Remember how I said this was the Winter That Wasn’t? Well, it’s winter now. Here’s a picture of our boat slip. In five more months, there’ll be a boat there.

I took Kate and a friend to the park today, because finally there was ice to skate on, and skate they did. Every time she puts her new skates on, she gets better at it; it’s a pleasure to watch, at least until the wind off the lake strips off all my mascara and I have to step inside the rec center to warm up a bit. There were two teenage girls in there with their mother, complaining that there was snow on the ice and why wasn’t anyone shoveling it off?

“It’s just a dusting, really,” I said, gesturing to the several skaters already out there, gliding around unimpeded. They glared at me. OK, don’t mind me. The fancy-shmancy private-school indoor rink a couple miles away opens to the public every Sunday for two hours; I’m sure they’d be more comfortable there anyway. I went back to watching Kate and her friend write their names in the ice and felt grateful they won’t be teenagers for a few more years.

I guess when they are, I’ll be back to watching them the way I did when they were toddlers, but in this nice in-between period I was free to take a little stroll along the lake, which was just like “Stranger Than Paradise,” only with maybe a little more blue and gray in the shot. I couldn’t really take the time to frame it because the wind was pretty strong and my eyes kept tearing.

I admit to getting tired of it by March, but all things considered, I sorta like winter.

And now it’s Monday, yet another of the days that make me suspect the Grosse Pointe Public Schools hate working parents — it’s an in-service day for teachers, so no school. Last week was the MLK holiday. Next month will be a one-week winter break, followed six weeks later by spring break. It’s hard to imagine that two weeks ago I daydreamed of going back to work in an actual office, with adults and everything. Not until it’s legal to kennel 10-year-olds. (You can kennel infants and toddlers, but once they grow up a little, the deal’s off.)

So, bloggage:

A young man was released from prison here last week. I wasn’t here for the full length of this story, but I gather it went like this: Nathaniel Abraham, at 11, was the youngest person in Michigan convicted of homicide, back in 1997. He was released from prison last week, the day before his 21st birthday. For his final court date, he chose an understated, I’m-ready-to-go-straight costume — an ivory suit with pink pinstriping, accented with pink shirt and pink alligator shoes, a matching fedora, the whole ensemble topped with a rabbit-fur coat.

Of course, in Detroit, a city where racism is the bass note of every song we hear, from hip-hop right down to the Muzak in grocery stores, this image was greeted with …not quite hysteria, but the sort of calm, reasoned discussion you see on lunatic-politics discussion boards. From across the metro area, a million voices rose as one and shouted: Pimp.

But at least it gave the columnists something to gnash over. This one includes a photo. This one doesn’t.

Eric Zorn had one of his very entertaining, supremely time-wasting Lank of Linkin’ roundups today, including this entry: Before you click on The Beast’s annual list of 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2006 (raw language warning), see if you can guess who’s number one from these excerpts: “… nakedly self-serving … has so successfully snowed America that he could go around kicking puppies all day and he’d be applauded for his authenticity. In reality (he) is as phony as slimeballs come.”

I guessed Donald Trump. It wasn’t him (although he was on the list, at No. 21). I must be losing my touch.

And now Monday begins in earnest. I guess we’ll go skating again.

If I could turn back the hands of time, as Tyrone Davis sang, there isn’t a whole lot I’d change. A few boyfriends would remain strangers, I would have paid closer attention in high school Russian class, I would have taken more chances. But for someone whose big mouth has gotten her into so much trouble, I don’t regret all that much. The remarks that were hurtful, yes. The ones that gave voice to a truth everyone in the room was thinking but which were impolitic to give voice to, not really. Every step on that road took me to this spot on the road, or not exactly on the road, more like off in the ditch, spinning my wheels, shrieking to passing traffic, “Sure! That road seems like the one you should take! But beware! Beware!” — I don’t mind this spot too too much. All part of the journey, etc. Soon the tow truck will arrive, or maybe it won’t, maybe I’ll start walking, and…

OK. Abandon metaphor.

My point: If I had it to do over again I wouldn’t have chosen journalism. Time Inc. laid off nearly 300 people yesterday, eliminated three bureaus. Yes, yes, the next Britney Spears story in People may not have five reporters, what a tragedy, etc. I don’t want to sound any big themes about journalism here; in a lot of ways we made our bed and now we’re lying in it, only it turns out it’s no longer a bed but just this sort of narrow cot, and people keep falling out, and…

Abandon metaphor.

