Scenes from a very modern 18-hour visit between friends:

The kitchen table is strewn with sections from two newspapers, three laptops (one of them the kind with widdle bunny ears), an iPhone, two venti Starbucks cups, my Flip video camera, two Gorillapods and, I dunno, maybe a salt and pepper shaker. “Sometimes I’m reading a paperback, and I try to flick the page with my finger,” says Sam. Not the way you flick a mosquito off the page. The iPhone flick. “Did you see these e-mails from Leslie?” she asks John, looking up from the iPhone. “Already answered,” he replies, not looking up from the laptop.

This is how we interact these days. John shoots a little video of Sam reading the e-mail and shows it to me, because I was sitting next to her when she did so, and I guess I might like to see it from another angle. Sam takes a picture of our stained-glass panel for her iPhone wallpaper. Then she takes a picture of the dog. Then we all realize what we’re doing, and go for a walk.

“Put on hats, it’s cold outside!” a passerby scolds us. Apparently the multiple weather widgets installed on every single electronic device on the kitchen table failed to warn us that it was 30 degrees. So we stop at Starbucks for more venti cups and a warmup. I tie Spriggy’s leash to a post outside. Sam takes a picture of him through the window. Good. He hasn’t had his picture taken in five or 10 minutes, and two or three soft-hearted ladies have petted him on their way in. No wonder his self-esteem is so toweringly high.

We need something, we decide. Maybe…a bottle of wine and a bunch of snacks. Also, a two-pound salmon filet and something from the deli called “Michigan black bean salad.” Cucumber, dill, Greek yogurt, a baguette, and we’re good to go.

Does the iPhone ring during dinner? Of course it does. I wait for John to say, “I’ll call you back after we finish eating,” but he doesn’t, because it’s a semi-emergency, the call is coming from Sam’s brother, stuck in an airplane on a runway at Hartsfield in Atlanta for going on three hours, and he wants to alert the media. Does John have a number at CNN? he wants to know. “How strange that you’re in Atlanta, where we live, but we’re in Detroit, but anyway you’re in the plane and can’t get out,” John says, before giving him the number. I kept waiting for him to check the weather, like the guy in the commercial, who used his iPhone to liberate a similarly imprisoned flight. It wouldn’t do any good, because the reason the flight is sitting on the ground is terrible weather in Atlanta. It’s snowing there, which we learned from an earlier phone call from John’s brother, who also lives there.

I wonder where this salmon came from, I thought. I hope not China.

Anyway, the dinner was delicious. We watched Jon Stewart dismember Jonah Goldberg, put all the devices to sleep and/or charge, and went to bed ourselves.*

This morning I read, not online, a NYT review of a book called “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob.” It begins:

In “Against the Machine,” the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic Lee Siegel pays a visit to Starbucks. He sits down. He looks around. And he finds himself surrounded by Internet zombies, laptop-addicted creatures who have so grievously lost their capacity for human interaction “that social space has been contracted into isolated points of wanting, all locked into separate phases of inwardness.” How long until they wake up and smell the coffee?

Mr. Siegel’s field trip illustrates several things, not least that Starbucks is today’s most hackneyed reportorial setting. His outing captures a vision of connectivity that is the precise opposite of what it appears to be. For him the semblance of a shared Starbucks experience masks endemic computer-generated isolation, a condition that has prompted psychic and ethical breakdowns that go well beyond the collapse of community.

He should have come for dinner last night. The salmon could have fed another easily, and maybe he would have had some suggestions for Sam’s brother to call. Then she would have taken his picture.

Bloggage:

Does Lee Siegel read Bossy? I’d like to hear what the swaggeringly abrasive cultural critic (can I get that job? Because I’ve got the skilz) has to say about her brand of humor writing, which combines the elements of photography, colored type, italics, strikethroughs and Photoshop-with-arrows to tell a story about her slippers which makes you glad you spent 45 seconds hearing about. Why can amateurs figure out the unique syntax of the web, and college-educated professional journalists can’t? Put that in your venti Starbucks cup and drink it, Lee Siegel.

Whenever I see a picture like the one with this story, I remember the federal judge in Columbus, Ohio, who ejected a female lawyer from his courtroom in the 1970s for the crime of wearing a pantsuit. The old geezer’s dead now, but I wonder what he’d think of a 75-year-old lawyer with his gray hair tucked into a neat braid at the back of his head. Note that he got charges dismissed against his client, who was a candidate for tar and feathers last year, when she was accused of hanging up on a boy who called 911. Well-played, sir. A little Googling reveals the same lawyer was instrumental in reviving the career of Andy Bey, which earns him a place in jazz heaven, no matter how long his ponytail is.

You know how you know you’re really, really old? When you see a gossip item that begins like this —

Bye-bye, Justin Bobby! Audrina Patridge has a new beau.

— and you not only have no idea who the people are, you don’t even have the slightest itty-bittiest ghost of a hint of a desire to know who they are, and what’s more, you know that even if you bothered to find out, in the name of keeping up with what the kids are into these days, you know that both people will be over by the time you can Google the names. You just have a sixth sense about these things.

* Some events reported out of order, but all events actually happened.

