I’m moving to Coozledad’s vegetarian farm.

The Ice House wasn’t having a very good day. The sun was out, and the temperature was on its way up to a high of 36 or so, and the roof was melting:

Apparently this has been a problem all along. The hipsters-in-charge weren’t too happy about the uncooperative weather. The bus and tarp were along the southern exposure, trying to block the sun from the very nice icicles. Otherwise, they were holding up OK:

I can never resist the Tri-X setting on the new camera for long:

Overall? Eh. It’s an interesting achievement, but ultimately — ice on a house. Perhaps I lack imagination.

Yeesh, what a week. You should not be surprised to hear that current events have schadenfreude thick in the air in Michigan. One of my Twitter follows is retweeting every Toyota joke that comes down the pike. My favorite is the new Toyota marketing slogan: “There’s no stopping us now!” They make good cars; they’ll pull through, but stuck accelerators are scary things, and handling a PR disaster like this is not for the weak of stomach. Ay yi yi, but being No. 1 is suddenly seeming a hollow victory.

They may think different in Silicon Valley, but manufacturing is not for the faint of heart. A million widgets that can fail you any number of ways, and now all this software. Alan was having a problem with the throttle on his Subaru a few months ago, and asked the dealer to check it out. The diagnosis? Some old code in the computer. No wonder the best mechanic I knew in Fort Wayne can’t work on his own car anymore.

I don’t want to bug out early, but I must. Another redonkulous day ahead, capped by yet another middle-school dance. I haven’t heard any Lady Gaga in a week — this’ll do me good. A little bloggage before I go:

A woman who collects Playboy magazines. Because why not?

Not everyone working at a newspaper is miserable. My old college classmate Mark just spent a month in Afghanistan for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, and came back with one of those great old expensive series newspapers do so well. Part 1 commences here.

For you writer fans, a new interview with Martin Amis.

Christopher Beam looks at that weird sheep ad. EDIT: Bad link fixed. Sorry. And thanks for the heads-up.

And I’m off to the shower.

If luck smiles on my schedule today, I hope to make it over to the Detroit Ice House. The managers of the project haven’t announced its location yet, so I won’t, either. But I know. It’s difficult to keep an abandoned house that has been carefully covered with ice much of a secret. They’ve surrounded the place with police tape, so the snow doesn’t get disturbed before the official project photographs are taken. Or so I’m told. It’s close enough for a quick lunchtime hop, and by then the temperature should be high enough that things should be a little drippy. High pressure promises preservative temperatures until the big reveal.

There are enough of these guerrilla art projects going on around here — a previous cadre of hipsters painted abandoned houses, from roof to foundation, including windows, in shades of safety orange and green — that I wonder if we’re on the tipping point of becoming a playground for this sort of thing. I once wrote that only in Detroit could a bartender become a real-estate developer, but now it’s even easier. In “The Farmer and the Philosopher,” the short film we saw the other night, Toby Barlow remarks that Detroit is a pretty big canvas. True dat. But I share Jim Griffioen’s oft-stated concern that poverty porn is not, in the end, a good thing, and attaching a food drive and other do-gooding to a project, while certainly worthy, can’t make it entirely right.

But I’ll reserve judgment until I see it. One of the very few conservative critiques of art I agree with is the idea that art shouldn’t have to come with a big explanation text, that when an artist has to post a signboard telling the viewer what he was after and whose blood the red paint signifies, the work has already failed. The Ice House may or may not “reference the contemporary urban conditions in the city and beyond,” as its blog states, but I do look forward to seeing it.

Which is a very long-winded way of saying, “I know what I like,” so there it is.

On Saturday, I’ll check out the Belle Isle Ice Tree, which makes no claims about urban conditions, other than, “Cold enough for you?”

