The weather gave us a break the last couple of days. All my friends were making jokes on Facebook about that odd glowing orb in the sky. Ha ha. I took advantage and did my usual one-hour cruise from my house to Mariner Park in Detroit and back. No one was exercising their pit bull in the field, but the fishing plaza was full, as usual. Someone had their car parked with the doors open, playing old-skool:

You can see why it’s a popular place. The marina to the northeast is in Grosse Pointe Park’s Windmill Pointe Park, for my money the best of the six residents-only parks in the GP. I can’t go there without an invitation — when they say residents-only, they mean it — but I’ve been there enough to get, y’know, a feel of the place. It includes a pool, fitness center, movie theater, etc. Mariner Park doesn’t even have a bathroom, but I have never visited when people weren’t having a good time. People bring hibachis and coolers and sometimes cook the fish fresh out of the water. Hard to go wrong with that.

That whole area down there is great to explore. Much of it is standard dilapidated Detroit ghetto, but even here, it’s location, location, location, and there are many hidden gems down there. I gasped when I first saw this one, a little bit of Newport Beach in the frost belt. It’s on Harbor Island Road, a one-block stretch that is indeed an island, surrounded by canals, reachable by one bridge. The residents could probably gate it if they wanted. Most of it is far more modest housing than this, with a community garden at the end.

This city, it is a complicated place. Not everything is as it seems. I was pleased to get out and see a bit of it yesterday. Today it’s rainy and overcast again. Balls.

But get out I must, so I will leave you with some bloggage that will tie you up all day:

Nearly 100 fantastic pieces of journalism from 2010, much of which you probably missed. I know I did. Who can keep up with the information barrage? And still, somehow Kim Kardashian pushes her way through. Go figure. Anyway, quality stuff there. You’ll like something in it, I promise.

Is there actually a restaurant in Los Angeles called Pink Taco? And people eat there? Ew.

I didn’t watch the GOP debate last night. Did you? What did I miss? I’m intrigued by this frame grab; are they all pledging allegiance, or what?

That’s it for me, today. Sorry. Friday morning is as busy as Mondays lately. Have a great weekend.

Bad news yesterday — both of the classes I’ve been teaching this year failed to fill for summer term, so I’m not exactly out of work, but my patchwork quilt of income sources just developed a large hole. My income stream lost a tributary, making it more of an income rill. (Rill: a small stream; a shallow channel cut in the ground by running water.) It’s not all that much money, but teaching was one of those things that tended to push other income-earning activities out of the way. In the spinning plates of my career, my freelance-writing plates are wobbling badly; now I have to run back there and give them another push. Just as I get them back up to speed, it’ll be time to teach again, assuming the courses fill in the fall.

Position wanted: Writer who knows what a rill is, plus facility with antique metaphors like plate-spinning and patchwork quilts, seeks paid employment. New and old-media expertise with portfolio that covers journalism to marketing, books to explainer copy in museum displays. Jane of all trades involving a pen.

Better get started on that Critical Mass piece.

Do you have Critical Mass in your city? Doing a little research on it the last few days, I’m amazed at the diversity of its impact. I first heard of it via Jon Carroll’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle some years back, and I gather the Bay area is where it was born. Much of cycling culture has its roots there, and Critical Mass rises out of a certain obnoxiousness born out of unpleasant encounters with cars. We can go back and forth on this and probably will, but it’s fair to say that in cities like San Francisco, or Chicago, New York and a handful of others, motorists and cyclists are the Israelis and Palestinians of transportation, and Critical Mass is a monthly intifada, a deliberate traffic jam of hundreds of cyclists moving through them on a rush-hour Friday, blowing lights, in yo face, saying, essentially, Fuck you.

My school of thought says obnoxiousness is no attitude for diplomacy, but I went on the Critical Mass ride anyway. I can explain rationalize: The Detroit ride is at 7 p.m., not 4:30, an hour when Friday-night Detroit is largely deserted. Our knot of 100 or so made for a pretty small peloton, and I’d be shocked if anyone in a car was delayed for more than one extra cycle of a traffic light.

And man, it was fun. Illegal fun, perhaps, but on the grand continuum of all the illegal fun being had in Detroit on the last Friday of any month, blowing through lights on a bicycle doesn’t even rate.

Breakin’ the law: It’s all relative.

