Every newspaper needs a pervert or two in a high enough position that they can stop disasters from happening — the headline that reads “you can put cucumbers up yourself,” the smartass in the bowling-team photo who gives his name as Dick Splinter, and, of course, this:

Eat out Catherine Cleary? With that smirk on her face?

And with that, we drag ourselves over the hump. Another week goes on the wane, we slide toward the weekend and, inevitably, that much closer to the grave.

Can you tell it’s November? I sure can.

How did we teach our children about the dangers of drinking before YouTube? This was a real teachable moment here this week:

As I told Kate, when someone says, “Hey e’rrbody, watch this,” it’s time to leave. As you may have heard, God takes care of babies and drunks, and the faller was only mildly injured. The guy he landed on? Head injury. However, I believe both will be fine, and I’m sure the lawyers will keep us all up-to-date.

Rob Ford doesn’t need YouTube; this is a man born to be a GIF.

OK, I have to roll. I’ve been in a medical office every day this week, and this is the last one — orthopedist. I’ll keep you posted.

What a fun Thanksgiving it will be at the Cheneys. Mary and Liz feuding, mom and dad taking the only side that matters — the one that plants the family flag in the U.S. Senate — and a lot of furious glances over the cranberry sauce, I’d wager.

I hesitate to draw conclusions from the sketchy information we have now. A Facebook post, a one-paragaph statement and a floundering political campaign. Maybe the Cheneys are like battling pundits on a cable yak show, yelling at one another until the red light goes off, at which point they grab a drink together and laugh about bread and circuses. Or maybe both daughters are chips off the old block. One worked for her father’s election, knowing exactly what the national platform was. Another sat at dad’s other hand, and is now trying to gain a Senate seat, while a good case can be made that she’s a carpetbagger.

A good case can be made that even if the family is tearing itself apart? Where’s the harm.

So, how was your Monday. I had an MRI. No, I don’t know what it turned up, if anything. The technician just runs the machine and burns the CD. I concentrated on holding as still as possible, breathing deeply and thinking about nothing. I’ve always envied people who can do that — think about nothing. I’d love to have a deeper relationship with yoga, but I can barely concentrate on the breathing, let alone the chakras. I did OK on the MRI, though. Maybe that’s my relaxation workout — the MRI.

Ugh, I’m tired. A few notes, though:

More on the Cheneys, from Slate.

A TV news station calls for viewer pictures of Sunday’s bad weather. A viewer submits one, and it’s posted. Not only is the tornado a fake, so is the UFO and Bigfoot.

And that’s it for me. Good Tuesday.

I ran into someone at the Eastern Market Saturday, who told me he’d been to Mitch Albom’s miracle event, at which the pint-size pundit laid hands on the thorny and ageless human problem of racism and healed it, healed it I say promoted his new book.

“You know, I like to think I’m pretty good at self-promotion,” he said. “But after that, I’d have to say I’m at maybe a bachelor’s degree level, and Albom has a couple of doctorates.”

The evening wasn’t a total waste, he added, as the admission price included an autographed copy of the Oracle’s new book, just in time for holiday regifting.

All of which was good to know when I read Sunday’s Mitch blurtage, which was, as usual, lazy and phoned-in and dumb in places it wasn’t actually wrong. It was about the Renisha McBride case, and contained the patented repeating-phrase trick. Mitch advises us all not to draw conclusions about the man who shot McBride, because “we don’t know” what happened. All true enough, but it’s incredibly annoying for this guy, who can barely rouse himself to report on sports, much less current affairs, to tell us “we don’t know” when he’s a virtual human shrine to knowing nothing.

Oh, well. Enough of that. It was a long weekend and a tiring one. Kate’s and Alan’s birthday was Saturday, so it was shop/cook/bake from dawn to well past dusk. Cake was prepared and enjoyed. Every morning errand took longer than it should have. I caught every red light, was helped last in every line, picked the wrong checkout, the usual. But at the end of the day? Chocolate frosting.

Now it’s Sunday, the wind is howling and I’m charging all my devices, as we’re told to expect power outages. I feel covered with a layer of grit, probably because I am — an early chore today was mulching a shitload of leaves to spread over our bare backyard topsoil. About a third of it tracked back into the house on our feet; I sincerely hope once it’s wet down thoroughly and starts to go back into the earth, this problem will abate. This is one winter we’ll be spending with gardening books, as we have a whole blank canvas to sketch.

