Barack Obama extends his press honeymoon for one more day with this fascinating New York Times story about the Hawaiian plate lunch, said to be one of those secret-longing favorites of the president-elect.

Which is? you ask. Get ready:

Drawing on the food ways of the Hawaiian Islands’ many Asian immigrant groups, and chowed down on regularly by everyone from surfers to businessmen to the future occupant of the White House, the plate lunch is simple in form but varied in its elements. Its foundation: two scoops of white rice and a side of macaroni salad, heavy on the mayonnaise.

This carbo load — usually piled into a plastic foam container — is paired with a protein, generally of the pan-Asian variety, often slathered in brown gravy. After a morning of hard work (or hard surf), one might opt for Korean kalbi or meat jun, Chinese char siu roast pork, Philippine pork adobo, Hawaiian kalua pork (a luau favorite), Japanese katsu or salmon teriyaki, Portuguese sausage, American-style beef stew, or loco moco — a hamburger patty and a fried egg.

I was with him right up to the brown gravy, but I get the idea. While perhaps unique in its pan-Asian weirdness, the basic structure of the plate lunch should be familiar to anyone who ever ate beef and noodles, chicken and noodles (including that singular Hoosier oddity, chicken and noodles over mashed potatoes), or my personal favorite, the Amish haystack.

My first screenplay was based in Amish country, and I included a haystack scene. Two teenage boys were sitting at a dinner table, and if a haystack should appeal to anyone, it’s the bottomless pit of an adolescent male stomach. Googling around for a description, most point back to the Amish Cook column, but I think this single line from a Washington Post travel piece says it best:

Plates in hand, we walked a line of women and girls, who each added a scoop of haystack ingredients: cracker crumbs, rice, seasoned hamburger, lettuce, tomatoes, onions, peppers, melted Velveeta cheese and crumbled Doritos.

You see the similarities: Start with a bed of carbs, add protein, top with sauce. It’s not really a recipe so much as it’s a way to clean out the fridge. Lots of recipes start with spaghetti on the bottom, but the interesting thing about Amish food is the way it calls, so often, for the cheapest possible ingredients, real Depression food — hence the crackers. And the Velveeta. (So often city people think of the Amish as the proto-crunchy con, living their pure peasant lives out in the country, which isn’t necessarily untrue, but I only want to note: When you have no refrigerator, Velveeta makes more sense than artisanal cream cheese, eh?)

Anyway, back to the plate lunch. I admire its daffiness, signified by the macaroni salad. Hawaii really is a land of mutts, isn’t it?

Quick bloggage, because I have a lot to do today:

The most interesting thing about this post-election period has been the beating of breasts and searching of souls in the GOP. “Fresh Air” had an interview with the NYT’s conservatism beat writer, David Kirkpatrick, who identified the new and old factions within the party. Old: Social issues, national security and fiscal restraint. New: “High” and “low.” Pretty cruel, I know, but what it boils down to is, if you aren’t embarrassed to say you believe in evolution, and are embarrassed by the separation of the country into “real” and “not real” segments, you’re high. If you love Sarah Palin, you’re low. I’d add to that: If Ted Nugent makes you want to change the subject, high; if you put his “writing” in your magazine, low low low.

Probably of interest to Detroiters only, this nearly slipped past me on Tuesday, a pollster’s look at the two key suburban counties here, Macomb and Oakland, and how the changes of past years reflect on voting trends there.

And probably of interest to journalists only, Ron Rosenbaum delivers a long-overdue takedown of Jeff Jarvis, he of the citizen-journalists-will-save-the-world school of media analysis.

Finally, I posted this to Facebook because I found it simultaneously amusing and depressing: Michelle Slatalla’s rumination on how difficult it is for a woman to lose weight after 40. I’d heard of Spanx, but I’ve never worn them. (Gents: They’re the 21st-century version of your grandma’s girdle.) What I’ve been missing:

I still remember how ecstatic I felt the first time I slipped on a pair of Seamless Mid-Thigh Shapers and managed to zip my tightest jeans. A sense of relief and well-being flooded me.

Unfortunately the good feeling didn’t last. Soon I had to start wearing two pairs at once. If only, like Gwyneth, I could have stopped there.

But I graduated to the harder stuff. I moved on to the Slim Cognito Body Shaping Cami and the Hide & Sleek Full Slip, as well. Yet each time a new layer magically smoothed one bulge, another popped out like a balloon sculpture of a dachshund.

