So how was our vacation? It was pretty good, I think. Here’s where we went:

Not here, exactly. Farther back:

Almost there. Here:

Wow! In that log mansion? Not exactly — that’s the owner’s house, and they were only there for the first weekend. We rented their guest cottage next door:

Two bedrooms, 30 feet or so from the Au Sable River, which meant Alan was in pig heaven and so was I, because in addition to the woods and the quiet and the tolerable level of bugs and the screened porch and the nothing-to-do-ness of it all, there was also this:

Lately, a key element to full enjoyment of one’s time off. No internet — and no kid, Kate having been deposited at camp on day one — meant I was free to loaf about and do pretty much exactly what I wanted, and that was: Loaf about. And read. I plowed through five novels, none of them particularly good, but it reminded me of how much I’ve missed this, and maybe I should stop trying to read the whole internet every single day and carve out an hour or so for the printed word. Did the world stop turning in my absence? No, and I still missed only four on the Slate News Quiz, and I hardly heard any news last week. So maybe I should stop trying so hard to keep up. This three-week break from Miss Kate might be a good time to try to make some adjustments. She’s already in France, and left a Father’s Day message stating that she was fed quail and goat cheese, and tonight’s menu was to include escargot, so it sounds like she’s getting a crash course in life adjustments herself.

We did get a little bit of exercise, but downstream? Not that much:

Back to the books I read. It included one Loren Estleman title, “American Detective,” which should have been a clue — when the book has such a generic title, beware. It’s one of his Amos Walker series, a classic gumshoe who works in Detroit. I read them because, duh, Detroit, and to be sure, they have some wonderful rat-a-tat dialogue here and there, but I think this will be the last. Maybe someone has asked Laura Lippman her thoughts on the novelist’s duty to a place, once they’ve decided to set a story in an existing city. What can you change? I think you can make up streets, and you can adjust some details via poetic license, but there have to be some rules. Can you make up entire suburbs? I say no. (Estleman does it all the time.) Can you change geography in significant ways? This is the second of his books that has featured a throwaway line about the Detroit River “widening into Lake St. Clair,” which has the entire continental flow of water going in the wrong direction, and this just makes me nuts. He also spelled “gunwales” wrong, which makes me wonder about fiction editors — weren’t they English majors?

He’s not alone, either. I never picked up a second book by a particular author, after his first featured a scene set in a nighttime jungle, and he mentions the screaming of the birds. I’ve never been to a jungle, but I’m 99 percent sure birds don’t scream at night, even there. You might have a few hoots from a nocturnal avian predator here and there, but if you want the birds to scream, it has to be daytime.

Later in the same book, a character watches the sun rise over the water in a place where such a view is impossible, because the sun rises in the east. Hey, mistakes happen. Books are hard. But I don’t think you get to move the damn sun around.

Rant over. I’m feeling pretty mellow, all things considered. I’m glad so many of you enjoyed the ancient archives, and am still working my way through the comments. I’m also reading up on Edward Snowden, and am glad I don’t have to have instant opinions anymore, because the picture keeps changing. I’ll leave you with this short video, the only job we had last week. The owners of the property dammed a small creek and stocked it with rainbow trout, which they enjoy almost entirely as pets — I think they said they’ve eaten one over the years, but none recently. Every other day we were instructed to toss them half a bucket of trout chow, which made for some amusement:

May your week be filled with something similar. Trout chow, or amusement, or a guy throwing food at you.

To close the week, a throwaway interview for a forgotten book that I enjoyed from start to finish, and learned a lot from, too. I love pulp paperbacks. This guy really knew his stuff. From March 2002. Thanks for bearing with me during Ancient Archives week; we’ll see you back here on Monday.

The blonde stands before a man at a desk. He regards her with a certain professional distance, all the more surprising given that she’s caught in the middle of ripping open her blouse, exposing her lacy underthings and ample attributes.

