There are times I truly miss being a G.A. — that’s old-fart-journo-speak for “general assignment reporter.” You never know what’s going to turn up. I had plans to spend yesterday relaxing with my kid, maybe cleaning the house. The phone rang at 8 a.m. with news the Detroit Police dive team was going to spend the next two days fishing cars out of the river. Plans changed.

A little background: In May, this same team was doing a training dive at the point where Lake St. Clair joins the Detroit River, preparing to recover a car, when the team leader discovered what seemed to be a hand, reaching up from the bottom. It turned out to be a bronze sculpture that had been stolen several years earlier from a local institution, part of a rash of outdoor-art thefts in the area. At the time, we told the team leader to call us the next time they went looking for a car, thinking a tick-tock on how they work would be a nice feature for my journalism students.

Of course they had to call only hours ahead, too little time to scramble a team of overscheduled college students. But I was able to go, and I don’t know about you, but to me, the great thing about journalism is the permission you get to watch other people work at interesting jobs. I could have watched these guys all day, and in fact, that’s pretty much what I did. The 60-ton heavy-duty tow truck alone was a marvel; it looked like you needed a master’s in engineering just to run the thing.

The divers were trying to clear at least 14 and as many as 16 (sonar was unclear) drowned cars from what must have been a popular dumping spot, once upon a time. A patch of riverfront land that had been the site of your standard-issue 20th-century poison factory — metal plating with casual environmental standards, shudder — stood empty for years, and if you took the time to drive or push a car through the weeds to the riverbank, you found a nice open area with no seawall and 15-20 feet of water ready to swallow the evidence of your insurance fraud, no questions asked.

The divers went down in teams and strapped up the axles or frames, and the truck operator ran the winch. The wrecks came up groaning and dropping vast cauldrons of mud and crawfish. As soon as they cleared the water, the gearheads started calling out models and years. Several fell to pieces as they came free; a Ford EXP, second cousin to a Mercury Capri I once owned, lost its roof and necessitated a second dive to retrieve the rest.

And once they were on dry land, photo ops galore:

What interested me the most: Even in that stew of heavy-metal waste and pollution, nature is always trying:

Those are salamander eggs — mudpuppies. Ah, well — based on what crawled out of those wrecks, there’s no shortage down there.

Note the zebra mussels, an invasive species that first entered the Great Lakes in the ballast water of oceangoing freighters. They have played havoc on treatment-plant intakes and other underwater structures, but have had an undeniably positive effect on water clarity; I’ve heard many long-time Great Lakes anglers say the water’s never been cleaner.

So that was yesterday. Today I’m giving blood. In consideration, I’ve gone off all my over-the-counter analgesics for the last 72 hours. Man, do I feel old.

Bloggage:

My TV now has to stay off for two reasons: The still-unplanted corpse of Michael Jackson, and the governor of South Carolina, who has now raised humiliation of his wife to a high art. I’m with Josh Marshall — just go be with her, already.

As for Miguel Jacko, the NYT lead says it all:

Nearly a week after he died, Michael Jackson still has not been buried, new complications have arisen over settling his vast estate, and his will has given up tantalizing details, including his choice of Diana Ross as a guardian of his children if his mother were unable to care for them.

I think his family is dragging their feet because they like the publicity. I fully expect him to be stuffed and mounted by the time this is over.

To the gym and to the exsanguination table after that. Back in a bit.

My sentence at the car dealer’s yesterday ran through lunchtime, but without wheels the options were a) vending machines; or b) walk two dealerships down to Fuddrucker’s. I chose B. One thing I’ll say about Grosse Pointe — it’s generally free of these sorts of places, the chain food-stravaganza. We’ve got bagel joints, Panera and a number of utterly mediocre locally owned restaurants, but hardly anything with a drive-through window and even fewer of these big-box grease pits.

The idea of Fuddrucker’s — and yes, every time I see it, I think of “Idiocracy,” in which one of the visual jokes is the evolution of the name into its logical obscenity — is to build your own burger. Giant burgers, all the condiments you could think of. I chose a 1/3-pound burger, the “small” size. Remember when McDonald’s introduced the quarter-pounder? My God, man, now that’s a hungry man’s meal! A quarter-pound burger? That’ll fill a tummy, ain’a?

That was a long time ago.

