So there I was at Staples, replenishing the manila-envelope and Sharpie supplies, when I passed an end-cap display for some sort of…camera? No, a camera system. For security? It’s running a demo loop, let’s watch: An attractive middle-aged woman climbs onto her elliptical trainer and starts working out, smiling down at the monitor, where she sees? Her teenage son, doing homework somewhere else in the house.

I was speechless. It didn’t take long, did it, for us to accept surveillance cameras not just in our public spaces, not just on light standards staring down on red-light runners, in virtually every corner of the world where they can be justified in the name of safety, but in our homes? It starts with baby monitors, I guess. Kate’s was probably the last generation to be surveilled by audio alone; it gentled my rattled new-mother nerves to know she wasn’t upstairs being eaten by a tiger.

(Later, I tried to chase down a story I heard through a remove or two, about an interoffice romance that had gone bad. She suspected he was up to something with another woman, so she hid a baby monitor in a little-used file drawer in his office, and put the receiver in her own desk. If it hadn’t been for a sudden burst of static one day, it might have gone on for some time.)

Then it was governors on cars; you could install aftermarket accessories that would reveal exactly whether she’d told her old man she was at the library, when she was really having fun fun fun at the hamburger stand. Then they were factory-installed, and we called it OnStar. What else? Keystroke monitors for computers. Constant text-messaging. (At least that’s voluntary.) And for every eye-roll you can think of, there’s a counter story, a case cracked because someone sauntered under a camera, or a stolen car recovered because OnStar was able to hit the kill switch, a kidnap victim able to get her hands on a cell phone and make a call.

Still. If I were that kid? I’d spray-paint the lens and tell mom to get a life.

So, what are you doing at the moment? I’m grading papers, cursing the adverb and looking to the bloggage. Which is?

A lyrical conundrum, solved: Steve Perry finally admits no, there is no such thing as “south Detroit,” as he sings in “Don’t Stop Believin’.” He does explain the origin of “streetlight people,” and as you might expect, it’s lame. As for SoDet (otherwise known as Windsor), he acknowledges it was a little poetic license. I recall how stunned I was to hear that there is no Gower Avenue in Los Angeles, as Warren Zevon’s chorus sang so wonderfully in “Desperadoes Under the Eaves.” It’s Gower Street, which just isn’t as lyrical. I don’t think I could do that. Accuracy is important.

Those of you who are higher-ed nerds — or who pay tuition in Michigan — might enjoy this project in Bridge, my new employer, by Ron French, comparing Michigan’s college costs to other states’. The results aren’t flattering.

I wonder if she’s selling her house in Arizona? Bristol Palin heads home.

Happy Wednesday, all. I think I might survive this week, but the jury’s still out.

Inaugural pix ‘n’ linx! Given the week’s theme in Detroit, let’s go with a car:

That’s the Smart concept, an “urban pickup.” Grabbed from the Flickr stream of Michelin Media, and used under a Creative Commons license.

The interior:

Would I want one? Hmm, prolly not. But I admire the thinking.

To kick off the linkage, a painful story to read about one of those guys. Everybody knows someone like this, a utility player at a company who doesn’t necessarily contribute to the bottom line, but supports those who do. In this case, he worked at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. The rest you can read for yourself. Spoiler: It’s not a happy story. But it is important.

When Charles Pierce referred to our new super-PAC era as one of “fully weaponized money,” I think this is what he was talking about. Josh Marshall:

Last night I saw a link on Twitter to the news that Sheldon Adelson, the billionaire casino mogul had given $5 million to a Gingrich-backing SuperPAC to run a brutal series of ads against Mitt Romney in South Carolina. (The ad campaign will be based on snippets from a half-hour swift-boat style ‘documentary’ about Mitt’s time at Bain Capital.) I knew this was big if for no other reason than the fact that $5 million thrown at a relatively small state like South Carolina over little more than a week is enough to totally change the calculus of a race. …But there’s much more afoot here.

Beyonce, celebrity maternity monster.

Oh, and me, on the play the other night. Actually, on the guy who made it possible. We should all be so fearless.

I was driving home from the mall Sunday, thinking about driving. I was in the far-right lane cruise-controlled at 70, woolgathering about a lot of what we talked about last week — safety and road stress, mainly, but also how the hell I’m going to teach my daughter to navigate these crazy freeways. How hard it is to resist the velocitizing effect of your fellow travelers. How you should never, ever travel faster than you feel comfortable. How margins of error are so much shorter at higher speeds. I glanced in the rear-view, where a BMW grille was closing in at a terrifying pace. My foot, which had been resting ineffectually on the accelerator (cruise control, remember) twitched up reflexively, just as the Beamer blew past on my left and wove another stitch around and through the cars ahead before disappearing into the flow of traffic.

