Remember how I said this was the Winter That Wasn’t? Well, it’s winter now. Here’s a picture of our boat slip. In five more months, there’ll be a boat there.

I took Kate and a friend to the park today, because finally there was ice to skate on, and skate they did. Every time she puts her new skates on, she gets better at it; it’s a pleasure to watch, at least until the wind off the lake strips off all my mascara and I have to step inside the rec center to warm up a bit. There were two teenage girls in there with their mother, complaining that there was snow on the ice and why wasn’t anyone shoveling it off?

“It’s just a dusting, really,” I said, gesturing to the several skaters already out there, gliding around unimpeded. They glared at me. OK, don’t mind me. The fancy-shmancy private-school indoor rink a couple miles away opens to the public every Sunday for two hours; I’m sure they’d be more comfortable there anyway. I went back to watching Kate and her friend write their names in the ice and felt grateful they won’t be teenagers for a few more years.

I guess when they are, I’ll be back to watching them the way I did when they were toddlers, but in this nice in-between period I was free to take a little stroll along the lake, which was just like “Stranger Than Paradise,” only with maybe a little more blue and gray in the shot. I couldn’t really take the time to frame it because the wind was pretty strong and my eyes kept tearing.

I admit to getting tired of it by March, but all things considered, I sorta like winter.

And now it’s Monday, yet another of the days that make me suspect the Grosse Pointe Public Schools hate working parents — it’s an in-service day for teachers, so no school. Last week was the MLK holiday. Next month will be a one-week winter break, followed six weeks later by spring break. It’s hard to imagine that two weeks ago I daydreamed of going back to work in an actual office, with adults and everything. Not until it’s legal to kennel 10-year-olds. (You can kennel infants and toddlers, but once they grow up a little, the deal’s off.)

So, bloggage:

A young man was released from prison here last week. I wasn’t here for the full length of this story, but I gather it went like this: Nathaniel Abraham, at 11, was the youngest person in Michigan convicted of homicide, back in 1997. He was released from prison last week, the day before his 21st birthday. For his final court date, he chose an understated, I’m-ready-to-go-straight costume — an ivory suit with pink pinstriping, accented with pink shirt and pink alligator shoes, a matching fedora, the whole ensemble topped with a rabbit-fur coat.

Of course, in Detroit, a city where racism is the bass note of every song we hear, from hip-hop right down to the Muzak in grocery stores, this image was greeted with …not quite hysteria, but the sort of calm, reasoned discussion you see on lunatic-politics discussion boards. From across the metro area, a million voices rose as one and shouted: Pimp.

But at least it gave the columnists something to gnash over. This one includes a photo. This one doesn’t.

Eric Zorn had one of his very entertaining, supremely time-wasting Lank of Linkin’ roundups today, including this entry: Before you click on The Beast’s annual list of 50 Most Loathsome People in America, 2006 (raw language warning), see if you can guess who’s number one from these excerpts: “… nakedly self-serving … has so successfully snowed America that he could go around kicking puppies all day and he’d be applauded for his authenticity. In reality (he) is as phony as slimeballs come.”

I guessed Donald Trump. It wasn’t him (although he was on the list, at No. 21). I must be losing my touch.

And now Monday begins in earnest. I guess we’ll go skating again.

One of those names from the past that only comes up every decade or so came up last night. Whatever happened to, etc.? We recalled that this person had been involved in an interoffice romance, which led to a particularly tawdry interoffice breakup, the sort of incident that makes managers long to be in the rank and file again.

(There’s one of these in every management career — when you have to tell people it’s not their work that’s the problem, it’s their b.o. Or their whack-ass meltdown over a love affair gone wrong. Whatever.)

Alan said, “She’s the reason companies have no-fraternization policies.” Yep. I never worked for one of those companies myself; if I had I’d be married to someone else today, if I were married at all, and Kate wouldn’t exist. Newsrooms, well-known as turkey pens of coltish intellects, weird hours, incompetent management, triple homicides on deadline and other spicy ingredients, are notorious for breeding office love affairs. I think of the journalists I know, and most are/were married to people they met at work, some serially, which is to say first this person from work, then that person from work. This can get complicated, oh yes it can. Office divorces and/or affairs have sold more quitting-time beers than Budweiser.

