OK, I’m declaring it. The worst of the cold is over. Has to be. On Friday it will be 30 degrees. It will also be the last day of January. As my friend Mark used to say, “If you get to February, it’s practically over.” That’s not true, Groundhog Day foolishness to the contrary, but it’s close enough to true that you can fool yourself about it for a while. Then it’s Valentine’s Day, the traditional time to have an ice storm at this latitude, and then it’s just a fortnight until the shortest month of the year is over, and it’s March. First St. Patrick’s Day, then the first day of spring really arrives, along around the three-week mark. Then opening day, the first green mist on the trees.

Of course, this being Michigan, there will be a few snows in there, too. Last year I had my eye surgery on May 2. The spring leading up to it was awful, and the warmth arrived just as I was spending five days staring through my padded toilet seat.

So: Just (potentially) three more months of winter! But you see how I chopped it up like that? It’s just a series of fortnights and little mini-holidays.

But the -7 bullshit of this morning? OVER. So let it be written, so let it be done.

Seems like a day for a You Fuckers roundup. I was in a toleratin’-it mood until 3 p.m., when I called the bakery to find out what was left before I trudged over there, and discovered the entire place had been cleaned out. Time for some fuckers.

Perhaps you’ve heard about the jihad against Wendy Davis, aka “Abortion Barbie,” who is said to have slept her way into marriage to an affluent man, who then had to “raise their kids alone” while she went off to Harvard Law school. The slut! How dare she…do what conservatives counsel poor women to do, i.e., boost her socioeconomic status through marriage? Well — it shouldn’t surprise you to learn this — it turns out that it’s not entirely true. So: Fuckers.

And then there’s the National Review, specifically Kathryn Jean Lopez, abortion warrior, and this thing. I think Roy Edroso said it best: Put the family through hell with your ghoulish wingnut theology, then weep crocodile tears over them. Fuckers.

Not part of the roundup: Madonna, what are you doing? Asks Lindy West.

Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow.

While we’re on the subject of olive oil, I actually have a couple of bottles around the place at the moment. My cheap-o go-to is Costco’s big bottle. I think it’s around $12. But while doing my final holiday shopping, I saw Colavita on sale in the Eastern Market, for about $10. Bought some. I thought I’d compare labels:

Costco: “Produced from Italian-grown olives.” Colavita: “Premium world selection.” They went to the trouble of putting a hang tag on the neck of the bottle. You can read it if your eyes aren’t too bad — it’s the United Nations of blends.

And here I thought Costco was the cheater, because they started using green-tinted bottles a few months ago.

And now you know. This is what we get up to in the deep freeze.

It was actually a pretty productive day, all things considered. It was also one of those days when a shower seemed like a big accomplishment. If you’ve ever been a work-at-home employee, you know what I mean. I was awakened at 3:30 a.m. by a text message from the city, telling me we’d received three inches overnight, and the plows were being rounded up. Gee, thanks. I tried to get back to sleep, but didn’t do much more of it. I blew the snow for Kate and Alan. Made a bunch of phone calls. Read some stuff, wrote some stuff, made a late-afternoon Kroger run, and the whole place was like the Crips and Bloods — not enough carts, not enough checkout lines, malfunctioning scanners, a ridiculous mess in the parking lot.

School is called off for tomorrow. I am looking forward to sleeping late.

And if it isn’t glaringly obvious by now, I have very little to offer today. There is…

…Ross Douchehat, living up to the name.

Meanwhile, it’s going to 10 below tonight, and I still have to do some dishes.

Tuesday.

I realize we’ve been doing a lot of weather-bitching this winter, but this week we have coming up is going to test us all. After seven days of miserable cold, it warmed up just enough to dump a few more inches of snow on our heads and today and tomorrow? Single-digit highs, subzero low, and fuck you too. Will there be school? Don’t know yet. Will there be misery? Almost certainly. Will there be the small compensation of the abatement of my cold? Based on today’s tissue consumption, don’t think so.

I know, I know, in a few weeks this will all be over. Maybe a few days. Still.

Bitching complete. At least on that score.

Watched “Mitt” this weekend. It didn’t make me like him any better. In fact, it rather made me like him less. At one point, he ticks off the terrible taxes that a small business owner has to pay — federal, FICA, state, real estate, etc. “It goes to the government,” he said. Of course, these are taxes we all have to pay, too, only I’ve found it helps if you think of “the government” as an imperfect structure that inspects our food, repairs freeway overpasses, educates children and, of course, funds our never-ending supply of military operations around the globe. Pay a teacher a salary, and you know what he does with it? He buys houses, cat food and shoes. It’s an economy.