I need to get out of the house, anyway. I’ve reached the stage of winter where feeling bad is a loop: I feel bad, so I skip workouts/eat too much/don’t get outdoors enough, which leads to more of the same. I should change my name to Ursa and just hibernate the season away, but then, who would dig up stuff to show you every day? Like…

Oh, the things you miss when you don’t watch Fox News. Bill O’Reilly had Jon Stewart on? And Stewart said Fox has “taken reasonable concerns about this president …and turned it into a full-fledged panic attack about the next coming of Chairman Mao”? I’d have paid to see that.

You’ve seen the generic TV report and the generic blog post. Here’s the generic Oscar-nominations story. If everyone is hip to this, why do these things keep getting done? (Thanks, Vince.)

I hate it when a story emerges that requires me to suddenly read a million words to get up to speed, and several hundred of the words involve morons whining that they should have to pay for something and why can’t they just steal it the way they did in the good ol’ days, but that seems to be what the Amazon/MacMillan fight last weekend seems to be. For those of you who weren’t tuned in, it involves a price war over e-books that broke out in the wake of the iPad announcement. Amazon is using cheap e-books to sell Kindles, and MacMillan is trying to hold the line on selling its inventory at a loss, for obvious reasons. Here’s Virginia Postrel at the Atlantic with something of an overview. Here’s John Scalzi on Amazon’s screwup. And here’s Scalzi again, being funny, on the many, many stupid things people are saying in the wake of last week’s events, including (in so many words), “it’s not like writing a book is that hard” and “I won’t pay for anything I can steal with impunity.” (I’m thinking this is maybe the only thing you need to read about this.)

May I add one more thing? All those people saying, “E-books are great, because then the last barrier standing between the dedicated amateur and his vast readership will fall to pieces” are invited to sign on as slush pile readers any any publisher within driving distance. And please, in keeping with your views about the real work of publishing, work for no pay. Report at the end of one week. Yes.

Oh, and while we’re at it? I read this thing in Slate about YouTube’s penny-ante rental proposal to help little-seen independent films get a little more-seen, offering feature-length films online for $3.99, and I see that the comments have already started:

“The beginning of the end,” wrote one user in comments; “i thought the purpose of youtube was to watch videos for free.” Another wrote that “Youtube is seriously [sic] selling out,” apparently unaware that YouTube, in fact, already sold out to Google in 2006 for $1.6 billion.

Only in a world where people think nothing of paying $4 for a cup of coffee could they balk at the idea of paying a penny less to watch a movie.

OK, now I’m inspired. I’m going to get dressed, floss the spinach out of my teeth — healthy breakfast, step one to improving one’s perspective on winter — and off to the Ice House! You enjoy Thursday.

A great time was had by me at the Mitten Movie Project last night (and probably at least some others). The monthly festival of short films featured the director’s cut of “The Message,” our December 48-hour challenge short, and please don’t laugh — unlike most director’s cuts, this one really was better than the original. (Yes, of course it grew. By two minutes.)

The Mitten is curated by one of our producers, Connie Mangilin, who keeps a relentlessly upbeat attitude about film in Michigan, large and small. She frequently works on the large productions, in part to finance her participation in the small ones. Knowing how much work goes into even a very small one, it’s always amazing to see how many people even bother to do it, and gratifying that so many do it well.

(Of course, many do it not-well, too, but now that I’ve done this a time or three, I can almost always see what the problem was, and forgive them for it. When you can’t pay people, you get people willing to work for nothing. When they are actors, it’s a coin flip. Amateur actors are more likely to have grating upper-Midwest eeaccents that can reduce even well-written dialogue to cole slaw. And nearly all of them are young and most are arty hipster types, which becomes a problem when you’ve written a role for, say, a gangster. A word to directors: Putting sunglasses on a guy with a soul patch and a visible piercing doesn’t make him look particularly threatening. He just looks like an arty hipster douchebag. By the way, many professional actors have voice problems, too. Brad Pitt is from Nebraska southern Missouri, but has a persistent contemporary burr in his voice that works in the “Oceans” movies but sounds ludicrous in many roles, particularly as Achilles.)

