It’s coming from the south. Beware! Beware!

Because I stupidly scheduled an orthodontist appointment for Kate on the same day her school is having something called NEAP testing — and you know how cool and laid-back educators are about standardized testing, especially in a soft real-estate market — I have to spend the morning on the phone, throwing myself at the mercy of secretaries who all run their lives more competently than I do.

(UPDATE: I’m wrong. It’s NAEP testing.)

Also, we’re expecting five to eight inches of snow today. Also, I have a deadline that’s now in the rear-view mirror. Also, I need to go to the library, and also, I need to do a rewrite/polish on a radio essay. Also, I’m getting my hair cut, although maybe not, depending on the orthodontist situation.

Fortunately, Neely Tucker showed up for work today. Read this, chuckle, and recall the good parts all day. My favorite:

Is there one among us who, at least once in this life, does not want to throw everything out the door and sprint to the Disco Ball of the Brain, where there are big white piles of dopamine, where a hot and sweaty Barry White is always on stage, thumping out “You’re My First! My Last! My Everything!” And there’s that new girl in class! Scantily clad! She’s on the floor, beckoning you! Yes, Bubba, you! Out you go, and she’s saying your name and her hand slips to the small of your back, and this is going to last FOREVER AND EVER!

Here it goes, a long time ago, Abelard and Heloise, two of history’s most famous lovers:

Abelard to Heloise: “So intense were the fires of lust which bound me to you that I set those wretched, obscene pleasures, which we blush even to name, above God as above myself.”

She to he: “Even during the celebration of the Mass, when our prayers should be purest, lewd visions of the pleasures we shared take . . . a hold on my unhappy soul.”

HONEY! BABY! SWEETIE! CALL ME!

Did we mention Abelard was castrated as a result of their affair? And Heloise went off to a convent for the rest of her life? That they named their child “Astrolabe”? What people! What passion! What the hell were they thinking?

Actually they weren’t, and neither are you, not really, when you fall passionately in love.

Word, bro. Later.

This is a company town, maybe the biggest one in the country (and the sickest), and everything is about cars. And so, at the Motown Winter Blast, people actually stood in line for the chance to sit in a Corvette made of ice.

(Overheard: “Don’t put your tongue on the windshield.”)

I have a busy day today, capped by daylong snow, which would normally be delightful if I didn’t have to drive to Royal Oak. Tomorrow will be busy too, with even more snow — five to nine inches, bless my soul — and so, while I may not make it back, if I do I’ll have lots of stories to tell, no doubt.

In the meantime, console yourself with bloggage:

Yes! Yes! Yes! Someone finally states the obvious: Wind-chill is a crock. I can be more tiresome on this subject than a whole bottle of Ambien, but it’s nice to be right:

As the use of equivalent temperatures spread, people started to notice inconsistencies between real temperatures and their wind chill counterparts. For some reason, a day spent in a minus-40 wind chill was a lot easier to handle than a minus-40-degree day with no wind. Around 2000, two researchers—Randall Osczevski in Canada and Maurice Bluestein in the United States—began looking closely at this problem. Before long, they discovered that the adapted Siple-Passel equations grossly overestimated rates of heat loss.

Just since I’ve been paying attention, wind-chill figures have gone from something that’s only reported when it seems to apply, i.e., when the wind is blowing, to (new this year, in my experience) reported as the “effective” temperature. That is, I open my newspaper and read, “Today it is, effectively, 6 below zero.” Oh, I don’t think so. I know six below. Six below is a friend of mine. And you, 12 degrees with an occasional 15-mile-per-hour gust, are not six below. Besides, isn’t the wind chill what it “feels like” on exposed flesh? So put on some gloves, dummy.

Wind chill now has an evil hot-weather cousin — the heat index. Not crazy about it, either, because if nothing else, the reverse of “put on some gloves” doesn’t always work.

