Late night with the writing group tonight. It was our Christmas party. The order was “bring something to eat or drink,” so four out of five brought drink. Karen brought latkes, like the good Jewish girl she is. Make a note: Latkes and merlot are enough to make a party.

Of course, it helps to have scandalous conversation, too. Make another note: Being single can be stressful, but boy, do these girls have some good stories.

Maybe some links tomorrow. For now? Zzzzzz.

TOMORROW: Linkage I offer to thee. Where Tommy Hearns trained, where George Clooney and Don Cheadle (and Ving Rhames and Steve Zahn) acted — that’s the Kronk Recreation Center. Like most Detroit institutions, it’s having a rough time of it. Like some, it has people trying to save it.

The feats of strength! The airing of grievances! Festivus catches on outside the world of “Seinfeld.”

Our server was under spam-attack last night, and so we shut comments down. It should be back up momentarily, although if the attack returns, it’ll go away again.

I thought robots were supposed to be a force for good.

Today’s chapter of Mundane Hijinx is all about meatloaf.

(Or is it meat loaf? Whatever. I like the one-word version.)

OK. So regular readers know my dog has a history of plundering food in the car. Which means everything that happened today is my fault. But really, I think my actions were defensible.

It felt like a meatloaf kind of night — a Monday, cold, dark December, the perfect weather for one of my local meat market’s bestest loaves. I stopped to pick one up after dropping Kate at her after-school play date. It was still frozen, in a foil pan, with a hard plastic lid. So when I decided to stop at the dry cleaner and pick up Alan’s shirts, it didn’t seem necessary to put it in the trunk or anything.

But alas. When I came out of the cleaner’s and found Spriggy hard at work on the floor of the front seat, I still didn’t think he’d penetrated the perimeter. It was hard plastic, and I’d only been out of the car for maybe three minutes. Of course he had. In only three minutes he’d opened the bag, dislodged the plastic and had put about four inches of tooth grooving on the surface, gnawing the semi-frozen surface efficiently and quickly.

“BAD DOG! BAD DOG!” I yelled at him. You know what he did? He growled at me. In other words: “Get your own meatloaf. This is mine.”

(I guess he imagined he was an Inuit sled dog, eating his meal of frozen reindeer meat at the end of the run across the ice pack. Only of course, as a terrier, he wouldn’t actually be pulling the sled. He no doubt saw himself as a coxswain of sorts, barking orders while standing on the cargo.)

But that was only half the fun. After I cooked the meatloaf and took it out of the pan to slice it, guess what happened? I dropped it on the floor, and had to yell, “Get back! Get back!” while I picked up the still-blistering thing and heaved it onto the counter.

We ate our portion from the unchewed end. My burned fingers still hurt. Spriggy got to lick up all the grease.

I’ve long suspected this dog has a guardian angel, or maybe a guardian poltergeist. Things just seem to fall his way, sometimes literally. Someone wanted him to have that meatloaf.

It’s Spriggy’s world. We’re all just living in it.

So, bloggage:

We all know that some cultures value virginity above all sense and reason, but you never thought you lived in one, did you? Well, you are wrong. I like Amy Alkon’s comment thread on this. Especially this one: She should have put the five grand towards a plasma TV. Her husband could enjoy that more than once.

Cute overload is the berries.

Why do people waste their time building websites like Fancy Parking? Because people like me will link to them, that’s why.

What is it about the Columbus Dispatch? Me and the D are like Michael Corleone and organized crime — they keep pullin’ me back in, although not for paying work, just for the Christmas party. I try to attend every few years.

“Do you still know people there?” my brother-in-law asked.

“No one ever leaves that place,” Alan said. He’s right. A few, maybe, but I’m always amazed at how many folks from my early-’80s tenure are still there, and I’m grateful at how many of them still want to talk to me when I show up at their Christmas party. Many even will buy me a beer.

