One of the presets on my car radio abruptly changed format a few weeks ago. To country. Because it’s too depressing to see what’s become of commercial radio in search of another, I left it there and commenced one of my every-few-years anthropological examinations of the strange world of country music.

It lasted about two days, and alas, wasn’t very surprising. Like so much pop music, it sounds like it’s written by a robot and recorded by an ad agency, the better to shorten the trip between the radio and the beer and/or truck commercials they all seem to be written for.

I do find country music refreshing, for about 15 minutes. I’ve always enjoyed it as a form of pop music that deals with adult problems and concerns, from the Pill to D-I-V-O-R-C-E. But of course, those songs are 40 years old now. The stuff I heard this week was mostly, as I said, good-time ditties about drinkin’ beer and drivin’ trucks, and sometimes self-reflective self-pity about farmin’ and America. Nashville lyricists do have a way with words, though — rain makes corn, corn makes whiskey, a little bit of whiskey makes my baby frisky, etc. But otherwise, it was a little like visiting Real America. I may be a citizen, but I don’t feel at home there.

A colleague of mine used to do this comedy routine at lunch sometimes: Stevie Wonder struggles to write “I Just Called to Say I Love You,” the treacle that announced to the world that “Innervisions” and “Songs in the Key of Life” were well in the past. He’d do Stevie at the piano, tearing his hair out: “I just called to say…what? Let’s have lunch? What’s happening? I know! I love you!”

That’s country music these days, alas. Obvious, dumb, beer, trucks.

Or maybe I’m just not tuned into the right station.

Bloggage today? Here’s a compare-and-contrast to show you what a good writer and a bad one can do with the same subject matter — Mitch Albom and Ta-Nehisi Coates. It’s embarrassing.

I’d have more, but in my scans tonight, I can’t find a headline that doesn’t start with “5 Ways,” “8 Ways” or “How  X Happened, And Why You Should Care.” God, sometimes I hate the internet.

A friend of mine here has a truly encyclopedic record collection, and when we were chatting online about the Westminster dog show, he recollected a garage-sale find of many years back, an album of songs about dogs. Children’s music, mind you, not country-western weepers about a latter-day Ol’ Yeller. Did he have any on MP3? But of course. Enjoy the one about terriers:

(No, it’s not as good as this one, I fear.)

And you dachshund lovers do the same:

So. I wish I had more to report today, but it was one of those. Woke up to -5 temperatures, which at this point is just one of those OK-so-no-early-dog-walk days. It was sunny, though. Just have to white-knuckle it through to Saturday, after which: Photo posts only next week. I will try to make them interesting photos, but no promises. I know I had time off only two months ago, but I’m feeling the need for this one — not to get away from work, but to get away from winter. I know you understand.

That said, there’s still some good stuff to share.

My friend Dave Jones, doing a pretty standard Winter Olympics column (hey dudes, figure skating isn’t so bad), which nevertheless has some very funny moments:

Even when the women aren’t classically beautiful, they are interesting looking. I mean, from what world is Meryl Davis? Were she only born 40 years before, Gene Roddenberry surely would have signed her for a single episode to be one of those women Captain Kirk used to fall in love with when he beamed down to warring planets and they’d look into each other’s eyes and the soundtrack would turn to quavering fifth-octave mellotron. Meryl Davis is evidence we are not alone.

And finally, an ad for a personal-care product. I’ll say no more. I’ll just lay it down on the table and …slip out of the room.

Perhaps it’s because I’m from Columbus and always found the words on The Limited’s shopping bags silly (New York Paris London) or perhaps it’s because I once interviewed the company’s CEO without a single PR person in the room, but I always will read stories about its business empire.

