Sorry for the no-show yesterday. Work intruded, and I planned to update Monday morning, but alas — I woke up with a cold, which will teach me to make plans for what promised to be (and was) the warmest day of the year so far.

I’m not a good cold sufferer. I’m very whiny. If I didn’t have another big project due in two weeks, I’d have taken the day off and mainlined “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” all afternoon. You shouldn’t take sick days for a cold, though — it’s burning your sick-days seed corn.

So I worked. But I’m watching “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt” now. And enjoying it very much.

Can’t say so much for “House of Cards,” which has already lost me, but I may power through anyway. It has skated so far from Realityville that it’s not even fun to hate-watch anymore. However, Claire and her wardrobe — actually, everybody and their wardrobe — never fails to entertain. I’ve never seen a show where everyone dresses to match the sofas.

“Who are you wearing?”

“Restoration Hardware!”

So, as you can tell, I’m pretty tapped out. Not much bloggage, either. There’s this very good story from the NYT’s ongoing occupation of Detroit’s North End neighborhood, a look at the city’s scrapping economy, and the parties who oppose one another in it. It’s very good — glosses over a few fine points, but for a national audience? First class. Recommended.

Me, I’m going to bed. Happy St. Patrick’s Day. Maybe a shot of whiskey will cure me.

Sometimes I think this blog is reaching its sell-by date, and then we push past it and find a new sell-by date. Seriously, though, it’s been 15 years now. How much longer can it go on?

Long enough to warrant another two-pack of Costco plastic wrap, maybe. Yes, those of you who’ve been marking days on your calendar and wondering who will win the Nancy-and-Alan bet on the longevity of the Costco two-pack? I think those who chose Alan will get this one, because the second roll is dwindling.

This all started when the first two-pack ran out, and I said, “Jeez, I think I bought this not long after we moved here. That means it lasted almost five years. So this two-pack will last until, what? Kate’s senior year in high school.” At least, that’s how I remember the conversation: Kate’s senior year in high school. The blog reveals I said, “Kate’s freshman year in college.” But they will both happen in 2015, won’t they? I’m considering this a draw. Alan differs.

Neither of us remembers what the stakes are. Probably best that it’s lost to the mists of time.

So.

Another interesting piece by Conor Friedersdorf on the Ferguson case, posting a key question, i.e., why aren’t conservatives more incensed about the Justice Department report on the little kingdom of official larceny by the Mississip’? After all, a founding principle of the movement is that government will naturally overreach, and that it should be resisted. But this virtual definition of government overreach has been greeted by…not exactly crickets, but certainly not a unified front of resistance.

If nothing else, it gives you a sense of what a hack factory the National Review is these days.

Any “Game of Thrones” fans in the house? Then you’ll be interested in this Zapruder-esque fly-specking of the latest Season 5 trailer, with all sorts of fly-specky details.

What else do I have? Not much. It was a deadline day, and my energy was elsewhere. We’ll try tomorrow.

Not a great weekend, but a productive one. Taxes, filed. (REFUND!) FAFSA, updated. (LESS EXPECTED FAMILY CONTRIBUTION!) And after it was all over, I stood up and put my hands on my hips and felt infrastructure.

I should explain. Six months ago I started adding side planks to my workout. One minute each side, three times a week at the end of the session. Today? Infrastructure. So y’all run out and start doing some side planks. Your waistline will thank you.

Seriously, though, there’s something about shoveling this great chore into the Outbox that just feels like springtime. A few years ago, I filed and immediately went on Craigslist and bought a Tiffany chain — this one, although not this one — from a woman, exchanging goods for cash in a Costco parking lot. I wear that chain several times a month and don’t regret a penny of the $75 I paid for it. (“My grandmother bought it for me, and I just…don’t like it,” she said. Excellent. She wasn’t the plain-silver-chain type, anyway.)

And why do I do the taxes? Because Alan does stuff like paint the dining room and bleach the mold out of the washer, which was his weekend project.

