I’m off to opening day at Wrigley today with my office. Chicago’s weather looks like ass today so don’t be too mad at me. I promise to throw peanuts at Vince and Jennifer the whole time. Here’s some links to tide ya’ over.

—”My dad wrote “Teenage Riot” and he says I can go on any TV show I want!” I keed, I keed. Actually this might be a really good sign for Coco Gordon-Moore: apparently they let her watch TV. Odds of normalcy now only a hundred to one.

—What kind of clown are you, Spike Lee? A crying-on-the-inside one? I THINK NOT.

—Sorry, Classes ’03-‘05. The economy arrived too late to save the drowning witches. Meaningless btw for all my homies holding it down in the M-I. Buy a Chevy already will ya, America?

— You know how FOX and ABC both have wife swapping shows? And nanny shows? But somehow they both seem to stay on the air? NBC decided to bring that sense of capitalistic competition to their own line-up…BY PITTING TWO OF THEIR OWN SHOWS AGAINST EACH OTHER. The weirdest thing is I will watch both of them. Your favorite catch phrase of the fall will be Tracey Morgon’s naked scream of “I’m a Jedi!”

—Pistons made Shaq look so old last night. I know the Heat are hurting with Mourning out, but damn D-town look so effing good rolling into the playoffs. Don’t sell the city for scrap until they burn it down post Championship.

Anybody know why “Meaningless” by Jon Brion is so hard to find? Was that self-released or something crazy like that? “Hook, Line and Sinker” is fighting it out in my head with Joanna Newsome’s “Bridges and Ballons” and it’s getting ugly in a really twee kinda way.

There’s satire, and then there’s making fun of Detroit. We ain’t gonna stand for it.

Detroit’s channel 7 anchorman Frank “I-don’t-pay-my-credit-cards-because-cocaine-is-expensive” Turner got born-again after he had to go away to pull it together a couple of years ago. He also was preaching in “commentaries” for awhile, till even by pitiful local news standards they figured out it wasn’t very objective. Now he wants to host a Christian radio show on the side.

Bill Bonds, wherever you are, come back to us and kick this dude’s ass. I’m down with JC, but I don’t think a man crucified by an over-zealous, repressive government would be down with wiretapping, like Turner implies.

“Glaeser, for his part, says he feels the same about New Orleans as he does about many cities of the Rust Belt. “I believe very strongly that our obligation is to people, not places, and I think we certainly have an obligation — ethical, economic, what have you — to the residents of Detroit,” he told me. But he sees no economic or geographic reason to have a large city there anymore, and he views the prospects for any rebound as dim. (Detroit ranks last among cities with more than 500,000 residents in percentage of college graduates.) The city produced the cars that produced the sprawl that helped destroy the city; such tragedy might have been lessened had it produced more universities too. “There are no reasons why it can’t, and shouldn’t, decline,” Glaeser says. “And I would say that for many other cities. There’s no reason not to let decline go forward.” The greatness of America is dependent in part upon regional evolutions and migrations, he adds. “Places decline and places grow. We shouldn’t stand in the way of that.”" -NYT Magazine article on some dufus from Harvard.

Goddamn Hippies.

Fucking Best Buy Rockers. (Or wait — never mind. A record doesn’t sound better or worse because of where you bought it. My first copy of “Slanted and Enchanted” was bought for $9 at Circuit City and it still ruined my ears/changed my life. My brother was saying just this weekend how he doesn’t miss going into hip record shops at all because Amazon.com never looks down its nose at him and judges him based on his jeans. I still feel guilty I guess that I don’t buy more actually CDs from cool retailers in my neighborhood and well because I don’t buy more actual CDs ((Have you heard “At War With the Mystics”? It’s pretty great)). Modern economic morals are getting tricky — it’s hard not to feel like a phony suburbanite when you go to the Borders at the end of your street instead of the tiny mom and pop place another block away.)

Mutherfuckin’ Polar-Bear-Hatin’ City Council. (For those of you who don’t know, the Detroit Zoo is not in the city proper, but in the ‘burbs, so there is a whole weird level of racial politics added into the power struggle for whether the bankrupt Detroit City Council will close the zoo or hand it over to any number of groups willing and able to keep it open ((ie honkeys).)

A list of stupid things that Domino’s Pizza founder and right-wing Catholic nut Tom Monaghan has done over the years:

1. Founded Domino’s Pizza.

2. Bought the Detroit Tigers and fired Ernie Harwell.

3. Stopped construction of his giant-ass mansion when he had a religious awakening. (A real Catholic would have completed the house and then turned it into the world’s most ostentatious orphanage for babies that would have otherwise been aborted.)

4. Founded a right-wing Catholic law school in Ann Arbor then hired Robert Bork as a lecturer.

5. Tried to build a giant-ass crucifix near the highway outside Ann Arbor. (I would’ve knocked it over with my car if it had been built.)

6. This.

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Breaking news out of Motown: Darko Milicic is apparently on his way to the Orlando Magic. After two-plus years of riding the Pistons’ bench, the Human Victory Cigar should see some actual playing time in Orlando, and we here at Barber College couldn’t be happier for the Seven-Foot Serbian Sasquatch (alliteration like a muhfukka - all night long). The fresh start and balmy climate will undoubtedly do him some good. Best wishes, big guy. We’re pulling for you. Give a shout out to Mickey for us.

Hmm, turns out that kid who went on a rampage at the Gay club in Massachusetts was a giant ICP fan. I knew a few juggalos in my d-town days, can’t say I ever remember them taking a hatchet to anyone, but I do remember some of those lyrics being pretty fucked up. “What do you do with a drunken hillbilly?/Cut his fucking eyes out” sticks in my head for some reason. In no way do I think Shaggy 2 Dope or the other one are responsible for one sick kid. Still that’s a weird little cult the clowns have going there and when the last Joker Card ended up being about God, well that and the Faygo — nevermind, not worth even making a joke.

To cleanse your pallete, try reading Malcolm Gladwell’s really cool article on Power Law and homelessness. I know it’s dumb to say at this point, but that frizzy bastard is kinda smart. I missed my bus stop on Friday because of this.

Obie Trice on having a fresh bullet lodged in his skull:

“This is living in Detroit, and that’s all. You hear about it because it’s me, I got ties to Eminem or whatever, but I got people that are out there dealing with it every single day where I’m from.”

Enjoy the SuperBowl everybody! Go D-Town!

We’d be lying if we said the folks at Shady Records, while still relieved, aren’t gonna making use of when it comes time for a 2nd album. Gunshots is dollar signs y’all. Of course, maybe if you take a bullet to the skull you deserve a pay day.

Brian Smith of The Metro Times says nice things about our friends MotorCityRocks.com, who are the gold standard out there for postive local music blogging anywhere. Also interesting to note they have a piece on Ann Gordon, who runs a really hip art blog and works cross-town for Real Detroit sometimes. An alt-weekly peace accord since I left time? Or sly off-season trade positioning? Careful Dusenberry, they’re gonna try to buy her love away.

Grambones seemingly gets snubbed because he writes about a world outside of the D sometimes. That’s fine, they had they’re angle and they’re sticking to it. Joel and I got snubbed because of complicated racial politics, which need not be explained here.

Also we don’t live in Detroit.