I had to keep checking the top of this story, so sure was I that I knew the author. The byline says Benjamin J. Dueholm, but I could have sworn it read Mild-Mannered Jeff.

It’s a thoughtful look at the work of Dan Savage, the alt-weekly sex columnist, who in recent years has branched out from refereeing bedroom disagreements to offering broader advice on what constitutes an ethical life. The premise of the story is that Savage has become an ethicist for the modern American age, in which no one is surprised (or should be) by sexual behavior, but is struggling to fit our new understanding into old frameworks. Here’s the nut, to this editor’s eye:

Half my mail at ‘Savage Love’ is from straight men and women who want to be reassured that their kinks—from BDSM to cross-dressing to fucking animals (!)—are normal,” Savage wrote in 2007, echoing a note of exasperation he has sounded a few times over the years. Savage has made clear he is not primarily interested in adjudicating whether people’s bedroom proclivities lie on the safe side of normality. …For him, what’s most important is that abandonment of inhibition should never entail an abandonment of personal responsibility.

That’s what makes him the right man for the job. Leave kinks aside for the moment. (Please.) Just as medical technology gallops ahead of our moral and ethical structures — does the surrogate mother get a card on the first Sunday in May? does the sperm donor owe anything to the children he helped create? — so too has our own behavior. Most adults with a functioning brain have figured out who the real beneficiaries of female virginity-until-marriage were, what’s really behind homophobia, but they’re uncomfortable with throwing all restraint out the window. Savage looks for an underlayment of basic human decency:

In ways that his frequent interlocutors on the Christian right wouldn’t expect, Savage has probably done more to uphold conventional families than many counselors who are unwilling to engage so frankly with modern sexual mores. “A successful marriage is basically an endless cycle of wrongs committed, apologies offered, and forgiveness granted,” he advised one very uptight spouse, “all leavened by the occasional orgasm.”

The reason I mention MMJeff is because it turns out the writer is a Lutheran minister. (Not that I would *ever* confuse Jeff with a Lutheran, perish the thought! It just had a certain clerical tone.) And he gets to my misgivings about Savage lower in the piece:

If there is something to treasure in the old, traumatized ideal of lifelong monogamy, it’s not that it demeans sexual fulfillment. Rather, it’s that monogamy integrates sexual fulfillment with the other good things in life—having someone to pay bills and raise children with, having a refuge both emotional and physical from the rest of the world. It is an ideal that is powerful even when it is not fully realized (as it rarely, if ever, is), not a contract voided by nonperformance. A worldview in which sex is so central to life that it may be detached from everything else and sought apart from every other ingredient of happiness presumes a world in which happiness itself can be redefined—in which people can be retrained in what they expect and accept from one another. To approach the libertarian ideal of human relationships, emotional shock therapy of the sort contemplated by AHND will be required. The promised land of natural, ethical, autonomous sexuality lies across a desert of self-mortifying trade-offs between sexual fulfillment and all the other joys and comforts of life.

Well-said. And that’s enough quoting from the copyright for one day. Worth your time.

What a day yesterday was. I spend a couple hours of Monday morning going around to our police stations, checking the blotters for GrossePointeToday.com’s public-safety report, easily the most popular feature of our site. And may I just say, all it takes is about a month of that to disabuse a person of any fantasies she might have had about living with a better class of people. (For the record, I never had any in the first place.) Most don’t make the roundup, as I define “public safety” as that which affects the safety of the public as a whole, but occasionally I’ll throw a domestic assault in, particularly if a weapon is involved. My favorite of this week was a woman who reported a “belated” assault, i.e., one that happened sometime before she sobered up and realized someone had punched her on the chin. The report described two black eyes, but noted those were from plastic surgery she underwent sometime before she went drinking and ran into an old boyfriend, her presumed assailant, although she wasn’t sure, because she couldn’t really remember anything. Some people live exciting lives, but mostly they lead drunken ones. Take alcohol out of the world, and people would find fewer reasons to beat up on one another. I’m sure we’d find another excuse pronto, however.

