An interesting cri de coeur in the Free Press Sunday — it was the lead story on the front page, this column by Susan Tompor, headlined, “I never knew Detroit was a dirty word.” It’s a good column, although I think anyone who honestly didn’t know Detroit was a dirty word in the rest of the country needs to get out of town more. I recommend it to you because it’s a pretty fair ground-level look at public opinion around here:

Each night when I go home and turn on the television, I find myself insulted by the righteous tone on cable or the networks. Look, I’ve always understood that many people do not like American cars or union workers or car company CEOs.

I didn’t know that some really, really hate us — and couldn’t care less if one or two or three Detroit carmakers up and dies. So we’d have hundreds of thousands of people suddenly unemployed. And the response is: Who cares?

That shouldn’t surprise anyone, really. I’ve written about this phenomenon before — I call it distancing. It’s a human trait, after a disaster, to look for differences between thee and me, so we can tell ourselves this would never happen to us. It’s actually easier to say “who cares” than to face the fact it might actually come true, and how we all might cope. I seem to recall, during the early-80s recession, when unemployed Michigan autoworkers were pouring into Texas in search of any sort of work, the natives sneeringly referred to them as “the black-tag people,” after the license plates then in use. I also remember a bumper sticker: “Let ’em freeze in the dark.” How I am looking forward to revisiting those happy days.

Let me say only this: I hope the Michiganders keep their deer rifles handy when they head south.

I’m writing this on Sunday, because Monday is going to be busybusybusy and I have the time now. Guess what’s happening outside? Fat fluffy flakes, that’s what. The whole mitten is covered in precipitation, most of it the freezing kind. And so it begins. Someone once told me more babies are born in November than any other month, a statement I could probably verify somewhere if I cared enough (but I don’t). There’s certainly nothing much to do in February, but I always link my birthday month to outright suckage, the real cruelest month. The only thing that saves it for me is Thanksgiving, which, as Jon Carroll points out, is a holiday that requires nothing of us but gratitude and approval of roast turkey. No problemo for either of those.

I’m not the only one with a November birthday, of course:

That was a lovely cake for Kate and Alan. Thanks to Jeffrey Steingarten, Joy of Cooking and the NYT for the recipe; it’s not the “birthday cake” recipe here, but the buttermilk-layer variety with chocolate-satin frosting.

The sweetness of another year, honored, the sweetness of the one to come, hoped-for. That’s what that cake was about. We’ll see what Congress thinks.

Oh, and as bad as it gets here, this was the view from Ricardo’s back yard Saturday. Here’s hopin’ for higher humidity, California:

UPDATE: Just got an e-mail from our frequent commenter (and my neighbor) JohnC, who recommends this Mark Phelan column from today’s Freep, and adds:

Couple other thoughts.

1. The main competitors of GM, Ford and Chrysler are already heavily subsidized by their governments in the form of universal health coverage. (Note: NOT socialized medicine, as some would have you believe, but guaranteed health coverage, in a private system, for all. ) This knocks at least $1,500 PER CAR off the overhead for foreign auto makers. The fact that the United States is the only industrialized country in the world that does not have universal health coverage is not only mind-boggling, but crippling to our industrial economy.

2. After Sept. 11, the economy, including the auto industry, went into a tailspin. You will recall that the airline industry was quickly bailed out by the government. The automakers, led by GM Chairman Rick Wagoner, rejected suggestions that they seek government help and instead lowered their prices to drive sales.

I love it when newspaper editors lecture, especially when they can’t punctuate:

Humor can be a dangerous thing as the line between funny and offensive can be a moving target as was certainly the case in this presidential campaign. In Sunday’s column Mr. Lewis pushed past that line, but only, I honestly and fully believe, in the pursuit of humor.

OK, your call: Did this push past the line between funny and offensive?

“Well we’re movin’ on up,
To Washington, D.C.
To a deee-luxe pimp pad,
Painted whiiiite.
Yeah we’re movin’ on up,
To the White House.
I’ll be jetting with P. Diddy cross the sky.

To be sure, the editor of the Murfreesboro Post (“giving a voice to Tennessee’s most dynamic city”) notes that author Stephen Lewis, identified as a columnist, “is not a journalist but a citizen of the community who writes a weekly column, again in his case a humor column.”

