D.C. Envy

Washington D.C. was the proud recipient of me and my positive attitude from Thursday of last week to Sunday. I had to go for a couple meetings on Friday, and then my traveling companion and I stuck around that part of the world for the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear. It's really a good thing that I did go to help flesh out the crowd. Barely 250,000 people showed up. I don't want to say that I was key to making the event a success, but I can't think of another way of finishing that sentence. It was one of those weird things where you go to a event and you can only barely see a giant monitor and you're literally about a mile from the stage, but you're still happy that you went. This phenomenal partial view of the monitor was the payoff of standing in one place for six hours next to a group of 7 or 8 freshman-aged wastes of life that must have smoked about 30 joints and 60 cigarettes over the course of the 6 hours. Really, they were just absolutely terrible people, maybe the worst I've ever experienced in my entire life. Here are a couples quotes from one of the guys:

"You don't even know what it takes to be me. I have to spend three hours in the gym everyday."

"I've done every drug in the world. Name a drug and I'll tell you if I've taken it. Yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, yep, so many times I can't even count, yep, yep, cocaine really clears out my system."

The good news is that this guy is a proud member of the U.S. Army.

Aside from the busy rally attendance of Saturday, I had a good amount of time to tool around D.C. between Thursday and Friday evening. I walked the national mall, quickly saw most of the key monuments and buildings, and found myself envying the majesty of Washington D.C. As the center of our nation, it is understandable that it should be an impressive destination. In addition to the traditional biggies, there were several new buildings near the mall, any one of which, if built in Detroit, would be the BIGGEST DEAL OF THE DECADE. I'd even take the Newseum in the D (which opened in D.C. in 2008) and enjoy it thoroughly despite its immense lameness. In addition to this, property values in D.C. and the surrounding suburbs (especially those in Virginia) have benefited immensely from D.C.'s largesse and the fact that if you want to do business with the federal government, you probably have to have a pretty big presence in the D.C. area. I don't fault any particular individual act or person for our country's trillion dollar deficit, but it does bother me a little bit as someone from a depressed big city that every federal tax dollar flows through D.C., and they can do pretty much whatever they want with it to keep the D.C.-area economy rolling along.

What's my point in all this? It has been five years since my last trip to D.C. and I forgot how much I enjoy it, but I do envy the leg up that region has on most other areas in the U.S. including our own. However, when I think about it, not that many areas in our country have clear economic advantages - the Bay Area has incomparable technology talent, D.C. has the feds, Connecticut has GE (which is an advantage unto itself), and a few tourist hot spots like Miami also tend to be a strong draw for businesses. Metro Detroit, while certainly not sexy, is one of these rare places in the U.S. that has a specific and significant business advantage. We have lived and died by the automotive industry (mostly died of late), but having these gigantic manufacturing+technology companies within a pretty small radius for about 100 years has provided a backbone for continued manufacturing and technology development if we just figure out how to harness this power as a state. I'm a pretty jealous guy and clearly very defensive of my home turf, but I just can't use "everywhere else has an unfair advantage over us" as a reasonable excuse for our troubles. We are the ones with an unfair advantage. Can we figure out what to do with it?

No ________, Sherlock

The New York Times is the greatest publication that I never read except for when my attention is directed toward a specific article for a specific purpose. I'm not sure why I don't read it as a standard, but it just hasn't called to me. It may also have something to do with the fact that the publication for years had quite a phenomenal time taking its all-too personal shots at Detroit from the fabulous, urine-soaked and rat-infested mecca of New York, New York. Perhaps if Detroit could smell slightly more urine-like in the vein of NYC, they would feel more kinship with us and like us more. I also don't like that the publication costs a cajillion dollars to have it delivered to your home and half-a-cajillion dollars to have it only delivered as part of the weekend package.

I think it was one of my more trusty go-to publications, Time, that directed me toward this article in The Times. It is about one of my favorite subjects on which to vent, which also happens to be one of the general areas that is most upsetting to me - water. Much of the southwest of the United States, including down in southern California, is fed water from Lake Mead, the lake created through the man-made awesomeness that is the Hoover Dam. Lake Mead is a function of the Colorado River smashing into the Hoover Dam, providing a body of relatively still water that can be channeled to whatever part of the southwest is in need.

Lake Mead is about to cross below a crucial altitude of 1,075 feet, at which point it will become difficult, if not impossible, from an engineering standpoint to funnel the water to its necessary destination. Furthermore, much below this level, there will not be enough water to spin the electric turbines at the Hoover Dam that power much of the southwest. This unfortunate situation is for two reasons:

1) There are too many people using too much water in the southwest
2) ALMOST THE WHOLE SOUTHWEST IS A DESERT.

As I've written about before (I'm too lazy to go back and find the link), I feel strongly that the southwest and all of its Michigan and Midwest-resident sucking attractiveness should not exist. It should not exist because IT IS A DESERT. You should not have golf courses or swimming pools in a desert. You should not have a lawn in a desert. You should not have a water park in the desert. You should not keep houses and workplaces cooled to 72 degrees in the desert. You should not use a Slip-N-Slide in the desert. You should not have misters at every bar in Scottsdale, Arizona because it is too hot to spend time at the bar without misters. You should not transport water hundreds and hundreds of miles from the Colorado River to do any of these things that make the southwest a somewhat bearable place to live.

But, because they do transport water hundreds and hundreds of miles to make the unlivable livable, people flock from all over the northern half of the country to the southwest because they are too weak to handle a little cold for a few months out of the year. Perhaps we could just have hundreds of thousands of heating lamps outside and next to every house and public place just blasting warmth into the air during the winter to approximate the waste of making the cold just a little more manageable. We could run heat elements through the sidewalks of every downtown area just to keep the snow from being too much of a nuisance.

In the event that Lake Mead does drop below the critical point, people in cities like Phoenix and Las Vegas will have to severely curb their water usage, making that beautiful rock lawn (as in a lawn made out of rocks) all the more necessary. Who wouldn't want their kids to play on a lush front yard made of 100% sharp rocks? It'll teach them character. I don't know if it'll be in my lifetime, but the water civil war is coming, people. I just hope that the southwest won't be able to power their electrical weapons and guidance systems because the Hoover Dam doesn't have enough water to generate electricity. Irony will be our victory.

Been Too Long

Shamefully, it's been 5 whole days since the last time that I wrote anything, and that was four days after the thing I wrote before that, and the thing from 5 days ago wasn't even a complete thought beyond "oh man it has been awhile." The last week has been pretty filled as we tried to get our house together for a couple of weekend events, but I also realized during this time the true holdup in me pumping out material in the manner to which you have been accustomed.

In my last job, I often worked from home with a pretty flexible work schedule, so in the middle of the day I would read a headline or see a news story, have a reaction, and then share that reaction with the blog. The reaction was fresh and because there was no delay between information reception and dissemination, I did not have the opportunity to realize that issue was not as important as I perceived or that my opinion about that issue was not half as funny as I thought. Now with a bit more of a normal schedule, I don't exactly have the time to intersect the regular working day with a brief respite because I thought it was funny that the guy from the new Al-Qaida video looks as non-threatening as a terrorist could possibly look (by the way, did you notice that he is so weak in appearance that they had to add a rifle to the background of his video? Like the Al-Qaida guys were like "oh shit, this guy needs props. Look at him. No one can take this seriously unless we add a gun.")

Because I no longer have the opportunity for immediate feedback, I've taken to emailing myself links and thoughts so that I can get back to them at the end of the day. The tough thing when I get back to these emails after the work day is that my reaction has faded and has instead been replaced by the evening's viewing of Detroit 1-8-7. I hope the show makes it at least one whole season. The show is good not great, but for some reason I am really enjoying seeing shots of the good and the bad parts of Detroit on television. Whoa there's the Greektown Casino! Hey I've driven under that street sign before! That's the place that the one bird pooped on me when I was walking out of that meeting! Everything great about the city is perfectly captured in those three exclamatory sentences. My friend told me he wasn't paying attention in downtown Royal Oak and he almost hit Michael Imperioli with his car. They could then do a "ripped from the headlines" show where the character Imperioli plays is hit by a car in downtown Royal Oak and then I can tell them who did it - it was Joe. You did it Joe.

Despite this new blogging difficulty and my (temporarily) reduced output, my love of Michigan and the metro Detroit area is stronger than ever. It's a little bit ironic because my work time in Detroit reduces my ability to evangelize, but this same work time is strengthening my resolve to do my part to get Michigan back on its feet. That may be a stupid thing to say (it is) for someone with a readership of two, but the battle for our state PR is a war of attrition and everyone can do something about it.

Please don't kill me, Al-Qaida. I just think it's a good idea to have a sense of humor about yourself and your spokespeople.

Nesting

Good morning - house and baby preparations have kept me fairly occupied over the past several days, so I regret that I have not had a great chance to even open up my laptop at home to do some writing. If I wasn't tired from all the things going on at home right now, I might even be upset about my poor showing. Yet again, I implore you to stick with me good people. As always, I will return with as many Days of Our Lives references as you can handle. For the next tiny bit though, hopefully you can find happiness in knowing that I was getting wrinkles out of curtains for about 6 or 7 hours on Sunday afternoon. Thank heaven that ironing boards are portable and can be moved directly in front of the television, or my head likely would have exploded.

