I felt guilty about leaving Meyer alone for so long. …I always feel guilty when I keep Meyer waiting. And there is never any need for it. He never paces up and down, checking the time. He has those places to go, inside his head. He looks as if he was sitting and dozing, fingers laced across his middle. Actually he has walked back into his head, where there are libraries, concert halls, work rooms, experimental laboratories, game rooms. He can listen to a fine string quartet, solve chess problems, write an essay on Chilean inflation under Allende, or compose haiku. He had a fine time back in there. if you could put his head in a jar of nutrient and keep him alive forever, he would wear forever that gentle, contented little smile.

— John D. MacDonald, “The Scarlet Ruse”

I don’t want to keep returning to Wednesday, but given that current events are so vexing of late, indulge me a little. Every so often I think about the problem of alone-ness (as opposed to loneliness). I can’t tell you how many people I knew who married the wrong person, too young, because they were afraid to be alone. The idea of coming home to an empty house, of eating a meal at a table for one, of seeing a movie alone — these things terrify many people. And that’s only the company problem. What do you do with yourself when it’s just you? Being able to amuse oneself for a period of time, without television or hand-held video games, is a talent, as MacDonald’s Meyer demonstrates.

I had a lot of time to think about this during my jury service, although I guess I sorta cheated — I brought a book. But it was interesting to look up, between chapters, and check out the faces. Some were reading, a few were socializing, a few more were doing what looked like paperwork. One woman brought provisions for a whole day, carried in a transparent tote — two bottles of water, three or four snacks, a book, a Sudoku collection and a knitting project. Others had the thousand-yard stare that could mean deep thought or a meditative state just this side of sleep.

But a few were plainly suffering. Their hands twitched, their feet shuffled, they walked back and forth between the bathroom and their seat, they stood up and stretched their legs. They were the precise opposite of contentment. I wanted to tell them: Take a lesson from Meyer. Go listen to a string quartet.

So. In precisely seven minutes I have to wash my face and head out the door for a little meeting. In lieu of the usual thousand-word blather, check out Jim at Sweet Juniper, one of the best journalists in Detroit, who finally found the place where he parts company with the Urban Explorer’s Code, i.e., take nothing but pictures. People who don’t live in Detroit can scarcely imagine the conditions around here, how many buildings have simply been abandoned. That so many are public schools only makes it worse:

After my first visit to the shattered middle school, I am haunted by what I found in one office: hundreds of file folders containing student psychological examinations complete with social security numbers, addresses, and parent information. I sat and thumbed through them. Many contained detailed histories of physical and sexual abuse, stories of home lives so horrifying I still can’t get them out of my head: sibling rape, torture, neglect that defies belief. The detailed reports explained emotional impairments, learning disabilities. There was another box full of IEPs. The dates revealed that many of these students are still in the school system somewhere. I found several of their faces in the 2007 yearbook.

I spend the next few months trying to track down someone who cares. I send e-mails to the school’s former principal, offering to go back and collect these records for her or destroy them. She never responds. I call my mom, a retired special education teacher and erstwhile administrator to determine the extent of malfeasance. Then I call the school district’s legal department and leave voice mails warning them of the liability of this gross violation of student privacy. I never receive a response. I track down the school psychologist to some address in Troy. Nothing. It turns out a daily newspaper reported abandoned records like these within many of the 33 schools closed in 2007 and the district did nothing. No one is responsible. Someone else was supposed to destroy them. The company that had been paid to secure the school never did its job.

So I did it. I went back in to destroy them so they would no longer be just sitting there on the floor for anyone to find.

And that’s only three paragraphs. Go read it all. I’m off, for the day and the weekend. You all have a good one.

Well, that was easy. A morning spent like cattle being sorted into pens ends with “Have a blessed year” around 11 a.m. and I was outta there. This time I actually got out of the assembly room and was sent to a specific courtroom, but never crossed the threshold. I had a feeling we’d not be called after we started cooling our heels, and they got cold indeed. We were asked to wait in the hallway outside, then told to take a 15 minute break that stretched to 35, then thanked for our service and sent back to the assembly room, where we were freed by a clerk who passed out excuse letters to all.

I had but one objective at that point — to supplement the 4.5 hours of sleep I’d gotten the night before — so I detoured into Greektown for an early lunch to put me in a soporific state by early afternoon. I was not the most pathetic nerd in the place, eating lunch at 11:15 a.m.; that would be the table of four ordering saganaki at that early hour, i.e., the Full Opa. Some things should only be enjoyed under the cover of darkness. An incomplete list: The music of Tom Waits and Miles Davis, single-malt scotch. To this I’d add flaming cheese.