I was the 143rd voter in my precinct at noon Tuesday, but my ballot was 105, which I assume means I was the 105th to ask for the Republican version. From this, we can extrapolate that the GOP will outpoll the Democrats by a 105-38 margin, and that the next president will be a Republican. Probably Romney.

Hey, just testing my punditry skills, in case anyone wants me to go on CNN.

Primary Day in Michigan was a big fat anticlimax, unless you were at the auto show Monday, which hosted the big three GOP contenders, plus Joe Lieberman, carrying John McCain’s coat. Connecticut for Lieberman for McCain: it has a real ring to it. But in the end, of course it was Romney’s show, seeing as how he was the only one who spent more than $1.98 and actually bothered to rent a local hotel ballroom for the victory speech. There’s something about seeing the candidates concede Michigan from South Carolina that really says “your primary was a joke,” isn’t there? (Jack Lessenberry over at the Metro Times put it more starkly: “Kazakhstan has better elections.” At least for Democrats.)

There were some chuckles, but they were so far inside as to be practically non-existent. The NYT’s county-by-county map is interesting, in that “uncommitted” carried the Democrats’ day in only two outposts — the thinly populated mystery spot of Emmet County, at the very tip of the mitten, where only 1,222 Democratic ballots were cast, but 49 percent of them went for U.N. Committed, and the Communistic pinko liberal People’s Republic of Washtenaw, which should not be counting on a warm hug from President Hillary, by God.

(As for what it says that the New York Times offers the best graphic representation of what’s happening in a state 500 miles away — that’s a question I’ll leave for you folks.)

Sorry I took the day off yesterday. I was walking into walls and not getting my calls returned. Also, I needed my roots touched up. Let me make it up to you with bloggage:

Ever wonder what a commune for crunchy-con buttheads would look like? Alas, county commissioners shot down this half-baked Hoosier version of Seaside, Florida. I think it would be a great setting for a murder mystery, however. Be my guest, Lippman. Maybe the next time Tess Monaghan takes a road trip, she can check out the corpse found in the dumpster behind Little Blessings Midwifery. Via The Good City. (Just an aside: What is it with these folks and chickens? They all want a backyard henhouse, or will until they learn just how early roosters get up in the morning. You should hear my vet talk about Grosse Pointe’s wild pheasant population, and the cocks that start crowing at 3:30 a.m. in midsummer. Only they don’t say cock-a-doodle-do, which is annoying enough at that hour; “it sounds like fingernails on a blackboard.” Ah, country life.)

Where did you first read about Truck Nutz? Here, that’s where. And four years ago, no less. (Sorry, the photo’s been lost to the ages. Here’s a replacement. I highly, highly recommend Nut Galleries one and two.) Now the Virginia legislature wants to ban them. For the children, of course.

Speaking of lame-ass punditry. I think Matthew Yglesias nails Tim Russert pretty well, in Washington Monthly.

Why the English are better than us: Because even their trashy tabloids, reporting bizarro police/court news, can use the word “remonstrate” in copy without fear that their idiot readers won’t know what it means.

Now I have to clean my house. John ‘n’ Sam arriving in about five hours. Friends! Adults to talk to! I may faint.

One of the things that interests me about the internet is its community-building potential. Overwhelmingly, this is a good thing, at least for me — I’ve “met” people online that I’ve later met in person, widened my correspondence considerably and generally find life far more interesting with e-mail than without it. It goes without saying that if you’re a parent of a child with a rare disease, or a dog-fur knitter, or a body-modification enthusiast living in a small Indiana town, you no longer need to feel you’re the only one in the world carrying your burden. Surely there’s a Usenet group for you, or a blog, or whatever.

No matter how small the pond, the internet supplies a map.

One of the more interesting/amusing communities to start talking amongst themselves has been the…well, I’m not sure what they call themselves. New Urbanists, Crunchy Conservatives, New Traditionalists, who the hell knows? I don’t think they do, either. The face they present to the world is of politically conservative Christians who reject the go-go market forces beloved by the rest of their confederates, and in some lifestyle matters verge dangerously close to filthy-hippiedom. Rod Dreher, the self-designated crunchy con, is probably the archetype. He eats organic vegetables (and can go on at great, boring length about it), lives in a Craftsman bungalow, likes urban neighborhoods over suburbs, etc.

Here’s a prototypical post from a Fort Wayne blog called The Good City. The author grew up in the Fort, moved away to New York City, married and had a few kids, and decided to come back to a place where a family of five didn’t have to share 700 square feet. It starts like this:

Tonight I’m sitting out on the front porch of our 100-year old rental house in a paleo-urbanistic neighborhood, and I’m quite enjoying myself. The porch light is on, my pipe is lighted, my legs are propped up on the balustrade, and a slight chill is in the air. Though dark outside, the old-fashioned street lamps allow me to see clearly up and down the street and notice the wonderful rhythm of other houses with similar front porches. Quickly, however, the charming atmosphere so much promoted by New Urbanists begins to fade as I notice that I’m the only one actually outside on my front porch. Well, you say, maybe it’s because this is the coldest night so far this fall. Not true, however. This has pretty much been the same as every other night: for all practical purposes, no one is ever out on their front porch!

