Note to self and all others: The turkey brining was definitely worth it. With so few people to feed (four), I haven’t done a whole turkey at Thanksgiving in a while, and even this year’s eight-pound breast was more-more-more than enough. But breasts love to dry out, and all the solutions I’ve tried so far — cooking in a bag, basting like a madwoman — have been only mildly successful in keeping the thing juicy through roasting, resting and through to the table. But the brine did the trick, and was only slightly more work. I put it in the solution at 2 p.m. Wednesday (in a heavy-duty plastic bag, in an ice-filled cooler, in the garage overnight), took it out at 8:30 a.m. Thursday, soaked it in plain water for a bit, tossed it in the oven with the usual preparations minus the salt, and noticed a huge difference. Even the leftovers are still moist. So. Brining: Gonna do that one again.

The birthday was nice, too. I did more or less nothing, which felt like a huge gift from the universe. Went for a walk, bought a nice piece of fish, read a little, wrote a little, napped a bit. Made my own birthday dinner — trout almondine and sauteed spinach, perfect after all the starch and gluten of the previous day, and opened my present. A pressure cooker! Just what I asked for! I intend to spend the rest of the grim weather making a lot of beans and soups and dals and other stuff in it.

Examining the packaging, it occurred to me I could never be a salesman, or perhaps even a marketer. Pressure cookers have been around since your grandmother was capable of climbing a stepladder to clean soup off the ceiling, although they’re much improved; the only reason I wanted one now is that I’ve been assured they no longer spew soup on the ceiling. But guess what the manual touted? They’re “green.” The company is committed to low-impact cookery. And so on. And why would that be? Because pressure cookers consume less energy. You can do in 10, 20 or 30 minutes what would have taken four hours at a simmer on a stove. Oh. Of all the ways I use energy and resources, cooking is one I’ve given approximately 0.0 minutes of thought or concern to. I feel worse about the brining bag than I do whatever energy it took to roast the turkey. But it’s what sells today. Eco-friendliness is to our decade what oat bran was to the ’80s.

The rest of the weekend was a cruise. We tried to see “Take Shelter,” and couldn’t work it into the schedule (far west side, only two screenings a day). “Hugo” was sold out in all but the 2D theaters, and if I’m going to see Marty’s first and probably only 3D feature in the theater, I’m going to see it how Marty intended. So “The Descendants” it was, yet more torture inflicted upon my daughter, who always notes, when we’re choosing our seats for “The King’s Speech” or “True Grit” or whatever, “Everyone here is old.” “That’s because there aren’t any explosions or vampires,” I told her. The film was rated R for language, which I thought would be for two or three F-bombs, but it turned out there were many moments when the air nearly turned blue from the potty-talk, mostly from the young actors. Although, I will grant you, it was done well. There’s a scene where the older sister warns her younger sister away from a bad classmate, and does it with an escalating tirade ending with “SHE’S A TWAT!” that I enjoyed very much. I thought, leaving, that the film was overpraised, but the further I get from it, the more I find myself thinking about it, so it might just be that my critical muscles are underdeveloped. It was certainly a worthy holiday movie. Many closeups of the Cloonester. He was wearing eyeliner.

I’m teaching a colleague’s feature-writing class today, so I have to make haste this morning. Some bloggage:

Caliban’s right: Sitcoms are officially over, so sayeth the New York Times.

I don’t know about you, but I could watch these turkey-attack videos all day. Hilarious. Why doesn’t anyone open an umbrella or wave their arms or just stop running?

For all you writers, a long Q-and-A with Hank, with a lot of smart insights about newspapers and working for them and the internet and everything else:

…we’re going through a big renaissance now. And it just destroys everything I love. Newspapers, for one. Magazines. The notion of paying a writer for her work. The notion of paying editors. Book releases, book signings, book parties, and worst of all, the loss of bookstores. No longer being able to see what someone on the subway is reading, because even book covers are gone now. It took the music industry, too — our record stores, our record collections and the idea that everyone makes out and/or gets laid to one hit song in the same summer. It’s taking away shopping malls, so it’s taking away something I consider key to the American adolescent experience.