Among the highlights last night: “The Farmer and the Philosopher,” a short about Toby Barlow, author and Detroit ad man, and Mark Covington, the inspiring soul behind the Georgia Street Community Collective, a reclamation of a battered neighborhood on the east side. A long-overdue note: Sweet Juniper has featured the GSCC a time or three, and when I mentioned it here some months back, one of you fabulous NN.C readers hit their Paypal button and donated $50. I learned of this sometime later, and while I know whoever did it wasn’t looking for credit (at least, I assume so — I don’t know who it was), here, have some: CREDIT.

Another fave was “Dr. Reddy,” a goofy story about a bad doctor but an awesome karaoke singer — in Telugu! Dr. Reddy was played by an actor — sorry, I didn’t get his name — who has actually worked in various Telugu-language films; it’s the one spoken in southern India, and the videos playing during his karaoke performance featured himself in a big Bollywood-style song-and-dance number. And the karaoke takes place in a biker bar, so what you end up with is a sort of Peewee Herman-goes-to-Hyderabad-via-Sturgis thing. That’s entertainment.

And then there was our film, with extra footage that wouldn’t fit into our 48-hour time limit. One of these days we’ll get it up on Vimeo and you folks can watch it. One of these days.

Until then, there’s a poster:

The existence of this poster just cracks me up. Both my co-writer Ron and I plan to hang it in our houses to impress our easily impressed friends. And if it isn’t a finalist in the competition (we find out any day now) I will stain it with bitter tears.

So, then, bloggage? There must be some:

I was struck by this picture of she-who, presumably taken on the set of some Fox News show. She may not have the Fox Lips yet, but she definitely has the Fox Parentheses, the styling of the hair into punctuation marks framing the face. For some reason this is the preferred hairstyle of TV news, mostly on blondes, but now on the world’s most famous right-wing brunette. I think we’ve seen the last of the messy updo, boys; if that’s your favorite look, hang on to your pictures and be careful how often you kiss them. I predict we’ll start seeing a lot more caramel-colored highlights in the future, too. Just be advised.

Hmm, Hoosiers: Dan Coats to take on Evan Bayh? We’ll see. Non-Hoosiers: The former Sen. Coats was one of the birdbrains behind the Communications Decency Act, an early attempt at regulating smut on the internet, a staggeringly dimwitted piece of legislation that was overturned by the Supreme Court unanimously. When you can get Justice John Paul Stevens and Justice Antonin Scalia to agree on something, you know you’ve got a hit on your hands.

And that’s it for today, folks. Let’s hope for a better tomorrow.

Alan and I are having one of our occasional squabbles (“The Atlantic is a better ocean! The Pacific is a better ocean!”) over the lede on this story:

DETROIT — The 911 call came at 6:35 p.m. on Aug. 28 from a car that was speeding out of control on Highway 125 near San Diego.

The caller, a male voice, was panic-stricken: “We’re in a Lexus … we’re going north on 125 and our accelerator is stuck … we’re in trouble … there’s no brakes … we’re approaching the intersection … hold on … hold on and pray … pray …”

The call ended with the sound of a crash.

The story is about Toyota’s sudden-acceleration problem, of course. The driver is described as an “off-duty California Highway Patrol officer.” We both agree that when one is in a car with an apparently stuck accelerator, the first thing to do is shift into neutral. However, I maintain that anyone in a highway patrol would have advanced training in high-speed driving and would know this in his bones, and if he didn’t do so, there must have been a reason — perhaps the car couldn’t be shifted into neutral at speed, I dunno. He maintains I am “overthinking” it, and the guy just panicked and forgot.

And then I realized that this is just about the five-year anniversary of our move to Detroit, and we must be natives for sure now, because we are arguing about cars.

