Guys, I’m back, but we got back late and, of course, there was too much to do late last night and this morning to put a proper post together. So just a few quickies so we can start a new comment thread, as the last one is getting unwieldy.

1) Canada is paying attention to us. My highly unscientific eavesdropping/taxi drivers poll, which has a +/- Everything margin of error, reveals that no one sees our position as enviable, moral or even smart. So there’s that.

2) Toronto is on a Great Lake, like Chicago, and is windy, like Chicago. Fortunately there are coffee houses and cocktail bars about every seven or eight doors, for warming purposes.

3) I watched the news from home obsessively. And this, while far-fetched, is disturbing.

Very full plate today. Best start eating.

…you’ll be reading this. Because friends, I have to disconnect for a couple of days. I’ve been trying to finish three novels since Christmas, and can’t, because I keep checking Twitter like a rat in a Skinner box. I have to keep up with the latest news — IT’S MY JOB — but this is simply wearing me out.

So Alan and I are off to a sophisticated Ontario city before the border closes or we start a trade war with them. Like we apparently already have with Mexico.

Peeps, I can’t even. We may have to assume protective coloration up there. You’ll know we mastered our accents if we don’t come back. But plans are to be back on Sunday.

In the meantime, stay safe, stay sane and can anyone else rustle up another women’s march? I need something to calm my nerves. Maybe some Canadian whiskey will help.

Greetings, good people of NN.c land. Sorry I missed the update last night, but I was in a January kinda mood. Seriously, yesterday I told Alan he needed to start with the Vitamin D along with me, because like Johnny Cash, we haven’t seen the sunshine since I-don’t-know-when.

But I’m rested and I’m between phone calls, so here goes, quickly.

First up, a question for LA Mary: Is this the bridge near your neighborhood that we drove over?

There’s just something about it that rang a bell in my head.

And yeah, that’s from “La La Land,” which you may have heard got a few Oscar nominations Tuesday.

In December, I did a story on this guy, who has done that rare thing – figured out a way to make news on the internet pay. Admittedly, only a narrow slice of news (the Iraqi oil market), but still. His readers pay about $2,000 a year to subscribe, and if you’re in the oil bidness, I bet it’s worth every penny. Anyway, one of the things they do is a daily, or near-daily, update from Mosul, which is still partially held by ISIS. It’s so smartly organized, with incidents exhaustively detailed, categorized and sourced (anonymously, for obvious reasons). I wish I could link, but valuable information isn’t something you just give away.

Anyway, I thought of this because apparently POTUS is talking about “taking the oil” again, and even as a casual reader of Iraq Oil Report, I can’t even.

Here’s a roundup of the remarkable leaks coming out of the Oval on, what? Day five? Man, we have a long road ahead.

Related, and nifty: Red feed, blue feed, or what Facebook looks like, depending on how your friend network shapes up. Illuminating. I wish Bridge had the budget to do stuff like this. Instead, we have to rely on good old legwork. Here’s our red/blue project, Divided Michigan, which kicked off this week. Feedback welcome.

Phone just rang. Back to work and see you tomorrow, I hope.

Well, this is what you call a weekend. I’m sitting here bathing in the news firehose, and I think I need to just do the shotgun thing, just write stuff down, whaddayacallit? Stream-of-consciousness, yeah. See what pops up.

My autocorrect keeps changing “Melania” to “Melanie,” so I think the first lady needs a new name. I choose Natasha.

Sean Spicer definitely needs a new suit. Although maybe badly fitting suits are a Thing now.

Is Barron Trump on the autism spectrum? I know speculation has been going around on that topic, and yeah — no one’s business and leave the kids alone. I’m only curious, as it would explain much, including why Andrew Wakefield attended the inaugural celebrations and the new president supposedly plans to put a vaccine questioner on a committee investigating them.

That march. Whew. I had no idea so many people I knew were going, and now I feel like I should have at least come down to take some pictures. My favorite single march? Antarctica.

