School vacations suck. School vacations with a sniffly kid suck more. School vacations with a sniffly kid who hasn’t yet made any friends in the neighborhood — at least, none who are also on break — suck the worst. Yesterday we went to the Detroit Science Center, another children’s museum that could be subtitled Short Attention Span Theater. Push this button, watch something happen, race to the next exhibit, push another button, watch something else happen, repeat until exhausted, etc.

Today we’re going to be done with education and go seek out a mall somewhere. My fervent belief is that somewhere in the metro D there’s a nice antique console table sitting around waiting for me to pick it up, along with a Queen Anne breakfront or some other piece of furniture suitable for storing my good china, and also lots of bookcases. And all these things are cheap. And all these things are destined to come home with me, and we will find one another, preferably this week.

In the meantime, I liked John Scalzi’s take on covenant marriage, one of those policies beloved of do-as-I-say-not-as-I-do conservatives, but which turns out, even in GWB’s America, to be a total joke: A covenant marriage also requires a two-year wait before a divorce becomes final, except in cases of adultery, abuse or imprisonment for a felony. …The concept of covenant marriage, which, to put it lightly, has not been a hit, even in Arkansas: just over two thirds of one percent of Arkansas marriages have been covenant marriages since the new variation of marriage was enacted into law in 2001. Simple reason for that: As a concept, it’s pretty damn insulting.

I’ll be back later, with all my fabulous new furniture!

Indiana is a strange state, but you all know that. I think you have to live there, though, to understand how strange.

Take poor relief.

Indiana’s poor-relief system — and yes, that’s what they call it — is based not at the state level, not at the county, not even at the municipality, but at the township. The first level of government, your neighbors, the unit conceived in the 18th century, when some people didn’t even have horses. The idea was, you should be able to walk to your township office in half a day or so. The idea was also this: If you need help, the people who know you best should be the ones to provide it. What’s more, all aid should be a one-time thing, not a dole you can just sign on. So if you need help with your gas bill in January, we’ll give it to you, but if you need help in February, you have to come back.

My friend Ron French did a series of stories on the problems with this system many years ago. He pointed out, with exquisite irony, that Indiana’s poor-relief system dates to the Washington administration. As in George.

Here’s the part where you have to know Indiana. When others point out that Indiana is the only state where this ridiculous system persists, Hoosiers never say, “Whoa, better change it, then.” Hoosiers say, “It’s not our fault we’re smarter than everybody else.”

Defenders of the system point out its strengths, and there are some, although they’re mostly theoretical — it discourages a welfare culture; it keeps relief on a human scale, rather than a bureaucratic one; it’s small government in action. In reality, though, these are far outweighed by the system’s flaws, of which there are dozens. Shall I name a few? It unfairly taxes middle-class residents of urban townships, who find themselves supporting the poor of the city while wealthy suburbanites opt out; it makes staying on the dole so complicated and time-consuming there’s little left over for job-hunting; it’s outrageously expensive, with overhead at something like 90 percent of total funds paid out; it puts one of society’s most important jobs in the hands of low-level government officials — township trustees — who, frankly, don’t always know what they’re doing.

There are 1,008 townships in Indiana, and if you talk to welfare professionals, you’ll hear horror stories like you wouldn’t believe, usually in rural areas — trustees who refuse aid to women with blackened eyes trying to escape battering husbands, because “your husband can take care of you”; trustees who deal with troublesome transients by buying them a bus ticket to the nearest urban township, where the poor-relief offices are bigger and more anonymous; and so on.

Stories like this are typical: A rural deputy trustee who hands out the dough, but in exchange for a little nookie.

There will be much scratching of editorial-board chins over this one. There will be fulmination. Nothing will change. Two hundred-plus years of Hoosier tradition won’t die easy.

Bloggage: Joe Conason strikes the nail on its flat part in re: Guckert/Gannon: Imagine the media explosion if a male escort had been discovered operating as a correspondent in the Clinton White House. Imagine that he was paid by an outfit owned by Arkansas Democrats and had been trained in journalism by James Carville. Imagine that this gentleman had been cultivated and called upon by Mike McCurry or Joe Lockhart�or by President Clinton himself. Imagine that this “journalist” had smeared a Republican Presidential candidate and had previously claimed access to classified documents in a national-security scandal. Then imagine the constant screaming on radio, on television, on Capitol Hill, in the Washington press corps�and listen to the placid mumbling of the “liberal” media now.

