We’re finally getting some competition for Comcast in these parts. As Comcast has recently rewarded my years of customer loyalty with a $20 monthly rate hike, to give me services I don’t use, I listened when the WOW cable guy stopped by yesterday. Most intriguing offer: Real savings on the land line, thanks to the choice of three tiers of service. We use it so little I know that if it rings, it’s likely someone I don’t want to talk to. I’d drop it if it weren’t for my husband’s objections, and the fact the phone mount in my kitchen is huge and will require a large framed portrait of Alexander Graham Bell to hide. So this would work for us, and I’m pissed Comcast hasn’t stepped in with an alternative.

They also offer three tiers of internet service, but in this area I require Maserati-like speed, so no savings there.

But the real elephant in the business-model room would be true choice in cable TV. The doomsday scenario for that industry is when customers can craft their own package from the channels they actually watch. Farewell, Golf Channel, hello AMC, etc. We’re there, more or less, at least with anyone willing to watch TV on their computer. I’m not. I still practice the exhaustion model of TV consumption — slump in chair, pick up remote, surf — enough that it would bug me to not have the option.

Anyone with WOW experience, I’m all ears.

Someone sent me this article, more food apocalypse-porn from Gary Taubes. Headline: Is Sugar Toxic? Let’s see if I can guess what the answer might be, coming from a writer who’s been beating the drum for the low-carb, paleo diet for years. Do I even need to read it? Probably not.

New rule: I no longer listen to anyone who tells me a food that I, and millions of other human beings, have enjoyed for centuries, is “toxic.” If nothing else, I’d like to enforce a certain strict constructionism in language. A toxin is a poison. If I eat this cookie, will I fall to the floor in a writhing heap? No? Then I’m going to eat it. Taubes acknowledges as much in his opening paragraphs:

It’s one thing to suggest, as most nutritionists will, that a healthful diet includes more fruits and vegetables, and maybe less fat, red meat and salt, or less of everything. It’s entirely different to claim that one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it. Suggesting that sugar might kill us is what zealots do. But Lustig, who has genuine expertise, has accumulated and synthesized a mass of evidence, which he finds compelling enough to convict sugar. His critics consider that evidence insufficient, but there’s no way to know who might be right, or what must be done to find out, without discussing it.

If I didn’t buy this argument myself, I wouldn’t be writing about it here.

OK, then!

The longer I live, the more I throw in with those nutritionists. I come from a long line of moderate people who lived into their ninth decade by practicing moderation, and eating a piece of birthday cake ever year.

However. Speaking of food, someone posted this on Facebook yesterday, and while its headline is immoderate — The 20 Worst Foods in America — it’s worth a click-through on your next coffee break. It’s not foods, exactly, but restaurant dishes, compiled by the folks at Eat This, Not That ™, yet another insta-book that became a franchise overnight. I don’t eat at places like the Cheesecake Factory and Blimpie’s often, but every so often circumstances will force us off the freeway and into an Olive Garden or some such. Just last week, Kate and I ate at a Chili’s nearby; I fired up the Fast Food Calorie Counter app on my phone, to get a sense of what we were in for.

And nearly fell on the floor. I’ve never seen so many 1,800-calorie appetizers in my life. Everything seemed to boil down to a fat stuffed into a carb, then deep-fried and glazed with more fat — crispy-cheesey tortilla bombs. I ordered the chicken tacos and ate half. Kate got the sliders and ate half. As these are not foods that reheat well, we passed on the go-boxes, but it reminded me of the other thing that is making us fat — portion size. Do you remember when restaurant plates became platters, when the goal was not to feed you so much as stuff you like a foie gras goose? I do. It was approximately the mid-70s. It started with Chi-Chis. I knew a woman who waitressed there; she was living in a hippie farm commune and asked the dishwashers to scrape the plates into a special garbage bag, which she took home at the end of every shift to feed to their pig. Fitting.

OK, the morning is fleeing, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

Longish, but worth a read, as Hugh Grant — yes, the actor — sits down with a former tabloid hack and gets the download on how prevalent surveillance techniques like phone-hacking and other digital eavesdropping is. Via hidden recording. Brilliant. P.S. And this is a developing story.

Speaking of food, Roy Edroso linked to this, and so am I: A few notes on modernist cuisine and molecular gastronomy, at both the restaurant and McDonald’s-lab level, from the Chicago magazine 312 blog. (Broken link fixed. Sorry.)

It’s not “Sophomore dies in kiln explosion,” but it’s close: Yale student dies when her hair gets caught in a lathe. Something to remember when you’re considering what factory work should pay.

OK, off to the bike, and outta here. The week, it’s nearly over!

With apologies to Linda, who is using her hydroponic greenhouse for salad greens, I have to establish ground rules for any discussion of the medical-marijuana issue. It’s pretty simple: I will happily concede that marijuana has a role to play in the health care of many people who either are not helped by conventional pharmaceuticals, or don’t wish to take them. In return, I only ask that they stop pretending legalized medical marijuana isn’t the best thing to happen to recreational pot smokers since the invention of Zig-Zags.

