Some years back, I posted a picture of my popcorn popper. This one:

It’s a Sears Kenmore. My late Aunt Charlene — who was really my mother’s cousin — worked there all her life, and gave it as a gift to my Irish-twin elder siblings when they were “real little kids,” in my mother’s recollection. They’re both Medicare-eligible, so I’d put its age at, conservatively, 60 years.

It still works perfectly. I use it about once a month.

I don’t have a picture of the other appliance in this tale, because it’s sitting in the trash and I’m not going out in 20-degree weather to get a mugshot. It’s my Cuisinart coffee maker, dead at the age of 2. It replaced the Krups, which lasted about five years, maybe more. I don’t know what the hell happened to it; one day I turned it on, the light lit, but nothing happened. The plate didn’t get warm, the gurgle didn’t start, it just laid there like a sick old whore.

Once upon a time, I’d have taken it to a small appliance repair shop and gotten by for a week with Starbucks and the Kuerig, but nowadays? You just pitch it and buy a new one. It so happened I got another Krups, pretty much the identical model we had before. And I realized I’d forgotten something about that one — a design flaw that makes the pot dribble all over the counter unless it’s poured at precisely the right speed and angle.

“If you pour it at precisely the right speed and angle, it doesn’t drip,” I told a swearing Alan as he mopped up a spill yesterday.

“I SHOULD BE ABLE TO POUR IT HOWEVER I WANT,” he snapped back, and you know what? He’s right. I realize a coffeemaker is a more complicated appliance than a mid-century popcorn popper, but for cryin’ out loud, we ain’t putting up a shuttle here, either.

I haz a mad. So in that frame of mind I’m presenting a news roundup I’m calling the YOU FUCKERS digest.

She said she was a victim of the Knockout Game, that two black men had punched her in the face when she left a St. Louis bar, but guess what? Her boyfriend did it, and she was covering for him. YOU FUCKER. Do click through and check out that super-shiner she got, and scoff with me at the explanation:

The two claim Simms inadvertently hit DePew in the eye after she placed her hand on his and he “flung it back violently.”

Brandon Rios didn’t look that bad after going 12 rounds with Manny Pacquaio. But hey — blame the black guys.

I think I’ve mentioned before that the streetlights on I-94 between downtown and my exit were out, contributing to the general haunted-forest atmosphere of the east side. So in the last year,
the state department of transportation spent millions replacing all the lights with shiny new ones — I suspect LEDs because during the brief time they were on, lo they bathed the freeway in the pure light of heaven, or an UFO tractor beam.

Well, they’re all out again — copper thieves. YOU FUCKERS. This is a crime all authorities seem powerless to stop.

I need a job like this, where they fire you and then pay you $8 million just to keep your mouth shut. Because you and everybody you work for is a FUCKER. I would retire and move someplace where fuckers like me are welcome.

Non-fucker bloggage?

Here’s something amusing and fun — evidently students at Taylor University, a Christian school in Upland, Ind., observe a tradition called “silent night” at basketball games. (I don’t know if it’s every game or just one.) They sit in absolute silence in the stands until the 10th point is scored, at which point they — well, watch the video.

There isn’t much to do in Upland. I’m sure they like it that way.

Off to Lansing this morning.

It was a busy weekend, and I hit the wall about five minutes ago. Open thread? Sure, open thread.

There’s only one thing, really, to talk about up top today: I’m doing an appearance on a local radio show this morning — one of those three-journos-crack-wise-about-the-week’s-events deals — but today we have a unusual third: Gilbert Gottfried. At least, he’s booked. Who knows if he’ll show up?

If you’re interested, you can listen live here. It’s around 10:40 or so, I believe, but I’ll be getting there around 10:30. If you miss it, there will surely be a podcast somewhere.

We will not be doing the aristocrats joke. It’s public radio, after all.

Otherwise, I’d talk about that live “Sound of Music” thing, but I fear I’ve been struck dumb.

For the rest of you stuck living in the frigid west, upper Midwest and elsewhere in the cold front, stay warm. I have the weekend ahead.