It hasn’t been a month, but I’m enjoying the passing news parade here in the D. Perhaps you’ve heard the red-Navigator story; it went national. In case you didn’t, here’s the short version:

Some time recently, the city paid $24,995 to lease a cherry-red, loaded, brand-new Lincoln Navigator. For whom was this lavish vehicle obtained? nosy reporters asked. The mayor looked at his nails and tried the old point-over-your-shoulder-and-yell-“Look! Comet Kahoutek!” trick, but eventually the truth came out: The car was for his wife and kids. The sum of $24,995? Can you guess what the cutoff is for city expenditures to require council approval? If you guessed $25,000, go to the head of the class.

This story was broken, and mostly pursued, by this guy Steve Wilson at Channel 7, one of those on-your-side reporters whose specialty is chasing people down the street with a microphone and ShakyCam. At one point, one of the mayor’s bodyguards put him up against the wall, ON CAMERA, and you can just imagine how many times that item was replayed; it was a body-slam sent from heaven.

So the other day I turn on the news — keep in mind, most of February is a TV rating period — and there it is again, the red Navigator, weeks after the original story cooled off. This time it was being driven to work by police commander, and where was the video shot? From above, of course. I mean, wouldn’t you send the chopper up to get video of the car, “being driven at speeds in excess of 80 mph.” I would. And then there’s Steve with his ShakyCam, chasing the cop into the building, asking why it doesn’t have any radios, if it’s a police car now.

Oh, it was rich. For a minute, I thought I was living in Florida.

Anyway, this Free Press piece seems to sum up the tragicomedy pretty well.

Bloggage: Via the Poor Man, I see the truth is still emerging on Jeff Gannon-J.D. Guckert’s so-called personal life, which would still be fairly personal if he didn’t have dick shots posted all over the damn internet. The link above is work-safe, but the links within that post are decidedly not, unless you work for Larry Flynt.

The trip to North Manchester was fine, but exhausting. Remind me again how difficult it is to drive 500 miles in one day after four hours of sleep or so. But it was nice to meet the North Manchester readers, and Manchester College folks, and Jeff Hawkins, whose Hawkins Family Farm community-agriculture project I wrote about once upon a time back in the day. He presented me with a frozen free-range chicken, which I accepted because I no longer have to abide by my employer’s payola rules and also because: It’s a chicken. There’s something amusing about accepting the gift of a frozen chicken. You can say, “I accept this gift on behalf of chicken lovers everywhere” and tuck it under your arm like a football.

I think I’ll have it for dinner Sunday, unless Alan has another awards show he has to get in the Monday paper.

Tomorrow I fulfill my last obligation to my ex-state. I’m speaking at the Monday student convo at Manchester College. Topic: Blogging. They asked for a title for my presentation, so I thought for approximately three seconds and came up with “Never Pick a Fight With Anyone Who Buys Bandwidth by the Barrel.”

“That’ll go over 90 percent of the heads in the room,” said my husband. Such faith in the broadening possibilities of higher education.

They asked me to be there by 9 a.m. I Mapquested the travel time. Gulp.

Oh, well. It’s not like I’m not accustomed to a 3:45 a.m. alarm. Thank God for coffee.

Alan’s off tomorrow, comp time for working two Sunday nights running. Kate’s off too, thanks to Michigan’s strange two-break second-semester. Of course we have no plans, while every other soul I’ve overheard in the last week…does. “We’re leaving for Colorado tonight” — that’s a common theme. Whereas we will be exploring Metro Detroit. Today we went to the lakefront. It wasn’t snowing, but it was freezing, and a brisk onshore breeze watered our eyes. Did you see “Stranger Than Paradise?” It was like that.

“I’m c-c-c-cold,” Kate moaned. We turned to go, as a single man walked toward us across the ice. He wasn’t c-c-c-cold; he wore a light jacket and no hat. He reached the shore as we turned back to the car.

“How was it out there?” I asked from deep within my parka hood.

“OK,” he said. “Not as nice as yesterday. I walked down to the yacht club yesterday.” Ice walking. I should have thought of that.