My second-favorite: A three-year-old boy found wandering near a major intersection, a full three blocks from his home. He’d been turned out into the yard by one of the adults in his short but unfortunate life, who was allegedly watching him from inside and couldn’t imagine how he’d gotten out, although, said adult noted, this was the fourth time he’d done so. “He’s a runner,” another caretaker reported. Can’t hardly blame the kid. I’d run, too.

Please note that I’m using “favorite” ironically here. Man hands on misery to man, etc.

Yeesh, it’s getting late. Best hop out of here before the day slips away. It’s Fat Tuesday — Paczki Day here in Detroit. I might stop somewhere around here for one later, although it’s decidedly not part of my diet at the moment. Wherever you are, I hope Mardi Gras finds you.

I really need to stop being outraged at this stuff, but I can’t help it, I am: Mike Huckabee is the latest — and most high-profile to date, unless I missed somebody — Republican to push the line that Barack Obama is a Kenyan alien.

Earlier this week, he told a radio talk-show host:

“One thing that I do know is his having grown up in Kenya, his view of the Brits, for example, very different than the average American,” said the Fox host. “If you think about it, his perspective as growing up in Kenya with a Kenyan father and grandfather, their view of the Mau Mau Revolution in Kenya is very different than ours because he probably grew up hearing that the British were a bunch of imperialists who persecuted his grandfather.”

He also mentioned Obama’s removal of a loaned bust of Winston Churchill that had been in the Oval Office and called it “a great insult to the British.” (He didn’t mention that Obama replaced it with one of Abraham Lincoln, who just might have more resonance for an African American president, but oh well — he is from Arkansas.)

These remarks, reflecting a stunning ignorance in a man who considers himself presidential timber, set off the usual whirlwind of blah-blah, which set off the usual response — it’s all the media’s fault, because he clearly “misspoke” and meant to say Indonesia.

Which is about as lame an excuse as they get, given the elaboration on the details about Kenya — even in Arkansas public schools, I don’t think they teach that the Mau Mau rebellion happened in Indonesia — and even if you take him at his word, how does five years of a childhood constitute “growing up” anywhere? Granted, Hawaii is such an exotic, foreign place, you can’t blame an Arkansan for getting confused.

The smart money is on this being dog-whistle politics, that Huckabee in no way misspoke, that he’s just letting the base know that he’s down with the program. And if that’s true, then no one — no voter, and certainly no journalist — owes Huckabee anything resembling respect anymore. Only shunning, and maybe not even that, will work on this sort of moronic, racist idiocy. Yes, racist. Yes, Mike Huckabee, you are a racist. A big, dumb racist. Racist McRaciston, the governor of a state with a large black population, has thrown in with racists. Own it.

Sorry, just had to get that off my chest. Where does this stop? WHERE?

Let’s switch to hockey, shall we? I expect this story will pick up steam hereabouts, or maybe not: Bob Probert, legendary hockey goon of Chicago and Detroit, died last summer of heart failure, but carried within his brain evidence of chronic traumatic encephalopathy, doubtless the result of the head trauma he endured both on and off the ice:

Probert’s posthumous autobiography, “Tough Guy,” gleefully offers details of his 3,300 career penalty minutes — fifth in N.H.L. history — and recounts so many brawls with enforcers like Tie Domi and Marty McSorley that it requires 11 pages to list them all. He scored 163 goals in his career from 1985 through 2002, for the Detroit Red Wings and the Chicago Blackhawks, but was so known for his fighting that a 2007 Hockey News poll rated him the greatest enforcer in hockey history.

Probert drank heavily beginning in his youth in Windsor, Ontario, and he used cocaine to the point that he served 90 days in a Minnesota prison and was suspended by the N.H.L. multiple times, including for the entire 1994-95 season. His police record included driving citations, bar fights and assaults on police officers. While boating last July 5 on Lake St. Clair, near his home in Tecumseh, Probert collapsed and died of heart failure, including an 80 percent blockage of the left coronary artery.

