The morning newspaper was a real remind-me-why-I-live-here moment today, a survey course of local misery. Factories are dismantled and sold to the highest bidder. Those stamping presses aren’t just melted down; they’re disassembled, sent by freighter overseas, and go on stamping in Korea or someplace. (Sometimes, that is. The one in the lead of this story went across town.) More perjury suspected among the mayoral minions — there’s dog-bites-man. The freeways are going to be a mess for the foreseeable future, such as it is in Michigan.

Yeesh. Turned to the business page. More good news about the housing market — average home equity slipped below 50 percent for the first time since 1945. Don’t remind me. So what’s opening at the cineplex this weekend? “College Road Trip?” Grade: F, says the Sun-Times critic.

Well, Daylight Saving Time starts Sunday. There’s that.

A couple of housekeeping notes: As you might imagine, the volume of unanswered e-mail around here is reaching amnesty levels. I don’t plan to do that, but am working through the pile at a slower pace than I’d like. It was great to hear from so many people I haven’t heard from in ages — and I’m talking to you, Carol Salad Girl — and I want to at least tag them back. So if you’re waiting for a reply, wait a little longer, and I should have everything answered by next week. Maybe.

As for more literal housekeeping, you should see the state of my bathrooms at the moment. Also, my lovely orchid, which sits on its own stand next to my luxurious Ikea chaise, my preferred writing place most days, has something called scale infestation. I downloaded a six-page treatment outline, and now I feel like a freshman with a very heavy backpack. My impulse is to pitch it and buy another at the Eastern Market tomorrow, but I fear being without something of beauty to contemplate when the creative well runs dry. God knows the landscape outside isn’t doing much for us at the moment, even though I did see a nice hawk far up in a neighbor’s oak the other day. Too far away for positive ID, but I’d put my next freelance check on it being Cooper’s or Red-tail.

Which is my long-winded way of saying, I’m outta here for the weekend. (Like I said: You should see my bathrooms.) Be kind to one another.

Patrick Swayze has terminal cancer, you say? I will take a moment to remember the man before he leaves. For a while, I was a student of his personal catalogue, and what a time it was.

My friend Ron French and I had a ritual in the late ’80s and early ’90s: We’d choose the worst movie in town, pick an off-peak screening and go to throw popcorn and trade snark from the audience. We tried to sit in a place where we wouldn’t disturb others, but we weren’t always successful; to the couple at the Holiday 6 whose enjoyment of “Point Break” we more or less ruined, I’m sorry. We had to see that one on opening night. The prospect of Keanu Reeves as an FBI agent and Swayze as a bank-robbin’ surfer was simply irresistible. (Talking in movies was a big pet peeve of mine at the time, too. I am a hypocrite.)

Swayze was to bad movies of the ’80s what Jack Nicholson was to good ones of the ’70s. “Dirty Dancing,” “Road House,” “Red Dawn,” “Ghost,” “North and South” (bad TV) and my personal favorite, “Next of Kin” — most of these were delightful to watch, so happily did they wallow in badness. What made them good-bad instead of bad-bad was, the people in them had a sense of humor about themselves. They knew it was bad, but they brought their A game, or at least their attention and energy. (The exception to the list was “Ghost,” which was bad-bad; Demi Moore’s personality is a black hole of dumb seriousness that sucks everything into its vortex.) “Red Dawn” was just plain hilarious, but was made funnier by its cultural impact; I remember seeing the program for an anti-communist function of some sort held in Fort Wayne, and “Red Dawn” was the afternoon’s entertainment. The thought of all those people coming off a morning of seminars and panel discussions about gulags and Stalinism, and into an afternoon of “Wolverines!” and Harry Dean Stanton bellowing, “Avenge me!” from behind the wire at the drive-in/re-education camp just kills.

“Next of Kin,” about a backwoods Appalachian clan taking revenge on the Chicago mob was a classic of the good-bad genre, combining elements of standard vengeance, gangster and fish-out-of-water plots. Ron pointed out the camera’s suspicious interest in an early family-picnic scene in which the elders of the clan practice their hatchet-throwin’ skills, and sure enough — I hope I’m not spoiling this for anyone — someone gets a hatchet in the brainpan in the big fight climax. It was so awesome.

