As we are boat people, I know what a bailout is, literally. A wave swamps the boat and all hands grab buckets. I don’t have to explain what bailing is, do I? If no more waves come and your captain knows what he’s doing, eventually the vessel finds an even keel again and all is well. If not, well…I hope you’re wearing your life jacket.

I thought of this when I recalled some of my earliest conversations with my friends here in Detroit, when I expressed wonder or frustration at the business practices of General Motors, Ford, Chrysler et al. The company was inevitably described as a battleship, an aircraft carrier, or some other very large seagoing vessel. And then they would add, “It can’t change direction quickly. But it can take a few hits and go through rough seas without too many problems.” I suppose that makes the credit crisis a Japanese torpedo hitting broadside. I hope $15 billion will buy enough buckets.

I mention this because Freep columnist Brian Dickerson makes a few good points regarding Detroit topic No. 1 today:

The primary reason to be skeptical is that the congressional enforcers tasked with holding Detroit’s feet to the fire have done a glaringly atrocious job reforming their own, ahem, industry. The same lawmakers lambasting the auto industry for promising its retirees more benefits than it can afford continue to promise their own constituents more benefits than the U.S. Government can afford. The same Congress that wants to crucify the Detroit Three for their preoccupation with short-term profits is notorious for strategic visions that extend only to the next election.

Um, yeah. But let’s not think about that now. You all want to talk about the Illinois governor, right? Rod Blago-unspellable. I’d like to talk about him too, but my mouth is so agape after hearing all the ugly details that I fear my only contribution would be buh-buh-buh. Even by the standards of the Illinois governorship, this resets the scale. Whoever said, yesterday, that the guv is stupid? I think that’s right.

Anyway, I have a doctor’s appointment early today, so I must away. Talk, instead, about Hank Stuever’s simple thesis:

We live comfortably, if strangely, in a pseudo-Sapphic era in which seemingly every college woman with a MySpace page has kissed another girl for the camera; but for men who kiss men, it’s still the final frontier.

So, James Franco, what was it like to kiss Sean Penn in “Milk?” (And no one seemed to ask him the question I want to know: What’s it like to kiss a heavy smoker these days? It’s been so long since I did that, I totally forget.)

I’m off to get prodded. Into the shower.

Some version of this story was on Page One of all three of our household’s daily newspapers this morning, and why not? The photo is irresistible — a sharply dressed gospel choir belting it out while arrayed around three heavenly white SUVs. (And yes, the opening number was a no-brainer: “I’m Looking for a Miracle.”) The name of the sermon at Greater Grace Temple? “A Hybrid Hope.” This is what Detroit’s been reduced to, America: Praying for money.

Although, honestly, who can blame anyone? You see what happens when you put your faith in representative democracy.

Among others who may be driven to their knees by current events: Employees at the Tribune Co., the recycling industry and, of course, everyone else:

This recession, which officially began in December 2007, now appears virtually certain to be the longest downturn — and possibly most severe — since the end of World War II, as evidenced last week by a demoralizing rat-a-tat of grim reports on jobs, sales and public confidence.

The reports signaled that even after 11 months, more than the entire length of the last two downturns, this recession has only now entered its fiercest phase, and economists say the pain will not end soon.

“For the average American it’s going to be devastating for the next 6 to 12 months,” said Bernard Baumohl, chief global economist at the Economic Outlook Group, a research and forecasting firm. He added, “I have not seen anything particularly hopeful right now, which tells me we have a ways to go.”

Well, thanks for that cheerful news, folks. Nothing like awakening on a dreary Monday to find that as bad as it was last week, this week it’s worse.

Actually, the church story interested me. One of the saddest things about the funerals we went to this year was seeing what remains of Alan’s family’s church, which we’re told is in a perilous state. It’s your standard Methodist congregation, as spicy as Wonder Bread, and I gather that’s part of the problem — Alan’s sister reports a large segment of the flock was lured away by “a holy-roller church” a few years back. I can scarcely believe Methodists would go holy-roller justlikethat, but on further questioning it seems the new joint was simply cast in the new mold of churches. That is, it had a band instead of an organist, video screens in lieu of felt banners, and a preacher who behaved as though he had an audience to please, rather than preach to. Not a megachurch per se, but leaning that way.

On the one hand, I don’t really have a problem with this. One of the things that most disappointed me during my brief attempt at reconciliation with the church of my birth — that would be the One True — was how lifeless it was, how rote, how dusty and oxygen-deprived. When the priest stepped away from the script in homilies, it was to complain that people wouldn’t put grocery carts in the cart corrals in the parking lot, or that birth control was like taking a drug to stop your heart. I would have welcomed an SUV rolling past the altar at that point, if only to maybe run him down and shut him up.

On the other hand, there’s just something wrong about going to church and expecting to be entertained. Sinners in the hand of a joke-telling God, etc.

But is there any doubt why these churches are in their ascendancy? If you want people to come back week after week, give them something to come to. Being prodded there at the point of an imaginary pitchfork isn’t a strategy for ongoing success.

I’d go to Greater Grace, but it would require a lot of new clothes and prayer with my hands in the air, a practice so divorced from my own tradition it would make me break out in hives. Plus, it would be totally obvious I was only there for the choir. I covered the funeral of a black civil-rights leader in Fort Wayne. By the end of the opening hymns, I was ready to make an altar call myself. That’s the power of a great gospel choir.

Running a little late this morning, and I still have Russian verb conjugations to drill myself on. Besides, I know this thread will belong to Jeff TMMO, so let’s let him take it away, and we’ll try for more later, eh? Eh.

Can we take credit for this?

That’s GM CEO Rick Wagoner (in the passenger seat, or “at left,” as they teach us on the copy desk), en route to Washington in a Chevy Malibu hybrid. Original story here. Original suggestion, by our own J.C. Burns, here, although the idea makes so much sense it may well be one of those cases of simultaneous light bulbs. As I reread J.C.’s comment, though, his is much better than a simple driving stunt:

Yeah, if I were doing PR for GM/Ford/Chrysler, I’d turn it into an event…put all three of them in a hybrid SUV and let them roll down the Ohio and Pennsylvania Turnpikes to DC, doing press avails by cell phone, stopping for mini news conferences at truckstops, and rolling triumphantly (with live shots) into the Capitol area. In the back seat: a UAW employee from each.

