Kate’s band had a gig last night. It was a Groundhog Day Eve event at one of the city parks. It was the usual clusterbump — the organizer thought “a PA system” referred to the one with speakers in the ceiling. Scott thought he could use the music school’s electronic drums, and he could, but we had to go fetch them. And then we got set up, and looked around. They thought it would be like the elementary school ice-cream social they played last spring, but it turned out to be even younger kids and a table of developmentally disabled adults. They were the final act, after the nature presentation on groundhogs.

“I feel like we’re in a Seinfeld episode,” Kate said.

“More like a Fellini movie,” I corrected.

But they did fine, even it was a little strange, their alt-rock repertoire with the little kids and the adults and the guy in the groundhog suit. But there was cake — how bad could it be? They finished the show with three verses of “I’m a Little Groundhog.” You don’t know that one?

I’m a little groundhog, furry and round
I’m coming out to look around
If I see my shadow, down I go
Six more weeks of winter, oh no!

I have it on video. I’ve been warned that if I put it on the internet, I will never be forgiven. Can’t really blame her.

So, happy groundhog day. Six more weeks of winter? We haven’t had six weeks of winter, period. Another ridonkulous day of above-40s temperatures, and the daffodils are now a full inch above ground. I’m thinking this is maybe it.

So, some bloggage?

Is there anything to say other than this? Don Cornelius is dead. One more line dance, for old time’s sake:

Happy Thursday, whether your groundhog sees its shadow or not.

Today was one of those days I was, as the kids say, so not looking forward to — breaking news happening in Grosse Pointe at a time when I can’t cover it, because I work for someone else now. However, when God gives you a job, he also opens a window, and through it can crawl a great student who, when you text him Breaking news. Call me, sets your phone a-jingling in about 60 seconds and then, when you explain that a local resident has been found dead in her car in Detroit, says, “I’ll brush my teeth, and then I’ll head down there.”

All of which makes me say: I am SO glad you’re here.

Seriously. It’s a tragedy, but when you have a competent person to help you carry the load, that’s all you can say. Journalists have to write a lot of stories we wish hadn’t happened. The good ones can get it down with minimal trauma to all.

Journo-peeps? If you have an internship to offer, you could do worse than Dustin Blitchok. He gets it.

Yeesh, what a day. Homicide, class and a full day for the Center. I don’t know about you, but when night fell, I dropped Kate at her Wednesday-night music lesson and went directly to the jazz club/restaurant a few blocks away, ordered steak and eggs and had a wonderful dinner all by my lonesome.

Eating alone with something to read: One of the great pleasures of my adult life. I’m such an eavesdropper.

So, a pic for today? How about Michigan, as seen from space?

Did you know Michigan has more coastline than California? It’s true.

The bad news: It’s frequently heaped with snow. Still.

Bloggage:

It’s sad when a famous person goes crazy, but when an obnoxious famous person goes crazy and refuses to shut up, that’s en-ter-tain-ment:

Victoria Jackson doesn’t want to meet at her house. “The Nation of Islam wants to kill me,” she explains apologetically in her inimitable shrill voice. Instead, she picks up a reporter at a Miami-area strip mall. Her weathered Honda Civic is adorned with “Nobama,” Marco Rubio, and Tea Party bumper stickers, and inside, it smells like it’s been fumigated with sweet incense.

She hurtles through intersections and down side streets, holding a Flip cam to her face with her left hand. Steering with elbows and the occasional pinkie, she opens a Bible inscribed with her name and quotes Scripture. Then she turns the camera on a reporter riding shotgun, whom she suspects is a socialist. “Don’t you think that some people are on welfare from cradle to grave,” she demands, ploddingly, “because the government is encouraging them never to work?”

Why did I ever take Lifehacker off my bookmarks? They know everything.

Farewell to the anonymous internet. Oh, Google. Why?

Happy Thursday to all.

