Radio stations are so well-branded these days — you don’t hear call letters, just whatever their marketing name is — that it was literally years before I realized one of my favorites is actually in Canada. First it was a temperature reported in Celsius, then an ad for a tire store in Windsor, then, just the other day, a news report.

Of course I listened. I love Canadian accents:

“Windsor police released figures indicating they used less violence subduing criminals in 2012. Officers used their batons and Tasers in 10 percent fewer incidents…”

Batons and Tasers? The Detroit River is less than half a mile wide between the city it shares a name with and Windsor. And yet? It might as well be a thousand miles. I wonder if Detroit police even gather data on baton and Taser usage. It’s not like they shoot people willy-nilly either, although it happens.

How is it possible for a country to be so close, and yet so far away, in so many ways?

I have no answers. I barely have bloggage:

Roger Ailes, swell guy:

Not long ago, on a ball field near his place in Garrison, NY, his nephew accidentally hit a baseball through the window of a 2012 Prius parked in a church lot. The owners were Koreans who didn’t speak much English, and they were extremely agitated. “It’s just a damn window,” Ailes told them. “I’ll pay for the damn thing.”

The owner was indignant. “We pray, you curse,” he said.

“Fine,” said Ailes. “Then let’s pray over the fucking window. Maybe that’ll fix it.”

“It was a 10-minute incident that I turned into an hour,” Ailes said when he told me the story. “Hell, it’s lucky they didn’t recognize me. It could have turned into a goddamn international scandal. But I told them I was sorry ” He laughed. “Damn it, though, I was kind of glad that it was a Prius.”

There are a lot of places a person might stash a revolver in a pinch, but this one beats all.

Another Waterloo criminal goes down in history. I remember when this crime happened. I swear, that town is going to have to get some new signs for the city limits.

Sorry for lameness. I’m just bushed.

It’s a good thing we all communicate through the written word here, because Hugo Chavez died today, and I’ve already decided the first person I hear call him “Oo-go” is going to have to go. Will have to oo-go.

This is just my personal prejudice. Carry on.

My favorite Chavez story isn’t a story at all, but a picture, of him on a rope line of sorts. A woman is coming forward to shake his hand with a baby on her breast. V-neck pulled down, kid in one hand, the other outstretched to her president. He’s not looking anywhere but at her smiling face. Hey, a kid’s gotta eat.

Guys, I have little to say today, even though was a good one. Got out for two whole hours in some fine late-winter sunshine, strong enough that it actually warmed my face as I drove. You know spring is on its way when that happens.

And scanning around for bloggage, I don’t even have much of that. How about a piece of graffiti I ran across last week? From the p.s. off to the side — “she said yes!!! March 2012” — it’s a bit dated, but it’s interesting that in a year, it hasn’t been defaced yet. True love!

For the longest time, seeing a person riding a bicycle in the depths of winter meant one thing to me: Chronic drunk driver. That is, someone who has offended so many times their license has been suspended and sacramentally burned, whose insurance agent blocks their calls and whose face is deeply lined with the toll of ten million drinks, not to mention the lash of the winter wind as they pedal to the package store in 15-degree weather.

(In Indiana, these guys were also allowed to ride mopeds. I once passed one hauling a case of Old Style strapped on the back. Actually, I saw this a lot of times.)

But lately, bike culture has taken its rejection of the motor to new lengths. I now see people winter riding in expensive outerwear that only slightly blurs the contours of their impressive leg muscles. These people are not alcoholics, just tough-ass cyclists.

It snowed overnight when we were in Chicago, a heavy, wet one, but we still saw many cyclists out there plowing through it. Full-face masks are pretty standard, and one guy had added skier’s goggles.

I see them in Detroit, too, but not so many. One of the bars I visit regularly keeps a large rack outside, and it’s been stowed for the winter. (Either that, or stolen for scrap. You never know.)