“These are the people you’re affecting. We’re just their drivers.”

I still think that’s a great idea. Put Wagoner behind the wheel, and hell yes, live shots. That’s what they do at the auto show every year. Have the Chrysler guy drive his Jeep up the Capitol steps, like they did at the Pontchartrain Hotel a few years back. Do something dramatic, anyway. It wasn’t so long ago that Detroit designs had mojo — do you see rappers customizing Hondas with hydraulics and rims? Do 45-year-old men wake up one day with an all-consuming lust for a vintage Datsun 210? Confidence, gents — get a little of it back. Honk the horn when you roll into D.C.! Turn on the four-ways! Have some fun! Stand up and tell ’em you’re from Detroit!

Fat chance. But here’s hopin’.

While we’re on the subject of J.C. luv, I found this in the comments of his wife Sammy’s blog — you following? It’s a recollection by the former editor of The Country Journal, a small weekly J.C. worked for in the 1970s, way up in Plainfield, Vermont:

My favorite J.C. memory involves sending him to Cabot to get a story — any story, so long as Cabot people were in the paper, because if they weren’t, no one in Cabot would buy a copy. All J.C. could find was adult night at the school gym, where basketball was in progress. He wrote a story that consisted almost entirely of the sounds of the game (THA-DUMP,THA-DUMP, THUNK! CLUNK-CLUNK … “Hey!” “Here!” “One More!” “All right, Harv!” “Hwup!” “Oh!” “Ow!” “I’m sorry!”). Classic.

David Mamet lives there now. I hear he was attracted by the quality of the local media.

OK, then. Thursday is the end of my week, more or less. Lately I have a standing Friday work-related thing, but mostly Thursday feels like Friday, and since the sun’s out today — for the first time in days — it feels a little special. No bad news allowed, today. Thanks to Brian for pointing out the overlooked story of the week, about a soured co-operative effort between the Cincinnati Zoo and the nearby Creation Museum:

The Cincinnati Zoo and the Creation Museum launched a joint promotional deal last week to draw attention to their holiday attractions.

It worked, but not the way zoo and museum officials had hoped.

The zoo pulled out of the deal Monday after receiving dozens of angry calls and e-mails about the partnership, which offered reduced prices to anyone who bought tickets to the zoo’s Festival of Lights and the museum’s Christmas celebration, Bethlehem’s Blessing.

I mean, speaking of tone-deaf. How could an institution with at least one or two actual scientists reporting for work on a daily basis dream up something this dumb?

Others said a scientific institution shouldn’t link itself to a place that argues man once lived side by side with dinosaurs. “They seem like diametrically opposed institutions,” said Dr. James Leach, a Cincinnati radiologist who e-mailed zoo officials about his concerns. “The Cincinnati Zoo is one of this city’s treasures. The Creation Museum is an international laughingstock.”

Yeah, that’s one way to describe it. John Scalzi’s account of his 2007 visit remains the foundational text, however. The LOL Creashun thread is just for grins.

Someone asked me last night, “What’s the difference between the stuff you write and then this thing you call ‘bloggage’?” I said, well, I tend to write a little column-y piece with few or no links, followed by a few linky/comment sorts of things, but he didn’t see it that way, and maybe I’m just fooling myself, maybe that’s not the structure these daily entries take anymore. Maybe we’ve become an all-bloggage blog without even noticing. Whatever. It’s time to go to the gym. My thighs are a much bigger problem.

UPDATE: Nearly forgot: Happy birthday, Kirk!

Add to the lengthening list of the many business I would not want to be in at the moment this: Funeral homes. Their profit margin — fancy caskets, spare-no-expense funerals — is swirling down the drain with everything else.

It’s the damn boomers, of course, who ruin everything they touch. At Thanksgiving, we had a brief discussion of what we wanted for our last tribute on earth, and neither Alan nor I want a fancy funeral. Frugal Midwesterners we are (soon to be broke Midwesterners), we ask for nothing more than immediate cremation followed by some sort of meaningful dispersal of ashes. (The church of my birth would strenuously object to the scattering part, but I left that building a while back. The thought of my corpse being pumped full of chemicals and laid out for public display grosses me out far more, so that’s that.)

Of course, others have more ambitious plans:

The Royal Shakespeare Company will no longer use the real skull of Polish pianist Andre Tchaikovsky in its performance of Hamlet when it transfers to West End as it is “too distracting for the audience.”

The use of the skull had been kept a carefully guarded secret throughout the play’s four month run in Stratford until leading man David Tennant disclosed that the skull belonged to the late pianist Andre Tchaikovsky – who bequeathed his skull to the RSC for this very purpose.

Andre Tchaikovsky left his skull to the RSC in 1982 after he died of cancer to be used on stage in Hamlet. It took a quarter of a century to happen – and he posthumously appeared as Yorick in the recent production of Hamlet at Stratford.

Tchaikovsky — no word on relation to Pyotr Ilyich — always hated productions where they used a prop for the Yorick scene, his agent said:

“He hated the way it was done. When he saw (Hamlet) with the RSC, he (Andre) said, ‘I am going to leave my skull to the RSC, they really should have a proper skull. It doesn’t work with the plastic thing they have.’ And then we looked at his will, and there it was.”

Back into the prop warehouse for the late pianist; maybe in another 25 years they can bring him out again. If the bigmouth actors can keep their yaps shut, that is.

And so we begin all-bloggage Wednesday here at NN.C. But it’s beefy bloggage:

Remember how I told you you should be reading Roger Ebert’s blog? If you were listening, you already read today’s riposte to critics who accused him of not reviewing “Expelled,” the anti-evolution “documentary.” If not, baste in its sweet, sweet revenge here:

The more you know about evolution, or simple logic, the more you are likely to be appalled by the film. No one with an ability for critical thinking could watch more than three minutes without becoming aware of its tactics. It isn’t even subtle. Take its treatment of Dawkins, who throughout his interviews with Stein is honest, plain-spoken, and courteous. As Stein goes to interview him for the last time, we see a makeup artist carefully patting on rouge and dusting Dawkins’ face. After he is prepared and composed, after the shine has been taken off his nose, here comes plain, down-to-earth, workaday Ben Stein. So we get the vain Dawkins with his effete makeup, talking to the ordinary Joe.

