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.

We sure do spend a lot of time worrying about things like this:

Especially when a far more effective odor neutralizer is available as close as your nearest matchbook. But it probably doesn’t smell like rainbows and unicorns, either.

And that’s why I’m glad my cell phone has a camera in it. Because you never know what you’ll find at the hardware store.

I hope it’s not too abrupt — or distasteful — to change the subject to food now. I have to apologize for not including a Saturday Morning Market photo last weekend, because I was certainly there, but conditions in the scrum in front of the poultry sellers weren’t conducive to photography. I got my turkey — a breast, anyway. And I got most of the other elements of the traditional meal. After years of trying to make Thanksgiving mine, I’m giving up and letting it be everyone else’s. Menu: Turkey, dressing, mashed you-know-whats, green beans with roasted onions, Waldorf salad, pie. No more sweet potatoes (I’m the only one who eats them). No more trying to nudge the feast to a later hour; Alan’s sister can never spend the night, so a late lunch is the best I can do. I will not give up the wine, and anyone who tries to make me, I will cut. It makes the afternoon snooze that much easier.

New this year: Brining. Never done that one. I’m using the Pioneer Woman’s recipe. Any advice would be appreciated.

Detroit is a great Thanksgiving town, maybe the best. Natives do the parade (usually as the guest of someone with an office or condo overlooking the route), maybe the Turkey Trot run, followed by the Lions game, followed by dinner. One of these days.

Monday, Monday, how I hate thou thee. Let’s blog it up and get on the road.

From David Frum, the cri de coeur of the moderate Republican:

We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

Come the revolution, I look forward to escorting these people to the gallows personally:

Carriers on international flights are offering private suites for first-class passengers, three-star meals and personal service once found only on corporate jets. They provide massages before takeoff, whisk passengers through special customs lanes and drive them in a private limousine right to the plane. Some have bars. One airline has installed showers onboard.

For those who haven’t heard, Jim Romenesko is back. First post: His side of the Poynter story.

And with that, I’m off. A short week, and after today, it will improve markedly. Hope yours does, too.

I believe I’ve mentioned that my husband has a new job at the paper. Alan’s the Detroit News auto editor now, which comes with new responsibilities, a laptop, a BlackBerry and the special perks an automotive journalist in Detroit enjoys, or as I’ve been putting it lately:

“When are you going to bring mama a big pimpin’ Escalade?”

The car companies keep a few sets of keys circulating through the newsrooms of the dailies and the trade papers, for reporters, critics and editors to test drive. One of our neighbors works at AutoWeek, and whenever their beige Camry is replaced in the driveway by something a little less beige and Camry-like, it’s a fair bet he’s enjoying the perks of the job. So last night I was out and about, and what do I come home to? A BIG PIMPIN’ ESCALADE. IN MY DRIVEWAY:

“You remembered my birthday!” I exclaimed, squealing over more than $70,000 of an $85,099 luxury SUV like the Midwestern girl I am. Then I commenced worrying. It’s so big we didn’t dare risk putting it in the garage overnight and having one of the bikes scratch its Black Ice paint job on the way in or out, so Alan tucked it into the second-most-secure parking space on the property. I’m sure the reason I woke up before 6 a.m. today was a nagging worry that we’d find the thing sitting on bricks this morning, or gone entirely.

But it’s fine. Now all I have to worry about is him getting carjacked on the way to work. One of our neighbors leases an Escalade every couple years, and both of fates described above — wheel theft and carjacking — have befallen them. The wheel theft came at daybreak one morning, and was accomplished by a crew of professionals who worked so fast they could probably find gainful employment with NASCAR. The theft was by two teenagers so young she thought they were kidding, until one lifted his shirt and showed her the gun in his waistband. And yes, you saw it first on “The Wire.”

It’s too bad we can’t take this behemoth on a road trip. You should see the back-seat entertainment system. Kate and I would hang back there, watching DVDs.

OK, then.

This ham-fisted p.o.s. was circulating a bit yesterday, Walter Russell Mead’s j’accuse against the baby-boom generation. I expect we’ll hear about a million more iterations of this before they lay the last of us in the ground, or, more likely, sprinkle our ashes in a sylvan glade somewhere, because we’re not into having our corpses pumped full of chemicals, man. Others with more time on their hands have handily disposed of this one, but all I have to say is, whaddaya mean “we,” white man?

