A note on our type problems: J.C. is aware, and is working on it from his vacation in the Upper Peninsula, where wi-fi is something no one’s really heard tell of yet. Good news: This seems to be a home-page problem. In the meantime, if you click the headline, it’ll take you to a separate page (with comments) where everything’s OK. Noted? Noted.

EDIT: Type problem seems fixed, for now. Thanks, brother Jim! Also, a version of the Eaton Beaver clip is now linked in comments. Thanks, Duffy.

It’s a measure of how scattered I’ve been of late that I’ve been sitting here for two days thinking I have nothing to write about, and then — forehead slap — I remember that I went to see Elmore Leonard last Thursday. He did a read/chat/sign at Border’s, supporting his new one, “Road Dogs.”

The reading was brief, just the first page of the novel, which in the usual fashion, starts halfway down the page. Maybe three paragraphs, after which he said, “And that’s what the book’s about,” shut it, and started talking. He was aided in this by his son Peter, who just published his second novel — it’s a father-son book tour. The two chatted back and forth for about half an hour, took some questions, signed some books. Among the highlights:

Peter talked about the party his father threw for the cast of “Out of Sight,” after they wrapped shooting in Detroit. He walked into the dining room to find George Clooney had just arrived and was standing by himself. They chatted for a while, and then “the women heard he was there.” Surrounded.

The “10 rules of writing” were delivered at Bouchercon, the convention for crime-fiction writers, and were something he just whipped up on a legal pad. Today the list is a book, and one of the most often-quoted in stories about him, probably because they’re short, snappy and don’t require much introduction. One of the rules: Never use a word other than “said” to carry dialogue. Another: Use no adverbs. Because they suck. (In the signing line, I told him about the reporter for the Ohio University Post who used “ejaculated” to describe an exclamation. His editor announced to the room: “Someone ejaculated on Tim’s copy.” That was hard to live down.)

My favorites were the stories about the old days, about being called in to a movie set to convince Charles Bronson — I assume this was “Mr. Majestyk” — that yes, his character would have a particular female character with him in the pickup truck during the big chase scene, because otherwise who would be driving when he crawled into the bed with a shotgun to fire at the bad guys? (“I don’t know why the producers couldn’t have told him that.”) But also about the era of pulp fiction, which he barely touched on, other than to say he’d been paid 2 cents a word for “3:10 to Yuma,” “which was the top rate for the pulps.” I wish he’d talked more about this bygone era in American fiction, where so many great writers paid their dues and learned their craft. (I was once lucky enough to interview an expert on the mass-market paperback, and I could have talked to him for hours and hours about cover art alone.) Fiction workshops are all well and good, but there’s something to be said for strong characters, snappy dialogue and the whip of the market as a navigator of plotlines. Every so often Leonard is asked why he switched from westerns to crime fiction, and he always shrugs and notes that that’s what the market wanted at the time. Try telling that to the next MFA you meet.

(That said, my favorite MFA, Lance Mannion, is a great respecter of genre fiction and its writers. So this may not apply to all of them.)

Martin Amis, in an essay about Leonard collected somewhere, described his writing as jazz, and that’s the truth. He said he doesn’t outline his novels, never knows where they’re going to end until they do, and that sounds to me like a nice bebop solo, the trumpeter stepping out to noodle around with phrases, themes and melodies for a while, until he’s said all he has to say and steps back to let someone else take a turn. Leonard is Miles Davis with a pen.

I bought “Road Dogs,” which I’m interspersing with “The Quiet Girl,” two books that couldn’t be more different. If Leonard is jazz, Peter Hoeg is atonality, translated from Danish. I can only recommend one, and I think you know which one it is.

So, a little bloggage? Sure:

A tale of two Michigan economies — Ann Arbor and Warren. From the WSJ.

The right’s talking points on Sotomayor, by Dahlia Lithwick, another writer nearing national-treasure status.

Only in Detroit: A city councilwoman is billed a pittance in property taxes for a decade. How much of a pittance? Try $68 a year. Turns out the city records show her address is a vacant lot. Her reaction: Huh. I wondered about that. Now it turns out she probably won’t have to pay much at all. This city. I ask you.

Only in Detroit Journalism: Yes, I saw the “Eaton Beaver turns 69 today” clip from one of our local TV station’s happy-birthday roundup on the morning show. No, I cannot direct you to it, as the station has effectively wiped out the clip. More proof every news organization needs an editor well-versed in dirty jokes, puns and Johnny Fucherfaster stories.