My sister-in-law came for the holiday with a belated birthday present for her brother: a CD with scans of the photos their father took when he was a soldier. He was a parachute infantryman, really in the shit as they say, but as we all know, sooner or later things began to break the Allies’ way, and among the spoils of war was a Leica camera he took from a German officer, seen here:

(The camera, not the officer. That’s Roger, who would have been my father-in-law if he’d lived long enough to see us married.)

He carried it through the south of France as troops liberated the region in August 1944. First, the bad guys:

I guess that’s a bunker of some sort. I can only guess at the construction materials, but it must have been a headquarters, don’t you think, with that insignia?

Anyway, up through France they marched. Cannes:

And Nice:

This is what being greeted like liberators looks like:

And no one cares if you take a souvenir or two:

I’d love to know where that flag ended up. Alan says his dad came home with his dog tags and little else. The camera went to an officer, I know. He must have sent the photos ahead somehow.

Quiet day today, not much to report. The coffeemaker broke — on a Monday morning, no less — but we had a backup. Staff call, phone calls, a lingering queasiness that tells me I should really go easier on the rich food, at least over a four-day weekend.

But there is some bloggage:

The perpetually wrong Jennifer Rubin thinks Hillary Clinton can be toppled by? Anyone? Yes, Caroline Kennedy. Your laff of the day.

This is Tippy the fainting squirrel.

Finally, the Amazon drones story. I was astounded to see how much attention it was getting today, especially when I heard people discussing it a year ago at the Detroit policy conference. The problems seem so enormous I don’t know how they can be overcome easily, starting with cost. I seriously doubt free shipping is going to be an option here, so what, exactly, might you order from Amazon that you would need in half an hour that would be worth the price of getting it air-dropped? An engagement ring? Olives for your martini? Beyond that, there’s the distance-from-warehouse detail. Drones are very clever little flying machines, but they are short-range solutions. Across town might work, but I can’t send one down to Coozledad’s farm with a bottle of bourbon strapped to its belly (as much as I might like to). A good deal if you live near a “fulfillment center” (and look how many there are in labor-compliant, low-wage states like Indiana and Kentucky) but not so much for everybody else.

Besides, everyone knows what drones should be used for: Taking pictures of Tina Turner’s wedding.

Happy Tuesday.

I found this via Tumblr, so the usual cautions about authenticity apply, but what the hell, it’s worth sharing. This is a purported listings page from an unnamed New York newspaper in November 1963. The hell with JFK — talk about mourning a lost world:

This, pals, is why I regret never living in New York City. Imagine an entertainment buffet spread with everything from Bill Monroe to Miles Davis to Sam Cooke to Bob Dylan. I looked it over twice before I noticed Stiller and Meara hiding in the cracks.

Was everyone’s Thanksgiving wonderful? Ours was just fine, if a little repetitive of last year’s. I was looking up a green bean recipe I like at this time of year, and a menu fell out of the book — exactly the same one I’ve been making for a while now. Oh, well. With a table set for only four, two of them picky eaters, what’s the point of adventure? That’s what dinner parties with friends are for.

The rest of the weekend was devoted to lazing on the couch watching Netflix, errands and the usual. Kate and I went to the DIA for a few hours on Friday, to tell “The Wedding Dance” we would always love it, even if it’s sold to Rupert Murdoch. Watched a couple of movies I would likely not have seen without streaming — “What Maisie Knew” and “The Panic in Needle Park,” which I was astounded to learn was written by Joan Didion and her husband. I cannot tell a lie: I love many, many things about the 1970s, and its strong tradition of antiheroic cinema is one of them.

