I guess you should save these sorts of entries for birth­days that end in a zero, but in pre­vi­ous years I’ve let this day blow right past me, and if 2009 taught us any­thing, it’s that you never know when your num­ber might be up. One minute you’re a painfully thin plastic-surgery addict who needs hospital-grade anes­the­sia just to grab 40 winks, the next you’re in long-term stor­age in your golden cas­ket while your insane fam­ily fights over the DVD rights to your funeral ser­vice. You know? Never pass up a chance to party. And so.….

[Toots madly on party horn.] Happy Blogver­sary Day! Today we are nine.

I remem­ber it as though it were yes­ter­day: J.C. set me up with Adobe GoLive 5.0, and designed a sim­ple tem­plate. I huffed and puffed and scanned and uploaded and sized and resized and cursed and scratched my head and sent out a bunch of e-mails invit­ing peo­ple to my “per­sonal web­site.” There was a pic­ture of 4-year-old Kate, one of Alan, one of Pilcher House (home of my col­lege news­pa­per), a few more this and a dozen more that. My links page, what the kids today call a blogroll, was a big wad of nar­ra­tive prose, explain­ing why I liked all my links. (That was what the inter­net was all about then — hav­ing the atten­tion span to read 200 words at a stretch.) I believe I may have included the cof­fee pot at Cam­bridge Uni­ver­sity, but maybe not; that was very early-WWW, and I’d had broad­band for two years by then.

I con­nected to the server, uploaded the whole thing, sat back and allowed myself to be proud of my per­sonal web­site for about 15 min­utes. And then it dawned on me: What am I going to do tomorrow?

Because that, as always, is the conun­drum. You can have a cor­ner of the inter­net to your­self, and you can invite all your friends to see it, but unless you’re a some­body, and even if you’re a some­body, it has to change once in a while, and if you’re a nobody like me, it bet­ter be chang­ing a lot. And so I got up the next day, took down the first day’s main-page copy, and wrote some­thing new. What to write about, now that I’d intro­duced myself? The events of the pre­vi­ous 24 hours, that’s what, and that’s how we got started.

At the time, I was a news­pa­per colum­nist writ­ing four times a week in the paper. Just­likethat, I became a per­sonal web­site oper­a­tor writ­ing five times a week for the inter­net. (I hadn’t yet heard of a weblog.)

Some­times peo­ple ask me what I told my bosses. I told them I was set­ting up a web­site, and was that OK? As I recall, the only ten­ta­tive objec­tion was from the edi­tor in chief, who won­dered if I might end up in com­pe­ti­tion with them by “sell­ing some­thing.” Yes, ha ha ha ha. I think every­one in the office checked in the first day. I got 100 hits. And then every­one for­got about it, and NN.C became the naughty cousin of Nance-in-the-newspaper. I’m still amazed at what I got away with, just because peo­ple didn’t read it.

For instance, I told the story of the army men at Fort Wayne News­pa­pers: One day early in the decade, and sorry, but I’m not dig­ging up old CD-ROMs to find out which one, an employee noted a soli­tary green army man, the toy kind you buy by the bag, placed high on a stair­well win­dowsill. It was aim­ing its gun at the stair­case. Look­ing around, the employee found another. A search revealed they were all through the build­ing, maybe a whole bag full, in unob­tru­sive places, atop vend­ing machines and dusty shelves, appar­ently mobi­liz­ing for attack.

And that’s how Human Resources treated it, as an OMG OFFICE SHOOTING EARLY WARNING, and there were hushed con­ver­sa­tions in offices and the strangest memo I’ve ever seen, that spoke of the army men with­out actu­ally say­ing what they were, so that you’d read it and be some­what alarmed but not informed, and, well, it was one of those days wor­thy of “Office Space.” I wrote all about in here, even quoted from the memo. It got linked by a cou­ple other blog­gers, ha ha, and no one said a word about it in my office because nobody read it.

