Joumana Kayrouz is the T.J. Eckleberg of Detroit. For a couple of years now, her face has dominated every third billboard across the metro area, advertising her services as a personal-injury lawyer. This seems to be what she looks like more or less au naturel:

She has an arresting appearance, with white-blonde hair, lashes and brows. This was her first billboard image:

Lately a new billboard is replacing it. Through the miracle of technology, she’s grown a giant pair of lips:

I crossed the street behind this bus yesterday, and up close, you can see how crappy the Photoshopping was; they didn’t even try to match her actual lips:

I hope she’s a better lawyer than her art director was a Photoshop artist.

And that is your Friday eye candy (if you like wax lips). But it starts us off on a thematic foot, as our first bit of bloggage today involves the subject of how women look. I realize calling Rush Limbaugh a vile sack of pus is like calling the ocean wet, but Laura Lippman posted this today, and it left me wondering, for the thousandth time, where the bottom of this man’s loathsomeness really is. By WashPost blogger Melinda Henneberger, she notes her (extremely mild) reaction to the Time magazine breastfeeding cover, and Limbaugh’s reaction to it. Ahem:

First, Limbaugh pronounced me “a classic inside-the-Beltway feminist, classic professional feminist. You know what that means.” I do?

“See, TIME Magazine blew it,’’ Limbaugh explained. “You know why it’s not working with the feminist women? Because the woman on the cover of TIME Magazine was too pretty. I call your attention once again to Undeniable Truth of Life Number 24. Dare I speak it again? Brian’s nodding his head yes. Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream. Here is Melinda Henneberger, who’s somewhat trying to be funny here, but in all comedy, there is a grain of truth, and she’s quite upset.

This is what Melinda Henneberger looks like. Just, y’know, for reference.

Finally, Donna Summer is dead, and I won’t apologize for enjoying her music. Disco had its day, it came and went, and sorry, but the Bee Gees were only the worst part of it. Summer wasn’t the best, but she was pretty good. I could never bring myself to hate disco. It was pop dance music, and a huge relief from the self-important blowhard rock’n’roll of the time. (All we are is dust in the wind, right?) And then punk came along and was a huge relief from disco. It all passes away, eventually. Right, D?

Have a great weekend, all.

Do you and your partner squabble over what to watch on TV in the evenings (assuming you’re so inclined; of course I spend my evenings reading great literature, and thinking deep thoughts)? I ask because I’m trying to sample the first few minutes of “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding” and my husband just referred to TLC as “the hillbilly channel.”

I take offense! The L clearly stands for “learning.” And I am learning about American gypsies.

And these people are some serious hillbilly gypsies.

As a reporter, your only connection with gypsies is the semi-annual press releases issued by the police department, about traveling home-improvement scams — old women who get only half their house painted (or painted with watery paint that disappears after a single rain), people who get their wallets lifted when someone comes inside for “interior measurements,” the usual. So it’s a little odd to see a show about people who make their living by buying a load of asphalt in the morning, and go door to door throughout the day, trying to sell it. Somewhere this must work, but man, these aren’t my people. I keep yelling at the screen to slam the door and call the Better Business Bureau.

They certainly do favor a ridiculous style of wedding dress. Tonight they’re making some poor pregnant teenager drag 75 pounds of satin, tulle and Swarovski crystals around Nowhere, W.Va., and all to be married in a tiny church, followed by a reception at what looks like a VFW hall.

And that will be our dose of reality TV for the night, the week, and most likely the month, if not the rest of the year. America is such a freak show; no wonder we’re on top of the world.

Another work-at-home day, but not so much bloggage today. But a little, both rants of a sort:

First, Gin and Tacos on that magical threshold beyond which an American plutocrat cannot fail. In this case, it’s Jamie Dimon:

I guess that whole “maximizing shareholder value” thing, the Commandment that has done more to turn this country into Dogpatch than anything else in the last three decades, doesn’t apply when it comes to doling out money at the top.