No one could fail to see the immediate appeal of Henry Lewis Nixon’s “The Golden Couch,” described on its cover as “a novel of the private lives and loves of psychiatrists.” The contents have been forgotten, if they were ever remembered long. But the blonde, the blouse, the 25-cent price – these things endure.

They’re the subject of “The Great American Paperback,” writer and cultural historian Richard Lupoff’s coffee-table tribute to the dime novel, pulp fiction, the sensational story – the great 20th-century innovation that took literature out of the library and brought it to the revolving rack in your corner drugstore.

Lupoff will be in Fort Wayne Sunday, appearing at Little Professor Book Company in support of “The Great American Paperback,” as well as his latest short story collection, “Claremont Tales II.”

“The Great American Paperback” is Lupoff’s “wow” volume, however – a fascinating, hilarious, comprehensive look at the forces that came together to make paperback books an institution.

Although the softcover book can be found as early as the 1930s, what we think of as the modern paperback did not arrive until 1938, when the U.S. holder of the Penguin imprint sought to test the waters for such a product with a 2,000-copy printing of Pearl S. Buck’s “The Good Earth.” The concept was revolutionary – a book small enough to fit in one’s pocket, bound only with glue. It had no dust jacket, just a brightly printed cover to draw the eye in the crowded confines of the marketplace.

And the price! About the same as an hour of labor at minimum wage, a figure that Lupoff says has remained remarkably consistent through the years.

“People loved it,” he said of the paperback’s debut. “You didn’t have to wait for the public library to get a book, or visit a lending library” – the early, literary version of a video store, where books could be rented for a small fee. “You could own the book, and it didn’t cost much at all.”

Within a year, the paperback was everywhere, and competition for the reader was pitched. Although an almost immediate struggle began between art and commerce, most publishers were savvy enough to realize they were competing for sometimes indifferent readers, and cloaked their books accordingly.

Thus, the blonde ripping open her blouse. “Don’t judge a book by its cover” was never so true as during the heyday of the paperback, when scantily clad cover girls often promised literary titillation that the pages behind them didn’t deliver.

“I’m competing for the customer’s beer money,” sci-fi writer Robert Heinlein once said, approving this rather mild bait-and-switch. Much quality literature has appeared between paper covers, and if it takes a white lie to get readers to it, it seems forgivable. Besides, such disconnects make for great collecting: Nathanael West’s classic novel of depraved Hollywood, “The Day of the Locust,” once appeared behind a cover that suggested the book was about a plague of insects.

That cover appears in Lupoff’s book, along with hundreds of others that illustrate the signposts along the way since 1938 – the genres, the publishers and the gimmicks. These include the Ace Double, two novels in one cover; finish one, then flip the book over and start the next. Such hooks now make collectors happy, who prize paperbacks not so much for what’s in them (although some do) as what’s on them.

Lupoff, who lives in Berkeley, Calif., said his local dealers report collectors with amazingly specific tastes. “One only wants books with hypodermic needles on the cover,” he said. (Fortunately, due to a strong horrors-of-drugs genre in paperback, there are plenty to choose from.) “Another only wants cover art that features women being menaced by gorillas.”

Others like campy sci-fi covers or content, or collect the work of specific artists, who labored in obscurity throughout their careers. But what really made collecting take off, Lupoff said, was the introduction of ISBN (International Standard Book Number) numbering around 1970. Before that, publishers kept track of their work with simple cover numbers: “D-150,” for instance, might refer to the 150th work of detective fiction produced by a given house. Where 150 exists, there are 149 others to collect, and many do.

“The Great American Paperback,” like great American paperbacks, is doing well since its publication late last year. “At one point I had simultaneous reviews in Entertainment Weekly, Playboy and the Wilson Quarterly,” Lupoff noted with amusement. Just like the volumes it honors, “The Great American Paperback” has appeal that crosses cultural lines.

When I look back at this part of my archive, I’m ashamed at how timid I was in the run-up to the Iraq invasion. I knew in my heart that this was the world’s worst idea, and yet, the city was a flag-waving, patriotic fever swamp. If I’d been braver, I’d have said so every damn day and screw the letters to the editor. But instead, I pulled stupid, sneery shit like this. I was such a coward. I suck. This was from March 2003.

