Smells like onions.

Today’s question is: How do you manage your credit cards? Mine strategy is pretty simple, and has been ever since I stopped living paycheck-to-paycheck: Most months, I pay them off in full. If I can’t pay them off, I pay them as quickly as possible. The longest I’ve carried a balance in recent years is about six months, maybe seven.

Like most moderates, I walk the middle of the road on plastic. Let me see the hands of anyone who wants to return to the days when, if your washing machine broke and you didn’t have liquid savings to replace it, you used a laundromat until you could scrape together a few hundred bucks? Didn’t think so. On the other hand, the last time I used a 90-days-same-as-cash financing option — to buy a new mattress after the old one sprung a leak and started poking me in the ass with a spring — the first mailing I got from the finance company was to spread that $300 over two years for an absurdly low monthly payment, etc. So I see how people become hard-liners.

I see plastic as an ally in navigating modern life, but as a treacherous one that must be watched at all times. Money — or rather, credit — is a powerful drug, and I’ve seen too many people end up in rehab. My sister has a friend who at one point owed a five-figure sum to MasterCard and Visa equal to half her annual salary. (She told me she knew the mortgage industry was crooked when someone offered this woman a 100 percent loan to buy a house, with enough extra cash thrown in to pay off all her cards, which at the time was something like 40 grand.) I’ve gotten in over my head a time or two, but was always able to recover quickly — maybe $2,000? On one card? Sounds about right.

Over the years, I’ve heard plastic horror stories from both sides of the fence, not just the in-over-your-head spenders, but also the gamers, the people who claimed to be harnessing the power of their cards, using the frequent-flyer miles and cash-advance perks to their advantage, and it’s fair to say I trusted them only incrementally more than the deadbeats. “I write two checks a month,” a friend told me once. “The mortgage, and MasterCard.” Everything — groceries, restaurants, utility bills, clothing — went on the card, which accrued frequent-flyer miles at the rate of $1=1 mile. He paid it off in full every month. After a year it had earned him a free ticket to Paris. He’s not the liar sort, so I guess I believed him, but part of me…didn’t.

Gaming plastic just sounds like something too good to be true. There’s got to be a catch. There’s always a catch.

Turns out, there’s a catch:

Credit cards have long been a very good deal for people who pay their bills on time and in full. Even as card companies imposed punitive fees and penalties on those late with their payments, the best customers racked up cash-back rewards, frequent-flier miles and other perks in recent years.

Now Congress is moving to limit the penalties on riskier borrowers, who have become a prime source of billions of dollars in fee revenue for the industry. And to make up for lost income, the card companies are going after those people with sterling credit.

Banks are expected to look at reviving annual fees, curtailing cash-back and other rewards programs and charging interest immediately on a purchase instead of allowing a grace period of weeks, according to bank officials and trade groups.

I did a story on credit a few years back, for a financial magazine. You know what the industry calls people who pay off in full every month? Deadbeats. Ha ha.

I have one card now, a Discover. I use it for newspaper subscriptions, which are set up as monthly bills, my iTunes account, and anything I order online, mainly because I can remember the number and expiration date and don’t have to dig up my debit card. I pay it off every month and have currently accrued cash-back rewards equal to a moderately priced piece of software. If they think I’m going back to the annual-fee days, they are, um, mistaken. I’ll go back to writing checks.

Why is money such a taboo in our culture? If I ruled the world, I’d institute a class in high school — say, sophomore year — called Practical Finance, and it would be all about using money in the adult world. Half the year would be spent studying credit. I think it’s at least as important as sex education, and maybe more.

Quick bloggage, because I went to a city council meeting last night that featured tears and cries of embezzlement, and I want to get the story written p.d.q.

Bloggage? Sure:

Matt Yglesias takes apart another stupid George Will column. Ably. I’m not even a total believer in light rail, but this is about facts.

