Important news you just cannot afford to miss

Insults to keep our minds off Great Depression II.

Knit tits for tots.

Oh, you mean that kind of thong. Damn. (Be sure to watch the video.)

What wine goes best with Cool Ranch Doritos? Sutton Cellars' Rattlesnake Rose.

Oh, no! Just when we wanted to practice water landings in the Hudson.

Green is back on the map

Last September 18 this blog told how a bump in the road on the southern shore of Lake Superior was coming up in the world: little unincorporated Green, pop. 350 or so, was being restored to its former glory on the official state road map of Michigan.

This is important because Steve Martinez, whom you might know as the sheriff of Porcupine County in my mystery novels, lives in Green. The Lady Friend and I summer in a cabin on the lake shore there, and we often invite Steve and his squeeze, Ginny, over for drinks, munchies, cop talk and salacious gossip about county officials.

Yesterday the Green Hermit, a native of the place and a habitue of this blog, e-mailed the graphic results of his thumpingly successful campaign to elevate Green to its rightful place -- a small corner of the official 2009 Michigan Highway Map, fresh off the press:

Letter from the snowy North

Steve Sundberg's dog Ruby "breaking trail" through deep snow in Ontonagon, Michigan.

Steve Sundberg, a friend away up in Ontonagon on the Lake Superior shore of Michigan -- the place where my mystery novels are set -- writes:

"Winter is well along and shaping up to be one that the kids will brag about to their grandchildren. We passed 200 inches of snow for the season on Monday and we still have at least six weeks of winter to go. It has snowed virtually every day since Thanksgiving, some days a dusting, some days a foot of the lightest, fluffiest powder snow.

"It has made for tremendous conditions for the ski hill, cross country trails and snowshoeing in the woods. The snowmobile traffic in the area is way down, probably due to the poor economic conditions, so their trails are in excellent condition.

"The economy of the area haa been hit hard. The paper mill in town started a partial layoff the second week of December. About two-thirds of the employees were laid off with the expectation that they would be called back the beginning of January. The layoff has now been extended to at least the beginning of February and that timetable may be optimistic.

"The two enormous paper machines at the mill are kept running at an idle speed. If the machines were stopped for any length of time the bearings on the huge rollers would develop flat spots and be ruined, so power plant and maintenance personnel and a millwright and oiler were kept on for each shift.

"Last week Smurfit-Stone, owner of the mill, indicated it is investigating filing for bankruptcy. That may actually be a positive. Smurfit-Stone is highly leveraged and may need to divest some assets to make its interest payments. The Ontonagon mill has a reputation for making first quality corrugation used for cardboard boxes and other manufacturers may be interested in buying it.

"The layoffs, of course, cascade through the businesses in the community. January and February are normally slow months and that is especially true this year. Even the bars, restaurants and motels are hurting due to the lack of snowmobilers this year. Things are slow at the hardware store but we can hold on until spring. The only boom business right now is roof shoveling."

This reminds me that none of the action in the Steve Martinez mystery novels takes place during a hard winter, and I had better get up there and research a chapter or three set during that time for Hang Fire, the novel in progress. I might even have to rent a snowmobile and go haring off into the woods.

The news about the layoff at the mill, however, is disturbing. It is the largest employer in Ontonagon County, and as Steve says, when it shuts down, many more than its own employees are hurt -- for example, the many scores of independent loggers who fell and truck pulpwood to the mill as well as those who provide other goods and services.

Economic hardships are bound to affect an already overextended rural county sheriff's department such as the one in my novels. Petty crime will rise, as will alcohol and drug offenses and domestic disturbances. And it's the deputies who have to carry out the increasing number of eviction notices.

All this, of course, is grist for a novelist's mill. But I deeply wish it weren't.

One for the nonbelievers

There were many things to praise in Obama's inauguration speech today, but the one that struck me the most was his open-armed welcome to "Christians and Muslims, Jews and Hindus -- and nonbelievers."

In recent years, acknowledging that good people do not necessarily worship a deity used to be political suicide -- even though many of the founding fathers, including Jefferson, were either agnostics or atheists. (They were, after all, children of the Enlightenment.)

In recent years American politicians have been so terrorized by the Christian right that they often pretended to be believers, faux Sunday-morning churchgoers, in order not to needlessly offend that important voting bloc.

Perhaps no more. It now looks certain that Obama means business when he says he wants government to be all-inclusive. Having Rick Warren deliver the invocation at his inauguration and also, on the same day, recognizing the moral legitimacy of those who do not believe in a higher power is nothing short of revolutionary.

It's about time.

Good stuff . . . and bad

Ten items of bright writing that captured my attention in the last few weeks (along with a front page that both amused and appalled me):

Gasoline marched toward $5 a gallon, turning Hummers into white elephants with running boards . . .

James G. Cobb, New York Times, Dec. 31, 2008

. . . Rumors began flying last Tuesday morning that Blagojevich was preparing to stick a potato in the exhaust pipe of those demanding his resignation by appointing Burris.