NN.C was my shadow col­umn. In the paper, one Nance, on the inter­net, dog Nance, because on the inter­net, nobody knows you’re a dog. Nobody knows you’re a nobody in Fort Wayne, Indi­ana, either, and that was the other rev­e­la­tion of the inter­net for me. (The first was that every­body can talk to every­body; I sent an e-mail to War­ren Zevon and he wrote back, a stun­ning devel­op­ment.) The sec­ond was that for the first time in my life, I didn’t have to be lim­ited by my newspaper’s lousy cir­cu­la­tion. I’m bad; I’m nationwide.

You think this is noth­ing, but you don’t know that one rea­son I took the job in Fort Wayne was, I thought it might lead to big­ger things. Knight-Ridder was then a respected news­pa­per chain, and I fool­ishly believed they treated their smaller papers as farm teams for the bigs in Philadel­phia, Miami, Detroit, San Jose. They did, but not the way I thought they did, and any­way, by then I was part of a cou­ple and had a mort­gage and life was get­ting com­pli­cated. I despaired of ever get­ting out of the place, and in 2002 Bob Greene finally got his junk caught in his fly. I banged out a few hun­dred words, uploaded, went to bed and got up the next morn­ing to look at e-mail. The first one was from a writer at the freakin’ New Yorker: “Great rant,” it began. Holy shit.

Over the next few days I gave an inter­view to Newsweek and one to a mag­a­zine in Japan, answered dozens of e-mails, got linked all over. I thought maybe I should give my bosses a heads-up that I was likely to be quoted in a national mag­a­zine. Oh, you wrote some­thing about Bob Greene? Are you still doing that web­site thing? They still weren’t read­ing it.

Well. I don’t want to go on too long here. But I do want to note the day, because it was a turn­ing point. I got my Knight-Wallace fel­low­ship because of the blog. I got my first free­lance con­tacts because of the blog. I met a dozen or more peo­ple that I cor­re­spond with today and visit when I can because of the blog. I haven’t enjoyed every day of this, not by a long shot. I’ve con­sid­ered shut­ting it down for a few weeks or months, just to clear my head and maybe let some­thing else fill in the time I spend here, but then I stop and con­sider that every good thing that’s hap­pened in my career since Jan­u­ary 14, 2001 was because of the blog. (A cou­ple of the bad things, too, but not many.)

Some­one once wrote me and said, “I read some­where that there are peo­ple who like to write and peo­ple who need to write, and you must be one of the sec­ond kind.” I never thought of it that way, but I guess it’s true. This is, and remains, my daily down­load, my quasi-diary, my shadow life, my bat­ting prac­tice. In Pete Dexter’s final news­pa­per col­umn, long after he’d become a suc­cess­ful nov­el­ist and screen­writer, he wrote that a Hol­ly­wood pro­ducer of large repute asked him why he still both­ered to write a col­umn for peanuts. “I don’t know,” he replied. “I just need it.” The rest of the col­umn was his announce­ment that he no longer needed it, but I’m not there yet.

Happy Blogver­sary Day. Time to get to work.

Friends, I have a pile of stuff today, and won’t be free until late after­noon. Until then, talk amongst your­selves. Pro­posed topic: Is Coo­zledad afford­ing his plush retire­ment by pub­lish­ing under a pen name? Discuss.

LATER: My morn­ing inter­view was post­poned and I have a lit­tle win­dow here, so some more meat on the table: Class of 2011 in pre­dom­i­nantly Arab high school rethinks an item of spirit wear. I won’t even touch the com­ments on that one — they’re exud­ing lit­tle smell lines.

Detroit! Never bor­ing, this city, and I mean never. The Wayne County pros­e­cu­tor dragged the for­mer mayor — the dis­graced felon, that is — back from Texas, where he now lives, for a pro­ba­tion hear­ing, to answer ques­tions about his finances, to wit: Why is he claim­ing poverty when it comes to pay­ing his resti­tu­tion to the city, while at the same time liv­ing in a man­sion in the Dal­las sub­urbs? He gets on the stand and drops the bomb: He was the recip­i­ent of a quarter-mil or so in “loans” from some of the city’s most respected busi­ness­men, i.e. Roger Penske, Pete Kar­manos, et al. The busi­ness­men say the money was grease intended to slide the stub­born bas­tard out of office so the city could “heal,” etc. All released state­ments say­ing the bal­ance owed “remains outstanding.”

