Kate’s band had a gig last night. It was a Groundhog Day Eve event at one of the city parks. It was the usual clusterbump — the organizer thought “a PA system” referred to the one with speakers in the ceiling. Scott thought he could use the music school’s electronic drums, and he could, but we had to go fetch them. And then we got set up, and looked around. They thought it would be like the elementary school ice-cream social they played last spring, but it turned out to be even younger kids and a table of developmentally disabled adults. They were the final act, after the nature presentation on groundhogs.

“I feel like we’re in a Seinfeld episode,” Kate said.

“More like a Fellini movie,” I corrected.

But they did fine, even it was a little strange, their alt-rock repertoire with the little kids and the adults and the guy in the groundhog suit. But there was cake — how bad could it be? They finished the show with three verses of “I’m a Little Groundhog.” You don’t know that one?

I’m a little groundhog, furry and round
I’m coming out to look around
If I see my shadow, down I go
Six more weeks of winter, oh no!

I have it on video. I’ve been warned that if I put it on the internet, I will never be forgiven. Can’t really blame her.

So, happy groundhog day. Six more weeks of winter? We haven’t had six weeks of winter, period. Another ridonkulous day of above-40s temperatures, and the daffodils are now a full inch above ground. I’m thinking this is maybe it.

So, some bloggage?

Is there anything to say other than this? Don Cornelius is dead. One more line dance, for old time’s sake:

Happy Thursday, whether your groundhog sees its shadow or not.

I was down at Wayne today when my colleague and GPT partner Ben Burns wandered in. I asked him whether his Little League coaching career had intersected with Prince Fielder’s time in the locals. It had.

Fielder — although I guess you’d call a 12-year-old kid by his first name, wouldn’t you — was a head taller and two kids wider than every other player there, and could hit anything, Ben said. He knocked everything over the fence, to the point that one day Ben called for an intentional walk, generally frowned upon in Little League, but hell, it’s not every day you face a future MLB star.

Fun fact: When Prince was 12, he was messing around in Tiger Stadium with his dad and hit one into the stands. Fair.

So, bloggage?

We had a good Bridge yesterday. Ron’s piece on the loss of skilled public employees in Michigan was great — you never think of stuff like that until you read something like this:

Michele Glinn loved her job, and she was good at it. As the only Ph.D toxicologist working in the Michigan State Police toxicology unit, she analyzed blood samples for alcohol and other drugs — and crisscrossed the state testifying in court.

Frustrated by unpaid furlough days, a shrinking staff and a negative public perception of state employees, Glinn sat down at her computer one day last fall and sent her resume to an employment search firm. “I got a call from the headhunter the same day,” Glinn recalled. “Two days later, I had a phone interview; a week later, I was in St. Louis being offered a job on the spot.”

Her U-Haul crossed the state border in November, leaving Michigan with no one who can provide expert testimony for the prosecution in alcohol and drug cases. “The state has no one to answer scientific questions,” Glinn said. “That’s a public safety issue.”

I had a piece on the guy who does the Pure Michigan parodies.

I was thinking the other day about maybe getting an iPhone 4S — the talking one. But maybe? No:

But not in every way. Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.

To make your wish her command, Siri floods your cell network with a stream of data; her responses require a similarly large flow in return. A study published this month by Arieso, an Atlanta firm that specializes in mobile networks, found that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S uses twice as much data as does the plain old iPhone 4 and nearly three times as much as does the iPhone 3G. The new phone requires far more data than most other advanced smartphones, which are pretty data-intensive themselves, The Post has reported.

I refuse to be a data hog just to have Siri type my text messages.

I thought the weekend would never come, but it’s here, it’s here! Enjoy yours. I’m hoping to get to the market — it’s been a while. Maybe a picture? Here’s hoping.