Despite the company’s warnings, I kept going. “If you go with more than two layers, it’s Spanx abuse and you need to get help,” a Spanx spokeswoman warned me.

Two layers of Spanx! No plate lunch for you!

OK, have a good day. I’ll be writin’ and exercisin’, so I can be a big fat middle-aged girl, too.

Things you don’t see often: A hot BMW bike in the handicapped space. (Yes, it had the proper plate.)

Of course, all I see are the flaws, but it got a few chuckles last night. Now it’s in the hands of the critics, i.e., you. Go ahead, be brutal:

Can you feel the excitement?

I love it when newspaper editors lecture, especially when they can’t punctuate:

Humor can be a dangerous thing as the line between funny and offensive can be a moving target as was certainly the case in this presidential campaign. In Sunday’s column Mr. Lewis pushed past that line, but only, I honestly and fully believe, in the pursuit of humor.

OK, your call: Did this push past the line between funny and offensive?

“Well we’re movin’ on up,
To Washington, D.C.
To a deee-luxe pimp pad,
Painted whiiiite.
Yeah we’re movin’ on up,
To the White House.
I’ll be jetting with P. Diddy cross the sky.

To be sure, the editor of the Murfreesboro Post (”giving a voice to Tennessee’s most dynamic city”) notes that author Stephen Lewis, identified as a columnist, “is not a journalist but a citizen of the community who writes a weekly column, again in his case a humor column.”

When you’re in a hole? Stop digging.

Oh, well. You can read the rest of it at the link above. Rush Limbaugh used to use “The Jeffersons” theme for his regular Carol Moseley Braun updates, so I guess it’s not without precedent.

The NYT reminds us that in the most recent election, most of Tennessee went even redder than it did in 2004. Enjoy cultural exile, Murfreesboro. And learn to use the comma.

I said yesterday I wanted to turn my thoughts to art in this post-election period. Well, OK. Here are the conditions insisted upon by a certain celebrity mother, on the occasion of her sons’ visit to their father on the other side of the Atlantic:

If I were running a newspaper I would strive for content like this every day.

Speaking of commas and punctuation and writing, I made a Wordle the other day. A Wordle is a word cloud; it analyzes text and makes a graphic representation of the words used, with the size of each word determined by its frequency in the text. Here’s one for Obama’s acceptance speech on election night, to give you an idea what they look like; I’m not going to bother screen-capturing a Java Applet thingie when you can make one yourself. Of course I used the text from the index page you’re looking at, and there in the middle was a big fat hulking JUST. Oy. It’s a word I use too much, a potato-chip word, one that I’m always stuffing into the cracks in my sentences. Just because I like it so much. But it’s wrong to use it so much. So I’m starting a campaign called Kill the Just, for my own writing alone.

Make your own Wordle, and find out what your darlings are. Then kill them.

I have work to do, and not enough time to do it. So have a good day, and I’ll be back later.

With the post-election afterglow quickly curdling into the usual nastiness, let me state a few things for the record today:

I think Sarah Palin knows Africa is a continent, not a country. Given that the lady is one of those people whose words, verbally, tend to become — I think in terms of the verbal expression, you know, she could be expressing, word-wise…

You get the idea. Also, I’ve heard many, many people refer to Africa as a country, and I know they know better. It’s just one of those things.

The NAFTA thing, I could go either way on. And I believe every word about the clothes and the shopping. I can’t say how, except that I’ve seen otherwise sensible people make utter fools of themselves when they thought something was free. This is all I have to go on — a few hunches.

Also, I think the McCain we saw at his concession speech was the real man, and his failure to be that man throughout his campaign is one of those Greek-tragedy things he’ll carry to his grave.

We’re reaching the end of my graciousness toward American conservatism, but I’ll hang on a little longer, to say this P.J. O’Rourke piece is worth a read. Everybody likes funny Patrick Jake, although some like him better than others, and this piece has the advantage of at least sounding honest:

Since the early 1980s I’ve been present at the conception (to use the polite term) of many of our foreign policy initiatives. Iran-contra was about as smart as using the U.S. Postal Service to get weapons to anti-Communists. And I notice Danny Ortega is back in power anyway. I had a look into the eyes of the future rulers of Afghanistan at a sura in Peshawar as the Soviets were withdrawing from Kabul. I would rather have had a beer with Leonid Brezhnev.

Fall of the Berlin wall? Being there was fun. Nations that flaked off of the Soviet Union in southeastern Europe, Central Asia, and the Caucasus? Being there was not so fun.