And while I believe Abercrombie & Fitch was formally spun off a while ago, it found its contemporary life as an arm of The Limited. Also, its CEO is a crackpot plastic-surgery addict control freak whose business life virtually sprouts good stories. So I read this one in New York magazine this week, pegged to the fact the thrill is gone. Sales are down, and the mojo that used to work doesn’t work anymore. Alas, Mike Jeffries, aforementioned CEO:

Above all, Jeffries, who was once married but is now openly gay, sought to sell an image of American beefcake sexuality as he saw it: a world of hairless, amply muscled men tussling in a pastoral Eden. That this world was so highly homoeroticized—the roughhousing in the catalogues seemed perpetually on the point of turning into a full-on orgy—is one of the most poignant ironies of his success. He was persuading straight jock teenagers to buy into a gay man’s fantasy of a jock utopia.

The story isn’t vicious. While frank about Jeffries’ many eccentricities and jerkishness, you’re left more with a picture of Puff the magic dragon after Jackie Paper stopped coming around, as rendered in American boardrooms. He’s been stripped of much of his power and, at 69, appears to be waiting for the ax to fall on his blonde-dyed head. But it was such fun (for him) while it lasted!

In many ways, Jeffries’s most impressive accomplishment was not the signature Abercrombie style but the signature Abercrombie attitude, with its bluntly brash appeal. As one former employee put it, “The only bad news was no news. Controversy was what you wanted.” Consequently, the list of PR disasters past and present is too lengthy to fully detail, but the more notable flare-ups include the following: the quickly recalled line of Asian-themed T-shirts, which featured men in rice-paddy hats and cartoonishly slanted eyes; a line of thongs, marketed to girls as young as 10, with the words wink-wink on the crotch; an issue of A&F Quarterly that included a user’s guide to having oral sex in a movie theater; and the disingenuous joke-apology to critics that appeared in the same periodical in 2003: “If you’d be so kind, please offer our apologies to the following: the Catholic League, former Lt. Governor Corrine Wood of Illinois, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, the Stanford University Asian-American Association, N.O.W.”

Ha ha ha. Come back, Jackie Paper:

But sensibilities have since evolved; casual prejudice is not as readily tolerated. Today’s teens are no longer interested in “the elite, cool-kid thing” to the extent that they once were, says Gordon, the Michigan professor. “This generation is about inclusiveness and valuing diversity. It’s about not looking down on people.”

I’m sure he has a nice retirement to look forward to, and plenty of money for botox.

My sister did some business with the Limited, back when she was selling phone systems. The headquarters were in an enormous building, with cafeterias scattered throughout, each one decorated with advertising images from a particular brand under the corporate umbrella. The guys she worked with always wanted to eat in the Victoria’s Secret canteen.

So, how are you spending the week? Olympics, yes of course, but is anyone watching Westminster? I am. I could watch those dogs trot up and back all day. And who is the winner in this house? Wendy with the crooked leg, Jack Russell Terrier No. 1.

Not much other bloggage today, although this story about a heroin overdose in Wisconsin broke my heart.

Supposed to be close to zero tonight. Keep those fleece jeans out, I guess.

My Russian teacher and I were marveling at the news during the last winter Olympics, that the next one would be in Sochi. It’s a resort at a fairly southerly latitude, for starters, and, well, it’s Russia. The country has galloped ahead on the usual emergent-economy trajectory, but an Olympic Games is a herculean task to mount, and this isn’t China.

Turns out we might have been on to something:

Some journalists arriving in Sochi are describing appalling conditions in the housing there, where only six of nine media hotels are ready for guests. Hotels are still under construction. Water, if it’s running, isn’t drinkable. One German photographer told the AP over the weekend that his hotel still had stray dogs and construction workers wandering in and out of rooms.

My favorite is this:

My hotel has no water. If restored, the front desk says, “do not use on your face because it contains something very dangerous.”

That’s from Stacy St. Clair of the Chicago Tribune.

I wonder if any of us really realizes how much safer our so-called nanny state keeps us, by insisting on things like animal control and water purification. I remember when we were in Argentina a decade ago — hardly a third-world country — and coming across broken sidewalks, which may or may not be under repair. No orange cones, no caution tape, just whoopsie daisy, there’s an 8-inch drop.

We should let the market decide whether water is safe to splash on your face, don’t you think?

