I was covering a local candidate forum last night, and missed the latest GOP debate. I understand that in a brilliant move to round up Sarah Palin’s little lost lambs, Rick Perry located the American revolution in the 16th century. Awright. Between this, Herman Cain’s skatting on Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan, Michele Bachmann’s vaccine-caused retardation and the seven or eight embarrassing moments yet to come in the next month, Barry’s got the second term all but sewed up.

Or not. Max Headroom Romney still floats above the fray. Way to pick your opponents, Mittens.

The local forum was put on by our chapter of the League of Women Voters. What mensches those folks are, arranging these deals every year so that none of us need go into the voting booth ignorant. Not that it makes much difference to most people, alas. Every term I discover how much my students — college students — don’t know about participatory democracy. Most of it is a function of simply not having lived very long; they don’t know how city councils work because they have never given a thought to city council, period. Nothing like buying property, paying taxes and having children to pique a person’s interest in public affairs. But I also wonder how much civics education is going on in schools these days. I took it in junior high. Today it might be wrapped into a general social-studies curriculum. I hope some of it is sinking in.

The warm weather will be leaving in a matter of hours, and it’s already cloudy and threatening rain. Leaves are falling like snowflakes, but it sho’ is purty out there.

I have quite a bit of tasty bloggage today, so let’s hop to it, shall we?

Your daily funny: Elizabeth Warren promises revenge vouchers.

Richard Dawkins, one of the most famous atheists in the world, was booked to appear tonight at a local fundraiser for the Center for Inquiry. But he was dropped at the last minute, when organizers learned — yes, learned — that he was an atheist. (From watching Fox News!!!) He’s complaining, but I’d consider myself lucky. If they can’t read a newspaper, they certainly can’t hire a decent caterer.

OID: A city so broke that the power company comes in and repossesses its streetlights. I didn’t think that was even possible.

Rochelle Riley is African-American, so this punchline doesn’t quite work, but it’s close enough for me, after reading this titanically dumb column: What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?

I haven’t been linking to NYT stories as much, knowing most of you can’t get behind the pay wall, but this story was so weird I can’t resist: Remember Professor Irwin Corey? “The world’s foremost authority?” I guess you’d call him a comedian, although as I recall, his schtick was to go on bubbly talk shows like Mike Douglas, Joey Bishop and maybe Carson, where the host would play straight man, asking him questions, which he would answer in long, convoluted bursts of verbiage. (We were so easily amused back then, but as I often think, watching contemporary comedy: It beats semen jokes.)

Anyway, Corey is still alive, lives in New York and is something of a panhandler, only the money he collects is sent to children’s charities in Cuba. He’s 97 years old. You really can’t make this stuff up, can you?

Off to work for me.

Such a freakish October we’ve been having so far. Summerlike temperatures, absolutely perfect weather, and the Lions are 5-0. This is what you might call a textbook lesson in “things that will not last, but should be enjoyed while they do.” Normally I do groundwork for the week ahead on Sunday evenings; instead I had dinner with the Hare Krishnas. I should be at work inside all day today, but odds are, I’m going to get a long bike ride in there somehow. And sooner or later the Lions will lose, but for now? I join my fellow Detroiters in celebrating their winning streak.

I generally confine my criticism of Mitch Albom to his weekly forays into the non-sporting world, mainly because I don’t read his sports columns, mainly because I don’t read sports coverage, period. I had a brief period of reading it, when I was on the copy desk in Fort Wayne, and handled the early-closing pages, i.e., business and sports. My takeaway was that I’d been wrong to feel any sympathy whatsoever for sportswriters who objected to the traditional newsroom moniker for their corner — the Toy Department. For every Frank DeFord or…who’s that funny guy at ESPN? Bill Simmons? Yeah. For every sportswriter like them, with talent and wit and insight, there were two score hacks who earned a living presenting high-school football rivalries as the latter-day equivalent of the Peloponnesian War. Sometimes a very good living. Having edited my share of his columns, I can tell you the downfall of Stephen A. Smith from his sinecure at the Philadelphia Inquirer was one of the very few times in recent memory I thought newspaper management got it right. (EDIT: OK, I was too harsh here. There are many fine sportswriters, and even the hacks work pretty hard, traveling constantly, not seeing their families for days on end. My hat is doffed to their brother- and sisterhood, but there are still plenty of lousy ones.)

