Man, all this pheasant and champagne and pie and the rest of it has taken a toll. I feel like crap, not in an I’m-getting-sick kind of way, more like an I’m-missing-the-gym deal. But I refuse to be one of those Jan. 1 newbies. (You like that logic? I’m missing the gym, but I won’t go to the gym. Because.) I considered my non-gym options and did something insane: I went for a walk.

Bipedal motion! What a crazy idea. I made it crazier yet — I didn’t use my iPod. Just me and my thoughts, and feet moving back and forth. Yesterday I walked about two miles and felt like someone had taken a ball-peen hammer to the bottoms of my feet, and yes, I was ashamed. Today I walked three and a half, and felt much better. Just needed to get the kinks out. I made both walks errands: Have a destination, get something done along the way. Yesterday I gave blood. Today, went to the library to return a DVD. (“Meek’s Cutoff,” don’t bother.) Things I noticed:

Couple of squabbling blue jays;
About a million storefronts I hadn’t seen up close;
The world. All snowy ‘n’ cold ‘n’ stuff.

When did we decide whatever was on our smartphone screens was so goddamn interesting? What if they’d told us the truth back in first grade, when we were first promised personal jetpacks? You won’t get that, but you will get a computer smaller than a deck of cards that you will carry in your pocket, one that will facilitate instant communication with the rest of the world. You will mainly use it to play Angry Birds and see what a celebrity is eating for lunch.

OK, enough. It was a good day. But tomorrow everything hits another gear. Today is the Iowa caucuses, and we’ll have lots to talk about In the meantime…

Dave Barry’s Year in Review. The same year after year, but always good for a chuckle or three.

My old News’n’Sentinel colleague Ash Khalil has a new book out. Unlike Herr Goeglein’s, I think I’ll read this one.

Eric Zorn notices two apocalyptic pronouncements from GOP candidates and wonders, hyperbole or hysteria? What’s scary is how many people agree with them.

Anyone want to make predictions on Iowa results?

Longtime readers know I’m not much for New Year’s Eve. In recent years I’ve had to work on many of them, but even when it fell on a weekend, it just never seemed worth the trouble. For years now, our preferred celebration has been a better-than-average meal made at home, some good wine, champagne and a video on the telly. We kiss at midnight, marvel over the sound of celebratory gunfire in Detroit, and go to bed.

This year, Alan’s been attending some of the media events at the car companies, and came home with a request:

“I know what I want for Christmas dinner,” he said. “Pheasant.”

O rly?

He explained that the Ford shindig he’d been at earlier in the evening had featured some cold roast pheasant on the buffet, along with some sort of fruit chutney, and boy, it sure was good. After determining that our Christmas guest wouldn’t eat pheasant at gunpoint, we decided it would maybe make a decent NYE entree. So I ordered one from the butcher and started exploring recipes.

We really aren’t meant to eat pheasant, I determined. No one can agree on how they should be prepared. Mark Bittman suggested whacking them up and cooking the various parts separately. Another said this is the ideal bird for brining. A woman at one of the holiday parties we attended said no, pressure-cook it. One recipe went with a slow roast with lots of basting, another with a short one in a very hot oven. That was Emeril Lagasse’s recipe. I’ve noticed several chefs, all men, suggest roasting duck and other game birds in blazing-hot ovens, claiming the heat works the way a sear does on a grilled steak — trapping the scarce fats inside; otherwise, you end up with a dessicated fowl.