So, then, some bloggage:

Today’s NYT ran a smoochfest on Jim Delany, whom I didn’t know about. Evidently he’s the guy responsible for the Big Ten conference being little more than a “brand.” Rutgers? Maryland? Now in the Big Ten? Fuck that noise. I prefer the Grantland take on this development:

In ways that matter to college administrators, Delany is a genius: The Big Ten Network is a money-making machine, and the conference actually made more money last year than even the SEC. Last fall, when I spent a day with the Indiana football program, they informed me that they’d been able to upgrade their facilities almost entirely with money procured from their Big Ten Network share. But that’s what makes this so frustrating for those of us who actually give a damn about the product: Speaking to Rittenberg, Delany appeared to characterize the conference’s football woes as a short-term concern, as something that could be attributed to an influx of new coaches and the consequences of immoral behavior at Penn State and Ohio State. He made no real acknowledgement of the long-term statistics, of the Big Ten’s 34-52 bowl record since 2000, of the fact that the Big Ten has won 37 percent of its nonconference games against nationally ranked teams since Ohio State won the national championship in 2002. The top of the conference is largely shaky, and the bottom has never been worse: I imagine Purdue and Minnesota and Illinois would struggle to finish .500 in the MAC.

Anything else? Yes, these rather astonishing-not-astonishing charts, about who uses marijuana and who gets busted for it, via Ezra Klein.

Finally, a fine piece by John Carlisle, former Detroitblogger, now roving columnist for the Freep. It’s about a community of legal scrappers in one of the most cursed neighborhoods in Detroit, who eke out a living digging holes in a now-vacant scrapyard, seeking out the long-buried bits of metal there. If you’re thinking, “why, that sounds like something you’d find in the Third World,” join the club. I was struck by the comments, which swung between that sentiment and a certain witless, attaboy-to-the-bootstrappers attitude, which ignores the fact the bootstrapping isn’t leading anywhere. Unless it’s to another generation of metal men:

Domenic Anderson used to follow his dad down here and watch him dig.

“Everybody would sit there, dig, get along,” he said. “All the grown-ups would be doing their own things, running their own crews out of here, making their own money.”

Now he works here, too. He stood on a dirt mound next to his twin brother, David Anderson. The 19-year-old brothers live just down the street and work in the lot six days a week. They’re rough edged and dirt streaked, and they share a distinct southwest Detroit accent and a kind of small-town genuineness.

For them, it’s not just work; it’s also their social life. Most of the neighbors moved away long ago, so there weren’t many kids to play with when they were younger, and there aren’t many to hang out with now that they’re older.

People around here like to say that we’re America’s future, so hey — look forward to it.

And so the long slog toward the holidays commences! Can you feel my excitement?

From the look of the comments Tuesday, the holiday weekend is starting early, so I’m wondering if anyone is even reading. So what the hey, let’s call it a weekend. I hope you all have a great one, wherever you are. I notice it’s snowing in Ohio, storming in the south, and pretty much more of the same here — cold and overcast.

However it is wherever you are, I hope your bird is juicy, your stuffing tasty, and your gravy free of lumps.

To discuss: A drive-by shooting in Amish country. Of a horse.

Well, it was a pretty quiet birthday. Leaden skies, unreturned phone calls, email. At the end of it, I played the ultimate working-mother card: The rotisserie chicken. What on earth is happening with rotisserie chickens these days? They’re the size of pigeons. You’re lucky to feed three people with one of them, and the third person is a teenager who picks.

I tried to get a fryer at the market a few weeks ago. The poor things were so thin you could see the pinkish flesh through the skin.

“Find me one that didn’t die of starvation,” I asked. It’s my standard quip. It never works. They all died of starvation. And yet, the lure of “Amish chicken” is powerful in an urban environment. I once heard one young man tell another that the Amish just do chicken better. This while standing over the case featuring the scrawny ones.

“The Amish do chicken exactly the same as everybody else,” I told him. He wasn’t having it, but I know whereof I speak. Not organic, not hormone-free, not running around a barnyard snagging bugs and grubs before being humanely beheaded on a tree-stump chopping block. Just a smaller sort of poultry operation, but hey — it ain’t Tyson.

But the rotisserie chicken was tasty, if not large enough. Mashed potatoes plus oven-roasted carrots with black sesame seeds. Leftover birthday cake. Good enough for a Monday.

And now “Boardwalk Empire” and the realization, once again, that all the allegedly high-quality Sunday-night TV is getting on my nerves. “Homeland” is a joke. “Masters of Sex,” which started strong, has stagnated into the same half-dozen or so themes over and over — Sex is science, sex is emotion, sex follows a script, sex never follows a script, blah blah blah. Will Dr. Masters overcome his emotional repression? Will Virginia Johnson get the respect she craves? We interrupt this repetition to display Lizzy Caplan’s naked breasts again. We interrupt those breasts to show you the saucy blonde secretary’s breasts again. And so on.