Every war has a home front. It’s our way of acknowledging that some of us are too old, too young, too infirm or too rich in draft deferments to risk dodging bullets, but we wish to do our part, too.

In the Civil War, we rolled bandages and sewed uniforms. In World War II, we saved tin for scrap drives and held blackout drills.

In Gulf War II, we’re rebranding our fried potatoes.

Maybe you’ve seen them around town, the fry formerly known as “french?” It’s now a “freedom fry.” That’ll show those cheese-eating surrender monkeys. If you’re not on the bus, you’re . . . well, you’re off the bus, somewhere, eating Montrachet with cowards. See you later, Pierre! And take your Dijon mustard with you!

Sorry. It’s so easy to get carried away with patriotic fervor.

If you’ve been able to tear yourself away from “Joe Millionaire” long enough to keep up with the events of the day, you know that in certain circles the French have become, if not public enemies, certainly ungrateful allies, unwilling to climb upon the Baghdad-or-bust bandwagon. What’s more, they’re turning their little Pepe LePew noses up! At us! Without whom they’d be speaking German now! And don’t even get us started on Germany, those jackbooted Fritzes. One more word from you, Herr Fischer, and you’re outta here too, with your Wiener schnitzel and hot potato salad.

OK, we’ve calmed down now. But the march to Americanize those pesky unsupportive foreign foods continues apace.

I called up Rick Hembrook, operations manager for Buckets Sports Pub & Grub, who took out a newspaper ad to announce the restaurant’s denunciation of all foods French. It was accompanied by a photo of a beret-wearing hag daring to arch one of her eyebrows in that time-honored way the French call “le snot,” probably fresh from a Jean-Luc Godard film festival.

“I thought, we serve a lot of French food here,” said Hembrook. “French fries, French dressing . . .”

From this week forward, Hembrook declared, Buckets would no longer serve french fries or French dressing. Or rather, the restaurant would serve them under new names, because it’s really un-American to ask us to do without anything, be it cheap gasoline or deep-fried potatoes.

Anyway, french fries come from Idaho. And French dressing comes from Kraft. The new names? “American fries.” And “American dressing.”

Take that, frere Jacques.

Over at Georgetown Bowl, the rechristening of their fries from french to “freedom fries” was “more as a joke,” said owner Dave Kerscher.

“My partner and I were kidding about it, and the next thing we knew, our snack-bar girl had gone ahead and changed it on her own,” he said. “It’s not a huge protest or anything.”

No, it’s not a huge protest. It’s just the little way we can all help. Perhaps the Army can make a short film about the New Francophobia: “Discover the Fun of Kissing Tongue-Free.” “Wouldn’t You Rather Have Pancakes Than Traitor Toast?” “Why Crusty, Chewy Bread is Unpatriotic.”

Oh, I can see it now: Take your dirty postcards, your berets, your fizzy water, your cheese that smells like old socks, your bernaise sauce and your stupid striped jerseys back to Gaul! (We’re keeping the Statue of Liberty and the 2000 Bordeaux.) Away, now, with all things French!

Of course, if we’re diligent, with most of Europe standing against us now, we won’t be left with much. Why, when we’re booting foreign cuisine, do we have to have an ally in Great Britain? Steak and kidney pie, anyone?

When you’re a columnist, editors are always stopping by your desk with a press release they’d like to offload. The some-magazine-just-named-us-something boilerplate was only the most irritating. “These are designed to get the magazine’s name in the media,” I would point out. “Look at the data they used. This is pure bullshit.” This was never met with anything other than a shrug. I’d round-file most of these, but every so often I’d feel inspired to answer bullshit with more bullshit. Published October 2000.

The word had scarcely gone out that no less a tribunal than the editors of Self magazine had declared our little town “least fit” (for women, anyway) in America than the hand-wringing began.

