In this jobless existence I’ve been leading of late, holidays have a way of sneaking up on you. And whaddaya know, Independence Day is upon us. After smashing my head so hard against the wall that I’ve had to scrub ‘em down, I’m opting to take a long weekend in lieu of any more. I’m trying to reorder my days to make them more productive and creative and, sure, remunerative, which means I have to set some things aside and/or let them find a new place in the hierarchy. (Pulls at chin — wha-?) OK, I’m trying to write some fiction every day and look for freelance work every day and while blogging still has a place, it’s going to have a somewhat smaller place than what it’s had in the past.

Or else it just can’t take so damn long and suck up so much time. And make me write redundant sentences like the previous one.

Seems a long weekend is a good time to start organizing. Also, to sail the boat.

In the meantime, Richard Cohen on the Speech. Be a patriot this weekend; have another hot dog. I’ll be back on Tuesday.

With the return of bike-riding weather comes the everlasting quest to make my iPod workout mix peppy and interesting. The thing about iPods is, everybody’s is different. Mine motivates me to never, ever get hit by a car, and leave the police to treat it as a piece of evidence. I don’t want my loved ones to have to claim it among my blood-spattered personal effects, and have everyone in the property room nudge one another and whisper, “Look! That’s the one that has ‘How Much is That Doggy in the Window’ and the Guess Who medley!”

Yes, the Guess Who medley. At the library today I picked up “The Ultimate Collection,” three whole discs of Canada’s finest ’70s pop band, if you rank Bachman Turner Overdrive in the rock category. Three whole discs? Yes. Once you get past “American Woman,” “Undun” and “No Sugar Tonight/New Mother Nature,” what is there? Plenty, it seems. “Runnin’ Back to Saskatoon,” for instance.

Yeah, that one never cracked the charts stateside. The bridge goes, This tune is home grown/Don’t come from Hong Kong Like he needed to tell us.

In the radio biz, you hear different stories about Canadian content — the famous…is it a law? Or a guideline? Or does it only pertain to CBC stations? Help me out here, Canadians. Anyway, the Canadian-content maybe-law dictates that a certain percentage of the stuff on Canadian radio and TV come from Canada. Some people say it killed CKLW’s pop-monolith radio presence; there’s only so much Gordon Lightfoot to go around. Others say AM was doomed as soon as FM radio became standard in new cars. Whatever. All I know is, if you want fast info on Canadian music, you can’t beat CanEHdian.com.

Personally, I enjoy our sleeping giant to the, um, south. (Yes, south, to a Detroiter. You could look it up.) They make a nice beer there.

Another scorcher today. Why bother showering? I get up, exercise, shower, take the time to put on makeup and dress myself in clean clothing, step outside and undo the whole last hour. I think tomorrow I’m going to embrace my funk. What’s so bad about an earthy smell, anyway? The other night I surfed past “What’s Love Got to Do With It?” and fell in love with Ike Turner briefly — he’s hectoring Tina to do a better job with her “Nutbush City Limits” vocal, and tells her, “Better put some stank on it!”

No one ever asks you to take the stink away.

So don’t stop by tomorrow. I’ll be putting some stank on it.

A while back, I headlined an entry here “Dear Mrs. Manners.” Since then, thanks to Google and those who forget that the real Manners dame calls herself “miss,” I’ve been getting a series of puzzling e-mails from people asking etiquette questions. Some of them are in the comments, if you’d like to click through that link. Others are e-mailed, and I try to answer them. I figure the essence of good manners is simply the ability to put oneself in the shoes of another, so what the hell? I get lost when you get into the when-to-wear-a-morning-coat question, or are-engraved-invitations-too-much-for-a-casual-second-wedding business, but I’ll take a crack at them.

So, today, another arrived. Pink font, smiley emoticon, the works. It wondered how much you should tip your hairdresser. It was signed “Jennifer Bastion” and the inside joke will perhaps only be appreciated by those who were KW Fellows with me. Our number included a woman with a very similar name who, I can state with confidence, doesn’t use pink fonts or smiley emoticons in her correspondence, and probably doesn’t give a rat’s ass about hairdresser-tipping etiquette. For a moment there, I thought I’d stepped into a parallel universe, where she was perhaps Miss America, and I was Peggy Fleming or something.

Anyway, of course I answered. I suggested 10 percent, with more at the holidays or with yeoman’s service. Why do we have to tip hairdressers, anyway? What do they do that deserves tippage? Someone let me know, please.