So that ought to set you up for some fun bitching today. If not, enjoy this, a montage of Horatio Caine and the Sunglasses of Justice:

T-minus 36 minutes until the arrival of painters. Time to reach deep into the blogger’s bag of tricks and pull out this two-bagger until the day settles into a more predictable rhythm — that is, YouTube. (And a YouTube clip I stole from The Poor Man, for a theft/YouTube double. And yes, yes, mixed metaphor. Kiss my butt.)

I don’t know what I like best about this: The cigarette, the way the giant head enters stage left, or the recollection of the cultural moment in the ’70s when Telly Savalas was considered a hottie.

Back later. Enjoy. And hey — who loves ya, baby?

The astronaut story is Page One all over the planet, as you had to figure it would be. The diaper detail clinched it, as did, well, the fact she’s an astronaut. Decades of careful indoctrination have led us to believe that if you are trained to drive a space shuttle, you have the presence of mind not to delaminate over a kinda-sorta love affair.

Ah, well. We may make it to Mars in my lifetime, but we will never come close to discovering the fathomless mysteries of the human heart. Talk about a final frontier.

The astronaut is out on bail at the moment. I hope she’s on suicide watch as well.

Speaking of fathomless mysteries, the book I finished this week, “The Return of the Player,” is hilarious, every bit as funny as “The Player,” but everyone who’s read Michael Tolkin knows to expect that. Near the end the protagonist, Griffin Mill, has a soul-searching conversation with Bill Clinton on Martha’s Vineyard, and the former president tells him:

Like it nor not, there are things learned in bed, and only in bed, that can move a man or woman to something great within themselves. Promiscuity can focus the senses, the faculties of mind and insight. Very few of the people who make a dent on history can get enough of such wisdom from only one bed. And that’s what the American people understand, and in a moment of panic and weakness I didn’t trust them. America has one heart. The American people said all of that to me with every poll that showed them enraged with my enemies. I let them down by not respecting their intelligence. Give them as much of the truth as the world can stand without needing more, get that out of the way, and you deflate your enemies because they’ll be screaming at the American people for not being shocked. And who really wants to be screamed at? I may be depraved, but I, William Jefferson Clinton, am the pure product of America, and the truth is, so is everyone else.

A liberal fantasia, sure, but as a statement of principles, I’ll take it over Ted Haggard’s I am 300 percent heterosexual claims anytime.

The great unreported story of the ex-gay movement: The wives. (At least the ones who aren’t lesbians themselves.)

OK, then. Back to normal, today. The temperature is expected to soar into the teens, school is back in session and I have precisely one day to enjoy the peace and quiet, because tomorrow we’re having some painters come in and rip our lives to shreds. For this, the last difficult painting job in the house, we’re splurging on a pro. It’s the foyer/upstairs hallway, which involves one of those tricky all-the-way-to-the-ceiling-of-the-staircase deals. The household control freak is allowing it, but I’m sure he’ll go around and get all those switchplate screws lined up to 12 o’clock afterward, because otherwise he couldn’t sleep at night. And he’s already done a minor reno ahead of them, removing the ’50s-style doorbell chimes from their alcove, so as to make an “art nook” instead.

“Are you sure you’re heterosexual?” I asked.

He didn’t reply, “300 percent!,” for which I am very grateful. He just kept spackling.

When all this is over, we will have finally driven out the color oatmeal, once the dominant shade of our little GP castle. I can tolerate it on the walls, but when people use it on ceilings I put my foot down. An oatmeal ceiling feels like a Michigan winter sky. Death to oatmeal.

Bloggage today? Not much. I’m a tapped-out soul today, but I will second Lance’s recommendation of Newcritics as a fine new culture blog worth a check-out by all.

Oh, OK, there’s this: I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC … in Japanese! And the best Mac/PC ad yet: Cancel or allow. Requires QuickTime, natch.

A question for the rest of you suffering through this cold snap: Do you wear long underwear? I do. I’ll show it to anyone who asks, too. My January/February life got measurably better when I came to terms with winter and started wearing long underwear.