Watchin’ the State o’ the Union, drinkin’ a second glass of wine, thinkin’ some thoughts. Among them:

Hey, there’s my congressman. Hansen Clarke. Big clapper. Well, it’s a big night for the D, on all fronts. We get major shoutouts in the SOTU, and the Tigers sign Prince Fielder. Here’s a rerun the Freep dug up from the vaults, about young Prince when he was a Little Leaguer in the Grosse Pointe Woods-Shores Little League. Note the photo. He has a great look in his eye, but clearly took that McDonald’s ad he did with his father to heart. On the other hand, one of the things to love about baseball is that some great players look like they enjoy an extra Pabst Blue Ribbon or three on the off days.

And it’s a good day for my darling daughter, entering the homestretch of midterms week. Today is history and gym. Yes, gym. They’ve been doing parts of it for the last week or so, and today is the 20-minute run, followed by the written test.

“A written test in gym?” her mother asked. “What sort of questions?”

“About stretching and stuff,” she said.

I hope she aces it. She doesn’t believe me when I tell her she’s getting off easy, gym-wise. Our system required .75 credits of gym to graduate, and every year was .25. You got senior year off, if you didn’t skip it chronically, which my friend Jeff did, to avoid getting his ass kicked for being an obvious homosexual. When they threatened to withhold his diploma, he signed up for six weeks of summer-school gym, which consisted of riding bikes and playing cards indoors on rainy days. No locker rooms, no ass-kicking, and the diploma arrived in August instead of June. I asked if he’d do it all again, knowing he missed “Pomp & Circumstance” at Vet’s Memorial and the all-night party.

“Absolutely,” he said.

Tells you everything you need to know about gym.

If she completes this year satisfactorily, Kate will never have to set foot in another high-school gym for anything but dances and pep rallies before graduation. So I hope she remembers how to stretch.

Bloggage? Oh, I’m sure we have some:

The SOTU featured warnings that “the middle class is under threat because of growing disparities between the rich and everyone else in America.” You don’t say. Did I link to that piece in last Sunday’s NYT, about Apple and its work at Foxconn, the Mordor-like Chinese factory where our favorite devices are born? No? You should read it, if you have the chance. It’s long, but like a horror movie, it’s hard to tear your eyes away. When Steve Jobs demanded an scratchproof glass screen for the iPhone, and demanded it be perfect in six weeks, they knew where to turn:

Apple executives say that going overseas, at this point, is their only option. One former executive described how the company relied upon a Chinese factory to revamp iPhone manufacturing just weeks before the device was due on shelves. Apple had redesigned the iPhone’s screen at the last minute, forcing an assembly line overhaul. New screens began arriving at the plant near midnight.

A foreman immediately roused 8,000 workers inside the company’s dormitories, according to the executive. Each employee was given a biscuit and a cup of tea, guided to a workstation and within half an hour started a 12-hour shift fitting glass screens into beveled frames. Within 96 hours, the plant was producing over 10,000 iPhones a day.

“The speed and flexibility is breathtaking,” the executive said. “There’s no American plant that can match that.”

…When an Apple team visited, the Chinese plant’s owners were already constructing a new wing. “This is in case you give us the contract,” the manager said, according to a former Apple executive. The Chinese government had agreed to underwrite costs for numerous industries, and those subsidies had trickled down to the glass-cutting factory. It had a warehouse filled with glass samples available to Apple, free of charge. The owners made engineers available at almost no cost. They had built on-site dormitories so employees would be available 24 hours a day.

That’s why the middle class is in trouble — because we cannot compete with slave labor, essentially. What? You don’t want to live in a dorm attached to your workplace (eight to a room) and be roused at midnight to work a 12-hour shift in the factory that was built by the government? Lazy, lazy, lazy.

I missed Our Man Mitch’s rebuttal last night. Was it any good?

This makes me immediately seek detox with celebrity gossip. Here’s a photo of Demi Moore, and even though it is only head and shoulders, shows the outsize-head-on-tiny-body prototype so common in movie stars. Bonus: Patton Oswalt’s tweet stream after being robbed of an Academy Award nomination.