My morning at the courthouse wasn’t wasted, however. I got 100 pages into the new nightstand volume and enjoyed seeing the sights. You’d have to go to Hieronymus Bosch to find a more interesting canvas of humanity than the courthouse in Detroit. I took my time returning to the bullpen, letting the claustrophobic elevators pass, and was rewarded with a ride down with one of the lawyers in the case. At least that’s what I assume he was. He came out of the courtroom we’d been teed up for, carrying a battered leather briefcase, the old square-bottom kind; it looked like something from the 1940s. His hair needed a trim and his jacket was of the same vintage as his briefcase, its lining drooping below the hem. He wore his reading glasses Carl Levin-style. If I were a painter, I’d ask him to sit for a portrait, and call it The Old Barrister. The bailiff said it was an embezzlement case we’d just avoided, and while I knew it couldn’t have been the fun couple from the Palace (wrong county), I wondered what I’d have said if the judge asked if I had any particular interest in the subject. Probably, “Ummm…”

Still, we were freed by that miracle of American jurisprudence: The plea bargain. Remember when inveighing against plea bargains was the hot topic for certain smartypants pundits? Remember how prosecutors started calling them plea agreements, on the grounds it sounded less sleazy? What a waste of time that crusade was. Without plea bargaining we’d have a prison on every corner. Informants would stop being forthcoming in exchange for a little consideration. Mutual back-scratching would cease. Negotiation — a skill everyone who hires a lawyer should place high on the must-have list — would become irrelevant. And we’d do a lot more jury duty.

I can’t remember where I read this, but I suspect it was a Scott Turow novel, since I’m not exactly a legal scholar — the idea that for most offenses, a trial by jury should be considered a last resort. Not exactly the nuclear option, but something that should be avoided if it can be. It explains the contempt we feel toward all involved when stupid, obvious cases come to trial; you think, someone didn’t do their job here. The phrase “rack twelve” sticks in my head. If you rack twelve, you better be ready to play the game.

Oh, well. Done for another year now. A blessed one.

I’m surprised you guys didn’t toss the Obama speech around a bit more yesterday. I had it on as I worked, and even with divided attention, it was a beautiful thing. I got the same feeling I get when I watch video clips of Secretariat, that tingly sensation that tells you you’re seeing one of the greats. I tried to remember this when judging Bobby Jindal, that even Abe Lincoln would have looked like a punk, cleaning up after Barry. Still, I think we can all agree Jindal was more than a disappointment. I’ve read a bit about the guy and know he’s considered one of the short-list best hopes for 2012, which is why watching him sing-song his way through that Toastmaster disaster left me with another tingly sensation, the one you get when you realize just how bare the opposition’s cupboard is. You can dress up thin content with a great delivery (which he didn’t), or an attractive package (Mrs. Palin’s forté), but when you don’t have either one, it’s just embarrassing.

And speaking of embarrassment, I want it on the record now that I’m going to disrespect Jindal’s religion if he doesn’t do some ‘spainin’ about that exorcism. I can respect an awful lot about someone else’s beliefs, but when they’re running for office I think I have a right to ask what the HELL about some things, and I draw the line at casting out demons. No way he’s hiding behind the “deeply religious” veil on this one. Michael Gerson did the kneepads duty Tuesday morning with this piece, the patented George Will allow-me-to-introduce-you-to-this-fascinating-outlier treatment, with whoppers like this stuffed in there like butter under the chicken’s skin:

He converted to a traditionalist Catholicism, in a nation where anti-Catholicism has been called “the last acceptable prejudice.”

Oh, really? Who has called it that? How would we explain that, given that half the Supreme Court, a huge chunk of official Washington and various other well-paid sinecure holders are just so? They like to throw around charming phrases like “culture of death,” but say, “let’s hear some more about that exorcism, Bobby,” and they run to the fainting couch, sobbing into their hankies. What a tool.

Well, maybe all that no longer matters. I can see Obama in 2012, batting this guy around like a cat with a mouse.

Look at the time. Look at the word count. Look at my to-do list. Time to sign off, get to the gym and make up for losing Wednesday.

If memory serves, I just did jury duty a scant 2.5 years ago, but as I recall, they told us we were safe from being called again for two years, so I guess my time is up.

By the time most of you read this, I’ll be cooling my heels at the storied Frank Murphy Hall of Justice, waiting to be thrown out of the jury pool. I’m always thrown out of the jury pool. That’s what lawyers do to journalists, even though we’re trained to put our personal opinions aside and consider things objectively. (Stipulated: This is not always a skill I excelled at, but I was a columnist.) Most of us are familiar with courthouse routines and procedures and are pretty well-informed. So of course lawyers give us the heave-ho at the first opportunity.

I’m bringing a book.

So this is an open thread for whatever might be happening in the world. I figure Barry’s speech will be topic one. (Here’s Dana Milbank on the Twittering of the speech.) But if y’all want to swap soufflé recipes, that’s fine, too. Assuming I’m not sequestered for a six-week-long death-penalty case, I’ll be back tomorrow.