So I check in on Mitch’s sports output rarely, but hey, the Lions’ unlikely streak is a bonafide talker outside of sports, so what the heck, and whaddaya know:

Change. On a sports night of epic proportions — playoff baseball team in action, undefeated football team on national TV — it was the Lions who provided the exclamation point, staying perfect by taking down the rival Bears, 24-13, the way they’ve taken down a lot of teams this year, emerging at halftime, righting the sails, sinking the battleship.

“Change” is Albom Trick No. 34, the Dramatic Repetition of Faux-Profundity, right before he swerves off Metaphor Highway and into the Ditch of Hackitude. Of course it was a sports night of “epic proportions,” because like fights of the century, they happen every few months or so. (Note to Mitch’s editors: Epic, in this usage, generally means long. If the Tigers had been playing at home, it’s a word that would have applied to the post-game traffic jams. Then they provide an exclamation point by righting their sails (and as a sailor, I have no idea what that even means) and sinking the battleship. OK, whatever. I bet they all gave 110 percent along the way, too.

No, but this:

From the jump, the human amplifiers in Ford Field were dialed to the point of explosion. The whole first quarter had the feeling of a building on fire. The stands were 5,000 volts of nervous energy. Players soared and crashed furiously. Yellow flags flew so fast you thought they were being thrown by Kevin Bacon at the riotous end of “Animal House.” Stay calm! All is well!

And we move on to exploding amplifiers, burning buildings, 5,000 volts, flying penalty flags, Kevin Bacon (six degrees!) and “Animal House.”

I have sympathy for these guys, I really do. Pity the modern sportswriter, tasked with reporting news everyone already knows — the Lions won in front of a crazy-excited hometown crowd on the first “Monday Night Football” to visit their venue in 37 years. (Wait a minute. Mitch says it’s the first MNF to play in “our city limits” in that time. Surely they made it to the Pontiac Silverdome sometime in that time.) You have to do one of two things — find an angle or story within that no one else is reporting, or convey the man-that-was-a-game feeling of bros at the water cooler the next morning. But he doesn’t have the ease of a Simmons (or the space), and he’s not the craftsman DeFord is, but he’s too much of a superstar to take a risk. He’s used to them holding Page One for him, or a room that falls silent when he enters. He’s Mitch, and we’re not. And so we get this. Well, he was on deadline.

You know what? Today would be a great day to Occupy something. There’s a local protest scheduled, but not until Friday. When it will be raining.

Occupy Detroit — it’s sort of a joke, isn’t it?

Speaking of occupying Detroit, I see today is Elmore Leonard’s 86th birthday. Best wishes to a true Detroit gem, and OMG, it just occurred to me that he won’t live forever, and when he goes, Mitch Albom will write something about him.

Hold me.

Have a happy Tuesday, all. I’m off to ride my bike.

I should have learned by now: When there are no new comments, the Publish function has misfired again. Sorry.

A friend who knows my interest in cycling asked if I’d like to join her and her family for their annual bike trek to the Fisher Mansion for the free Sunday-evening dinner put on by the Hare Krishnas, who now occupy the 1920s-era Mission-style building. Lawrence Fisher was quite the swell, and if the Krishnas’ belief in reincarnation has legs, it’s amusing to think whether he’s somewhere on another spiritual plane, contemplating the scene outside his former home.

Tonight, a birthday party:

Actually, more than one. I think four cakes were presented and sung over. The Hare Krishna birthday song is in the familiar tune, but wishes “Hare Krishna to you,” etc. But there are three verses, the Hare Rama and another I couldn’t identify. Which meant, three verses times four cakes with all the accompanying ceremony, that the food was late. We’d already had an extended discussion with one of the Krishnites, so I felt I’d earned my dal. Alas, no dal. Nothing even Indian, except for a few samosas. Two pasta dishes, a soup of some sort, and birthday cake.

And then the ride home, under the rising full moon. It was chilly, but I banished it with hard pedaling and the mantra: hare krishna hare krishna krishna krishna hare hare hare rama hare rama rama rama hare hare. It made the miles slip by, I’ll say that for it. I also wondered if we have eternal souls, if we must pay a karmic debt for eating animals, as they believe. Strange to think of arriving in hell and greeting a crowd of angry cows, pigs and chickens. (And one goat. But I didn’t know what I was eating!) And a few deer. The HKs don’t do heaven and hell, so I’m mixing my religions here a bit. Forgive me.

One note to the folks in robes: If you turn that abandoned boat down by the canal upside-down, you might observe a dramatic improvement in your mosquito problem. I swatted more than a dozen, increasing my karmic debt only a little.