There was some fun, too: The Deadly Vipers played Friday night at the Hamtramck Music Festival. They were the last act at one of the venues, and the crowd seemed to dig it. I shot a bunch of hail mary pix with my phone, and they were the usual mixed bag. I was trying to capture the moshing, which was too close to the band for my comfort, but that’s how it goes in bars:

And then every so often you got a fun moment. BUDWEISER:

We also watched “Foxcatcher” because I was too tired to go out Saturday night, and it was, what’s the word? Disappointing. Tonally self-important, and the story was just sort of boring. Vanessa Redgrave, meanwhile, has three scenes as a nearly-dead WASP dowager, and manages to steal every one. Because she’s Vanessa Redgrave.

And now the winds have finally shifted and a breeze is blowing out of the southwest, and by Wednesday we are promised 50 degrees. Mirabile dictu.

So, did you catch the president’s speech at Selma? If you have only one thing to read about it, make it this. It was such a great speech; I can’t wait to see what the lunatics find to hate about it.

Comic relief: Tom and Lorenzo and a million pictures of “fashion clown Kim Kardashian,” who looks incredibly weird. (That said, I’m adding some blonde chunks to my hair the next touch-up I get, because why the hell not.)

Seems a good note to start Monday. Enjoy yours.

I was following the comments about stinky factories in the previous thread. It made me recall a line from an older Jim Harrison novel: If you think a belching smokestack is ugly, try one that isn’t. It was a fact underlined over and over when I was up north last month — good jobs for working-class people are likely to be smelly and/or ugly.

We pulled up to the foundry that’s the heart of East Jordan Iron Works, and it’s this big, steam-belching deal on the shores of a lovely lake. It doesn’t look right, but the parking lot is full of $50,000 pickup trucks and everyone who works there loves their overtime.

A few years ago, there was a photo story in the New York Times about the foundry in India where Con Ed, the local electrical utility, has their manhole covers made. East Jordan Iron Works makes manhole covers for virtually every city in Michigan and many more around the world. The NYT photos showed conditions that would horrify most modern eyes, of barefoot men working around cauldrons of molten iron, sparks flying, the whole bit, all for the usual wage of third-world peanuts. The plants in Michigan pay very well.

Work is frequently done in ugly, smelly places. We can’t all be college professors.

So, how was your weekend? The cold hung on and hung on and is supposed to let up…Tuesday. Well above freezing, 37 whole degrees. Woo! And then? Cold again. FML. I could use a week in Mexico right around now.

And then we went out to the movies. Saw “Maps to the Stars,” yet another David Cronenberg cup of poison that, when the lights go up, make you cackle bleakly. The screening was at Cinema Detroit, located in an old elementary school in the heart of the Cass Corridor — the film is shown in the school auditorium. But the seats are in surprisingly good shape. So much in Detroit is strange, and so much of the strangeness is being paved over by a certain pan-yuppie familiarity, it’s nice to see some things are still the old way.

News: Grand Rapids revels in its low murder rate, the headline says. For some reason, it makes me giggle.

NYT: How to dress to complement your dog.

And that’s what I got. I hope you got a little more, and a good week ahead.

Something I learned today: Michigan is the only state in the nation that explicitly forbids discrimination based on height and weight.

There’s been talk of adding sexual orientation to the state’s civil-rights law, but in the current legislature, that’s unlikely to happen. A little googling reveals that height and weight were added in 1976, and it was the foundation of a suit brought five years ago by a Hooters waitress — 5-foot-8 and 132 pounds, who was pressured to lose more weight, so as to fit into a size-XS uniform.

In the comments, some guy refers to her as “a porker.” Which put me in mind of this, semi-NSFW. We are so cruel to one another, but only in the comments sections are we cruel to young women who can’t squeeze into an XS.