Not so much to ask. And yet, here is medical marijuana, happily taking root in Michigan, and to listen to one side, you’d think the entire state is filled with chemo patients, or MS sufferers, or victims of AIDS-related wasting, or some other affliction that can only be helped by Nurse Mary Jane. And the other side says it’s all about potheads who are claiming “anxiety,” “insomnia,” “excessive whiteness of the eyes” or whatever else they can come up with, to Drs. Feelgood all over the state who will happily write “prescriptions” for a drug whose strength and efficacy — even the dosage — is either a big question mark, or left up to the user.

Before I get Prospero all up in my grill, I hasten to add I have no particular problem with pot smoking, as long as a) it’s not done by my husband or child; and b) it’s done in a place where it won’t affect my own personal safety — which is to say, not behind the wheel. I have no interest in it personally, having reached a point where I most often cut myself off alcohol after two. The way I look at it, the world is already full of attractive substances that will make me dumber, from Facebook to poorly executed LOLcats. I don’t need any more.

I should add this: De facto legalization seems to have made the air a little more herb-scented. In my unscientific observations, I see pot appearing more often in the police reports I see, smell it more often on the street. Some guy was smoking a blunt in the butcher shops at Eastern Market this weekend. Just standing there, self-medicating in front of dozens of people, no effort to conceal it at all.

Two “dispensaries” have opened in our neck of the woods in the last couple of weeks, both on the Detroit side of our border. This is the story behind one of them. I guess Big Daddy got what he needed from medical marijuana. (Although I’m puzzled by the math in the story. It says a work injury and subsequent convalescence pushed Big Daddy from 300 to 600 pounds, and that treating himself with marijuana allowed him to shed 250, which means he’s still 350 pounds. Well, munchies can be a pow’ful thing.)

For what it’s worth, I’ll be surprised if it’s still legal in 10 years. It’s possible the legislature will tune up the law to everyone’s satisfaction, but I doubt it. Bigger fish to fry, etc.

Why the New York Times is worth whatever they’re charging; A.O. Scott on Charlie Sheen’s Detroit show:

You could say that Mr. Sheen and the audience failed each other. The ticket buyers did not show him the “love and gratitude” to which he felt entitled, and he did not give them the kind of entertainment they thought they had paid for. But you could also say that the performer and the audience deserved each other, and that their mutual contempt was its own kind of bond. The ushers, in their black gold-braided uniforms, retained an air of inscrutable dignity in the midst of an orgy of depthless vulgarity. Everyone else in the room — onstage, backstage, in the $69 orchestra seats — had to swallow a gag-inducing, self-administered dose of shame. And no, the journalists who traveled to Detroit to gawk and philosophize at the spectacle are not exempt from that judgment.

What is this horrible man, Clarence Thomas, doing on our Supreme Court?

Via LGM, a little wit from Krugman.

Finally, a tax-season cautionary tale of stupidity: Don’t be as dumb as this TV anchor, who thought, because she was on the teevee and everybody else did it, that she could deduct the cost of all her work clothes, as well as her contact lenses, teeth whitening, manicures, hairdressing, and thong underwear.

Monday commences now. Have a good one, all.

Hey, look what my sister found in her cache of our old family stuff:

This was our mom’s old typewriter, barely used. (By us. As I said yesterday, I preferred the Smith-Corona Sterling.) Serial numbers peg its manufacture to 1938, and Pam reports they’re fetching good prices on eBay, so that’s where it’s going. I hope it goes to some hipster enthusiast and not to someone who will carve it up and make something silly, like this steampunk wristband (speaking of Brooklyn hipsters):

Although I have seen some cute Etsy stuff made of old typewriter keys — bracelets and cufflinks and the like. Stuff like this. I guess that decision — to leave intact or disassembled for parts — is up to the buyer.

My mother was 18 in 1938. The time, it do fly.

And now it is 9:05, and I have an appointment to give blood in 25 minutes. I’m as tired as a rented mule and hope it’s not due to anemia — I guess I’ll find out. So right to the bloggage:

One of the amusing things about all the movie action here is the props that get left behind. The Chinese North Korean police station from the “Red Dawn” remake stayed in place for a while after they left, and there have been other things. Jim from Sweet Juniper ran across one the other day. Funny.

Well, I’m glad somebody else noticed. Yay, John Stewart.

The rest of the day’s political news is simply too depressing for words. With that, I limp toward the weekend. Have a good one, all.

This isn’t my idea — it’s John Carpenter’s, my former Grosse Pointe buddy who now lives in Chicago — but it’s a good one, and I’m stealing it. A little background:

Today’s issue of the Metro Times features a remarkably lousy interview with Elmore Leonard. It’s lousy for many reasons, starting with the cliché on the the cover (“The Dickens of Detroit”) and running throughout the copy, which in several thousand words manages to turn up practically nothing about the man that isn’t already known. With no obvious hook — a new book or movie to promote — the writer asks no questions that haven’t already been asked a million times. Leonard gives the same answers he’s already given a million times, which makes him look like a bore, but what else can he do? How many times can he describe his writing routine, or why he thinks the movies made from his books almost all suck?