Time for work. Hump day!

After yesterday’s overcast start, the day brightened into something a little less leaden. The sun was safe behind many veils of clouds, but the rain stopped and what ho, I have an interview at the coffee shop on the corner? Think I’ll wear my raincoat in this mild, 50-degree weather. I called my editor in Lansing after I got home. It was 52 here, but 100 miles to the west, 32. And sure enough, soon the sky darkened again, the wind changed from southwest to northwest justlikethat, rain blew horizontally for a while and tomorrow it’ll be winter again. Highs in the 20s.

Do I start every blog with a weather report? Yes, I do. I am a Midwesterner, after all.

And at the moment I’m a Midwesterner with just two squares of a Green & Black white-chocolate bar left, the spoils of a splurge trip to Whole Foods Saturday. Whole Foods in Ann Arbor, I should add — a childhood friend was passing through, and thought she’d give me a shout, see if I was up for lunch. These days, I have a refuse-no-friends-who-are-passing-through policy, especially when I haven’t seen them in years. You never know when you’ll get another chance.

So we went to Zingerman’s Roadhouse. It was an episode of “Portlandia” come to life, with the waiter introducing himself, sketching out the restaurant’s philosophy (“comfort food and barbecue”), its policy on sourcing (local, of course) and then expressing his deep delight that he would get to break my friends’ Z-cherry, so to speak. All of this would be intolerable if Zingerman’s didn’t dollar up on the hoof so well. You pay through the nose, you put up with this seemingly endless bullshit, but when the food arrives, there is nothing to do but say, “This may be a side dish of macaroni and cheese priced at $7.50, but if there’s a dish of macaroni and cheese worth $7.50? It tastes like this.”

Cindy ordered the go-go grilled cheese sandwich. She asked if she could change the cheeses. But of course. Could she maybe have some cheddar with a little Maytag bleu? Certainly, our waiter said, adding:

“How old?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“How old on the cheddar?” There was a choice. One year, two years, or five. She asked for the one-year vintage. It was an excellent sandwich, and the mushroom soup was even better.

I had lentil soup, with a side of sauteed spinach. I’m going through a big sauteed-spinach phase. So easy. Buy it by the bag, prewashed, throw a little olive oil and garlic into the pan, get it going, toss in the greens and wait until they wilt down into iron-rich deliciousness. Sometimes I have it for breakfast, with a poached egg. Florentine, but without the mornay sauce. Popeye never asked for mornay sauce. It gives me the strength of 10 old bags.

Weather and food. Yep, that’s about right.

Fortunately, we have much good bloggage today:

First, quite the arresting slide show of the Italian cruise-ship disaster. Alan tells me they actually drifted to that position so close to the rocks, but I’m not sure. This overhead view plainly shows barely submerged rocks. How much pinot grigio was this captain drinking? The first rule of marine navigation: If you see rocks sticking out of the water, don’t drive the boat there. (It’s possible that’s some sort of lens flare or other trick of the light. Still. Awful close to those rocks, cap’n.)

My education sources keep telling me the lecture is dead. It’s not only not dead, it’s pretty lucrative — if you’re the lecturer, anyway:

In official Washington, there is an afterlife, and it’s a crowded, cacophonous place. Called the public speaking circuit, this D.C. Elysium is bound by the same transactional laws as the realm that preceded it. But instead of political parties, it is governed by speakers bureaus that promise visibility to those who sign up. In the past 30 years, a proliferation of bureaus has promoted, booked and enriched former lawmakers, candidates, consultants, Cabinet members, political reporters and gadflies.

“Let’s say you are secretary of something — there are two ways you are going to make a really good living: a lobbyist or a speaker, or a combination of the two,” said James Carville, the political consultant and a client of the Washington Speakers Bureau.

The bulls got out at Coozledad’s place again. Spoiler: Purley was OK after his encounter with the truck. I’m so glad, as Purley is the cutest bull ever. You let Mrs. Gingrich set eyes on him, and he’ll be a character in her next children’s book.

