That was an amazing speech. I’ve been waiting a long time for it. I don’t mean the speech given by the first black president, but the speech that opens the nation’s arms and asks for the best in people. I know the coming weeks, months and years won’t be easy, but for just a few moments, I believed it was possible we’ll get through them more or less intact.

I still do. In a country where a black Democrat could carry Indiana — although not Allen County, har — anything really is possible.

So let’s see how the invitation is being taken in the losers’ locker room:

Just watched Wonder Boy’s speech. Hmph. “Callused hands”? When did he ever have callused hands? – John Derbyshire, The Corner.

Ah, well. Let us be magnanimous in victory. I always hated all that “get over it, loser” bullshit the more obnoxious wings of the GOP served on its mornings after, so let’s not serve it.

Let’s just chuckle wryly for a few days. And check the less-talked-about races:

Here in Michigan, medical marijuana won by an embarrassingly wide margin — 63 percent approved it. Embryonic stem-cell research, approved. The first Democrat in history will represent the Grosse Pointes in the statehouse. (He defeated a nice blonde lady who seemingly had a sign in every yard in the district, in line to be the first woman commodore of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, which will have to be her consolation prize. We may be talking a reverse-Bradley effect today.) Over in Oakland County, Toilet Joe Knollenberg is outta here, along with the first sitting chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court to be voted out of office.

In the words of a Detroit city councilwoman: Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat?

I didn’t sleep well last night — iChat was buzzing well after midnight. Today let’s discuss not the presidential race, but local ones in your various municipalities and districts, oddities that didn’t make the national-news roundups, but are worth mentioning.

And let’s speculate on the Obama family puppy. Given how stunningly photogenic the rest of the crew is, I expect nothing less than a yappy little rag bundle with an eye patch. Name of…Scamp, maybe. In other words…a Jack Russell! John Scalzi already has his reality-check post up, and wisely notes, Your president will not give you everything you want, when you want it. But I want that puppy, dammit.

I’m going back to bed for a couple hours. You kids play nice, now.

I tend to disengage from the news on the weekends, except for the usual NPR, which is way too high-minded to cover a story like this.

And it was in my back yard!

UPDATE, via Kos and Detroitist: Oh, of course she was an alternate delegate to the GOP convention.

When I saw the minivan parked in the library fire lane (where I was parked too — fortunately, there was no fire at the moment) with two Weimaraners sitting in the front seats, it looked like a scene from William Wegman, and I crept forward for a picture.

Fay and Man Ray weren’t fooled, however, and challenged my approach:

Eh, I needed a polarizing filter, anyway.

I was driving home from our boat haul-out chore when I saw a sign for an estate sale. I had an hour to spare, so what the hell. It was a house in the Shores with the usual For Sale sign; I’d seen the listing for it earlier and remembered the ad mentioned a wide variety of designer clothes. I was actually looking for my usual — a lovingly used copper gratin pan, some interesting glass for my sister, whatevah — and not the clothes. Designer clothes are bought by skinny bitches, not women like me. So I approached the closet expecting to find the usual size zero, 2 and 4. Imagine my surprise when I grasped the first item, an Escada shell of wool, cashmere and silk, and glanced at the size:

FORTY-FREAKIN’-SIX.

That’s a European 46. Size L/XL in the U.S. A rich lady of normal size! Oh, happy day!

Not only that, she also had either a shopping problem or was one of those women who motivates herself to lose weight by buying nice things in a smaller size and hanging them in the closet as a goad. Because her stuff ranged from size 12 to 20, and much of it was NWT — new with tags. As in, never worn. As in:

That’s a pair of Miu Miu satin platform heels, probably about $375 in the store, never worn. Regrettably, just a hair too small for me. Because while that’s not a pair of shoes a girl needs, exactly, that is a pair of shoes that can change one’s life. (Yes, yes, a broken ankle is life-changing, too.)

As for me, I went through everything and tried on a lot. But I restricted myself to things I would really, actually wear. (Just because it says Lanvin on the label doesn’t make it so.) Came home with the original Escada shell and a Max Mara black cashmere sweater, NWT, for fifty bucks. I passed on the Ralph Lauren black label evening skirt, 100 percent silk, for $65. I haven’t worn an evening skirt in seven years. Even at that price, I wouldn’t get my money’s worth.