I have done television interviews for more than 40 years. I have been on both ends of the questions. I have news for you. Everyone is made up before going on television. If they are not, depending on their complexions, they will look sunburned, red-splotched, oily, pale as a fish belly, orange, mottled, ashen, or too dark to be lighted in the same shot with a lighter skin. There is not a person reading this right now who should go on camera without some kind of makeup. Even the obligatory “shocked neighbors” standing in their front yards after a murder usually have some powder brushed on by the camera person. Was Ben Stein wearing makeup? Of course he was. Did he whisper to his camera crew to roll while Dawkins was being made up? Of course he did. Otherwise, no camera operator on earth would have taped that. That incident dramatizes his approach throughout the film. If you want to study Gotcha! moments, start here.

It weighs in at about a million words, each one as sweet as candy. Bon appetit.

How often have you sat through a meeting at your workplace — Six Sigma blah blah blah pursuit of excellence blah blah blah best practices blah blah to the blah — and yearned for something…more? Thought, “the writer’s life for me!” and considered jumping out the window, or maybe walking out the door? If so, let me introduce you to the closest equivalent to a copy desk staff meeting, “The Right Word” blog at the NYT:

Careful readers, including some in the cement industry, are quick to point it out when we confuse cement and concrete.

What’s the difference, you say? Go back to kindergarten, bonehead. From the NYT stylebook:

cement. Use concrete instead to mean the material that forms blocks, walls and roads. One ingredient is cement, the binding agent that is mixed with water, sand and gravel.

You can almost hear the voice of Ben Stein, can’t you? Click through for more exciting hair-splitting over “podium” and “lectern.”

(All snark aside, I do think these distinctions are important, and I recognize the importance, and thanklessness, of the job of maintaining language standards. I only question whether the public gives enough of a fig to make it part of the NYT’s website.)

From the WashPost, a sobering story on how technology makes a better terrorist:

The heavily armed attackers who set out for Mumbai by sea last week navigated with Global Positioning System equipment, according to Indian investigators and police. They carried BlackBerrys, CDs holding high-resolution satellite images like those used for Google Earth maps, and multiple cellphones with switchable SIM cards that would be hard to track. They spoke by satellite telephone. And as television channels broadcast live coverage of the young men carrying out the terrorist attack, TV sets were turned on in the hotel rooms occupied by the gunmen, eyewitnesses recalled.

This is terrorism in the digital age. Emerging details about the 60-hour siege of Mumbai suggest the attackers had made sophisticated use of high technology in planning and carrying out the assault that killed at least 174 people and wounded more than 300. The flood of information about the attacks — on TV, cellphones, the Internet — seized the attention of a terrified city, but it also was exploited by the assailants to direct their fire and cover their origins.

Fascinating story.

If you prefer gunplay more relaxed, less deadly and a whole lot funnier, try this piece on Detroit’s last surviving inside-the-city-limits gun store, written by the Metro Times’ own Detroitblogger John. (I’m reliably told the pseudonym protects an actual reporter for the more smugly self-satisfied of the city’s dailies, and why these excellent little sketches of city life aren’t running there is anybody’s guess, but I’d guess it comes down to the suicidal standards of corporate journalism.)

Anyhoo, some great detail about the dangers of ricochet on the indoor range:

He unconsciously shields his groin with his hand as he talks. “A woman was shooting, and I got hit right on the head of my dick!” he says. “But it didn’t hurt. It just come and fell. So about two, three months later a lady’s down here shooting, the damn bullet ricocheted, hit my damn dick. I said ‘What the hell’s going on here!'”

And finally, what the hell is going on here? General Motors needs $4 billion in cash just to get through the end of the month. Anyone want to buy a nice house in Grosse Pointe? I could probably make you a deal.

Off to whistle past the graveyard. Happy Wednesday.

One of the things I like best about living in a metro area this size is the way the various ethnicities assert themselves. Columbus, while no tank town, is (or was) a place where a certain mushy pan-European generic culture stamps out the details of what it means to be, say, of Greek heritage (except during Greekfest). Fort Wayne’s foundation of German bloodstock eclipses all but a few other early-immigrant groups. (One of these is the Macedonian community, but they sort of stamped themselves out by invading the restaurant trade, where they proved excellent hosts mainly by offering what you like, not their own tastes.) The preceding is obviously a little like painting a portrait with a whitewashing brush, and I’ll disavow all of it soon enough.

But I’m always pleased to do my holiday shopping here and see details of old-country culinary culture I thought had been long-forgotten — Easter cakes made in the shape of a lamb, corned beef by the truckload for St. Patrick’s Day, paczki for Fat Tuesday, kosher-for-Passover Coca-Cola, tamales at Christmastime in Mexicantown. Of late the big meat mall at Eastern Market is selling chitterlings by the truckload. Every vendor is having a special, and hand-lettered signs are everywhere. (No one can agree on a spelling: chitterlings, chittlins, chit’lins, chittins.) It seems to be a seasonal thing, although whether it’s connected to Thanksgiving, Christmas or cold weather in general is hard to say. (I should learn to check the Google first — it is, indeed, a pan-cold-weather-holiday thing.)

I recall a passage from “Gone With the Wind” (the novel) where Scarlett, in the grip of post-war hunger at Tara, finds herself fantasizing over the bounty of years gone by, when at hog-killing time the results would be shared from the big house to the slave quarters. Obviously the white folks claimed the ham and bacon, but there was offal — the chitterlings, maws another other queasy-making parts — for the Negroes. It’s always interesting to me how many cultures still eat the foods of poverty and deprivation long after they no longer need to. (Someday I’ll publish this as a scholarly thesis called, simply, “Lutefisk: WTF?”) Personally, I think nothing short of starvation would get me to eat a pig’s intestines, but like Barack Obama and gay marriage, I’m always willing to be persuaded otherwise.