I met and married my husband through work, but even after the I-dos, we played it cool. Alan hated talking about domestic matters out in the open. He didn’t even want me to ask what he wanted for dinner. All around us were couples who held hands on the way to the Coke machine, or wives who marched over to collect hubby’s paycheck the minute it was distributed on payday. I’m sure he considered it a huge success when we threw a party and one of his own staff members was amazed to discover I lived in the same house, that we were in fact married and had been for about five years.

(Actually, I considered it a success, too, since it seemed to indicate I was such a boring person no one even bothered to gossip about me anymore.)

I hesitate to bring up this topic, not because everyone has a story, but because everyone’s story is better than mine. Maybe Alex will tell us about the security camera that in one of his former workplaces captured an episode of oral love between a man and a woman who thoughtfully removed her dentures for the occasion. Maybe Kirk will tell us about the couple who was caught not only having an extramarital interoffice affair, but writing a pornographic novel with bondage themes in what they thought was a secret corner of the newsroom computer system. (I pinned down one of the bosses who read this treasure and said I’d be willing to do just about anything to see a sample chapter. He said, “It wouldn’t be a fair trade. It wasn’t nearly as good as it could have been.”) And then there was the young reporter who slept with an older colleague on his living-room couch after an impromptu party when his wife was away, gave him crabs, caused a crisis in his marriage (to say the least) and then later, when the parasites had been routed and the wounds had finally started to scab, showed up at another party where the wife was in attendance, along with her children. “Mommy,” said the little boy. “I saw that lady lying down with daddy on our couch once.” (That story may be somewhat apocryphal, but it still cracks me up.) Or the obsessed Glenn Close wannabe who demanded her lover, as the price of dumping her, insert a secret message to her in his newspaper column. She said this would be their secret. It remained secret for approximately as long as it took to survive editing and get onto the press. As the papers arrived in the newsroom, she showed it around, pointing out how the first letter in every paragraph spelled out, “I love you Joanie.”

None of those stories are mine, in the sense that they didn’t happen at my workplace, but were shared over beers later. It’s amazing to me that I heard them all and still sought out and married a colleague. It’s not like we weren’t warned.

So, bloggage:

You know how you get those e-mails from Nigerian scam artists asking for your help in removing $6 million from the national treasury, offering a 30 percent reward and asking only that you put up some of your own cash as security? You know how you ask yourselves, “Who could ever be so stupid as to fall for this?” We have an answer: The treasurer of Alcona County, Michigan.

Today’s forecast calls for a chance of snow in Michigan. Unless, of course, it gets rerouted to southern California again. Jeez, I remember being in LA once when it rained, and it had the same effect on traffic as eight inches of snow does here. I can’t imagine what actual snow does to the place. Besides freeze the oranges.

Whenever I hear a nitwit like Dinesh D’Souza pushing his latest book, I think to myself, “Maintain your sense of humor.” However, it’s difficult. Fortunately, we have Stephen Colbert to shore us up in the difficult moments.

One of the best seminar speakers of my fellowship year was Bill Miller, a UM law school professor. I mentioned him before, and we don’t need to get into it all over again, but he said something funny about the nervousness of today’s parents with their children’s physical safety that amused me:

“You know those stories about knights in the Middle Ages, how they wore so much armor that they had to be hoisted onto their horses? That’s a 5-year-old kid in Ann Arbor learning to ride a bike.”

I thought of this Saturday, when I watched Kate at her latest improvement activity — ice-skating lessons. She’s good on skates but she needs to learn some technique, like how to stop without running into the boards, crossovers and so forth. She takes them in a vast group divided by ability, and the age range starts at 3. In this hockey-mad town, that means the group is lopsided at the low end, with pint-size tots in tiny skates who can probably still remember learning to walk, now learning to skate. It’s pretty funny. They give them these little frame things like walkers, and they spend 50 minutes falling down and crashing into one another. They make Kate, with her relative competence, look like Nancy Kerrigan.

The flyer said “bike helmets recommended for the tots,” and about half wear them, the other half already in their very own wee-small hockey helmets. I understand this, even as I recall the words of the very first skate instructor Kate had, at McMillen arena back in the Fort: “Learn to skate correctly and you don’t need a helmet.” Children that young are lightweight and top-heavy; all you have to do is watch them fall a few times to see they do so like cartoon characters — the feet go way up, the head tips back precipitously, and it’s even money which hits the ice first, the noggin or the butt.