I mourn those heels, though. One size up and they? Would be mine.

We need a little shopping talk on this dreary Monday, don’t we? It’s dreary here, anyway. Eight more days to you-know-what, and it’s like the last miles of a very long race — they’re just longer than all the ones that came before. Sarah Palin was in Fort Wayne Saturday, and the crowd got bitchy when they had to wait hours to clear security. (Please don’t read that story far enough down to see the TSA referred to as the “Traffic Safety Administration.” Don’t you know editors cost money? And everyone makes misteaks.) And the DetNews parachutes in to Angola, Ind., and calls it a “tiny college town,” which made both Alan and me say huh over breakfast; while technically true, a more accurate description of Angola would be “farm hamlet with a significant population of homesick Malaysian engineering students.” Anyway, it’s either the epicenter of an era of epochal change for the Hoosier state, or the closest town to the Michigan border that one could set a foot in and earn the dateline.

In other local races at this hour, I have the opportunity to vote on medical marijuana and embryonic stem-cell research, both of which I intend to approve. Medical marijuana may sneak through; lots of people are voting yes just because it sounds goofy, and by the time-honored polling technique of “asking people I know,” I predict a landslide. Besides, with the state circling the drain as it is, can anyone mount a credible argument for not staying stoned around the clock? Stem cells are a little harder-fought, and the opposition is targeting and fine-tuning their advertising: For farty old Republicans, it’ll cost taxpayer money. For religious conservatives, it’s about dead babies, and adding Welcome to the Island of Doctor Moreau to the signs at the state border. And for African Americans, it’s Tuskegee all over again.

I’m voting yes. I’m considering, for this very special election year and this year only, voting a straight bug-the-GOP ticket. That’ll mean giving my vote to lots of people who, quite frankly, don’t deserve it, but at this point my greater aim is to punish the opposition on every possible front. Congratulations, John McCain — it took a moderate Republican to do what even Newt Gingrich couldn’t.

So in that spirit, on to the bloggage:

Do you use FedEx? Might consider an alternative.

New York magazine assembles a Top 10 list of daffy old coots, complete with YouTube clips, here. The Cloris Leachman clip alone is worth the price of admission.

Meanwhile, here in Detroit, the former mayor checks into the Graybar Hotel tomorrow, but not after one last f-you to the city he claims to love — a dine-and-dash incident at a local club. He signed his name to the $126.16 bill, called “charge it to the city” over his shoulder, and walked out. We may not be a swing state this year, but does that ever happen in squeaky-clean Indiana? I don’t think so.

Finally, wassup? Wassup:

Today’s only-in-Detroit story is about hunting pheasant in the ghetto. Money quote:

“You have to watch out for missing manhole covers. People steal them for scrap metal. Last year we had a dog fall into one.”

From the land where you can’t make this shit up, have a nice rest of the day.

If California were Virginia, they could get Pat Robertson to turn stuff like this back:

God hates the Golden State, obviously. I often note, driving around town, that Detroit is really one of the butt-ugliest cities I’ve ever seen, but so far I’ve never seen anything like this, driving home. On the other hand, I can’t say it’s all that much worse than a typical January morning commute down, say, Jefferson, with the boarded storefronts and the snow pushed to the curb and what is that in the right lane that I can barely make out in the gray murk of a steely dawn? An old woman driving her electric scooter in the road because the sidewalk is impassable? Oh, OK.

(Sometimes she’s walking on two canes. Alan and I have been to the Majestic Theater complex a couple times in the past year. It’s adjacent to the Detroit Medical Center, formerly Detroit Receiving, the big public hospital that serves everyone. In a place where the safety net is strained and fraying, it’s safe to say that not everyone is released from the ER into the arms of a loving family and a comfortable home. Both times we were at the Majestic, I came thisclose to mowing down some poor shlub in a hospital scrub top and fresh bandages, jaywalking home from their latest doctor visit, across Woodward and against the light. One was in a wheelchair. I almost wet my pants.)