“What can this mean for our future efforts to be the next Indianapolis?” fretted
 town boosters, many of them picking over egg-white omelets and dressing-on-the-side spinach salads at tables with lovely views. “What does it say about us when an obscure women’s magazine catering to the solipsistic says we’re a city full of people with sofa cushions stuffed down the back of our pants? Does this mean we’re a no-go for the NAIA?”

Does it ever stop? wondered a put-upon soul at one economic-development office or another. Sighing, he launched his word processor and drafted a memo on damage control.

In other quarters, the news was appraised with a cooler eye. Restaurateurs made mental notes to add an extra roll to the bread basket, and underlined “butter” three times on the “must-have” list, just so the suppliers wouldn t forget.

At the health clubs, the bickering was fast and furious. “It doesn t surprise me,” offered one indifferent block of chiseled masculinity. “You thought Monica Lewinsky was overqualified for thong underwear? I won’t even tell you what I was able to make out through Ms. L’ s spandex yesterday.”

That’ll be enough of that,” retorted a blonde — zaftig, but in that apple-cheeked, I-could-bench-press-a-Holstein farm girl way. “It’s well-known that your media-promoted model of skinniness is based on an unhealthy model of living. Not for me the Tic Tac diet, the quiet after-dinner hurl with the water running. Life is a sandwich, and I intend to eat it. With mayonnaise.” With that, she turned and sauntered away, swinging her 42-inch hips — quite fetchingly, the chiseled block thought.

A lone cardiologist, torn between the Porsche and the Mercedes, decided to take both. Business was looking very good, after all.

A high school speech teacher sought to make it the central question for debate class. “Resolved: We are a city of wheezing fat people.” For the affirmative, a sophomore named Heather gamely held her ground. Later, everyone continued the colloquy in the student lounge, over snacks from the vending machines.

Meanwhile — and this next part is true, while the preceding is, fairly obviously, not — plans for a city-county master parks plan are moving forward, in the sense that a company has been hired to prepare one. There is talk of extending the Rivergreenway, rumored to be a place where much exercise takes place, into New Haven. There is no talk of repairing the existing Rivergreenway, a huge chunk of which was torn up earlier this year for sewer work and remains so. And there is that unfortunate washed-out stretch near Lakeside. Just a reminder.

At the same time the rivers flow past their greenways, someone awakens on a sunny morning, filled with resolve. He prepares oatmeal without butter, black coffee, orange juice. He opens the newspaper turns to the classifieds, scans down to the “exercise equipment for sale” listings. Stationary bike treadmill, rower, stepper — the choices seem endless. He dials a few numbers.

In all likelihood, the piece he buys will make a second appearance in the paper in a few months, or else be covered with clothing in that peculiar household sculpture of the late 20th century. The pair of athletic shoes he bought at the same time will be the frame he watches basketball through, when the recliner footrest is up.

In the meantime, we’ll continue to super-size our fast-food meals, no matter how many heart attacks that nice Dave Thomas suffers. We’ll remember he got his start in Fort Wayne, a true son of the city, the city that just made the national news, if only for a moment, but for the same old depressing reasons.

Continuing our theme of How Things Change, an early look at the now-burgeoning local-food movement in Indiana, back when you had to put “community-supported agriculture” in quotes, so readers would know it was this crazy new idea. I looked up this CSA’s URL with some trepidation, expecting to find it long-gone, but still it thrives! Good news. This was originally published in May 2003.

Jeff Hawkins dropped me a note a few years ago, after I wrote something about food. I think I talked about how hard you have to look to find organic this and free-range that; he sent me a brochure for the Hawkins Family Farm.

It was an experiment, he said, in “raising some food where we know what it is and what’s in it.” The first year, he bought 25 chickens and raised them the old-fashioned way – under a blue North Manchester sky, where they were allowed to scratch the dirt and chase bugs and be chickens.

“My daughter named them all,” he said. Typical first-year mistake for chickens destined for the pot.

But the experiment went fine otherwise, and the next year he bought a few more, and started selling them.