I’m not the first person to observe that when people who believe the government can’t do anything right rise to power, they put in charge people who can’t do anything right. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Still, a week doesn’t go by that I’m not astonished by how much regular people distrust their government. Two quick examples drawn from that bottomless pit of stupidity, my Facebook feed:

We’ve had some sewer line problems in an adjacent county, and a lot of rain, and some raw-sewage overflows into the lake have occurred. It happens, it’s not good, all freely acknowledged. Crews are working on it. On Facebook, a movement is rising: BOIL YOUR WATER. A person with an adequate understanding of how water systems work steps in to point out that the overflow is into the water source, “raw” water, and it is all treated at the plant before it goes out as potable. So you’re fine, this person said, which only prompted a torrent of how stupid do you think we are? Do you think they’d TELL us the water was unsafe to drink? Boil your water! As though water-plant management, with absolutely zero reason to lie because the problem wasn’t theirs in the first place or to fix, would just lie to nearly 3 million people who drink it. Because GOVERNMENT.

The next day, a person inexperienced with eggs reported getting a double yolk in one. “I threw it away, just to be safe,” she wrote. Smart! replied one of her network. You never know what the government is doing with these chickens! Of course a double yolk is a perfectly natural, if unusual occurrence in laying hens, but please: Blame the government.

Of course, water and food safety in the U.S. are two triumphs of government oversight, with one notable exception.

I could be amused by this stuff if the stakes weren’t so high.

A copied cake? What’s HAPPENING???!!?

Sherri posted this Rick Perlstein piece, low in yesterday’s comments. You should read.

And with that, I gotta scoot. Happy Monday, all.

We all know what day it is. The outgoing president has been generous with his time this week, with his presser, various other interviews and one I’m halfway through on Pod Save America, the podcast that succeeded Keepin’ it 1600.

You can read/listen/watch those, or you can join me in Tom & Lorenzo’s retrospective of FLOTUS’ style, which I’m enjoying. Daywear, parts one and two, plus separate posts on the gowns and the coats.

So many pretty clothes to look at. I’m so sad. I’m going to look at the pretty clothes and try not to think of the incoming administration’s extended family trying to cadge free haircuts.

Here we go, America. Try to have a good weekend.

One of those days, folks. Long and not terrible, but one that didn’t yield much material. Did a radio thing at 9 a.m. about the governor’s state of the state address. Fortunately, the other guest had taken very detailed notes, and can say that Flint didn’t come up until 34 minutes in. My notes read, “says ‘shoutout’ incessantly.” Which he did, enough that I looked up “shoutout” on Google Ngram. It’s hiphop slang, now over deployed by our nerd governor.

Then I came in to the office. Had soup for lunch. Had soup for dinner. Didn’t get enough done; my bullet journal will scold me tomorrow.

But I got some bloggage! It’s a bit infuriating.

Another one of those Vox things — I voted for Donald Trump, and I already regret it. Oy, these people:

Since that 60 Minutes interview when Trump went back on his promise to investigate Clinton, I haven’t been able to look at him the same way. Witnessing his open admittance that he made promises simply because they “played well” during the campaign was disturbing. He has shown himself to be guilty of all of the same things he accused Hillary of — lying to the public, refusing to do press conferences, putting himself and his business interests above the American people.

Since the election, Trump has repeatedly spat in the faces of those that cast their ballots for him. I did not cast my vote for his Cabinet members, many of them rich millionaires and billionaires, despite Trump’s lambasting of Hillary Clinton on her association with Wall Street. I did not cast my vote for his sons who sat next to him during his meeting with tech titans, potentially representing the vast business interests of the Trump company that they now run. I did not cast my vote for Ivanka, whose clothing brand was working out an ongoing deal with a Japanese clothing company when she sat in on a meeting with her father and the Japanese prime minister. I did not cast my vote to enrich the very swamp that Trump promised he would drain.

Today’s talker will be this NYT piece on Rick Perry, which made the blood drain from my face:

When President-elect Donald J. Trump offered Rick Perry the job of energy secretary five weeks ago, Mr. Perry gladly accepted, believing he was taking on a role as a global ambassador for the American oil and gas industry that he had long championed in his home state.

In the days after, Mr. Perry, the former Texas governor, discovered that he would be no such thing — that in fact, if confirmed by the Senate, he would become the steward of a vast national security complex he knew almost nothing about, caring for the most fearsome weapons on the planet, the United States’ nuclear arsenal.