A Gallup poll adds up the damage to the GOP:

Since the first year of George W. Bush’s presidency in 2001, the Republican Party has maintained its support only among frequent churchgoers, with conservatives and senior citizens showing minimal decline.

In other words, the party of Palin and Plumber. Good luck with the rehab.

One of those Sara-Jane-Olson-but-not stories — prison escapee builds new life on the outside, only to see it come crashing down decades later — concluded here today. Susan LeFevre was released today and, surprise, said something dumb:

“Prison is a very tragic – it’s a very hard place,” she said. “People really do suffer. Beneath the laughter and the veneer, there’s suffering.”

You don’t say.

I say: Time to write that council story. And do it justice.

I know I’ve spent most days in recent weeks opening with a whine about how much work I have to do and how I shouldn’t be wasting time blogging, and today? Today will be no different. Maybe I should just put it on a user key. For now, accept a macro:

[Whining boilerplate.]

In my defense, there is much to do and much to cover of late. The big news here is the Twilight of the Dealerships, and as you might expect, the Reaper is not sparing us. Go ahead and scoff, but what’s happening here is…well, it’s very bleak. Families who have been in business selling cars for decades are going to be stepping off a cliff in just a few weeks. History is so much less alarming when you’re watching it on television. Living through it can be a real bitch.

But hey, the Red Wings won last night. There’s always that.

So let’s go bloggage-plundering, shall we?

As you might expect, Obama killed at ASU yesterday. Here’s a YouTube link to the first part of his speech. You only need to get through 4:00 and change to hear the joke that cuts the legs off their stupid diploma-mill pretentiousness. Of course, the Daily Show was funnier, and meaner.

And then there was this, waiting for him at home. Sasha is my favorite Obama.

Brian wants you all to read this very nice profile of Robert Gates, from the WashPost. A taste:

In a small building next to the tarmac, an officer briefed the defense secretary on the four deceased troops arriving that evening. They had been driving along a rutted road near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, when their Humvee hit a powerful roadside bomb.

Gates flashed with anger, according to people with him that day. He had spent most of his tenure in the Pentagon pushing to replace Humvees in Afghanistan and Iraq with Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, built to withstand such blasts. “Find out why they hadn’t gotten their goddamn MRAPs yet,” he snapped at his staff.

Clad in the black suit he had worn to work that morning in the Pentagon, Gates climbed into the cargo hold of the white 747 bearing the remains. From the ground, troops could see the defense secretary as he knelt, alone, by the flag-draped transfer cases. Five minutes passed.

Prayer is private (or should be). But I’d love to know what he said to God. (I bet it wasn’t, “Sorry for the blasphemy.”)

Funny story about what happens when police respond to a report of a black panther crouching menacingly in a culvert. They draw their Tasers! They approach! They fire! And then…well, I hope they laughed.

And now I see the morning is waning and I still have too much crap to do. Be good, and we’ll try for a little more calm next week.

Guys, I have my first meeting with my Wayne State class in a few hours, and of course I have a combination of stage fright and impostor’s syndrome, that feeling that you’re going to ask for everyone’s attention, only to be interrupted by two goons with badges who will come through the door and arrest you on suspicion of being a big ol’ fraud.

In other words, I’m a bit nervous and distracted. Fortunately, there’s some good bloggage in the world.

First up, another absolute gem from the anonymous scribe who writes in the Metro Times under the pseudonym Detroitblogger John, probably because in his day job at the News or Free Press they have him on the better-parenting beat. It’s a story about the attempted rehabilitation of one of the most notorious strip clubs on Eight Mile Road, the All Star Gentleman’s Club:

(The new manager) was a DJ at All Star for years before convincing the owners to pour a quarter-million dollars into its renovation — a gamble to convert a ghetto dive into a glitzy club. They made him general manager.

First thing he did was ban pot smoking in the bar. Then he tore down the VIP wall, turning what was essentially brothel space into a display area with little privacy. Next, he ruthlessly culled the crew of strippers.