Now if you want to see money fly away and never been seen again, see what Bain Capital does with its profits. I also got peevish during the family’s final meeting before the concession on election night, and Mittens made a little speech about how the country was headed for a big-government tipping point within five years and, essentially, all is lost. Only a man who grew up the son of a major automotive executive and governor, educated at the finest schools money can buy, someone who beamed from Harvard straight into management consulting, whose wife was able to say with a straight face that they knew hard times because sometimes they had to “sell stock” to cover the bills, among about a million other instances of aggravated cluelessness — only he could get away with that and not have everyone else in the room pelt him with dinner rolls.

I also saw “Captain Phillips,” which was pretty good, an action movie with a conscience. Maybe when I don’t feel like my head is full of gunk, we can talk about that one.

For now, a skip to the bloggage:

Thanks, Dexter, for digging up this photo gallery from a California trail cam. It’s nice to see a place not covered with snow.

Your Italian extra-virgin olive oil is 69 percent likely to be not Italian, not extra virgin, and maybe not even olive oil.

Finally, as bad as it is where you are, take heart if you don’t have children in Louisiana public schools. Appalling. Infuriating and appalling.

A good week to all. Let’s hope it’s warmer by the end of it.

Neil Steinberg had a great blog yesterday, about his intention to see the entire Ring cycle at Chicago’s Lyric Opera in 2020. For you non-opera fans, this is the four-part, 15-hour magnum opus of Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Niebelung,” the most operatic opera of all. Staging it is the Mt. Everest of opera, and watching it is pretty much the same. In Chicago…

The first opera in the cycle, “Das Rheingold,” will be staged in the 2016/17 season, with the other three, “Die Walkure,” “Siegried” and “Gotterdammerung” performed in each subsequent season, with the whole megillah, as Wagner definitely would not say, being performed — three complete Ring Cycles — in April, 2020.

Mark your calendars.

What I liked about it, though, were his observations on Big Works, and why they’re still important:

…like a mountain, a massive work calls to you. Not by its pure massivity, mind you. There are plenty of works that are long, multi-part 19th century romance novels and such, that have fallen into deserved obscurity.

But certain long works endure into our Twittery time, not because they’re big, but because they’re also good. Very good, wonderful, something that becomes clear when you gird your loins and finally sit down and read them. If they weren’t, they’d be forgotten. People don’t hold onto these things because they should, but because they have to. War and Peace is the template for every Barbara Cartland novel that followed. It isn’t tedious — well, much of it isn’t — but filled with love and conversation, with blood and battle, with war and, umm, peace. It’s a great book. That sounds obvious, but so many years of it being a “great book” sometimes obscure that. Tolstoy knew his stuff.

I need to read a great work this summer. So much depends on translation, though, and how do you choose the right one? I started “Dr. Zhivago” when I found a copy at a vacation house we rented years ago, but absolutely couldn’t penetrate it. Just show me one hint of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, I kept thinking. Nothing doing.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. So many great books have been adapted into something else, and necessarily sliced down to a shadow of their original selves. We need to approach them as something completely new. On the other hand, Steinberg does a nice job explaining why the Ring is pretty much the single source for all opera jokes in pop culture; it is where the fat lady sang, after all.

OK, a quick cut to the bloggage, because this has been one long icy-lumpy-fuck week:

Columbusites! Remember Larry’s bar on High Street? Here’s a lot of old pictures from the place. I wasn’t a regular, but I loved that place.

I just found this, but it MUST BE SHARED. Of course Wendy’s day-care center posts daily photos; how else would her humans get through a day without her? (This is from Monday, obvs.)

Finally, can the Marlise Munoz case in Texas get any worse? Hard to imagine. How awful.

Let’s all have a good weekend.

I don’t want to continually moan about the weather, but it’s fairly moan-worthy. Last night we were all watching “Silver Linings Playbook” when Wendy slipped out of the room for about two minutes, then slipped back in. I went upstairs after the big dance number and found a puddle on the bathmat, next to the toilet. Hey, it was 4 degrees! And everybody else goes in this room!

Dogs. Right now, she’s snoozing on Kate’s lap. Scorin’ some cute points.

So, a while back I saw a piece on how badly stories about the Affordable Care Act are being reported in the nation’s hinterlands. I thought of that when I read this story, here in Michigan, this week. It informs us that the family, the Daverts, every one of whom is disabled, “fall within a niche that makes the Affordable Care Act more of a burden than a blessing. Now, they say, they’ll be paying nearly $8,000 more per year for medical care after being denied coverage through Obamacare.”