Oh, and because we mentioned it while we were eating: Steve Jobs used to go to his local Hare Krishna temple for the free food when he was young and poor. It led him to his trips to India, among other things. This was the Steve Jobs Memorial Bike Ride to the Hare Krishna manse.

Sucktastic Monday, so a quick jump to the bloggage:

There’s a year-round haunted-house attraction in Niagara Falls called Nightmares Fear Factory. Evidently there’s a spot on the tour where you get your picture taken. The pictures? Are fantastic. HT: Hank.

The recession is over, but you’re still poor, right? Join the club.

And now, because it’s Goddamn Monday, I must run. Hare Krishna to you all.

We’re having some strange-bedfellows moments where I live, as the governor and a supportive legislature enact various planks of his education-reform package. In large part, they’re cut and pasted from the white-paper library of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, which probably exists, in some form and under a different name, in your state, too — (Name of state) + (policy) + (institute/review/consortium). The Mackinac Center is “non-partisan,” the Indiana Policy Review (for which I once did some work) seeks to “marshall the best thought on governmental, economic and educational issues,” but down the line they’re pretty much doctrinaire Republican, and take their cues from the big boys higher up the food chain, the Hudsons and Hoovers and the like.

(I shouldn’t say they’re doctrinaire Republican, as the relationship is the other way around — the Republicans are doctrinaire free-minds-free-markets think-tank policy photocopiers. Beats workin’.)

Anyway, the governor is pushing his education agenda through a compliant legislature, and it’s ruffling feathers big-time here in this very Republican area. At its heart is the strongly held belief that public education is a shambles, that a big part of the problem is fat, overpaid teachers, and “market solutions” like charter schools are the answer to all our problems.

An early proposal was to make all Michigan schools open to all Michigan students, which sounds very egalitarian and progressive and a whole lot of no-big-deal, as 80 percent of Michigan schools have already voted to make themselves so-called schools of choice. As funding is determined on a per-pupil basis, kids simply arrive with a backpack full of cash and take their seat. This was a lead-balloon idea in Grosse Pointe, however, for a number of reasons. We’re not a schools-of-choice district, and never have been. We already pay higher taxes here, in order to keep our per-pupil spending at a higher level than the state allows, and no one accounted for that in the bill — how would these new arrivals make up the difference? Perhaps by magic. There’s also a strong sense of community and parental involvement in the schools, a shared belief that money alone doesn’t make a school excellent, but rather buy-in by all. And finally, unlike lots of high-quality suburban districts, we are not in exurbia, but hard by, literally across the street from, the worst-performing district in the state. The fear was that open enrollment would mean an influx of badly prepared Detroit students who would need disproportionate teacher attention, etc. And because race is the bass note to every single issue here, some of this fear was based in racism, and I’d never deny that for even a second. But that’s not the whole part of it. I don’t favor schools of choice, either, at least not without a lot of carefully considered conditions that would ameliorate the obvious problems. (Those who think we’re walled in by stacks of money are invited to peruse real-estate listings here, which are extremely affordable — ahem — of late. We also offer a range of rental housing. You can get into our district for well under $1,000 a month in housing costs.)

But I don’t want to get into a detailed discussion of Michigan education policy for you folks, most of whom don’t live here. Rather, I want to think a little about public education, including the foundation of this reform movement — that it’s a bloody mess.

Obviously, it’s not a mess in Grosse Pointe, and it’s not a mess in Carmel, Ind., and it’s not a mess in any number of well-to-do suburban districts. It’s also not a mess in urban schools where an engaged parent base demands excellence, and gets it. (Shoutout to LAMary here.) It’s not even a mess in a place like Fort Wayne, which has a student body across the economic spectrum, and generally does a good job with them. It can be admittedly difficult to navigate in many cities — you have to know which schools are the ones you want, and know the teachers down to a dossier level — but when we talk about failing public education, we’re mainly talking about a handful of dysfunctional, chaotic big-city districts like Detroit, Chicago and the like. And I’m not even sure it’s failing there. Rather, I think the schools are simply where we’re seeing the manifestations of a decimated middle and working class.