But it gets bet­ter: Matty Moroun, the bil­lion­aire who owns the Ambas­sador Bridge, was even more gen­er­ous, mak­ing his cash pay­ment an out­right gift. The Moroun prose style, revealed in the let­ter that accom­pa­nied the check, is a metaphor-mixin’ thing of beauty:

“My heart strings are tugged when I think of the storm your fam­ily has weath­ered, and my heart is heavy that you and your chil­dren have been harmed while doing every­thing pos­si­ble to strengthen your fam­ily… Enclosed, please find a token of my affec­tion for the Kil­patrick family.”

The let­ter goes on to state Moroun “thought long and hard” about “what I could do that would be an encour­age­ment and help as you per­se­vere and rebuild your fam­ily.” I can imag­ine that thought process: Fruit bas­ket? Jelly of the Month Club? A sub­scrip­tion to Reader’s Digest? A free ticket to a moti­va­tional sem­i­nar? No, I know: Money.

Even bet­ter is the fol­low­ing para­graph in the News story:

Moroun’s spokesman on Thurs­day insisted that while Moroun is try­ing to win fed­eral approval of a sec­ond span beside his bridge to Canada, the per­sonal largess lav­ished on Kilpatrick’s wife and chil­dren wasn’t aimed at influ­enc­ing Kilpatrick’s mother, U.S. Rep. Car­olyn Cheeks Kilpatrick.

No. No, I’m sure that had noth­ing to do with it.

Of course, 50 grand is a drop in the bucket for a fam­ily like the Kilpatricks:

Kil­patrick and his wife deposited nearly $1.2 mil­lion into their bank accounts after Kil­patrick was sent to jail on Oct. 28, 2008 — and have spent nearly all of it — accord­ing to a pros­e­cu­tors’ analysis.

The analy­sis was con­tained in a two-page doc­u­ment which was entered into evi­dence. It says the Kil­patricks had no money in their joint account and in Car­lita Kilpatrick’s account on Oct. 15, 2008.

By Oct. 13 of this year, they had deposited $1,160,374 and writ­ten checks or with­drawn $1,150,498, leav­ing a bal­ance of $21,761.

Kar­manos is already bruised for hav­ing given Kil­patrick a cushy sales job with his soft­ware com­pany when he got out of prison, defend­ing it on the grounds that the guy was worth it. I won­der if the family’s big-spending lifestyle is a rebuke of sorts to his bene­fac­tors, a cer­tain “don’t expect to see your money again, suck­ers.” I guess that’s between the Kil­patricks, their lenders, and the con­sciences of all involved.

P.S. Kil­patrick took the fifth when asked about his tax returns.

I sus­pect Moroun doesn’t care about his rep­u­ta­tion, but the rest — patrons of the arts, titans of the charity-ball cir­cuit — surely do. It’s a pity the term has picked up racist con­no­ta­tions, because in the strictest pos­si­ble sense, Kil­patrick is the embod­i­ment of the char­ac­ter from the folk tale: The tar baby. Every­one who touches him becomes ensnared in his stick­i­ness. I bet the brier patch sounds like a dip in a cool lake to those guys, right about now.

The ex-mayor is still a sharp dresser, how­ever: That four-button suit is a thing of beauty, even on a big man.

So, then: I should pause a moment and thank all of you who’ve been shop­ping Ama­zon via my store. While not a cash bonanza accom­pa­nied by trea­cly notes from bil­lion­aires, the income gen­er­ated makes Google Ads look like the crap they are. It’ll help with my Christ­mas shop­ping, much of which I’ll be doing through Ama­zon, so hey — it’s a loop of love.

Only the shop­ping I can’t do locally, that is. Now more than ever, Michi­gan needs every dol­lar, every sales tax penny, every warm body walk­ing through the malls. But for some things, eh, I’m happy to sup­port the big A. I’m a one-woman stim­u­lus package.

And if that isn’t the title of a dirty movie yet, it should be: “The Stim­u­lus Package.”

And now it’s 9 a.m. and time for me to do a few mil­lion chores I’ve been putting off. Hop­ing to get Kate her H1N1 vac­cine today, if the doctor’s office has any left. I’m won­der­ing if she may have already had it — her “chest cold” week before last was accom­pa­nied by a day of 102-degree fever, and for those who have been lucky enough to get the mild ver­sion of the virus, it sounds famil­iar. Prob­a­bly too late to test for it, but if that’s what it was and that’s all it was, I’m grateful.