And now, I have a barn to raise and a day to do it. Onward to the work pile.

I have a sick dog and a full plate, two factors that fill me with a desire to go back to bed, but alas — the long weekend is over, and I can’t say I didn’t enjoy it, although I spent a chunk of it working.

I’m worried about the dog. He stopped eating yesterday and showed other signs of intestinal distress, perhaps a result of licking up some bone meal Alan spread around the plants the last few days, or perhaps due to the fact he’s 17.75 years old and has the customary unknown expiration date. He no longer has the physical reserves to sustain an extended illness. I’m taking him to the vet today, if I can get in. Fingers crossed for Spriggy.

Meanwhile, here’s a funny video, via Roy, via Wonkette:

People sometimes tell me, “I’m not a Republican. I’m a libertarian.” This sounds to me like, “I want to smoke pot with the loose-moraled Democratic girls, but still not pay taxes.” To be a libertarian is to spend your life writing checks you’ll never have to cash and knowing that no matter what happens in the next election your side won’t win, and will only have to spend the next four years having, and expressing, grand opinions about those who did. You ask me, you guys can take a little ridicule.

God, I hope the dog is OK. Here’s hoping. You guys carry the discussion today. A few ideas:

Nice NYMag piece on the ancient roots of Jewish humor in the new Woody Allen movie. (Although why is it, when I hear that Allen likes to start production on a film when his children are out of school — i.e., have an excuse to be elsewhere — that I feel simultaneously relieved and creeped out?)

Also, word is we’ll have a Supreme Court nominee by midmorning. Let it be someone good.

I’ll be in and out, and maybe back by midafternoon, if I’m not at the vet’s.

I have a new plan for retirement: To live somewhere I can ride my bicycle 365 days a year (366 in leap years). I know this boils down to “a place that is unpleasantly hot for a large chunk of that time,” so the plan needs work. But few things make me happier, I realized yesterday, than saddling up for a quick trip to the butcher three blocks away. If only we hadn’t engineered modern life to do away with much of its moderate exercise; maybe the murder rate would be lower.

Detroit is a town that, like Los Angeles, was built to accommodate the automobile, and friends, it ain’t aging well. Every few months I feel the need to say this again, but it bears repeating: This is one ugly town. Not just the decimated city, but also its suburbs, and it’s at times like this I’m ever so glad we chose the Pointes, because it was platted before walking was seen as a sign of weakness, and at least we have the lake. There’s nothing like rolling out one of the big through avenues like Gratiot, six lanes or so, flowing fast and free because it’s at maybe 50 percent of its carrying capacity even at rush hour, while one ugly storefront after another goes past. How does anyone make a living in vacuum-cleaner repair, you wonder, when just finding your store means you have to buck traffic and hunt out a five-digit address that may or may not be on the building? You can almost mark the point, as you drive out from the core, when the idea of the strip mall took hold — a little more setback in return for easier parking out front, six little shops replaced by three larger anchors, if you can call a chain video store an anchor, plus the inevitable Lee Nails. (When was it decreed that all nail shops be run by Asians? How do these ethnic connections to market sectors get made? Is it the same group that says, “OK, Chaldeans — you got the party stores. Jews? Jewelry for you. Macedonians? I hope you like restaurants.” And so on.)

Urban planners point out the inevitable a lot (perhaps to disguise how often “planning” doesn’t got as, um, planned), and say the trend toward dense urban centers is real and has legs, and the sooner individual municipalities start accommodating it, the better. Walkable, bikeable, parking-out-of-sight — this is the future. Turns out people want to rub elbows with their fellow man, after all, preferably in a farmer’s market. We’ll see. But I sure like my bicycle. In about an hour I’m going out to make my cop-shop rounds on it — it’ll be two hours of mostly riding, covering 12 miles or so, work/workout all in one. This is living.

(It helps that people don’t expect reporters to be much more than sweaty and unpleasant.)

So how was your weekend? Mine was fine. We got the boat in the water on Saturday with no arguments or even much yelling, showing that it only takes a few years of practice to get the our routine down, plus the help of a couple of able souls at the marina. The lake is a foot higher this year, a happy turn of events that’s been in the news quite a bit of late. A new study by the International Joint Commission (a group virtually unknown outside the Great Lakes) says the drastically lower levels of recent years are a natural phenomenon, caused in part by ice jams that scoured the St. Clair River bottom — nature’s dredge, in other words. An interesting theory, but at this point all I care about it how nice it is to have a little more water out there.