Also, I’m tired of these allegedly period shows dumping 21st-century language and attitudes hither and yon when it suits the writers. The previews for next week show one character raging, “I’m just an organ donor to you people,” a neat trick for 1959 or thereabouts, when organ transplantation was in its very earliest days and the phrase “organ donor” was hardly in common usage.

So, some bloggage before we start the runup to the holiday? Sure:

The Hollywood Reporter blows the lid off “No animals were harmed in the making of this motion picture,” with mixed results. I don’t think anyone can help but feel for a tiger that nearly drowns making “Life of Pi,” but it’s hard not to chuckle over a paragraph like this:

… a chipmunk was fatally squashed in Paramount’s 2006 Matthew McConaughey-Sarah Jessica Parker romantic comedy Failure to Launch.

Not the chipmunk! Fatally squashed! The problem is, it brings out the way we really do put animals on a hierarchy. Mammals over fish, some mammals over other mammals.

Remember the Columbus Dispatch bike blogger hit by a car earlier this month? He’s awake and blogging again. But a long way from OK. Shudder.

So, happy Tuesday? Happy Tuesday.

Hey, whaddaya know. Now it’s my turn:

Today’s the day, but we celebrated last night in the usual fashion. My present this year was a pair of L.L. Bean moccasins, lined with shearling just to be extra-fancy. Dog-walking boots for every kind of weather.

Oh, and a waffle iron. But that’s more a house present.

Otherwise, a nice weekend. Kate and Alan worked for hours on a project for her physics class. The task was to construct a catapult that would fling a marshmallow 5 meters and land in a bucket. If you know Alan, you know this required multiple trips to the hardware store, math, power tools, drilling, testing, tape measures, more testing and, of course, marshmallows:

My job was to purchase the marshmallows. Wendy handled fielding the ones that missed the bucket. Given the rules — exactly five meters, one marshmallow, landing in the bucket — I feel bad for the kids who don’t have a handy dad. You can make one with a shoebox, rubber bands and a tongue depressor, but it won’t go five meters.

I think there are lots of non-handy dads in Grosse Pointe. One thing I’ve noticed, when I look at estate sales — the more expensive the house, the fewer the tools. And more sporting goods. Many, many more of those, skis and boxing gloves and hockey sticks and high-end bicycles and boat stuff and horse stuff. But rarely so much as a hammer. You hire that shit done.

Otherwise? I watched “Olympus Has Fallen,” and marveled once again at a few things:

1) Great actors can go a long way toward rescuing a dumb script.
2) American movies are just ridiculously violent. Torture and gunplay is really baked into our bones.
3) There’s a reason Melissa Leo is nearly unrecognizable. She probably insisted on that dark wig to conceal her identity.

So, bloggage? Here’s something I wrote, a little different sort of thing for Bridge, for a slow holiday week. Hit it and keep me employed.

We did this — mulch nearly all our leaves — this year, to cover the bare topsoil in the still-unfinished back yard, and hopefully spare us a winter of muddy dog footprints throughout the house. Interesting that policy is nudging homeowners in that direction now:

In the past few years, lawn signs have sprouted in this Hudson River village and across Westchester County, proclaiming the benefits of mulching the leaves in place, rather than raking them up and taking them away. The technique involves mowing the leaves with special mulching blades, which shred them into tiny bits. That allows them to quickly decompose and naturally feed lawns and shrubs.

Officials are encouraging the practice for its cost savings: Westchester spends $3.5 million a year on private contractors who haul away leaves in tractor-trailers and bring them to commercial composting sites in places like Orange County, N.Y., and Connecticut. At the same time, environmental groups and horticulturalists are praising the practice’s sustainability, devising slogans like “Leave Leaves Alone” and “Love ’Em and Leave ’Em.”

