Morenci native Doug Adams sent this shot of some tennis courts in the Flint area. Doug was a long-time coach at – Clio, wasn’t it? I see that Flint had 5.48 inches of rain reported this morning while we had nothing down here:

Flint area’s only clay courts are under water –by several feet. That is the roof of our club house.

Montreal Kay saw this advertised recently:

Couch for Chicken: This couch is a mix of beige and grey and is not of any particular brand. It sits at least three people, but two of the three would have recliners and thus make them superior to the unsuspecting middle-sitter. The condition of the couch is decent; as good as you would expect from two male roommates, really. Aside from standard wear and tear, there are no obscene stains or misleading defects. The dimensions are 7 ft. long, 3 ft. tall, and 3 ft. deep but if you’re the visual type, it’s about the length of a pair of French doors.

Offer: At first, we were set on selling the couch but realized that putting a price on her would be demeaning and just plain wrong for the years of humble and unabashed service she’s provided. Instead, we would like to exchange our cherished sofa for some delicious chicken. That’s right, chicken. We felt that the future owners needed to be just as easygoing as their predecessors if they were to inherit Montreal’s greatest couch. So why not trade it for Montreal’s greatest chicken — Romados.


Details: This couch is one of the most versatile pieces of furniture you’ll ever come across. She can host out-of-town crashers, double as a snack-hold (as displayed), and if you’re anything like us, be the safe haven for hours upon hours of Netflix watching and NHL gaming. The chicken trade is as follows: one beige/grey couch for two half chickens (yes, that totals one full chicken) — heavy on that spicy sauce, please.



MOVING: The couch is on the second floor of a Plateau apartment building. It will require two adults or two really strong children to carry it out.

If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to inquire. We look forward to arranging a date optimal for couch pick-up and chicken eating. Have yourself a great day!

Football injuries are big talk these days. I was reminded of this excellent New Yorker article by Malcolm Gladwell about brain trauma:

Nowinski found her another ex-football player. McKee saw the same thing. She has now examined the brains of sixteen ex-athletes, most of them ex-football players. Some had long careers and some played only in college. Some died of dementia. Some died of unrelated causes. Some were old. Some were young. Most were linemen or linebackers, although there was one wide receiver. In one case, a man who had been a linebacker for sixteen years, you could see, without the aid of magnification, that there was trouble: there was a shiny tan layer of scar tissue, right on the surface of the frontal lobe, where the brain had repeatedly slammed into the skull. It was the kind of scar you’d get only if you used your head as a battering ram. You could also see that some of the openings in the brain were larger than you’d expect, as if the surrounding tissue had died and shrunk away. In other cases, everything seemed entirely normal until you looked under the microscope and saw the brown ribbons of tau. But all sixteen of the ex-athlete brains that McKee had examined—those of the two boxers, plus the ones that Nowinski had found for her—had something in common: every one had abnormal tau.

Two Observers ago there was a page of photographs showing faces with other people’s facial features. It was a very silly presentation, as done. What I should have done is located here.

Author Stephen “He’s a fat cat, too” King is angry about rich people and taxes – angry about their whining – and he’s worried about the continuing growth in the disparity betwixt rich and poor. We have to change, he says:

This has to happen if America is to remain strong and true to its ideals. It’s a practical necessity and a moral imperative. Last year during the Occupy movement, the conservatives who oppose tax equality saw the first real ripples of discontent. Their response was either Marie Antoinette (“Let them eat cake”) or Ebenezer Scrooge (“Are there no prisons? Are there no workhouses?”). Short-sighted, gentlemen. Very short-sighted. If this situation isn’t fairly addressed, last year’s protests will just be the beginning. Scrooge changed his tune after the ghosts visited him. Marie Antoinette, on the other hand, lost her head.

Raintitan Software has an iPad app to get your cat started on Twitter. It’s in the App store (Tweets from my Cat) but their website tells nothing.

The Internet is a constant source of, “Hmmmm, I never thought about that before.” For example, what are you favorite examples of crosswords in fiction? That’s question asked by Guardian writer Alan Connor in his crossword blog. I never thought about crosswords in fiction. I’ve probably never encountered one before. As of now, no one has yet responded to Connor’s request for examples, but here’s one he doesn’t like:

The worst? Well, for example, I am rarely impressed by the use of a crossword to indicate that a character is deranged, obsessive or otherwise ill-suited to conventional society. At the beginning of the 2009 “mixed-reviews” rom-com All About Steve, we see in a trice that Sandra Bullock’s character is so detached from what anyone would consider reasonableness that she might plausibly spend the next 98 minutes stalking him from The Hangover around the States. How do we know? Perhaps … because she solves crosswords? Worse. Reader, she sets them. Well, I’ve met crossword setters and I can tell you: relatively few of them would stalk anyone across more than a few county lines.

But then again, I’ve never heard the phrase “crossword setter.”

Fair Warning reports on a criminal probe in Florida related to the killing of trees by billboard companies. Lamar advertising says it’s against company policy:

Trees were the enemy if they spoiled the view of a billboard. On days of an attack, Barnhart, 27, would arrive by dawn at Lamar Advertising Co. in Tallahassee, Fla. After removing the magnetic Lamar logo from a company truck, he would set forth with a machete, a hospital mask and a container of what he described as a “pretty gnarly” herbicide.

It was all about being fast: Hack into the roots or base of the tree, douse the wound with herbicide, and get out of there. The Lamar executive who gave the orders, said Barnhart, called it “a hit and run.”