Two-thirds of the agency’s annual $30 billion budget is devoted to maintaining, refurbishing and keeping safe the nation’s nuclear stockpile; thwarting nuclear proliferation; cleaning up and rebuilding an aging constellation of nuclear production facilities; and overseeing national laboratories that are considered the crown jewels of government science.

“If you asked him on that first day he said yes, he would have said, ‘I want to be an advocate for energy,’” said Michael McKenna, a Republican energy lobbyist who advised Mr. Perry’s 2016 presidential campaign and worked on the Trump transition’s Energy Department team in its early days. “If you asked him now, he’d say, ‘I’m serious about the challenges facing the nuclear complex.’ It’s been a learning curve.”

It’s fashionable these days to go around muttering “we’re so fucked,” and it’s easy to see why.

Finally, this Bridge story goes live at 6:20 a.m. Thursday, and I’m eager to hear what people think of it. It’s very strange, and there’s a twist at about the three-quarter mark that I’d rather not spoil until more people have a chance to read it. But I want to hear opinions.

Onward to the week’s downside. And…Friday.

As a card-carrying member of the evil media, I’ll acknowledge being a little out of touch, but there’s one thing you civilians do that has always bugged me. And that’s the insistence that when terrible crimes are committed, it’s somehow wrong to pay any attention to those who perpetrate them.

Seriously, I can’t tell you how often I’ve heard people claim that it was wrong to put O.J. Simpson on the cover of some newsmagazine, or Tim McVeigh, or anyone other than, oh, Osama bin Laden. (Funny how this rule is suspended for certain terrorists.) Sometimes this goes to extremes; one of the best criticisms I read about the Oklahoma City memorial was that McVeigh is barely mentioned, and his cause not at all. We wouldn’t want to offend the families of victims, who don’t want to see him mentioned.

How such an unspeakable tragedy can happen in a vacuum escapes me. And I don’t think O.J. killed his wife and another man to get on the cover of Time magazine. But that’s how people think, and all I can do is argue.

This came up because Alan and I watched “Tower” on Saturday, an interesting and excellent documentary on the sniper shootings from the University of Texas tower in 1966. (Last year was the 50th anniversary.) The film uses actors, and the animation technique known as rotoscoping. This gives you the effect of hearing young people describe a 50-year-old incident, which gives it a sense of immediacy. It also covers up for the lack of contemporary footage – contemporary with 1966, that is. There’s some of that, but it being the era before cell phones and video, there’s not enough to make a whole movie from it.

But here’s what’s missing: Charles Whitman. I believe his name is mentioned once, and there’s zero discussion of his motivations, admittedly oblique. So what? So this: As these hideous incidents pile up, an amazingly consistent throughline is emerging – domestic violence. In fact, Whitman’s first act, before he climbed the tower, was to kill his wife and mother-in-law.

So when you say you don’t want to “glorify” killers, consider what else you’re doing, i.e., turning your back on knowledge that may be valuable in the future.

Last year I did a story on human trafficking, and one of the advocates made a comment that’s stuck with me; that is, that human trafficking is, in terms of public awareness and understanding, approximately where domestic violence was 30 years ago. The better we understand the link between domestic and mass violence, the better prepared we’ll be to put a stop to the next one.

But we can’t do that if we act like it’s somehow wrong to talk about the men — and it’s always men, at least so far — who perpetrate these things, that won’t happen.

Just sayin’.

It’s a good movie. On iTunes. Recommended.

Man, this week started at a gallop, and it’s still galloping. Worked last night, worked a little tonight, gonna work on the usual schedule all week because you all know what comes on Friday, right?

And today I drove back and forth to Ann Arbor. In a driving rain. I listened to a Chapo Trap House podcast, a Pod Save America podcast, and missed the day’s big news – the pardon commutation of Chelsea Manning’s sentence. What should we think of this?

The Obamas have started their move, evidently.

And that’s all I got. Back to work.

The North American International Auto Show Charity Preview is, I am obliged to say, the single largest charity event in the metro area, and raises a small fortune for its various beneficiaries – $5.2 million this year. They do it by not spending much at all — the drinks are included with the $400 ticket price, and I was shocked this year that I was actually able to nab one. In previous years it seemed like they had one bar and a case of mediocre champagne. This year there were multiple bars, and mediocre red and white wine, plus beer. But that’s fine, because it’s for charity, and as they always say, the stars are the cars.

