Good lord, will you look at Nashville these days? I wonder if we should send the Bassets dry clothes, a blank check or a snorkel. If you didn’t see the comments late last night, here’s the dispatch from Chez Basset:

Cleanup continues in Nashville… haven’t been in position to hear much about the rest of the city, but on my street everyone seems to have friends, volunteers, whoever coming by to help dump the contents of the house out into the front yard.

My house and the one next door are only 35 yards from the Harpeth River, which is normally down a little hill, the other side of a treeline and down maybe a ten- or twelve-foot bank. Sunday morning, though, it was counter-top high through our place, and I just added a few pictures of the result to my stream here.

So… we lost lots of books, all the furniture, all electronics and major appliances, clothes, so on, so forth… but I have been amazed by the level of help and support we’re receiving. Friends are putting us up and feeding us, co-workers are coming by to help shovel out, a total stranger walked up to me as I was getting into my storage unit and gave me stacks of boxes, tape to stick them together, and a dolly, all the wet clothes out of our closets are piled in a friend of a friend’s garage and they’re letting us wash them, visitors came down our street handing out food and drinks… really helps make it a lot more bearable.

That said… our house will have to be stripped to the bare frame from about eye level down to the ground, doors, windows, and HVAC replaced, it’s gonna take awhile and be expensive. We have insurance, though, and an apartment, and a storage locker… we’ll get through it.

You always get through it. But nothing short of all-consuming fire destroys a house quite like a flood. I’ve said this before, but it bears repeating if you’ve never been through one: In a fire, pfft, it’s gone, but after a flood you can actually recognize your wedding album or Christmas decorations. It’s just that they have a thin layer of brown slime covering them, and sometimes it smells like raw sewage, too.

In 1993, a photographer and I went to Iowa to cover the flooding of the Mississippi and its tributaries in Iowa. (Fort Wayne media loves a flood. If we can’t have one ourselves, we’ll go looking for others’. I bet they’re on their way to Nashville now.) A homeowner took me through his house, which had filled to the gutters with Raccoon River floodwaters. “Check this out,” he said, opening the washing machine. It was full of water the color of chocolate syrup, reeking of poo.

I think he was planning on taking the insurance money, tearing the house down and buying something on higher ground. Floods are pretty awful.

So Basset, we’re thinking about you. Anything you need, say the word.

While we’re on the subject of misfortune befalling the NN.C community, J.C. set up a page compiling all of Whitebeard’s comments on one page, just as he did for Ashley when he left us. The comments are separated from that which prompted them, but oddly enough, they make a certain kind of sense. I see he was one who joined us aprés-Goeglein — his first is March 1, 2008. It’s now on the right rail, whenever you want to check in.

I’m going to have to make this a short one today — my schedule for the rest of the week is insane, and tonight I’m taking Kate to a school-night concert, the second of the year, a treat because she gives me no problems (other than refusing green vegetables) and regularly brings home sterling report cards. We’re seeing a band called Cobra Starship, and I wish I could tell you more about them, but in the age of the iPod, I have never even heard a single note of their music. For all I know, they could perform hip-hop in the nude, and if they do, please, don’t spoil the surprise. I’m certainly grateful that my kid is into the indie bands, because that means I only have to drive to the Fillmore, which is downtown, and not to the bleedin’ Palace of Auburn Hills, the arena-size destination in Outer Mongolia, Oakland County.

So let’s skip right to the bloggage, eh? There’s some good stuff today:

Oh, look: The co-founder of the Family Research Council is caught red-handed arriving home from an extended vacation with a rentboy. No, really, an actual rentboy, hired from Rentboy.com. As lame excuses go, this one certainly takes the pink-frosted cupcake:

Reached by New Times before a trip to Bermuda, Rekers said he learned Lucien was a prostitute only midway through their vacation. “I had surgery,” Rekers said, “and I can’t lift luggage. That’s why I hired him.”

It doesn’t trump “hiking the Appalachian Trail,” but “please, Lucien, come over here and help me lift this” is certainly a strong contender. The luggage-handler notes that he is uncircumcised. Strange qualification, mmm? I’d say something here, but honestly — what more needs to be said? How about this: The man with the heavy luggage is the author of a book entitled “Shaping Your Child’s Sexual Identity.” Dan Savage’s blog entry on this is titled, “Is Every Right-Wing, Anti-Gay Christian Bigot Sucking Off Rent Boys?” I think the answer is clear and simple: Yes.