…I’m entering a cranky cuss phase. I’m entitled to that, because I have rolled with a lot of change. But for now, I’M STICKING TO MY WAYS. I’m sticking with my dumbphone. I’m not joining Google+. I will tweet if I want and I will Facebook if I want but I’m not going to meld them into some social reader account that synchs me up to instantaneousness and lets the world know what 10 articles I just clicked on and what bar I just walked into. I’m still without an e-book reader or a tablet. I like books; I like they way they smell and the way they feel and how I feel when I buy one and have it with me. I still read my newspaper in the morning. I refuse to check my phone for texts while having dinner with a friend. I’m sticking to my ways as they currently are in 2011. I will be exactly where we agreed to meet at the time we agreed to meet, and if you start sending me last-minute texts with amendments to the plan and GPS coordinates of the new location and a change to the cast of who is joining us, I will probably just bag it and go home, because I still believe that a plan is a plan, and that plans are worth sticking to.

But such a fun cranky cuss!

Welcome back to the working week. Let’s get to it.

So I’ve started reading the HuffPo Detroit, or rather, I’m reading the things my Facebook and Twitter contacts believe worthy of posting. One was this restaurant review, which I clicked as part of my never-ending quest to find a decent meal outside my own kitchen.

Nora Ephron once said all restaurant criticism can be boiled down to, “The (noun) was (complimentary adjective) but the (noun) was (uncomplimentary adjective),” e.g., “The beef was succulent but the sauce was bland,” or “The appetizers wowed but the desserts were disappointing,” etc. But that was many years ago, before citizen journalism.

This particular piece is about a Mexican/Italian place in southwest Detroit. Fusion? Never gets around to saying, although a glance at the website reveals it’s simply two menus. There’s also no address offered. As for the review itself, it’s a symphony of solely complimentary adjectives and adverbs, with notes of unintentional humor — a “hand selected” wine list, etc. I enjoyed this sentence, too:

All smelling deliciously fragrant and looking excellent upon presentation, the four of us decided to share our dishes with one another.

You know, I’ve never been one of those people who describes my job as a profession. It’s a craft at best, and anyone can do it. But we have standards, generally agreed-upon rules, which aren’t hard to learn. You could print who-what-where-when-why on a matchbook or cocktail napkin, for cryin’ out loud. And yet, every day the new wave in journalism demonstrates the public doesn’t give a fat rat’s ass about rules, standards or subject-verb agreement. If you want Free, well, this is what free is.

Li’l Miss Grumpy Pants, getting off on the right foot today.

A couple of minor housekeeping notes: I think after tomorrow, that’ll be it for the week. I’ll try to get some photo posts up for the weekend, just to give y’all something to hang your discussions about the holiday and whatever on. And Friday is my (mumble) birthday, and I think I’ll renew an old tradition of full, gainful employment and take a personal day, maybe take a walk downtown or see a movie or somethin’. Has anyone seen “Take Shelter”? I’m thinking Michael Shannon is my new movie boyfriend.

Actually, I’m already feeling a little tapped, idea-wise. We could always go with the On This Date in History space-filler:

I gotta tell you, I don’t have a story associated with this one. It was days before my sixth birthday. I don’t recall a teacher telling us anything, and even my in-home memories are murky. At some point I must have watched it — my parents weren’t the sort of people to ignore news like that — but the standard where-were-you-when-it-happened discussion always leaves me cold. I was in Columbus, Ohio, in first grade. Done.

Now, I look at that clip and think: Now there was a broadcaster. And a journalist. Back when you could be both.

Ten-thirty, and it’s not going to get any easier from here on out. Why don’t you guys take the helm, while I send nine million emails and write a story?

We sure do spend a lot of time worrying about things like this:

Especially when a far more effective odor neutralizer is available as close as your nearest matchbook. But it probably doesn’t smell like rainbows and unicorns, either.

And that’s why I’m glad my cell phone has a camera in it. Because you never know what you’ll find at the hardware store.

I hope it’s not too abrupt — or distasteful — to change the subject to food now. I have to apologize for not including a Saturday Morning Market photo last weekend, because I was certainly there, but conditions in the scrum in front of the poultry sellers weren’t conducive to photography. I got my turkey — a breast, anyway. And I got most of the other elements of the traditional meal. After years of trying to make Thanksgiving mine, I’m giving up and letting it be everyone else’s. Menu: Turkey, dressing, mashed you-know-whats, green beans with roasted onions, Waldorf salad, pie. No more sweet potatoes (I’m the only one who eats them). No more trying to nudge the feast to a later hour; Alan’s sister can never spend the night, so a late lunch is the best I can do. I will not give up the wine, and anyone who tries to make me, I will cut. It makes the afternoon snooze that much easier.