And so boating season begins. At least four, effectively five, and as many as six months of sailing lies ahead. In other words, as much winter as I just bitched about. Life really is binary.

Bloggage? Not much, buth this:

One of Justice David Souter’s clerks reveals the man you don’t know in Slate, a man who would rather read by the last two foot-candles of winter light than turn on a lamp. Now I feel bad for having made fun of him:

Why would a man who can understand Grokster read by the window rather than turn on a light? Souter has a characteristic New England thriftiness and a distrust of luxury that verges on the spartan. He can keep a suit for decades, and he gently mocked me and my fellow clerks for wearing overcoats in the winter, claiming that his view was shared by that other great Yankee justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Souter is also deeply unpretentious. It would never occur to him that because he is a Supreme Court justice he’s entitled to waste a bit of the taxpayers’ electricity. (He once wrote me a note on a napkin I’d left on my desk rather than using a new sheet of paper.)

Souter’s current position on the left wing of the court owes much more to movement by the court and the country than to any lurch on his part. The current court, after all, has seven Republican appointees and has been on a steady rightward drift since the Reagan years. The Republican Party has, too. I think Souter is indeed in many ways a Republican; it’s just that his sort of Republican no longer really exists.

Remember those? I do. I miss ’em.

OK, off to edit my syllabus and fire up the NewsCycle. Have a great week, all.

ADDED: Because Brian brought it up last week — either here or in an e-mail, I don’t recall — an interview with Lenore Skenazy, who advocates off-leash child-rearing. Interesting.

This is spring break in our neck of the woods. As usual, we didn’t go anywhere. I thought just this one year we’d have company, but it seems the need to escape a Michigan winter trumps recessionary income downturns. Also, everyone in Michigan has a relative in a warmer state, so even if you can’t afford a cruise, you can visit the siblings or parents in Clearwater for a few days. So Kate is stuck moping around the house. Yesterday’s weather made it worse — a chill all-day rain with temperatures in the 40s. At midafternoon I cracked, and we went to the mall.

I needed a new printer, anyway, a scan/fax model for those times when I need to do one or the other. Kinko’s charges $3 a page, anything out of the area code is considered long distance, and yes, you must have a cover sheet, although they cut you a break on that — it’s only a buck. Freelancers have to fax a lot of tax forms. And of course, on the next rainy day when everyone’s out of town, I can send the kid to the printing station to scan her butt and face.

Went to the Apple store — let’s pay top dollar! The geniuses had but three models in stock, none on the floor, and gave me that Genius Bar smile that suggests printing is so last century, it’s kind of cute that I asked for it. We left without one, and as a consolation prize, I bought Kate a pair of red Chuck Taylor high-tops, on sale. Chucks are very big with her crowd. I tried on a pair and marveled that men once played basketball at a professional level in these things. No wonder the dunk is a fairly recent innovation in the game.

And today? More shopping! Today we’re going for the full Monty, an hour’s drive to the world’s biggest outlet mall, or something. All I know is, they have an Aeropostale store, which will take care of the bulk of Kate’s list (brand loyalty, thou art a 12-year-old girl) and Under Armour, which will take care of mine. The rest of the time we will wander and drink Starbucks. Female bonding.

I wonder if we’ll see any teabaggers along the way. If so, I’ll take pictures and notes.

We have some amusing bloggage today:

Sandra Tsing Loh takes a second look at Paul Fussell’s “Class.”

Couldn’t the Obamas have found a dog that was somewhat less adorable? I’m starting to think they’re not playing fair; can’t they conjure some asymmetry or imperfection to make the rest of us feel less bewitched? Meanwhile, my “awwww” at Bo’s appearance on my TV last night prompted Alan and Kate, one floor up, to say, “It must be video of the new puppy.” Those mismatched white socks! That fluffy coat! I am entranced. (Oh, and sorry, but I’m not buying the allergy-free line, either. I’d tell the pediatrician: “It’s a big house” and leave it at that.)