So, bloggage:

For a long time now, I’ve believed the right wing is in its Caligula phase — pure decadence, lighting seegars with C-notes, using phrases like “reality-based community.” William Bennett repackages public-domain fairy tales, adds an introduction about the “moral lessons” we learn from them, and hits the bestseller list — while incidentally gambling compulsively. Rush Limbaugh divorces wife numero tres after he kicks a drug habit — and he’s defended, because he had “back pain” and it’s not like he was taking heroin, for God’s sake. And of course Ann Coulter. I read just the lists of people who have books out, and I think, will these people buy anything? Evidence suggests so. So I’m glad Richard Cohen feels the same way:

Edward Klein has written one hell of an exposé. His new book on Hillary Clinton, “The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President,” insinuates epic mendacities, sapphic sex, fiscal improprieties and marital rape. All of that Klein documents either vaguely or not at all and is so beyond belief and good taste that the very fact his book is selling like proverbial hotcakes starkly exposes the anti-Clinton people as the village idiots of our time. It takes one to buy this book.

…His book is flying off the shelves — more than 350,000 shipped. The other day it was No. 4 on Amazon’s bestseller list and was sold out at my sedate neighborhood bookstore when I checked. It has become a Rorschach of conservative madness — proof that they will buy anything, no matter how badly done, that attacks the Clintons or liberalism. Klein’s book is just the most recent example. He looked at conservatives the way P.T. Barnum looked over his audience: “There’s a sucker born every minute,” Barnum said. Ed is nodding all the way to the bank.

Word.

I had the same reaction when I read about the Corporation for Public Broadcasting’s super-secret monitoring of Bill Moyers for liberal bias. Jon Carroll had a better, less expensive idea: Why not ask him?

A mean but amusing piece in the Nation underlines the point, while visiting the College Republicans convention: By the time I encountered Cory Bray, a towering senior from the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business, the beer was flowing freely. “The people opposed to the war aren’t putting their asses on the line,” Bray boomed from beside the bar. Then why isn’t he putting his ass on the line? “I’m not putting my ass on the line because I had the opportunity to go to the number-one business school in the country,” he declared, his voice rising in defensive anger, “and I wasn’t going to pass that up.”

And besides, being a College Republican is so much more fun than counterinsurgency warfare. Bray recounted the pride he and his buddies had felt walking through the center of campus last fall waving a giant American flag, wearing cowboy boots and hats with the letters B-U-S-H painted on their bare chests. “We’re the big guys,” he said. “We’re the ones who stand up for what we believe in. The College Democrats just sit around talking about how much they hate Bush. We actually do shit.”

Yes, the College Republicans do shit. My ex-newspaper ran a story a couple years ago about how the College Republicans targeted an old lady in Fort Wayne, sending her daily fundraising letters warning that liberals were about to take over Washington, so please please please send more money! She sent tens of thousands of dollars — she had senile dementia, by the way — and they pleaded for more. The letters redefined shamelessness. Other papers found other cases around the country. The Nation story alludes to it briefly:

CRNC front-runner and University of South Dakota senior Paul Gourley was at the center of a controversial fundraising scheme. During the height of last year’s campaign, a firm hired by the CRNC sent repeated solicitation letters printed on “Republican Headquarters 2004″ letterhead to elderly Republicans, some of whom suffered from dementia. The letter urged recipients to pray over an American flag lapel pin, then send it back–along with $1,000–so George W. Bush could wear it during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention. The solicitation was signed by “Paul Gourley, National Director.” Though Gourley denied knowledge of the letter’s content until it was published, it cast a cloud over his candidacy.

Although he did win the election. Hmm.

Read more about the College Republicans here.

My husband, the ace reporter. The boat arrived today. Note that it is not called the Mary B. It is, in fact, the Mary M. Sorry, Mary Beth. Good news, Mary Margaret!

That was the high point of the day, which was otherwise hot, sweaty and dehydrating. It took seven hours to get the boat unloaded, the motor mounted and the mast raised, after which Alan motored it into its new slip at the park and we called it a day. It was mostly memorable for these guys, which assaulted us in clouds. OK, so it’s wrong to accuse an insect that neither stings nor bites of being assaultive, but you have no idea how the millions of mayflies — called “fish flies” locally — coat this town in June. This is a light dusting. Under street lights, there are places where they cover the grass. Like snow. (You want to know more? You know you do.)

They flew around our heads, in our mouths, down our shirts. At one point, I noticed Alan was sweating so hard he had actually drowned two of them on his neck.