The new film “Philomena” tells the story of Philomena Lee and her search for the child she gave birth to in one of those notorious Irish slave-convents, a story I’d been unaware of until reading the pre-release publicity. Here’s a Guardian story about the book the film is based on. It is breathtaking to think this happened in my lifetime. Just awful.

Now, I’m off to have a happy birthday. For you, just another Monday.

So this is how life slows down in the fall: One day you’re riding 10 or 15 miles a day, grilling out, drinking beer, and the next? Icing your knee and watching “Vanilla Ice Goes Amish” on HGTV. Although frankly, after my drive home from Ann Arbor early this evening, I feel like watching Vanilla Ice for the rest of the winter. As long as there’s wine.

I’m simply not a safe driver after dark anymore, at least until this cataract is fixed. I figured I’d be fine, as 90 percent of the trip is familiar freeway and reasonably well-lit. But then it rained, and the world became one of shiny surfaces and reflected headlights and murk. Murk murk murk. What’s the worst thing you can see in white-knuckle murk? How about Mr. Low-Impact Man, riding a bike down this exurban road, in the rain, with one weak-ass light on the back and no reflective clothing. Y’all know I’m a cyclist, but sometimes my people piss me off.

It took about 90 minutes to drive 45 miles. Never again. At least not until Dec. 19, the day after my cataract surgery.

Cataracts. Knees. Hello, grandma.

I actually feel pretty good. You should hear my medical history. One long chorus of “no” on every chronic condition, topped off with “none.” (For “what prescription medications do you take?”) NONE.

So. Guess what Kate asked for (and received) for her birthday?

Everything old is new again. Although I think what she likes best is that most of the other kids are not into vinyl. And in case you think you’re keeping up because you’re into vinyl, too, know this: When we were in Fort Wayne, Kate’s friend gave her a recording by one of her favorite local bands. On cassette. Somebody is always hipper than you.

Not much bloggage today; I’ve been writing for two days, and feel a little empty. But there’s this:

Dexter gets his wish; Prince Fielder is out at home.

I just channel-surfed past the last two minutes of “Glee.” How long has it been this bad?

The weekend can’t get here soon enough. Enjoy yours.

For those of you who a) care; and b) don’t read the comments, here’s the late-edition Knee News headline:

56-year-old knees fail before expiration; ‘disaster,’ claims primary-care doc

And that’s pretty much it. My left knee, the one I injured two weeks ago, has a ruptured anterior cruciate ligament, a tibial plateau fracture and various other trauma. That’s the bad news. The good news is, it really doesn’t hurt much anymore. It’s tender, I can’t flex it much beyond 90 degrees, but just plain old walking and moving? It’s comfortable. But it was a strange visit, as it started out with an examination of an X-ray, with my doctor getting right to the point: “I’ve done replacements on people with less arthritis than this,” he said. He said this while pointing to my right knee — the good one.

I have arthritis? Why yes. Pretty bad, too. I’m a candidate for a new knee, maybe two of them, sooner rather than later. And that sucks. “But we treat patients, not X-rays,” he said, which means that if it isn’t keeping me from enjoying my life and getting around, well, no need to rush.

If I were an 18-year-old soccer player, I’d be having ACL reconstruction, but it’s foolish to fix a ligament on a knee on its way out. I will have to give up my lifelong dream of being a downhill ski racer, but swimming, biking, anything without lateral stresses — all these are fine, as long as there’s little or no pain.

I guess the mature response to all this is to be grateful I live in a world with replacement knees. The immature one would be to say fuck this shit. Guess which one I’ve been thinking about today. But it will pass.

Next on the agenda: Lose 20 pounds. Can’t hurt.

So, with that scintillating medical report completed, how was your day? I wrote a few hundred words, rotated my tires, reflected on the frailties of the human body, did a load of delicates. Started making a Thanksgiving shopping list. Basically, got on with it.

So, bloggage.

The fascinating world of genetics: A 24,000-year-old corpse reveals details of human migration through Asia. I love this stuff.

I was concerned about the next Hunger Games movie, but maybe it’ll be worth a mother/daughter movie outing this season.

The painting of the Danish royal family is simply fantastic.

Limping off to bed.