Where are they?! Don’t these people know this man returned from NYC to sit on this porch? Why aren’t they populating his fantasy of front-porch America?

Well, it didn’t take me more than a couple times walking up and down the block to realize the problem: instead of sitting out on the front porch, everyone is inside watching TV!

How dare they.

This makes me chuckle because I’m mostly in agreement with him — I, too, love old houses and front porches and wish others did, too, so we could stop building horrible subdivisions and the like. And I’ve written about it. I guess I didn’t realize what a scold I must have sounded like. (Just one tip for the blogger: In Indiana, they call a balustrade a porch railing.)

But not even in my scoldiest moments could I have written something like this, by Patrick Deneen: “It’s a Destructive Life,” all about how George Bailey destroys Bedford Falls:

George Bailey hates this town. Even as a child, he wants to escape its limiting clutches, ideally to visit the distant and exotic locales vividly pictured in National Geographic. As he grows, his ambitions change in a significant direction: he craves “to build things, design new buildings, plan modern cities.” The modern city of his dreams is imagined in direct contrast to the enclosure of Bedford Falls: it is to be open, fast, glittering, kaleidoscopic. He craves “to shake off the dust of this crummy little town” to build “airfields, skyscrapers one hundred stories tall, bridges a mile long….” George represents the vision of post-war America: the ambition to alter the landscape so to accommodate modern life, to uproot nature and replace it with monuments of human accomplishment, to re-engineer life for mobility and swiftness, one unencumbered by permanence, one no longer limited to a moderate and comprehensible human scale.

You know, it occurs to me he might be kidding. But he might just as well be not. The Crunchy Cons blog, which ran at National Review Online when the book was published, swiftly descended into blanket pronouncements that anyone who moves away from the (small) town of their birth is, prima facie, a bad parent and a selfish whelp. I liked it better when we said things like, “It takes all kinds” and left it at that.

OK, some new year housekeeping notes: Along with the sexy and curvaceous Ashley Morris and four others, I’ll be participating in a group blog on season five of “The Wire,” which all fans know starts this coming Sunday. The first episode is available On Demand now, and I’ve watched it twice, but I’m not posting anything until Sunday. Very old-media of me, I know, but sometimes a little stewing time is better than nyah-nyah-I-got-here-first speed. The site’s up now, and called — what else? — The New Package.

(Not-even-a-spoiler: One of the many small jokes in this multilayered series is the background noise of the corner touts calling out their wares, the brand names of which change periodically and reflect the times we live in; in past seasons we’ve heard them pushing heroin called WMD and Pandemic. There’s a new one this year. We should start a pool on what it will be.)

Bloggage:

Hank tells us what’s in and out for 2008. You know he’s right.

No, it’s not just you: Network news sucks out loud. John Hockenberry has some thoughts.

On the second day of the New Year, I resolve to bring some order back to my chaotic office. Better get started.

As you all know, I’m a Midwesterner, and nothing in the world warms a Midwesterner’s heart like using up leftovers. Last night, I opened the fridge and noticed we had a) lots of eggs; b) a box of Pillsbury ready-made pie crusts, a.k.a. mommy’s dirty little secret; c) some broccoli that was about to go around the bend; and d) an odd lot of cheddar. Fifteen minutes later, I had quiche in the oven. That’s the sort of meal that feeds you twice — in your stomach, and in your frugal little spirit, too.

Then I hit the New York magazine website and said, revolucion!:

…even though year-end bonuses are expected to be (relatively) small across Wall Street, Goldman employees are expected to rake in an average of $600,000 each.

We’re living in a new Gilded Age, which is not news. I’m just wondering how to make a little fairy dust trickle down on me. The reason Goldman Sachs is riding so high, we’re told, is they “bet against the subprime market and won.” Well, hey, I could have give them that advice. “Those people who are getting enormous mortgages based on oral declarations that they make $6,000 a week with no verification? Those are a bad bet. Get out now.” Maybe I could have sold them that information for, say, $50 million. But what is my tiny, non-entrepreneurial mind concerned with? Using up 75 cents worth of broccoli. I just don’t dream big enough.

Elsewhere in the news, I see that Britney Spears’ heretofore-believed-to-be-somewhat-smarter younger sister, 16-year-old Jamie Lynn, is expecting a little bundle of out-of-wedlock joy. Terrific. This is what happens when you let your child watch supposedly wholesome tween-targeted TV shows like “Zoey 101.” You duck the Vanessa what’s-her-name nude-picture missile and get smacked between the eyes by a teen pregnancy. I wonder how long before Kate hears about it, and whether she’ll ask me about it, and what I should say. Might as well start rehearsing a speech now. Would it be wrong to introduce an 11-year-old to the concept of trailer trash, or should I go with Lance Mannion’s oft-stated opinion that all actresses are promiscuous? One seems overly judgmental, the other too much adult-stained reality for a pre-teen. And yet, the naked truth — “Mrs. Spears lived out her dream of showbiz success through her daughters, who now stand before the world, 26 and 16, old before their years and destined for a long, slow slide into a sort of purgatory that will end in drug addiction, early death and where-are-they-now features on VH1” — seems even worse.

