Before I pack it in for the night, howsabout a bunch of pictures?

Here’s Honda’s late run at the Prius — the 2010 Insight:

It’s head-to-head competition because it, like the Prius but unlike the Civic Hybrid, comes only as a hybrid. Remember those stories last year that pegged the Prius’ popularity over other similar (and frequently cheaper) hybrids to the fact that its owners wanted to make a statement? They didn’t want anyone to look at their cars and wonder whether it was a hybrid. Well, that’s the Insight for 2010.

Car models — that is to say, pretty human women standing next to vehicles — used to be standard equipment at the auto show, but now it’s mainly the European luxury brands that use them. Three brunettes stood by three Maseratis all damn day, in stiletto heels no less, striking poses at random. They find their excellence through passion:

I am so glad I’m only working for myself this year. This is no way to do journalism, friends:

Somewhere in the middle is Rick Wagoner, I think.

Talk about some sweet wheels. My dogs were barking after a few hours, and I could have used one of these:

You want to know the difference between old and new media, there it is. The News or Free Press would never accept a perk like this, but I guess Gawker Media figures if it’s transparent — and there’s a strip somewhere on there that acknowledges Chrysler’s courtesy — it’s not an ethical problem.

Some sort of concept from the Toy people:

I think the birdies and flowers are pushing it, but that is the overwhelming impression given by electric vehicles; the pollution is somewhere in Kentucky or China, and the driver wears only a halo.

Finally, I don’t covet cars as a rule, but I covet this one:

I took one look at it, and my brain said, in a British accent, “That is one beautiful motor car.” A Bentley Azure T. They served champagne after their press conference. (I declined.) As long as we’re on the subject, here’s the payola disclosure, for transparency’s sake — I accepted a mini-burger from the Smart people, a Diet Coke from Chrysler, a cookie from Bentley and one beer, with an accompanying foam cozy, from Kia, even though I thought the car they were celebrating — the Soul’ster concept — looked like it was constructed from plastic. One of the designers took a bow; he had “creative” facial hair, a closely trimmed chin with voluminous side pieces. I was so rattled I grabbed a Corona.

Back tomorrow (I hope). Now to the showers, to wash off all the fabulousness.

Halfway through Day One, we seem to have established a theme:

But I’m wondering: Until electricity is generated by converting your bad karma into good vibes, aren’t we simply transferring our energy demands to things like coal-burning plants (the standard in my part of the country), river-destroying hydroelectric or, gasp, nuclear? I mean, I’m all for zero emissions, but at some point it’s like squeezing the toothpaste around in the tube. Oh, well. Life is the journey, not the destination. Speaking of electric, here’s Chrysler’s concept:

It’s the 200c EV, another range-extending mostly electric hybrid like the Volt — the first 40 miles are all-electric, etc. What makes this car special — or horrifying, depending on your outlook — is its unprecedented digital FunPak, which includes onboard wifi, and I only wish I was kidding, but you’ll be able to access FaceBook from your car, and your car will have “mobile buddies.” I look forward to the status updates: Taking Fat Ass to Domino’s again. I’ll bet she orders the lowfat cheese. The Chrysler executive sketched out a scenario where you’d start your car via your iPhone, and if it gets stolen? You pick up the same phone and tell it to come home immediately, young man, and while it won’t exactly do that, you can disable it wherever it stands and take a picture of the thievin’ driver. It also has something called “teen mode,” to rat out your kid.

Signs and wonders.

“No laser light shows” seems to be the theme at the post-crash NAIAS. GM relied on people power — its own employees:

Go ahead and laugh, but these folks are nothing if not sincere. I told you this was a company town. They cheer without irony.

The cool news of the GM press conference was the introduction of the Cadillac Converj concept, and no it’s not a typo. The Converj is the luxury version of the Chevy Volt, the gas-electric hybrid which, if it lives up to its hype, will make the Prius look like a Hummer. It has a 40-mile all-electric range, with a miniscule gas engine that will kick in after that. It’s designed to be your “city car,” the short-hop vehicle. It’s also set to cost $40,000, a lot of money to pay for a lifestyle statement, so you could argue the need for a luxury version is sort of questionable, but never underestimate what people will pay to tell the world, “I’m green.” I’m assuming the idea is to see if the public warms to the Volt, at which point the price could fall like all new technology. The Converj is a concept, which means GM hasn’t committed to production. I tried to look at it and strip away all the car-show cool that won’t make it to the street — the low-profile tires and those snaky mirrors — and I still liked it. Lousy photo; as you can see, there was a bit of a scrum:

Jalopnik got a wider shot as it came down the runway. That’s Bob Lutz in the passenger seat.

