A Christmas card arrived the other day, with photos. I was stunned to discover that the little baby I’d once visited in Milwaukee is now a) grown up; and b) has a Jewfro, even though he’s Catholic. How did that happen?

This didn’t start me down a weepy path of nostalgia and humming “Sunrise, Sunset.” It made me think I want to see Mary’s backyard Christmas cactus in faraway Los Angeles, which she claims blooms at Christmas every year. Yes, friends, it made me think of …the power of pictures.

So now until the end of the year, it’s Send Me a Picture time here at NN.C. I’ll start:

If I were an Airedale, I’d have killed you by now.

You all know who this is. The day he got his hair cut, there was an Airedale in the next cage at the groomer’s, a dog of truly fearsome energy. Airedales are terriers, but with the complicating factor that they weigh 80 pounds or so. When we were struggling to train ha ha our own terrier, Alan and I would often remark that if this dog weighed an ounce over 20 pounds, the experience would be a lot less comical and perhaps even life-threatening. (Yes. Spriggy flunked out of puppy first grade when the instructor decided to assert her dominance over him by pinning him to the floor and he brazenly growled in her face for several minutes. He never did stop, although the instructor decided she had other dogs to teach and finally let him up, with a comment that he might actually be untrainable. This was the next-to-last session, and we didn’t go back for graduation. By the way, as soon as she let him up he was all waggy and friendly again, but man, this dog does not submit to anyone.)

He will wear his antlers for 30 seconds or so. Be quick with that camera, and you’ll get your shot.

OK.

Sorry to be boring today, but I have two stories to write and that 7,000-word (plus appendices — I keep having to add that) anal blister of an edit to get started on. I’ll leave you with a huge story you can read if you feel like it and wring hands over in the comments: Little Hotties, from last week’s New Yorker. It’s about the Bratz dolls, which give parents fits. Why? Because they look like pint-size hoochie mamas, that’s why. I’m pleased to say that Kate has already passed through her Bratz period. I considered objecting to them — it’s hard to hide your horror when you see them the first time — but decided on a different strategy: Going limp. Not only did I go limp, I aided and abetted. When Kate asked for a new Bratz for Christmas, I went out and bought the trashiest one I could find. The Bratz I bought that year made a Vegas streetwalker look like Julie Andrews — short skirt, bootz, and my favorite style detail, a faux-fur shrug over a halter top.

See, my Barbie experience taught me something that they don’t teach in Women’s Studies courses: Little girls don’t see dolls the way you do. You see “slutty,” they see “pretty.” Kate didn’t ask for short skirts and halter tops; she just played with them. And then she graduated to American Girls and all the Bratz are down in the basement, legless and seminude, waiting for the next garage sale. Parents of younger girls, behold I say unto you: All things must pass. And so will this.

I’ve gotten a particular piece of wienie spam four times today. The first one said, “I don’t care why your woody is so small, but 81% of women do.”

The second one said, “I don’t care why your schlong is so small, but 74% of women do.”

The third one said, “I don’t care why your member is so small, but 85% of women do.”

The fourth one said, “I don’t care why your sausage is so small, but 70% of women do.”

Checking the junk file, I see I also got a version with a slightly different sentence construction, with the same tic — the euphemism changes, along with the percentage.

Oh, wait, another just arrived: “woody” and 80 percent.

Spammers. If only we could harness their powers for good.

It’s Friday, a sunny but cold Friday, which means today I’m a-gonna live large. Put in the contact lenses and wear my sunglasses, maybe hit an estate sale, work a bit and look forward to the weekend. On the strength of a hunch and a Free Press preview, I just bought tickets to the Moscow Cats Theater for tomorrow. Kate loves cats and needs to be exposed to more weirdness outside the boundaries of Grosse Pointe, so this seemed to fit the bill. I liked this detail:

When a stray cat jumps into the orchestra pit or refuses to move off the stage, Kuklachev will just move on to the next routine. “When they notice that all eyes are off of them, they will do something to win the attention back,” Gelfman says. “The show never plays the same way twice.”

Cats. If only we could harness their powers for good.

