An all-links Friday update? Sure, works for me. Opening Day was clear and sunny and beautiful, but damn cold. I was standing on a corner waiting for a light to change near Wayne State, and the wind gusted in my face, and what did I do? I moaned. It’s April. Time for crazy weather to stop this shit and start being spring. Those two weeks of summer were a cruel taunt. Easter Sunday will be rainy and barely 60. But it’s time to strip the cover off the boat and get this show on the road, eh?

Best Tumblr I’ve seen in a while: Texts from Hillary.

But still, my fave is Animals Talking in All Caps.

It’s a tough town: Second law-abiding Detroiter in a week shoots and kills an intruder. Any more of this, and the ghost of Charlton Heston will come to town.

Are any of you even at work today? Happy Passover, and a somber Good Friday. And who’ll be watching “The Ten Commandments?” I will.

Today, a question for the room: Have you ever eaten a spear of asparagus right out of the ground? Snapped it off and ate it as you wandered through the rows? You should try it sometime, if you ever get a chance; it’s like a whole different vegetable, as tender at the base as it is at the tip. No bitterness, no stringiness. I’m thinking these rabbits are onto something. Maybe we should all get on all fours and graze a bit.

No, I haven’t been smoking weed or anything. John and Sam, aka J.C. and Sam, have been in Lansing for the last few weeks, helping Sammy’s father start his journey down the ghost road. That journey having commenced over the weekend, I stopped by on my way out of town yesterday and beheld his legendary garden — he was a botanist — which will be on its own this season, although I’m sure the neighbors will enjoy the strawberries and raspberries and other perennials. We enjoyed the raw asparagus. Man, what a revelation.

And if you had spent most of the day in Excel training, that’s what you’d remember about the day, too.

Excel: I know it’s a titan of software. I know it makes data analysis possible in ways undreamed of by data nerds in times gone by, but when the most common thing you hear in several hours of training is, “Excel will trip you up,” maybe there’s a little feature-not-bug thing going on. I use Numbers, m’self. It does everything Excel does — except for something called “pivot tables,” and may I never learn what those are — and looks prettier.

And other than that, it was a lot of driving. But a beautiful day.

Bloggage?

Sure: Lots of women get abortions at 24 weeks, because they “had to have a career.” A dispatch from the right-wing propaganda war, “October Baby.”

It’s simply appalling how long it’s taken Detroit’s city council to come to terms with reality, but it finally did. I’ve started making screen captures of Charles Pugh’s glasses — he wears a different pair every day. I’m thinking it’s a metaphor.

And now I’m off to my warm, soft bed. Downside of the week, y’all.

I was having office hours today when the department secretary stuck her head in the door.

“You haven’t responded to your invitation to the diversity awards,” she said.

“I never got an invitation to the diversity awards,” I said.

“It’s in your mailbox.”

“I have a mailbox?” Kidding. I learned I had a mailbox about six months ago, maybe longer. I hadn’t checked it since. So I found it — it’s in an office I never visit — and pulled out the invitation to the diversity awards. Also, one to the department Christmas party and something from the president informing us of the rich menu of learning experiences available on campus. I reached all the way back, just to make sure I hadn’t missed anything.

And pulled out something that looked like the paychecks I used to receive before I signed up for direct deposit. Surely it was some sort of tax document. Dammit, already filed, I thought, ripping off the zip tabs on the ends, wondering if I’d have to file an amended return.

Unfolded it. It was a check. Made out to me. For several hundred dollars. Dated April 27, 2011. I have no idea why I was paid by check when it was supposed to be coming electronically. Don’t know why I didn’t notice I was short, except that adjuncts are paid through the term and when the term stops, the money stops, and this was likely the last one of the term. I probably thought it just stopped early.

I could go on at great length explaining my budgeting process to you, but it would only serve to make me sound even stupider. As it was, the two or three people I had to explain this to by way of getting it voided and repaid looked at me like I’m some silly rich twit who didn’t even know she was short an entire paycheck a whole year previous.