When you’re in a hole? Stop digging.

Oh, well. You can read the rest of it at the link above. Rush Limbaugh used to use “The Jeffersons” theme for his regular Carol Moseley Braun updates, so I guess it’s not without precedent.

The NYT reminds us that in the most recent election, most of Tennessee went even redder than it did in 2004. Enjoy cultural exile, Murfreesboro. And learn to use the comma.

I said yesterday I wanted to turn my thoughts to art in this post-election period. Well, OK. Here are the conditions insisted upon by a certain celebrity mother, on the occasion of her sons’ visit to their father on the other side of the Atlantic:

If I were running a newspaper I would strive for content like this every day.

Speaking of commas and punctuation and writing, I made a Wordle the other day. A Wordle is a word cloud; it analyzes text and makes a graphic representation of the words used, with the size of each word determined by its frequency in the text. Here’s one for Obama’s acceptance speech on election night, to give you an idea what they look like; I’m not going to bother screen-capturing a Java Applet thingie when you can make one yourself. Of course I used the text from the index page you’re looking at, and there in the middle was a big fat hulking JUST. Oy. It’s a word I use too much, a potato-chip word, one that I’m always stuffing into the cracks in my sentences. Just because I like it so much. But it’s wrong to use it so much. So I’m starting a campaign called Kill the Just, for my own writing alone.

Make your own Wordle, and find out what your darlings are. Then kill them.

I have work to do, and not enough time to do it. So have a good day, and I’ll be back later.

Brian has a question for the barflies:

Do you suppose this dog is a coyote? This picture was snapped today (by a colleague), just outside our office. She (he?) has scared away the geese that flock to the water retention pond — which is a very good thing!

Based on the photographic evidence…

…I’d say, “Almost certainly.” And a pretty healthy one, from the looks of it.

(Which reminds me of the stupidest local-TV report I’ve ever seen, which will probably remain so until I watch TV again, in which a reporter did a breathless report on a coyote captured in downtown Detroit. It came from “the wild,” the reporter said, and would be released there as well. What. A. Moron.)

Today in Gardening Galore, we have a question from a reader:

Dear Gardeners,

I recently bought yet another orchid — a phalaenopsis, your basic hotel-lobby, posed-under-a-pinpoint-halogen plant. It sits next to the chaise where I do a lot of my writing, and I like to contemplate its loveliness from time to time. “Easy to grow,” the man said. “Just ignore it, and it’ll do better than if you mess with it,” the man said. So I took it home, and for a while it was fine, and then all the blossoms dried up and fell off, and now the stem is drying up, and even though I’ve continued to water it — not too much! — I’m wondering if the thing is doomed. If I cut the stem off, will another one grow from it, or am I out another $20?

You’ll notice I’m trying to make a transition here, although I’m wondering if I should. Y’all want to talk about Rahm Emanuel in the comments, who am I to say you can’t? But in this blessed period between the conclusion of the election and the Confiscation of the Weapons and Opening of the Re-education Camps, maybe someone can answer my question about the goddamn orchid. I’m starting to wonder if these things are worth the trouble. But I need a little color in the gray Michigan winter. Is this so wrong?

As you can see, this week has left me tapped, and my house needs dusting. In the meantime:

Home page for the PuppyCam. Among the details there — all the puppy genders and names, which are Japanese-y and disappointing. I much prefer to call them by their collar colors. It should not surprise anyone to learn that Mr. Green is, indeed, a mister. Or a master.

The Chicago Tribune posted a few rejected election-result front pages. My favorite is the one about the Adler Planetarium.

I’m going to start letting Detroitist pick my morning Metro Mayhem stories; he does it so well:

Some pyscho fired shots at teenagers driving through Harper Woods. A bowling ball stopped a bullet from hitting one of the kids. Just like in the movies! And, ha ha ha, the Free Press said the gunmen “split.” Ha ha ha, just like a 7-10 split! The victims were from Detroit so naturally the Free Press message board klavern assumed they were no good black kids buying drugs in Harper Woods. It’s nice to know some people still cling to the old way and aren’t caught up in this “post-race America” thing.