Anyway, LA Mary, who sent me a couple of fire pictures this week: Keep your roof wet and your powder dry.

I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: It’s hard to understand what life is like in another place, even another place you’ve visited. Even if you read a lot and are very skilled at putting yourself in the shoes of another. And if that place is Los Angeles, triple that. I’ve never been anywhere in this country that felt so much like a different country, and that mostly has to do with the land and the weather. Everyone discusses L.A.’s essential oddness in terms of freeways, which seems silly, because every city bigger than a grease spot has freeways. What always baffled me about L.A. was the topography — one minute you’re in a regular old city and the next you’ve gone over a ridge and you’re in a canyon, and you might as well be in a cowboy movie. When I was freelancing for a horse magazine, I had a long chat with a California-based rider, who told me she kept four jumpers on a single acre of land tucked back in one of those canyons, and it all worked out fine. There was a small barn — I imagine the horses slept in bunk beds — and a small corral made of PVC pipe, and her own living space. The tack was hung from trees. The animals were ridden daily, and there was a network of trails leading to a community ring for their schoolwork, and that was just the California Way.

In the Midwest, in case you’re wondering, the rule of thumb for horsekeeping is one acre per horse. Some people go denser than that, but those would be commercial operations, not backyard owners.

Throw in the hell winds from the desert and the sort of single-digit humidity that makes your skin feel like a stretched drumhead, it’s easy to see how this sort of thing happens. But hard to fully understand, just the same.

Meanwhile, I’m always telling people how flat is is here. How flat? This flat: Last weekend I stopped at a light at Mound and 10 Mile Road, facing south. And I could see the Renaissance Center. Ten miles away.

OK, bloggage, while I frantically clean house — John and Sam due this afternoon — and prepare for Tolstoy:

You know how Sarah Palin complained about how irritated she was with Katie Couric’s mean, irrelevant questions? She was probably happier with Rush Limbaugh:

“You seem to understand the stark choice we have and the real danger the country faces in the future if the Obama-Biden ticket is elected. And I’d just like to know, do you see it that way?”

“I do,” she responded.

I missed David Frum on Rachel Maddow’s show the other night, but that’s why we have YouTube. My lord, what a horrible, horrible man. Is it worth it, having to take ridiculous, contemptible positions in public in exchange for a fat living? It can’t be, not in the end. (When he brought up Paul Wolfowitz, I thought my head would asplode.) Roy, as usual, nails it.

OK, sheet-changin’ time. The floor is yours.

But what’s my motivation?

A zombie consults with his director, October 2008.

Hey, look! I got a postcard from Sarah Palin:

Governed from the center, eh? Let’s see what the other side of the card says:

Whu-? Stem-cell research? Climate change? Bill Ayers for the proles, stem-cell research for the college-educated suburbs? Whatever works, I guess. My zip code is telling the world too much about me.

I turned off “Marketplace” last night when they got to the news of GM and Ford’s stock price ($4.76 and $2.08, respectively). There’s a downside to living in a company town, and this is it. I’m thinking I’m going to restrict myself to the digest items for a while, lest I fall down hyperventilating. I took the dog for a meander — “walk” doesn’t really describe our excursions these days — and thought about other scary times in history. I was Kate’s age in 1968, a year that must have seemed at least as perilous as this one, and I don’t recall my parents doing anything more than discussing current events calmly. I was driving with my mother one night in May 1970 when the radio broadcast was interrupted by an emergency bulletin directing all off-duty Columbus police officers to report to their local station house immediately. The student riots that followed the invasion of Cambodia had begun, and while Ohio saw blood spilled and lives lost by the end of it, all my mother said about the muster of police was, “It must be something on campus.”

So that’s the role model, right there: Calm acknowledgment, sans freak-out. I made a mental list of everything I could do to get through this, and came up with:

1) Make soup.
2) Exercise.
3) Drink lots of water.
4) Keep the house looking nice.
5) Take good notes.

So we had a curried butternut squash/apple soup — recipe in the Junior League cookbook, which gives the lie to the old myth about WASPs not appreciating non-salt-and-pepper flavors — and got our vitamin A.