Jeff TMMO just posted this in the previous thread, so let me post it here, another elegant Dan Barry dispatch from, whaddaya know, Jeff TMMO’s hometown. It’s about the difficulty of nurturing art and an artistic temperament in a place like Newark, Ohio. I was struck by this passage:

Here in Newark, half the students are poor enough to receive lunch free or at a discount. The system also has one of the highest dropout rates in Ohio; nearly a third of the high school students do not graduate. That elevated percentage seems out of place given the Middle America setting, but officials have a theory:

Back in the day, you could drop out and still get a good job at one of the many manufacturing plants in town. You could pay the mortgage, buy a car new, take holiday trips — all without a high school diploma.

“Now those jobs have gone away,” says Keith Richards, the city’s schools superintendent. “But the mindset has not.”

It echoes something I heard on the radio yesterday: In the latest survey of Michigan parents, half — HALF — thought their kids would be able to earn a middle-class living with only a high-school education. Half. Earlier in the show, the host referred to the auto industry as “economic crack.” A lot of people have yet to detox, apparently.

Me, I’m off to spend a portion of my tax refund.

One of the local bloggers refers to the Free Press’ reader comments as the Klavern, and one look at it after a story touching on race — as approximately 75 percent of all stories in Detroit do, and a little imagination can bring the other 25 percent under the umbrella — shows why that’s true:

I see it all now. A new amusement park right on the riverfront.
“GHETTOVILLE” !!!
A real life amusement park. You’ll take part in muggings, and car jackings. See what it’s like to live in a crackhouse neighborhood. Try your skills as either a streetwalker or a crack dealer. Dress up like a clown and serve on the city council.
for the kids there is the “Who’s your daddy” ride

Ha ha. This was attached to a story on the Cobo expansion, which is, of course, about race.

This is one of the things we’ve discussed about GrossePointeToday.com, whether we’re going to allow anonymous comments, and we’ve decided we’d rather have fewer with real names attached than the sort of sewage allowing anonymity would encourage.

Earlier this week, a former editor at the Washington Post’s website defended the anonymous variety, arguing they served as an unpleasant but necessary reminder of a particular segment of the audience. This was picked up by Romenesko, where all important issues of journalism are debated, and it was there that a Gannett reporter replied with his own experience. Hello, future of journalism:

Like other Gannett papers, the Register has turned its newsroom into an “Information Center,” in part by publishing rumors, half-truths and outright lies submitted by anonymous folks with screen names like “Hugh G. Rekshon.” Not long ago, we had a reader who decided to publish on our site the juvenile court record of a young woman, complete with references to drug testing, psychological exams and the girl’s one-time status as a juvenile ward of the state. We routinely publish comments questioning the virtue of female criminal defendants and the citizenship of anyone who seems to have a Hispanic surname. We call that “community conversation.” Others see it as a public stoning, hosted by a newspaper that grants all of the attackers complete anonymity.

And like other Gannett papers, the Register is cutting back on content produced by trained, professional journalists while encouraging community members to submit photos, columns and blogs. A few of our community bloggers have used this forum to write about the details of their drug use and their sexual activities. Most of our contributors choose their topics more carefully, but again, they’re not professionals. Not everyone who can type is a reporter. Not everyone with a cell-phone camera is a photographer. But in the Information Center, we’re all part of a homogenized team of “content providers” — some of whom, not coincidentally, work for free. A well-researched Register news article is published on the same Web page as a reader’s step-by-step instructions as to how a local woman under a psychiatrist’s care should commit suicide using carbon monoxide.

That’s the Des Moines Register, by the way, one of those papers that existed for years as proof that Iowa was a state that valued education, that far from being a collection of farmers and cornfields, could produce a paper that was the equal of any in the country. Won several Pulitzers. I read it when I was in Iowa covering the floods of 1993. They ran exhaustive coverage, much of it presented in Spanish as well. And now it’s the home of Hugh G. Rekshon.

I don’t know why I’m talking about this today. It is Good Friday. Death and execution is topic one today. Maybe that’s why.

So, friends, how are you today? I’m fabulous. I spent most of yesterday away from my computer, and recommend it highly. It turns out there are people out there with whom you can have these things called “conversations,” which don’t involve a keyboard. You can accompany them to restaurants and eat actual food, actual being the opposite of everyone’s favorite adjective these days, “virtual.” We went to B.D.’s Mongolian Barbeque, a place I’d not visited before this year. How had I missed it, this place that McDonald’s-izes the hibachi table? The last I checked, the Mongolians were a nation of proud horsemen who once conquered the world and today eat a lot of yogurt. The fast-casual joint that bears its name invites you to gather a large bowl of raw meat and vegetables, complemented by sauces that range from Fajita Pepper to Thai peanut. You present this mess to a cook who makes snappy banter while he shoves it around on the grill for a few minutes, then take it back to your table, where you’ve been given a bowl of rice. Also, a small tortilla warmer.