It was the “message-board klavern” that got me. Word.

Off to dust. Have a good weekend.

I was one of the last Americans to learn about the dirty movie featuring the Sarah Palin lookalike, and I am grateful to the young man who told me, because if there’s one thing I need to have scratching around my skull on a long bike ride, it’s imagined dialogue sketches between a pretty woman with an updo and glasses and two Russian sailors whose rowboat has drifted ashore on the American side of the Aleutians.

At least, I think that’s the setup.

Now we discover that, as usual, truth is stranger than even Larry Flynt’s fiction:

At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. “I’ll be just a minute,” she said.

I guess I shouldn’t be suprised. She’s a natural for the take-off-the-glasses, shake-out-the-bun scene, too.

As you know if you’ve clicked around the web in the last 24 hours, this is part of an anonymously sourced Night of the Long Knives designed to place blame for the McCain campaign disaster where it properly belongs: Anywhere but on the anonymous sources’ shoulders. The Fox report going around (she didn’t know Africa was a continent, not a country), the NYT story today (her clothing was originally budgeted at $20,000 to $25,000, and her eye-popping overages were for such items as jewelry and luggage and outfits for the family) — these are to be expected. The entertainment factor, as Roy and TBogg and LGM point out, is just gravy. (And that’s not the entertainment of seeing Palin trashed, by the way; what fun is that? Rather, it’s the fun of watching Michelle Malkin, et al, threaten those who violate message discipline. Somewhere in Hell, Stalin chuckles.)

Anyway I find the whole thing sort of depressing. You wouldn’t think the ability to make William Kristol’s worm turn could carry a woman so far in the world, but never underestimate the power of a strategic flirtation. Or that of the so-called played-out, intellectually bankrupt, last-century MSM. Which brings us to our next topic today, when I called Alan at work yesterday and he said, “You’ll never believe what I’m looking at,” and began to describe people lined up in the street below his window. I thought maybe Barack Obama had parachuted in to the AFSCME offices across the street to spontaneously thank union members for their support, and word had gotten around.

No. They were there to buy a newspaper. Across the country, it’s the same story, as people lined up — at printing plants! — to buy dozens of extra copies. I think we’ve found a solution to our problems, comrades. All we need is…news.

Unfortunately, all the reporters have been laid off. Funny how that works.

Some quick bloggage today, because I’m well-rested, the sun is shining, and I plan to get both strength and cardio workouts in today:

Someone tell Joe the Douchebag his 15 minutes are up. HT: Detroitist.

“Heartwarming” + “unforgettable” + “opening on Christmas Day” = a movie you couldn’t get me to at gunpoint.

Weights class in 20 minutes. Must fly.

Via MetaFilter: Election got you down? Can’t relax? What you need is a live webcam of a box full of puppies. They were all sleeping a while ago, and Mr. Green Collar woke everybody up.

UPDATE: Poo. The puppies are off the air. I’ll keep checking.

A thunderstorm rolled through around 6 a.m., maybe earlier. Shook the house, woke us all. Alan, who sleeps with a clear conscience every night of his life, drifted back under. Kate, the early riser discombobulated by the time change, got up and went downstairs for some surreptitious television. Me, I opened the Jim Harrison book on the nightstand and read a couple of chapters. It’s a funny one, and I chuckled a lot.

I started thinking what life will be like after tomorrow, and hoped it would be like this morning — a storm followed by the pleasant sound of rain on the window, a good book and less time at the computer. That’s the best I can wish for, you Republican assholes.

Just kidding!

Maybe the mood is catching. The NYT says John McCain is winding up the campaign in a jocular mood, telling Henny Youngman jokes. Henny Youngman jokes, yes. I’m middle-aged, and Henny Youngman was already on the golden-oldie circuit when I was growing up. Everything I know about him I learned from JoodyB’s husband, who spent senior year at Ohio University slumped in a chair in The Post newsroom, telling Henny Youngman jokes: “They’re a real fastidious couple. She’s fast, he’s hideous.” “A man goes to a psychiatrist. The doctor says, ‘You’re crazy.’ The man says, ‘I want a second opinion!’ ‘Okay, you’re ugly too!'”