OK, so a 1/3-pound burger. What the hell, I’ll get what I usually put on it at home — grilled onions and crumbled blue cheese.

“We don’t have that kind of blue cheese.”

That kind? What kind do you have?

“Blue cheese dressing.”

Oh. OK, then. Grilled onions, blue cheese dressing on the side, and let’s try to get out of here at under a million calories. Fries? Sure. Something from the fountain to drink. Nine bucks and change.

The burger came piled high with grilled onions. Now there’s a menu phrase — “piled high.” When you’re cooking at home, how often do you pile anything high? I could have stuck my finger into this onion pile down to the second knuckle. Onions are a low-cost item, so it pays to stack ‘em deep. It gives the customer the sense of getting a bargain for his food dollar. Judging from the other customers in the place, these are folks who drive a hard bargain. Only in the Midwest, witty Jim Harrison once wrote, is overeating seen as heroic.

I picked off seven-eights of the onions and added an experimental dab of blue-cheese dressing, wondering if it would sub for my beloved crumbled Stilton. It did not. The fries were thick-cut slabs of potatoes, no doubt sliced, seasoned and prepped at a processing factory far, far away. They were speckled with a seasoning blend that is probably “secret.” Fries like this frequently disappoint me, and so did these. I ate a few, left the rest.

I once asked a short-order cook why I couldn’t make a hamburger as good as his. “Because you wouldn’t fucking believe how much salt I put in it,” he said. (He’d been drinking.) “Almost a tablespoon. And then I add butter to the grill.”

I can’t speak for the butter, but they surely didn’t skimp on the salt in my lunch. If salt was the bass note, it was blasting out the windows of the car. I sat and did the L.A. Times crossword — too easy — waiting for the clamor in my mouth to subside. It didn’t. I grabbed a cookie on my way out for the relief of sugar. Mission accomplished, Fuddrucker’s! Customer carpet-bombed with sodium chloride and grease, upsold dessert upon exit. Well-done.

Maybe this is a good sign. There was a time in my life when I would have happily cleaned my plate, but lately I’m working toward, what’s the word? Mindfulness. Nothing prohibited, just carefully considered. Maybe I should have fallen happily into the Fuddrucker embrace and gone whole-hog with the cheese, which would have been the yang to the yin of salt. Or maybe I should have had another glass of water and some yogic breathing, and just put off lunch another 90 minutes.

Lately I’ve been reading about David Kessler’s new book, “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,” in which the former FDA chief takes a look at so-called food engineering, in which chemists seek to find just the right layers of salt, fat and sugar to find the “bliss point” that gets us cleaning our plates and ordering more:

Foods rich in sugar and fat are relatively recent arrivals on the food landscape, Dr. Kessler noted. But today, foods are more than just a combination of ingredients. They are highly complex creations, loaded up with layer upon layer of stimulating tastes that result in a multisensory experience for the brain. Food companies “design food for irresistibility,” Dr. Kessler noted. “It’s been part of their business plans.”

But this book is less an exposé about the food industry and more an exploration of us. “My real goal is, How do you explain to people what’s going on with them?” Dr. Kessler said. “Nobody has ever explained to people how their brains have been captured.”

My brain has been captured. Lately, I’ve been trying to take it back.

You know what I had for lunch the other day? A kale smoothie. I’m not kidding. Alan has this pasta dish he likes, with Italian sausage and peppers and kale, and it always leaves me with a lot of leftover kale. I found this recipe online: Put two cups of chopped kale in a blender with a frozen ripe banana, half a cup of orange juice and a quarter-cup of skim milk. Blend and serve. It looks like grass clippings, but it’s actually quite tasty. Those of you who make smoothies a lot know the ingredients are utterly malleable — one person said to try it with pineapple juice instead, and I’ll probably substitute a dollop of vanilla yogurt for the skim milk next time. And when you’ve drained your glass, you’ve eaten kale instead of chocolate ice cream, and you’re not so very deprived at all.

Maybe I’ll open a kale smoothie shack in retirement. Call it Buttpuckers. “So good, it’ll make you clench your cheeks.”

OK, maybe not.

Some bloggage:

Life is strange in Oklahoma. A state legislator blames the economic crisis on divorce, abortion and homosexuality. Well, that’s one way to look at it.