I think men are the ones who promote this method because, by and large, they don’t have to clean their own ovens. Personally, I despise any temperature above 425 degrees on my home oven, except maybe for pizza. It gets everything so hot grease splatters throughout the oven, which creates smoke, which sets off every smoke alarm in the house, etc. But still: Pheasant. If I can’t trust Emeril, who can I trust? I dialed the heat up to 500, turned on the fans, and started it in a jacket of bacon, as instructed:

This whole process was supposed to take less than an hour, I remind you. After 15 minutes, I removed the bacon; just opening the oven started the smoke alarm shrieking. (Alan took it down and stuck it under some towels.) We took the bird out when it looked like this; a few tentative pokes suggested its juices were running clear:

But when we flipped it over to do a bilateral carve, it still had plenty of blood left in it. Back into the oven for another 15, and that did it. It made for a pretty presentation:

And how did it taste? Eh, OK. It was still too dry. Alan got down to the bones, but I stopped at the white meat. Not a terrible dinner, but far from my best work. If I ever meet Emeril, I will ask him to come clean my goddamn oven. His sauce was good, however, a red-wine-and-orange-juice reduction.

That’s a wild rice pilaf on the side, by the way, with some toasted pine nuts. A very harvest-season meal.

Lesson learned: Some things are best left to the pros. Next year: Salmon.

How was your new year celebration? I finally watched “Midnight in Paris,” which was perfectly wonderful.

I’m a lazy girl on the bloggage today, but Gawker did all my work for me, in their best-of-2011-reading roundup. A few things are behind paywalls, but there’s some great stuff here, all of which I missed the first time around, including the incredible true story of the collar-bomb heist from Wired, a fabulous rant/takedown of “Eat, Pray, Love,” and finally, a piece that introduces and explains Courtney Stodden for me once and for all, so that I never have to read another word about her, thankyaJesus. All three worth your time, and probably even more at the Gawker link.

And so it begins, this 2012. I’m hoping it’s a good one. For all of us. Even the pheasant.

Sorry for being such a bummer yesterday, but stories like that strike a nerve. Years ago, a friend who worked in emergency medicine introduced me to a bit of their diagnostic jargon — DFM, or dumb fuckin’ mom. Despite a moderate episode of DFM, the child is expected to recover, although it is known to be a chronic condition. DFM is the cause of childhood caries, the cavities that can deprive a kid of baby teeth well before the permanent ones come in, usually thanks to a mom who poured Hi-C or Coca-Cola into a bottle. That’s at one end of the spectrum. At the other is DFM with extreme prejudice, which was certainly a contributing factor in the ghastly demise of that cursed little girl in Fort Wayne last week. Leave your children with Some Guy for a week? Sure, why not?

But let’s lighten the mood a bit today. I get the sense many of you are like me this week, at work or not, but likely spending a lot of time goofing off on your computers. Fortunately, I have much linkage to love today, so let’s get to it.

I found this CDC data set in a Nate Silver tweet; it’s about the percentage of American households with cellular-only coverage, and he mentioned it in connection with polling. Evidently many pollsters don’t use cell-only households in their canvassing, and it has bitten them more than once — the seemingly come-from-behind victory of Kwame Kilpatrick in his last Detroit mayoral election was attributed to unpolled cell-only voters, mostly young people, who gave him an easy victory in a race that was said to be too close to call.

We’re starting this discussion — cutting the land line — in our house, and are being held back by a few factors, including 911 service, the lack of significant cost savings and, of course, the necessity of covering that ugly wall jack in the kitchen once the phone is gone. J.C., my digital guru and mentor, went to a Google Voice landline setup a while back, and reports no problems. What say the NN.C hoardes hordes?

Kim Severson considers sorghum, that quintessential southron sweetener, in today’s NYT food pages. Southern cooking is so far outside my gene pool that I don’t dare to experiment, but this sounds interesting:

At Two Boroughs Larder in Charleston, sorghum sweetens semifreddo. In Atlanta, Richard Blais, a winning “Top Chef” contestant, serves tiny popped grains of sorghum as a bar snack at his restaurant, HD1. It tastes like a toasty marriage of kettle corn and puffed rice.

And at Lantern, in Chapel Hill, N.C., Andrea Reusing uses sorghum to bridge the South and Asia. She makes a Vietnamese-style sorghum caramel with fish sauce, lime and chiles to glaze pork belly, and coats spicy fried walnuts or pine nuts with sorghum. Her pastry kitchen turns out a five-spice confection like Cracker Jack using sorghum. It also goes into a gold rum cocktail infused with black pepper and vanilla bean.