Which is not to say Henny Youngman isn’t funny. It’s just that this campaign has been so awful all I can think is what the reaction would be if Barack Obama sat on his plane telling Richard Pryor jokes.

One thing I’ll sort of miss: Checking fivethirtyeight every day, and sort of regretting I paid so little attention to statistics, etc., during my formal education. How can a person stay interested in this stuff day after day? Probably by crunching subsets of numbers like the cellphone effect. Fascinating.

Let this be the last (very tall, equal parts amusing/cringe-inducing) word on the election. Although I’m sure it won’t be.

Because there’s this, too:

Don’t let that be the last word.

Let’s talk about cooking today, eh? I made Betty Rosbottom’s cider-roasted chicken last night, along with mashed potatoes and sauteed Swiss chard. For dessert, a crumb-topped apple pie made with Northern Spies. If you don’t think that’s a fine repast, well, then you’re my daughter, who did her usual pick-and-gag over everything but the pie. No, not everything. I would have had to splatter her brains with a shotgun to even get her to consider the chard. What sort of mutant child doesn’t like mashed potatoes, I ask? WHAT SORT OF CHILD?!? Mine.

Of course, you guys can talk about anything you want. And probably will.

I overachieved on the candy front yesterday. My lesson to you: Don’t ever shop for candy when you’re hungry. Ah, but trick-or-treat hours are promised to be more or less perfect, so I’m sure we’ll sell out. Yesterday’s DetNews had a story about trick-or-treat tourism, which is nothing new here or anywhere else, but may be exacerbated this year by foreclosure:

In several Metro Detroit neighborhoods battered by home foreclosures, the spookiest thing this Halloween is the dramatic numbers of empty homes and “For Sale” signs. With as many as 63,453 homes now for sale in Wayne, Oakland, Macomb and Livingston counties — many of them empty — once-well-lighted houses now sit vacant, and some parents say they’ll be seeking greener trick-or-treating pastures elsewhere. Several of those who stay behind are stocking fewer bags of candy.

Our neighborhood here, like our neighborhood in Fort Wayne, always gets a million outside kids — it must have that magical combination of middle-class stability, maximum density and young children in residence that rings all the cherries. This used to bug me, but doesn’t anymore. Not everyone can be from Leave it to Beaver-ville, and I wouldn’t want to take my kid door-to-door in many neighborhoods, either.

In the meantime, who wants a peanut-butter cup?

(Speaking of which, among the ten thousand irrational food fears my own little girl insists on cultivating is this one: She loves peanut butter, hates peanuts. The other day Alton Brown had a show on peanuts, and demonstrated how easy it is to make peanut butter. I paused it, called Kate into the room, and made her watch how peanut-butter is made: Throw some peanuts in a food processor, turn it on, presto, peanut butter. She watched, and said, “I still don’t like peanuts.” That’s my girl.)

Because I have a lot to do today, short shrift but good bloggage for a lazy Friday:

While I enjoyed this piece on a mathematician who “cracked the code” of the opening chord of “A Hard Day’s Night,” I wish some editor would have reined in the writer who called it “the most famous chord in rock ‘n’ roll.” Oh reeeeeallly? Want to have that debate over a million beers? I’m sure it can be arranged.

In David Edelstein’s review of “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” he concludes with an unnecessarily complicated question:

Now, I could be wrong about this: Perhaps Rogen is catnip to the ladies, the Daniel Craig of sex farce. But this is not a man who appears to take good care of his body, and the movie doesn’t use his lack of physical appeal as a source of laughs—as Apatow sort of did in “Knocked Up.” The way Smith treats Rogen strikes me as the way he’d treat a young Tom Hanks or Jason Segel of “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” or Justin Long (who has an overlong cameo as a gay-porn actor)—the quick-witted nerd who could also be a dreamboat. But when Rogen sheds his clothes and climbs atop the lovely Banks and the bells ring and the fireworks explode, well … Imagine if James Franco played Zack, and Miri was an out-of-shape woman with bad skin and a big honker. Can there be that much of a double standard when it comes to actors’ looks?

Answer: Yes.