There’s a guy at the Eastern Market who sells sprouts year-round. A few weeks back he showed up with a Dutch grocery bike crossed with a limo — solid metal body with a long front section where he can store his toddler, all encased in sturdy clear plastic. A trailer hitch on back is for the produce trailer. Saturday he didn’t have it.

“Where’s the limo?” I asked.

“My wife needed it for a doctor’s appointment,” he said. “She has the boy with her.”

I wondered if she might be feeling too poorly to pedal to the doctor in 25-degree weather. Oh, she’s not sick, he said. Only pregnant. Due in three weeks. I didn’t ask about how they were planning to get to the hospital, as I suspect it’s not part of their plan.

They’re the couple with the baby in this story. One-fifth of an acre in the most bombed-out part of east-side Detroit.

I think I’ve said before my misery index is 40 degrees, and my cycling hiatus is November 1, give or take, through the ides of March. I did a 60-minute spinning class today, in an effort to start feeling it again. This might be a new-bike year.

So, today’s bloggage? The Florida sinkhole story is the latest testimony to the essential weirdness of the Sunshine State. It’s good to know that whatever happens in Detroit, Florida always has a countermove.

After Dad Shot Mom, a story in the WashPost Sunday magazine, and the headline says it all.

And since I don’t have any more links to throw at you, some photos, from Rob Kantner, one of my Facebook friends, who lives north of here. The first is jet engines purchased in South America by one of his clients, slated for recycling:

Next, what was found living in one of them, after its arrival in Michigan:

A northern caiman lizard, most likely. But do you realize what this means? This is the snake in the carpet urban legend! Redeemed!

Have a good week, all. Hope it’s lizard-free.

This is winter break, one of Grosse Pointe’s two sadistically scheduled week-long second-semester vacations. Of course, all of Kate’s friends are on a beach or a ski slope. Bored to tears, she made arrangements to spend the evening at a recording studio where she sometimes helps out, in downtown Detroit. I agreed to this on the grounds of a) personal initiative in affirmatively treating boredom; and b) empathy for her plight. As soon as she rolled out of the driveway it started to snow, the light, dry, fluffy kind that brings no moisture to the land but enslickens every roadway it lands on. It’s the sort of snow that led to that mile-long pileup on I-75. It’s the trickiest to drive in, because it looks like nothing, but isn’t.

So now I get to sit here gnawing my cuticles until she comes home. Did I mention every single streetlight on the freeway between here and there is out? Did I mention the surface-street route home would take her through the worst of the ghetto prairie, and that the road is pitted with tire-flattening hazards, like abandoned railroad crossings that would shame the Third World, not to mention potholes like you wouldn’t believe?

Did I mention I’m the worst parent in the world? What was I thinking? It’s like I sent her out for milk and bread beyond the compound walls in “The Walking Dead.”

When does this anxiety stop, by the way? How old do they have to be? Don’t answer. I already know.

(Update: She arrived home safe and sound an hour later. To my immense relief.)

With that transition to children in peril, let me jump right to the bloggage. You’re going to want to listen to this, part one of a two-parter, “This American Life” and its deep embed at Harper High School in Chicago. You can download it as a podcast or listen at the website, however you like. But you’re going to want to listen to it. It’s chilling, a look at a high school where 29 students were shot last year (three died) and violence in the surrounding neighborhood is so intense that kids don’t even choose to belong to gangs — the very fact of life in the area imposes gang membership on you, depending on what side of what street you live on. It’s shudder-worthy, but very important, journalism.

An old-fashioned hey-Martha from the Columbus Dispatch, HT to Jeff, on scooter drivers behaving badly:

Taylor used humor to good effect in her latest scooter-speed warning letter to residents of Seton Square North: “A number of our scooter drivers are guilty of reckless scooter operation (did I really just have to write that sentence?).”

She is not alone in her concern. Other property managers, nursing-home administrators and doctors say they stress safe driving to keep mobility-scooter and power-wheelchair operators from gouging walls, knocking over medicine carts and running into pedestrians.