The other thing worth reading today is this Frank Rich piece on Ben Carson, or “Dr. Ben Carson,” as he’s popularly known. Cutting right to the point:

Thanks to his status as the political equivalent of a unicorn, Carson qualifies for the most elite affirmative-action program in America, albeit one paradoxically administered by a party opposed to affirmative-action programs. Simply put: If an African-American raises his hand to run for president as a Republican, he (they’ve all been men) will instantly be cheered on as a serious contender by conservative grandees, few or no questions asked. He is guaranteed editorials like the one in the Journal, accolades from powerful talk-show hosts (Carson would make “a superb president,” says Mark Levin), and credulous profiles like the one Fred Barnes contributed to The Weekly Standard last month. Barnes’s piece regurgitated spin from Carson’s political circle, typified by his neophyte campaign chief Terry Giles, a criminal litigator whose clients have included Richard Pryor, Enron’s Kenneth Lay, and an estate-seeking son of Anna Nicole Smith’s elderly final husband. “If nominated, can Carson beat Hillary Clinton or another Democrat?” Barnes asked—and then answered the question himself: “Yes, he can.” How? By winning 17 percent of the black vote in swing states—a theoretical percentage offered by a co-founder of the Draft Carson movement.

There’s no reason that a small-government black conservative Republican couldn’t be elected president—a proposition that might have been tested by Colin Powell and no doubt will be by other black Republicans one day. But not today. There have been three Great Black Presidential Hopes in the GOP’s entire history, Carson included—all of them in the past two decades. None has had a chance of victory in a national election, not least because none of the three ever won any elective office. None can be classified as presidential timber without a herculean suspension of disbelief. Indeed, the two Great Hopes before Carson were a buffoon with congenital financial woes and a two-time settler of sexual-harassment suits. But they, too, were praised to the skies by their Republican cheering section up until—and sometimes past—their inevitable implosions. And not without reason. There is a political method to this madness that reaches its culmination with Carson.

If nothing else, it’s an entertaining walk down memory lane. I’d forgotten about Alan Keyes. And Herman Cain is probably best left that way.

Whoa, but I’m sort of whipped. Let’s try again later.

The cold abated this weekend. It went clear up to the high 20s, which felt like beach weather. We were promised snow, just in case we thought the near-thaw was a prelude to spring, but only a dusting fell, and the forecast is for more subzero cold, arriving today (Monday).

On Saturday I bought a pair of fleece-lined tights, and if you were reading this on a text message, I would insert a thumbs-up emoji right here. Instead I’ll note that today is a prelude to spring, because everything in winter is, in some way. Sunset is a full hour later than it was at Christmastime, and sunrise ditto. Believe me, the early-morning exerciser notices these things. It takes our minds off the fact our hair is freezing.

It hasn’t been a terrible February. We’ve had parties to attend each of the last three weekends, and Saturday’s was at the home of one of the old filmmaking crew’s, so there were lots of jokes about getting the band back together. I doubt we will, but it was fun to catch up. One of our number is a pretty high-level IT guy, and was describing an incident in which some guy nearly crashed the internet for a very large ISP through one mistake. “The more you learn about any complicated system, the more you come away thinking it’s a miracle it works at all,” he said. Amen to that, brother.

Sunday I read this story in the NYT:

On the nights when she has just seven hours between shifts at a Taco Bell in Tampa, Fla., Shetara Brown drops off her three young children with her mother. After work, she catches a bus to her apartment, takes a shower to wash off the grease and sleeps three and a half hours before getting back on the bus to return to her job.

…Employees are literally losing sleep as restaurants, retailers and many other businesses shrink the intervals between shifts and rely on smaller, leaner staffs to shave costs. These scheduling practices can take a toll on employees who have to squeeze commuting, family duties and sleep into fewer hours between shifts. The growing practice of the same workers closing the doors at night and returning to open them in the morning even has its own name: “clopening.”