The problem with modern life is, we all live in a bubble. Our bubbles float through space, occasionally bumping into other bubbles, but you know how that happens — the two bubbles don’t become one, but just adhere for a while. We can look into the bubble next door, but there’s still the membrane between us.

The better your bubble, the more secure you are. On the other hand, the better your bubble, the harder it is to hear what’s going on outside it. Bubbles can be called by other names — I prefer “Graceland” — but it’s still a bubble. My membrane is thin at the moment; I am not secure. On the other hand, I am not Peggy Noonan, either:

On Wednesday, in an interview with Politico, Dick Cheney warned of the possible deaths of “perhaps hundreds of thousands” of Americans in a terror attack using nuclear or biological weapons. “I think there is a high probability of such an attempt,” he said.

When the interview broke and was read on the air, I was in a room off a television studio. For a moment everything went silent, and then a makeup woman said to a guest, “I don’t see how anyone can think that’s not true.”

A makeup woman. Peggy’s bubble has adhered to another’s. She peers inside at the strange life there, and is pleased to see the makeup woman shares her anxieties. Makeup people, taxi drivers, “an e-mail from a reader” — these are how the pundit class takes the pulse of the mob. It doesn’t matter; it’s still a bubble.

Actually, the whole column is just classic Noonan, and I know I’ve said this a million times, but every time I picture her at her laptop, working, I see her stirring a highball with her index finger, sucking the bourbon off, tapping out a few lines, back to the highball. I can think of no other explanation for an opening line like this: All week the word I kept thinking of was “braced.” Peggy doesn’t write so much as she streams her consciousness, whatever shape it’s in at any given moment. Who knew that Hunter Thompson’s legacy would carry so far from the pages of college newspapers? It is to marvel.

Eh. I can’t get excited about picking on the holders of wingnut sinecures this morning. It’s Thursday, almost the end of my week, but not this week. I’ll be working every day, on one job or another, for the foreseeable future, which makes me a little glum and, like Peggy, very thirsty. So let’s turn to the one place that never fails to cheer me up: The big world outside the bubble.

Here in Detroit, the city council president is… well, what is the word I’m looking for? Insane? Maybe. You tell me how to describe a woman who cannot check into a hotel without police being called, who reduces a public meeting to chaos by flinging insults at a colleague? Insane implies she’s irrational, when she’s clearly not. Bloggers and commenters not affiliated with mainstream media reach for more racially tinged descriptions; “ghetto trash” seems to be the term of the moment. She’s always wagging her finger, metaphorically or not, in someone’s face. There was another incident last week:

Detroit City Council President Monica Conyers had to be restrained during a confrontation last week with Councilman Kwame Kenyatta in which she hurled insults at Kenyatta about his hearing aid, health and education.

…When Kenyatta asked her what she said, Conyers responded he needed to learn how to talk to a woman.

Kenyatta shot back that when he was with a woman, he would do so. That prompted Conyers to yell at Kenyatta that he was stupid, citing his lack of a college degree, to tell him he “can’t hear” — a dig at his hearing aid — and to try to rub in his face rumors that Kenyatta has cancer.

It sounds like an episode of “Rock of Love Charm School,” only without the hope of elimination at the end of the episode. Oh, wait. Monica may take care of that herself:

“Sometimes, I think of this job, it’s like, Is it all worth it?” she said in a half-hour interview. “It’s just so much scrutiny for nothing that I didn’t even see none of this when I wanted to run for this office. But now here I am in this office, and it’s just like, beat up on Monica.”

Narcissists are such interesting people, aren’t they? Poor them.

Meanwhile, in totally unrelated musings, Supergay Detroit has some thoughts.

But that wasn’t the only outrage coming out of Detroit this week. (Is there ever only one? No.) The same day one of the city’s few successful and legal businesses lays off 250, it also hires one: Kwame Kilpatrick. And while you can read the legitimate stories about this in the usual places, for pure summing-up pungency, you really can’t beat Detroitist:

Kleptocracy uber alles.

Oh, hell yes.

Dana Milbank can be a bit full of himself, but for a certain sort of Washington reporting, no one does it better:

In another time, Stew Parnell, the man whose peanut butter killed eight people and sickened 550 more, would have been put in the stocks or the pillory. Congress didn’t have such tools at its disposal yesterday, so lawmakers did the modern equivalent: They put him through the walk of shame.

The House commerce committee hauled Parnell up to testify under subpoena, even though lawmakers knew the Peanut Corporation of America boss would take the Fifth. Before calling him to the witness table, they heard from the grieving relatives of Parnell’s victims. They made him take the oath, then invited him to sample some of product he shipped even though he knew it had tested positive for salmonella. Finally, they forced him and his lawyers to take a quarter-mile perp walk on Capitol Hill, chased by television cameras and reporters jamming microphones in his face and shouting questions:

“Mr. Parnell, did you put profits ahead of the public’s health?”

“People died, sir. Do you have anything to say to their families?”