Well, the Rockettes aren’t bringing their Christmas show to the D this year, and it beats the drive-thru Nativity in Sterling Heights.

This feels like an end-of-the-week stew already, so let’s get to it:

I know I haven’t been keeping up with “On the Nightstand,” and yes, I’m about to change it, but before I put “The Woman at the Washington Zoo” back on the shelf, a plug for its wonderfulness. I’ve been reading compilations of journalists’ work for years, and not all of them are worth the paper they’re printed on, but this one — this one has legs. A bouquet of wonderful profiles, followed by personal essays of grace and style. It would make a fine book club selection, or beach reading, or whatever. And yes, it has a new website, full of supplemental materials. Enjoy.

I just read a rave of “Apocalypto” by one of my favorite critics, but you know what they say about opinions. Here’s another take, from Slate’s Dana Stevens:

Here is a partial list of the indignities to which the human body is subjected in Mel Gibson’s Mayan epic Apocalypto (Buena Vista): being impaled on a trap made of animal bones. Being forced to ingest tapir testicles. Being tricked into rubbing a caustic agent on one’s own genitals while the whole village watches and laughs. Seeing one’s father have his throat slit. Getting one’s heart cut out in a sacrificial ritual. Having one’s head subsequently chopped off and thrown down the stairs of a pyramid. Having one’s face chewed off by a panther. …Gibson’s fascination with the Mayans seems to spring entirely from the fact (or fantasy) that they were exotic badasses who knew how to whomp the hell out of one another, old-school.

Extra credit for a fresh use of that old analogy: “so (blank) it makes (blank) look like (blank).” Ahem: A chase scene at a roaring waterfall is so spectacular, it makes “Last of the Mohicans” look like an Esther Williams musical.

Mercy. I’ll wait for the cable debut. Although I still haven’t seen “The Passion of the Christ.” Doesn’t Mel believe in HBO?

Finally, I pride myself — not really; I just take note of it — on not having any accent. I’m from the middle of Ohio, where the natives have no regional accent whatsoever. My St. Louis-raised parents said “fark” and “harse” for fork and horse, but they moved me to the Buckeye state before I started kindergarten, and so — no accent. Evidently, experts agree:

Glad to clear that up. Now, on to “What mental disorder do you have?” Have a swell weekend.

I have my problems with charity. I suppose it comes from being a journalist too long. You write, or read, too many stories about thieving and/or featherbedding charities, and soon you start to doubt the whole lot. Of course this is wrong; there are many people out there doing truly selfless work on behalf of the disadvantaged. Just because the head of the United Way flew first-class doesn’t mean they all do.

My problem is, these days, that I don’t know where to start. I don’t belong to a church, so tithing is out. I no longer work in an office, so no United Way, either. (Besides, I stopped giving to those folks, after the Aramony scandal and my own issues with the Fort Wayne chapter, none of which had to do with mismanagement of money, I hasten to add.) Lately I’ve taken to writing checks when events seem to demand it — Katrina, tsunamis — and I try to make my giving as direct as possible. (When I cut out the United Way, I still gave to several of my favorite agencies, just minus the middleman.)

I’ve even taken to giving money to bums on the street, which we have no shortage of in Detroit. Needless to say, this makes Alan crazy. I usually give a couple bucks to a legless guy who begs at a freeway on-ramp near his office. “He probably spends it on drugs or booze,” he says. “If I had no legs and had to sit out in bad weather all year with my hand out, I’d probably want to be drunk or stoned, too,” I reply.

“I bet that guy lives in Grosse Pointe,” he replied.

But I’m on a tangent here. The point I’m trying to make is this: If you’re looking for a way to spend just a few dollars, and have it go through as few layers as possible, and help another soul in a really tangible way, I have a suggestion. You might want to consider a donation to these girls:

They’re either orphans or from desperately poor families in Tibet. A man named Dockpo Tra has just launched a school for 30 of them in Qinghai Province. They need warm clothing.