Pix ‘n’ linx on a night when it’s so windy I regret that I live under tall trees. Only on nights like this, but they happen often enough that I pass an uneasy night every few months. We are paying for yet another April-in-January morning — nearly 50 today. And now the warmth must be banished. In 35 mph gusts.

So let’s ask Flickr for “wind” in the Creative Commons area. This is nice:

Thanks, Richard White. That’s a lovely country you have there. (England.)

Now, some linkage:

New York magazine, in what we all hope is hyperbole, promises us the slimiest campaign season ever. It probably isn’t hyperbole. Oh, I can’t wait.

If you want to feel better, though, here’s Gabrielle Giffords finishing the town meeting she started a little over a year ago, and didn’t finish. I love her bad-guys-don’t-get-to-win spirit. This is a great country.

Duff McKagan — yes, that one — on the SOPA affair:

The legislation’s meant to combat theft of creative works like movies and music from overseas web sites. But when I turned to the Twitter and Facebook, I saw an overwhelming dog pile of support against the bills. Excuse me, but where were you all when piracy started to decimate the music industry? Why didn’t you take a stand against that? Those free records felt good, huh?

The fury from the Internet class is that the broad language in the pieces of legislation will be bad for start-ups, might prevent the next YouTube, or give the government the ability to take down a whole site because of one link to copyrighted works. In short, they’re opposed to the legislation because they think it will be bad for the Internet business.

Bad for business. Anti-piracy legislation could be bad for the Internet business. It almost takes my breath away. Internet piracy has claimed half of the recorded music business, and made the prospect of making a living as a musician harder for artists of all rank and file. Why didn’t Google, or Facebook, or Wikipedia ever stand in solidarity with musicians, actors, and writers – most of whom have never known fame and fortune – as their works were stolen with no recourse on their sites?

You gotta admit, the guy has a point. Barn doors and horses and all that, but someone needs to say it.

And now it’s, what? Tuesday? Is that all? Seemed like a long Monday. Let’s hope it speeds by.

I think I’m starting to lose my perspective on media criticism. Have I been away too long? Am I cynical to the point of…cynicism? I need a reality check. Watch this, and tell me I’m crazy to think it’s — what’s the word I’m looking for? — vile:

It’s a long piece, and I’m sorry to ask you for 11 whole minutes of your time. Asking someone to watch Charlie LeDuff is a little like asking them to watch Morton Downey Jr., c. 1982. Is this a new thing? Is this what TV news people do now? Pose dramatically, do stupid visualizations of their narrative, and build an 11-minute piece out of the fact one’s grandfather was a “mulatto,” whatever that meant in the American South at early midcentury, and then have the nerve to call their piece about it — wait for it — “Black Like Me?”

You people who do genealogy research (Alex?) and are familiar with the racial issues it sometimes brings up (Alex!) are going to have to calibrate me a little. Because this is chapping my ass. I’m starting to believe I have found the next Albom. And that’s saying something.

I had a work-at-home day, and what a perfect day it was: Take Kate to school just as the sky was lowering, work near a window through a lovely, brief snowstorm, then watch it clear off and get all sparkly while the high pressure moved in with the cold air. A red-tailed hawk landed on my garage roof, and that cleared off the crowd at the bird feeder for a good long while. I rooted for the predator to find lunch somewhere, if not at our feeder.

And now it’s Thursday night, and I’m about to shut down the internet, because I understand Newt Gingrich is thundering at some CNN sap, and the only thing that can fix that is some “Project Runway.” But before I do, a little bloggage:

I’m late posting this from Charles Pierce, his account of How The Greatest Health-Care System In The World Works, an account of something that happens to someone, and likely many someones, every single day in this country:

I mention all of this because, tomorrow night, the five remaining Republican candidates will get up on stage and they will promise to repeal even the tepid, insurance-friendly reform of the way we do health-care in this country. Willard Romney will do this even though the tepid, insurance-friendly reform is one he virtually invented. They will have nothing to replace it. They will argue for “market-based” solutions. The above — that is a “market-based solution.” And, by the way, this is the kind of thing that zombie-eyed granny starver Paul Ryan wants to put elderly people through in place of Medicare. Phone trees. Automated voices. Hours of their dwindling lives on hold, waiting for purportedly live persons who won’t be able to help them. And zombie-eyed granny-starver Paul Ryan is considered by people in my business to be a serious thinker on these matters.