He had to have been going 100, if not more. I’m assuming it was an auto-show tourist of some sort or another. The same thing happened to us Saturday night around 11, only it was a Dodge with fancy LED taillights. I don’t know if it was a dealer or a journalist or a corporate test driver, Ryan-goddamn-Gosling or Michael-goddamn-Shumacher, but that is an ignorant, stupid thing to do on an American freeway, especially one demonstrably full of people who are doing everything except paying attention to what they’re supposed to be doing. But it’s auto-show week, and that’s what happens here.

I’ve driven fast enough times myself to know why people do it and how invincible you can feel in a new, well-made car with all the latest safety features, but treating I-75 like an F-1 proving ground has too many hazards to count, including something as simple as my automatic reaction to seeing a car roaring up from behind — to take my foot off the gas. A sudden decrease in my speed, a closing hole in the lane to the left, and we all might have ended up in a sheet-metal sandwich. (I wonder how I’d be described in the story/obit, “journalist,” “blogger” or the ignoble “area woman.”)

And it did seem the BMW driver knew what s/he was doing. It’s the multi-lane swerve-overs behind me that freak my cheese, as so much depends on the trustworthiness of your fellow motorist, and that is? Not bloody trustworthy.

While we’re on the subject, for those of you who didn’t follow the comment thread Friday, the story of the firefighter killed while changing a tire on the freeway — the very incident that started this train of thought — has taken a turn. Now it’s looking less like a tragic accident and maybe a staged one, but the investigation continues.

Hope your weekend was a fine one. We went to see a production of “The Tempest” at a local bar. It was fun, but I think I’ll blog about it over at 42 North in the next day or two. But this part is for you guys alone: The actor who played Caliban was a real scenery-chewer, and had a very funny bare-ass scene that left me thinking our own Caliban chose his handle well.

A little bloggage:

Rick Santorum quotes as New Yorker cartoon captions.

Mitt Romney and his Irish setter — the anecdote that won’t go away, by the writer who dug it up. HT: John Wallace.

Finally, some housekeeping: I think this week will be the one I’ll start experimenting with some shorter material. Classes start at Wayne today, and my life will hit another gear. I’m thinking writing posts on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and pix-with-linx Tuesday and Thursday. Not sure how it will shake out, but I want to put up a new post daily, but perhaps one that won’t take quite so much of my increasingly scarce free time.

We’ll see how it works out.

Tulips. In January.

I’ve written before about the terrifying conditions of a typical Detroit rush hour. I haven’t driven in every city in the U.S., but I’ve driven in a few, and the closest match I can think of is Chicago, where traffic flies along at an insane speed, bunched up so close you can smell the other drivers’ sweat, until it can’t anymore. Detroiters love driving, and driving fast. They bring a certain skill to the endeavor, but it only takes one jerkoff to make a mistake, and lo, there are many on the road on a typical rush-hour weekday.

My new job requires twice-weekly days in Lansing, and Thursday was one of them. I left extra-early, with the aim of getting to the office shortly after 8 a.m. I switched on the radio once I reached cruising speed, and the first traffic bulletin informed me westbound 696 was closed at Orchard Lake Road, after an accident involving a pedestrian. Poor bastard, I thought. And then: WAIT. CLOSED? I’LL BE PASSING THAT EXIT IN 10 MINUTES. Or rather, I wouldn’t be passing it, but would instead be neck-deep in stopped traffic, being shunted off at some surface street on the far west side, with no idea how the hell I’d ever find my way back to I-96. I’ve been a work-from-homer for so long the whole west side of the metro is terra incognita. What to do? What to do? The I-75 interchange was seconds away. I took it south and executed a move I’m christening the Davison evasion, hopping onto this little-traveled spur of a freeway, a mere five miles or so in length, that connects I-75, the Lodge and a little more in both directions, but mainly exists to remind old-timers that no one really needs to get from one side of Highland Park to the other in three minutes, unless they’re running from muggers. Maybe you old-timers know the use for the Davison, but it was certainly welcome Thursday morning.

A helpful illustration for you out-of-towners.

The guy who died was an Ann Arbor firefighter. That’s the worst thing about freeway commutes — it’s so unnerving and stressful that you remember a well-executed evasive maneuver rather than the fact a man died. It’s the chariot race, for sure.

At this spot, there’s a sign posted on one of the ramps that says, “Follow the signs, not your GPS.”

Lotsa ramps.

Bloggage?

Picking on Rick “Dead Man Walking” Santorum seems a bit of a waste of time, but what the hell, Charles Pierce does it so well.

America loves Skrillex? Not according to my daughter.