What’s more, there are some remarkable omissions. There’s no mention of “Justified,” the TV series based on his work, which is running new episodes now and would have presented some new ground to plow, had the writer noticed. There’s no mention of his son Peter, who recently launched his own writing career and now appears with his father when he (pére) is book-touring. And there’s a ton of description of Leonard’s painstaking research that fails to mention that he doesn’t do his own research anymore. He hasn’t for years. He pays a guy to do it for him, which is an unusual arrangement right there. His researcher, Gregg Sutter, has been the subject of many stories in his own right, and I for one find their relationship interesting. But Gregg isn’t mentioned anywhere.

You expect crap like this from Entertainment Weekly, but not from the alt-weekly in Leonard’s own hometown, which should know him better than anyone.

But that’s not the point of this. The point is that if someone is looking for a fresh angle on Leonard, I have an idea. Or rather, John Carpenter had it: We need a Dutchday in Detroit.

Dutchday — I like the one-word usage better than Dutch Day — would be based on Bloomsday in Dublin. The whole city celebrates on June 16, the day described at great length in “Ulysses,” in which Leopold Bloom wanders the city and has lots of interior monologues. Among the many activities of Bloomsday is to retrace Leopold’s steps, stop at places mentioned in the novel, and read those passages aloud.

I think we could easily put together a tour of Detroit where we could do the same thing. There would be some problems I can see right up front. Leonard’s books range widely over the metro area, from Detroit to Macomb to Oakland to Port Huron, and doing it by bus wouldn’t be the same thing. So, say, we’d limit it to those places that can be easily reached by bicycle. A bike tour of Elmore Leonard venues, on a weekend close to his birthday, which I believe is in early October. So, a bike tour of Leonard’s Detroit venues in the fall, one of the prettiest months of the year here. With a small PA system for the read-aloud portions, which you could tow in a bike trailer. It would all wind up in some pub for lager and discussion. Maybe the Dickens of Detroit could be persuaded to join us for a signing, and to sell a few books. Now that’s a story, Metro Times.

Who’s with me? I’m serious.

If anyone in Baltimore hasn’t done this with the works of Laura Lippman, they should do that, too.

So, bloggage:

So now it’s a right-wing group here in Michigan who’s gone a-FOIAing for college-professor dirt, that’s if you describe union activities as dirt:

The Mackinac Center, which describes itself as a nonpartisan research and educational institution and receives money from numerous conservative foundations, asked the three universities’ labor studies faculty members for any e-mails mentioning “Scott Walker,” “Madison,” “Wisconsin” or “Rachel Maddow,” the liberal talk show host on MSNBC.

The Mackinac Center hasn’t stated a reason for the request — it doesn’t have to — but the conventional wisdom is that public employees are prohibited from political activities on company time or with company resources, so if they can find one e-mail where a professor says, “I saw on Rachel Maddow that the governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, is a fink, and that he lives in Madison,” well, jackpot!!!!!

Note to the Mackinac Center: One of the libraries at Wayne State is named for Walter Reuther. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. I don’t know what to say about this, other than: Enough. I know it’s fashionable in some circles to fly-speck every minute of public employees’ time, to find whether they’ve cheated, somehow, using “taxpayers’ time” to send personal e-mail or shop for shoes online or whatever. I know every job in the world includes some down time, which may be used to call one’s doctor or fill out NCAA brackets or whatever. Let me know when it gets ridiculous, but for now, this is cheap bullying and harassment, and the people who run the Mackinac Center should be ashamed.

(Most people know other conservative groups are doing this in Wisconsin, and if you haven’t read the target’s extremely reasonable response, you should.)

A couple of you have asked me, over the years, why I wasn’t more taken with Jennifer Granholm, the now-former governor of Michigan. She appears on national chat shows from time to time, and always impresses the rest of the country as attractive, personable, reasonable and articulate. She is all those things. She is also not much of a leader, who let two terms pass while the state’s economy went into a ditch, without doing much more than talking about it — in a very articulate manner, granted.

Now she’s taking a page from the Evan Bayh playbook. She just accepted a richly compensated seat on the board of Dow Chemical.

A Michigan company, granted. Still. I’ll also grant the absurdity of a conservative editorial writer calling this “a payoff” for tax breaks Granholm steered the company’s way when she was in office, as this happens regularly in Republican politics, and is called Works Well With Business. Still. The ex-guv and her husband both recently accepted two-year teaching positions at the University of California at Berkeley. I guess this is part of the let-the-well-refill strategy all politicians seem to think they deserve once they leave office.

Finally, an obit for a San Francisco food writer, whom I wish I’d known. Among her last words: Never eat margarine! A woman after my own heart.

Work beckons. Have a great day, all.

Yesterday’s highlight: I met Detroitblogger John, the genius writer behind the stories at Detroitblog and their dead-tree versions in the Metro Times. (The former publishes more pictures; the latter pays him money, so I always click both.) I’ve known his name for a while, having wheedled it out of a filmmaker working on a documentary based on one of his stories. (This one.) I looked him up online, saw that he’s employed as an editor at a newspaper concern that never, ever publishes stories like the ones he writes, and took momentary pleasure in my accurate guess when I first stumbled across his work online — newspaperman. I don’t know much, but I know a prose style.

I didn’t try to contact him otherwise, having once exchanged an e-mail with him in which he said he keeps an anonymous byline because of his employer’s prickliness about freelancing. Besides, I’d already expressed my fangirl love; what else would there be to say?