Every single one of these Republicans will make the argument that, because of the entire morning I spent dealing with the preposterous way we do health-care in this country, that I am a “freer” person than are the people in Canada, or New Zealand, or Germany, or Finland. That I had to spend an entire morning mired in bureaucratic absurdity means I have retained my “freedom” as an American.

I’m not up on Paula Deen, you guys. I don’t watch cooking shows for the most part, but I pay at least some attention to pop culture, and I knew she was known for buttery, sugary, over-the-top, borderline-white-trashy food. I didn’t really have many thoughts on her diabetes diagnosis other than to say that it’s too bad, until I saw this and fell to the floor, insensate. Bacon-wrapped, deep-fried macaroni and cheese? Oh-kay.

Finally, thanks to Paddyo, what it’s like to have a rabbit in your life, and apparently, no limit on what you’ll spend on vet care. Sweet, but crazy.

Oh, it’s so nice to watch “Project Runway” again, in real time. Lifetime has done its best to ruin it, but it’s still worth your time, if you don’t mind all those promos for “Dance Moms” along the way. Tonight’s challenge is to make a ball gown suitable for opening night at the opera. The winner was one of two or three that deserved it (Austin). Now here comes the boot. I’m thinking it’s going to be Sweet P. And yes! I’m right. I knew she was toast. Her dress looked like something you’d wear to a beach party, not the opera.

Reality television. It’s not my thing, but sometimes, it’s my thing.

Every so often I think about what the next new thing’s going to be, in any field. Not long ago we were talking about R.E.M., which broke up after 30 years. The Beatles were together for, what, seven? When was the last real new thing in pop music? Hip-hop, I figure — something no one had ever heard before, that enough people flipped over (and the right people hated) that it took its place in the parade. Same with TV. Reality TV made its first big splash with “Survivor.” A friend told me it wouldn’t last. “Reality TV is OVER,” he was always declaring. The last time he did, it was 2002.

Reality TV. Not over.

How about some bloggage?

A very oldie, but something I hadn’t read before, until someone unearthed it for the New Hampshire primary — Henry Allen on New Hampshire. Cruel and unfair, but it feels right to me. The place sounds like northern Michigan.

Six things I love about Detroit, by some Internet guy I should know more about, but don’t.

Matty Moroun’s terrible, awful, no-good, very bad week. And one that made applause break out in the courtroom.

I’m going to bed.

So this is it, then? Winter solstice? It doesn’t exactly feel like it — too warm — but given that it’s 8 a.m. and barely light, and that it’s raining and looks like it will be doing so for a while, then I guess this must be the place. Today the corner is turned. (Technically, not until 12:30 a.m. tomorrow, in my time zone, anyway.) Enjoy it, Argentina. Because we’re coming for that light. Starts now.

That last link is a sound clip, and somewhat NSFW, depending on your office. From one of my favorite movies-nobody-else-saw: “The Limey.” Roger Ebert gave it three stars, or a half-star less than what he gave “Horrible Bosses,” which was so bad I couldn’t even last through the DVD, and that’s saying something. It was amazingly crude, and do you know what it takes for me to say that? I, who once worked in newsrooms? How did we get to this point? One minute you’re laughing at the semen-as-hair-gel gag in “There’s Something About Mary,” the next a character in a Judd Apatow movie is dressing down another for shaving his balls in the bathroom and leaving the hair in the toilet, so that “my shit looked like a stuffed animal.” This was in “Knocked Up,” which later took a tonal shift to suggest the main character is positively changed by the presence of a child in his life. In other words, they girlied it up to make it suitable date-night fare, which suggests there are women out there who sat through the turd conversation en route to the baby-picture montage over the closing credits, and were pleased. What a world.