“What’s in there?” I asked the waitress.

“Tortillas,” she said. Oh.

Anyway, against all expectations, this mess is still delicious. I cleaned my plate and wiped it with a tortilla. God bless the melting pot.

And God bless Wikipedia, which notes the first American restaurant chain to open in Ulan Bator was? B.D.’s Mongolian Barbeque! The entry goes on to note: “…neither the ingredients nor the cooking method has anything in common with Mongolian cuisine.” Good to know.

Somewhere in the world is an American restaurant that serves live eels.

OK. So I’m off to buy white eggs, asparagus and maybe a beef tenderloin. We’re staying in for Easter, making it a feast for three. So no ham for us — we’re going with the good stuff.

Happy weekends to all.

I posted this picture on Facebook yesterday:

It’s from my Russian teacher’s fascinating library of Soviet-era children’s books. This is in a beautifully illustrated picture book about the alphabet, pitched at, I’d estimate, the kindergarten cohort. Because this was published in 1962 or so, and because this was the Soviet Union, the parade of alphabet pages are interrupted by propaganda. The sausage-fingered Ukrainian above is, of course, Nikita Sergeyovich Khrushchev. The copy tells us he is a soldier for peace, ha ha. Sometimes peace needs to be imposed at the point of a bayonet. I’m impressed at how the artist captured his essential peasant nature — check out the fit of that jacket around the shoulders. And the brow.

Later in the same volume is a page about Vladimir Lenin. I regret I didn’t take a picture, but I was too amused by the text under his portrait, which reads:

Lenin is dead.
Lenin is alive.
Lenin will rise again.

Just a little mystery of faith for you Catholics to contemplate during Holy Week. You gotta think that was deliberate, but Catholicism isn’t so big in Russia, and I’m not sure that passage (“Let us proclaim the mystery of faith: Christ has died, Christ is risen, Christ will come again.”) is part of the Orthodox liturgy. One thing about the internet is, you can throw any question out there and someone will answer it in an hour or two.

How is your week going? Mine is the usual train wreck, complicated by my glance at the calendar Monday to discover it is now the second week in April and I haven’t even started our taxes yet. So that’s what I’ll be doing the rest of today, and maybe the rest of the week. Unholy week, in my case.

So before I send you off with a half-baked effort, here’s a story from the NYT’s front page today, about good Samaritans using social networking and other digital technology to return found objects to their rightful owners:

Companies are also moving to exploit the fact that millions of people have published information about themselves on the Web. Traditional lost-and-founds are migrating online, and a batch of start-ups and hobby Web sites have sprouted with the aim of harnessing people’s altruistic impulses to return lost items.

“Generally when people are given the opportunity to do something good for someone else, they’ll take it,” said Matt Preprost, a college student in Canada who has created a blog, Found Cameras and Orphan Pictures, to reunite cameras and their owners.

The opening anecdote is about a lost camera and the Scottish woman who did not rest until she had returned it to its rightful owners, a couple who thought they had lost all their wedding and honeymoon pictures.

And how coincidental that Metafilter led me to Is This Your Lost Luggage, a site kept by a guy who buys abandoned bags at auction, then photographs their contents. You can claim your property if you don’t mind knowing a total stranger has taken a picture of your “Daddy’s Girl” t-shirt, Roxy bikini and green-and-pink hippopotamus PJs.

If you ever wondered why mystery novels are popular, here’s why. People love to solve a mystery.

The story touches on the findees, some of whom “feel weird” that others were able to find out so much about them, even if it was for a good cause. Good grief. We live in Overshare Nation and this surprises anyone? Be grateful you got your stuff back and shut up about it. As Coozledad pointed out so eloquently the other day, your damn mail carrier knows far more about you than you might think, let alone Facebook.

Finally, I’ve started taking special notice of a few talking heads/bloggers, who are ignoring the conventional wisdom about Michelle Obama — that she looks great — and instead picking nits over her wardrobe, that sleeveless is the same as topless, that cardigan sweaters are tacky, blah blah blah. Oscar de la Renta seems mainly peeved that she’s not wearing more Oscar de la Renta. I know those pink knit suits are popular with some people — hello, Mrs. John Roberts — but for the life of me I don’t understand why people are so up in arms, ha, about Mrs. O. It’s not like she wore a tank top and trucker hat to Buckingham Palace. The NYT celebrates the end of Wife Wear.