So. I was driving to Ann Arbor today, listening to Tom Jones’ version of “Sixteen Tons,” and it reminded me of something I read a while ago — that Jones is married to the same girl he chose back in the hometown, pre-famous days. A quick Google, and what do you know: They’ve been married since before I was born:

“We grew up together, come from the same place, have the same sense of humour. That has a lot to do with it. How do you walk away from somebody that you get along so well with? What’s the point?

“And we do still have a lot of laughs together. The first thing my wife asks me when I get home is: ‘Have you heard any good jokes lately?’”

It doesn’t exactly sound like passion — he admits to having had many infidelities and a long-term affair with Mary Wilson — but after all this time, more of a tea cozy of a marriage, warm and comforting and familiar. She looks like an ordinary girl from Wales who married a handsome boy and then found herself being swept up by his crazy career.

Remember: The only two people qualified to judge the quality of a marriage are the people in it.

Guess what we’re doing tonight? Waiting for snow. Yes! Snow! Quite a lot of it, too, although not as much as some. Then another deep freeze.

At least it’s a short month.

Neil Steinberg had a great blog yesterday, about his intention to see the entire Ring cycle at Chicago’s Lyric Opera in 2020. For you non-opera fans, this is the four-part, 15-hour magnum opus of Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Niebelung,” the most operatic opera of all. Staging it is the Mt. Everest of opera, and watching it is pretty much the same. In Chicago…

The first opera in the cycle, “Das Rheingold,” will be staged in the 2016/17 season, with the other three, “Die Walkure,” “Siegried” and “Gotterdammerung” performed in each subsequent season, with the whole megillah, as Wagner definitely would not say, being performed — three complete Ring Cycles — in April, 2020.

Mark your calendars.

What I liked about it, though, were his observations on Big Works, and why they’re still important:

…like a mountain, a massive work calls to you. Not by its pure massivity, mind you. There are plenty of works that are long, multi-part 19th century romance novels and such, that have fallen into deserved obscurity.

But certain long works endure into our Twittery time, not because they’re big, but because they’re also good. Very good, wonderful, something that becomes clear when you gird your loins and finally sit down and read them. If they weren’t, they’d be forgotten. People don’t hold onto these things because they should, but because they have to. War and Peace is the template for every Barbara Cartland novel that followed. It isn’t tedious — well, much of it isn’t — but filled with love and conversation, with blood and battle, with war and, umm, peace. It’s a great book. That sounds obvious, but so many years of it being a “great book” sometimes obscure that. Tolstoy knew his stuff.

I need to read a great work this summer. So much depends on translation, though, and how do you choose the right one? I started “Dr. Zhivago” when I found a copy at a vacation house we rented years ago, but absolutely couldn’t penetrate it. Just show me one hint of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, I kept thinking. Nothing doing.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. So many great books have been adapted into something else, and necessarily sliced down to a shadow of their original selves. We need to approach them as something completely new. On the other hand, Steinberg does a nice job explaining why the Ring is pretty much the single source for all opera jokes in pop culture; it is where the fat lady sang, after all.

OK, a quick cut to the bloggage, because this has been one long icy-lumpy-fuck week:

Columbusites! Remember Larry’s bar on High Street? Here’s a lot of old pictures from the place. I wasn’t a regular, but I loved that place.

I just found this, but it MUST BE SHARED. Of course Wendy’s day-care center posts daily photos; how else would her humans get through a day without her? (This is from Monday, obvs.)

Finally, can the Marlise Munoz case in Texas get any worse? Hard to imagine. How awful.

Let’s all have a good weekend.

If I get through the North American International Auto Show Charity Preview tonight, aka the Car Prom, it will be a damn miracle. Things just aren’t going my way. For weeks, I’ve been wondering if my poor knees can stand three hours in high heels, and to be sure, the heels I have don’t really work with my dress, but fuck it, these are about the most comfortable heels I can find (they have cork soles), and some things have to give when you’ve recently lost an ACL.

But now it’s worse, as today, I was fetching one from the closet for a final try-on, and what happened? I dropped it on my foot. The heel landed with the feeling of a scimitar to my third toe, just blinding pain. Hours later, it’s a vivid shade of purple and it hurts to walk. Oh, well — pain is how ladies roll at formal events.