Eh, not so much this year. It was a pretty underwhelming show, which you can see as a just a fallow year or maybe a tipping point. The big talker this year was Ford’s embrace of “mobility,” the buzzword for the city of the future — light rail plus buses plus ride-sharing plus driverless cars plus bikes plus, oh yeah, your own two feet. This is how we’ll get around in denser environments, and for those of you who insist on living elsewhere? Here’s an SUV. So let’s get to the pictures, shall we?

The underwhelming stuff is in the lobby outside the show hall. The guy pimping this whatever-it-is roped me in with an air of desperation. It’s one seat wide, no back seat, and it gets 85 miles per gallon. He told me that three times. Whatever, dude. I can’t imagine how it handles, but it’s your car for getting to the light-rail station, maybe.

We entered at Kia, which unveiled a new fancy-schmancy thing, seen here. I think it’s called a Stinger:

If you’re thinking, yes, the world’s been waiting for a better Camry, then you must be living in my head. But hey, it’s a Kia. And it’s very red and shiny. This, elsewhere in the Kia space, was my fave:

Now those are some damn snow tires. About three or four days a year, I could use the hell out of those.

This matte paint is a trend, I gathered. That’s a vintage …Challenger body (I think) with a brand-new performance engine in it. For the boomer who has everything:

I’m including this picture of a Chrysler concept van for Brian Stouder, and I think he knows exactly why:

It’s actually kind of cool. Called the Portal. It’s a concept, so all the cool shit will be stripped off if it ever hits the road, but that’s why we love concepts.

The Volvo moose. I think it’s promoting their accident-avoidance system:

Here’s something I’m glad we are finally speaking plainly about. Quien es mas macho?

Finally, the new dress. Don’t like this picture; I don’t know what told me to stand with my feet like that, but it’s this year’s model, and probably next year’s, too:

It is always fun to dress up, but man — wearing heels for just a few hours is like getting shitfaced drunk — my feet have a 24-hour hangover at a minimum. (And yeah, I should really have an evening sandal; didn’t get to that chore this year.) Maybe next year I should go floor-length and wear some Chuck Taylors underneath.

And that’s all for 2017, folks. Be safe out there and watch out for the autonomous cars.

I’ve been a scarce girl this week, haven’t I? Sorry about that, but it’s been a bit busy around here. Also, last night I was doing research for a story. More on that when it drops.

It so happens I wrote the last entry just a couple hours before the urine-soaked mattress hit the fan, so to speak. I’ve been wrestling with my thoughts on that issue ever since, and I think they come down like this: The link above, to a NYT story, is probably how I would have handled it if I were editing this thing. That is to say, talk about the bigger story, that there is such a dossier, and that it was circulating, and the basic facts of what it is said to contain, because otherwise it makes no sense to readers. You have to have a sense of the stakes. Would I have included the part about Natasha, Olga and the extra orders of Aquafina sent by room service to the Ritz Carlton presidential suite? Eh, probably not.

But I’m glad someone did, even though it’s a very risky move; after all, Peter Thiel could decide he is displeased and fund another lawsuit in a friendly jurisdiction. There is something distasteful about the idea that this dossier had been leaked all over D.C., was something everyone was talking about, and yet that information couldn’t be shared with the American public. Once it goes to Congress it’s Game Over as far as keeping a lid on anything. I respect the role of gatekeeper and I think the gate needs to be kept, but maybe not in this case. It is, as they say, extraordinary. These are extraordinary times. We are flying blind, without a map, and one engine is on fire. We are going to have to make a lot of stuff up as we go. That’s just the way it is.

Life is now a “Black Mirror” episode, isn’t it? And this is Season 1, Episode 1, only with Russian hookers.

One amusing detail I gleaned from this river of sludge: I think it was the Daily Beast that, in one of its subheads or other teasers to this story, said the president-elect hired “sex workers.” The dossier said “prostitutes.” You have to be fairly well-versed in sex-work vocabulary to know that “prostitute” is not their preferred description. “Sex worker” is. I laughed, anyway.

