My sister-in-law has a parrotlet that she dotes on — Max travels with her, and squawks with alarm when she leaves the room. He eats what she eats, and has a fondness for firehouse chili, and before you exclaim in dismay, be advised that her birds live as long as Methuselah. The last one, a parakeet, was well into double digits when he finally fell off the perch. Anyway, Max came for Christmas, and as soon as his cage door was open, went directly to the highest point in the room:

Next year’s Christmas card! (Yeah, the molting feathers throw the effect off a bit, but oh well. I cropped the picture with him off to the side to indicate where the holiday greeting would go.)

He didn’t want to come down, but Jenny waved a Kleenex at him and he immediately surrendered. Bird’s got a thing for Kleenex, evidently.

And that was the best picture of Christmas I got this year, unless you count the few snaps Kate got at the Electric Six concert last weekend, but that only took on a holiday feel when they covered “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.”

We haven’t really discussed Christmas, have we? The Derringers got a new turntable, which wasn’t in the plan, but it’s how things ended up. Kate asked for and received a few vinyl items, but when we went to play them, discovered the cartridge on the old one was toast, and the cost of a new one was about the same as a new platter-spinner, so that’s how it happened. All my records are in the basement, but I’ve found a few I needed to rediscover, particularly the “Repo Man” soundtrack, introduced to me by Jeff Borden many moons back. It’s a great sampler of L.A. punk bands of the early ’80s era, including the Plugz and Suicidal Tendencies. I’d be over the moon if Kate would add “Pablo Picasso” to her small repertoire, pottymouth lyrics and all, but I can’t talk that kid into anything, musically. Maybe I should try some reverse psychology — if you dare to sing that foul song, you’ll be grounded, young lady. Whatever works.

I see you guys are reduced to the smallest of small talk in the previous thread, so I guess I best get this posted before someone points out that Chauncey, Ohio, is actually pronounced “chancy.”

Any bloggage?

No. Nothing. And I don’t think it’s going to be any better tomorrow. So why don’t we close the books on 2011 with this (unless there’s a particularly good picture waiting at the Saturday-morning market). It’s been a great year, and I hope 2012 has a few pleasant surprises for all of us.

Happy new year.

Sorry for being such a bummer yesterday, but stories like that strike a nerve. Years ago, a friend who worked in emergency medicine introduced me to a bit of their diagnostic jargon — DFM, or dumb fuckin’ mom. Despite a moderate episode of DFM, the child is expected to recover, although it is known to be a chronic condition. DFM is the cause of childhood caries, the cavities that can deprive a kid of baby teeth well before the permanent ones come in, usually thanks to a mom who poured Hi-C or Coca-Cola into a bottle. That’s at one end of the spectrum. At the other is DFM with extreme prejudice, which was certainly a contributing factor in the ghastly demise of that cursed little girl in Fort Wayne last week. Leave your children with Some Guy for a week? Sure, why not?

But let’s lighten the mood a bit today. I get the sense many of you are like me this week, at work or not, but likely spending a lot of time goofing off on your computers. Fortunately, I have much linkage to love today, so let’s get to it.

I found this CDC data set in a Nate Silver tweet; it’s about the percentage of American households with cellular-only coverage, and he mentioned it in connection with polling. Evidently many pollsters don’t use cell-only households in their canvassing, and it has bitten them more than once — the seemingly come-from-behind victory of Kwame Kilpatrick in his last Detroit mayoral election was attributed to unpolled cell-only voters, mostly young people, who gave him an easy victory in a race that was said to be too close to call.

We’re starting this discussion — cutting the land line — in our house, and are being held back by a few factors, including 911 service, the lack of significant cost savings and, of course, the necessity of covering that ugly wall jack in the kitchen once the phone is gone. J.C., my digital guru and mentor, went to a Google Voice landline setup a while back, and reports no problems. What say the NN.C hoardes hordes?

