A foggy day today, thanks to the unseasonable — newly seasonable, maybe — warmth. It grew thicker as I drove west, not the way it usually goes for us low-lying, water-adjacent east siders. My destination? Dearborn, city of magic, city of bilingual signage. I had an excellent interview for a story I hope I can share with you soon, and decided to take the long way home, down Michigan Avenue, another one of those Detroit thoroughfares that drops your jaw and goggles your eyes. Strip clubs, rim stores, burned-out storefronts that will be cleared in another couple decades or when Jesus returns, whichever comes first, unless it maybe goes a little longer. The fog made everything sort of extra-depressing, although the temperature made it impossible to be depressed. Fifty-seven on a December Monday? You usually say, “I’ll take it,” but truth be told, we don’t have much choice these days.

Which is sort of depressing.

I’m predicting a 2013 that is, meteorologically anyway, a repeat of 2012 — a warm winter, a blast-furnace summer, and another drought. (No, I am not a scientist. I am a crone, and I feel it in my witchy bones.) Alan had a sit-down with the manager of the city’s marina today, because he fears, rightly so, that the channel to it, and the slips within it, won’t be navigable by midsummer. We’ll see what comes of it. Meanwhile, low lake levels plague even those with shallow-draft boats. He was discussing it with another guest at a party we were at this weekend when a third piped up and said, hey, what about all this stuff he’d been reading about melting Arctic ice and rising sea levels?

Alan explained that, as Niagara Falls had not yet been overtopped, that wasn’t a problem for us. YET.

In the meantime, I will try to think about the Duchess of Cambridge’s Royal Crumpet in the oven. I’m ridiculously pleased to hear this, as the world always likes a new baby, and at least this one will be well cared for. Yesterday in comments we discussed hyperemesis gravidarum, her barfing complaint. I recalled a New Yorker story by Atul Gawande on the subject some years back, and whaddaya know, so did he. He posted a link to the story in the digital edition, which has apparently been unlocked for the occasion. Once you figure out the navigation it’s fairly easy to read. I hope our friend Cathy Cambridge isn’t feeling this lousy. This NYT explainer (thanks, Jolene) is shorter, and get the job done.

Which I guess ushers us into the bloggage, eh? Here’s the president introducing Led Zeppelin at the Kennedy Center Honors the other night. I’m always taken by his natural comic timing. He really has the gift.

And with that, I’m out and hope your Tuesday is worth it. Happy birthday, Kirk.

I haven’t dared look at my traffic numbers in…? How long? A long time. I’m sure they’re in the toilet, and have been for about a year, because one thing you can’t really do when you are a servant of two masters — i.e., a journalist with a day job — is be a fun ‘n’ lively blogger. Plus, I’m absorbed once again in how much I don’t know, an experience that I always find shuts me up for a while. Nothing like being stupid to make you want to stop digging your hole of ignorance.

And there’s the other thing: I now write at the end of the day, when I’m a lot lower on energy. So consider this a blanket apology for general lameness, and maybe in the new year I’ll try some new models that give you all the conversation pit you seem to enjoy, and give the lurkers and drive-bys a little more.

And leave me time to write some other things. Not sure what, but it’s something else I’d really like to do. This isn’t a book I’d like to write, but it’s an idea I had last summer, when I was talking to Tom Nardone, the Mower Gang guy. Sooner or later, you learn that Tom’s day job, when he’s not saving Detroit parks for children, is selling sex toys on the internet. He really has a great story about how he got into it in the early-early days of the internet, how he started as a middleman for anything a person might find embarrassing to buy in person. He and his girlfriend went through every drugstore, Walmart and Target they could find and made a list of anything a person might be embarrassed to lay in front of a human clerk. It was a list that ranged from Rogaine to Fleet enemas to Preparation H. The company they launched, PriveCo, would sell you this stuff over the internet, and their value-add was that you’d never hear from them again — no mailing lists, no you-might-be-interested-in-this, none of that. And it went pretty well for a while, until Drugstore.com came online and undercut them on everything and threw in free shipping to boot.

So now they deal exclusively in sex toys, but because Tom is a total mensch, they do it their own wholesome way. Every year they put up a table at the Dirty Show, an annual erotic-art show here in Detroit, and raise money for charity. One year they offered “take a ride on the world’s largest vibrator” for $3, last year it was a claw machine called Mr. Grab Ass. (The joystick control was an actual joy stick, heh heh.)

