I’d just answered the door for the zillionth time (our neighborhood saw diminished turnout, but even so, enough that I didn’t get a five-minute break for two hours), treated some miscellaneous kids and one of Kate’s middle-school friends, who came to the door dressed as a slutty nun (why, God? Why?) and a woman emerged from the murk.

“Can I use your bathroom?” she asked. Well, this was a first. In her favor: She didn’t look crazy. I considered the golden rule. The weather was rainy and windy; it would be miserable to add a full bladder on top of that.

I showed her in. She slipped off her shoes and was in and out in a trice. I’m sure she felt treated.

It wasn’t a terrible Halloween, even with the weather. We still got rid of all the candy, save two Reese’s Cups, which I’ll put in Kate’s lunch tomorrow. And since All Souls’ Day will fall on Saturday, here’s a picture from five years ago, which I ran across while doing some memory-laning:

I took this in the oldest part of an old Polish cemetery, and it seemed to say everything about what happens after we leave the earth. People mourn, they put you in the ground, and eventually, the ground itself forgets you’re there.

I don’t have any links today, because I’m lazy. Didn’t sleep well last night, rained all day — I’m headed for bed. Have a great weekend, all.

Happy Halloween. It’s pouring rain and we’re supposed to take the boat out of the water today.

At least it’s not cold.

But we were out late last night — Devil’s Night, meh heh heh heh heh — and missed my blogging time. Just a couple things today.

First, some of you have probably heard about Movember, the annual prostate-cancer awareness event in which men spend the month growing mustaches, perhaps in the hope of turning a few worried and/or exasperated glances (“You, Bob? A pornstache? YOU?) into a productive discussion about a disease that kills roughly 30,000 men in the U.S. every year.

Well, this year NN.c has a preferred mustache, and if you are so inclined, you can give to Bernie Mulvey, who is my BFF’s brilliant son, a first-year med student at Wash U. in St. Louis. Here’s his donation page. Here’s his statement:

BY GROWING UNKEMPT, PATCHY FACIAL HAIR, I WILL SYMBOLIZE THE BODILY DISARRAY OF PROSTATE CANCER AND ITS TREATMENT. IN SOLIDARITY WITH CANCER PATIENTS, I WILL ENDURE ANY EMBARRASSMENT AND SOCIAL OR PROFESSIONAL CONSEQUENCES OF APPEARING UNTIDY AND PERHAPS UNHYGIENIC.

I’m sorry it’s in all caps. His mom’s an editor, and he should know better, but perhaps the topic REQUIRES THIS SORT OF EMPHASIS.

Anyway, the money will be pooled with other Wash U. first-year med students, and it’s worth it. Bernie adds, in upper and lower case:

For those of you weary of research philanthropy groups, fear not; the PCF spends over 75% of its money on the research it exists to support! Plus, your donation is tax deductible (and really, would you rather that money go towards the NSA reading your Facebook, or towards keeping people alive and well?).

So that’s today’s cause: Fighting the disease that killed Frank Zappa and Pierre Elliot Trudeau.

Here’s a snap from last night, Alan and Kate gazing upon the blazing carcass of a house in Detroit a bonfire:

Alas, the event at the Lincoln Street Art Park, aka the Ghetto Louvre, was rained out before we could see the dragon:

We saw it before at Maker Faire. Here it is, in action, defending the Detroit Institute of Arts.

With that, I must rush. Happy Halloween, and I hope all your trick-or-treaters are sweet as candy.

This is how the people who bought the newspaper I used to work for in Fort Wayne are running things now:

On their birthday, Fort Wayne journalists get a little — and I do mean little — gift from Fort Wayne Newspapers CEO Mike Christman: It’s a $1.25 vending machine token.

This is offered via a three-sentence email, one of which is “Happy birthday!” The token isn’t even delivered to your mail slot; you have to come down to HR to pick it up.