“The old-timers said (the poultry) tasted the way they used to taste,” he said. He began to suspect he might be on to something.

He is. This year the brochure arrived right on time, at the beginning of the growing season. But the Hawkins Family Farm is no longer a health spa for chickens. They’ve added beef, turkeys, fresh produce and a plan – “community-supported agriculture.”

Today, in addition to direct-sale poultry, the farm operates on a share system. For $1,080, shareholders get a quarter carcass of beef, 25 chickens, fresh produce for 22 weeks, soup beans, a Thanksgiving turkey and “extras” – flowers, experimental crops and the like. All the meat is free-range and humanely slaughtered. Fifty shares are available, minus the five he will tithe to local food banks.

“It’s become a calling,” said Hawkins, who quit his job as pastor of Zion Evangelical Lutheran Church in North Manchester to run the farm full time.

He’s also using the farm as the basis for a new ministry, aimed at the well-being of clergy. About a dozen ministers meet monthly on the farm for a “day away” of work and discussion – a working retreat for personal reflection.

Hawkins believes we spend a lot of time talking about how the hand of God moves in the world, but too little actually going out to see it at work. He found, with two teenage children, that doing farm chores together has a way of loosening restraints on conversation. And a day on the farm, away from one’s usual work and concerns, “connects us to the natural world” in ways other activities don’t, he said.

Nevertheless, it’s not all blue skies and fresh breezes.

“This is teaching me a number of things,” he said. “It’s teaching me a whole lot about trust, and to learn to ask for help.” When you’re an unemployed preacher embarking on an experiment in community agriculture, you need a lot of both.

It’s not unheard of. No less an entity than the U.S. Department of Agriculture recognizes community-supported agriculture as a viable economic model for small farms. And Hawkins doesn’t discount the hunger some townfolks have for a slower pace of living, as well as farm-raised food. Shareholders may be asked to pick their own produce, which saves labor and assures customers of the freshest possible product, among other things.

“(Wife) Kathy plans to have the porch swing ready and a pitcher of iced tea waiting for you when you come to the farm,” the farm’s Web site says. (Yes, Web site. Even back-to-the-land folks have to live in the modern world, and the farm’s place in it is at www.hawkinsfamilyfarm.com.) Come, pick, reconnect – that’s the message.

And get a chicken that tastes the way they used to. Not a bad deal.

Ancient Archives Week — i.e., I’m on vacation and can’t update daily — kicks off with a theme, of sorts: How Things Change. I wrote this column in October 2001, when Elliot Kwilinski, 9 months, was about to become Indiana’s youngest cochlear implant recipient. The Kwilinskis moved to Colorado not long after their son’s surgery, but before they left I heard from them that the procedure was a success. A little present-day Googling reveals they had a second son, also born with profound deafness, also a CI recipient. I’m struck by the optimism she shows in this interview, and in this YouTube video, she indicates their choice has not been popular with some, presumably in the deaf-culture community. It was to be expected, but still depressing. The videos would indicate Elliot is growing into a fine young man. Anyway, this column, and all the ones that will follow this week, originally appeared in The News-Sentinel of Fort Wayne, my employer at the time.

In her “crying in the shower moments,” Amy Kwilinski thinks of the beach.

The beach, where one of the rituals is taking off your watch, your jewelry, and other valuables that might be harmed by exposure to sand and grit and water.

“But how do you tell a child to take off a $5,000 device that allows him to hear?” she wonders. It’s not the device she worries about; it’s her son Elliot’s ability to experience the beach the way everyone else does.

Those moments pass pretty quickly, though. Kwilinski and her husband, Kevin, know that $5,000 device – a cochlear implant – will give their son an excellent chance at experiencing life the way everyone else does.

Next week, if all goes as scheduled, Elliot will travel to Riley Children’s Hospital in Indianapolis and there become the youngest Indiana resident to receive one of the electronic devices, which help the profoundly deaf to hear in a manner approaching natural hearing. He’s only 9 months old, still nursing, not yet crawling. But his young age will allow him to adapt to the implant in a way older recipients might not – and get the maximum benefit from it.