“I’m not rich!” I told them. “I’m just dumb.”

In three to five days, I will have a brand-new check. In four to six days, I predict a bill will arrive for precisely that amount.

One of my longer-term resolutions this year is to get certain financial ducks in a row. So if you owe me any money, please send a check now. Or just order lots of Amazon through the Kickback Lounge.

The WSJ had a story Thursday about how high schools are dealing with the prom-dress problem, i.e., enforcing the dress code necessitated by the new prom dresses.

“New prom dresses?” you ask. “How new can they be?”

How about this new, to use an extreme example, but not all that unusual, evidently. The story says that the trend toward cut-down-to-there, slit-up-to-here, tight/plunging/see-through dresses is coming out of Hollywood, driven by “Dancing With the Stars,” the Real Housewives and J-Lo, mainly. I urge you to take a walk through the Promgirl online catalog, and marvel — at the models, all of whom look like Kardashians on the far side of 30; at the cutouts; at the boob jobs; at the…whatever this is. Do any of the girls whose mothers permit them to walk outside the house dressed like this have any sense of propriety? Or are they all raising their girls to be sold into white slavery? I tell Kate if she wants to dress like this, I will teach her to say, in Russian, “My name is Olga, and I cost two hundred dollars.”

Best line from the story:

Southmoore High’s guidelines say male students must keep their shirts on all night. “We don’t care that you work out,” the guide states.

OK, then! Got any bloggage? Yes, and a wide variety of it.

From New York magazine, President John Tyler, born in 1790, our 10th president, has a living grandson. Yes, grandson:

Both my grandfather — the president — and my father, were married twice. And they had children by their first wives. And their first wives died, and they married again and had more children. And my father was 75 when I was born, his father was 63 when he was born. John Tyler had fifteen children — eight by his first wife, seven by his second wife — so it does get very confusing.

A T-shirt company in town sells a wide variety of shirts promoting various parts of the Metro — one emblazoned Taylortucky, for a downriver community; another showing a sombrero-wearing cactus for Mexicantown. But it wasn’t until it released one for Dearborn that featured the city’s name in Arabic letters that the shit hit the fan. Maybe that’s too strong. It was more like a vile fart in front of an air conditioner. I still want one.

Dig it: A nice piece on a Detroit urban farmer, and mine on the Mower Gang, if you missed the link in the comments yesterday.

There’s a second Mad Style post today! T-Lo, the gift that keeps on blogging.

A good weekend, all. Sorry I’ve been so uninspired, of late. It’s been a killer week.

A woman approached me at a freeway exit today, holding a gas can and rattling off a mile-a-minute story about running out of gas, being late for work and panicked about losing her job. She didn’t look like she worked at Victoria’s Secret at Macomb Mall, but it wasn’t out of the question, either. Please, please, please, she said.

I gave her $4. There’s at least a 50-50 chance she spent it in a nearby crack house, but I always consider the possibility she really needed the money. You have to make a decision about these things in half the cycle of a red light, and what the hell — will your karma be terribly dented by a kindness to a drug addict, even if it’s not the kindness they need? The last thing she said as she moved to the next car?

“I’ll pay it forward. I will.”

Let’s hope so.

I felt the need to rearrange karma a bit yesterday, having read about what most seem to consider a fairly disastrous argument for the Affordable Care Act earlier. Well. If it goes down, I look forward to the GOP’s “modest, incremental fixes” of the existing unsustainable reality, not to mention the usual preening about the greatest health-care system in the world.

What happened to the solicitor general? It sounds like he was utterly unprepared to be aggressively questioned. He was asked if the government could require people to buy a burial plot. Maybe if a burial plot cost $100,000, and your failure to afford one meant we all had to chip in for yours? I’d say yeah. (My boss Derek says, “Ask the government if you can bury your aunt in the back yard, and see what they say.”) The more polite commentators are pretending John Roberts is a wild card — ha! — and, of course, Clarence Thomas sat there like a toad who hasn’t had quite enough hours in direct sunlight yet.