Note that “Zoey 101” is a Nickelodeon show. I’d like to think Disney keeps their young moneymakers on a tighter leash, or at least locked in chastity belts, but naked Vanessa proved otherwise. I guess the stupid show is history. Mom Lynne’s “parenting” book has been back-burnered, too. Do we still run people out of town on a rail? Can it be done to this nest of skanks? Bring back the studio system, with its morals clauses, and its pleasing tissue of lies!

(As it relates to our discussion of names below, here are a few character names on “Zoey 101:” Dustin, Quinn, Logan, Chase. Boy, girl, boy, boy.)

OK, bloggage:

Micki Maynard and Nick Bunkley at the NYT examine a local paradox — the flowering of downtown Detroit at the same time the auto industry continues to decline, statewide unemployment stands just short of 8 percent and finding a deeply discounted house to buy is as easy as walking out your front door.

I don’t know why, either. My instinct is to say: What the hell, let’s party. Most amusing passage:

And in the eyes of some, the new casinos, which include the 17-story Motor City Hotel and Casino that opened on Nov. 28, may be doing as much harm as good.

Some of the casino’s patrons include Detroit’s homeless. They used to buy food with the nickels and dimes they received for collecting returnable beverage containers, said Chad Audi, director of the rescue mission, which sits on a side street a few blocks from the Motor City.

Instead, these gamblers are spending their change in slot machines. “It’s turning into a very bad, negative impact on us,” he said.

I wonder if they have this problem in Vegas.

Off to work. Great days for all.

Such a strange artifact I found today: A letter from an old lawyer to a new one. Published in the American Lawyer, found via New York magazine’s website, getta loada this:

Dear Sarah,

Your father tells me you started a job at Cravath, Swaine & Moore earlier this fall. Perhaps you are aware that I spent some of my formative years at that firm.

I’m sure you will learn a lot at present-day Cravath. I, certainly, learned a lot when I went to work at the firm in the fall of 1952, just after graduating from law school. The firm was then located at 15 Broad St., directly opposite the New York Stock Exchange, the facade of which, outside my window, was not yet covered by a gigantic American flag.

Actually, the window was the province of E. Gabriel Perle, a more senior associate who got the desk nearest the window in the office we shared. “Gabby” took me out to lunch and dinner and introduced me to the many stanzas of “The Partners’ John,” a song telling the story of the rise of a young associate to the long-anticipated moment when he receives a key to the partners’ john.

I use the pronoun “he” because there were only men at the Cravath of 1952. No women lawyers, no women secretaries or stenographers, no women in any capacity at all were allowed in the hallways of Cravath, Swaine & Moore. “We are a place of business,” it was explained to me. Ladies would be a “distraction.” Even the messengers, who carried documents from one office to another and sharpened our stacks of pencils every morning, were elderly men in gray office jackets, reputedly recruited from among the ranks of retired runners at the exchange. If I needed to dictate, a buzz quickly brought a male “steno” who was older than I was. There was a special midnight shift of stenos who would have any late-night work freshly typed and ready on a partner’s desk first thing in the morning. “Women wouldn’t be safe in downtown New York during these night hours,” it was explained.

It could be difficult to tell a male secretary or steno from an associate, but clothes made the difference. Lawyers wore suits from Brooks Brothers. Stenos did not. Moreover, lawyers wore hats, something I completely failed to understand, despite frequent admonitions to “take your hat and come to lunch.” I never acquired a hat, nor, as you can imagine, did I ever see the inside of the partners’ john.

Every few days I get something in the e-mail about Hillary Clinton — what a bitch she is, what a ball-breaker, needless to say a dyke, an asshole, you can take your pick. And then I think about an interview I did last year, with a woman lawyer of Hillary’s age. Here’s the entry from my notes: When I decided to apply (to law school), was accepted and spoke to the dean of admissions. “Will I be employable?” Dean said, “Of course you will be, we need women to take low-paying legal work that men won’t take.” Representing juveniles, etc.

This was at the University of Michigan, by the way, not exactly Bob’s College of Law and Bartending. Then, as now, a tough nut to crack. And this was the dean of admissions talking, no doubt already pissed that he had to give one of his 450 precious seats to someone destined to work in juvie legal aid. (Two word coda to her story: She didn’t.)

Obviously, things have changed. But if, in 1952, women were considered so toxic to the legal mind that they couldn’t even be seen in the background of the office landscape at this particular white-shoe firm, that was still recent history in 1972, when Hillary graduated. I’m not going to belabor this point; I can’t imagine what I would bring to the discussion that hasn’t already been said. Just: Follow that link up there to the whole piece. It’s fascinating reading. And then think about it a while. That’s all.

You are also allowed a snicker or three at the homoerotic overtones of it all. I mean — all those jokes about the partners’ john. Please. A large infusion of estrogen must have been a downer in more ways than one. At least for some of them.

Bloggage:

This arrived a little late to do any good — it’s the entry for a YouTube/Home Depot contest to win a major cash infusion for renovating your home, and entries are closed. But you Hoosiers in particular are urged to watch. It’s funny, and it’s about a town in your orbit (Huntington). What did old buildings do before gay men were invented? Wait for the inevitable blow from the wrecking ball, I guess.

Also: This project has a blog. I really hope they win.