A little background: Last year I met Stephannie Piro, who worked as the secretary at Wallace House, headquarters of the Knight-Wallace Fellows in Ann Arbor. Perhaps typical of Ann Arbor secretaries, she was also a classically trained opera singer and fluent in Tibetan. She also seems to be a Buddhist of some sort, but I’m not sure about that. Anyway, she only stayed at the job a year, because she got the opportunity to go to Tibet, to live and teach and translate.

After arriving, she hooked up with Dockpo Tra, who saw a need and is trying to meet it: Educating girls. Most of the schools in Tibet are for boys, and girls make up only 25-30 percent of the student body, locally. Last summer, he traveled the province in search of girls from impoverished families interested in going to school. The 30 he found range in age from 5-13, and most come from backgrounds so poor that they own little more than the clothes on their back, and not much of those.

Dockpo lays out his ambitions for the school and the girls here.

Stephannie, now going by the Tibetan name Tsering Wangmo, aka Ane (auntie) Wangmo, has adopted these girls as well. Here’s her photo page devoted to the school, and here is her travel blog; the latest entry lays out short bios of about half the girls. This one is typical:

Tamdrin Wangmo (new name Tare Drolma) (age 12) comes from a family of seven; four of them are small children. Her father is dead. Before, the family supported themselves with a large herd of cattle, but disease wiped out all but 20 animals, and they now are unable to cover their living expenses. One monk provides assistance to the family and her mother does all of the work to care for their remaining livestock.

Here’s the good news: A little bit of money goes a long way in Tibet. Immediately, the girls need warm clothes to get through the winter. I Paypal’d Stephannie $50 last week, and this was her reply:

We bought long underwear yesterday, and your money almost covered all of it. Dockpo left today to drive it all down to the girls (a two-day trip). They’ll be thrilled to receive it — they’ve had the same pair of long underwear on for three weeks straight. It’s too cold to take them off to wash them, so the second set will be a welcome change!

I love that. Last week that $50 was rattling around my bank account looking to start trouble, and today it’s going on the backs of 30 little girls somewhere in Tibet. That’s satisfying.

I’m not asking you to give $50. I’m not asking you to give anything. I’m pointing out that even if you only have $5 or $10 to part with, you can see it go a long way in Tibet. A pair of mittens costs about $1.40. I put that much in the Salvation Army bucket every time I pass.

Obviously, giving to a stranger involves some risk. I offer no guarantees, except that I trust Stephannie, and if she trusts Dockpo Tra, that’s good enough for me. Besides, it’s not that much money. And this is the season for giving. And I have a daughter the same age as these girls. Keeping someone warm is a pretty direct gesture. I’m going to chalk this up to improving my karma.

American friends have set Stephannie/Wangmo up with a Paypal account. You can send her money at zangthal@mac.com, or e-mail her there, too. I’m sure she’d be happy to answer any questions you have. I also advise you to follow the links to Stephannie’s other photos and travels; what a beautiful country.

Have a good cause you’d like to plug? Leave it in the comments.

Here’s how I remember it: It was Friday night, and I’d just finished watching “Millennium.” It was a spinoff series, sorta, of “The X-Files.” And as far as I recall, it was one of those Aura shows — there was the sense that Something Large and Evil was lurking just offstage, part of a Huge Conspiracy of Shadowy Forces, and it was all tied to the coming turn of the millennium, which was then, what? A little over three years away.

The credits were rolling, and I felt a contraction.

Damn. False labor.

I was in false labor, I was sure, because I’d just been to the doctor that day. Of course I knew the baby was coming eventually, but the nurse practitioner had checked everything out down there and pronounced my cervix “long and closed,” which meant she was willing to bet money I wouldn’t go before my due date, still five days away.

I was ready. My suitcase was packed, the camera loaded with film, the “Kind of Blue” CD ready in case the room had a player. The crib was set up, the little onesies in the drawer, the mobile of black-and-white shapes — supposedly the only thing a newborn could see — assembled and ready to be gazed upon. It was called the Infant Stim-Mobile. Stim is for “stimulation.” Everything was all about stimulation back then. Of course, the first thing you learn about newborns is, they’re already getting all the stimulation they can handle, and when they can’t handle it anymore, they scream. This was the first lesson of parenthood, and I pass it on to you now: Someone’s always trying to sell you useless crap, and 95 percent of it you don’t need.