“When the bar went upscale, I had to let go of a lot of girls I really care about because they’d gotten on in years, gained 30 to 40 pounds, 33 years old now,” he says. “In the old days you had a little longevity dancing. Now you burn up a girl in a few years.”

Just one of ten thousand gems within. OK, one more:

“Lots of things let you know not to let somebody in,” he says. “Twelve guys wearing white T-shirts with the dead guy on their T-shirt and they just came from his funeral — uh-uh, you’re not coming in here, baby, ’cause I know what happens. They want to grieve, and ‘grieve’ means pouring alcohol on the floor and slapping girls around.”

Highly recommended. Be a mensch and hit the MetTimes site for the traffic, then cruise over to Detroitblog for the extra photos, which are borderline NSFW.

Elsewhere, I have to take back at least some of the mean things I’ve said about Rod Dreher over the years, because he’s how I found part one of a Naples Daily News series on the ongoing train wreck of Ave Maria, Tom Monaghan’s little Catholic outpost down in Florida. It’s a big country and there’s room here for everyone, but talk about things that would make Jesus Christ say, “Jesus Christ,” here’s this:

When Kathy Delaney moved a year and a half ago with her two teenage sons from Maryland to Ave Maria, she believed certain rights remained unalienable.

Elections, she thought, followed the rule she’d known all her life: Her vote counted as much as anyone’s. Delaney could only assume the government of her new town operated the same. …What Delaney didn’t know is that Ave Maria’s founders already had decided how the town northeast of Naples would be ruled. They would have the power to control the town forever. This power, some say, is so great, it might be unconstitutional.

Long story short: Monaghan and his co-developer successfully lobbied the Florida legislature — the members of which would find a lot in common with the tricking strippers at the All Star Gentleman’s Club — into passing them their own little law regarding Ave Maria’s governance:

The law gives Monaghan and Barron Collier Cos. more power than any Florida developer in at least 24 years, power perhaps not seen since the days of the early 20th century land boom. The law makes landowners, not registered voters, the ultimate authority in Ave Maria. The law ensures Monaghan and Barron Collier Cos., as the largest landowners, can control Ave Maria’s government forever.

Or, to put it another way, move to Ave Maria, exit the United States of America. The whole series is here. Years ago, I sent an e-mail to Carl Hiaasen’s Miami Herald address — in other words, I spit down a well — suggesting Monaghan would be a good person to base a character on in one of his novels. However, I don’t think even he could have dreamed up a twist like this.

Oh, look: Sarah Palin has figured out a way to keep herself in the news that doesn’t involve parading her daughter and grandson around the morning talk shows — she’s “writing a book.” God help her editor:

“There’s been so much written about and spoken about in the mainstream media and in the anonymous blogosphere world, that this will be a wonderful, refreshing chance for me to get to tell my story, that a lot of people have asked about, unfiltered,” the Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate said during a brief telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.

Palin’s logorrhea is truly a thing of beauty. Not just written about, but also spoken about. Not just in the mainstream media, but in the anonymous blogosphere world. This won’t just be a chance to tell her story, but a wonderful, refreshing chance (because God knows, this woman really has been forcibly kept from microphones, hasn’t she?) to tell her story, unfiltered.

I suggest her publisher really and truly leave it unfiltered. Give her a microphone and a stenographer and let the story rip. The book will weigh in at 1,200 pages and be so boring no one will get past chapter one.

And now, you must please excuse me, because I have to go obsess over my syllabus and handouts. If you see those goons coming to arrest me, try to distract them.

The short version: If you get a chance to see Leonard Cohen on his current tour, take it. You won’t see a better show this year.

In fact, if tickets are available, stop reading now and go buy some, fool. They’re pretty ridiculous, pricewise — the cheap seats at the Fox Theatre in Detroit Saturday were $65 plus service charge, ranging up to $250 — but like I said, this is a rare pop-music outing that’s worth the price. The 74-year-old Cohen plays for more than three hours, and if you have a favorite song, you’re likely to hear it. Alan is not an easily pleased concertgoer, and he turned to me after the third number and said, “This is a top-fiver.” That’s not an annual ranking.