Everyone in that Lexus died, by the way. This just underlines why I am bound and determined that Kate learn to drive on a stick shift, and I don’t care if she burns out a clutch doing so; driving a manual requires you to pay more attention to the task at hand. And there’s another reminder: When we moved here, Kate was in second grade. This time next year, she will be months away from getting her learner’s license. Of course Michigan teens can start driving under supervision at 14 years, eight months. Utter insanity, but that’s how an automotive state rolls. I’m sure kids in Kentucky and Virginia were expected to start smoking at 12, once upon a time, to help the state’s economy.

First of February, today. This is always around the time I notice the light is changing, not so much the time the sun shines but the angle — ask a scientist why, I prefer the poets. The same thing happens the first week in August, when, on lower-humidity days (it never quite gets “low” here), the sun seems distinctly autumnal. As any groundhog will tell you, there’s a lot more winter ahead of us, but today, you can see the high-water mark. And it’s dry.

Both bits of bloggage are old, but not everyone has time to read the internet every day. So here goes:

A Texas politician declines to seek newspaper endorsement, and the newspaper calls this a “major rebuke.” Ha. Endorsements are one of those holdovers from not just an earlier time, but a way-way earlier time, and flat-out refuse to die. The best guesstimates I’ve seen is that in a hotly contentious presidential election year, all the newspaper endorsements in the country might have an influence over 10,000 votes, tops, and that’s being generous. Locally, who knows, but the fact that candidates work so hard to get them, and make such a fuss when they do or don’t, always struck me as sort of pathetic.

Endorsements are based on editorial-board interviews with candidates, followed by a discussion. The publisher usually wins, and the publisher is usually either a pro-business conservative and sometimes a generic center-left liberal. A windy, boring editorial will be published, using the royal “we.” (I sometimes wonder if that royal we isn’t why editorials are so boring; a previous ed-page editor of in Fort Wayne referred to the board as “the page” or “this page,” and solicited columns from “friends of the page,” which is how they were designated: Bob Butthead, Friend of the Page. I once asked why they didn’t ask others to be Enemies of the Page, a far cooler column head if you ask me, but as usually happens when you’re dealing with people who consider themselves not an I but a We, it didn’t go over well.

Anyway, the whole editorial-page structure — Hear Us, Voice of This August Institution — was blown out of the water by the internet, but many of them haven’t gotten the news yet. And so: “Major rebuke.” Now there’s a column I’d read: By Major Rebuke, Enemy of the Page.

And speaking of media institutions that refuse to change, even while the foundations are washed out from under them, Charlie Brooker on how to report news, TV-style. A YouTube link, but funny and worth your time. Wasn’t I just talking about this the other day? If only I’d taken the time to make the video.

Manic Monday is already underway, a day with a perpetually stuck accelerator. Ciao for me, and off to rounds ‘n’ Russian.

Factoid of the day, unsourced, from a newspaper account of Detroit’s experience during the Great Depression:

But poverty had not diminished moral rectitude: a man who had accepted a charitable donation of a shirt returned the diamond cufflinks he found in the cuffs.

I’m the kind of sap who would do this. I’m guessing the man who donated the shirt would not.

Shortly before the blue moon, I shared a pitcher of Blue Moon with a new acquaintance, who keeps a foot in public policy. We discussed the coming shitstorm, which in politer company is known as “the financial bind local governments find themselves in as sharply falling property-tax revenues mean curtailed services, increased taxes/fees and pain all around, or all of the above.”

On the way home, I reflected once again that if Barack Obama’s first official act after changing out of his inauguration-day tuxedo was to erect pikes up and down Wall Street and start decorating each with a severed head of a former master of the universe, we’d be talking about repealing the 22nd amendment today. (I’d travel to New York just to take a picture of Angelo Mozilo’s.)