More constrained reporters had to settle for wussy adjectives like “theatrical,” but I thought Milbank’s “sketch,” as these pieces are called, captured the absurdity of the situation — posturing on one side, weaseling on the other — rather neatly. He should cover Detroit.

And with that, I think I should drag my stinky ass through some hot water and try to make some sense of the day. Some days, you think Joaquin Phoenix is the only one who really has it figured out. Hilarious clip behind the link.

Our lonely quest for accuracy remains unfinished, so let’s put this at the top of the blog today, so our vast and influential readership sees it, first thing:

A commode is not a toilet.

It’s true that the word is a euphemism for toilet in many places, including the American south. But the one purchased by ex-Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain for his office likely supported his tabletop cigar humidifier, a Baccarat crystal decanter, a solid-gold dildo or perhaps his latest golf trophy, but not his overpaid ass.

This is a commode:

Thanks, Wikipedia.

No one, including his editors, tells Mitch Albom anything other than “yes, sir” and “great column, sir!,” so we’ll write him off, and let him snicker, you can’t justify $35,000 for a commode — yes, a commode …

But David Brooks has the best editors money can buy, so what’s his excuse? Ahem:

Then there was John Thain, who was humiliated because it is no longer acceptable to spend $35,000 on a commode for a Merrill Lynch washroom.

The Wall Street Journal, run by well-paid journalists who presumably know their Louis Quinze from their Louis Seize, explained it very well a few days back, but still, the confusion persists.

The WSJ is good enough to provide the original itemized list of Thain’s office furnishings, and you’ll note the commode is for the reception area. Think about it.

And that will be our last word on the subject, until someone screws it up again.

While we’re on the subject of language, however, let’s take a look at what the ex-governor of Illinois is doing. Oh, look. He’s lashing out:

CHICAGO — Former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich today lashed out at lawmakers who booted him from office, calling his removal a “hijacking.”

Someone is always lashing out in the newspaper. “Lashed out” is straight journalese, the language reporters and editors speak amongst themselves that no one else does. Let’s use the miracle of Google to see its awesome power of description:

Drunk George Tenet lashed out at Bush’s neocons…

Noam Schalit lashed out at Prime Minister Ehud Olmert and his government on Wednesday…

Pictured: The moment Sharon Osbourne lashed out at reality show contestant…

Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney lashed out Friday when quizzed about the flap over a landscaping crew working at his home…

Kanye lashes out at Britney’s return to VMA…

Lashing out is done so often in news stories, and describes such a wide range of behavior, that the term is effectively meaningless. Follow that link to Sharon Osbourne, and you’ll see a proper lashing out — she’s throwing a drink in some slut’s face. Whereas Mitt Romney, whom you wouldn’t think has a lashing-out bone in his body, got tagged after responding to a question with another question: “If I go to a restaurant, do I make sure all the waiters there are all legal? How would I do that?” the former Massachusetts governor asked.

Of course, the first is from the Daily Mail, the second from the uptight L.A. Times. When in doubt, always trust a Brit. They know their lashing.

So. Kwame Kilpatrick was sprung from the slam shortly after midnight this morning. Of course he had a security detail, ineptly described in the Freep as “self-important, well-dressed men,” but the writer gets a pass — he was on deadline. I’m amazed at the politics of security details in this town; it really seems to be a badge of honor. (The superintendent of schools gets security as part of the position’s compensation package.) Kwame in particular appears to love rolling like Suge Knight, which I always found amusing, because the guy played college ball and packed on the usual few dozen retirement pounds, and hardly looks like a handy mugging target. He likes multiple vehicles and a big carbon footprint — his private posse last night went for no fewer than five SUVs. I guess Fidel Castro gets more, but in a place like this, it just reads as TGFW. Too Ghetto for Words:

The security guys, some wearing bow ties and long coats, others with Bluetooth-like devices in their ears, made it seem like the ex-mayor would be getting into one vehicle parked illegally in front of the jail.

For 20 minutes before Kilpatrick appeared, they stood next to an open door and kicked at the icy snow piled on the curb. It was a bush-league feint reminiscent of the body-double stunt Kilpatrick’s Detroit Police Executive Protection Unit employed last year during one of the then-mayor’s court appearances.

Instead, Kilpatrick walked about 100 feet to the west and entered the Suburban.

Sigh. Well, politics at the other end of the American class spectrum doesn’t seem any prettier. I read the New Yorker’s story about the brief political career of Caroline Kennedy and came away with two conclusions: New York dodged a bullet, and Lawrence O’Donnell is a gold-plated asshole. You’d think we’d have moved past the era of Kennedy brown-nosing, but nooo. Here he is on the woman who did get the job:

Now Caroline Kennedy has had her moment and flubbed it. Paterson has appointed Kirsten Gillibrand, a second-term congresswoman from Hudson, near Albany. “Paterson has no comprehension of upstate New York, absolutely none, and has chosen someone better at representing cows than people,” Lawrence O’Donnell says. “What you have is the daughter of a lobbyist, instead of the daughter of a former President or the son of a former governor. This is the hack world producing the hack result that the hacks are happy with.”

