Yeah, I know — the pictures are atrocious. All I can say in my defense is: I’m a writer, not a photographer, dammit! and the working conditions are, er, challenging. It’s bellies-to-bummies sardine-packing in most of these throwdowns, and my top priority is: Keep up with the pace. So I haven’t had the luxury to hang around until the crowd thins out and get a nice beauty shot.

Otherwise, it’s very hectic and mostly fun.

It’s also 6:15 a.m. and I have another press conference in about an hour, so better shove off.

I’ll be here all day, under the heading Auto show today.

Insomnia has a certain dreamlike quality to it. I woke up after midnight and couldn’t get back to sleep, so I thought I’d catch up on the headlines. Wow, I thought. All those miners safe! And Alan and I were just saying how sure we were that they were dead. It’s a miracle.

Then I woke up, hours later, and they were dead, all but one.

Someone — a lot of someones — got some bad information.

For once, I’m not blaming reporters. The management of this mine sounds like a real piece of work.

I went to college in southeastern Ohio, which is coal country. One of my roommates dated a miner, a young guy drawn to the work for the usual reasons. No, reason: It paid handsomely. And that was about the last good thing you could say about it. Medieval working conditions, punishing hours, danger around every corner and lots and lots of money. And since that’s about the only job that pays well in Appalachia, there’s no shortage of people willing to do it.

This guy my roommate dated? He took a shower when he reached the surface after a shift. He took another when he got home. Sometimes he took a third at our place, if he was sleeping over. And he still left black streaks on her sheets.

Best book about coal mining (fiction division): Martin Cruz Smith’s “Rose.”

May they all rest in peace.

Bloggage:

Why Midwesterners flock to Florida all winter — it gets dark here:

“I just got off the phone with the National Weather Service,” Hugh McDiarmid Jr. said. “Guess how much sunshine we’ve had since Dec. 19.”

“Fourteen minutes!”

Hell, it’s character-building.

Who is Jack Abramoff? Don’t ask the WSJ.

Make forward progress — this is my 2006 resolution. Of course, even lying in bed all day constitutes some form of forward progress, but my goal is to do a little something every day on a number of fronts, and hope they add up to something at the end of the day, week, month and year.

MFP, for short.

Today — I remind you, a staggering three days into the new year — I logged MFP points on exercise, work, social and miscellaneous fronts. In late afternoon, it feels like a pretty good day.

One of those chores was writing a recommendation letter for one of my writing group members, who’s going for an MFA in creative writing. Among her choices is none other than my beloved U of M, and I’m here to tell you, these folks have online application down to a science. I was given a log-in and password, and the whole thing took about five minutes, including saving my recommendation letter as a PDF. It reminded me of how that big ol’ learning factory chugs along on the digital highway. It’s the only place I’ve ever been where checking your e-mail hourly is not an illness, but a requirement. To wit:

“Class is cancelled?”

“Didn’t you get the e-mail?”

“No.”

“Why? I sent it 20 minutes ago.”

On the other hand, the place always seemed one virus away from disaster.

Today’s forward progress did not keep me from finding you the linkalicious roundup I always strive for. First, I was thrilled to find so many other typeface nerds out there, and Nerd Nonpareil John even had…the rest of the Helvetica-in-“Good Night, and Good Luck” story:

I was very happy to be included in a short article in today’s New York Times about designers who notice anachronistic font choices in films, but I was a bit taken aback when I received an email first thing this morning from the art director of Good Night, And Good Luck. She pointed out that Helvetica was not used in the film, contrary to what was claimed in the article. She said, rather, that the sign shown in the example frame was set in Akzidenz Grotesk, a face which predated (and in fact was the basis for) Helvetica, and that this choice was based on extensive research of CBS’s graphic design during the period depicted in the film.

Whew. I am so relieved.

See it now.

