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 nancynall.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.

Well, this has certainly been an …interesting campaign season, hasn’t it? Two weeks ago, I thought there was a good chance Obama was finished. Last night, it’s looking as though McCain is toast. All of it — “suspending the campaign,” Palin’s foreign-affairs cram course (which, unfortunately, brought the “Caribou Barbie” image home — world leaders and colorful native costumes sold separately!), the Letterman thing — makes him look desperate and weak, and that’s a very bad thing to be when you’re running for president at a time like this.

(“The Letterman thing,” I realize, makes me sound like one of those “low-information voters” who votes based on who did better with Ellen and Tyra, but the truth is, no one has aged into his Jack Paar elder status quite as gracefully as Dave. Doing the late-night chat shows is as important as doing “Meet the Press,” and McCain should have known that.)

Today, though I know the chat about this will be lively, let’s try to give one another a break. One reason I’ve come to hate the four-year election cycle is how easily I allow my buttons to be pushed, how culture war pushes everything else to the side. Deb spoke yesterday of yelling like a crazy lady when she sees a McCain yard sign, and I know exactly what she’s talking about. I’m grateful there are so few signs of any sort on my block, because I really don’t want to start doing the same thing. For a while when the war was going very badly, one of the houses in the next block had a sign in the yard that was phrased as a command: SUPPORT PRESIDENT BUSH AND OUR TROOPS. I had to avert my eyes. I didn’t want to put a human face to the house. I wanted the social lubricant of neighborliness to remain intact as long as possible.

I bring this up because we’ve already had a player carried off the field here, our old pal Jeff the Mild-Mannered, who wrote me last night:

I seem to be provoking more unpleasantness than is my preference, and it isn’t a position i’m used to occupying; that, and at 47 i’m already on lisinopril, and don’t need to up my dosage, so i’m just going to gracefully bow out through the election week. When i’m tempted to be extremely un-mild mannered in response to others, it’s a sign i need to pause and reflect and (forgive me) pray.

Others have written similar thoughts, and have taken shorter time-outs, and surely others have simply stopped commenting and reading without announcing it. One of my conundrums as a blogger has always been how I might “monetize” this site, and it reminds me of how I was always told to monetize my career when I was a columnist. People would say, “You need a niche, a cause, something people will associate with you,” but I could never do it. If I made this site all about politics I would doubtless pick up more outside linkage, and traffic, and maybe 35 more cents in my Google Ads account at the end of the month, but I’d hate doing it. I’d rather keep this blog about a lot of different things than one big thing, and attracting people who are interested in a lot of different things and like to comment on them.

One thing I like about Jeff is his willingness to take unpopular positions here, and I’ll miss him. Even though he’ll be back in six weeks or so.

Let’s keep talking about the events of the day. Let’s just try to remember that the other guy is not necessarily the enemy.

If you need to, when feeling overheated, you can play this video, and repeat as needed:

Puppies! All better now.

A little bloggage:

“Mad Men” fans, take note. Emma turned me on to this Flickr set of an artists’ images inspired by the show, but did you know this same artist has a shop at Zazzle? I’m getting the Betty-smashes-a-chair T-shirt as soon as I hang up with you.

Amy Welborn, Catholic blogger, left Fort Wayne earlier this year and has written about her impressions of her time there. You Fort people might like it. Or might not.

Gym-bound. Back later.

An offhand comment Kirk made in the previous thread leads me to try this experiment.

As regular readers know, this has been a lively place of late. Our discussions/fights/shoving matches over the upcoming elections have made our threads beefy, but unwieldy. Really, some people, on some days, would just rather talk about dogs. But after watching the Palin interviews from yesterday, I’m sure we still have a few things to get out of our systems, so this is now the open, election-only thread. No holds barred! Mixed martial arts! Cage match!

If you want to have tea-party chat about dogs, or rougher chat about anything else, see the previous thread. But for All Things Electoral And Particularly Palin, this is your thread.

(Speaking of mixed martial arts, Alan and I had our first extended look at Ultimate Fighting last Friday — the bar TV was tuned to Spike while we waited for the Dirtbombs. It was, without question, the most awful thing I’ve seen in…well, maybe ever. We watched a man get his face pounded to a pulp while another man straddled him and [shudder]. The winner welcomed his 7-year-old son into the ring afterward to accept the crowd’s cheers. “That kid better enjoy it,” Alan said. “Because in a few years he’s going to be changing his dad’s diapers.”)

OK, folks, in honor of Labor Day and our blood pressure, I’m closing comments on the previous post. This one will be open, but please let’s stay away from speculation on Sarah Palin’s pregnancies — Four or five? Inquiring minds want to know! — and otherwise keep our hearts and minds out of the gutter.