But yesterday, when I walked into my department chairman’s office and found him talking to someone, and was introduced to John Redacted, the first thing I did was to blurt out, “I know your secret!” What a tool. I could share a cab with Colin Firth and never feel the need to tell him how much I love him. But writers? I lose all self-control.

“I think most people know by now,” he said. Well, that’s good. A man deserves credit for great work. I gather that he’s reached a rapprochement with his employer over the freelancing, but chooses to keep his profile low. Wise.

Then I asked something that’s been knocking around my head for some time: “Do you think Jay Thunderbolt would be amenable to having a spec screenplay written about him?” Cuz, you know, nothing is quite as visual as a six-foot-five-inch chain smoker whose face droops to one side and always wears a black suit with a bulletproof vest underneath. And runs a strip club out of his house. He already looks like a taller, younger, more facially paralyzed Christopher Walken.

“Sure,” he said. “He’s all about self-promotion.”

Don’t none of you folks steal my idea. Although I’m surely not the only one to comprehend his awesomeness. I was trying to find that story a couple weeks ago, I ran across another — apparently MTV did a piece on him for one of their series. Money quote from the show hosts:

“The thing about Jay is he probably hasn’t left Detroit in 30 years. He hasn’t flown in, God knows how long. When we booked him a flight his first question was, ‘How many of my guns can I bring?’ His second was, ‘Could you get me a smoking seat?'”

When you’re as awesome as Jay, you don’t need to leave Detroit. The party comes to you.

So that was yesterday. It also included a bowl of carrot-ginger soup from Russell Street Deli. Win-win.

Before I leave today, I have an RFK — request for kindness. Or to make it even more low-pressure, call it a request for karma, or even a DOYITAWC (direction of your interest to a worthy cause). One of our number, who comments from time to time as Velvet Goldmine, has a daughter who’s been invited to a National Youth Leadership Forum program at Yale this summer. It’s pricey, a deposit has to be sent pretty soon, and the money isn’t in this month’s budget. VG — I don’t think she’d mind if I told you her name is Melissa, and she’s the sister-in-law of my trusted friend Lance Mannion — is in a cash pinch. I told her that if she had a PayPal account, I’d send her a few shekels, and I just did. If you feel like sending a few of your own, the linked e-mail is qwerty1017 at ay-oh-ell dot you-know-what. (You can figure that out, right?) One of the great things about PayPal is, you can send any amount. I look at this as the online equivalent of a kid knocking on your door selling candy bars to finance a band trip. I always give those kids a fiver or so, so why not someone in Connecticut?

I stress that this isn’t an endorsement, I’m keeping no records, everything is between you and VG, and if you’d like to ask her any questions privately, you can send her an e-mail.

And is that all? I think that is all. Have an outstanding weekend. We’re expecting freezing rain!

I guess everybody wants to talk about last night’s Chrysler ad. OK. Let’s all watch it first; this looks like a nice HD version:

Wow. This is probably the seventh or eighth time I’ve watched it, and it keeps getting better. The opening shots are of the Rouge complex, the vast field of ominous smokestacks on the south side that you see from I-75 as you enter the metro area. It is not a pretty sight. It’s the sort of thing that if you were, say, a middle-aged woman coming to town on a house-hunting trip with your husband and little girl, preparing at midlife to pull up stakes and start over in a new city, and the day was gray and cold anyway, and suddenly the freeway starts to rise and you’re looking down at a place that looks like a set for a dystopian sci-fi flick featuring killer robots and toxic-avenger zombies — if you were that person, you might wonder what you’d gotten yourself into. (Not that I would know anything about that.)

Not only that, but the scene was shot in winter. No Pebble Beach ocean vistas or green mountain switchbacks or Bonneville salt flats with picturesque dust clouds, just bare trees, leaden skies and those clouds that roll in at Thanksgiving and don’t roll out until Easter except for once in a while in winter, when they are replaced by single-digit temperatures. Yep, this is the industrial Midwest, all right. The people we see on the street — Door Man and Dapper Man in Crosswalk — are African-American, as is the Fist. But not everybody. Look, a pretty skater. Are those real Lions doing roadwork? Can’t say. But it’s snowing, it’s cold, the manhole covers can’t contain the steam that rises up from below.

Is this hell? No, it’s Detroit. (And it’s a lot cooler.)

Now we see more of the car, because of course this is a car ad. If you’re an Eminem fan, or even know his face, you’ve already figured out who’s driving. After all, that’s his music on the soundtrack, along with…is that a gospel choir? Oh, man, they are going to go right up to the edge, aren’t they? And then here we are at the Fox — great marquee message, just fabulous — and yes, that is a gospel choir. Careful, Marshall, gospel choirs have been the ruin of many pop artists; they must be handled like plutonium, careful careful…

“This is the Motor City. And this is what we do.”

Perfect. In another venue, it would have played as bombast, but this is the Super Bowl. It’s where bombast goes to recharge itself, after it’s tired from visiting with Rush Limbaugh and Emerson, Lake and Palmer. This is where Apple dared to compare itself to George Orwell, where the Budweiser Clydesdales honored 9/11 victims, where a former presidential candidate made a joke about getting a boner for Britney Spears. You can’t go too far here, or if you can, no one has done it yet. And you came a little close, but not really. And you did it with such style. Ten out of 10. I hope the car’s half as good. You’re certainly going to sell a shitload of them here.