“I have, honestly, had times where I’ve had to say, ‘You can no longer use the scooter here,’  ” said Debbie Cassel, executive director at Trillium Place on the Northwest Side.

I read Grantland pretty religiously during the Jerry Sandusky thing, then fell out of it for a while. I hesitate to post this because I fear it will lead to a daylong Prospero tirade of pronouncements and YouTube links no one will click, but what the hell: An essay about the Black Keys that takes a few twists here and there and ends up making some valid points about music these days:

When I said earlier that indie has failed rock and roll, this is what I meant: Indie bands haven’t done enough to compete. The status quo in indie rock these days is to make records aimed directly at upper-middle-class college graduates living in big cities. Only a small handful of indie bands attempt to reach listeners who aren’t already on the team; even the really good records reside firmly in a familiar wheelhouse of tastefully arty and historically proven “college rock” aesthetics and attitudes that mean nothing to the outside world. The distance is also geographic: If you want to see most indie bands play live, it helps if you reside in New York City or Los Angeles, because the bands probably live there, too. Otherwise, you have to hope that your city — and by “your city,” I mean a city within a couple hundred miles of where you live — is one of the 15 to 20 stops on the band’s tour.

If you happen to be part of the audience that rock music used to cater to — if you work an unsexy job in an unsexy town in an unsexy part of the country — you’re not really invited to the party anymore. Which is OK, because there’s still a form of rock music that’s made for you, it’s just not called rock music — it’s called country. One of the best-selling country records of the last few years is Eric Church’s Chief, and one of that record’s biggest songs is “Springsteen,” which is about the ability of rock music to signify the most crucial moments of a person’s life. When was the last time a rock song talked about that? Chief is precisely the sort of heartland rock record that people like Springsteen, Tom Petty, and Bob Seger made into a viable commercial genre in the ’70s and ’80s. It’s not that people stopped wanting records like that; rock bands just lost interest in making them.

That might be a little too what’s-your-point for you, but I liked it. Although not the part where one of the Keys referred to Akron, Ohio as a “small town.” WTF? Two hundred thousand people counts as a small town these days? I had no idea.

Do not recline your seat on an airplane. That is all.

Good Wednesdays, all.

I have to be honest: I’ve been through so many snow-teases that I tend to ignore them. Now I’m looking at a radar image that shows snow falling all over the Mitten, but not here. Maybe it’s coming this way, maybe it isn’t. I’m going to bed and saying the hell with it.

Friday morning

And as suspected, we had about two inches overnight. Two. And there’s a snow day, in a district that was notorious for years for one thing — no snow days, ever. So here we are, the snow needs a-blowin’, and what do I have? A lot of good links.

Dave Kindred on the last days of Muhammed Ali, not in the sense that he’s on his way out (although he could be), but on the last days of all great boxers. I will say this: There’s something about boxing that inspires great sportswriting. It’s a dying sport, although it may well prevail, simply by flying below a certain radar. I hear a lot these days about football, that it’ll be gone in a generation because of the head-injury issue. You don’t hear that about boxing, perhaps because there are fewer people involved, and fighters are frequently bottom-of-the-barrel types who don’t practice their sports under the auspices of a college or university. Frank DeFord, the Sports Illustrated sage, famously washed his hands of boxing a while back, although I’m sure he’d be proud to have an essay this good published under his byline. Your good read for the day.

Everybody posted that Funny or Die parody of the “God made a farmer” ad, but just in case you missed it, you can find it here.

Gene Weingarten on how the internet is changing writing. My favorite:

3. The Rise of the Sillyble, or extraneous syllable. In pre-Internet days we saw this with the pointless tacking on of “ir” to “regardless,” creating a brand-new word meaning, uh, “regardless.” The Web has accelerated this process. “Preventative” has just about overtaken “preventive,” to mean “preventive.” “Orientate” is moving up on “orient” to mean “orient.” There is work yet to be done, though: The Web reveals that “ironical” has just begun its assault on the summit of Mount Ironic. We wish it Godspeed.