I Agree with Your Agreement

Before I start to talk about the main subject for the day, let me first congratulate my 2010 kickball team. We ended the year with a record of 4-4, but we were able to get to that record because we went 4-1 in our last five games. As with every year, despite my absolute certainty at the beginning of the season that there is no way that we are going to win any games, we always end up doing pretty decently for a group of people with minimal soccer backgrounds. We also do not play kickball more than one season of the year (you'd be surprised at the number of teams that play something approaching year-round), so we always start with a pretty significant disadvantage. Our game last night was particularly exciting because we were losing 2-1 in the bottom of the seventh, and we somehow scored 2 runs and won the game with a walk-off bunt. A Walk-off Bunt!! Man that was some exciting kickball. I'm sure at this point you regret that you were unable to attend our last game of the season as a fan, but you can probably catch us kicking ass 50% of the time next season. After the game, we continued our 2nd year tradition of celebrating the season with a party barge from Rosie O'Grady's in Ferndale. That party barge is hilarious. In one bite, you get peanut butter cup ice cream, strawberry ice cream, whip cream, chocolate covered peanuts, and pineapple. The mere fact that these items go terribly together makes the barge that much better. It is a truly exciting dessert.

Before I move on, what is the deal with the look of the one detective from Law & Order: Los Angeles? It seems too easy to go the route of comparing him to a sexually liberated 70s porn star, but holy cow does he look like a sexually liberated 70s porn star. He's bald, has a thick almost entirely linear mustache, and defines the prototype of a bear. My description can't do him justice. Here is a picture. If this is what cops look like in LA, then I understand how this city is the porn center of the U.S.

Now on to the real deal - the Pure Michigan tourism advertising campaign. There has been a lot of press about the campaign over the last month. The biggest issue is that because of Michigan's reduced tax receipts from our economic pain, the fall and winter advertisements (starring Buzz Lightyear!) were being diminished down to zero budget and thus killed. Because of this seasonal elimination, there was quite a bit of speculation that the 6th best tourism campaign in the world of all time would be completely canceled, thus pissing off everyone in Michigan with a brain cell. This would not be cool.

Yesterday, The Free Press was reporting at around 2 o'clock that Jennifer Granholm would be making an announcement about the Pure Michigan campaign at 3:30, and that I, the reader, should stay tuned for additional breaking news. This was exciting potential news as it would seem pointless for Jennifer Granholm to make an official announcement about the end of the campaign. Only good things could be in store for Buzz Lightyear.

This is why I am completely befuddled that her announcement was that she is officially calling for funding to restore Pure Michigan. That is boring. That is as boring as you reading my thoughts about my kickball season and eating a trough of ice cream. This is so boring, I would prefer to watch an episode of Two and a Half Men. For God's sake, Two and a Half Men.

Homer Simpson: "I've seen plays that were more exciting than this! Honest to god, PLAYS"

Is this a failure of The Free Press reporting or Jennifer Granholm? Mostly I don't care. Don't cancel Pure Michigan, but more importantly, don't hype an announcement that does not amount to a cat fart. Stop the presses! I may or may not eat a second piece of pizza for dinner even though I was pretty sure that I was only going to eat one.

Working for the (Awesome) Weekend

I can't remember the last time I was so excited for a weekend. Awesome things going on in life this weekend:

1) Steve is back in town

2) We received our new entryway tables, dining room table, and chairs today. We're also getting our sprinkler system fixed right now for next summer and we started the process of getting crown molding today.

2) We're going to see Louis C.K. at the Detroit Opera House tonight. About a year ago, I caught up with what much of the world realized 15-20 years ago when they identified that Louis C.K. is hilarious. You can't exactly blame me for being behind the times because 20 years ago I would have been 8 and my parents would have been absolutely terrible parents if they let me listen to his comedy.

3) Football game tailgating tomorrow morning and early afternoon. I enjoy tailgating quite a bit, but I find a like it less than most dudes. The reason, I think, is that I am fearful of awkward silence, and it is hard for me to make conversation with people for 6+ hours. Real tailgaters are out there for at least that long, so I parachute in, make a couple of jokes, eat someone else's sausage, and hit the road. If they're lucky, I will also drink their drinks, eat their brownies, and play whatever game they have that consists of throwing something at something else. There are a million variants of the game of throwing something at something else, and if there is one thing I love, it's throwing something and something else.

4) Football game!!!! UM vs. MSU with me leaning heavily toward the good folks from the University of Michigan. This is the first college football game I've been genuinely excited about in some time while Michigan has struggled through the dark times. I will be upset if Michigan does not conquer, but either way, Michigan wins, and that is good by me.

5) If I'm doing nothing after the football game, I have a massive queue of TV shows to watch. All of them fantastic! Thursday night TV alone is simultaneously ruining and enhancing my life. What a great, great night of television waiting for me on TiVo. 30 Rock, The Office, Community, Fringe, Bones, and It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. Just thinking about it is stimulating me a little bit.

6) Sunday family get together to celebrate Steve being in town.

7) The weather is going to be BEAUTIFUL. I can exercise outside, breathe in the crisp fall air, do some yard work, and anything else to fill my time that isn't already filled.

8) The colors in southeast Michigan are peak fall colors.

Life is great. This is one of those times where I feel compelled to say if you're feeling down, give me a shout. Time is undoubtedly best spent with others.

Neighborhood Violence

Detroit is often cited fondly as "the murder capital of the world". On It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia this year, Mac was wearing a shirt with the word "Detroit" spelled to look like a pistol. It was a pretty cool shirt, but the message is pretty clear. People far and wide talk about entering the city limits as a death-defying feat that should only be attempted absolutely never. Of all the perceived negativity around the city, fear of violence probably stands near the top of the heap, particularly for those who might even consider moving into the city. Even for people who have an affinity for that rundown metropolis on the banks of the Detroit River, there is a subliminal and constant fear of something bad happening. Someone might rob you or beat you up or Lafayette Coney Island may run out of hot dogs - all equally terrible outcomes.

For these reasons and more, I was not looking forward to looking through the list of the 25 Most Dangerous Neighborhoods in the U.S. for 2010. My basic underlying assumption was that neighborhoods in Detroit and thereabouts would populate the entirety of the top 10 and then probably a few more in the 15-25 range. I looked through the complete list, and when I finished looking through the list, I had to read the description of what was going on to make sure that I didn't miss something of key importance. You see, no where in the top 25 did a neighborhood from Detroit (or anywhere else in Michigan for that matter) fall. Detroit, "the murder capital of the world", does not have a single neighborhood in the top 25 most dangerous list. That is amazing. When I didn't see anywhere from Michigan on the list, I re-read to try to see if they called out "of course, this list intentionally excludes Michigan because Michigan has the top 10 most dangerous neighborhoods and we just wanted to be more diverse than that." As I did not see that or anything resembling that in the description, I take this list as pretty good news. The article explains "that even the cities with the highest crime rates can have relatively safe neighborhoods, and thus it is less useful to generalize about an entire city."

Something like this won't actually cause people to stop generalizing about the entire city, but it is good fodder to counter enemies of Detroit. The only thing better than arming yourself with armaments is information - neither of which you'll need in Detroit's neighborhoods.

Kid

Maureen and I are now at less than two months, if timing goes as is estimated, to having our first child. Like television tells me most first time parents feel, I am both excited and scared at the prospect of being a parent. There was never a question that at some point we wanted to be parents, but the impending reality is miles different from the concept. We've done the classes and Maureen has performed her baby product research and we have removed most of the barbed wire from the soon-to-be nursery, but none of these things actually prepare you for caring for a human life form.

My biggest concern about me and being a parent is that, as I've written about before, I'm extremely selfish. I have spent 28 years cultivating a life that wonderfully serves me and all of my shallow needs. I exercise for as long as I want on any given day, I can stay late at work as necessary, and any time I don't want to spend with family or friends I can spend blogging or watching way too much television. On top of these things, ice cream is a regular meal and I can play Howard Stern on the radio in the house whenever I want - things not conducive to actually being a parent.

So while my excitement about being a loving parent has consistently grown over the period of Maureen's pregnancy, I have had a nagging fear that my selfishness would prevent me from being the kind of selfless dad that my son and wife will need. I know in my heart that this will not be the case and I will be able to happily adjust as necessary to be what everyone wants and needs me to be, but without actually having raised a child, it is not entirely clear what would cause this positive change in personality and corresponding reduction in self-absorption. My mom and others have been quite valuable in trying to explain the process of falling in love with a baby after it is born and that often, for many people, this is not an instantaneous event - it can be a process of learning to love your baby and the changes this child creates in your life.

The reason I mention all this is because as the day of birth grows closer, this subject makes me increasingly emotional. A few days ago, I read a great column by humorous columnist Joel Stein in Time about how he wants a second child, but his wife is not currently in the mood for #2. There are a few things in particular in this article that I found to be especially beautiful and touched me because they directly relate to the process of loving and appreciating your child. I just wanted to call a little attention to these (because Time does not have a broad enough reach. They really do require my broader audience) for any moms or dads to be or people who may be seriously considering parenting. They're not new or groundbreaking concepts, but I like to think that Joel Stein has a similar level of sarcasm and a relate-able worldview to my own. I guess you don't need to be groundbreaking to be touching.

