beetles, made a little flatter and less cute, now with guitar-y rock’n’roll-osity. Maybe it’s because I remember the special-edition lemons of the ’70s — anyone for a blue-jeans Pacer? — but I think they’re all kind of silly. The King Ranch interior package for the Ford trucks and SUVs has been around for a while; some people found the cup holders a good place to leave their empties:

The many open vehicles made for a nice place to take a load off. I think this was a Mini Cooper I was sitting in:

Speaking of cute little cars, here’s the front end of that Smart pickup-truck concept from last week:

Look, it’s smiling at you! Aren’t you all ashamed of all the mean things you said about it? It’s like you were picking on a kitten or something.

A few odds and ends. I seem to recall one of you regulars is a foot man; here’s some eye candy for you:

I can’t remember if that was on a guest or one of the product specialists.

Black tie on the People Mover:

Finally, the afterglow at the Ren Cen, where the view from the glass elevator (how ’70s!) was of America Junior across the river:

Better pictures of the Charity Preview and the show in general are available at the Detroit News website. Especially this one.

And this is your correspondent, signing out:

But no, we have some bloggage first:

Joe Paterno speaks, to Sally Jenkins at the WashPost:

Paterno’s hope is that time will be his ally when it comes to judging what he built, versus what broke down. “I’m not 31 years old trying to prove something to anybody,” he said. “I know where I am.” This is where he is: wracked by radiation and chemotherapy, in a wheelchair with a broken pelvis, and “shocked and saddened” as he struggles to explain a breakdown of devastating proportions.

…How (Jerry) Sandusky, 67, allegedly evaded detection by state child services, university administrators, teachers, parents, donors and Paterno himself remains an open question. “I wish I knew,” Paterno said. “I don’t know the answer to that. It’s hard.” Almost as difficult for Paterno to answer is the question of why, after receiving a report in 2002 that Sandusky had abused a boy in the shower of Penn State’s Lasch Football Building, and forwarding it to his superiors, he didn’t follow up more aggressively.

It’s worth reading for the account of how he was fired alone.

Every audience-member’s nightmare — one’s cell phone goes off during a performance of the New York Philharmonic — turns the culprit into the culture-pages version of That Guy Who Cost the Cubs a Pivotal Game. You can see why he insisted on anonymity. I recall a profile of Wynton Marsalis from a few years back, which described a similar incident. Marsalis, without missing a note, picked up the tune of the ringtone, wove it into his improv and wove it back out to the exact point where it went off — the last two notes in “I Don’t Stand a Ghost of a Chance With You.” And that’s why he’s Wynton Marsalis and everyone else is just a player.

Oh, I can’t wait until campaign season ramps up, so we can see more ads like this. Evil French!

The week awaits. If you have the day off today, enjoy it.

Hunter Thompson ain’t seen nothin’ like this.

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.