So before I turn in, some bloggage:

I don’t know how anyone — anyone at all — takes Michael Medved seriously. As a social critic, as a moral compass and certainly not as a film critic. I mean, if you’re looking for that sort of thing, CAP Alert is so much more entertaining. What this yapping nitwit is doing to “Million Dollar Baby” is disgraceful, and Roger Ebert’s editor makes fairly short work of him (in a longish piece) here. Worth your time.

Me, I’ll be back post-Indiana.

A true contrarian, in the Diana vs. Charles Wars of the ’90s, I was a Charles partisan all the way. Poor guy — he was expected to be one of the world’s most eligible bachelors and conduct himself accordingly, and marry a virgin. So he ended up with a toddler narcissist bride, and we all know what happened next. All over the world, women like Diana make the marital deals she did, and manage to console themselves somehow from the vast resources at their, and her, disposal — clothes, lunch, massages, aromatherapy, yoga, decorating, take your pick. I always thought it was impossible that a woman could have as many gay boyfriends as Diana and still not know the score, but there you are. Talk about high-maintenance.

(Alan, who pays pretty much zero attention to the British royals, asked me for an update when the two were divorcing. I gave him the three-minute version. He thought for a minute and said, “No wonder he goes fishing all the time.”)

So now Charles is marrying his dear Camilla, who shares his interests and plays hostess at his table and no doubt holds his craggy paw when it needs holding. I think this is just impossibly romantic. What a story for February.

Update: Now if we could just do something about those hats.

Jon Carroll has a good column defending reality TV today. As usual, he’s more right than wrong, but I have a tiny bone to pick on his “reality TV is unpredictable” contention. His example was sound, but my observation is somewhat different. What puzzles me about R-TV is how quickly it’s fallen into a predictable framework — two teams, a challenge, cutaways to cast members trashing each other, the editing-based fakeout of who’s going down, the last-act no-it’s-someone-else, the climactic tribal council vote-off, the parting shot.

Mark Burnett, what hath you wrought?

I watched a few “Survivors,” got bored, watched another, found it was still pretty Kabuki — there’s the Bitch, the Earth Mom, the Rebel, the Drill Sergeant, the Hottie, the Grandparent, etc. Bor-ing. So then I tuned into something new, “Wickedly Perfect,” touted as a quest to find America’s next “style maven,” I guess because its current maven is in the slam. How this maven will be mave-ified is still a mystery, but I understand a book deal is involved. The point is the TV time, anyway, and so far, I’m not disappointed. The style mavens are working harder for their 15 minutes than any “Survivor” castaway, most of whom lie around the beach while the Grandparent and the Drill Sergeant do all the wood-gathering and grouse about kids these days.

Anyone who’s ever hosted a dinner party for eight knows how hard it is, and these folks are usually asked to do that or its equivalent, plus an “individual project” and some other busy work on every episode. The individual projects I’ve seen are interesting, the sort of crafty stuff that people who do it would have you believe is just some li’l thing they whipped up when they were bored the other afternoon. Last week’s was a wreath made of fruit, and half the fun was hearing the way Joan Lunden laid out the task: “You will be required to make a wreath out of fruit,” she said, with the same approximate gravity the CIA guy uses on Martin Sheen when he’s telling him to terminate Col. Kurtz with extreme prejudice.

The fruit wreath was part of an overall challenge that involved running a B&B for a night, with the judges as the high-strung, demanding guests, showing up with their own sheets or demanding a bourbon and ginger ale at midnight or finding fault with their prosciutto-wrapped melon balls or whatever. At one point one of the judges had to show a contestant how to poach an egg, and you knew she was toast, but her teammate just sat there and beamed, because she TOLD her you needed to put vinegar in the water, and that snooty leave-me-alone-I-can-handle-it Margo said she NEVER uses vinegar, and just let her do it her way, OK?

I mean, why take people to a tropical island and make them eat bugs and inadequately cooked fish and pretend they’re starving? This is a framework that truly fits the backstabbing narrative.

The vote-offs are done in “the rock garden” of whatever Connecticut house they’re staying in. Everybody wears dramatic shawls. Instead of getting their torches snuffed, they have to walk off across the manicured lawn out of the spotlight, growing dimmer and dimmer, until they get to stand before the microphone one last time and say, “Just try to get along without my chocolate mousse, you pretenders! I’m walking off with my head high!”

Oh, my. Now this is television.