A long day, followed by a long evening. Grading papers. Grading, grading, grading. My eyes are crossed.

Looks like Gawker noticed Frank Bruni’s column Sunday, too:

…Here are a couple questions.

1) If you were a vocal anti-abortion protester, and you needed to get an abortion, would you select the very abortion clinic that you had protested for years? The one that is staffed be people you had stared in the face and called “murderers” for years? Would you seek out those “familiar faces”? Or would you maybe go somewhere else?

2) How did this young lady enter the clinic without being spotted by any of her co-protesters?

3) If you were a virulent anti-abortion protester who suddenly and hypocritically sought out an abortion from the very people you had been calling murderers for years, would you return to that very same clinic a week later to call those very same people murderers, even though you knew that they knew you were a horrible liar?

These are the very same questions I asked! Bruni hasn’t responded to Gawker, but he has his defenders out there, and I seriously don’t get it.

Did I mention my eyes are crossed with fatigue? They are. I’m going to bed.

I don’t think Alan’s been to Lansing since we’ve lived in Michigan, and now that I’m here a day or two every week, it’s not like I’m an expert or anything, but I know my way around more than he does.

The other day I commented that Lansing reminded me of another place we’ve lived before — Fort Wayne.

“Really?” he said.

Sure. Sorta-high-rise buildings, a certain Stalinesque look to a few of them, a domed structure at the middle of it all, and of course, that low, evergray sky.

He was surprised. He thought Lansing was like Ann Arbor, with a major university weaving its way through the town, his wife wandering out at lunch to eat at some cool vegan restaurant where the wait staff all have dreadlocks. That kind of thing.

Alas, no. East Lansing is nowhere near the capitol building. Here’s the sign on the lawn of one of our neighbors:

Ah, the rich economic loam of a white-collar government-dependent city — consultants. My favorite is CPAN. And, of course, the Rockstar Factory.

If there’s a cool vegan place within walking distance, I haven’t found it. The other day we ambled over to the all-you-can-eat Chinese buffet.

Speaking of government, perhaps you’ve heard what’s happening in Detroit these days. The city is teetering on the brink of Chapter 9, with fighting over what role the state will take in whatever comes next — emergency financial manager or consent agreement. There are public meetings and lots of yelling.

So, you might ask: What’s the city council president up to? This.

You know what I love best about this? It’s a two-camera production.

I know the set of “fans of smart medical ethicists” isn’t very large, but I’m in it, and my favorite is Art Caplan. He used to write a syndicated column that was distributed on the Knight Ridder wire, and I admired how he could take cases from Baby M to something you never heard of, and always manage to say something interesting about them. Later on, I’d love him for a more personal reason — you could call him, and even though he’s a big fromage and you’re just some yutz from Fort Wayne, he would take your call, or call you back, or give you his personal cell number, or whatever.

Anyway, he’s leaving the University of Pennsylvania, where he’s been forever, and going to New York University. The Philadelphia City Paper marked his exit in their Bell Curve column:

Famed medical ethicist Arthur Caplan is leaving UPenn to work for NYU. “They promised me an unlimited supply of drifters to just fuck around with in my lab,” he shrugs. “I’m making a monster that I plan to marry and then hunt for sport. Is that wrong?”

Both Ron and Derek had good blogs at 42 North yesterday. Ron’s here — on lying liars and their lying lyingness, and Derek’s here, about the various outrageous abuses of sunshine laws in this state, and probably yours, too.

These issues wouldn’t be so critical if we didn’t have so many people like this holding public office:

Five (International Baccalaureate) students who traveled to the Dominican Republic over spring break – Abhijay Kumar, Rahul Gannapureddy, Kyla Roland, Jessica Khoury and Kate Kreiss – described a program that makes them want to come to school every day.