The aftermath of the Gulf war still makes me sick. Fine to save the fat, greedy Kuwaitis and the arrogant, grasping house of Saud, but to hell with the Shiites and Kurds of Iraq until they get some oil.

Then, half a generation later, when we returned with our armies, we expected to be greeted as liberators. And, damn it, we were. I was in Baghdad in April 2003. People were glad to see us, until they noticed that we’d forgotten to bring along any personnel or provisions to feed or doctor the survivors of shock and awe or to get their electricity and water running again. After that they got huffy and began stuffing dynamite down their pants before consulting with the occupying forces.

Is there a moral dimension to foreign policy in our political philosophy? Or do we just exist to help the world’s rich people make and keep their money? (And a fine job we’ve been doing of that lately.)

I haven’t always kept current on the O’Rourke catalog, but I assume someone here has; did he ever write this stuff at the time it was happening? If so, I don’t recall any of it, but maybe this is just his niche — truth-telling long after the fact, kind of like David Horowitz on the Panthers. Whatever. At least someone’s trying honesty for a change. Strategic honesty, anyway — there’s the usual abuse aimed at “liberals,” but I guess if there wasn’t at least a little bit of that, it wouldn’t be a Weekly Standard piece.

And so begins the new era, and while I’m optimistic and hopeful, I’m not stupid, either. If you want to know what an abyss looks like, look at an abyss, so over the weekend I contemplated what might happen to this town if General Motors, et al, filed for bankruptcy. Our house, already worth tens of thousands less than we paid for it, would fall further in value. One of the papers would probably fold, and it would likely be the one my health insurance is tied to. The freelance market would either dry up or become so competitive, what with all the unemployed journalists on the market, that it wouldn’t pay worth a damn. When I was in college, a nearby power-plant cooling tower — one of those wasp-waisted structures you see in the non-picturesque parts of the country, and in Indiana, practically on the lovely sandy beach of Lake Michigan, and whose idea was that — collapsed while under construction. The workers, under pressure to make a deadline, had anchored their safety harnesses in cement that wasn’t fully set. The line gave way at one end, and took down a couple dozen workers in a motion not unlike water going down a drain.

It would be like that.

Still, we had dinner with friends Saturday night, and we all had a champagne toast to the new era. Someday we’ll look back on it and say, either, we should have saved those few dollars we spent on champagne or else, hey, at least we have our memories.

Hard times are hard times, but acting as though they’re harder than they are can make them worse. This is common sense. Rod Dreher is on one of his pants-wetting jags about “stockpiling food.” I may well lose my health insurance, my job and my house, but staying fed has never seemed much of a risk, not in this country. By the time the food runs out, most of your stockpiles will have been depleted too, so why bother trying to keep the mice out of the 50-pound bags of rice in the basement? Now that we have firearms in the house, I plan to feed us during a Depression the old-fashioned way — by killing and eating the neighbors’ pets.

Dreher goes on to quote some lady at his church: “The newspapers ought to be telling us how to prepare, but instead they talk about nothing but sports and entertainment and everything like it is normal,” she said. “It’s not going to be normal.” No, I don’t expect it’ll be normal, but running stories about how to make your own pemmican and squirrel jerky isn’t going to set well with the few advertisers you still have left, who are trying to sell wide-screen TVs and electric skillets.

There’s a lot of automotive-buyout money floating around town now, and I think it’s behind a lot of small businesses that are popping up in the oddest places. Two are on the commercial block nearest our house. One I suspect is doomed; there just can’t possibly be that much demand for a dog wash, aimed at that slice of the population that has a dog to bathe but doesn’t want to do it in their own tub. The other is a fast-casual restaurant called the Big Salad, which amuses me because I remember the “Seinfeld” episode where they got the name, and pleases me because they make a pretty good salad there. I try to stop in every week or two, if only because it’s good to get out of the house and without customers, the lettuce will wilt and there will be no more Big Salad on the block. Perhaps Dreher and his old-lady friend, eyes squinched shut in fervent prayer, haven’t thought of this.

Anyway, I’m sick of current events, and plan to be for a while. You guys talk amongst yourselves about whatever you like, but I’m going to turn my thoughts to art and Christmas shopping. Or that might just be the weather talking — snow is flying outside my window as I write this. Seems like a good time to study Russian instead of polling data, and for a good long while.