Ten words you mispronounce that make people think you’re an idiot. Not long enough.

And finally, the List of Lists, the WashPost’s 2012 Ins and Outs! Yayyyyy. (claps wildly) Out: Pippa’s bum; In: Kate’s uterus. Beautiful.

Have a great day, all.

Hey there. I’m still on the road, so not much today. My Christmas was merry and bright and so calorific I’ll be in elastic waistbands for a week.

How was yours?

For Boxing Day, a little boxing:

More tomorrow, when the world wakes up from its food coma, eh?

I need to knock together a short video for my other site, which doesn’t exactly count as a chore, except when it does. And it has to be done pretty soon, because I’m taking Kate downtown later today for a little micro-internship with an acquaintance who owns a recording studio. I take all career aspirations at this age with a mine full of salt, but it does no harm to encourage. And who knows? Maybe she will be a music producer, and maybe she’ll be the next Rick Rubin. I read a profile of Rubin once, years ago, with the arresting detail that he lived with his parents until years after an average adult would be shamed into leaving the nest, much less one with a hot streak of charting records, and not only that, he would crawl into their bed with them when he came home from a night out, and they’d talk about what he did. Srsly. The story featured a photo of all three of them, in bed.

So maybe not. But it won’t do her any harm to watch Jim lay down a few guitar tracks, which is the task for today.

So what I’m saying is, I have to turn my energies elsewhere this morning. How about some bloggage instead?

And….I don’t have much.

But I do have something for you English nerds. A little background: The Atlantic recently published a piece by Stephen Bloom, a University of Iowa journalism professor, a 4,000-word essay slagging the state as it prepares to kick off the 2012 presidential race with its famous caucuses. I haven’t read it; I refuse to read it; you can’t make me. Did I punctuate that sentence correctly? I ask because perhaps the only interesting detail in it is this blog post by the editor of the Gazette, which singles out this passage by Bloom…

When my family and I first moved to Iowa, our first Easter morning I read the second-largest newspaper in the state (the Cedar Rapids Gazette) with this headline splashed across Page One: HE HAS RISEN.

…and does what Bloom didn’t: Check the microfilm. Turns out the front page indeed includes the words “He is risen,” but not in a headline splashed across the page, but in a rather pedestrian graphic that papers run on holidays like Easter. The type is actually quite small. If anything is splashed across the page, it’s the headline MURDER DRAMA, but you know how memory is.

Anyway, score one for the editor, but in his blog, he writes:

I tend to see the religious aspect of that day’s newspaper as less splash and more dribble, kind of like Bloom’s 4,000-word embellishment.

I get what he’s going for here, comparing splash to dribble, but in comparing it to the original essay, I think he’s confusing dribble and drivel. And that, my friends, is the long way around to making several hundred words of fussy superciliousness.

Supercilious. Now there’s a word.

Off to edit video. And HT to Jeff for finding the editor’s blog. Enjoy the final countdown, all.

Someone in one of my social networks posted a quote — “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” — and attributed it to Plato. Even allowing for translation from ancient Greek, that doesn’t sound like Plato’s territory (like I would know), but it sent me in search of the original.

For those of you who care, I have been deploying this aphorism with greater frequency of late; life with a teenager will do that, especially when they get wound up about their persecution by this or that teacher, or the relative weirdness of this or that classmate. I hate to get all Hallmark on her, but it’s a useful observation that you don’t know what’s going on in another person’s life, that sometimes it expresses itself in persecution or weirdness, which underlines what I think should be the central message of parent to child at this time in their lives: It’s not about you, and it’s hardly ever about you, so chill.

In the past, I would trot off to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, a copy of which I own. Because I am crazy, and because I used to leaf through it when I was bored and stuck for inspiration. For the hell of it and the pre-internet thrill of it all, I just did. Not in there, which shoots the Plato attribution all to hell. So I turn to the mighty internet, and quickly bog down in the Straight Dope discussion boards, where smart people who know everything gather, and have already taken this one apart.