Have a great week­end, all.

I’m in Ann Arbor, doing online jour­nal­ism train­ing. About to eat roast beef. Carry on, all.

Thanks to all of you who made Day 1 of the Ama­zon store such a suc­cess. I earned $15.43! This is bet­ter than Google has done me in a sin­gle day, ever, and while I know it can’t last, I’m pleased to know how many of you are will­ing to do me this small favor.

I’m equally pleased to see my report from Ama­zon tells me what you bought. No names attached, alas, although some of you announced your pur­chases in com­ments. So I know Del is prob­a­bly the one behind “The McCleers and the Bir­neys;: Irish immi­grant families-into Michi­gan and the Cal­i­for­nia gold fields, 1820 – 1893,” but I have no idea who might have picked up “Strip To It: Core Moves and Fan­tasies Sexy Striptease (exotic danc­ing)” on DVD. Although I have my ideas ::koff::BrianStouder::koff::. And truly, I am delighted, because it would seem to indi­cate we’re draw­ing a younger demo­graphic. Money in the bank!

One of these days J.C. and I will put together a proper but­ton for the side­bar, but for now click either the cur­rent On the Night­stand book or the link below. Oh, and Laura Lipp­man, if you’re read­ing this, we also sold a copy of “Life Sen­tences.” Onward to the best­seller list.

So. I haven’t said much about the Gen­eral Motors sit­u­a­tion, mainly because the more I read, the less I know about this com­pany — or know that I know, any­way. I don’t want to be one of those pun­dits whose advice to the com­pany boils down to “duh, make cars peo­ple want to drive,” as though run­ning the largest indus­trial cor­po­ra­tion in the world, with a few hun­dred thou­sand employ­ees, plants all over the globe, a prod­uct line that takes years to develop and pro­duce, that’s expen­sive and prone to the vagaries of com­mod­ity and labor prices, trends and a fickle pub­lic — all this is no more dif­fi­cult than run­ning a cup­cake bak­ery somewhere.

For­tu­nately, in Detroit, there are lots of peo­ple who know more about this than I do. I e-mailed one and asked him his take on the Wag­oner busi­ness. I don’t think he’d mind if I pasted his thoughts:

I think Wag­oner got a raw deal. But I also think GM could use a lit­tle out­side agi­ta­tion. It’s a huge com­pany. And huge com­pa­nies are hard to turn around. Maybe a new face at the top will help. Cer­tainly the gov­ern­ment has the right to call some shots.

But two of the biggest prob­lems of GM were cre­ated a long time ago — shitty cars and bloated union con­tracts. The third — health­care costs — is out of their hands. Wag­oner went a long way to turn­ing qual­ity around. (It’s ironic that he’s out a week after Buick offi­cially ended Lexus’ 14-year run at the top of JD Pow­ers “Most Depend­able” list.) And he took a huge step in bring­ing union costs in line with the last con­tract. He cer­tainly blew it when they decided not to build a Prius-like hybrid when Toy­ota did. But he’s admit­ted that mis­take and GM is catch­ing up. (And he gets no credit for the fact that GM was devel­op­ing that tech­nol­ogy as fast as Toy­ota and Honda. They just made the strate­gic mis­take of not think­ing the mar­ket was ready for it … a mis­take that must be viewed in the con­text of the fact that GM strug­gles to make money with small cars under the weight of their stag­ger­ing health care costs.)

True to Wag­oner form, he didn’t stamp his feet and make a fuss. He is the rarest of birds — a CEO with very lit­tle ego. GM is in trou­ble, much of it by their own hand. But that trou­ble started a long time ago. Rick Wag­oner was the guy turn­ing it around … until a bank­ing and credit cri­sis clipped him from behind.