One of these days when the temperature rises above freezing, I’m going to do a short picture-taking tour of my surroundings. Every so often it strikes me how watershed moments very rarely happen the way they do in the movies, with fancy camera movements and a pulsating score underneath to cue you to the drama. You still get up every day, brush your teeth, make coffee. People rarely riot in the streets. It’s bleak out there, but it ain’t “The Road,” not yet. It’s in how one day you’re in the passenger seat instead of the driver’s, so you can watch the storefronts as they flash by, and notice how many are empty, how the For Sale or Lease signs have been there so long they’re now sun-bleached. It’s in how you notice the house down the street, bearing the unmistakable look of abandonment, suddenly sprouts the realty sign of a firm that handles only foreclosures, and that’s no good, but! There are painters woking in there! And the dead tree in the front yard is gone! And wow, maybe it did actually sell, but the next sign is, For Rent. And that’s hopeful, right, because no one has scrapped it yet.

Everybody is seeing coyotes, not just the guy who jogs at 2 a.m., and I find myself getting all Eugenides, wondering if they’re a metaphor, like the dying elms in “The Virgin Suicides,” only no, the dying ash trees are the metaphor, right? They’re the auto-industry metaphor; the coyotes are the subprime-meltdown metaphor.

Forgive me. I think I shouldn’t have had that glass of wine on an empty stomach. But something is happening here, the bedrock is shifting, has shifted, and no one really knows what comes next. All anyone knows is, we were the first state to enter the recession, and will likely be the last to climb out. We’re the new Mississippi. May you live in interesting times, as the Chinese say.

Actually, I’m optimistic. Who isn’t, in January? There’s something tied to throwing out the tree, I think, that feeling of light and space again. As Bossy once said, it’s like getting another room in your house. One-word resolution: Finish. Several things, actually, but that’s what ties them all together. Happy new year to all.

So let’s kick off the bloggage with some supplemental reading, the WashPost ins-and-outs list, done this year by not-Hank, but still funny: Ripped abs/Ripped jeans. I’m there.

Everything you ever wanted to know — and a lot you didn’t — about Warren Beatty’s love life. More than 12,000 women, by his biographer’s estimation, and “that does not include daytime quickies, drive-bys, casual gropings, stolen kisses and so on.” Noted.

Finally, the ground beef story that will push you to vegetarianism, or else toward my KitchenAid meat grinder. Pity it ran during the slowest news day of the year.

THe first manic Monday of the new year. Off and running!

We’ve been having some coyote drama here of late. The story is familiar all over the Midwest — after years, perhaps a century or more, of never seeing a coyote anywhere but a cowboy movie, the critters are turning up in the suburbs and sometimes not the suburbs at all, as when a pregnant female was found trotting the streets of downtown Detroit a year or two ago. The reporter from the local Fox affiliate about peed his pants squealing about the coyote who came in from “the wild.” He kept repeating the phrase, right through his happy ending, in which the animal was released in Oakland County, i.e., “back into the wild.”

Anyway, they’re well-established in Grosse Pointe now, drawn by the same factors that lure rich people — wide-open spaces, access to clean water and plenty to eat. Unfortunately, one of the things they’ve been eating of late is cats and dogs — killing them, anyway — and this! Can! Not! Stand! So the police are hunting them with shotguns and have already killed one. They, the police, hunt the same time the coyotes do, at dawn and dusk, and try to get a clean shot between the people who like to walk their Labs and Goldens in the area at the same time.

I’m of two minds. Well, no, not really. I’m sympathetic to people who’ve lost their pets, really I am, but on the other hand all that’s going to happen in the long run is, some coyotes will be shot and more will move in, and that will be that.

One of the police chiefs speculated the coyotes moved in during a cold snap a couple of years ago, when they “crossed the ice from Harsen’s Island.” (The geography in question, for the unfamiliar.) Alan scoffed when I told him this and said, “Or else they came up Jefferson Avenue.” That’s approximately what I suggested to the police chief, too. I’m always amazed at how even people who like to think of themselves as outdoorsy don’t really know all that much about it, and I include myself in that number. One of the things I find most interesting about this crazy place is how feral it is, from the plant life to the mammals. I wonder how many feral pit bulls have joined up with coyote gangs in Detroit. Plump pheasant, squirrel too numerous to count, endless prairie joined by easily trottable paved roads? Life would be a dream sh-boom.