You can imagine what his office is like. And it’s in this bland light-industrial park, which is to say, it’s in a light-industrial park, period. All light-industrial parks are bland; it’s like their designs are a competition for the most boring architects in the world. You could locate the CIA in a light-industrial park, and no one would ever find it. As he was walking me out, he pointed out the building next door, which was equally boring and beige and surrounded by boxy shrubs and nondescript trees. His neighbor, Tom said, makes some sort of custom-fabricated hot rod parts, and is considered the best in the world at it. So just in this one corner of this one industrial park, you have dildos and hot rods.

“What other secrets are lurking in this neighborhood?” I asked. And that’s the book idea: Secrets of the Light-Industrial Park: Adventures in American Capitalism.

I don’t particularly want to write it. But who knows, maybe someday I will.

In the meantime, I’m collecting some thoughts on jewelry advertising this time of year. Later in the week.

Bloggage? “The Queen of Versailles” is on my watch-one-of-these-days list, especially so after reading Dave Weigel’s take on it. The story of how two Florida sharpies set out to build the largest residence in the U.S. gets sidetracked by something bigger, i.e., trouble in their time-share paradise:

The hard-selling Siegel employees try to convince their marks to buy time shares before said marks can do the math and realize the risks. We see one couple, both tattooed and glum-looking, grow more and more interested as they’re told that they can save thousands of dollars if, instead of booking motels every time they come to Vegas, they buy a time-share condo in the tower. Eventually, the husband pushes a credit card across the table. “I can’t believe we just did it!” he says, with little evident joy. He could do it because he had credit.

The Freep does a huge, year-end (i.e., awards-bait) project on the Packard plant here in Detroit. If you don’t want to wade through a million words, I can recommend the video, which is really well-done.

The WashPost has a great report on the Kennedy Center honors this year. Start at Led Zeppelin and follow the links to the rest.

The week begins! December already. How’d that happen?

Our windows have been grimy for a while, and I’ve been trying to think of a solution that would involve me waking up one sunny morning to discover they were clean and shiny, one that wouldn’t require the household’s primary breadwinner to climb a ladder to the second floor. And lo, one was revealed to me when I saw a guy washing windows at the house across the street. He was obviously not the owner, and my steel-trap mind made the deduction — he was a window-washer.

A couple of phone calls later, he and his partner arrived at the house today, on a fine sunny morning. Washer No. 1 was morbidly obese. Washer No. 2 was older and walked as though he needed double hip replacements. The thought of either one on a ladder was a little heart-clutching, but as it turned out, they used their stealthy technique of “doing the outside from the inside” and managed to avoid it. Their copious compliments on our decorating choices made me feel a little better about them; everyone enjoys flattery. They got it all done and at the end, made a pitch for an every-six-months visit, which I guess I’ll go for, because who doesn’t want someone else to do that chore.

“All our clients are getting old,” Hip-Replacement Guy said. “The last one said she couldn’t see the dirt anymore, so why bother.”

I’ll take your place, old lady. I will keep this duo squirting and polishing into 2013.

If the stray dogs and cats of the world ever figure out what a soft touch I am, they’ll all develop hip problems and come a-calling.

A fascinating story to kick off the bloggage today, which it took me all day to read in bits and pieces — “The Lying Disease,” about a phenomenon I’ve read about before, but not in such detail. That is, Munchausen syndrome by internet. That is, people who fake illness on the internet. Fascinating, and another big swing for the fences by The Stranger. Gotta love an alt-weekly that still kicks it ol’-skool.

For you Michiganians, especially those with kids in schools, Bridge has a nice little package on the school-choice plans being rolled out this month. How choicey are these choices? Pretty choice-er-iffic:

Imagine a world where your teenage son chooses high school courses like picking dishes in a cafeteria – a serving of Advanced Placement chemistry in the white collar enclave across the river, Spanish online at the dining room table, an English class at the local community college, band at his home school.

Now imagine that same world, but where schools act less like cafeterias and more like department stores. Billboards promote quick high school math credits at an online branch. A new charter school operating in the old Sears building offers iPads to the first 100 students who enroll. Your son’s home public high school drops its football team in a downsizing caused by lost revenue from plummeting enrollment.