Our e-mail buddy Hank did the WashPost’s in-and-out list. It’s a fine effort; many chuckles (Out: Badunkadunks, In: Humps). I had to think for a bit to get Out: Fitzmas, In: Abramoffukkah. But I think he missed one, which only a New Year’s weekend couch potato like me would include:

Out: TV poker shows, In: TV One’s Bid Whist Party Throwdown.

I’m telling you, bid whist shows are the coming thing. Out: Attitude-laden, sunglasses-wearing paunchy white boys throwing shade around the room, In: Fun-having black folks bringing big platters of food and talking trash as they actually have a good time, playing cards. You mark my words.

And thanks to the Poor Man, yet again, for one of those where-does-he-FIND-these links, things you should know about Chuck Norris. Sample:

Chuck Norris’ tears cure cancer. Too bad he has never cried.

Chuck Norris sold his soul to the devil for his rugged good looks and unparalleled martial arts ability. Shortly after the transaction was finalized, Chuck roundhouse kicked the devil in the face and took his soul back. The devil, who appreciates irony, couldn’t stay mad and admitted he should have seen it coming. They now play poker every second Wednesday of the month.

Finally, I think I mentioned before that this is the first time I’ve lived in a metro area big enough to support a B-team conservative talk station. The B-team consists of people like William Bennett, Laura Ingraham and other sparkling stars of the right-wing speakers’ tour. All are pretty mediocre — all talk radio is pretty mediocre, no matter the spot on the political spectrum — but none is more fascinating than Dennis Prager, at least to me. You’ve never heard more arrogance, smugness and self-righteousness in one voice. No, not even in Rush Limbaugh. El Rushbo is a drug-addicted screwup and knows it, and his self-loathing underlies everything about him. But Prager? He knows, deep in his orthodox-Jewish, evangelical-butt-kissing, holier-than-thou soul, that he really is better than all the rest of us.

Well, no, maybe not. He’s getting a divorce. His second. I guess he’s right: Gay marriage does weaken the traditional kind.

Who knew? We do, now.

Due in large part to my long friendship with J.C. Burns, I know a little bit more about typefaces than most people, which is to say: Not much. I know serifs from sans, ascenders from descenders, and have a few watery opinions on what works and what doesn’t. (I think Wired magazine, in its early days, set a whole new standard for “what doesn’t.” Also, my Volkswagen dealer uses the Mary Tyler Moore Show font, which I used to love and now hate. Your opinions may differ.)

J.C. — John — does not have watery opinions. He has very strong ones. (Most graphic designers do, I’ve noticed. They’re always swearing blood oaths over Optima.) I listen to these opinions because he knows his fonts. He carries them around in his capacious hard drive of a head, and at a glance can say, “Caslon.” or “Step away from the Copperplate. Right now.”

So when I started noticing a new font on highway signs about a year ago, I knew just who to call. John wasn’t home, but I left a message on his machine. By the time I reached my destination, I had an e-mail introducing me to Clearview Highway,

We’ve had lots of highway construction in the D in 2005, and on a trip to Ann Arbor this afternoon, I noticed how many Clearview signs are up now, and how much easier they are to read.

Predictably, not all graphic designers are pleased. Here’s a typical argument, which also offers some nice side-by-side comparisons of new and old.

(My guess is, most people won’t even notice. I think you have to cultivate an eye for typography. More than once in Fort Wayne, a computer glitch at the paper would make our typesetter switch fonts in the middle of a story, causing, for example, the second half to come out in the other paper’s body-copy font. I could always see this, but I was amazed at how many people simply couldn’t.)

One final note: Besides being a fine friend, a great website designer and my numero-uno computer troubleshooter, John has also offered to design the new name for Alan’s boat. AND he did our wedding invitations. A designer? Is a good friend to have.

Bloggage:

A story you don’t have to be a typographical nitpicker to appreciate: Shame about the Helvetica.

Go ahead, drive yourself insane with the flag game. (I cheated like crazy, and still scored abysmally low.)