I hope this doesn’t signal the moment when Detroit Chic suddenly goes mainstream. If it does, I hope I can sell my screenplay first.

Elsewhere on the ad front, I can’t really speak with authority, as I only had the game on for background noise and didn’t watch all that closely. But, in general:

Darth Vader/Passat — very cute. However, I really wish I hadn’t read this obnoxious blog post about it first.

Groupon — ooh, edgy! I feel provoked! It’s so provocative! Actually, I’m not sure I trust Groupon anyway. I’ve used them once, for an opera ticket last fall, and felt I got what I paid for, i.e., a terrible seat for half price. But the half off stuff just seems wrong. From what I’ve heard, you offer at least a 50 percent discount, and then split the rest with Groupon, which means your discount is now 75 percent. I suppose the idea is to bring in new business, but I suspect it also brings in chintzy customers who tip for shit. Someone else, enlighten me.

The rest are a blur. No, I remember the Kia Optima, the epic journey. That was worth the time.

So. Another Monday, under a Monday-in-Detroit kind of sky. It’s been snowing on and off for three days, and finally, I feel like we have enough. I’ll feel differently in another month, but for now, the blanket seems just about right.

And now I have to get to work. Not in a Diego Rivera-mural sort of way, but in my own fashion. I risk repetitive strain injury! My collar is…well, at the moment it’s a turtleneck. Have a good day, all.

Hate to say it — I was really looking forward to a true blizzard — but what hit last night wasn’t anything close. Total snowfall of maybe four or five inches. Lots of wind, which made driving difficult, but the apocalyptic scenario promised all week fizzled. When will I learn? Take the forecast, divide by two. I did just check the weather radar, and there’s another big blob moving through at the moment, so we’ll get more, but the worst is over, and it wasn’t all that bad.

I did finally get enough sleep last night, with Kate being off school. Our district is infamous for never calling snow days, but they did today.

So now I’m drinking coffee and reading about Egypt. Also, thinking about my Arab students at Wayne State, who have been one of the great pleasures of this job. Many of them could easily make the grade at places like Michigan, but I suspect they come from conservative families who wouldn’t allow their sons — but especially their daughters — to leave home for a college dormitory. So much the better for me. I discovered a kindred spirit, i.e., a fellow Mitch Albom non-fan, in one, a girl who wants to be a sportswriter. Big hockey fan. She goes to Red Wings games in a jersey and matching hijab.

I just sent her this story, which I posted on Facebook last night. Delta airlines just did a special edition of their in-flight magazine all about the wonderfulness that is Detroit, a real boosterama of in-flight journalism. When I saw it was a million pages and stressed such unknown, uncovered stories as the blooming artists’ community and film industry, I gave it a pass. So I’m grateful someone else didn’t, and found the part where Albom is asked what he loves about the city, and he replies:

“I can walk into a coffee shop and see people reading my work or clipping columns to mail away, to give their loved ones a piece of home. As a newspaper columnist, there is a real sense of the community embracing you as one of their own wordsmiths — and that’s one of the reasons I’ve never left.”

This is an old theme with our boy, and he’s written several astonishing columns pledging he’ll never leave because you love me so much!!!! (Meanwhile, people who work close to him will tell you he’s looked many times for his next local fan club, but can’t find one worthy of him, i.e., a media market with four pro teams, a sizable newspaper and a radio station that will host his show and meet his salary demands, which speaks very well of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles, in my opinion.) Anyway, let me see the hands of anyone who believes Mitch Albom has ever walked into a coffee shop and seen a single soul “clipping columns to mail away.” He’s not even trying anymore, but I don’t think they put the A-team on this project in the first place, as just this brief, four-question visit with Mitch includes a usage error (Detroit is “family-orientated”) and misspells the name of Joe Louis Arena.

Anyway, I think my student will get a kick out of that.

OK, it’s time to go outside and get a-blowin’. I think I spent 14 hours at or near a keyboard yesterday, and frankly, I’m real damn sick of it. A swell day to you, whether you’re digging out or digging in.

Perhaps you’re wondering what the genesis of my problem is with Charles Pugh, current Detroit City Council president and former numbskull TV reporter in Fort Wayne. Reader, I’ll tell you.

Back in the 1990s-ish day, Pugh did a story on the well-known link between the Super Bowl and domestic violence. You remember that? Rising testosterone combined with cabin fever and erratic blood-sugar levels caused by weird snack foods and brought male tempers to a boil, and they bounced their wives all over hell ‘n’ gone. For a couple of years, this was an established fact that all the lifestyle sections and (especially) TV stations liked to make a fuss over around the end of January.

Only guess what? It wasn’t true.

An enterprising Washington Post reporter asked to see the data, and it turned out the whole contention was based on one study, and the authors of the study said the data had been misreported and twisted by people with an ax to grind. You can read the whole story at Snopes, if you’re so inclined.