It’s probably just as well I’m concentrating on soup, because I no longer understand the world of finance (if I ever did). Ford and GM have plants all over the world, production lines, product that’s still selling (badly, but still selling). I don’t understand how the market could value them at a fraction of what you could get even if you pulled the plug on the whole business and parted out each and every factory.

This is what a lack of liquidity does, I guess. Can’t get a loan, can’t get a car. Even Toyota sales are down by a third. How this shakes out remains to be seen — that’s a phrase they teach you on the first day of j-school — but I don’t imagine it’ll be pretty.

It’s hard to believe I’m going to spend the next two weekends making a no-budget zombie movie. On the other hand, why not make a zombie movie? What else should I do? Start cutting firewood for supplemental heating?

Speaking of which, my co-executive producer sent out the all-hands e-mail yesterday. Because we’re no-budget, we require the cast to wear their own clothes for costumes. With some caveats, of course:

Julie, business casual as well, but please wear clothes that you don’t have to wear again. A wooden stake is going into the front of your blouse and coming out the back.

As our makeup guy said, “Let the good times roll.” Have a good weekend.

Scrappers at work, east side of Detroit.

Next time you buy used bricks, spare a thought to the provenance.

Yesterday I had a conflict, between a need for some vegetables and a little exercise vs. about a million unreturned phone calls. As you all know, when you’re waiting for a call, the phone waits until you’re out or mowing the lawn or in the bathroom to ring; this is the first rule of phoning. But what is all our technology for if not to serve us, so I forwarded the landline to the iPhone, mounted the bike and rode off to the vegetable stand a couple miles up Mack Avenue.

On the way back, “Spirit in the Sky” faded out, and my ringtone — the “old phone” ring, the metal-bell ring — faded in. I touched the “answer” button and coasted to a bench in the park strip about 100 feet farther down the road. Sat down, had a conference call and a little chitchat, using the earbuds and the mic attached to the cord, and we all heard one another just fine. When I hit “end call,” “Spirit in the Sky” faded back in from pause, and I rode on home. It was the fades that got me. I don’t argue with anyone who says Apple can be a little too twee in their product design, but let me just say, it’s nice to have a few things in your life that not only work well, but better than well.

Snowed again today, and probably for the rest of the week, which is good, because otherwise I might be reduced to staring at the wall and wondering what it’s going to feel like to still be working when I’m 85, probably cleaning toilets for the occupying Chinese army or something. (Relax: I intent to be a spy. No one notices the old cleaning woman. You might as well be invisible.) In the meantime, if you live in metro Detroit and have lost your house to foreclosure (but not your computer), you are instructed to e-mail me immediately. If not, enjoy a little bloggage:

Yesterday I was trashing graphic designers, but I hope it goes without saying they’re not all bad. My former employer once sent a reporter halfway around the world for a story, and ran two of the dumbest graphics I’ve ever seen with his reports — one showed the time difference between Fort Wayne and Central Asia, and the other detailed his plane connections traveling there. These ran every day for two weeks, and I winced every time. Needless to say, this wasn’t the New York Times, where graphics mean something. Here, an amazingly detailed and nuanced breakdown of the no votes on yesterday’s bailout package, by district.

An entertaining read on the retirement of a Detroit homicide detective, with the obligatory hard-bitten quote:

An envelope kept in his desk drawer is a collage of family highlights and back-alley insanity. There is a photograph of a fishing trip; his son in his naval uniform; Carlisle and his wife, Nancy, at their wedding. Then there is the one of the man with his face half shot off; a nude woman dead in an abandoned garage; a corpse under a Christmas tree. “More people are murdered around Christmastime in Detroit,” Carlisle said of that photograph, the tree shining in the window. “I think it’s to avoid buying Christmas gifts.”

Bicycle commuting at night is hazardous, particularly on Woodward Avenue, which is eight or 10 lanes across in this stretch; still, people have to get to their jobs, and some of them are poor, and sometimes they pay the ultimate price.

I may be scarce around here for a couple of days, but I’ll do my best. In the meantime, commence your bickering. Only 35 days before we can break into separate groups and commence gloating!