You can sense I’m putting off the inevitable. Time to install Turbo Tax and do the job I really should delegate to someone smarter than me.

This is the dog who lives in the house that Jack built:

(At least, I think so. I figure, in 1947, the chances of at least one Jack working on this house’s construction are pretty high.)

This is the dog who grew very old, and lives in the house that Jack built.

This is the dog who’s due at the vet’s, and lives in the house that Jack built.

This is the vet, who’s expecting a stool, from the dog who grew very old, who lives in the house that jack built.

This is the rain, that falls on the land…

including the vet, and also the dog, who grew very old and lives in the house that Jack built.

This is the Nance who owns the dog who’s due at the vet’s who needs a stool despite the rain that falls on the house that Jack built:

(You can see why she’s blue, maybe.)

And this the blog that gets ignored because of the Nance who owns the dog who’s due at the vet’s who needs a stool despite the rain that falls on the house that Jack built.

Time to get the Ziploc. And the umbrella. Have a good weekend.

It seems half the people I know are going gluten-free. Gluten is the new sugar, no, the new lactose — something you can claim a vague “sensitivity” to and give up, thereafter proclaiming you never felt better. While I know that celiac disease is real and that people actually suffer from it, I’m a little dubious about many of my newly gluten-free friends’ health claims. But I have a prejudice. When I was in fourth grade, the teacher asked us to speculate on what is meant when bread is called “the staff of life.”

I raised my hand. “That you’ll die without it?” The teacher chuckled and called on someone else, but I stand by my contention. Life without bread not only lacks a staff, but a point.

Alan was a health reporter for a time, and brought his deep skepticism to the job. It’s his contention that 99 percent of all self-diagnosed food allergies and sensitivities are b.s., that for every person who goes into anaphylactic shock after eating peanuts or shellfish, there are 99 who claim “allergies” that basically boil down to being a picky eater. If ice cream makes you fart, that does not mean you’re lactose intolerant. (Bloody diarrhea is another matter, and yes, you’re welcome for that observation. I suppose there’s a middle ground where you’re confined to your room until you stop smelling like a dairy that’s been abandoned during a heat wave, but everything’s a spectrum.)

But this gluten thing is sweepin’ the nation. Just a brief scan of the celiac disease entry on Wikipedia makes it sound nearly crippling, and no one in my circle who’s given up gluten can really claim to have had it, but may I digress and gross you out some more? From the wiki:

The diarrhoea characteristic of coeliac disease is pale, voluminous and malodorous.

That’s as opposed to the scant, sweet-smelling diarrhea, I guess. Ha ha.

Crunchy Rod, between posts on economic catastrophe, the Benedict Option and the usual mania, posted a while back that his house has given up gluten and casein (milk protein) and they’re all feeling better. (I only wish this was reflected in his writing.) The post attracted the usual comments, wherein some people claimed that making one change in their diet led to clearer thinking, retraction of an autism diagnosis, etc.

Speaking as one who has always had a cast-iron stomach, who can eat virtually anything with no ill effects whatsoever, who has never even experienced heartburn, whose sum total of bad dietary outcomes boils down to “no matter how good it sounds at 2 a.m., White Castles at closing time are almost never worth the morning-after misery,” it is perhaps hard for me to empathize. If one doesn’t have celiac disease, how can cutting one food from one’s diet make that big a change? Maybe if you replace it with something healthier, more complex carbs or whole grains, I can see it. Otherwise, I’m still skeptical. I note how many people are diagnosed with these conditions by “alternative” doctors, and trash the AMA all you want, but I used to sit next to an alt-medicine crackpot at work, and I formed my own opinions, particularly about iridology.

The U.S. is a far more diverse place than it was when I was a kid. Different ethnicities bring different genes into the mix. I’ve heard it said that Asians can actually smell white people, that we reek like aged Cheddar to noses that don’t mess with milk past the breast-feeding stage. So I won’t rule it out. But can anyone tell me what a mixed-bag-of-European-genes person like me has to gain from giving up her twice-weekly loaf of rustic Italian bread?

The question to the crowd today: Gluten — threat or menace?