Not Plato. Probably Ian MacLaren, a Scottish author who left us in 1907.

It took more legwork, but part of me misses reference books. Dictionaries, thesauruses, reference grammars, Bartlett’s Familiar, etc. (Not “The Elements of Style.” I read Strunk & White, but I never picked it up again, and writers who hold it up like a beacon through the murky, wordy darkness get on my last goddamn nerve. It’s usually some twit in a bow tie. A useful text if you want to write like E.B. White, but not everyone does.) I miss them like I miss smoking — as a writer’s procrastination device. Stuck? Lean back, light a cigarette, think for a couple minutes. Or select one of your tomes and leaf through it for a minute or two, in search of le mot juste. In fact, there’s a book by that very title, Le Mot Juste, to help you find just the right foreign word or phrase to punctuate your essay. For writers who cannot afford George Will’s quote boy, it’s nice to have.

Perhaps my all-time favorite was “An Incomplete Education,” now in its umpteenth edition, which is a veritable internet full of interesting things you should have learned by now, but probably didn’t. The section on world religions alone is worth the cover price if, like me, your catechism class didn’t cover Zoroastrianism.

All are more or less obsolete in the age of Wikipedia and a billion websites as close as your laptop.

Do you have any favorite reference volumes? That you still use?

I’m running late today, so let’s get to the bloggage:

A nanny by profession, a photographer in her off hours, but she collected some amazing snaps from the streets of Chicago in the 1950s. Vivian Maier, the posthumous tribute.

Something I miss about being a columnist — pulling any old thing out of your ass, and getting it published:

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

Yes, it’s Condi-mania! Oh, and yes, nowadays I pull any old thing out of my ass and publish it, but I no longer get paid for it. Big difference.

I’ve become a fan of Ken Jennings’ Twitter stream. Yes, the “Jeopardy” champion. And you would, too:

BREAKING: Tim Tebow currently in the locker room watching a Bergman film, smoking Gauloises, contemplating “God’s awful silence.”

My phone just autocorrected “dreidels” into “strudels.” Strudels! That is just insult to injury.

Funny guy. OK, gotta run. Have a good one, all.

If any of you are looking for a good way to make green beans — and who isn’t? I ask you, who isn’t? — you can’t do much better than Mark Bittman’s spicy-sweet take on this most mundane vegetable. I know I’ve mentioned it here before, but I just made them for the third time, and was reminded again how good they are. They do depend on you being the sort of person who has almonds on hand, and dried chilies, but if you’re not, it’s worth adding both to your shopping list. They’re that good.

(And if you don’t have almonds around but you do have pine nuts, try the garlicky variation using pine nuts. I plan to, next time, now that I’ve used up the last of the almonds.)

And that is today’s installment of What Did You Have For Dinner, which I was reminded last week is perhaps a too-common topic around here. Well, hell. I can’t sparkle every day, and sometimes that’s the most interesting thing to happen in my rather sedate life. I’m writing this Sunday night to get a jump on Monday’s grind, and for now, at least, all is right with the world, which is a trite way to say I got the laundry done, Sunday dinner made/served/cleaned up after, and I more or less know what the week to come will bring. Plus, the full moon is rising in a clear sky, and I can see it from where I sit. Little things.

Oh, and while we’re on the subject, I made that French pork stew BobNG suggested last weekend, and it was great. I liked the prunes, Alan didn’t, but we both agreed it was the fresh tarragon that put it over the top. Again, not something most people keep on hand, but worth a trip to the fresh herbs section of your grocery. It’s a very good recipe.