Boomer CEOs accelerated the trend toward unlimited greed among corporate elites, and Boomer members of corporate boards sit by and let it happen. Boomer academics created a profoundly dysfunctional system that systemically shovels resources upward from students and adjuncts to overpaid administrators and professors who by and large have not, to say the least, done an outstanding job of transmitting the cultural heritage of the past to future generations. Boomer Hollywood execs created an amoral morass of sludge — and maybe I’m missing something, but nobody spends a lot of time talking about the towering cultural accomplishments of the world historical art geniuses of the Boomer years. Boomer greens enthusiastically bet their movement on the truly idiotic drive for a global carbon treaty; they are now grieving over their failure to make any measurable progress after decades spent and hundreds of millions of dollars thrown away. On the Boomer watch the American family and the American middle class entered major crises; by the time the Boomers have finished with it the health system will be an unaffordable and dysfunctional tangle — perhaps the most complicated, expensive and poorly designed such system in the history of the world.

Oh, shut up. I guess I missed the double-secret boomer briefings at which all this was laid out, but I also expect we’ll be paying for that Who song for a long time. As far as I’m concerned, much of the model for that which he describes, the sha-na-na-na-na-let’s-live-for-today mindset, was put in place by Grampa Reagan, and he was no more a baby boomer than I am an Escalade buyer. There are many, many of us who save for what we want, raise our children right, work hard and otherwise don’t expect much in the way of handouts. Mead himself writes:

What the Boomers as a generation missed (there were, of course and thankfully, many honorable individual exceptions) was the core set of values that every generation must discover to make a successful transition to real adulthood: maturity.

“There are many honorable individual exceptions,” yes, enough that the whole essay pretty much falls apart, especially when he tries to hang Jerry Sandusky on us, considering Sandusky (d.o.b. 1944) isn’t a boomer.

Speaking of which. Can this case get any more awful? “I shouldn’t have showered with those kids,” he says now. Really? Ya think? And this lawyer of his who thought this interview was a good idea? I’m speechless. I need to stop reading about this story. It’s making me too crazy.

You’ve already read this Charles Pierce jeremiad on Penn State by now, I expect, but just in case you haven’t, you should.

And now I get to edit a bunch of city council meeting copy.

It’s a symphony of reds.

The clock on the wall says it’s almost time to go to Theatre Bizarre. Are the Derringers ready to attend Detroit’s best Halloween party?

Alan researched his look very carefully, and would like you to know he is a plague doctor, not one half of Spy vs. Spy, although granted, the resemblance is remarkable. He says the latter was based on the former, but his aim was the former.

Honestly? On the grand spectrum of costumes, ours were at the conservative end. The most enthusiastic comment I got was at the Detroit CVS drugstore where we stopped to buy straws, so that Alan might be able to drink without removing his mask. He stayed in the car (“If I go in dressed like this, they’ll call the cops”) while I negotiated the Saturday night crowd in my formal riding costume. “Where’d you get them boots at?” a woman waiting on the next line asked. Answer: A catalog.

The Masonic Temple is a grand old Detroit institution fallen on hard times, due to its location in one of the worst neighborhoods adjacent to downtown. They had guarded parking, but the area around it was, as usual, full of skulking wraiths and the homeless. Which gave the lit-up, rocking hive around the Masonic the feeling of a naughty Brigadoon. The lobby and entrance featured jugglers, stilt-walkers and one of the many TB props, in this case, the Fiji Mermaid:

It’s a moving mermaid skeleton, with a very nice water effect.

Just a short tour around one floor — there were seven or so levels, including mezzanines — showed how well John Dunivant and his crew used the space. The 1920s Masonic made a great backdrop for the Theatre’s ’30s-carnival props and sets, and honestly, it was hard to separate the things the crew brought from the permanent architectural details of the building. I especially liked it in this room, where the chandelier and clock look like an organic part of the stage:

Those booths at either end were where the suspension artists performed — the hooks-through-flesh folks. It freaked me out, but no one seemed to be in any pain.

One room had a simple but arresting effect made with red can lights overhung with white scrims. I think this might be the best single picture I took. It’s a barbershop quartet who sang there:

There were several different venues within the space, with something going on at each one. I liked the smaller spaces, so we ended up seeing lots of burlesque, like this naughty-nun act:

She had a padlock on her g-string. Har. Elsewhere were the aforementioned carnival acts, bands and, in between, stuff like this DJ, with his steampunk rig:

Which brings us to the costumes. As I said, we were the equivalent of Grosse Pointe squares, at least as compared to the Goat Girls:

And Swamp Thing:

Note, just to the left of Swamp Thing — an elevator operator, in the traditional uniform, with zombie makeup. He actually rode the elevator up and down, announcing floors. They really thought of every detail. This lady is a Detroit school teacher who obviously threw her costume together at the last minute:

She’s a MEAP test. This is the time of year for our state’s standardized test. I’m sure it haunts her nightmares, much as Swamp Thing might.