But it’s the extra padding I find amusing. Several of the kids wear kneepads, which seems silly on ice. (First of all, how often do you fall knees-first? And if you do, you fall and slide; it’s not a sidewalk.) One kid seemed to be skating with a drinking straw in his mouth, and I thought, well that’s pretty foolish, and then I looked closer and realized he was wearing a football-style mouthguard, and the drinking straw was actually the loop that attaches to the helmet’s face mask. Only it wasn’t attached to anything, because he was wearing a bike helmet. What are the chances a kid’s going to go face-first onto the ice in a long-billed bike helmet and land on his teeth?

On the other hand, I remember all those pictures of Bobby Orr, missing several of his lateral incisors. I can see where moms get nervous.

Kate got skates for Christmas, which she asked for in hopes that it would be a nice cold winter and she could skate at our local park, which has two low-tech rinks, which is to say, they rely on Mom Nature for ice. She’s normally pretty reliable in a Michigan winter, but not this one. Or the last one. The weather ninnies are barking about “Arctic cold” expected later this week, so I checked the long-term forecast. To me, Arctic cold is defined as single-digit highs, subzero lows. Today’s revised definition, at least to judge from the forecast: Highs in the 20s, lows in the teens. Please.

Meanwhile, once again, it rained all night last night. At least now the rinks will freeze, though.

So what did Barbara Boxer really say to Condoleezza Rice that made Rush Limbaugh call her a “rich white chick with a huge, big mouth, trying to lynch … an African-American woman right before Martin Luther King Day”? You know, it must have been terrible for America’s foremost deaf drug addict to come to the defense of “an African-American woman” (although maybe he was just high). I looked it up in the communist New York Times. Winston Smith must have been hard at work that night, because this is all I found:

“Now, the issue is who pays the price, who pays the price? I’m not going to pay a personal price. My kids are too old, and my grandchild is too young. You’re not going to pay a particular price, as I understand it, within immediate family. So who pays the price? The American military and their families, and I just want to bring us back to that fact.”

While I’m sure Rush, like lots of wankers, loves a good cat fight (rOWRrrrr…), this is ridiculous.

Finally, some fun bloggage for a slow Monday — the trailer for “Black Snake Moan.” Suggested discussion topic: Is Samuel Jackson committing career suicide (I mean, two movies with snake in the title, back-to-back?) or having the time of his life? I’m leaning toward the latter.

One of Kate’s friends was over yesterday, and when her father came to pick her up, he committed the cardinal sin of male rudeness: He pulled into the driveway and honked.

I went outside to scold him. He said he didn’t want to leave the comfort of his heated seat. Then he told me about his friend’s 1986 Mercedes, which has two horn settings — standard and, with the flip of a switch, “polite,” for driveway honkers, I suppose. We talked about the neighbor across the street, who had all four of his 2006 Escalade wheels stolen one morning last week, from his driveway and in early daylight. They left it precariously balanced on landscaping bricks, one of which collapsed, giving the thing the look of an elegant, chrome-trimmed dinosaur drowning in the La Brea Tar Pits. Then we discussed whether his friend with the 1986 Mercedes should get the Michigan Heritage license plate for classic vehicles of a certain age. You pay one price and never have to renew again. Then his daughter came out and got in the car to go home.

Detroit: Where all the small talk is about cars.

(After the Escalade wheel theft last week, some of the neighbors gathered on the sidewalk and talked it over. It took approximately 40 seconds for the discussion to shift to whether GM should make locking lugnuts standard on all models above a certain price point. After living in one place where all the small talk was about the weather, and another place where it was all about the Buckeyes, it’s a nice change.)

I told Alan the other day that I want my next car to be an American-made minivan with a pumpin’ sound system and spinning rims. That ought to confound ’em in the carpool lane.

OK, then. Detroit will soon host one of those plastinated-body exhibits (at a rather staggering ticket cost, I notice — $70 if all three of us go). It looks simultaneously fascinating and repellent. I have no objection on religious grounds, but whenever I hear “all the bodies were freely given” and “in China” together in a sentence, I just don’t quite want to swallow it whole. It’s rated PG-13 as well, which makes me wonder why — genitalia? I suppose so. Gruesomeness? Most likely.