This is the second story about this phenomenon I’ve seen recently; the other was also in the NYT, and looked at a single mother at a single business – Starbucks, if I recall correctly. The story led to some red-faced corrections on the part of Starbucks, but as this one makes clear, the practice is widespread across fast food, retail and other service businesses. There are some reasons this isn’t 100 percent a human-rights issue…

Some managers say there are workers who don’t mind clopenings — like students who have classes Monday through Friday and want to cram in a lot of weekend work hours to maximize their pay.

Tightly scheduled shifts seem to have become more common for a number of reasons. Many fast-food restaurants and other service businesses have high employee turnover, and as a result they are often left with only a few trusted workers who have the authority and experience to close at night and open in the morning.

…but at the same time, you have to ask yourself: Hmm, why high turnover? Maybe because the money is bad and the hours are torture. What’s the solution? Keep the money low and the hours ditto, and hope a unicorn drops off an application.

Come the revolution, the quants and MBAs who dreamed this stuff up will be the first to the guillotines, and who will cry for them? Maybe their mothers. Meanwhile, our own Jolene passed this along, via her Facebook network:

That’s the workaday world these days.

And here’s the workaday week, upon us. Another thumbs-up emoji here for a good one.

For the record, my family knows how to do laundry. I do the laundry because I’m a control freak and I like it done the way I like it done, but friends? That’s going to change. I’m done washing those goddamn towels.

You wouldn’t think laundry would be a high-skill job, but with all the fast-fashion items out there in weird fabrics, and my mania to reduce dry-cleaning bills, it can get a little complicated. Cold-water wash, low-temperature dry — ah, it’s a muddle.

But towels are uncomplicated. Wash, dry, fold, bing-bam-boom.

That was Thursday.

So much good linkage today, let’s just get to it.

This story is basically a shortened, condensed version of the Michael Kruse Politico piece on Jeb Bush and the Terri Schiavo case, spiced up with some obvious point of view. Still, worth reading. I’d forgotten how awful that skirmish in the culture wars was, but you shouldn’t. It also led me to this obviously sympathetic, 10-year-old profile of Michael Schiavo’s new woman, but hey — life is complicated.

How complicated? CLOWNS, THAT’S HOW COMPLICATED.

Finally, Ta’Nehisi Coates’ remembrance of David Carr brought me to tears. We should always have a mentor like this is our lives, but few of us are that lucky.

Oliver Sacks is on his way out. Another sad story.

Have a great weekend, all.

Sorry for the no-show yesterday. I was planning to write an information-dense, four- to five-paragraph press release for Kate’s band’s press kit instead of blogging, then I decided to blog instead, and then I ended up doing neither.

Yeah, I ended up watching the dog show. But I went to bed after the Russells. Didn’t see the beagle win. I don’t worry about missing things on TV anymore, because everything’s on YouTube the following day.

So, a day off.

A little housekeeping before you get bored: The poverty-in-paradise project concludes today, and my part is on how Aspen and Jackson Hole have instituted affordable-housing programs amid spiking real-estate prices. The Jackson Hole portion came with the help of our own MarkH, yay NN.c commentariat. That link won’t work until after 6:05 a.m. EST, mind you. The other two main pieces, on two schools up north and the exodus of young workers, are pretty good, too. There are also some short pieces; you can start here and cycle through.

That out of the way, let’s start a discussion about towels. Dirty towels. Or not-dirty ones.

Lately I feel like all I do is wash towels. Every week, I do four loads of clothing and three of goddamn towels. A while back I stopped using a fresh one every day, because what does a towel do? You step out of the shower, clean, and use it to absorb clean water from your body. Does that require a new towel every time? I think not. But I live with two people who get a fresh one every time, and that adds up to MORE GODDAMN TOWELS in the wash than you can imagine.

I started college during a summer term, one of the steamiest I’ve ever endured, and in un-air conditioned dorms. It was two- or three-shower a day weather, and I quickly ran out of towels. I’d rotate them through, hoping I could find a dry one by the time the next shower rolled around. So I’m not some hotel-dwelling, fresh-towel-every-handwash petunia. Have I underlined this enough? You don’t need a fresh towel every day.