After a couple hours in my riding boots (which are made for riding, not walking) I was happy to just sit and watch the parade flow by.

We left after 1, and things seemed to have hit another gear, but there were still plenty of people left to fly the flag. Theatre Bizarre isn’t so much a party as it is a conceptual art installation that uses all its guests as participants. We’d done our part, and someone else could stay until dawn. This is your correspondent, over and out:

Good lord, but the escaped-animal story gets worse and worse. The numbers are simply appalling — 18 Bengal tigers? There are only about 3,000 left in the wild. Lions are no big loss in that regard (they breed prodigiously in and out of captivity, and are known to get it on through chain-link fences, if need be), but the bears, they hurt my soul. All a grizzly bear wants is a few thousand acres of wild country to go be ursine in, and the thought of one living in a goddamn cage in Muskingum County, only to be dispatched by a sheriff’s deputy, is almost too much to deal with.

I’m declining to read any more idiot comments about the police actions, as well. Even NPR asked, “Why didn’t you tranquilize them?” The sheriff, who’d probably given about 2,000 interviews yesterday, said, “Because we don’t carry tranquilizer guns.” Good answer. Even the Columbus Zoo people, who do carry them, said the job was nearly impossible, from trying to estimate a correct dosage without knowing much more about their quarry other than its species, to the trickier matter of actually hitting one, in the dark, in the rain, in a stressful situation. Evidently the one instance in which they tried to dart a tiger went awry when the tiger responded by turning on the vet, which meant that one had to go, too.

We forget how, on “Wild Kingdom,” the animal runs for a while with the dart hanging out of its butt. Imagine one running into a dark woods. Imagine being the one going in after it. Then stop talking about how they should have just tranquilized those poor beasts. Here’s a comment from the New York magazine site:

How long would it have taken to helicopter wild animal specialists and tranquilizer guns from cleveland or cincinatti, whichever is closer?

Very cinematic image, that. Get some wild-animal specialists — whose numbers I keep in my Rolodex — and chopper ’em in! I see James Franco and Mark Ruffalo, clad in safari grunge, standing on the helipad in Cleveland or Cincinnati — whichever is closer! — with their duffels, ready for the chopper to carry them into the wilds of Muskingum County where, in the middle of the night, they will use their night-vision scopes to, first, identify the beasts, and then expertly shoot them with tranquilizer. From a helicopter.

PILOT: Dammit, I’m telling you, this is too low! I could lose my license!
CHIP SUDBURY, WILDLIFE EXPERT: Just get me a little closer! Do it!

I also note that the city I was raised in, now grown to Ohio’s largest, is still being forgotten. People who’ve never been to Ohio know two cities: Cleveland and Cincinnati (which they can never spell). And that’s it.

Jack Hanna, the emeritus Columbus Zoo director who was widely quoted yesterday, has done more for that institution than any other single person. At the same time, I remember many puffy stories about how he raised many of the zoo animals in his own home, including a tiger, who slept next to his bed for midnight feedings. The parks and rec director, Mel Dodge, raised many of the zoo’s lions that way, too, keeping them as pets until they got too big. I can’t recall the justification for this; maybe it was to acclimate them early to humans, to make them easier to handle? (I do recall the time I was leaving downtown around quittin’ time, gazing emptily at the car in front of me at a light, when a baby lion’s head popped up from the back seat and the cat climbed onto the back deck. Oh, right, I thought — Mel Dodge.) I’m not saying this was bad or irresponsible, but the animals were so cute, and the coverage so unquestioning, that I wonder how many people read it and thought, “I could do that, too.”

Then, as always, there is the Detroit Way:

Which seems as good a pivot point as any to transition to the local angle. May I just ask, in the name of reason and whatever passes for journalistic standards these days, WTF makes Ted Nugent the go-to party for reaction? Not only does he have nothing to do with the story, his only tangential connection is, what? That he, too, shoots guns at animals? Wonderful. He calls it a “downright tragedy” for people to keep wild animals in captivity, to which I reply, well, that is f’in’ rich:

In 1970, Ted Nugent began accumulating wild Michigan hunting ground. That land is now known as SUNRIZE ACRES! This sportsman’s dream now contains 340 acres of perfect big game habitat, rich with wildlife and the Spirit of the Wild. Managed for optimum health and indigenous bio-diversity, Sunrize Acres is home to world-class trophy whitetail deer, wild boar, American buffalo and various exotics.