So, for bloggage? I don’t have much, but there’s this, a piece done mostly by my colleague Mike, with some help from me: County maps of where the ACA/Medicaid expansion has been most-used. Please to not guffaw when we note that these were places that went hard for Trump.

Tomorrow is the auto prom. I will wear a red dress and take some pix for ya. See you after the weekend.

As a car-show widow for the last few days, I invited a friend over Monday night for dinner and a movie – “Bright Lights,” the Carrie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds HBO documentary that was rushed into release after you-know-what.

The film was just fine, an enjoyable tour through the past and present of both women, along with Fisher’s brother Todd, who comes across here as an amiable fellow who mostly escaped the family curse, but never learned it’s not appropriate to wear a baseball cap with black tie. The clan is (was) obviously close and loving, while at the same time a bit tetched in the head, as they say, but that’s showbiz. There’s marvelous, well-preserved archival footage of Carrie and Todd as children and teens, perhaps some of it from the famous MGM publicity apparatus. The various glimpses of magazine covers and newspaper clippings give younger viewers a hint of how ferocious that was at guarding and cultivating a very particular image of the various show ponies in the stable. The studio ran your life. Lots of people were happy it did. (As for me, I want to know where I can find the black-and-white dress Debbie wore in the birthday-party clips.)

Of course, the reality was as squalid as it appears to be now. Eddie Fisher not only left Debbie for the sexiest dish in town (Liz Taylor), he was shooting methamphetamine, which he referred to as “vitamin shots.” (It was very likely supplied by a studio doctor.) A brief scene of him at what had to be the very end of his life was painful to watch. And while the kids grew up with every advantage, as we like to say, it’s hard not to see how doomed they were, especially the pretty daughter called onstage at 14 by her mother to sing — we see a weird version of “Bridge Over Troubled Water” — as part of mom’s cabaret act.

Carrie Fisher was renowned as a great writer and wit, and the latter is on full display here. She’s also an interior decorator nonpareil, and I would watch another documentary where the camera just poked around her house for a while.

But people, I gotta tell you: If you wanted a clearer, more sobering case against a life of smoking, drinking and related drug abuse, you couldn’t do better than Carrie Fisher. That fresh-faced gamine who played Princess Leia was only a year older than me, but you could hardly see the plucky leader of the rebel alliance in anything but her quick wit. The smoky-lens eyeglasses seemed to be hiding something, her hair was thin (I know she took medication to stabilize her mental illness, and I know it has side effects) and her lovely face looked badly used by too much ill-advised plastic surgery. Required to exercise under the gaze of a trainer for a part in the latter-day “Star Wars,” she struggles on an elliptical like someone far further down the road. We often refer to Hollywood as the beautiful people, but there has to be a better way to grow older.

This seems a good place to drop in this wonderful moment from “Postcards From the Edge” – Shirley MacLaine in the closest thing to a Debbie Reynolds impersonation you’re likely to find on YouTube.

Just a bit of bloggage today: A useful, deeply reported profile of Jared Kushner from New York magazine. The family history alone is fascinating.

Finally, a simultaneously hilarious and infuriating piece by Neal Pollack on the trials of educating one (1) kid in modern America. At least if you aren’t wealthy:

The school gave him math homework where the first problem was “1-0,” even though he already knew long division. And his teacher sent home an information sheet that began “To many times, their are students who …”

We pulled him out after two weeks, instead enrolling him in a “progressive” charter school that was only a 15-mile drive from our house. This school, located in a former mental hospital at the edge of a toxic waste dump near the airport, was so radical that it didn’t have a principal. Parents ran everything. The cinderblock buildings didn’t get washed very often. Supplies were in short supply. They combined fourth and fifth graders into the same class, which led to bullying problems. We spent three hours a day in the car, hauling Elijah back and forth.

At the end of the first semester, in lieu of a Christmas concert, the students performed a winter solstice dance in the midst of a freezing, stick-strewn field, like something out of a Lars von Trier film. My wife and I looked at each other and said, “no more.”

The kids I tutor in the after-school program where I volunteer frequently work from typo-strewn materials, too. Charters, almost to a person.

OK, good midweek to all.