Also, a fine read on an actor who’s been in “The Phantom of the Opera” for its entire 18-year NYC run: Imagine it. Eighteen years of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s NutraSweet score, a hybrid that suggests Puccini as rendered by A Flock of Seagulls. Plus numbingly sentimental lyrics, courtesy of Charles Hart and Richard Stilgoe, such as “Anywhere you go let me go too/Love me, that’s all I ask of you.” It’s the sort of punishment that the Geneva Conventions were supposed to ban, isn’t it? But the math doesn’t lie. Tally up all the actual stage time — not counting rehearsals — and each of these three actors has spent a total of 750 24-hour days, more than two years of their respective lives, performing “Phantom of the Opera.”

“People ask me if I get bored,” says Andrews, who seems the very opposite of aggrieved and rarely stops smiling. “That’s not really an issue for me.”

Today really feels like a new year. I don’t know why. But it’s not even noon, and I’ve already turned my mattress, cleaned my basement and exercised half an hour. 2006, get outta my way.

I hadn’t planned on this being a hangover day — the Eve, for us, is usually marked by a nicer-than-usual dinner, a nicer-than-usual bottle of wine and a nicer-than-usual rented movie. We did all that — roast chicken, pinot noir and “Me and You and Everyone We Know.” But then, just to show you even a boring old NYE routine can have a little excitement in it, came the show that started around 11:40 p.m.

“Is someone hammering out there?” I asked.

“Those are automatic weapons, dummy,” Alan scoffed, and he was right. How is Detroit like Baghdad? When we’re happy in the D, we like to empty weapons at the sky. Because it’s so…so…what’s the word I’m looking for? Oh yeah: Stupid.

But if any 9mm rounds fell our way, we didn’t notice any. (Last year one penetrated Alan’s office; fortunately, no one was at work, and windows don’t bleed.) Fingers crossed for the rest of the year.

Here’s an ad on Detroit’s Craigslist. The heading is “Models needed for VIP Super Bowl Party.” It’s above the one that asks for “Go-Go Dancers needed for VIP Super Bowl Party.”

You are being asked to join us for a VIP SuperBowl party, the client wants their party to be the “talk of the town”, so all we ask is you mingle, dance, socialize, network and have a good time. O-Yea, and get paid for it. Send your information and photo to the above email address and we will contact you with further details.

Call me crazy, but when someone can’t spell “yeah,” I get a little suspicious.

Someone told me today that the big SB parties are flying in “planeloads” of top-grade strippers for the festivities. I wonder where the local talent will be working.

What, you’ve never seen a Hanukkah parade before? Fifty cars with electric menorahs on top, including, of course, the traditional Hummer limo.

Just another December night in Oak Park, Mich. Happy Hanukkah.

Thought I’d stop in and throw a little holiday bloggage your way.

The gauzy Currier-and-Ives veil Capra drapes over Bedford Falls has prevented viewers from grasping what a tiresome and, frankly, toxic environment it is. When Marx penned his immortal words about “the idiocy of rural life,” he probably had Bedford Falls in mind. B.F. is the kind of claustrophobic, undersized burg where everybody knows where you’re going and what you’re doing at all times. If you’re a Norman Rockwell collector, this might not bother you, but it should — and it certainly bothered George Bailey. It is all too easily forgotten that George himself wanted nothing more than to shake the dust of that two-bit town off his feet — and he would have, too, if he hadn’t gotten waylaid by a massive load of family-business guilt and a happy ending engineered by God himself. Gary Kamiya says what I’ve always thought — Pottersville isn’t THAT bad a place.

And remember a few days ago, when Slate called “My Humps” a song so bad “as to veer toward evil?” Darlin’s, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

The UPS man delivered The Last Package of Christmas today, and wished me a happy holiday as he left. So I did what all good Americans are supposed to do these days: I flew into a rage.