Kim Severson considers sorghum, that quintessential southron sweetener, in today’s NYT food pages. Southern cooking is so far outside my gene pool that I don’t dare to experiment, but this sounds interesting:

At Two Boroughs Larder in Charleston, sorghum sweetens semifreddo. In Atlanta, Richard Blais, a winning “Top Chef” contestant, serves tiny popped grains of sorghum as a bar snack at his restaurant, HD1. It tastes like a toasty marriage of kettle corn and puffed rice.

And at Lantern, in Chapel Hill, N.C., Andrea Reusing uses sorghum to bridge the South and Asia. She makes a Vietnamese-style sorghum caramel with fish sauce, lime and chiles to glaze pork belly, and coats spicy fried walnuts or pine nuts with sorghum. Her pastry kitchen turns out a five-spice confection like Cracker Jack using sorghum. It also goes into a gold rum cocktail infused with black pepper and vanilla bean.

Ten words you mispronounce that make people think you’re an idiot. Not long enough.

And finally, the List of Lists, the WashPost’s 2012 Ins and Outs! Yayyyyy. (claps wildly) Out: Pippa’s bum; In: Kate’s uterus. Beautiful.

Have a great day, all.

A story has been unspooling in Fort Wayne since Friday, and anyone who knows anything about such things suspected it was going to have a tragic ending. Late last night, it arrived — Aliahna Lemmon, 9, missing since Friday morning, was found dead, and the man she’d been left with, Michael Plumadore, was arrested. As frequently happens in these cases, everyone involved was poor, and every reported fact raised more questions than it answered.

The trailer park where everybody involved lived was said to be home to 15 registered sex offenders, which until recently included the missing girl’s grandfather, who died earlier this month. Plumadore had been the grandfather’s caretaker, and was staying in his mobile home. Plumadore had priors — I’d imagine a clean record in a place like this is as unlikely as finding an adult resident without a tattoo — but none of them were for violent felonies, so no worries, eh? The dead girl was said to have emotional problems, PTSD in some accounts, with no explanation of how a 9-year-old might come to develop a post-traumatic stress disorder. Until she was found, the girl’s grandmother had given numerous interviews saying she trusted Plumadore implicitly, although she admitted it was probably not a good idea for him to have left Aliahna and her sisters alone for half an hour Friday morning, when she likely disappeared, while he went to a nearby convenience store in search of a cigar.

Yes, that was his account of his whereabouts: Woke up, couldn’t get back to sleep, went out for a cigar, came home, smoked it and fell back to sleep for a few hours, and woke up to find the girl gone. He assumed her mother had taken her, although the sisters were still there. It was hours before anyone finally realized the girl was gone. And why was she staying with him? Because her mother had the flu, and her stepfather needed to sleep during the day, and who the hell knows? It was one of those stories you put down and ask yourself that if Jesus loves the little children, all the little children of the world, red and yellow black and white they are precious in his sight, why he lets so many of them arrive in a world where they are, objectively, fucked for life.

I’ve known a few people who grew up in conditions like this — rural and/or urban squalor, for lack of a better word, in houses where nobody cleaned or cooked or considered it odd that mom or dad or both were drunk all the time. Houses where grandpa is a sex offender, where mom is crazy, where you and your brother had to split a single pork chop but the dogs were all well-fed, because they were mama’s babies. Houses where your uncle or your dad’s army buddy tried to catch you alone in a room so he could push you up against a wall and ask if there was fur on that monkey yet. Houses where the TV was never turned off, ever, and you never saw a dentist and grandma smoked right next to her oxygen tank. And you know what? These people are heroes in the truest sense of the word. They battled great odds and emerged with a prize beyond rubies — a safe, sane, balanced middle-class life that they could bring their own children into and keep them from harm. Why aren’t we studying them in the world’s great universities? Why do we spend so much time lionizing frauds and con men and politicians and actors and other assholes, and not the few Aliahnas left behind who will survive their ghastly upbringings and prosper? Why aren’t we carrying them through the streets, or at least debriefing them to discover how, exactly, they slipped the noose of ignorance and poverty?