GM also unveiled the Orlando, a seven-seat don’t-say-SUV — check the Freep for that pic, and a “microcar” called the Spark, a rebadged Beat:

You don’t know whether to drive it or pat its wee head.

Off to stake out a seat at Chrysler, and see how their sackcloth-and-ashes act will play.

One of the things the exit of Nissan did for this year’s North American International Auto Show was free up a bunch of exhibition space. A lot of companies that had been in the Cobo basement came up to the main floor, which left the basement open to become…

…the Enchanted Hybrid Forest!

You come down the escalator, and the first smell you get is mulch, an odd thing to smell in the iron grip of winter around these parts. And then you step around the corner, and there it is: A little test track winding through a grove of real trees, flowers, a fountain. In the pit area, a number of vehicles available for drives:

That’s a Ford Escape. Must be a prototype.

The Enchanted Hybrid Forest has everything but hemp-wearing fairies and magical squirrels. And, at the moment, drivers — the show’s just getting underway. More in a bit.

I went to bed expecting a cold and woke up feeling more or less OK, so I’m hoping it’s an omen. Because wooee, we may have a fun few days coming up here. My press credential for the North American International Auto Show was approved, so I’ll be attending the press preview, starting Sunday. Look for updates here and at Grosse Pointe Today, which may be duplicates or may not. I have no specific plan for coverage; I plan to work via the time-honored but forgotten tactic of “letting things happen first, and then writing about them.” So we’ll see. I applied because, duh, this is a pivotal year for the industry that supports this company town, and I wanted to see how recent catastrophes affect the overall mood of the show, which in most years is celebratory.

The first year I went as a working journalist I spotted a common attitude among my colleagues — the supercool mask of Not Impressed. Chrysler is known for entertaining, attention-getting stunts during its press conferences, and that year it introduced a new Jeep, then drove it offstage, through the Cobo Center, smashed through the front window, drove it down the steps, across the street and up a specially constructed rocky-hill platform in front of the Pontchartrain Hotel. They put Angie Harmon, who had been in an earlier press conference, in the way of the Jeep as it blew through the convention floor, and she squealed as she ran out of the way. Later, I mentioned it to another reporter.

“Oh, that,” he said. “They did that 10 years ago.” Well, excuse me. Friends, I admit it to you now: I laughed. It was funny.

I expect a subdued show this year, but it will have to walk a careful line. The point of the show is optimism and salesmanship, but when you’ve taken a bunch of money from the taxpayers, it probably won’t pay to overdo the stunts, or even the liquor — some tightass Baptist southern-state senator might take offense. (In the past, most of the exhibitors have some sort of open bar for press-preview days. A drinking journalist is a happy journalist.) The Firehouse — the food-and-liquor trough across the street traditionally colonized by Chrysler for its diplomacy — is closed this year. And I doubt (muffled sob) there will be a cattle drive. Damnit. But we’ll see.

I’ll be packing the laptop, the Flip and the iPhone. So start watching your RSS feeds Sunday.

In other news at this hour, our longtime friend and reader Adrianne (aka Mrs. Lance Mannion, aka the Blonde) sends along a bit of humor from that fixture in every American newsroom, the amusing soul always described as One Wag. Adrianne works in the far far exurbs of New York City and as a perk of the job gets all the NY tabs delivered to her desk. She writes:

So here’s the front cover of the New York Daily News Thursday morning: “I gave her my kidney, she broke my heart” (and now I want my kidney back!) The story concerns a certain Long Island doctor, Dr. Richard Batista, who had donated a kidney to his wife, Dawnell, in happier days. Dawnell repaid the gesture by sleeping with her physical therapist. Now they’re in divorce proceedings, and he wants the kidney back. Barring that, he’ll take $1.5 million.

I like how Adrianne has already internalized the language of the gossip pages, which you can see in her unselfconscious use of the phrase “in happier days.” This staple of the boldface names came up in Anne Tyler’s “The Accidental Tourist,” in a scene where Muriel writes a country song based on it. Funny I should mention country songs, because Adrianne continues:

I challenged Ken Hall, our editorial page editor and talented writer of doggerel, to come up with a country-western song about the doc’s ordeal. Here’s the result:

First she took my kidney, then she broke my heart
She messed around behind my back and tore my life apart.
She left a hole inside of me that’s very hard to fill
A million and a half bucks, now I’m sending her the bill

CHORUS:

She married me and promised that in health and sickness, too
We’d share it all – and she meant all – so what was I to do?
I should have known that first time when I saw her from afar
That she would be the kind of girl who always leaves a scar.