One of the joys of bad-movie fandom is, you get to see them on cable years later and squeal, “How the hell did I miss Liam Neeson in this the first time around?!” Check out some of the players in the IMDb listing, beside Neeson: Helen Hunt, Bill Paxton, Ben Stiller, Michael J. Pollard, Ted Levine and that necessity for all bad ’80s cinema — a Baldwin brother (Adam). The character names are nearly as good, with a Patsy-Ruth, Aunt Peg, Old Hillbilly and, of course, Grandpa. (He may be the hatchet-thrower; can’t remember.)

But back to Swayze. What made him a pleasure to watch was his grace. He seemed to know he’d never be doing Mamet off Broadway, but he could dance the shoes off anyone, and didn’t mind wearing tight pants while doing so. It’s hard to dislike a man so masculine, and still so happy in a body built for hip-swivelin’ rather than football. Relax, I’m not going to compare him to Gene Kelly, but they shared a distant ancestor, maybe.

The TV commercial for “Next of Kin” featured Swayze, in an eastern-Kentucky accent, warning, “You ain’t seen bad yet…but it’s a-comin’,” a line I treasure to this day. If only we’d had some more of that kind of bad.

What’s your favorite good-bad movie? Discuss in comments.

P.S. As good as Swayze’s bad was, it really couldn’t match the all-time worst movie we saw together: “On Deadly Ground,” in which Steven Seagal saves the Alaskan wilderness by blowing up an oil refinery in the middle of it. (Sample dialogue, via IMDb: My guy in D.C. tells me that we are not dealing with a student here, we’re dealing with the Professor. Any time the military has an operation that can’t fail, they call this guy in to train the troops, OK? He’s the kind of guy that would drink a gallon of gasoline so he could piss in your campfire! You could drop this guy off at the Arctic Circle wearing a pair of bikini underwear, without his toothbrush, and tomorrow afternoon he’s going to show up at your pool side with a million dollar smile and fist full of pesos. This guy’s a professional, you got me? If he reaches this rig, we’re all gonna be nothing but a big goddamned hole right in the middle of Alaska. So let’s go find him and kill him and get rid of the son of a bitch!

Also: Drunken Eskimo: You are about to go on a sacred journey.

Do we have a little bloggage? We might:

Via Jeff, in comments above, How Hillary won Ohio.

Dahlia Lithwick explains Charlotte Allen to you. Well, someone had to.

For some reason, Detroit is fond of dressing up its large statuary in clothes. With opening day less than a month away, a Tiger in Carhartt.

Off to the gym. Guess what we have to look forward to this weekend? Yes, that.

I have hope for Detroit yet. Bossy’s Excellent Road Trip — one blogging woman’s lap of America to meet her blog readers — has a corporate sponsor, and it’s a GM brand:

JohnC, if your wife had anything to do with this, excellent viral product placement, which I am happy to amplify. At least now we know why she’s stopping in Detroit, eh?

No, not my pups. But some wonderful dog faces, just the same. Music from one of Johnny Rivers’ “Live at the Whiskey A Go Go” albums:

Bill McGraw had a heartbreaker in the Freep today, about a fatal fire in southwest Detroit last week, one where the two closest pumpers were out of service for “staffing reasons.” They weren’t in service because the city couldn’t pay firefighters to staff them. A third pumper, also closer, was taken out of service permanently three years ago, for the same reason. You want to read some chilling statistics? How about these:

In May, the Free Press reported that 22% of the city’s 66 firefighting vehicles either were unavailable to answer alarms or were working with broken equipment.

On the day Marian Rembis died, 27% of the fire vehicles were out of service or working with acknowledged defects — such as ladder trucks with ladders that won’t rise. Ten rigs in good condition sat idle in their quarters that day because the department couldn’t staff them.

The problems play out every day, though mostly beyond public view.

Battalion chiefs, who supervise at fire scenes, sometimes can be heard on the radio begging dispatchers to send them a truck with a functioning ladder, even though their bosses discourage them from speaking so explicitly over public airwaves.

On Feb. 6, the first ladder truck — Ladder 10 — to arrive at the scene of what became a five-alarm fire at the Forest Arms apartment building near Wayne State University did not have a working ladder, but it was not needed to perform immediate rescues. Ladder 10’s ladder has been broken since at least early January, firefighters said.