It’s been snowing, anyway. I may well schlep to the event in my L.L. Bean boots with my shoes in a bag. We’re already going on the People Mover; you can call me the Spirit of Detroit.

Ouch.

OK, I have to make this short, because the end of the week is nigh and, well, see above. I see Neil Steinberg is no fan of the new Chicago Cubs mascot, Clark the Cub. It puts me in mind of when the Fort Wayne Wizards moved to a new stadium, and rebranded as the Tin Caps, the historical reference for which can be found via Wikipedia. I got an email from a lurker on this blog, asking if I could come up with an alternative team name on very short notice. I suggested “the Rivermen,” which I’m still sort of fond of. But the Tin Caps is what it was, and what it has stayed. Go with God, Tin Caps.

A not-safe-for-work photo array, but hugely beautiful — a lovely yoga practitioner, doing so in stark nakedness. It’s one of those photo essays that’s so beautiful it transcends sex; I found myself mostly examining her musculature. I’m sure you guys will be examining something else, but be forewarned. Not for the office.

Finally, I know some of you remember Marcia, who used to comment here a couple of years ago. You might not know that her family hit a rough patch for a while, culminating in the death of her nephew, just weeks before his graduation from Duke law school. There’s a final chapter to the story, and it’s a good read. Drink it in.

A good weekend, all!

Boy, do I feel awful tonight. Nothing specific, just a lack of sleep woven with intermittent lower-abdominal pain stitched to the deep ache in my knee and sprinkled with the onset of cold weather overnight. Supposed to get down to the 20s. It snowed earlier. It was a thoroughly Monday sort of Monday.

Tomorrow, however, there will be a new Martin Cruz Smith novel on my iPad. I learned today it was not an easy book for him to write:

Author of the 1981 blockbuster “Gorky Park” and many acclaimed books since, Mr. Smith writes about people who uncover and keep secrets. But for 18 years, he has had a secret of his own.

In 1995, he received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. But he kept it hidden, not only from the public, but from his publisher and editors.

…Ingenuity, gumption, and others’ generosity have allowed him to keep working. “Tatiana,” whose title character is a journalist who writes despite life-threatening dangers, was produced in an especially unusual way, which he also hid from his publisher and editor. In a room with a blue floor and a window glazed with prehistoric creatures, Mr. Smith perched on a wooden stool and spun out words while his wife, Emily, known as Em, typed them into the computer, gave feedback, and made his on-the-spot changes.

Sort of puts one’s own abdominal pain in perspective, doesn’t it? Probably bad clams.

So, with that? I think I’m going to bed. I leave you with Tom & Lorenzo, and yet another ghastly Miley Cyrus outfit. Let’s see how Tuesday goes.

I remember when my nephew hit puberty, and stopped smelling like a person and started smelling like a French whorehouse. Or whatever your preferred euphemism is for “too much cologne.”

I don’t know what it is with adolescent boys and their mustard gas-intensity fragrances. It must be some combination of anxiety over one’s rapidly changing body and — I don’t know what. But my nephew was hardly the only one who seemingly bathed in the stuff. The Axe Body Spray cartel could give any women’s personal-care product a run for its money.

So I immediately dived into Dahlia Lithwick’s hilarious piece about what happened when she went a solid week, wearing Axe and Axe-y products. She’s such a good writer; why confine her to the Supreme Court? Behold:

What happens when a fortysomething women walks around smelling like a 13-year-old boy for a week? Mostly nothing. As it turns out, ours is a culture in which, as a general principle, people don’t really feel comfortable commenting on your scent, even when it is so powerful as to be causing climate change. So even if you apply Axe before a funeral—as I did—nobody is going to grab you by the arm and ask you to please leave. I wore a heavy coating of it to a dinner party one night. Eliciting no response, even when I started helpfully jamming my neck into the other guests’ noses, I did learn from several mothers that the Wall of Axe (a naturally occurring phenomenon in which eight or more teen boys reapply Axe after phys ed, then stand in the stairwell together) has become so bad at some local schools that it’s been banned altogether. Another guest described a perennial teen rite of passage—the agony of spraying Axe down your own pants for the first time.