Among the other activities: Watched “Flight,” not as bad as some of last year’s reviews led me to believe, but not great, either. The early plane crash scene is one of the greats. I think I’ve seen three movie plane crashes that made me reconsider flying altogether, and Robert Zemeckis directed two of them — this, and “Cast Away,” of course. The third was “Fearless” with Jeff Bridges, which might have been the best, as it explored human emotions other than terror.

But it’s a deeply flawed, overlong movie, worth watching for one performance — Denzel’s. Which makes it perfect Netflix material.

No bloggage today: I spent all my web time working. If you have something worth posting, feel free.

Let’s have a good week.

Kale has jumped the shark.

One of the reasons for extended lameness in this space is my job. For better or worse, I’m a reporter again, and I have to be careful what I opine about in public. My bosses are quite indulgent, but on most local subjects I have to hold my fire other than an occasional isn’t-this-interesting.

Probably the highest-profile interesting — in the Chinese-curse sense of the word — story these days is the Detroit bankruptcy, specifically how it applies to the Detroit Institute of Arts. For those who need background: In an unusual arrangement, the collection of the DIA is actually owned by the city of Detroit. As the city is in bankruptcy, and a bankruptcy requires the listing of assets and obligations, the art is theoretically on the table for liquidation to pay the city’s billions in debt.

Now. From the beginning, all concerned have said that is not their intent to put paintings on the market to pay pensions, but you don’t have to be an art lover to see the Sophie’s choice offered here — cutting pensions to 78-year-old former file clerks vs. looting the museum to pay the bills. I doubt the governor, who appointed the emergency manager, wants to go down in state history as the guy who wrecked a great American cultural institution. Those file clerks will eventually die and stop collecting their pensions, but a closed DIA would loom over Woodward Avenue forever, maybe with the bolts that used to hold Rodin’s Thinker protruding, growing rust by the day. Even for a pro-business Republican, the idea of a once-great working-class city’s treasure being sold to Russian oligarchs and hedge-fund douchebags would likely be a bridge too far.

And for those who might say, “Can’t they just sell some art? Like some stuff from the basement, or a couple of the really valuable pieces?” The answer is no. Selling so much as an ashtray for any purpose other than to buy more art is forbidden under the rules of the museum’s professional organization, the name of which I can’t recall. It’s one they enforce strictly, and breaking it would mean ejection, which would mean the DIA could no longer host exhibits from other institutions, among other sanctions. More to the point, it would endanger the tri-county tax millage that now provides the DIA with its operating budget. Officials in two of those counties have explicitly said that if art is sold, the tax dollars stop. That is a far bigger threat.

In recent weeks, the tune has changed. Someone close to the emergency manager leaked a story to a friendly conservative columnist, claiming the EM “wants $500 million” from the DIA. That story has laid on the table like a rotten oyster for a while now, and finally, today, there seemed to be a response.

The judge has approached the deep-pocketed foundations in the region and asked them to get out their checkbooks:

The federal judge mediating Detroit’s bankruptcy is exploring whether regional and national foundations could create a fund that would protect the Detroit Institute of Arts’ city-owned collection by helping to support retiree pensions, multiple sources told The Detroit News.

Near the end of a Nov. 5 meeting lasting more than three hours, Chief U.S. District Judge Gerald Rosen offered what one participant called a “very carefully worded” concept that fell short of asking the nine foundations — including Kresge, Hudson-Webber, Mott, Knight and the Ford Foundation of New York — for commitments to support a plan. Rosen did not cite a specific amount, but participants said it could approach $500 million.

“The number is what’s in question,” said a participant, who asked not to be identified because the talks are confidential. “What does it take to pull this off, to satisfy everybody around the table? And what’s the time frame – 20 years, 25 years? It’s a creative solution to this thing.”

From the beginning, it’s been hard to avoid noting the discomfort of suburbanites, who usually watch Detroit’s agony the way they watch an old disaster movie at 1 a.m. — i.e., through half-closed eyes — suddenly bolt upright on the couch and shriek, SELL THE VAN GOGH? OVER MY DEAD BODY!!!! The foundations are the byproduct of generations-old family and corporate fortunes, many of which made their dollars here in the near-ruined city. Asking for this is a way of saying, OK, let’s see how much the big private money cares about this.

Here’s another thing I think I can note without fear of retribution: The national coverage of Detroit has been a mixed bag, but mainly an argument for the perils of parachute journalism. From Anthony Bourdain to 60 Minutes to this bit of libertarian troll-baiting, it’s been an instructive lesson for all: Outside eyes are valuable, but seldom see everything. Or even most things. And sometimes, not much of anything.