One thing I did yesterday while I waited on $600 worth of repairs on a car that was running fine: Read the Sarah Palin piece in Vanity Fair. Nothing really new, except the obligatory Olbermann dog-whistle item about writing in the voice of God, but it was nice to see it all in one place.

I swore I’d have nothing more to say on it, and I really don’t, but here’s something that bugs me about the blacks-take-pride-in-Michael-Jackson stories popping up here and there: How much racial pride can you project upon a man who, when he had the choice, chose to have WHITE CHILDREN?

I ask you. And now I head to the shower, and another day too full of obligation, but hey — work’s work.

Today I plan to spend most of the day at the Volkswagen dealer’s, getting the car serviced. I assume the internet service is still a single crappy, for-your-convenience 90’s-era PC with track ball mouse — yes, way — so I’m taking a bunch of work that will benefit from no internet distractions.

That includes you guys.

If I’d had time, I’d have written something yesterday for today, but yesterday was like today, only sunnier and warmer. I did get a chance to see “Hung” on demand, the latest set-in-Detroit series to take advantage of those fat tax incentives. I believe most of it is shot elsewhere, but the credit sequence and the pilot had some serious D-town locations, the most amusing being the final scene, in which the main character finds his son waiting in an all-night line to buy concert tickets. The line is at Harpo’s, and both Alan and I guffawed at the idea of a nice suburban mom allowing her teenage son to spend the night outdoors at the corner of Chalmers and Harper Avenue in Detroit; he’d be safer in South Waziristan. I seem to recall the former Mrs. Eminem used to buy her drugs in that neighborhood.

Otherwise, I liked the pilot. The rest? We’ll see. Anything with Jane Adams can never be a waste of time.

No bloggage, but why I love the New York Times: Their reporters can use “Stygian” in a lead.

Back later, I hope.

You know what the world needs? More choreography like this:

And like this:

(Every year at my all-white junior high and high school, there was a talent show, and there were always two lip-synch acts, always Motown, always the most popular kids in school — the cheerleader girls did a Supremes/Martha & the Vandellas/Marvelettes, etc. number, and the jock boys did a Temptations/Four Tops, etc. song. I wonder how they learned the choreography, this being before YouTube and even videotape. No one ever noted the oddity of white kids dressed in matching orange tuxedos and/or sequined fishtail gowns, imitating black music acts. Berry Gordy really did bring the races together, didn’t he?)

I’m posting those clips because, as promised, I spent the weekend trying to ignore M.J., but a few nice pieces cut through the static, and one was written by Alistair Macaulay, the NYT dance critic, who looked at nothing but Jackson the dancer. Whenever someone names this or that MTV phenom as a great dancer, I always wonder how you could tell, as the quick-cut editing that defines music videos can make anyone look like a great dancer. Move, cut, move, cut, etc. — I always thought dancing was how you put the moves together. Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up” is a pretty good example, and now that I watch it again I notice that the sustained shot at the beginning is a pretty long one, and could have been a stand-in. I take her word it’s really her, but music video, more than any other medium, took dance and chopped it up into a series of tricks. (Two-left-footed me could probably be made graceful with a good editor.) So it’s nice to watch these old J-5 performance clips and be reminded that in his case, it was real, and in that, I can start to find a little empathy with the departed.

Dancers and athletes thrill us with a few years of amazing physical feats, and too many spend the rest of their lives paying for it. A few years back, our late pal Ashley Morris tipped me to a story on a Hall of Fame running back, a man who once had thighs of an outrageous, fearsome circumference, who now cannot climb the stadium stairs to watch his own son play college ball, and I’m sorry but I can’t remember who it was. I once read an interview with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who talked about the constant pain that dancers live with, even young ones. He was in his 40s by then, long retired, but still took class when he could. One quote stuck with me: “A dancer knows what kind of day he’s going to have the moment he gets out of bed.” (Misha in “Giselle.”)

Anyway, Macaulay notes:

But to watch “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” (1979) is to be amazed at just how much charm the 20-year-old Mr. Jackson had, and the charm gets more infectious as the dancing proceeds. You begin by noticing the pelvis, doing its characteristic pulsation, and you recognize how close you are to the world of John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.” Fairly soon, you take in the heels, or rather the action of the insteps that keeps rhythmically lifting the heels off the floor, and then, in various ways, you see the ripple of motion between feet and those very slender hips.