Thanks, Charlotte, for finding this, because I might have missed it: The guy who lives in the old Packard plant.

I wanted to send someone a clip from “Babe: Pig in the City,” a favorite from Kate’s young years. I couldn’t find it — it’s the one where the pink poodle says her humans had cast her aside for someone younger and prettier — but I did find this AVClub essay about the film. I remember at the time of its release, how badly it flopped, and how one critic observed, wryly, “You don’t hear the word ‘dark’ used often in discussing children’s films.” And yet, it is so wonderful, in so many ways. I just loved it.

Finally, while I don’t approve of the legal strategy of suing a hosting company over objectionable internet content, I’m glad someone is taking some kind of action against the purveyors of so-called revenge porn. It beats a bullet, anyway.

Off to fire up that blower. Have a good weekend, all.

My shocking-and-mocking meter must need recalibration. I saw this story — about a prankster/conceptual artist/asshole who posted a sign reading “Arbeit macht frei” on an overpass in the abandoned Packard plant and I wasn’t outraged, insulted or wounded. I just thought “jerk, or jerky artist, or mean jerk.”

For those of you not up on your history, the phrase in its original context:

That’s Auschwitz, if you can’t tell. It means “work will set you free.”

No one has taken the credit/blame for the Detroit installation, but my money’s on hipster dildos who are either trying to be provocative or just liked the idea of the words on an archway leading to a crumbling ruin. Not well thought-out, but what do you want?

The reaction, however, was a bit much:

Stephen Goldman, executive director of the Holocaust Memorial Center on Orchard Lake Road in Farmington Hills, was appalled by the message.

“It’s offensive on a number of levels,” Goldman said. “Metro Detroit has one of the largest Jewish communities, and largest survivor communities in the country.

“It’s a mocking message from when Jews saw that message over the gates of concentration camps, and then learned what was going to happen after passing under that gate.”

OK, with you so far. Then…

Goldman also sees it as an insult to the auto industry.

“Does it mean that working in the auto plants is the same as working as slaves in a concentration camp?” Goldman said. “Yes, the Packard Plant is a derelict facility, but so are the concentration camps still in Europe, although some serve as museums.

“Slave labor is insulting, and this is an insult to the auto industry.”

Oh.

Moving on! I was paying some bills today, checking out my online banking for the first time in a while. Hmm, when did I spend $125 at a Sunoco station? In, whu-? Brooklyn? THAT Brooklyn? And I spent $125 there yesterday, too? And the day before that?

Yep, my debit card had been hacked. For a four-figure sum. I’ll get it all back — so the bank lady said — but it was something of a shock, particularly as I’d spent much of New Year’s weekend strengthening all my passwords, making them as firm and unbreakable as Popeye’s biceps. I used Farhad Manjoo’s method, and while this didn’t include a password crack, it was still ironic.

The good news is, I still have some money left, and my account isn’t frozen, although my debit card is toast. Back to buying things with checks and that other funny, paper-based method known as cash.

I always wanted to write a story about paying every bill I had with cash for, say, a month, just to see if it made me spend any differently. Over the years I’ve gradually transitioned into debit-plastic for everything, and online for everything else. My mother used to remark on the separate line at her credit union on payday, for those who were literally cashing their entire paycheck. Who would do such a thing? I wondered. “Installers,” she said. (She worked for the phone company.)

Alan’s parents paid all their bills in person every month. It was an outing — go downtown, buy groceries, pay the electric bill. They didn’t get a checking account until he went to college. It was a common behavior at the time for working-class people. Then all the working-class people got credit cards and home equity lines of credit, and you know how that worked out.

OK, a li’l bloggage?