I haven’t seen one yet. I’m rarely abroad when the coyotes are, so I have to live through others’ sightings, and what they tell me — the coyote who flew across Lake Shore Road in a couple of strides and then leaped the wall around the Ford House like it was little more than a low hedge, etc. My secret: I’m kind of glad the police are on a fool’s errand. There’s enough domestication in the world.

Bloggage? Not much:

I guess everyone has seen the Wienie Roast Bomber’s undies by now. Tell me, how are full-body scans going to catch this? The explosive was sewn up tight in the crotch. I think the next step in airport security is going to be one of those sniffing machines; we had to go through them before being admitted to the Statue of Liberty a couple of years ago. Each turn took about 15 seconds. Multiply by the number of people on your flight, and have a nice day.

Here’s an interview with David Simon. I haven’t read it yet. Don’t I already know enough about this guy? Nevertheless, I salute anyone willing to give this much time to a pesky reporter.

Off to the shower with me. This is my to-do list today:

Bank
Post office
Beer
Library

That beer isn’t going to drink itself. Have a good one, all.

Saturday night we had a party to attend, the cast/wrap thang for the 48 Hour Film Project International Shootout. The party was basically 10 miles due east west [D’oh! Thanks, Beb] of my house, which means you either take the southerly indirect route via freeway or the northerly indirect route via freeway or the direct route via surface streets on the storied Eight Mile Road. You know which one we took.

Alan drove, leaving me free to soak in the spectacular ugly-loveliness of Detroit’s northern border from the passenger seat. I saw a sign I’d never noticed before: Eastpointe: Gateway to Macomb County, which you may have to live here to fully appreciate. Imagine: Scranton: The Flower of East-Central Pennsylvania, and you’re getting close. Eastpointe changed its name in the ’90s. It used to be East Detroit, and I guess they thought maybe an upgrade would help boost its fortunes. Didn’t work. It’s still the gateway to Macomb County.

But the Eastpointe border is only the beginning of the fun, because soon you’re passing Hot Wheel City, a rim shop with garish neon and a perpetual Open sign in the window. When we passed going home after midnight it was still on, and while I’m not sure you could buy a set of spinners at midnight on a Saturday night, I wouldn’t bet against it. People take automotive accessories seriously here.

Zoom, zoom and you pass two women’s health centers, not quite across the street from one another. I assume they’re abortion clinics, because there’s usually an old woman standing out front, a bloody fetus poster propped on her walker. It seems of a piece with the general scuzziness of Eight Mile, which is anchored by liquor stores, strip clubs and no-tell motels. The abortion clinic is only the last stop on the sad journey.

But that’s not all. The thoroughfare also carries high-tension electric wires down its median strip, and one of them is decorated for the holidays. Srsly. Draped along its exoskeleton is a long rope of white lights, along with a sign from the power company, wishing happy holidays. It’s about as pathetic and ugly as it sounds, but it’s entirely in keeping with the mood of the drive. You can’t help but smile.

Then you’re at the Coliseum, Detroit’s “award-winning gentlemen’s club.” Don’t click that link; the Flash will induce seizures. But if you’re wondering what awards the Coliseum can claim, I’ll lay them out for you: Best Topless Bar 2006 (Real Detroit Weekly), Club World Award “Best Lighting System” (Exotic Dancer magazine) and so on. “No cover for union members,” one of the pop-ups lures, but I don’t know if that’s all the time, or just for the Amber Lynn shows. “Must present proof,” anyway. Solidarity forever!

But it’s not all neon and breast implants. There are dozens of homely office buildings along the way, every other one wearing a For Sale or Lease sign and the distinct whiff of abandonment. Oh, what will become of us? When I moved here the first crazy visionaries were suggesting the city be converted to farms, an idea that sounded preposterous. No more. A series of urban villages surrounded by cropland and an outer ring of affluence — that’s what we’re heading toward.