We might expect that the shareholders would be inclined to save money rather than spend it, and certainly to avoid rewarding people who perform so poorly. But a stockholders’ meeting is little more than a boys’ club operating under the pretext of a transparent process of corporate governance. The kind of heavy-hitting institutional shareholders who decide these votes – mutual fund managers, fellow banking executives, and so on – are either in Dimon’s position or expect to be there someday if they can make it to the other side of the shark tank. Perhaps getting to the top, into a position like Dimon’s, is so difficult and unpleasant that the people who manage to do it feel entitled to endless compensation to make it all seem worth it.

And here’s Angry Black Bitch on just another day in the Missouri legislature, which this week honored native son Rush Limbaugh:

Limbaugh arrived with 40 state troopers (did my tax dollars pay for that?) and was smuggled into the Capitol where Republican lawmakers and their staff greeted him much like North Koreans used to greet Kim Jung Il…and then Limbaugh was honored at an invitation only ceremony on the House floor that was closed to the public.

The other day at work we were looking at the current electoral-vote breakdown for the November election, and someone remarked that calling Missouri a toss-up is wishful thinking in the extreme. It’s as much a part of the modern confederacy as Mississippi. Looks like it.

With that, the hour grows late and bed beckons me. I hope I dream of anything but gypsies, Jamie Dimon or the sex tourist from Cape Girardeau. A good Thursday to all.

Folks, I went to a city council meeting tonight and now would happily drive spikes in my eyes rather than stare at my laptop another minute. I’d like to get up early-early and get a bike ride in. So let’s do an all-bloggage Tuesday, eh?

Via 4dbirds, Germans express puzzlement that such a religious country as ours opposes health care for all. They don’t know us very well, do they?

How John just-an-umpire-callin’-them-strikes-and-balls Roberts orchestrated the Citizens United case. Foul!

T-Lo look at Cathy Cambridge. And look and look and look, because she looks fabulous. Off to bed.

Was it just yesterday I went off on Rant 13B at lunch? That is, Why The Hell Is Facebook Worth $96 Billion? Probably. I deliver it roughly every other week. I don’t get it — a few ads on the sidebar for weight loss? How does it add up?

The only thing I can figure is, the data and privacy and all the rest of it we share with them, so willingly and unthinkingly, is worth a lot. A LOT.

Over time, I’ve been trimming my Facebook apps to the bare minimum I need to interact with people I want to interact with. I’ve had to resist stuff like Words With Friends, but given my problems resisting crap like Angry Birds, that’s probably a pretty good thing. But by doing so, I’ve been spared the mortifying — to me, anyway — updates I get on what everybody’s reading, delivered via “social reader” apps. Did I need to know my friend’s wife has a fondness for Kardashian news? No. Did Famous Journalist really check out a story about Kate Upton’s breasts? Shudder.

Still, there’s a sense, every time I run through my news feed, that I’m selling all my information short.

So it’s with joy, real joy, that I read that social readers are collapsing — the Washington Post’s, but also the Guardian’s and others. There’s a nominal explanation from the WashPost, something about Facebook modules, whatever they are, and I guess it’s plausible. But I can’t help but hope there’s something to it. I love the WashPost like few other newspapers– er, “content providers,” but there has to be a limit. I’ll register at their site, and they can presumably track what I’m reading there, but Mark Zuckerberg can kiss my bum. From casual observation, my opinion isn’t a minority view.

Sharing is one thing. Window-peeping is quite another.

Social media is essential for journalists, but man, I wish it weren’t.

Any “Mad Men” fans in da house? Of course there are. Any guesses as to what it cost to land the rights to “Tomorrow Never Knows” for last night’s episode? (And may I just say, what a great choice. My favorite on “Revolver,” and I didn’t know until today that the things that sound like seagulls in the first few seconds are actually tape squeals. Learn something new every day, etc.) A quarter-mil. Yikes.