Although I hope “Bad Santa” comes around on one of the cable channels in the next few days. Because that was one that did crudity right. More or less.

Excuse me, we have a correction: Technically the winter solstice is at 12:30 a.m. tomorrow, I’m told. In my time zone anyway.

I’m still waiting for the coffee to kick in, so how about a picture I stole from a total stranger’s Facebook?

That’s our own MMJeff on the left. I guess he brought the gold to the infant Jesus, although think, Jeff: If you were traveling by donkey, preparing for the flight into Egypt, would a ginormous candlestick be a practical gift? Still, nice that you played your part in the living Nativity — you really are a Boy Scout, aren’t you? There was one last weekend at the church next to my Kroger store. The camel-wrangler wore the traditional burnoose over jeans and sneakers, and took a few calls on his cell phone while children petted his dromedary. If the wise men lived at this latitude, they would most definitely wear sweatshirts beneath their kingly finery.

Shoes are always the Achilles heel of the period costume. At how many renaissance faires have I watched knights and ladies touring the grounds in Tevas? The Johnny Appleseed Festival in Fort Wayne featured electricity-free carnival rides — I always liked the wind-up spinning thing — run by people wearing Nikes. The true non-farb Civil War re-enactor pays through the nose for a pair of true Civil War-era reproduction boots, which did not come in left-right configurations until afterward.

So, speaking of movies: Alan and I have finally accepted the inevitable, and are doing the years-overdue adult chore of writing our wills. We had the signing at the lawyer’s office yesterday. Without going into too much none-of-anyone’s-business detail, I was delighted to learn that the living trust we’ve set up features a “stuff” section, designed to dispose of particular valuables and/or personal possessions, should that be important to us. We can hand-write our wishes there, amend and cross them out, which strikes me as a very cinematic thing to have in one’s safe-deposit box. The first person I knew in life who had a significant relative die came back from the funeral with the disappointing news that wills aren’t all they’re cracked up to be in the movies. There was no dramatic reading in a lawyer’s office with the women all dressed in black, clutching hankies in their grief. There was no itemized list of goodies, with flowery legal instructions about their disposition, just some version of “I leave all my stuff to X, Y and Z,” and they can sort things out.”

I may, just for laffs, fill out this section with a list of identical distributions, all but the last one crossed out, to suggest a mercurial temperament I simply don’t have.

OK, so, bloggage:

The tea party takes the reins of power: The queer-bashin’ Troy mayor’s path through public service continues to be rocky, and this time it has nothing to do with her I-heart-NY tote bag. She and her confederates defeated a long-planned transit hub in that city earlier this week, by a 4-3 vote, bucking the wishes of the business community, which turned on her with a vengeance this week. The project came with $8 million in federal aid, but they reasoned that with the government drowning in debt, they must do their part, and said no thanks. The Chamber of Commerce was furious — do you know how hard it is for a suburban mayor in Oakland County to piss off a chamber of commerce? — and yesterday a remarkable letter leaked from a government-affairs manager from a major automotive supplier, saying he would put the word out in the business community that they “no longer consider the City of Troy for future site considerations, expansions or new job creation.” Wow.

The mayor, for her part, claims she’s heard “nothing but congratulations and accolades.”

Cathy Cambridge falls out in a black evening dress, looks smashing. I kind of wish she’d put her hair up for events like this, however, if only so we can ogle the rocks.

Perhaps some of you followed the link to the latest story about embarrassing College Republicans yesterday; I think Cooz posted something in comments. A roundup here, at Romenesko’s site. A student tweeted something offensive about the president: My president is black, he snorts a lot of crack. Holla. #2012 #Obama. You know what bugs me most about that? That stupid holla. Y’know: I’m a racist, but I still want to use hip-hop slang.

