Scene: The bike shop today. I’m wait­ing on a minor bit of ser­vice. The only other cus­tomer is a 40ish man with three lovely chil­dren. He’s got the whippet-like build of a ded­i­cated ama­teur ath­lete. He’s buy­ing the kids an assort­ment of sports equip­ment. His youngest two, a girl and a boy about 4 and 5, are rid­ing dis­play bikes around the perime­ter of the store.

The girl clips a line of expen­sive — there don’t seem to be any other kind here — road bikes, send­ing the whole line down like domi­nos. “Margo,” her father says. “Look what you did.” Margo doesn’t. Margo con­tin­ues to ride.

The rank­ing senior employee comes out from the back, sees thou­sands of dol­lars of inven­tory, all with sharp edges capa­ble of scratch­ing the bikes lying below and above, and blanches. “What hap­pened?” he asks the clos­est per­son, who hap­pens to be the boy. Also still riding.

“My sis­ter knocked them down,” he says, and gig­gles, then rides off. Margo makes another lap. “You have to get off that bike,” the employee says, rather weakly, to her back.

“Margo, get off the bike,” her dad says. Margo ignores them both.

Around and around ride Margo and her brother, while the employee resets the lineup and dad con­tin­ues to shop. “Margo, get off the bike,” he says again, absently. Margo ignores him. Even­tu­ally he con­cludes his busi­ness, pays up and sum­mons Margo and her brother. She gets off the bike and leaves with dad.

Often I feel like I’m too hard on Kate. I wish I had ten times the patience, ten per­cent of the tem­per, a tongue less sharp and a voice less aggres­sive. I won­der, when she still asks for per­mis­sion to make a phone call or wear flip-flops, whether I’m one of those hor­ri­ble dom­i­neer­ing moth­ers who will end up trad­ing slaps with Joan Craw­ford in hell. Then I see kids like Margo, and I think: Con­sider one alternative.

Kate broke a glass at Pier One when she was about Margo’s age. You’d have thought, from her reac­tion, that she per­son­ally pushed the but­ton on Nagasaki. I tried to calm her down — it was one crummy glass, in a store full of them — while the employ­ees rushed with a bas­ket of penny candy: Here, kid, have a hand­ful, and really, it’s no big deal at all.

At least she didn’t giggle.

Blog­gage: The NYT ran a story on the Styles page Sun­day that, even for Sun­day Styles, seemed to plumb new depths of silli­ness: Gay or straight? Hard to tell. Evi­dently Brad Pitt’s fash­ion sense and hair color has just thrown everyone’s gay­dar off, and oh, but it’s tne end of the repub­lic. No one can tell any­more! It’s awful!

Any­way, the web ver­sion didn’t include the side­bar, which divided var­i­ous sig­ni­fiers — pre­ferred brand of jeans, TV show, dog — into straight, gay and “gay vague” clas­si­fi­ca­tions. I learned Boston ter­ri­ers are straight, French bull­dogs are gay-vague and Jack Rus­sell ter­ri­ers are gay. My own Jack Rus­sell was out­raged, par­tic­u­larly because we have a French bull­dog across the street and he just seems so much gayer. Says Sprig: Not that there’s any­thing wrong with that.

Share a bad-kid story in the com­ments. You know you’re dying to.

Today’s Tao will make you stark rav­ing nuts if you think about it too much. Which is pretty much what it’s saying:

Stop think­ing, and end your prob­lems.
What dif­fer­ence between yes and no?
What dif­fer­ence between suc­cess and fail­ure?
Must you value what oth­ers value,
avoid what oth­ers avoid?
How ridiculous!

I am dif­fer­ent from ordi­nary peo­ple.
I drink from the Great Mother’s breasts.

So does John Prine. Did you know the first three songs he ever sang in pub­lic were “Sam Stone,” “Hello in There” and “Par­adise?” This is what he says:

“If you’re look­ing for the big pic­ture, some­times you’ve got to get a really small frame.” John Prine drinks from the Great Mother’s breasts.

Because I seem­ingly want to make sure I never work in news­pa­pers again, I wrote a let­ter to Rome­nesko about that Mil­wau­kee story. Find it here.

I read Kate’s report card when she got home today, teas­ing her by hum­ming the “Jaws” theme before I opened it. It was fine. I declared the after­noon A Salute to Kate Day, and said we could do any­thing she wanted.