I think a lot about what I’m paying for here in Grosse Pointe. What does my education dollar buy? A huge chunk, at least half, buys an engaged public, period — parents who value education and support it with their behavior and lifestyles. They read books, feed nutritious meals, use correct grammar and tell their children from an early age that college isn’t an option. Another big chunk is for excellent teachers. We just had back-to-school night, and I was impressed by nearly all of Kate’s teachers this term, from geometry to gym. Since enrolling her in second grade, I can count the clinkers on one hand, no, three fingers. And even they were only clinkers in the sense that they were merely competent, falling short of talented. I don’t begrudge any of them a dime of their salaries; teaching is an exhausting job. I think the next-largest chunk is for the physical plant — pleasant schools, current textbooks, contemporary technology, bathrooms with toilet paper. (And may I just say? Anyone who says throwing money at the problem doesn’t improve education hasn’t been in an affluent public school lately, where so much money is thrown around great wads of cash blow down the halls like tumbleweeds. SMART boards, new computers — and you haven’t even stuck your head in the auditorium yet.)

The rest is spent in dribs and drabs, but by and large, I feel like I’m getting full value for my education tax dollar. Detroit, on the other hand, is feeling the effects of all the social chaos that plagues the city — poverty, single parenthood, substance abuse. I volunteered for a year in an after-school program a while back, and saw with my own eyes the kids who struggled with simple arithmetic, with the difference between a noun and a pronoun, with finding a clean shirt and stick of deodorant in the morning. One night I was asked to drop off a trio of siblings at home, as yet another crisis in their crisis-ridden lives had derailed transportation that day. The eldest directed me down a typical Detroit street — streetlights out, half the houses gone and half of the remaining ones abandoned — until I got to a bungalow so dark I hesitated to let them out of the car. “It’s fine,” the kid said, and walked onto the porch, where he pulled open the door and let out the light inside. They were living behind plywood. Of course.

And the answer to this, the various public-policy think tanks tell us, is? Charter schools! Market solutions! Choice!

By the way, Detroit is already riddled with charter schools; the idea parents have no choice in alternatives to the building on the corner — or several corners away, depending on what’s closed lately — is a joke.

Here’s another: The governor, a wealthy man, sends his children to private schools. I am done listening to his ideas for public education. The charter-school movement is yet another flavor of the month designed to neuter teachers’ unions and transfer public resources into private hands. That the people pushing it think we’re too stupid to see this makes me wonder where they went to school.

OK, enough rant. I have to go meet with my own students, and I have work to do. Bloggage:

Like all Michiganders, I look forward to my new sense of safety and freedom, now that I will be allowed to carry a concealed Taser.

Detroitblogger John — I wish he’d just use his regular name, now that he’s been outed as John Carlisle — on the people who beg in Detroit. What works, what doesn’t.

For me, it’s breakfast time. Happy Wednesday, all.

Our local science museum is closed, allegedly temporarily, although the light is growing dim. The institution’s financial problems are broad, deep and rather simple — it doesn’t have any. Money, that is. It can’t borrow, as it’s already tapped out a line of credit and defaulted on a loan. You think to yourself, how could things have gotten so bad?

No simple answer, but the biggest chunk? Bad management. Also, those stupid mummies.

The billboards for the “Accidental Mummies of Guanajuato” exhibit were everywhere for a while. I seem to recall they emphasized the actual human corpses!!! angle, and coming so soon after the museum hosted one of those Chinese real-bodies exhibits, I wondered if I couldn’t spin it into an essay for someone, as it seemed so obvious that was the hook.

For those who’ve never been to one, the Chinese exhibits — Body Worlds, Bodies: The Exhibition, one or two others — were a gimmicky attraction a while back. It used a technique called “plastination” to put a whole cemetery full of corpses on display, many with baroque cutaways revealing various internal systems. All the specimens were Chinese, which led to obvious questions about provenance, as they say in the art world. Patrons were assured all was on the up-and-up, that the individuals had donated their bodies to science willingly, and don’t give it another thought. On the other hand, no one ever saw a signed release, either.

I snuck away to see it while chaperoning a field trip with Kate’s fourth-grade class. I found it…interesting. Not terribly ghoulish, but not without a distinct whiff of it, either. (“There is no odor,” an elderly docent assured us as we rode an elevator to the special floor, the same briefing where we were handed the donated-to-science story.) There were moments of strange beauty — I recall a circulatory system standing alone like a red cloud — and others I found unnecessary, like the preserved fetuses. But OK, I saw it, cross that one off the list.

When the bodies were followed by the mummies, it seemed to bespeak a trend. Further reading was appalling. The mummies were “accidental” because they’d been interred in above-ground burial niches in a particular mountain town, where the combination of high heat and low humidity dessicated them quickly. They were discovered when families could no longer pay a municipal grave tax, and the bodies were evicted from not-so-final resting places. They were collected for the exhibit the old-fashioned way, with pesos.