It was a fun evening. Columbus passed a no-smoking-in-public-places-even-bars ordinance earlier this year, and I have to say: Wow. I generally have no problem with smoking in a bar, but on a night like this, everyone packed ass to elbow and the air humid with the collective respiration, having the place smoke-free made all the difference between a pleasant evening and one after which you undressed on the back porch so as not to bring reeking clothes into the house.

Alan was coming down with a cold and ducked out for a walk anyway. He said later, “I went past a restaurant with no name on the front, and mostly gay couples inside.” Probably somebody’s house. German Village — feh. Always too trendy for the room.

And then it was the Nall Family Christmas celebration, and the Sunday drive home from Columbus, which I try to plan around one of my favorite public radio shows, To the Best of Our Knowledge. I’ve never heard it anywhere but on WOSU, and I don’t know why, because it’s really a fine, relaxing listen. It’s like a less intense “This American Life” — a handful of pleasant conversations and interviews arranged around broad themes. Very broad themes, sometimes. Today’s were Death and Family (in two separate hours, not “death and family”). The interviews were with everyone from a cancer specialist to some guy from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. A Sunday Ideas section for the drive. Which beat the real paper Sunday, and its tales of presidentially approved domestic spying. That kind of stuff makes me drive off the road.

Bloggage, then:

Something that’s likely not on your radar screen, and hasn’t even registered much in Detroit, is the dust-up between the Ford Motor Co., the American Family Association and various gay-rights groups. To my way of thinking, Ford came down on the right side of this thing eventually, but I can surely not be the only American tired of all this crap.

You mean it’s dangerous to let your kid go online without adult oversight? You’re kidding. Ahem: Justin’s mother, Karen Page, said she sensed nothing out of the ordinary. Her son seemed to be just a boy talented with computers who enjoyed speaking to friends online. The Webcam, as she saw it, was just another device that would improve her son’s computer skills, and maybe even help him on his Web site development business. “Everything I ever heard was that children should be exposed to computers and given every opportunity to learn from them,” Ms. Page said in an interview.

Heaps upon piles of snow today. Very wet snow, too — the temperature sat at around 32 degrees all day. (That’s zero for you Canadian readers.) Snow is great for writers — you can stare out at it with your chin on your hand, or go out and push it around if you get blocked.

I did both. I forgot to mention, one of our household gifts to ourselves this year was a snowblower. I’ve disdained them in the past, but that was before I got a long driveway, and now I can’t imagine living without it. It’s more satisfying than mowing the lawn. I took it out at midafternoon in hopes it would make some of my calls be returned. It didn’t, but I got the driveway cleared. Afterward, I glowered at a downspout that seemed entirely clogged with ice. I disconnected it and ran hot water over it, piece by piece, until the huge chunks of ice fell out and it ran clear. Why is such a task so absurdly satisfying? Because, unlike writing a big essay, it gets done and when it’s done, stays done, pretty much. I can concentrate on clearing the downspout in ways I can never concentrate on writing.

Should have been a gutter-cleaner. Clambering around on roofs, I’d think about essays I want to write.

Now the snow’s shin-deep. And it’s perfect for packing. A winter fun-derland!

Now, to the bloggage.

This is not bloggage, but in checking the TV guide, I just found these shows on TLC, back-to-back: “The Boy Whose Skin Fell Off,” followed by “Born With Two Heads,” followed by “Archie, the 84-Pound Baby.” Have yourself a merry little Christmas.

Hey, dads! Looking for a meaningful gift for your teenage daughter? How about a symbolic representation of her hymen, in precious metals? Plus: There’s a suggested ceremony, woo-hoo.

I can’t stand to read one more word about That Cowboy Movie, but I gritted my teeth and got through these, and I was glad I did.

I like good design as much as the next girl, but this is ridiculous.

I’m going to be slammin’ work today, with a heap o’ writin’ to do — and a passel o’ letters to drop — before the weekend, so just move along, little to see here.