It’s been a while since I’ve lived in the suburbs but like riding a bike, some things just come back to you. Last week a free newspaper appeared in my mailbox — “The Pointer.” It didn’t look like anything I needed to pay close attention to, but then I spied this Publisher’s Note:

Although the response to my question regarding a letter in the last issue about the cover of the December issue of The Pointer was overwhelming, I have chosen not to print any of those letters. Thank you all for writing and calling and for giving me your opinions, but as of this date, this matter has gone as far as it is going to go in these pages.

As for my beliefs, I will stand up for them too, which is my right also. Hopefully, we can meet on common ground some day as friends. That would be my wish for this new year.

No, I have no idea what she’s talking about, either. But it reminded me of the first rule of suburbia: Don’t make waves.

If there’s a secular church where we all worship around here, it has to be Our Lady of Real Estate. In the last week no fewer than three freebie real-estate publications and/or mail solicitations came over the transom. Evidently people buy and sell houses for fun around here. Having just barely survived this last move, I can tell you I won’t be pulling up stakes until we master the Star Trek transporter technology, and I can simply beam my belongings to my new address.

But the people who put those fliers out are onto something; they know that even those of us who aren’t in the market can find a few minutes to leaf through the Homes of Distinction tabloid, just to see what houses are fetching these days. I read mine this week just to find out how much I overpaid; buyer’s remorse set in right on schedule. Why aren’t these f*cking kitchen cabinets deeper? I fume, wondering how long it’ll be before my coffee cups come sliding out to smash on the tile. And where the hell’s the built-in china cabinet I used to have?

Then I think about how many frogs we kissed, how we spent two days looking at every house in our price range, and how all but two sucked out loud. Yesterday I pitched the notes I kept, being careful to read them all again, so I’ll remember how this one had small rooms and smelled like old people, that one had a Silence of the Lambs basement and the other had the world’s most awful carpeting, unless you like a pattern of ugly green squares.

I recall one really promising bungalow — well located! brand-new cedar shake roof! closets out the wazoo! — that had a distinctly strange vibe indoors. One wall was half-painted, a portion of the hall floor was half-varnished. All through the house were half-done improvement projects, but they were far enough along that you could see how much potential the place had, if you’d just do the other half. The previous owner, the Realtor said, had died suddenly in a car crash. “Was this her kid’s bedroom?” I asked at one point. “She didn’t have custody,” he said. “She had…issues.” I thought for a moment and said, “Let me guess: She was bipolar.” He nodded. The whole house was a shrine to being insufficiently medicated.

Now I’m looking around at this place — new windows, check. Good light, check. Refinished wood floors, check. So there aren’t any phone jacks in the room I’m using as an office. That’s why we have cordless phones and wireless laptops.

I wonder what that publisher’s note was about.

Many of you may not be aware, as we Metro Detroiters are reminded roughly every 15 minutes, that next year’s Super Bowl will be held…here. Not in Pontiac this time, but right here in the D. It’s a good news/bad news deal. The bad news: Your chances of going to the game are close to nil, you’re not cool enough to go to any of the parties, it’ll be serious orange-barrel time this summer as the freeways are made ready and, well, there are probably a million other reasons. The good news: Take that, Columbus, Ohio!

I was thinking of the halftime show on my morning dog-walk. It should be hip-hop, or at least showcase the Detroit music scene, one of the most vibrant in the country. It will be…Motown. I mean, don’t you think? It’s inescapable. They’ll dust off whatever aging stars might still be ambulatory, beam in Diana from whatever planet she’s living on, and the whole thing will end with a battle between Smokey Robinson and Eminem, which Smokey will win, and then fireworks will go off.

God bless America.

It rained all day, drops going plinky-plunky on the skylights. What a great idea for this latitude, skylights. There’s one in our otherwise miniscule master bath, and get this — it has a pleated blind you can draw over it, I guess in case you’re worried the squirrels might see you naked.

Bloggage:

When I interviewed in Houston last year, an editor there told me it was a “good news town.” Well, that’s one way of putting it.

Today’s We Are No Longer in Fort Wayne moment comes from Kate. I picked her up at school Friday, and in the this-and-that of the day’s download, she says so-and-so will not be attending the class Valentine’s Day party.

“Oh? Why?” I ask.

“She’s going to the Grammys.”

Oh. Huh.