I was ready, but there was still work to be done. I had to help Alan clean the gutters, the last onerous outdoor chore of the year, and I had to shop for and prepare a meal for Alan’s 40th birthday, which was Saturday. Once Saturday was over, I’d be all the way ready.

Only now, damn: False labor. I went to bed in the guest room. Alan had a cold, and I didn’t want to catch it with the delivery so close. Tried to sleep, but the false labor continued. Hey, I kept thinking. My cervix is long and closed, and I don’t need to be up all damn night with this false labor. I need my rest. I have to clean gutters and make a semi-elaborate meal. Give me a break, uterus.

I managed to doze a while, but still, all night — contractions. Some were sort of strong. Once I whimpered a little, and Alan said, from the next room, half-asleep: “Try to breathe through it, hon. Zzzzzzzz.” By dawn, I was beginning to think we were going to have to go to the hospital. Not for the baby to be born, mind you, but for the doctor to look at me again — long and closed! — and send me home. This happened to everyone we knew. And here I’d have to make dinner and a cake on a night of interrupted sleep. Damn this false labor; it was ruining my plans.

Second lesson of parenthood: Someone’s always ruining your plans.

I got Alan up, told him we were probably going to have to go to the hospital, and he should walk the dog. I called my parents and told them we were going, but not to get their hopes up, because my cervix was long and closed. The contractions were pretty strong and grueling by now, but honestly, I still thought they were false alarms. This ability to ignore reality when it’s right in front of my face explains a lot about me, including why I stayed in the newspaper business so long.

On the way to the hospital, I noticed the contractions were now three minutes apart, down from five. It began to occur to me that I might, possibly, be having the baby that day.

At the hospital they offered to check me in under an assumed name. Really. Apparently this service is available to certain VIPs, and as a newspaper columnist, I qualified. “I really don’t think that’s necessary,” I said through gritted teeth and another contraction. “I think the photographers are still staking out Madonna’s apartment.” Madonna was my celebrity pregnancy doppelganger and had delivered a month earlier.

We got up to the intake ward, where a jolly nurse checked everything out. “You’re six centimeters dilated, almost seven. You’re in transition.” I told Alan to call his mom and tell her dinner was definitely off.

I had the epidural, which I now regret. The day stretched out to its full length. I was no longer in pain; all activity seemed to be taking place on the other side of a glass wall that passed through my waist. The jolly nurse went home, replaced by a less-jolly but seemingly far more competent one, who ordered a pitocin drip. I pushed and pushed and pushed and nothing happened. They tried the suction-cup thing and it didn’t work. I looked up and saw my ya-ya, illuminated by halogen lights, reflected in six pairs of glasses, which was weird. At one point I blacked out, although I never lost consciousness. There’s just a long gap in my memory, which I’m thankful for, because apparently that’s when the episiotomy happened and the forceps appeared. All I know is I was pushing unsuccessfully and then the doctor said, “The head’s out,” and I thought, cool, I didn’t need an episiotomy. And the next thing I knew, they laid Kate on my stomach, all hair and huge, staring eyes.

I’d like to tell you we all burst into tears like the moms on “E.R.,” but all I remember thinking was: Wow. Get a load of those eyes.

There was a lot of busywork then. A pulmonary tech hoovered out her lungs, because there had been meconium in the amniotic fluid. The nurses rubbed her rather vigorously. The doctor said, “She had a rough trip.” I didn’t know, then, that her one-minute Apgar score was a mere 4. Finally I said, “Is she OK? Can I see her?” And the pulmonary tech turned around and said, “Sure.”

(That’s the competent nurse on the right.) I told Alan, “Happy birthday. Don’t expect me to top this for 41,” and everyone made a big fuss.

I sometimes think back on this comedy of errors and wonder if it set the tone for anything. The denial of the obvious, the convenient blackout at a critical moment — what does this say about my chips-are-down mettle? Nothing, I hope. Third lesson of parenthood: Nothing ever turns out the way you think it will.