“You learn how to talk to people who have different views than you, in a constructive way,” Kreiss said. “I personally believe the IB program is preparing me more for the real world.”

…Board member Murray Kahn said students who spoke glowingly of the program used some of the same language he had read on the IB program website.

“I’m hearing indoctrination,” he said, “and it concerns me a lot, because of where this program originates.”

Your school board. Hard at work.

Hello, weekend! Think I’ll do our taxes.

Detroitblogger John, aka John Carlisle, spoke to my feature-writing class today. A joy. He talked about starting his blog as a way to keep his writing skills sharp, which morphed into his Metro Times column (down on the DL), which morphed into being named Detroit’s Journalist of the Year, and a reconciliation of sorts with his current employer, a suburban chain where he doesn’t write anything other than headlines.

I was struck, once again, by how far we’ve fallen as a business and how much we’ve changed as a craft, that a writer as talented as he is has to literally hide it away, and this in a town where the newspapers once stood in national company as places where a writer could really flex. I wanted to work at the Detroit Free Press once, and no, it wasn’t the Gannett sale that wrecked the place. Some great writers passed through that newsroom, a tiny few might still be there, but when I look for good examples of the craft to share with my students, I almost always go to the big four or five — WSJ, NYT, WashPost, St. Petersburg Times, et al.

And that’s a crime.

I should be out riding my bike or something, but I’m not. I skipped lunch today, and just broke the fast with some pasta with cannellini beans, rosemary and onions. It made me feel so warm and happy I just want to enjoy the feeling for a while. How do people who live forever on zero-carb diets do it? How can one feel warm and happy without beans and pasta? No wonder they’re so nasty all the time.

I wonder if anyone has done that research before — correlating one’s diet with their politics. I follow a few blogs not listed on the sidebar, and it’s so strange how often a switch to paleo eating is followed by aggressive assertion of right-wing political views. They eat a few steaks and start thinking they actually went out and slaughtered the beef themselves, using only their stone-tipped spears that they sharpened themselves. No government program for them, no sir!

Maybe it’s the growth hormones talking.

Not that I have ever turned down a nice steak. But then, I’m a moderate.

My head has been immersed in politics and policy all day, and I’m craving a palate-cleanser. When I do, I pop in on T&L and see who they’re taking apart (or not). I’m totally with them on Jennifer Lawrence and Beyonce, ditto Emma Stone and Shelley O. I LOVE that dress, hate the brooch. Maybe it’s part of her security equipment.

And when I’m done palate-cleansin’, I may take us out to see “The Hunger Games” this weekend, but only if I have two signed affidavits that it doesn’t suck. I just sampled some pages from the book online, and I’m not sure if I’m up for two hours of dystopia, but on the upside? Jennifer Lawrence. She seems to be playing the same character she did in “Winter’s Bone,” only with more sci-fi and Elizabeth Banks, and no meth. And she looks so cute in that black dress, right T&L?

Is this book any good? Anyone?

Late afternoon brought a phone call: Lance Mannion, telling me that Mrs. Mannion was the college classmate of the Romney aide who made the Etch-a-Sketch faux pas today. For the record, I loved it. Romney, and his staff, have such a tin ear for this sort of thing that it will make for a truly entertaining campaign season. One step forward, two gaffes back. If nothing else, it will be more entertaining than the escalating spiral of the-world-is-ending campaign speechifying, which Eric Zorn has been dutifully cataloging.

What else? Here’s a Gawker rant on fabrications by This American Life contributors who aren’t named Mike Daisey.

And with that, I’m off to Lansing. Happy Thursday, all.

Wow, what a day. So warm I drove home from Lansing with the sun roof open, IGNORING THE NEWS. I had to switch to the iPod about halfway there this morning, and it held through the afternoon commute, too. It was this story that did it; the sound of the Deep South voices saying this…

John Gentile of Crossville, Tenn., still doesn’t believe Obama is allowed to be president because his father was born in Kenya.