Thanksgiving is a great blank canvas for ethnic cuisine in general. I stood in line behind a black woman in September who was buying a bushel of assorted greens at a bargain prices, and told the seller she would cook and freeze it all for Thanksgiving. One of my favorite Sopranos episodes is the one where Paulie Walnuts lays out the typical Italian-American Thanksgiving feast, starting with antipasto, manicotti, “and then the bird.” So maybe chitterlings have a place there. All I know is, if you’re interested, they’re having lots of sales downtown.

Thanks for all the birthday greetings yesterday. The day was pretty average for my own natal day, which I’ve de-emphasized in recent years. I got a chocolate-raspberry cake, yum, and Mark Bittman’s “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian.” Which I asked for. A good day.

Holiday-week bloggage:

Despite my brief sojourn as a sports copy editor, I didn’t know why so much attention was being paid to whether the disgraceful Lions would sell out Ford Field for their traditional Thanksgiving game. (That’s because my time reading sports copy ended when I stopped being paid to do so.) They finally did, barely, probably by handing out tickets to the homeless guys who panhandle on the freeway ramps. Now I know why: If they don’t sell out, there’s no TV broadcast, and that — the broadcast — is an important part of many Thanksgiving traditions, not only here but around the country. So, whew: We can still watch the Lions on TV tomorrow. At 0-11, they’re playing the Titans, who are 10-1. There was some hope Tennessee would win last week, so we’d get that symmetry thing going: 0-11 vs. 11-0. That would be the last symmetry such a matchup would yield, as the Lions suck so badly this year they need a new word for it, and the score will probably be 425-3. You can watch the game on TV, or let Detroitist live-blog it for you.

Maybe if he’d said “asshole” and “tyrant,” he could have killed the guy: Dubious Seattle Times story tries to draw a line between a heckler and the collapse last week of U.S. Attorney General Michael Mukasey.

Have a good weekend, all. I think I’ll take tomorrow and Friday off — unless the mood strikes me otherwise. I expect we’ll be seeing “Twilight” at some point, even though I’d rather take Kate to see “Milk.” Anyway, we won’t be seeing “Australia,” although I loved Hank Stuever’s capsule description via his Facebook status: “It’s a movie about Hugh Jackman’s chest, and some other stuff around him.” And what a chest!

Be thankful for something tomorrow. You know you have a long list.

There’s so much going on hereabouts, and so many good things I want to direct your attention to, that today will be an all-bloggage entry. Maybe we should make Thursdays the ADHD edition on a semi-permanent basis, eh? On with it, then:

One of the best meals of my life was in a long-dead restaurant in Columbus called L’Armagnac. It was in a converted house somewhere in a gentrifying neighborhood, and some weeks later I had occasion to see the kitchen on a reporting assignment. It was very easy to see the kitchen because it was the size of a broom closet — not much bigger than the one in my apartment, in fact. And yet, magic happened there, and happened on a scale large enough to share with several dozen people every night, and the only real accommodation anyone had to make was scheduled seatings and prix fixe. So I was amused to note this NYT blog piece called Mark Bittman’s Bad Kitchen, Bittman being everyone’s favorite food columnist. (Really. His recipes are worth the NYT subscription price alone.) Anyhoo:

Q: Okay Mark. What’s a popular food writer like you doing in a kitchen like that?

A: I got a bunch of e-mails that say, “Can you believe all this stuff about your crummy kitchen?” But the whole idea is that you don’t need a fancy kitchen. You don’t need fancy equipment, and you don’t need fancy recipes. When I show people my kitchen, they believe it. But I hate my kitchen also. I bump my shins on the dishwasher. There is not enough room to put stuff. It’s a terrible stove. It’s a terrible dishwasher. I don’t have room for the pots I’d like to have. I’ve cooked in much worse, though. I’m used to it. Someday I’ll grow up and get a real kitchen.

Q: So why do so many people think a nice kitchen will solve their cooking woes?

A: Maybe it’s like what you said. You use your crummy kitchen as an excuse not to cook. Maybe it’s like saying, “I can’t exercise in the winter because I don’t have an elliptical trainer.” I once cooked for six months in what amounted to a basement with a hot plate, microwave and a refrigerator and sink.

Sorry if you’re OD’d on the current crisis, but you’re not going to be reading this stuff in your local papers, and some of it is good:

Pete Karmanos — local hero, hereabouts — takes on Alabama’s most irritating senator:

The intent of this letter, however, is not to take you to task for the inaccuracy of your comments or for the over-simplicity of your views, but rather to point out the hypocrisy of your position as it relates to Alabama’s (the state for which you have served as senator since 1987) recent history of providing subsidies to manufacturing. During the segment on Meet the Press, you stated that:

“We don’t need government — governmental subsidies — for manufacturing in this country. It’s the French model, it’s the wrong road. We will pay for it. The average American taxpayer is going to pay dearly for this, if I’m not wrong.”

I trust it is safe to say that when you refer to “government subsidies,” you are referring to subsidies provided by both federal and state governments. And if this is in fact true, then I am sure you were adamantly against the State of Alabama offering lucrative incentives (in essence, subsidies) to Mercedes Benz in the early 1990s to lure the German automobile manufacturer to the State.

As it turned out, Alabama offered a stunning $253 million incentive package to Mercedes. Additionally, the State also offered to train the workers, clear and improve the site, upgrade utilities, and buy 2,500 Mercedes Benz vehicles. All told, it is estimated that the incentive package totaled anywhere from $153,000 to $220,000 per created job. On top of all this, the State gave the foreign automaker a large parcel of land worth between $250 and $300 million, which was coincidentally how much the company expected to invest in building the plant.

[Insert Nelson Muntz HAW-ha here.]