The show was gussied up with material about life in a 19th-century Mexican village and other cultural displays, but the attraction was the bodies themselves. To me, this was a distinct call-and-raise on Chinese political prisoners; come look at bodies of people who could be the parents or grandparents of living people, with no real science attached beyond the stuff that could be covered in a paragraph.

And the Detroit Science Center actually curated this thing, dumping $1 million into it in hopes it would be a moneymaker when it went on the road, but there was a lawsuit, and so far it’s only opened in one other city (Dallas), and it didn’t do so well there, either.

I don’t have a particularly Catholic view of human remains. When the soul, if any, departs, our bodies are just 100-plus pounds of inconvenient meat. But I think we have the right to determine what happens to our meat afterward, and I bet all those Mexican folks had no idea they’d be put in a traveling sideshow. It was maybe a bridge too far.

So, bloggage?

Of all the things I thought would sink Rick Perry, I never thought it would be the casual racism of his family’s hunting-camp moniker, but whatever. As in most questions about racial issues, I turn to Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I think he has this one about right.

Meanwhile, as is often the case, Cooz offers us some musical accompaniment, with apologies to John Prine:

When I was a young pol my family would travel
to a corner of Texas where the ranches once lay
There’s a big n… rock we couldn’t flip over
so we paid us some n…cowhands to paint it one day

Repeat chorus.

If you missed this yesterday, don’t.

A beautiful day is shaping up outside, and I have errands to run, which I think I will do on the bike. So I’m outta here, all.

The talk surrounding Ken Burns’ “Prohibition” dislodged a memory from my earliest days as a newspaper columnist, when I wrote about the Women’s Christian Temperance Union of Jay County, Ind.

This would have been…1984? Not a day later than ’85, certainly. And the WCTU, one of the driving forces behind a century-old social movement almost universally believed to have been a terrible mistake, was still alive and kicking. Even considering that Jay County was decades behind the times, it was surprising.

More surprising was the meeting itself — the members not as old as I expected, but the form of it, the structure, was 19th century. There was a sermonette, a short two-woman play, ending with a call to take the White Ribbon Pledge, a promise to not only live a life of abstinence from intoxicating liquor, but to raise one’s children the same way. I don’t recall if fathers were mentioned, although surely they must have been. The message, however, was that alcohol was yet another mess made by men, to be cleaned up by women.

Those who read “Last Call” know the material in last night’s episode of “Prohibition,” how many parallels exist between that time and ours, not the least of which was the conflict between urban and rural America. Jay County is pretty rural, with a few small towns here and there. The people I’ve known from places like this, the ones who had problem drinkers in their families, describe a pattern of imbibing that more closely resembles crack cocaine than convivial tippling at the local tavern — crack seal, pour glass, repeat until violent, abusive or unconscious.

(Terry Ryan’s father, as described in her most excellent memoir, “The Prize Winner of Defiance, Ohio,” followed this model as well.)

So it’s not surprising that, faced with this level of consumption, eventually the pendulum swung as far as the Volstead Act. I haven’t seen the documentary yet, but as I recall, much is made in the early chapters of how much Americans drank in the years leading to its passage; visiting Europeans were staggered by it. It was a way to avoid dodgy water supplies and blunt the pain of daily existence, which was grim in both cities and towns — back-breaking labor in farm or factory, a child every year, and of course, a terrible war that stacked bodies like cordwood without resolving much of anything. Average consumption then was about three times what it is now, if I remember correctly.

I’ve been doing some reading on college binge drinking, and it has a ring of familiarity — the pounding of shots, consumption with the goal of getting as ripped as possible as soon as possible. It sounds positively…rural.

Those who watched last night — what did you think? Did it make you want to take the White Ribbon Pledge?

So. Monday. I HAVE to change my life. I never have time for anything, especially on Monday. And Tuesday. And, increasingly, most of the other days, too.

Bloggage? Some:

Jim at Sweet Juniper has a photography show coming up. More buildings, I gather, like this one. Never seen that …place before. I bet it’s seen its share of shot-pounding.

On the subject of obesity, a weight-loss story to inspire you on a Monday.