Anyway, this was 10 years ago today. Today, little Miss 4-on-the-Apgar woke up and caroled, “I’m in double digits now!” She and her father wished one another a happy birthday. Presents were unwrapped at the breakfast table; it was an electronics theme this year. Ten years of water under the bridge, more than halfway to adulthood (legal adulthood, anyway). I’ve made approximately seven jajillion mistakes but I think, for the most part, they were all non-fatal, and I’ve tried to learn from them.

The latest lesson of parenthood: Birthdays are special. Time to go make some cake. Have a good day.

Nearly all my junk mail comes from spammers these days, and man, those folks are still the hardest-working people on the internet, aren’t they? I get at least 100 pieces of pharmaspam, pornospam and lonelyhearts spam a day. I can’t say I haven’t learned anything from it; did you know that the world’s top-selling erectile dysfunction medication now comes in “soft tabs”? Wouldn’t you think “able to swallow a small pill in the conventional manner” might be kind of a bottom-line test for one’s ability to withstand the rigors of sexual activity? I mean, if you need to gum your e.d. pills, maybe you’ve got bigger fish to fry. So to speak.

I should probably add that spam doesn’t make me as crazy as it does some people. I figure, how long does it take to hit the delete key? It’s a nuisance, but I keep it in perspective.

But the other day I got a piece of junk that had obviously come from one individual. It has 25-count-’em-25 layers of forwarding headers on it. Subject line: PLEEEEEEASE REEEEEAD! IT WAS ON GOOD MORNING AMERICA TODAY SHOW. I actually skipped to the bottom to discover what was so important that more than two dozen people had found it worthy of bugging their friends with. Ready?

“Please do not take this for a junk letter. Bill Gates sharing his fortune. …For every person that you forward this e-mail to, Microsoft will pay you $245.00 For every person that you sent it to that forwards it on, Microsoft will pay you $243.00 and for every third person that receives it, you will be paid $241.00. Within two weeks, Microsoft will contact you for your address and then send you a check.” And so on: “…two weeks after receiving this e-mail and forwarding it on. Microsoft contacted me for my address and within days, I received a check for $24,800.00.”

Now. I’ve received this before, but not since, oh, 1999. Surely, in the last five or six years, every sentient person with an e-mail address has figured out that Bill Gates is spending his fortune on vaccines for the world’s poorest children, not in an effort to find the internet’s dumbest users. Right? Is there a single soul who believes these anymore? I half expect to find a follow-up note warning me of the Good Times virus.

Anyway, I took a moment to hit reply, and wrote, “I don’t know you. Stop sending me your junk-mail forwards, or I’ll report you to Yahoo and Gmail as a spammer.”

And he replied, and guess what he said? “You shouldn’t put your e-mail in the newspaper, then.” I had a couple of bylines in the Free Press over the weekend, which included my Gmail address.

Huh.

Of course I don’t know where this guy lives, but if I did? I’d send him a letter, by regular mail, no, FedEx. It would include a check for, say, $32,998, signed “Bill Gates.” On the memo line: “Thanks for helping with that e-mail beta test!”

I mean, it might be a disproportionate response, but it would feel really, really good.

If I had to think of one thing that’s different about adult life in my generation as opposed to my parents’, it would be…well, about a million things. But today I’m thinking about restaurants.

My parents went out to eat only occasionally, more often as they got older and started hanging with my dad’s gang of handball buddies, but as I recall, going to a restaurant was still a dress-up-and-shine-your-shoes deal for the most part. Fast food, a daily fact of many of today’s children’s lives, was fairly rare for me, something my mom treated me to when dad was out of town on business. We went to Arthur Treacher’s, the Original Fish & Chips. (If you’re old enough to remember Arthur Treacher, you’ve definitely entered the Bifocals Years. Of course, I can sing the jingle.)

I don’t know why I’ve been thinking about restaurants lately, except that I was trying to decide which was the worst restaurant I’ve ever eaten in. There have been so many contenders, but I finally settled on one that was, top to bottom, a disaster. The concept was bad, the decor was bad, the food was bad, the service was bad, and everything else? Bad.