“I just don’t like the directions that he’s headed in, and personally I don’t think he qualifies to be president under the ‘natural born citizen.’ In the Constitution it states that you have to have two parents that were born in the United States, so that there’s no alternative allegiance by any member of the family,” Gentile said.

The Constitution actually doesn’t say that.

…just sent me around the bend. So much more calming to listen to Rod Stewart in his glory days. It made me want to learn how to play “Every Picture Tells a Story” on some random stringed instrument.

Has any one ever read anything I’ve written and said, “I wish I could turn a phrase like that girl?” I mean, other than Tim Goeglein? Because we all have gifts, but mine isn’t the guitar. (Or mandolin, in this case.)

A good day all around, today. I brought my iPad in, so Ron could watch “Game Change” on his lunch hour, and could hear him giggling from his office. His fave line: “Thanks for cutting your mullet, Levi.” I can’t believe I objected to the rate increase that made HBO Go and online streaming possible — old “Sopranos” and “The Wire” episodes have been the reason a number of boring household chores even got done in this house. Now, if only they’d add “John From Cincinnati,” a series that’s been so thoroughly scrubbed from HBO memory I’m convinced it might be my own private hallucination. Kem Nunn + David Milch = incoherence.

And now, I’m watching the returns come in from Dixie. Santorum just took Alabam’. I think I’ll celebrate with another glass of Cote du Rhone, like the urban elitist I am.

Meanwhile, some bloggage?

Charter schools by moi, mainbar and sidebar. Click and keep me employed.

A lead I think we can all agree we never want written about our death:

Charges were announced Tuesday for a gas station clerk in Detroit accused in a fatal shooting over the price of condoms in a late-night dispute over the weekend.

The kid was shot in the back. I understand the life of a Detroit gas-station clerk is perilous, but that is wrong.

I cannot get enough of Animals Talking in All Caps. Sorry, but it’s a joke that never gets old. (So far.)

Wednesday, almost! Huzzah.

Usually I arrive at this point of the day with at least one link-worth-clicking stashed here in a draft, but today? Pfft. That’s a Wednesday for you — the craziest of the week, but the one that feels like a curve being rounded, and dare I say it? Hump Day. After seven years of freelancing, back on a Monday-through-Friday schedule feels like…well, it feels like something different. And something celebratory.

But it also feels like a catch-up day. I finally got a spare minute to read the amazing Gawker screed about Andrew Breitbart. An angry, angry piece that has the advantage of being? Mostly true. It’s an angry piece that finds its villain not in Breitbart, but in the…how do they put it? The people whose job it was to call him out, and didn’t:

To borrow a gross analogy lustily employed on Breitbart’s own websites, if today’s mainstream media was penning obits on May 1, 1945, they would have summed up with, “Despite initiating the Second World War, the German leader was fond of public architecture and is survived by his beloved dachshunds.” …Breitbart trained the media like dogs, and he was still doing so, on Thursday morning, from beyond the grave. People joked that they didn’t know if his death was a hoax, and it’s a certainty that some asked because they were afraid of telling the truth about someone by then literally incapable of hurting them. If you beat a dog long enough, it learns to cower before you reach for a switch.

It kind of builds and builds, and reaches a masterful crescendo, and… isn’t there something already over about Breitbart? He really is a sort of wicked witch of the media, isn’t he? Now that he’s gone, he’s melted into a puddle and left behind, what? That years ago, Barack Obama went to a play? Now there’s a legacy.

Actually, the high point of yesterday was when one of my students filed a story about a city council meeting that featured “activists” complaining about “smart meters,” i.e. electric meters that can be read remotely, via cellular signals. Of course, this being the United States, this has caused no end of paranoia. The meters are either emitting signals that cause brain cancer, or stealing our data. Actual quote: “It is an infringement upon our constitutional rights.”