More here, and still more here.

Great moments in mugshots, local version.

Great Lakes at record lows. Arizona? If you ever entertained any thoughts about that trans-national water pipeline, better give ’em up now.

And now it’s Wednesday, and the week struggles over the hump, dragging me along. These post-holiday weeks are a bitch, ain’a?

Honestly, I shouldn’t be surprised that troll-bait like this keeps getting published, but being of perhaps a too-Panglossian temperament (at the moment, anyway), I am. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you… the war on men:

The so-called dearth of good men (read: marriageable men) has been a hot subject in the media as of late. Much of the coverage has been in response to the fact that for the first time in history, women have become the majority of the U.S. workforce. They’re also getting most of the college degrees. The problem? This new phenomenon has changed the dance between men and women.

…To say gender relations have changed dramatically is an understatement. Ever since the sexual revolution, there has been a profound overhaul in the way men and women interact. Men haven’t changed much – they had no revolution that demanded it – but women have changed dramatically.

In a nutshell, women are angry. They’re also defensive, though often unknowingly. That’s because they’ve been raised to think of men as the enemy. Armed with this new attitude, women pushed men off their pedestal (women had their own pedestal, but feminists convinced them otherwise) and climbed up to take what they were taught to believe was rightfully theirs.

Granted, this was on the Fox News website, which ain’t exactly the New Yorker. Granted, it’s post-election, when everyone is looking for things to fight about. But still, I read this and think, Really? Really?

There’s a whole mens-rights subculture on the internet that laps this stuff up like a kitty does cream. They’ve been around for a while. You know those dating services you see in the back of sketchy magazines offering Philippine and Russian brides with “traditional” ideas of how husbands should be treated? Meet their clients.

Truth be told, I’m wasting time thinking about this nonsense to avoid thinking about the garment-factory fire in Bangladesh — over 100 dead and has anyone compared it to the Triangle Shirtwaist fire yet? Because they should. Having spent at least part of the weekend looking over the wares available at local shopping malls — marveling that year after year, Forever 21’s clothes seem to get even cheaper — it does give one pause. Slate has been running excerpts now and then from Elizabeth Cline’s “Overdressed: The High Cost of Cheap Fashion,” and I’m thinking it’s time for a change. While I love a good cheap T-shirt as much as the next girl — and acknowledging it’s impossible to find domestically made clothes consistently — buying shit with Made In labels like this is sort of like buying cocaine. There’s a cheap high, and then you’re left with the realization that you’re supporting an icky industry.

So, it’s Monday and as usual, my day has been long and my patience is short. How about some easy bloggage?

A two-minute roundup of the best lines from “Liz & Dick.”

And with that, I’m making an exit. TV to catch up on, y’see.

I feared a lonesome Thanksgiving this year. Various obligations required us to stay here, and everybody else to stay where they were, and so it would just be the three of us on our own — along with all my dead Catholic relatives who frowned on small families (not that many, really). We considered even going out to eat, but those options were a) limited; and b) gross. So I bought a turkey breast, planned a tiny little feast, and waited for it to arrive.

And we had a pretty much perfect holiday. It was helped along by the weather, which was in the high 50s under blue skies. With the whole day to kill — the first rule of Nance’s Thanksgiving is that the food is served at the dinner hour, not at midday — we threw the bikes into the cars and headed for Belle Isle.

(Kate loves her leather jacket, yes.)

This wasn’t exercise as atonement for gluttony, but just a lazy lap of the island, with many stops for photography and sightseeing. Do you ever think we’ll build public works in this country with lovely designs details again? This is the lighthouse at the northeast end:

The teenager is into photographing graffiti these days, so of course we had to stop at the abandoned zoo…

…before winding up close to where we began, at the Scott Fountain.

You might see it bubbling away when the Pistons’ season extends past the freezing season. The networks have it in their beauty-shot bumper file; the fact the team plays about 40 miles away doesn’t seem to bother anyone.

And then it was home to watch the Lions lose and make all the chow. We ended the evening watching “Almost Famous” en famille. And if that isn’t a great holiday, I don’t know what is.