Good god. Now there’s a lash-out.

OK, off to Gymville. I feel like shit, but I’m soldiering on. Have a better day than mine doubtless will be.

The dead guy frozen in ice was found in the Detroit Public Schools book depository building. I should have picked up on this yesterday, but I was rushed and disorganized as usual, and it wasn’t until later that I remembered: This was the building whose contents and criminal decay were photographed by Jim from Sweet Juniper (and, to be sure, about a million other professional and amateur shooters, urban explorers, blight tourists and various slumming gawkers). He put together one of his typically thoughtful posts about it, which got Boing Boing’d, Fark’d, Metafilter’d and Web 2.0’d to a fare-thee-well, culminating in one photo running in Harper’s Magazine last year.

The post was also featured on some racist websites, used by its proprietors to show what happens when you let “them” run their own school systems, and Jim responded to that with a follow-up post that describes the building and how it got to the state it’s in. It’s pretty long, but it’s probably the best single explanation of how decay happens and why it persists in this city, and it boils down to: It’s complicated.

What’s most important for purposes of looking at the How and Why of the Dead Guy is probably the building’s most recent chapter, when it was sold to Manuel “Matty” Moroun, whose hip-pocket, one-phrase media description is usually “reclusive billionaire.” Moroun owns — yes, owns outright — the Ambassador Bridge across the Detroit River, which carries 70 25 percent of all the freight that moves between the United States and Canada. Some people think a crossing that important should be in the public’s hands — and if you’re thinking this sounds kind of like “Chinatown,” you’re not alone — and efforts have been underway on both sides of the border to bring this monopoly to a halt. Moroun is opposed to this, of course, and has taken steps to preserve his holdings, including buying key real estate parcels near the bridge, one of which is the building where the dead guy was found.

Moroun has no motivation to either demolish the building or even secure it. Like a lot of structures built around that time in this city, it’s solid to a fault. (You did know one of this area’s architectural innovations was the invention of reinforced concrete, didn’t you?) It would cost millions to demolish and he doesn’t need it demolished, and so, writes Jim:

So for seven years, Moroun’s company has held a permit for the demolition of the former Detroit Public Schools book depository, but he has done nothing but neglect the building. …Instead, because this is Detroit, it just sits there. It is left unsecured, open to scrappers, looters, crackheads, graffiti artists, suburban taggers, vandals, prostitutes, and local bloggers.

I imagine it’ll be secured now — at least for a while; the Freep today ran a photo of the perimeter fence being repaired. The Freep, having been beaten on this story, is pushing the city’s defense, which is: We responded to the 911 call and found nothing. Now that Kwame Kilpatrick, beneficiary of much Moroun campaign cash, is gone, city officials are blaming Moroun for the incident, for failing to secure the building. I’m sure this will still be playing out long after the dead guy is or isn’t ID’d and laid to rest in whatever potter’s field the city is currently using.

This is interesting: The News story today doesn’t mention Moroun at all. It, like yesterday’s story, was written by Charlie LeDuff, who also had a coup of sorts late last year, when he lured the reclusive billionaire from under his bridge for his first interview in forever. It was, not surprisingly, a pretty respectful one, and didn’t touch on this issue. (He does mention the building adjacent to the book depository, the infamous Michigan Central Station, which Moroun also owns. He claims he can’t tear that one down, because it’s a historic landmark. No word on whether that applies to the book depository, probably because it doesn’t.)

This is getting complicated. Like most things around here.

Anyway, there are many more links in the ones I’ve already given you. The link to Jim’s follow-up post is to all his depository-tagged posts, including the original. A quick Flickr tag search for “detroit book depository” will take you to hundreds of photos of the place. And for those of you puzzled over the headline for this post, it’s a reference to “So Much Water So Close to Home,” a Raymond Carver short story about the problem posed by a dead body. It was one of the threads in the movie “Short Cuts,” for you film buffs.

So. A little bloggage:

I suspect the maternity wedding dress is nothing new — what else is an empire waist for other than fetal concealment — but still, here’s a story about the latest styles.

And while we’re stealing links from Jezebel…now there’s a talent competition.

Why we have a health-care crisis in this country: Because there are doctors who will implant eight embryos in the uterus of a woman who already has six children. Remember that the next time your insurance premiums go up.

Have a good weekend, all. I hope to.

ADDED: Oops, almost forgot. When the Iraqi journalist threw his shoes at George Bush, Alan said, “You wait. They’re going to put up a statue of that guy.” Not quite, but close. Alan would like you all to know he told you so.