…One more thought. I made this pre­dic­tion late last year, and this lat­est news makes me think it’s more likely that this sce­nario will unfold: The gov­ern­ment over­seers will, with sup­port from Nancy Pelosi et al, right­eously force GM to shift its focus to smaller, more fuel effi­cient cars. Not much will be done about health care costs, of course. So these cars won’t make money. Toy­ota and Honda, mean­while, con­tinue to invest bil­lions in their truck fleet, fight­ing for a spot in this sec­tor. With Detroit money sucked away from truck devel­op­ment — Chevy’s new Sil­ver­ado gets bet­ter gas mileage with its V8 than Toy­ota can get with its V6 — Toy­ota and Honda will rush in and seize this highly prof­itable high ground. And that, my friends, will be all she wrote.

I might add: While gas prices remain low, lots of Priuses are sit­ting on lots, too. And Toy­ota sales are down as much as the domes­tic com­pa­nies’. When peo­ple are los­ing jobs and can’t get credit, a car that flies would be a tough sell, let alone a Volt. Although Toy­ota saw some­thing in hybrids that GM didn’t, and was will­ing to carry the Prius for a good long time until it wormed its way into the zeit­geist. And now when peo­ple think of Toy­ota, they think Prius, not Sequoia, High­lander or Tun­dra. And GM will for­ever be the mak­ers of the Sub­ur­ban. (Which I still see a lot of on the streets, btw.)

A bit of blog­gage before we depart? OK:

Detroit­blog unearths another great story, about a old-time west-side schvitz patron­ized mainly by Russ­ian geezers, but on week­ends? It’s an orgy venue. More pix (noth­ing spicy) at the first link, easier-on-the-eyes black-on-white text here.

Oh, it’s so cute when news­pa­pers have April Fool’s Day sto­ries, isn’t it? I’m amazed they’re toy­ing with sub­scrip­tion can­cel­la­tions at a time like this, frankly.

I am stu­pid and law-abiding, because my first ques­tion, read­ing this, was, “Why not sell at a loss?” I know nothing.

But I have a lot of work to do. So off I go.

Today starts the Grand Exper­i­ment, i.e., no Detroit paper-made-of-paper on my doorstep today. Our progress so far…yesterday I got the Sun­day Free Press, and no New York Times. On Sun­day, this is like get­ting the bill and the mints at the cash reg­is­ter, but no break­fast. I actu­ally had to read Albom. Alan insisted on call­ing for our copy, and it was deliv­ered six hours later by an old man in a bat­tered car. He walked with a limp as he made his way up the walk, but his man­ner was courtly and his apol­ogy, sin­cere. A new com­pany is doing the deliv­ery, he said, and this was an early glitch. So sorry.

Today there was a New York Times, but no Wall Street Jour­nal. Since I can’t speak Eng­lish until after my cof­fee, I opted to han­dle it online. In red type on the Ser­vices page:

Due to some delays in your area today, you may expe­ri­ence late or missed deliv­ery of The Wall Street Jour­nal. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

It’s sad when the old world meets the new. Noth­ing but blood on the floor. And yes, the ironies have occurred to me: This is hap­pen­ing on a day when the biggest local story in months is break­ing. Also, that the per­son who pays more than $700 a year for news­pa­pers is the one being incon­ve­nienced, so we can cater to the free­load­ers. (Jeff TMMO linked to some­thing Jim Lileks had to say on this sub­ject today, but I won’t, because as usual he buries his point in sev­eral hun­dred words of blather about what he had for din­ner Fri­day night. Kind of like, oh, me.)

But it’s Mon­day, it’s cold and there’s snow on the ground. Let’s turn our thoughts to hap­pier sub­jects, shall we? Not what I had for din­ner Fri­day, but what I made for dessert two weeks ago. Speak­ing of news­pa­pers, the New York Times food-front main story a few weeks ago was about whoopie pies. Noth­ing like a pic­ture like this to get your mouth water­ing. Nor­mally my bak­ing runs toward more tra­di­tional fare, but it looked like some­thing Kate would enjoy mak­ing with me, and so we gave it a whirl.