I’m not some kind of monster, no vampire, ghoul or ghost
No grave digger or gold digger, I feel quite free to boast
My friends all say I’m very nice, and not the nasty sort
But add up what I have in life and I’m an organ short

CHORUS

She might give me a hand? Who cares? Not what I want to hear
She needn’t stick her neck out, or even lend an ear
It’s not as if I’m looking for an arm, a leg and such
I only want my organ back, is that asking too much?

CHORUS

BraVO! I smell synergy here. If anyone wants to set the lyrics to music, I ask only a credit in the liner notes.

It’s a beautiful day with snow on the way. Best hit the retail sector for supplies and, just to be safe, Zicam.

I probably should have linked this in the previous post, but on second thought, no: It deserves its own blinking arrow. Jim Griffoen, aka the blogger/photographer proprietor of Sweet Juniper, has another aces dispatch up, another heartbreaker about Detroit abandonment, in this case the zoo on Belle Isle. In a post that starts with a dead deer, moves on to a stray dog, touches briefly on Kwame Kilpatrick’s to-the-bone corruption and winds up with a series of haunted photos, Jim is one of those writers who makes the Web worth it. (Unlike, say, the Daily Beast. Zoos. Beasts. Huh.)

If I were a hiring editor at the Free Press or News — if there are any left — I’d start peeling off $100 bills to let the papers publish him 48 hours ahead of his own blog. Not that it would ever happen. But I can dream.

Much talk, hereabouts, about this story from the Weekly Standard, by Matt Labash. The cover features a photo of the Michigan Central Depot, the most infamous abandoned building in Detroit. Guess what the story’s about? If you answered, “the decline and fall of what was once North America’s great industrial city,” pat yourself on the back. You’re on your way to earning a full scholarship to journalism school.

It’s long, and if you don’t want to read it, here are the Cliff’s Notes: Labash sets off to spend a week in our fair city. Packing for the trip, he meets unnamed people who give him him pithy quotes:

Before I’d left, I’d asked an acquaintance if he was from Detroit. “Indeed I am,” he said, “Give me all your f–ing money.”

Ha ha. He arrives and hooks up with Charlie LeDuff, a Detroit News reporter with a rather maniacally cultivated image as an eccentric renegade. (Of which I will speak no more, as conflicts of interest exist in the household.) The first part of the article is a full-on kneepads job on LeDuff, who muses that he was put in his current position by God. Then Charlie tells him to grab his coat, and they’re off to cover Charlie’s beat, which he describes as “the hole” — “forgotten people in forgotten places.” Labash recounts some of Charlie’s greatest reporting hits — the Dr. Kevorkian profile, the repo-man profile, the exhuming-the-dead piece — before sliding into the stock parachuted-in, out-of-town-journalist’s tour of the usual suspects and venues. Adolph Mongo, L. Brooks Patterson, Martha Reeves. They meet the latter at the Hitsville USA Motown museum; now there’s a place you don’t read about very often, eh? And they drop in on a firehouse that recently lost a beloved brother to a collapsing roof while fighting an arsonist’s fire in an abandoned house, surely the worst possible circumstances for such a death to occur. The Detroit fire department’s problems are a true shame upon the city, and Labash doesn’t fail to fully note it.

It’s a good piece, well-written and very readable, but it’s only a better version of dozens that came before it, and the fact it appeared in a conservative policy review, at this particular point in time, suggests a strategy underneath it all. Rod Dreher, faithful doggy that he is, catches the scent immediately:

I wondered over the holiday why it is that it’s correct to believe that New Orleans should be saved, even though it has many of the same endemic and seemingly unsolvable problems as Detroit, and faces one Detroit doesn’t: the likelihood (say some scientists) that it will all sink between now and 2100. Anyway, why is it correct to believe that it’s our moral duty as Americans to “save” New Orleans, whatever that means, but Detroit — well, it can keep going to hell, because what can anybody do with a city so far gone?

In the comments he answers his own question:

People who wish to save New Orleans generally argue that N.O. is so important culturally and otherwise to America that we can’t let it waste away. More pragmatic voices argue … that the city is in a nearly impossible position geographically, and that had Katrina not happened, it was still an economic sinkhole, with high rates of crime, illiteracy, welfare dependency, corruption and all the same demons that haunt Detroit. But there’s nothing romantic at all about Detroit.