So, bloggage:

I’m continuing to go through the bin Laden mop-up stories, and find nearly all of them fascinating. A sub-sub-ancillary story was the fake Martin Luther King Jr. quote, and this Q-and-A with the woman whose innocent Facebook status update started it all might be worth your time, if that sort of thing interests you. It only interests me in terms of my career as a tester of internet-related bullshit. I guess I’d be suspicious if anyone quoted MLK to me outside of the “content of our character” chestnut, but most of my Facebook friends know better.

I know one of our loyal commenters — I’m looking at you, 4dbirds — is a poker player. Getta loada this. We are all laid low by our vices, one way or another. (And may I just say? Why do lamestream media sites waste FTEs on internet-culture reporters, i.e., the person whose job it is to stay online all day long and report on the Shiba Inu puppies? They will never beat Adrian Chen at Gawker at this game. He is the Dexter Filkins of the internet.)

Eric Z. remembers another daring raid approved by a president — which didn’t go so well.

Ha ha. I promise, no Rickroll or Linda Blair devil-face at the end.

Finally, I keep forgetting to post this, which I shot with my now-obsolete HD Flip camera last weekend, at the Dorais Velodrome in Detroit, reclaimed from nature last summer by the Mower Gang. I could be wrong, but I suspect this was another renegade event, held in a city where doing these sorts of things is so, so easy. Which is one reason I love it. This was the “tiny triathlon,” three laps on the bike, one lap on foot, and finish through the flooded infield.

Off to earn a living. More or less.

Bumper stickers expressing this sentiment are pretty common around here. Most aren’t this obnoxious.

Oh, look: The long form is here! This will certainly put an end to birther foolishness once and for all. Let’s check… oh, let’s just drop in on a random site to see how the reaction is. How about Facebook?

Must have taken all this time to “produce” it.

OK, well, that’s not a surprise, is it? Now we can move on to the Afterbirther* movement, who will clamor for a sample of the president’s placenta, as well as a small amount of amniotic fluid, just to put the question to rest once and for all.

* “Afterbirthers” — an Onion story. But you believed it, for a minute, didn’t you?

Because yesterday was a killer and today will be the same, how about some good odds, ends and bloggage? Yesterday it occurred to me my phone might work better if I stripped out some of the old crap cluttering up the innards. I trashed most of the pictures. Here’s one I deleted — my husband with a pair of underpants on his head:

He doesn’t normally wear underpants on his head, but the metadata on the photo tells the story: Taken April 16, 2010. He was scraping and painting the boat bottom, an annual chore. He puts blown-elastic boxer shorts on his head to keep the paint dust out of his ears. If anyone at the boat yard thinks it’s odd, they don’t say anything.

It isn’t just Michigan that lost ground in the 2000s. A Dayton Daily News project looks as the “lost decade” in numbers, and they’re pretty scary:

Since 2000, Ohio’s total annual private payroll dropped by $22 billion, the examination found, a devastating economic implosion that hit every aspect of Ohio’s economy — from grocery stores, restaurants and retail to government budgets and beyond. As one telling indicator, the Ohio Department of Education said the proportion of youngsters receiving federally subsidized school lunches has reached a record high of four for every 10 students.

It’s the same old story:

Driving the lopsided trade is that the Chinese value their currency far below its true value, under-pricing U.S. goods. And that’s not all. Protracted trade disputes that threaten even more local jobs have ensnared key Miami Valley industrial employers such as NewPage and AK Steel.

“I have told one Chinese delegation after another that we don’t like the fact that you manipulate your currency,” (Gov. John) Kasich said in his State of the State address. “And it will stop.”

Really? It will? Send me a postcard.

I don’t follow sports much, although I should, given the amount of public money showered on these zillionaire team owners. But I appreciate a good sneery rant as much as the next gal, and this one, about Frank McCourt, former owner of the L.A. Dodgers, is pretty good:

Frank McCourt bought the Dodgers, a team he couldn’t afford, using money he didn’t have. In a deal that only could’ve happened in the 2000s, McCourt got a $145 million loan from Fox—the Dodgers’ previous owner—to purchase the team, using his parking lots in Boston as collateral. (McCourt defaulted on the loan, and Fox sold the lots.) The team, meanwhile, accrued more than $400 million in debt from 2004 to 2009. In perhaps the most egregious example of McCourt-style accounting, the owner charged his team rent to play in its own stadium, with the proceeds being used to pay the family’s personal bills.