I’ve worked with some cheapskates in my life, but this might be a cake-taker. People will cut your pay, trim staff, fire staff and basically squeeze until the people left fully understand the new reality, and then? Flip ’em a few quarters and wish them a happy birthday. You can almost admire it.

My prediction: The management is hot on the trail of who leaked their birthday letter to Romenesko.

I don’t have much today, alas. It’s shaping up to be one of those weeks. But I do have some bloggage:

I’ve gotten back into the habit of checking in with Gin & Tacos regularly, and was struck by this piece. The writer, a college professor, notes:

Post-1980 America is a land in which it is impossible to engage in a discussion about a System with college-aged people without inevitably and almost immediately devolving into mini-soliloquies on Good and Bad choices. Why have so many kids? Why did he start drinking? And they signed a contract without reading the whole thing! Everyone knows not to do that.

This is what I mean when I describe college students, when I’m forced to generalize, as extremely conservative. They aren’t necessarily hardcore political conservatives in the context of Washington politics, but they have thoroughly internalized the message that their parents and the media have been hammering them with since birth: everything that happens to you is your fault. There are no innocent victims of anything. This is a coping mechanism / cognitive bias called the Just World Phenomenon, wherein people victim-blame as a means of coping with the random cruelty of the world. Rather than accept that horrible things happen to good people – and, thus, that a horrible fate could befall them at any moment – people choose to retreat into the comforts of believing that everyone Had It Coming.

I always call this “the distancing,” everyone does it, and the best you can do is be self-aware enough to know when it’s happening. There’s an element in it of the dust-up over Emily Yoffe’s rape-prevention advice. You saw it during Hurricane Katrina, where everything bad that happened in the Gulf of Mexico was because a) it was stupid to build a city there; and b) those people should have left anyway.

Anyway, an interesting observation.

I read this story in the Sunday NYT magazine, but I should have read it online, as the bells-and-whistles presentation of this account of international conflict in the South China Sea is truly remarkable. (Not recommended for slow connections or anyone using Internet Explorer 6, heh.) I was pretty outspoken in the ’80s and ’90s about not letting the design tail wag the content dog, but every so often it all comes together, and it’s worth the effort. If you want to know what longform journalism will be in the 21st century, look here.

Here’s a story by me; the tea party at the local-local level.

OK, I have to be off. Sorry for the late arrival. We’ll try to do better tomorrow.

Not to appear ungrateful for the spectacular weekend weather — on Saturday, I found myself sitting in blazing sunshine, watching the boats go by on the Detroit River, wearing sleeveless linen — but we could use some rain. A mulch-don’t-rake fall lawn-care strategy only works if there’s enough rain to beat down all those shredded oak leaves to the earthworms, for whom they’re intended. Otherwise it just looks like leaf confetti.

On the other hand, who’s going to argue with 75 degrees in October? Not too many, that’s for sure.

And what a weekend it was. Dinner with friends, drinks with a friend, enough exercise to feel non-slothful, a new haircut. Shorter, because why the hell not? I’m still figuring out what it really wants to look like, but it no longer wanted to be the length it was. Nothing like a new haircut to welcome the fall. If it ever stops being summer.

Oh, and the Tigers won. (EDIT: Also, they lost.) Almost forgot about that, although I can assure you, no one here did.

So. We watched “Room 237” Friday night, new to Netflix, and recommended, even though I think it’s a rather flawed film. It’s about a number of batshit fanboys (no women, interestingly) of “The Shining,” who are convinced the film contains layers upon layers of deeper meaning than what’s commonly understood. Some of these are reasonable (the film is about the Holocaust) and some are insane (the film is Stanley Kubrick’s confession that he used his talents to help NASA fake the moon landing) and all are, at the very least, interesting.

Alan had less patience with it than I did, but we both found it both amusing and exasperating, and — as long as we’re looking for deeper meanings than the obvious — to really be about internet culture, and how it’s taken so many things and turned them into a colossal waste of time.

The bit about the red and yellow Volkswagens was funny, though. I have to watch “The Shining” again, now.