But Mr. Jackson was an upper-body dancer too: there’s a marvelous moment here when he tilts back and stays there. Now go to “Billie Jean” in Motown’s 25th-anniversary celebration (1983). You can see that already everything is much more choreographed, both in the bad sense of unspontaneous and the good sense of dance structure. Most of the time his dancing is so aflame you don’t feel any lack of freshness, and he’s so alert that you hardly have time to laugh — though I think you ought, happily — at the way his busy pelvis keeps hoisting his pants up and revealing his off-white socks. (The changing expanse of socks becomes part of the rhythm.)

“Busy pelvis” — now there’s a great name for a band. (Video HT: Hank.)

How was your weekend? We spent part of it traveling for the wrong reasons — Alan’s 94-year-old Aunt Martha, the last of the Smith sisters, his mom’s side, went to her reward last week, and the funeral was Saturday. “Reward” is literal when you’ve lived that long; we all agreed that the wind really went out of her sails when Alan’s mom died, followed by her last sibling, Dorothy, a few months later. The circle is closed, and the organist was instructed to dial back the mournful tone by 30 percent or so. The lunch and fellowship afterward took place among the still-standing structures of Vacation Bible School, which evidently had a class in Roman history — there were draped tents, plastic swords and CLOSED BY ORDER OF CAESAR AUGUSTUS signs here and there. They even had a little aqueduct made of shipping tubes sawed in half lengthwise.

Alan reports VBS is where he learned to sing, “Oh I’ve got joy joy joy joy down in my heart,” etc. VBS is a real Protestant tradition, ain’a, JeffTMMO? I had no such experience, although after years of CCD classes they’d have had to take me there in leg irons.

Oh, and we had a collective eye-roll over the last hours of Martha’s life: After her heart attack, she was taken to the local hospital, where, even though she had a DNR order, etc., they insisted on transporting her, BY HELICOPTER, to Toledo. They did the same thing to Alan’s mom, even though all agreed her case was hopeless and she would end her life in hospice care within a few days. The Toledo hospital is like the Atlanta airport — you can’t go anywhere without passing through their ER first. And we wonder why health-care costs are staggering.

Even though it’s Monday, it’s a fine and sunny day and I’ve got joy joy joy joy down in my heart. I think this is due to me getting more sleep, however. Off to bicycle through my weekly cop-shop rounds and find out where the bodies are buried. (Like they’d tell us. Hah.)

Jesus Christ, my brain is going to explode before MJ gets planted. This will be like Princess Diana with three-quarters of the IQ points sucked out, worse accents, bigger phonies and more baldly obvious money-grubbing. Who ARE these mutants? Do I share a country with them? How soon can we move to Denmark or Uruguay?

Even with the TV only murmuring in the background, the stupidity seeped through the room like a toxic gas. After a while I started jotting down the lines that penetrated my concentration. Entirely out of context, of course:

He’s credited with changing the way music videos were done…with changing how artists were marketed. …These people have come here to recognize this.

…And I was wearing these beaded socks by Bob Mackie, and he kept telling me, “Cher, I just love your socks.”

Larry King was really in a class of his own, running what he called “this special, sad edition of Larry King Live.” He asked one guest, a doctor: “What could be done to bring someone back from cardiac arrest?” (The doc replied: “Resuscitation.”)

He pushed his celebrity guests through the mill like sports-talk radio callers the night a big coach gets fired. Disco icon Donna Summer. Donna, you knew Michael, did you not? What are your thoughts, Donna? Donna, what was his greatness? His greatness was perfection, Larry. Will you be doing a tribute song tonight? I will, Larry. Thank you, Donna. Joining us now is Sheryl Crow, who knew him well. Sheryl, how are you feeling tonight?

Randy Jackson called it “one of the biggest shocks of my lifetime.” The helicopter took off from the hospital, bound for the coroner’s office. Where is this helicopter going? You wouldn’t happen to know, Randy? Randy didn’t know.

Madonna “couldn’t stop crying.” Maybe she can draw on this memory the next time she’s called upon to act.

Write it down: Drug overdose. In true Hollywood fashion, his stomach contents will consist of brown rice, organic vegetables and Fiji water, while his bloodstream coursed with more industrial-strength opiates and tranquilizers than you could find in 10 hard-case mental hospitals.