An elegant stage set — a riser for the band, simple scrims lit by changing-color lights, everyone in black and white — walked a careful line that suggested the gravitas one of the greatest living singer-songwriters has accumulated over his long life, but never edged into pretension. This guy worked hard for the money. There was less love-me vibe coming from the stage than you’d find at the American Idols also-rans show. Cohen spent five years in seclusion at a Zen center during the 1990s, and he must have learned some powerful lessons about simplicity and understatement.

Oh, what am I saying? He’s known that for a while. Truth be told, I didn’t leap at the chance to go when Alan suggested it; it’s been my experience that singer-songwriters frequently put on lousy shows, and the sole time I saw Bob Dylan live will remain a lifelong disappointment. Get them in a small enough venue and it works, but what is Cohen about? The lyrics, and that mournful, whispery baritone. He plays best on CD, when you’re alone and able to concentrate and stare out the window at some Canadian landscape. The thought of seeing him overpowered by an electric guitar didn’t sound worth $130, plus service charges, parking and add-ons.

I shouldn’t have worried. The sound mix was a miracle — you could hear every word, even while the musicians did anything but fade into the woodwork. There was everything from a Hammond B3 to an oud to a gong onstage, and you heard every one as well as you did Cohen’s voice. Add three angel-voiced chick singers, one of them Cohen’s longtime collaborator, Sharon Robinson, and that was a stage full of talent that could have supported any singer capably.

At the final encore, everyone took a quick solo, and Cohen lined up the whole gang for an extended farewell that sounded like a valediction. “I don’t know when we’ll be passing this way again,” he said. In other words: This is it, folks. (The story goes that this tour was necessitated by money troubles, but ah well — even the greatest artists have to eat.) As the last show of a distinguished career, it’s hard to imagine how it could have been better.

[Pause.]

In other news at this hour, Kate and I went to see “Star Trek” on Sunday, and that was pretty good, too, although once time travel gets introduced into any movie plot, that’s my signal to stop asking questions and just let it wash over me. Fortunately, it was a pleasant bath.

If you’re looking for a way to intellectually justify your attendance at the same movie, take one op-ed and call me in the morning:

I can still remember the first time I saw “A Piece of the Action,” which was set on Sigma Iotia II, the gangster-movie planet, on which Kirk and Spock donned fedoras and pinstriped suits to blend in. As a boy in grade school, I found it excitingly ridiculous but baffling. Why was Spock waving around a tommy gun?

Fortunately, my big sister, then already in high school, was on hand to explain the wondrous narrative physics of the episode. I was watching a puzzle made from three things, she said: one, the “Star Trek” I understood; two, a period crime movie our father liked, called “The Roaring Twenties”; and three, the clownish “Soupy Sales Show.”

I realized years later that I had heard the future in my sister’s cheeky teasing out of the pop-culture influences in one wonderfully, unashamedly preposterous episode of “Star Trek.” Today, my 22-year-old daughter talks that way about everything.

If you want to relate “Star Trek” to the new world of Hope and Change, well, you take that shit down to the comments, because in this bar, we take our big-explodey-movie fun straight.

Related: Hank Stuever on the Trouble with Quibbles, or how fanboys ‘n’ girls ruin everything. Or try to.

A final bit of bloggage: My poor suburb made it to the front page of Sunday Styles. Of course, it could have been better news — Grosse Pointe Blues.

I looked around for Coozledad, but I think he was back at the production facility.

Big slab o’ beeswax, $45.

T-shirt at Cinco de Mayo, Detroit.