OK, the Great Christmas Cleaning Project begins. Holla!

It’s December, and time for the nation’s newspapers to clear the decks of any Pulitzer-worthy material they might have hanging around, but trust me on this: The three-part series the New York Times just concluded, about Derek Boogaard, a recently deceased hockey goon, is worth the time it takes to read it beginning to end.

Part 1 is here, with links to the rest of the series at the top of the page. I know some of you might have difficulty accessing NYT material, so it’s worth a Google to see if a non-restricted newspaper is running it off the NYT wire service. It’s really that good, a heartbreaking look at a boy who rose in the NHL by… well, this sums it up pretty well:

There is no athlete quite like the hockey enforcer, a man and a role viewed alternately as noble and barbaric, necessary and regrettable. Like so many Canadian boys, Boogaard wanted to reach the National Hockey League on the glory of goals. That dream ended early, as it usually does, and no one had to tell him.

But big-time hockey has a unique side entrance. Boogaard could fight his way there with his bare knuckles, his stick dropped, the game paused and the crowd on its feet. And he did, all the way until he became the Boogeyman, the N.H.L.’s most fearsome fighter, a caricature of a hockey goon rising nearly 7 feet in his skates.

Boogaard’s death was from an overdose of the prescription painkillers he took to live with his many injuries, although he had crossed the line into addiction some time before, and was in fact just out of rehab when he swallowed the pills that killed him this past May. The package has many links to supplemental materials, including YouTube videos of his most infamous fights. I’m not a hockey fan, but it reminded me of this two-year-old piece, most likely also behind a paywall, called “Why the Red Wings Don’t Fight,” about the Detroit team’s rise to greatness on the Russian model of the game, emphasizing well-rounded players in every position, rather than the stars-plus-enforcers North American lineup:

Fights have always broken out during physical hockey games, but in the 1960s it became a strategy. The Boston Bruins and Philadelphia Flyers used intimidation to win Stanley Cups between 1969 and 1975. Without players who specialized in fisticuffs, a team’s star players would be beaten to a pulp.

…Since the bloody ’80s, the NHL has been struggling to scale back fighting. It instituted penalties for coming off the bench for a fight and extra penalties for instigating. After the lockout season of 2004-2005, the league made strides to speed up the game by increasing enforcement of hooking and interference penalties. These measures further decreased the need for “enforcers.” Fighting plummeted in the 2005-2006 season. The Red Wings had 28 fights in 2003-04 and only six in 2005-06. This season the team has so little need for fisticuffs that it opted to populate its fourth line with skill players, leaving enforcer Darren McCarty in the minors for most of the season.

The bomb lurking inside Boogaard was the brain damage he sustained in all those throwdowns; he was one of the growing number of athletes whose brain was left to science to study, and what the pathologists found was sobering:

Boogaard had chronic traumatic encephalopathy, commonly known as C.T.E., a close relative of Alzheimer’s disease. It is believed to be caused by repeated blows to the head. It can be diagnosed only posthumously, but scientists say it shows itself in symptoms like memory loss, impulsiveness, mood swings, even addiction.

More than 20 dead former N.F.L. players and many boxers have had C.T.E. diagnosed. It generally hollowed out the final years of their lives into something unrecognizable to loved ones.

And now, the fourth hockey player, of four examined, was found to have had it, too.

But this was different. The others were not in their 20s, not in the prime of their careers.

The scientists on the far end of the conference call told the Boogaard family that they were shocked to see so much damage in someone so young. It appeared to be spreading through his brain. Had Derek Boogaard lived, they said, his condition likely would have worsened into middle-age dementia.

The NHL’s response? “Not enough evidence” to draw a link between repeated concussions and CTE. Keep digging, boys.