OK, one thing to see: Dead Celebrity Songs, featuring retooled lyrics to “Candle in the Wind” for most recently dead celebrities you could name. Like, oh…

Goodby Don Adams
Though Agent 99 knew you well
You had the grace to act a fool
Using your shoe phone we could tell
You crawled out of New York City
With a dream in your hand
Always had a job
Once the Love Boat set sail again

Which reminds me: The other day I was in the bank, and picked up a copy of The Economist. Like most Yanks, I assumed this magazine would be edited for a smarter class of folks than, oh, Time magazine. Flipped to a random page. Elton John is described as “the bespectacled pop star.”

Alan threatens to shoot all writers who use the word “bespectacled.”

Off to the keys. Wish me well.

The last half-dozen or so newspaper Christmas parties I’ve been to have been about as fun as joint-replacement surgery, but once upon a time, you could always count on them to rock the house. Why? Because we spent our holiday season reporting, editing and slapping headlines on stories like this:

Newburgh — A Wal-Mart Santa Claus was arrested Monday for allegedly exposing himself to a 15-year-old boy and attempting to have the boy engage in oral sex with him at his home on Dec. 9, according to a City of Newburgh police press release.

Bad Santa. Bad, baaaad Santa.

My friend who passed this along added, And also in the fine city of Newburgh: The police chief is apologizing for two overzealous officers who took time out of crime-fighting to knock down a 6-foot snow penis, complete with snowballs, that was festooning a lawn in the city.

UPDATE: Actually, that story’s too good not to link, too. Doesn’t skimp on the snickers, either: The last two nights of freezing weather has made the snow too stiff to sculpt, said Sherer. There are many, many more.

Ho ho ho. Eggnog refill, please.

Actually, I have been drinking a bit of eggnog this month. I always buy a quart, use some of it to make French toast on Christmas morning and throw the rest of it out sometime in February. (Eggnog has an amazingly long shelf life.) But this year, I’ve been adding a little Myers’ rum and putting my feet up, allowing the warm glow of the season to penetrate my bones. One thing about spiked eggnog is, you never want a refill.

It has made me toy with the idea of making homemade eggnog, something I’ve never done before. I was also considering trying a buche de noel, too — what the hell, I have the time. Who doesn’t want to spend at least one December afternoon carving mushrooms out of marzipan and laboriously smudging them with faux-forest dirt made of cocoa?

These thoughts pass pretty quickly, though. I don’t think I was cut out to roll spongecake in a towel. And with my luck, I’d be halfway through the project when the salmonella poisoning from the raw eggs would kick in.

So, bloggage:

I guess having your favorite radio station ruined is a rite of adult passage. Still. All my adult life I’ve wanted to live in a city large enough to support a AAA-format radio station. Guess it was too good to last.

Why I love my NYT: The mysteries of the narwhal, explained.

I didn’t see “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” (Other than, you know, paying attention to the John Roberts stuff. Snicker.) Now it’s out on DVD, and with 17 additional minutes of too-raunchy-for-R humor. I had no idea.

Curse you, Eric Zorn, and your competitive link-wrangling!

I don’t think anyone will top this, today: “Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” sung to the tune of “Folsom Prison Blues.”

Yes, there are more. But this is the best.

I found this column via Romenesko, and if you can’t open it (I think Philly requires registration), here’s the relevant passage:

I was a year out of college and working as a copy editor at a lackluster little newspaper in western Michigan. Because the paper was published in the afternoon, my shift began at an ungodly 4:45 a.m. My job was to clean up the copy of others – the best I could often hope for was to nudge the truly awful up to merely mediocre – and then put a headline on it.

I literally reeled backward. I stuttered and stumbled. “He what?” I asked, trying to process it. They all found this immensely amusing.

This is the second column I’ve read this month about a generational divide in newsrooms over Lennon’s death. I wasn’t working in Metro, nor in Entertainment, in 1980, so I can’t say what happened in my newsroom then.