My advice to the student: Get the utility’s comment, and then run with that sucker. Some activists are more interesting than others.

How was your Wednesday?

It looks as though HBO’s “Game Change” is worth watching, and if you can’t bear it, by all means read Hank’s review. He’s so smart about these things:

Like its star character, the movie can be interpreted a number of ways, depending on your vantage point. If you are eternally baffled by Palin’s rise, then please enjoy the horror flick. If you harbor sympathy for someone who was plucked from near-obscurity and thrust into an impossible 11-week frenzy far beyond her skills or education, then it’s a psychological thriller. If you’re just a politics wonk, then it’s basically porn.

Amanda Marcotte on the Fluke thing:

Americans are still uptight about poor women having sex, teenage girls having sex, queer women having sex, and women who openly reject the path to marriage and motherhood having sex, but they’re just fine with the Sandra Flukes of the world having sex. Cohabitation before marriage is the national norm, and not just for my generation. I’m from Texas, for god’s sake, and I can probably count the married couples I know under 60 who didn’t live together before marriage on one hand, and in all my life, I’ve never known anyone to have a fight with their family about that.

And now, whaddaya know, it’s already Thursday. Let’s hope something happens of note around here.

Gotta say: I wasn’t a close observer of Andrew Breitbart. I knew who he was and what he was about, of course, but I wasn’t masochistic enough to monitor his various Big Whatevers on a regular basis. I skimmed the New Yorker profile awhile back, and came away with an impression of a fantastically angry man who brought a showbiz sensibility to a very baldly stated desire to destroy what he saw as institutions of the liberal media, blah blah blah. The fact he was able to get away with so much of this I attribute to the ability of those targets to say, Look, a truck. It’s coming this way. It’s speeding up. It’s not turning away. Isn’t that interesting?

I checked in on a few of the obituaries today, and once the shock wore off and the conspiracy theories fizzled and popped like firecrackers, a portrait like this emerged. David Frum:

The good was there. Breitbart was by all accounts generous with time and advice, a loving husband and father, and a loyal friend. One of those friends, Arianna Huffington, wrote today: “All I can think is what Andrew meant to me as a friend … his passion, his exuberance, his fearlessness.” Breitbart was unquestionably passionate and was exuberant. If by “fearless” you mean perpetually eager for confrontation, then yes he was fearless too, although in a very particular way. Nobody would ever describe Andrew Breitbart as a man of “quiet courage.” He delighted in the enraged outburst, the shouted insult, the videotaped jab of a finger into an opponent’s chest.

And I’m sorry, but this is the point where I check out. So he was a good guy in private, a jerkoff in public? I’m not interested in — no. I don’t like people like this. I understand that Don Rickles may well be a fantastic, sweet fellow after he’s offstage, but Don Rickles is an entertainer. Breitbart seemed to think of himself as one, too, but the world was his stage, and the damage was real. He told lies about people, malicious lies with very real consequences. Shirley Sherrod lost her job because of Breitbart. James O’Keefe, another trifling little liar, a nasty creep who makes Abbie Hoffman look like Willie Wonka, has a career because of him. He chose his targets and then said, By any means necessary.

Frum goes on:

Yet perhaps Breitbart’s most consequential innovation was his invention of a new kind of culture war. …Because President Obama was black, and because Breitbart believed in using every and any weapon at hand, Breitbart’s politics did inevitably become racially coded. Breitbart’s memory will always be linked to his defamation of Shirley Sherrod and his attempt to make a national scandal out of back payments to black farmers: the story he always called “Pigford” with self-conscious resonance.

Frum, whose discontent with the contemporary Republican party is no secret, goes on to add, “but he wasn’t a racist.” He was willing to use racist subtext to attack a president he didn’t like, and damn the consequences. But it was all in the game, yo.