New this year: Brining. Never done that one. I’m using the Pioneer Woman’s recipe. Any advice would be appreciated.

Detroit is a great Thanksgiving town, maybe the best. Natives do the parade (usually as the guest of someone with an office or condo overlooking the route), maybe the Turkey Trot run, followed by the Lions game, followed by dinner. One of these days.

Monday, Monday, how I hate thou thee. Let’s blog it up and get on the road.

From David Frum, the cri de coeur of the moderate Republican:

We don’t usually delude others until after we have first deluded ourselves. Some of the smartest and most sophisticated people I know—canny investors, erudite authors—sincerely and passionately believe that President Barack Obama has gone far beyond conventional American liberalism and is willfully and relentlessly driving the United States down the road to socialism. No counterevidence will dissuade them from this belief: not record-high corporate profits, not almost 500,000 job losses in the public sector, not the lowest tax rates since the Truman administration. It is not easy to fit this belief alongside the equally strongly held belief that the president is a pitiful, bumbling amateur, dazed and overwhelmed by a job too big for him—and yet that is done too.

Come the revolution, I look forward to escorting these people to the gallows personally:

Carriers on international flights are offering private suites for first-class passengers, three-star meals and personal service once found only on corporate jets. They provide massages before takeoff, whisk passengers through special customs lanes and drive them in a private limousine right to the plane. Some have bars. One airline has installed showers onboard.

For those who haven’t heard, Jim Romenesko is back. First post: His side of the Poynter story.

And with that, I’m off. A short week, and after today, it will improve markedly. Hope yours does, too.

Among the weekend’s action: Dinner with friends, the market, book club, the usual laundry and grocery chores, and what else…oh, right. Apparently there’s this book:

I’ve been robo-written. In a fit of late-night Googling, Alan found this eponymous volume, consisting of “high-quality content by WIKIPEDIA articles.” Yes, for a mere $45, you can get a print-on-demand edition of the Wikipedia article about me and my three-years-past celebrity brush with greatness. It’s 96 pages. That’s gotta be some big type to fill 96 pages. Maybe they cut and pasted the 570 comments that followed that day. But I think I need to deliver some disclaimers before anyone buys it:

1) My Wikipedia entry contains errors, which I freely acknowledge and will not fix, in the name of keeping those who rely on Wikipedia on their toes.

2) That is not me on the cover.

This phenomenon rang a bell, which sent me a-Googling, and I found this NYT piece, “Do Androids Dream of Electric Authors?,” a clever title explaining that the robots are wrangled by a German company, which I flat do not believe, based on the email exchange one subject had with its managing director, one Wolfgang Philipp Müller. That sounds like a German name a robot would come up with. I’m thinking this is Skynet we’re dealing with here. This is only an early effort.

Monday, o day of suck, have you at least kicked up some tasty linkage for my long-suffering readers? Let’s see…

I went off on a little rant about Mitch Albom yesterday on Facebook. I’m thinking I’m not going to reproduce it here, as we’ve heard it all before and as Mitch’s work product goes, it was no worse than any other Sunday column. But it prompted Jeff Gill to post a YouTube of another Sunday offering with about the same level of numb predictability, which y’all are welcome to check out, particularly if you’re megachurch attendees.

Chelsea Clinton is changing jobs again. Now she’s going to be a TV correspondent, reporting NBC News’ “Making a Difference” segment on the evening news, which is to say she’s going to be a glossy show pony appearing in — I refuse to use a word like “reported” — happy-happy stories for a very large salary. Yes, she’s donating all her salary to charity, and she’s not just going to be a famous face, nuh-uh:

But Mr. Capus emphasized that this, and the others, are all serious hires by NBC News. He said Ms. Clinton had “made it very clear that this is not going to be a surface-deep relationship.” He added, “She wants to be in the field for the shoot and in the edit room for the edit.”

A dues-payer! Gotta love it.

Because I know lots of you are Elizabeth Warren fans, a profile on her senate campaign from New York magazine. Haven’t gotten all the way through it, but it’s a good read so far.