Just wondering.

I’m going to stop reading about this kid for a while. Not good for me.

UPDATE: Too late! She was clubbed to death with a brick, then dismembered.

And I’m sorry to bum you out, but these cases take it out of me.

And now here we are in the last days of the year. I’m counting down to my final day on the old job and first ones on the new, so of course I’m reaching for the most calming activity I know in times of stress — cleaning bathrooms. If I really hit a lick, I could get the whole house clean, but for now, I’ll settle for a couple toilets.

Bloggage?

Fascinating holiday-weekend reader from the NYT: The Empire State Building — and other tall skyscrapers around the country — find astonishing profits in their upper-level observation decks. Sixty million in profits in one year? Yikes. (As one who bought that ticket, a few years back? Not worth it. The wait was endless and the view? Eh. The Chicago skyscrapers are far better, and I concur with those who told me that the best bargain is the cocktail lounge a few levels down from the top, where you get the same view, free of charge, and with drinks.

And as it’s late, that’s about all I have. Hope the news at your end was better.

Hey there. I’m still on the road, so not much today. My Christmas was merry and bright and so calorific I’ll be in elastic waistbands for a week.

How was yours?

For Boxing Day, a little boxing:

More tomorrow, when the world wakes up from its food coma, eh?

I’d been paying scant attention to the Ron Paul newsletter story over the past few days, but finally caught up last night with this Reuters piece, which, as in the Fuqua School case, we need to remind ourselves is not that far in the past — in this case, 1993. And in the letter over Paul’s signature:

Among other things, the articles called the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. a “world-class philanderer,” criticized the U.S. holiday bearing King’s name as “Hate Whitey Day,” and said that AIDS sufferers “enjoy the attention and pity that comes with being sick.”

Oh.

The story includes a pdf of one of the solicitations for his investment counseling service. It’s a marvel of the form, and reading it took me back to my talk-radio days, when paranoia ruled the land and dark speculations on black helicopters and FEMA kept the phones ringing. Paul speaks of how new anti-counterfeiting measures in U.S. paper money was a plot to track good Americans with radio beams:

These totalitarian bills were tinted pink and green and brown, and blighted with holograms, diffraction gratings, metal and plastic threads, and chemical alarms. It wasn’t money for a free people.

This tone must work on somebody, because it’s widely pervasive in paranoia/fringe circles. There must be a lot of dementia patients out there who still have control of the checkbook.

Or maybe I just move in the wrong circles, and this stuff is simply more common than I think. The sitting secretary of state in Indiana, Charlie White, was ruled ineligible to hold office yesterday, clearing the way for the Democrat he defeated in 2010 to take the seat. I really know very little about this case — honestly, nothing — so you Hoosiers will have to bring me up to date. However, late last night, one of my Indiana Facebook people told me to check out Charlie’s father’s FB wall, where, in posts no more than an hour or two old, he was ranting about the “Jew judge” who presided in the case, as well as the Nigerian-born Democrat who wins his son’s seat by default. Today, all the posts were gone. (I’m sure he’s the victim of a cruel hacker.)

Bleh. It’s almost Christmas. Let’s clear our palates with…Festivus! We start with the airing of grievances. Caliban?

Srsly, happy Christmas to all. I shall be back Monday.

I need to knock together a short video for my other site, which doesn’t exactly count as a chore, except when it does. And it has to be done pretty soon, because I’m taking Kate downtown later today for a little micro-internship with an acquaintance who owns a recording studio. I take all career aspirations at this age with a mine full of salt, but it does no harm to encourage. And who knows? Maybe she will be a music producer, and maybe she’ll be the next Rick Rubin. I read a profile of Rubin once, years ago, with the arresting detail that he lived with his parents until years after an average adult would be shamed into leaving the nest, much less one with a hot streak of charting records, and not only that, he would crawl into their bed with them when he came home from a night out, and they’d talk about what he did. Srsly. The story featured a photo of all three of them, in bed.