The Free Press, like all newspapers, is series-heavy this time of year; gotta get ’em published before year’s end, to qualify for awards. Columnist Bill McGraw’s assignment — drive every street in Detroit, then write about it — started strong on Sunday, faltered a bit Monday, and is back today with an entertaining piece about art, guerilla and otherwise, in the city.

Off to drive around the city in a panic finish my shopping. Strength and honor!

First snow of the season = first pot of split-pea soup. I’ve been planning this for a couple of weeks, so the timing is strictly a coincidence. I bought the ham but kept forgetting the split peas, then remembered when I was getting hummus from the gourmet-y market down the street. I found not the plain, unadorned bag of split peas that Kroger sells, but an everything-you-need soup-assembly kit, which translated to two cups of split peas plus a seasoning bundle.

Price: $5.99. No, I am not kidding.

I think I did one of those cough-explosions you do when someone tells you the thing you thought would cost a dime is actually $20,000. That’s roughly the disproportion here, as split peas are among the humblest and cheapest foods on the planet. For a long time I’d pay 69 cents a pound, but lately it’s around 84 cents, which I figure is skyrocketing energy prices asserting themselves. Or perhaps that six-buck soup kit reflected the true cost of what I’ve long believed is the truth about split peas — that they’re painstakingly split on a long, Tim Burton-style assembly line:

An army of workers arrives and take their seats on the line, hammer and chisel in hand. As the factory whistle blows, a single pea is released down a chute to land in front of each worker. A small vise is tightened, the worker places the chisel, taps it once, and the pea separates into equal hemispheres, each rolling down to a collection bin. A tap of a foot lever releases the next pea, and the process starts all over again.

Well, that’s how it should go.

More likely, the peas were “organic,” a designation that requires a lot of faith in the purchaser. I buy organic food when the price differential isn’t insulting, but figure the designation is a crapshoot and, perhaps, a fairy tale. (Also, at the midcentury mark, I figure all my filtering organs have already been poisoned by the chemicals of half a lifetime, so why lose sleep over it now?) Organic is hot, “green” is hot, and the marketplace is cashing in. The $5.15 difference in what I pay for split peas at Kroger and what I’d pay for the soup kit at Fancypants Market isn’t for the extra tablespoon of dried herbs; it’s for a complicated mix of overhead, packaging, advertising, distribution and a harder-to-quantify factor I guess you could call specialness. (This is the sort of thing I think about on bike rides. If only I could make it pay somehow.)

I realize discussion of what things cost is about as interesting to some of you as shoveling snow, but it seems to be a theme of late. My health-care news farming last night harvested a lengthy NYT report on how global “free trade zones” abet prescription-drug counterfeiters. (There’s money in heroin, but there’s also money — and fewer automatic weapons — in fake and otherwise squirrelly erectile-dysfunction drugs. Even Tony Soprano was getting in on it in the last season. Remember his meeting with Bobby and the Canadian gangsters? They were discussing bulk pricing on expired Fosamax.) It’s an interesting story, because it illustrates what happens when one country — that would be us — makes health care so complicated for people living at the margins of affordability. If it were just a bunch of boner drugs being faked and sold on the black and grey markets, it would be a problem for the patent holders and the people who gamble on swallowing them. But alas, it’s more complicated than that:

…An examination of the case reveals its link to a complex supply chain of fake drugs that ran from China through Hong Kong, the United Arab Emirates, Britain and the Bahamas, ultimately leading to an Internet pharmacy whose American customers believed they were buying medicine from Canada, according to interviews with regulators and drug company investigators in six countries. …These were not just lifestyle drugs; this medicine was supposed to treat high blood pressure, high cholesterol, osteoporosis and acid reflux, among other ailments.

…In the Bahamas, investigators had also made an important discovery. The computers at Personal Touch Pharmacy were connected to a server hosting a Canadian Internet pharmacy Web site.

The site belonged to RxNorth, described by one trade association as the world’s first major online pharmacy.

A founder, Andrew Strempler, had been the subject of numerous profiles, including one in The New York Times in 2005 that described how at the age of 30 he had two Dodge Vipers, a Jaguar and a yellow Lamborghini with a license plate that reads “RX Boss.”

The article reported that Mr. Strempler’s innovation “created a whole new Canadian industry that has plugged a niche in America’s troubled health care system almost overnight, providing about $800 million worth of low-cost drugs a year to two million uninsured and underinsured Americans, many elderly.” Drugs have traditionally been cheaper in Canada because of its health care system.

One of the counterfeits of a name-brand blood thinner was found to contain cement powder. And that’s what some geezer was taking to head off a stroke. Ah, free enterprise.

But I don’t want to bring you down on what promises to be a lovely day. We got another dusting of fresh snow overnight, and the world is white and beautiful. We’re promised enough sunshine to make glacier glasses a necessity today, so I’m bucking up. Besides, we have a special sub-category of bloggage today: NN.C Readers in the News!