We have a local story unfolding here, yet more of the endless corruption shenanigans in local government. Long story short: An overpaid county development officer left her job last fall, willingly, pocketing a year’s salary as severance, which would merely be wrong and appalling, except that the county is bankrupt and laying off less fortunate employees. A few raised a stink, which became a big stink, and throughout it all, this particular development officer has stuck her elegant nose in the air and refused to apologize for any of it, other than to say she deserved every penny because she worked so hard.

Over the weekend the Freep broke a story about some of the outside jobs she held, for alleged nonprofits that existed mainly to guide even more dollars into her overflowing pockets:

Turkia Awada Mullin had only one Cadillac, but she had two monthly car allowances to pay for it.

One was for $500 from her $200,000-a-year job as chief development officer of Wayne County. The other was for $500 or $600 — she couldn’t quite remember — paid by the Wayne County Regional Jobs and Economic Growth Foundation, one of several nonprofit groups Mullin headed in addition to her county job.

Did she really need $1,000 a month to run her car? Mullin was asked last month.

“I think it’s more than that with the mileage I put on it,” she said.

Poor, poor, greedy, greedy baby.

The tower of Monday has been scaled. Let’s hope the rest of the week goes more smoothly.

I’m not going to go on about Dick Clark. Y’know? R’spect, but let’s not go overboard. I was a fan of many of the shows that were all bigfooted out of existence by “American Bandstand,” and what were they? “Hullabaloo,” “Where the Action Is,” and, of course, Jerry Rasor’s “Dance Party.” You never saw that one? That’s because it was a local:

Years and years and years later, I hung out at a club with our own Jeff Borden, and every so often they’d project clips from “Dance Party” over the dance floor, just for the ironic frisson of it all, because the music in the club was more likely to be the Ramones or Human Sexual Response. Good times.

Anyway, I sort of lost it after Clark insisted on coming back to “New Year’s Rockin’ Eve” after his stroke. I didn’t know whether I should be a) happy that a stroke victim wasn’t having any of that societal disapproval of slurred speech; or b) horrified. You can’t speak clearly anymore, Dick! It’s a tragedy, but you had a good run! Let someone else take the helm! You’re 100 years old!

Knowing when to leave — that’s a tough one. I guess he figured it out for himself. Andy Rooney was about a decade overdue. Something to remember for all of us contemplating retirement.

I’m done with my horse-eating project at work and did so just in time to enjoy my two (2) craft beers, along with a falafel wrap at my new favorite local. I read a couple of chapters in “American Gods,” which I can’t decide if I like or not. It’s certainly a page-turner, but I’m sort of allergic to this genre. Can it rise above? Time will tell. It’s a great premise — a sort of underground trip to find gods of yore and beyond-yore. We shall see. In the meantime, it was good falafel accompaniment.

Bloggage?

Who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb? Hell if they know.

The University of Michigan joined Coursera. Have any of you guys ever done one of these things? Some of those courses look sort of interesting.

Just a few more days to get through, and then it’s May, and may I just say? That will be awesome. Have a great downslope of the week.

Yeesh, what a cold, miserable day. Please, never mind that I didn’t wear a coat. It’s mid-April, and I’m done with coats. A sweater was it, then, which underlined the misery, but I didn’t have to be outdoors long, and ah well — you have to go through a few of these days every spring, and Tuesday was one of them.

Tomorrow will be warmer. Winter is going.

Which seems a nice transition into the new season of “Game of Thrones.” I’m watching, yes, although this is the beginning of the long slog of the middle of “A Song of Ice and Fire.” I petered out somewhere toward the end of “A Storm of Swords,” and there’s still another doorstop of a volume before “A Dance of Dragons,” and guess what? Winter has not yet come, although it’s autumn, and the book after that one is, I believe, “The Winds of Winter,” and there’s another book beyond that, and yikes, I just don’t have time. Catching up via HBO seems the most prudent course of action. If anything, the visuals are even more arresting than last season — the budget must have gotten a boost — but I remember this passage of the story as mostly about rain and blood soaking into the mud of Westeros, along with the usual dragons and ice-zombies and the like.

