I guess this is the real end of the holidays. The tree is still up, but it knows its time is short. I’m back at work and the only thing to look forward to is some truly atrocious weather coming next week — single-digit highs on Monday and Tuesday, with the latter’s accompanied by high winds. Yay! My character will be totally built.

The parka of misery has been my main coat this year. My fleece-lined jeans, in a hideous cut but so, so warm, are indispensable. Oh, well. There’s a reason January is National Soup Month. We started with a homemade tomato tonight, along with, yes, grilled-cheese sandwiches. What do you have after a seven-inch snowfall?

In keeping with this theme of misery, and beauty, and a hope for better things, a photo essay on life in a Russian village. Lovely pictures.

Today’s long read: A speck in the sea. The moral of the story: Don’t fall overboard.

What happened when Axl Rose rented my apartment.

Now it’s snowing in New York, and you know what that means: IT’S SNOWING IN NEW YORK!!!! OMG, MORE STORIES!!!

A good weekend to all.

Happy new year to all! I’m taking a break from closet-cleaning to cook for our dinner party tonight. Just two guests besides us, and here’s the menu: Prime rib, pommes dauphine, spinach sautéed with garlic and olive oil, chocolate mousse. Our guests are bringing a seafood appetizer and a fennel-arugula salad. If I were Jesus and could perform miracles, I’d whisk you all here and multiply the menu loaves-and-fishes style, but alas, I am but me.

It was a good year, and I’m hoping for another. There were trials along the way, but we got them into the rear-view, and no one got seriously sick, injured or estranged. I saw a lot, did a lot, drank a bit of wine. Today’s breakfast was a scrambled egg with some leftover black beans and rice, topped with pico de gallo. A tasty final breakfast for a tasty year.

I hope yours was as good, and the same for the future.

Laura Lippman is doing her one-word resolution again. I cheated in 2013 and made three — focus, floss, finish. I accomplished two, which I guess serves me right. The hygienist was unimpressed, said I still had gum recession, and counseled an electric toothbrush. Well, OK.

So for 2014, a continuation of those three, and a new one, just one word: Prune. As in, to trim, to cut back, to pare away deadwood, to leave behind bullshit that isn’t working anymore.

We’ll see how it goes. In the meantime, I’ll see you around these usual haunts. Because this place, year after year, slump after peak, still works.

If you’re off today and tomorrow and looking for something to read, let me make a recommendation: This. Henry Allen was one of the first people I met in my professional career who made me say, “I want to be that guy,” and this essay, about his grandfather’s house in Orange, N.J., shows why. Not too long, a beautiful journey down memory’s potholed path.

Happy 2014 to all.

So I was sitting in my pre-op curtained cubicle, having already been gowned, IV’d and dilated. My time in the OR was still an hour away, and I asked for a magazine. The nurse returned with four, and I was working my way through Oprah, HGTV, Family Circle and one I can’t recall, but it wasn’t drowning out the chatter on either side.

To my right, a lawyer sat with his wife, who was having some sort of orthopedic procedure. He was bitching about an upcoming case, and the flaunting of the rules on discovery. Then he took a break, and resumed bitching, this time about the fact everything was running behind. “I make it a point not to keep people waiting at my office,” he said.

On the other side, a woman with an old-lady voice and an old-lady medical history — hysterectomy, joint replacement, heart valves, the whole nine. She was chirpy and sweet, and her husband joined her, too, and they discussed the stock market. It was down, she said. That’s to be expected this time of year, he replied. They both quoted some authority named Rush, which chilled my blood. Is Rush Limbaugh offering investment advice? Then something chilled it even more: It’s possible their investment counselor is named Rush, and was so christened due to his parents’ devotion to the famous one — he’s been on the air that long. What a depressing idea. What a depressing place to work every day, I thought, so when my own doctor appeared to make a mark on my forehead to indicate which eye he was planning to work on, I said, “What do you mean, eye? I’m here for vaginal rejuvenation surgery.” I was hoping to bring a smile to his face amid all this talk of deep-vein thrombosis and evidentiary rules, and he did smile, but then the people on both sides got very quiet, so hey — win-win!

They have ads for vaginal rejuvenation surgery in a magazine I used to freelance for. The art for the ad was a cameo-type photo of an apparently nude, very lithe gymnast doing a difficult back bend. I guess this is supposed to suggest the new suppleness that will infuse your previously tired old hoo-hah. Vaginal surgery, I’m told, is most popular among certain ethnic groups where virginity is a condition of betrothal, and proof is expected in the form of wedding-bed bloodstains. Hence, the revirginization procedure. I read a story about this in a newspaper a few years ago. A woman gave it to her husband for their 10th anniversary; it cost $6,000. A reader left this comment: She should have spent that money on a really great big-screen TV, so he could enjoy it more than once.