However, feel free to check back. We are heading off en famille to downtown Detroit, hoping to catch the Labor Day parade and perhaps a glimpse of that nice young Irish politician everyone’s talking about, Barry O’Bama. May blog some pix from the road, and will be carrying the Flip in case of shoving matches.

Solidarity forever, for the union makes us strong!

Can I post from my iPhone? This is a rest. I mean: A test.

Talked to a couple of old friends in the past few days. One recently had a hysterectomy, and it went well. She described the moment when the doctor came in to her hospital room and announced she could be released, just as soon as the surgical packing was removed from her vagina — gauze, mostly.

“You know that trick where the magician pulls out a long string of scarves, and it just goes on and on and on?” she said. “It was like that, only grosser.”

The other one told a few stories about her work life, which are the best stories ever. I’d pay money to see her one-woman show someday, and maybe I will. If you want to collect good stories about people, don’t bother becoming a bartender. Become a house cleaner instead. Better stories. One of my editors used to say a mailman knew more about your life than any other stranger who touched it. I say it’s your house cleaner, who knows the state of your marriage from the remains of your romantic dinners for two, and certainly by the number of votive candles arrayed around your bathtub. This friend used to clean empty houses for Realtors, and could tell the ethnicity of the former owners with astonishing accuracy:

“Asians lived there,” she said. “Long black hairs in the bathroom, lots of spilled rice in the pantry.” Indians left behind cooking smells, and favored certain paint colors. (White folks like neutrals.)

The best story she told me was about a lovely house in an upscale suburban area that one of her clients picked up very very cheap. It had been trashed, she said, by the previous owner’s children. It seemed that one day mom ran off with her boyfriend and moved to a faraway state. Then, a few months later, dad accepted a job in another distant city. When the teenage children, who were entering their junior and senior year of high school, objected to the relocation, he said, “OK, you kids can live here until you finish school. You’re old enough to take care of yourselves. I’ll send you some money. Bye.” You can imagine what happened: It became party central, a cushy crash pad for every local kid who needed a place to drink, get high or get laid. And over time, no doubt egged on by the effectively orphaned tenants, the place was very nearly destroyed — they threw cans of house paint out the window onto the driveway to see what it would look like, let the pool go back to nature, wrecked the furniture and carpets, punched holes in the walls and so on. Rehabbing it was a six-figure job, and it was practically a new house to begin with.

That should be a movie, don’t you think? The most interesting stories are be-careful-what-you-wish-for stories.

I have the bestest friends.

Bloggage:

My new rock-star husband, Don Was — yes, Rodney Crowell, while I will always love you, it’s all over between us — was in the Metro Times last week. I missed the show he was promoting, The Don Was Detroit Super Session, and yes I am kicking myself. But he’s so generous in his interviews, which is one reason I love him. They just go on and on and on, and he says so many interesting things. I bring this up because we were talking about the Jill Sobule album-financing deal a while back, and lo, guess what happened:

MT: Other than the Todd Snider project, do you have anything else major coming up?

WAS: Well, just before that, I finished an album with Jill Sobule. She did the original “I Kissed A Girl,” but she shouldn’t be judged on that. She’s a really deep songwriter — both funny and profound. She has a devoted fan base, and she had a “telethon” on her website where fans could contribute as little as $18, for which they got a T-shirt and an early download of the album. For $10,000 — which some people actually bought — you got the hyper-platinum package which allowed you to come and sing background vocals on the album. And she raised $85,000 in about three weeks. Then we made that album — recorded and mixed it — in less than two weeks. Same basic principle. And, you know, there’s just, something about it – that immediacy.

And also in the Metro Times, one of the Starbucks that’s closing is the one on Jefferson in Detroit. Alas, it was beloved by someone other than the usual nobodies:

Long before Renee Zellweger’s brief marriage to country “singer” Kenny Chesney, long before Jack White married model Karen Elson while floating down a Brazilian river, the movie star and the rock star were, as your grandparents might have called ’em, an item. Zellweger spent much time in Detroit, in fact, which was a shocker to us regular folk who spotted her wandering about in supermarkets and dining in restaurants like someone who is, as she calls herself, “just kind of normal”… “Oh, yeah,” she says, drawing the “yeah” out with a few extra vowels. “I’d like to say hi to my friends at the Starbucks on Jefferson. Nice guys.”

A little housekeeping: I’m now on Twitter, as NNall. Like Facebook, I don’t quite get it, but maybe I can figure it out.