If a city has any business collecting taxes at all, job one is public safety. Police and fire. In recent years it’s become fashionable for city government to venture into economic development, and I have no objection, but only as long as they’re still covering the basics. In some respects, the city’s police department has all the money they need, certainly enough to give the mayor a publicly funded security entourage that’s said to be the biggest in the nation for a mayor. I went out to dinner with the girls the other night, and one was talking about a Democratic fundraiser in Grosse Pointe Farms. The governor, a woman, showed up with one state police officer working as driver and escort. The mayor of Detroit, Kwame Kilpatrick, arrived a few moments later in a black Cadillac Escalade with a full complement of muscle. Because the GP can be a pretty dangerous place, I guess.

A few weeks ago, Metro Times columnist Jack Lessenberry chided those of us who were giggling over the text-message scandal, saying it was only lurid cover for real tragedy, the ongoing tragedy of Detroit and, in a larger sense, all of rustbelt urban America, and I’ve come to see he’s right. This is like the comic relief in Hamlet, but while you might smile at the Poor Yorick scene, there’s no denying the stage will be covered with bodies at the final curtain. It takes an event like this fire to remind us that one of the bodies will be a 37-year-old Down Syndrome victim, too scared to run out of a burning house and too far from a fully staffed fire station to get help in time.

The Metro Times lays out its case for resignation in this week’s issue, by the way.

Forgive me the late posting today. I’m having one of those days. The Committee has been working overtime this week, and I simply could not get over the hump without some extra morning sleep today, which I accomplished by skipping the morning coffee and going back to bed once Kate had been shuffled out the door. I got my sleep, but woke up with a caffeine-deprivation headache, which is pretty absurd when you think about it — you can’t sleep because you haven’t had any coffee. Also, my rededication to the gym this week reveals, once again, just how stiff and out of shape I am. So here I sit, headache-y, muscle ache-y, ache-y break-y. In a few minutes I’m going to get a shower, then head off to Starbucks for some medicine. An ibuprofen latte, please (aka triple espresso).

Hearing William F. Buckley Jr. has died is having no effect on my day, Danny. I can’t say anything bad about him. He started something, and others are ending it now, and I’ve got to think he’d disapprove of what’s become of his beloved conservative movement. Never cared for his twee affectations, but give him this: The man died in the saddle. At his desk. Writing something. That’s how I want to go. (If this headache gets any worse, that may well be my fate.)

Granted, a lot of what he wrote was crap, but Michael Jordan missed a lot of baskets, too.

What I’m mainly dreading is the reaction. After reading Ann Coulter’s eulogy for her daddy — Now Daddy is with Joe McCarthy and Ronald Reagan. I hope they stop laughing about the Reds long enough to talk to God about smiting some liberals for me. — I can only imagine what they’ll say about Bill. I’m virtually certain we can expect a goo-fest from Tim Goeglein. He was a regular weekend guest on Bill’s piece of Connecticut waterfront. Huh — so was Rod Dreher:

Just this past weekend, Julie and I were talking about the time we went to the Buckleys’ Connecticut house on the water, and we were both kind of intimidated by the indomitable Mrs. Buckley. Then she sat down next to Julie and they started talking about gardening, and the evil of squirrels. Pat, with her smoker’s cackle, said she used to lie in bed upstairs at their place and take aim with her .22 rifle at the little bulb-eating bastards in the yard. It was hilarious to hear her this locked-and-loaded socialite talk about her adventures in gardening with gunpowder. Julie and I laughed in recalling the humanity of the Buckleys. That’s how they are.

Proof Dreher isn’t the Right Sort: Well brought-up girls have been taught hunting skills by their daddies for generations. Ask Ann Coulter.

Anyway, I never met the old gasbag, but I did meet his son, Christopher, who was easily one of the nicest and most charming fellows I’ve ever had the pleasure of making small talk with. Whatever part of that he owes to the old man, he couldn’t have been all bad.

Quite an evocative story from yesterday’s DetNews, in Neal Rubin’s column. I can’t decide if it’s a story about pluck, stubbornness or stupidity: A Detroit teacher has had 15 vehicles stolen in four years. Fourteen, actually — 13 Town & Country minivans and one Durango, twice. I’ll give her this much — this is one nice white lady who is not intimidated by the rough, tough city:

Another time, she found her Town & Country in some delinquent’s driveway near Vetal. When the police didn’t show any great interest in helping her get it back, she dialed her cell phone, which she had left in the console. The thief picked up. “I hope you like orange,” Fulton said, “because you’re going to be wearing an orange jumpsuit.” The kid jumped back into the van, drove it to Grand River Avenue and McNichols Road and crashed it into a tree. So maybe that wasn’t the best idea on her part, but at least she felt better for a little while.