I’m turning off the TV, and I won’t turn it back on until Elizabeth Taylor has been wheeled home from the funeral service. You all carry on, but like Forrest Gump, I think this is all I have to say about that.

Jeez, Farrah Fawcett was 62? Groan. How the time do fly. For the record, I was young when she was young (but older!), and I lived through the era of the Poster. This poster, of course:

In about five minutes, Farrah’s poster replaced Carly Simon’s cover photo on “No Secrets” as the erect-nippled fantasy queen of the dorm room. It was time. American boys might go for a brunette from time to time, but sooner or later they always come back to the archetype of the California blonde. (Fawcett was from Texas, but then, many of the blondes in California are from elsewhere.) I argued over that poster many a night, always met by the same implacable male shit-eating grin: But I like it. OK, fine. Farrah was blot-out-the-sun beautiful and sold a million blow dryers to a million women who aped her haircut, but she was never really threatening. Take note, Angelina. It’s possible to be a sex symbol without making other women want to put a tack on your chair.

It was the smile, of course. And the fact that nothing but the hair looked excessively fussed-over. Since every woman fusses over her hair, it bound her to us, instead of pushing us away, the way breast implants and see-through blouses do. She isn’t showing an acre of skin, only the results of a healthy, athletic lifestyle and the sort of thoroughbred good looks that some people get through the luck of the genetic draw. You know what that poster says? Don’t hate me because I’m beautiful. It wasn’t something she could help.

Farrah also wasn’t a man-eater. There was that unfortunate early marriage, after which she dropped the -Majors from her name and apparently swore off matrimony forever, even as she settled down with one man, Ryan O’Neal, for nearly 20 years. And while she had many ups and more downs, most apparently of her own making, she always seemed to be carrying her own weight. She worked in crap and quality, she went off the rails for a while, she had too much plastic surgery, but she was writing her own story, not depending on others to take care of her. Is it possible the girl in the poster, who angered so many feminists, turned out to be one herself?

I am thinking of another picture of Farrah, which you probably won’t see in the obit roundups. It was from a book I bought from a remainder table, “Cheap Chic,” by the editors of Rags magazine, now defunct. The picture looks like it dates from her pre-famous, modeling days, and features her in plain old Levis, white sneakers and a man’s white shirt, tails knotted at the waist. She’s posing on a skateboard, showing evidence of skateboard competence and the customary sunny smile. She looks great, of course, the essence of the American blonde beauty but warm, not Grace Kelly cool, fresh and clean and scrubbed. Don’t hate her because she’s beautiful. She was just one of the lucky ones.

I suppose you guys will want to discuss the latest GOP flameout, and I can’t blame you. This is good because I have morning obligations and won’t be able to sit down and think until lunchtime. So come back then.

In the hours since all this broke, I’m finding my position toward Gov. Sanford softening, if only a bit. Nothing in his constricted morality prepared him for this, and while you can’t excuse the betrayal of his family, I can’t help but empathize with him — he really did look half-poleaxed yesterday. Whatever else this thing was, it does appear to have been a love affair, and not just another tawdry mistress-boffing. If nothing else, the e-mails confirm that.

I guess what I’m saying is, this was a nervous breakdown as much as it was an explanation. I think Roy got it right in the first half of this post.

OK, then. Off to cycle and sweat, and back in a few hours.

I think Time magazine touched this story a while back. Certainly some smart business reporter must have done it by now, too, looking at the dark world of the internet, where otherwise straight-arrow corporations come out to play.

Exhibit A: Gillette offers you tips on how to shave your groin. Why would you do this? Because “when there’s no underbrush, the tree looks taller.” Ha ha, let’s pause for a moment and listen to Don Draper spin in his grave for a moment. (Lung cancer took him. Too soon.) For the curious, Gillette offers similar videos covering armpits, chest, head, and back. (The videos use animation, not live models, so they’re SFW.)

Exhibit B: Budweiser recycles the old standby — guy buying porn gets embarrassed — into a Bud Light commercial. Two minutes of jokey fun about magazines called Tongue in Cheeks, and you don’t even notice you’re watching a commercial for watery beer. I have to say, however, that the casting is perfect — that guy looks exactly like the sort of cubicle drone who picks up a sixer of Bud Light on the way home from work, then decides to make a night of it with a dirty magazine. The real star of the show is the other customer in line, who is probably buying something other than beer.