In other words: Because I like New Orleans, and I don’t like Detroit. Do I need to mention where Dreher hails from? Yes, Louisiana. But of course that has nothing to do with why New Orleans should be helped, and Detroit written off. It’s all about culture and romance.

But you see what he’s done? He’s conflated Detroit, the city that’s been in a death spiral since the late ’60s, with Detroit, shorthand for the domestic automotive industry. When any fool could tell him they are two very different things. Unfortunately, any fool doesn’t write for the Weekly Standard, or any of the other publications who have sent less talented writers to essentially draw the same wrong conclusion. For those of you who may be newcomers here: The problems of Detroit-the-city are related to the auto industry, but not in the obvious way. The city is full of monuments to automotive wealth and largesse and history, but the truth is, outside of the GM corporate offices downtown, most of what we think of as Detroit-the-car-business is located outside of Detroit-the-city. Maybe all of it, at least in terms of major plants and production facilities. The GM Tech Center is in Warren. Chrysler’s in Auburn Hills, Ford in Dearborn. The plants are all over the place (and around the country). There are abandoned factories in the city, but they’ve been so for decades. If you want to cover what’s happening to southeast Michigan as a result of the auto industry’s problems, you need to go to the suburbs — Wayne, Wixom, Dearborn, Auburn Hills, Grosse Pointe, Livonia…all of them, really.

But here’s something else: No one in Detroit-the-city is asking for over-and-above salvation from the likes of Dreher. Like every other city in the country, it angles for handouts from Uncle Sam, but the idea that there’s a push on for the city to be “saved” is absurd. Its problems are many and complicated, not all self-inflicted but certainly self-propagating. However, it has been so for 40 years and will likely be so for another 40. After four years of living just outside its eastern border, I can tell you I don’t really understand the place and probably never will, but I have come to like it very much and even love it, as ugly and blighted as it is. It is a city with a heart that continues to beat in a terribly diseased body, and you have to respect any place that just flat refuses to die.

Dreher claims to have read and enjoyed all of Labash’s piece, but he doesn’t mention this part, which quotes Adolph Mongo, generally described as a “political consultant,” but as with many Detroiters, that’s not all of the story. He doesn’t pussyfoot around:

When white politicians want to get elected around here, explains Mongo, “They don’t say ‘n—-r’ anymore, they say ‘Detroit.'” And so, while the Big Three have been running away from Detroit for years, they “got a rude awakening when they went to D.C.” Mongo holds that when congressmen associate automakers with Detroit, what they’re intending to associate them with are all the inept black people who come from there. Or as he puts it, when they say “ ’Detroit,’ they really said, ‘they the new n—–s.’ Welcome to the club.”

Yup.

Finally, because Dreher identifies himself as a Christian and writes for a religious blog, I’d ask him this: Since when did romance and culture become the criteria for determining who should be helped? Both Detroit and New Orleans are full of people, or as Dreher’s religion would describe them, souls. Are Louisiana souls more worthy of help than Michigan’s? I guess so. And finally finally, if he’s going to put NOLA culture up against Detroit’s, I hope he brought his lunch, because Detroit is going to eat it. I suspect he’s one of those guys who puts on his Meters CDs a few times a year and says all that bon temps roulez shit to his kids, while up here in Gritty City we’re incubating the next Smokey Robinson, Marvin Gaye, Eminem, White Stripes, Don Was or the-list-goes-on. Here’s a video taste of one show last summer. (Admittedly, an extraordinary one. Don Was is like a magnet of cool. I still can’t believe I missed it.)

So. Rant over. But it put me in such a mood! So let’s close out with a brief bit of bloggage, once again from Roger Ebert — a collection of his best zingers through the years, nearly all of them from pans:

I had a colonoscopy once, and they let me watch it on TV. It was more entertaining than The Brown Bunny. — Response to Vincent Gallo’s hex to give me colon cancer

This film obtained a PG-13 rating, depressing evidence of how comfortable with vulgarity American teenagers are presumed to be. Apparently you can drink shit just as long as you don’t say it. — “Austin Powers II”

At first I thought it was presumptuous to select your own best lines — isn’t that the reader’s job? — but I soon found myself laughing so hard I couldn’t read them aloud to Alan. So I guess I trust his judgment.

Oops, one more: The best single story about Caroline Kennedy’s ambitions, and oh my, it’s satire:

Caroline Kennedy would like to be considered Time magazine’s Person of the Year for 2009 and has let the magazine’s editor know of her interest in the honor, aides to Ms. Kennedy confirmed today.