What particularly cheeses me is the timing. Speaking out of pure selfishness, this could not come at a worse time. For me, anyway. Too young for retirement, too old to make a graceful sidestep into another field, it seems that those of us who were drawn to journalism by its two great movements of recent memory — New Journalism and Woodstein-style investigation — are now in the worst possible position. Tough times may make tough people, but they also shred a few in the bargain. Again, speaking selfishly, those 289 jobs eliminated yesterday represent 289 lives turned upside down, and not all will be righted. Yes, it happens in every industry. No, I’m not asking for sympathy. I’m just taking note.

Pout, pout, pout.

I remember, many years ago, my newspaper sent a couple of reporters to some training sponsored by our parent company, Knight Ridder. They came back with their heads spinning; some Free Press people were at the same session, bitching about their latest degradation — the paper would not employ stenographers to transcribe taped interviews. How were they supposed to do their jobs, etc. I feel like Scarlett O’Hara, starved to a ravenous husk, remembering the antebellum tables groaning with food as she’s puking up that radish in the Twelve Oaks garden.

As God as my witness, I’ll never…well, I’d better get to work.

But first! Bloggage! Because that’s why you come here, right? A few snarky remarks, a report on how we’re doing in the D, maybe a dinner menu, and then some tasty linkage, after which we turn the floor show over to the commenters. See? We evolved a new form of journalism, justlikethat. Let’s make it pay for the proprietress, and we’ll all be happy. I will, anyway.

Salon reports on the latest alt-foods craze — raw milk. One of my college boyfriends rented a place in the country for a while, next door to a dairy farm, where he bought gallons of raw milk for something like a buck or two. I mentioned this in passing to my mother, who nearly leapt from her chair in alarm, then commenced telling a hair-raising tale about a girl she knew who got undulant fever (medical name: brucellosis, for you Zevon fans) from drinking unpasteurized milk. She made me promise never to touch the stuff, and I did. It was an easy promise to make, as what little I’d had so far was sort of like drinking liquified butter. In the Salon story, people say raw milk keeps them away from sweets. I’ll say — liquified butter will do that.

It made good coffee cream, I’ll allow. Still: Thank God for Louis Pasteur.

With a 10-year-old in the house, “American Idol” is simply an element that we must live with, and the lack thereof would make life impossible, kind of like oxygen. Eric Zorn tried to put up his dukes against the juggernaut of humiliation that is the early episodes, but on this, I’m more with Jody Rosen at the Slate AI blog, who points out “you couldn’t help but suspect that most of the ‘bad’ singers were actually savvy performance artists, angling for a few minutes of airtime.” Yup. And there were teachable moments, just the same; Alan told Kate the moral of this story is, “Always wear a bra.” How true that is.

Do you hate Pachelbel’s Canon in D? Rob Paravonian does.

UPDATE: And while I was feeling sorry for myself a little while ago, I forgot to thank my lucky stars that while I may not work for the New York Times, that also means I’ll never have to write a story like this:

For some people, the most elusive aspect of owning a vacation home that sits beyond big-city borders isn’t finding the time to enjoy it. It’s finding someone to service the deluxe appliances inside.

“We called Viking over the holidays every year,�? Rosemary Devlin said of her half-decade-long (and mostly futile) efforts to schedule manufacturer service for her mutinous dishwasher. The appliance was installed along with a suite of Viking cousins when Ms. Devlin and her husband, Fay, whose main house is about 20 miles north of Manhattan in Irvington, N.Y., built their six-bedroom ski house on Okemo Mountain in Ludlow, Vt.

I mean: Whew.

One of Kate’s friends was over yesterday, and when her father came to pick her up, he committed the cardinal sin of male rudeness: He pulled into the driveway and honked.

I went outside to scold him. He said he didn’t want to leave the comfort of his heated seat. Then he told me about his friend’s 1986 Mercedes, which has two horn settings — standard and, with the flip of a switch, “polite,” for driveway honkers, I suppose. We talked about the neighbor across the street, who had all four of his 2006 Escalade wheels stolen one morning last week, from his driveway and in early daylight. They left it precariously balanced on landscaping bricks, one of which collapsed, giving the thing the look of an elegant, chrome-trimmed dinosaur drowning in the La Brea Tar Pits. Then we discussed whether his friend with the 1986 Mercedes should get the Michigan Heritage license plate for classic vehicles of a certain age. You pay one price and never have to renew again. Then his daughter came out and got in the car to go home.