No, I didn’t. Anyone who visits here knows I’m part of the problem on this one, part of the liberal pinko conspiracy taking Christ out of Christmas and turning Jesus’ birthday party into an amorphous year-end observance of giving and spending, food and liquor. It’s true: I’m no longer Christian in any but a cultural sense, and the secular version works for me. Kate’s school party this year featured recreation stations devoted to the Big C, Hanukkah and Kwanzaa. She came home with gelt and a black, red and green placemat, and this is fine with me. The world is different than when I was her age — this is to be expected — and if my public-school Christmas pageant was more religious than most you’d find in a parochial school, the time for that is past. It leads to crappier Christmas pageants, but it doesn’t feel like going backward.

I also smashed the shreds of my daughter’s Santa belief last year. It was time. This is what I said: “There is no man who lives at the North Pole and flies around the world with a reindeer sleigh. But there is a Santa. I am Santa, and this — this is important — you are Santa. Santa Claus is a symbol for the spirit of giving and care for others we all try to embody at this time of year.”

Maybe I didn’t say “embody.” But that was the gist.

She was disappointed. She knows the Reason for the Season, but this was a loss. Still, this year she took money to her school’s Secret Santa Shop and came home with something for everyone on her list, gifts that indicated she’d thought of those people, considered who they are and what they might want and need, and chose accordingly. Progress.

I said I was only culturally Christian, but if you’re into that sort of thing, it seems Amy gets it pretty close to exactly right here:

The really traditional Christian remembrance of the Nativity is not about sweetness. It is about awe, fear, and trembling, and it is shot through with hints of suffering to come.

Look at it closely, with clear eyes. At every turn in this story of this baby there is threat and fear and powers circling, attempting to strike at the light.

This has always been the year-end holiday for me, religious or not, and maybe it’s because I tend toward gloom and pessimism — a single light in a sea of darkness. Concentrate on the light, whatever it is for you. It really is all we have.

Here’s one of my favorite Christmas stories: Years ago, in a newsroom far, far away, budget cuts were already taking their toll on the year-end party. The woman whose job it was to put the thing together was tasked with having a lunch and arranging entertainment with a criminally small budget. My first year at the paper, we’d had lunch catered by a semi-gourmet restaurant down the street. By just a few years later, the last year this woman did it, she opted for a mediocre caterer, who served chicken breasts that looked as though they were boiled in ditch water. The entertainment was a local elementary-school choir, brought in to perform musical selections from the school’s Christmas pageant.

There was no Noelling, nor Rudolph, nor even Jingle Bells. The music was entirely unfamiliar, something about a boy who doesn’t Believe, and at the end there was more, some oral interpretation by a young woman who was sweeping the state speech tournaments that year. Her showstopper was a dialogue between two women, both African American. (As was the girl. As was two-thirds of the choir. As was hardly anyone in the newsroom.) The younger one was a modern black woman, the older her grandmother, who persisted in believing most people were good and well-intended.

As the dialogue went on, it became clear the older woman was a fool, too ignorant to see evil and racism everywhere. Finally, the younger woman explodes: “But Grandma, they call us niggers behind our back!”

We looked at one another. If there was even a shred of hope that we could salvage some goodwill toward men from the wreckage of the day, it was gone now. The party was officially a failure. My friend David got up at the end, stretched and said, “Bad food, lousy music, tension between the races — ah, merry Christmas.”

The next year two of us wrestled the budget away from the woman whose heart was clearly no longer in it, and for about a few more years we spent it in a different way, in the bar next door. We had food and drinking in a cozy basement space, and drunken caroling in the men’s room — “three urinals flushing!” (swoosh!) — and it was fun again.

I’m not sure what the point of this story is, except that the holidays are a strange and funny and wonderful time of year, and also that if you have a choice in how to spend your money, it’s better to opt for Buffalo wings and cheese lumps and liquor after quitting time than bad chicken and racial accusations at midday. Make a note.

Posting will be intermittent, but not non-existent, for the next week or so. Back to full strength in 2006. Happy, happy holidays to one and all. I appreciate the gift you give me every day — your time and attention — and I thank you for it.