If this sounds like the mental ramblings of a woman enjoying the twilight-sleep form of anesthesia, it should. Man, that stuff is some kind of nod. You lie there thinking someone is poking something into my eye, and I don’t even care! Keep that sweet drip coming. I was released as soon as I was safely ambulatory and coherent, and Alan took me out for pancakes, begging me to let him snip the FALL RISK bracelet off my wrist, but I refused. Then we went home, and I took a one-hour nap. It was wonderful. I never sleep like that during the day anymore.

And now, if you missed it yesterday, I have the eyesight of a Terminator. It’s quite something.

So we come to the end of the week, and slide into the holidays. I don’t know how much posting will be happening through New Year’s; I’m thinking maybe pictures, links, not much else unless the spirit moves me. I hope I’m moved, but I may not be. But there will be fresh threads here from time to time for y’all to discuss things, and who knows? Perhaps there will be big news.

Which brings us to the bloggage, which starts with Dan Savage’s takedown of Sarah Palin’s stupid new book. Taking her down, I suppose, is sort of like shooting a big dumb fish in a very small barrel, but it’s still fun to read:

Page 5: Here I learn something I didn’t know and, if I were Sarah Palin, something I wouldn’t want anyone to know. But Sarah hustles this fact to the front of the book because she sure as hell wants us to know it: Sarah surprised Todd with a “nice, needed, powerful gun” for Christmas in 2012. It was a “small act of civil disobedience,” Palin writes, prompted by “the anti-gun chatter coming from Washington.”

What was inspiring that anti-gun chatter in Washington in December of 2012? Oh, right: Twenty children and six teachers were shot dead in their classrooms by a deranged asshole with a “powerful gun.” And before the grieving mothers and fathers of Newtown, Connecticut, could put their dead children in the ground, Sarah Palin ran out gun shopping. Buying Todd a gun in the wake of the massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary was “fun,” Palin writes—and, again, an act of “civil disobedience.” Because gun nuts are a persecuted minority.

This paragraph about gun shopping in December of 2012—one first grader at Sandy Hook was shot 11 times—ends with Palin bragging about her tits. I’m not kidding.

Best long read I haven’t finished yet, but will eventually: The incredible true story of Linda Taylor, welfare queen.

Alex Pareene’s 2013 Hack List in Salon is a thing of beauty, each piece written in the style of the hack him/herself.

Noted yesterday in comments, but noted again here: Al Goldstein is dead. He was a filthy man in a filthy business, and twits like Rod Dreher feel very smug calling his life “wasted,” and let them if they must. I will recall an observation made by filmmaker Milos Forman, at the time he made “The People vs. Larry Flynt.” I can’t look it up now, but he said something to the effect that it’s easy to go after pornographers. No one likes them, their work is repellant, and who really cares if they’re driven into illegality? Well, I care. I think the Supreme Court argument scene in that film is one of the very best presented, and do keep in mind this was a case that Flynt won unanimously. Flynt was fighting for the right to run a repulsive parody about Jerry Falwell; Goldstein fought to make his mail-order magazine legal to buy anywhere in the country. Flynt had the better case, and both are (were) nasty men, but that’s who makes the big laws at that level:

Happy holidays to all, even you, Sarah Palin. I’ll be around, and I hope all of you will be, too.

I stepped outside today for a quick dog walk and caught my breath — 12 degrees at sundown. That was better than the morning dog walk — 11 degrees, with a clear sunrise emerging over the lake. That’s the bargain you make with winter; you want a sunny day? You can have your sunny day, but it’s going to cost you. It’s been a cold one so far. I’ve worn the Parka of Misery several times already, and some years, it stays in the closet all season.

The Parka of Misery — North Face, down, suitable for a Fargo winter — is actually quite cozy and hence, not miserable to wear. It’s the external forces that give it its name. If it’s much over 20 degrees, it’s uncomfortable. Which tells you something.

The Parka of Michigan.

Folks, I’m sorta whipped today. Kate and Alan are working on another project — a spaghetti bridge — and we’re all in end-of-the-year mode. Right now all I want to do is watch “Getting On,” my new favorite HBO show. It’s about life on the extended-care nursing ward of a crappy hospital, centering on the nursing station. Basically, I will always watch a smart show about how people work together, the workplace being the great anti-family life we all live. If nothing else, it’s given me the eye-popping sight of watching the woman who played Millie Helper on the old Dick Van Dyke show, simulating a blow job on Harry Dean Stanton, for a subplot about elder sex.