But our boat floats. It needs its boom and sails, its belowdecks straightened, its cooler filled with ice-cold Labatt’s blue and a bottle or two of nice white wine, perhaps champagne for its maiden voyage under sail. Now there will be some pictures.

Those mayflies? Alan informs me they come from the genus ephemera. They exist to make fish and fishermen happy, and to be beautiful. So they do.

No bloggage today. I was outside, getting solar radiation instead of the kind that leaks from my laptop.

I am proud to say I have spotted a new meme — the “if you had read (blank), as I have, you would know (blank)” smackdown.

Just for the hell of it, Google “schiavo + ‘read the autopsy report’” and look at all the autopsy-report-readers out there. Michelle Malkin has read it (”…something which, it is clear to me, most of the callous gloaters on the other side of this debate have not bothered to do”). The posters on Free Republic have read it (”I have read the autopsy report and am more conviced than ever that Terri was harmed by Michael those fifteen years ago. What else would cause a healthy twenty-six year old to go into resperatory arrest?”). And so on.

I didn’t read it, personally. Oh, I looked at it. I’ve looked at lots of autopsy reports — in Ohio, they were actually public record (not so in Indiana), so there were always a couple lying around the newsroom. Usually, I got lost between “the patient is a 67-inch white male weighing 165 pounds, and seems to be consistent with the stated age of 53 years old…” and the rest of it, where we get reports on how much the liver weighed. The problem is, I’m not a pathologist, so while I can figure some stuff out — “the patient’s upper torso shows evidence of 13 separate stab wounds, each from a weapon appearing to be 4 centimeters wide and penetrating to a depth of 10 centimeters” — most of the rest of it is Greek to me.

But then, I’m not Michelle Malkin, whose talents know no end.

Nor am I Tom Cruise, another multi-talented individual. Last week, he challenged Matt Lauer’s nightstand contents: “You don’t even know what Ritalin is. If you start talking about chemical imbalance, you have to evaluate and read the research papers on how they came up with these theories, Matt, okay? That’s what I’ve done.”

The mind boggles:

“Honey, you want to run that scene again? ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ starts filming in only three days.”

“Not now, Nic. I’ve got two more research papers to get through.”

Well, he did spend half that movie telling people, “I’m a doctor.” Maybe it’s sort of like…transference.

The plain truth, I’ve seen through direct observation, is that too many of us don’t read enough, much less stuff like research papers and autopsy reports. I’m reading pretty much all day, and at the end of it, I’m convinced I’m the most uninformed human being on the planet. The more you read, the more you realize you haven’t read, and then you have to write about it, too.

It’s frankly amazing I even feel confident enough to form opinions. Which, anyone will tell you, are consistently ill-informed. Because I didn’t read enough.

A long, hot weekend. It started Thursday night, when I was awakened around midnight by what seemed to be a lot of yelling and horn-honking far off in the distance. It took me a minute to look at the clock and register: Right, the basketball game. I laid there a moment longer, waiting for more info, and then it came — gunfire. Nine shots bam bam bam right after the other, the unmistakable sound of a semi-automatic weapon being emptied in, what? Celebration, I decided; if it had been a fight over the game’s outcome, it wouldn’t have been necessary to fire the whole clip. The Pistons must have won, I thought. And went back to sleep.

So it was a big surprise to awaken the next morning and discover that was a grief display, not celebration, which I suppose varies mostly in where the gun is aimed. I hope no one got hurt.

Alan got hurt this weekend, although not in a gun battle over the ref’s calls in game seven. He has a purple fingernail and a fat knuckle, the result of the struggle on Friday to get his new boat loaded onto the truck for its trip to Michigan. He was helped in this struggle by the seller and the trucker, but I’m informed I’m the designated helper for its reassembly on Monday, when the mast will be raised and the shrouds reattached and we sail from the commercial marina where the delivery happens to the new slip at the city dock. Oh, I can’t wait. Sometimes it seems Alan and I have spent half our marriage yelling at one another, not over substantive issues like infidelity or drunkenness, but over whether I am holding the flashlight at the proper angle or letting my end of a 4-by-8 sheet of plywood droop while he runs it through a saw or whether bacon should be started in a cold or hot skillet. What is a boat but merely a new venue for our squabbles? Couples need common interests, don’t they?

At least, this is something I read somewhere.

Pictures tomorrow, if I survive.