Ours did not resem­ble the Times’:

But they were quite tasty, although if you’re plan­ning to fol­low the same recipe, a word of advice: The cakes are fine, but drop the pre­pos­ter­ously rich but­ter­cream fill­ing and just go ahead and whip up a bowl of plain old cream, with lots of pow­dered sugar and vanilla. The recipe is adapted from Zingerman’s Bake­house in Ann Arbor, and once you look under the hood of one of their con­coc­tions, you see how they jus­tify their prices. There’s just no rea­son for every one of those suck­ers to have the equiv­a­lent of a half-stick of but­ter in it. Use whipped cream, refrig­er­ate briefly and hand them out at a child’s birth­day party. Yum.

A house­keep­ing note: Start­ing today, I’m intro­duc­ing some small steps toward a mod­est mon­e­ti­za­tion of this site. Oy, you don’t know the time I’ve grap­pled with this, but what I’m grop­ing toward is a few lit­tle trick­les that might add up to a stream some­day. Today, I’m reviv­ing my old Ama­zon Asso­ciates store, which I’m embed­ding in the “On the Night­stand” link. Click on Ms. Lippman’s lat­est, and instead of being taken to some review of her work — all of which have been very com­pli­men­tary, by the way — you’ll go to my Ama­zon store, Nance’s Kick­back Lounge. If you buy the book, or any­thing else, through me, I get four whole per­cent of your pur­chase. But you can buy any­thing there, not just “Life Sen­tences.” I’ve high­lighted a few of my favorite cur­rent books, movies and so on, but if you sim­ply access the greater Ama­zon site via my store, it all goes back to me. (Click on the “Pow­ered by Ama­zon” logo to access their main page.)

In com­ing weeks and months, I’ll try a few more things, most of which will be unob­tru­sive and that which isn’t, I hope, will be some­thing you’ll enjoy. My work­ing model is, if it’s in yo’ face, it’s gotta be some­thing extra. We’ll see.

I men­tioned snow on the ground. It came through last night, a lit­tle squall that when it started deliv­ered flakes the size of coast­ers, it seemed. We all stared out the win­dow, resent­ing the hell out of it, even though it won’t stick and won’t last past 10 a.m. today. I resented it even more for being so pretty — the big flakes were very Hall­mark. At least they were last night. Today, they’re just sort of…Monday. Enjoy yours.

So J.C. calls tonight and tells me, “Oh, by the way, I redesigned your site. Noth­ing dras­tic. I just got this crazy idea.”

And I’d just been think­ing we haven’t had a new look in a while. So how do we like it?

UPDATE: It’s very Cool Blue, isn’t it? Do we like the sin­gle splash of warmth in the flag? I’m still mak­ing up my mind.

Sorry so late updat­ing today. As oth­ers have noted, we’ve had a com­pli­ca­tion here­abouts. The school can­cel­la­tion came by robo-call at 5:45 a.m., which rather ticked off the house’s phone-answerer, because we’ve known this storm was com­ing for days, you could see its vast pink-and-white mass bear­ing down on us from the west, and most schools can­celled last night. At least there wasn’t the 6 a.m. answer­ing cho­rus of snow­blow­ers, mainly because it was still com­ing down so hard we were in what’s-the-point ter­ri­tory. I was able to go back to sleep and make it clear until 8:30 a.m. — pure luxury.

Any­way, I’m going out in a bit with the video cam­era. So maybe we’ll have some­thing to add for the weekend.

In the spirit of the already wack-a-doo sched­ule, then, let’s make this a left­over stew today. First, an announcement:

Last year’s NN.C com­menters’ hol­i­day photo sub­mis­sions were so nice, let’s us all do it again, shall we? For the week between Christ­mas and New Year’s, let’s see if we can assign a face to some of the names in our com­mu­nity. I know a lot of you have blogs and already put up pic­tures there; if so, give us a link. It’s just that this is such a close-knit lit­tle group already, it’d be nice to put a face with a name. You know where to send things — my first name at nan​cy​nall​.com. If you’re shy, send a pic­ture of Christ­mas out your way. Because God knows, there’s not a lot to talk about that week. His­tor­i­cally, any­way. Knock wood.