That is all. Now to wash another load of practically clean towels.

Did you all see Neely Tucker’s WashPost piece on how Harper Lee was manipulated into publishing her first draft of what became “To Kill a Mockingbird?” You should. There’s no way I would buy this book, and unlikely I’d even read it.

The president explains why he won’t call ISIS “Islamic extremists,” as the ravening chorus is demanding he do:

“They are not religious leaders; they are terrorists,” Obama said during remarks at a White House event on countering violent extremism. “We are not at war with Islam. We are at war with people who have perverted Islam.”

Obama said the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, also known as ISIS or ISIL, is “desperate” to portray itself as a group of holy warriors defending Islam. It counts on that legitimacy, he said, to propagate the idea that Western countries are at war with Islam, which is how it recruits and radicalizes young people.

“We must never accept the premise that they put forward, because it is a lie,” he said.

Of course this won’t work, but it’s nice to hear.

The midweek hump is behind us. Let’s coast to the weekend.

So, the Dirty Show. It’s been going on since we’ve lived here, but this was our first time going. John Waters was the draw, of course – we’ve both been fans for a while, Alan of his movies and me of his post-Hairspray persona as this cuddly post-smutmeister who keeps telling people what a smutmeister he is.

His one-man show is raw, but also funny, which makes the raw go down easy. “What ever happened to pubic hair? I went to court to show bush. Now no one has one.” He talks about his parents a lot. He talks about assholes (the real ones, the ones we all have). He talks about his projects; when I heard his Hairspray-sequel TV series, currently in development hell, is called “White Lipstick,” I knew he would get it all right. He manages to come across as a perv and your favorite uncle all at the same time.

Afterward, he did a signing that went on for hours and hours. Everybody got a picture. We didn’t participate, as we were busy touring the rest of show, trying to find the pearls among an awful lot of bad oysters. It’s not that I find the human body artless, it’s just that you have to do more with it than just show me a big red dick. And dicks were scarce compared to the seemingly endless parade of tits ‘n’ vulvas. The sideshows were more interesting, including a touring burlesque show featuring a dwarf stripper and a man whose whole act was a hymn to the hot dog. There was also one of those gymnasts who performs aloft suspended and entwined in a long length of cloth, whatever they’re called. At first I thought she was nude, but after she came down I saw she was wearing a flesh-colored bodysuit with the anatomy spray painted on, and quite well.

Really, the only thing left to the imagination was why so many women into baroque lingerie, especially corsetry, are overweight.

I only saw one piece I could take home, a sketch that looked like a bunch of birds of paradise flowers but turned out to be, yes, more vulvas. But it was clever. And alas, it had a red “sold” sticker on it.

The rest of the weekend was half fun, half duty — a wedding, plus FAFSA and related forms. The wedding was at the National Shrine of the Little Flower, better known as Father Coughlin’s old church. Which is spectacular. Fr. Coughlin was the original Rush Limbaugh, and had quite the career until the diocese reined him in. The church has a theater-in-the-round thing going on; the first guests weren’t sure where to sit, but we all figured it out. The bride was beautiful, the groom flubbed some hand-holding instructions and we all went out to face the cold front howling in. Current temperature: 2 below, and the night has only begun.

Let’s hope we get a little relief by the end of the week, but I’m not hopeful.

Hey, I’m back. That felt like a long trip, and I guess by most standards, it was: I was gone from predawn Tuesday to Friday twilight, and I barely had a minute to myself, although at one point I turned on the TV just for the noise of company and actually watched a few minutes of a Real Housewives episode.