First, John Ritter — who I think comments here as just plain John — writes an op-ed in his hometown paper, The Day. The headline is typical of op-ed pages everywhere, in that it states an obvious, inoffensive truth with a lot of capital letters:

An Understanding Of American History makes Us Better Appreciate Who We Are

That’s too bad, because John was reacting to a previous letter to the editor, in which the writer stated Daniel Boone died at the Alamo, a rather major fact-boner that either skated under the editors’ noses, or was thought harmless enough to pass unchallenged. I think John gets at, but does not explicitly state, the reason for the confusion here:

Yes, Daniel Boone was a big man and yes, he did fight for America to make it free. He did quite a few things in his life but one thing he didn’t do was die at the Alamo. He had died a peaceful death on Sept. 20, 1820, only 15 1/2 years before Davy Crockett perished at the Alamo. Davy Crockett is another larger than life American legend. But he was not Daniel Boone, although the actor Fess Parker did portray both of them very well.

Fess Parker played them both! You can see why we get these things mixed up.

On the other side of the world, communist bomb-throwing college professor Ashley Morris does his best to bolster jihad on his way home from a two-week teaching stint in the Persian Gulf:

I have been in Bahrain for two weeks and I am quite happy to report that as a New Orleanian, I feel vindicated. I travel around the world, and people ask where I am from. I do not say, “America”, I say “New Orleans”. After the complete and utter abandonment of the city and people of New Orleans by the American government, I do not feel like an “American” anymore. Being in the Arabian Gulf has made me realise that most people here understand the feeling.

As I commented on Ashley’s own blog: Enjoy your next strip search, professor.

Less personal bloggage:

You’ve heard of a turducken? Or a tofucken? Meet the…turdugoosquapartsquab…en. Or something. Make up your own name. It sounds vile, but then, I’ve always considered goose to be the white-people version of chitlins. Sure, it has a long history — very Dickens and all — but you don’t have to live in the past, and anyone who would eat one of those greasy beasts when a nice tender chicken or turkey was available is simply nuts. Of course, the percentage of goose in this thing is pretty low. Still.

Off to find my glacier glasses (although the sun is still behind a cloud bank somewhere). Have a swell day, all.

Lawyers, Guns and Money takes note of former Mitten Stater Ted Nugent, as part of its Worst American Birthdays series.

Snerk: Rising to fame in the 1970s with a string of somewhat well-regarded, jizz-splattered albums, “The Nuge” has spent the last two decades descending the evolutionary tree with artistic and political statements that grate against the ears with equal degrees of intensity.

My sister shared a Christmas-shopping moment the other day: Standing in a crowded store in a crowded mall, trying to find a decent outfit for her teenage granddaughter. The girl and her brother generally get one nice outfit every year, the sorts of splurge-y name brands they wouldn’t normally get. Every kid needs to feel cool at least sometimes.

So she found something, then looked at the price tag: A pair of Baby Phat jeans, juniors size 5. Price: $80.

“Kimora Lee Simmons should be ashamed of herself!” she exploded. I heartily agree (although it has nothing to do with her jeans).

I had my own moment today, in Bath & Body Works. I was buying a few stocking stuffers for a Girl Scout Christmas project — personal-care products for the girls at a local children’s home. I figure one of the thousand petty humiliations of being poor and institutionalized at Christmas is having to settle for everyone’s hand-me-downs, so I was determined to buy something that didn’t say “dollar store.” I went into the ubiquitous mall soap store for some cute crap-in-a-bottle. Picked up a tiny tin of American Girl-branded lip balm. Four-fifty.

“Leslie Wexner should be ashamed of himself!” I said. It didn’t quite have the same ring to it. Not here, anyway — it would play in Columbus. But the day I spend nearly five bucks for two cents’ worth of flavored wax hasn’t yet arrived. I went next door to Rite Aid and loaded up with a bunch of perfectly acceptable stuff and spent around $30.

I shouldn’t even set foot in that store, anyway. It always smells like a chemistry set. Everything under The Limited’s umbrella made its rep selling goods of barely acceptable quality to the greatest number of people. I haven’t trusted the place since I tucked a Victoria’s Secret bra away for six months, and took it out again to find half the elastic had rotted.

Ah, well. We have greater things to discuss today than lip balm. The death of Ike Turner, say.

The way of all flesh, etc. I saw Ike and Tina once, at the Ohio State Fair. Mid-’70s, sometime in there. Tina and the Ikettes wore their trademark minidresses with fringe, and shook that shit into knots. A highly memorable performance. Ike did what Ike always did: He hung back and led the band. From what we know now, Tina already hated his guts by then and was plotting her escape. Their marriage seemed a tragic case of “A Star is Born,” if James Mason had bounced Judy Garland off the walls when he had a snoot full of coke. Rock ‘n’ roll historians are making the case that it’s unfair for the man who gave the world “Rocket 88” to be remembered solely as a wife-beater. Miles Davis was not very nice to his women, either, but it didn’t lead his obituaries. (Note: Davis was also lucky none of them became stars like Tina, or the story might be different.) Two things need to be said about Ike. One, that he was very lucky in the casting of the man who would play him in Tina’s version of her life story. Laurence Fishburne brought something extra to that role and made it memorable. And second, that he found Tina. There wouldn’t have been a Tina without Ike. So there’s that.

I once heard Tina interviewed on “60 Minutes,” and Ed Bradley asked if she’d had any plastic surgery done. She freely admitted to a breast lift and a nose job, the latter because Ike had connected with it so many times it needed the repair, and the former to “put them back where they belong.” Gotta chuckle.

