On the way to the auto show last week, a truck passed us on I-94.

“What the hell is that thing hanging from the axle?” I asked my brother. “Is that…balls?

It was. Behold the latest automotive accessory for men who have no doubts about their manhood.

I know what you’re thinking: Can I buy these on the net? Why, of course. At several places.

I have ripped my first headline. Whether I can separate a story from it for my nefarious purposes remains to be seen, but what a yarn in the AA News tonight:

Seven Eastern Michigan University football players and one former player were arrested early Sunday after a series of parties in Ypsilanti turned into a donnybrook with police from three agencies, authorities said.

At one point, a female police officer was lifted nearly to the ceiling by a player, then body-slammed across the back of a couch as police tried to break up one of the parties, according to police reports.

The link’s worth following, if only to get a feel for how these situations get out of control, not to mention what sounds like some police sorely in need of major backup:

EMU Public Safety officers and Washtenaw County Sheriff’s deputies also responded to the scene. Police said the anger escalated when officers tried to ticket the player who lived in the apartment for a noise violation, and he refused to take the ticket. He swore at the female officer, she reported, so she threw the ticket into the apartment as police tried to back out.

The first officer tried to spray the second player with pepper spray, but said the 6-foot-2, 205-pound player hoisted her nearly to the ceiling in a bear hug, then slammed her back and shoulder into the back of a sofa while she screamed for help.

It sounds like it was fortunate they didn’t have a riot on their hands.

Oh, and just in case you’re tut-tutting at the sensational media coverage, rest assured: They put it on the metro page, not out front where it belonged. You couldn’t find it on the website with a magnifying glass. Move along, nothing to see here.

Fellow fellow Vince and I decided, on the spur of the moment (relatively speaking), to attend the Bette Midler show at the Palace at Auburn Hills last night. It was the only spontaneity an evening like this can accommodate, because face it: Shows like this cannot do spontaneous. If, like me, you had your formative pop-concert experiences in the ’70s, and somehow believed that people in the audience shouting “Free Bird!” translated into Skynyrd’s performance of that number later in the evening, you may have been led to believe that performers are capable of spontaneity in performance. They are not. At least, they are not in shows like the one at the Palace last night. There is a schedule. There is a computer-controlled carousel horse on wires arriving from the wings in 45 seconds, and you’ve got to get on and fly out, whether you want to or not. There are two dozen more cities to visit. The jokes individually tailored for each city will be written by a professional, and the magic will come in the performer’s delivery of same, making it seem they just popped into her curly little head.

Not that there’s anything wrong with this. It’s theater, not improv. You gotta rock the cheap seats, too, and I appreciate the effort with the scenery, the effects, the everything. You also gotta give Bette her props: This is a girl who can still tear the roof off the sucka when she wants to. I happily believed she made up the snappy patter right there on the spot. (Sample: “Ah, Detroit, home of Joe Louis’ fist. I saw it today; it was wearing a glove. It’s cold out there!”)

It was kind of a poignant evening for me. I loved Bette Midler in the ’70s along with all my gay friends, and then all my gay friends died, and Bette and I lost touch sometime after “The Rose.” You can’t fault someone for making hits where she found them; I’m just not one of those girls who feels the need to stand up with a lit match in hand when she hears “The Wind Beneath My Wings.”

But the first part of the show was fabulous — the Rosemary Clooney homage, the Fishtails Over Broadway bit (whatever else it is, mermaids rolling around the stage in electric wheelchairs is just funny), the Sophie Tucker jokes. The trick to aging well is not taking yourself too seriously, and no one ever accused Bette Midler of that. Speaking of Christina Aguilera performing in little more clothing than would fit in a Barbie doll’s pocket, she said:

“Do these girls ever call and say thank you? Do they? No. And I opened the door for trashy singers with bad taste and big tits!”

She did. And she did it so well.

In conclusion, here’s a Sophie Tucker joke:

“My boyfriend Ernie said, ‘Soph, if you’d learn to cook, we could fire the chef.’ And I said, ‘Ernie, if you’d learn to fuck, we could fire the chauffeur!'”

Thank you very much. Drive carefully. I love you, Detroit!

It’s a few days late, but let’s mark it anyway: Pictured (by the Lagrange News, no less) above is Mark the Shark, celebrating the New Year with the traditional polar bear swim held at his lake house in Lagrange County, Indiana. I didn’t go this year, for the first time in ages (slightly hungover, only slightly). Glad he’s still manipulating the media in his evil way.

More evidence, if I needed any more, that journalism is a sucker’s game: Just got back from my first Writing for Television class. Our first assignment is to start a clip file of newspaper stories we can use for narratives. Yes, that’s right: We’ve been ordered to find our raw material, and then rip it from the headlines.

This came after she sketched out the pros and cons of being a TV writer, and one of the pros was: Lots of money. “As a journalist, I’ve long suspected we were the poorly compensated legmen for ‘Law & Order,'” I said after class. “Nice to have it confirmed.” She took the joke well, I’m relieved to say.

Jon Carroll, as usual, makes a 600-word casual on shopping something you want to read all the way to the end:

The in-store music is suddenly familiar. An electric organ. Good Lord, that’s the long middle section of “Light My Fire.” The Lizard King is not dead; he is merely in the stomach remedies section.

Oliver Stone, back in his “I can take drugs and make movies anyway” phase, turned the story of the Doors into an epic of self-destruction. Now it’s just Lawrence Welk for daytime shoppers. I’d love to take your LSD, sir, but I need to buy a package of Bean-O.

What I said about how lots of amateur bloggers write better than lots of highly paid op-ed columnists? I was talking about The Poor Man. Among others.

…physician, heal thyself. NYT story; requires registration.

I had a big entry written about this WashPost piece on the popular/literary divide, but Alan logged me out and the whole thing went down the memory hole, dammit.

Anyway, read and respond. I have to go; more later, but this now: If Stephen King wants to lump Elmore Leonard and Tom Clancy in the same sentence, he’s a stone jive-ass and I take back every good thing I said about “Misery.” If not, we can talk.

Also, Elmore Leonard should get a National Book Award before he dies. But y’all go read.

Two cops see a strange sight in the skies over Huntington. Money quote: “It wasn’t any kind of flying machine that I can think of,” Olinger told The Herald-Press. “And it’s not like a ’50s flying saucer. It was that big, but it didn’t have a hump in the middle.”

Yes, the ’50s model flying saucers did have that hump, didn’t they?