And speaking of dragons, we saw “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” over the weekend, which settled any question I might have had about that series — ick. It was competently done, even beautiful in that David Fincher-esque way, but I’ve had it with perverts, rapists and fucking Sweden. Also girls on motorcycles, coffee, mysteries outlined via charts on walls and Rooney Mara. Where are the romantic comedies of yore, I ask you. I just scanned the trailers of coming attractions on the Apple movie-trailers site, and didn’t see a single thing that looked like much, and quite a bit that looked like dreck. “That’s My Boy,” in fact, might be the worst of the lot.

Back to novels for the summer, I fear.

So. Sayonara, Ricky Santorum. It’s a sign of this crazy year that he lasted this long, but there are many others. Here’s a column from the Indianapolis Star about Richard Mourdock, who is challenging Richard Lugar in the primary and just might win:

In politics, there are partisans who truly believe in and fight for their principles and policy ideas as they seek to craft solutions to big problems. And then there are people like Mourdock — unbending ideologues who believe the only acceptable outcome to any argument is a complete victory by their side. In a diverse nation, such victories are largely impossible. And, so, under this type of thinking nothing gets done.

That’s your choice, Hoosiers.

Hell, let’s look at the wind map instead. Very soothing.

Happy Wednesday. Think I might take Kate to see “Titanic 3D,” if she’s up for it. Our hearts will go on.

Monday, Monday (da dahh, da da dah dah). So much to do (da dahh, da da dah dah). Instead have some links, while I go take a shower so I can leave at 6:30 a.m. for Lansing, and here my singalong collapses somewhat. Fortunately, the links aren’t terrible:

Laura Miller at Salon stretches a bit to link Thomas Kinkade to George W. Bush, but not too-too far — they both peddled kitsch, after all. I didn’t know — or rather, I knew and then forgot — that the painter of light showed evidence of a serious drinking problem, and his premature death may well have been a result of same. His empire of kitsch seemed to be in financial trouble, but that’s nothing new; as a feisty interior decorator back in FW told me years ago, “Once he started whoring himself out on QVC, it was all over.” The story contains a link to a 2001 Susan Orlean profile of Kinkade. She visited the Knight Wallace Fellows my year, and revealed she’d made a bet with him, that “a major American museum” would have a show of his work “in (Kinkade’s) lifetime.” It was for a million dollars, too. I guess this means Orlean wins, but I don’t know how she’d collect. Anyway, it sounds like there’s not much left in the kitty.

People have known it’s possible to hack those flashing highway signs for some time. Someone hacked one on I-94 night before last to read, “Trayvon (is) a (big racial slur that sometimes trips internet filters).” What a world.

How my colleague Ron French almost killed Mike Wallace (sort of). A good one.

Finally, a supercut of various famous actors’ first screen appearances. Because why not.

By the time you read this, I’ll be sleepin’. Or drivin’. Happy Tuesday to all, and let’s hope it goes fast.

An all-links Friday update? Sure, works for me. Opening Day was clear and sunny and beautiful, but damn cold. I was standing on a corner waiting for a light to change near Wayne State, and the wind gusted in my face, and what did I do? I moaned. It’s April. Time for crazy weather to stop this shit and start being spring. Those two weeks of summer were a cruel taunt. Easter Sunday will be rainy and barely 60. But it’s time to strip the cover off the boat and get this show on the road, eh?

Best Tumblr I’ve seen in a while: Texts from Hillary.

But still, my fave is Animals Talking in All Caps.

It’s a tough town: Second law-abiding Detroiter in a week shoots and kills an intruder. Any more of this, and the ghost of Charlton Heston will come to town.