In other words, Frank McCourt was just like every other rich jerk in recession-era America, not to mention the owners of the Mets and the Rangers. The Dodgers fiasco has allowed me to see the greed that caused the financial crisis up close. I don’t have massive investments, and I sold my house before the market crashed. Luckily, I didn’t have a ton to lose in this recession. Instead, I watched someone gamble hundreds of millions that weren’t his, on a baseball team I love, and come up snake eyes.

Via Hank, a great read that should be subtitled: You want the glamorous life of an author? Enjoy one writer’s remembrance of his Uncle Bill, who published 25 books you’ve never heard of:

Bill took great delight in turning any family occasion into a debacle, which I appreciated, kind of:

Florida, 1968–Family vacation. We climb a tower at a scenic overlook. When everyone else is climbing down, Bill grabs me by the ankles and hangs my scrawny, seven-year-old ass, Pip-like, above the Everglades. When I scream and squirm like a psychotic shrimp, he tells me now you know what it feels like to be scared.

Extremely entertaining read, with much truth within.

Tom & Lorenzo on another Michelle Obama outfit, but you should click through for the photos of Malia at the White House Egg Roll, who is apparently growing into a willowy beauty with an inseam as long as her father’s. When did these children do all this growing, says the woman who just went through three years of iPhone photos.

Finally, for you Detroiters: There’s a Critical Mass bike ride Friday night IF IT EVER STOPS RAINING, followed the next day by races at the Dorais Velodrome, both of which I plan to attend IF IT EVER STOPS RAINING. Details here.

But I don’t think it ever will. Stop raining, that is. On to the Mangle. Happy Wednesday, all.

Well, finally: Spring came in with a great gust of southwesterly breezes. They promised us warmth, but warned it would be mitigated by storms. Instead, the storms were pushed far off to the north, and we got — mirabile dictu — sun. I’m writing with the windows open. I should be outside, but I was already outside plenty, earlier. Got the bike out and rode far enough and fast enough to induce a little fatigue in the legs; ate a hot dog from the grill for lunch; opened the windows. Now I’m getting a jump on tomorrow, because tomorrow will be Monday.

Still, it felt like a full weekend, in the sense that I got a few things done and mostly stayed away from the computer. Got a big chunk of the way into “Super Sad Love Story,” had many naps and cooked a little. Alan and I had planned to enjoy Detroit Restaurant Week Friday night, but nothin’ doin’ — when this town wakes up, it wakes up all at once, and you couldn’t get a table anywhere for love or money, not with the Wings in town and Opening Day and the symphony coming back from a long strike and about a million other things afoot downtown. We ended up at our Mexican taqueria, followed by a couple beers at P.J.’s Lager House with a few dozen drunken baseball fans. And it was fun, because Detroit is fun like all winter-bound towns are, once winter finally goes away.

Milwaukee has a festival pretty much every weekend throughout the summer, because warmth + beer = party.

What did I drink Friday night? Bell’s Oberon. Cuz duh.

The Times did a nice job with the symphony’s return, and I give the writer credit for knowing a few simple facts about Detroit-the-city and Detroit-the-metro-area, but I stumbled over this:

The city’s decline has sapped donations and ticket sales. Its reputation keeps some wealthy suburbanites away. “Downtown is still a tough ticket for people,” Mr. Slatkin said in an interview. “It has some frightening images.”

Much bitterness remains. “I resent what’s gone down,” said Joseph Striplin, a Detroit native who has played violin in the orchestra since 1972. He blamed board members and orchestra executives, “a mix of politically reactionary right-wing figures who never saw a union they didn’t hate” and a leadership with a “distorted vision of what a symphony orchestra should be.”

I guess “some” wealthy suburbanites are afraid to come downtown to park in a guarded garage a couple blocks from the freeway, and walk a few dozen yards, among throngs of other concertgoers, to the front door of the DSO’s lovingly restored concert hall, but it’s hard to imagine who they might be, as well as where they’ll get their classical music otherwise.

As for the angry Mr. Striplin, he’d have a better argument deriding their fiscal management; one of the biggest millstones hanging over the organization is the debt for last decade’s construction binge. But that was a different time here, and it was before I got here, so I’ll reserve judgment. (Although I think he’s got a point. It’s amazing how many people think artists should work free, or for close to it. Even top-tier players like the DSO.)