Detroit: Where all the small talk is about cars.

(After the Escalade wheel theft last week, some of the neighbors gathered on the sidewalk and talked it over. It took approximately 40 seconds for the discussion to shift to whether GM should make locking lugnuts standard on all models above a certain price point. After living in one place where all the small talk was about the weather, and another place where it was all about the Buckeyes, it’s a nice change.)

I told Alan the other day that I want my next car to be an American-made minivan with a pumpin’ sound system and spinning rims. That ought to confound ’em in the carpool lane.

OK, then. Detroit will soon host one of those plastinated-body exhibits (at a rather staggering ticket cost, I notice — $70 if all three of us go). It looks simultaneously fascinating and repellent. I have no objection on religious grounds, but whenever I hear “all the bodies were freely given” and “in China” together in a sentence, I just don’t quite want to swallow it whole. It’s rated PG-13 as well, which makes me wonder why — genitalia? I suppose so. Gruesomeness? Most likely.

Ever been to one? What was it like? How did it make you feeeeeel?

…they turn to YouTube. TwoTube, today. First is a little inside-newspaper baseball, some “I’m the Tribune/I’m the Sun-Times” spoofery:

And because I kinda feel bad about their pain, and because someone mentioned it in the comments yesterday, a good, high-quality Script Ohio, including a great i-dot:

So I got “Hannibal Rising” out of the library Saturday, expecting it to be a fine, sucky read in the model of “Hannibal.” (If you don’t understand how something can be fine and sucky, get outta here. It’s the same impulse that makes me want to call my friend Ron whenever the commercial for “Freedom Writers” airs, and say, we are so there.)

Twelve hours later, I closed the book, having read it more or less straight through. I didn’t stay up until 3, because nothing can keep me up until 3 anymore, at least not when I have the option of going to bed at 11. It didn’t suck. Too much. I was astonished.

In this opinion, I noted that I have very little company. The Amazon reviewers are savaging it, as are most professionals; Terrence Rafferty in the New York Times is fairly kind. But I don’t care who knows it: I kinda liked it.

“Hannibal” was such a shock to the system, taking the imprisoned monster of “Silence of the Lambs” and turning him loose in the world, where he promptly reveals himself as, well, a big ol’ fairy. People always speak of the ending, where he makes Clarice Starling his love slave and they live happily ever after in Buenos Aires. They say, “That was so out of character for her, I felt robbed.” Out of character for her? What about him? He’s arranging flowers and fussing over his table settings like Mr. Gay from Gaytown, population you!

Doubt me? Ahem:

Early in the morning the doctor laid his table carefully for three, studying it from different angles with the tip of his finger beside his nose, changed candlesticks twice and went from his damask place mats to a gathered tablecloth to reduce to more manageable size the oval dining table.

I could have bought this guy as merely a serious table-setter, but the changing-candlesticks-twice part was, how you say, the tell. Not to mention the finger beside his nose.

The rest of the book was larded with ridiculous details, all of which were rich fodder for Martin Amis’ takedown of the book in Talk magazine when it came out. I can’t find a copy online, but trust me when I say that after reading it, I thought Harris wouldn’t dare write about Hannibal again. A character is described as having “a rank smell, like sausage from an animal improperly gelded.” (You know, that smell.) There’s a lot of foofraw about the proper reduction of a stock, the outfitting of a picnic basket from Hammacher Schlemmer, and most absurd of all, the really creepy villain who makes martinis from the tears of weeping poor children. How would you order that in a bar?

A lot of that stuff is in “Hannibal Rising,” but either I’m more used to it or it just isn’t dwelt on so much, and doesn’t get in the way. There’s some flower-arranging, but it’s Japanese, hence not quite so twee. The plot I’m not so crazy about — it’s Hannibal’s origin story, and progresses in such a cinematic fashion that you immediately say, “Why, it’s almost as if this book was written simultaneously with the screenplay,” and then you realize, yes, yes it was. Seriously, the climax is so end-of-the-second-act you can practically hear the director shouting, “cut!” There’s even a big explosion, from which some actor will no doubt be harmlessly flung, arms and legs windmilling.

Maybe I didn’t like this book as much as I thought.