Me, on one side effect of the college competition — the common-app crush.

For once, a photo I find more interesting than Tom & Lorenzo. Spike Lee is a Christian now? Mariah Carey looks drunk, but considering she showed up in a version of the same dress that other lady did, maybe she had a reason. And yeah, Shelley shut it down. She looks better every year.

And with that, the hump day commences. Not you, Purley! Down, boy.

Tuesday morning comin’ down, in the form of what looks to be an all-day rain. After a brief cold snap we’re back into the 40s, and while the warmth is better than cold (I guess), it’s certainly dreary. Let’s pick an appropriate picture from the ol’ Flickr stream. Ah, here’s one:

Chili — with or without corn — will taste good today. Photo by J.C. Burns, nicked from his Flickr stream, used under a Creative Commons license. Let’s hop to the links, shall we?

Jim Griffoen at Sweet Juniper! on how they managed to sneak a bit of American toy kitsch into their neighbors’ perfect apartment. How perfect?

So we’ve got these wonderful German neighbors who are such sophisticated design nerds they make us look like Randy Quaid and his wife emptying our RV’s septic tank into the storm drain. One is a professor of architecture (and since most architects already try to look like Germans, you can imagine how ahead of the curve these two are). They have pretty much every piece of iconic midcentury furniture in their immaculate Mies van der Rohe townhouse. It’s like the furniture wing at MOMA.

We had a neighborhood garage sale a few months ago and when this family stopped at ours, the architect saw her four-year-old son having a blast while playing with some of my son’s old toys and she said with a delightful German bluntness:

“I see he likes these toys, but the design is not good and they would not really fit in our home.”

The New Yorker on Callista Gingrich. Fact I didn’t know: She writes children’s books! Well, of course she does, being a strict Catholic who spent her prime childbearing years in unmarried congress with a married man, only to win the big prize (the man) and discover it really wasn’t what she wanted anyway, but it came with a shitload of fancy jewelry and the chance to play Pretend Mommy with her children’s book-authoring career. Every self-respecting child I know would flee from her in terror. Well, book-signings are rare, anyway.

Finally, I am long overdue with this, which ran last week, when my friend Sammy Smith, spouse of J.C. Burns and likely the creator of today’s pot of chili, was settling affairs in Michigan following the death of her mother. She and her father (the Botanist) visited the Michigan Women’s Historical Center and Hall of Fame, and found a photo of then-governor Albert Sleeper signing the bill granting women’s suffrage while selected members of the gender “look on,” as the caption-writers always put it. One is Sammy’s great-grandmother. I like the picture because the women, dowagers all, look like they have the assembled power to stab the governor to death with their hatpins if he doesn’t come across.

Anyway, condolences to Sammy, and a good Tuesday to all.

So there I was at Staples, replenishing the manila-envelope and Sharpie supplies, when I passed an end-cap display for some sort of…camera? No, a camera system. For security? It’s running a demo loop, let’s watch: An attractive middle-aged woman climbs onto her elliptical trainer and starts working out, smiling down at the monitor, where she sees? Her teenage son, doing homework somewhere else in the house.

I was speechless. It didn’t take long, did it, for us to accept surveillance cameras not just in our public spaces, not just on light standards staring down on red-light runners, in virtually every corner of the world where they can be justified in the name of safety, but in our homes? It starts with baby monitors, I guess. Kate’s was probably the last generation to be surveilled by audio alone; it gentled my rattled new-mother nerves to know she wasn’t upstairs being eaten by a tiger.

(Later, I tried to chase down a story I heard through a remove or two, about an interoffice romance that had gone bad. She suspected he was up to something with another woman, so she hid a baby monitor in a little-used file drawer in his office, and put the receiver in her own desk. If it hadn’t been for a sudden burst of static one day, it might have gone on for some time.)