Speaking of movies, the trailer for “Gran Torino” is online. This is the Clint Eastwood movie shot in and around the Pointes last summer (while we, ironically, toured Carmel, Calif., Clint’s hometown). The good news: It’s clearly the GP. The bad news: Looks like a fairly crappy movie, i.e. “Dirty Harry: The McCain Years.”

Speaking of McCain, why why why is the campaign doing stuff like this? I mean: Way to court the youth vote, gramps.

Anne Hull stops in at Liberty University to see how the war for McCain is being fought at the insular-right-wing-Christian-raised-in-a-bubble level. (Short answer: Who fucking cares?) Still a good read.

Off to bake cupcakes. Happy Halloween.

Great googly moogly, here it is the day before Halloween and I haven’t bought any candy. Must get some, if there’s any left. Anything other than Circus Peanuts, that is, the sad reject of trick-or-treat bags the world over.

Who am I kidding? Of course there’s candy left in the stores — that’s one advantage of living in an emptying metro area in a deep recession. There’s always inventory. It’s not always the inventory you want, but no one runs out. Yet. That’ll come. For the early warning, you need only travel a mile or two west of my neighborhood and check out our local mall, Eastland in Harper Woods. I walk through Eastland with a feeling of nagging familiarity, with another mall named for a compass point dancing just outside my cognitive lobes…oh, what is it?…Ah yes, Southtown. I can already see, Carnack-like, into its future:

It starts when you go to the mall’s big anchors — in this case, Macy’s, Sears and Target. You normally think of Macy’s as a full-service department store, but you can never find what you’re looking for there. When you ask a clerk, “Is this all the winter hats and gloves you have in stock? This is it?,” they look sad and say, “Oh, we don’t carry a full selection at this location. You have to go to (insert name of mall in more prosperous area).” The Sears is full — and I mean full, crammed, racks-in-the-aisles-full — of oddities like spangled cocktail dresses in some sort of weird polyester that looks like a science experiment and cost $14.99, but the Land’s End turtlenecks are nowhere to be found. Target soldiers on; it’s Target and it cannot fail, at least not this year, but the rest of the mall is a carbuncle on its ass. Management has decided its customer base is 99 percent African American, and every store has a name like Urban Scene and sells ghetto-fabulous gear along the lines of Apple Bottom jeans and those manic-embroidered jackets with the big fur-trimmed hoods, but there’s not a pair of Levi’s in the building.

Wait. Wasn’t I talking about candy a minute ago?

Yes, well. I’m thinking Reese’s Cups this year. I’m only staying open for the first hour, anyway. After that I’m going to a neighbor’s house for Girl’s Night Wine-or-Treat. I’ll leave the remaining candy in a bowl on the front steps with a sign reading, “Please take only one.” Some kid will empty the whole bowl into his bag before I’m out of the driveway. That’s the Detroit Way, and I’m not complaining.

So what did we think of Barry O. last night? I tried to watch it with two sets of eyes — the critical, journalist-who-dabbles-in-video one, and the lizard-brain variety, and the verdict was the same. I wasn’t in tears, but I was impressed. As a piece of propaganda, it was a master stroke. Whether anyone was watching? We’ll see. If I were John McCain, I’d hire John Woo:

Quick bloggage today (LA Mary was having a slow afternoon yesterday and did most of the heavy lifting):

As long as there’s Larry Birkhead, we’ll always have Anna Nicole Smith. Note this fabulous shot of America’s luckiest baby daddy packing up the memento mori for an impending move to the ‘burbs. I was so taken by the pink bubble wrap I was sure it was Photoshopped, but a little Googling revealed the truth: Pink bubble wrap exists. (It’s the antistatic variety, for electronics.)

When Alan bought his shotgun a while back, I said I wanted one of these. It turns out there’s more to love about the makers of The Back-Up: They aren’t afraid to exploit high-profile tragedies for their own profit. It’s the American Way!

Finally, the program for Zombie Night is online.

I’m off to put on my winter cycling tights that I splurged on this year — the ones that make you feel like you’re wearing a big diaper, or 1960s-era maxipad — and punish myself.