Anyway, at least two years after this, after it had been discussed and put through the usual journalistic mea-culpa wringers, Pugh did a story for his station about how domestic-violence shelters are flooded with black-eyed women on Super Bowl Sunday. I think even his sources knew it was b.s., but hey — publicity! And so the one woman who appeared on camera was careful to say she noticed an uptick in services “during football season,” which also covers a lot of other stressors, including the start of school, cold weather, the holidays, and well, you get the idea. I wrote a note to the news director and Pugh himself, asking for an explanation, and discovered what it feels like to shout down a well. Neither responded. What is TV, anyway? Just a few moments in time that no one even gives their full attention to. La-di-da.

So last night I’m doing one of my jobs, gleaning the fields for stories about health care, and what do I turn up but this:

When fans flock to the Dallas Cowboys’ stadium on Super Bowl Sunday, few will be thinking about anything other than touchdowns and tailgates.

But nearby, in hotels, motels and on street corners, Texas authorities say a “dark side” will exist, one where children are sold for sex by pimps. And those sex traffickers are descending on the area.

“People are thinking of the Packers and the Steelers and the game on the field, having a good time and Super Bowl commercials. Most don’t think about a 12-year-old being forced to dance naked,” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told ABC News.

And this:

ATLANTA — Pimps will traffic thousands of under-age prostitutes to Texas for Sunday’s Super Bowl, hoping to do business with men arriving for the big game with money to burn, child rights advocates said.

And this:

While football fans are eagerly anticipating the Feb. 6 Super Bowl showdown in Dallas, some state officials are gearing up for the big game’s dark side: the surge in human trafficking that tends to accompany major sports and entertainment events. “What we’ve learned is that sexual trafficking, sexual exploitation of children in particular, is all about supply and demand,” says Ernie Allen, president of the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children. With more than 100,000 fans descending on Dallas, that demand is going to be great. There is a “looming potential explosion of human trafficking around the Super Bowl,” says Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott, who is expecting hundreds of girls and women to be brought to the area.

The second story, from Reuters, is instructive. I’m going to do something I don’t normally do — quote more than three paragraphs or so, just so we can go through it and see if we can spot all the weasel words and agenda-laden sources. This entire story rests on two rickety legs, “child rights advocates” and the Texas attorney general. Ahem:

As the country’s largest sporting event, the game between the Green Bay Packers and the Pittsburgh Steelers will make the Dallas-Fort Worth area a magnet for business of all kinds.

That includes the multimillion dollar, under-age sex industry, said activists and law enforcement officials working to combat what they say is an annual spike in trafficking of under-age girls ahead of the Super Bowl.

“The Super Bowl is one of the biggest human trafficking events in the United States,” Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott told a trafficking prevention meeting in January.

Wow, really? Tell me more:

Girls who enter the grim trade face a life of harsh treatment and danger, according to a Dallas police report in 2010. Few who emerge are willing to speak about it. Tina Frundt, 36, is an exception.

Now married and living in Washington D.C., Frundt was lured into sex work at 14 after she fell for a 24-year-old who invited her to leave home in 1989 and join his “family” in Cleveland, Ohio.

That family consisted of the man and three girls living in a motel. When Frundt declined on the first night to have sex with her boyfriend’s friends they raped her.

“I was angry with myself for not listening to him, so the next night when he sent me out on the street and told me … (to earn $500) I listened,” she said in a telephone interview.

Frundt paced the streets for hours and finally got into a client’s car.

When she came home in the morning with just $50, her pimp beat her in front of the other girls to teach them all a lesson and sent her back onto the street the next night with the warning not to return until she had reached the quota.

The scenario was repeated night after night as Frundt’s pimp moved his stable across the Midwest. Any sign of rebellion led to further beatings. Escape seemed out of the question.

“I was a teen-ager in a strange town with no money and no place to go,” she said. She finally escaped by getting arrested.

Frundt’s story is terrible, for sure. Notice it has nothing to do with the Super Bowl.

There’s some more stuff about how awful a teen prostitute’s life is, and then we’re back to the news peg:

“At previous Super Bowls, pimps hired cab drivers to turn their vehicles into mobile brothels,” said Deena Graves, executive director of child advocacy group Traffick911.

Up to 10,000 adult and under-age girls have come to previous Super Bowls, said Jerry Strickland, communications director in the Texas attorney general’s office, who acknowledged that precise figures are hard to gauge.

“The statistics are a moving target. They (under age sex workers) can’t be counted in turnstiles like ticket holders,” he said in an interview.

Can you give us a specific, Deena Graves? One arrest made in one of these moving brothels? One cab driver who took the cash to turn his rear-view mirror up? At least Jerry Strickland seems to know he’s carrying his boss’ water. Note the “up to 10,000 adult and underage girls,” which is sort of amusing. When Detroit hosted the Super Bowl five years ago, there were public and private parties galore, and you have to figure at least some working girls were there; I know I was told high-end strippers were happy to come and work as Jenna Jameson’s lingerie models at the party she threw. But “up to” is a wonderfully elastic term, and by saying that number includes adults, well, you’ve sort of muddied your own story. Anyway, it’s not like they can be counted with turnstiles! Onward:

Law enforcement agencies and advocacy groups rescued around 50 girls during the previous two Super Bowls, said Graves. Six were registered on the Center for Missing and Exploited Children website. One had been trafficked from Hawaii.

“Even one rescue is considered a success,” said Frundt who now advocates for exploited girls and has founded a girls’ treatment center and a safe house for girls in Washington D.C.