Then it was governors on cars; you could install aftermarket accessories that would reveal exactly whether she’d told her old man she was at the library, when she was really having fun fun fun at the hamburger stand. Then they were factory-installed, and we called it OnStar. What else? Keystroke monitors for computers. Constant text-messaging. (At least that’s voluntary.) And for every eye-roll you can think of, there’s a counter story, a case cracked because someone sauntered under a camera, or a stolen car recovered because OnStar was able to hit the kill switch, a kidnap victim able to get her hands on a cell phone and make a call.

Still. If I were that kid? I’d spray-paint the lens and tell mom to get a life.

So, what are you doing at the moment? I’m grading papers, cursing the adverb and looking to the bloggage. Which is?

A lyrical conundrum, solved: Steve Perry finally admits no, there is no such thing as “south Detroit,” as he sings in “Don’t Stop Believin’.” He does explain the origin of “streetlight people,” and as you might expect, it’s lame. As for SoDet (otherwise known as Windsor), he acknowledges it was a little poetic license. I recall how stunned I was to hear that there is no Gower Avenue in Los Angeles, as Warren Zevon’s chorus sang so wonderfully in “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.” It’s Gower Street, which just isn’t as lyrical. I don’t think I could do that. Accuracy is important.

Those of you who are higher-ed nerds — or who pay tuition in Michigan — might enjoy this project in Bridge, my new employer, by Ron French, comparing Michigan’s college costs to other states’. The results aren’t flattering.

I wonder if she’s selling her house in Arizona? Bristol Palin heads home.

Happy Wednesday, all. I think I might survive this week, but the jury’s still out.

Early in the Iowa caucusing, and I’m watching the live coverage. Why?

1) Because it’s too early for “Downton Abbey,” “Game of Thrones” or the Westminster Dog Show.
2) Because I’m so giddy at having a fairly typical American weeknight — drive home, dinner, a second glass of wine — that it just seems the thing to do.

Although jeez, it’s excruciating. Is American broadcast media ever worse than when it’s devoting all its attention to something of very little real consequence that won’t actually throw off any news for a few hours yet? It’s like watching someone toast an ant on a sidewalk with a magnifying glass. All agree that if Romney loses tonight, it’s a terrible setback for his campaign. Feh. They said Newton was done when he went on that Greek cruise and all of his top staff quit. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Eh, time for a Sopranos episode on demand. That’s why we have premium cable.

Oh, and “Southland” isn’t back yet, either. But soon. It’s not the best cop show ever, but it’s better than most, and I find myself oddly drawn in by Regina King and Michael Cudlitz. The latter plays a hard-working, first-class police officer with a painkiller addiction. Addict antiheroes are all the rage these days — hello, Nurse Jackie — and I’m not sure why, as drug addicts can be some truly despicable people, or rather, they’re people who do some truly despicable things. Both Cudlitz’ John Cooper and Edie Falco’s Nurse Jackie play competent, highly decent people who just happen to suck down Vicodin and Oxycontin like it’s going out of style. While I have to admire the writers’ impulse to dramatize a growing social problem, please — Cooper or Jackie need to be stealing a little more from their own family members, and a little less rough-around-the-edges.

Back to the caucuses.

Ron Paul is leading.

Have a nice year, GOP.

Bloggage?

Dan Savage is running out of patience with some of these people. You know it.

Keith Olbermann, cratering again? Oh, probably.

Is Stephen Glass forgivable? Hey, if Tim Goeglein is, I don’t see why not.

Man, all this pheasant and champagne and pie and the rest of it has taken a toll. I feel like crap, not in an I’m-getting-sick kind of way, more like an I’m-missing-the-gym deal. But I refuse to be one of those Jan. 1 newbies. (You like that logic? I’m missing the gym, but I won’t go to the gym. Because.) I considered my non-gym options and did something insane: I went for a walk.