The father has cerebral palsy; the mother and their children all have osteogensis imperfecta, which leaves them with very fragile bones. The adults get disability, and I can’t believe they earn much. Michigan did Medicaid expansion, but (the mother) “went on to say that her family is not eligible for Medicaid because they come from a working background.” What?

Read the details, and what it appears happened is, they tried to insure their children separately, probably unnecessarily — because I can’t believe they aren’t Medicaid-eligible, and/or the kids aren’t covered under an S-CHIP plan — and fell into a morass that many people are trying to extricate them from. I’m very confused, as the mother says the kids are CHIP insured, but it “only assists in matters directly linked to their bone disease.” This makes no sense.

But hey, let the quotes roll:

Despite their quandary, the Daverts say they are not seeking handouts or anything of the sort from the public. Rather, they’re seeking to let others know what can befall them.

“We’re coming forward to educate the community, that if these kinds of costs can be imposed on our family, it can be imposed on any family,” Missy Davert said. “A word of caution is to take notice and if they do think the system is unfair, to speak out.

“It’s frustrating to me. It seems more and more our government has become a controlling power when the power is supposed to be with the people. I’m not saying this law isn’t good for some people. I’m really happy for those people (being helped), and I’m not trying to take away what they’ve gained, but it’s also hurting many people.”

Toooo perfect, those quotes.

This is the week that will never end. I had a dental cleaning today that felt like a jackhammer, I got 427 emails and 398 of them seemed to be cross-talk. But a few good interviews, and those are always good. A little bloggage:

The 25 most common passwords. One is, yes, “password.”

A little more about the Florida movie-theater shooting.

The cold seems to be in retreat. Fingers crossed.

The things we do for our animals. We’re going on vacation soon, for the first time since Wendy’s been part of the family. After four months in a shelter, I couldn’t bear the thought of her sitting in a kennel-type situation. So I investigated a group boarding facility, the main business of which is dog day care. Before they’d accept her, she had to have a dry run, a get-acquainted day to make sure she could follow the rules and so forth.

And yes, she passed:

You will not be surprised to learn they have webcams. (And that Alan checked it today. She was running around like a happy maniac.)

Well, I do want her to be well-cared for when we’re gone.

I’m not 100 percent comfortable with the elevation of pets to human status in middle-class culture, even as I acknowledge they are better companions than many members of our species. I can take a laughing reference to “fur babies,” but I think many of the people who throw around terms like that aren’t doing so lightly. There’s a new pet store in my neighborhood that should be called Thanks to the Chinese Juggernaut! because if it weren’t for the pet poisonings of a few years back, surely there wouldn’t be this vast market for organic, 100 percent natural pet food, would there? It’s frightfully expensive, and there’s nothing like spending $50 for a 20-pound bag to convince you every penny is worth it.

Wendy eats Eukanuba. It’s not cheap. ($38/20 lbs.) It used to be considered gourmet. The pet-store people smile indulgently when I lug it to the counter. You’ll come around, their eyes say. Your fur baby deserves it.

Pals, after the revelry of the weekend, I have finally been felled — a cold, nothing serious, but the last thing I want to do is stare at this laptop another damn minute. You guys play nice, and I’ll try to rally tomorrow, OK?

If I get through the North American International Auto Show Charity Preview tonight, aka the Car Prom, it will be a damn miracle. Things just aren’t going my way. For weeks, I’ve been wondering if my poor knees can stand three hours in high heels, and to be sure, the heels I have don’t really work with my dress, but fuck it, these are about the most comfortable heels I can find (they have cork soles), and some things have to give when you’ve recently lost an ACL.

But now it’s worse, as today, I was fetching one from the closet for a final try-on, and what happened? I dropped it on my foot. The heel landed with the feeling of a scimitar to my third toe, just blinding pain. Hours later, it’s a vivid shade of purple and it hurts to walk. Oh, well — pain is how ladies roll at formal events.

It’s been snowing, anyway. I may well schlep to the event in my L.L. Bean boots with my shoes in a bag. We’re already going on the People Mover; you can call me the Spirit of Detroit.

Ouch.

OK, I have to make this short, because the end of the week is nigh and, well, see above. I see Neil Steinberg is no fan of the new Chicago Cubs mascot, Clark the Cub. It puts me in mind of when the Fort Wayne Wizards moved to a new stadium, and rebranded as the Tin Caps, the historical reference for which can be found via Wikipedia. I got an email from a lurker on this blog, asking if I could come up with an alternative team name on very short notice. I suggested “the Rivermen,” which I’m still sort of fond of. But the Tin Caps is what it was, and what it has stayed. Go with God, Tin Caps.