One of my favorite — OK, my absolute favorite — local blogger is Jim Griffioen of Sweet Juniper, who covers Detroit, urban wastelands, parenthood and stay-at-home fatherhood from a perch somewhere near Lafayette Park. His piece on the events of this week is worth a read because it’s beautifully written, and because it captures the ambiguity so many of us feel about the situation:

I take pictures of the sad state of Detroit partly because I know there are people out there who can hardly believe places like this exist in their own country. From our greatest, most unique cities to our blandest, most generic suburbs, things have been pretty nice for a long time. It is easy to forget how our once-great economy was built (or what happened to the places that built it). Now it has been pointed out that this robust economic juggernaut we’ve believed we were for the last several years hasn’t actually been wearing any clothes. And winter is here.

Some of the people saying let them fail about Detroit’s automakers are the very same people who had no problem with the $700 billion bailout of the very “industries” responsible for the sudden evaporation of so many billions of dollars in equity and credit. I would like to show them the state of this city and ask them to think about how much worse it (and hundreds of other cities reliant on the auto industry) will get if any of these three employers were suddenly unable to pay their employees or suppliers. This isn’t Manhattan. We’re not talking about Goldman Sachs associates suddenly not being able to pay the mortgages on their $350,000 parking spaces in Tribeca for the Ferraris they bought with their 2006 bonuses. We are talking about the lifeblood of a region that has already suffered so deeply, and I can’t believe how many people are speaking so flippantly about allowing this great American industry to die.

I’m no apologist for the Big Three or their ridiculous missteps and lapses of judgment. But I do care about the regular people who work for these companies and who played no role in those poor decisions. Where is the compassion?

Jim used to live in San Francisco. Ahem:

They say a sustainable model for future economies will trend away from globalization and be based more on localization. The yuppies and hippies have sort of turned that into “I am better than the white trash at Wal-Mart because I buy my eggs from Farmer Brown the next town over,” but that doesn’t mean a movement towards more local economies is without merit. For Detroiters, of course, it is hard to separate all this talk of “buy local” economics from the misery of the auto industry, and not be frustrated with those Prius-driving yuppies in the Pacific Northwest calling for the death of this massive American industry while patting themselves on the back for buying butter made from the milk of organically-fed Oregon cows. It’s not a simple matter, and hopefully if there is some sort of “bailout” there will be plenty of strings attached: perhaps this could be an opportunity to start transforming manufacturing in the United States to a sustainable model that strengthens our economy and provides jobs here rather than just strengthening the portfolios of a privileged few at the expense of so many. But calling for the death of this American industry is callous and shortsighted, and I would add that slowly turning into a nation where no one knows how to make anything but hamburgers and silkscreened t-shirts can’t be good for national security.

Oh, and speaking of San Francisco, where else could a letter to the editor this stupid originate?

Missing from both Detroit’s pleas for a bailout and the national discussion of its pros and cons is any acknowledgment that the American taxpayer continuously subsidizes the automobile industry through the financing of local, state and federal roads.

If car companies were suddenly forced to acquire the land and maintain the infrastructure that its products need to function, the real cost of a car would be beyond the reach of all but the wealthiest people, and our national economy would come to a standstill until another form of transportation were subsidized and developed to take its place.

Whether General Motors is “too big to fail” and therefore deserves a bailout ignores the fact that the company, along with every other carmaker in the world, is subsidized by our tax dollars. Giving the automakers more for abusing their unique standing hardly seems appropriate.

Do we need a palate-cleanser? We do:

Jon Carroll quotes an amazing fact about Tom Friedman:

The Nov. 10 issue of the New Yorker had a long and quite balanced profile of Friedman by Ian Parker. This paragraph caught my eye:

“A few years ago, the Friedmans bought a seven-and-a-half-acre plot in Bethesda, Maryland. They tore down the existing house, built an eleven-thousand-square-foot replacement, and planted 200 trees. (In a note at the end of [his new book] ‘Hot, Flat and Crowded,’ where Friedman explains his own ecological circumstances – geothermal heating, solar panels – he invites readers, perhaps unwisely, to regard his real estate move as an act of rescue: He writes that he and his wife bought the land ‘to prevent it from being developed into a subdivision of a dozen or more houses,’ which could sound like someone buying a lot of champagne to protect society from cork-related injuries.) Here, the Friedmans have started an art collection on a theme of reading, writing and the media, which includes a book by Anselm Kiefer and a bench by Jenny Holzer.”

“Perhaps unwisely” — snerk.

Finally, some comedy. One of the many, many shameful things about the way the city of Detroit rolls is the bloated Executive Protection Unit, the police-department detail that protects the mayor. The most recent former occupant of that office apparently looked into the mirror every morning and saw not a college football player going soft in the middle, but a TOTAL BADASS who needed muscle to get through his day without someone busting a cap in his ass. People said the EPU was staffed by his high-school classmates and was just another form of featherbedding, which isn’t hard to believe. Anyway, someone I know attended a Democratic fundraiser in Grosse Pointe Farms last year, and said the talk of the party was the way the governor, this 110-pound blonde lady, made a quiet entrance, her security consisting of one state highway patrolman, followed a few minutes later by Kwame Kilpatrick’s posse in two SUVs. (Because the Farms is a place where you take your life into your own hands after dark, I guess.)

When Kwame left the mountain headfirst earlier this year, there was some local comment that now would be an excellent time to dissolve the EPU as well. Not so fast:

City Council President Monica Conyers took along two police officers from the Executive Protection Unit last weekend to a National League of Cities conference in Orlando, Fla., which some colleagues say is a misuse of taxpayer dollars. Police spokesman James Tate confirmed the trip and said police have escorted Conyers during other jaunts out of town since she became president in September.

Of course, the best part is always the justification:

“She is next in line to be the mayor,” said Conyers’ spokeswoman Denise Tolliver, who added that Conyers took two officers because one requested that a partner come to share the duties. “She absolutely needs that security. She is a woman. She can’t protect herself in many instances. You have to be concerned with her safety.”

Let me just go on the record as saying that if any female can protect herself, it’s Monica Conyers, who can’t even check into a hotel without the police being called. Anybody who would mess with her deserves whatever they have coming.

Now I’m off to exercise until I look like a drowned rat. Mmm, sexy.

UPDATE: Wait! One more. Staffers at the Longmont Times-Call in Colorado have a unique opportunity to make some extra cash this Christmas: Working as valet parkers at the publisher’s holiday bash. If this isn’t the bottom, it’s hard to know what is.