And suddenly we are upon the Booby Trap, and guess what that is. “LIKE CHEERS, ONLY TOPLESS,” as the sign says. If we are upon the Booby Trap that means the state fairgrounds are not far behind, and it’s time to turn left, which means you get into the right lane. We have a brief squabble over this — it’s not a true Michigan left, but it’s close, and Alan disagrees on how we should execute. I’m right, of course. Left onto Woodward, and we’re practically there.

Woodward — now that’s a book. Don’t have time now.

The party was fun. It’s been a long time since I’ve been introduced to Milla Jovovich’s stand-in, attending as the date of Robert DeNiro’s stand-in. The theme was “now we eat pie,” so I brought three. You know what the secret to great apple pie is? A little lemon zest grated into the filling.

So, bloggage? Maybe:

I’d like to watch the Geminids meteor shower one night this week, but the blanket of gray has descended upon our little Eden, and I’m thinking it’s not going to work. Enjoy, desert dwellers.

Joe Lieberman is a jerk. But you knew that.

Tiger Woods is spending Christmas in Sweden? Nothing like a little Scandinavian bleakness to underline a tragic situation, eh?

Why I can’t take the HuffPo seriously.

Off to take on Monday.

This is what the precipitation map looked like all day yesterday:

I’m sorry this isn’t the animated version, so you could see the way those cotton-ball areas of snow park themselves over certain coastal stretches and stay and stay and stay. Some of you non-Midwesterners may not be acquainted with what we call “lake effect” snow, but that’s it, right there. It’s why western Michigan driveways and parking lots need three-foot day-glo sticks along their edges to guide the plows, like they have in ski-resort towns. It’s why the east side of Cleveland can get heaps of snow while the west side doesn’t. (Or maybe it’s the other way around. Borden?) It’s why snow in Buffalo and Erie can be nearly apocalyptic. It’s why, coming home from Milwaukee to Indiana, you can be all, like, what a beautiful day for a drive, round the southern end of Lake Michigan and suddenly realize it’s going to be a blizzard clear to South Bend.

Cold air races across rising warmer air from a large body of water and bingo-bango, precipitation. Lake-effect snowfall is a wash for lake levels, as it represents only a temporary relocation of water, and all melts back into the lake in spring. Last year, we had a snowy winter that came from storms moving south-to-north, and that was a good thing for the 21st-century Saudi Arabia of H2O. All ur waters are belong to us.

If you’re interested, western Michigan got 13 inches yesterday. We have the lightest dusting, not even enough to sweep, much less shovel.

Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice. That’s our state motto. If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.

Maybe not in January.

So much for fifth-grade civics. How was your day? It’s Friday, traditionally my Exhale Day, although there won’t be much exhaling today — I’m meeting a student later to cut some video, and tonight it’s the middle-school Christmas dance, known hereabouts as “the winter formal,” although it’s not. Girls must wear dresses and boys, ties. But it will require a Getting Ready pre-party, and I gather we’re hosting. So I’d best pull up my socks and get it in gear. Some bloggage? Oh, why not:

I’m not nearly as well-traveled as you might think, and certainly less than I’d like to be. For instance, I’ve only been to Los Angeles once, but the city has stayed with me. The hills and canyons were so strange to a flatlander like me; I found it fascinating how you could be in an unmistakably urban area one minute, take a right turn and two lefts, and be in some cleft in the hills that felt entirely off the map. Ever since, I’ve wanted to live somewhere that strange. And while the Grosse Pointes are hardly L.A., Detroit offers enough strangeness and off-the-map feel for years of exploration.

All of which leads to a couple of Sweet Juniper bonbons, in which Jim and the kids find the country in the city and also the prairie.

All that talk of cutout cookies yesterday prompted Lex to send along instructions for making your own mad gingerbread men.

Tiger Woods nude photos? As one of my FB friends says, he needs to start talking, and the words he needs to say are SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY SORRY.

Via Fark, the headline I never got to write: Snowball the overweight hedgehog is running and swimming his way back to health

Costco awaits. Have a good weekend.