A not-safe-for-work photo array, but hugely beautiful — a lovely yoga practitioner, doing so in stark nakedness. It’s one of those photo essays that’s so beautiful it transcends sex; I found myself mostly examining her musculature. I’m sure you guys will be examining something else, but be forewarned. Not for the office.

Finally, I know some of you remember Marcia, who used to comment here a couple of years ago. You might not know that her family hit a rough patch for a while, culminating in the death of her nephew, just weeks before his graduation from Duke law school. There’s a final chapter to the story, and it’s a good read. Drink it in.

A good weekend, all!

Our old refrigerator started making a sound Alan diagnosed as a death rattle recently, and the thought of it going toes-up in the middle of the most stressful week of his work year drove us to Sears last weekend for a replacement. It was delivered Wednesday. Looking at its pristine, LED-lit interior, I considered styling it like a refrigerator ad, with a crown roast of pork and a whole, pristine cake, just for the hell of it. But instead, I put all the stuff from the old fridge inside and now I offer you this intimate glimpse of our family’s refrigerated life:

It’s pretty full, I know, but that’s the way it usually is. In the bottom drawers: Kale, beets, way too much spinach, celery, garlic and a red bell pepper. In the meat drawer: Sliced ham, Italian sausage, chicken filets and way too much bacon. Up top, citrus, yogurt, a pie crust (secret shame! Pillsbury!), pico de gallo, leftovers and a lone Lender’s bagel (don’t blame me; Kate likes them). And yep, there’s plenty of likker in there, too. Did I mention it’s auto-show week?

Every so often I’ll see a magazine feature where a reporter/photographer team takes us into the refrigerators of famous people, and even when it’s allegedly a surprise pop-in, they always seems suspiciously perfect. Maybe the rich and famous employ servants to color-coordinate the fridge and stack all those pop cans and bottled juices. But this is my actual fridge as of Wednesday morning.

The sweet vermouth is due to an excess of bourbon in the house at the moment. We’re fooling around with manhattans this winter. Last year it was vodka cocktails. We are not alcoholics. For the first time in my life I have a through-the-door water dispenser. GOD I FEEL RICH.

OK. Since we’re already into all-caps, I also feel the need for a YOU FUCKERS roundup. I was reading about the retired cop who shot the man in the movie theater for texting. He certainly is a fucker, but I’m thinking the all-caps YOU FUCKER has to be reserved for the people who made him so crazy and paranoid that he felt the need to pack heat to watch a movie. Unfortunately, that is pretty much the entire culture, except for all of us. Too many FUCKERS.

Have you heard of the Shriver Report yet? Apparently Maria Shriver — born into wealth and privilege and never left it for even a minute — has discovered her own gender, and wants to uplift it. So she made a report, and it was bound in book form, and she presented it to the president! And then, because there is no media story that cannot be made even more appalling, she did a piece for NBC News about her own report, and how she presented it. And then, because this report is truly in touch with the American woman and how she works today, guess who is in the report, quoted as an expert on gender-based pay inequality? Beyoncé! Because even though Queen Bey earns on a roughly equivalent level as her husband, she has to dance around in revealing clothing in high heels, I guess.

You can’t make this shit up.

Here’s Shriver, that FUCKER, presenting her report to the president. You can tell from the look on his face that he’s going to cancel all his afternoon appointments and read this thing from cover to cover:

Jon Hamm isn’t a FUCKER, but he plays one on television, and he’s back at it. April, folks.

And with that, I have some chores to do. I will not have to clean the refrigerator, though.

I love eavesdropping. It’s my favorite vice, and I will do it without apology anywhere I can get away with it. The other day, at the bread store, a single clerk was left in charge as yet another impending winter storm sent half the world out for French toast supplies. Fortunately, the two college-age women ahead of me in line were chatterboxes.

“They get mad because I don’t want to get up at 7 a.m. on my vacation and go work out with them.”

“You work out with your parents?”

“They made us all do it, starting when we were kids. They also tell me the calorie content of every single thing I put in my mouth. Sometimes my mom freaks out because she thinks she’s getting fat, so she goes on these juice cleanses. I want to tell her, ‘Mom, if you’d lay off the wine and chocolate, you wouldn’t have to do that.'”