So maybe not. But it won’t do her any harm to watch Jim lay down a few guitar tracks, which is the task for today.

So what I’m saying is, I have to turn my energies elsewhere this morning. How about some bloggage instead?

And….I don’t have much.

But I do have something for you English nerds. A little background: The Atlantic recently published a piece by Stephen Bloom, a University of Iowa journalism professor, a 4,000-word essay slagging the state as it prepares to kick off the 2012 presidential race with its famous caucuses. I haven’t read it; I refuse to read it; you can’t make me. Did I punctuate that sentence correctly? I ask because perhaps the only interesting detail in it is this blog post by the editor of the Gazette, which singles out this passage by Bloom…

When my family and I first moved to Iowa, our first Easter morning I read the second-largest newspaper in the state (the Cedar Rapids Gazette) with this headline splashed across Page One: HE HAS RISEN.

…and does what Bloom didn’t: Check the microfilm. Turns out the front page indeed includes the words “He is risen,” but not in a headline splashed across the page, but in a rather pedestrian graphic that papers run on holidays like Easter. The type is actually quite small. If anything is splashed across the page, it’s the headline MURDER DRAMA, but you know how memory is.

Anyway, score one for the editor, but in his blog, he writes:

I tend to see the religious aspect of that day’s newspaper as less splash and more dribble, kind of like Bloom’s 4,000-word embellishment.

I get what he’s going for here, comparing splash to dribble, but in comparing it to the original essay, I think he’s confusing dribble and drivel. And that, my friends, is the long way around to making several hundred words of fussy superciliousness.

Supercilious. Now there’s a word.

Off to edit video. And HT to Jeff for finding the editor’s blog. Enjoy the final countdown, all.

So this is it, then? Winter solstice? It doesn’t exactly feel like it — too warm — but given that it’s 8 a.m. and barely light, and that it’s raining and looks like it will be doing so for a while, then I guess this must be the place. Today the corner is turned. (Technically, not until 12:30 a.m. tomorrow, in my time zone, anyway.) Enjoy it, Argentina. Because we’re coming for that light. Starts now.

That last link is a sound clip, and somewhat NSFW, depending on your office. From one of my favorite movies-nobody-else-saw: “The Limey.” Roger Ebert gave it three stars, or a half-star less than what he gave “Horrible Bosses,” which was so bad I couldn’t even last through the DVD, and that’s saying something. It was amazingly crude, and do you know what it takes for me to say that? I, who once worked in newsrooms? How did we get to this point? One minute you’re laughing at the semen-as-hair-gel gag in “There’s Something About Mary,” the next a character in a Judd Apatow movie is dressing down another for shaving his balls in the bathroom and leaving the hair in the toilet, so that “my shit looked like a stuffed animal.” This was in “Knocked Up,” which later took a tonal shift to suggest the main character is positively changed by the presence of a child in his life. In other words, they girlied it up to make it suitable date-night fare, which suggests there are women out there who sat through the turd conversation en route to the baby-picture montage over the closing credits, and were pleased. What a world.

Although I hope “Bad Santa” comes around on one of the cable channels in the next few days. Because that was one that did crudity right. More or less.

Excuse me, we have a correction: Technically the winter solstice is at 12:30 a.m. tomorrow, I’m told. In my time zone anyway.

I’m still waiting for the coffee to kick in, so how about a picture I stole from a total stranger’s Facebook?

That’s our own MMJeff on the left. I guess he brought the gold to the infant Jesus, although think, Jeff: If you were traveling by donkey, preparing for the flight into Egypt, would a ginormous candlestick be a practical gift? Still, nice that you played your part in the living Nativity — you really are a Boy Scout, aren’t you? There was one last weekend at the church next to my Kroger store. The camel-wrangler wore the traditional burnoose over jeans and sneakers, and took a few calls on his cell phone while children petted his dromedary. If the wise men lived at this latitude, they would most definitely wear sweatshirts beneath their kingly finery.