Some quick bloggage before I run a couple errands in the last of the afternoon:

Chuck Klosterman on “Room 237.” Good stuff.

Thomas Frank on the creativity industry, which is not particularly creative, and is, in fact, almost entirely wrong. When I say “the creativity industry,” I’m talking about the talkers — the people who write books and give TED talks on what’s allegedly this incredible creativity renaissance we’re allegedly experiencing, at the same time we’re stripping income streams from actual creative people and making it harder to make a living. Being creative, that is.

The Affordable Care Act signup website is a disaster, or so the NYT says. Has anyone here used it? How did it go?

Oh, and speaking of: Neil Steinberg finds Dan Savage’s defense of the ACA to be most persuasive.

And let’s hope the week goes well for all of us.

Prompted by the advent of cooler weather and a desire not to have to suit up for a Michigan winter night every time the dog needs her bedtime pee, Alan and I have embarked upon a long-discussed back yard renovation project. It’s modest, really, but as usual, it’s not cheap.

So we’ve applied for a home equity line of credit. I remember when banks were giving these away like logo keychains, but evidently things have changed. This is good — anything to keep banks a little more sober — but honestly, once I got the letters informing us of our credit rating I thought we’d get the money within a couple of days. We’re both above 800! Platinum level, they call that.

Instead, it’s been phone calls and send this document, no, send that document and today was the worst — an email telling us our loan status had been updated, without explaining was it was and what it is now, concluding with this appalling sentence:

If needed, we will be contacting you shortly to collect any additional information that may be required to fully decision your loan request.

Fully decision our loan request, yes. I can’t stand it. Or rather, I am lacking tolerate for this.

Really good piece by Ezra Klein today, arranged BuzzFeed style: The 13 reasons Washington is failing. It’s stuff you think you know (Polarized media makes it easier for politicians and voters to fool themselves) and stuff you probably haven’t thought of (Earmarks are gone) and, well, 11 others. Best single line:

The problem with living in an age when you can choose your own media isn’t just that it’s easier to surround yourself with people who agree with you. It’s that it’s easier to surround yourself with people who, purposefully or not, mislead you.

I know I don’t get much response when I post items about the news media, but this one struck me today, a complaint by a TV producer about aggregating websites — some of which, like the Daily Mail, don’t really own up to being one — outright stealing original stories and repackaging them as their own, sometimes with errors inserted:

Saturday, a “reporter” from thinkprogress.org cribbed from several stories about of an Alaska Supreme Court case with no explicit attribution for any of his news sources. He also introduced several factual errors, and appears to have done virtually no firsthand reporting. The most egregious copying was of a bulleted list of three questions on which the case hinges without quotes.

I see, via social media, how often people post stories from sites like these. That’s not to say they’re all crap, but please, if you do: Consider the source.

I’m watching a great “Frontline” as I write this, about the head-trauma scandal in pro football. Watch it if you can, and certainly if you have a child who plays football. (Suggest he try golf instead.)

How can it possibly be only Wednesday? It feels like next Tuesday.

Is Mercury retrograde? (Answer: No.) Something else must explain why I spent the weekend going from one sweaty-head interval to the next, slept badly, felt like I worked the whole damn time and still managed to slip on the sidewalk while walking the dog. The sidewalk in question was coated with a thin layer of mud, thanks to a recent sprinkler installation. No one in my neighborhood drags a sprinkler around the yard anymore; in-ground automatic watering systems are the only thing for a striver to have.

(The Derringers, with their laissez-faire attitude toward lawn care in general, are the Problem House of the ‘hood. Both of us have done too much environmental reporting to give a fat rat’s ass about lawns.)

In my neighbor’s case, the night after the old lawn was peeled off and taken away and before the new one was installed, enough rain fell to wash a fair amount of topsoil onto the sidewalk. I hit it in the murky moments of dawn yesterday and went sprawling. The only good thing to report is a) my injuries were limited to a scrape or two; and b) the string of curses I unleashed woke the family dog, who barked loudly and, I devoutly hope, roused the whole household.