I’m sure there are dozens more out there. Marketers aren’t stupid. Pube-shavers need a lot of razor blades. So you can’t run a spot like that on “30 Rock” — who cares? If they don’t tell you how to do it, someone else will, and they’re not as likely to tout your products. Sooner or later this stuff will end up on mainstream TV, and so you’d best watch those and get ready, because I’m sure Rod Dreher is already preparing a big whiny blog post on them, only by then he’ll be writing for the goddamn New York Times. (Sooner or later Ross Douchehat will run out of material.)

You know what else happens when you clear away the underbrush, gents? You look like the kind of guy who thinks an optical illusion really fools something other than the eye. Go buy some Bud Light.

Here’s another video I found en route to looking up the Gillette spots. By the hit count I may be the last American to actually see it, but still recommended.

Another scorcher ahead — mid-90s, we’re promised. So while we’re all sitting in the nice a/c, contemplate what the hell with Gov. Sanford. Argentina? Did he go for a spur-of-the-moment tango lesson? I could hear Keith Olbermann in his second-most insufferable persona last night beating this dead horse to a bloody pulp, and this isn’t going to help. But still — this guy sounds like he has a few screws loose.

You’ll be living in a van down by the river! Another gem from Detroitblog, a portrait of one of those singular community-activist types that make city life worth living:

In the early ’80s Hume bid on a neighboring city-owned marina, won as the low bidder, then the city canceled the sale without clear explanation. Hume sued, the city settled. He took the money, bought video cameras and started a company called Public Eye Video, a one-man operation that taped all council meetings after he found crazy statements made by council members never made it into the meeting minutes. “I videotaped their asses, so at least somebody would have a record of what the fuck they’re saying,” he says.

It drove them nuts. They tried to shut him down, but learned they couldn’t because it was a public meeting and he had a right to record it. Then they tried to cut off his use of their electricity, but he found a way to buy it directly from the City-County Building authorities instead. At one point council member Kay Everett lost it in front of his camera, shouting at Hume, “You’re very close to getting this thing rammed down your throat!”

As I’ve said many times in the last few years: And people wonder why I love this crazy-ass town.

Headline of the day: “‘You Light Up My Life’ Composer is Criminal Sex Monster, Naturally.” Hell yes.

Off to beat the day into submission. I suspect it’ll be sweaty.

I really don’t want to be a pill about this, but here goes: I keep running into the World’s Loudest Lawn Service. No matter where I go, they are my neighbor’s choice for lawn care, lawn treatment and especially running a goddamn gas-powered edger — talk about the world’s stupidest lawn chore — around the perimeter of the lawn, preferably twice, getting right up next to the pavement so sparks fly from the blade and the sound goes SCREE SCREE SCREE for 30 minutes or so.

After which they will fire up the gas-powered blower.

The blower is always last. I am accustomed to working in newsrooms, and I like to believe there’s no noise I can’t tune out if it’s just consistent. Teletype machines, phones, colleagues with droning nasal voices explaining tax policy to their editors — all of these can become white noise with a little mind yoga. (In fact, I’ve often thought teletypes are even soothing, that chugging sound they make, occasionally punctuated by bells. New lede! Writethru! Fixes Burns’ title, adds spokesman comment, background!) But people operating gas-powered lawn equipment are like the sorts of people who own motorcycles — they don’t know this thing we call “idle.” The sound of a motor just going put-put-put doesn’t satisfy. And so they must throw in little revs every 12 seconds or so, goose the throttle a little, just to show all the other bitches out there how we roll.

Ann Arbor wasn’t lawn-crazy. You found shaggy, weedy lawns in the nicest neighborhoods in town; leggy saplings, little more than lignifying (look it up) weeds, sprouted in every park strip. Tree Town always looks a little scruffy and mossy, the sign of a populace preoccupied with grading papers or translating ancient Greek or arguing over Hugo Chavez, and far too bohemian to worry about something as stupid as crabgrass. Also, quiet.

Ah, well. The owner of my gym says his aches and pains remind him he’s alive. I suppose, when you open windows, you have to listen to your neighbors from time to time. I just wish they’d let me finish my goddamn coffee before they start.