And I’m so tired I’m off to bed. Enjoy the weekend, all.

Can’t lie — my mind is rather full of personal stuff at the moment, and not focused at all on blogfodder. It’ll pass, but it makes for slim pickin’s here. The next couple of weeks are going to be busy-like-crazy. The start of classes at Wayne, the North American International Auto Show, a new job — our little co-prosperity sphere will be full up with things-that-aren’t-this. Oh, and the cherry on the sundae? We’re going to the Charity Preview next Friday, courtesy of the paper. And that is? A night of black-tie swellishness, the biggest benefit of the year, when everybody in town welcomes the auto show and raises jillions for children’s charities. My feet hurt just thinking about it.

I went to the dress department at one of the department stores after Christmas. Everything was on sale and the racks looked like they’d been looted. I tried on four dresses and hated them all — I didn’t wear a floor-length dress to my own wedding, for crying out loud. So I guess it’ll be a cocktail dress and I’ll spend a lot of time standing behind Cadillacs so no one knows I’m cheating.

Eh, it’ll be fine. Alan’s not wearing a tux. And once Aretha arrives, all eyes will be on her. That photo caption is wrong, by the way — that’s her longtime boyfriend, not her husband, although she announced this week they’re finally getting married this summer. A few years ago, they rolled into the Charity Preview in his-and-her white mink.

(A friend saw her shopping at Kroger a few years ago, in sable. Sable and a baseball cap.)

Oh, and guess what she said in the press release about the engagement? “No, I’m not pregnant.” Ha.

So, a quick skip to the bloggage?

I can’t stand shows like “Wife Swap,” but I’m sort of sorry I missed this one.

Newt Gingrich: Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds. Maybe.

Eric Zorn echoes my call of a year or so back — leave the lights for a while after the holidays — although I gotta tell you, everything in and outside the house came down on Jan. 1. It was either take them down then, or they’d stay up until February. And I have to tell you, by February? You’re definitely in the lazy-bum camp.

And that’s it for me. Enjoy Thursday, when the world starts to smell distinctly of? Weekend!

Early in the Iowa caucusing, and I’m watching the live coverage. Why?

1) Because it’s too early for “Downton Abbey,” “Game of Thrones” or the Westminster Dog Show.
2) Because I’m so giddy at having a fairly typical American weeknight — drive home, dinner, a second glass of wine — that it just seems the thing to do.

Although jeez, it’s excruciating. Is American broadcast media ever worse than when it’s devoting all its attention to something of very little real consequence that won’t actually throw off any news for a few hours yet? It’s like watching someone toast an ant on a sidewalk with a magnifying glass. All agree that if Romney loses tonight, it’s a terrible setback for his campaign. Feh. They said Newton was done when he went on that Greek cruise and all of his top staff quit. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor?

Eh, time for a Sopranos episode on demand. That’s why we have premium cable.

Oh, and “Southland” isn’t back yet, either. But soon. It’s not the best cop show ever, but it’s better than most, and I find myself oddly drawn in by Regina King and Michael Cudlitz. The latter plays a hard-working, first-class police officer with a painkiller addiction. Addict antiheroes are all the rage these days — hello, Nurse Jackie — and I’m not sure why, as drug addicts can be some truly despicable people, or rather, they’re people who do some truly despicable things. Both Cudlitz’ John Cooper and Edie Falco’s Nurse Jackie play competent, highly decent people who just happen to suck down Vicodin and Oxycontin like it’s going out of style. While I have to admire the writers’ impulse to dramatize a growing social problem, please — Cooper or Jackie need to be stealing a little more from their own family members, and a little less rough-around-the-edges.

Back to the caucuses.

Ron Paul is leading.

Have a nice year, GOP.

Bloggage?

Dan Savage is running out of patience with some of these people. You know it.

Keith Olbermann, cratering again? Oh, probably.

Is Stephen Glass forgivable? Hey, if Tim Goeglein is, I don’t see why not.

Man, all this pheasant and champagne and pie and the rest of it has taken a toll. I feel like crap, not in an I’m-getting-sick kind of way, more like an I’m-missing-the-gym deal. But I refuse to be one of those Jan. 1 newbies. (You like that logic? I’m missing the gym, but I won’t go to the gym. Because.) I considered my non-gym options and did something insane: I went for a walk.

Bipedal motion! What a crazy idea. I made it crazier yet — I didn’t use my iPod. Just me and my thoughts, and feet moving back and forth. Yesterday I walked about two miles and felt like someone had taken a ball-peen hammer to the bottoms of my feet, and yes, I was ashamed. Today I walked three and a half, and felt much better. Just needed to get the kinks out. I made both walks errands: Have a destination, get something done along the way. Yesterday I gave blood. Today, went to the library to return a DVD. (“Meek’s Cutoff,” don’t bother.) Things I noticed:

Couple of squabbling blue jays;
About a million storefronts I hadn’t seen up close;
The world. All snowy ‘n’ cold ‘n’ stuff.