The story goes on to point out that Chrysler lags other domestic carmakers in anti-theft protection. They do, however, offer lots of helpful advice:

After the most recent theft, she e-mailed Chrysler to ask why it didn’t do a better job stopping thieves. After 15 vehicles, she said, she was running out of patience. Someone named Jenny e-mailed her back. Among Jenny’s suggestions was to park in “lighted areas, garages or neighborhoods without a history of stolen vehicles activity, whenever possible.” “Great,” Fulton fired back. “Are you going to drive me to work?”

If the city survives, it’ll be because of women like this — always willing to buy American one more time. When Alan finally got his shotgun out of layaway, the gun shop owner was examining a new item of inventory, a .38-caliber Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special, the standard-issue police service revolver for generations (at least until they started carrying semiautomatics, to keep up with the bad guys). It had “Detroit P.D.” stamped on the barrel, and he said, “I could put this up for sale and get a $300 premium from somebody in Los Angeles who wants to own a gun from the murder capital of the United States. But I won’t.” You said it, mister. Keep Detroit armed and strong.

Folks, as should be obvious by now, I got nuttin’ today. I see some of you are discussing the wind on the east coast in previous post comments. Well, before you had that wind, we had it, two nights ago. Let’s all offer good thoughts and support for NN.C’s neighbor and commenter JohnC, who’s probably wishing he’d cleaned out the garage and put the Cadillac away that night:

They were out of town at the time. I wonder if the car alarm continued for hours and hours.

Off to write words for money. Later.

We finished photography on our student film Saturday. It was 27 degrees, and we all stood around blowing on our fingers to keep blood circulating for the last shots. Our batteries kept failing in the cold, and at one point I took a near-dead one and stuck it in my bra on the chance a little warmth might bring it back to life. When we needed it later, it had miraculously recovered to near-full capacity. Make of that what you will, but I feel justified in claiming my breasts can now generate electricity. I think I’ll put it on my resume.

Good thing we finished, though, because this was Sunday’s weather:

You need a day like this every so often, an excuse to stay inside and gather linkage for your stupid blog. Let’s make it an all-bloggage Monday morning, because it’s winter break and I’m not fully awake yet.

Sunday’s fields were rich and fruitful, starting with a story that got barely briefed in the local fishwrap but, thankfully, much wider coverage in the WashPost — the horrific multiple fatal in Prince George’s County, Maryland. The Fast and the Furious meets … reality, I guess. People have been illegally racing cars as long as there have been cars, but when I started reading the story, I assumed it was an out-of-control racer who spun into the crowd, not a bunch of people standing in the middle of the road, neatly screened by tire smoke. What a nightmare.

There seems to be a bit of this going around — illegal racing ending in multiple funerals, that is. I was never a gearhead, and the only place I ever saw this sort of drag-racing happen was on a freshly paved but still unopened part of a new freeway in Columbus, just days away from its ribbon-cutting. (Ohio readers? It was Rt. 315, and now you know the truth: my middle name is Methuselah.) It was motorcycles, and I’m not even sure anyone was racing, just winding it out in a convenient place. Still: shudder.

The WashPost also provides a wonderful, funny summation of the Detroit mayoral scandal, by ex-Freeper Neely Tucker. He reprints a number of the text messages in question, and now seems as good a time as any to point out what’s bugged me about this since the beginning: How complete they are. With the exception of the inescapable LOLs, even figuring the parties had devices with QWERTY keyboards, they don’t sound like the way two people who know one another well — exceptionally well, in this case — actually text-chat with one another:

CB: “I’m feeling like I want another night like the most recent Saturday at the Residence Inn! You made me feel so damn good that night.”

Somehow, she neglected to give the street address. It’s like bad expository dialogue in a movie.

Which is a good transition to Gene Weingarten’s column, yes, also in the WashPost (my new favorite Sunday paper), written entirely on his cell phone:

on the few occasions i do text message, the only concession i make is that i dont use capitals or apostrophes or question marks or hyphens because they take an extra keystroke and when one is typing with ones thumbs one wants to conserve keystrokes. it pains me to realize that mankinds signature anatomical adaptation, the one that distinguishes us from the lowly beasts, has been pressed into service for such a moronic chore. its like using a stradivarius to hammer a nail.

so, texting is stupid. but do you want to know what is stupider. to get this column published, i have to email it to myself every 30 words.