The New York Times has a pretty good package today on the Steve Jobs liver transplant, and the question it’s raising. Looking for justice in American health-care resource allocation is a fool’s errand, but I am interested in the investors’ angle, i.e., can a CEO with this high a profile get away with claiming privacy when he’s obviously gravely ill? This is a publicly traded company and Jobs is hardly another cog in the Apple wheel. I’d be interested in hearing anyone else’s thoughts about this. I’m equally amused by how quickly Jobs abandoned the alternative therapies he was said to be trying after his diagnosis. Nothing like an organ transplant to make one a believer in the miracles of western medicine. Which is one way of saying one reason American health care is so expensive is because, hello, you can get a liver transplant. You can take statins. You can replace your damn knee when it falls apart. I’m old enough to remember ads in magazines for trusses. I’m sure Jobs had great insurance, but still.

OK, off to the gym. Speaking of achy knees. Back later, but not for long, because hello? Eighty-six degrees and sunny? I’m going to the pool.

Up north to a wedding this weekend. Always fun to attend weddings. They beat funerals, for one thing. There’s cake. And usually wine, and frequently champagne.

There was certainly no shortage at this wedding, which was held in the northern Michigan woods. Not all the way off the grid, but edging in that direction — catering, but with porta-potties and an explicit warning from the wedding couple not to wear heels, because of the walk in from the road, which was decidedly unfriendly to delicate footwear. But once back there, it was a little oasis of loveliness, with a blue color scheme. The bride wore a $30 gown she got at Goodwill and had altered to her taste; why wear Vera Wang to trail behind you down a dirt path en route to the forest clearing? Any last-minute fit alterations just went with the color scheme:

The couple was said to be going for an effect that was “rustic, not redneck.” I’d say they succeeded. All guests were invited to camp on the surrounding acreage, and many took them up on it. We didn’t, and stayed at another guest’s nearby hunting cabin, which had the benefit of window screens on a night when the mosquitos were feeling particularly bloodthirsty. On the other hand, I bet the afterparty was a blast.

Leaving, it occurred to me the last wedding I went to in northern Michigan was also held right around the summer solstice. The sky after 10 p.m., as we were leaving:

They prize summer in the north. “Three months of bad sledding,” etc.

That was my weekend. How was yours?

On the way we passed the Perma-Log Co., a company about which the name says everything. I regret that the website doesn’t feature the other perma-items from the company’s acreage on M-33, which included perma-Stonehenge and perma-Easter Island heads. Both of which would be perma-cool in our front yard, I think. Northern Michigan kitsch doesn’t have quite the same feel as that of, say, southern Ohio. Not so many fat ladies bending over or plywood silhouettes of a guy leaning against a tree, but there’s nothing like a flying-bird windmill to let you know you’re not in the city anymore.

Actually, there are lots of ways to tell you’re not in the city, once you get out of it, headed north. The entire economy of northern Michigan, never robust in the first place, seems to rest on competition between hospitals to land your next heart attack, at least to judge from the billboards. In between those billboards are other billboards advertising schools that can get you in a scrub top and working in the wide-open world of health care faster than the next one. Nothing really says, “We are a region of the obese and old” more clearly than this. I bet, in places like Portland and California, you might see the occasional ad for sports-medicine and laparoscopic knee surgery.

But we also sat with one of our filmmaking party, who moonlights as a DJ. One of his gigs is the local women’s roller-derby team, and he shared their favorite requests — 2 Live Crew, and assorted other acts whose lyrics feature maximum degradation of women. This tickles me, as it suggests rollergirls know more about what feminism entails than those who have PhDs in gender studies. There’s something about picturing these jammers and blockers, any one of whom could kill you with her bare hands, throwing ‘em up to “Me So Horny” that cracks me up.

Bloggage? Surrrreee:

We’ve had a local story breaking in the past few days, with the Fox affiliate leading the way. The coverage — all bluster, posturing and “as I told you exclusively” — has been excruciating, but not as excruciating as this, which I beg you to watch, because besides being excruciating, it’s also sort of awesome.

The etiquette of the CrackBerry, something I admit I struggle with myself. Nothing like those little interstitial spaces in life for multitasking on your smartphone, I always say. Nothing like a little Wurdle to fill up a two-minute bathroom break in a meeting. When does it cross the line into rudeness? A question for our time.

My question for today is, can I get everything done that I have to get done? Only if I sign off now and go pick the dog up from the vet’s boarding kennel. Latuh.