Bipedal motion! What a crazy idea. I made it crazier yet — I didn’t use my iPod. Just me and my thoughts, and feet moving back and forth. Yesterday I walked about two miles and felt like someone had taken a ball-peen hammer to the bottoms of my feet, and yes, I was ashamed. Today I walked three and a half, and felt much better. Just needed to get the kinks out. I made both walks errands: Have a destination, get something done along the way. Yesterday I gave blood. Today, went to the library to return a DVD. (“Meek’s Cutoff,” don’t bother.) Things I noticed:

Couple of squabbling blue jays;
About a million storefronts I hadn’t seen up close;
The world. All snowy ‘n’ cold ‘n’ stuff.

When did we decide whatever was on our smartphone screens was so goddamn interesting? What if they’d told us the truth back in first grade, when we were first promised personal jetpacks? You won’t get that, but you will get a computer smaller than a deck of cards that you will carry in your pocket, one that will facilitate instant communication with the rest of the world. You will mainly use it to play Angry Birds and see what a celebrity is eating for lunch.

OK, enough. It was a good day. But tomorrow everything hits another gear. Today is the Iowa caucuses, and we’ll have lots to talk about In the meantime…

Dave Barry’s Year in Review. The same year after year, but always good for a chuckle or three.

My old News’n'Sentinel colleague Ash Khalil has a new book out. Unlike Herr Goeglein’s, I think I’ll read this one.

Eric Zorn notices two apocalyptic pronouncements from GOP candidates and wonders, hyperbole or hysteria? What’s scary is how many people agree with them.

Anyone want to make predictions on Iowa results?

Longtime readers know I’m not much for New Year’s Eve. In recent years I’ve had to work on many of them, but even when it fell on a weekend, it just never seemed worth the trouble. For years now, our preferred celebration has been a better-than-average meal made at home, some good wine, champagne and a video on the telly. We kiss at midnight, marvel over the sound of celebratory gunfire in Detroit, and go to bed.

This year, Alan’s been attending some of the media events at the car companies, and came home with a request:

“I know what I want for Christmas dinner,” he said. “Pheasant.”

O rly?

He explained that the Ford shindig he’d been at earlier in the evening had featured some cold roast pheasant on the buffet, along with some sort of fruit chutney, and boy, it sure was good. After determining that our Christmas guest wouldn’t eat pheasant at gunpoint, we decided it would maybe make a decent NYE entree. So I ordered one from the butcher and started exploring recipes.

We really aren’t meant to eat pheasant, I determined. No one can agree on how they should be prepared. Mark Bittman suggested whacking them up and cooking the various parts separately. Another said this is the ideal bird for brining. A woman at one of the holiday parties we attended said no, pressure-cook it. One recipe went with a slow roast with lots of basting, another with a short one in a very hot oven. That was Emeril Lagasse’s recipe. I’ve noticed several chefs, all men, suggest roasting duck and other game birds in blazing-hot ovens, claiming the heat works the way a sear does on a grilled steak — trapping the scarce fats inside; otherwise, you end up with a dessicated fowl.

I think men are the ones who promote this method because, by and large, they don’t have to clean their own ovens. Personally, I despise any temperature above 425 degrees on my home oven, except maybe for pizza. It gets everything so hot grease splatters throughout the oven, which creates smoke, which sets off every smoke alarm in the house, etc. But still: Pheasant. If I can’t trust Emeril, who can I trust? I dialed the heat up to 500, turned on the fans, and started it in a jacket of bacon, as instructed:

This whole process was supposed to take less than an hour, I remind you. After 15 minutes, I removed the bacon; just opening the oven started the smoke alarm shrieking. (Alan took it down and stuck it under some towels.) We took the bird out when it looked like this; a few tentative pokes suggested its juices were running clear:

But when we flipped it over to do a bilateral carve, it still had plenty of blood left in it. Back into the oven for another 15, and that did it. It made for a pretty presentation:

And how did it taste? Eh, OK. It was still too dry. Alan got down to the bones, but I stopped at the white meat. Not a terrible dinner, but far from my best work. If I ever meet Emeril, I will ask him to come clean my goddamn oven. His sauce was good, however, a red-wine-and-orange-juice reduction.