Many athletes later found with C.T.E. — whose test for abnormal protein deposits in brain tissue can be administered only after death — presented symptoms like drug abuse, impulse control and impaired memory only in the years before they died, suggesting that the disease contributed to it.

So the trauma created its own loop, I guess — head trauma leads to poor impulse control which leads to more head trauma. This is a story that started small, with a few studies mostly covered by the prestige papers, and mostly off the sports pages, but is picking up steam over the course of the last few years. The suicide of former Chicago Bears safety Dave Duerson — who is said to have shot himself in the heart to preserve his brain for postmortem research — pushed it higher, and I imagine this finding will, too.

Ironically, I remember reading this story a couple of years ago as the Stanley Cup playoffs got under way, “Why the Red Wings don’t fight,” about how the North American game is changing to a more European, less pugilistic model. Fewer goons, better skating.

Do click that first link on the Probert story, and check out the photo, and the look on the kid’s face. There’s the problem in a nutshell. Oh, and I did the math — 3,300 penalty minutes translates to 55 hours.

OK, we’ve done infuriating and depressing. Can we take a run past something fun?

I’m tapped out for funny, but here are a couple shots of Christina Hendricks in a low-cut dress. (Yes, Rob Daumeyer, that’s a big WIN!!!!!) I actually love the first dress (what I can see of it, anyway), but think it would look better with a double strand of pearls rather than that big honkin’ heart, but that is the product after all. (And I am old.) My jewelry box seems to be missing a giant crown of oak leaves; I’m glad someone has stepped in to fill the gap.

Onward into a cold, cold March morning.

Breakfast: One scrambled egg, some of last night’s leftover oven-roasted potatoes with garlic, one tablespoon of salsa, all wrapped in a tortilla. The black-coffee portion of the meal is still in progress, but I hereby pronounce this breakfast an unqualified success.

Protein at every meal is my goal for the spring. Lately I’ve been corresponding with an urban farmer who lives a couple miles from me, on the other side of Mack Avenue (i.e., Detroit) and keeps a flock of ducks. She sells fresh duck eggs whenever you feel like stopping by, for 50 cents apiece. My bravery in all things culinary wavers a bit here. My reading tells me they taste the same as the chicken variety, with more nutrients; is this true? I never ate eggs until I was in college, when a boyfriend who had been a grill chef at Perkins introduced me to western omelets. I think I’ve been a trouper since then, but there are two kinds of people in the world — those whose breakfasts run to fruit-yogurt-juice and those who are eggs-meat-potatoes, and I’m in the first camp. Eggs are for lunch.

I’m going to get some duck eggs, although mostly I just want to see her flock. There are so many urban farmers in Detroit now it’s no longer a novelty, but I love animals and I love ducks. Jim at Sweet Juniper has friends deeper in the city who keep goats and chickens, and there’s a high school for girls who have children — do we even bother to call them unwed mothers anymore? — that has at least one horse, along with a garden plot that earns them real money. Parts of the city look like rural Mississippi during the Depression, only with curbs. Crazy town.

Speaking of protein, the Free Press has gone so Gannett of late that I’ve practically stopped reading it, but this story caught my eye today — about scientific research on underwater rock formations in Lake Huron, concentrating on a now-submerged land bridge that arcs across the lake between Alpena, Michigan and Amberley, Ontario. Scientists suspect the formations were man-made, and served as Ice Age caribou hunting blinds. Imagine what it took to bring down a caribou with the tools of the era. Alley Oop, you have my respect.

Meanwhile, the graphic with the story has a big boo-boo in it, describing the land bridge as 10 feet wide. No. Ten miles. Details, details.

Years ago I read a story about some ancient human remains found in the Pacific Northwest — Something Man — that are unmistakably Caucasian in nature, challenging the belief that Indians were the first to migrate into North America across the Bering land bridge. The remains were being fought over, with Indians wanting to reclaim them for reburial, and the scientific community, which wants to study them more and maybe recast some theories. The story broke down the sides into approximate camps, with the most troublesome being, essentially, Indian religious fundamentalists, who didn’t want the corpse studied at all, because their version of history is the only one they accept — that they’ve always been there, that they were the first ones there, and the rest of you just shut up. The piece included the comments of a prominent Native American mocking the whole idea of the Bering land bridge, finding it a little too conveeeenient, this idea that the ocean was once dry in a particular place. I guess he’s an Indian fundamentalist, but for my money, I’d rather imagine that land bridge arcing across the lake with its caribou blinds, and the desperate search for protein and nutrition that only required me to consult my refrigerator this morning.