Me, I must strap on armor and prepare for my week. I hope yours goes well.

Autumn has gifts besides the traditional foliage displays and apples right off the tree. Behold, an attempt to capture one:

Setting Sun Lights Tops of Trees, as Dark Clouds Bulk in the North, by yours truly. Pretty weak, I’d say, although it was a nice moment.

So, a little inside baseball for some of you, but I have to get this off my chest. Is anyone else disgusted that, with all the problems journalism has at the moment, someone at the Poynter Institute thought the way Jim Romenesko crafts his blog entries was cause for a public shaming? It’s a little hard to follow (and probably impossible for non-journalists), to grasp exactly what the problem is, exactly. I’ve had three or four pieces linked/promoted by Romenesko, an inside-media blogger, over the years, and I’ve never, not once, felt that he misappropriated my work, or quoted even a single phrase of it improperly. I’ve been reading him since the beginning, pre-Poynter, and can’t recall anyone, ever, thinking he did aggregation any way other than the right way. He was one of the very first to do so, in fact, and blazed a trail, showing journalists how this crazy internet thing could work for us, rather than against us.

Romenesko, who had been ramping down his Poynter output for some time, leading to a semi-retirement/switch to part-time status in a few weeks, reacted the way anyone would: He quit, leaving his boss, Julie Moos, to reap the whirlwind of damnation from the trade, who have quite correctly called her (and whoever put her up to this, if there is one) a spectacular forest-misser due to tree examination. I’m trying not to jump to conclusions here, but I get the feeling I’ve known people like her throughout my career, officious little twerps who bustle around kissing ass up the chain and assigning demerits down. I could be wrong. Someone closer to the newspaper bidness these days tell me if I am.

Anyway, this piece from The Awl, about the blog’s evolution (and devolution) is worth your time.

So is the Kitten Covers, perhaps the first LOLcat brand extension I’ve seen in a while that I found genuinely amusing.

And since we’ve already gone to the bloggage, let’s go all the way!

The Harrisburg Patriot-News gives up a special report on the Penn State scandal that doesn’t really uncover a lot of new information, but lays it out in relatively succinct linear fashion, underlining how many chances there were to stop Jerry Sandusky, and how all of them were missed. They emphasize how the central shocking event of the grand jury report — the grad student’s eyewitness account of the anal rape of a 10-year-old — was passed up the chain of command and became less serious with every stop on the telephone tree:

According to the grand jury, then, here is how McQueary’s eyewitness account became watered down at each stage:

McQueary: anal rape.
Paterno: something of a sexual nature.
Schultz: inappropriately grabbing of the young boy’s genitals.
Curley: inappropriate conduct or horsing around.
Spanier: conduct that made someone uncomfortable.
Raykovitz: a ban on bringing kids to the locker room.

I’m sure, given two more stops, it would have been that Jerry Sandusky tousled a young boy’s hair, and some weenie thinks it’s a huge scandal or somethin’.

I think we’ve well-covered the outrage angle of this case, but a lot of people are linking to this piece by John Scalzi, so I will too, mainly because it reminds me I should read more sci-fi, perhaps my second-least-favorite niche of genre fiction (although fantasy, sci-fi and romance are all pretty close).

And with that, I have to run. Must clean the entire house and Cliff Notes (that’s a verb phrase, I just decided) tonight’s book-club assignment. Who can summarize “Rising from the Rails” in a few paragraphs? I’d be most obliged.

Oh, and happy eleven-eleven-eleven!

Read a fascinating story overnight, about corporate tax rates. Although the rate is allegedly 35 percent — AND CAN YOU BELIEVE IT’S THAT HIGH? WHAT IS THIS, THE SOVIET UNION? — it should not surprise you to know that many companies pay far less, and some collect fat…well, you can’t exactly call them refunds, as there was nothing paid to be refunded in the first place. “The thanks of a grateful nation,” perhaps.

Here’s a chart. I notice that many of the biggest refunders are utilities, including my own, DTE Energy. I’d imagine that comes from exploiting energy policy that rewards some sources of power over others. Here’s a jaw-dropper, however:

The report said that many other companies took advantage of tax breaks that favor certain industries, including drilling for oil and gas, making video games, building NASCAR racetracks, producing ethanol, and making movies.