I’ll say this for living in America’s most-loathed city (suck it, New York! we rool!) — local-media coverage of the auto-industry crisis is a cut above. You can’t really feed slogans and warmed-over talk radio calls to an informed audience, and so we’re spared “but if they’d only make cars people want, none of this would be happening.” For the most part.

My favorite of these is: America doesn’t want SUVs. Ha. Now they don’t. They don’t want them when gas is $4 a gallon. But until gas got that high, they wanted lots of them. Did everyone sleep through the ’90s and the first half of this decade? People not only wanted SUVs, they wanted them in all sizes, shapes and colors. They wanted big ones (Suburbans). They wanted little ones (Escapes). They wanted their Japanese brands tricked out to look more SUV-like (hello, Honda CRX). They wanted fancy-schmancy luxury SUVs (Escalade, Navigator). They wanted cheap ones for the entry-level market (Hyundai, Kia). Did O.J. Simpson flee in an Accord? I must have missed that.

Even now, they still want so-called crossovers, SUVs that drive and handle more like cars — Buick Enclave, Ford Edge, etc. You can pick many, many fights with the U.S. auto industry and make many, many good arguments against the government helping them, but you can’t change the facts to suit your prejudices, and the fact is, the Big Three invented the SUV, and for a very long time, the SUV was very, very good to the Big Three. So please shut up about that.

(On some right-wing blog I can’t remember, I heard the most stupido argument of all: The companies didn’t want to make SUVs, but were forced to by their onerous UAW contracts, which required them to make the highest-profit-margin vehicles possible. These people really live in their own fantasy world. I don’t want to wake them up. They’re like sleeping babies.)

Here’s the other thing you don’t hear so much here: Those greedy autoworkers. How dare they want stuff like health insurance and pensions. We really are crabs in a bucket, aren’t we? Again, go ahead and make informed remarks about certain work forces having to face the reality of higher co-pays and cost-sharing. But unless you’re willing to give up your own company-paid health insurance in solidarity, kindly shut up about it. Non-union GM retirees lost their health-care bennies earlier this year — replaced by a whole $300/month subsidy to buy private insurance in that marvelous free market, and good luck with that if you’re a cancer survivor or have heart disease. Spare a kind thought for them, eh?

What we’re seeing in Detroit is the death of the well-paid working class, and if that makes you happy, go be happy about it. Asshole.

Anyway, speaking of cars nobody wants:

LONG BEACH, Calif. — Gleaming new Mercedes cars roll one by one out of a huge container ship here and onto a pier. Ordinarily the cars would be loaded on trucks within hours, destined for dealerships around the country. But these are not ordinary times.

For now, the port itself is the destination. Unwelcome by dealers and buyers, thousands of cars worth tens of millions of dollars are being warehoused on increasingly crowded port property.

And for the first time, Mercedes-Benz, Toyota, and Nissan have each asked to lease space from the port for these orphan vehicles. They are turning dozens of acres of the nation’s second-largest container port into a parking lot, creating a vivid picture of a paralyzed auto business and an economy in peril.

But…but…people want Toyotas! How can this be happening?

It is more unusual to see a lot at the California port filled with thousands of unsold Mercedeses, most of them gathering dirt on the plastic white film that protects their hoods and trunks. Some appeared to have been stashed at the port for several months.

Last week, Mercedes delivered around 1,000 more cars to Long Beach on the Grus, a 580-foot container ship.

“A year ago, I was looking into buying one of these for my wife,” said Kurt Garland, the terminal manager overseeing the unloading of the white, silver and black sports cars, sport utility vehicles and sedans. “Now I’m not. I’m saving money, paying bills, hunkering down.”

Oh, the poor economy is to blame. Not those Mercedes SUVs nobody wants.

(Yesterday I wrote on my Facebook status that I felt “amorphous anger.” I’m starting to see why.)

So let’s lighten up, a bit, shall we? I hope somewhere out there in the ranks of working screenwriters, someone is crafting a script about pirates, and not the ones in the Caribbean. If you can’t get a movie out of Somali hijackers, rocket-propelled grenades, hijacked Saudi oil tankers and the Indian Navy (!!!They have one??!!), you’re not worth your union dues. Or you’re just not reading the newspapers. (I heard on NPR the other day that all the coastal fishing villages in Somalia have become pirate dens, and that all the women want a pirate boyfriend. Well, duh.)

My Great Books discussion group meets in three hours, and I still have a few pages of the reading material to get through (“The Man Who Would Be King,” if you’re interested), so let’s wrap it up with just a bit of bloggage:

One of the reasons I sometimes curse Roy Edroso is, he got me hooked on reading Rod Dreher, and a more entertaining correspondent of Wingnuttia you will not find. What I like about him is his lack of filters; so much of what he writes seems to come directly from an id-well in his brain, and so you’ll sometimes see, in the space of 36 hours, a plea for us to be kinder to one another (“because we’re all carrying a great burden”) and then a denunciation of a bride who wants her wedding dress to show a special tattoo as a slut. It’s so amusing.

Anyway, lately he’s all het up about the Prop 8 backlash in California. “Gay mob assaults peaceful Christians,” he shrieked on Monday, embedding a video clip that showed the reaction when a group of Christians went into the Castro, the most famous gay neighborhood in the whole frickin’ country, to try to pray the gay away. Astonishingly, it wasn’t friendly. I know, I’m as shocked as you are.

The next day, he called for all of us to “stand by the Mormons,” because “a friend” tells him:

Things are pretty grim. On the ground pastors are worried, and for my Mormon friends it is very bad. No LDS person in their right mind who is not a man of courage would announce his church affiliation without knowing it to be safe.

Safe? From what? Disapproval? An argument? I must have missed the invasion of Salt Lake City by the drag-queen army. Even his Beliefnet commenters were unimpressed:

Yeah, it’s like Darfur out there what with all the pogroms and midnight roundups and mass executions of the Mormons out there.

Oh, well. On to Rudyard Kipling. I’m calling it the white woman’s burden.