It’s a little anticlimactic; you see the premise and you expect to hear stories of rooms emptying and cats fainting, and it’s not quite that lively. But honestly, my hat is off to anyone who can olfactorily bond with a teenage boy like that.

I had a few boyfriends who were fond of male fragrance. I grew to the point where I would rather smell regular old b.o. and farts than CK1.

Tired, I am. I’m always tired at this point of the day. How about a dog picture? Wendy wants to be a meerkat for Halloween:

Something outside was very interesting.

Here’s Neil Steinberg, laying out a few of his least-favorite companies:

Maybe there is something about humans that just needs to hate something, and since I can’t find it in my heart to despise any particular group of people based on race, religion or nationality, I express that natural tendency to loathe by really getting my back into hating certain companies and their products, and not always rationally either.

It starts with Caribou. It goes on.

Wednesday. Ohhh-kay. I’m going to bed.

Because I have a very modest public profile as a writer, I get a lot of social-media connection requests from people I don’t actually know. Over time, I’ve developed a general rule: I accept nearly all friend requests on Facebook, followers on Twitter, whatever the hell they call it on Google Plus. And then I wait, and see what happens — what people post, how they use the platform in general, whether they feel the need to have a screaming bald eagle as a profile picture. If I like what I see, or feel neutral about it, I generally keep them around. If I don’t, I either bump them down several notches on the ladder, “hide” or just unfriend them.

They have to be pretty bad to be unfriended, but I was in a tetchy mood the other day, and unfriended someone I probably should have kept around. (Mood: VERY tetchy, come to think of it.) I did it because I kept seeing baldly inaccurate political posts in my feed, and it was one of those fuckitlifestooshortforthiscrap things. This time, I actually read one post, and followed the links all the way back. Here’s how one went:

OBAMACARE WILL ALLOW GOVERNMENT AGENTS TO ENTER YOUR HOME! linked to a slightly less hysterical post saying the same thing, which linked to a HHS website, which outlined? Anyone? Yes, a visiting-nurse service for patients who have difficulty traveling to a doctor — brand-new mothers, the elderly, the carless, etc. Those are the government agents. Nurses.

(I allowed one of these jackbooted thugs into my home after Kate was born. She told me I had a cute baby, and that breastfeeding would get easier.)

It seemed to crystalize something I’ve become increasingly aware of: No one reads anything anymore. And the social-media business model has this as its cornerstone. Just keep clicking, sheeple. Click, like and comment! Retweet!

Earlier this week, during the discussion of Yoffe’s rape column, attention fell on this sentence: “Researchers such as Abbey and David Lisak have explored how these men use alcohol, instead of violence, to commit their crimes.” Now, a reader with a room-temperature IQ could understand what she was saying here: That these perpetrators don’t hold a gun to a woman’s head, but keep refilling her glass. Nevertheless, this was a typical comment: “Someone needs to tell Emily Yoffe ALL rape is violent,” followed by the amen chorale. Don’t read. Forget comprehension. Just react!

Miley Cyrus, a woman who hardly speaks in Zen koans, gave an interview to Rolling Stone where she mentioned Detroit, and Detroit being as parochial as any tank town, the local media picked it up. The passage in question:

Miley’s transformation from America’s sweetheart into whatever the hell she is now kicked into high gear three years ago, when she went to Detroit to shoot a movie called LOL. “Detroit’s where I felt like I really grew up,” she says. “It was only for a summer, but that’s where I started going to clubs, where I got my first tattoo. Well, not my first tattoo, but my first without my mom’s consent. I got it on 8 Mile! I lied to the guy and told him I was 18. I got a heart on my finger and wore a Band-Aid for two months so my mom wouldn’t find out.”