As I said, I’m not a hockey fan, but there sure are a lot of them here, and the Wings are probably the first or second most-beloved team in a city full of them. I’ve never heard a fan complain that the team doesn’t fight enough, and the few people I recommended that WSJ column to nodded in agreement, and said the team doesn’t need to fight, because they play so well.

So why are hockey teams still fighting? One of you who knows better will have to ‘splain that one.

Anyway, a truly sad story still worth reading.

So let’s turn on a dime, shall we? We need a little funny up in here:

Tom & Lorenzo take on a few of the truly astonishing outfits worn to the premiere of “W.E.,” the new Madonna movie, which I am PISSED has not dropped a trailer yet, so I can laugh and mock it. Oh, no, wait: It has. And it looks just about as awful as promised. That Madonna — so transgressive!

One of those roundups of a dozen or so helpful household hints, most of which I’d never heard of before, many of them pure genius.

And to come full circle, a great read from Deadspin on another figure from the sporting world who likely had brain damage, but the more conventional, self-inflicted kind. Never heard of George Kimball before. Thanks, Cooz.

And that’s it for me. Happy Wednesday, all.

I’m a fan of prunes. Not gonna apologize. I’ve eaten them since I was a kid, although less in adulthood — their famous fiber-richness makes me fart, which becomes less cute in a woman as she ages. But for a quick sweet that doesn’t cost much, calorie-wise, you can’t beat a prune, and I buy a box from time to time.

I’ve watched the contortions of the California Prune Board over the years as they try to overcome their image as producers of something old people gum in a vain effort to get their bowels moving. Some of these have been more successful than others. You see prunes now offered in individual wrappers; I guess you’re supposed to toss a few in your gym bag or purse for when you feel your energy flagging. Then there was the rebranding as “dried plums,” which didn’t do any good, I gather. They’re back to prunes, but it appears this year’s marketing strategy is snob appeal:

You can see a package of the individually wrapped ones peeking out there.

Who knows if this will work in boosting American per-capita prune consumption. I have a booklet somewhere of prune recipes, and once tried to tempt my family into eating some prune bran muffins. (It didn’t work.) They weren’t very good — the heat from the oven made the prunes kind of leathery, and the batch turned out tasting a little like commune cuisine, c. 1970. No, your best bet with prunes is just to eat a couple at a time right out of the box. And then spend the next couple of hours in a private place with good cross ventilation.

Let’s have a linkfest today, shall we? I’m tired and I’d like to get some Christmas shopping done this afternoon. So…

Whoever came up with this gimmick — destress the law students at exam time with an order of puppies to go — certainly earned their paycheck. How do I get one? I’m under stress, too. Maybe with a side of kittens.

Whenever Newt Gingrich considers the world outside the Tiffany’s showroom, he steps in it. I can’t believe this guy was ever a teacher. I’d love to see what Rate My Profs would do to his doughy ass.

Guns N Roses — what’s left of them — played the Palace last night. One of my Facebook friends just posted that her husband left at 11 p.m., and they still hadn’t taken the stage yet. Axl must have had some doughnuts to clean off the backstage buffet yet. Anyway, sounds like no one missed much; an “inescapably generic experience,” the DetNews critic said (without mentioning the delay, oddly). Show still went three hours, with Axl leaving the stage during the many extended guitar solos. Doughnuts…mmmmm….

A short video that’s basically an audio clip, filed under Strange Bedfellows.

OK, I must flee. A good weekend to all.

So yesterday I was reading, and enjoying, “The Great Leader,” Jim Harrison’s new novel (currently on the nightstand), when I come across this on page 93:

He hit the radio OFF button when someone on NPR used the word turd iconic.

Yes. [Fist pump.] It’s always good to find allies in this cruel world. The paragraph goes on to condemn “closure” (total agreement) and “embedded” (neutral) and the whole idea of punditry. Having once been a pundit of sorts — or “pundint,” in Sarah Palin’s pronunciation — I say right on, Jim.