So, bloggage?

Change the names, it’s all the same — lunatic known for his bullhorn protests at something called the Southern Decadence Festival is busted jerking off in a public park.

More $P sockpuppetry. This just gets funnier by the day.

The best picture on the Internet, via the WashPost’s Style Tumblr. Related (to protein and Internet pictures, which brings us full circle): Al Qaeda attacks America with photo of piglet wearing boots. Via the Onion News Network, natch.

I’m off, all.

Because it seemed like something worth doing while another snowstorm bore down on us — now in progress, a few new inches — I took myself way the hell out to the west side last night. There was a “town meeting” for supporters of the Michigan film incentive tax credits, threatened with near-elimination in next year’s budget, and while my job isn’t on the line, I thought I’d go to fly the flag, another warm body in the crowd. I should have known something was up when it was moved at the last minute from a local studio with cavernous sound stages to a nearby banquet hall with enough room for an army.

Because an army showed up, and then some. Thousands, I’d estimate, at least two, maybe more. Parking was a nightmare, the hall so overfilled the fire marshall shut the doors and turned away probably a few hundred more. I squeaked in under the wire, but spent a lot of time standing around; the show started half an hour late, and the first speaker was ol’ shoe-polish head, the li’l man himself, ladies and gentlemen, Misterrrrr Mitch! Albom!

And to be sure, he wasn’t terrible. In fact, he was easily the best speaker of the night, doing what he does best — telling people what they want to hear: “This isn’t about saving Hollywood! This is about saving Michigan!” Big standing O for that one. And he did what newspaper columnists do best, talk tough without fear of contradiction: “Like it or not, this industry goes where the incentives are.” The message of the night was, the generous tax credits — and they are the most generous in the country, ranging from 30 to 42 percent — given to the film industry for work done here, is getting results beyond the chance to see Robert DeNiro in a restaurant. It’s providing jobs, building a talent base for future productions, etc.

No one talked about an end game, or even a compromise, at least while I was there. I had to leave during Mike Binder’s lament that “The Upside of Anger,” set in Bloomfield Hills, was shot in London because that was the best deal. (You remember “The Upside of Anger,” don’t you? Kevin Costner, Joan Allen, lots of University of Michigan references?) Is there ever a sunset on tax incentives, or do they set the state up to be thrown over when the next state gets stardust in its eyes? On the other hand, what else does Michigan have going for it at the moment? And the incentives have been an adrenaline shot to the burgeoning creative-class economy, and they are my people.

On the third hand, the same budget Gov. Rick Snyder has proposed cutting education funding by $920 million. (Mitch Albom has no children, and if he did, he’d doubtless send them to private schools.)

We’ll see how this works out. I’ll do my part, but I’m not hopeful. The best-case scenario would be for a cut that falls short of disastrous. Fingers crossed.

It was nice to get out of the house, even to wrangle with impossible parking. That’s how bad my cabin fever is at the moment.

Not much bloggage today:

Keep it classy, Georgia!

New York Times cooking columnist reveals, in his final column, that he doesn’t really cook all that much. (His wife does. Quel surprise.)

Think I’ll make some broccoli-cheddar soup today. Just because it’s snowy. A great weekend to all.

I think this explains why we bought a noisy, polluting machine to clear our driveway. Just to give y’all a sense of what we were facing this morning…

A final busy day in a very busy week means today’s entry is all caffeine and bloggage. Caffeine and bloggage, people! I know you’ll be OK with it, because when it comes to a discussion, you folks rock the house. I thought yesterday’s comment thread was tremendous, by the way; thanks to all who contributed. Besides, we have ourselves plenty to talk about today:

OID: Tow truck driver spots what he thinks is an abandoned car, calls police and waits for permission to hook it. Permission never comes. So he calls 911 with the same information, waits two hours, no one shows up. Then:

Two weeks later, on Jan. 24, after several calls from neighbors, a police officer finally came to the site. Inside the SUV, the officer found the body of James Mullen of Oak Park, riddled with bullets.