Lots of bloggage today, so let’s get to it:

I think a good lesson to take away from Grantland’s piece on Brian Holloway’s house is to be wary of any story that spreads primarily via social media. Holloway’s story, about how a gang of teenagers took over his empty vacation home and trashed it, turns out to be not the whole story. And not by a long shot. Read the whole thing, but here’s an insightful passage from low in the piece:

For all serious men, the ubiquity of smartphones, social media, and the Internet has opened up a widening gap between parents and their children. And while it’s easy and alluringly postmodern to slough all this off and say that all times in American history are the same as other times in American history, I wonder if there are really many among us who do not worry about what happens when one generation’s message to the next gets blocked off by that dirty cloud kicked up by our information addictions. Holloway’s mantra of discipline and accountability has resonated with thousands of frustrated parents who wax nostalgic for the days when kids could be disciplined in the old-fashioned way. To them, the photos of kids dancing on tables, the accounts of the damage, and Brian Holloway’s tough, militaristic rhetoric confirmed what they had always suspected: Kids were up to no damn good on that Internet.

(That’s especially recommended for Jeff the mild-mannered.)

The Nashville Tennessean digs up an old double homicide. The prose is lightly Albomed, but it’s still a pretty good read about how Stringbean and Estelle Akeman were murdered on their idyllic country property in 1973. Moral: If you carry lots of cash, don’t let everybody know.

Details on an interesting building renovation in Detroit, of an old apartment building heavily damaged by fire five years ago:

The building’s interior must be almost entirely rebuilt off of the rough framing. Developers are taking the opportunity to install some interesting features:
· Added partial penthouse floor with five additional apartments
· Twenty-seven geothermal wells for heating/air conditioning
· Roof deck for resident use
· Rainwater cisterns, which will provide water for flushing toilets
· Rooftop solar panels to aid with hot water
· Soundproof band-practice room in the former boiler room

What interests me most are the rainwater cisterns. Remember, Michigan is one of the wettest states in the nation. But conservation of potable supplies is always smart.

#AskJPM! This is hilarious.

Finally, a WashPost multi-parter on how an alleged small business operator gamed the federal system into millions in federal contracts. Great long form work.

Should we close with a dog picture? Here’s Wendy, having been shoved off my legs, keeping dibs on her seat and giving me the big sad dog eyes:

Have a swell weekend, all. I’ll be raking me some leaves.

Sorry for the no-show yesterday. Worked late. Had nothin’. Phoned it in.

I have little more today, but I do have a question about dog psychology, for you dog psychologists. I mentioned a while back that Wendy had become a lap dog with the onset of cool weather. Now I’m not so sure it’s got anything to do with the weather. She wants to be in physical contact with me for amazingly long periods. If I’m sitting on a chaise, she wants to lie on, not next to, my legs. Couch, ditto. The other day I pushed her off — I’ve got a lame leg, after all — and she smushed up next to me and laid a paw where she had been lying.

I’ve never had a dog who seemed to need so much physical contact. Spriggy didn’t put up with much more than normal petting and belly-scratching. I don’t know if it’s a remnant of her shelter life, or what. It’s sort of nice, but sometimes it’s like having a clingy toddler.

Terriers are supposed to be independent. I’m a little concerned, as in a few weeks or months Bridge will be opening a Detroit office and I’ll be working there more often. I don’t want to come home to a vibrating, freaked-out dog.

Which is one reason ads for the Thundershirt keep turning up in my web perambulations.

And aren’t you sorry you dropped by?

I’ve come to think the prefix “ultra” never indicates something good. Today, “ultra-traditionalist Catholics” from the Society of Saint Pius X disrupted an interfaith ceremony observing Kristallnacht, at a cathedral in Buenos Aires. Which I’m mentioning just because. Even though you know how much I love Catholic rad trads.

With my achy knee and otherwise aging joints, I can only look upon this video of the Detroit Jit and think, sadly, oh, but this ship has sailed. Probably just as well.

Modern Farmer brings you the pie chart of pies. No more apple for you. And they are so, so wrong about cherry.

Again, a short effort, and I am off to bed. Cut way back on the ibuprofen this week and my gut feels better, but I also have Martin Cruz Smith to keep me warm, so back to “Tatiana.”

Boy, do I feel awful tonight. Nothing specific, just a lack of sleep woven with intermittent lower-abdominal pain stitched to the deep ache in my knee and sprinkled with the onset of cold weather overnight. Supposed to get down to the 20s. It snowed earlier. It was a thoroughly Monday sort of Monday.