Now there’s a career — from the comic neighbor on a beloved sitcom to a blow job on premium cable.

A Christmas-lights video for your amusement.

The atrocious “Homeland” finale.

Have a good Tuesday.

Big snowstorm this weekend, the first biggie of the season. I was out in it, experiencing all the hassles it brought, because lo, Saturday is errand day, and if I get off my schedule, the household will grind to a halt. It’s nearly impossible to push a grocery cart through three inches of unplowed snow — did you know this? The freeways were covered and snot-slick. Parking everywhere was a hassle. And yet, I cannot help but sing a merry tune in my heart. Winter is supposed to look like this, and now it does.

Wendy’s not so sold, however. She can’t seem to find the right pooping spot, as virtually anywhere she goes, the snow touches her bottom. Sunday morning she was reduced to using the sidewalk, anathema to every dog I’ve known. Why is that? I’d think, given the communicative value of excrement in dog language, that dropping a load in the middle of a known thoroughfare would be like buying a Super Bowl spot, but not for Wendy. She’s a curb girl, and has been since early on. Riiiight at the curb. I know not why.

After the errands, there was time for a three-beer lunch with a friend, and that was nice, too. This past summer was a pretty terrific one — other than the half-blindness thing — but there’s something to be said for the enforced idleness of a snowy winter afternoon.

This week is the last I’ll work before we go on our holiday break and get some R&R. My goal is to make serious progress in my end-of-year plan to strip as much stuff as possible out of my house, whether through sale, gift or donation. Anything we sell goes into our discretionary fund for an upcoming vacation (New Orleans, February), and anything we give away is karma points.

All of which may be complicated by Wednesday’s cataract surgery. I was asked by the prep team at the hospital if I have an advance directive. I do. I was asked to bring it along.

“Seriously?” I asked. Yes, seriously. I asked the doctor what the worst thing that could happen and he said, “I could drop dead in the middle of your surgery.” I suppose that could happen. The laser would go swinging wildly around the room, slicing off the top of my head or maybe setting something on fire. Won’t Alan be surprised when a grim-faced nurse emerges with the bad news.

Let’s not go there.

So, some bloggage? Not much, but some:

The ADHD racket. I know you will be as shocked as I am to learn that the explosion in ADHD diagnoses followed a concerted effort by two pharmaceutical companies to sell ADHD drugs make sure every child is properly diagnosed. The story about how Adderall got its name is worth the price of admission. Via NYT.

Would you spend $300 for a Bluetooth speaker that looked like a gramophone horn?

Alternet is generally full of crap, but if you’ve been in a Sears store lately — a once-great American retail institution laid low — it’s hard not to think this story about how the current CEO drove it into the ground doesn’t have at least a germ of truth to it. Yes, Sears’ problems started well before this CEO. But I went there the other day and was shocked by how dingy the place was. If nothing else, the tool department should be spun off and cash-infused. I can live without the slippers and polyester clothes, but not the tools.

Monday! It is here! Let’s embrace it.

Some years back, I posted a picture of my popcorn popper. This one:

It’s a Sears Kenmore. My late Aunt Charlene — who was really my mother’s cousin — worked there all her life, and gave it as a gift to my Irish-twin elder siblings when they were “real little kids,” in my mother’s recollection. They’re both Medicare-eligible, so I’d put its age at, conservatively, 60 years.

It still works perfectly. I use it about once a month.

I don’t have a picture of the other appliance in this tale, because it’s sitting in the trash and I’m not going out in 20-degree weather to get a mugshot. It’s my Cuisinart coffee maker, dead at the age of 2. It replaced the Krups, which lasted about five years, maybe more. I don’t know what the hell happened to it; one day I turned it on, the light lit, but nothing happened. The plate didn’t get warm, the gurgle didn’t start, it just laid there like a sick old whore.

Once upon a time, I’d have taken it to a small appliance repair shop and gotten by for a week with Starbucks and the Kuerig, but nowadays? You just pitch it and buy a new one. It so happened I got another Krups, pretty much the identical model we had before. And I realized I’d forgotten something about that one — a design flaw that makes the pot dribble all over the counter unless it’s poured at precisely the right speed and angle.

“If you pour it at precisely the right speed and angle, it doesn’t drip,” I told a swearing Alan as he mopped up a spill yesterday.

