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.

Big news out of Georgia yesterday: R.E.M. (or is it REM? Periods or no periods?) is breaking up. To touch on yesterday’s discussion, this seems like the sort of iconic news event for whatever the phenomenon is where you hear something like that and think, “Huh. I thought they were dead.”

I didn’t think R.E.M. was dead, but one of them had some health issues a while back — brain tumor, maybe? A quick glance at the indisputably authoritative Wikipedia says no, it was a brain aneurysm, it was Bill Berry, and he left in 1997, at which point it’s safe to say I was no longer paying attention. “Green” (1988) was the last album I bought, although I think “Automatic for the People” (1992) is lying around here somewhere. A guy I knew in the Fort had a one-night fling with Michael Stipe when they passed through Bloomington on tour.

And when I reread those two paragraphs, I am reminded why one should never tattoo one’s enthusiasms on one’s body. There was a time when I wore the grooves down on “Murmur” and “Reckoning” and the rest of the early catalog, and if the tattooing thing had had any traction then, I might have opted for a discreet “Radio Free Europe” inside an ankle. They were my favorite band in the last time in my life when I thought I needed to make such a designation. Such things are only evident in hindsight, and thank heavens for that, eh?

As (a very small) part of this enthusiasm, J.C. and Sam and I day-tripped to Athens when I visited them in Atlanta one year. We made the drive noticing all the parallels between Georgia’s Athens and Ohio’s, which is where J.C. and I became friends: It’s a college town about 90 miles east of a large city. The road there starts out a traditional interstate, then becomes a plain old four-lane. And once you get there, well, you’ve got your traditional college town, which immediately sets off the ache of nostalgia and familiarity in anyone who ever spent time in one. You want to stop the students on the street and tell them savor every moment and stop snoozing through your comp lit class and you’ll never live like this again (nor want to).

And then we visited the Uga graves — that’s pronounced “ugga” — and the Tree that Owns Itself and ate in one of those places every college town has, probably a vegetarian/locavore/Moosewood hippie trough, and visited a bookstore. Then, while near a courthouse-lawn cannon, Sam said she thought the guns still had some mobility to them, so I put my hands on the barrel of one and pushed down, and whaddaya know, it moved, and poured about a gallon of accumulated rainwater, no doubt mixed with discarded beer and frat-boy pee, onto my shoes.

Then we went home. Now that I think of it, I was probably already pretty much over R.E.M. by then.

The other big news out of Georgia yesterday was the execution of Troy Davis, of which you have probably heard enough to at least make up your mind about the morality of the act. I have rather studiously avoided death-penalty arguments over the years, although I have my opinions about it. In general, I think: Some form of it will always be with us, because Americans are bloodthirsty people. We have almost certainly executed innocent men and women, and we will almost certainly do it again, and maybe the people of Georgia did it last night. And I’m against it, not enough for the Full Prejean but enough that I admire those who make its opposition their life’s work.

My ambitions are more modest — to get people to stop using “electrocute” as a synonym for “shock.” No one recovers from an electrocution.

OK, so: Speaking of Helen Prejean, which makes me think of movies, it’s now September, which means the list of movies I must see is already growing. So far: “Contagion” and “Drive.” Anyone with fewer weekend commitments seen them yet? What am I missing? I was going to avoid “Contagion” on general Paltrow-ish principle, but it’s my understanding she dies early and the rest of the film is “Traffic”-esque, which I loved.

We haven’t discussed the post office here, have we? You’ve probably heard about the organization’s financial problems, which set off the usual clamor in the well-paid flying monkeys of the conservative chattering classes (Roy’s got you covered there). It so happens I needed to get something in hard copy to the other side of the country in a two-day time frame not long ago, and alas, it was a Sunday. (This was a parcel consisting of about 100 pages of paper, letter-size.) My first stop was FedEx, thinking that was my only alternative. No, they couldn’t absolutely, positively get it there overnight, but they could get it there by Tuesday, for … the lady put it on the scale … $54.

“Are you kidding me?” I gasped. Of course not. I rechecked my requirements, found I only needed it to be postmarked by Monday, so I went to the post office the next day, and Express Mailed it for $18. It got there Tuesday, same as the FedEx package would have, for $36 less. Just so you get a sense of what we’re in for, in a USPS-free world.

Everybody saw this yesterday, but just in case you didn’t: Elizabeth Warren, bringing the Awesome.

Alas, work beckons. And the lawn-service trucks just pulled up outside, which means soon I won’t be able to hear myself think, let alone think of jangle guitars. Happy Thursday.

Fifty chilly degrees outside, but I’m not in any hurry to get the furnace going. Never mind the A/C was blasting not two weeks ago; as Dexter said in yesterday’s comments, sometimes it’s good just to be a little chilled. I had a roommate once who’d gone through a bout of anorexia, and was still quite thin, and she was cold in all but the hottest weather. Which, for some reason, made my mind go skip-skip-skip and land on Michaele Salahi.

You remember the Salahis — the vulgar social climbers of Washington D.C., who somehow managed to slip the security ring at the White House, enter a state dinner and get to handshake distance with the president. She was a Real Housewife, he was a “vineyard owner” or some such, and both were grifters, basically. The WashPost gossip columnists beat them like a drum for a while, pointing out their trail of unpaid bills and lawsuits, her sketchy resume and his likewise, but it never seemed to faze either of them, and they kept showing up at parties and getting in. Someone kept letting them check into ritzy hotels, ride in limousines and otherwise live the life. I should be so shameless.

This week — and I hope you’re sitting down for this shocking turn of events — they split up, and the way Michaele fitted her husband Tareq in cuckold’s horns was about as bad as it gets. She left him for Neal Schon. Who’s Neal Schon, you ask? Why, he’s the guitarist for Journey. Tareq was further humiliated by his actions when he noticed his wife missing. He called the cops and claimed she’d been abducted, because she left her things behind.

Tareq, hasn’t life with Michaele taught you anything? You leave it all behind when you have to, because there’s always someone with a fresh credit card waiting around the corner. In this case, a “rock icon” (TMZ’s description, not mine), whom Michaele joined on the road in Memphis, where Journey was playing a show with Foreigner.

Just let that soak in for a minute. A pair of high-profile publicity hounds, riven by the fleshly sword of a power-pop arena-band guitarist, now touring with another power-pop arena band. Imagine the crowd at those shows, rising from their $200 front-row seats to shake their Docker’d behinds to “Hot Blooded” and, of course, “Don’t Stop Believin’.” We are in hell, aren’t we?

You had to know things were rough for the Salahis. Why, just this year Michaele was accepted by, and then booted from, VH-1’s “Celebrity Rehab” show, on the grounds she’s not addicted to anything. But they knew that going in! Tareq protested. Michaele wanted to be treated — in a reality-show setting, of course — for her multiple sclerosis, which has been aggravated by the couple’s “ordeal” with the White House.

I have to pause for a minute and just say: I really enjoy wallowing in a good gossip sheet from time to time. Not necessarily the snark blogs — too meta — but the ones like TMZ and the Daily Mail. So retro! There are sources, and there are “close to” sources, but the ones they’re relying on to dish the Salahi dirt are described as “extremely close” to Michaele, which I’m taking to mean it’s Michaele herself. Any woman who wants MS treatment on cable TV would have no problem informing on herself to Harvey Levin. Who else could share the exact wording of this text message, from the icon to the blonde herself: “xxxoooxxxoo Kiss, lick, and a nice stiff one 4 ya lol Neal.”

(May I just say one thing? Any man who sent me anything that lame had better watch his ass. And people? I don’t do LOL. Nor “ya.”)

Anyway, the Kidnapping of Michaele Salahi, a Q-and-A.

And I’m sorry I’m so lame this morning. This is the first five-day week of school, and my new name is Erasmus B. Draggin. One-third of the household is sick, and I fear it might come for me next. So, regular hand-washing, no kisses for anyone and maybe a pot of soup this weekend. I’m thinking Minestrone, but if you have any ideas, you know where to leave ’em.

I work a lot for others during the week, much of it for little or no compensation, and in return I ask for only one thing: Saturday. Saturday is mine, for Eastern Market visits and maybe a little urban exploration (in the bland, non-lawbreaking sense), and that’s how I ended up at the Rust Belt Market last weekend, in search of pie. This guy’s pies, specifically. But it would be silly to just pop in and out for pie, so I took a stroll through the market, which is kind of an offline Etsy — vintage clothes, handmade this, hipster that. Very Detroit-as-new-Brooklyn. Not quite the epicenter, but there is no epicenter. Still, a good place to put your cultural feelers out and get a sense of the millennial/late-X generation in their salad-days prime. What are you into, young folks? What moves you?

Just this: Food and bikes.

I’m not a fan of the writer Caitlin Flanagan, but she made an observation a while back that’s stuck with me. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but indulge me: Imagine two young women — a housewife of the ’50s and her closest equivalent today. Quiz both on their attitudes about food and sex. You’ll find the ’50s housewife has many opinions about how you should live your sex life, but honestly doesn’t care what you eat — that’s your business. Whereas a 21st century woman is likely to be precisely the opposite. Are those eggs organic? Is your beef grass-fed? Those tomatoes — locally grown? But who you sleep with, and what you do in your bedroom? Who cares?

The good news about the foodie revolution is, the world is a much tastier place. You can get a better meal, or make yourself one, today than you could a generation ago, and certainly more so than in the ’50s. For all the concerns about pesticides and hormones and feedlots and the like, the fact remains that a stroll through even an unhip, pedestrian suburban grocery chain is a revelation of food unknown to even 25-year-old me, and I like to think I got in on this stuff early. My mother-in-law thought mangoes were green peppers. Today: Actual mangoes. A good thing.

The bad news is that it can get awfully tiresome, and I think we’ve gone down this road here before. When Anthony Bourdain says Alice Waters has a touch of the Khmer Rouge about her, it’s funny because it’s true. She’s the one who suggested $4-per-pound organic grapes should not be considered out of reach in any nation where poor people buy $100 sneakers, after all.

But getting back to the good news, it’s also given rise to a generation of young foodie entrepreneurs, many flying below the radar of the health inspectors, in food trucks and market stalls, trying to change the world with empanadas or bagels or whatever. The pie guy I visited was very much of this tradition, with his artistic tattoos — a chef’s knife on his forearm, among many — and his unexpected flavor combinations. Oh, and his T-shirt: “Fuck cupcakes. Eat pie.” I bought three slices at $2.50 per — salted caramel apple, peach mango (hold the green peppers) and blueberry lemon. Elsewhere in this market you could buy artisanal coffee and other snacky things; at the Eastern Market you could buy everything, including a nosh from my favorite new stop, the People’s Pierogi Collective (their slogan includes the word “revolutionary,” but I can’t remember it now).

Elsewhere in the market, I looked through a booth that sold make-your-own necklace systems, with various charms and suchlike. It seemed half the charms had bicycle themes — chains and chainrings, spokes, wheels. I see bike-themed tattoos everywhere, too, “fixie forever” on a muscular calf, or “fuck cars,” one word to a leg, something for motorists to see as you flash past them on your fixie. Bike culture is strong in Detroit, a flat city with many miles of eye-popping sights. But it’s crazy strong among younger people, who commute on sticker-covered, beat-looking-but-fast-moving bikes and lock them to any old thing with chains heavy enough to swing at crackheads, should the need arise.

Meanwhile, there is $70,000 in county parks money lying on the table in my community, waiting for the cities to pick it up and use it to buy mainly paint and signs to designate bike routes (not paths, mind you, just routes) through the five Pointes. I predict it will sit there until it grows mold and expires, because the police chiefs are fretting about the need for a traffic study first, and why can’t we all just ride on sidewalks, anyway? The suburbs always move behind the city. Although I hear everybody enjoys pie.

So, not much bloggage today, but may I say one thing? I’m extremely uncomfortable about much of the commentary I’m hearing about whether She-Who did or did not bang a University of Michigan basketball player when she was young and single and the calendar read 1987. I’m getting the strong feeling this Joe McGinniss book is a steaming pile of crap, and I don’t care how respectable he is. If the big talker you come up with is that she slept with a black guy when she was 23, you are only Kitty Kelley with a better publicist. The discussion I heard yesterday bugged me on several levels, including but not limited to noting it happened “just nine months before her marriage to Todd,” misuse of the word “fetish” and whoa, MANDINGO!!!!!

I’m disappointed in Garry Trudeau for making this a week’s worth of “Doonesbury” and I really, really resent the way it makes me feel like defending her. That said, some of the comments on this thread are sort of funny.

The first serious review of the book I’ve seen. Doesn’t sound like a must-read.

After 10, gotta go. Happy Thursday, all. The weekend is drawing nigh.

This is my goal over the next four years, and foolhardy it may be: To get my daughter admitted to the University of Michigan. She doesn’t have to go there. But as I have told her since we moved here:

1) It’s the best education for the money that we are likely to have available to us; however,
2) If you can get into Michigan, you can get into a lot of other schools. We have money saved, and you’ll be able to get more elsewhere. All bridges will be crossed when we get to them. But for now, aim high. Aim for Ann Arbor.

So. Last year she took two courses that offered high-school credit. She got an A-plus in Spanish I, and a B-plus in Honors Algebra, missing the A by a whisker. Still, a very good start, I thought. Earlier this summer, a letter arrived, informing us that we could have those grades entered on her high school transcript as credit only, or grade and credit. I did what I always do with perplexing or disturbing mail — set it aside for the remainder of the summer.

But now the deadline for deciding is approaching, so I called her high school, figuring the counselors were back on the job by now, and sure enough, the phone was picked up by the person I needed to talk to. Explained what I just told you, and asked her opinion.

“Hmm, well, the thing you don’t want to do is take credit for one and grade and credit for the other,” she said. “That’s a red flag.” Noted. Grade and credit for both, then?

“Well, there’s that B-plus,” she said, as though I’d presented her with a dead mouse or something.

“It’s an honors algebra course,” I pointed out. “Accelerated math.”

“There will be many other factors determining whether she’ll get into Michigan,” she said. “But for now, you want to play it safe. We’ve had students with 4.0 averages not get in.” She advised credit-only. I put down the phone with a variety of emotions, but one swam to the surface first — eye-crossing anger. It just occurred to me what my poor, sweet, smart daughter will be up against to join the student body at my state’s premiere university four years hence. She’ll be angling for one of the spots available for kids who aren’t rich, who aren’t Olympic athletes, who contribute nothing special to the diversity profile, and who aren’t — a burr under my particular saddle, because they’re so thick on the ground hereabouts — a Topsiders-and-madras-shorts-wearing, entitled brat whose lawyer daddy is a legacy.

Four years stretch before me, years of applying the whip on the grades front, and winter months scouting the sorts of fascinating summer camps and volunteer opportunities that will make her stand out in this crowded field. All so my sole offspring can get a toehold into the middle class, a stratum her own parents are rapidly sliding to the edge of. All so she can maybe attend a university I had my own experience with a few years back, filled with undergraduates who didn’t have the sense to change out of flip-flops on a February day, among many other dullards. (This really happened. A girl stopped in front of me to adjust her backpack in the vestibule of a building. I looked down, and beheld her toenail polish. The temperature outside was in the low 30s. I asked her why she was wearing rubber sandals. Her answer: “Because my dorm is, like, really hot.”)

I’ve told this story before, about the UM women’s sport-redacted coach, who complained in one of our Wallace House seminars about her players, who stand like children before her, awaiting orders. “They have to be told when to warm up, when to cool down, what uniforms to wear, when to wash them. It’s like they’ve spent their entire life getting into the back seat and being driven to their appointments.” And they have. Their mothers and fathers have functioned as their personal assistants. They’re like the powerful men I know, whose jobs are so all-consuming they’ve come to rely on their wives to run every other aspect of their lives. One gets a weekly allowance. Srsly.

I don’t want to raise that kind of kid.

I told the counselor, “I’d rather she swing for the fences and miss a few than play it safe for the sake of a grade-point average.” She said playing it safe isn’t enough. You must swing for the fences and clear them, every time, to get into a top college.

Personally, I think she’s full of shit. But for now, credit only.

Perhaps you’re wondering where Kate wants to go to school. (Ha! Like that matters.) The only one she’s mentioned so far is UC/Berkeley, because she remembers Telegraph Avenue from our trip a few years back, and “it seems like a cool place.” Maybe if mom writes three best-sellers in the next four years, we can swing it.

OK, time to hop to the shower and embrace the day. A little bloggage:

Via Nancy Friedman, Hollywood clichés in infographic form. Funny.

That Mark Bittman can even figure out a way to improve spaghetti and meatballs. I think I’m going to try this one.

Neil Steinberg considers the new Michael Jordan Steak House in Chicago:

When you can get a fantastic steak three blocks from your office, why go elsewhere? This is not to ignore Chicago’s other fine steakhouses, in no particular order: Gibson’s, Chicago Cut, The Capital Grille, Smith & Wollensky, Ditka’s, Ruth’s Chris, Sullivan’s, Harry Caray’s, Chicago Chop House, Lawry’s — there are many more, but those are the ones off the top of my head, places that I have patronized.

I haven’t been to the new Michael Jordan Steak House that opened this week in the InterContinental, and frankly, as much as I love the hotel it’s in — my wife and I were married there — I don’t plan to go. You have to wonder at the savvy of somebody who could survey the Chicago restaurant scene and conclude: “What this city needs is another steakhouse!”

And I’m off.

I’ve had the iPad long enough to have made my way through three e-books, so I feel qualified to assess the experience, at least at a first-impression level. (The fact two of them were “A Game of Thrones” and “A Clash of Kings” is the reason the total isn’t much bigger. More on that in a minute.)

A friend of mine who’s a little further down this road said, when I expressed reservations at ever joining the Kindle generation, “You will,” which to my ears sounded like me talking to vinyl holdouts in the late ’80s, complaining about CDs. The wave of the future sweeps all before it, and while there will always be a place in the world for ink on paper, and I’m sure there will be some Brooklyn-hipster retro book movement down the road (they’ll call themselves “codexers”), e-books are here to stay. Which is fine, but to a far greater extent than CDs, they’ll change the experience of reading.

Unless you’re the sort of audiophile who really notices the difference between analog and digital recording — and I wasn’t, at least not at first — the prime selling point for CDs was convenience. They were smaller. They didn’t wear out, at least not quickly. They didn’t need to be flipped halfway through. You could have a party, and if someone pogoed too hard, they didn’t skip all over the place. Multi-disk changers meant you could load up an evening’s worth of music, press play and forget about it.

I don’t quite see the same argument for e-books. A Kindler I know who travels often says it’s a nice way to carry an armload of magazines onto a plane, and mentions the added value of being useful for the sort of books you want to leaf through or even read, but not necessarily buy in hardcover. The trendy non-fiction read of the month, say, or something dirty. An author here in Detroit says her erotica-penning colleagues are enjoying a renaissance via Kindle, as you no longer have to hold something with a whip on the cover while reading your lunch hour away on a park bench.

But as to the claim that ebooks will declutter your house? No, thanks. I love all my books, and only fail to love them at moving time. As I’m not likely to be moving again until I’m carried out feet-first, it won’t be my problem.

There are some advantages, though. Last month, I set up an interview with an author whose book was being published that day. Available electronically? Yes. Money in the Amazon account? Yes. (And thanks for that, all of you Kickback Lounge shoppers!) Click, click, and there it is. About as fast as it took you to read that last sentence. It takes just a few seconds. So great, more instant gratification for a nation swimming in it. There’s that.

Your comfort with the reading experience will depend on how you read, and that’s where my problems come in. Take George R.R. Martin’s fantasy series, for instance, the first two volumes I mentioned above. Every one is the size of a cinder block, and features nine million characters. Each volume features endpaper maps, and appendices that lay out all the families, clans and alliances between them all. I’m only at the end of the second book, and I can already see the series developing Harry Potter’s Disease — the sort of overwriting authors do, and editors permit, when a franchise has become so popular that fans clamor for more, more, more. (I haven’t read Harry Potter, but people whose opinion I respect say that each subsequent volume was more bloated than the last, and knowing some HP fans, I can see how it happened. They are black holes of need.)

But I’m at the point in “A Clash of Kings” where, if I were a reader of ink on paper, I’d be flipping ahead, skimming battle scenes, blowing off interior monologues and, of course, checking all those family trees, but I don’t, because I’m afraid of losing my place. (Yes, there’s a bookmarking system. I don’t like it.) At this point, in the final chapters, I feel like I’m driving a snowplow through 10 inches of slush.

On the other hand, I search for a living, and I’ve developed my eye for keywords. I like having a search function so, if I can remember a character’s name and its odd spelling — and I do remember, and they’re all odd — I can easily find his or her first appearance if I want to recheck something. I like that. And I like the fact I can read a 1,000-page novel in a slim little case the size of a file folder.

When I go on vacation next week, I’m taking “Just Kids” and “Djibouti” in analog form, and “A Storm of Swords” on the iPad. I’ll tell you how it works out.

So, bloggage:

Rick Perry says he wants to be president? Gee, I wonder what he’ll decide. Stop teasing and get it over with, a’ready.

Meanwhile, you’re not paying enough attention to Sarah! She will not be ignored!

And with that, I must run. Be good, all.

UPDATE: Oops, almost forgot! The heartbreak of cleavage wrinkles. The New York Times is ON IT.

OK, now I’ve seen everything (or, rather, Hank Stuever has): There’s now a competitive league for beard-growing:

“Whisker Wars” starts tonight on IFC, and even though I get that channel on cable, I’m not convinced this is exactly appointment TV yet. But who can resist, really? A whole subculture of men whose activities are not only of no or little interest to women, it actively repels them? You could almost compare them to homosexuals, but every smart girl has a gay boyfriend, and some are even sexually attracted to them. Whereas if a competitive bearder even came near me with one of those waist-length things, I’d run away as fast as possible. And I bet you would, too.

Oh, but what am I saying? There’s a match for every sock in the world; you just have to look at bit harder, is all. My youth was a big era for facial hair. My male confederates had beards and moustaches of all shapes and sizes. One of my favorite boyfriends had a splendid moustache, in fact, although I doubt he still does, as one day we all woke up and they were called “pornstaches,” a cruel jape, because as every man with a weak chin eventually discovers, facial hair can cover a multitude of sins, and sometimes that sin is an upper lip that is too thin, too stiff, too something, and a moustache can salvage it.

(There was a TV personality of my youth, fella named Bob Braun. A friend of mine, a hilarious and dead-on mimic, could conjure him out of the air just by pulling down and fortifying his upper lip. Bob Braun could have used a moustache.)

The facial hair of my yout’, however, was generally not something to be fussed with. Trimmed, yes. Groomed, certainly. But it was either there or it wasn’t. (With a few exceptions, like the aforementioned Joe Namath and his famous Fu Manchu.) These latter-day beards, with their fanciful trimming? No. Show me a man who grooms it like this, and I’ll show you a real asshole.

Alan had a beard, long before I met him. He looked like a young Bob Seger. My dad grew one in his young manhood, and it came in all gray and white. The other guys called him Frostypuss, so he shaved and never ventured forth again. But it strikes me the real problem with beards is, they invite stroking by their owners. It’s very hard to stroke one’s own chin without looking like a total douche. In fact, the very gesture of chin-stroking, the phrase itself, is shorthand for someone who talks too much and rarely proposes action of any value, but rather, thinks the whole room needs to do some supplemental reading before we revisit the topic at a later date.

At which point the room rolls its eyes and makes the jackoff gesture.

Boy, am I in need of a vacation, or what? Which, by the way, I will soon be taking. We’re heading north in a week, and I will be away from the internet for most of that time. I might have asked J.C. to maybe fill in here while I’m gone, but as it turns out, that’s who we’ll be visiting. There may be supplemental material, however, and comments will be open all week. You all are so good at playing amongst yourselves. We’ll see.

Bloggage! Let’s get to it!

Minister of Culture Michael Heaton on why August is the month of bad decisions:

The bad decisions of August also include the impulse road trip. You and a college friend are sitting around talking about Crazy Bob from your fraternity. Next thing you know you are on the road to Kalamazoo, where Bob lives, for a surprise visit. At his house you find only his mother, an old and broken woman who informs you that Bob killed his wife with a ball-peen hammer and then set himself on fire. Always call first.

We’ve already got one embedded video already today, so you’ll have to follow the link to YouTube for this one: That stock-trading talking baby confronts his losses.

Wow. The Cat Scan Tumblr. Wow.

Hurry, vacation. But first, lots of work to do. Have a great weekend.