Tom & Lorenzo give the little girl with the hard-to-spell name who was in “Beasts of the Southern Wild” a baby WERQ for her outfit at the Oscars nominee luncheon. It’s the purse that sells it.

Interesting essay on guns, from NYMag.

And now it is Wednesday. Let us get over the hump in one piece.

Yeesh, there are dates when the commutes to and from Lansing goes swimmingly, and those when it doesn’t. Today: Not one of those days, although not that anything awful happened. A chain-reaction accident on 127 clogged us for a while. And then it was a fairly eventful day, and a drive home enlivened by fun with Voice Control, my primitive iPhone’s early version of Siri:

“Play songs by Lady Gaga.”

PLAYING SONGS BY LADY GAGA.

And so on. (Nothing like Lady Gaga for a boring drive.)

“Play songs by the Rolling Stones.”

PLAYING SONGS BY NEIL YOUNG.

“No, play songs by the Rolling Stones.”

PLAYING SONGS BY RUFUS THOMAS.

It’s sort of fun, actually. Sometimes I listen to Mitch Albom’s radio show. I wish Mitch would figure out what he wants to do with the rest of his life, because this is two of his many media outlets where he mostly seems to be doing it with half his enthusiasm tied behind his back. But let’s speak no more of him.

This was the subject of the press conference — the release of the Center for Michigan’s year-long community engagement project, asking the public what it wants from its public schools. What it wants is, by and large, not what the legislature wants to make state policy. Oh, it’ll be an interesting budget this year.

And with this lameness, I leave you with my final words of the day: Pizza, wine, zzzzz.

National Soup Month started with a bang on New Year’s Day — lentil, enlivened with a couple hot Italian sausages from our boutique sausage outlet here. I used Mark Bittman’s recipe, doubling the lentils because I like a lentil soup you can stand a spoon in.

It was great. Really good, really flavorful and it had that wonderful lentil-soup benefit, which is to say, it was as pleasant leaving the body as it was entering it, and let’s speak no more of that, shall we?

But it’s hard to go wrong with lentils. I used the rest of the bag on a Madha Jaffrey lentil-and-Basmati-rice recipe, with lots of cardamom. Yum.

Pot No. 2 was tomato. Here’s the problem with tomato soup: You want it when the weather’s cold, but then you can’t get really good fresh tomatoes, and I’m sorry, but it’s taken me this long to admit that I’m not a canner and likely never will be. Fortunately, modern food processing has taken care of that, and I was able to make a very nice cream-of soup using the Cook’s Illustrated master recipe from one of my Christmas cookbooks. I believe I’ve mentioned before that my husband once worked at a northwestern Ohio factory run by the company that came up with the whole idea of National Soup Month. He saw too much there, and won’t touch anything made by them, and as their tomato is a mainstay, it means he doesn’t get too much tomato soup. He really liked this one. You can eat it with a grilled cheese sandwich, or just some cheesy croutons.

(I have to say at this point that other than the stockpot, the kitchen utensil that gets used more than anything else during National Soup Month is my immersion blender. It really is one of those things where once you get it, you wonder how you lived without it. Also, you drink way more smoothies.)

Pot No. 3 was a cream of cauliflower, only with no cream. Milk of cauliflower doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it? I used this recipe, because it allowed me to throw a couple of potatoes in there, and I’m always looking for a way to use up the last couple of potatoes in a bag. It came out nice and thick and rich-tasting, but like many great soups, wasn’t particularly rich. It was, however, a bit farty. Not enough to not make it worth eating, but, y’know, be advised.

The final pot of the fortnight was spicy sweet potato, and the closest thing to a disappointment so far. It wasn’t bad, it just wasn’t as good as I was hoping for. The Russell Street Deli here in Detroit makes a sweet potato bisque that makes you want to lick the bowl. I once asked the waiter what the secret was, and he said, “Oh, those North African spices,” but couldn’t really elaborate. I will continue my search for its equal.

Tonight, at the fulcrum of the month, it’s chili. And I’m open to suggestions for the second half.