“We wanted to take advantage of the brain’s plasticity,” said Amy, 33, who has been researching deafness, deaf culture, hearing aids and cochlear implants since Elliot’s disability turned up in a newborn screening. In infancy, the brain is wired to learn, and learn quickly; they want Elliot experiencing the world of sound before his personal learning window narrows or closes.

A cochlear implant works through its three main parts – an external microphone, which picks up sound; a microprocessor, which codes the sound into a series of electrical impulses; and a wire that carries those impulses into the human cochlea, where they are sent to the brain and understood as sound. It is an imperfect way to hear, but an enormous improvement over conventional hearing aids.

And for an infant, whose brain is especially open to learning about sound and what sounds mean, it’s a golden opportunity, Amy believes.

“Who really knows if the way I hear is the way you hear,” she said. “The important thing is, we understand one another. . . . (People who’ve lost their hearing and then received cochlear implants) say that the voices sound like Darth Vader and Minnie Mouse at first, but you get used to them. And you recognize the voices as speech and know what they’re saying.”

Cochlear implant technology is advancing in huge strides, as well, Amy said. The latest implants represent enormous improvements over the earliest ones, and the technology itself is only a few years old. By Elliot’s adulthood, she hopes, the devices may be so small and so sophisticated that no one else need know a person is wearing one.

Many in the deaf community are opposed to the implants, particularly in children. Deafness, they believe, is not a condition to be cured but a trait of human diversity. Adults might choose CIs, but children should not have the choice imposed upon them. The Kwilinskis reject that argument.

“It’s much more difficult for a person to learn to process sound the older they are,” Amy said. “And for Elliot to talk until then, he’d have to use sign language. I want him to be able to communicate with everybody, and to choose any career he wants. What if he wants to be a surgeon? How can he work with his hands if he has to talk with them, too?”

The surgery is only the first step for Elliot. It’ll be a month before the device is activated, after which he will spend time with audiologists and speech therapists to calibrate and adjust it, effectively turning on an entirely new sense in a person who lacks any framework to understand it. After that, “it’ll be pretty noisy around here,” Amy said. She expects lots of crying, followed by sounds of delight.

“People who’ve done this with their toddlers say within a few days, the kids don’t want to take them off,” she said.

“We went to a convention (of cochlear implant recipients), and I sat there with tears in my eyes, watching these teen-agers talk to one another,” she said. “I know this is the right thing to do.”

Well, I will not deny it: This is outrageous. I know, I know — no one is looking at your stuff, nor mine, but this is outrageous.

However, at the moment I’m just going to let shit slide. I’m now on vacation, and I’m in shit-sliding mode. You discuss. I’m still in absorption mode on this one.

What I can’t let slide is this column by Virginia Postrel, on the possible liquidation of Detroit’s art museum. Every idiot libertarian I’ve ever known has had a big googly-eyed crush on her, but this hits a little close to home:

Parochial interests aside, however, great artworks shouldn’t be held hostage by a relatively unpopular museum in a declining region. The cause of art would be better served if they were sold to institutions in growing cities where museum attendance is more substantial and the visual arts are more appreciated than they’ve ever been in Detroit. Art lovers should stop equating the public good with the status quo.

The cause of art. Hmm, what do you suppose that is? Postrel thinks our collection would be better off in those two artistic oases — Los Angeles and, get this, Dallas. God, what an odious twit.

I really need to go on vacation. So I think I will.

To repeat: Next week, five from the ancient archives. They suck, but they will suck free of charge, as always. I’ll be back, live and in the flesh, June 17.

OK, it’s decided: Next week will be one of Ancient Archives, selections from the work of a newspaper columnist who toiled in relative obscurity in the northeast corner of Indiana. You might like ‘em, you might not, but at least you’ll have fresh entries to comment on, and under, every day.

I have three lined up so far. If I can find two more that don’t turn my stomach — and so, so many of them do; I see only the flaws — we’ll have a week’s worth.