Tom & Lorenzo have inspired me to watch “The Rachel Zoe Project” from time to time, although I find I can rarely get through an entire episode, because it’s more boring than a five-hour speech by Fidel Castro, and because the star and everyone around her uses the English language the same way we used those heavy metal records on Manuel Noriega — as an instrument of torture. She’s a happy abuser of “literally,” which she pronounces “lit’rully,” with a distinct pause at the apostrophe: Oh my god, I’m lit’rully dying here.

Zoe has a job that barely existed a generation ago — she’s a stylist, which means famous people pay her to tell them what to wear, and sometimes magazines pay her to dress their sets and models for photo shoots. If you want to know why we will never again see another Cher on the red carpet, it’s because of people like Zoe. How “stylist” became an actual job could be an interesting topic, encompassing some ideas of wide interest, particularly the rise of self-appointed grassroots fashion critics, people like Joan Rivers and bloggers like T-Lo, which has left chronically insecure Hollywood types terrified to put a foot wrong in their public outfits. Throw in the rise of paparazzi photography as a cultural force and marketing tool, branding as ninja practice and the freelanceification of everything, and you might have a decent show. Alas, Bravo’s producers settle for scene after scene of Zoe being driven around Los Angeles in a black SUV, moaning My head is lit’rully exploding, which must be their idea of Drama.

You have to look for the entertainment. I find it in the language.

Every occupation has its own jargon, and styling is no different. Take pull, for instance. Zoe’s minions do a pull before a shoot, which basically means they remove every single item from her cavernous closets and transport them to the shoot location (known as set, never with the definite article), where it’s all transferred to rolling racks and hangers shoved back and forth with much murmuring of she will so love this and this is so crazy sexy and I’m lit’rully dying over this one. That only two or three outfits are selected from this mobile garment district never seems to bother anyone, as it’s a given that you must have the widest possible selection of clothing to choose from. Why not leave everything on rolling racks, perhaps in a truck or something, and drive it around?

Because then it couldn’t be pulled, stupid. And pulling is a skill. Requiring many assistants.

Once pulled, Rachel will make her choices, adding some more of her nonsensical expressions of enthusiasm — bananas, maybe, or I die. Afterward, everything is pronounced fabulous. Nothing Zoe does is ever less than fabulous. A non-fabulous look, or an unhappy client, would make more interesting television, but that’s asking too much.

That’s episode outline 1A. Outline 1B is when Zoe is dressing a client for a red carpet event, known simply as carpet. What Anne Hathaway or Cameron Diaz or Jennifer Garner or Kate Hudson wears for carpet is an operation requiring a great deal of driving around, blabbing into phones, and perhaps some eyes-shut rubbing of the temples just before the commercial break, because OMG my head, it’s lit’rully killing me. But it always works out! Zoe and her minions gather to watch the Oscars or Emmys or Whatevers in her living room, the same way we do, only of course they pronounce all of Zoe’s clients so crazy sexy beautiful I lit’rully can’t stand it.

But even this isn’t enough to make me watch very often. I’m bananas that way.

And now, I must do a pull in my own closet. I predict — Carnack envelope to forehead — I will pull blue jeans with either a black or white top. Lit’rully the same thing I wear every day.

So let’s go to the bloggage, eh?

Ezra Klein: Could this time have been different? A look at where the stimulus went wrong, and right. HT: Cathy Dee.

More language nitpicking: The Occupy movement is cropping up in “scores of cities across Michigan.” No. A score = 20. Later in the story we hear that “nearly 20” Facebook pages have been created for Occupy events in the Mitten. Which would mean we’d have to see another 20 to have plural scores. Maybe I’m quibbling, but I don’t think so. Not lit’rully, anyway.

I still contend that “Occupy Detroit” is funny, and “Occupy the Upper Peninsula” is downright hilarious.