"Still, Laszlo, despite his inability to cure even simple, nonmetastasizing diseases, makes me so happy and interested in life that I want to watch it all happen again, and I want to see him interact with another child I love."

"In fact, before we were married, I was sure I never wanted children. Having Laszlo has made me feel closer to Cassandra than ever — as if we're alone exploring a beautiful continent that happens to be filled with human excrement. I love when he makes the curious raised-eyes face she makes, and I've cried watching her sneak into his room at night to straighten his pajamas while he's asleep."

A Forward that Didn't Suck

As a general rule, I hate forwarded email. I'm not even talking about just forwarded jokes, videos, pictures, links, and other miscellaneous crap that makes my inbox a more annoying place to hang out. I also hate useful forwards like conversations, valuable links, and invites. Mostly, I dislike how I have to figure out where the email originated from down the chain, how the email progressed from there, and why/how at some point that wasn't initiation of the email I was brought into the stupid loop. Forwards are an unavoidable piece of information gathering and the business world, but I don't anticipate ever being much of a fan. However, my friend/co-worker Brian sent me a forwarded link today that was quite interesting and touched on many of the things I've been feeling for the past few years. Actually, looking back at the email, it wasn't even a forward. It was an email sent directly to me with the link included in it, so you can really ignore the title of this post that I don't want to go back and re-write and every word in the paragraph prior to this one. As it turns out, forwards still suck.

So now on to the non-forwarded link. Here it is:

San Francisco Business Times

This is a great article that indirectly addresses the new professional direction of my life, and as such, it really is something on which you, the world's most bored office workers and therefore readers of mine and therefore Michigan and scifi television lovers, should be intricately versed. This is of the more valuable category of articles about Michigan because it does not originate from within our biased borders.

Did I mention I got pooped on today? A bird pooped right on my suit coat jacket while I was walking the streets of downtown after a meeting. The poop deflected off my suit and also landed on Brian's suit coat - the second time that he has been pooped on while walking around downtown with me.

Back to the article - it starts with these words that really hit the key message:

If California wants to get its innovation game back, says venture capitalist Tom Baruch, it should look at Michigan.

That wasn't a misprint — much-maligned, Rust Belt-tagged Michigan.

While Michigan's traditional industries and job-generating companies have faltered and somewhat failed over the last several years, many locals actually saw this coming and start to build the infrastructure of the future of Michigan jobs. Believe it or not, Michigan has actually done some things better than the vaunted land of Google and Stanford to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship. In the article, they reference some of the many good things going on right here at home like tax breaks for small businesses, transforming the automobile industry, SmartZones (mentors, funding, lab space), and ongoing economic diversification.

I can feel it. You can feel it. Underneath the tough economic times, the flailing auto industry, the high unemployment, and my kickball team only being .500, something is happening. It has been happening for a long time, slowly, painfully, but it is moving forward, and other people are finally starting to notice. Hell yeah.

While Rome burned, not everyone fiddled. Instead, they used their fiddles to build the most fiddle-ing-est fiddle orchestra hall at which they could fiddle once all the other fiddlers were forced to stop fiddling because they died while Rome was burning. Fiddles!

TV Time

Fall TV season! This is the third new fall TV season during the lifespan of my blog, and the first with a major network television show that included the word 'Detroit' in the title. My personal happy place is Fall TV season. All the shows I know and love are tying up loose ends from last season, rebooting from a bad year of writing, or just bringing additional joy and happiness into my life through continued excellence. On top of this, all the hard work, expectations, and excitement of the new series starts to either pay off or crash and burn in the matter of mere weeks. It is actually tough for me to overstate how sincerely and deeply I appreciate fall TV.

This year, two brand spanking new shows are highly featuring parts and pieces of Michigan. The first and more obvious, is the show that debuted last night and I'm finishing up as I type: "Detroit 1-8-7". I feel the dashes between the numbers are unnecessary and they make it a little bit more annoying to type. Maybe if they used stars of little hearts between the numbers that would be cool. 1*8*7 or Detroit 1 <3 8 <3 7. The show is pretty decent, and I really do get a kick out of seeing different cinematic shots of the city where they actually want the shots to reflect the city of Detroit instead of some other metropolis. I know that a good portion of the pilot was shot in Atlanta (the only thing that upsets me about that is that I would like our blight on television to be OUR blight, not Atlanta's. Give us the blight respect we deserve). At this point I have no specific commentary on the show except to say that it definitely doesn't suck - I'm just not sure if it's awesome or something that I'll just watch because I love Detroit.

The second major connection to Michigan on TV this season is the lead actor on a Fox series called "Lonestar". This show premiered on Monday and it didn't do great in the ratings, but it is getting pretty rave reviews across the board. I must have been drunk or something when I saw early commercials about the show, because I could have sworn it was about some sort of law person in Texas (which interested me very little), and it turns out that I had no idea what I was thinking about. It's actually about a conman leading at least a couple different lives. The lead guy in the show is named James Wolk and he is from Farmington Hills. Maureen and I also watched that show and we definitely enjoyed the pilot. Mr. Wolk impressed me rather soundly with his acting chops. He had a way of emoting without being annoying. He could do subtle, he could do direct, and he could do everything in between (by the way, I heard a speech today where someone said "from the poor house to the crack house and everywhere in between." I immediately thought "what is between a poor house and a crack house?" I simply cannot imagine that type of establishment). I fear for the life of "Lonestar" because despite its strong reviews, its ratings were pretty low. Fox sometimes gives shows they believe in a chance to pull through initial low ratings so all hope is not yet lost. That's all part of the fun of Fall TV Season.

My heaven.

Lists and Links

Thanks again to Alex for keeping a close eye on all the great lists of the world, Michigan has been again appropriately represented in some form or another on many of the recent "best place to..." or "smelliest township that..." or "top incorporated city you ate..." etc. Starting at the end of life and working our way back:

Fortune magazine has again placed Ann Arbor as the 11th best place in the United States at which to retire. The description of the selection starts like this:

"Retire to... Michigan? Ann Arbor's lack of year-round balmy temperatures may be a deal breaker for some retirees, but those who relish four seasons could do worse than to settle in this bustling college town about 40 miles west of Detroit."

First, yes, retire to Michigan. Yet again, why would a positive ranking have to start with a broader implied negative about the state. Unnecessary and kind of stupid. Second, retirees - grow some balls. In fact, everyone grow some balls. It is not summer year-round, but that is one of the greatest things about the state. Most winter days are very manageable and for the really, really cold days, put on some long underwear, get under a blanket, cozy up to a loved one or one of those hot packs you can put in the microwave, and enjoy the sensation. Finally, again to insult the writer, why would you rate a place at #11 if the retiree "could do worse" than Ann Arbor? Yes, you can do worse according to you, writer person, if you were to retire to any of the rest of the 19,418 municipalities in the U.S (yup, I looked it up).

Next, additional big ups to Ann Arbor for making Yahoo's 10 Great Cities for Raising Families list. I tried to raise a family of chipmunks while I attended school there, and that didn't work out very well for me or the chipmunks, but I'm sure that it is far easier to raise a family of humans than chipmunks.

Finally, for a little Michigan respect outside of Ann Arbor, Birmingham was selected for Yahoo's list of Coolest Suburbs Worth a Visit. I can't say that I love Birmingham and in my opinion there are way better Detroit-area suburbs to visit, but I also won't turn down national Michigan love. Man in high school I spent so much time on the corners of Birmingham trying to figure out WHAT THE HELL TO DO THERE. Should we go to Caribou? How about the Birmingham 8? Now to Starbucks. What about the park? Library is closed. Back to Caribou. You know what I'm talking about high school friends. The video I've posted below is directed at Royal Oak where I was raised and I think this video pertains infinitely more to Birmingham than Royal Oak. Even if it is misdirected, it's still a little funny and worth a brief viewing:

Michigan Jewish

As I quickly made my way into work this morning, I was struck by how much less traffic there was today than the last few weeks. When I posed the question to my co-workers as to why this may be the case, one of them suggested that it is because today and tomorrow are Yom Kippur. Because I have no idea when Yom Kippur falls, I looked it up online and found out that Yom Kippur falls on the Hebrew calendar date of 10 Tishrei. The same website also told me that is the equivalent of the 17th and 18th of September, so Happy 10 Tishrei to everyone. I am not Jewish.

So it turns out that today and tomorrow are, in fact, Yom Kippur. However, if the reason the traffic was so much lighter today is because of this holiday, I have severely underestimated the number of Jewish people in Michigan (or at least those who are traveling east on I-96 from I-275). Like way, way underestimated. Based on the reduced traffic flow, I would improperly estimate that 50% of drivers on the road on any given morning are Jewish. If true (highly unlikely), that is absolutely amazing.

From this, it is clear that I have certainly not been properly serving Michigan's Jewish population. At least half of my religious based articles (in the past 3+ years rounding out to a total of zero religious based articles) should be Jewish-centric.

Happy (?!) Yom Kippur my Jewish friends. Whether or not Jesus resurrected and is the son of God, I think you are pretty great.

You Can Always Go, Downtown

I've successfully completed two weeks in my new professional career. "Success" is a very ambiguous term, but I feel comfortable declaring a successful two weeks because I have not yet been dismissed from the role and zero people have threatened to beat me up. Every day that no one wants to beat me up (or at least makes this threat to my face) is a victory.

First, I'd like to thank everyone who has wished me luck and encouraging words on my new endeavor. Changing jobs isn't necessarily an easy thing to do, especially when you like what you did do, and encouragement is very...encouraging. That makes sense.

Second, my usual apologies for the reduced writing over the last couple of weeks. There was a time many years ago when I envisioned a time where enough people were readers that if I took a break, be it for vacation, laziness, or a terrible case of diarrhea, hearts would break across the state and possibly even the greater Midwest. Now that I'm slightly (I said slightly!) less of a moron, it is abundantly clear that, if anything, the world is a happier, funnier, and more Michigan-appreciating place when I am on break. Based on this, you may just be lucky enough that I more regularly contract terrible, terrible cases of diarrhea. How lucky that would be for both of us.

Third and finally getting to the point, let me just say how awesome it is to work in downtown Detroit. Really, no fooling, working downtown is the greatest surprise of the new work. It was something that I was originally looking forward to, but it is even better than I anticipated (you are not allowed to hold this against me when I have to make the painful commute from Northville to downtown Detroit in the middle of winter as opposed to the zero minute commute of working from home and I complain about it as I most certainly will do). Our offices are in the 34th floor of the Guardian Building (pictured above), which is just a few blocks from the RenCen and Cobo. From the window I can look out from my seat, I can view the Ambassador Bridge, the Detroit River, Joe Louis, and Cobo. From our conference room, I can see Campus Martius, Ford Field, home plate at Comerica, and pretty much all of metro Detroit out to the Silverdome. It is beautiful gazing across the land I love. On top of the great outside views, I was shocked the first time I walked into the Guardian Building and it looked like this. What a great building.

So all this is great. However, there are many other things about working downtown that I never really appreciated until I was based there. I've spent quite a bit of time visiting clients downtown in my past life, but it just isn't the same. There is an energy about working in the heart of our state's biggest city that adds some real excitement to the day. It's also kind of amazing who you can run into by constantly being downtown. A few days ago I had a catch up lunch with a friend from high school who is in a building right near mine, and he introduced me to the city deputy ombudsman who was having lunch where we were. That was random, but something that certainly would not have happened in my underpants on the couch in my home - or if that did happen then something seriously wrong happened in my life or that guy's life.

Detroit is not respected as a place to live or work by people both in and out of the state, and it isn't the nicest downtown out there, but I love it. My dad has worked downtown his entire career and he has always talked about how much he likes working there, and I couldn't fully understand it without having a similar experience under my belt. I've only been at it for two weeks, and I'm anxious to experience more. That might be asking for trouble, but that's all part of the experience.

Because it's Friday

It's been a little while since I last wrote about my genius nephew, so when I received this link from my sister, Gail, I was certain that now is the right time to return Louis to the blog. Watch him here as he works his way through a variation of the ABCs (thanks to daycare, according to my sister). I asked a couple people at work if this was objectively cute or only cute to me because I'm related to him, and they assured me that it is both objectively cute and funny, so I feel justified including it here. If I don't get angry enough to write before or during the weekend, have a great couple days!

F*@K Rahm Emanuel

I just want Rahm to feel the sting of turnabout when he will undoubtedly stumble upon my blog when he performs his nightly self-Google check. The biggest national Michigan-related news of the last week are the early excerpts from the forthcoming book from Steven Rattner, former head of the automotive task force. That's the group of random individuals appointed by President Obama who decided to not kill the state of Michigan by bailing out Chrysler and GM (thanks again, guys, you're the best!). The excerpts and early stories from the book tell a harrowing story of how close those who call Michigan home or otherwise have some employment relationship with GM or Chrysler were to having a lot more time on their hands to read this fine blog. It is pretty amazing stuff and a great majority was effectively hidden from public awareness. For example, if it were not for the automotive task force, GM would have entirely moved out of the RenCen and into the Warren Tech Center, effectively tearing the metaphorical head off the wobbling body of the (also metaphorical) body of the great city of Detroit. In my opinion, this would have been an instant death knell - like a fatality from Mortal Kombat (specifically, Scorpion's Spear Shot). Other points of interest include the allegedly true story that Chrysler wanted the Treasury Department to force GM to purchase Chrysler (as opposed to the public image that GM was voluntarily considering acquiring that company).

It's kind of weird, from an outsider's perspective, how informally the automotive task force seems to have addressed some of the biggest issues to face Michigan in the last 50 years. For example, they decided whether or not to bailout the companies through a hand raise vote. I'm not sure exactly what method would have been better because a vote is a vote, but at least they could have broken out the paper and pencils. That just seems so much more official. Relating this back to the well-known firebrand Rahm Emanuel:

"By the time the auto team met with White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel in the West Wing, they doubted whether Chrysler should be allowed to continue to survive as an independent entity. Emanuel was characteristically blunt: "Why even save GM?" he asked, according to Rattner. Reminded of tens of thousands of autoworkers whose jobs were at stake, he barked out 'Fuck the UAW.'"

This might not be the best thing for the chief of staff of a pro-union president to have forever on the record. I'm not talking about whether or not I support the UAW, but this bull and dick-headed response is especially insulting when considering the flippancy with which he clearly disregards the union employees of the Michigan auto manufacturers and the state as a whole. I don't really care what happens with Rahm Emanuel, but the next time I see him, I will certainly let him know that I am entirely displeased, and that if I ever have the choice to destroy his personal wealth and career, I will certainly take that option.

My last thought on the Rattner Memoirs is this - shut up Steven Rattner. I really do appreciate the challenges you must have gone through and the support you eventually threw our way, but I can't imagine what benefit you imagine this upcoming book is going to serve aside from your personal wealth - and you're already super rich. It could be that you think the American public deserves to know some of the details as we are collectively on the hook for $80B in bailout dollars, and I don't disagree with this, but it damages the public perception of the government's ability to intelligently make big decisions without high school style bickering. I think the public would have enough information if the task force came out with a unified message about the whole process - something in the vein of "many options were on the table (include a few options here) and there were pros and cons to every option (include some pros and cons here), but in the end, we could not allow the failure of GM and Chrysler and the loss of tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs. That's the tough decision we made and this decision is in the past." End of story.

And it would be the end of the story, except for now I have a personal tie to the widely reported douchiness of Rahm Emanuel. I don't swear very often in my blog, but at this point I do feel comfortable saying this right here - Fuck you Rahm Emanuel.

The Only Reason to Hate Idaho

Last night past my new bedtime with the new work schedule, Maureen and I watched Boise State defeat Virginia Tech on yet another end-of-game drive and then Virginia Tech unable to respond with a field goal or touchdown of their own.

First, it's great to have college football back. I'm not one of those crazy football people who knows the jersey numbers and hometowns of ever single slightly significant player in Division 1. It's just not worth the mental energy to me. Welcome back, collegiate and professional football sport. However, there is one thing that happens every year that makes the second half of the college football season nearly unbearable; specifically, the terrible crapiness of idiots going on and on about whether or not college football should do away with the BCS system. It's an imperfect system with its set of annoyances, but these annoyances do not pale in comparison to the annoyances of people debating its validity. The number one reason for people to complain? GD BOISE STATE. I hate you Boise State.

Let's start with the easiest reason to hate them - their blue football field. That blue football field is offensive even to the Smurfs. It's one of those things where they were probably like "hey, let's be quirky" but they accidentally mistook insanely annoying for quirky. That football field sucks almost as much as the football team. Why does the football team suck? Every year Boise State nears the end of the season with an undefeated record, not because they are the best team out there, but because they generally play terrible teams and even against those teams, they have to win with trick plays. Trick plays are fun, but I believe a legitimate team can/should consistently win without having to regularly resort to them. No team relies on trick plays for success more than Boise State. So anyway, because they are undefeated, journalists starts to opine that Boise State may deserve a place in the BCS title game. Every year.

With about 4 minutes left in the game last night, I guaranteed Maureen that even though they were losing, Boise State was going to pull off the victory for another year of BCS debate, mostly because God hates me. Wouldn't you know it - they won (though I must admit without the use of a trick play, however there was a very questionable personal foul call in their favor on the final drive. Everything always works out in their favor). I hate them so much.

I just can't stand the BCS talk with Boise State as the prime reference for another year. For the whole season, I am going to pray that Boise State loses so that we don't have to hear about the subject anymore. If they feel so disrespected, JOIN A LEGITIMATE CONFERENCE. Do you know how easy it is to join a legitimate conference? No? That's too bad, I was hoping you would because I have no idea. Remember when a few years ago several people thought that Hawaii should play for the national championship, but then when they played against a legitimate team in Georgia, they got crushed hard? That made me so happy. I wish the same for BSU. Lose you blue losers. I hate you.

Big Changes

The past year has been undoubtedly the most dynamic year of my existence. It's not that anything has been different from what most people experience during the course of life, just that everything has probably been a little more compact than typical. The last year has had all the major milestones - our wedding, a first (rented) condo, our first couch, our first two self-financed vehicles, our first house and major house renovation, moving family members, our first incoming baby, and a bunch of new furniture to fill up the home. It's been quite a shock to the system for a person who loved the mundane consistency of being alive. Not to sound too boring, but routine makes me happy.

To this list, I'd like to use this relevant space to announce one more major life change - a new job for me. This was a very difficult step to take voluntarily because I absolutely love what I did, the people I worked with, and the flexibility this work afforded me. On top of this, my job was exactly what I studied in school, and I had the opportunity to work from home with some frequency (especially brilliant when the snow was pounding down and my commute was a walk to the kitchen table). Why, then, would I ever consider leaving this position?

It is finally time to, almost literally, put my money where my mouth is. I've been talking about Michigan and supporting Michigan for so many years, and acting as a cheerleader to out-of-towners and negative in-towners, that after awhile, the thoughts and then words started to feel numb in my mouth. It can be tiring to espouse the virtues of one place constantly to people, and then it became a running joke with some people that I was a walking, talking, relentless billboard for the state - kind of like a Pure Michigan Tim Allen without anyone knowing or caring that I exist.

With great excitement and a fair amount of anxiety, I am happy to announce that my next professional step is directly aligned with the state of Michigan. A few months ago, a friend and professional acquaintance approached me to see if I had interest in directing a start up non-profit organization based in downtown Detroit. This organization is charged with creating a critical and necessary backbone for the state to promote entrepreneurship and small business development throughout the state of Michigan. Our primary goal is to intelligently and systematically match entrepreneurs and innovators with the tens of thousands of resources intended to support entrepreneurs available throughout the state. There is a little more to the work than this, but that's not a bad one-sentence description.

Thanks to the hard work by many people that aren't me (because yesterday was my first official day on the job), the (federal) Department of Commerce actually announced a formal partnership with my organization yesterday. That is quite exciting - now it is largely up to me to make sure that I don't screw it up.

This is an opportunity and a somewhat corny chance for me to actually make a difference - beyond the many dumb, irrelevant things that I try to write about regularly. For these reasons, the only right choice for me was to leave the work I love to actually work toward strengthening a state that I love. It wasn't necessarily an easy change, but it's one that I'm happy to have made.

The Least Controversy

The Catholic Church has suffered its fair share of controversy over the past life of its existence (and particularly the last 10 years), and I don't mean to take away from those involved in these difficult issues, but there is one additional Catholic church controversy that everyone who attends a mass is confronted with in every mass: Should you sit down or stand as you wait to take communion? Everyone knows that after you take communion you kneel and either pray or pretend to pray because at that moment you are said to be as close to God as you can be (since you are eating his Son), but there is more confusion in the church before receiving communion than you can shake a confusion-finding stick at.

The reason this comes to mind is because this past weekend, my sister-in-law had her Catholic church wedding to another family friend on Friday evening. The ceremony and reception both went great and everything went smoothly up until the moment that the priests took their chalices and made their way to the front of the church.

For as long as I have been attending mass, the same awkward process has played out in churches ranging all the way from Birmingham to Ann Arbor to Royal Oak. It's probably going on outside of this church triangle but I can't say definitively. Here's how it goes.

First, the people in the front pews start to shuffle into the center aisle. At that moment, everyone behind the fifth row starts to look around the church in search of helpful signals. The fifth row is key because the people in that row and forward know that very soon, they will be making their way up for the wafer so they don't necessarily have to choose between sitting and standing. No one wants to make eye contact as they look around for the sit vs. stand signal because that would indicate that they are unsure whether or not they are supposed to sit or stand. As soon as people start to look around, everyone feels a little bit guilty because even though they have likely been attending mass for years and years, they're still not sure if they're supposed to be sitting or standing. It is also at this moment that an even broader guilt settles in as the confused individuals realize and accept for another week that not only do they not know when to sit or stand throughout the entire ceremony (without explicit cues), but they often don't know the exact correct verbal responses at the end of readings.

"Praise to you Lord, Jesus Christ." or "Thanks be to God." or "Lord, I am not worthy to receive you, but only say the word and I shall be healed." and don't even get be started on the whole Nicene Creed. That thing is absolutely ridiculous. I love the people who know it and shout it out proud to demonstrate their excellent levels of Catholicism.

After this awkwardness, the people in the very back of the church realize that they're pretty sure they're supposed to be sitting, that they'll have to wait the longest to get to the front, and so they take their seats. After this, the remainder of the back third identifies that some people have led the way and are already sitting, and the whole back third flings themselves down to the pews. By this time, the front third of the church has already been served their Lord, the middle third sees that the back third is seated, and they're torn because it's almost their turns to eat. Because of this confusion, some of them sit, some of them stand, and some kind of do the squat sit to hedge their bets. You don't want to choose the wrong option lest God get angry and banish you to Hell for improper sitting approaches.

I contend that God is OK with you sitting during the entire communion process, even after you've ingested the host. It's the Greater Power's award to the congregation for both showing up to praise and making it all the way through communion. Don't even get me stared on everyone who leaves right after Communion. For those people, it doesn't matter if you sit or stand because God is keeping score and you don't get a point for the Mass at all if you leave right after Communion. And, as with most things, he who has the highest score wins.

Who disagrees?

Up That Guys'

Remember the good old days where I had the pride in my work to come up with a good title? Man those were heady times during which I had the time and inclination to wow you with my cleverness. Time is just a little bit more limited these days, but one thing that is completely independent of available time is my willingness and ability to get super pissed with someone.

Over the past few days in the sports world, there has been a pretty interesting story evolving on the Detroit sports scene. I've tried not to comment on it because it is pretty saturated in the media and from everything I was hearing, it was difficult to formulate a clear opinion on it. In basic terms, Tigers' player Johnny Damon was requested by the Boston Red Sox (his former team) to return to them to assist that team with their run toward the playoffs Because of some stipulations in his contract, Damon had the option of going to the Red Sox or staying a Tiger, and after much consideration, he decided to stay with our hometown good guys. There are many possible reasons for this decision - Damon himself claimed that "I definitely thought long and hard about it, and the bottom line was my happiness here and the guys here telling me this is a good place for me." Others have suggested that his decision was entirely based on the likelihood that he would get a better contract next year if he stayed with the Tigers instead of moving back to Beantown. He also had a difficult relationship with the Boston fans after he decided to leave their team for the hated Yankees. It's not possible to say with 100% certainty the true reason for his decision, but I would like to take at partial face value that he genuinely enjoys playing for the Tigers organization, the Tigers' fans, and living in Michigan. I'm happy whenever someone publicly speaks positively about the Detroit area, so maybe I'm fooled by the right words.

That's the background to the story. The foreground to the story is that giant poophead columnist from The Boston Globe Dan Shaughnessy took this opportunity to take a dig at Detroit, and that is the kind of shitty thing a giant poophead would do (because his head is made out of poop). He wrote "Think about it: For the next five weeks, you could live in downtown Boston and your wife could shop on Newbury Street. Or you could live in downtown Detroit, amid the boarded-up buildings and the proverbial skeleton frames of burned-out Chevrolets. Is this really a tough call?" What the hell, dude? Do you know shit about this place that you are insulting on a national level? Do you feel jilted that Michigan was chosen over Massachusetts?

The biggest problem I typically have with many people from the coasts in particular, and I've written about this before, is their absolute certain belief that they are simply better than you - if not for any other reason than they live in Boston, or New York, or L.A., or Seattle. These are all great cities with many positives, but is it so impossible to believe that many people who don't live there are actually making a choice not to live there? That's how it is for me and many of my friends. Maybe we couldn't stand the thought of being close to more people like you. It's impossible to ignore that there are many legitimate reasons to take a dig at Detroit, but it is really crappy that this dude chose to make someone saying positive things about the area one of these reasons. That is hurtfully unwarranted. He must have known exactly what he was doing though - he's from Boston!

In response to this, for his part, Johnny Damon was pretty awesome. He said "Detroit gets a bad rap. I love it here, my family loves it here, a bunch of the players who have been here a while love it here, the new guys love it here. There's a lot to offer here." He's only been here a few months, and already knows what so many of us know.

As the story continued to spread, Matthew Stafford responded to this story with the following: "Oh, yeah. I am going to be here and I want to be here for a long time. I am from the south but this is a place that I've started to adopt. I've had a great experience with the fans and all the people." These are professionals who know what to say to get the fans behind them, but just maybe there is some truth to their sentiment.

From all this, what it really comes down to is: Up Yours Dan Shaughnessy.

Milestone 1

I did not forget and we celebrated appropriately, but yesterday was the one year anniversary of my wedding to my smart, funny, caring, and beautiful wife. In addition to that, we spent part of the weekend house sitting for my parents and doing some additional required shopping for our house, so I have not had the necessary time to focus on giving you the incredible amount of pleasure that my writing is known to provide.

Apologies.

I will also be in California from Tuesday night through Friday morning for work so that will be keeping me busy, but I do have to say that some very big, exciting things are going on right now that I am at liberty to discuss in a little over a week. So stay tuned for that, and in the meantime, stay tuned for all of the small, boring things on which I typically focus. If the promise of small, boring things doesn't sell the blog to you, I just don't know what will.

Happy Anniversary Maureen! It couldn't have been a better (or busier) year.

False Alarm

Around the time Maureen got home from work today, the air was filled with the horrible wailing siren of the tornado warning that is on top of a big pole a little less than half a mile from our home. Should we have run downstairs in terror? Of course not - it was sunny and warm outside without a breeze in the air. There weren't even any dark clouds on the horizon. Someone must have fallen asleep and hit their head on the "turn on the tornado alarm" button as their head drifted downward into dreamland.

This misappropriation of tornado warnings has been increasing and increasingly annoying over the past couple of years, but seems to have really peaked this year. At least three or four times over the past few months, the Northville sirens have gone off in situations in which any reasonable person with or without a degree in meteorology would not have any concern regarding getting sucked away in a funnel cloud (which, truthfully, is one of my biggest unrealistic fears in life. Like if I actually got sucked into a tornado, would I fly around in circles for awhile and then be deposited in some random location hundreds of feet away from my home? Do I hit flying debris while circling around in the funnel cloud? Do you have time to consider your circumstances?) Someone was telling me recently that these errant sirens are a function of the way cities and municipalities have changed their approach to setting off tornado sirens. Not too long ago, a city would not set off the siren unless someone actually spotted a tornado or the formation of a funnel cloud. Because of this, when these alarms went off, I would be huddled in the basement with my family playing some board game waiting for at least 30 minutes after the cessation of the siren before getting back to normal life at the level of the earth dwellers.

Now, though, cities set off their alarms if a condition or series of conditions is met (barometric pressure changing by a certain amount over a certain length of time, measured wind speeds of a certain level, etc.). This is absurd and terribly frustrating because now every time I hear the noise it's kind of like the boy who cried wolf, and if one day I don't go downstairs (as I mostly don't budge now) and I do get sucked away by a tornado, I would be super pissed at myself before I smash into a barn. Worse would be if Maureen got sucked away and I would be responsible for all of the mechanical fixes in the house from then on. That would be disaster on at least two levels.

While on the subject of exaggerated warnings, is every center of a thunderstorm now magenta? Before, only the rarest of strong storms encroached on the red/magenta space, and now my farts have been measured as magenta. This is like a worse version of grade inflation, because how I am I to know if I have actually experienced a severe storm or not? Magenta validation used to be the greatest kind of validation - "man, that storm I was in was freaking MAGENTA. You only got green. Suck it green." Get it together, meteorologists. You are encouraging the wussification of America.

Wocka Wocka (that's a reference to Fozzie Bear, you dummy)

There is a lot to be said about coming up with a good title. Sometimes titles are funny, sometimes they're clever, other times nuanced, and every once in awhile, you come across a title that is none of these things. This article title I saw earlier today is none of these things, but it is still a beautiful title.

Woman Accused of Hitting Levin's Face with Pie in Big Rapids

This one short phrase includes many of the things that I so very love in life - women, dessert (albeit pie, one of the worst kinds of dessert), Michigan, and things getting hit in the face (oh yeah, that's a throwback reference to more than 2 years ago). However, these things combined in the order in which they have been combined to make up the story frustrate me, because a woman threw a pie into the face of one of our state Senators. Like....why would you throw a pie into someone's face? Wait, don't answer that, because if you do have an answer for that, you should still have the wherewithal to not follow through on that reason and therefore not throw a pie in someone's face. The only time dessert should be flung about with such reckless abandon is celebration throwing, like "hey you don't have herpes let me throw this brownie in your face" or "the Lego you accidentally ate will pass through without harm enjoy this vanilla custard - IN YOUR FACE." You get the idea.

Imagine if you were just doing your job, regular day with a set of regular tasks, and some turdbucket decides that she is unhappy with your effort, bakes (or perhaps if she's less committed purchases from Bakers Square) a pie, and then throws that pie in your face! I don't think anything could be more confusing - "Did you just throw a pie at me?" (who throws a shoe??) That would be entirely uncool, and I think no one deserves this outcome unless they intentionally enter into a profession where crust is a known work hazard. Well, I hope this MSU student knows that she has opened the floodgates on my willingness to throw pie in her face if I ever encounter her. Turnabout is fair play.

Militia-tants

Like most places, Michigan has its fair share of weirdos. In fact, writing about and appreciating weirdos is one of my favorite things to do. Weirdos are wonderful people who typically happen to love one thing or category of things so much, they distance themselves from the rest of the regulars. Weirdos enable non-weirdos to define themselves as regulars only because weirdos do exist. They serve many important purposes.

Today on Hardball with Chris Matthews, Chris Matthews was doing a profile piece on a southeastern Michigan militia group. These people use their free time in the winter out in the woods training in survival tactics in preparations for the Y3K computer bug that will inevitably prevent sliding doors from opening correctly. They also do other things like arm themselves for, among reasons, protecting themselves against the tyranny of the United States government. Homegrown militias have been common in Michigan for years and they tend to cover the complete spectrum of crazy. Because they are so out there, major media outlets like television news frequently do stories on these many groups of weirdos, highlighting without any effort how insane they truly are (no effort is required because you really just need to put group representatives on TV, ask them regular questions, and then wait for the inevitable wacky).

Even though I tend not to agree with their politics (or, more broadly, general view of the world), I continue to welcome all groups of weirdos who choose to call Michigan home. We need every last person we can get. However, my one request is that they apply the smallest degree of effort to stop being so weird so very conspicuously. It's like they can't help themselves - "Hey, we're crazy. We spend winter free time preparing for the end of the world and we do it in MICHIGAN." The problem with this is that it is another one of those instances in which people from elsewhere will have no choice but to assume that many of the people in this fine state are as nuts as state militia members. This really isn't the case - just no one will put me on TV for laying on the couch, eating dinner at Macaroni Grill, and watching television. Believe me, I've tried. Name of my show - "World's Worst Reality Show"

Laid Up

From a personal perspective (the perspective at which I'm best at providing), this has not been the best week ever. For the past month or so, I've had low-level back pain primarily on the lower left side of my back. The discomfort was actually most noticeable when driving in the car or sitting through a meeting. It was pretty bearable and didn't really have any bearing on my ability to do anything - just a little imperfect and uncomfortable. However, this changed on Monday night while I was sliding after a softball during our playoff loss to a team that was probably too good for our division. As soon as I started to slide to the ground, my back tweaked, I lost my breath, and I knew that I was going to be in trouble.

Typically after an injury like that, I have the next few hours to enjoy life, then after I lay down or sleep for the night, things go all down hill for awhile. True to form, I enjoyed the next few hours of happy life through celebrating another fun softball season with my team and team family members at Shield's in Troy, drove home, went to sleep, and since then, I've been just about the most pathetic person you'll see. The couch has been my home since Tuesday morning, and it has been hard to focus on very much. It takes me about 3 minutes to stand up and five minutes to put on my right sock. The only way I can put on the sock is to roll onto my back like a big naked turtle (as opposed to turtles who wear clothes - and you know they wear turtlenecks) on our bed and s----t----r----e----t---c----h out with my right hand until minutes later I make approximate contact with my foot. I've learned that it's not easy to put on a sock with one hand.

It's frustrating because I'm a pretty active person, so by the end of the day I've done absolutely nothing active or semi-active and I have barrels of energy to burn and no way to burn that energy. The two good things to come out of this injury are the following:

1) I finished watching The Shield yesterday. That show is crazy.
2) This story happened yesterday because I could be home for it - our new fridge has a super annoying click every time it is opened. Maureen and I were sure that we'd just need a new part, but we had to have a repair person come out to verify this requirement. After a couple weeks, we were finally able to schedule an appointment for yesterday because I definitely wasn't going anywhere else. The store called me in the morning to tell me the repair person would be arriving between 10-2. That's kind of a standard four hour window for things like repairs, deliveries, and installations, so while it sucks to have to be available for a full window, it didn't seem unreasonable. By about 2:30 no one had yet arrived so I called dispatch to say "hey, just wanted to see if someone is still on the way because we're now comfortably past the stated window." I understand that appointments and appointment windows are missed, and that doesn't bother me so much, but what did bother me was that instead of saying something like "sorry" or "let me find out what's going on", the woman on the phone said "well, these are estimated times." That was just about enough for me, so I definitely didn't let that one slide by. "Estimated times? I thought that's why you give people a FOUR HOUR ESTIMATED TIME WINDOW," I said to her. After a little more push back from me she eventually called her repair guy and got him on his way to our house. I couldn't imagine a better way to spend 5 hours.

Detroit is in Detroit?

News bubbled up today that the Ilitch clan, owners and proprietors of most of the fun things to do downtown, are interested in purchasing the Detroit Pistons and moving them downtown. This would be a ridiculous outcome. I don't own three of anything, let alone three professional sports teams. Once I owned two pizzas and was thinking of buying a third, but the time I got around to buying a third, I had already eaten one of the pizzas, so technically the purchase was really only a second pizza.

On one hand, it would be pretty amazing to put another Detroit team inside the boundaries of the city, possibly resulting in some variety of positive economic impact on our poor major city. It would be hard to argue that Comerica and Ford Field have no positive benefit to the city, especially on game days and nights. If the Ilitches do get the Pistons and build a new arena for the Red Wings+Pistons, all four of Michigan's major sports teams would likely be in a less than one mile radius from each other. I can't think of any city in the country that has any setup like that. Detroit could be FootBaseketey Town instead of just "Hockey Town". Think of the T-Shirts: "Hey, Hey, FootBaseketey Town". Everyone would ask you what the hell is up with your shirt, but that wouldn't make it a less awesome shirt. In addition to this, the Ilitches buying the team would keep the Pistons from leaving the state, and right now, there is a pretty decent chance that out-of-state investors would buy the team and move them somewhere super duper crappy like Las Vegas. Las Vegas! Nothing could possibly be worse.

On the other hand, the suburbs like Pontiac and Auburn Hills really depend on their sports arenas. One sports arena doesn't turn a city like Pontiac around, but there is some really intense sadness around the mostly ghost town of the Silverdome. It looks more like an alien ghost town than a human ghost town, but it's still kind of depressing - even with the new ownership and occasional events. There is pretty much nothing to do or see in Auburn Hills except The Palace and Chrysler HQ, and Lord knows there is not much going on at Chrysler HQ. The people in Auburn Hills don't deserve blight any more than the people in Detroit.

Taking into account these pros and cons (there are lots more of both but these are the ones I want to address right now), but without a doubt if I had to choose between losing the Pistons or gaining FootBaseketey Town, I'm all in for FootBaseketey Town.

California Freezin'

Bah, I'm back in California through Saturday morning. I can't believe how cold it is here sometimes. I got off the plane in San Francisco last night and it was like 50 degrees, then all day today it barely touched 70 degrees, tonight back to 50-ish, and then tomorrow more of the same. I like my summers hot, my winters freezing, and my women making me brownies when I complain about the heat and cold. That's just the Michigan way!

You'll also be happy to hear that I was upgraded to first class on my flight home tomorrow. This is an infrequent occurrence, and I couldn't be happier because the flight leaves here at 10:45 tomorrow night. I'm not sure what Delta did, but they replaced all of the seats in their planes in coach with rocks covered in leather or some sort of leathery substance. It is the worst seating experience I could imagine, with the exception of sitting on the plane with someone farting in my face the whole time, and that would be only marginally worse. Anyway, thank you Delta for the favor but reverse thank you for making your seats suck so hard (literally, hard).

See you in 36 hours, Michigan!

Fame, Political Style

Yo dudes and some dudettes (definitely not all dudettes). I'm back from northern Michigan and had a great time on Lake Walloon. It's hard to have any reasonable complaints when the weather is between 78-84 and sunny every single day for a whole week. I also have my first and only tan of the entire year where if I stand up against a white backdrop, you'll actually be able to identify me as a human being instead of a possible shadow or stain on the backdrop, so that's pretty nice, too. Now I have to play some catch up as I must try to get back up to speed on some of the responsibilities that slipped while on vacation. For example, my parents, Maureen, and I spent about 12 hours adding a tile back splash to the kitchen (no, we're not 100% done with house now or ever) yesterday. It was a pretty successful-feeling day, until Maureen and I were headed up to bed and I somewhat slashed the sole of my foot on a glass shard that must have followed me into the house during one of my hundreds of tile cuts yesterday. That was not super great.

Aside from that biographical catch up for all you somewhat important people, today is a good day to update you on one of my favorite pastimes, assessing how much famous or slightly famous people like to spend time with me. Today I was dining on a Subway submarine sandwich down in Campus Martius and who came over and talked to my table? None other than gubernatorial candidate in the primary tomorrow, Andy Dillon. Sure he looks a little bit like a villain from a science fiction show, but his hair is amazing in the way that it says in place. Really stunning hair. Anyway, he came over and told us about how the election was super important and pivotal this year and I very much agree with that sentiment. After his brief speech, I asked him what time he is going to bed tonight. I wasn't trying to be a smart ass, but really I wanted to know how late a candidate goes to bed the night before the primary (thinking that maybe they stay up really late campaigning and shaking hands).

He didn't seem to love the question, but answered that he would be getting home at about 9 and then going to bed somewhat shortly after that. That seemed a little bit early to me, so my follow up question was "Are you going to watch America's Got Talent tonight?" He responded that he doesn't follow that show and doesn't have much time to watch television to which I said "that's OK, the show's not that great." At this point Andy Dillon walked away, happy not to have to talk to me anymore. in retrospect, I really should have said something like "I respect the way you tried to bring all state employees under one insurance plan, thereby instantly saving Michigan hundreds of millions of dollars", but instead I asked him about America's Got Talent. Lesson learned for next time, I guess.

In addition to Mr. Dillon, Detroit City Council President Charles Pugh was also walking around and telling people to go out and vote for Andy Dillon (I think that's what he was saying). He was following up behind Andy D., so I think his handlers steered him away from our table so he wouldn't have to talk to me. However, I did hear him talking to the table next to us and felt like he said something kind of weird. He told that table that the election was really important and they needed to go out and tell "everyone, even Pookie and Ray Ray" (Rae Rae?) that they needed to go out and vote. I'm pretty sure that he didn't know them personally, so Pookie and Ray Ray seemed to be some sort of weird thing to me. What I didn't really care for is that if I said that phrase to the table next to me, I would not be able to blog right now because all of my fingers would be broken.

With this level of political exposure I'm experiencing right now, I wouldn't be surprised if I come across Alvin Greene tomorrow.

Oh yeah, also while I did not hang out with them directly, Harold and Kumar were filming right across the street from me in pretend New York at the intersection of pretend Wall Street and pretend Broad Street during pretend Christmas. I felt bad for all the extras wearing winter clothes (hats, gloves, coats) on the hot day. Hopefully part of their compensation package was water. If someone had gone and told Harold and Kumar that I was across the street, I'm pretty sure they would have rushed right over to spend some quality time with me and Andy Dillon.

Up North

Good evening, I just wanted to let you know that I'm up on beautiful Lake Walloon until Saturday in the late afternoon. I'd love to have more time to write, but I'd love more to not and enjoy the week with my family mostly away from work and other responsibilities. In the meantime, I hope you spend the week generally agreeing with me that Mad Men super sucks. Have a great week!

Mad Men is the Most Overrated TV Show Ever

By "ratings", of course, I don't refer to the number of people who watch the show, because by that measure, the show is very poorly rated. Despite the massive amount of critical acclaim and regular people declaring that "Mad Men is UhhhMAAAAZZZING", very few people actually watch Mad Men on AMC. I understand why this is, and it is because for a show that is so very critically lauded, it is the most boring 60 minutes on television. UhhhMAAAAZZZING-ly boring. I've watched Season 1 and Season 2 (not yet Season 3 but I probably will watch it as I continue to try to figure out why people love the show), and by the end of every almost episode I find myself wondering "when does this show stop being so incomprehensibly boring?"

Is it the "pitch-perfect" nostalgia of a bygone era? Because that bygone era totally sucked - No technology, smoking jerks everywhere, and women (who from my experience seem to be more inclined toward liking the show than men) are consistently treated like total pieces of crap.

Is it the "mystery" of Don Draper? We know exactly what his deal is, and there is more per minute mystery in an episode of Blue's Clues than Mad Men.

Nothing ever happens, and when things do happen, I care so little about the nonredeemable characters that I don't care about the outcome one bit. No way, Don Draper moved to California! I don't care! Everything seemed to function just fine back at his home and at his office, he just hung around with a bunch of weirdos in California. On Battlestar Galactica the entire human race was wiped out in the first hour of the show. The level of conflict and my interest in the conflict is incomparable. On Lost a whole bunch of people inexplicably disappeared farther away than California for the entire run of the series. Aside from people dressing in out-of-date clothing and misogyny, I can't think of a single thing that this show does better than any other show currently on television.

I don't necessarily need explosions and murders and aliens and comedy to enjoy a television program, but Mad Men not only lacks all of these things, but it also lacks anything that captures my interest, my sense of nostalgia and whimsy, my excitement, intrigue, funny bone, or slightest sense of care or respect. Every person on the show is terrible (even Peggy who denies her own baby and is insanely selfish), the conflict is boring, I hear January Jones may be the dumbest person on plant earth, and yet, despite all this, critics still love the show.

I challenge anyone to convince me I'm wrong. Mad Men sucks. Season 4 premieres on Sunday - perfect for an early bedtime assist in preparation for the coming work week.

Beer, The Cause of, and Solution to...

This Saturday, I will be spending the early part of the day celebrating my friend Brad's bachelor party. Party organizer, Nick, cleverly came up with the name "Bradchelor." Truthfully, I'm a little jealous that I did not come up with that myself. Not by coincidence, Brad is marrying the sister of my wife. I'm looking forward to a good time before I head up north for next week, but I am a little bit intrigued by the daytime events of the party.

This weekend in Ypsilanti, the Michigan Beer Fest is taking place. The festival runs from Friday to Saturday as direct competition to the Ann Arbor Art Festival, because the same kind of people who would go to the art festival would definitely be Beer Fest attendees. I'm very happy to be going to celebrate Brad, but I've never attended a beer fest and I'm not quite sure what to expect. It is $35-$40 for a ticket, and with that price, the fest-goer gets 15 3 oz. samples of beers from many of Michigan's fine independent brewers. That's the approximate equivalent of a $10 beer, so I'm intrigued by what else is going to be going on at the festival. Have any of my extremely faithful readers attended a similar event in Michigan? I'm generally not even that big a fan of beer, but I am going to do my finest to appreciate each of my 45 ounces of Michigan beer on Saturday. I do wonder, though, where does the rest of the ticket cost go? I'm happy to support Michigan businesses, but I do wish it was a little more transparent how the cost of the ticket gets distributed to these businesses, because I'm pretty sure it exceeds the cost of materials and logistics for the beer distributors.

Anyway, my comments have dropped to negative (the blogger service is so disappointed by the lack of commenting they've started penalizing me by removing old comments) so I expect little from all your jerks, but I'm looking for recommendations for beers to try, what else I should expect from the event, and if there is some sort of beer festival song I should learn prior to my attendance. No matter what, I'm pretty sure Maureen is going to be driving us up north on Saturday night. Party on, Bradchelor.

Parents are Like Angels

I'm sitting here in the family room with my beautiful wife on the couch in our wonderful home in which we've lived for almost exactly one week. This has been the culmination of 6 months of almost non-stop work for Maureen and me and a fleet of support staff, and this is my opportunity to call out a couple of members of the support staff without whom, literally, our home would not be anywhere near where it is today - my parents Karen and Bob.

Since February, they have contributed probably hundreds and hundreds of hours only for the good of their son and daughter-in-law. Why? I really have no idea. They must love us, but any reasonable person would have exhausted the supply of love energy months ago, particularly because I'm kind of a jerk. My parents aren't people who don't have enough to do. They both work demanding full time jobs, with additional familial obligations, pets, and numerous other requirements of their time. They've painted, sanded, patched, repaired, built, tore down, wired, and plumbed every surface in the entire house alongside Maureen and me. It is impossible to overstate their contributions - just as a frame of reference, when this remodeling par-tay got rocking months ago, my home improvement skills were entirely limited to explaining to people how little capability I actually had. On top of this, they brought pizza, sub sandwiches, and bagels for our working sessions, purchased us tools that we did not have, and provided recommendations when we requested them. After work until 9 or 10 pm, on the weekends from sunup to sundown, my mom would be patching a hole in the ceiling or my dad would be beautifying the insides of our closets in new white paint. It's not quite possible to express my complete gratitude for these contributions, but that is too limited a view of things.

For example, why were Maureen and I able to afford a house? We've certainly worked for a living whenever possible so we could eventually buy a house, but a big part of the reason is that our parents have supported us through college, provided us with vehicular transportation and gas money in our early years, and I lived rent free at home with my folks for about 4 years after college. We're not a wealthy family, but they regularly did without so that their children did not have to experience being without. A parent has an obligation to provide reasonable support to their children when possible, but the support they've provided is on a level bordering kind of nuts.

I can go on and on in this vein, but maybe the best way to wrap up this thought is this pontification on life. Now that I'm some sort of adult, married, and have a child on the way, thoughts about the meaning of life have started to make their way into my mind. Fortunately for me and you, I've already figured out the meaning and it's not all that original - family and friends. I'm not exactly sure what about family and friends is the meaning of life, but it has something to do with spending happy times with them, sad times with them, and then figuring out how to make these people feel better about their existence. We're here to provide meaning for others, and that is kind of cool. By this measure, I hope my parents know that they've succeeded in life, and they've set off a chain of family togetherness that will likely carry forth in perpetuity. It must feel kind of nice to still be relatively young and have all your children feel that you're a success in life.

The only thing I don't like about this feelgoodness is that as a near future parent and selfish individual, I fear that I will not be able to live up to the standard of selflessness as practiced by my parents. Hopefully this is a skill that quickly develops prior to and shortly after the birth of a child, otherwise I'm in trouble. I'll always be kind of a jerk, but hopefully this characteristic and good parenting aren't mutually exclusive. It's a tough standard to live up to, but perhaps the best challenge worth facing in all of life.

What Doesn't Happen in Vegas Should Stay Out of Vegas

By which, of course, I mean professional basketball. This well-versed thought comes out of reports/rumors that Las Vegas has rights to any moving basketball team, and that this mystery basketball team may well be the Detroit Pistons. There are a few less-loved teams also in the discussion, so at the moment it doesn't seem entirely likely that the Pistons will be pulling up stakes and moving to the crappy desert. I don't really need another reason to hate Las Vegas, and this would be Vegas well into the "I hate you as much as LA" zone. That is a dangerous zone in which to be - just look at the years of distress in which LA remains mired because of my distaste for the city. Could things be any worse for a city than my good friend Brian moving there? Definitely not, unless he was moving back to Michigan and then it would be a good omen for that city.

Just the thought of losing one of our four awesome professional sports teams is distressing, and I kind of figured if we were to lose one of them, it would almost definitely be the crappiest of the crappy Detroit Lions. Even that would be a bummer, but it would be a bearable pain because it would not remove any sense of victory from our collective Michigan consciousness. The Pistons have a nationally respected basketball heritage that is loved locally, and hated but respected in other states. Karen Davidson, current owner of the Pistons because of the unfortunate death of her husband Bill, shouldn't and can't tear another part of the heart out of this place. Bill should have been forward thinking and put in his will "if Karen sells the Pistons in such a way that they move out of Detroit she loses every penny that I give her." That would be a harsh, but fair, punishment.

As if I needed more reason to not watch the NBA than Bosh, Wade, and James all hanging around South Beach together trying to get cameos on Burn Notice. If this happens, I'm going to reunite the Bad Boys and we're going to head to Vegas, throw some elbows, shoot some awkward white guy 3-pointers, make up some poor nicknames, and bring the Pistons home. My suggested name for the team if they leave: The Las Vegas Sucks

Things I Learned Today #9 - Northville

Greetings from the friendly confines of Northville. Over the past three days, our non-existent downstairs neighbor has not come to tell us that we're too loud, the fire and police departments have not dispatched from a mile down the road and driven by our front window, every time we walk in the house we don't have to walk up flights of stairs right off the bat, and LandArc hasn't removed our steps without any sort of heads up. Overall, things are going pretty well in the new location and eventually we'll finish unpacking some of the boxes that still remain full of clothes and other miscellaneous goods. Maureen and I have even successfully wall-mounted our television without a single threat of divorce or karate chop.

With all of these generally positive things, I thought I would dispense to the internet a little knowledge that I've gained over the past three days. First, as I walked out to my car on Saturday morning - the first night I parked my car at the house - I was a little bemused to find a ticket on my windshield. I read through the ticket, and I now owe $5 for parking my car on the street (in our little tiny out of the way cul de sac) between 3am and 6am. If I pay the ticket after 7 days it's $15. I searched all over our neighborhood and no where between any main street and our house is there a sign that reads "No parking between 3am and 6am". Today on a run about a mile from our house, I did see a sign that laid down the parking rules, but how the hell was I supposed to know about this if I did not drive by this sign in the past (which, of course, I never had)? It's only $5, but was I supposed to read all city ordinances prior to moving into the home? For this, I say Boo Northville. If you ever crash at our house, park on the street overnight at your own peril.

Second, and this is the kind of thing you don't really think about when looking for a first home, take into account the elevation of your home if you are a runner. As it turns out, our new home is pretty much at the highest point in the entire city. The first half of the run is fantastically fun, but the second half of the run makes you want to go into the past 6 months, risk a time paradox, and just warn the house-hunting version of you that Michigan is way less flat than you thought, especially in Northville. This isn't a deal breaker, but definitely something to keep in mind when house hunting.

Those are the only two things I've learned over the past week. Well, those and that I am officially giving up on being a fan of professional basketball.

Seacrest, Out

Happy 3rd of July + 30 minutes = 4th of July!

This is just a quick note to inform that I am in Minnesota visiting my sister and her family. Minnesota is kind of like Michigan except west and Joe Mauer lives there. Joe Mauer!

Maureen and I are charging toward a move date of Friday the 9th so I may have minimal time to focus on you, uninterested and non-adulating universe of blog readers until the move is largely complete. It's exciting, and hopefully my last move for quite some time.

As a quick funny note about a reminder of how much I hate LandArc (the property management company of the condo we rent), they decided late last week (without informing us, they may have told our landlady but she did not tell us) to replace the bottom stair of our stoop. Right now it is an empty area boxed in by 2x4's and caution tape around it, rendering our staircase - and primary means of escaping LandArc - at least temporarily useless. I have no confidence that this will be fixed before our move date on Friday, making that day just a little more fun for all. I have now entered the contact number for LandArc into my phone as "LandArc - the worst people in the world". It makes me smile a little bit when I pull it up to view it in the contacts list.