Oh, well. Let’s move on. Feral swine are taking over the state. That link goes to a column from a agriculture-industry poobah, which means the numbers are probably inflated significantly. But he’s certainly right that there’s a problem here, and it’s getting worse, and guess where it started:

Before a few hunt clubs began importing the nonnative species into Michigan, it was a problem we associated only with places like Texas and the South. Now, herds of feral swine — each averaging around 300 pounds — wreak havoc by destroying land and damaging important crops and plants.

Thanks, Ted Nugent! He owns at least one of the canned-hunt concerns that bear responsibility for wild pigs gaining a beachhead in Michigan. Clubs turned these critters loose on their fenced holdings for their members to “hunt.” A highly adaptable and intelligent species known for its prodigious digging skills; what, really, could have possibly gone wrong?

Mr. Whack ’em and Stack ’em thinks the problem is exaggerated. Let’s put him on a cruise, eh?

Speaking of which, the coverage of the Kid Rock cruise appears to be winding up. Verdict: A huge disappointment. So much potential, yet the stories read like it was covered by telephone. I was hoping for a rock ‘n’ roll version of “Down the Volga on the Ship of Fools,” P.J. O’Rourke’s account of touring the Soviet Union with a group lured through an ad in The Nation.

Alan said of the cruise, “I would have thrown myself overboard by the 15th woooooooo.” And yet, no wooooooos came through in this copy. Just bum-smooching:

Out in the water, a trio of teen girls in a kayak had paddled over from a nearby resort, oblivious that they were 10 yards from one of the era’s best-known music celebrities. A pair from Kid Rock’s entourage crept up underwater and tipped the kayak to the squealing girls’ surprise — prompting the star to swim over and assist them back on their boat.

Situated back in their kayak, one of the soaked girls at last gave him a long look. “Did you know you look like Kid Rock?”

Rock began to swim away.

“I am!”

Ulghr.

OK, time to hit it and get the week going. Hope your day is a cruise. Mine will be more like an upstream paddle.

With apologies to Linda, who is using her hydroponic greenhouse for salad greens, I have to establish ground rules for any discussion of the medical-marijuana issue. It’s pretty simple: I will happily concede that marijuana has a role to play in the health care of many people who either are not helped by conventional pharmaceuticals, or don’t wish to take them. In return, I only ask that they stop pretending legalized medical marijuana isn’t the best thing to happen to recreational pot smokers since the invention of Zig-Zags.

Not so much to ask. And yet, here is medical marijuana, happily taking root in Michigan, and to listen to one side, you’d think the entire state is filled with chemo patients, or MS sufferers, or victims of AIDS-related wasting, or some other affliction that can only be helped by Nurse Mary Jane. And the other side says it’s all about potheads who are claiming “anxiety,” “insomnia,” “excessive whiteness of the eyes” or whatever else they can come up with, to Drs. Feelgood all over the state who will happily write “prescriptions” for a drug whose strength and efficacy — even the dosage — is either a big question mark, or left up to the user.

Before I get Prospero all up in my grill, I hasten to add I have no particular problem with pot smoking, as long as a) it’s not done by my husband or child; and b) it’s done in a place where it won’t affect my own personal safety — which is to say, not behind the wheel. I have no interest in it personally, having reached a point where I most often cut myself off alcohol after two. The way I look at it, the world is already full of attractive substances that will make me dumber, from Facebook to poorly executed LOLcats. I don’t need any more.

I should add this: De facto legalization seems to have made the air a little more herb-scented. In my unscientific observations, I see pot appearing more often in the police reports I see, smell it more often on the street. Some guy was smoking a blunt in the butcher shops at Eastern Market this weekend. Just standing there, self-medicating in front of dozens of people, no effort to conceal it at all.

Two “dispensaries” have opened in our neck of the woods in the last couple of weeks, both on the Detroit side of our border. This is the story behind one of them. I guess Big Daddy got what he needed from medical marijuana. (Although I’m puzzled by the math in the story. It says a work injury and subsequent convalescence pushed Big Daddy from 300 to 600 pounds, and that treating himself with marijuana allowed him to shed 250, which means he’s still 350 pounds. Well, munchies can be a pow’ful thing.)

For what it’s worth, I’ll be surprised if it’s still legal in 10 years. It’s possible the legislature will tune up the law to everyone’s satisfaction, but I doubt it. Bigger fish to fry, etc.