A lit­tle bloggage:

Maybe we are reach­ing the blogging/fair use/who’s-zooming-who tip­ping point sooner rather than later. The Chicago Reader has prob­lems with the Huff­in­g­ton Post’s sticky-fingered blog­ging style. Good posts on it here and here. The lat­ter post sums it up nicely:

I’m sure that some­one is think­ing, “hey, you get lots of inbound links from a pop­u­lar site, and they link to you directly from their local home­page, which helps your SEO.” What­ever – they’re still tak­ing other people’s con­tent, in my non-expert but rea­son­ably well-informed opin­ion well out­side the bounds of fair use – so that they can get more pageviews and SEO advan­tages for them­selves by tak­ing the entirety of other people’s work. They’re tak­ing all of it. Real peo­ple – my col­leagues – wrote those. You can give us the inbound links, which helps you, us, and every­one, with­out tak­ing entire pieces of work.

Preach, my bruthuh.

Maybe I’m show­ing my age here, but I came of age in news­pa­pers when the prime visual ele­ment in them wasn’t the USA Today dum­b­ass graphic, the “char­ti­cle” or any of the other graph­ics so com­mon today, but a big-ass, black-and-white photo. Tri-X Kodak film, ASA 400 pushed to 1600, baseball-size grain heav­ily burned and dodged in the dark­room. Pic­tures like this. And this. I like video fine, but there’s noth­ing like a still to say “news” — at least to me. All this by way of set­ting up a link to this 2008 Year in Pho­tos col­lec­tion, with many jaw-dropping images. (All in color, how­ever. RIP, Tri-X.) Warn­ing to dial-up users: These are big, high-res images that will take a while to load even on fast con­nec­tions. Be patient.

Finally, an idea so silly it could only come out of Detroit, but at the same time crazy enough that it just might work. I’d drive one, any­way: A Cadil­lac Volt. Shut UP. Too expen­sive for me, but I’d love to drive one to, say, a Whole Foods park­ing lot in Santa Mon­ica. I’d be Chili Palmer, only greener.

The prob­lem with cold-weather out­door art is, some peo­ple always have to over­achieve. Note the fish.

With that, I think the bat­tery is charged and I’m ready to go out again. Bon voy­age, Danny, you bas­tard, head­ing off to Hawaii. The rest of us will be down here, reek­ing of two-stroke engine enhaust (from the snow­blow­ers). Spare a kind thought.

I didn’t see most of the debate last night, although I heard a fair amount. I took the French jour­nal­ists to a GOP grass­roots fundraiser/debate party, but we left 15 min­utes after the green flag, and after that I had to rely on NPR for most of it. My impres­sion was of some­one who had com­pe­tently deployed the me-so-dumb advance strat­egy, enough so that any per­for­mance short of pants-wetting would be seen as a resound­ing vic­tory, but oth­er­wise: Meh.

Admit­tedly, I wasn’t pre­dis­posed to like her. But in the com­pany of jour­nal­ists, I tried to watch it with a journalist’s eye, and still it was pretty meh. I know soc­cer moms with sim­i­lar resumes and qual­i­fi­ca­tions — they are thick on the ground in the GP — who would have blown her doors off.

But as usu­ally hap­pens, it left me think­ing about some­thing else, i.e., ways to be a pub­lic woman. The old Hol­ly­wood joke about the three ages of women — babe, dis­trict attor­ney and “Dri­ving Miss Daisy” — still seems to apply. I wasn’t the biggest Hillary fan, but my heart went out to her for the fight she put up, to be taken seri­ously amidst a bar­rage of abuse about every­thing from the size of her ass to the sound of her voice. How easy it is to step into a niche that comes with pre-arranged stereo­types and expec­ta­tions, and all you have to do is put it on like a uniform.

Which is to say, about 20 per­cent of my prob­lem with Palin comes from my gen­eral dis­like of folksi­ness. Fif­teen per­cent more is about how folksi­ness is sup­posed to sub­sti­tute for pre­pared­ness, as though al-Qaeda can be slain single-handedly by Marge Gunderson.

Sixty per­cent is about her lack of qual­i­fi­ca­tion. The rest is unease over her appar­ent reli­gious weird­ness, but notice we’re down to five per­cent here. Liv­ing in Indi­ana taught me there are many paths to God; I’m just sus­pi­cious of the Assem­blies of God ver­sion. That’s all.