Ever been to one? What was it like? How did it make you feeeeeel?

Just switched off a radio interview so boring it could peel paint off the walls. (Really. I was getting paint chips in my hair.) Broadcast interviews are difficult, and I’m not one to throw stones, but making one this bad is a two-person job. There’s a certain sort of talker (and writer) who is never content to say “October” when he can say “the month of October,” or better yet, “the month in autumn that falls between September and November, which is to say, the month of October.” The only way to get these people to the point is to step in when they’re drawing a breath and redirect them a bit, but that’s a tricky business — be too abrupt and you sound rude; even the bored audience starts thinking, “Jeez, let the man finish his sentence,” although the sentence was meandering around the room with no period in sight.

Terry Gross has a well-deserved reputation as a skilled questioner, but I’d love to hear one of her raw tapes sometime; I would expect she has the benefit of some good editing. And even she can’t work miracles. I once heard her confess to being so bored in an interview that she actually fell asleep, and woke up when her lolling head hit the microphone.

I’d like to hear that one.

The person in the interview today was talking about Islam, and was distinctly American. But he had that tic you hear sometimes where a person tries to give a foreign word the native pronunciation. So Koran becomes “K’urahn,” etc. Spare me. Did you ever see the video of the initial interrogation of John Walker Lindh, the Taliban kid? Raised in NoCal, when he was questioned by the CIA he put on this preposterous Arab accent. “My fahther’s name…is Frahnk.” Talk Amur’can, kid.

Notice how many reporters say “Neek-a-rah-gwah” but never call the capital of France Par-ee?

Low-intensity rant over.

Here’s one I’m even less enthusiastic about: The iPhone. Oh sure, as a Mac-head I assume the usual kowtowing position in the direction of its elegant design, intuitive interface, blah to the blah. I won’t, however, be an early adopter. I blame my mom.

My mother never carried a big ring of keys. Her car keys were on one fob, house keys on another. She never fell for those all-in-one wallets, either, that holds all your cards, all your money and your checkbook, too; she carried all three separately. It’s obvious why: So when you lose one, you don’t lose everything. As it is, it’s terrifying to think of all I’d lose if my laptop were nicked, but even worse to imagine my laptop fitting into my pocket, too.

On the other hand, how wonderful it would be, as a journalist, to carry your one-man-band in a shirt pocket — to be able to write, take pictures and send the whole shebang back to the office without having a 5-pound device digging into your shoulder.

As for the phone, all I can say is: It’s Cingular. Beware.

Someone once wrote about the language of technology on the big screen, how there’s something about slamming a phone down that becomes part of the conversation, and the cell-phone era just doesn’t have an equivalent. Or rather, it didn’t, but the popularity of the folding phone sort of gave it one — snapping it shut is a gesture that can be performed quietly or angrily. When I saw the iPhone’s flat surface, my first thought was, great, another keypad that’ll have to be locked, and my second was, gotta get a new gesture for hanging up.

“Light Sleeper” was on last night, a film I ordinarily have a great deal of affection for. However, after last night, I see Alan’s point when he said, “Boy, is this pretentious and depressing.” The Call/Michael Been music on the soundtrack may have been the tipping point, especially since the budget seemed to have only allowed for one song, and so over and over the score told us that it feels like the world’s on fire. OK, OK, we get the point. Actually, the setting indicated that New York City was going through a garbage strike, but “it smells like the world’s an old rotting piece of fish” isn’t nearly as romantic-sounding.

Nice cast, though — Willem Dafoe, Susan Sarandon, Victor Garber, David Clennon (!!! my fave !!!), with Sam Rockwell and David Spade in bit parts with character names like Jealous and Theological Cokehead. (They’re the worst kind, aren’t they?)

As you can see, I’m plainly tapped out. Discuss the Surge if you’re so inclined. Throwing more good lives away, or something worse?

Today’s cruel taunting of the already wounded comes to us courtesy of regular commenter Basset, who forwards this photo of the Ohio State University Marching Band’s postgame show Monday night:

Funny, but sloppy Photoshopping; I can see the cloned areas. Although I’m an alum of the smaller, less well-known Ohio University, with its own excellent marching band, I have to say: I always enjoyed Script Ohio. Early in my career I had to do a lot of “first woman” stories. That is to say, “Miss X is the first woman to do whatever” stories. Among them was one on the first woman to dot the i in Script Ohio, a big honor for the sousaphone players. I recall only that my lead called it “something to toot your tuba about.” How thrilled my editors must have been, to see this early promise of the writer within.

