Enotes

Another taco place is opening up near me and suddenly it's 1979 again. Taco Bell was a mostly unexplored food experience for me and my friends when word got out that they were constructing one on Merriman Road in Livonia, just north of Plymouth Road. We'd been, but always via car, somewhere else, and on precious few occasions. But this new one would be only a nice, worth-it bike's ride away from our houses. So it opens, and if we didn't go on the first day, it was pretty darn close to it. My friends were amazed at how much Taco Bell I could consume. Kind of like today, when my wife and daughter are amazed at how much Taco Bell I can consume. Still. It's a great bang-for-the-buck, really. You gotta love any fast food place anymore that has items on its menu for under a dollar. We wore out that new Taco Bell for a period of time, enamored with its newness and novelty status. And I typically ordered the most food. Back then, I could probably gorge myself for about thre...

Glenn Beck is an idiot. I'm tempted to not stop there, and do the school days equivalent: write it 100 times on the blackboard, er, this post. Hell, I'll write it 500 times. I doubt I'd get sick of it. Glenn Beck is an idiot. No, not even close to being tired of those words yet. Beck, another who soils the broadcast air on Fox News, called President Obama a racist. Beck's attack comes in the wake of the controversial arrest of Harvard University Scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr., who is black, and Obama's reaction, which included taking the police to task. Read: the white police officer to task. Obama then backed off his statement, in which he initially said that the police had "acted stupidly." On this morning's episode of "Fox & Friends", Beck said the president--- the President of the United States--- has exposed himself as a person with "a deep-seated hatred for white people or the white culture." WHAT?? Beck's statement, th...

Psst! Hey, you there! I like to watch "Leave it to Beaver." I'm outed. The beans have been spilled. I hope you don't think I'm a creep or somethin'. To be honest, I've never NOT liked The Beaver. He was someone I could relate to as a youngster, and now that I'm a grown-up, his world is somewhere to which I like to escape. I prefer the older episodes, though. The ones where Jerry Mathers was small, no older than nine or ten years old. He was cuter then, and the storylines were more innocent. We own a box set of one of the earlier seasons of "Beaver", and when you feel like the world is crawling up your rear end, it's nice to slide one of those discs into the DVD player and be taken away. It's like a Calgon bath that way. It starts with the neighborhood the Cleavers lived in---one of the first sprawling sub-divisions built after the second World War. The two-story homes with the picket fences and the well-manicured lawns. The Cleavers T...

Dick Nixon was a liar. That's not news, I know, but Tricky Dick lied to us long before he circled the wagons and covered up his involvement in the Watergate scandal in 1972-73. No, Nixon lied to us when he stood before the media after losing in the 1962 California gubernatorial election. "You won't have Richard Nixon to kick around anymore!" Nixon scolded the press after what he thought was unfair treatment during the '62 campaign in California. It was a promise he didn't keep. No, we had plenty more opportunities to kick Dick around, thanks to his rising like a Phoenix to win the 1968 presidential election, and again four years later. Sarah Palin is making like Nixon. Palin, the now former Alaskan governor, wagged her finger at the press as she vacated the state mansion. "So how about in honor of the American soldier, you quit making up things. And don't underestimate the wisdom of the people. And one other thing for the media -- our new governor has...

Add another lady to Kwame Kilpatrick's harem. Sheryl Robinson Wood, the federal monitor for the Detroit Police Department’s consent decree with the Department of Justice, resigned Thursday because of “meetings of a personal nature” with former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick. Talk amongst yourselves. U.S. District Judge Julian Cook issued an order today accepting her resignation. The order said Wood had “engaged in conduct which was totally inconsistent with the terms and conditions of the two consent judgments in this litigation.” So Kilpatrick has indirectly ruined yet another person's professional life, albeit with the complicity of said individual. The reign of terror Kilpatrick has left in his wake is incredible. Kilpatrick had it all, at one point. Then he wanted some more, and some more, and some booty, to boot. This is a man for whom the world was his oyster. Kwame Kilpatrick could have been a wonderkind, a political power and success story to the nth degree. He was elec...

I have found out something, partly by accident but largely by design. Few things don't taste better with some hot sauce added. Meet me and my cast iron stomach. It started when I was a pre-teen. In the fridge one day I found some of those Vlasic pepper rings, though likely they were of the mild variety. But to a youngster, that's quite a different taste paradigm. I loved them---their tanginess, the vinegary aftertaste. And I thought it was cool how they made my salivary glands spritz, even when I simply opened the jar and sniffed. I guess my story is similar to how a heroin addict would tell of how he hopped on his train. For the mild pepper rings gave way to the "hot" pepper rings, which gave way to Tabasco sauce. But until I went away to college, I thought hot food was pretty much limited to my pickled peppers and the hot sauce at Taco Bell, plus the fiery menu at Mexican joints. I had no idea what awaited me. I soon found out that "hot food" was a big par...

Shame on Tom Barrow. First, I thought we were rid of Barrow, who once upon a time tried to provide a sensible, smart alternative to Detroit Mayor Coleman Young and later, Dennis Archer. But he's resurfaced, at age 60, and he again has his eye on the mayor's chair. He's expected to finish among the top two in the August 4 primary (yeah, Detroiters have to traipse to the polls yet again) along with incumbent Dave Bing, thus facing off against Bing, mano-a-mano, in the November general election. There was a time when Barrow was refreshing and above the dirty pool that was being played in City Hall and its environs. That, apparently, has changed. Barrow took a swipe at Bing today through a press release, and in doing so placed himself down among the folks he used to be so head and shoulders above, back in the day. Barrow's concern is that Bing's proposed budget cuts are not only painful, but smacks of a plot to "dismantle" (Barrow's word) city government ...