Shoes are always the Achilles heel of the period costume. At how many renaissance faires have I watched knights and ladies touring the grounds in Tevas? The Johnny Appleseed Festival in Fort Wayne featured electricity-free carnival rides — I always liked the wind-up spinning thing — run by people wearing Nikes. The true non-farb Civil War re-enactor pays through the nose for a pair of true Civil War-era reproduction boots, which did not come in left-right configurations until afterward.

So, speaking of movies: Alan and I have finally accepted the inevitable, and are doing the years-overdue adult chore of writing our wills. We had the signing at the lawyer’s office yesterday. Without going into too much none-of-anyone’s-business detail, I was delighted to learn that the living trust we’ve set up features a “stuff” section, designed to dispose of particular valuables and/or personal possessions, should that be important to us. We can hand-write our wishes there, amend and cross them out, which strikes me as a very cinematic thing to have in one’s safe-deposit box. The first person I knew in life who had a significant relative die came back from the funeral with the disappointing news that wills aren’t all they’re cracked up to be in the movies. There was no dramatic reading in a lawyer’s office with the women all dressed in black, clutching hankies in their grief. There was no itemized list of goodies, with flowery legal instructions about their disposition, just some version of “I leave all my stuff to X, Y and Z,” and they can sort things out.”

I may, just for laffs, fill out this section with a list of identical distributions, all but the last one crossed out, to suggest a mercurial temperament I simply don’t have.

OK, so, bloggage:

The tea party takes the reins of power: The queer-bashin’ Troy mayor’s path through public service continues to be rocky, and this time it has nothing to do with her I-heart-NY tote bag. She and her confederates defeated a long-planned transit hub in that city earlier this week, by a 4-3 vote, bucking the wishes of the business community, which turned on her with a vengeance this week. The project came with $8 million in federal aid, but they reasoned that with the government drowning in debt, they must do their part, and said no thanks. The Chamber of Commerce was furious — do you know how hard it is for a suburban mayor in Oakland County to piss off a chamber of commerce? — and yesterday a remarkable letter leaked from a government-affairs manager from a major automotive supplier, saying he would put the word out in the business community that they “no longer consider the City of Troy for future site considerations, expansions or new job creation.” Wow.

The mayor, for her part, claims she’s heard “nothing but congratulations and accolades.”

Cathy Cambridge falls out in a black evening dress, looks smashing. I kind of wish she’d put her hair up for events like this, however, if only so we can ogle the rocks.

Perhaps some of you followed the link to the latest story about embarrassing College Republicans yesterday; I think Cooz posted something in comments. A roundup here, at Romenesko’s site. A student tweeted something offensive about the president: My president is black, he snorts a lot of crack. Holla. #2012 #Obama. You know what bugs me most about that? That stupid holla. Y’know: I’m a racist, but I still want to use hip-hop slang.

OK, the Great Christmas Cleaning Project begins. Holla!

Someone in one of my social networks posted a quote — “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle” — and attributed it to Plato. Even allowing for translation from ancient Greek, that doesn’t sound like Plato’s territory (like I would know), but it sent me in search of the original.

For those of you who care, I have been deploying this aphorism with greater frequency of late; life with a teenager will do that, especially when they get wound up about their persecution by this or that teacher, or the relative weirdness of this or that classmate. I hate to get all Hallmark on her, but it’s a useful observation that you don’t know what’s going on in another person’s life, that sometimes it expresses itself in persecution or weirdness, which underlines what I think should be the central message of parent to child at this time in their lives: It’s not about you, and it’s hardly ever about you, so chill.