Video games, movies and NASCAR. If you wonder why lobbyists are as rich as Midas, wonder no more.

Rick Snyder, the new governor of Michigan, drastically reduced our film tax credits, on the grounds that governments shouldn’t “pick winners and losers” for special treatment. (Then he turned around and top-downed a bunch of other ideas and “best practices,” which goes to show we all have a different idea of what constitutes a winner and a loser.)

What I don’t know about tax policy could fill the Grand Canyon, but I do know I studied the wrong thing in college. A lawyer friend of mine likes to say he wouldn’t trade his B.A. in economics for anything, that no single field of study explains the world as well as econ. I’d say he’s right.

So what’s your major, anyway?

I have an interview to do in 45 minutes, and I intend to ride my bike to it, because what’s the point of doing hyperlocal journalism if you can’t do hyperlocal transportation along the way. I haven’t been doing as much cycling as I usually do in the fall, but that’s to be expected, considering the near-constant rain we’ve been having. I have to remind myself to be alert to autumnal cycling hazards; one year in Fort Wayne I nearly came to ruin after thoughtlessly riding fast under an aesculus glabra tree that had dropped its fruit all over the Rivergreenway. I use the Latin name so I don’t wreck the punchline: It would be ironic indeed for an Ohio native to be felled by a buckeye.

Fortunately, I have some bloggage:

Mitch Albom, infamous crafter of over-the-top obituaries, stays his hand (mostly) and does one I actually enjoyed reading — about his piano teacher. It’s good because he mostly keeps himself out of it, although it has enough head-smacking phrases for a few winces; the man’s cancer battle had “gone to a minor key,” not to mention this entire paragraph:

Sing a song of Matt Michaels. Make it sweet and melodic as the best jazz tune, make it funny and smart and a little whimsical, a trill note here or there. Make it smoky and coffee-stained and gently inspiring to anyone who hears it. The old expression goes, “Those who can’t do, teach,” but that is false. Sometimes, those who can do teach anyhow, and the world is better for it.

Ugh. But the guy left behind a million stories, and Mitch wrangled a few of them. Kate’s wonderful bass teacher gets to tell one, so there’s that.

Mark my words: At some point in the near or distant future, Kim Kardashian is going to claim her whole joke of a marriage was planned for just this reason.

Jim at Sweet Juniper’s other kid — that would be “Juniper” — was a ghost for Halloween. But not a sheet ghost.

My phone just alerted me that it’s time to head out. The weekend is drawing so, so near, I can almost taste it.

“Patchy dense fog,” the guy on the radio said this morning. I guess they can’t say “lovely wisps of water vapor will cling to low-lying areas, including creek bottoms and golf courses, catching the early morning light in opaque streaks of loveliness that remind us of the dying of the season,” but that’s what it looked like as I drove Kate to school this morning. I’m not supposed to drive the morning shift, but as I said yesterday, it’s good to get out of your rut from time to time. Sometimes you see the morning light in new ways.

Then I came home and read this story, from AnnArbor.com, which replaced the daily newspaper there a few years back, and discovered I’m the same old grump. On just one readthrough, I spotted facts repeated in adjacent paragraphs, the governor’s name misspelled and windy quotes that needed a trim. Argh:

Dennis says, if passed, the bill would be an insurmountable blow to U-M.

“Surmount” and its variants apply to obstacles and other things you have to get over or around, not blows, even figurative ones. I’m sure two or three more reads would turn up more fat and gas, but editing brave new experiments in journalism isn’t my job. (Well, yes it is, but not this one.) Point these things out to people who aren’t in the journo-biz, and they look at you funny, but dammit, EDITING MATTERS. Proper use of quotes matters a lot. This is how you don’t do it:

“I am concerned for the university as a whole,” Dennis said. “It would be a really damaging blow to the university’s reputation as a fair and humane employer. I think it would cause us to lose faculty and never get them back.”

“It would just be tragic for the university,” he added.

I tell my students: Avoid using quotes to carry information. Use them to comment on the information. They are the pinpoint spotlights of storytelling, drawing your eye to important or interesting facts. The first and last lines of that four-sentence quote are unnecessary. In a squeeze, so is the second one.