What a wonder! I’ve never beheld this spectacle for more time than it takes to change channels or watch Jon Stewart mock them on “The Daily Show.” I’m not clueless. I know the basic gimmick: An assembly of polished, high-dollar women are followed by camera crews as they go about their days, with various trumped-up activities thrown in to give them something to do. Sometimes they sit around their lavish kitchens and drink wine. Sometimes they go to parties and drink wine. On this particular day, the Beverly Hills flock was arriving at some sort of reception or opening or something similar in one of those southern California restaurant courtyards that makes a Michigander wonder why she doesn’t live there.

Everyone wears a curve-hugging sleeveless sheath dress. Everyone’s hair falls in barrel curls. Everyone’s makeup is perfect, if a bit overdone. (Lots of false eyelashes.) Everyone air-kisses. Everyone drinks wine. And then the “reality” begins, as one character approaches another for a tete-a-tete. I have no idea what they’re talking about, but apparently there’s some bad blood there.

“What do I have to do?” one asks. “Eat your pussy?”

Whoa. This is basic cable now? A scene of comic relief followed, in which all the housewives discuss cunnilingus. (The relief comes from one who hasn’t ever heard the term.) And then suddenly I had a camera-pulls-back moment and realized I was actually watching “Real Housewives of Beverly Hills,” and turned it off.

I swear, we are going to be cutting the cable cord very soon.

The rest of the trip was very nice. I was reporting a project that will appear in another couple of weeks, concerning conditions at the tip of the mitten. Along the way I met some almost freakishly nice people – it’s true what they say about friendliness around here – and saw a lot of good and bad and beautiful things. Of course, ice covers the water, but ski season is in full swing. One night I peeled off to the dark-sky park up there, the Headlands.

True to Connie’s warning, the stargazing was subpar with a bright, waxing moon in the western sky, but Orion looked close enough to touch and the moon was a veritable spotlight. I was absolutely alone out there, and the weird feeling that started as I pulled in began to build. It was helped along by the various information stations on the road in, which featured life-size human cutouts; I only recognized one (Galileo), so I gather the others were pioneering astronomers, too. But with the single-digit cold, the blazing moon, the snow-covered road and the utter absence of other humans, it all took on a sort of Blair Witch vibe: WHAT IS THAT? WHO IS STANDING IN THE WOODS? Ohit’sjustGalileo. I stopped the car at the very end, got out and looked up. The silence was absolute. There was no wind, so the ice wasn’t shifting out in the Straits of Mackinac. No rustling from the surrounding woods. No owls. Even the cooling car engine seemed to stop ticking in just a minute or two. I strained to hear anything, but the best I could do was the far-far-off laboring of a big engine, probably a logging truck on the Mackinac Bridge.

All this while standing in the clearing, under the moon. I watch “Game of Thrones.” If a White Walker had emerged from the forest on a zombie horse, I wouldn’t have been surprised.

I stood there until the cold penetrated deeply enough to make me uncomfortable, and left. I’m going back this summer, I think. There’s a guest house there you can rent. Alan will love it.

So that was sort of the sublime and ridiculous of the trip. Now to write all these stories.

In the meantime, I have some bloggage, some of which you posted in the comments last week.

A dive into Jeb Bush’s role in the Terri Schiavo catastrophe, reported and written for Politico by the talented Michael Kruse. Long, but well worth your time.

Something you’ve probably heard of, but didn’t know there was a name for: Tip-overs, the hazard that kills a few children every year, and doesn’t need to. If you have little kids at home, be advised.

Finally, a Free Press story simultaneously inspiring and infuriating: A Detroit man walks 21 miles, every single work day, to get to his job. From the timeline I gather he has about four hours in his day when he’s not getting to, or doing, his job. I hope with all my heart that by the time you read this, some kindhearted used-car dealer has gifted him with reliable transportation, and the rest of us have donated money to pay his insurance bill.

And so the week begins. We’re currently in the midst of a snowmageddon, and my poor baby has to work tonight — at the pizza place where she’s been since the fall. A pizza place on Super Bowl Sunday during an 8-inch snowfall? It’ll be a character-builder for sure.