The warm feelings must have lasted, because at 9:30 a.m. Friday I found myself doing something I haven’t done in years, maybe decades — setting out to shop on Black Friday. No door-busting — I’m not insane — but just a stroll around the mall to sniff the air and see what the nation’s mall-based retailers thought worthy of my attention. Parking was a breeze. The place wasn’t even that crowded, although if you were fool enough to go into one of those 50%-off-everything-before-noon stores, you could find yourself waiting in line 40 minutes to try on a sweater.

What did I find? That malls are about as useful to me on Black Friday as they are the other 364 days of the year. But I did enjoy reading the windows, seeing if Bebe is still selling the Russian-prostitute look (yes), whether Macy’s is still inferior to all the stores it gobbled (yes), whether you can still find the horse picture (yes). The horse picture, you ask? Look around any fashion-marketing campaign, and sooner or later you’ll see a picture of a model in an elaborate evening gown, posing with a horse. I’ve never understood this picture; what is it saying? Someone call for a horse? or I told the stableboy I wanted to go riding in the morning, and what happens? I dress for dinner and there’s a knock on the damn door. or Would you walk this beast back to the barn? The path is muddy and these are $700 shoes.

When I owned a horse, I learned that wearing a white T-shirt to the barn directly increased the chance he would sneeze on me. An evening gown probably would have provoked a fecal explosion.

And now the week begins anew. I’m writing this on my birthday (Sunday) and I accept all your tributes, those already offered and the ones you forgot. Not you — the other guy.

So, bloggage?

I’ve been quiet on the subject of Black Friday doorbuster madness, ever since reading Hank Stuever’s “Tinsel” and realizing how many people shop BF sales because they have more people on their lists than their budget will accommodate. Now, we can take apart the whole idea of over-shopping, but for now, I choose to simply abstain from getting all hot and bothered over it. Still, when someone posted the worst of the BF Walmart mosh pit videos scored with heavy metal, I gotta tell ya — I laffed.

My insomnia had me up at an insane hour Sunday, and I think I read the whole internet, from Kim Kardashian’s butt to this George Will column. I haven’t bothered to see what this braying ass has to say about anything in quite a while, so I’m not sure what I expected, but I guess I wasn’t surprised:

In any case, the crisis of Hostess Brands Inc., the maker of Twinkies, involves two potent lessons.

First, market forces will have their way. Second, never underestimate baby-boomer nostalgia, which is acute narcissism. The Twinkies melodrama has the boomers thinking — as usual, about themselves: If an 82-year-old brand can die, so can we. Is that even legal?

Oh, very droll. That, right-chere, is what you call SPARKLE.

Finally, I’m sorry to say that Angel, the rescue pup referenced in the Thanksgiving post, didn’t make it, and died that very day. Andi, however, continues to thrive. I know a few of you kicked her some money, so you should know her ribs are disappearing, and it looks like she had a very good Thanksgiving indeed:

Let’s lurch on into the holidays together — I hope the mellowness of the weekend continues all the way through.

For those of you asking, yes this stuff exists and yes you can buy it:

And that is Basset’s hand and he must have been bored up in that tree stand because he made several comments here and sent me this picture. It’s getting to where Da Yoopers’ version of deer season needs an update to feature Twitter and shaming photos:

Whatever else happened yesterday, I hope Basset got himself one. Although the weather is pretty damn perfect for spending another day out in it, if he’s so inclined.

I’m thinking a can of that deer pee would make an excellent mischief-making aid. I bet they sell a lot to frat boys exploring new frontiers in hazing.

Did anyone watch “The Dust Bowl?” I have to admit — sometimes Ken Burns gets on my nerves, but this one dragged me in. The photography alone was awe-inspiring; I simply can’t imagine what it must have been like, seeing one of those terrible clouds bearing down. If it’s on a replay anywhere near you, I recommend it. Steel yourself for many dead children, however. Not easy.

I have a feeling this week will be a pretty light-duty sort of stretch, but yes, there’s some bloggage:

The faces of medical marijuana.

Leslie Mann, the least-funny comic actress in Hollywood today. Nepotism is an irritating thing.

And that’s it for me.

I cannot write much today, for I fear I have been flattened by a cultural juggernaut. Kate’s birthday present from her aunt in Defiance was a ticket to see the Trans-Siberian Orchestra Sunday afternoon, in Toledo. Of course we went, too.

