Enotes

The corner video store has turned into the city video store. Time was that you couldn't walk much more than 500 feet in any direction without running smack into a joint that rented VHS tapes. Then, you couldn't walk much more than 2,000 feet without running into a place that rented DVDs. Now, you can drive for most of a Sunday afternoon without seeing more than a couple video stores. They close all the time these days, but locally there is a closing that might tug on some heart strings. I used to go out of my way to venture into Thomas Video. So did everyone else, because there was only one Thomas Video---literally and figuratively. Thomas Video, the favorite of the intense B-movie fan, is closing up shop. To many, this is like the news of a loved one with a terminal disease passing away. You knew it was coming. Thomas Video has been located in Royal Oak since 2009, but I remember visiting when it was on Main Street, south of 14 Mile Road, in Clawson. Like I said,...

Our daughter just turned 21. And, parked in front of our house as I write this, is the car in which we drove her home. I remember strapping her tiny, 4-lb. body into her car seat and securing her in the Mustang's back seat that day in June, 1993 in front of Beaumont Hospital in Royal Oak. She was born two months premature, and thus weighed just 2-lb, 14-oz. when she was born via emergency C-section. The Mustang was purchased in September, 1992, just before my bride and I were betrothed. Little did we know that some 21-plus years and 115,000 miles later, we'd still own the car. But that's OK. It's been a good car. How could it not be, if it's old enough to legally drink alcohol? It's starting to come apart at the seams now, which is to be expected. Rust is spreading like cancer. But the Mustang still runs and it gets me front Point A to Point B. We just make sure that the distance between those two points isn't too far. We have a 2003 Mercury Sable ...

Sometimes the 24-hour news cycle gets extended. Sometimes it's a 48-hour or 72-hour news cycle. And, on occasion, a story manages to stay in the public's consciousness for a week or more. News stories anymore are like pieces of pasta thrown against the wall. Only some stick. The Stephen Utash beating has beat the 24-hour news cycle, by far. Now the question is, Will it matter? The Utash story is right out of a novel or a made-for-TV movie. White suburbanite hits a young black boy with his pickup truck, in the city. The suburbanite stops to check on the condition of the boy and is then beaten senseless, perhaps to death (that's a part of the story that has yet to be resolved), by a mob of black men. It's a story that almost had to happen, to provide the most recent litmus test of where we are as a society, particularly when it comes to violence and race relations. The elements are all there, and if they weren't, the story wouldn't work as well. It w...

It's not easy to be a trailblazer when so many of the trails have already been blazed, but David Letterman somehow managed to blaze one anyway. You may think that late night television was an already-mined resource by the time Letterman, 66, came along in 1982, hosting "Late Night with David Letterman" on NBC. It's true that TV at the witching hour was nothing new in 1982, having been first attempted some 30 years prior and being refined for 20 years by Johnny Carson when NBC gave Letterman a late night slot, following Carson's "Tonight Show." But it turned out there was still plenty that Letterman found to do that not even the iconic Carson managed to discover. Letterman announced today, somewhat shockingly during the taping of "The Late Show with David Letterman," that 2015 will be the year of his retirement. "This (retirement) means Paul (bandleader Shaffer) and I can finally get married," Letterman said to a crowd that s...