I used to own a red wool/flannel union suit from L.L. Bean (in fact, it could be this one), until I washed it wrong and it lost its shape. I liked it because you could throw it on with a pair of jeans on a Saturday and, theoretically at least, go out and run errands. If you got too hot, you could unbutton a few buttons at the top, for that Northern Exposure Vixen look. Yes, it was utterly unfashionable and fairly ridiculous, but man oh man, it did the job. I bought it after a winter trip to the Upper Peninsula, where everyone has one or two.

Of course, today we have miracle fabrics, and I have graduated to Patagonia Capilene separates, medium-weight. I wear them — bottoms mostly — anytime the temperature dips into the teens. Dog-walking is misery without them; going out in jeans alone exposes half your body to the elements with only a thin layer of denim between them. We top-load our winter dressing because, as we’re reminded by helpful newspaper tip boxes every year, you lose heat through your head. OK, so wear a hat. But don’t forget your butt, either.

I bought Kate a pair for last Christmas. To date, she has worn them only on her head, for laughs. She’d rather die that put such a thing on her body.

I should probably have waited another 20 years. That’s how long it took me to come around.

One more tip: Lands End, L.L. Bean and lots of other mail-order houses offer flannel- and fleece-lined jeans and chinos this time of year. They are…heavenly.

This concludes today’s edition of Too Much Information.

Day two of the no-school freeze-out. Hey, that’s OK — I have nothing important to do, just report a story and get into my essay-writing head for something that’s long overdue. And someone’s calling for a get-acquainted professional chat, so I have to sound wise and with-it and all the rest. That should be easy to do with squealing cabin-feverish children stampeding through the house.

Something else I’d really like to do this week, while conditions are right: Go for a walk on the lake. Nothing crazy or stupid, just a little shoreline amble to see the majesty of winter whipping through the Great Lakes. With subzero temperatures at night and nothing above the mid-20s forecast for the rest of the week, conditions should be ideal. If I fall through a soft spot and die, please don’t read this at my funeral.

Bloggage:

Of course it’s cold, but be strong: You could live in Washington D.C. Everything’s relative — nothing like a few subzero days to make 20 degrees feel positively Floridian — but man, getta loada this:

The National Weather Service said today could be the coldest day in Washington since Jan. 10, 2004, when the mercury dipped to 8, which was the chilliest reading in the past decade. Such conditions can cause frostbite and hypothermia, forecasters said.

Well, yes, I guess that’s true. But wearing clothing (see above) can be really effective against such threats. Read the story, anyway; the word “cold” or “coldest” appears 14 times, mostly in quotes where people express the idea that it is, indeed, cold outside. This is why reporters hate to write weather stories.

Zero-gravity catfight! What happens when two astronauts vie for the romantic attention of a third? Me-ow!

A screen capture of my current desktop widgets. Note the weather radar and the current temperature, bottom left. That cotton ball over western Michigan has been there for days (lake-effect snow, for you non-Midwesterners.) Don’t you wish you lived here?

And so it begins: After a solid week of nursing Kate’s flu, including a full-blown relapse beginning Friday evening that was pretty much a rerun of the first three days, I woke up today to:

1) No school. Temps at minus-2 now, with wind chills fierce enough to frighten even Michigan school superintendents.

2) A tiny, unscratchable tickle in the back of my own throat. It’s too early to say what it is, but it’s safe to say it’s nothing good.

Will I allow this to keep me down? Maybe. We’ll see.

Well, by kickoff time I had allowed my usual who-gives-a-fig attitude toward the Super Bowl to veer into full-blown Colts-hatin’ — and I only watched 45 minutes of the pre-game, but that was enough to tire of the “Peyton Manning: god-king or world-conquering titan?” hagiography. (Football coverage: Where if too much is too much, even more is even better.) Of course it was not to be, but the first quarter was enough to take a little wind out of the sails, so to speak. By then I had to get dinner on the table and was restored to agnosticism. Great halftime show. Love that Prince. Then I went to work, and the rest of the game passed unseen by me. Vince IM’d to say he thought the suicidal robot was in bad taste, considering the current state of the auto industry. Otherwise, that was the extent of my personal post-game.