Best line in “What’s Love Got to Do With It?”: “Get back in there and do it again, and this time put some stink on it.” They were recording “Nutbush City Limits.” I’d say she did so.

So, bloggage:

I read the New York Times Styles section these days for a look into a world I don’t and (I hope) never will occupy — one where, when a person is invited to dinner, they feel free to present the hostess with a long list of objectionable foods; where people fret over the carbon footprint of their holiday gifts; where there are no more entrees in restaurants, because 17 bites is 14 too many for boredom not to set in.

Today, another nose-against-the-glass moment: People who don’t know when to leave the dog at home.

It was a dark and stormy night — actually four stormy nights — when Jayme Otto, 31, and her husband, Ryan Otto, 33, drove 1,200 miles from their home in Boulder, Colo., to her parents’ house in Cleveland for Christmas.

“We traveled all this way to bring our yellow Labrador, Cody Bear, home to spend time with his grandparents,” Ms. Otto said, “grandparents” being dog-person-speak for her parents.

Besides wanting Cody Bear “to participate in his favorite yearly activity of unwrapping gifts and destroying all the boxes,” as Ms. Otto put it, they wanted the dog to meet her brother’s fiancée.

But on Christmas morning, a commotion ensued: the fiancée was allergic to dogs and broke out in hives.

“The dog was banished to the guest bedroom and we were unable to share our Christmas morning with Cody Bear,” Ms. Otto said bitterly. “The family blowup between my brother and I over the dog resulted in my mother not speaking to me for two months and my brother for four.” This Christmas will mark the first time that the Ottos will not be returning home.

I’m trying to think of the people I know who remained virginal until marriage. (think, think, think.) OK, I know a few. Now I’m trying to think of the people who did the opposite — who pretty much fell into bed on date one, and got married at some later date. (think, think, think.) I know a lot of those. Now I’m thinking of the states of all those marriages. (think, think, think.) And I see pretty much identical success/failure rates in both camps. Which is hardly a scientific poll, I realize, but seems to underline what every adult with a lick of common sense knows about marital sex — that it’s a very important part of the relationship, but only one part. So why does the Weekly Standard, which would never stand for facile analyses of Middle Eastern affairs (to take them at their word, anyway), run nonsense like this?

Instant sex and romantic love can’t coexist any more than hurricanes and forest fires. One drives out the other.

It’s a standard cheap shot of lefties to say that right-wing social policy comes from its proponents not being able to get laid, but if only they didn’t make it so easy to say so.

Finally, the Christians said, “Merry Christmas” and the Jew replied, “Happy Hanukkah,” so of course a fistfight was the only reasonable response. Fortunately, a Muslim stepped in to break things up.

Well, it is the season of miracles.

Sometimes people ask, “Is Grosse Pointe really as preppy as all that? Is it really the land of Muffy and Skip, madras and seersucker, headbands and understated jewelry?”

You bet your ass it is. Not so much in my neighborhood, alas, but we have that stuff — mostly in the dug-in WASP enclaves in the City and the Farms. And every so often you’ll stand in line at the store behind a reed-slim dowager, hair in the same velvet-headband pageboy she’s worn since she was 17, in the sort of clean, classic clothes you don’t see so often anymore. From behind, you might think she still is 17, and then she turns and displays a face that is not surgically altered or maintained, and shows every line all those hours in the sun earned her, but it all works, because she is an American thoroughbred, and she’s got great bone structure. She is G.P.O.G.

Also, Grosse Pointe has a Brooks Brothers. So do a lot of places, but it’s different here. It’s, like, the uniform. People who wear Brooks Brothers wear it all their lives, and if you doubt it, you should have seen the woman who waited on me there the other day — 60 if she was a day, in an argyle sweater more suitable for a teenager, but it looked just fine on her. That’s Brooks Brothers.

Jezebel is having a little fun with the current catalog, and to be sure, it’s pretty fun-worthy. Check out George H.W. Bush’s cousin’s pants, here:

I like the cut of his jib! When I saw this feature, I thought perhaps they’d dug up an old BB catalog, but no, that’s the current one. Funniest comment to the post: Who wants to bet that in 30 yrs this is going to be going around the e-mail circles much like that now-infamous 1977 JC Penney Catalog is doing now? There’s someone who doesn’t get it. In 30 years the Brooks Brothers catalog will look pretty much the same as it does today, and that’s why people shop there. Good clothes of good quality that are neither in nor out of style. You’ll never be the sharpest dresser in the room, but you’ll be suitable, the man, or woman, in the gray flannel suit.

Or maybe the woman in the plaid shoes:

You know what I like about that outfit? The red tartan. Let those rappers and Hollywood types wear Burberry. The right sort of people favor the Stewart tartan.

And who says WASPs don’t have a sense of humor? If they made an “Animal House” reunion movie, Bluto would wear these pants:

He’s not sure which pattern he has an ancestral claim to, so he just wears them all. I say we call him Braveheart.

OK, then. How’s your week going? All I can think about these days is how much I have yet to do before the holiday, but not so much that I can’t enjoy its pleasures. The tree went up over the weekend, and lo, it is lovely. Where would you think a household in a state covered with piney forests and Christmas-tree farms would get their own? At a local lot, of course, but state of origin? Starts with an M?