Which a local TV station tacked onto a blatant traffic grab:

Miley Cyrus says she grew up in Detroit. How does that make you feel?…

Which prompted the usual responses, which ranged from “stupid bitch” to “she’s a liar.” And so a vapid pop star’s pedestrian observation on how she came of age was twisted into her somehow lying about an upbringing that’s been in every celebrity magazine in America, including Rolling Stone.

Nobody reads anything. Except you, of course. You’re reading this, and you understand it. Bless your heart.

So, bloggage:

This story cries out for satire, and maybe TBogg is up to the task, but man, just read this stuff:

James Hancock wanted to meet a woman who shared his core values. But when you’re a strict Objectivist, it can be a little tricky.

So he found a dating site catering to Ayn Rand aficionados. And he found one, and now they have…well, I guess you’d call it a marriage:

They now live with their 3-year-old daughter in North Walpole, N.H. Their dog, Frisco, is named for Francisco d’Anconia, the mining tycoon in “Atlas Shrugged.”

…Mr. Hancock says the couple’s shared Objectivist values ensure familial harmony. If their daughter doesn’t want to brush her teeth, they both agree that she has to do it. “There’s no back-and-forth or ‘well, just let her do it this one time,’ ” he says. “We know that if we don’t do this now, it’ll be worse later. So that’s logic and reason instead of just emotion and inconvenience.”

I don’t know how I missed Motivational Biden until now:

My new favorite person to see Tom & Lorenzo pick on is Allison Williams, daughter of Brian, co-star of “Girls.” She cultivates a sort of classic American/thoroughbred style that frequently comes across as boring. Or, as T-Lo put it, “She looks like a Chief of Surgery’s wife attending a hospital benefit.”

Attend the benefit of your choice this weekend, because it’s HERE.

The New York Times had a great piece on an old episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” one I saw once as a child and never again. Over the years, I’d ask others if they remembered it, and I think only one did. Thank God for him, because it almost seemed I’d hallucinated it:

“Remember that episode where Rob was convinced they’d taken the wrong baby home from the hospital?” Blank stare. (Except for Lance Mannion, who watched every episode of every show ever aired, evidently.)

Well, I didn’t. “That’s My Boy??” is a classic of the civil-rights era, and — critic Neil Genzlinger points out — a milestone of racial relations in TV entertainment.

The plot: Rob is recounting the days around little Richie’s birth. He’s getting ready to take Laura and the baby home from the hospital, and the nurse delivers the wrong envelope of jewelry. No, this is Mrs. Peters’ jewelry, Laura says, remarking that it’s been happening all week: She got Mrs. Peters’ flowers, and Mrs. Peters got her rice pudding. Their names are similar, after all — Peters, Petrie. This starts Rob thinking that maybe they swapped something else, too. Something more important.

The rest of the episode is Rob staring into the bassinet, trying to find any family resemblance. Finally, he calls the Peters, who live nearby, and tells them his suspicions. They agree to stop by that night.

The doorbell rings in the middle of a squabble between Rob and Laura, who refuses to believe the baby is anything other than hers. Rob goes to the door, opens it:

“Hi! We’re Mr. and Mrs. Peters!” And they step into the room. It’s Greg Morris and another African-American actress, although then she would have been a Negro actress. The studio audience is howling with laughter. Morris can’t keep a straight face, either. I remember laughing so hard in my own living room that I almost peed. It was one of the funniest moments of TV I’ve ever seen. Here’s a two-minute clip of the big reveal.

Genzlinger:

Today TV seems to push various envelopes with a vengeance, often clumsily so, trying for shock value in a world that is increasingly hard to shock. You have to admire the bravery and the unwillingness to tolerate any barrier, whether it be the one against gay characters or characters with disabilities or unsettling subjects like rape and child abuse. But you also sometimes are left mourning the lack of subtlety and art.

Carl Reiner knew what he was doing, that’s for sure.

I started writing this with some gusto, and then my connection started flickering again, so let’s get this going:

Make a man 300 sandwiches, earn an engagement ring! Jezebel takes it apart — hilariously.

Yet another reason Kid Rock sucks: His Malibu house — of course he has a Malibu house — has a stripper pole in the living room.

Thursday already? You don’t say.