Living in a lefty NPR cultural cocoon as I do, these things tend to take me by surprise. Terry Gross keeps me up on the latest interesting lesbian singer-songwriters, but a group that’s sold more tickets than the gross national product of Tanzania? I say, “Oh, is it a Russian thing? Sure, we’ll go.”

Truth be told, I wasn’t quite that ignorant, but I didn’t know much. Christmas. Synthesizers. That’s about it.

(Alan, too. We were eating lunch before he realized this wasn’t Mannheim Steamroller we were about to see.)

Three hours later, having had my hair blown back by something that resembled Emerson, Lake and Palmer meets Disney by way of the Super Bowl halftime show, I can say: Ignorant no more! Lasers, snow, a story hokey enough to embarrass Red Skelton read from the stage, more lasers, acrobatic fiddlin’, hair-flippin’ chick singers, hair-flippin’ male guitarists, a salute to the troops and am I forgetting anything? Oh yeah: FIRE. Tons of fire. And fireworks! The house lights came up in a haze so thick the smoke alarms kept going off, and I have to think someone was keeping the sprinkler system on manual override — otherwise we’d all have been soaked.

I’m no photographer, but one crappy cellphone shot from the cheap seats:

And while I’m sure Dave Weigel would never count them among his beloved prog-rock practitioners, you can’t deny the influence.

Walking out, listening to the chatter, I gathered many in the audience come to this thing every year. Well, the Rockettes can’t go everywhere.

And it was fun.

Otherwise, it was a good weekend. Birthdays — the world an always use a little more cake.

Bloggage? Sure, some:

“What can be worse than to sell your soul and find it not valuable enough to get anything for it?” — Garry Wills on guess-who.

I have nothing to say about Hostess, except that I don’t eat that crap myself. Twinkies. Bleh.

A short week for most of us, I expect. Enjoy it, whatever its length.

There was this woman who worked in Columbus for a time when I was there. Two women, actually. Both were young and quite pretty, which by newsroom standards made them practically Victoria’s Secret models. I think it’s safe to say both had their immediate (male) supervisors buffaloed, which is a little duh-you-don’t-say, but as someone who’s never been able to do that, it rankled a bit.

But only a bit. Both were far outside my orbit, so I was able to observe them both rather dispassionately.

Both were excellent at one key skill — seeming really busy. They bustled around, arms full of three-ring binders, pencils held in their mouths like a horse’s bit, hair prettily askew. They seemed barely contained. Oh my god I can’t believe how much I have to do, etc. They went to meetings. They leaned in close to talk to you. They contained multitudes. They vibrated with energy. (That men might find this attractive was something I’d never even considered until William Hurt essentially told Holly Hunter it was a huge turn-on in “Broadcast News.”)

One was working on a reporting project that was going to blow off lids. The other was launching a new section. Only the project landed with a dull, wet thud and the section editor ended up in the ER just hours before D-day, being treated for “stress” and seemingly clamped in a sustained anxiety attack.

I hadn’t thought of either of them in years, until I read this passage in a story about Paula Broadwell, posted yesterday in comments. Sorry for the length, but I need this whole passage to illustrate something.

One of Broadwell’s former professors at Harvard described her as a self-promoter who would routinely show up at office hours.

“It was very much, ‘I’m here and you’re going to know I’m here,’” said the professor, who did not want to be identified because of the sensitivity of ongoing investigations. “She was not someone you would think of as a critical thinker. I don’t remember anything about her as a student. I remember her as a personality.”

The professor said when Petraeus chose Broadwell to write his biography, there was shock among the national security faculty at Harvard because “she just didn’t have the background — the academic background, the national security background, or the writing background.”

A second Harvard faculty member who knows Broadwell and Petraeus had similar misgivings.

At one point, Broadwell said she was leaving the doctorate track because she was over­extended and didn’t have time to complete the coursework, recounted the professor, who was not authorized to speak to the press.

Broadwell later complained that the writing project on Petraeus was not going well.

“She was a lot of talk but not a lot of follow-through,” said the second professor, who described Broadwell’s struggle to deliver on the biography as “deeply embarrassing” to the Kennedy School. “That is why she brought on a co-author,” Vernon Loeb, an editor at the Washington Post.