I mean, the lawn went in days ago. Someone should have taken the time to wash away the mud.

And while the weather was unseasonably warm, it was accompanied by a certain Gulf of Mexico-ish humidity. Alan spent the weekend tearing up underbrush for a coming fence installation in the back yard, and looked like he was dredging oysters without waders.

In between these toe-curling episodes of excitement, there was a rotisserie chicken and some fine dishes from my Eastern Market foray. Made Alice Waters’ fresh shell-bean gratin and a shitload of brussels sprouts.

There was also homecoming. After freshman year, when we paid too much for a dress that wouldn’t be worn twice, I got a little smarter about the whole thing. Last year we found a $27 special from Forever 21 that wasn’t quite dressy enough on its own. But I was raised by a seamstress, and thought I could improve it immensely with a black satin sash, which I made myself from the best polyester satin I could find at the fabric store. We saved it, and found this year’s dress on ModCloth for a similarly modest sum. Out came the sash again, and I don’t know about you, but I think it works pretty well (this year’s model is the red one; the blue is year one of Project Sash):

You can see I also skimped on hairdressing this year, but so what? They had a great time, and went to a better restaurant beforehand. Some of the homecoming frocks I saw on my Facebook news feed look like ho gear. At least she looks cute and age-appropriate, and take off the sash, add a regular belt and shoes, and it’s a regular old dress again.

And it didn’t cost me $100.

I don’t really have much bloggage today, but if you missed Cooz’ comment late yesterday, you missed something great. Go read.

Never waste a good crisis, smart leaders say. And if necessary, you can always invent one.

A great week ahead, I hope. Let’s try to stay perpendicular to the pavement, eh?

My cell phone rang yesterday. I answered it the way I always do for a number I don’t recognize: “Hello, this is Nancy.”

“Nancy, are you in the Tea Party?” a belligerent male voice demanded.

“Who is calling, please?” I replied.

“It’s a simple question: Are you in the Tea Party,” he repeated, just as belligerent.

I hung up. The phone number was from Wilmington, Del., and the reverse lookup was for someone named Jackson. My cell number isn’t widely known, but it’s out there. Is craziness in the air these days? It must be. Why should only the U.S. Congress be affected?

It turned out the same guy called my colleague in Lansing, who started laughing. Might have been the better response.

I recall a guy who rang the city desk in Columbus one night and started raving about the IRA and the British monarchy. We were just leaving for dinner, and the editor who answered put the receiver down on the desk. We left and when we returned an hour later, the guy was still raving. I hung up the phone on the words “right down the queen’s chimney,” followed by a cackle.

It was a craptastic day all around. As I hinted yesterday, our health insurance in the new year is skyrocketing. Which means we’ll be moving to my employer’s plan, but that can’t happen until mid-year 2014. Which means it was one of those days I spent figuring expenses we can cut, while simultaneously trying to gather data for a story, but guess what? Any data website run by the federal government is down.

Here’s something you shouldn’t do on a bad day: Read the comments on a story. Take this one, for example. It’s a column by a grad student at Johns Hopkins, explaining all the ways the shutdown is affecting her life. I read it with a sinking heart, knowing the comments on the story would be horrible, as the accepted narrative seems to be that nothing all that bad is happening, and anyone who goes to grad school to study “environmental change and demographic transition theory” must be a twee egghead and all the rest of it.

To be sure, they weren’t that bad, but they were depressing. Don’t read the comments. EVER.

Don’t read stories like this, either:

Many members of an audience of mostly Ole Miss students, including an estimated 20 Ole Miss football players, openly disrespected and disrupted the Ole Miss theater department’s production of “The Laramie Project” Tuesday night at the Meek Auditorium.

Cast members of the play, which is about an openly gay male who was murdered in Laramie County in Wyoming, said members of the audience became so disruptive at times that they struggled completing the play.