Finally, a link between the game and the crime. Too bad it’s vague and utterly unverifiable. “Around 50” during two previous games? Was that 25 per game, or 50 each year? How many were rescued by law enforcement, and how many by those convenient advocacy groups? Six were registered, only we can’t tell you who they are, alas, as sex-crime victims.

Finally, the feel-good ending:

To fight the trade, authorities, child welfare advocates and the airline industry are collaborating.

Representatives from American Airlines, Delta, United, Quantas and American Eagle are holding a training session to help them spot signs of trafficking. Nancy Rivard, president of Airline Ambassadors International, will also work with another 100 flight crews to distribute materials on flights.

Some 67,000 people signed a petition on www.change.org opposing sex trafficking as part of a campaign by Traffick911 called “I’m Not Buying It!” that is supported by 60 nonprofits and faith-based groups.

That campaign has also attracted heavy hitters like Dallas Cowboy Jay Ratliff, a three-time Pro Bowler, who made a public service announcement entitled “Real men don’t buy children. They don’t buy sex.”

Ratliff, who himself has two daughters, is recruiting other National Football League players for the campaign.

“You hear of sex trafficking overseas,” he wrote in an email from Hawaii where he is playing in the Pro Bowl. “But you never imagine it is happening in the United States.”

Training will happen. A petition has happened. A PSA has happened. And the Texas AG will be on the alert.

Please note that I am not questioning whether trafficking in underage prostitutes happens. We know it does. I am questioning whether it has any connection whatsoever with the Super Bowl. Why not the U.S. Open, or the Olympics, or the All-Star Game? Those events all bring large numbers of out-of-towners into a strange city to watch sports; are they less likely to get their freak on with a 16-year-old captive? What is it about the national pro football championship game that tempts so many to hitch a ride on its coattails? Is it something about the violence on the field, or the ridiculous, dead-of-winter, what-else-is-there-to-write-about hype that covers everything from advertising to the food pages (super dip ideas for your super spread!) that makes those left out want to latch on to the media gravy train?

I don’t mind a story on how to make a cheese ball in the shape of a football. But this sort of thing pisses me off. We’ve been burned once by this sort of piggybacking. If I were the NFL, I’d be throwing flags all over the place.

Speaking of which, this was also a health story last night:

Suffering an emotional loss in the Super Bowl may be hazardous to a fan’s heart health, a new study suggests.

Oh, bollocks it is.

Little Miss Grumpy, sitting here waiting for her snowstorm. Pantry is stocked, snowblower is gassed, bets are laid. Kate’s taking 12 inches, I’m going for eight, even though we’re in the purple band (forecast of 12+ inches) on the maps. We both think there’ll be a school cancellation. She still has to do her homework. Because I hope she’ll get good grades and grow up to be something other than a credulous journalist.

So I’m waiting for Snotorious BIG. Photos tomorrow, I hope. Have a good one, all.

Jeff TMMO has asked me to address the big news from last night, although it was really the big news from Monday: Mark Bittman is dropping his Minimalist column from the NYT, but starting an op-ed and magazine gig with the same paper, moving on from recipes to ruminations and analyses of U.S. food policy.

Jeff seems to mourn the loss for the food pages. I’m thrilled for the other sections’ gain.

I guess I should have mentioned it sooner, but as owners of the two Bittman cornerstones — “How to Cook Everything” and “How to Cook Everything Vegetarian” — I have paid less attention to his column, save for those “101” blowouts he does from time to time, the 101 salads piece, or the make-ahead Thanksgiving dishes, or whatever. I learned what I needed to learn about cooking from Bittman a while ago, and I think he’s going to be a wonderful voice on the opinion pages.

In fact, I’ll go out on a limb and predict that within five years, Bittman will win a Pulitzer Prize for commentary. He’s that good, and besides, the ranks of commentators in the dailies has grown so thin, the juries will be desperate to hand one to a fresh new voice. When Kathleen Parker and Leonard Pitts win the Big P, you know it’s time.

And judging from the lively discussions we have in this space about food, food policy, eating and all the rest of it, he’ll have no shortage of thought-provoking material. I can’t wait.

Meanwhile, what about the other news last night? I’m talking about Chris Matthews yelling at some Tea Party d’bag over their shameless use of Michele Bachmann to deliver their propaganda last night. While I congratulate Matthews for being one of the few journalists (on TV, anyway) who actually tells people they’re not answering the question he asked, all his spluttering isn’t going to change anything or anybody, so maybe the answer is to not pay attention to Michele Bachmann. Works for me.

And the Oscars! Nothing really really surprising there, was there? Brian took umbrage over Hailee Steinfeld being nominated for best-supporting when she was clearly in a lead role, but that’s the way Oscar rolls. Promising ingenues who hit one out of the park in their first role are almost always supporters, especially if they’re minors. It’s the Rookie of the Year prize, and all you have to do is think of all the people who have won it who never did work of the same caliber again. There was Haing Ngor (“The Killing Fields”), who wasn’t even an actor; Marlee Matlin (“Children of a Lesser God”), who still acts, but whose work is strictly at the TV-drama skill level, and, of course, Mo’Nique. I just hope the Oscars aren’t a total walkover for “The King’s Speech” this year. A very fine film, but there were many others, and those big consensus winners don’t age well. When was the last time you saw “Gandhi” on cable and stopped to watch even a minute of it? Or “Out of Africa,” for that matter? (Actually, I will watch “Out of Africa,” but only for Meryl Streep. Robert Redford is laughable.)