(This is also, I warn you, the “my website is a tar baby” spasm of disgust I go through from time to time. I can’t think of the last time I got a nickel from GoogleAds, those chiselers. Roy Edroso details the unintentionally hilarious goodbye-to-all-that of a one-time high-flying right-wing blogger, his finances destroyed by hours spent at the keyboard, along with gout and the expenses of “lap-band surgery,” for both the blogger and his daughter (so she could make the weight requirement for military enlistment). I was so embarrassed for him, reading this, that I had to look away for a while. I don’t want to be that guy. But I would like to write some other stuff. So I may redirect my time for a while.)

Anyway, I think Brian Dickerson, easily the best remaining columnist at the Freep, sums it up well:

The wild-eyed Marxist revolutionary known as Barack Obama convened the first meeting of his economic advisory board Friday. Besides Michigan’s own Gov. Jennifer Granholm, those invited to participate included two former secretaries of the U.S. Treasury Department, former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volker, and über-capitalist Warren Buffett. If this strikes you as an unlikely group to task with the radical redistribution of America’s wealth, you’ve stumbled upon the not-so-dirty little secret of American government, which is its frustrating (and enormously reassuring) continuity.

Not that any of this has occurred to yet another Hoosier asshole picking up on the fly-the-flag-upside-down meme, tacitly approved of by the newspaper columnist who detailed it. Get this guy to a Boy Scout, stat.

Off to the gym. Monday. Sigh.

Brian has a question for the barflies:

Do you suppose this dog is a coyote? This picture was snapped today (by a colleague), just outside our office. She (he?) has scared away the geese that flock to the water retention pond — which is a very good thing!

Based on the photographic evidence…

…I’d say, “Almost certainly.” And a pretty healthy one, from the looks of it.

(Which reminds me of the stupidest local-TV report I’ve ever seen, which will probably remain so until I watch TV again, in which a reporter did a breathless report on a coyote captured in downtown Detroit. It came from “the wild,” the reporter said, and would be released there as well. What. A. Moron.)

Today in Gardening Galore, we have a question from a reader:

Dear Gardeners,

I recently bought yet another orchid — a phalaenopsis, your basic hotel-lobby, posed-under-a-pinpoint-halogen plant. It sits next to the chaise where I do a lot of my writing, and I like to contemplate its loveliness from time to time. “Easy to grow,” the man said. “Just ignore it, and it’ll do better than if you mess with it,” the man said. So I took it home, and for a while it was fine, and then all the blossoms dried up and fell off, and now the stem is drying up, and even though I’ve continued to water it — not too much! — I’m wondering if the thing is doomed. If I cut the stem off, will another one grow from it, or am I out another $20?

You’ll notice I’m trying to make a transition here, although I’m wondering if I should. Y’all want to talk about Rahm Emanuel in the comments, who am I to say you can’t? But in this blessed period between the conclusion of the election and the Confiscation of the Weapons and Opening of the Re-education Camps, maybe someone can answer my question about the goddamn orchid. I’m starting to wonder if these things are worth the trouble. But I need a little color in the gray Michigan winter. Is this so wrong?

As you can see, this week has left me tapped, and my house needs dusting. In the meantime:

Home page for the PuppyCam. Among the details there — all the puppy genders and names, which are Japanese-y and disappointing. I much prefer to call them by their collar colors. It should not surprise anyone to learn that Mr. Green is, indeed, a mister. Or a master.

The Chicago Tribune posted a few rejected election-result front pages. My favorite is the one about the Adler Planetarium.

I’m going to start letting Detroitist pick my morning Metro Mayhem stories; he does it so well:

Some pyscho fired shots at teenagers driving through Harper Woods. A bowling ball stopped a bullet from hitting one of the kids. Just like in the movies! And, ha ha ha, the Free Press said the gunmen “split.” Ha ha ha, just like a 7-10 split! The victims were from Detroit so naturally the Free Press message board klavern assumed they were no good black kids buying drugs in Harper Woods. It’s nice to know some people still cling to the old way and aren’t caught up in this “post-race America” thing.

It was the “message-board klavern” that got me. Word.

Off to dust. Have a good weekend.

I was one of the last Americans to learn about the dirty movie featuring the Sarah Palin lookalike, and I am grateful to the young man who told me, because if there’s one thing I need to have scratching around my skull on a long bike ride, it’s imagined dialogue sketches between a pretty woman with an updo and glasses and two Russian sailors whose rowboat has drifted ashore on the American side of the Aleutians.

At least, I think that’s the setup.