Why the New York Times is worth whatever they’re charging; A.O. Scott on Charlie Sheen’s Detroit show:

You could say that Mr. Sheen and the audience failed each other. The ticket buyers did not show him the “love and gratitude” to which he felt entitled, and he did not give them the kind of entertainment they thought they had paid for. But you could also say that the performer and the audience deserved each other, and that their mutual contempt was its own kind of bond. The ushers, in their black gold-braided uniforms, retained an air of inscrutable dignity in the midst of an orgy of depthless vulgarity. Everyone else in the room — onstage, backstage, in the $69 orchestra seats — had to swallow a gag-inducing, self-administered dose of shame. And no, the journalists who traveled to Detroit to gawk and philosophize at the spectacle are not exempt from that judgment.

What is this horrible man, Clarence Thomas, doing on our Supreme Court?

Via LGM, a little wit from Krugman.

Finally, a tax-season cautionary tale of stupidity: Don’t be as dumb as this TV anchor, who thought, because she was on the teevee and everybody else did it, that she could deduct the cost of all her work clothes, as well as her contact lenses, teeth whitening, manicures, hairdressing, and thong underwear.

Monday commences now. Have a good one, all.

Medical marijuana = reefer madness, baby.

This isn’t my idea — it’s John Carpenter’s, my former Grosse Pointe buddy who now lives in Chicago — but it’s a good one, and I’m stealing it. A little background:

Today’s issue of the Metro Times features a remarkably lousy interview with Elmore Leonard. It’s lousy for many reasons, starting with the cliché on the the cover (“The Dickens of Detroit”) and running throughout the copy, which in several thousand words manages to turn up practically nothing about the man that isn’t already known. With no obvious hook — a new book or movie to promote — the writer asks no questions that haven’t already been asked a million times. Leonard gives the same answers he’s already given a million times, which makes him look like a bore, but what else can he do? How many times can he describe his writing routine, or why he thinks the movies made from his books almost all suck?

What’s more, there are some remarkable omissions. There’s no mention of “Justified,” the TV series based on his work, which is running new episodes now and would have presented some new ground to plow, had the writer noticed. There’s no mention of his son Peter, who recently launched his own writing career and now appears with his father when he (pére) is book-touring. And there’s a ton of description of Leonard’s painstaking research that fails to mention that he doesn’t do his own research anymore. He hasn’t for years. He pays a guy to do it for him, which is an unusual arrangement right there. His researcher, Gregg Sutter, has been the subject of many stories in his own right, and I for one find their relationship interesting. But Gregg isn’t mentioned anywhere.

You expect crap like this from Entertainment Weekly, but not from the alt-weekly in Leonard’s own hometown, which should know him better than anyone.

But that’s not the point of this. The point is that if someone is looking for a fresh angle on Leonard, I have an idea. Or rather, John Carpenter had it: We need a Dutchday in Detroit.

Dutchday — I like the one-word usage better than Dutch Day — would be based on Bloomsday in Dublin. The whole city celebrates on June 16, the day described at great length in “Ulysses,” in which Leopold Bloom wanders the city and has lots of interior monologues. Among the many activities of Bloomsday is to retrace Leopold’s steps, stop at places mentioned in the novel, and read those passages aloud.

I think we could easily put together a tour of Detroit where we could do the same thing. There would be some problems I can see right up front. Leonard’s books range widely over the metro area, from Detroit to Macomb to Oakland to Port Huron, and doing it by bus wouldn’t be the same thing. So, say, we’d limit it to those places that can be easily reached by bicycle. A bike tour of Elmore Leonard venues, on a weekend close to his birthday, which I believe is in early October. So, a bike tour of Leonard’s Detroit venues in the fall, one of the prettiest months of the year here. With a small PA system for the read-aloud portions, which you could tow in a bike trailer. It would all wind up in some pub for lager and discussion. Maybe the Dickens of Detroit could be persuaded to join us for a signing, and to sell a few books. Now that’s a story, Metro Times.

Who’s with me? I’m serious.

If anyone in Baltimore hasn’t done this with the works of Laura Lippman, they should do that, too.