You’d think, with the heaps of frozen water in the yard, that moisture wouldn’t be a problem for a Michigan family on a day like today, but you’d think wrong. Winter is perverse that way. I’ve identified a large part of my physical misery as a lack of moisture, and am working to rectify it. If you’ve never awakened at 5 a.m. with parched nasal passages swollen shut and a mouth that feels like a cat peed in it, well, you’ve never lived in your average heated house in winter. There’s no furnace-linked humidifier in the world that can keep up with it, so you have to supplement — with vaporizers, saline nasal spray, industrial-grade moisturizers and other foofraw, trying to find some sort of equilibrium. It sucks. What sucks even more is knowing that by July, I’ll be bitching about the humidity along with everyone else.

Is there a place on earth where naked primates can live in comfort year-round? I read somewhere that some Caribbean island suspended daily weather forecasting because it was the same every single day except when a hurricane was in the neighborhood — highs in the low 70s, winds steady out of the west at 10-15 knots, slight chance of late-afternoon showers. Maybe that’s the place.

You want to see what winter can do to a girl? Watch the trailer for New in Town. Cold weather appears to have frozen Renee Zellweger’s face to the point she can only move her mean little mouth! (And it’s her skin that looks worst of all, at least in the trailer. When a movie can’t make Renee Zellweger look pretty, it’s time to investigate the straight-to-video option.)

OK, enough. It’s not so bad out there. We’re predicted to break the 20-degree mark today, woohoo. And a white winter is always a better than a brown one, so I’ll take it.

For the sake of relativity, Jeff TMMO posted a link in comments to the webcam at the South Pole. It’s -19 in what is, after all, high summer down there. No one will be joining the 300 Club today.

OK, then. Let’s talk fresh starts. Does anyone else find it ironic that Detroit’s ex-mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, convicted felon, local disgrace and all-around shitheel, apparently has a job prospect after he’s sprung from the slam in a few days? With actual law-abiding working people falling like dead soldiers every day, you’d think the guy might have to spend some time swearing at Craigslist with all the rest of us, but no. The good news: It’s in Texas. A few more immigrants like him, and the Lone Star state will be the new Florida.

A little bit of bloggage today:

Watch the first clip. Are all pageant dads nancyboys? Is there some way to grow girl babies in wombtanks rather than make innocent women marry these guys?

You thought this blog had the stupidest comment about John Updike yesterday? Not even close.

Not much for you today, I know, and I apologize. But it’s off to Costco for me — we’re out of beer and wine. That’s a must-rectify situation in our house. So maybe later, eh?

Forget Michelle’s dresses. You really want to know where Aretha got her hat, and today we have the answer: Mr. Song Millinery on Woodward Avenue, Detroit, Michigan. The phones started ringing within moments of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee,” and the details are this — you can buy versions of the hat in 15 colors for $180, but the original is “exclusive to” Aretha, and you probably expected that, didn’t you?

The Free Press story goes into greater depth about millinery designer Luke Song, son of a Korean immigrant, whose humble storefront conceals a business with national, and now international, range:

Mr. Song Millinery’s clientele is 90% African-American, churchgoing women, Song said. His wholesale business supplies hats to shops in other cities with large African-American communities, and the merchandise sells especially well in California, Houston and Dallas. He designs 100 hat styles every six months.

…By Wednesday afternoon, Mr. Song had sold hundreds of hats. A store in Dallas had sold 500 more, and the material was running out.

“People are calling from England, asking for the hat,” said Luke Song, who designed Franklin’s chapeau. “I’m shocked. I had no idea. We did not expect this.”

He should have. Aretha looks about five minutes away from a major coronary, but she can still sing a song, and she can definitely rock a hat. This is a black city and a church-going city, which means it’s a hat city; I told Alan I knew we had moved to Detroit when I noticed our local Macy’s had a men’s millinery department.

(Men have their own version of Mr. Song — Henry the Hatter, also downtown, where Kid Rock buys his lids. I urge you not to click that link unless you have about an hour to kill. The Borsalinos alone — oy. I reread an Elmore Leonard novel during the most recent cold snap; a Borsalino appeared in one scene. The character called it a “Bosalini.”)

Anyway, I call your attention to this for two reasons — just in case you want to buy Aretha’s hat (even though I suspect that ship has sailed), and to introduce you to the comment section that the blogger Detroitist calls the Free Press Klavern, the chorus of ugly, anonymous racists who can always be counted on, in any story featuring black people, to make ignorant-ass comments like this:

Jig up your own songs-not ours.

I used to wonder why the paper didn’t moderate their comment queues better, and someone told me it’s a legal thing — if they make any attempt to treat the comments as actual content and not as randomly sprinkled turds, they open themselves up for a lawsuit. Doesn’t make sense to me, either, but hey. Anyway, there’s page after page after page of them. Warning: at the bottom of every page is picture of Winkin’ Sarah Palin:

Which seems like a good transition to the bloggage, which today includes The Poor Man’s Golden Winger Awards, and they include a reference to None Other. So it fits.