Stipulated: It is the height of shittiness to say stuff like this behind the cloak of anonymity, and all that “the sensitivity of the investigation” and “not being authorized to speak to the press” is just a fancy way of being shitty. But if any of it is to be believed, it appears Broadwell was cut from the same cloth as these other women, born cute and smart and energetic, a city girl who seemed to find out early how to open doors with just a smile.

Broadwell was by any measure a superachiever, but she wouldn’t be the first woman defeated by a long-form writing project.

You want to know the punchline of this one? Check it:

Nonetheless, Harvard embraced Broadwell as a distinguished alumna after “All In: The Education of General David Petraeus” became a New York Times bestseller this year. On Sept. 10, the Kennedy School included Broadwell on an alumni panel of accomplished public servants and the next day hosted a forum at which she discussed her book.

Fuckers. Speaking of lyin’ eyes.

So. The weekend awaits. A little bloggage before I go? Sure.

This has been around for a while, and I know I said I was moving beyond the election, but “Letter to a future Republican strategist regarding white people” is too good a rant not to take note of:

My wife and I are quite familiar with America’s healthcare system due to our professions, and having lived abroad extensively, also very aware of comparable systems. Your party’s insistence on declaring the private U.S. healthcare system “the best in the world” fails nearly every factual measure available to any curious mind. We watch our country piss away 60% more expenditures than the next most expensive system (Switzerland) for health outcomes that rival former Soviet bloc nations. On a personal scale, my wife watches poor WORKING people show up in emergency rooms with fourth-stage cancer because they were unable to afford primary care visits. I have watched countless small businesses unable to attract talented workers because of the outrageous and climbing cost of private insurance. And I watch European and Asian businesses outpace American companies because they can attract that talent without asking people to risk bankruptcy and death. That you think this state of affairs is somehow preferable to “Obamacare,” which you compared ludicrously to Trotskyite Russian communism, is a sign of deficient minds unfit to guide health policy in America.

Thanks, Eric Zorn.

And now, if you’ll excuse me, I must rest for a day of reportin’, writin’ and birthday-cake-bakin’ tomorrow. It’s a big day at our house, Nov. 16:

Hope your weekend is pleasant.

Every year around this time, my friend Connie, who curates a monthly short-film fest, devotes one month’s program to zombies. Tonight was Zombie Night, and I went. One hour and 40 minutes of splattering, moaning and head-smashing. And that was just the audience. Ha, a joke. But seriously — making a film might make you a filmmaker, but it doesn’t make you a good one. I grew very weary of guns and guts, although there were some nice moments — a couple playing bedroom games, a little girl who cooks a meal (or ten) for a visiting ghoul. The point is, some people simply love zombies. And for that, many makeup artists will have long careers.

But I am weary. And I would like to go to bed. So here is a link or two, eh?

Best restaurant review I’ve read since maybe ever, of Guy Fieri’s 500-seat Times Square hog trough. I don’t want to spoil it for you — just read.

One of my former neighbors in Fort Wayne is a tattoo artist, emphasis on the artistry. Although I’m never going to get one myself, his work always seemed a cut above to me. The shop he co-owns with his brother has a new website, and as good as Dominick’s work is, his brother’s is amazing. If I could be assured my skin would never stretch or sag in any way, I’d consider getting that Bettie Page somewhere. And that’s the highest praise I’m capable of.

Time for bed. Night, all.

On edit: I forgot to include this appalling story, about a woman who died in an Irish hospital for want of the D&C that would have cleared the doomed, 17-week fetus she was in the process of miscarrying. I know the election’s over and the idiots lost, but let’s be reminded once more that these things happen all the time, and to refuse a woman in this position is the most repulsive sort of “pro-life” advocacy.

I’m not normally in town on Mondays, but I was this week, which happened to intersect with THE DARKEST SHAME OF MY LIFE, the every-other-week visit from my cleaning woman. Neither one of us wants me here while she’s working, and somehow I ended up at the newly opened McDonald’s in my neighborhood. They promised, when it was on the drawing board, that they wanted it to become a Starbucky gathering place, with free wifi, so I figured I’d take them up on it.