Everybody loves the last scene of “A River Runs Through It,” but my favorite is the Zen writing lesson:

NARRATOR: Each weekday, while my father worked on his Sunday sermon, I attended the school of the Reverend Maclean. He taught nothing but reading and writing. And being a Scot, believed that the art of writing lay in thrift.

REV. MACLEAN: Good. Now throw it away.

Throw it away! Now that’s a man who knows the value of words on paper. Every so often a group of Buddhist monks show up at the Allen County Public Library and spend several days making a sand mandala in one of the public spaces, after which it is poured into the river. That’s all we do, although newspaper people have the added thrill of knowing their words are now lining my rabbit cage.

Let’s hop quick to the bloggage, so I can get a workout in today:

The Onion proves, once again, that it is America’s truly indispensable news source:

A team of leading archaeologists announced Monday they had uncovered the remains of an ancient job-creating race that, at the peak of its civilization, may have provided occupations for hundreds of thousands of humans in the American Northeast and Midwest.

The latest from Chest magazine (yes, it exists): Your blue jeans may have killed Turkish garment workers. Have a nice day!

One for Connie, Beth and the rest of you librarians and archivists, via MMJeff, a library mystery that reminds me, a little bit, of the guy who leaves cognac and roses on Edgar Allen Poe’s grave every year.

Jon Corzine, financial genius, nearly bails out of the company he ruined with a measly $12 million severance package. I can’t stand it.

Happy Tuesday to all.

The new biography of Steve Jobs confirms what was already pretty well known about the pancreatic cancer that killed him earlier this month. That is, that the man widely hailed as a genius did a pretty dumb thing when diagnosed with cancer in 2003 — he denied he had it.

Or rather, he denied he had anything serious enough to need treatment with serious medicine. Rather:

His early decision to put off surgery and rely instead on fruit juices, acupuncture, herbal remedies and other treatments — some of which he found on the Internet — infuriated and distressed his family, friends and physicians, the book says. From the time of his first diagnosis in October 2003, until he received surgery in July 2004, he kept his condition largely private — secret from Apple employees, executives and shareholders, who were misled.

Later, Jobs did turn to Western medicine to fight his cancer. But from the fall of 2003 to the summer of 2004, when he finally had surgery, he dithered. Everything we know about cancer stresses early detection and treatment as key to long-term survival. So it’s not a leap to conclude that Jobs may have acupunctured himself into an early grave.

It’s unclear whether Jobs thought acupuncture and juice were a real treatment, or if something else was going on in his famously intelligent head. He wouldn’t be the first person who, when faced with a deadly threat in the prime of his life, simply refused to see it as such. In the world Jobs lives in, there’s certainly no shortage of this sort of thinking, and California’s reputation as the center of it is well-earned.

My doctor friend Frank and I would occasionally bat this ball around over beers. Why were some people so ready to believe practitioners of quackery like iridology, Reiki and at least some chiropractic — yes, I think it can be effective for back and neck pain, but asthma? Please — and not their doctors? Why is a guy who went to the Colon Cleanse Academy more believable than one who interned at Johns Hopkins? We ran down the list of million reasons, but Frank, unlike most MDs, was always willing to put a big part of the blame on doctors themselves, the most visible actors in the insane ongoing stage play of American health care. They helped build their own prison, then complained the view was obscured by iron bars. Doctors are, speaking generally, very smart control freaks (like Steve Jobs, come to think of it), and patients frequently are not. After the thousandth emphysema patient who refuses to quit smoking but still complains of symptoms, it’s easy for a doctor to get high-handed, and that arrogance can seep into interactions with all patients. Pretty soon, you are the doc whose patients desert him for a nutritionist. And you have lots of company.

“Doctors like to complain about the patient who comes in with a sheaf of printouts from the internet,” he would say. “But that patient is the one who is taking responsibility for their own health. It’s all in how you look at it.”

In some ways, knowing Jobs was one of those patients humanizes him as much as his other widely reported flaws. Life is a terminal disease, after all.

The Huffington Post got their hands on an early copy, too. This is the story they pulled from it:

Jobs, who was known for his prickly, stubborn personality, almost missed meeting President Obama in the fall of 2010 because he insisted that the president personally ask him for a meeting. Though his wife told him that Obama “was really psyched to meet with you,” Jobs insisted on the personal invitation, and the standoff lasted for five days. When he finally relented and they met at the Westin San Francisco Airport, Jobs was characteristically blunt. He seemed to have transformed from a liberal into a conservative.