I have a new plan for retirement: To live somewhere I can ride my bicycle 365 days a year (366 in leap years). I know this boils down to “a place that is unpleasantly hot for a large chunk of that time,” so the plan needs work. But few things make me happier, I realized yesterday, than saddling up for a quick trip to the butcher three blocks away. If only we hadn’t engineered modern life to do away with much of its moderate exercise; maybe the murder rate would be lower.

Detroit is a town that, like Los Angeles, was built to accommodate the automobile, and friends, it ain’t aging well. Every few months I feel the need to say this again, but it bears repeating: This is one ugly town. Not just the decimated city, but also its suburbs, and it’s at times like this I’m ever so glad we chose the Pointes, because it was platted before walking was seen as a sign of weakness, and at least we have the lake. There’s nothing like rolling out one of the big through avenues like Gratiot, six lanes or so, flowing fast and free because it’s at maybe 50 percent of its carrying capacity even at rush hour, while one ugly storefront after another goes past. How does anyone make a living in vacuum-cleaner repair, you wonder, when just finding your store means you have to buck traffic and hunt out a five-digit address that may or may not be on the building? You can almost mark the point, as you drive out from the core, when the idea of the strip mall took hold — a little more setback in return for easier parking out front, six little shops replaced by three larger anchors, if you can call a chain video store an anchor, plus the inevitable Lee Nails. (When was it decreed that all nail shops be run by Asians? How do these ethnic connections to market sectors get made? Is it the same group that says, “OK, Chaldeans — you got the party stores. Jews? Jewelry for you. Macedonians? I hope you like restaurants.” And so on.)

Urban planners point out the inevitable a lot (perhaps to disguise how often “planning” doesn’t got as, um, planned), and say the trend toward dense urban centers is real and has legs, and the sooner individual municipalities start accommodating it, the better. Walkable, bikeable, parking-out-of-sight — this is the future. Turns out people want to rub elbows with their fellow man, after all, preferably in a farmer’s market. We’ll see. But I sure like my bicycle. In about an hour I’m going out to make my cop-shop rounds on it — it’ll be two hours of mostly riding, covering 12 miles or so, work/workout all in one. This is living.

(It helps that people don’t expect reporters to be much more than sweaty and unpleasant.)

So how was your weekend? Mine was fine. We got the boat in the water on Saturday with no arguments or even much yelling, showing that it only takes a few years of practice to get the our routine down, plus the help of a couple of able souls at the marina. The lake is a foot higher this year, a happy turn of events that’s been in the news quite a bit of late. A new study by the International Joint Commission (a group virtually unknown outside the Great Lakes) says the drastically lower levels of recent years are a natural phenomenon, caused in part by ice jams that scoured the St. Clair River bottom — nature’s dredge, in other words. An interesting theory, but at this point all I care about it how nice it is to have a little more water out there.

And so boating season begins. At least four, effectively five, and as many as six months of sailing lies ahead. In other words, as much winter as I just bitched about. Life really is binary.

Bloggage? Not much, buth this:

One of Justice David Souter’s clerks reveals the man you don’t know in Slate, a man who would rather read by the last two foot-candles of winter light than turn on a lamp. Now I feel bad for having made fun of him:

Why would a man who can understand Grokster read by the window rather than turn on a light? Souter has a characteristic New England thriftiness and a distrust of luxury that verges on the spartan. He can keep a suit for decades, and he gently mocked me and my fellow clerks for wearing overcoats in the winter, claiming that his view was shared by that other great Yankee justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Souter is also deeply unpretentious. It would never occur to him that because he is a Supreme Court justice he’s entitled to waste a bit of the taxpayers’ electricity. (He once wrote me a note on a napkin I’d left on my desk rather than using a new sheet of paper.)

Souter’s current position on the left wing of the court owes much more to movement by the court and the country than to any lurch on his part. The current court, after all, has seven Republican appointees and has been on a steady rightward drift since the Reagan years. The Republican Party has, too. I think Souter is indeed in many ways a Republican; it’s just that his sort of Republican no longer really exists.