First, lunch at the Orig­i­nal Pan­cake House. She had chocolate-chip pan­cakes. (I didn’t.)

Then, a long-promised, good-report-card trip to Build-a-Bear Work­shop, where she chose Mocha Bunny. Then it was off to Nordstrom’s, for a bathing suit that won’t crawl up her butt (half off!). Then we went to Restora­tion Hard­ware, because if we’re going to drive clear to Troy for shop­ping amuse­ment, mommy deserves a lit­tle, too. Then home.

It was a good day.

Ear­lier, when I was wait­ing to meet her at our usual cor­ner, one of our lit­tle neigh­bors passed by. She’s a year ahead of Kate, and was on the verge of tears. Why?

“I’m a lit­tle emo­tional about school being over,” she said, before hur­ry­ing on. Kate said she stopped at the end of the dri­ve­way later and out­lined her anx­i­eties: “I’m not big enough to be a fourth-grader. I’m only 8. That’s not old enough.” Then she hur­ried home to be emotional.

“How do you feel about school being over?” I asked Kate.

“Not like that,” she said.

Yes, it was a good day.

So let’s have a quick tran­si­tion to blog­gage then, shall we?

When I’m not enjoy­ing my local a.m. news­pa­per — which I do very often — I am fling­ing sec­tions to the floor. I can accept that Detroit is sports-mad. I can accept that the NBA cham­pi­onship finals are a big deal. I don’t mind see­ing Pis­tons cov­er­age on Page One. I don’t mind copi­ous Pis­tons cov­er­age else­where in the paper. And then I just…snap.

Take today: What’s on the front page? Pis­tons. It’s a warm, fuzzy fea­ture about the pre-game prayer cir­cle held by the team chap­lain. (Look, more mock­ing of reli­gion by the athe­ist, god­less MSM!) At the bot­tom of the page, a huge teaser to the fea­tures front, which reveals the win­ners of the Pis­tons Fan­tasy Sneaker con­test, one of those reader-participation fea­tures edi­tors are so big on these days. So the Pis­tons are on the fea­tures front, too.

Need­less to say, they’re all over the sports front. One col­umn, two columns, another story, more. Big pic­tures, of course. I turn to the auto sec­tion. At first glance it seems it’s a story on which cars the Pis­tons drive, but no, it’s a col­umn! If the Pis­tons were autos, what would they be?

Ben Wal­lace, I learn, would be a Ford F-150 — Pow­er­ful and durable, Ben’s not afraid to shoul­der the dirty work. He digs into the unglam­orous jobs and car­ries the load for the Pis­tons.

I’m devel­op­ing a facial tic.

It might not be so bad if the week hadn’t begun with this, which included that photo played huge on Page One. This kid has been the key art — the lit­tle pic­ture at the top of the page — every postgame day since, hid­ing her face in grief for the losses and exult­ing for the win. She’s four. I ask you.

OK, enough of that. I don’t know how I missed this Gene Wein­garten col­umn last month, about an online poll to pick the 100 great­est Amer­i­cans, ever, but I’m glad I didn’t miss it this month. He’s inter­view­ing a spokesman for the Dis­cov­ery Chan­nel, which will cover the runoff:

Me: I see Oprah is on the list, and Ellen DeGeneres, and Martha Stew­art and Dr. Phil McGraw. They are appar­ently tak­ing the place of peo­ple such as Whit­man, Poe, Hop­per, Gersh­win and Melville, who many believe wrote the great­est Amer­i­can novel. So basi­cally — ref­er­enc­ing the McGraw-Melville cal­cu­lus — Amer­i­cans have picked The Ulti­mate Weight Solu­tion over Moby Dick. Do you feel they are show­ing dis­cern­ing lit­er­ary judgment?

Eliz­a­beth: Well, yes.

Finally, this last link is only going to be of inter­est to jour­nal­ists or those few masochists in the room who lie awake won­der­ing why news­pa­pers suck so bad. A long, long story from a mag­a­zine writer who did a three-year hitch report­ing for the Mil­wau­kee Journal-Sentinel, it has a num­ber of sim­ple insights into why that might be. How about this?

The end result is an often strained news­room where top edi­tors drive the agenda, mid­dle edi­tors worry about their dic­tates and reporters take turns being con­fused and demor­al­ized. Against all odds, good sto­ries � and an occa­sional great one � get writ­ten, but you can�t help but won­der why the paper can�t be bet­ter. The answer begins in the chaotic mess of the newsroom.