How many here have ever put on the paper hat of McDonald’s? I know, it’s a visor now, but it was a paper hat when most of us here were likely to work there. Working at Mickey D’s is the classic American first job, and I’ve lost count of how many people I’ve known who earned their first paychecks dishing up fries. I’m now mellow enough that I don’t mind little mistakes in my orders, figuring they’re payback on the millions of mistakes I’ve made in my own work.

This McDonald’s is in Detroit, and of course Detroit is an African-American city, so most of the kids working there are, as well. Also, Grosse Pointe kids get their first jobs clerking for Supreme Court justices or caddying for General Motors board members. Today, this crew is being overseen by a middle-aged woman, black, a clone of every other manager or assistant manager in every other McDonald’s in this part of the world.

When my friend Deb’s son was getting his training at his local McD’s, one of these women came into the room where they were learning the closing procedure and food-handling procedure and all the rest of it. It’s a lot for a 16-year-old to take in. She was carrying a tray filled with french fries. “MAC-Donald’s kicking y’all’s butts yet? How about something to eat.”

The woman Monday afternoon was shepherding her young workers with that mix of absolute authority and indulgent maternal instinct so necessary in this particular environment. One blocked an aisle I was trying to walk through, and she barked, “Make ROOM for this lady — she’s a customer!” before turning back to the kid she was sitting down with.

“Do you know your schedule?” she asked him.

“Um, yeah,” the kid said. Pause. “I think.”

“Tell it to me,” she ordered.

“Saturday, 3-9,” he tried.

“And Sunday?”

“The same?”

“That’s right, honey. You’re doing good.”

It cannot be easy to run one of these places. You’re always hiring, always training, always ready to step in when one of your teenage workers decides not to show up on Saturday, having not yet learned the courtesy of two weeks’ notice. The owner of Zingerman’s once described dishwashing positions as something that change on almost an hourly basis, and any restaurant owner too good to handle that duty isn’t long for the business. You don’t have that problem at McDonald’s, but you better not be too proud to make coffee and shake salt over the fries.

I passed the time writing a letter of recommendation for one of my former students, now trying to get into Berkeley’s documentary program. The advantage of dealing with digital files is, the selection committee won’t be able to see grease smears on the paper.

The kid who took my order was obviously a greenhorn, but like I said: No biggie. The time to worry is when people who are plainly overqualified for the work start turning up behind the counter. During the absolute worst of the recession, I had my bags at Trader Joe’s packed by a guy who took enormous care to use every inch of space wisely. I walked out with two perfectly balanced bags and thought God, I hope this man didn’t go to engineering school.

So. How was your Monday? I see the Petraeus story is getting weirder (and more understandable) by the day, now that we know it features that fixture of Washington scandal — a man sending around shirtless photos of himself:

A federal agent who launched the investigation that ultimately led to the resignation of Central Intelligence Agency chief David Petraeus was barred from taking part in the case over the summer due to superiors’ concerns that he had become personally involved in the case, according to officials familiar with the probe.

New details about how the Federal Bureau of Investigation handled the case suggest that even as the bureau delved into Mr. Petraeus’s personal life, the agency had to address questionable conduct by one of its own—including allegedly sending shirtless photos of himself to a woman involved in the case.

May I just offer this word of advice to the men of the world — from Detroit judges to U.S. Congressmen — who feel compelled to send seminude photos of yourself to women you want to bag? Don’t. It doesn’t work. Women appreciate a nice-looking man, sure, but our brains don’t really work like that. Yours do, but not ours. Send a funny note instead, or an iTunes mix, or whatever. She’ll thank you, and you’ll be less likely to end up famous for the wrong reason.

On a more serious note, a Q&A with an expert on education policy worldwide. We’re doing it wrong:

When we think about market mechanisms in education, we think about managing consumer demand. It’s all about school choice.

And then you look at Shanghai, which also believes in market mechanisms, but has a totally different strategy. They operate on the supply side. What Shanghai has done is create incentives to attract the most talented teachers into the most challenging classrooms. And to get the best principals into the toughest schools. It’s the same kind of philosophy, based on market mechanisms. But they turned the problem on its head and achieved a remarkable improvement in educational outcomes.

Having dispensed with Monday — during which Sunday’s 70-degree temperatures fell 35 degrees — Tuesday is looking far better. Let’s hope so.