Today’s update is the ADHD Edition. You’ve been warned:

Peppers and eggs — now there’s a breakfast of champions. Cook the peppers first in some EVOO, and you could even call it healthy. (I will brook no slander of eggs. Moderation, peoples.) Halfway through, I remembered I’m supposed to be lunching with JohnC today, and I probably won’t be hungry until 2 p.m. Ah, well. That’s why we have salads.

Saw the trailer for “Cadillac Records” on the Apple site this week. It looks as though it has a 50-50 chance of being tremendous or sucktastic. I winced at the moment where the Rolling Stones show up on the sidewalk outside the Chess offices to tell Muddy Waters they’d named their band after one of his songs. But when Beyoncé sings “At Last” — magic. And Adrien Brody is swiftly becoming one of my favorite actors, mainly due to his marvelous honker. I don’t think I’ve seen an imperfect feature make for such a perfect face since, oh, Barbra Streisand.

Trivia: Barbra Streisand was on the Knight Ridder copy-editing tests, along with Charles Addams, for obvious reasons. Now you know. And yes, I caught them both. (Although, rereading this entry prior to hitting “publish,” I see I misspelled Adrien Brody’s name — twice.)

And while we’re making transitions from tissue-thin connections, here’s Adrien Brody in the titular make of his latest movie. Sigh. Detroit was something while it lasted, wasn’t it?

Which brings us around to the automotive bailout, apparently dead in the water, and probably that’s a good thing. You don’t cure a drug addict by giving him one last binge, and after quite a bit of reading I’ve come around to Micki Maynard’s analysis — bankruptcy is a better way out for General Motors than a bailout. Although this, from Tom Friedman, sounds appealing:

I am as terrified as anyone of the domino effect on industry and workers if G.M. were to collapse. But if we are going to use taxpayer money to rescue Detroit, then it should be done along the lines proposed in The Wall Street Journal on Monday by Paul Ingrassia, a former Detroit bureau chief for that paper.

“In return for any direct government aid,” he wrote, “the board and the management [of G.M.] should go. Shareholders should lose their paltry remaining equity. And a government-appointed receiver — someone hard-nosed and nonpolitical — should have broad power to revamp G.M. with a viable business plan and return it to a private operation as soon as possible. That will mean tearing up existing contracts with unions, dealers and suppliers, closing some operations and selling others and downsizing the company. … Giving G.M. a blank check — which the company and the United Auto Workers union badly want, and which Washington will be tempted to grant — would be an enormous mistake.”

I like the idea of Mr. or Ms. Hard-Nose putting Rick Wagoner and the Board of Bystanders (to use Jalopnik’s amusing phrase) in charge of the office coffee pot while they tear up contracts and fire people. It will be so amusing to mop up the blood in the gutters of my neighborhood. We live in interesting times, don’t we?

Wherever the former GM workers end up after Paul Ingrassia’s plan has them beheaded, the women among them will want to invest in a nice suit. The NYT says so: The return of the interview suit, it proclaimed yesterday. Jezebel got a little knicker-twisted over it, but that’s just because they’re young and products of our casual culture. The interview suit was simply a given for women my age; we called them hire-me suits. For best results, hire-me suits should always be worn with fuck-me pumps — it sends precisely the right message, which you are free to retract as soon as you get the job. In later years, it was always sort of funny-painful to see younger people going through the interview process, as clearly the relaxation of rules had done them no good. One kid came in wearing what had to have been his dad’s suit, it was that big on him. (He may have borrowed it from David Byrne.) They wore neckties and pantyhose as though these items were made of barbed wire, not the trappings of adulthood. Once hired, they retracted their own messages, and started showing up in Teva sandals exposing dirty toenails. Which is fine, I guess, but you should still make the effort for your first impression. It’s common courtesy.

By the way, does anyone know who made the pantsuit Darryl Hannah wears in “Kill Bill, Vol. 2”? I want that for my next suit, along with the blouse and the six-foot-tall coat-hanger body Hannah brings to the party. She can keep the eye patch.

And now I am distracted by a shiny object and must go. But I wish you all a great weekend.

With the post-election afterglow quickly curdling into the usual nastiness, let me state a few things for the record today:

I think Sarah Palin knows Africa is a continent, not a country. Given that the lady is one of those people whose words, verbally, tend to become — I think in terms of the verbal expression, you know, she could be expressing, word-wise…

You get the idea. Also, I’ve heard many, many people refer to Africa as a country, and I know they know better. It’s just one of those things.

The NAFTA thing, I could go either way on. And I believe every word about the clothes and the shopping. I can’t say how, except that I’ve seen otherwise sensible people make utter fools of themselves when they thought something was free. This is all I have to go on — a few hunches.

Also, I think the McCain we saw at his concession speech was the real man, and his failure to be that man throughout his campaign is one of those Greek-tragedy things he’ll carry to his grave.

We’re reaching the end of my graciousness toward American conservatism, but I’ll hang on a little longer, to say this P.J. O’Rourke piece is worth a read. Everybody likes funny Patrick Jake, although some like him better than others, and this piece has the advantage of at least sounding honest:

Since the early 1980s I’ve been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.

Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we’d forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world’s rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we’ve been doing of that lately.)

I haven’t always kept current on the O’Rourke catalog, but I assume someone here has; did he ever write this stuff at the time it was happening? If so, I don’t recall any of it, but maybe this is just his niche — truth-telling long after the fact, kind of like David Horowitz on the Panthers. Whatever. At least someone’s trying honesty for a change. Strategic honesty, anyway — there’s the usual abuse aimed at “liberals,” but I guess if there wasn’t at least a little bit of that, it wouldn’t be a Weekly Standard piece.

And so begins the new era, and while I’m optimistic and hopeful, I’m not stupid, either. If you want to know what an abyss looks like, look at an abyss, so over the weekend I contemplated what might happen to this town if General Motors, et al, filed for bankruptcy. Our house, already worth tens of thousands less than we paid for it, would fall further in value. One of the papers would probably fold, and it would likely be the one my health insurance is tied to. The freelance market would either dry up or become so competitive, what with all the unemployed journalists on the market, that it wouldn’t pay worth a damn. When I was in college, a nearby power-plant cooling tower — one of those wasp-waisted structures you see in the non-picturesque parts of the country, and in Indiana, practically on the lovely sandy beach of Lake Michigan, and whose idea was that — collapsed while under construction. The workers, under pressure to make a deadline, had anchored their safety harnesses in cement that wasn’t fully set. The line gave way at one end, and took down a couple dozen workers in a motion not unlike water going down a drain.