The New York Times had a recent blog entry about the theft of Facebook account data, which coincided with a weekend of hinky activity in friends’ Facebooks. FB is sort of on probation with me already; I really don’t want to give up my account, but if they can’t keep it more secure and respect my privacy, I might have to give it the heave-ho. Via LGM, the Rocket.ly blog on the Top 10 reasons you should quit.

Finally, you baseball fans probably know Ernie Harwell, the voice of the Detroit Tigers for decades, died yesterday. As local news goes, this is on a level with an al-Qaeda strike on the RenCen. But of course everyone knew this was coming — Harwell announced his terminal cancer diagnosis months ago — and so everyone had time to plan coverage. A loyal local correspondent looked at Mitch Albom’s column and made this incisive comment:

I was looking at the Freep this morning for the coverage of Ernie Harwell’s death. Of course I had to read Mitch to see how Mitchy he got. He didn’t disappoint, as I’m sure you saw. But it occurred to me that this passage is what is especially maddening about the guy:

“…simply by doing the same gentle thing over and over, simply by being there, by remaining consistent, pure, good and true, even as things around him became anything but. Ernie stood out because he stood still. He was reliable as a rock. A soul in a void. A heart in a sometimes heartless world.”

This takes an excellent observation, turns it into a wonderful turn of phrase – “simply by doing the same thing over and over again” – then over-writes it into oblivion. There it is, a glimpse of the old, great sportswriter, smothered by the sappy pap celebrity.

Yep. I’d also note the faux-meaningful phrases — what, pray tell, is “a soul in a void” — but as concise summations of What’s Wrong With Mitch go, this is pretty good.

And now I have to get to work. Have a good day, all. I’m off to search for earplugs.

Today’s to-do list:

1) Deposit money in IRA.
2) Mail tax form/check to city of Detroit. Amount owed: $5.
3) Order kick-ass GoPro HD camera for self as a tax-refund, just-because-you’re-you present.
4) Clean house.

That’s a pretty good to-do list. As a self-employed person, April 15 is supposed to be gloomy, but it hasn’t been for the past couple years, since we got Alan’s withholding adjusted. My new year’s resolution is an aggressive savings plan, and once I get it calibrated, we can do some more adjusting to get to the theoretical ideal — zero owed on April 15 (other than the first quarterly, of course). I’m enough of a peasant that I love refunds, however. It feels like found money.

Some years ago, a weenie editorial writer for the other paper in Fort Wayne wrote a tax-day column proclaiming his love for paying taxes. Signing that check to Uncle Sam, he wrote, made him feel like a real American. He envisioned his money flowing into road-building, national parks and health care for grandma. Taxes, he concluded, are good. For this he was roundly ridiculed by our paper’s editorial writers, whose tax dollars mainly go to food stamps for the lazy poor, boondoggle public-works projects and high-calorie lunches for Tip O’Neill (the big-government bete noire of that moment). Taxes are bad.

(And that, we were often told, was why newspaper readers in Fort Wayne were the luckiest in the world. They had a choice in editorial pages.)

Taxes just are, in my book. And today I don’t have to write a check. Except for that camera, about which I’m already having second thoughts. It’s such a bauble, even if the purchase price does include a waterproof housing and several mounts. While we were in Vegas, one of my filmmaking friends said he’d always wanted to do a short documentary about a day in the life of a Detroit street dog. I think this is a great idea, and haven’t been able to stop thinking about it. It seems a small strap-on camera of this sort might be a valuable tool in such a project. In fact, it might even be…tax-deductible.

Sold!

A few housekeeping items:

A long-overdue change in the nightstand book, right rail. The other day I was pre-ordering something from Amazon (pub date of Martin Cruz Smith’s new Arkady Renko novel: August. Sheesh.) and needed something to fill out the order. I IM’d Laura Lippman on Facebook and said this was a one-time limited offer to pimp any book, by any friend or fellow traveler, and I would buy it sight unseen, no questions asked, just on the power of her recommendation. She suggested “True Confections” by Katharine Weber. Sold. I read it on vacation, and friends? She did not steer me wrong. It’s a wonderful, funny, breezy novel about the candy business, love and marriage, work and truth and all the rest of it. I’m finished with it, but leaving it on the nightstand for a while.

I have a few thoughts on “Treme,” but I want to watch the whole episode again, uninterrupted, to fully absorb it. My first is the same as Ray Shea, a NOLA blogger who pointed out one quibble: In the scenes were people are returning to their homes after the flood, everyone’s door opens easily. As a former 20-year resident of a flooding city, I can second that — the door of a flooded house never opens easily. It’s warped and swollen, and stuff is piled up behind it, and, well. That’s not much of a criticism, but when I saw Clarke Peters’ clothes still hanging in his closet, looking pretty damn clean, I thought of it. (Real NOLA residents have their own thoughts, here.)