Or it might be that it simply benefited from low expectations. Whatever. I enjoyed the trip through eastern Europe it took me on, before we relocated to France and Hannibal’s training in flower arranging begins anew. Maybe what I liked best is, it showed me people like me, and like most readers, who actually like this character. I always thought it was amusing that Harris gave Lecter all the great lines, the most withering put-downs, the best taste, the highest IQ, and then turns around every third page and reminds us that he’s a MONSTAH, dammit, which makes you feel bad for ever wanting to have dinner with him (at a restaurant). Because this was pre-monstrous Hannibal, you don’t feel so guilty about it.

I see from the casting that “Hannibal Rising,” the released-in-February (kiss of death) movie, will feature two of my favorite HBO series actors — Kevin McKidd (Lucius Vorenus in “Rome”) and Dominic West (Jimmy McNulty in “The Wire”), the former as a bad guy, the latter as a French police inspector. It’s going to be accent-a-palooza, I can just see it now. Maybe I should call Ron. I think we have a bad-movie date coming.

With all the bodies piling up in the last couple of days, we haven’t had much time to talk about Christmas. How was yours? Mine was fine, with perhaps a bit too much driving. Down to Columbus on Saturday, back to Detroit on Sunday, to and from Defiance on Monday. But we had a nice time. My big present from Alan were several nice antique prints, including this one, which made me laugh. (I don’t think Alan paid that much, however, and if he did, he’s in trouble.)

As I’ve gotten older, my contributions to the what-I’d-do-if-I-won-the-lottery conversation are dwindling. I’m over cars, houses, and most grown-up toys. If I won the lottery, I’d do most of my big spending on two things — travel and art. A few years ago Alan and I started buying antique prints, nothing grand, the sort of things a couple of underpaid journalists can afford. (In all our time together, I think we’ve only owned two pieces that cost more to buy than they did to frame.) One of the household dramas of recent weeks that I’ve spared you was the Great Bedroom Painting Project, in which I learned (yet again!) that one does not argue with Alan’s color sense. Now we’re living in a taupe bedroom — and yes, all the screws on the light switches line up at 12 o’clock — and need some new stuff for the walls. Audubon’s butt-licking lynx will do nicely.

Among our experiences over the weekend was this oddity: My brother, Alan and I stopped in for a drink at the little workingman’s bar in Obetz, a little workingman’s suburb of Columbus. (My brother owns the joint.) It was quiet for a Saturday night, just two women and three men, all sitting at the bar. Only wait, that third man isn’t a man at all…

“There’s a dog at the bar,” Alan said. I looked closer. Looking back through the barroom gloom was, indeed, a dog. A big chocolate Lab, sitting on a stool as nice as you please. He had a bowl of water in front of him. (At least, I think it was water. It didn’t have an olive in it, so I assume it wasn’t a martini.) It looked like a beer commercial; I kept waiting for the dog’s lips to move CGI-style and for him to call someone dude.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Budweiser,” his owner said. But of course.

Budweiser was a very good dog, parking his considerable Lab frame on a rather tiny spot of barstool real estate with no obvious discomfort or complaint. Every so often someone would buy him a piece of beef jerky. At one point my brother talked some amicable trash to his owner, and the owner talked some trash back, and Budweiser barked in agreement. When one of the women called him over for some jerky and petting, he jumped down from his stool and jumped up onto the one next to her with no coaxing whatsoever.

“Doesn’t the health department have a problem with this?” I asked. (For the record, I think every bar should have a house dog.)

“This is Obetz,” he said. “You can do anything you want here. No one knows we exist.”

Good dog, Budweiser.

So, bloggage:

God bless the crazy men among us: Man spends $60,000 and half his life building a “Jetsons-style” vehicle. “Why drive when you can fly 500 m.p.h.?” he asks.

Excellent question.

Spike Lee’s directing the James Brown biopic? Finally, a movie where I care who plays the lead. (My bet’s on Eddie Murphy.)

Guess how much sleep I got last night? Not enough. I’m off to find more French Roast and take a shower.

Here’s my James Brown story. It’s not much of a story.

I used to be a night person. It was a necessity of working 2-10 p.m., night shift at an afternoon paper. But I was young and had the sort of energy and lifestyle that made those hours pretty much ideal. Anyway, one night one of my colleagues, Dave Jones, stopped by my desk and said, “You want to see James Brown later on tonight? He’s playing at the Agora.” It was a crummy but busy rock club down in the campus area (now the Newport Music Hall, for you Buckeyes), seats about 1,000, maybe more.