Gah, a long day lies ahead. I hope I have all my obligations written down. The night before last was a stressful one, with two middle-of-the-night phone calls, followed by a busy day. In late afternoon I tried to catch a nap. I was lying on my bed with a paperback, trying to relax, and the next thing I knew it was dark outside and the phone was ringing. Foolishly, I answered it. Of course it was someone who wanted to talk to me about a job. I’m sure they won’t want to hire the aphasic idiot they spoke to, who said “uhhhh” a lot and seemed to be communicating from the bottom of a Placidyl binge, but you never know. I appear to have made an appointment to speak with them later. Note to self: Use lots of under-eye concealer.

One thing before I forget: Is anyone out there flying on Northwest Airlines this month, at least before the in-flight magazine changes to February? If so, grab the January issue. Kate’s in it. Really. This was yesterday’s excitement. Her birthday party in November was a repeat of last year’s, with a small group of her friends invited to ice-skate at Campus Martius Park downtown. A photographer was lurking around the edges of the rink, snapping photos. He was obviously a professional — he held his camera like one, anyway, and he wasn’t wearing skates — and we struck up a conversation. He said he was shooting candids of the rink for Northwest Airlines’ magazine. The girls went insane, of course, thinking their next step would be America’s Next Top Model, so I explained about how photographers shoot dozens of photos and only one or two get used, if that, so don’t get your hopes up and blah blah blah. Then we had pizza and everyone forgot about it.

Until yesterday, when I had to go over to Kate’s school, and she shows me the magazine, and whaddaya know, there’s her birthday-party ice conga line. Everyone’s in profile except one of the girls in the middle, who had turned to look at the photographer, resembling this sort of serene blonde ice angel. One of that girl’s mother’s friends was flying somewhere, opened the magazine, said, “I know that girl,” and the rest is a bunch of phone calls and checks sent off for extra copies. If you’re on an NWA flight, though, grab one (there’s a snorkeler on the cover, enjoying the many benefits of a vacation to Cancun) and drop me an e-mail. You can never have enough extra copies of Baby’s First Appearance in a National Magazine.

I guess next year I’ll have to invite Vanity Fair.

I’m of two minds on Dick Clark’s appearance on New Year’s Rockin’ Eve. First mind: Good for him, soldiering on after a stroke left his speech muddy and his body partially paralyzed. Just think, a generation ago he would have been put out to pasture and not allowed near a camera, lest he bum someone out. So rock on, Dick Clark.

Second mind: What the hell was he thinking? A veteran news broadcaster once told me he was effective only until his appearance and delivery became a fatal distraction from what he was saying. (Of course, as a man, this guaranteed him 25 more years on the job than the women in the newsroom.) Not that what Dick Clark has to say on New Year’s Eve is so mesmerizing, but still.

It was oddly appropriate for the weekend, though, which had the theme: Soldiering on. Alan was hard at work on yet another of the projects which have saved us thousands of dollars over the years (installing a garage door opener, this time), when he went down to the basement with a hacksaw and a piece of steel to perform some manly surgery on it. A minute later there was an extended clatter that suggested much more than the steel was falling.

Relax, he didn’t have a stroke. He just tripped on something in the work room, nearly recovered, tripped again and smashed face-first into the wall, splitting his lip and necessitating a trip to the emergency room Saturday night for five stitches. He came home with three no-nos until they come out — no beer from the bottle, no smiling and no kissing. So as midnight struck and the sound of gunfire resounded from the direction of Detroit, we leaned toward each other and Alan said through his stitched-up lip: “iss e, I ick Cark.”

I hope karma allows him this small joke without too much payback. The split lip seemed to be pay-forward, in a sense.

That gunfire — that is the sound of Detroit celebrating. Yes, it’s what you’d call tops in stupid. Alan had only been on the job a week when he came to work Jan. 2 to find a bullet hole in one of the department’s windows, a gouge in the wainscoting and other evidence that, duh, what goes up, etc. I let the dog out — trepidatiously — shortly after midnight and it sounded, no kidding, like high noon in the Green Zone. Some of it was fireworks, but one thing life here has taught me is the difference between the pop-pop-pop of fireworks and the pop-pop-pop of semiautomatic weaponry. And there was more gunfire than firecrackers.