Now we discover that, as usual, truth is stranger than even Larry Flynt’s fiction:

At the GOP convention in St. Paul, Palin was completely unfazed by the boys’ club fraternity she had just joined. One night, Steve Schmidt and Mark Salter went to her hotel room to brief her. After a minute, Palin sailed into the room wearing nothing but a towel, with another on her wet hair. She told them to chat with her laconic husband, Todd. “I’ll be just a minute,” she said.

I guess I shouldn’t be suprised. She’s a natural for the take-off-the-glasses, shake-out-the-bun scene, too.

As you know if you’ve clicked around the web in the last 24 hours, this is part of an anonymously sourced Night of the Long Knives designed to place blame for the McCain campaign disaster where it properly belongs: Anywhere but on the anonymous sources’ shoulders. The Fox report going around (she didn’t know Africa was a continent, not a country), the NYT story today (her clothing was originally budgeted at $20,000 to $25,000, and her eye-popping overages were for such items as jewelry and luggage and outfits for the family) — these are to be expected. The entertainment factor, as Roy and TBogg and LGM point out, is just gravy. (And that’s not the entertainment of seeing Palin trashed, by the way; what fun is that? Rather, it’s the fun of watching Michelle Malkin, et al, threaten those who violate message discipline. Somewhere in Hell, Stalin chuckles.)

Anyway I find the whole thing sort of depressing. You wouldn’t think the ability to make William Kristol’s worm turn could carry a woman so far in the world, but never underestimate the power of a strategic flirtation. Or that of the so-called played-out, intellectually bankrupt, last-century MSM. Which brings us to our next topic today, when I called Alan at work yesterday and he said, “You’ll never believe what I’m looking at,” and began to describe people lined up in the street below his window. I thought maybe Barack Obama had parachuted in to the AFSCME offices across the street to spontaneously thank union members for their support, and word had gotten around.

No. They were there to buy a newspaper. Across the country, it’s the same story, as people lined up — at printing plants! — to buy dozens of extra copies. I think we’ve found a solution to our problems, comrades. All we need is…news.

Unfortunately, all the reporters have been laid off. Funny how that works.

Some quick bloggage today, because I’m well-rested, the sun is shining, and I plan to get both strength and cardio workouts in today:

Someone tell Joe the Douchebag his 15 minutes are up. HT: Detroitist.

“Heartwarming” + “unforgettable” + “opening on Christmas Day” = a movie you couldn’t get me to at gunpoint.

Weights class in 20 minutes. Must fly.

That was an amazing speech. I’ve been waiting a long time for it. I don’t mean the speech given by the first black president, but the speech that opens the nation’s arms and asks for the best in people. I know the coming weeks, months and years won’t be easy, but for just a few moments, I believed it was possible we’ll get through them more or less intact.

I still do. In a country where a black Democrat could carry Indiana — although not Allen County, har — anything really is possible.

So let’s see how the invitation is being taken in the losers’ locker room:

Just watched Wonder Boy’s speech. Hmph. “Callused hands”? When did he ever have callused hands? – John Derbyshire, The Corner.

Ah, well. Let us be magnanimous in victory. I always hated all that “get over it, loser” bullshit the more obnoxious wings of the GOP served on its mornings after, so let’s not serve it.

Let’s just chuckle wryly for a few days. And check the less-talked-about races:

Here in Michigan, medical marijuana won by an embarrassingly wide margin — 63 percent approved it. Embryonic stem-cell research, approved. The first Democrat in history will represent the Grosse Pointes in the statehouse. (He defeated a nice blonde lady who seemingly had a sign in every yard in the district, in line to be the first woman commodore of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, which will have to be her consolation prize. We may be talking a reverse-Bradley effect today.) Over in Oakland County, Toilet Joe Knollenberg is outta here, along with the first sitting chief justice of the Michigan Supreme Court to be voted out of office.

In the words of a Detroit city councilwoman: Calling out around the world, are you ready for a brand new beat?

I didn’t sleep well last night — iChat was buzzing well after midnight. Today let’s discuss not the presidential race, but local ones in your various municipalities and districts, oddities that didn’t make the national-news roundups, but are worth mentioning.

And let’s speculate on the Obama family puppy. Given how stunningly photogenic the rest of the crew is, I expect nothing less than a yappy little rag bundle with an eye patch. Name of…Scamp, maybe. In other words…a Jack Russell! John Scalzi already has his reality-check post up, and wisely notes, Your president will not give you everything you want, when you want it. But I want that puppy, dammit.

I’m going back to bed for a couple hours. You kids play nice, now.