A difficult day, spent mostly staring at the mockery of a cursor, which had this to say: Blink. So let’s get to some bloggage, because it’s good today:

Only in Detroit! Teenagers walking to school look down an alley, and see the astonishing sight of a man having sex with a pit bull, so they do what any kid would do: Take out their phones and shoot some video. After showing it to a school security guard, police came to the scene and found the man sitting on the ground naked, but he took off. From here the story becomes a little murky, but it appears the man was taken to the psych ward, the dog to a shelter, and the final verdict, from the man’s brother, is that he had “mental issues, and also drug issues.” But of course. And because this is local TV news, there had to be a shot of the reporter getting tough with the brother. I hate local TV news. (That link explains why, admirably. It’s not enough to bug people who don’t want to be interviewed on a nothing story. You have to bug and bug and bug, and make sure the camera catches it all.)

Meanwhile, if great news photos had been taken with an iPhone.

It’s the new dance craze that’s sweepin’ the nation: Artisanal distillery. A natural for Cooz, I think.

Why conservatives hate the Citibike program in New York, in one Venn diagram. This is actually hilarious to watch unfold. We’ll see how it goes.

It appears all the good has been bred out of the Kennedy line. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaccine advocate. Lots of links to follow in that one, so I won’t quote any of it.

Back to packing, and that damn cursor.

I’m sorry for yesterday’s absence. I had one of those very long days on little sleep, and still managed to drag my flabby ass to the gym, and re-watch “Mad Men” just for the hell of it, and by the time I realized it was 10:30 and I hadn’t written a word, my head was nodding. But I did squeeze out a few! They were these

Brian Stouder, this is for you.

Also, this. Dorothy Rabinowitz, ack ack ack. I’ll be in later, because for now I’m simply too pooped.

And then, evidently, I forgot to hit Publish. Well, that’s how it goes.

But now it’s Tuesday evening, I’m better-rested, and besides the links above, a few notes:

We leave Friday to take Kate to camp, where she’ll rehearse for a week and then jet off to the Continent. We are celebrating by taking our first just-us vacation in a decade, and we’ll be far from wi-fi and the rest of the internet. I COULDN’T BE HAPPIER, she said, right before her eye started to twitch.

How will the week go? Not sure. I still have a bunch of old newspaper columns (thanks, Mark P.!) I might dust off and rerun. As I recall, it took me forever to find five that I could stand to re-read the last time I did this two years ago. But I just scanned a couple, and find they don’t suck as much as I remember. We’ll see. But you’ll be on your own otherwise. If your comment gets stuck in the spam filter — Prospero, I am looking at YOU — it’ll stay there for days.

It sorta hurts — in a non-painful way — to write this. Just returned from my one-month post-op check at the eye doctor’s, and was reminded anew how much I’m not looking forward to this stage of my life. The appointment was screwed up, and they tried to hit me for a $50 co-pay I contend I didn’t owe. I won easily, which should give you an idea of medical-office economics. That colonoscopy piece in the NYT should have been horrifying to anyone still trying to defend the American health-care system in its current form.

Anyway, my eye is healing, but the cataract — which I was told was a possible complication, years down the road — is already starting to form. Fuckety-fuck.

So since we’ve already started with a jab at American health care, let’s start the bloggage with a charming BBC story about the fascinating miracle known as the Finnish baby box. Every expectant mother in Finland gets one:

The maternity package – a gift from the government – is available to all expectant mothers.

It contains bodysuits, a sleeping bag, outdoor gear, bathing products for the baby, as well as nappies, bedding and a small mattress.

With the mattress in the bottom, the box becomes a baby’s first bed. Many children, from all social backgrounds, have their first naps within the safety of the box’s four cardboard walls.

The box, with a shower’s worth of useful products to take care of the new critter, is only part of the miracle. To get it, women have to see a doctor before their fourth month of pregnancy. So it’s win-win — mothers get prenatal care, and the government sees fewer babies in NICU units, leading to Finland having a tiny infant-mortality rate. A good investment, I’d say. A great read, especially if you’re a mother.