The first house we looked at when we were house-hunting here was in the Park, the first street of the Pointes as you come north/east from Detroit. One of Alan’s colleagues lives there. She said they spend New Year’s Eve “on the floor.” How festive.

(If you click on that link above, you’ll see the city’s suggestion for an alternative activity: “Hugs, not Bullets.” It’s like they have meetings to think of the lamest possible alternative, to insure the original undesirable activity goes on forever.)

Ah, I didn’t sleep well last night, so I’m going back to bed to get a little more. In the meantime: The WashPost tells us what’s in and what’s out. Study up. There’ll probably be a quiz.

So Kate has this great teacher this year, who’s into all sorts of different and fun ways to learn that make extra work for me.

Just kidding. He’s actually very cool about that sort of thing. But this upcoming project is one where I’m going to have to do, or direct, a lot of the preparation. For two weeks in January, every kid in the class has to set up and run a “business” from their desk, which will be surrounded by a refrigerator box “storefront.” I have the box, thanks to a terrifyingly well-organized room mother, who went out to Livonia and picked up a couple dozen from an appliance store weeks ago, then drove around the Woods distributing them. And we have the business plan — Miss Kitty’s Homemade Dog and Cat Treats (which narrowly beat out the tattoo parlor). I even have a recipe for homemade dog biscuits.

(And needless to say, I have a camera-ready celebrity spokesdog to endorse them in billboards and advertising.)

What I don’t have is a cat-treat recipe. Which is where you, dear readers, come in. Of course I’ve found scores on the internet, but most require subsequent refrigeration or some other preservation, because they’re soft and moist the way cats like ’em. I’m looking for something dry enough to keep in a coffee can or Tupperware, but not so hard that Pussy will turn up her pampered nose. Anybody have a recipe that fits the bill?

Here are two tentative finalists, which I’ll make this weekend and test on neighborhood cats:

Cat crackers
6 ounces of undrained tuna
1 cup cornmeal
1 cup flour
1/3 cup water

Preheat the oven to 350 degrees. Measure all of the ingredients into a bowl and mix thoroughly with your hands. Roll out to 1/4 inch thickness and cut into treat sized pieces. Place on a greased cookie sheet. Bake for about 20 minutes or until golden. Let cool. Give to your cat and watch them gobble it up.

Kitty cookies
1 cup whole wheat flour
1/4 cup soy flour
1 teaspoon catnip
1 egg
1/3 cup milk
2 tablespoons wheat germ
1/3 cup powdered milk
1 tablespoon unsulfured molasses
2 tablespoons butter or vegetable oil

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. 

Mix dry ingredients together. Add molasses, egg, oil and milk. Roll out flat onto oiled cookie sheet and cut into small, cat bite-sized pieces. Bake for 20 minutes. Let cool and store in tightly sealed container.

But if you have any to add, along with a personal testimonial, leave ’em in the comments.

With all the bodies piling up in the last couple of days, we haven’t had much time to talk about Christmas. How was yours? Mine was fine, with perhaps a bit too much driving. Down to Columbus on Saturday, back to Detroit on Sunday, to and from Defiance on Monday. But we had a nice time. My big present from Alan were several nice antique prints, including this one, which made me laugh. (I don’t think Alan paid that much, however, and if he did, he’s in trouble.)

As I’ve gotten older, my contributions to the what-I’d-do-if-I-won-the-lottery conversation are dwindling. I’m over cars, houses, and most grown-up toys. If I won the lottery, I’d do most of my big spending on two things — travel and art. A few years ago Alan and I started buying antique prints, nothing grand, the sort of things a couple of underpaid journalists can afford. (In all our time together, I think we’ve only owned two pieces that cost more to buy than they did to frame.) One of the household dramas of recent weeks that I’ve spared you was the Great Bedroom Painting Project, in which I learned (yet again!) that one does not argue with Alan’s color sense. Now we’re living in a taupe bedroom — and yes, all the screws on the light switches line up at 12 o’clock — and need some new stuff for the walls. Audubon’s butt-licking lynx will do nicely.