There’s was this, though: During the pre-game CBS showed a split-screen image of Tony Dungy and Lovie Smith, to underline that one of them would be the first African-American head coach to win a Super Bowl championship. And then the announcer used a word. I always think of it as the flip side of “articulate,” which Joe Biden got caught applying to Barack Obama last week. The word?

“Dignified.” Really. “One of these two dignified men…” Good lord. Doesn’t anyone have an ear for language anymore?

For the record, I wrote the “articulate”-as-insult column at least a decade ago; apparently Joe Biden didn’t read it. But “dignified” is right up there, too. Do white head coaches get called dignified? No. They’re sober, serious, composed, leaders. Dignified is what we call black people who have already proven they’re articulate. Yuck.

On to the bloggage:

I’m a Mac, and I’m a PC… with British accents.

Dan Savage’s whopping fine screed about Mary Cheney. Profanity alert, probably needless profanity, but it needed to be said. I think we pay attention to the culture war because it’s a cartoony, easily understood alternative to the real one. Which grows ever more unbearable.

Sorry for no regular update today. We had one of those last-minute changes of plan this morning, and somehow I ended up shuttling Kate on a school field trip to the Detroit Science Center and staying most of the day. (And giving up a pair of FREE Red Wings tickets for tonight. In some area households, making such a sacrifice for a sick kid is something you remind them of for 10 years at least.)

Low point: Listening to her hack up a lung most of the way there and back, mitigated by the fact most other kids in the group were doing the same thing.

High point: I saw the bodies exhibit. Which I’d like to tell you about, but not now. My feet are tired, and I keep thinking about them being sawed off and donated to science. Check back later.

Boy, I am out of it. I never realized the Vietnam vet spitting story had been pretty much debunked. Although it doesn’t surprise me, as the whole narrative was a little too tidy for real life: Recently discharged Vietnam vet, in uniform, comes home not to a festive parade, but to a cold, sterile airport. While walking through the airport, not a hero, but just another shlub between planes, a contemptuous fellow traveler, usually a woman, spits on him. Baby-killer! Etc.

I don’t just say this because I’m not a spitter, myself. I know spitting on another person is a time-honored insult, but it never occurred to me to do it, ever. (I like the gypsy custom of spitting on a person’s shadow, though; that’s kind of chilling.) To spit well takes practice; otherwise you’re left with drool all over your chin. Women don’t do that spit-a-hocker thing men do. I’d think even Hanoi Jane Fonda would rather fling a verbal insult than saliva, and face it: Most people just wouldn’t do that.

As for male spitters, there isn’t a riper opportunity for a butt-whippin’ than a filthy civilian hippie expectorating on a uniformed soldier. Most people are smarter than to invite a butt-whippin’.

If you’re an urban-myth spotter, though, you look for the consistencies, or inconsistencies, that make a story too good to be true. Jack Shafer in Slate explains:

While Lembcke doesn’t prove that nobody ever expectorated on a serviceman–you can’t prove a negative, after all–he reduces the claim to an urban myth. In most urban myths, the details morph slightly from telling to telling, but at least one element survives unchanged. In the tale of the spitting protester, the signature element is the location: The protester almost always ambushes the serviceman at the airport–not in a park, or at a bar, or on Main Street.

(And yes, boys and girls, I’m aware Bob Greene swallowed this gob whole and got another tiresome book out of it.)