A man I could love (and who bears a striking resemblance to Detroit’s mayor, at least in that hat), Patrice O’Neal, says he likes to eat like Caligula:

I made thigh-meat gumbo with some kielbasa. For some reason, when the recipe calls for chicken breast, I use thigh. I’m a thigh-meat dude. Thigh is just the best meat — I don’t get chicken breast. I think it’s a publicity stunt that we’ve convinced people it’s delicious. Chicken is legs and thighs — they’re juicy.

Are you listening, James Lileks? Unlikely.

Barack Obama made me a mixtape. What has Barack Obama done for you lately? HT: Eric Zorn. Keep reloading for endless fun.

Finally, a housekeeping note: I’m getting spam-bombed. At least two dozen spam comments a day are slipping the main net and landing in the moderation queue, which is not a huge headache, but since they come to me as e-mail first, it’s just a pain. So we’re going to start closing comments after one or two weeks, since the vast majority of the spam attempts are sent to old threads. This means approximately nothing to 99 percent of you, but if you’re the sort who likes to catch up every six months, you may not be able to join the conversation. Send an e-mail instead.

Go commence the week. I need about a million cups of coffee first.

Well, it only took three years, but I guess I’m a real Detroiter now. Behold, what I parked next to at Starbucks yesterday:

When we moved here, people said we’d see this sort of thing all the time — mystery cars obscured with tape or fool-the-autofocus camouflage, models ready for road-testing but not the showroom. But this is the first one I’ve seen. (I really need to get out more.) It hardly looked cherry, but couldn’t have been more anonymous. The interior was terra incognita as well:

I didn’t recognize the badge on the steering wheel, but — and this is a key part of the experience — I was soon joined by another Starbucks customer, who was about to pull out of the lot, but re-parked to get out and check out the mystery car, too. And he knew everything. “That’s a BMW,” he said. Never mind the badge, “that’s the iDrive.” No clue. So he explained the iDrive, with which he was well-acquainted; he did everything but offer a supplemental reading list. This is standard local small talk, and on the whole, I prefer it to chatting about the weather. Someday we’ll have to get JohnC to talk about standing around the grill while the burgers cook at a backyard party, arguing over whether Billy Batts was driven to his funeral in a Bonneville or a Grand Prix. This is not worth arguing, as the record clearly shows it was a Grand Prix.

Anyway that’s a Toughbook on the console, powered by the cigarette lighter, wires running to a mystery port between the seats. And that’s your correspondent reflected in the window. Always happy to bring citizen journalism to my readers from sea to shining sea.

Alex noted something I was marveling at yesterday — that you never know what will get people chattering, and apparently, asking about everyone’s fun with prescription drugs is one of those all-skate topics. He suggested perhaps sex or rock ‘n’ roll for a follow-up, but I don’t have it in me. Besides, it’s snowing again and I’d like to go out and enjoy the pretty part of winter.

Do we have bloggage? We have some:

Brian Stouder recommends this story about a narrow escape from the tornadoes earlier in the week, says it passed his lump-in-throat test. I’ll leave it up to you to measure it against your own. What I’m always amazed by, in these situations, is how people rise to the occasion. A few years ago, an F4 hit Van Wert, Ohio, just as a small crowd of young people were leaving an afternoon movie. The manager saw it coming, turned around, herded everyone into the bathrooms — the only cement-block part of the structure — and there they crouched while the wind destroyed the entire building. Here’s where everyone had been sitting only a couple minutes earlier. And all survived, uninjured, except the manager himself, who had a cut on his arm. He hadn’t had any special training in evacuation procedures or where the safest part of the building was; he just thought fast. What if the movie had gone five minutes longer? What if it had been little kids instead of teenagers? What if the crowd had been bigger? What if?

A young Vince Vaughn fights a ‘roid-raging Peter Billingsley in an after-school special. Yes, that Peter Billingsley. Ralphie.

Prostitution, drinking, drugs and having Tom Sizemore as a boyfriend is tough on a girl’s looks. Ask Heidi Fleiss. And check out her co-pilot.

So, Mittens is on his way home, but was it good for the Mormons?

Friday on my mind, folks. I’m outta here.