My sister’s friend Pat in Atlanta sent me this picture. Her story:

Our family was out and about one beautiful Saturday….putz-ing around town, shopping, etc. We had included our two dogsinour adventures…as one of our stops was to the local park for the dog’s weekend walk. After stopping by a local sandwich place to get a bite to eat, we decided to pop into Kmart and browse about. My youngest son had not eaten his sandwich completely, and had neatly wrapped the leftovers in a napkin to bring home. Since the dogs were in the car and we were about to go into a store, we decided to put the leftover sandwich in the glove compartment for safekeeping (away from the dogs).

You can see what happened next. Wilma wasn’t going to let any glove compartment keep her away from her treat, and if she didn’t exactly vanquish the foe entirely, We’re sure that she would have broken through eventually.

No word on what sort of dog Wilma is. Maybe Pat will share.

One more quick bit of bloggage before I head out to tie up some loose ends — This priceless story from the Free Press, on the downfall of a self-styled superhero:

JACKSON — Several years ago in this modest mid-Michigan city, a masked man swooped down from the ether, donned a purple cape and declared himself Captain Jackson, defender of the citizenry.

“Crime fighter busted for drunken driving.”

It only gets better, because of course this story is not about drunken driving, oh no. It’s about whether the paper should have unmasked Captain Jackson. It includes this priceless quote:

“My patrol days are over, I’m afraid,” Frankini told the Free Press by phone last week, before failing to show for an interview Tuesday. “We’re gonna keep going, but I guess not in Jackson. We’re definitely in danger, I know that. We’re like David Hasselhoff from ‘Baywatch’ — he had this singing career and he was popular everywhere but America. Why they decided to destroy one of the best things I know in Jackson, I have no idea.”

Somehow I think Peter Parker has this guy trumped in existential suffering, but you knew I’d say that, didn’t you?

Have a swell day, bad dogs and good guys everywhere.

Warren Zevon died more than two years ago, and ever since, I’ve been wondering if I could learn to love again. Never mind the essential question of whether a woman my age should even have an imaginary rock-star boyfriend; could my heart stand it? After all, chances are anyone I would pick would be old ‘n’ stuff, and likely headed for decrepitude at roughly the same accelerated rate I am. Musicians are famous for their misspent youth, which has a way of catching up with one later in life. (Hello, David Crosby. Hello, Keith Richard. That blood change working out for you?) Anyone I loved would be far more likely to take sick than your average Backstreet Boy. Does a girl need this in her life?

Well, yes. Mooning over unattainable performing artists with which one has made an entirely imaginary bond keeps one young. At least as long as firearms stay out of the picture. This is something I believe.

So congratulations, Rodney Crowell. I picked up “Fate’s Right Hand” over the weekend and decided it’s you. Sorry, but I won’t be able to see the shows the way I saw Warren’s, but what the hell — I’m buying the back catalog. This is the best I can do.

I should listen to more alt-country. The “alt,” I’ve found, means “not a redneck asshole singing about wanting to take a poke at Osama if only he didn’t have this three-record deal that keeps him tied down stateside.” You want to go out drinking with Lucinda Williams, you know?

Speaking of excitable redneck assholes, have you ever seen Bill Maher do his Kobe Teeth character? Not too far off the mark, if you ask me.

After blogging yesterday’s story about the Kronk, I had to see if the script for “Out of Sight” was online. It is. “Out of Sight” is a remarkable movie, proof that once Jennifer Lopez had something close to acting talent, among other things. It’s also, for my money, the best single Elmore Leonard adaptation, mainly because the screenwriter, Scott Frank, had the sense to leave the source material alone. Except in the final scene, which isn’t in the book, which shows that even Leonard can be improved upon, if you do it right:

Before Foley can say anything, the back door is opened once more and the Marshal helps ANOTHER PRISONER — a black man with a shaved head — into the back of the van.

FOLEY
I don’t know.
(then)
It’s a long way down to Florida.