Two stories about rich people:

A few days ago, Detroit’s Masonic Temple — a wonderful Gothic pile sadly fallen on hard times — was at the risk of foreclosure due to unpaid taxes. In the nick of time, an anonymous check for $142,000 arrived to save it from becoming yet another empty building in a city full of them. Today, the anonymous donor was revealed: Jack White. Who really wanted to remain anonymous, but the Masonic owners insisted on naming the central theater after him.

Meanwhile, in California, the damage to the Big Sur redwood forest done by Sean Parker’s (Napster/Facebook Silicon Valley shithead) wedding was tallied, and this Atlantic explication of it is such a delicious read, I don’t want to spoil it for you. But this is some shameful shit here, the sort of willful, stupid behavior for which the term “rich douchebag” was invented.

Finally, I see the Chicago Sun-Times, in its nonstop effort to strip the paper of every possible reason to buy it, has cut off Neil Steinberg to spite its face. I am a late-coming fan of his column, but I find this amazing — he’s a consistently good read, and this is an invitation to find the exit. I hope someone reconsiders, or snaps him up elsewhere.

And with that, I leave you to a good Wednesday, I hope.

It’s official: After a lifetime of sneering after retirees moving to warmer climates, I now totally get it. It occurred to me today that I could live the rest of my life at 72 degrees and three weeks before the summer solstice. I have more energy, eat better, find exercise a temptation and not a chore and feel optimistic about the day ahead.

Florida! I take it all back! Except for that part about the heat and the bugs.

Yes, it was a good weekend. Got out, got around, lazed around re-reading a Travis McGee novel. Make a homemade pizza topped with roasted red peppers, tomatoes, spinach, garlic and fresh mozz. Made hamburgers. Drank some craft beers and pinot noir. Watched, via Netflix, “The Way,” which I expect you religious types have seen by now, and “Drive,” just to see if it was still disappointing, and yes it was. Had a 20-mile bike ride and a short sail. If that ain’t summer living, I’d like to know what is.

A little bloggage? OK:

Why are colonoscopies thousands of dollars in the U.S. and only hundreds in the rest of the developed world? The New York Times explains:

The high price paid for colonoscopies mostly results not from top-notch patient care, according to interviews with health care experts and economists, but from business plans seeking to maximize revenue; haggling between hospitals and insurers that have no relation to the actual costs of performing the procedure; and lobbying, marketing and turf battles among specialists that increase patient fees.

You don’t say.

How did Michael Douglas develop oral cancer? Now it can be told:

Michael Douglas – the star of Basic Instinct and Fatal Attraction – has revealed that his throat cancer was apparently caused by performing oral sex.

In a surprisingly frank interview with the Guardian, the actor, now winning plaudits in the Liberace biopic Behind the Candelabra, explained the background to a condition that was thought to be nearly fatal when diagnosed three years ago. Asked whether he now regretted his years of smoking and drinking, usually thought to be the cause of the disease, Douglas replied: “No. Because without wanting to get too specific, this particular cancer is caused by HPV [human papillomavirus], which actually comes about from cunnilingus.”

Mercy. Well, this is why I believe in HPV vaccination. Does the world need any more discouragement of this practice? I think not!

What else can split Republicans? How about Common Core?

The opposition’s momentum was evident this week in Michigan, where Republican lawmakers moved toward delaying Common Core despite entreaties from former Florida governor Jeb Bush, a respected voice within the party on education and one of the most vocal GOP champions of the new standards.

Bush, who is considering a run for president in 2016, defended Common Core during a closed-door lunch on Tuesday with state House Republicans in Lansing, then reiterated his arguments Wednesday in appearances with Snyder during a policy conference on Mackinac Island.

“Do not pull back. Please do not pull back from high, lofty standards,” Bush said in a pleading tone. He described Common Core as a “clear and straightforward” strategy that would “allow for more innovation in the classroom, less regulation.”

Good luck with that. And good luck with the week ahead.