When did we decide whatever was on our smartphone screens was so goddamn interesting? What if they’d told us the truth back in first grade, when we were first promised personal jetpacks? You won’t get that, but you will get a computer smaller than a deck of cards that you will carry in your pocket, one that will facilitate instant communication with the rest of the world. You will mainly use it to play Angry Birds and see what a celebrity is eating for lunch.

OK, enough. It was a good day. But tomorrow everything hits another gear. Today is the Iowa caucuses, and we’ll have lots to talk about In the meantime…

Dave Barry’s Year in Review. The same year after year, but always good for a chuckle or three.

My old News’n'Sentinel colleague Ash Khalil has a new book out. Unlike Herr Goeglein’s, I think I’ll read this one.

Eric Zorn notices two apocalyptic pronouncements from GOP candidates and wonders, hyperbole or hysteria? What’s scary is how many people agree with them.

Anyone want to make predictions on Iowa results?

Longtime readers know I’m not much for New Year’s Eve. In recent years I’ve had to work on many of them, but even when it fell on a weekend, it just never seemed worth the trouble. For years now, our preferred celebration has been a better-than-average meal made at home, some good wine, champagne and a video on the telly. We kiss at midnight, marvel over the sound of celebratory gunfire in Detroit, and go to bed.

This year, Alan’s been attending some of the media events at the car companies, and came home with a request:

“I know what I want for Christmas dinner,” he said. “Pheasant.”

O rly?

He explained that the Ford shindig he’d been at earlier in the evening had featured some cold roast pheasant on the buffet, along with some sort of fruit chutney, and boy, it sure was good. After determining that our Christmas guest wouldn’t eat pheasant at gunpoint, we decided it would maybe make a decent NYE entree. So I ordered one from the butcher and started exploring recipes.

We really aren’t meant to eat pheasant, I determined. No one can agree on how they should be prepared. Mark Bittman suggested whacking them up and cooking the various parts separately. Another said this is the ideal bird for brining. A woman at one of the holiday parties we attended said no, pressure-cook it. One recipe went with a slow roast with lots of basting, another with a short one in a very hot oven. That was Emeril Lagasse’s recipe. I’ve noticed several chefs, all men, suggest roasting duck and other game birds in blazing-hot ovens, claiming the heat works the way a sear does on a grilled steak — trapping the scarce fats inside; otherwise, you end up with a dessicated fowl.

I think men are the ones who promote this method because, by and large, they don’t have to clean their own ovens. Personally, I despise any temperature above 425 degrees on my home oven, except maybe for pizza. It gets everything so hot grease splatters throughout the oven, which creates smoke, which sets off every smoke alarm in the house, etc. But still: Pheasant. If I can’t trust Emeril, who can I trust? I dialed the heat up to 500, turned on the fans, and started it in a jacket of bacon, as instructed:

This whole process was supposed to take less than an hour, I remind you. After 15 minutes, I removed the bacon; just opening the oven started the smoke alarm shrieking. (Alan took it down and stuck it under some towels.) We took the bird out when it looked like this; a few tentative pokes suggested its juices were running clear:

But when we flipped it over to do a bilateral carve, it still had plenty of blood left in it. Back into the oven for another 15, and that did it. It made for a pretty presentation:

And how did it taste? Eh, OK. It was still too dry. Alan got down to the bones, but I stopped at the white meat. Not a terrible dinner, but far from my best work. If I ever meet Emeril, I will ask him to come clean my goddamn oven. His sauce was good, however, a red-wine-and-orange-juice reduction.

That’s a wild rice pilaf on the side, by the way, with some toasted pine nuts. A very harvest-season meal.

Lesson learned: Some things are best left to the pros. Next year: Salmon.

How was your new year celebration? I finally watched “Midnight in Paris,” which was perfectly wonderful.

I’m a lazy girl on the bloggage today, but Gawker did all my work for me, in their best-of-2011-reading roundup. A few things are behind paywalls, but there’s some great stuff here, all of which I missed the first time around, including the incredible true story of the collar-bomb heist from Wired, a fabulous rant/takedown of “Eat, Pray, Love,” and finally, a piece that introduces and explains Courtney Stodden for me once and for all, so that I never have to read another word about her, thankyaJesus. All three worth your time, and probably even more at the Gawker link.

And so it begins, this 2012. I’m hoping it’s a good one. For all of us. Even the pheasant.

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.