Well, good thing it’s winter.

I can’t tell you how often I read stories like this in the paper. Later on, a deputy chief describes the situation as “confusing.” I’ll say. So many unanswered questions. Were the windows tinted? Was the corpse in the driver’s seat, or stowed in the cargo area? Where, exactly, was the car parked? The story was based on testimony offered at a Board of Police Commissioners hearing, and I guess no one asked.

Some of you got to this yesterday, but I’m just now reading about $P’s comment about the “Sputnik moment” passage in the SOTU speech, and I’m, well, speechless. Combined with Michele Bachmann’s retelling of our founders’ commitment to diversity, I’m wondering if this particular wing of the right-wing dog-and-pony show isn’t some sort of performance art piece. Nothing else explains it.

We won’t have Mike Pence to kick around, come primary season. Alas, Hoosiers, you’ll still be stuck with him.

First Tunisia, now Egypt. I have nothing to contribute to this discussion, other than to recall a story from the dark ages of journalism, when second-tier diplomats would make the rounds of newspaper editorial boards, for coffee and discussion about foreign policy, with an eye toward guiding the opinion-mongers in their opinion-making. I know — crazy, right? Anyway, if the diplomat was important enough, and there was a chance he’d say something newsworthy, sometimes a reporter was invited to sit in, because hey, you can’t ask an editorial writer to do a news story. It’s beneath their dignity. This was in Columbus, by the way.

So one day some Israeli undersecretary stops by, and my colleague Ted draws the reporting duty. The discussion was about negotiations with Egypt. Anwar Sadat had just been assassinated, and succeeded by someone named Hosni Mubarak. The editor of the paper, a twinkly pipe-smoking gent already coasting toward retirement, had a question for the diplomat.

“What about this McBurke? Can he bring peace?”

The Israeli blinked a time or two, trying to remember when the Egyptians had installed a Scotsman in the president’s office. “What? Who?”

“McBurke,” the editor pressed. “The new president.”

But the diplomat was diplomatic. “Oh, you’re speaking of Mr. Mubarak,” he said, and the moment passed, but Ted told us all about it. All the young people, whose brains had not yet started farting at inappropriate moments, got a good laugh out of it. This was when Bob and Doug McKenzie were doing their “Great White North” routine all over, and so we decided the Egyptian Scot’s first name should be “Hoser” and ever since, I’ve thought of the president of Egypt as Hoser McBurke. The other day I heard a statistic that half the Egyptian population had never known another president.

Boy, do I feel old.

Have a great weekend, all.

A deer came to an unfortunate end at Eminem’s house this week, after it failed to clear an iron-picket fence and presumably died in a highly unpleasant bleed-out while hanging from it. (Extremely graphic photo here; you’ve been warned.) A perfunctory Freep story says the singer “is expected to have the meat processed and given to a family in need.”

“Winter’s Bone” notwithstanding, there may be a few needy families in the metro area who still possess the knowledge to prepare venison, but I’m betting their numbers are dwindling by the year. We’ve been over this ground before here, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth noting again — cooking skills correlate to income, and until we untie them, I think we’ll continue to have an obesity problem. (Let’s leave out the upper class for now, the people with showplace kitchens who can’t make a peanut-butter sandwich.) Mark Bittman once bravely let a video crew into his small New York apartment and showed them where he makes his own personal foodie magic — in a spartan space, with few tools, very limited storage, not even much of a refrigerator. It can be done. But if you’re smart enough to know this, you’re far less likely to be needy, these days.