Which then reminds me that the poobahs at Cook’s Illustrated — where the French pork stew came from — were on “Fresh Air” last week, and gave a delightful interview about what it’s like to run a test kitchen. They said the biggest challenge is people who don’t follow the recipe, substituting this for that and then complaining it didn’t work. There was an anecdote about a man who whined about a chicken recipe that had required about half an hour of heat — the worst chicken he’d ever had, he said, before adding that he hadn’t had any chicken, and had substituted shrimp. Oh. Well. Cook’s is known for testing recipes dozens of times to get the very best one, and I’m indebted to them for solving my au gratin potatoes problem once and for all. Mine always turned out runny, but not anymore. The secret: Half-and-half, and start them on the stovetop before they go into the oven. Yum.

Have I bored you senseless yet? Good. Then let’s go to the bloggage:

I listened to Hank regarding “All-American Muslim,” and haven’t been watching:

Though there will be occasional arguments and mini-crises that come along whenever you put any human beings on TV and then tell them to pretend the camera crew is invisible, “All-American Muslim” is mainly an act of public relations, going out of its way to avoid becoming “The Real Housewives of Dearborn.”

What I said up there about having a rather sedate life applies to most people, and you don’t have to live here, or in any metro area where Muslims reach critical mass, very long before they start to blend into the scenery. But that wasn’t enough for the Florida Family Association, which started an email campaign to lean on its biggest advertiser, Lowe’s, which folded like a cheap tent, although now that there’s been some loud pushback, they’re doing the dither, in a Facebook statement:

“Lowe’s has received a significant amount of communication on this program, from every perspective possible. Individuals and groups have strong political and societal views on this topic, and this program became a lighting rod for many of those views. As a result we did pull our advertising on this program. We believe it is best to respectfully defer to communities, individuals and groups to discuss and consider such issues of importance.”

How special. How respectful. In my winding path through the web many days, I’m amazed at how the Islam-exists-to-destroy-us meme flourishes on right-wing sites, and there’s simply no doubt in my mind that a North Carolina-based corporation is a particularly ripe target for the various “family associations” out there stirring the pot. Too bad, as they led the way with bilingual signage, and seem to at least acknowledge a rapidly diversifying nation, although maybe they think it only exists among contractors.

Oh, and speaking of bigotry, the case of the gay-hatin’ Troy mayor seems to be finding another gear. She’s already showing signs of fatigue — she’s tired, and she doesn’t feel well — and the Chamber of Commerce, generally the squarest, dullest people in any town, does not like this woman, especially now that gay groups are calling for shopping boycotts. (Troy is home to the area’s swankiest mall, which may be too big to dent, but maybe not restaurants and smaller stores.) One of their leaders was on a local radio show this week telling listeners the voters were victims of their own apathy, and elected a tea party ignoramus because they didn’t do their homework. The one quoted in the linked story is similarly dismissive. This woman may crumple yet.

And as always, when I read stories like this, I reflect that I never thought I’d live long enough to see gay people throw weight around like this, but whaddaya know? Progress is possible after all.

Among the many things I feel no obligation to pay the first bit of attention to, I’d put pro football in the top five. However, I understand that there’s this quarterback out there named Tim Tebow, and he’s doing something newsworthy? In matters like this, I rely on the guys at LGM, and of course TBogg.

OK, time to get out of here. The week lies ahead of us. Let’s embrace it.

Thanks for your patience this morning. Evidently we had a server crash, but it’s fixed now, and y’all are free to move about the cabin.

This is one of those mornings where I feel like I’m living in a parallel universe than the one I woke up in yesterday, one where I can open the newspapers and read several different takes on the Jon Corzine grilling before Congress yesterday, and not read the following line:

At several points during the questioning, members of the committee leaned across the table and hissed through clenched teeth, “Where is the money, Mr. Corzine? WHERE IS THE GODDAMN MONEY?!?”

Because this is where I am simply in over my head. Maybe I don’t read closely enough. I certainly don’t understand finance at this level, other than the banal observation that it has a lot in common with a casino, only with computer screens instead of slot machines but the same hookers.