Are any of you even at work today? Happy Passover, and a somber Good Friday. And who’ll be watching “The Ten Commandments?” I will.

Thank our lucky stars above for the Mad Style postings of Tom & Lorenzo. Those two queens may not have lived through it, but they understand fashion in times gone by. It so happens this era on “Mad Men” — 1966 — is when I first started paying close attention to what women wore, and what it said about them. This post is dead on. In fact, I think that whole party scene was staged to give T-Lo something to write about.

And if you can’t get enough — and who can ever get enough ’60s fashion? — Slate has a slideshow with commentary by the costume designer.

Spring was here and not so much anymore, but the calendar says yes and so it’s time to start thinking Easter. And what does Easter mean? Newspaper-sponsored Peep contests, that’s what — so let’s check out the winners of the Washington Post Peeps Show contest, eh? A fun way to blow five minutes.

And while we’re speaking of Easter and birds, Coozledad’s story of how a four-legged chicken came to live on his place:

Our first chicken was a by-product of a Perdue farm. Every twenty thousand iterations or so of their bloodline of Cornish Rock moribunds they get a chick that manages to form up from two yolks, crack the shell, get up on its multiple legs and avoid the cruel fate of being eaten by its thousands of broodmates. A friend of ours whose father contracted for Perdue told him about us, and he hit on the idea that we might be the perfect kind of idiots with which to place one of these grievous instances of broiler production.

He was right. When my wife broached the subject at dinner I was naively enthused. I pictured a sort of plush chicken car with legs instead of tires.

When it arrived, huddled and wheezing in its travel box, it looked more like a late model sedan pulling a homemade trailer brimming with liquid shit. I wasn’t just deflated, I was a little horrified.

If I had more to do, I’d be the president. Good night and good Thursday.

A wild weather evening in our part of the world yesterday. I’m sitting in the car place, waiting on an oil change and watching the news footage scroll by, and it’s a standard-issue tornado damage — houses reduced to matchsticks, the usual. But no injuries. Presumably someone will get a splinter or a nail puncture before the mess is cleaned up, but it’s times like this we should all join hands and thank civilization for our infrastructure, the things we all take for granted — weather alerts, in this case.

I remember turning my ankle on a sidewalk-repair job in Buenos Aires that didn’t have so much as a strip of yellow tape to warn the pedestrian. The Argentine capital has many charms, but for all our whining about the lawyerizing of American culture and so forth, we live in a pretty safe country, all things considered.

(If I were writing this screenplay, this is the part in the story where I am killed by a stray bullet fired by an armed citizen practicing their right to self-defense, perhaps with ammo purchased from Michi-Gun, the actual name of an actual gun store in the next strip mall. Actual motto: “We aim to please!” God bless America.)

Speaking of which! Here’s an actual movie trailer for an actual movie with that actual title — God Bless America — which seems to consist entirely of sweet Freddie Rumson from “Mad Men” on a killing spree, taking out people who chap his ass. You know, the standard antihero thing. I’m interested in what sort of arc Bobcat Goldthwait might be able to squeeze out of that story, but not enough to pay to see it. Even with Freddy Rumson.

If you feel like going on a killing spree — or even just stamping your feet a little — watch Stephen Colbert take apart Rick Santorum’s latest. I heard the NPR version today, in which Santorum claims his previously quoted remarks — that he thought Puerto Rico could become a state, but only if they were willing to make English the “main language” — were twisted. OK, whatever. I’m sure he believes it in his heart.

The hell with that — how about a stop by the South by Southwest festival. Thanks, Hank, for the tip on this lively read of the music part of the deal. Lively turns of phrase: The Mean Jeans are “a Portland trio who sound like the Ramones with a colony of fire ants dumped down their boxer-briefs.” Yeah.

And for me, that’ll have to be it. Enjoy your weekend. I’m spending mine grading papers.