Oh, and bloggage: Lance and Nance go to the movies. Or don’t go. At the American Street.

The problem with starting a writers’ group, I’ve found, is that sooner or later you have to write for it. I’m committing tomorrow to that task, which means I’m just limping into the weekend blog-wise. So be it. The way the movie-quotes discussion has been going, I feel like just opening the floor to this question:

RESOLVED: The inclusion, in a top-100 list on great movie lines, of a quote from “On Golden Pond,” a shitty movie no one in their right mind saw more than once, is an insult to the concept. Especially when they left out “If someone gets in your way, step on ‘em,” from “Showgirls.”

I mean: Take it away. Or talk about anything you want. I’ll be back after the weekend.

Locals and regular readers know the basic outline of NN.C’s new home office: What most people in the rest of the country call “Grosse Pointe” is actually “the Pointes.” There are five — GP Park, GP Farms, GP Shores, GP Woods and just plain GP, aka “the city.” About 58,000 people live in all five municipalities, the Shores being the smallest, the Woods the largest. We’re in the Woods.

Is there a pecking order among the quintet? But of course. The Park and the Woods are at the bottom. The Park is closest to Detroit, and has a few blocks of modest houses, even duplexes and rentals. The rest of the Park is glorious, and my one true regret is we didn’t find a place there. It was the first of the five to be developed, in the ’20s, and there are some really wonderful craftsman houses down there, among scores of others. (Also, it went for Kerry in ‘04. My people.)

And why is the Woods down there too? Too large, too…affordable. You can still get into the Woods for under $200K, if you aren’t too picky. It’s also the only one of the five that has no lakefront lots, for whatever that’s worth. But all but the Shores has a pretty decent mix of middle class-to-plutocrat housing, which is one of the things I like about the area.

So, then, five municipalities. We share a school system and a public library, but everything else is separate. Five police departments. Five trash contracts. And five parks departments. Each city has its own lakefront park (the Park has two). Each is private, accessible to residents with a pass, which you have to show at the gate. “Hey, a little bit of South Africa right here at home,” I quipped to the Realtor, who at least chuckled. But I didn’t know how far it went.

Park passes are not honored across the Pointes. A Woods resident can’t get into the Farms park, and vice versa. Each has something to put it above the others. The Woods has the best pool and biggest marina, for which I’m thankful, because we have a slip and my friend John, in the Park, is sitting on a 10-year waiting list for one there. The Farms’ has a beach. The Shores’ is — well, I don’t know. Haven’t been there. The Park has both a state-of-the-art fitness facility (your tax dollars at work) and a freakin’ movie theater, which shows first-run movies after about a two-week delay. (The lack of nearby movie theaters is a real sore point for this movie lover; we drove 30 miles one-way to see that Enron flick last month.)

I guess I can’t really blame them; the parks approach country-club levels of amenities, and you don’t want to give those away to people who haven’t paid for them. But there’s something creepy, in such a segregated metro area, in having restricted parks. (GP is not alone; St. Clair Shores has them, too.) A few weeks ago the GP school board president got in hot water for suggesting, to a newspaper reporter, that this area is “uncomfortable with diversity.” There was a week of letter-to-the-editor outrage, followed by another week of the other side having its say. Someone made the suggestion: Why not let non-residents into the parks, if they pay a fee? Capital idea. At least I could see a first-run movie once in a while, without driving 60 miles round-trip.

(Also, the school board president was right, but face it: Every community is uncomfortable with diversity. It’s just human nature. We’re tribal primates.)

So, bloggage:

This is a long read, but worth it, if you’re interested in such things: You know those guys who donate to sperm banks? What happens when they meet their offspring?

I’m on the record — you could look up the links if you’re so inclined, but I’m not — as opposed to list journalism. VH1 names the 100 greatest rock songs of all time. Rolling Stone lists the 50 best album covers. And blah to the blah to the blizzle, etc. They exist for one reason — to get the listmaker’s name in the press as much as possible. Editors and producers have a lot of space to fill, and if someone else does the heavy lifting, what’s a little back-scratching among friends? So I’m not going to comment on the AFI List of Top 100 U.S. Movie Quotes, except to note, oh, the bottom five:

96. “Snap out of it!”, “Moonstruck,” 1987.

100. “I’m king of the world!”, “Titanic,” 1997.

I can’t think of a day that goes by when I don’t tell someone, “Nobody puts Baby in a corner.” I ask you.

Sorry, but I think this story is funny.