Off to shop for my holiday dinner. Among about a million other chores. Huzzah.

When the bad news piles up, it’s tempting to brood, but today let’s give ourselves a break, shall we? All is not lost. There are even pleasures to be had in bad times, as last night, on the phone with my sister, when she let loose with a short list of punishments she’d like to see visited on Bernard Madoff:

…and I’d like to see them go into his closet. I’d like to see his shoes auctioned off. I’d like to see him in jail. Not a good jail, but a really, really bad one…

Me: The Wayne County Jail!

Yeah, that’s a good one. And I’d like to see his kids go there, too. And his wife, and…

Actually, I think the Scourging of the Wall Streeters would not only be a totally excellent reality show, I think that if Barack Obama made it a centerpiece of his inaugural ball, we could go ahead and start carving him on Mt. Rushmore now.

So let’s pause and just throw a little credit and praise around the room, shall we? Let’s start with this week’s Metro Times, where the horribly bylined “Detroitblogger John” has another gem, about one of the many Detroit storefronts that have become private hangouts. It’s one of the unique features of this city, with so many empty buildings and cheap real estate, that it costs practically nothing to claim a little commercial space as your own. I first noticed this when I wrote a (very bad, but that wasn’t entirely my fault) story on one of the city’s bid whist clubs, where members gather twice a week to play cards. The MT story is on the Chip-in Sportsmen’s Club on Seven Mile, home to a group of retired autoworkers who’d rather hang with their friends than hang at home, and are willing to pay a modest fee to do so:

Dues are $35 a month, plus $6 for Mega Millions lottery tickets bought by the club. Members are entitled to a key and free access anytime, including two private parties a year. They throw a Christmas Eve bash and a fish fry now and then, and grow a garden out back, giving the vegetables to folks in the neighborhood in the fall. On warm summer afternoons they’ll line chairs out front and watch as traffic passes by and the day winds along.

Detroitblog publishes in the Metro Times, and later in the day posts the same story on his own website, with additional photos. So, in keeping with what we’ve been talking about of late, read the story on the MT link above, and then, if you like, check out the extra pix here.

Everyone must be in a mellow mood today. Check out the Bush twins in People, via New York magazine:

People: Barbara, Jenna, any advice for Sasha and Malia Obama?
Jenna: Well, they’re a lot younger than we are, cuter than we are. We’re old news.
Barbara: Even the puppy is going to be cuter.

A puppy cuter than you, Barbara? It doesn’t exist!

No, wait: It does.

Finally, let’s forget our economic troubles and turn our focus to something that really matters — redecorating the White House — especially when it gives us an excuse to link to this picture:

Kids, the ’60s were real, and they happened for a reason. See above.

Off to relieve stress. Back later.

From the Department of Whaddaya Mean We, White Man?, Detroit’s very own Mitch Albom has found a new vein of cheap sentiment to mine, and it is rich indeed, i.e., the so-called “open letter” trope:

Do you want to watch us drown? Is that it? Do want to see the last gurgle of economic air spit from our lips? If so, senators, know this: We’re taking a piece of you with us. America isn’t America without an auto industry. You can argue whether $14 billion would have saved it, but your actions surely could have killed it.

We have grease on our hands.

You have blood.

Huh? You do? Grease? Where did that come from, passing a tip to the masseuse? This piece is headlined, Hey, you senators: Thanks for nothing. I suppose we should be grateful the editor didn’t try to channel the driving spirit behind the piece, and call it “t’anks for nuttin’!” But it’s bad enough as it is, a millionaire claiming solidarity with The People — worse, claiming to be a voice of the people. (One would hope that The People, if allowed to speak for themselves, could come up with a better turn of phrase than “the last gurgle of economic air,” etc. I do, anyway.)

The prose gets worse, too. You all know Mitch’s favorite rhetorical device: The single-sentence paragraph set off by lots of dramatic white space. Note the next passage; this may be a record:

And now you want those foreign companies, which you lured, and which get help from their governments, to dictate to American workers how much they should be paid? Tell you what. You’re so fond of the foreign model, why don’t you do what Japanese ministers do when they screw up the country’s finances?

They cut their salaries.

Or they resign in shame.

When was the last time a U.S. senator resigned over a failed policy?

Yet you want to fire Rick Wagoner?

Who are you people?