Remember those? I do. I miss ’em.

OK, off to edit my syllabus and fire up the NewsCycle. Have a great week, all.

ADDED: Because Brian brought it up last week — either here or in an e-mail, I don’t recall — an interview with Lenore Skenazy, who advocates off-leash child-rearing. Interesting.

I’m criminally tired today, to the point that a third cup of coffee is not the solution. What is? Short Attention Span Bloggage Theater, that’s what!

A lede that made me laugh:

British Oscar winner Kate Winslet has revealed exclusively to marie claire magazine that she was bullied as a child and lived with the nickname ‘Blubber’.

When I started as a freelancer, I thought maybe I’d pitch some stuff to women’s magazines, even though other freelancers warned me off with waving arms — “they’re run by insane people, they make ridiculous assignments, they change their minds when you’re 90 percent done and expect you to redo the whole thing for no more money, and they take forever to pay.” I never did much pitching to them, as it turned out; they didn’t like my ideas, so I turned my efforts elsewhere. The only person I’ve even heard of who is successful with the lady books writes under a pseudonym, so as not to sully her more upmarket reputation as an respected essayist.

But mostly I’m discouraged by, you know, reading them. Someone sat down at a keyboard and had to actually write that stuff about Kate Winslet. I hope they had as much fun writing as I did reading. It’s the “has revealed exclusively” that slays me every time, that Hedda Hopper/Deadline USA/stop-the-presses usage that only serves to underline the triviality of the revelation. It’s a staple on the gossip blogs. Someone is always revealing something exclusively to some ink-stained hack. In fact, I think they’ll keep calling themselves ink-stained hacks well into this century, long after ink has gone the way of quill pens.

That was my favorite part of “Shakespeare in Love” — the scenes of Will at work, sharpening his pens, dipping and scratching, the ink gradually spreading up his fingers. You had to be motivated to be a writer, once. Which reminds me of my favorite passage from that Christopher Buckley piece we discussed earlier in the week:

He fired up his computers. He hunched unsteadily over his keyboard. I hovered behind, ready to catch him if he pitched forward.

“I’m going to have to dictate to you,” he said.

“I’m a little rusty at WordStar,” I said. “It’s been a quarter-century or so.”

Pup still used the word-processing system he first learned in the early 1980s. Generations of his computer gurus had had to install this antiquated system in his increasingly sophisticated computers, which were like F-22 fighter jets with the controls of a Sopwith Camel.

WordStar, jeez. I hadn’t thought of that in a thousand years. I can’t even remember what word processor I used back in the Cenozoic era, on my very first IBM PC — WordPerfect, maybe? The thing required so many floppy swaps that I went back to the typewriter after the novelty wore off, and stayed there for a few years, until we bought our first Mac and adopted MS Word, a program I have come to loathe. Lately I’ve been doing most of my in-and-out writing on Google Docs. Walter Feigenson has an amusing recollection on his intersection with the Buckleys and WordStar, prompted by the same passage.

Right before my last Mac died I downloaded WriteRoom, which is sort of like WordStar for those of us who suffer from fatigue-induced ADD — green letters, black screen, no distractions.

Finally, Jim at Sweet Juniper is not only ten times the reporter I am, he puts me to shame with his curiosity. He’s the full-time dad to two little kids, and he still finds time to photograph dozens of bottles of hobo pee. If you don’t click that link, you will be sorry.

I was working my way through this story about today’s GOP dilemma — a broader party or a purer one? the headline asks — when it occurred to me this is exactly what some were saying, with great pleasure, when the current pope was elected. It would be a smaller church once Benedict XVI drove out all the lesser souls, but a purer one, and yes, that was exactly the word they used — purer. And while the Catholic church and the Republican party have very different missions in the world, it’s interesting that both are having the very same discussion, isn’t it?

I’d make my own observations about it, but as I may have told you: I’m tired. You feel free.

And now it’s 10 a.m. Work beckons.