“I SHOULD BE ABLE TO POUR IT HOWEVER I WANT,” he snapped back, and you know what? He’s right. I realize a coffeemaker is a more complicated appliance than a mid-century popcorn popper, but for cryin’ out loud, we ain’t putting up a shuttle here, either.

I haz a mad. So in that frame of mind I’m presenting a news roundup I’m calling the YOU FUCKERS digest.

She said she was a victim of the Knockout Game, that two black men had punched her in the face when she left a St. Louis bar, but guess what? Her boyfriend did it, and she was covering for him. YOU FUCKER. Do click through and check out that super-shiner she got, and scoff with me at the explanation:

The two claim Simms inadvertently hit DePew in the eye after she placed her hand on his and he “flung it back violently.”

Brandon Rios didn’t look that bad after going 12 rounds with Manny Pacquaio. But hey — blame the black guys.

I think I’ve mentioned before that the streetlights on I-94 between downtown and my exit were out, contributing to the general haunted-forest atmosphere of the east side. So in the last year,
the state department of transportation spent millions replacing all the lights with shiny new ones — I suspect LEDs because during the brief time they were on, lo they bathed the freeway in the pure light of heaven, or an UFO tractor beam.

Well, they’re all out again — copper thieves. YOU FUCKERS. This is a crime all authorities seem powerless to stop.

I need a job like this, where they fire you and then pay you $8 million just to keep your mouth shut. Because you and everybody you work for is a FUCKER. I would retire and move someplace where fuckers like me are welcome.

Non-fucker bloggage?

Here’s something amusing and fun — evidently students at Taylor University, a Christian school in Upland, Ind., observe a tradition called “silent night” at basketball games. (I don’t know if it’s every game or just one.) They sit in absolute silence in the stands until the 10th point is scored, at which point they — well, watch the video.

There isn’t much to do in Upland. I’m sure they like it that way.

Off to Lansing this morning.

It was a busy weekend, and I hit the wall about five minutes ago. Open thread? Sure, open thread.

There’s only one thing, really, to talk about up top today: I’m doing an appearance on a local radio show this morning — one of those three-journos-crack-wise-about-the-week’s-events deals — but today we have a unusual third: Gilbert Gottfried. At least, he’s booked. Who knows if he’ll show up?

If you’re interested, you can listen live here. It’s around 10:40 or so, I believe, but I’ll be getting there around 10:30. If you miss it, there will surely be a podcast somewhere.

We will not be doing the aristocrats joke. It’s public radio, after all.

Otherwise, I’d talk about that live “Sound of Music” thing, but I fear I’ve been struck dumb.

For the rest of you stuck living in the frigid west, upper Midwest and elsewhere in the cold front, stay warm. I have the weekend ahead.

My sister-in-law came for the holiday with a belated birthday present for her brother: a CD with scans of the photos their father took when he was a soldier. He was a parachute infantryman, really in the shit as they say, but as we all know, sooner or later things began to break the Allies’ way, and among the spoils of war was a Leica camera he took from a German officer, seen here:

(The camera, not the officer. That’s Roger, who would have been my father-in-law if he’d lived long enough to see us married.)

He carried it through the south of France as troops liberated the region in August 1944. First, the bad guys:

I guess that’s a bunker of some sort. I can only guess at the construction materials, but it must have been a headquarters, don’t you think, with that insignia?

Anyway, up through France they marched. Cannes:

And Nice:

This is what being greeted like liberators looks like:

And no one cares if you take a souvenir or two:

I’d love to know where that flag ended up. Alan says his dad came home with his dog tags and little else. The camera went to an officer, I know. He must have sent the photos ahead somehow.

Quiet day today, not much to report. The coffeemaker broke — on a Monday morning, no less — but we had a backup. Staff call, phone calls, a lingering queasiness that tells me I should really go easier on the rich food, at least over a four-day weekend.

But there is some bloggage:

The perpetually wrong Jennifer Rubin thinks Hillary Clinton can be toppled by? Anyone? Yes, Caroline Kennedy. Your laff of the day.

This is Tippy the fainting squirrel.

Finally, the Amazon drones story. I was astounded to see how much attention it was getting today, especially when I heard people discussing it a year ago at the Detroit policy conference. The problems seem so enormous I don’t know how they can be overcome easily, starting with cost. I seriously doubt free shipping is going to be an option here, so what, exactly, might you order from Amazon that you would need in half an hour that would be worth the price of getting it air-dropped? An engagement ring? Olives for your martini? Beyond that, there’s the distance-from-warehouse detail. Drones are very clever little flying machines, but they are short-range solutions. Across town might work, but I can’t send one down to Coozledad’s farm with a bottle of bourbon strapped to its belly (as much as I might like to). A good deal if you live near a “fulfillment center” (and look how many there are in labor-compliant, low-wage states like Indiana and Kentucky) but not so much for everybody else.