May I just say, also, to those who are considering the racial angles to all this, that every week at the Eastern Market I see obviously smart shoppers, many of them African-American, buying the raw ingredients for some serious dinners, much of it southern-style, bushels of mustard or collard greens, every edible part of the pig, chickens by the score. These people aren’t needy, but I’d wager many of their recipes were born from neediness — not much else explains chitterlings, in my opinion — so I know the skills are out there. But they’re fading.

That deer obviously died in agony. I thought adrenaline was bad for the taste of game, or is that an old wives’ tale? Basset’s our resident deer hunter, maybe he can say.

I don’t wish to start every report here with a weather report, but it is currently 10 degrees and we’re not expected to see 20 again until Wednesday. Might be time for my winter walk on the lake this weekend. We haven’t had a great deal of snow yet, and last weekend I walked a couple loops at Lake Front Park and watched a guy running his golden retriever out on the ice. He was on skates, taking advantage of the vast stretches of mostly clear ice to keep pace with the galloping dog, which had just enough snow under its paws to run without slipping. It looked like a lot of fun.

Downside of a cold snap: The cold. Upside: The sunshine. Caribbean-blue skies at the moment. Good thing I bought some fleece-lined jeans this year. My ass and thighs carry plenty of natural insulation, but I can always use a little more.

Some bloggage to ease into the weekend:

James Wolcott, his usual fine self, on political entertainments, from Stewart to Palin. A taste:

Think back on the Iraq war and the W.M.D.’s, the Terri Schiavo circus, the iguana contortions of John McCain under the guise of maverick integrity, the Wall Street meltdown and bailout—TV satirists and late-night hosts drove much deeper nails into the marrow of what was happening than the editorial pages of The Washington Post, that prison morgue of Beltway consensus. A new political-entertainment class has moved into the noisy void once occupied by the sage pontiffs of yore, a class just as polarized as our partisan divide: one side holding up a fun-house mirror to folly, the other side reveling in its own warped reflection.

Many laff lines, including the best single description of Glenn Beck in the flesh I’ve yet read:

Round and beige, he resembles one of the squeamish pod sperm awaiting launch instructions upstream in Woody Allen’s Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex.

Only in Detroit: Two scrappy babes overcome a would-be car thief and try to perform a citizen’s arrest, getting zero help from the Detroit police. A Wayne State patrolman finally came to the rescue. Bonus weirdness factor: One of the scrappy babes is named “Officer.”

John Dingell, gunning to be the Strom Thurmond of the House, announces his intention to try for a 30th term. We’ll see. Redistricting will come between then and now, and Republicans control the Statehouse top to bottom.

OK, time to put on the fleece jeans and tackle a very cold day. Have a great weekend.

I hope someone here has noticed that I’ve said not word one about Ted Williams until now. I’ll admit to having passed the link along in the first day of his story, but it was in a private e-mail, to a radio person whom I thought might appreciate the essential weirdness of it back when it was fresh. But after that, I held my tongue, because I saw how many people in my Facebook network were posting the clip from the Columbus Dispatch, and I knew what would happen.

I knew Williams would be an overnight sensation. I knew someone would give him a big break. He would be taken in, cleaned up and hustled off to the Today show to warm hearts. He’d be Cinderfella for a week, a month, a… no, just a week. A week is all we can spare a story these days. A week is the new month, a month is the new year. A year is, well, who cares? These days years run forward and backward and probably into a fourth and fifth dimension.

After a week, he would fade away, but until then, I wasn’t going to say a word. Because? BECAUSE THIS GUY IS HOMELESS. DO YOU THINK HE BECAME HOMELESS BECAUSE HE FORGOT TO PAY THE RENT? Also, because even a sane, well-balanced person would go crazy under such treatment, being the week’s designated heartwarmer. Gabby Giffords’ aide, Daniel Hernandez, is this week’s. He seems like a nice young man. FOR NOW.

Williams imploded right on schedule. He turned himself in to a rehab facility — on television! — for none other than Dr. Phil. I assume it’s the standard 28-day residential program. Whew. Now I don’t have to think about him for a month.