A case in point was the �Blue Shirt,� the air­port art­work that was rejected by county gov­ern­ment, rais­ing a host of fas­ci­nat­ing artis­tic and polit­i­cal issues. But the pub­lic appeared to be anti-Blue Shirt and the news­pa­per was wary of look­ing elit­ist, so reporters weren�t allowed to dig too deeply.

I don’t know a reporter who wouldn’t nod like a mar­i­onette through­out this piece. If you are, well, “enjoy” isn’t really the word, is it?

The edi­tors needed to grab read­ers� atten­tion with­out get­ting some so mad they can­celled their sub­scrip­tions. How about some more Pis­tons stories?

I really love my Daily Tao wid­get. I don’t go to church, but that doesn’t mean I’m a howl­ing void of spir­i­tual empti­ness. I will admit how shal­low and trendy it is to have your day’s sole reli­gious moment when you’re check­ing the fore­cast and morn­ing traf­fic, but hey — deal.

It can drive me insane, how­ever. So many chap­ters seem to instruct us to lie there like a lump and lo, wis­dom will descend like the gen­tle rain that drop­peth from heaven. This is a dif­fi­cult les­son for your aver­age Type-A Amer­i­can to learn. Take today:

When the great Tao is for­got­ten,
good­ness and piety appear.
When the body’s intel­li­gence declines,
clev­er­ness and knowl­edge step forth.
When there is no peace in the fam­ily,
fil­ial piety begins.
When the coun­try falls into chaos,
patri­o­tism is born.

When I was in high school, all the cool kids were into “Kung Fu,” a show I found pre­pos­ter­ous. My sole attempt to catch the magic included the wise mas­ter telling Keith Car­ra­dine, “When you can walk on the rice paper with­out rip­ping it, grasshop­per, then you will have learned.” Duuuude.

Still, I like that last line. In today’s Tao, that is. When the coun­try falls into chaos, patri­o­tism is born. Dude. Word.

Today’s the last day of school. Obvi­ously, I have mixed feel­ings. My life gets more com­pli­cated, Kate’s gets less. Her Indi­ana class­mates were out two weeks ago, so I told her that by start­ing early in Indi­ana and end­ing late in Michi­gan, she had already stacked up two weeks of extra-credit learn­ing karma, and that this is a good thing. But lately I don’t know. When I was a kid, we attended school for 170 days, which meant we started the day after Labor Day — the date God Him­self intended chil­dren to return to school — and fin­ished around the first week of June. When state leg­is­la­tures became con­vinced 170 days wasn’t enough for the Three Rs, plus social stud­ies, AIDS aware­ness and self-esteem cal­is­then­ics, school years length­ened to 180 days, push­ing start dates into August and dis­missals past the first week of June.

And what hap­pens in those last weeks of school? Plenty, and noth­ing. I don’t think Kate’s done actual school­work since the heat wave started more than a week ago. It’s all par­ties and pop­si­cles and pic­nics and farewell-to-the-fifth-graders assem­blies. Sev­eral of her class­mates have already left on fam­ily vaca­tions, and I can hardly blame them for cut­ting this silli­ness short. When we left this morn­ing, Kate reminded me this is the day they receive their “end-of-year gifts.”

“You get an end-of-year gift?” I’m still adjust­ing to the con­cept of a lav­ish end-of-year gift for the teacher. Yes, the kids get an end-of-year gift, too. The next time you see kinder­garten grad­u­a­tions that steadily amp up into the lav­ish, weeks-long prom/high-school grad­u­a­tion fes­tiv­i­ties of recent years, you know where the idea came from.

Any­way, I have three hours remain­ing of free­dom. I plan to spend it clean­ing. Best get to the bloggage:

Terri Schiavo’s autopsy was released yes­ter­day. Her hus­band could not have ordered a more com­plete vin­di­ca­tion for his posi­tion, not that it mat­ters to any­one from the nut­tier end of the spec­trum. This liar pushed the husband-abused-her-into-a-heart-attack line relent­lessly, and if you click through and notice that he’s a Catholic-freakin’-priest, well, draw your own con­clu­sions. He hasn’t reacted yet, but as the report’s release was approach­ing, this is what he had to say:

I am not ter­ri­bly opti­mistic that the autopsy will pro­vide evi­dence of either the cause of Terri’s car­diac arrest or any abuse. I think there was sim­ply too much time between Terri’s injury(ies) and her death for any such evi­dence to still be detectable.