A little background: For years, there was a restaurant on West Fifth Avenue in Columbus called Presutti’s Villa. It was a typical ’50s-era Italian place, checked tablecloths and chianti-bottle candles and spaghetti and meatballs. If there wasn’t a Venetian gondola scene painted on the wall, it sure would have fit right in. It was beloved by its neighbors and customers, the sort of place you’d think would be there forever.

But one night they had a fire. And the restaurant never reopened as Presutti’s. There was a period of mourning, and then remodeling crews started work, and before anyone knew it, the place had reopened, but not as Presutti’s.

As JoAnn’s Chili Bordello.

At first I thought this was simply a spectacularly bad one-off, some coke-crazed sex addict’s idea of fun, sort of a proto-Hooter’s. The slogan was something like “17 varieties of chili served in an atmosphere of sin,” and was the cue for everything else. The place was decked out as a Hollywood version of a New Orleans whorehouse — flocked wallpaper, red everything — and the waitresses wore underwear. Really. Merry Widow corsets with garters, stockings and panties. Honestly, I think Playboy Bunnies wore more, and they were mostly serving drinks. The idea of eating actual food, which doesn’t have the disinfecting properties of a stiff drink, served by a woman whose junk and all its filth are covered by only a thin film of polyester, well — someone probably thought it was sexy, but I just thought it was gross.

Anyway, at first I thought it was just a single bad idea. I was wrong. Googling around, I see it was part of a chain. A chain! Someone opened one and thought, let’s do this again! I’m speechless, even as I acknowledge that this fact means some have left documentary evidence behind.

I ate there once. The waitress’s corset was green, and I have rarely been so embarrassed for another soul in my life. The chili was barely average, but the place had an ambitious dessert menu, so I tried to salvage the night with a piece of chocolate cake. A really exquisite chocolate cake is hard to do, but a truly bad one is almost equally hard. (I mean, it’s chocolate cake.) It was called Better Than Sex Cake. I think the restaurant critic for one of the dailies described it best when he said: “It isn’t.”

Anyway, it lasted longer at its other locations than it did in Columbus, where it opened and closed pretty quickly. I hope this is a testimony to my hometown’s superior taste in eateries, but it probably has more to do with women not wanting to accompany their husbands and boyfriends to a place with that much cleavage.

OK, the bloggage: Slate takes an entertaining look at that journalism perennial, the bus plunge: Bus plunges had become an inside joke, with editors scouting the wires for new ones. “If a bus fell anywhere, they would cut that story from the wire and send it to the copy desk and put it in the paper, whereas earlier perhaps they wouldn’t have,” Siegal says. It was no longer a matter of how badly shorts were needed. “They became newsworthy in and of their own right because it was amusing to get the expression ‘bus plunge’ into the paper as often as possible.”

I liked this part: At the Times, the shortest stories—a one-line hed and a single paragraph of copy—were called “K-heds.” “The great challenge was to edit those things as short as they could be and still have them make sense,” Siegal says. Great acclaim came to the editor who could artfully reduce wire stories to their absolute essence. One of Siegal’s favorite K-heds, which ran in the Times in the 1950s, read in its entirety:

Most snails are both male and female, according to the Associated Press.

I’m impressed the Times had a special name for what everyone else called fillers. Fillers were on their way out when I entered the business in 1979, but still, every Friday the wires moved a few stories that consisted of nothing but hermaphroditic snail factoids, and if you had time, one of the duties in our department was to slap little heads on them and typeset a bunch in three column widths, to be used whenever a story came up short. I know editors who collected them, which is one reason they can be such pains in the ass when you play Trivial Pursuit or Jeopardy! opposite them.

In Columbus, we ran a one-line filler about some museum that hung a Matisse painting upside-down for a year before someone noticed. The headline: “Matisse hung wrong.” Another carried the headline: “Jaguars fear dogs.” The text: “Jaguars are afraid of dogs.”

Go ahead, laugh. But that was a time when circulation was strong. Chili, anyone?

Alan was on his way into work Friday when he passed a homeless man, who had taken the top off a sidewalk garbage can and was rooting around inside for whatever treasures he could find. (People in states where you don’t pay deposit on cans and bottles think the whole idea is an unbearable nuisance, but I’m telling you, it’s like having your own state scrip. Keeps trashpickers busy, too.)