And right now I’m going to cash in a few mark­ers, picked up when var­i­ous sex­ist shitheels were trash­ing “Shril­lary” and her voice, and say, Palin’s gets on my last nerve. On the other hand, if some­how the Repub­li­cans pull it off, I doubt I’ll hear it much. She’ll be redec­o­rat­ing Cheney’s dark lair.

Enough of her. A lit­tle goes a very long way.

I’m sick of the rou­tine, any­way, so let’s shake things up a bit. I need a rul­ing from the group on some­thing I found in the hall closet the other day:

It’s Alan’s old motor­cy­cle jacket. Relax, it’s no mis­placed Ital­ian or Eng­lish gem, just an incred­i­bly sturdy old no-name leather jacket built to take the pun­ish­ment meant for your skin should you need to lay your bike down in a pinch. It’s very heavy — the scale says it weighs five pounds, and I believe that’s fairly accu­rate. And it’s a size 38, a ship that sailed for Alan many years ago, but it fits me pretty well. So my ques­tion for the group is: Is it accept­able for a 50-year-old woman to wear her husband’s old motor­cy­cle jacket? I tend to dress in a rotat­ing wardrobe of blue jeans and neu­tral tops, and I freely acknowl­edge I didn’t inherit my mother’s fash­ion sense. (You should see her in pic­tures from her teen years — the height of the Depres­sion, and she was a total babe, in clothes she made her­self, right down to the hats.) It’s pos­si­ble I’m look­ing in the mir­ror and see­ing Carla Bruni, when the rest of the world sees a les­bian with­out a mirror.

And if the answer is yes, would adding an Her­mes scarf just be impos­si­bly cliché?

What­ever the answer, I’m not get­ting rid of this jacket. Kate will look smash­ing in it, someday.

Squir­ing the French around town this week, I didn’t have time for col­lect­ing all the week’s tasty blog­gage, but assum­ing Jolene and some of our fleet-fingered num­ber are still on the job, you’ll have plenty to read. Well, maybe you have a moment for this, yet another of Coozledad’s charm­ing lit­tle rec­ol­lec­tions of peo­ple from his past. You don’t have to be a writer to be a good writer. You just have to write.

Have a swell week­end, all.

My time as the Bagh­dad escort for my inter­na­tional col­leagues isn’t quite over, but I have a break. I’d like to tell you more about the last two days — it’s been enter­tain­ing, to say the least — but I don’t want to step on their story, what­ever it turns out to be. Let me just say that there’s no bet­ter way to spend a ran­dom Thurs­day than try­ing to sort our your droit turns from your gauche, and watch­ing an urban Euro­pean con­front a drive-through ATM:

“You open your win­dow to use the machine?”

“Yes, very convenient.”

“I won’t do this. Lazy country.”

And so we pulled into the drive-through lane, parked a few feet beyond, opened the door and walked three steps back to get cash. Because once you start bank­ing from your car, a 42-inch waist­line is just around the corner.

(On the other hand, I tried to buy Kate an Obama T-shirt at the East­ern Mar­ket last Sat­ur­day. The sizes started at L — on a slen­der 11-year-old, a large dress — and topped out at 5XL. So maybe it would do us all some good to walk back to the ATM.)

In other news at this hour, McCain is aban­don­ing Michi­gan, Politico says. There’s a cer­tain sense of all-over-but-the-shoutin’ in south­east Michi­gan, to be sure, but you can’t judge the rest of the state by our lit­tle tri-county area. At this point, how­ever, the veep debate is shap­ing up to be topic A for the next 36 hours, with the Couric snip­pets — end­lessly e-mailed and embed­ded and pref­aced with I can’t stand it — act­ing as trail­ers. That’ll be the high­light of my night, anyway.

So con­sider this your Palin/Biden debate open thread, and I’ll be back on my reg’lar sched­ule tomor­row. Oh, and speak­ing of tomor­row: I have an appoint­ment tomor­row, and neglected to write it down. There’s a lunch-adjacent thing on my cal­en­dar, but I know there’s some­thing else, too, and for the life of me I can’t remem­ber it. So just in case you’re read­ing this, who­ever you are: Are we sup­posed to do some­thing tomor­row? If so, please remind me so I can show up.

Mean­while, Cari­bou Bar­bie v. Bab­blin’ Joe! It’s so on.