Among our experiences over the weekend was this oddity: My brother, Alan and I stopped in for a drink at the little workingman’s bar in Obetz, a little workingman’s suburb of Columbus. (My brother owns the joint.) It was quiet for a Saturday night, just two women and three men, all sitting at the bar. Only wait, that third man isn’t a man at all…

“There’s a dog at the bar,” Alan said. I looked closer. Looking back through the barroom gloom was, indeed, a dog. A big chocolate Lab, sitting on a stool as nice as you please. He had a bowl of water in front of him. (At least, I think it was water. It didn’t have an olive in it, so I assume it wasn’t a martini.) It looked like a beer commercial; I kept waiting for the dog’s lips to move CGI-style and for him to call someone dude.

“What’s his name?” I asked.

“Budweiser,” his owner said. But of course.

Budweiser was a very good dog, parking his considerable Lab frame on a rather tiny spot of barstool real estate with no obvious discomfort or complaint. Every so often someone would buy him a piece of beef jerky. At one point my brother talked some amicable trash to his owner, and the owner talked some trash back, and Budweiser barked in agreement. When one of the women called him over for some jerky and petting, he jumped down from his stool and jumped up onto the one next to her with no coaxing whatsoever.

“Doesn’t the health department have a problem with this?” I asked. (For the record, I think every bar should have a house dog.)

“This is Obetz,” he said. “You can do anything you want here. No one knows we exist.”

Good dog, Budweiser.

So, bloggage:

God bless the crazy men among us: Man spends $60,000 and half his life building a “Jetsons-style” vehicle. “Why drive when you can fly 500 m.p.h.?” he asks.

Excellent question.

Spike Lee’s directing the James Brown biopic? Finally, a movie where I care who plays the lead. (My bet’s on Eddie Murphy.)

Guess how much sleep I got last night? Not enough. I’m off to find more French Roast and take a shower.

Someone has stolen David and Amy Flach’s horse. They’d like to get the horse back, so they offered a description, to wit:

Mecca, estimated to be 16 years old, is described as having speckles and a scar on its right rear knee.

Sigh. Horses don’t have “rear knees.” Neither does any other four-legged animal. They have two knees, just like us. The hind legs fold the other way, and the joint that allows such movement is called a hock. After years in the newspaper business, I can tell you that these little details mean a lot. If you get them wrong, people who notice assume everything else is wrong, too. As a horseman, I don’t expect lay folk to know the difference between a cannon bone and a croup, but I don’t think it’s too much to expect a reporter to know the difference between a knee and a hock. We’ve all heard of ham hocks, haven’t we?

It’s little details like this that make reporters and editors such fearsome contestants on “Jeopardy!” And if we’re ever together in New York, and hail the Cash Cab? You should let me do the talking.

Speaking of quadrupeds, Kate and I went on a grocery run yesterday and ran across a living Nativity. Of course we stopped; anyone who passes a living Nativity is a person who deserves coal in their stocking. When we actually got to the tent, however, we found that we were either too early or too late, as the Nativity had no Mary, no Joseph, no Magi, no baby Jesus, but did have two donkeys, two sheep, three goats and a chicken munching hay in a pen under a tent, next to a caged rabbit.

“I missed the part about rabbits in the Gospel of Luke,” I said to the man next to me, who didn’t get the joke.

There was a camel outside, ruminating, held by a man dressed as a shepherd. His Gore-Tex boots peeked from under his robe while he discussed the living Nativity circuit with a friend: “Yeah, we’re in Sterling Heights tomorrow, then Roseville, I forget where else.” Make that camel pay for its hay, dude.

We aren’t religious, but I try to explain its rituals whenever I can, so Kate won’t be entirely ignorant of the world. I searched for one in this menagerie, considered telling her the legend of how the donkey got the cross on its back and realized it would confuse her, as it’s a Holy Week story, and it’s only Christmas.

“I once knew someone who had a donkey named Milton. Milton Burro,” I said, lamely. She didn’t get that, either.

We left.

Holiday picture week continues. Here’s frequent commenter Brian Stouder’s wife Pam and daughter Chloe with the Man last week, photo taken at Pottersville Mall. Chloe appears to be asking for her own domain for Christmas, as MySpace is just so over:

Keep ’em coming.