Well, I hope her classmate has a good time. If the mood of G-rated moderation sweepin’ the nation carries over to the music awards, her parents will rest easy, too. I just watched the most boring Super Bowl ever, at least in terms of the good parts — the commercials and the halftime show. Paul McCartney? Sheesh. Just bring back Up With People and be done with it. Where did they get those young girls to jump up and down in the front row? It would be like recruiting my junior-high classmates to scream over Benny Goodman.

On Saturday, Kate and I went exploring, from Lake Shore Drive to Royal Oak, along the infamous Eight Mile Road. The overwhelming impression: Apparently there’s always a living to be made in this town, if you’re willing to open 1) a used car lot; or 2) a liquor store. But at the end of the line we found Trader Joe’s, and so life is good again. Two-Buck Chuck — the consolation of the one-income household.

Headlines I wish I’d written: Man fined, banned from McDonald’s after Egg McMuffin assault

More tomorrow. I’m tired.

My connectivity problems are solved, as are my printing problems. I won’t bore you with the long version, only the vindication: I wasn’t crazy. Every part of my system was doing its job, and the fault, dear Brutus, was not in ourselves but in Comcast’s DNS servers.

Anyway, mad props to Adam at the Troy Apple store, who sussed it out for me. He also gave me an excuse to leave the east side and travel into the prosperous suburbs of Oakland County, where Apple stores tend to be located. This one was in a mall called, in a very postmodern name for a mall: The Somerset Collection. It sprawls across two sides of a busy four-lane road; of course I parked on the wrong side. But there’s a skyway with moving sidewalks to carry you over the road, from one temple of consumerism (Neiman Marcus) to another (Nordstrom’s). This was a very high-end mall; no Claire’s tacky accessories or Lidz baseball-cap stores, just Cartier and its expensive cousins. I was there early in the business day, when the only other customers were suburban stay-at-home moms, out for an outing with their perfect blonde haircuts and perfect size-4 butts in $170 jeans and perfect little babies in $300 strollers. They each carried a designer coffee and looked exquisitely bored with it all.

If I were one of their husbands, my motto would be: Cherchez la tennis pro.

That is the end of the cruel cultural stereotyping portion of our broadcast today; I’m certain some of these young women had vivid inner and outer lives. Maybe one served in the Peace Corps in Kenya. Maybe one dreamed of being a large-animal vet in Montana. Maybe another is working on her second novel. At least, I hope so.

Besides, I lied. They weren’t the only customers at the mall, because there were at least a dozen or more in the Apple store. A dozen customers at 10:30 a.m. on a Wednesday — all hail Steve Jobs and the iPod. It was actually busy, not the usual assortment of young dudes waiting to Apple-ify your life. Those guys can be insufferable, except when they solve all your problems.

I didn’t buy the $99 iPod, just as I didn’t buy the iPod mini, even when its tiny profile made my old white iPod look like an obese cow. I think iPods are becoming like hidden cheese in a pizza — I mean, how much more do you want? If an iPod the size of a deck of cards is too big, maybe you need to examine your miniaturization needs.

Bloggage:

My preoccupation with the move has limited my exposure to the news lately; the Iraqi elections passed as aural background noise to unpacking, and the Ward Churchill story completely passed me by. But I think Richard Cohen has a sensible take on it today. Worth a read.

I thought Jon Carroll neatly wove together the new Jared Diamond book with a recent Detroit News column in his own column today.

I’ve also been paying attention to news of the new town, of course. As a true moderate, I can’t deccide who’s right in this story, about what happens when police recruits fail to salute their chief. It’s either typical management overreaction or else she’s onto something, like, What else don’t these rookies know?

Oh, and Beato’s going to town on Maggie Gallagher, here: So who exactly is this valiant protector who keeps the nation safe from all those privileged white divorce worshippers? Well, for one, she’s a proud graduate of the school of hard knocks, otherwise known as Yale University. She lives on the easternmost fringe of the Midwest, in New York’s Westchester County. She’s the president of the Institute of Marriage and Public Policy, which appears to be an offshoot of the Manhattan Institute, a grassroots collective of populist pointyheads that subsists on tiny $400,000 contributions from jus’-folks donors like the John M. Olin Foundation. … So what keeps her from being exactly the sort of elite white cultural engineer she regularly derides? Actually, it’s pretty obvious. She’s conservative – and only liberals can be insular elites. And who knows – maybe she also really likes country music.