“The show’ll be over by the time we get there,” I said. Nope, said Jones. He’s playing two shows.

This was 1982, around there, which would have made Brown 50-ish. He’d been in showbiz for decades already, had been its Hardest-Working Man for at least that long. But he was, shall we say, in a trough. The ’60s were long over, disco was dead, hip-hop was still a-borning, New Wave had peaked and radio was starting to split into armed camps of strict formats. “Living in America” was still a few years away, and the baby-boom nostalgia machine had yet to crank all the way up and give him a residual income from getting “I Feel Good” in all those Huggies commercials. And so he and his band were touring and playing two shows a night in 1,000-seat clubs.

We arrived in plenty of time to get tickets for the midnight show. The hall filled with a mixed-race crowd spanning a wide age range. We snared a table off to the side, a few steps above the standing-room main floor, ordered a pitcher and waited.

Brown’s shows always began the same way — with his large, brass-heavy Revue playing a few numbers by themselves, while an MC, Danny Ray, started the crowd chanting “James Brown! James Brown!” I was eager to see the show, but this seemed a little silly, even as we joined in. I looked closely at the Revue. The intimacy of the space and the artlessness of the lighting showed every pill on their powder-blue tuxedos. Their ruffled shirts looked tired. I thought I could see grime on their collars and cuffs, but that might have been my imagination. And it was the second show, after all.

After about 15 minutes of this, Brown made his entrance, lights shining on his trademark pompadour, his forehead already sweaty, his clothing the same tight polyester pants and wide-spread collars he’d been wearing for years. To this day, I can’t tell you a single song I heard or much at all about the music, except that it simply ran over me like a train. By the second song, Jones and I had left our table behind, moved onto the floor and were dancing like a couple of Ecstasy idiots. I felt like a Pentecostal taken with the spirit; the show was that powerful. The Revue played their guitars and horns and Brown danced and screamed and moaned into the microphone, sweat flying from him the way it would from a prizefighter. He stopped once in a while to mop his brow, but not for long. It was just a seamless, two-hour musical throwdown, and I hadn’t seen anyone, yes, work that hard on a stage ever. Still haven’t.

As time ran short, he went through the same wind-down he’d been doing for years: He starts to leave the stage, and MC Ray comes up with a cape and throws it over his shoulders. The first time I saw this was on a TV show in the mid-’60s, and the action was more of Ray trying to save his man from an onstage collapse: Boss, you gotta stop now or you’re gonna hurt yourself! The cape was thrown over him the way a groom throws a blanket on a racehorse that’s just stepped off the track — gotta keep those muscles warm so they don’t cramp up. But no! James Brown is too powerful to stop, and must keep gettin’ fun-kay! He throws the cape off and rushes back to the mic, sings a little more, and after a bit Ray approaches with another cape. This goes on for three or four capes.

On this night, the action was a little stylized, an acknowledgement that this routine was now 20 years old and everyone knew how it played out, but it was still entertaining as hell. By now it was last call in the club, 2 a.m., and the management was ready for it to be over. They turned the houselights all the way up, but James Brown cannot be rushed by the Man. He played two encores, another blur of butt-shakin’ and splits and good-gods and microphone swinging, and then finally left the stage for good and we all filed out to let our sweat evaporate on the sidewalk.

(Two years ago, Jones e-mailed me and said he’d finally seen a show that was better — Prince’s “Musicology” tour. Prince wears tight pants, a pompadour and knows how to get fun-kay. Wonder where he learned that?)

It seemed I saw several shows that year that simultaneously underlined both the joy and the pain of the professional musician. There was also Albert King, blues genius, in a bar so small he had to leave the stage by walking through the crowd. Still buzzing from “Little Red Rooster,” I assaulted him with a bear hug, which he was nice enough to return. (My overwhelming impression: This man is sweaty.) He would have been around 60 at the time, playing tiny bars for college students. And yet, he put everything he had into that show, or at least seemed to. I think about James Brown, already annointed the Godfather of Soul, reduced to two-show nights in small venues, still giving so much that he demanded you give it all back to him. And we did.

A couple years ago, Terry Gross had one of Brown’s longtime band members on her show, and they talked about the rhythmic signature of his music: “Playing on the one,” which is how Brown often cued his band: “On the one!” ONE two three four ONE two three four. The beat was more insistent that way, the musician said. I don’t know enough about music to comment, except maybe this: Amen.