I’m so glad Charles Pierce is writing about politics. So, so glad. Lit’rully, very glad.

Off to office hours. Enjoy Thursday, all.

I guess the topic du jour is the death of Steve Jobs, and I don’t have much to add to the thousands of words already committed to paper and pixels today. My first steps onto the digital path were with the first IBM PC, which I bought secondhand from a guy who was headed on an open-ended, Jobsian journey to Europe. It worked OK for what it was — a very expensive typewriter — but once the loud, noisy printer died, I went back to using my Smith-Corona and left the thing on my desk to collect dust. A decade later, I bought my first Mac, and haven’t looked back.

Here’s why: In the early ’80s, I took a trip to Paris. The flight originated in New York; I found it in the back pages of the Village Voice. People’s Express was running its rock-bottom fares to New York at the time, and I cobbled together a package that got me from Columbus to Paris for about $500, a $200 savings over a traditional ticket. I had to arrange my own transportation from LaGuardia to Kennedy airports, but I fancied myself a brave, resourceful traveler, and this was only proof of my awesomeness.

It all worked fine getting there, but getting home was something else. The trip was a charter, which meant we weren’t committed to a particular airline, and on the way home, it was Alitalia. Every stereotype you ever heard about how Italians run things? It was like that. The flight was hours late leaving. We’d been in the air only a little while when the ice ran out, then the drinking water, then the water in the tanks that flushed the toilets. Before long, the passengers broke out their duty-free liquor purchases and started sharing bottles. The flight attendants did their best to put a stop to this, but as one belligerent man bellowed, in a voice loud enough to reach the entire coach cabin, “I’ll be goddamned if I’ll pay three bucks a pop to drink your hot booze when I can have my own.”

The drunken conviviality was a welcome break, and if nothing else, it helped everyone get to sleep, but as we approached New York and people started waking up, they were headachey and the toilets still weren’t flushing. We landed, and one of the loudest and drunkest of the complaining passengers immediately stood up to stretch his legs. The little Italian steward told him to take his seat. Nothing. The steward got up and approached him. The passenger continued to stand. The steward extended his hand, and…IF YOU PUT YOUR GREASY FUCKING HANDS ON ME, YOU WILL REGRET IT.

It was a genuinely scary moment. The steward wisely retreated.

We all deplaned. I’d missed my connection, and was now in Kennedy Airport, it was nighttime and I was probably broke. Fortunately, Jeff Borden was in New York for a TV critics’ convention, and had a double room at a Hilton in midtown Manhattan. I took the train to the plane in the opposite direction — thanking God it was an express, as we passed through those infamous, pre-Giuliani subway stations, filled with lurking wraiths — before shlepping my bags into Jeff’s room and collapsing on the bed.

I rebooked my People’s Express flight the next morning, and as we winged our way to Ohio, I asked myself if I’d have paid $200 to avoid the previous 24 hours, to get on a nice Air France or Pan Am jet at Orly and get off at Port Columbus, skipping Alitalia and the nonfunctioning toilets and the angry passenger and the train to the plane and all the rest of it, and thought: Oh, hell yes.

Years later, as I was contemplating the purchase of another computer, I learned that formatting a floppy in MS-DOS required me to type…

FORMAT drive: /C

…plus some other stuff, and if I got so much as a comma or space in the wrong place, it wouldn’t work. And if I bought the PowerPC Mac laptop I was considering, I would face a simple question: This disk is not formatted. Would you like to format it?, followed by a yes/no click option.

The Mac was a few hundred dollars more than the PC. I remembered the lesson of Alitalia. I clicked Yes, and haven’t looked back.

Thanks, Steve.

Jobsian bloggage today: Walter Mossberg remembers.

EDIT: Hank Stuever sums it up, and on deadline. We love us some Hank.

Bumper sticker I saw last night in Detroit: JESUS DIDN’T TAP OUT. I laffed all the way downtown.

And that’s it for me. I have to go format a day of work.