Eric Zorn, Chicago Tribune, Jan. 6, 2009

The happy StairMaster president is on his way to a mansionette in Dallas, to be the decider of where to put the sofa. His successor, Mister Mambo, has cast his lot with Harvard and Yale and old Clinton hands, and soon enough, Lord knows, they will get the first of many comeuppances, and their shining faces will be chopfallen.

Garrison Keillor, Salon.com, Jan. 7, 2009

The prefix for trillion, as we know from super-computer lingo, is “tera.” I propose a neologism for our times: terafy. (V. tr.: To instill fear by mentioning the US deficit.)

Christopher Buckley, The Daily Beast, Jan. 14, 2009

. . . As we hurry through the streets, like dog-paddling through a liquid hydrogen slushie, we might remember the tranquility with which the explorers of a century ago went to their frigid deaths.

Neil Steinberg, Chicago Sun-Times, Jan. 16, 2009

Political thrillers are like fish fingers: squarish, stodgy, reliable.

The Economist, in a review of Leonard Downie's The Rules of the Game, Jan. 17th-23rd, 2009

A couple of nights ago, dusk brought a different illusion. The clouds had been hammered flat. But in the last few moments of afternoon, the sun slid below the overcast, coming out strong and red along the rim of the horizon.

Verlyn Klinkenborg, New York Times, Jan. 18, 2009

. . . the Fox News building . . . is the only refuge New York Republicans have. Walking into Fox is like slipping into a warm bath.

S.E. Cupp, Washington Post, Jan. 18, 2009

The chattering class saw Dubya as a walking style crime in a cowboy suit.

Debra J. Saunders, San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 18, 2009

Scrabble is both mindless and cerebral, which may account for its appeal to writers -- it gives you a chance to push words around without having to make them mean something.

Judith Thurman, The New Yorker, Jan. 19, 2009

R.I.P. Sir John Mortimer

Let us now gather before the polished oaken slab at Pommeroy's Wine Bar and hoist a glass of vintage Chateau Thames Embankment to Sir John Mortimer, who died today in London, aged 85.

Sir John, devotees of comic crime fiction know, was the creator of Horace Rumpole, the Shakespeare-loving barrister who happily defended crooks of all kinds, especially colorful types devoted to relieving rich people of their expensive baubles, in the courtrooms of the Old Bailey. Rumpole found good in every baddie, at least enough so that he never regretted winning a scoundrel's case.

Breathes there a mystery reader who did not watch the British television series with the inimitable Leo McKern (right) in the title role, singing grapey praises of "honest plonk" after hours before going home to She Who Must Be Obeyed?

There was quite a bit of Rumpolish shin-kicking in Sir John (left), who as a Queen's Counsel was traditionally obligated to take whatever brief might come his way and do his best for his client, innocent or guilty. Fortunately for posterity, Sir John realized that he much preferred doing the right thing for deserving clients, taking on a great many controversial free speech and human rights cases -- and winning them.

“Doing these cases,” he once wrote, “I began to find myself in a dangerous situation as an advocate. I came to believe in the truth of what I was saying. I was no longer entirely what my professional duties demanded, the old taxi on the rank waiting for the client to open the door and give his instruction, prepared to drive off in any direction, with the disbelief suspended.”

Helen T. Verongos approvingly quotes this passage in her New York Times obituary today. Read it, and let us link elbows for another sweet sip of the claret of truth and hilarity.

Home again

The eastbound California Zephyr stops at Glenwood Springs, Colorado, last Tuesday with a grimy but still colorful Union Pacific freight locomotive on the point, subbing for a sick Amtrak engine.

The Lady Friend and I have returned, a bit weary but happy and rested, from Glenwood Springs. Hang Fire, the fourth Steve Martinez novel, is now 20 pages longer and I'm feeling good about it.

Our train trip back on the eastbound California Zephyr was as pleasant as the westbound one, albeit a lot longer. One of the train's two locomotives took sick, and a freight engine had to be borrowed from the Union Pacific to haul the train over the steep Rockies to Denver. There that engine was replaced by another freight locomotive from the Burlington Northern Santa Fe.

All to the good, but freight engines are geared for running no faster than 70 miles per hour, while passenger locomotives can go as fast as 79 and often do. This means the train lost more time while in 79-mph territory. By the time we got to Denver, the Zephyr was 4.5 hours behind schedule.

Worse was to come. Yesterday, on the last day of the trip, a westbound Southwest Chief derailed just after departure in the yard at Chicago Union Station, throwing the entire BNSF and Metra commuter line from Chicago to Aurora into gridlock for hours during bone-chilling cold. When our train finally crawled in shortly before 10 p.m., it was nearly six hours late.

That was nothing compared to what the Metra commuters had to endure. That very morning all inbound trains were held up for two hours while black-clad cops converged upon a Metra train believed to be carrying a man with a gun. It was, but he was a Secret Service agent.

Bad luck both coming and going for the poor straphangers. But the Lady Friend and I were snug, warm and well-fed all the way, except for the 20 minutes of waiting for a taxi in arctic weather outside Union Station.

And that is all I shall be writing about my rail-riding enthusiasm for the next few weeks, if we are lucky.