Tomorrow, however, there will be a new Martin Cruz Smith novel on my iPad. I learned today it was not an easy book for him to write:

Author of the 1981 blockbuster “Gorky Park” and many acclaimed books since, Mr. Smith writes about people who uncover and keep secrets. But for 18 years, he has had a secret of his own.

In 1995, he received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. But he kept it hidden, not only from the public, but from his publisher and editors.

…Ingenuity, gumption, and others’ generosity have allowed him to keep working. “Tatiana,” whose title character is a journalist who writes despite life-threatening dangers, was produced in an especially unusual way, which he also hid from his publisher and editor. In a room with a blue floor and a window glazed with prehistoric creatures, Mr. Smith perched on a wooden stool and spun out words while his wife, Emily, known as Em, typed them into the computer, gave feedback, and made his on-the-spot changes.

Sort of puts one’s own abdominal pain in perspective, doesn’t it? Probably bad clams.

So, with that? I think I’m going to bed. I leave you with Tom & Lorenzo, and yet another ghastly Miley Cyrus outfit. Let’s see how Tuesday goes.

It had to happen sometime, and it finally did: Alan and I went to the movies Saturday night. Saw “All is Lost.” As the line moved forward, we heard a lot of people ask for two tickets, and be told, “That’ll be $20.”

We got to the head of the line. “That’ll be $15,” the ticket-seller said.

As we walked away, Alan wondered aloud why this movie was apparently priced lower than all the others. I told him to check the tickets. Sure enough, we’d been given the senior discount. Without even asking! We wondered if, perhaps, every single person who cared to watch 77-year-old Robert Redford battle with increasing despair for one hour and 40 minutes that night was a senior, so we just got it by default. I think that might be the answer. It was definitely an old crowd.

But a good movie. I read somewhere that the script was only 31 pages long. The sum total of words spoken wouldn’t fill half a page, single-spaced. The story of how one man, sailing along somewhere in the middle of the Indian Ocean, finds himself in a long, slow battle with the unforgiving ocean would seem to require more of them, but no. Redford is impressive in how he manages to convey the look of desperation, thought and calculation without having to prattle aloud to himself, a la Tom Hanks in “Cast Away.” I was surprised at how affecting it was, and how skillfully done.

The rest of the weekend was the usual — a drink or three Friday night, errands galore Saturday, the aforementioned movie, and then the first concert of the year for Kate’s jazz group. Hers is the creative jazz ensemble, where the rule is that if you show up with an instrument, they’ll figure out a way to fit you in. Sometimes these configurations are downright strange: This cycle, they have three violinists, two guitars, bass, drums and percussion. It helps that the most experienced violinist plays like Jean-Luc Ponty. A very enjoyable ensemble.

I hope all the rest of you had the same.

Bloggage? Sure:

We had to leave Wendy alone today for what turned out to be almost six hours. She was very anxious when we returned, which led me to google the Thundershirt, which means that every site I visit now shows me an ad for the Thundershirt. Neil Steinberg considers the implication of this sort of benign Big Data:

Could facial recognition and GPS and drones all unite into some grand web of repression? Sure, but it would be hard-pressed to top the old Soviet-style informant and jackboot repression. Teens are already bored with Facebook, and it’s easy to see why. There’s only so much Farmville you can play. We like technology, but we insist on it being our choice, or seeming to. You can trace an arc of increasing personal liberty for the past 300 years. A new chip isn’t going to change that. We build anarchy into our systems — the speed limit may be 55, but auto speedometers still go up to 160.

Gun madness continues. No comment. America has made its bloody bed — lie in it.

Finally, an illustrated mini-guide to why the world finds hipsters so irritating. After we dropped off Kate at Orchestra Hall, we had about an hour to kill, and went down the block for a drink. I used the bathroom. They were arrayed in the usual way, but hey, not separate by gender:

No, you have a choice. This:

Or this:

Both were occupied, and a man came out of better lighting first. He was wearing sunglasses.

Have a good week, all.

The Motor Trend Car of the Year spent the night at our house last night. I had to move it to allow our backyard crew to get their truck in. It kept tickling my butt, until I figured out it was trying to tell me I hadn’t fastened my seat belt. That is all. No, wait: Alan sure likes that Underground Garage show on the satellite radio. And that is all.