In the past, I would trot off to Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, a copy of which I own. Because I am crazy, and because I used to leaf through it when I was bored and stuck for inspiration. For the hell of it and the pre-internet thrill of it all, I just did. Not in there, which shoots the Plato attribution all to hell. So I turn to the mighty internet, and quickly bog down in the Straight Dope discussion boards, where smart people who know everything gather, and have already taken this one apart.

Not Plato. Probably Ian MacLaren, a Scottish author who left us in 1907.

It took more legwork, but part of me misses reference books. Dictionaries, thesauruses, reference grammars, Bartlett’s Familiar, etc. (Not “The Elements of Style.” I read Strunk & White, but I never picked it up again, and writers who hold it up like a beacon through the murky, wordy darkness get on my last goddamn nerve. It’s usually some twit in a bow tie. A useful text if you want to write like E.B. White, but not everyone does.) I miss them like I miss smoking — as a writer’s procrastination device. Stuck? Lean back, light a cigarette, think for a couple minutes. Or select one of your tomes and leaf through it for a minute or two, in search of le mot juste. In fact, there’s a book by that very title, Le Mot Juste, to help you find just the right foreign word or phrase to punctuate your essay. For writers who cannot afford George Will’s quote boy, it’s nice to have.

Perhaps my all-time favorite was “An Incomplete Education,” now in its umpteenth edition, which is a veritable internet full of interesting things you should have learned by now, but probably didn’t. The section on world religions alone is worth the cover price if, like me, your catechism class didn’t cover Zoroastrianism.

All are more or less obsolete in the age of Wikipedia and a billion websites as close as your laptop.

Do you have any favorite reference volumes? That you still use?

I’m running late today, so let’s get to the bloggage:

A nanny by profession, a photographer in her off hours, but she collected some amazing snaps from the streets of Chicago in the 1950s. Vivian Maier, the posthumous tribute.

Something I miss about being a columnist — pulling any old thing out of your ass, and getting it published:

America’s first black female secretary of state is quietly positioning herself to be the top choice of the eventual Republican presidential nominee, ready to deliver bona fide foreign-policy credentials lacking among the candidates. The 56-year-old has recently raised her profile, releasing her memoir in November and embarking on a monthlong book tour.

After 2 1/2 years as a professor at Stanford, Miss Rice is reportedly getting “antsy” to get back into the political game. “She’s ready to go,” said one top source.

Yes, it’s Condi-mania! Oh, and yes, nowadays I pull any old thing out of my ass and publish it, but I no longer get paid for it. Big difference.

I’ve become a fan of Ken Jennings’ Twitter stream. Yes, the “Jeopardy” champion. And you would, too:

BREAKING: Tim Tebow currently in the locker room watching a Bergman film, smoking Gauloises, contemplating “God’s awful silence.”

My phone just autocorrected “dreidels” into “strudels.” Strudels! That is just insult to injury.

Funny guy. OK, gotta run. Have a good one, all.

As no one has ever been able to explain how the use of a neti pot differs significantly from a kinder, gentler waterboarding, I’ve never been tempted to use one. I’ve never had sinus problems, and I was one of those kids whose day at the pool could be ruined by getting water up my nose — it really is one of my least-favorite physical sensations. I understand many of you may well swear by pouring gently warmed saltwater into your nasal passages as the first step on the road to a happy nose, and to you I say: How nice. But get that thing away from me.

So when, settling in for my shift of harvesting health-care news last night, I clicked onto Google’s health page and saw a headline reading, Improper use of neti pots linked to deaths, and read this showstopper of a lead —

BATON ROUGE, La., Dec. 18 (UPI) — Louisiana health officials warn the improper use of neti pots is linked to two deaths in the state caused by a so-called brain-eating amoeba.

– I felt vindicated. Although, in fairness, when you read the story, it sounds like it’s more about the poor quality of tap water in Louisiana than anything else. The brain-eating amoeba in question mainly infects swimmers in warm water in places like Louisiana, Florida, Texas, and please, hold your Cletus jokes. The fact this stuff can live in warm tap water would make me hesitant to take a damn shower in bayou country without seeing a microbiology report from the local treatment plant.