After almost a year of carrying the bag, I turned concert-chaperone duty over to Alan Friday night; he took Kate and a friend to see Wavves down at the Magic Stick. I asked him for the report and he said, “Very young crowd, very intense. I was trying to find Kate up at the front, and the next thing I know, she goes surfing past me.” He got out the camera for the second pass, but she never made one. Fortunately, someone was packing video. I asked, “Do you do that often?” She said, “I needed to get to the back, and that was the fastest way.” I guess. Just try not to get dropped on your head, OK?

For the first time in ages, Alan and I are going to a Halloween party. Actually, we’re going to a killer Halloween party, Theatre Bizarre’s “The Initiation” at the Masonic. Costumes are mandatory. The ticket says those that obscure identity entirely are preferred. So. Hmm.

Alan, ninja shopper, immediately hit Etsy and fell hard for the plague doctor getups. He likes the idea of placing aromatic herbs in the snout to cleanse the miasma from the air, probably a good idea among the throngs at the Masonic.

As for me, he suggested this rabbit mask, perhaps worn with my black wool tail coat and my riding boots, for a March hare vibe, although I think it would also be arresting with a black velvet cocktail dress I might be able to wedge myself into. The price is ridiculous, but we’ve had a little good fortune lately, and I could justify it as an art purchase, as I’d certainly hang it on the wall afterward. Who doesn’t want a demonic leather rabbit face looking down on them in the living room?

Looking through the rest of the offerings from this particular shop, I wonder what sexual proclivity I might be advertising with my rabbit mask, unbeknownst to me. The rabbit is a symbol of fertility, after all. I’d hate to be followed home by some sort of Furry variant.

The Theatre Bizarre documentary trailer is online, and is entertaining, although you are warned of an outburst of profanity toward the end, so — NSFW, unless you’re using headphones. But some great imagery.

Sweet, sweet Friday. I thought you’d never get here. Only about three hours of assorted this ‘n’ that, and then the rest of you is mine-all-mine. The school year schedule has settled in, with a couple of new activities that virtually guarantee I will never nap again. Although Kate is the one I feel for — her homework load is ridiculous. On back-to-school night the counselor said two hours is standard for a student with a basic course load, and add an hour for honors classes. Her extracurricular is music, but not at school; she was prohibited from auditioning for jazz band because she’s not enrolled in the music program. (During what hour of the day? I wondered.) So she’s doing the youth program at the DSO, which is going to be great, but is demanding at a whole new level.

I guess it’s pointless to object, because this is The Way Things Are These Days, but it still bugs me. Every so often I read something worrying about the things teenagers can see on TV these days. TV? If your kid has time to watch TV for longer than a few minutes at a time, he’s not doing his homework.

So. Before I leave, a few words about fat.

When Mark Bittman wrote, the other day, that the campaign against fast food will have to be conducted at the cultural level and patterned after the one against smoking, I shifted in my seat a little. That’s partly because I enjoy an Egg McMuffin from time to time, and also because if you’re waging war against corporations in the name of public health, the collateral damage is going to be human.

Many fat people will tell you their condition is the last acceptable prejudice, and I don’t doubt it. People who would drive nails through their tongues before allowing it to speak the word “nigger” have no problem casting casual slurs at fat people, seeing it not as a thing one cannot change but as a character flaw. They have a point. We all know how to lose weight, and to the extent we don’t, well, it’s our choice. I’d argue that we all have character flaws, and if we’re lucky, they’re not visible to the world. We watch baroque pornography online, or harbor vile thoughts about others. We’re wearing our special underwear right now. We cheat on our taxes. We stole our best friend’s girlfriend, or maybe we just had a quickie that one time. We dream, late at night, about getting in the car, draining the bank accounts, and heading west without a word to those left behind.

This is all prompted by a discussion I find not just ridiculous but offensive, i.e., is Chris Christie too fat to be president? Michael Kinsley:

He is just too fat. Maybe, if he runs for president and we get to know him, we will overlook this awkward issue because we are so impressed with the way he stands up to teachers’ unions. But we shouldn’t overlook it — unless he goes on a diet and shows he can stick to it. … Controlling what you eat and how much is not easy, and it’s harder for some people than for others. But it’s not as difficult as curing a chemical addiction. With a determined, disciplined effort, Christie could thin down, and he should — because the obesity epidemic is real and dangerous. And the president inevitably sets an example.

There are many reasons to think Christie shouldn’t be president, but this isn’t one of them. And oh, I know — I’ve chuckled at fat-Rush Limbaugh jokes with the rest of you. And I laffed out loud at Cooz’s most recent expression of lyrical genius, filed just moments ago. But I’m going to decline to participate in the fat-bashing this time.

(Oh, and Michael Kinsley? How casually you state that fixing disordered eating patterns is less difficult than “curing” a chemical dependency. You quit heroin by not taking heroin ever again. A fat person trying to lose weight still has to eat. A while back my health-care searching kicked up a story out of Australia, in which a number of fashionistas told the truth and nothing but the truth about what they eat. One drinks hot water all day long before sitting down to a 1,200-calorie dinner. Another confesses to taking a daily over-the-counter cold medicine, because her doctor told her it would boost her metabolism by a tiny amount. That’s as fucked-up as any McDonald’s habit.)

Let’s end the fat hate. Just for a while, to see how we like it. And because I’m not totally dour on the subject, I’d like to unearth one of my favorite SNL sketches of all time, Bill Clinton at McDonald’s:

I love it because it gets to the truth about both Clinton and so many fat people — they are that way because their appetites, for everything, are large. I always thought Clinton’s fondness for chunk-making food was an expression of his essential generosity and love of people. Not to mention salt and grease.

So, some quick bloggage:

Lance Mannion considers Archbishop Timothy Dolan, darlin’ of the right.

You all were right about Officer Pepper Spray yesterday; I just wasn’t keeping up with the story. Jon Stewart takes it one step further.

And now, I’m off to (almost) start the weekend. Enjoy yours.

I’m missing the TEDxDetroit event as we speak. I came down to the wire on my reservation before finally taking a look at my calendar and saying, eh, not this year. Last year’s event was a mixed bag, to be expected in a daylong conference, but by the end, I grew tired of marketers with jokey, goofy websites that describe themselves as “networking ninjas,” not to mention many conceptual artists and anyone with “incubator” or “empower” on their resume.

Last year’s event ran the gamut from Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. to some woman who, as near as I could tell, was a presenter because she runs an aerobics studio that uses Bollywood film-score music as the soundtrack. When she led the stage in a group dance to “Jai Ho,” I checked my watch, noted the lovely day in progress outside, and left.

I wish the conference well. Might try to watch it on the live stream.

I see Fort Wayne had a TED this year. Glancing at the speakers list, looks like a lot of the same phenomenon. Well, Nathan Myhrvold has only so many dates on his calendar.

Today is the last ridonkulous day of my week. If I can motor through it, tomorrow should be an improvement, and Friday a downright coast. We’ll see. In the meantime, a little bloggage:

In today’s Daily Snicker, a headline that would go a long way toward making me forgive the Free Press for Mitch Albom.

David Letterman’s Top 10 Chris Christie fat jokes. Eh, not funny enough.

I’m pleased to report that only one person in my Facebook network copied and pasted THAT STUPID ALL-CAPS THING ABOUT FACEBOOK CHARGING. (Favorite line: IT’S TRUE THIS WAS ON THE NEWS.) I would only like to point out that Facebook already charges. And they’re the ones getting the better end of the deal.

A final word: Amazon just sent me another gift card, my monthly skim from you kind people, shopping through the Kickback Lounge. It’s never a lot of money — $38.82 this month — but it’s always enough to remind me how lucky I am to have such great readers. Of course the money is re-spent with Amazon, which gives me cool things to read and talk about here, contributing to a loop of wonderfulness. Thanks to all of you who take the time to do so.

Mariam Charara, one of my students from last year, got married in May, and as part of their engagement-photo package, she and her fiancé Hussein, both avid Red Wings fans, took some pictures at the Joe:

As you can see from the brand, it got them named the team’s official Facebook fans of the day yesterday. The last I checked, 850 people “liked” the photo, and 89 had left comments. Eighty-eight were cheery and supportive. One wasn’t:

I don’t like. I see this as a provocation. Arabs will never integrate themselves into the american culture, believe me. When they will be numerous, Arabs will try to impose their culture to America, and when you will become aware, it will be too late. So wake up. We had the same problem in France, and now… it’s too late.

Actually, this is probably good news. One jerkoff among 90 hockey fans? The Pope himself might call that a miracle. To me, it’s a reflection of the utterly unremarkable nature of the scene; you see young women like Mariam all over the area, and all over the sports venues. When I took Kate to a Tigers game a few years ago, we sat behind a father with three daughters, each wearing a team jersey and hijab in matching colors.

And it’s too funny to imagine someone could look at a picture of a Lebanese-American woman dressed in a Red Wings jersey and blue jeans, capering in front of their arena, and draw the conclusion that Arabs are trying to impose their culture on the U.S. Because of course this is a very common sight in Beirut.

Mariam’s career goal, by the way, is to be the first hijab-wearing hockey beat writer in the NHL, and my guess is, she’ll make it.

I have about six hours of work to fit into a four-hour bag, so I’m going to have to get out of here. A few quick blogends:

From one of Sweet Juniper’s side blogs: Urchin with puppies.

Something Gawker is indispensable for: Telling me about parts of the internet I would never visit, but still want to be briefed on.

One reason to give Barack Obama a second term. There is no way Mrs. Mitt Romney will turn herself out like this.

Ta ta.

I can’t tell you enough what a good time Saturday’s Tour de Troit was, even though I rode all by my little lonesome, the other two-thirds of my family SO busy with THEIR lives they couldn’t be bothered to rise at dawn and take a three-hour bike ride with mom. But so what? I do lots of things alone, and found plenty of people to talk to among the 4,000 or so rolling along with me. The weather was perfect and the route was great — Detroit high to low, crack houses to manor houses, with a lap of Belle Isle and a crisp McIntosh apple thrown in. And lunch. With beer. None of which I drank, as it was 11 a.m. and I had a day of chores ahead. So I found a table of thirsty-looking guys, and gave them my final food and drink tickets.

I should have given my extra ticket to Dexter. He could have put one of his 37 specialized bikes into the van, driven up and rolled on out with me. Would have been a crazy early start for a night owl like him, though. Maybe next time.

I just realized what-all my week will entail, looked at my calendar and groaned. If I miss a day this week, don’t bother with search parties. It’s just me, exhausted and weeping, trying to make a 50-hour week run with five hours of sleep, nightly.

But so we can get it started in the same fashion it will likely end, how about a bunch of tossed-off bloggage?

We seem to be on a capital-punishment jag here, so one more, a column about what it was like to be in the crowd outside Troy Davis’ execution. Sounds a lot like the Tim McVeigh death carnival in 2001, i.e. a reporter-to-protestor ratio of about 10:1, and not much news to report other than, “it’s going to happen in two hours” and “it happened 20 minutes ago.”

It did jog my memory, however, to when my friend Ron French (with whom I worked at TimFest) covered an execution of a Michigan man in Florida, years previous. There’s a wire-service reporter at those things who, like the Atlanta reporter linked above, has seen more men lose their lives than an infantryman in a war zone. The protestors, pro and con, all know one another, shake hands and ask after one another’s kids. They keep their signs in their car trunks, and some of them are looking a little worn out.

The wire-service reporter told a story about how, back in the electric-chair days, the liner on the chair’s cap finally wore out, probably from overuse. It’s a sea sponge which is saturated in salt water before it’s fitted on the condemned man’s head, and aids in conducting the charge through the body. When it wore out, some genius at the prison, probably looking to save taxpayer dollars, replaced it with a common cellulose sea sponge. Which burst into flames during the event, upsetting everyone and very likely hastening the era of lethal injection.

A few of you have asked, in the past, what my problem is with Jennifer Granholm, who always looked so smart and presentable on “Meet the Press” while she was governor of Michigan. I think my Wayne State colleague Jack Lessenberry gets to the heart of it in his review of what seems to be her laughably awful memoir. A friend of mine suggested some staged readings might be fun to do, and with passages like this, of course I’m waving my hand in the air, volunteering to play Jenny:

Actually, the book, which is subtitled The Fight for Jobs and America’s Economic Future, is so appallingly bad it is weirdly fascinating, starting with the weird, stilted dialogue it claims were real conversations, mainly between husband and wife.

What they actually sound like are Ayn Rand characters who have learned a whole lot of psychobabble. (“His words finally pierced my hard, self-pitying armor. It was my ego that was sucking me down.” Finally, she told him “Thanks for caring so much.”)

Mark Bittman takes on the “junk food is cheaper than broccoli” canard and finds: No, it’s not. This is not exactly a state secret, which we’ve discussed here many times before — oh, my little smartlings, you make this job so rewarding — but I have to pull back at his solution, which is to turn Mickey D’s into the new Philip Morris. Just what the culture war needs: Another front.

Finally, one for Cooz: A chapter from North Carolina’s history of social engineering, i.e., aggressive sterilization programs for the poor, feeble-minded and, of course, promiscuous. The reveal is who presided over these programs for decades — one Wallace Kuralt, father of Charles the Beloved.

And now I must get moving. Happy week to you. As for me, I just hope to endure it, and make a few deadlines.