It’s just too much of a bummer.

Let’s move on to black comedy. It wasn’t a great day for Indiana congressmen in general. Besides the much-discussed story about Marlin Stutzman, there was this:

Rep. Todd Rokita (R-IN), a member of the House Committee on the Budget, was invited to discuss the government shutdown on this morning’s CNN Newsroom, but the congressman seemed far more interested in hitting on the host instead.

After Carol Costello called Rokita out over the “divisive approach” taken by Republicans to arrive at a resolution that benefits them alone, the lawmaker retorted by “mansplaining” the situation to the anchor.

“I don’t know if you have children yet, I’m sure you don’t have grandchildren yet, you look much too young, but we’re fighting for them,” Rokita told Costello. “Carol, do you have any idea how much this law is going to cost?”

There were later comments about Carol’s loveliness. I wonder what Mrs. Rokita thinks of that.

Here’s Charles Pierce on Stutzman.

And now let’s change it up a bit.

Oprah Winfrey is cutting her ties to Chicago. Neil Steinberg bids her farewell:

As much as you liked to float your Chicago street cred when basking in the endless celebrity limelight that trailed you like your own personal sun, it wasn’t as if you were ever really here beyond the confines of your 15,000-square-foot Water Tower Place duplex. Not a lot of Oprah sightings in all those years you did that hall-of-mirrors show of yours. No river of Oprah bucks watering thirsty Chicago charities. More like a trickle.

…Or, in your defense, the public’s gullibility was already there, and you just reflected it. You had your moments. Sure, too many were spent in squealing worship of brand materialism as its basest. But sometimes you rose above: One show, you sent a family from St. Louis to live in Mongolia in yurts. It was interesting.

(I should probably say, in the spirit of full disclosure, that I was a guest on Oprah’s show once, nearly 20 years ago, promoting my second book. A four-hour ordeal I remember as a blur of endless waiting punctuated by frantic assistant producers with clipboards lunging past, of fellow guests blinking in wonder at indoor plumbing, of cheap vending machine muffins sweating oil in their plastic wrap, piled in the Green Room by minions of the richest woman after Queen Elizabeth II. Of how flinty, disinterested and queenly in a bad way you were in person. It is not a happy memory).

OID: A shots-fired police raid across from an elementary school. Leads to a change in policy. OK.

And I think that’s it for now. Have a good weekend, all. I think I’ll be firing our cleaning lady. With regret.

I wish I could get to New York more often. Every six months, say, often enough to have a few favorite places to go to, ideas about hotels. Alas, I am not that person. Enough time passes between visits that the place remakes itself two or three times over.

The last time I visited with Alan and Kate, we stayed on what I called the far west side, i.e., Jersey City. Back then, there were a few hotels, populated mainly by south Asian men who shlepped off to work in the financial district in the morning, in polo shirts and lanyards, on the PATH train. Now those hotels are surrounded by high-rise apartment buildings and a few restaurants, and the area is now called Wall Street West.

We actually stayed in the same hotel — a suite thing, just a couple blocks from the PATH. Manhattan is even more a gated community for tourists and the super-wealthy than ever, with most of the tourists gathered around the World Trade Center site. Seriously. On Saturday, I think English speakers were in the minority, with guided tours going on in about a million other languages. But we were bound for Brooklyn, and ended up in DUMBO, which I’m told stands for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge, with the O added so it’s not a neighborhood called simply DUMB. Correction: Directly Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Thanks, commenters.

Walked around. Ate meatballs. Went up to Prospect Park. Came back over to Manhattan and strolled the east Village. Talked and walked and talked and walked, until I had a giant blister on one toe, at which point it was back under the river via PATH and a bottle of wine in the suite.

Repeat on Sunday. I bought Kate a CBGB T-shirt, which her government teacher told her was worth extra-credit points. And then home, where after about 48 hours, my feet have finally stopped hurting. Mostly.