I was driving home from our boat haul-out chore when I saw a sign for an estate sale. I had an hour to spare, so what the hell. It was a house in the Shores with the usual For Sale sign; I’d seen the listing for it earlier and remembered the ad mentioned a wide variety of designer clothes. I was actually looking for my usual — a lovingly used copper gratin pan, some interesting glass for my sister, whatevah — and not the clothes. Designer clothes are bought by skinny bitches, not women like me. So I approached the closet expecting to find the usual size zero, 2 and 4. Imagine my surprise when I grasped the first item, an Escada shell of wool, cashmere and silk, and glanced at the size:

FORTY-FREAKIN’-SIX.

That’s a European 46. Size L/XL in the U.S. A rich lady of normal size! Oh, happy day!

Not only that, she also had either a shopping problem or was one of those women who motivates herself to lose weight by buying nice things in a smaller size and hanging them in the closet as a goad. Because her stuff ranged from size 12 to 20, and much of it was NWT — new with tags. As in, never worn. As in:

That’s a pair of Miu Miu satin platform heels, probably about $375 in the store, never worn. Regrettably, just a hair too small for me. Because while that’s not a pair of shoes a girl needs, exactly, that is a pair of shoes that can change one’s life. (Yes, yes, a broken ankle is life-changing, too.)

As for me, I went through everything and tried on a lot. But I restricted myself to things I would really, actually wear. (Just because it says Lanvin on the label doesn’t make it so.) Came home with the original Escada shell and a Max Mara black cashmere sweater, NWT, for fifty bucks. I passed on the Ralph Lauren black label evening skirt, 100 percent silk, for $65. I haven’t worn an evening skirt in seven years. Even at that price, I wouldn’t get my money’s worth.

I mourn those heels, though. One size up and they? Would be mine.

We need a little shopping talk on this dreary Monday, don’t we? It’s dreary here, anyway. Eight more days to you-know-what, and it’s like the last miles of a very long race — they’re just longer than all the ones that came before. Sarah Palin was in Fort Wayne Saturday, and the crowd got bitchy when they had to wait hours to clear security. (Please don’t read that story far enough down to see the TSA referred to as the “Traffic Safety Administration.” Don’t you know editors cost money? And everyone makes misteaks.) And the DetNews parachutes in to Angola, Ind., and calls it a “tiny college town,” which made both Alan and me say huh over breakfast; while technically true, a more accurate description of Angola would be “farm hamlet with a significant population of homesick Malaysian engineering students.” Anyway, it’s either the epicenter of an era of epochal change for the Hoosier state, or the closest town to the Michigan border that one could set a foot in and earn the dateline.

In other local races at this hour, I have the opportunity to vote on medical marijuana and embryonic stem-cell research, both of which I intend to approve. Medical marijuana may sneak through; lots of people are voting yes just because it sounds goofy, and by the time-honored polling technique of “asking people I know,” I predict a landslide. Besides, with the state circling the drain as it is, can anyone mount a credible argument for not staying stoned around the clock? Stem cells are a little harder-fought, and the opposition is targeting and fine-tuning their advertising: For farty old Republicans, it’ll cost taxpayer money. For religious conservatives, it’s about dead babies, and adding Welcome to the Island of Doctor Moreau to the signs at the state border. And for African Americans, it’s Tuskegee all over again.

I’m voting yes. I’m considering, for this very special election year and this year only, voting a straight bug-the-GOP ticket. That’ll mean giving my vote to lots of people who, quite frankly, don’t deserve it, but at this point my greater aim is to punish the opposition on every possible front. Congratulations, John McCain — it took a moderate Republican to do what even Newt Gingrich couldn’t.

So in that spirit, on to the bloggage:

Do you use FedEx? Might consider an alternative.

New York magazine assembles a Top 10 list of daffy old coots, complete with YouTube clips, here. The Cloris Leachman clip alone is worth the price of admission.

Meanwhile, here in Detroit, the former mayor checks into the Graybar Hotel tomorrow, but not after one last f-you to the city he claims to love — a dine-and-dash incident at a local club. He signed his name to the $126.16 bill, called “charge it to the city” over his shoulder, and walked out. We may not be a swing state this year, but does that ever happen in squeaky-clean Indiana? I don’t think so.

Finally, wassup? Wassup: