Recently in Random Musings Category

So somehow, the whole freaking month of August managed to blow right by me. And of course, I haven’t even remotely come close to keeping this thing as up-to-date as I’d like to. Not that I haven’t had lots to write about — I just, well, haven’t written it.

My dad was in town recently, and we went on testosterone-driven car overload at the Woodward Dream Cruise. Somehow Amy managed to survive my dad and I drooling at cars for hours on end without needing any apparent need for therapy. Then my dad, who was in town for a week after a whirlwind tour of the east coast, managed to pull into his driveway just as Hurricane Fay did. That’s the sort of “good timing” I’m usually known for.

I also have plenty of things and people to mock, and my long-promised “GeoffBrown.net Best of Detroit.” And if I really want to get my blood pressure up, I could write about politics. But those things will have to wait until later.

Until then, if you haven’t already, scroll down and watch “Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog.” You’ll be glad you did.

It’s been a while since I posted here, hasn’t it? I promise I’ll post more soon.

As I mentioned in a previous post, since I became a homeowner, I have had occasion to learn quite a bit about home repair as things (a) broke and needed fixing, or (b) as I decided to add things. This weekend involved the intersection of (a) and (b) as the result of some bad luck.

Yesterday, near the end of my shower, one of my feet hit a slippery spot, and I started going down. I tried valiantly to right myself, to no avail. Trying desperately not to become one of those statistics insurance salesmen always talk about (“more accidents in the shower,” yadda yadda), I grabbed for the only thing I could get my hands on to break my fall — the shower curtain. Which was (operative word being “was”) hanging from the shower rod I described installing in the above-mentioned previous blog post. It did slow my fall a bit — I fell ass-backwards out of the shower, and I’m convinced that I’d have hit my head harder on the toilet than I did if not for that curtain. Sadly, I took the shower curtain rod with me. Which left some rather ugly-looking holes in the wall.

Now, I realize I was damn lucky. And after I managed to convince myself that I was alive, and that it could have been much worse, I realized I had another new home repair project on my hands. Yesterday and today were spent patching and painting drywall, which I managed to handle reasonably well for an amateur. I’m hesitant to tell my dad about this, however, because I will have to admit that I put to work some things I learned observing his mad home improvement skills when I was a kid, and I’m not looking forward to the gloating and “told you so”s.

Anyway, a couple pieces of fiberglass, a couple of coats of patching compound and sanding, and a coat of paint later, and you almost can’t tell anything happened, except for the missing shower rod. Which goes back up tomorrow after the paint dries.

Now if only I could repair my sore neck and wounded pride …

Wil Wheaton blog features an account of a bad concert-going experience that reminds me of why I stopped going to concerts. Seems he had gone to see The Police — at $60 per ticket — when he encountered some rude woman behind him who insisted on talking loudly on her cell phone for a good chunk of the concert, then had the unmitigated gall to get pissed off when he politely asked her to keep it down:

For the next twenty minutes, this woman loudly complained about me to her equally drunk, equally idiotic friends. She kicked my chair. She clapped her hands next to my head. She screamed like a teenage girl in a Beatles concert film.

In other words, this stupid asshole made about a third of her concert experience — seeing The Police! — all about trying as hard as she could to ruin it for me, because I’d asked — politely — for her to just be considerate of the people around her.

I used to go to a fair number of concerts, especially after I started seeing Amy, who enjoys music more than I do. But I noticed that concerts started getting more and more expensive, especially as “TicketBastard” tacks on more and more “service fees.” And more and more often, I would have to deal with a large number of assholes at these concerts. People like the woman who ruined Wil’s evening with The Police. The attitude among these cretins seems to be “I spent a bunch of money to be here, so I can act however I want.”

And generally, I think people are becoming less and less considerate of other people. For example, very few people I know show up when they tell me they will, which forces me to tell people to be somewhere much earlier than the “real” time because that’s the only hope in hell I have of people showing up somewhere when I need them to. People also seem to have taken a rather cavalier attitude to RSVPs, too. These days, if you ask for RSVPs for an event, you can count on a small but not insignificant number of people telling you they’re coming to your event and then, without warning, deciding not to show. I was reading one of those “advice columns” once, and a guy wrote in to say that he planned a big 40th birthday party for his wife (catered, DJ, everything), invited a bunch of her friends and co-workers, who all said they’d be there, and then none of them showed. Not one. In a later edition of the column, people expressed shock and disbelief, but, sadly, this doesn’t surprise me at all. People just seem to have lost their consideration for other people, and think nothing of deciding not to show up places after telling people they’ll be there. Shoppers block aisles in grocery stores without moving out of the way of others trying to get by, asshole neighbors will smoke or use their grill right outside your open window without a thought for you, and yes, people will talk through a concert or movie you’re trying very hard to enjoy. What’s more sad about Wil’s post is not that it happened, but that things like that happen so often.

(Yeah, that Wil Wheaton. Yeah, I’m still a Star Trek geek.)

(I know, I know. Ill post it soon.)

Today might possibly be one of the best days I’ve had in a while. It was gorgeous outside — about 70 degrees, not humid, sunny with no clouds. I had breakfast with Amy, and then went to Greenfield Village for their annual Memorial Day Civil War Remembrance activities (as a history geek, this is something I really like doing). The only downside is that Amy was busy with schoolwork and couldn’t go with me.

And now, the Detroit Red Wings are playing in the Stanley Cup finals against Pittsburgh, and the Detroit Pistons are about to start Game 3 of the Eastern Conference Finals against the Celtics here in Detroit. And thanks to picture-in-picture, I can watch them both.

Like I said, a damn good day.

(Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten my promise to post my Best of Michigan 2008. Soon.)

Today’s Detroit News proved that thousands of people can be wrong. The News released it list of what it alleges to be “Michigan’s Best” businesses of 2008, in a variety of categories. For the most part, it is what the kids these days would call an “EPIC FAIL.” It reads more like one of those “word-association” games, where someone says a word, and one spits out, without thinking, the first thing to come to mind. Because, for most of these, unless the majority of the Detroit News is a bunch of sheltered, ignorant slugs, they can’t have put much thought into some of these selections. Indeed, the News staff itself probably agrees — in some categories, apparently no longer to contain their annoyance at the poor choices, they chime in with their own choices. For several categories, they divided into “National” and “Michigan” subcategories, with the intent being that readers were to choose, say, the best national pizza chains and then the best locally based businesses. Apparently the people answering the survey couldn’t handle these simple instructions, choosing local-only chains for the “national” spot in some categories, forcing the News to begrudgingly cook up some preposterous explanation for why people would do something that stupid, much the same way adults tend to condescendingly praise children for childish activity that they find annoying, but don’t want to condemn for fear of stifling childlike wonder. Here are a few examples of the so-called “Best of Michigan 2008,” and why they’re completely misguided (in th very rare instance where the folk of the Detroit area actually chose wisely, I’ll point that out, too).

Best Seafood (National)

1. Red Lobster

Red. Lobster. Really. Red Lobster?! Jesus Christ, you might as well have chosen Long John Silver, too. If Long John Silver is the McDonald’s of Seafood, Red Lobster is the Denny’s. I know I’m a bit of a seafood snob given that my mom’s side of the family is from Baltimore, and my dad lives on the Atlantic coast in Florida, so I’m spoiled by real, fresh seafood, which you don’t get much around here. But really, of the many national seafood restaurant chains (McCormick & Schmick, Real Seafood Co), Red Lobster is the best you could come up with?

Best Sunday brunch (National)

1. Big Boy

I guess it’s hard to criticize this choice too much — There aren’t many “national” chains that do “Sunday brunch” around here. But while Big Boy’s breakfast buffet is a lot of food, cheap, I can put together a better breakfast myself.

2. Ram’s Horn

I don’t even like having to dignify this with a response. Ram’s Horn?! (1) It’s NOT A NATIONAL CHAIN; and (2) worse, still, THEY DON’T HAVE BRUNCH! And for the trifecta of idiocy, Ram’s Horn sucks. A lot. It’s a local knock-off of Denny’s that somehow manages to fall short of the “quality” one would expect from Denny’s.

The absolute horridness of these choices is perhaps more indicative of how weak this particular category is. There are plenty of decent brunch places, but they’re all local places.

Best Burger (National)

1. Big Boy

Big Boy has decent burgers, but they aren’t the best of the “nationals” — Ruby Tuesday’s “Triple Prime” or Chili’s “Big Mouth” burgers are probably more deserving.

2. Red Robin

Okay, they do have decent burgers here, so I have little to criticize here. But the local choices…. Oh, boy:

Best Burger (Michigan)

1. Yeck Family Drive-in Restaurant, Cheboygan

2. Strawberry Fields Restaurant, New Baltimore

Okay, GQ rated the best 20 hamburgers in the whole freakin’ country, and there were TWO from Michigan that made the list: The “Famous Burger” from the Sidetrack Grill in Ypsilanti, and the burger at the nigh-legendary Miller’s Bar in Dearborn. Neither managed to make it onto the Detroit News readers’ radars. Good job, Detroit. Instead, we get two restaurants from Cheboygan and New Baltimore. Not sure how the readers of a Detroit newspaper all manage to pick these two decidedly non-Detroit-area restaurant for this category (and a couple others), other than to say that methinks the “fix is in.”

Best Pizza (Michigan)

1. Papa Romano’s

2. Shields

As far as pizza goes, both of these are good, but not nearly close to the best, which is Buddy’s Pizza. Perhaps more insulting to Buddy’s than not being included on the list is the inclusion of Shields, which tries very hard to duplicate Buddy’s recipe (I think, actually, that Shields was opened by someone who used to be with Buddy’s) but falls short.

Place for a Coney (National)

1. National Coney Island

2. A&W

An exasperated Detroit News was forced to explain that, yes, it knows that National Coney Island is a local Detroit-area chain, but the mouth-breathers who answered the survey apparently thought that having the word “National” in the name was close enough. “Coneys” for those not in the know, are something of a Detroit-area thing — hot dogs with chili on them. In Pennsylvania, they actually call them “hot dogs with Michigan sauce.” A&W probably wins by default for being the only national chain one can think of that sells coneys.

Best Deli (Michigan)

1. Deli Basket

2. Zingerman’s Deli

Ah, yes — once more people buy into the Zingerman’s hype, probably without much thought. The Detroit area is just chock full of excellent delis, and while Zingerman’s is pretty good, I daresay there are many better ones. Plus Zingerman’s has let success get a bit to its head, and now charges a rather ridiculously high price for its food.

For some reason, the so-called “national” delis are also, as far as I can tell, local businesses. Another example of the failure of the Detroit News’s category system.

Best Grocery Store

1. Kroger

This is just plain wrong. The best grocery store around here is Hiller’s, followed perhaps by Holiday Market in Royal Oak.

Best Fried Chicken (Michigan)

1. Chicken Shack

Now here, I think I agree with this one. Chicken Shack does some damn good chicken.

I think the Detroit News dropped the ball on this year’s “Best of.” And many of the categories had the same out-of-town restaurant nobody here has ever heard of, which suggests to me that perhaps some of these results were rigged by some out-staters looking for free publicity. Most of the choices, though, were pretty bland, and it doesn’t seem like most of the voter’s put much thought into their choices. In my next post, I’ll give you the REAL “Best of Michigan.”

Travel writer Thomas Khonstamm has admitted that he either plagiarized or just plain made up a bunch of the stuff he wrote for the “Lonely Planet” travel guidebook series. He says that he broke company policy by taking free travel (presumably from travel companies whose services he was reviewing, though the story doesn’t say). He even claims to have written stuff about Colombia without even going there, relying instead on information from a girlfriend who worked at the Colombian consulate in San Francisco.

Well, hell, I can do that. If I knew you didn’t have to be a travel expert to write travel guides, I’d have tried my hand at it years ago. Of course, I actually have done a fair amount of traveling. In my travels, though, I’d say I came across many things that I couldn’t even make up. So I’d have to go the honest route and, you know, actually go to the places I would be writing about.

But one thing this story shows is how you can’t necessarily trust those who hold themselves out as experts. There seems to be so little vetting or oversight. I mean, apparently nobody would have caught Mr Khonstamm (which sounds awfully similar to “con man”) had he not come out with a book in which he admitted his deeds.

Anyway, the expert tag gets handed out with a bit too much frequency these days. In my profession, when we call “expert witnesses” to testify about something, there is a whole pile of evidentiary and legal standards we have to meet in order to qualify our “experts” as bona fide experts. You have to establish that they have training, expertise, and that that their opinions on the subject have some kind of grounding in fact or accepted theory.

Not so for Mr. Khonstamm, it seems. And not so out in the real world beyond the courtroom, either. Lots of people get to be experts on all kinds of things, without any guarantee that the “expert advice” you’re getting is based upon reliable information or an acceptable amount of training or experience. For example, I have an acquaintance I’ve known for a few years who apparently fancies himself a relationship expert, who even had a column running in an actual local newspaper. Oh, he would often, in his columns, coyly pretend to shrug off the title of “expert.” But ask yourself: how many newspapers would waste precious column-inches for “some guy who really isn’t an expert in the subject being discussed, but wants to prattle on about it anyway”? (Granted, that’s a good way to describe this blog sometimes. But I’m not asking people to pay to read it, either.)

Anyway, despite the coy, and not altogether too strident, attempts to make it look like he’s not the presumptuous type of guy who would label himself an “expert” on relationships, he would often “quote” other people who described him as (good God) the “Male Carrie Bradshaw” (the relationship-expert-columnist protagonist of Sex and the City fame). The columns themselves, however, were less “male Carrie Bradshaw” and more the print version of the high-school/college guy who wears the very thinly veiled sensitive-new-age-guy disguise to try and get women into bed with him. Except not even as well-written as that. Oh, sure, to people who didn’t know much about the guy, and who didn’t read too much below the syrupy, very-easy-to-see-through veneer, this guy looked like the in-touch-with-his-feminine-side progressive man. It was easy to get caught up in the tale of a guy who got his heart broken time after time by women who didn’t appreciate him for the nice, sensitive guy that he is.

Except, that’s not really how I knew/know the guy. To get the full picture, you have to see the side that wasn’t in his column. You have to see the guy who’s several years older than me (I’m in my early thirties) who surrounds himself with women in their early- to mid-twenties (some of them are younger than my girlfriend’s youngest sister, who is in her early twenties). If you go to his page on one of a number of social networking sites, that’s what you see—scores of much-younger women in his friends page. You also have to see the guy as I saw him when I first met him—married, with an infant daughter, pocketing his wedding ring, and making the rounds of every female at our office in search of one who would be receptive to his advances. I had friends who knew him in other contexts, and that seemed to be his M.O. in other contexts as well. (Suffice it to say that I wasn’t shocked to learn of his divorce a couple of years later.)

My reaction, when I learned of his column, was mixed — I wasn’t sure whether he had no business playing the sensitive “metrosexual” relationship expert dude, or whether he ought to be considered an “expert” because he had done just about everything a guy shouldn’t do if he expects to have and preserve a long-term relationship.

Of course, you didn’t see any of that in his column. You rarely saw a mention that he had ever been married, and you didn’t really see him talking about having a kid. Because if you’re a late-30s guy trying to get sweet young twenty-somethings under your spell, you can’t be some old divorced dude with wandering eyes, a flexible definition of commitment, and a kid. No, what you saw was a guy who latched onto some kind of “metrosexual” persona to show how in touch with his feminine side he was. He would always lament his failed relationships with some girlfriend or another, and the theme would always be “poor me, these women just don’t know how to deal with a nice guy in touch with his feminine side.” It was certainly never his fault. It probably had little to do with the fact that he could be sometimes be seen literally hanging all over other women.

He would also post his columns to a running online blog for the rest of the world to see. Most of the comments that showed up were from the segment he likely aimed for — women who don’t know any better who always fell for the guy who had the thinly veiled nice-sensitive-guy act. Every once in a while, someone who did know better would throw the bullshit card, but such comments either disappeared or were buried under a back-pedaling act that politicians could take lessons from. Indeed, once the guy had the gall to post a syrupy-sweet column about how he had never had a girlfriend on Valentines Day, and how he longed to know what that was like. That’s right, the guy who was married for several years. Posting about how he envied people who had “someone special” to spend Valentines Day with. Someone posted a comment throwing the bullshit card on that one, too. I could only imagine what his ex-wife might have thought when she read that. I can only imagine what his child will think if she ever stumbles across it.

Eventually, he posted a column saying no one would get to kick him around anymore because his column was leading to too many problems dating because his status as a “relationship expert” put “too much pressure” on his dating life. I suspect it had a little more to do with one too many bullshit cards being thrown. Of course, as those of you who are cynics like me might guess, it wasn’t very much longer before he started posting again, despite saying he’d never do it again.

Anyway, my point is that it’s all a little too easy to become known as an expert today, and consequently, not too surprising to see that so-called experts are just making things up and phoning things in. If an ardent womanizer can cast himself as a soulful “relationship advice columnist” in seek of his one, true love and lamenting the fact that a nice guy like himself keeps getting jilted, then surely there can be travel writers who never travel to the places they write about. The problem is, people don’t seem to care. Oh, sure, they act surprised when the cat’s out of the bag, but really, what do they really do to check whether the guy dispensing travel advice or advice for the lovelorn actually has anything backing up his opinions?

On the other hand, what do I know? After all, I’m no expert.

Well, it seemed like just about that time to completely overhaul the site again. Now that Movable Type version 4 has been out for a while, and seems mostly stable, it seemed like a good time to make the switch. Since I’ve basically been cobbling on updates for as long as I’ve been running MT, I figured it was time for a clean install, including using MT4-style templates. So here it is.

The behind-the-scenes stuff, like blog maintenance and entry posting and editing is really quite well put together. And there’s some nifty changes to the “front end,” too.

You may notice the “Sign in” link at the upper left corner. As many of you bloggers know, comment spam got way out of hand in a big hurry a few years back. One of MT’s early solutions was to institute authentication using their “Typekey” system. I thought that was pretty cool, and my unauthenticated comment spam was getting out of control. This prompted a switch to Typekey, only to have readers and commenters complain about having to sign into Typekey.

So I brought back anonymous comments, but moderated them. Typekey folks got their comments published immediately, but others had to be approved. You can imagine how onerous that became as the comment spammers ran wild. Then a wonderful person put together a CAPTCHA plugin for Movable Type comment forms. CAPTCHA is an authentication system where you’re shown a graphic with random letters and numbers, and you have to type them into a box — the theory is that only a human being can see them, so only a human being could type them in. This allowed the non-Typekey folks to comment without being moderated, and kept the spam out, too.

In the current incarnation of GeoffBrown.net, there are all kinds of options to let people comment at will while keeping spammers at bay. There’s still Typekey, if you have that. But now you can also register for a login and password directly from GeoffBrown.net. And if you don’t like the idea of coming up with yet another username and password, you can also use your LiveJournal login to post here, too (which should be good for the many friends I know who use LiveJournal). You can also use OpenID, if you have that or your Vox login if you have one. Coming soon, you’ll be able to use WordPress to login, or even your AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) login. That should pretty much cover a lot of folks. And for the stubborn among you, you can still post comments without logging in if you fill in your name and email address, and don’t mind filling in that annoying little CAPTCHA box.

And I’ll even be sure to do regular backups, so that I don’t have an unfortunate comment loss again.

I’m still learning about all the new bells and whistles in MT4, so while I’m checking those out, one never knows — I might even post a few things more often.

Yesterday, I flew up to Marquette, Michigan, to argue a post-trial motion in a medical malpractice case. Our firm’s appellate department is often called upon to handle appeals after medical malpractice trials, and we often start that off with the post-trial motions.

Despite living in Michigan my whole life, I haven’t been to the Upper Peninsula too much, and certainly not as far north as Marquette, which, by my reckoning, lies maybe five minutes south of the Arctic Circle. It’s farther away from Detroit than places like Chicago or Buffalo, so I took one of those tiny propeller planes. Amy helped me out by becoming convinced that I was going to crash to a fiery death because “those little planes crash all the time.” As if Northern Michigan is littered with commuter planes that went down before making it to Marquette.

With that uplifting reassurance, I set out for the airport at an ungodly early hour, and caught my flight to Marquette, which managed to arrive without crashing into the wilderness. Instead, it landed at the “International Airport” for Marquette, which is, well, kind of in the middle of the wilderness.

Marquette is really a very nice place, except it was very cold and there was snow everywhere. Given how far north it is, though, I almost felt like I should be watching out for polar bears everywhere I went:

ME: Your Honor, in response to plaintiffs’ assertion that …

POLAR BEAR: ROAR!!!

ME: AAAAARRRRGGGHHH!!! Oh my God, it’s EATING MY SPLEEN!!!

PLAINTIFFS’ COUNSEL: Objection, Your Honor — counsel is bleeding on my files.

Fortunately, nothing like that happened. As for my hearing, it went about as expected. What was really quite cool about the hearing, though, was the courthouse. If you’ve ever seen the movie Anatomy of a Murder, the courtroom in that movie is the one I appeared in yesterday. It is a historic site, and really quite stunning. It looks like something, well, out of a movie. (As an aside, the movie is based on a novel by John Voelker, a former Michigan Supreme Court justice from the Upper Peninsula.)

After my hearing, I made my way back through the wilderness to the airport, where I again boarded what is, in Amy’s mind, a flying death trap for the flight home. It was quite the contrast to flying out of Detroit, which has about three gazillion gates and planes flying in and out all the time. When they print on your Detroit boarding pass to check at the airport to see whether your gate has changed, they mean it (and my flight out of Detroit indeed did change gates). The gate change is also likely to require you to go to a new gate in a different ZIP code. They print the same thing on your Marquette boarding pass, but there’s only two gates there: Gate 1 and Gate 2. They’re right next to each other. Which means gate changes aren’t really a big deal. Also in contrast to Detroit, when we left, we were the only plane leaving. In fact, we may have been the only plane at the airport. No long trip to the runway. And no waiting around for anything (other than, maybe, making sure there were no polar bears on the runway). That was very nice compared to our landing at the Detroit airport, where we ended up taxiing down the runway for what seemed like three hours before getting to the gate.

Jokes about wilderness and polar bears (which don’t really live that far south — I hope) aside, I rather enjoyed my day trip to the U.P. It’s really quite a nice place, somewhere I’d like to visit again. Maybe in July when there’s a little less snow.

Since I've become a homeowner, I have had a few occasions to see whether I am completely incompetent at home improvement and home repair projects. My dad, an engineer, is also quite skilled at home improvement projects. When I was a kid, he was always working on some project. For example, he turned our unfinished basement into a finished basement. That meant cutting up lumber and turning it into walls, and putting drywall up and all that stuff. My role was helping. I was never too keen on it, because, well, as your typically computer geek type, I was neither skilled nor interested in building stuff. For my dad, it must have been the first heartbreak, which continued when I became a lawyer, and likely became complete when I got my cats.

Until a couple years ago, I spent most of my adult life in apartments, where repairs were handled by the landlord, and you couldn't make much in the way of modifications to those places. But now, this place is mine, and I have to do the repairs, and get to make all the modifications. Which is pretty funny, because unlike my dad, who could wander into a forest with a cordless drill and a hammer and build a house, I pretty much have all the building acumen of a chipmunk (except that they can probably build their own homes).

So not too long ago, I decided to put in a programmable thermostat. It was billed as an easy job, but it did involve a bit of drilling and hammering, and also disconnecting and reconnecting wires. The last part is the only part that I felt pretty confident I could handle. The first two parts had the potential for putting unwanted holes in the wall, or, worse, me. But I managed, and now I have a functioning programmable thermostat, which really has helped lower my energy costs. Plus it will make Al Gore and the other tree huggers happy.

More recently, specifically Thursday night, I came home from work and a quick stop at the grocery store (at about 9:30) only to find that the door from my garage into the house stopped working. The knob turned, but the door wouldn't open. Luckily, I was able to get in the front door. After figuring out how to take the doorknob apart, I was able to to discover that the deadlatch -- the part that keeps the door closed -- pretty much disintegrated and so the doorknob would turn without opening the door. Now I always was good at figuring out puzzles, so I was able, after some fumbling and swearing, to reassemble the thing, but it just disintegrated again after I (after some more swearing) managed to put it back together. Luckily, the hardware store sells replacement deadlatches, so I was able to keep my old doorknob and finally fix the door so I could open and close it again. Score another one for me.

Today, I installed a new shower curtain rod -- one of the ones that curves out so that the shower curtain sticks out a bit and give you a little more room. This involved more drilling, measuring, and putting in hollow wall anchors. Again, the risk for unwanted holes in the wall or me seemed to have increased. But I managed to get the thing put in with a minimum of bodily injury (Amy helped hold things and hand me stuff, which was only fair since it was her idea :-) ). Score another one for me. I guess I picked up more helping my out my dad than I thought. It was even kind of fun. I hope he doesn't find out I said so, though -- he gets way too into "I-told-you-so"s.

On top of my brief forays into home repair, I spent a good chunk of the day making what is possibly some of the best chicken noodle soup I've ever eaten (if I do say so myself). Luckily, I'm far more skilled at cooking than I am with home improvement. Good homemade soup is so much better than the canned stuff, but it can take time, and I haven't had as much experience with that as I have with a lot of the other stuff I like to make, so it was nice to have the chance to try it out.

It’s currently 61 degrees. At night. In Detroit. In January. I’m not given to global climate change hysteria, but even I have to start to wonder. It’s only a few degrees warmer right now where my dad lives. In Florida. A few days ago it was in the teens, and we had about 8 inches of snow on the ground. Now? Snow’s almost all gone, and it’s warm enough to go without a coat — or even in shorts.

I wish every winter day was like this around here, actually. Winter gets old after 32 years or so.

What's with the crappy fake Blues Brothers on the Capital One Bowl halftime show?!

The National Weather Service was right. We were pretty much pounded by snow last night. Oh, sure, my dad, who grew up in Buffalo, would say that the 8 inches or so of snow we got is nothing compared to the kind of snow they see all the time in Buffalo. And he's right, technically, but then, he lives in Florida now, so I'm not sure he gets to be all superior about how we're "too wussy" about snow here in Michigan.

Anyway, this will end up being the perfect day to stay bundled up inside, watching my beloved Michigan Wolverines play in the Capital One Bowl against the University of Florida Geckos. Today's game marks the final game coached by Lloyd Carr, who is retiring as Michigan's head coach. Now, I've made no secret that I was hoping that Lloyd would move on, but I still think he did do a lot of good for the program, and I hope he can go out with a win. The Geckos, though, are likely to put up a hell of a fight, what with their superstar Heisman-Trophy-winning quarterback Tim Tebow. Given our lackluster season, the Geckos' power, and the fact that the entire coaching staff was canned by the new head coach, Rich Rodriguez, I'm thinking it will be an uphill battle. Still, I'm hoping for a win. Go Blue!

Happy 2008! I hope 2007 was a good year for you, and that the new year will be even better!

In this week's installment of "Why the Hell Didn't I Move Somewhere Warm, Again?!," it seems that our friends in the National Weather Service have issued a nice "Winter Storm Warning," which they cheerfully define as meaning that "significant amounts of snow, sleet, and ice are expected or occurring." Marvelous.

This time, it apparently means that about 5 to 10 inches of snow, and heavy winds, are on the way, just in time for the new year. Amy and I were going to had to a party in Ann Arbor, but might end up chilling closer to home with ol' Dick Clark, or whoever the hell does the TV version these days.

Hope the weather is nicer in your neck of the woods.