And people make jokes about Detroit’s tap water. (Which is actually pretty good.)

With that, Monday begins. Stand by for news! But first, some bloggage:

Retiring Sports Illustrated super-photographer Walter Iooss Jr. tells a few stories on his way out, including this one about LeBron James:

LeBron became a villain to many after The Decision. I’ve seen a lot of entourages, but none like his. In July 2010 I got an assignment from Nike to shoot LeBron right after his TV special announcing his move to the Heat. We rented the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena, where the Lakers and the Clippers used to play, and there were 53 people on my crew-including hair and makeup artists, production people, a stylist. I had $10,000 in Hollywood lighting. It was huge. When LeBron arrived, it was as if Nelson Mandela had come in. Six or seven blacked-out Escalades pulled up, a convoy. LeBron had bodyguards and his masseuse. His deejay was already there, blasting. This for a photo shoot that was going to last an hour, tops.

And that is how a monster is made. If you like sports, or just have time to kill today, it’s worth digging up the whole story at SI. I once knew a photographer who admired Iooss, and he taught me how to pronounce the name — yose, rhymes with dose.

A copy editor at the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel inserts a rock ‘n’ roll reference that will be understood by a tiny fraction of the readership:

LAWYERS: Walker camp sues election board
VOTES: 500,000 recall signatures claimed
AND MONEY: Huge dollars flow to governor

Kim Jong Il is dead, which means it’s time to take another look at this remarkable photo, and marvel at the people who have enough time on their hands to produce videos like this, which we are encouraged to snicker at while we wait for the mood to darken as new instability encroaches upon the Korean peninsula. (Even if you disapprove of the joke, some amazing visuals.)

Finally, we have some news today.

I got a job. A full-time, actual j-o-b with bennies and everything. It’s been fun freelancing and odd-jobbing, but it was time for a change, and the change is a pretty great one — I’ll be a staff writer with The Center for Michigan. It’s a think tank. But it’s not a sinecure, that word that so often walks hand in hand with it. Maybe some day I’ll have a think-tank sinecure, but the Center for Michigan calls itself a “think-and-do” tank, which means work beyond just thinkin’. They are nonpartisan and “radically centrist,” and reject the usual institutional model of pounding out position papers for the benefit of one party’s intelligentsia, but are instead focused on being a bottom-up voice for the majority of Michigan residents who don’t fall into standard left-right slots. You can read more about what they’re about here.

I think it’s going to be a pretty good gig. I’ll be doing project reporting for their online publication, Bridge, as well as bringing a new voice to 42 North, their blog. Which brings us to this blog.

I always knew this place would be a problem for some employer, somewhere down the line. Editors don’t exactly want to own your thoughts, but they don’t like the idea of you expressing them anywhere other than in pre-approved spaces. It’s just the way it is. But over the years and with the help of everyone here, I’ve managed to attract and hold a respectable number of eyeballs for a blog that isn’t about anything in particular, and that has value these days, too. So, for now, NN.C will go on. I may throttle back on frequency a bit — perhaps three writing posts a week, and two photos-plus-links, not sure. (I still have to — wait for it — think about it some more.) I’ll be teaching two classes at Wayne this term, in addition to my new duties, so time will be short and valuable. I will be linking to my work over at the Center, of course. If you want to see NN.C continue, the best thing you can do is take the time to click there and astound my new bosses with my Venus flytrap-like drawing power.

All this begins after the first of the year. New year, new job, new directions. I think it’s gonna be a good one.

Christopher Hitchens has left for the undiscovered country. Like many of you, I found him maddening at times, and his advocacy for the Iraq war was insane. It goes without saying that his boosterism of that tragedy was a grave mistake, but he was frequently a contrarian, and even though a lot of his writing on that subject made me think he was simply a faltering alky with a clever pen, you could never write him off. He was too smart and his writing too entertaining for that. What can I say? I respected the talent and the work ethic. He was writing for publication to the very end.