How does…I think the figure is up to $1 billion now, according to that NYT DealBook story linked above. How does $1 billion in customer money just up and walk away? WHERE IS IT? Because you tell me a billion dollars is missing, and my first thought is of the “Die Hard” movies, the last one of which featured Jeremy Irons stealing all the money in the world in a parade of dump trucks. Is Simon Gruber sitting on a beach in Tahiti, digging his toes in the sand and cackling over the unbelievable score sitting in his Swiss bank account?

And yet, scrolling through the stories about the implosion of MF Global, I read passages like this:

“I simply do not know where the money is, or why the accounts have not been reconciled to date,” said Corzine, 64, in his first public comments since his resignation was announced four days after the bankruptcy filing.

Or this:

When pressed by lawmakers at the House Agriculture Committee about whether he authorized a transfer of customer funds to firm accounts, Corzine said: “If I did, it was a misunderstanding.”

Or this:

“I’m not in a position, given the number of transactions, to know anything specific about the movement of any specific funds,” said Corzine, who took over as CEO more than a year and a half ago.

So, there were a “number of transactions” that siphoned off $1 billion? And now it’s gone, and no one knows where it went, and presumably a team — hell, an army — of forensic accountants are going to be billing a lot of hours for months on end, but for now, sorry, no one knows where it is?

I’m in the wrong business. And Simon Gruber, you sly dog.

I don’t always participate as fully in comment threads as I’d like — frequently I’m reading them on my phone while running errands, or otherwise can’t get to a keyboard, but I read every one, and I’d like to call a couple to your attention, if you don’t usually dip into the comments. One is MMJeff’s experience in dealing with Richard Cordray, which you should read if you haven’t yet, and the other was an offhand remark made by Basset, to the effect that his wife is a nurse and occasionally sees young women who make the living workin’ a pole, so to speak, with terrible skin infections. I’d like to know more about that, Basset. Also, don’t look at this picture.

Also, don’t read this story, although the headline is great: Castrating lambs with your teeth may make you sick. This must be a Spanish technique. I’m sure Cooz knows more.

I remember when Tim McVeigh was executed, his last statement was the text of “Invictus,” which my friend Lance Mannion, a former English professor, explained was kitsch, a killer going down with some bad 19th-century he-man poetry. It would appear he has a spiritual brother, Rod Blagojevich, who is fond of quoting Rudyard Kipling. Fortunately, Neil Steinberg found a more appropriate poem than “If,” the one Blagojevich likes to wave around.

One for you grammar nerds, from Nancy Friedman.

Excuse me. I seem to have something in my eye…

I’ll leave you with that. Let’s get this weekend under way, shall we?

I have a system whereby I gather links for this space. Early in the day, I open a “new post” window on WordPress and copy/paste things I find in my perambulations, and then sort ’em out when I write the day’s post, usually in the morning. Some days I’m busier than others, and find less of note. Today there was only one waiting for me, a YouTube link; I can’t remember what it was and the link gives no clue. So let’s just embed it and be surprised, shall we?

Oh, right. That one.

I love high-def video; it’s fun to pause it randomly and see where I can capture the most unflattering facial expression. And that’s pretty much all I have to say about Rick Perry 2012 and his Carhartt jacket.

Something else I learned and can’t post a link to: Michigan congressman John Dingell was a page on the floor of the U.S. House when President Roosevelt asked them to declare war on Japan. Yes, we have a YouTube of that, too:

A number of immediate observations we can draw:

1) Those Carhartt jackets just don’t look right unless they’re a little dirty. Squeaky-clean like that, they resemble a Lincoln pickup truck. Twee.

2) Still, Perry could step in for one of the Village People in a pinch. The construction worker.

3) John Dingell will outlive us all.

(Pause.)