P.S. It is fenced.

Also, escapes from facilities like this are the reason one of Michigan’s biggest backcountry problems is feral swine. Which the Nuge claims don’t exist.

OK, then. No real bloggage today, mainly because, with Moammar What’s-his-face dead, I’m going to go outside and fire our guns into the air.

Happy Thursday. Watch out for roaming monkeys.

I think Halloween is nailed down, costume-wise: Riding breeches and tall boots, men’s formal shirt (the kind with pleats and studs and thank you, Salvation Army, for providing one already cleaned and pressed), some sort of ascot/tie, my black tail coat and the rabbit mask, which arrived yesterday. Alan’s plague-doctor getup is also ready to go, so if you’re going to The Initiation, wave to the man all in black, escorting the sexually threatening rabbit.

Just checked my old tack trunk. Why yes, my spurs and riding crop are right where I left them. Oh, this should be a blast. I’m told there will be burlesque and sideshow-style geekery on every stage, another one of those odd hipster subcultures that seemingly came from nowhere. Roxi Dlite has been a Theatre Bizarre regular, and was one of the first practitioners of neo-burlesque I saw outside of late-night HBO. I totally get the idea — reclaim striptease from the evil pole-dancers who ruined it. (Striptease : pole dancing :: boxing : mixed martial arts.) I’m just wondering who decided it needed to be done, and how it caught on. New-style burley-Q girls are more likely to live in the body God gave them, and while toned and fit, don’t diet away that last layer of subcutaneous fat that separates men from women.

The geekery I trace back to the Jim Rose Circus, which I first spotted in the ’90s, when they proudly restored the circus sideshow to its former, transgressive, step-right-up glory. I remember attending an actual freak show at the Ohio State Fair as a teenager, watching people with copious facial tumors tell their stories of shame and ostracism, among other things. It seemed wrong then, it seems wrong now, but hey — watch a guy hang a 25-pound weight from his scrotum? That’s entertainment!

Here’s an interview with John Dunivant, the creative force behind Theatre Bizarre, from our local public-radio station. His dream is to someday make a living from his art, and he came close for a while, working on film sets, but the loss of tax incentives put the kibosh on that. Well, at least it’s cheap to live here.

As the hour is drawing late, a quick skip to bloggage:

Today’s OID story is a humdinger, although today the D stands for Downriver, a particular subsection of the Detroit Metro, and once you hear the story you’ll know just what I’m talking about:

Brownstown Township— A Downriver man who knew he was too drunk to drive bragged to gas station attendants that he had a designated driver — his 9-year-old daughter — who ferried him to the station and would drive him home.

Soon after, 39-year-old Shawn Weimer was arrested with his young daughter, booster seat beneath her, at the wheel of a red and white full-size panel van he uses for work.

The little girl is said to have asked the police why she was being pulled over, because she was a good driver.

I guess this story will play as comedy, but I guess the world’s children of alcoholics aren’t laughing. Although I’m snickering at the Starsky and Hutch paint job on the van. I mean, you HAVE to.

I haven’t read Michael Lewis’ exegesis of California finances, but I’m hearing good things about it, if “good” is quite the word for this:

A compelling book called Cal­ifornia Crackup describes this problem more generally. It was written by a pair of journalists and nonpartisan think-tank scholars, Joe Mathews and Mark Paul, and they explain, among other things, why Arnold Schwarze­neg­ger’s experience as governor was going to be unlike any other experience in his career: he was never going to win. California had organized itself, not accidentally, into highly partisan legislative districts. It elected highly partisan people to office and then required these people to reach a two-thirds majority to enact any new tax or meddle with big spending decisions. On the off chance that they found some common ground, it could be pulled out from under them by voters through the initiative process. Throw in term limits—no elected official now serves in California government long enough to fully understand it—and you have a recipe for generating maximum contempt for elected officials. Politicians are elected to get things done and are prevented by the system from doing it, leading the people to grow even more disgusted with them. “The vicious cycle of contempt,” as Mark Paul calls it. California state government was designed mainly to maximize the likelihood that voters will continue to despise the people they elect.

But when you look below the surface, he adds, the system is actually very good at giving Californians what they want. “What all the polls show,” says Paul, “is that people want services and not to pay for them. And that’s exactly what they have now got.”

Wow, there’s a cheery passage. Think I’ll try to find time to read it later. For now, have a swell Tuesday.