That’s a wild rice pilaf on the side, by the way, with some toasted pine nuts. A very harvest-season meal.

Lesson learned: Some things are best left to the pros. Next year: Salmon.

How was your new year celebration? I finally watched “Midnight in Paris,” which was perfectly wonderful.

I’m a lazy girl on the bloggage today, but Gawker did all my work for me, in their best-of-2011-reading roundup. A few things are behind paywalls, but there’s some great stuff here, all of which I missed the first time around, including the incredible true story of the collar-bomb heist from Wired, a fabulous rant/takedown of “Eat, Pray, Love,” and finally, a piece that introduces and explains Courtney Stodden for me once and for all, so that I never have to read another word about her, thankyaJesus. All three worth your time, and probably even more at the Gawker link.

And so it begins, this 2012. I’m hoping it’s a good one. For all of us. Even the pheasant.

Sorry for being such a bummer yesterday, but stories like that strike a nerve. Years ago, a friend who worked in emergency medicine introduced me to a bit of their diagnostic jargon — DFM, or dumb fuckin’ mom. Despite a moderate episode of DFM, the child is expected to recover, although it is known to be a chronic condition. DFM is the cause of childhood caries, the cavities that can deprive a kid of baby teeth well before the permanent ones come in, usually thanks to a mom who poured Hi-C or Coca-Cola into a bottle. That’s at one end of the spectrum. At the other is DFM with extreme prejudice, which was certainly a contributing factor in the ghastly demise of that cursed little girl in Fort Wayne last week. Leave your children with Some Guy for a week? Sure, why not?

But let’s lighten the mood a bit today. I get the sense many of you are like me this week, at work or not, but likely spending a lot of time goofing off on your computers. Fortunately, I have much linkage to love today, so let’s get to it.

I found this CDC data set in a Nate Silver tweet; it’s about the percentage of American households with cellular-only coverage, and he mentioned it in connection with polling. Evidently many pollsters don’t use cell-only households in their canvassing, and it has bitten them more than once — the seemingly come-from-behind victory of Kwame Kilpatrick in his last Detroit mayoral election was attributed to unpolled cell-only voters, mostly young people, who gave him an easy victory in a race that was said to be too close to call.

We’re starting this discussion — cutting the land line — in our house, and are being held back by a few factors, including 911 service, the lack of significant cost savings and, of course, the necessity of covering that ugly wall jack in the kitchen once the phone is gone. J.C., my digital guru and mentor, went to a Google Voice landline setup a while back, and reports no problems. What say the NN.C hoardes hordes?

Kim Severson considers sorghum, that quintessential southron sweetener, in today’s NYT food pages. Southern cooking is so far outside my gene pool that I don’t dare to experiment, but this sounds interesting:

At Two Boroughs Larder in Charleston, sorghum sweetens semifreddo. In Atlanta, Richard Blais, a winning “Top Chef” contestant, serves tiny popped grains of sorghum as a bar snack at his restaurant, HD1. It tastes like a toasty marriage of kettle corn and puffed rice.

And at Lantern, in Chapel Hill, N.C., Andrea Reusing uses sorghum to bridge the South and Asia. She makes a Vietnamese-style sorghum caramel with fish sauce, lime and chiles to glaze pork belly, and coats spicy fried walnuts or pine nuts with sorghum. Her pastry kitchen turns out a five-spice confection like Cracker Jack using sorghum. It also goes into a gold rum cocktail infused with black pepper and vanilla bean.

Ten words you mispronounce that make people think you’re an idiot. Not long enough.

And finally, the List of Lists, the WashPost’s 2012 Ins and Outs! Yayyyyy. (claps wildly) Out: Pippa’s bum; In: Kate’s uterus. Beautiful.

Have a great day, all.