Anyway, it hardly matters now. The spitting story is now part of the landscape, contrary to the best efforts of Jack Shafer and Jerry Lembcke. And now we have a whole new generation of wounded vets coming home (or not coming home), and the spitting story is always the subtext of the new welcome-home movement: Never again! Support the troops! No problem. I support the troops. But when you press people on what that means, actually, you rarely get a straight answer other than: Don’t spit on them. Agreed. No spitting.

I know I have some military readers, so let me ask this question, something I’ve always wondered about: Those care packages that various groups are always fund-raising for, or collecting for, or sending out — are they worth it? I ask because they so often seem compiled for a troop of hardscrabble mercenaries, not soldiers in the most technologically advanced, well-trained and generously funded fighting force in world history. If I were putting together a soldier care package, I’d try to put myself in a soldier’s shoes and imagine what I’d miss most about home. I’d include… something like… DVDs and video games; meaty letters including photos of lovers/spouses/children; digital cameras; a pint of excellent bourbon in unlabeled, non-breakable flasks; Tabasco sauce for MREs; maybe some discreetly packaged porno. But the ones that I see people sending include things like baby wipes, toothpaste and Kool-Aid. I always think, can’t they get adequately supplied with toothpaste and baby wipes any other way? What kind of Army can’t get its troops adequate wiping supplies?

Probably the same one that can’t get decent body armor. Never mind.

One of my old neighbors, a Marine and Vietnam vet, said a bottle of Tabasco was as highly prized as a bottle of scotch whiskey. He carried his at all times, like his rifle: This is my hot sauce. There are many like it but this one is mine, and better stay mine, if my comrades know what’s good for them.

Day three at home with my poor sick bunny. I’m racing to get a story done so that if I’m felled next, my calendar will be clear. Downside of freelancing: No paid sick days.

One bit of bloggage: Have you driven a Ford lately? No? Well, you can still buy Bill Ford’s house. One error Autoblog makes: You can’t have a “view of Lake Huron” from Ann Arbor. You can have a view of the Huron River, however.

Remember the Michigan county treasurer who lost $200,000 in the Nigerian e-mail fraud? The story gets worse.

Nursing sick children is part of the job description for parenthood, and mercifully, Kate is pretty healthy. Most of the time. Not now. She was down yesterday with a 100-degree fever, chesty cough, sore throat and general ickiness; I knew she was really sick because she didn’t move off the couch all day, mainlining “Suite Life of Zach and Cody” episodes for hours. My rule is: Don’t call the doctor until a change. This morning her fever was up to 103, a personal best for this kid. Called the doc. We’ll be going in later this morning.

I’m taking action on the diagnosis. Her voice sounds like it hurts to even whisper, so I was thinking strep throat, but the cough is wrong for that. Bronchitis, 5-2. Strep, 7-1.

Of course, thinking of odds brings us to yesterday’s sad news, about Barbaro. Even with all that’s been written about the colt, there’s still a certain bafflement in some people — how can a horse die of a broken leg? Jane Smiley explains it elegantly in today’s WashPost:

A horse’s hoof is wondrous structure — the outside horn is lined with delicate membranes and blood vessels that feed and support the bones of the foot. The bones of the foot are analogous to a person’s fingertips, since a horse’s knee is analogous to a person’s wrist. The racehorse carries a thousand pounds at 35 to 40 miles per hour using a few slender bones supported by an apparatus of ligaments and tendons that have no analogues in human anatomy. Every part of the system depends on every other part. What happened to Barbaro was that the engineering couldn’t take it. When it was right, as in the Kentucky Derby, it was perfectly right, and when it became wrong, it became irredeemably wrong.

I knew Barbaro was doomed last weekend when I heard that 80 percent of one of his hooves had to be removed due to laminitis. That’s practically an amputation. The part that was removed is the part that grows back, but to do so would take more than a year, and this after 8 months in slings and casts and padded stalls. Even banking on the return a horse like this can bring at stud — and thoroughbreds breed live, no artificial insemination for them, so he’d have to be sound enough to cover the mare — it would be cruel to put him through that. He’s happier in horse heaven, where only people wear leather.

