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.

One book I read recently, which didn’t ahem make the right rail here, was “The Last Days of Dead Celebrities,” by Mitchell Fink. I needn’t have been ashamed; it’s an entirely respectable work of journalism, and if you squint your eyes a bit, it even works as a collection of cautionary tales about how to deal with the end of your life, whether you see it coming or not. I got it from the library because I wanted to read the chapter on Warren Zevon, but I found others more interesting, especially that of Ted Williams, the baseball player.

I lost the thread of the family wrangle over Teddy Ballgame’s remains — as I recall, Bob Greene wrote a really stupid column about it that queered me on the whole story — but it turns out the forces of evil triumphed, and somewhere in California or Florida Williams’ disembodied head rests in a cryogenic suspension, waiting for science to make a whole hell of a lot of advances, so that one day it can…do something. Not sure.

Anyway, it was yet another reminder, if any of us needed it, that families are fractious things. Today comes another: Billy Graham’s sons are fighting over where to bury the old man. The fact he isn’t, technically, dead yet is only one interesting angle of this story. One son wants him buried at the still-under-construction memorial library in Charlotte, which is built to look like a barn and silo, and features a cross-shaped entry and a mechanical talking cow. The other wants what his mother wants — a more dignified and private final resting place in the Carolina mountains. The fact that the sons are even capable of disagreeing over this astonishes me, but probably shouldn’t. We’re all human.

I watched a Billy Graham crusade on TV when I was about Kate’s age. My attention span hadn’t been shredded by the internet, remote-control channel-changing and the like, but I still think it’s remarkable that my attention was captured and held for some time. At the altar call at the end, I stood up and wanted to walk down to Billy and make my commitment to Jesus. Only he was imprisoned in a small black-and-white television, and I remembered I was Catholic and had, technically, already made the commitment. So I sat back down and changed the channel. Still, the man could preach.

OK, subject change: One of the earliest and most lasting bonds between Lance Mannion’s wife, the Blonde, and me, back in the day, was our shared devotion to the comics page. I still credit the Blonde with handing me one of my most satisfying columns, the great Journal Gazette Doonesbury/Spiderman “Sucks” Flip-Flop, which I’ve shared here before, so I won’t bore you. When Alan became features editor, I was elevated to a post of rare power vis-a-vis the comics page; I had the ear of the Decider. Still, it never came to much, because by the time that happened a new world order was ruling newspapers and especially comics, and it was: Less space, more crap.

The crap mostly came because of, who else, fretful editors, who thought they could hang on to readers by introducing, say, a comic strip featuring a young black couple. The funnies should look like America! And so on.

Of course comics are over. A few stalwarts hang on — Doonesbury is still worth your time, and we always have hope for another Calvin & Hobbes — but in the age of Photoshop funnies and Get Your War On, what more can be said in three panels?

Well, there’s this: “Mary Worth” comics in digital video, including the original camera angles. Enjoy, the Blonde! P.S. You’ll need QuickTime.

A holiday party invitation that recently arrived at NN.C Central promised “piping hot chili.” While I’m pleased that we won’t be having somewhat hot chili, I had one of those moments you sometimes get when you look at a word too long. That is: What the hell does “piping” mean, anyway?

Piping is what pipers do. It’s what plumbers install in your house. It’s the little row of cord or decorative seam that runs along your sofa cushions, or down the leg of an usher’s trousers. Hmm, what else? Adjectives — The child spoke in a piping voice. That is, he piped up. OK, like a flute. But how does something very hot become piping? (Richard Dawson voice.) Dictionary SAYS?! “Because of the whistling sound made by very hot liquid or food.” Huh. In a teakettle, maybe. I’ve had casseroles that sizzled a bit. But nothing that could be confused with actual piping.

Resolved: Never say “piping hot” again. And so, little by little, we banish clichés from our beloved language.

Further resolved: No more “deeply religious” or “badly decomposed” again, either. If you catch me at it, say something.

Gah. A kwazy-busy week stretches before me. I only volunteer for a few school activities a year, and yet they always seem to arrive in the middle of a deadline week. Fortunately, to leaven the seven-grain dough of this week (huh?) I have the rich stew of humanity all around me, which calls itself…Detroit.

Really. It’s weeks like this that I pity those of you living in places like Salt Lake City or Indianapolis. You should hear the morning traffic reports: “And we have a backup on the Lodge Freeway, apparently due to an engine block sitting in the left-hand lane…A pothole on the Chalmers exit ramp from eastbound I-94 has flattened the tires of at least two dozen cars, and they’ve run out of room to pull over, so expect delays there…” (Note: Paraphrasing of actual traffic reports, with very little exaggeration. The pothole actually had only 12 cars disabled and pulled over, and the engine block? Word. A couple weeks ago it was a driveshaft in the road. Ah, Detroit iron!)

And today? A man fleeing police this morning made his getaway by jumping into the Detroit River. Since the likelihood that this was either Mark Spitz or a battle-hardened Channel swimmer is pretty slim, it’s safe to say this tactic constituted suicide and not an unorthodox bid for asylum in Canada. The other day we drove downtown on surface streets instead of the freeway, and Alan pointed out the latest wrinkle in urban life — razor wire around industrial and commercial buildings’ rooflines, to keep thieves from stealing the rooftop air conditioners. And yet, the town refuses to die. You gotta love it. It’s Miami with snow.

A little bloggage today, for your amusement:

Do not, whatever you do, go to the Generator Blog. I mean, if you have work to do. Because you will not be coming back soon:

The NYT has a story today on gay evangelical Christians. You can tell the gay gene is a little weak in these guys because they have a really ugly coffee table. (Regrettably, the online version crops most of it out, but take my word for it — it’s plate glass on top of two ceramic elephants, Pier One c. 1980-something.)

Off to beat my head against the wall of a corporate PR machine make some phone calls. Make merry in the comments.