The guy popped his head up suddenly and said, “Man! You gotta come look at this!”

Alan, well-versed in the art of ignoring the homeless, did what anyone would do — put up his urban blast shields and quickened his step.

“No, man, you gotta see this! It’s some crazy kind of bird!”

The man who gave me both Audubon’s Baby Elephant Folio and Roger Tory Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds of North America could resist no longer. He approached the garbage can, and looked inside. There was, indeed, a bird there.

An American woodcock.

A peacock would have been less surprising. The Hare Krishnas have been known to keep those at their headquarters at the Fisher Mansion. Peregrine falcons are well-established in many U.S. cities, where they nest on skyscrapers the way they nest on cliff faces in the wild; that wouldn’t have been such a shock. And of course Detroit is home to a thriving pheasant population. But a woodcock? This reclusive, perfectly camouflaged game bird lives far from cities. In Michigan they prefer forest floors near swampy areas where they can easily find the earthworms that make up 75 percent of their diet. Their long, curved beaks are made for probing soft ground. Some people call them timberdoodles.

“What is it?” the homeless guy said. “Some kind of woodpecker?”

Alan told him what it was, reached in and took it out. He placed it on the sidewalk, where it flopped around uncontrollably. One wing was badly broken. By this time another reporter had shown up, and the three of them watched the wounded bird struggle.

I’ve never seen one myself. Alan says he kicks them up sometimes in the woods when he’s fishing up north, particularly at night — they hide until the last minute, then flush almost into your face. Once we went out to Fox Island, a county park in Fort Wayne, hoping to see them do their spring mating display. While the females stay on the ground, the males rise in long, slow spirals, then suddenly fall zig-zagging to the ground. They do this well after they’ve charmed the girls into mating; some theorize the males do it to keep the females entertained during the tedious nest-sitting.

How did it end up in a covered garbage can in downtown Detroit? The possibilities seemed endless, and impossible to know: Migrating along the Great Lakes flyway, it went astray, hit a building and fell to the ground. Perhaps. Maybe the hole of the garbage can looked like the open end of a log, and it somehow managed to fly in. Hit by a motorist? Escaped from a chef? (They’re beloved by adventurous gourmets, particularly French ones, who eat them right down to the trail, the earthworm-filled intestinal tract.) Whatever brought it here, it wasn’t going to make it to any wintering ground in the non-frozen south.

“This bird doesn’t deserve to suffer like this,” Alan said, scooping it up again. “It needs to be put out of its misery.”

“I don’t need to see that,” the homeless guy said, scuttling away. The reporter did likewise. Alan paused a mournful moment and broke the bird’s neck, then placed it back in the garbage can.

“It was a bad way to start Friday,” he said. “Kind of put me off.”

I told him that if I tell this story here, some people will say he did the wrong thing, that he should have called the Humane Society of Animal Cops or whoever, who would have tenderly nursed the bird back to health and released it in a bird sanctuary somewhere. Alan, the outdoorsman, shook his head. “It wasn’t going to get better. It was miserable. This was the right thing to do,” he said.

I believe him. Sometimes, the hardest thing is the only thing.

This happened in ONE HOUR after I put the pumpkins out on the porch today. I swear, Michigan squirrels might as well carry switchblades and have gang tattoos.

My mother had a Christmas cactus. As a houseplant, it was pretty much as advertised — easy to care for, impervious to all but the most heinous abuse. And it bloomed like clockwork every year, only not at Christmas. My mom ignored it other than regular watering, and it rewarded her by blooming at Halloween. Fortunately, its blossoms were a sort of salmon/orange color, so it went with the general Halloween theme.

I bought a Christmas cactus last year, at Christmas. It bloomed through the holidays and then threatened to die, but I repotted it and it found a new reason to live. Encouraged, I hit the internet and downloaded a multi-page document detailing exactly how I should care for it to ensure another bloom at Christmas 2006. I can’t say I followed it religiously — there was something about both lowering the temperature and reducing the light by sticking it in a cool closet. All my closets are more or less room temperature, so I opted to just leave it outside until right before first frost. The night I brought it in, it had tiny blossoms forming.