I read some version of this — and Frum’s assessment is very good, I should add — half a dozen times today, and was left thinking that I simply have nothing but contempt for a life lived like this. I have more flaws, failings and human frailty than anyone here, but I think I’m basically honest. I try to tell the truth — and yes, my truth is not absolute and may not be yours — because if you’re in the communication business and you’re a liar, you’re a villain. It’s that simple. This is why I can’t stand phonies like Bob Greene and Mitch Albom, who do the same thing, but in a toadying, flattering way for their suburban audiences. If you write for a living, you may not always swing the sword of truth, but you cannot reject it entirely.

Oh, and may I just say? All these right-wingers clutching their pearls over all the mean things said about their boy today? Who left four young children and a wife, etc., and where is the decency? You have got to be fucking kidding me. Have you read what this man had to say about Ted Kennedy when he moved to the undiscovered country? Seriously?

A few Breitbartian links: Salon. Slate’s rerun of their 2010 profile of the man. Charlie Pierce. Mark Warren, at Charlie Pierce’s blog.

And that’s pretty much where I’m leaving it. No, one more note. Here’s what Shirley Sherrod, who had to leave her job after Breitbart colluded in a lie about her, had to say about his death:

“The news of Mr. Breitbart’s death came as a surprise to me when I was informed of it this morning,” Sherrod said in a statement sent to International Business Times by her attorney, Thomas Clare. “My prayers go out to Mr. Breitbart’s family as they cope during this very difficult time. I do not intend to make any further comments.”

Speaking of the truth, here’s one I need to pass along: I got my Amazon gift card, the one that arrives every few months, my cut of the Kickback Lounge. The range of these payouts ranges from around $17 to — in a Christmas month — $45. But this one? Ninety bucks. I’m speechless. I’m not sure why it’s so high, whether we had more shopping or just one shopper with a fondness for big-ticket items, but I’m not sure it matters. I’m grateful. Really.

OK, now the weekend awaits. I hope yours is spectacular. We’re going to see the Black Keys! Carumba.

Late Thursday evening, and I’m waiting for snow. We’re supposed to get a pile overnight, and I’d like to get a sense of what it might be before I turn in. If the pile arrives, I’ll work here tomorrow. No pile, off to Lansing (City of Light, City of Magic) at oh-dark-30.

In the meantime, I’m watching “Cellblock 6: Female Lockup” on TLC. Women in prison is an erotic archetype for some guys, a fact I’ve been aware of since seeing “The Big Bird Cage” at a drive-in in Ironton, Ohio, sometime around 1972. In an early scene, one of the birds makes a break for it, running for her life while naked and covered with grease. Oh, brother, I recall thinking, wondering how much longer until “Superfly” started.

The first few minutes, featuring a young Pam Grier in a white halter top/bellbottoms outfit. Also, this exchange, between an abducted woman and her kidnapper:

Woman: What are you going to do to me?
Man: Well, first I’m gonna rape ya.
Woman: You can’t rape me. I like sex.

I miss the ’70s. (Except that part.) Not ashamed.

(Later.)

As we’ve come to expect this winter, the snow underwhelmed here in Michigan’s banana belt. Between here and the capital, however, it’s deep and messy and so: It’s an at-home day for me.

But I have to get to work. So here’s some bloggage:

I got through most of this yesterday, Slate’s exhaustive look at Mitt Romney’s evolving abortion position. It’s pretty clear to me that there’s been little evolution at all, except in Romney’s packaging of his beliefs. For me, I keep coming back to Ann Keenan, the sister of Romney’s brother-in-law, who died of a botched illegal abortion in 1963. Once it was important to Romney. Not anymore, I guess. Well, 1963 was a long time ago.

The only voters in play for this primary are the tea partiers, anyway.

Via one of my FB network, “Will You Still Love Me Tomorrow?,” in French. Because.

Slush. This is winter? Please.