A woman from People magazine interviewed for a journalism fellowship the year after my class, and her idea for the year was outstanding — spend it researching and writing a book about people who become accidental celebrities. Overnight sensations. At the time, the Elizabeth Smart case was in the news, and she mentioned that family as the textbook case for the total weirdness that can overtake a person thrust into the public eye with no active effort on their part. Remember how strange that case was? How many press conferences the parents called, how generously they provided hours of video footage of their home movies, how welcoming they were to any old news crew that wanted to drop in and poke around their two artfully decorated houses? They were the first people I’ve seen in a while who could outlast a crowd of reporters; it seemed they never said, “OK, one more question and we’re going to wrap it up.”

And then when Elizabeth was found, they got right back into the groove — more press conferences, no question left unanswered. It was merely strange until I read that Elizabeth had asked to audition to play herself in the TV movie about the case. At the time, a smart person could speculate pretty accurately what went on during her captivity, and it was confirmed in her recent court testimony about it: She was raped daily for nine months. And she wanted to relive it on a film set, shot by shot. Clearly, this publicity stuff is powerful medicine.

But back to Williams. He admitted to “problems with drugs and alcohol.” And yet some producer thought he’d make for a few minutes of warm hearts.

Who are these producers, and how old are they? Eighteen?

And so another week lurches to a close. I’m hoping next week will be calmer, as I don’t have too many of these in me. How about a little bloggage?

We haven’t had an OID (only in Detroit) story for a while: It’s auto-show week, and during that time all the companies have fleets of cars not just under the exhibit lights of Cobo, but out on the streets as well. One of BMW’s haulers was loading high-end Beemers onto a truck outside the Book Cadillac Hotel when he was distracted for, he estimates, 60 seconds. Oops.

We’ve all seen the best-of lists for 2010, so now it’s time for the worst-of. NYMag considers the movies. Admittedly, No. 1 was easy to predict, but it was nice to see “Black Swan” made the list, too.

Amy Chua, the crazy Chinese mother, finds the “I was drunk” excuse of the media age: It was the editing. Thanks, Moe, for digging this one up.

Whatever you do, don’t do it there: The peculiar slight of adultery conducted in [ominous chords, organ sting] the marital bed.

This weekend looks like heaven to me. Enjoy yours.

Earlier this year Last year my friend Clark had an idea for a short documentary film — a day in the life of a Detroit street dog. He said he’d brought it up before among our little guerrilla tribe, and no one liked it, but I loved it. Immediately I started imagining how we’d do it: We’d need some sort of ride-along expert, either a vet or (the guerrilla, zero-budget solution), a vet student, preferably someone with access to the specialized equipment you’d need, including drugs. We’d need a radio-collar system to keep track of whatever dog we settled on as our star. We’d need at least one but preferably several small, wearable video cameras, like the new GoPro, along with specially fitted harnesses for the dogs to carry them on their chests. And we’d need a crazy crew who wouldn’t mind working all night in some of the city’s worst-of-the-worst neighborhoods, probably following our subject on bicycles, carrying equipment in backpacks. We’d have to be our own security, which would mean no security.

It’s still a great idea. But after several fruitless phone calls to the city and the Michigan State vet school, along with a back-of-the-envelope budget estimate, I decided it wasn’t going to be done by us.

It’s not going to be done by the Discovery Channel, either. The channel applied for and was approved for a tax credit for nearly $560,000 to make a series called “A Dog’s Life,” about guess-what:

Besides using crews to film the dogs, the project would attach small cameras to the animals to capture Detroit life from a dog’s-eye view.

Bad news for the Discovery Channel: The city turned them down for permits, saying such a portrayal would be bad for the city. Note to the Discovery Channel: Try Flint. They’re hungrier, and unless I miss my guess, the problem is just as bad there. My vet, who works as the on-call professional for animal emergencies for several different police agencies, said the problem was always bad, and became critical when the foreclosures started; people would simply turn their animals out to fend for themselves. Weird breed mixes are a common sight in the city. Most have at least some pit bull in them, but you really do see all kinds — Wendell, Sweet Juniper’s dog, was a resident of the Detroit streets before he was adopted, and he looks pretty close to purebred German shorthair. Jim has written several times of what an enthusiastic bird dog he is on the neighborhood’s pheasants, so it stands to reason.

