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 CanE​Hdian​.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 expos�. 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.