So, bloggage:

One of the trainers at my gym is trying to sell two Final Four tickets. Great seats (he says), all three games, $2,000. Yesterday it was $2,500. I don’t know what this means — the price reduction, that is — but I hear through the grapevine that there are still seats available. Everyone blames The Economy, but if you’re in the market, yo, I can hook you up.

Jeff TMMO posted this to Facebook, and as of five minutes ago, so had two others, so heads up for the hey-martha story of the week and probably the month. The headline alone is a classic: Police charge man with OVI after he crashed motorized bar stool. And there’s a picture!

Brian mentioned Google’s invasion of privacy a few days ago. A too-perfect story along those lines, that we won’t bother to check out further.

Hey, John Rich: Screw you, too. Love, Detroit.

Off to the gym. Times like these require all my strength.

Today starts the Grand Experiment, i.e., no Detroit paper-made-of-paper on my doorstep today. Our progress so far…yesterday I got the Sunday Free Press, and no New York Times. On Sunday, this is like getting the bill and the mints at the cash register, but no breakfast. I actually had to read Albom. Alan insisted on calling for our copy, and it was delivered six hours later by an old man in a battered car. He walked with a limp as he made his way up the walk, but his manner was courtly and his apology, sincere. A new company is doing the delivery, he said, and this was an early glitch. So sorry.

Today there was a New York Times, but no Wall Street Journal. Since I can’t speak English until after my coffee, I opted to handle it online. In red type on the Services page:

Due to some delays in your area today, you may experience late or missed delivery of The Wall Street Journal. We are sorry for the inconvenience.

It’s sad when the old world meets the new. Nothing but blood on the floor. And yes, the ironies have occurred to me: This is happening on a day when the biggest local story in months is breaking. Also, that the person who pays more than $700 a year for newspapers is the one being inconvenienced, so we can cater to the freeloaders. (Jeff TMMO linked to something Jim Lileks had to say on this subject today, but I won’t, because as usual he buries his point in several hundred words of blather about what he had for dinner Friday night. Kind of like, oh, me.)

But it’s Monday, it’s cold and there’s snow on the ground. Let’s turn our thoughts to happier subjects, shall we? Not what I had for dinner Friday, but what I made for dessert two weeks ago. Speaking of newspapers, the New York Times food-front main story a few weeks ago was about whoopie pies. Nothing like a picture like this to get your mouth watering. Normally my baking runs toward more traditional fare, but it looked like something Kate would enjoy making with me, and so we gave it a whirl.

Ours did not resemble the Times’:

But they were quite tasty, although if you’re planning to follow the same recipe, a word of advice: The cakes are fine, but drop the preposterously rich buttercream filling and just go ahead and whip up a bowl of plain old cream, with lots of powdered sugar and vanilla. The recipe is adapted from Zingerman’s Bakehouse in Ann Arbor, and once you look under the hood of one of their concoctions, you see how they justify their prices. There’s just no reason for every one of those suckers to have the equivalent of a half-stick of butter in it. Use whipped cream, refrigerate briefly and hand them out at a child’s birthday party. Yum.

A housekeeping note: Starting today, I’m introducing some small steps toward a modest monetization of this site. Oy, you don’t know the time I’ve grappled with this, but what I’m groping toward is a few little trickles that might add up to a stream someday. Today, I’m reviving my old Amazon Associates store, which I’m embedding in the “On the Nightstand” link. Click on Ms. Lippman’s latest, and instead of being taken to some review of her work — all of which have been very complimentary, by the way — you’ll go to my Amazon store, Nance’s Kickback Lounge. If you buy the book, or anything else, through me, I get four whole percent of your purchase. But you can buy anything there, not just “Life Sentences.” I’ve highlighted a few of my favorite current books, movies and so on, but if you simply access the greater Amazon site via my store, it all goes back to me. (Click on the “Powered by Amazon” logo to access their main page.)

In coming weeks and months, I’ll try a few more things, most of which will be unobtrusive and that which isn’t, I hope, will be something you’ll enjoy. My working model is, if it’s in yo’ face, it’s gotta be something extra. We’ll see.

I mentioned snow on the ground. It came through last night, a little squall that when it started delivered flakes the size of coasters, it seemed. We all stared out the window, resenting the hell out of it, even though it won’t stick and won’t last past 10 a.m. today. I resented it even more for being so pretty — the big flakes were very Hallmark. At least they were last night. Today, they’re just sort of…Monday. Enjoy yours.

It’s not just a rumor, after all.