It would be like that.

Still, we had dinner with friends Saturday night, and we all had a champagne toast to the new era. Someday we’ll look back on it and say, either, we should have saved those few dollars we spent on champagne or else, hey, at least we have our memories.

Hard times are hard times, but acting as though they’re harder than they are can make them worse. This is common sense. Rod Dreher is on one of his pants-wetting jags about “stockpiling food.” I may well lose my health insurance, my job and my house, but staying fed has never seemed much of a risk, not in this country. By the time the food runs out, most of your stockpiles will have been depleted too, so why bother trying to keep the mice out of the 50-pound bags of rice in the basement? Now that we have firearms in the house, I plan to feed us during a Depression the old-fashioned way — by killing and eating the neighbors’ pets.

Dreher goes on to quote some lady at his church: “The newspapers ought to be telling us how to prepare, but instead they talk about nothing but sports and entertainment and everything like it is normal,” she said. “It’s not going to be normal.” No, I don’t expect it’ll be normal, but running stories about how to make your own pemmican and squirrel jerky isn’t going to set well with the few advertisers you still have left, who are trying to sell wide-screen TVs and electric skillets.

There’s a lot of automotive-buyout money floating around town now, and I think it’s behind a lot of small businesses that are popping up in the oddest places. Two are on the commercial block nearest our house. One I suspect is doomed; there just can’t possibly be that much demand for a dog wash, aimed at that slice of the population that has a dog to bathe but doesn’t want to do it in their own tub. The other is a fast-casual restaurant called the Big Salad, which amuses me because I remember the “Seinfeld” episode where they got the name, and pleases me because they make a pretty good salad there. I try to stop in every week or two, if only because it’s good to get out of the house and without customers, the lettuce will wilt and there will be no more Big Salad on the block. Perhaps Dreher and his old-lady friend, eyes squinched shut in fervent prayer, haven’t thought of this.

Anyway, I’m sick of current events, and plan to be for a while. You guys talk amongst yourselves about whatever you like, but I’m going to turn my thoughts to art and Christmas shopping. Or that might just be the weather talking — snow is flying outside my window as I write this. Seems like a good time to study Russian instead of polling data, and for a good long while.

(This is also, I warn you, the “my website is a tar baby” spasm of disgust I go through from time to time. I can’t think of the last time I got a nickel from GoogleAds, those chiselers. Roy Edroso details the unintentionally hilarious goodbye-to-all-that of a one-time high-flying right-wing blogger, his finances destroyed by hours spent at the keyboard, along with gout and the expenses of “lap-band surgery,” for both the blogger and his daughter (so she could make the weight requirement for military enlistment). I was so embarrassed for him, reading this, that I had to look away for a while. I don’t want to be that guy. But I would like to write some other stuff. So I may redirect my time for a while.)

Anyway, I think Brian Dickerson, easily the best remaining columnist at the Freep, sums it up well:

The wild-eyed Marxist revolutionary known as Barack Obama convened the first meeting of his economic advisory board Friday. Besides Michigan’s own Gov. Jennifer Granholm, those invited to participate included two former secretaries of the U.S. Treasury Department, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker, and über-capitalist Warren Buffett. If this strikes you as an unlikely group to task with the radical redistribution of America’s wealth, you’ve stumbled upon the not-so-dirty little secret of American government, which is its frustrating (and enormously reassuring) continuity.

Not that any of this has occurred to yet another Hoosier asshole picking up on the fly-the-flag-upside-down meme, tacitly approved of by the newspaper columnist who detailed it. Get this guy to a Boy Scout, stat.

Off to the gym. Monday. Sigh.

Today in Gardening Galore, we have a question from a reader:

Dear Gardeners,

I recently bought yet another orchid — a phalaenopsis, your basic hotel-lobby, posed-under-a-pinpoint-halogen plant. It sits next to the chaise where I do a lot of my writing, and I like to contemplate its loveliness from time to time. “Easy to grow,” the man said. “Just ignore it, and it’ll do better than if you mess with it,” the man said. So I took it home, and for a while it was fine, and then all the blossoms dried up and fell off, and now the stem is drying up, and even though I’ve continued to water it — not too much! — I’m wondering if the thing is doomed. If I cut the stem off, will another one grow from it, or am I out another $20?

You’ll notice I’m trying to make a transition here, although I’m wondering if I should. Y’all want to talk about Rahm Emanuel in the comments, who am I to say you can’t? But in this blessed period between the conclusion of the election and the Confiscation of the Weapons and Opening of the Re-education Camps, maybe someone can answer my question about the goddamn orchid. I’m starting to wonder if these things are worth the trouble. But I need a little color in the gray Michigan winter. Is this so wrong?

As you can see, this week has left me tapped, and my house needs dusting. In the meantime:

Home page for the PuppyCam. Among the details there — all the puppy genders and names, which are Japanese-y and disappointing. I much prefer to call them by their collar colors. It should not surprise anyone to learn that Mr. Green is, indeed, a mister. Or a master.

The Chicago Tribune posted a few rejected election-result front pages. My favorite is the one about the Adler Planetarium.

I’m going to start letting Detroitist pick my morning Metro Mayhem stories; he does it so well:

Some pyscho fired shots at teenagers driving through Harper Woods. A bowling ball stopped a bullet from hitting one of the kids. Just like in the movies! And, ha ha ha, the Free Press said the gunmen “split.” Ha ha ha, just like a 7-10 split! The victims were from Detroit so naturally the Free Press message board klavern assumed they were no good black kids buying drugs in Harper Woods. It’s nice to know some people still cling to the old way and aren’t caught up in this “post-race America” thing.

It was the “message-board klavern” that got me. Word.

Off to dust. Have a good weekend.