They had the Miss America pageant last night? In JANUARY? In VEGAS? For the SECOND year? (Man, I’m out of it.) Still, though, you have to laugh — what feminism couldn’t kill, reality TV slaughtered without a peep. The new action is in Miss USA, with its rehab-attending top Miss and MySpace-disgraced wannabe Miss. Now there’s a pageant for today’s world, ain’a? And to think, this used to be considered the contest for girls who were too dumb to say they advocated world peace. Huh.

So, the San Francisco Chronicle started this new podcast — “Correct Me if I’m Wrong,” reader voice mails shared with the world. The first one was genius. Not only do we have a reader who uses terms like “prolix” and “tautology,” he goes off on a rant that’s one for the ages (“Aren’t you there to ensure that the English language is not pissed on by your sub-editors?”), and the readers responded with remixes, mash-ups and ringtones made from it. I wish I’d saved some of my better reader VMs, but none of them are nearly as good as this one; I got grouchy bitching, mostly, including one from a man who lectured me for five minutes about why I wasn’t using my husband’s name. (Time stamp: 3:30 a.m., a nice way to ensure the writer won’t croon “chuck you, Farley” back atcha.) There was a guy who used to call the Columbus Dispatch city desk at night, utterly stone crazy, and rant about the Irish Republican Army (he was a fan) and dropping bombs down the Queen’s chimney (which he advocated). One night he called as we were leaving for dinner, so as an experiment, we laid the receiver down on the desk and went ahead and took our break. When we came back an hour later, he was still talking.

Pilotless aircraft! Pilotless aircraft! Don’t you check these things?!

Gary Kamiya weighs in on those pesky readers and all their opinions, here.

Off to the doc. Temp’s down to 99 and she’s feeling better, but we’re going anyway.

A few people in the comments the other day were discussing how they learned to skate, on farm ponds, without supervision, with a casually tended fire for warmth. Ah, memories. Monday I took Kate and another friend to the park to skate again. This was the third consecutive day, and watching them, I was left with the feeling that most of what adults do for kids in this area is unnecessary. On Saturday, in her lesson at the indoor rink, they practiced jumping — not figure-skating jumps, but just little hops. The hops were tentative and lots of kids fell. Yesterday, at the outdoor ice at the park, one kid dragged a large stick out onto the ice and they all made a game of lining up to jump it. With every pass, their jumps got higher and more confident.

Then an adult came out and dragged the stick away. Because, you know, it’s unsafe to have obstructions on the ice. But it did its work. By the time we went home, Kate and three other kids had made a game of skating fast to fire snowballs at one another. She was keeping up with the hockey players. Not with their agility and fast changes of direction, but that’ll come next week, I expect.

I should have skipped the damn lessons and saved myself $100.

So. I need to get out of the house more, so yesterday I got out of the house. Clear to lovely Dearborn I went, for an interview. You know you’re in Dearborn when the signs switch to Arabic. Cooling my heels in the reception area of my subject’s office, a woman click-clacked through the lobby in stilettos. I looked up; she was dressed in tunic, pants and a hijab. That’s a hard look to rock, but rock it she did — I think the stilettos were key. That, and the confidence. Wear your clothes, don’t let them wear you. She had that part figured out, Islamic constraints or not.

On the way home, the on-ramp to I-94 was closed, so I opted to stay on U.S. 12, Michigan Avenue, and just see what I could see, in this case, urban decay infused with that unstoppable Motown pulse. (This makes no sense, but if you came here, you’d understand.) Soon the bilingual signs gave way from Arabic to Spanish, my stomach started to growl, and I knew what was coming next — carne asada tacos in Mexicantown with lots of cilantro and onions. I hate to say it, for fear of bringing on another rage explosion from my nastier commenters, but if recent immigration from south of the border did nothing but vastly improve the menus in Mexican restaurants, I’d call it an even trade. My favorite taqueria doesn’t take plastic, and I was down to my last $3, so I turned on to Vernor to look for a bank. Block after block — no banks. I decided to settle for a Quik-E-Mart with a high-fee ATM — none of those, either. Lots of Payday Loans and check-cashing joints, though. And people. This part of the city may be poor, but it is populated. Finally found a bank branch with a non-usurious ATM, back down to Taqueria Lupita and the lunch special.