So, bloggage:

So now it’s a right-wing group here in Michigan who’s gone a-FOIAing for college-professor dirt, that’s if you describe union activities as dirt:

The Mackinac Center, which describes itself as a nonpartisan research and educational institution and receives money from numerous conservative foundations, asked the three universities’ labor studies faculty members for any e-mails mentioning “Scott Walker,” “Madison,” “Wisconsin” or “Rachel Maddow,” the liberal talk show host on MSNBC.

The Mackinac Center hasn’t stated a reason for the request — it doesn’t have to — but the conventional wisdom is that public employees are prohibited from political activities on company time or with company resources, so if they can find one e-mail where a professor says, “I saw on Rachel Maddow that the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, is a fink, and that he lives in Madison,” well, jackpot!!!!!

Note to the Mackinac Center: One of the libraries at Wayne State is named for Walter Reuther. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. I don’t know what to say about this, other than: Enough. I know it’s fashionable in some circles to fly-speck every minute of public employees’ time, to find whether they’ve cheated, somehow, using “taxpayers’ time” to send personal e-mail or shop for shoes online or whatever. I know every job in the world includes some down time, which may be used to call one’s doctor or fill out NCAA brackets or whatever. Let me know when it gets ridiculous, but for now, this is cheap bullying and harassment, and the people who run the Mackinac Center should be ashamed.

(Most people know other conservative groups are doing this in Wisconsin, and if you haven’t read the target’s extremely reasonable response, you should.)

A couple of you have asked me, over the years, why I wasn’t more taken with Jennifer Granholm, the now-former governor of Michigan. She appears on national chat shows from time to time, and always impresses the rest of the country as attractive, personable, reasonable and articulate. She is all those things. She is also not much of a leader, who let two terms pass while the state’s economy went into a ditch, without doing much more than talking about it — in a very articulate manner, granted.

Now she’s taking a page from the Evan Bayh playbook. She just accepted a richly compensated seat on the board of Dow Chemical.

A Michigan company, granted. Still. I’ll also grant the absurdity of a conservative editorial writer calling this “a payoff” for tax breaks Granholm steered the company’s way when she was in office, as this happens regularly in Republican politics, and is called Works Well With Business. Still. The ex-guv and her husband both recently accepted two-year teaching positions at the University of California at Berkeley. I guess this is part of the let-the-well-refill strategy all politicians seem to think they deserve once they leave office.

Finally, an obit for a San Francisco food writer, whom I wish I’d known. Among her last words: Never eat margarine! A woman after my own heart.

Work beckons. Have a great day, all.

Open thread today, folks. Michigan’s census numbers were released yesterday, and I’m up to my eyebrows in data, trying to figure it out. Plus office hours and a writing gig that has to be finished by week’s end, so in the eenie-meanie of priorities, you lose.

In the meantime, for those of you who think I’m too hard on Charles Pugh, ex-Fort Wayne TV “journalist” and current president of Detroit’s City Council, how about this nugget of Pugh-y goodness:

City Council President Charles Pugh is blaming high rates of incarceration and car insurance premiums for U.S. Census figures pegging Detroit’s population at 713,777.

Pugh told The News today that city officials know of thousands of Detroiters who are incarcerated in other municipalities who will soon get out. Those people should be counted “when they get out and come back to Detroit,” said Pugh, adding that he doubts the city has lost more than 200,000 people in a decade.

“We know that there are thousands of people because of car insurance that have addresses in the suburbs,” he said. “We need to let those people know, look, this is not an effort to catch you and to prosecute you. We want your numbers so we can get federal dollars and state dollars.”

An undercount of prisoners! What a maroon. As a friend says, “Why make it easy for Rush Limbaugh to fill an hour?”

OK, so: Sayonara. The rest of the week looks pretty grim, but I’m going to try to grab time here and there for you, dear readers. And at week’s end, I’m gonna sleep like a corpse.

Some years back, Alan and I saw Bill Maher’s Broadway show in New York. He spent a few minutes talking about people whose response to 9/11 was to put American flags on their SUVs. This was, “literally, the least you could do,” Maher said.

This was 2003, before Facebook and Twitter and the rise of what we’ve come to call slacktivism. It was before People magazine could write a story like this and not have heads explode across the country:

In the wake of the 8.9-magnitude earthquake that struck Japan Friday afternoon – which triggered a 10-meter tsunami and a lingering threat as far west as the California coast – celebs have taken to Twitter to reach out after what may be the biggest such disaster on record to strike the country

(It ended like that, too. No period. Like a tweet, sorta.)

I guess this is what constitutes “reaching out” these days — reaching for your iPhone and pecking out a text message. This was Lea Michelle’s contribution:

So devastating to hear about the huge earthquake & tsunami Japan. My thoughts and prayers are with everyone there.

This makes putting a flag on your car look like a two-year hitch in the Peace Corps. You actually have to go to a store or corner gas station or whatever, select and pay for the flag, figure out the plastic clip thingy, affix it to the car and take it down when it’s torn to ribbons.

Ah, well. This all seems like a very small thing after an event that actually changed the coastline of Japan — it’s now “wider,” the earth’s axis shifted by 6.5 inches. You read stories like that, and you realize we are all just ants crawling around on a picnic blanket, and every so often someone shakes the blanket.

Tiny, insignificant ants.

That’s a cheerful thought for a Monday, wouldn’t you say? How about a change of subject? A few people have sent me the “Michigan is screwed” video that’s been going around, Rachel Maddow breaking down the details of new GOP Gov. Rick Snyder’s budget plan, spinning it as an evil plot to not just smash unions, but be the flying wedge of a Republican takeover of EVERYTHING, EVERYTHING I TELL YOU, until one day in the near future it is complete and Snyder peels off his face to reveal that of a SkyNet commander, OUR NEW ROBOT OVERLORDS.

Well, that’s one way to spin it.

Every fact in that report is correct. What it lacks is context. It is true that Snyder’s budget — still in proposal form, still not enacted — raises taxes on the poor and elderly and strips business taxes to the lowest in the Great Lakes region. What Maddow doesn’t tell you is the first is the loss of an earned income tax credit averaging $432 a year, and that Michigan is among a dwindling handful of states that doesn’t tax pension income. If all you do is benchmark the practice, it’s probably time for Michigan to join the rest of the country.

But the real meat of her report is the part about state officials being able to swoop into any municipality or school district and stomp it to pieces under their jackboots, a fate she implies is right around the corner for any number of cities and towns — the part about the sign on the outskirts with “founded in 1872” being made obsolete is a bit much. This part of the plan is only the beefing up of the state’s existing emergency financial management law. Stephen Henderson, a Freep columnist — and no conservative — provides context:

For years, local governments and school districts have been able to walk right up to the brink of financial disaster without any intervention from the state. So when state officials do rush in, they face horrific conditions with too few options for balancing the books.

That’s why cities such as Pontiac have made so little progress getting costs under control even with emergency financial management. It’s why Robert Bobb can’t do what the accountant in him knows needs to be done to fix Detroit Public Schools. And it’s why officials in Hamtramck were just a few months ago begging the state to let the city go bankrupt so drastic steps could be taken.

The state’s current rubric for dealing with financial emergencies is weak to the point of flaccidity. Legislators are right to firm up the consequences of inaction.

He goes on to say that wiping out elected officials and smashing existing contracts goes too far. But he’s right that for now, there’s too little sanction placed on cities that screw up.

There’s a great deal of discussion about the budget proposal in the state now. Much of it — led by Mitch Albom, Rochelle Riley and a few other high-profile Michiganders, along with many of my friends — is about the loss of the generous film tax credits, which would undoubtedly take all the air out of the movie and TV production going on around here. That concerns me, but frankly, that’s not my ox being gored. I’ve long thought the amount we’re handing out is unsustainable over the long haul, or even the short one, although I’m sorry to see it go.

What’s far, far more worrisome to me is are the proposed, and enormous, cuts in education funding — primary, secondary and higher — as well as municipal revenue sharing, which will have a far greater impact on our way of life than whether the next Mitch Albom film project is shot in Detroit or not. Virtually all education monies in Michigan come from the state, following an overhaul in the 1990s designed to fix inequities. I frankly can’t believe this isn’t getting more attention, but then again, Albom has no children.

The forces of all the affected constituencies are girding for the battle ahead — the AARP, Michigan Municipal League, Albom and his fearsome quiver of dramatic repetition, et al. One of my local school-board members has written a bit about these issues on his blog, including the emergency financial manager proposal, and the school-funding issues. (I suspect he’s very proud of the latter entry, which works on a Winnie the Pooh metaphor. Michiganders, show your luv with a click.)

I guess it’s all in how you look at things. It could be worse. We could live in Japan.

Manic Monday — must run.