You really don’t need to read more than the lead —

A dive team in Port Huron is fishing a car out of the Black River today after a man who drove onto the ice accidentally locked his keys in the car, and the running engine melted ice beneath it.

— to get the awesomeness of this story, but there’s the link, anyway.

Bye, Caroline. You’re free to go back to being deeply private, and I can’t help but think that’s a good thing. Someone who can’t even make up their mind about quitting is clearly not cut out for the hurlyburly:

After frantic talks between the governor’s operation and Ms. Kennedy’s camp Wednesday evening, Ms. Kennedy appeared to waver on whether to withdraw, and was preparing a statement reasserting her interest in the job. But just after midnight, she decided to make clear she was taking her name out of consideration and released the statement saying so.

The Hoosier dropped the ball, but the refs allowed a do-over. I just find this story hysterical.

And that’s it. Short shrift today, but I have to get back to the gym before they forget my face. Have a swell day, all.

In the grand tradition of self-delusion looking at the bright side, let’s take a look at an interesting story from today’s Free Press:

Stacy Sloan, director of culinary education at Holiday Market’s Mirepoix (mihr-PWAH) Cooking School, says that because of the dismal economy, she had expected sales for this year’s cooking classes to be flat or worse.

But the opposite has happened.

Yes, basic cooking classes at this specialty market in Royal Oak are full, mainly with students who have never cooked for themselves before, and are using the recession as a motivation to eat out less and eat in more. The other day I was stopped outside Kroger by a market researcher, who offered me $10 for a five-minute interview on video; one of her questions was whether I’m eating out less. I said not really, that one pitfall of recessionary economies is their self-perpetuation, as people curtail their spending and by doing so make the situation worse. But I certainly understand the impulse, and to the extent it gets a few more adults comfortable around knives, cutting boards and saute pans, so much the better. There’s something amusing about seeing people learn the simplest things. Last quote:

“You can start out with a roast chicken as one meal and make other meals from it,” he says.

I imagine this guy, getting this idea, bathed in pure white light. I’m glad my mother was cremated, so I can’t hear her rolling in her grave.

But seriously: Home cooking = good. I’ve been doing my nightly news-farming for three years now, and one story I’ve seen grow from nothing in that time to something that alarms even me is the contamination of the U.S. food supply. We’re under another salmonella cloud, this one from peanut butter. Here’s what I find interesting: Most super-market peanut butter is fine, provided you’re not buying in five-gallon buckets. It’s the peanut-butter products that are transported in tanker truck-size loads that are the problem, which is why the recalls are for things like those neon-orange snack crackers you buy from vending machines, and not the jar of Crunchy in your pantry.

It’s best, if you eat processed food, not to think too much about it. I think I’ve told Alan’s many entertaining stories of his college years, spent working in various food-processing plants before. What they’ve done is made him unwilling to eat certain brands of canned soup and frozen pizza. Other people I’ve known have worked everywhere from commercial dairies to candy factories, and none of them eat the stuff they used to make, either. Best line, from my ex-candy making friend: “Chocolate is the opposite of scotch. You’ve got to learn to dislike it.”

But salmonella’s only the beginning. The other day I bought a package of ground chuck for the Derringer family’s dirty little dinner secret: Family Taco Night. As it was going over the scanner I noticed a package sticker I hadn’t read: Product of U.S.A., Canada and Mexico. Ewww. (I made sure that stuff was well-frickin’-done, believe me.) Globalization and open markets mean your supermarket snack cake may be made from ingredients gathered around the world, many in countries where food-safety regulation is, um, flexible. How did melamine get into the food supply? Chinese entrepreneurs found it raised protein levels while costing less than actual protein, with poisoning being merely an unfortunate side effect. This sort of corner-cutting is an established business practice in the Asian economy. Bon appetit.

I see Mark Bittman has a new book out, and unlike the more abrasive Michael Pollan and elitist Alice Waters, he seems to have an actual understanding of how average Americans actually live their lives. The diet he advocates — less crap, more plants — is one most people can manage, if they have rudimentary cooking skills. To the extent these classes are helping make that happen, huzzah.

I’m off to learn Final Cut Pro — be there soon, Rob — so here’s a bit o’ bloggage:

I see quite a few snarkers took note of Dick Cheney’s wheelchair and made the usual jokes, most of them about Dr. Strangelove. They’ve got it all wrong. This is the cultural reference you’re looking for:

Rich jerk suicide watch: Another one, this one a so-called Celtic Tiger. Tigers elsewhere call him a pussy denounce him as unworthy of big cat-hood.

What do you get when you knock on the door of a house with a “fresh coons” sign in the yard? Why, you get a recipe:

“You soak him in vinegar and water, soak it four, five hours, and that get the wild game taste out of it. After that you cut him up just like you cut up a rabbit, then you preboil it about a half-hour, let the water jump about a half-hour, then take him out, put him in a pan like that, get your seasoning on, then you put him in the oven, just like you do a roast.”