Oh, this is good stuff. Go slower, clerk. I want to hear more of this. And I did. Mom and dad went to Hawaii the year they both turned 50, a trip they called “Hawaii five-oh.” When they retire, they’re moving to Italy. At least that’s what they say now. It might be Hawaii. Anyway, the daughter is in some sort of professional program where client confidentiality is important, but her mother “makes her” talk about her cases, which she then aired at the Christmas dinner table.

(This last made me feel a lot better about eavesdropping.)

Then it was on to her roommate, who is the world’s biggest slob — she spills chili all over the stove, cheese all over the carpet, and never cleans them up. Also, she’s neurotic about men. “She’s always crying, and then they’re lying together on her bed watching TV.”

After a good 10-minute wait in line, it was finally her turn. She got a loaf of pumpkin bread. Lots of calories in that one.

So. It’s auto-show week, which means Alan left the house at 5:15 a.m. and hasn’t been seen for the last 14 hours — at least by me. The end of the week brings car prom, and I expect to be doing another photo …something from the big night. I actually got an email about this today; called it a “fan favorite,” in fact. Fans, you can see better pictures at the dailies’ websites, but I’ll do what I can.

Now, for some bloggage? From the Department of Kids These Days, the sad tale of the Delta Chi fraternity at Central Michigan University. The frat was suspended for four years last fall, after an incident at a party the previous spring. And what happened? This:

She woke up around 4:30 a.m. “with a man on top of her,” according to the email. The student said she could not recall anything that happened after midnight and she only had one drink at the party. The email states that similar events happened to four other women who were at the party.

The assaulted woman’s phone disappeared during the party, but it is unclear whether it vanished before or after she blacked out.

The phone was used to take nude photos of her and of male genitalia. The images were later emailed to the woman’s parents and posted to her Twitter account.

There’s a punchline, though. One of the women — there were several — involved in the complaint heard from one of the guys in the frat:

One of the women received a text message from the Delta Chi man under investigation that read, “thanks for ruining my life,” according to the police report.

Yeah, poor kid. Who raises these boys?

I asked for a Nest thermostat for Christmas, but Alan said it was too expensive for what it does. I said fine, then give me one that actually fucking works. (Our allegedly programmable thermostat? Didn’t.) I got one. It’s not as sexy as the Nest, but it works. The Nest was sold to Google today for $3.2 billion, yes billion. And now I’m sort of glad I didn’t get one:

Nest is billed as a thermostat and smoke detector company, but it’s really in the data-collection business. Once Nest’s sensor-equipped devices are in a user’s home, they can pick up all kinds of information — when people enter and leave, when lights are turned on and off, how patterns of energy use change throughout the day — and use that information in various ways. Google has long been interested in this kind of data collection and use — in 2011, it shut down a pilot project called PowerMeter that tracked energy use in the home and suggested ways to be more ecofriendly. But it never had its own proprietary devices to put in people’s homes. Now it does.

Yich. I’ve had a post percolating in my head on the Benevolent Internet vs. the Evil One. I’m thinking this is part of it. Of course, I also just bought a Google Chromecast today, to get some use out of an under-utilized TV in the bedroom. So I haven’t gone totally NSA-paranoid. Yet.

And so the week gets under way. I hope it’s not snowing where you are.

I was briefly watching Chris Christie deliver his Sgt. Schulz defense – he knew NUT-ting – and reflected that I’m sure I read somewhere that he had lap-band surgery, and I did. But he doesn’t look like it. I briefly had a boss who had it and became unrecognizable within months, but I guess Christie’s on the slow-diet plan. Good thing, because his fat actually a) looks OK on him, in the sense that he  seems to be one of those born-to-be-fat guys; and b) it makes him more believable, for those who do that trust-your-gut thing.

Not that I believe him. I mean, come on.

Of course, heads are rolling, and the first is Bridget Anne Kelly, the aide who first called for traffic problems in Fort Lee. She’ll be fine in the end. The Tracy Flicks of the world always seem to land on their feet. I won’t speculate on how Christie will end up. Republicans don’t trust him, and anyone who would punish an entire city because its mayor wouldn’t endorse a guy with a more than 20-point lead is not going to be beloved by Democrats.

Tough break. I don’t know if a two-hour apology will do it, but we’ll see.

Spent part of the evening at a two-beer confab with a friend, working on a piece of writing. Came outside to discover, hoo-boy, it’s snowing again. It won’t last. Because this weekend it will rain. Character feels fully built right about now.

I don’t have any links today; do you? If so, post them in the comments. I’m going to bed and hoping next week, nobody dies. Happy weekend, all.

UPDATE: Please don’t miss the note from Prospero’s brother, which he left in a previous thread.