“You’re headed for a one-term presidency,” he told Obama at the start of their meeting, insisting that the administration needed to be more business-friendly. As an example, Jobs described the ease with which companies can build factories in China compared to the United States, where “regulations and unnecessary costs” make it difficult for them.

Yes, regulations and unnecessary costs, like federal laws on how hard you can whip your workforce, and how many pollutants you may dump into the soil and waterways and air around your factory. I hate to say it two days in a row, but that’s f’ing rich. Yes, Jobs was “prickly,” the root of which is “prick.”

A pivot into the bloggage, and then I’m on to other things:

When I was younger, and would fantasize about exchanging faces with other women in the world, one who always ended up on my top-five list was Charlotte Rampling. Those amazing cheekbones. Those incredible, hooded eyes. That jawline. So beautiful. I saw a trailer for a new documentary about her yesterday. My oh my, but she’s gotten old. (Still looks great. It’s the bone structure.) I have a feeling that of all the women of a certain age who say they’ve never had work done, she is telling the truth.

Marco Rubio, truth-stretcher.

I agree with James Fallows: Good for WDAV, an NPR station that for once acted with common sense when considering the after-hours work of one of its employees.

A morning’s worth of work to do, and then I’m going to rake leaves. Have a great weekend.

I was covering a local candidate forum last night, and missed the latest GOP debate. I understand that in a brilliant move to round up Sarah Palin’s little lost lambs, Rick Perry located the American revolution in the 16th century. Awright. Between this, Herman Cain’s skatting on Uzbeki-beki-beki-stan-stan, Michele Bachmann’s vaccine-caused retardation and the seven or eight embarrassing moments yet to come in the next month, Barry’s got the second term all but sewed up.

Or not. Max Headroom Romney still floats above the fray. Way to pick your opponents, Mittens.

The local forum was put on by our chapter of the League of Women Voters. What mensches those folks are, arranging these deals every year so that none of us need go into the voting booth ignorant. Not that it makes much difference to most people, alas. Every term I discover how much my students — college students — don’t know about participatory democracy. Most of it is a function of simply not having lived very long; they don’t know how city councils work because they have never given a thought to city council, period. Nothing like buying property, paying taxes and having children to pique a person’s interest in public affairs. But I also wonder how much civics education is going on in schools these days. I took it in junior high. Today it might be wrapped into a general social-studies curriculum. I hope some of it is sinking in.

The warm weather will be leaving in a matter of hours, and it’s already cloudy and threatening rain. Leaves are falling like snowflakes, but it sho’ is purty out there.

I have quite a bit of tasty bloggage today, so let’s hop to it, shall we?

Your daily funny: Elizabeth Warren promises revenge vouchers.

Richard Dawkins, one of the most famous atheists in the world, was booked to appear tonight at a local fundraiser for the Center for Inquiry. But he was dropped at the last minute, when organizers learned — yes, learned — that he was an atheist. (From watching Fox News!!!) He’s complaining, but I’d consider myself lucky. If they can’t read a newspaper, they certainly can’t hire a decent caterer.

OID: A city so broke that the power company comes in and repossesses its streetlights. I didn’t think that was even possible.

Rochelle Riley is African-American, so this punchline doesn’t quite work, but it’s close enough for me, after reading this titanically dumb column: What do you mean ‘we,’ white man?

I haven’t been linking to NYT stories as much, knowing most of you can’t get behind the pay wall, but this story was so weird I can’t resist: Remember Professor Irwin Corey? “The world’s foremost authority?” I guess you’d call him a comedian, although as I recall, his schtick was to go on bubbly talk shows like Mike Douglas, Joey Bishop and maybe Carson, where the host would play straight man, asking him questions, which he would answer in long, convoluted bursts of verbiage. (We were so easily amused back then, but as I often think, watching contemporary comedy: It beats semen jokes.)

Anyway, Corey is still alive, lives in New York and is something of a panhandler, only the money he collects is sent to children’s charities in Cuba. He’s 97 years old. You really can’t make this stuff up, can you?

Off to work for me.