But I do remember getting on the elevator at the paper with my friend Kirk, not long after another tragic rock-related event, this one in 1979. Eleven people had been crushed or trampled to death trying to get “festival seating” before a Who concert in Cincinnati. The doors opened, and we were joined by two old farts, both of whom were staring at us as though we had blood dripping from our hands. One of the OFs made some comment about the tragedy; I recall the words “killing their own kind, like animals.”

(Why do people always try to pin human crimes on animals? Most animals treat others of the same species pretty well.)

Anyway, I don’t know what I said; I’m sure it wasn’t profound or even interesting. But I remember how accusatory the OF was, as though I had to personally take responsibility for the actions of everyone closer to my age than his, and those looks — like we were a repulsive alien species that had somehow infiltrated the building.

Oh, well. Time is a great leveler. I’m sure at least one of those OFs, and perhaps both, have bit the big one by now. And who was it who chuckled over the hand-wringing over Kurt Cobain. Uh, that would be me.

OK, then. I hope I’m not blowing her cover, but Laura Lippman keeps a down-low blog called The Memory Project. She throws out a memory and asks for people to contribute their own. Sometimes I contribute, mostly I don’t, but today she set the hook deep: For research on her next book, contribute the smells of the ’70s. (If you were a teenage girl, that is.)

I hadn’t considered this in, like, forever, but since smell is the most evocative sense, it’s been hard to forget. (I had a colleague who wore the same cologne as an old boyfriend. I was always finding reasons to hang around his desk and sort of stick my nose near his neck.) Laura started the ball rolling with Noxema. It made me think of Herbal Essence, a smell I hadn’t even thought of in 20 years or more.

What’s your ’70s smell? Charlie? Emeraude? Or Ten-o-Six?

I first heard Richard Pryor about the time “That Nigger’s Crazy” came out. How old was I? High school, I guess. Lived in an all-white neighborhood, but I’d read Dick Gregory’s autobiography and was the usual desperately-seeking-hipness white suburban girl, so while I can’t say I was shocked, I will say that I laughed my ass off. Who wouldn’t? The guy was hilarious.

I found a strange backwater of Rotten.com with a Pryor bio that resurrected some of his routines from that era. This one is typical, with some dead-on commentary from an anonymous writer at Rotten.com:

Pryor’s racial observations were about as tame as dialogue written for Apu on The Simpsons — but his frenetic, sociologically-aware inflections gave his stories overarching comic weight. Pinched, uptight impersonations of white people were delivered with depressing believability, and always worth the price of admission. White folks do things a lot different than niggas. They eat quieter. Pass the potatoes, thank you darling, could I have a bit of that sauce. How are the kids coming along with their studies? Do you think we’ll be having sexual intercourse tonight? We’re not? Well, what the heck? The text alone is hardly funny if you’ve been contaminated by the contemporary recycling of it by the likes of Sinbad.

I remember him sketching out the downfall of Leon Spinks, knocking on his coke dealer’s door:

What you want, Leon?

A dollar-fiddy cent worth of cocaine.

Of course Richard Pryor could say that because you know that at one time he was probably the one scratching at the man’s door with six quarters in his hand. You look at Pryor and you think, if he could be that funny when he was high (because, for years and years, he was always high), what could he have been sober?

I like to think he wouldn’t have made so many crappy movies. Although I liked him in “Lady Sings the Blues,” a movie Alan refused to watch earlier this year. (“Diana Ross as Billie Holiday?!?”)

Today Neil Steinberg reprinted a portion of a column he wrote five years ago, when Pryor’s hometown of Peoria, Ill., refused to name a street after him. I think he gets it exactly right:

Richard Pryor was raised in a whorehouse in Peoria. His grandma was a madam and his mom was a hooker.

If we think of culture as having a boundary, a line between the glittery, golden fake surface of artifice and the sweaty, compromised funk of reality, then Richard Pryor moved that line about six yards toward the muddy end of the field. Maybe you hate that. Maybe you hate that there are curse words in Newsweek, and that kids watch South Park and the Simpsons and all those black comedies on the WB. Tough, that’s life today, and Pryor helped bring us here.