Huh. I checked the multi-page document, which said the plant should be “developing buds” in October for a holiday bloom. It went into the front window, where the development hit the gas.

And now we’re right on track to be in full flower at… Halloween:

Oh, well. It’s still very pretty. I bought pink for a reason. One gets tired of all that red and green at the holidays.

If it isn’t quite Christmas on the calendar, it felt like it was closer than it is, today. Of course this was the day Alan elected to take the boat out of the water, because nothing says “winter’s coming” like taking waves from a stiff northwest wind over your starboard bow, eh? Fortunately I wasn’t there; I was on car duty. But we got Lush Life de-masted and hoisted from the water and her bottom power-washed. Soon she’ll be on her winter cradle and buttoned up for the duration. Fun fact: If you don’t wash off the bottom slime with a hose immediately upon removal from the water — that is, before it dries — you’ll be removing it with a chisel a day later. All the books tell you this, and it must be true, because that is, quite literally, the first thing the guys at the marina do, once the hull is clear of the surface. Why can’t this miraculous substance be harnessed for good?

Pardon me if I sound rather empty-headed today. I sat for an hour this morning trying to think of something to say about the upcoming elections and realized I was as empty as a cup. What else is there to say? Bush is really really really really really really bad? The Michigan governor’s race is really really really really really depressing? Everything else feels like piling on. I know who I’m voting for, and if the election were held tomorrow, I’d be really really really really really happy to get it over with.

Here in Michigan, and everywhere else I expect, the campaigns (and hence, the ads) have entered the “desperate” state. It’s the Week of the Undecided Woman, and both campaigns are pulling out the stops. Jennifer Granholm has an ad about abortion, and Dick DeVos has one featuring his very pretty daughters and their very pearly white smiles, saying “Vote for my dad.” Both are fairly lame, but DeVos’ is lamer, as I don’t care a whit what the third generation of Amway wealth thinks of anything. But. These are desperate times. DeVos is behind, facing a candidate who has little going for her other than telegenic good looks. I guess he figures: Fire with fire. We’ll see how it works.

Still empty. I guess it’s houseplant bloggin’ until the well refills, eh?

Update: Just went through the comment spam file. It’s the usual — comments loaded with links for pharma products, porn and the like. I don’t usually go through the comment spam, except that lately it’s been catching our own Mary, and sure enough, there she was. Again. I de-spammed her, reread the part on the page where it says de-spammed comments will be resubmitted to the filters, “so that it will learn,” and wondered when this learning might take place. Ah, well. I also like to take note of the different tacks spammers are using to penetrate the filter. This is a recent hit parader:

Interesting post. I came across this blog by accident, but it was a good accident. I have now bookmarked your blog for future use. Best wishes.

Man, that says “my native language isn’t English” as well as anything, don’t you think? There’s also a naked-celebrities site that uses come-ons like this:

Remember Bacon in Footloose and Quicksilver? Now those were some classics.

Or:

I am pretty surprised that Julia Roberts is getting all politcal! I read she is supporting raising taxes on oil. That’s gotta be a pretty unpopular opinion these days.

Thanks, jerk. Into the ether with you.

Busy blog morning. You just never know what you’re going to find when you launch Google News, do you? Today I discover that the guy in Florida who was stabbed in the heart by the stingray? Was a local. Floridians must think that everyone in the world comes from Ohio or Michigan.

And now it’s pushing 11 and I haven’t done my 30 minutes of erg torture. So I’ll leave you with a quick photo and an invitation to make merry in the comments.

A little background: A few days ago, one of my favorite lemon-sucking conservative crones, Mona Charen, made a remark on the National Review’s Corner site that “childhood now ends at 8,” and girls older than that are only interested in being “vamps” for Halloween.

Please note: Charen has no daughters of her own. And you know what? She’s not only a lemon-sucking crone, she’s wrong:

Please do not look too closely at the craftsmanship on Little Red Riding Hood’s signature item. I am but mortal.