As you can probably tell, my morning has not exactly been a-brim with inspiration. In fact, I was just sitting here thinking it might feel good to do some yoga. I never do yoga. But I need a lot of stretching today, and maybe some lean, protein-rich foods. Yesterday I took myself out to lunch at a little middle eastern joint in Midtown, and got the grilled falafel sandwich. (Yes, it exists.) The proprietor was yakking it up with some of his regulars in guttural Arabic, or at least I assume it was; what other language sounds so much like extended throat-clearing? Hebrew does, a little, which suggests a connection between their delicious food, with its various nutty pastes, and those hacking consonant blends. Like most bilingual people, they scattered their conversation with English words, and the most common one in this chat was “chicken.” Puzzling, because surely there’s an Arabic word for that. (There is: dajaj. Thank you, internet.) I ate most of the falafel and got a go-box for the rest. As I rose to go, the proprietor asked, in perfect un-accented English, “Did we give you enough of a headache yet?” Ha ha, don’t be silly, I said, and as I left, the usual l’esprit de l’escalier flooded in:

You should have a doctor look at that throat.

As you can see, I wasn’t at my best yesterday, but I’m glad I had enough presence of mind not to say anything that witless. And that was one tasty sammich.

I love eavesdropping on people speaking Spanglish, or Arablish, or whatever. The last time was in one of my fave Mexican places, and the woman talking on her phone looked a wee bit street. Blah blah blah in Español and then, And I’m like, gurl, you don’t need to put UP with that shit blah blah blah. It suggests there is no satisfying translation for that concept, which makes me proud to be a native English speaker.

Good lord, it’s time to pull the plug on this mudbath, isn’t it? On to the bloggage:

I have much love for my Wisconsin friends and readers, and I say this with great affection: Wisconsin, you are NOT a mitten. Michigan is a mitten. Stop trying to be something you’re not.

Newt Gingrich has only 106,055 Twitter followers. The rest of the 1.3 million his site claims are fakes. Well, who understands the internet, anyway?

Obviously I don’t, or I wouldn’t be about to hit “publish.” Have a great Thursday.

I hope you guys are having a better Monday than I am. Funny how a gloomy morning after an all-night rain means one thing on Sunday — brew a bigger pot of coffee, read the entire newspaper front to back, maybe make gingerbread because we won’t be doing yard work today — and something else entirely on Monday. That is to say, ich.

But this is the Monday we have chosen, and as usual — AS USUAL — it intends to be difficult. So let’s go to the bloggage, eh?

You know how we can make education SO much BETTER? Turn it over to the American businessman, with his endless ingenuity and his new perspectives, unencumbered by the oldthink of the education establishment! Take it from this sadder-but-wiser student at something called Brown Mackie College in Fort Wayne, an institution that didn’t exist when I left town seven years ago. I think the deal was sealed for me when I learned this about the school’s corporate parent:

Goldman Sachs owns 41 percent of the company.

Say no more!

Seriously, though, it’s a good read. When I went to the TED conference last year, I ran into a guy who was a Knight-Wallace Fellow at Michigan, my brother in fellowship. He was a beat reporter for the AP, and was planning to spend his year studying this exploding field of for-profit education. It’s not that the schools are all as bad as this one — which has students with felony convictions enrolled in the criminal-justice program, a field they will never be able to enter — but they are mostly far more expensive than community-college options. In this particular case, 3X more expensive.

I don’t know how I missed this on the health beat when it was new, but its warning is timeless: Men who have sex with animals have a higher risk of developing penile cancer. The gems are in the last two paragraphs, in which we learn about the length of these relationships and, of course, the preferred species. Whinny!

JeffTMMO posted this on his Facebook, about the Kindle Fire:

Amazon seems to have learned a lesson from the late Steve Jobs, who derided the original Kindle: “It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don’t read anymore.” The company’s business model for the new tablet reflects the fact that Americans prefer to juggle a wide variety of games, apps, and videos rather than sit and focus on a book or essay. The case of the Kindle Fire demonstrates that today’s consumers embrace a lifestyle of interruption, multitasking, and limited focus. Unless we use the Fire and devices like it to read more books, our society may be driven to distraction.

I’ve embraced e-books, but not wholeheartedly. I think my one-word New Year’s resolution (a tradition introduced to me by Laura Lippman) will be: Focus. In other words, I’m going to be reading more paper books.

But I won’t be reading anything unless I get moving. So I am.