Filming them is still a good idea, and it can be done for a lot less than a million bucks. Fly under the radar, and you don’t need permits.

OK, this is the second-to-last day of Hell Week, i.e., the first week of classes at Wayne. I have to hit the shower, the gas station and probably several other places before heading downtown, so quick bloggage:

I only caught the end of the president’s speech in Tucson last night, but before it was over I predicted it would drive conservatives crazy, and whaddaya know?

Good gravy, this flooding in Australia is positively Biblical.

I’ve been reading some of the inside-baseball mea culpas and discussion over the early misreporting from Tucson this weekend, and it strikes me as a huge waste of time. Every study I’ve read says people want news NOW, and don’t mind if early reports in a breaking situation are wrong, as long as they’re corrected quickly; in fact, they expect it. Reporting Gabrielle Giffords to be dead, and then correcting it a few minutes later, doesn’t strike me as an egregious mistake after a woman’s been shot in the head point-blank. It happened with Jim Brady during the Reagan assassination attempt, and it’ll happen again.

What do you civilians think? As for me, I think I need a shower. Later, all.

Here’s an idea to get us through January. Call it Stash the Santa, Leave the Lights. If you decorate the outside of your house for the holidays, come twelfth night/epiphany (i.e., tomorrow) you are strongly encouraged to strike all the Christmasy stuff — the Santas, the creches, the wreaths, the reindeer, whatever. But leave the lights. If your display consists entirely of white lights outlining your spruce tree, leave ’em up. If you put up blue ones, so much the better. (Red and green? On the bubble. But multicolored is fine.)

The idea is to say, Christmas is over and we’re not going to depress anyone by leaving Santa on the lawn until April, but it’s a long few weeks before we start to see anything approaching the softer light of spring, and so we’re going to let the candle of civilization burn in the dark a while longer. Until Valentine’s Day, say.

Who’s with me?

I don’t think Alan will be. Disassemble half the Christmas lights, then bring in the other half six weeks later? Winter sucks. Deal.

Well, that was my idea, anyway.

How are all of you this morning? We’re starting the year off right, with a glugging floor drain in the basement. It’s good that I handle Christmas on a pay-as-you-go basis, as January always seems to hold a few of these nasty surprises. There’s also the appraisal for our house, revealed yesterday, which came in at — calculating here — 52 percent of its 2005 purchase price. Yay, us! We’re po’.

There are times when the only reasonable response to such a pickle is to saute some spinach with garlic and then scramble a couple of eggs in there, too. There is little that can’t be faced on a spinach breakfast. Ask Popeye.

So while I wait for C&G Sewer Service, a question: Where would we be without Jon Stewart? Even in the clips roundups the day after, he’s better and funnier than anyone else on late night. The battle of the would-be Republican National Committee chairmen alone is worth your time. It’s hilarious to watch these tools caper for Grover Norquist. (If it weren’t so terrifying, of course.)

Charles Pugh — once the dumbest reporter on WKJG-TV in Fort Wayne, now the dumbest city council president Detroit has had since the last one:

City Council President Charles Pugh is dissolving his controversial nonprofit after taking criticism for secrecy surrounding it. The Pugh & You: Move Detroit Forward Fund was set up in March to raise money for staff travel and community outreach. But it caused heat for hosting a $5,000 a table fundraiser in August for Pugh’s 39th birthday. Criticism increased when Pugh refused to disclose donors that a staffer confirmed included a strip club operator who gave $500.

(A great picture, too. It needs a thought bubble: Once again, Kwame ruins it for everyone.)

I saw a couple of kids in downtown Grosse Pointe in shorts the other day. The temperature was edging toward balminess, so I thought perhaps they were just encouraging warmer weather. No. Turns out this is the thing, these days. Who knew? (I’m with the choose-your-battles parents. As long as hypothermia or frostbite isn’t a real risk, let ’em suffer.)

And with that, I sign off to await the arrival of a plumber-y looking van in the driveway. You?