Besides, everyone knows what drones should be used for: Taking pictures of Tina Turner’s wedding.

Happy Tuesday.

I found this via Tumblr, so the usual cautions about authenticity apply, but what the hell, it’s worth sharing. This is a purported listings page from an unnamed New York newspaper in November 1963. The hell with JFK — talk about mourning a lost world:

This, pals, is why I regret never living in New York City. Imagine an entertainment buffet spread with everything from Bill Monroe to Miles Davis to Sam Cooke to Bob Dylan. I looked it over twice before I noticed Stiller and Meara hiding in the cracks.

Was everyone’s Thanksgiving wonderful? Ours was just fine, if a little repetitive of last year’s. I was looking up a green bean recipe I like at this time of year, and a menu fell out of the book — exactly the same one I’ve been making for a while now. Oh, well. With a table set for only four, two of them picky eaters, what’s the point of adventure? That’s what dinner parties with friends are for.

The rest of the weekend was devoted to lazing on the couch watching Netflix, errands and the usual. Kate and I went to the DIA for a few hours on Friday, to tell “The Wedding Dance” we would always love it, even if it’s sold to Rupert Murdoch. Watched a couple of movies I would likely not have seen without streaming — “What Maisie Knew” and “The Panic in Needle Park,” which I was astounded to learn was written by Joan Didion and her husband. I cannot tell a lie: I love many, many things about the 1970s, and its strong tradition of antiheroic cinema is one of them.

So, then, some bloggage:

Today’s NYT ran a smoochfest on Jim Delany, whom I didn’t know about. Evidently he’s the guy responsible for the Big Ten conference being little more than a “brand.” Rutgers? Maryland? Now in the Big Ten? Fuck that noise. I prefer the Grantland take on this development:

In ways that matter to college administrators, Delany is a genius: The Big Ten Network is a money-making machine, and the conference actually made more money last year than even the SEC. Last fall, when I spent a day with the Indiana football program, they informed me that they’d been able to upgrade their facilities almost entirely with money procured from their Big Ten Network share. But that’s what makes this so frustrating for those of us who actually give a damn about the product: Speaking to Rittenberg, Delany appeared to characterize the conference’s football woes as a short-term concern, as something that could be attributed to an influx of new coaches and the consequences of immoral behavior at Penn State and Ohio State. He made no real acknowledgement of the long-term statistics, of the Big Ten’s 34-52 bowl record since 2000, of the fact that the Big Ten has won 37 percent of its nonconference games against nationally ranked teams since Ohio State won the national championship in 2002. The top of the conference is largely shaky, and the bottom has never been worse: I imagine Purdue and Minnesota and Illinois would struggle to finish .500 in the MAC.

Anything else? Yes, these rather astonishing-not-astonishing charts, about who uses marijuana and who gets busted for it, via Ezra Klein.

Finally, a fine piece by John Carlisle, former Detroitblogger, now roving columnist for the Freep. It’s about a community of legal scrappers in one of the most cursed neighborhoods in Detroit, who eke out a living digging holes in a now-vacant scrapyard, seeking out the long-buried bits of metal there. If you’re thinking, “why, that sounds like something you’d find in the Third World,” join the club. I was struck by the comments, which swung between that sentiment and a certain witless, attaboy-to-the-bootstrappers attitude, which ignores the fact the bootstrapping isn’t leading anywhere. Unless it’s to another generation of metal men:

Domenic Anderson used to follow his dad down here and watch him dig.

“Everybody would sit there, dig, get along,” he said. “All the grown-ups would be doing their own things, running their own crews out of here, making their own money.”

Now he works here, too. He stood on a dirt mound next to his twin brother, David Anderson. The 19-year-old brothers live just down the street and work in the lot six days a week. They’re rough edged and dirt streaked, and they share a distinct southwest Detroit accent and a kind of small-town genuineness.

For them, it’s not just work; it’s also their social life. Most of the neighbors moved away long ago, so there weren’t many kids to play with when they were younger, and there aren’t many to hang out with now that they’re older.

People around here like to say that we’re America’s future, so hey — look forward to it.

And so the long slog toward the holidays commences! Can you feel my excitement?