I originally started this post with a few paragraphs about unlucky Miss Nevada and her problems. It had a gratuitous swipe at Donald Trump and some other stuff, but Kate has started reading my website again, so I can’t do that anymore. Back to PG-13 material. And no, no links for you. You know how to use Google News.

Anyway, how crude of me, to bring up Miss Nevada on a day like today, the weekend before our Savior’s birth, when every other blogger in the world is putting up soft-focus shots of his family and offering joy to the world. Especially when there’s other, holiday-related bloggage, like this NYT story on inflatable holiday decorations:

“Appalling,�? Catherine Bruckner, a traditionalist who decorates only in holly and evergreen, sneered as she stopped her car in front of an inflated Santa playing poker with two shrewd-eyed reindeer in a menagerie totaling two dozen figures. “It’s bad enough to see those things on Halloween. At Christmas, they rise to a level of tackiness that is horrible.�?

Well, yeah. But when has that stopped Americans from expressing themselves at the holidays?

But the inflatables have brought the notion of Christmas self-expression to another plane. Now, the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, that televised triumphal march that inaugurates the season, can live on in miniature for weeks at a time, swaying and bobble-heading across the front lawn of anyone willing to pay the electric bill — maybe a thousand dollars if you keep them inflated all the time, less if you leave the skins of your Christmas characters sprawled on the ground most of the day, their crumpled faces staring blankly at the sky or the sod, depending.

Why I love the New York Times: The story contains the fascinating detail that Gemmy, the company that makes the vast majority of these things, had its first success with? Anyone?

Yes, “the wall-mounted singing fish known as Big Mouth Billy Bass.” Perhaps my favorite Sopranos-episode prop.

And there’s also this fabulously dry sentence: The company also sells inflatable turkeys, pumpkins and the occasional dreidel.

“The occasional dreidel.” That cracked me up.

Oh, my, but I’m done here. I’m taking the holiday weekend off along with everyone else. Until the 26th, have a great time with you and yours. One last Festive Foto, although not the one the photographer was perhaps expecting to see. Colleen sent a link to a picture of the Fort Wayne Santa, but it was a tad out of focus and the bulbs were burned out in the sleigh’s runners. So I browsed her Photobucket and found this shot I like a lot more. Not Christmasy, but it is, to me, the essence of my drive to work when I was on the 5 a.m. shift. The city is never more deserted than it is between 4 and 5, which gives its lighted displays even more impact. I knew I was almost there when I saw this:

It doesn’t exactly say “sleep in heavenly peace,” but it works for me.

Happy holidays! Merry Christmas!

Today’s Holiday Foto Fest submissions come from our stalwart reader Mary Beth Poole, out Los Angeles way, where, if it’s December, it must be time for Las Posadas:

The festival — posada means “inn” — commemorates the failure of Mary and Joseph to find so much as a Motel 6 open in Bethlehem during tax-collection season. Presumably, the festiveness of the occasion suggests that today’s Mexican-Americans wouldn’t turn the couple away, and would even fete them with tamales. (Note to self: Go down to Mexicantown today and buy some tamales.)

As for Casa NN.C, the other night we celebrated our long-standing tradition of I Can Never Remember: Do We Have Latkes for Hanukkah, or One of Those Other Jewish Holidays? Why, when we’re not even close to being Jewish? Because potato pancakes are damn tasty, that’s why. I’d sit down at the table of brotherhood with Osama bin Laden if the food was good enough. (Note, though, that Osama is thin as a rail. Figures. Probably lives on tea, fasting and self-flagellation.) Our other holiday traditions are pretty flexible — nothing like a major relocation to throw a bomb into those things. But we have them. They include decorating the tree, Kate rearranging the NOEL stocking holders to read LEON and eggnog French toast on Christmas morning. We are a small family; it works for me. Oh, and by the way, that is Mary’s backyard Christmas cactus, blooming naturally on schedule.

I have some linkage this morning, yes I do. A new blog, found via James Wolcott: Ken Levine, “the world as seen by a TV comedy writer.” Great Hollywood stories, told by someone who can really write. Whenever I find a new blog I like to go back to the first month of the archives, just out of curiosity. In Levine’s November 2005 archive: Porn Star Karaoke. Worth the visit.