But I’m grateful for every chance I get to see the place, although I have to say: Shopping in New York isn’t the thrill it once was. What’s there is outrageously expensive, and what isn’t you can find on the internet. Maybe if I had a few more days to wander. But then I’d need new shoes. Or maybe a wheelchair.

One photo from Dumbo (I’m done with the capitalization):

Yes, what a crazy idea! Come into the tent and type a letter! Wacky.

There is so much good stuff about the shutdown today, I can’t possibly cover it all. But here’s Paul Krugman, and here’s Charles Pierce, and everything else is out there for the finding.

For a chance of pace, how about this? Two idiots scuffle with the police. In the process, a paddleboat — yes, a paddleboat — is used in an escape attempt and capsized. It is difficult to capsize a paddleboat. In fact, i”d think it was nearly impossible, in anything other than extraordinary circumstances. And yet they managed.

Why I will never live in Florida. EVER.

OK, let’s give this a try. All my devices are getting on my nerves at some level today, partly because I went and IOS 7’d the mobile ones, and the iPad is having a little freakout over it. I’m not at all sure I like the new look, but it’s too late to turn back now.

For some reason, all this downloading and syncing is taking hours I might have spent here serving youuuu, my little minions, although back-to-school night might have had something to do with it. I’m always impressed by Kate’s teachers at these things, and even though the event itself is of minimal true value, it’s nice to put a face with the names we’ll be hearing about for the next few months. The biggest character was her physics teacher, a fast-talking wiseacre made for the age of edutainment. In his seven-minute pitch, he put on three demonstrations of SCIENCE! Kind of a Walter White without the resentment and sociopathy.

It was a warm evening, and I rode my bike there, and ran into two of the grade-school parents when I was locking up; they’d walked. The parking lot was stuffed like a foie gras goose, and I heard one mother saying parking was such a pain, they really should have walked. “It’s only two blocks,” she said. Imagine driving a car two blocks on a beautiful night, and then bitching about the parking situation, and you have Detroit in a nutshell. Support the local economy!

I feel like I’m out of things to say, and surely I am. How about some bloggage?

Bridge dropped a couple of stories lately you might be interested in. Me, on the changing nature of marriage in the middle class, and my colleague Ron’s package on building a better teacher. The main story, about the failure to support teachers, may be a little too Michigan-centric for most of you, but the sidebar, about the difference between U.S. and Canadian teacher training, was fascinating:

It’s easier to get into university teacher training programs in Michigan than in Ontario. There’s less mentoring and professional development here. And far more young Michigan teachers flee the profession after just a year or two, before attaining journeyman levels of classroom competency.

I like doing stories like this. I like reading them. I like my job.

Prince Fielder does the Bill-Clinton-at-McDonald’s thing. Funny video.

A downmarket update on the two-Samurai-in-the-rain story. In Michigan.

Have a great weekend, all.

It appears our connectivity has been restored, but my personal connectivity is reduced — I’m heading to Windsor for a show tonight, and so am headed out the door for that rare treat, a weeknight out with the hipsters. At least as hip as Canadians can be.

Seeing this band. Like the Black Keys, but girls. A friend of mine here in Detroit produces their rekkids. Here’s their new single.

So have some linkage: If you were thinking there’s no one in the world as annoying as Anthony Weiner, well son, you are wrong. It’s a veritable carnival of douchebags when Weiner faces…Lawrence O’Donnell.

The hearing featuring the worst Grosse Pointe husband ever produced this killer lead:

Detroit — Robert Bashara wooed an Oregon woman he hoped would join him and his girlfriend in a polygamous relationship by mailing her a T-shirt he’d worn for several days, a leather collar — and a gift certificate to the Olive Garden restaurant, according to court testimony Thursday.

What do you think constituted the sadism? The Olive Garden gift card?

Guess what I passed on my bike ride today? The Google street view car. I waved. How long before that stuff uploads?

Have a great weekend, all.