Such a freakish October we’ve been having so far. Summerlike temperatures, absolutely perfect weather, and the Lions are 5-0. This is what you might call a textbook lesson in “things that will not last, but should be enjoyed while they do.” Normally I do groundwork for the week ahead on Sunday evenings; instead I had dinner with the Hare Krishnas. I should be at work inside all day today, but odds are, I’m going to get a long bike ride in there somehow. And sooner or later the Lions will lose, but for now? I join my fellow Detroiters in celebrating their winning streak.

I generally confine my criticism of Mitch Albom to his weekly forays into the non-sporting world, mainly because I don’t read his sports columns, mainly because I don’t read sports coverage, period. I had a brief period of reading it, when I was on the copy desk in Fort Wayne, and handled the early-closing pages, i.e., business and sports. My takeaway was that I’d been wrong to feel any sympathy whatsoever for sportswriters who objected to the traditional newsroom moniker for their corner — the Toy Department. For every Frank DeFord or…who’s that funny guy at ESPN? Bill Simmons? Yeah. For every sportswriter like them, with talent and wit and insight, there were two score hacks who earned a living presenting high-school football rivalries as the latter-day equivalent of the Peloponnesian War. Sometimes a very good living. Having edited my share of his columns, I can tell you the downfall of Stephen A. Smith from his sinecure at the Philadelphia Inquirer was one of the very few times in recent memory I thought newspaper management got it right. (EDIT: OK, I was too harsh here. There are many fine sportswriters, and even the hacks work pretty hard, traveling constantly, not seeing their families for days on end. My hat is doffed to their brother- and sisterhood, but there are still plenty of lousy ones.)

So I check in on Mitch’s sports output rarely, but hey, the Lions’ unlikely streak is a bonafide talker outside of sports, so what the heck, and whaddaya know:

Change. On a sports night of epic proportions — playoff baseball team in action, undefeated football team on national TV — it was the Lions who provided the exclamation point, staying perfect by taking down the rival Bears, 24-13, the way they’ve taken down a lot of teams this year, emerging at halftime, righting the sails, sinking the battleship.

“Change” is Albom Trick No. 34, the Dramatic Repetition of Faux-Profundity, right before he swerves off Metaphor Highway and into the Ditch of Hackitude. Of course it was a sports night of “epic proportions,” because like fights of the century, they happen every few months or so. (Note to Mitch’s editors: Epic, in this usage, generally means long. If the Tigers had been playing at home, it’s a word that would have applied to the post-game traffic jams. Then they provide an exclamation point by righting their sails (and as a sailor, I have no idea what that even means) and sinking the battleship. OK, whatever. I bet they all gave 110 percent along the way, too.

No, but this:

From the jump, the human amplifiers in Ford Field were dialed to the point of explosion. The whole first quarter had the feeling of a building on fire. The stands were 5,000 volts of nervous energy. Players soared and crashed furiously. Yellow flags flew so fast you thought they were being thrown by Kevin Bacon at the riotous end of “Animal House.” Stay calm! All is well!

And we move on to exploding amplifiers, burning buildings, 5,000 volts, flying penalty flags, Kevin Bacon (six degrees!) and “Animal House.”

I have sympathy for these guys, I really do. Pity the modern sportswriter, tasked with reporting news everyone already knows — the Lions won in front of a crazy-excited hometown crowd on the first “Monday Night Football” to visit their venue in 37 years. (Wait a minute. Mitch says it’s the first MNF to play in “our city limits” in that time. Surely they made it to the Pontiac Silverdome sometime in that time.) You have to do one of two things — find an angle or story within that no one else is reporting, or convey the man-that-was-a-game feeling of bros at the water cooler the next morning. But he doesn’t have the ease of a Simmons (or the space), and he’s not the craftsman DeFord is, but he’s too much of a superstar to take a risk. He’s used to them holding Page One for him, or a room that falls silent when he enters. He’s Mitch, and we’re not. And so we get this. Well, he was on deadline.

You know what? Today would be a great day to Occupy something. There’s a local protest scheduled, but not until Friday. When it will be raining.

Occupy Detroit — it’s sort of a joke, isn’t it?

Speaking of occupying Detroit, I see today is Elmore Leonard’s 86th birthday. Best wishes to a true Detroit gem, and OMG, it just occurred to me that he won’t live forever, and when he goes, Mitch Albom will write something about him.

Hold me.

Have a happy Tuesday, all. I’m off to ride my bike.