My other first impression: Jesus Christ himself must have written some of that music. Watching “The Civil War” for the first time many years ago, the Ken Burns project, my pal Lance Mannion turned to the room after the first musical break of Afro-American spiritual music and said, “And Southerners thought these people were less than fully human. Imagine that.” Yes.

But more later.

And now off to the long-neglected gym.

Not everyone gets to stay up late enough to see “The Colbert Report,” and I hope I’m not spoiling anyone who catches it on the next-day reasonable-hour replay, but last night’s guest was David Simon, and guess whose name he dropped? Ashley Morris’. (You can watch the clip here, and thanks, Del, for digging that up.)

I’m so proud of my stupid little blog. It may not have many readers, but it has the right readers.

(Pause.)

Where is my money?

(Pause.)

For those of you new to this blog, after Ashley left us suddenly in 2008, our web wizard J.C. set up a script that pulled every comment he ever made here into a single thread. The link’s in the right rail, or here. What I find amusing about it is that, even severed from the posts he was talking about, they still make a certain amount of sense, and you can dip in and out of them at will and still get a feeling for the man. Here’s one from near the top:

In St. Petersburg in 1997, I was walking down Nevsky Prospekt, and stopped at the Grand Hotel Evropa. They were advertising “Bud and Burger: $8″. After a week in Eastern Europe, this actually looked good. So I order my burger, get my Bud (they can’t call it Budweiser there because the Czechs own that name), and pound it down. I walk up to the bar for another Bud, and this gorgeous blonde is standing beside me. Being a fearless virile American heterosexual, I say to myself, what the hell. So I look at her and say “Hi, what’s your name”. She responds “Two hundred dollars”. Without missing a beat, I say “Is that your first name, your last name, or is that what your friends call you?” She looks confused, thinks for a second, then says again “two hundred dollars”. Finally, I’m served my Bud, and I walk away. And out in front of the hotel were all of the Russian Mafia guys wearing the uniform: khaki pants, black shirts, italian loafers with no socks, and wrap-around sunglasses. Oh, and they were all leaning on black mercedes, black BMWs, or black somethings. I didn’t follow my Rick Steves guide and try to strike up a conversation…

For those even newer to this blog, Ashley provided the loose framework of the character in “Treme” played by John Goodman. It’s an “inspired by,” not a “based on” characterization, so don’t go getting any ideas; it’s not a line-for-line copy. But knowing that Creighton Bernette’s lines were in some cases lifted from Ashley’s blog, it was funny to read this, in Hank’s review today:

His character was added to the array late in the show’s assembly and his dialogue is saddled with distilling “Treme’s” social commentary.

When a British journalist interviewing Creighton asks if New Orleans is worth rebuilding — since its destruction and sinking is considered by many to be Mother Nature’s fait accompli — the belligerent Creighton assaults him, tries to hurl his TV camera into the Mississippi River and lets loose with the fiery counterargument that is “Treme’s” (and New Orleans’s) broadest concern: The floods were a man-made disaster, triggered by a hurricane but caused by years of government neglect and an inept federal response.

While essential to any story of life in New Orleans, such moments are nevertheless “Treme’s” burden to bear. No matter how hard the writers seemed to have worked to avoid it, much of Goodman’s dialogue in the early episodes has the flavoring of op-ed screeds, and it sometimes seeps into other characters’ scenes.

That’s what a blog is, isn’t it? One long op-ed screed. Ashley’s blog is still up, and while not quite a ghost ship, it’s tended intermittently by his widow, Hana (who was paid for her husband’s inspiration). Spammers have flooded the comments, but I recommend the “greatest hits” links down the left rail, especially “My Life in Porn,” because it links back here in sort of an orgy of log-rolling and ass-kissing.

Hank says “Treme” is good, by the way. It premieres Sunday. Although I will not be seeing it until Tuesday. I’ll explain that later.

Thinking about J.C. and his web wizardry, he asked me once, when we were discussing how I’ve still not made a last will and testament, “All I want to know is, who has control of your online content?” I thought for half a second, and bequeathed it all to him. As far as I’m concerned, if a blood vessel bursts in my brain today, I trust J.C. to keep the bar open. This ghost ship could sail for years. Maybe we can set up a guest-bartender system.

One bit of bloggage today:

By my count, this is the second near-tragedy to strike the Milwaukee Brewers sausage race in my memory. HOW MUCH LONGER MUST THIS DEATH RACE BE ALLOWED TO CONTINUE? (This one’s the first.)

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to go chase down a rabbit. Back later.

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.