And I’ll give him this: He opened my eyes about Mother Teresa. His attacks on her frequently turn up in the one-paragraph summations of his life — her name was in her lifetime and even after her death shorthand for selflessness and God’s love embodied in human form, a living saint, but once you looked past the surface, you had to admit he had a point. Here’s the short version of his argument, and here’s the shorter one: Mother Teresa and her order exalted suffering, and provided “comfort” to the dying of Calcutta, but refused to take any active steps to prevent it in the first place, or even to treat it beyond prayer and a little brow-mopping. They’d pick a dying man up out of the gutter and bring him inside, but give him a shot of morphine? No. (Christ didn’t get any morphine.) When they did administer drugs, her untrained, ignorant nuns didn’t follow standard medical protocols — reusing needles, etc. Meanwhile, she flitted around the world for photo ops with monsters like Charles Keating and the Duvalier family, serving as sort of a moral money-launderer.

(He wrote a book about this, if you’re interested.)

It’s hard to get more contrarian than that, but he managed. A part of me thinks he became a warmonger simply because he wanted to be the guy everyone paid attention to at parties.

For a lighter version of the man’s work, I recommend his first-person account of getting a “crack, back and sack” wax, from Vanity Fair some years back:

Here’s what happens. You have to spread your knees as far apart as they will go, while keeping your feet together. In this “wide stance” position, which is disconcertingly like waiting to have your Pampers changed, you are painted with hot wax, to which strips are successively attached and then torn away. Not once, but many, many times. I had no idea it would be so excruciating. The combined effect was like being tortured for information that you do not possess, with intervals for a (incidentally very costly) sandpaper handjob. The thing is that, in order to rip, you have to grip. A point of leverage is required: a place that can be firmly gripped and pulled while the skin is tautened. Ms. Turlington doesn’t have this problem. The businesslike Senhora Padilha daubed away, took a purchase on the only available handhold, and then wrenched and wrenched again. The impression of being a huge baby was enhanced by the blizzards of talcum powder that followed each searing application. I swear that several times she soothingly said that I was being a brave little boy … Meanwhile, everything in the general area was fighting to retract itself inside my body.

What a baby. I’ve had many waxes in that area, and it’s not THAT bad. Take two Tylenol half an hour previous and lay off the caffeine for a while. Excites the nerve endings.

I have to get moving, so let’s hop to the bloggage:

I’ve noticed that with the Republican fringe’s insistence on repeating the old “40 percent of Americans pay no income tax at all” line — which is another way of saying 40 percent of Americans are too poor to owe anything — has come a refreshing new attitude among its low-level pundits, a willingness to scold the impoverished for their circumstances. We might call this the Are There No Workhouses school, and encompasses the Gene Marks piece discussed earlier here, “If I Were a Poor Black Kid.” Yesterday our own Jason T. pointed me to this graybeard’s reminiscence in the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, which begins:

Nobody scolds the needy anymore.

Can you guess what he then proceeds to do? Yes! Scold the needy! You’ve read many versions of this before, a why-in-my-day-by-cracky lament that if you’re not starving or if you have a cell phone or cable TV, you can’t really consider yourself poor. He points out a couple cases of people who have no cause to complain over having to downgrade from ground sirloin to ground chuck, etc. I always want to ask these folks why they have problem with the poor living better than they did a century ago, but never mention how the rich have similarly upgraded. Wealthy people live like pashas today; how many of you grew up, as I did, next door to a doctor, who lived in a pretty standard three-bedroom house? Today that would be the size of his ski condo. His third home.

Finally, because I know we’ve noted this before, more carnage in Waterloo: A cop shot, his killer dead. You have to check out the mugshot of the guy, with what looks to be a Chinese character tattooed on his face. Guess what he was wanted for? Anyone? It starts with M.

OK, must run. Have a great weekend.