A quick pass by the bloggage before our mortgage man stops by. We’re refinancing our house, and I need to limber up for signing my name 400 times.

Via Lawyers, Guns and Money, a site you can waste a minute or an hour on: Better Book Titles.

I’ve been giving Tom & Lorenzo a lotta love of late, but what the hell, they’re on a hot streak, like today’s Dress Libs with Zooey Deschanel.

Someone should do this with “It’s the End of the World as We Know It:” A visual map of “Total Eclipse of the Heart.” Actually, someone should do a master’s thesis on the pop-culture afterlife of songs like this. Exhibit A, of course: the Rickroll.

Finally, today is my state’s 174th birthday, or so one of my tweeps tells me. Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam, circumspice. Happy birthday to the pleasant peninsula.

Off to flex my fingers. Good day to all.

It seemed the sun would never rise today, and I imagine it will be in a big hurry to get out this evening. I understand there’s a reason for that. It’s also the reason I’m feeling lamer and blanker than usual this morning. It couldn’t possibly be that I had four glasses of wine on a mostly empty stomach last night. As I had the night off and we were home before 11, I followed them with an over-the-counter sleep aid, ’cause I had the rare opportunity for a full night’s sleep and I didn’t want anything short of a wailing smoke alarm to penetrate it.

And sleep I did, but I still feel wrapped in cotton wool. After breakfast and two cups of coffee. Oh, well. If you’re not allowed a third cup four days before the winter solstice, when are you allowed?

And, not making excuses here, but I have work to do on a story. So let’s go to the bloggage early, shall we?

(Third cup, in progress.)

You’ve probably heard of PolitiFact, the St. Petersburg Times’ website, which strives to bring light to the darkness by fact-checking claims made by politicians. It was the 2009 Pulitzer Prize winner for Public Service, i.e., the best of the big P’s, and has been widely emulated around the country — there’s a version of it in Michigan now, run by a non-profit think tank, and original-recipe PolitiFact has licensed its name to other papers, as well. Seven states have PolitiFact sites now. (Don’t worry, Indiana. I’m sure you’ll get one…some day.)

This week, PolitiFact named its Lie of the Year. Before you click, see if you can guess. Anyone? Anyone? OK, Iet’s cut to the chase:

PolitiFact editors and reporters have chosen “government takeover of health care” as the 2010 Lie of the Year. Uttered by dozens of politicians and pundits, it played an important role in shaping public opinion about the health care plan and was a significant factor in the Democrats’ shellacking in the November elections.

Remember, earlier in the week, when we discussed the Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and how they game the system? They have company: The Center for Science in the Public Interest, another group of nutritional busybodies. Yesterday they were a player in this story, which had the conservative blogs and Facebook rockin’ with outrage:

With perfect Grinch timing, a consumer group has sued McDonald’s demanding that it take the toys out of its Happy Meals.

The Center for Science in the Public Interest, an advocacy group, claims it violates California law for the hamburger chain to make its meals too appealing to kids, thus launching them on a lifelong course to overeating and other health horrors. It’s representing an allegedly typical mother of two from Sacramento named Monet Parham. What’s Parham’s (so to speak) beef? “Because of McDonald’s marketing, [her daughter] Maya has frequently pestered Parham into purchasing Happy Meals, thereby spending money on a product she would not otherwise have purchased.”

The story goes on to harumph about Parham’s lack of parenting skills, blah blah blah, to the point that you can almost ignore a few key phrases:

You’re probably wondering: How is this grounds for a lawsuit? No one forced Parham to take her daughters to McDonald’s, buy them that particular menu item, and sit by as they ate every last French fry in the bag (if they did).

No, she’s suing because when she said no, her kids became disagreeable and “pouted” – for which she wants class action status. If she gets it, McDonald’s isn’t the only company that should worry. Other kids pout because parents won’t get them 800-piece Lego sets, Madame Alexander dolls and Disney World vacations. Are those companies going to be liable too?

No, New York Daily News, all the conservative bloggers in the world and MMJeff, they aren’t. Filing a suit and seeking class-action status isn’t the same as winning a suit or getting class-action status. I know we have many lawyers in this house, who can maybe speak to the possibility of Ms. Parham’s suit getting anywhere beyond the pages of the New York Daily News, but at this point, it hardly matters. They’re in a New York daily newspaper, their message has been amplified, they’ve put McDonald’s on notice that it has wandered into the crosshairs of the media-savvy Center for Science in the Public Interest and WIN WIN WIN.

The CSPI is the group behind the “health scares” of the ’90s, which really showed how this ridiculous gamesmanship works, the “studies” that showed fettuccine alfredo, Chinese food and movie-theater popcorn is bad for you. Remember the phrase “heart attack on a plate?” That was theirs.

Another Xtranormal winner: Why your waiter hates you.

Did you know Coozledad has a pet chicken? And that he talks to the animals, just like me? He does.

Phone’s ringin’. Gotta go. Have a great weekend, all.