The backyard crew are the guys who were installing the fence, and they finished today. Woot. We now have a fenced yard, a patio and a shit-ton of bare topsoil, which I’m anticipating will be a winter-long headache until we can get something planted in the spring. The timing wasn’t perfect, but now the heavy lifting is done, we’ve reclaimed a chunk of the yard from concrete, ripped out the rotten deck, aka the Grosse Pointe Home for Dying Possums and Nasty-ass Raccoons, and set the stage for a nice entertaining space next year. Here’s something Alan found while ripping out the deck:

Click to enlarge, if you like. After puzzling over it for a while, we figured it was probably a cat. Large eye sockets, the fangs, suburbia — it’s unlikely to be anything more exotic. Although it was just a skull, which makes me wonder where the rest of kitty might have gone. Nature is red in tooth and claw, even when we’re drinking cocktails six inches over its head.

So, some quick bloggage:

What if Hallmark made a horror movie? The trailer would look like the one for Mitch Albom’s new book — er, new novel.

You’ve heard of the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald? Here’s an account of a century-old gale of November on the Great Lakes that gives you an idea of how fearsome a “white hurricane” can be.

And now we have arrived at the weekend. Let’s make something good of it.

On Sunday, trying to distract myself from the throbbing in my knee, I dialed up “How to Survive a Plague” on my iPad. A history of the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, aka ACT-UP, it first got on my nerves. My patience for ShakyCam is growing short these days, and apparently no one in the ACT-UP publicity crew owned a tripod.

But that was a quibble, and soon I was absorbed into the bad old years again, the mid-’80s, when gay men were falling ill and at first we didn’t know why, and then we did. And knowing didn’t make it better; there wasn’t a cure, there was barely a treatment and the incubation period was so long — it seemed if you’d been gay and sexually active for any length of time, you were doomed.

And one by one, they were. I lost two close friends, several more in the outer friendship circles. First they lost weight, then came the pneumonia or the Kaposi’s sarcoma, then came the spiral. “How to Survive a Plague” brought it all back, with the overlay of the birth of ACT-UP, which was pretty far from Columbus, Ohio at the time. They, as much as anyone, brought the anger the community was feeling into America’s living rooms, mainly through their outrageous protests. They carried giant condoms up the steps of St. Patrick’s Cathedral. They called Jesse Helms “that pig in the Senate.” They were rude and confrontational and made over-the-top demands. They insisted the FDA had drugs that could save them, but was holding back, or not trying to modify the agency’s long timeline for approval.

There’s a scene from a protest where a pharmaceutical company was invaded, an executive summoned forth, and a man hectors him at length: “You have my blood on your hands,” he shouts, and even now, knowing how absolutely justified ACT-UP was in their anger, this seems a bit much. Science has its own timeline. It doesn’t always match yours.

But there are other moments that bring the loss home — an ad executive talking about why we so want to blame people for mistakes they make while “being human.” That they have sex they shouldn’t, swallow drugs they shouldn’t, misbehave in ways that make the rest of us say, “See, it is your fault, after all.” When there is not a single one of us who isn’t guilty of being human. When we all misbehave, at least sometimes.

A lot of the ACT-UP protests set the tone for stuff I quickly grew tired of — the red ribbons, the quilts, all that awareness-raising. But it helped to be reminded, yet again, of what spawned it all, the incandescent anger felt by a community that found itself dwindling, young men dying at 26, 30, 42, the prime of their lives, and almost no one seemed to care.

In other words, Jesse Helms was a pig in the Senate. The Catholic church was preposterously wrong to suggest that condom use would lead to more cases, not fewer. ACT-UP’s tactics you can argue with. But they were right. The times cried out for a furious response. We all should have been acting up. I’m glad they did. Silence did equal death, in the movement’s famous T-shirt. They stood for life.

We haven’t discussed the shooting last Friday at the Los Angeles airport, at least not much. A publication I can’t quite get a handle on, nsfwcorp.com, which has a strange paywall system, is alone in pointing out how loud the anti-TSA clamor has been from both the left and the right, and how perfectly the LAX shooter seemed to be dancing to their drumbeat. I read their story today, but it’s back behind the paywall, and so alas.

What does everyone think? Or am I the only one. I fly infrequently enough that I don’t share in the anger, but it does seem like overkill — the scan, the shoeless shuffle, all of it. There must be a better way to do airport security.

Not much bloggage today, but a good Bridge package drops that might be of interest outside Michigan, about legacy costs for retiree pensions and health care that cities are simply not prepared to meet. Part one is here. It’s happening everywhere, maybe in your town, too.

Otherwise, the week is coming to its denouement. Knee feels better, and let’s hope it continues to do so.