I like that last one — Who are you people? It’s the latest way to say How dare you?, a phrase that always packs a punch. Why I never is another goodie, the verbal equivalent of a clutched strand of pearls. Albom is a short little guy, a fact that doesn’t come across on ESPN, which perhaps explain his effortless belligerence in print. If he actually walked onto a shop floor, they’d pull the old no-really-we-need-you-to-be-the-crash-test-dummy joke. And he’d believe it.

Last check: The story had been recommended 825 times by readers. Probably a record. Most popular? Yup. Most e-mailed? Yup. I smell…book contract!

Well, he’s going to need one. I assume you all heard the news that leaked over the weekend, which hasn’t been formally announced yet. As it stands, you all know as much as I do, including how it might affect our household. I’m hoping for the best and expecting the worst, and if I can get something in between, I’ll be happy.

Of course, there are other ways to make money in this crazy world.

I’m posting this Sunday and spending Monday a) waiting for Sears to deliver our new washing machine, because of course no economic crisis can be complete without a major appliance throwing in the towel; b) studying Russian sentence structure; and c) writing and writing and writing and writing, in the hopes that someone might throw me a few coins for it, someday. I suppose Dwight has a lecture he’s about to deliver in 5,4,3…

You all have a good week.

UPDATE: For a lesson in how to say all the same things Mitch Albom said, only in less eye-rolling fashion, see the great Gretchen Morgenson in the NYT.

A novel I read once — can’t remember which one — described a woman in a blouse with one too many buttons undone over abundant cleavage. The wording is lost to me, but it said something about the picture she made, somewhere between maternal and sexy, a suggestion of warmth and generosity. That’s always stuck with me, and not as an excuse to leave an extra button open. One of the advantages of having a bosom, after all, is its invitation, not to grope but to comfort. Children, friends, amusing pervs — women have been holding them to their chests throughout history. It’s just fun to say: “Come. Let me clasp you to my bosom.” Try it on a friend today. (This works for men, too.) Share the warmth.

Anyway, I’ve been thinking a lot about generosity of late, as the bad news piles up like an avalanche. There’s a meeting scheduled for early next week that could settle a few things in our household, in the sense that when a roof falls in, it eventually settles somewhere. Every time I hear another story, I find a Salvation Army bell-ringer, a help-the-homeless collection jar or someone to tip. And I stuff another bill in. It’s disgusting.

Disgusting because it’s so nakedly craven, so plainly rooted in self-interest. On the other hand, I know others who go to church, light candles and send up prayers when they find themselves under siege. After the L.A. riots in the ’90s, rich west siders poured into South Central to sweep up broken glass and do good works. Is this so different? It’s hope for a little good karma, mixed with a realization that there are others who have it far, far worse, and gratitude is called for. The stock market falls 700 points, and I know I’m about to be $5 poorer. A 700-point drop calls for a fiver in the bucket. Two hundred points and I can get away with a buck. Now that the Senate has killed the bridge-loan package for the Big Three, I might as well sign over title to my house. It won’t be worth much soon, anyway.

And generosity, even generosity meant to deflect the Evil Eye, is better than the other impulse that fights with it at the moment — incandescent anger. Apparently the Senate finally called it quits when they couldn’t agree on when American auto workers would accept the same wages paid by foreign car makers doing business here. These men and women have never accepted a pay cut in their lives, never saw a deal they couldn’t sweeten for themselves, think organized labor should be taken down a peg and start accepting shitty health care and salaries under $40,000 a year, not that any of them would consider such a thing.

I really don’t know what’s going to happen now. No one does. But the next time a hurricane comes ashore in Alabama, they can figure it out themselves. I’m feeling all out of generosity at the moment.

So what else is happening here? The New York Times liked “Gran Torino” pretty well. That’s the movie that was shot in and around Detroit and the Pointes last summer. Oh, wait:

Despite all the jokes — the scenes of Walt lighting up at female flattery and scrambling for Hmong delicacies — the film has the feel of a requiem. Melancholy is etched in every long shot of Detroit’s decimated, emptied streets and in the faces of those who remain to still walk in them. Made in the 1960s and ’70s, the Gran Torino was never a great symbol of American automotive might, which makes Walt’s love for the car more poignant. It was made by an industry that now barely makes cars, in a city that hardly works, in a country that too often has felt recently as if it can’t do anything right anymore except, every so often, make a movie like this one.

Well, OK. Seems like a good note to knock off on. I’m off to prepare for yet another job that promises little other than a heapin’ helpin’ of not cash, but personal satisfaction, i.e., citizen journalism. FTW.