I’ve been unaware of the so-called Sandy Hook Truthers in all but the vaguest sense of the term. I mean, of course there are people who believe that Evil President Muslim somehow ordered the execution of 28 people so HE COULD TAKE OUR GUNS!!!!!!, but you know, I’ve made my peace with that. Crazy is just part of the landscape, and while I’m sorry this is happening, I get it.

This, however, is another kettle of fish. Maybe J.C. or Basset will weigh in on this new wrinkle in local news — the local lunatic who feeds the Crazy under the nominal cloak of respectability. In many ways, l.l. Charlie LeDuff does the same thing here, only without the paranoia, only the egomania. Is this a new Fox consultant thing? I’m a little baffled. (This breed — the super-conservative TV reporter — is quite common otherwise, in my experience. So much for the liberal media.)

We need a palate-cleanser to close out Hump Day. The Martin Luther insult generator, hell yeah. I bet even Tim Goeglein would approve.

Happy Wednesday, all.

This wasn’t a Lansing day, but it started that way, which is to say, early — up at 5 a.m., out the door at 6:30, back home 15 minutes later, when a mysterious sound from the undercarriage led me to believe it would be foolish to continue on a 100-mile morning rush-hour commute.

Turned back around and began a long and sorta-productive day. The good news: The car problem was simple and fixed free of charge (loose underbody pan). But it seemed to require lots of driving, packing and unpacking the computer, this and that. Frankly, I’m whipped, and Alan — who was out of the house even earlier and still isn’t home — must be even more so. Auto show, of course. If y’all don’t mind, I’m going to phone it in today.

As a discussion topic, though, let me throw out this: Is the Aaron Swartz suicide that important? Because a lot of the commentary so far suggests the government drove this kid to suicide, and I’m not buying that. Overzealous prosecution I can handle, but suicide is a pretty personal choice, and people going through far rougher ordeals make it through. So there’s that. But I’m curious what y’all think. Supplemental reading here and here, along with Swartz’s own site.

Let’s hope for a quieter Tuesday.

This little speaker, no bigger than a salt shaker, was a party favor at a holiday gathering, and looked so cheap I considered consigning it directly to the garage-sale stash, but decided today to charge it up and listen first.

Man. It rocks the llama’s ass. Not a whole hell of a lot of bottom end, but an amazingly rich sound — enough that I didn’t miss much during an extended session with the Miles Davis Pandora station today. It runs off Bluetooth, too, but I kept it hard-wired today, as I’m already running one Bluetooth accessory with the phone. Every so often I stop to consider this age of miracles we live in, and I can only shake my head.

Oh, and speaking of garage sales, ask me when we last had one. Yeah, a long damn time. Long enough that in the next one, you can pick up two end-table-size Kenwood speakers, at least 30 years old. It’s like selling a TV with a tube in it.

Oh, I have such good linkage for you kittens today. The story everyone’s talking about today, and for good reason: A dispatch from a deep embed on the set of “The Canyons.” And what is that? Why, that’s the new film starting Lindsay Lohan and a porn star, directed by a man who should know better (Paul Schrader), costing practically nothing ($225,000). And even though you think you don’t care about shitty movies (which this certainly will be) or Hollywood in general, you should read this story. Because it’s fabulous and hilarious and appalling and you will learn something.

And in Chicago, the Sun-Times is using the 35th anniversary of its great, great series on the Mirage Tavern to revisit the whole thing on its blog. As usual, scroll to the bottom and come back up. For those of you who don’t know this chapter in journalism history, it was made out of pure Awesome: To show how corrupt the city’s regulatory agencies were, the paper bought and opened a bar. Called the Mirage. Equipped with hidden cameras. And city inspectors, state liquor agents and more came to call with their hands out. It was really audacious. Relive the fun.

Finally, the story of a single striking news photo, and what came after.

What comes after this? The weekend. Have a good one.