And another action-packed day awaits! The coffee must be kicking in! I’m using exclamation points!

Magazine deadlines are long before publication — it takes the paper artisans longer to make those pages so slick, I guess — so it seems like weeks ago that I wrote a piece for Hour Detroit on the Port Huron-to-Mackinac yacht race, but lo and behold, it showed up in this month’s issue (no link, sorry) and even better, it got me invited to the media lunch at Bayview Yacht Club today. What a lucky girl I am, because who should sit next to me but this guy (scroll down to the picture of the short man in the glasses towering over the tall guy).

His name is Chuck Bayer, and he’s a past commodore of the yacht club and credited with saving the lives of eight or nine people in the 1985 race. First there was a nasty line of thunderstorms, and then the wind came around to the north, and the seas got huge. The yacht Tomahawk came down hard in a trough and broke apart, he said, and sent out a mayday just before it sank. Bayer and his boat, Old Bear, picked the skipper and crew up from a life raft about half an hour later.

They would have kept racing, he said, but several of the rescued sailors were sick, so they motored into Alpena and dropped them off and called it a race. “We got the Coast Guard’s highest civilian honor for that,” he said.

He’s sailing in either his 55th or 56th Mackinac race this year. He leased a 72-footer for the occasion, and it’ll be temporarily rechristened Old Bear. Someone else will handle most of the helm duties, but no problem — the yacht has a hot tub and a wide-screen plasma TV. Now this is a lunch conversation.

Which I guess seems the appropriate time to announce that our long domestic nightmare is over (or perhaps just beginning), and we now own yes, yet another boat. Or will within a few days, when money changes hands, the trucker delivers the goods and we dock Alan’s new Sea Sprite 23 in our slip down at the city marina. I haven’t seen it yet; Alan had to go to Cleveland to find it, but I trust his judgment. I already know the most important thing: It has a built-in cooler. Photos when the thing arrives.

“Does it have a name?” I asked.

“The Mary B,” he replied. “Named for the guy’s mother.”

“Well, that’s gonna change.”

“Eventually,” he said. “Not until it needs a paint job.”

If I were naming a boat for a mother, I think I’d pick Mommie Dearest, but there you are. I guess getting to know the vessel beforehand will allow us to choose a moniker that fits. Alan the jazz fan favors Salt Peanuts; continuing the theme, I like Boplicity or Epistrophy. What I don’t want is something trite and obvious — you just wouldn’t believe how many sailboats are named Windrunner or Windchaser or Windwhatever. No names for women, either, although I’d like to see a gay man name his boat Long John Silver or something like that.

Anyway, this is something we’ll be thinking about. Got any suggestions? Leave them in comments. And yes, Nancypants has already been ruled out.

Saturday Kate and I went to the Rafal Spice Co., one of the many permanent stores that surround the farmers-market space at Detroit’s Eastern Market. They specialize in, duh, guess what, but they also have a sideline in coffee. Lots of coffee. The clerk asked me what I was looking for.

“You know that Folgers commercial where the smell of coffee permeates the house, and everyone upstairs yawns and stretches and smiles and sort of lolls out of bed and heads for the kitchen to get a cup? I don’t want that. I want coffee that’s like a drill sergeant. I want coffee that doesn’t coax me out of bed, it kicks my ass with a caffeine boot. I want the strong stuff, the methamphetamine of beans, reveille in arabica form.”

(Note: The above quote may be improved a bit to make me sound cleverer than I actually am. I may have actually said, “What’s the strongest blend you have?”)

She pointed to the Turkish stuff. “I’ll take a pound, whole bean. Now what’s the second-strongest?” She pointed to the Cuban. “Same thing again.”

That lady knew her stuff. I may write a novel today. Thank you, Turkey! But now I have to take a shower. I may actually be sweating a bit.

I had a longish post prepared, was ready to hit “save” and thought I’d close out some unnecessary windows. Went to hit command/W, which closes windows. Guess what key is next to the W? Guess what tells Safari to shut itself down and take a nice nap?

Grrrr.

So I’ll stick just to the bloggage today:

The Freep had at least seven Pistons stories today, but this is the only one you need to bother with. Lucky another brawl didn’t break out.

A nicely done Father’s Day post, played in a minor key, by Roy Edroso.

I not only wouldn’t live in Kansas on a bet, I don’t even want to drive through it. One of several reasons.

I had more to say, about music, reading and sitting poolside on a fine day in June. Wish it hadn’t gone down the memory hole. We’ll try again tomorrow.