Yes, folks, it’s another gem from Detroitblog. (BTW, I can’t tell you how many reporters of my acquaintance would have failed to write down the best line of that passage — “let the water jump about a half-hour.” Poetry.)

It’s the first day of the rest of the Obama administration. Mark it however you will.

Here’s how the morning was scheduled: Take Kate to school, then home to repack the mojo bag (mobile journalism), swing by the mammography center for the annual you-know-what, then break free in time to catch the unveiling of the third-generation Prius at Cobo. And it all would have worked if there hadn’t been a fire alarm at the cancer hospital where the mammography center is located, which threw the proverbial monkey wrench into things. But it was probably useful, as there’s nothing like standing out in 20-degree cold with a bunch of cancer patients to make you decide things like Priuses (Prii?) aren’t all that important.

I considered bagging the m’gram entirely; I hadn’t been called yet, and so wasn’t in the position of the woman who’d gone in just ahead of me, left standing in her winter jacket over the gown, her bra and shirt in a plastic bag. But I couldn’t leave the company, and I’m not sure why. There was a woman trying to calm a young girl who obviously had a host of serious disabilities, quietly having a panic attack over the honking of the alarm. There was an old man in a wheelchair, heaped with blankets. And last out of the door serving our stairway was a young woman holding a baby, escorted by two others who were carrying an IV stand. The tube ran into the heaps of blankets and fleece keeping the two of them warm, and I didn’t know who it was attached to, but from the way the little party was acting, I suspect it was the baby. Do babies get chemo? Is it even possible for a kid not even a year old?

It cleared my head, certainly. The alarm was silenced after about 15 minutes, and after about five more, we were able to return to our individual appointments, but by then the schedule was FUBAR. I was freed from the Big Squeeze exactly 15 minutes before the Prius was scheduled for unveiling, and even I can’t drive that fast.

Fortunately, others were there. The new Prius looks a lot like the old Prius, but it’s supposedly bigger, faster, this-er and that-er.

As a consolation prize, how about a Tesla?

This is the Silicon Valley supercar, the all-electric totally hot totally green sports car. You need Steve Jobs’ salary to buy it — it costs well over $100K — and, well, it’s had a few problems. Daniel Lyons wrote about the car in Newsweek a few weeks back:

Tesla Motors didn’t just set out to build an electric car. It set out to teach Detroit a lesson. Back in 2003, when these guys from Silicon Valley were launching their company, they didn’t apologize for knowing next to nothing about the automotive industry. In fact, they took pride in this. They were rebels, disruptors, technogeeks operating at Internet speed—and they were convinced they could do better than the lumbering, clueless Big Three. Tesla’s lead investor, Elon Musk, a charismatic Web entrepreneur who made a fortune as a cofounder of PayPal, last year boasted to BusinessWeek that “Silicon Valley is the best in the world at everything it does.”

They must sell hubris in bulk at Whole Foods. Today, the Tesla, in Lyons’ words, is:

…a classic Silicon Valley product—it’s late and over budget, has gone through loads of redesigns, still has bugs and, at $109,000, costs more than originally planned. Tesla’s first 40 roadsters went out of the factory with a drivetrain that needs to be replaced. (Tesla will do the rip-and-replace for free.) Its second car, a sedan, has been delayed until 2011. Tesla, based in San Carlos, Calif., has raised $150 million and burned through almost all of it, plus millions more put down by customers in the form of deposits (the company won’t give an exact figure). Now, hit by the downturn, Tesla has laid off 20 percent of its staff, closed its Detroit office and borrowed money to stay afloat.

“The best in the world at everything it does.” I love people willing to say things like that on the record. You just know the followup stories will be even better.

Jalopnik really is the go-to source for auto-show blogging, at least for photos. (The Free Press and News provide a more holistic picture for Detroiters.) You can see the foxy model from my picture yesterday on Jalopnik’s, taken at the reveal of the Maserati Quattoporte. (Quattroporte means “four models.” No, wait. Let me check.)

I don’t know if I’ll make it back downtown after all. Things wrap up tomorrow at lunchtime, and then it’s Industry Days, the Charity Preview and finally the hoi polloi gates open Saturday.

A few people have asked about the pictures. Yes, they were taken with my new camera. (If you click the photos, it takes you to the Flickr page, which tells you the exact model, and if you click that, you get taken to another page that gives you everything from the price range to a selection of other Flickr pix taken with the same model.) Yes, most of them were shot on point-and-shoot settings. (I did a few on the Sports setting, to raise the shutter speed for moving rollouts.) Yes, it takes very nice pictures, but — don’t fail to consider the show floor is engineered to produce beautiful pictures, with artful lighting, lovely staging and an army of polishers who stand ready to banish any dust mote that dare show its face. Which is to say the camera is great but it’s not just the camera.

OK. I still have some paid work to do today, so I’d best get to it. A good afternoon to all. Be back whenever.