Lupita’s sits in a strip with several other restaurants, one of which was named a “best of” in a magazine roundup I helped write last summer. We ate at the best-of place, and to say it was disappointing in comparison was an understatement. It was full of gringos, however, whereas at Lupita’s at least half the customers are speaking Spanish. When in doubt, choose the latter.

So, bloggage:

Christopher Hitchens is something of a self-parody these days, and while this piece in Slate doesn’t mention Islamofascism or Bill Clinton or any of his other well-worn topics, it’s b.s. just the same: In the matter of Michael Devlin and his captive boys, blame the neighbors. After noting Devlin’s adherence to the old psycho cliché (the quiet psycho who kept to himself), he adds:

Of course, as the story necessarily went on to say, the good people of this section of Kirkwood, Mo., are now slightly kicking themselves for failing to spot their neighbor’s uncanny ability to produce full-grown male children without having a woman on hand.

Of course, if Devlin had moved into Hitchens’ neighborhood and come home with a pubescent boy, things would have been different:

I live in an upscale building that abuts a not-quite-so-upscale neighborhood, and when I heard blood-chilling female screams one night, I know I had the (Kitty Genovese) story in mind as I caught up a kitchen knife and ran downstairs. I was almost abashed by the number of my fellow residents outside on the street before me. (The assailant ran off, and we were able to comfort the girl until the cops came—and more than one person alluded to the Genovese case.) But to find that you have been passively watching a crime, or crimes, in slow motion, must make you feel stupid as well as cowardly. This might help explain the slightly plaintive and defensive tone adopted by some of the local Kirkwoodians, such as the lady I cited above who had moved there just to avoid this kind of unpleasantness. “A lot of us are down on our luck and living paycheck to paycheck,” observed Harry C. Reichard IV, who occupied the apartment above Devlin’s. “When you’re just trying to survive, you don’t pay a lot of attention to people around you.” This justifiable emphasis on one’s own priorities extends apparently even to the avoidance of idle gossip—as in, “I see the guy downstairs has just had another teenager.”

Hmm. Well. Good for Hitchens, running to the damsel’s aid with a kitchen knife. Note that no one in Devlin’s neighborhood heard any boys screaming, however. They just noticed that he had one, and then he had another one. I guess Hitchens doesn’t get into the lousy neighborhood next door very often, because if he did, he’d know that neighbors with ever-changing household demographics are as common as rain.

I’ve spent much of my adult life not just abutting “not-quite-so-upscale” neighborhoods, but living in them. Once I stupidly wondered aloud why, when I got a wrong-number call, the person on the other end so often opened with “Who’s this?” I say “stupidly” because I was sitting with someone who worked in the juvenile-justice system, and he rolled his eyes. “Don’t you know anything?” he said, explaining that his clients overwhelmingly lived in households where someone was always moving out or in, where every couch was someone’s bed, where the person who answered the phone might be mom, uncle, uncle’s friend Ed, mom’s boyfriend Skeeter, etc. “Who’s this” was a necessary salutation when you heard an unfamiliar voice on the other end.

In Fort Wayne we had a house around the corner from us, a three-bedroom of maybe 1,500 square feet, with 16 people living in it. They were very discreet, probably because someone was fraudulently using Section 8 housing vouchers, and you never would have known there were so many people under one roof, but if you counted noses, there were 16 noses.

And Hitchens disapproves of Devlin’s neighbors, who, when they saw another boy around, failed to investigate? Some people really do live on the right side of the tracks.