“Where’s this tree from?” I asked as the guy wrote out a slip for our bushy Fraser fir.

“North Carolina,” he said.

“You’re kidding me.”

He wasn’t. He said the Frasers need a longer growing season to get nice and tall, and fewer deer gnawing on them to get nice and bushy. I guess Michigan deer are like Michigan squirrels — they’ll eat anything.

I feel like a fool, but thanks, Carolinas.

I suppose this is the answer to a lot of prayers: Armed good guy stops armed bad guy. It’s all a lot of people will need to settle the argument whether we should all be packin’ a piece as we go about our day. Few people ask the questions I ask, starting with the one raised by this startling passage: New Life Pastor Brady Boyd called Assam, who is normally his personal security guard… I was raised a Catholic. I don’t recall Father Gamba traveling with muscle. What a world.

Big day, too much to do. Make merry in the comments.

Hank alerts us to what he calls Oklahoma’s “de facto state Christmas carol,” a jingle for a local jewelry store that’s been running every holiday season for 51 years. I warn you, click at your own risk. Those susceptible to jingle-sickness — the tendency for these things to burn themselves on your personal hard drive, shoving aside such minor data bits as the names of your children — are urged not to go there. But hey! It’s catchy!

A little background:

Oklahoma is pro-capitalism; some people will buy TV time to sing your jingle:

OK, no more links. The virus has been passed. Soon, crowds will mill around the evacuating helicopters, shouting, “I’m not infected! I’m not infected!” as the rest of us scream and scream “at Oklahoma’s oldest jeweler! Since eighteen-ninety-two!” over the sound of the spinning rotors.

Actually, when you think about it, there’s something about a certain four-syllable state name that lends itself to music, isn’t there? Every night my honey lamb and I sit alone and talk, and watch a hawk making lazy circles in the skyyyyyy…

Since we seem to be off on a YouTube foot this morning, you can waste all kinds of time following the links from this Metafilter post, which managed to dig up a video of Ella no-I’m-not-kidding Fitzgerald singing “Sunshine of Your Love.”

As for me, I’m watching the sun rise on a severe-clear day (Midwest weather-nerd translation: Clear winter skies, abundant winter sunshine, cold as hell) that promises to turn overcast and snowy sometime in the next 24 hours. Fine with me. Bring on the precipitation, bring on the set-dressing for the holidays. Alan is out evacuating the dog; he (the dog) is on a new food regimen, and I’m making sure he has every opportunity to get his innards adjusted to the change before he settles back into his usual daytime routine of sleeping it away. The depredations of age are starting to settle in — the new food is a response to recent weight loss, which the vet says is caused by diminished kidney function.

“And what’s causing that?” I asked.

“Being 16 years old,” he replied.

Oh, well. None of us live forever, and ever since he entered the double digits, I guess I’ve been waiting for the inevitable. The good news: “He’s still got a lot of fight left in him,” the vet says. I’ll say. The little bastard still has a few Easter baskets and trick-or-treat bags to plunder. If the $20-a-case canned stuff allows him to do so, all the better.

Brian passes along a story I’d meant to bring to your attention earlier in the week, and then forgot about (probably because I was reading In Style): Everything a Parent Needs to Know About Theme-Park Rides to Make Them Want to Lock Their Children in the Basement Forever, via the WashPost. Bottom line: Many are not safe and everything you suspected about sleazebag carnies is probably true. And then, buried in the middle, is this gem:

Although the (Consumer Product Safety Commission) regulates children’s toys, strollers, bicycles and car seats, it has no jurisdiction over rides at fixed amusement parks, such as those run by Walt Disney Co., Six Flags, Universal and Anheuser-Busch Entertainment that host an estimated 300 million people on 1.84 billion rides annually.

Theme parks won their exemption in 1981, after a CPSC probe of ride accidents at Marriott theme parks alleged a coverup of safety hazards. Marriott, represented by Kenneth W. Starr, then a young Washington lawyer, and the industry fought back in the courts and on the Hill, where its top lobbyist complained about the “economic hardship” created by CPSC policing. More safety measures lessening risks would “make the ride worthless,” lobbyist John Graff told Congress at the time. “The activities of the commission must be limited.”

We must spare economic hardship to Disney at all costs. What’s a few immature human feet when such great American companies would be inconvenienced:

At Six Flags Kentucky Kingdom, 13-year-old Kaitlyn Lasitter’s feet were severed while she was riding the Tower of Power, a stomach-flipping thriller that draws riders up and pauses briefly before plunging at more than 50 mph. A cable snapped and wound around Kaitlyn’s legs like a bullwhip. Surgeons reattached her right foot, but her left was too damaged to save.

OK, that’s unfair. The story is more about rides that should have seat belts but don’t, the ones you see at the church fundraiser on the corner. And also, the lack of consistent inspection of rides, which typically travel the country, in and out of jurisdictions, many of which lack the manpower to even make a passing safety check. Since it’s no longer theme-park season, at least at this latitude, you can probably read this story without getting nauseous. I can’t guarantee anything about next year, though.

OK, that’s it for me. Have a great day.