I always thought the dividing line between a true big city and a wannabe was how the hometown folks handled the successful locals. Do they make a big honkin’ deal out of them, or play it cool? (For years I thought “Fort Wayne’s” was a permanent attachment to Shelley Long’s name, and she just dropped it so it would fit easier on a marquee.) You’d think, with Detroit’s rich and ever-evolving musical tradition, we’d be able to handle a Bob Seger concert without making our pop music writers break a sweat, but I was wrong:

The Freep, today: They waited a decade. Sometimes impatiently, sometimes forgiving. Always with passion intact. Wednesday night, at last, they got Bob Seger. In the most prominent concert of Detroit music since Eminem played Ford Field in summer 2003, more than 17,000 fans watched — and sang, and screamed — as the local icon lit up the Palace of Auburn Hills for his first hometown show in more than 10 years.

The News, today: When the crowd sings all of “Turn the Page,” word for word, loudly enough to almost drown Seger out, there’s obviously a lot more than a concert going on. There are innumerable layers of communal and personal memory kicking in, with Seger acting as the much-loved host and emotional touchstone.

Well, it is Bob Seger. I forget not everyone spend the ’80s listening to the Ramones and B-52s and snapping the radio off in irritation when “Roll Me Away” came on for the 11 millionth time. I really need to get out more. And to think, after two years in Michigan the only place I’m really interested in seeing Bob Seger is out on the water. (And he didn’t do “Heavy Music”?! Or “Feel Like a Number”?!? Those folks wuz robbed.)

Most people think genetic engineering of plants to make them resistant to disease and other stresses begins and ends with soybeans, corn and wheat. Nope.

Finally, the video that made Kate giggle all morning:

Me, too.

A Christmas card arrived the other day, with photos. I was stunned to discover that the little baby I’d once visited in Milwaukee is now a) grown up; and b) has a Jewfro, even though he’s Catholic. How did that happen?

This didn’t start me down a weepy path of nostalgia and humming “Sunrise, Sunset.” It made me think I want to see Mary’s backyard Christmas cactus in faraway Los Angeles, which she claims blooms at Christmas every year. Yes, friends, it made me think of …the power of pictures.

So now until the end of the year, it’s Send Me a Picture time here at NN.C. I’ll start:

If I were an Airedale, I’d have killed you by now.

You all know who this is. The day he got his hair cut, there was an Airedale in the next cage at the groomer’s, a dog of truly fearsome energy. Airedales are terriers, but with the complicating factor that they weigh 80 pounds or so. When we were struggling to train ha ha our own terrier, Alan and I would often remark that if this dog weighed an ounce over 20 pounds, the experience would be a lot less comical and perhaps even life-threatening. (Yes. Spriggy flunked out of puppy first grade when the instructor decided to assert her dominance over him by pinning him to the floor and he brazenly growled in her face for several minutes. He never did stop, although the instructor decided she had other dogs to teach and finally let him up, with a comment that he might actually be untrainable. This was the next-to-last session, and we didn’t go back for graduation. By the way, as soon as she let him up he was all waggy and friendly again, but man, this dog does not submit to anyone.)

He will wear his antlers for 30 seconds or so. Be quick with that camera, and you’ll get your shot.

OK.

Sorry to be boring today, but I have two stories to write and that 7,000-word (plus appendices — I keep having to add that) anal blister of an edit to get started on. I’ll leave you with a huge story you can read if you feel like it and wring hands over in the comments: Little Hotties, from last week’s New Yorker. It’s about the Bratz dolls, which give parents fits. Why? Because they look like pint-size hoochie mamas, that’s why. I’m pleased to say that Kate has already passed through her Bratz period. I considered objecting to them — it’s hard to hide your horror when you see them the first time — but decided on a different strategy: Going limp. Not only did I go limp, I aided and abetted. When Kate asked for a new Bratz for Christmas, I went out and bought the trashiest one I could find. The Bratz I bought that year made a Vegas streetwalker look like Julie Andrews — short skirt, bootz, and my favorite style detail, a faux-fur shrug over a halter top.

See, my Barbie experience taught me something that they don’t teach in Women’s Studies courses: Little girls don’t see dolls the way you do. You see “slutty,” they see “pretty.” Kate didn’t ask for short skirts and halter tops; she just played with them. And then she graduated to American Girls and all the Bratz are down in the basement, legless and seminude, waiting for the next garage sale. Parents of younger girls, behold I say unto you: All things must pass. And so will this.