Note that rea­son­ing — there won’t be evi­dence of abuse, because too much time passed “between Terri’s injury(ies) and her death.” Because of course there were injuries. Of which there is no evidence.

Thanks, Father. Keep doing the work of Christ!

As a glimpse into the heart of the right-to-life move­ment, you could hardly ask for a bet­ter case. If your brain has with­ered to half its nor­mal size, if you’re blind, if you’re in no way con­scious of any­thing in the greater world, as long as you’re still breath­ing and pee­ing, you need to be kept alive, even if you could rea­son­ably be expected to live another 30 years.

Sorry, no, no, no, a thou­sand times no. I’m not inter­ested in being anyone’s cross to bear. I don’t want Alan or Kate com­ing to visit me in a nurs­ing home, keep­ing watch over my insen­sate body. I want them out in the world. Because I love them both, I want Alan shop­ping for another wife and mother for Kate. I’d want to be dead, all the way dead, cre­mated and up the chim­ney and my ashes scat­tered to the wind and waves. Because that’s what I’d be — dead.

I guess now I’m a card-carrying mem­ber of the Cul­ture of Death. Well, sing hal­lelu­jah and pass the night­shade, because liv­ing like Terri is no way to live at all. And peo­ple know this. Which is why this issue is going to be a net loser for Wingnuttia.

Diane Sawyer, Katie Couric et al really get on my nerves. Wolcott’s, too: This morn­ing Sawyer was inter­view­ing the mother of miss­ing teen Natalee Hol­loway, last seen in Aruba on May 30th. Inter­view­ing isn’t the right word. The ques­tions were more like oppor­tu­ni­ties for Sawyer to become the golden chal­ice into which the mother — Beth — poured her hopes and mem­o­ries as Sawyer nod­ded with an under­stand­ing too deep for words, though she kept using them.

What JC Burns would be doing if he’d been born 30 years later, seen here. OK, let’s amend that to what he would have been doing in junior-high school. Still, amusing.

Bet­ter go run that vac­uum. In two (!!!) hours I become a full-timer again.

Project Ice Cream has its first unqual­i­fied suc­cess: Mango. Mmm­mango, I should say. It’s a real Homer Simp­son fla­vor. Marge, more mmm­m­m­mango. And it’s the eas­i­est one so far, if you don’t mind peel­ing ripe man­gos, which are slip­pery bug­gers. And oh my, it was the per­fect end­ing to din­ner, which was a rather fiery Thai curry thing.

So, make a note: Mango ice cream will send your guests home happy. (And Mau­reen, thanks for the Tol­s­tini recipe! We’ll be mak­ing a date for that one, surely.)

Eeeek! Stop the presses. The 10 o’clock news just brought word of a homi­cide in Grosse Pointe. The city of just-plain Grosse Pointe, aka “the city,” one of the five munic­i­pal­i­ties that make up our lit­tle Eden. It looks like some sort of domes­tic, but the stand­out detail for me was this: This is the first homi­cide in GP city in, ahem, over 30 years.

Because homi­cide is so rude. It’s also tacky, and shows a lack of breed­ing. And it makes a mess. So we don’t do that here.

So with that, let’s start with the blog­gage, which is rather D-centric today:

Meet the young mayor of a dynamic city over­look­ing the Detroit River — Wind­sor, Ont. Does this story sound famil­iar? When he was born in May 1974, his fam­ily had just arrived from Lebanon, and his father, a jew­eler in the old coun­try, started a busi­ness sell­ing pita bread, pri­mar­ily to the city�s Arab immi­grants. (The mayor speaks flu­ent Eng­lish, French and Ara­bic.) Later, when his father retired, Eddie and his broth­ers took the busi­ness over and expanded it across Ontario and into a dozen states. Mean­while, he earned an hon­ors degree in chem­istry and bio­chem­istry, and started law school. When he was 24, he was cho­sen young entre­pre­neur of the year. I think I buy this family’s pita bread, but I’m not sure; I’ll have to check the label.

When baby wolver­ines were born at the Detroit Zoo, and were given the names Sparty and Bucky, I won­dered what was going on. So did lots of UM alumni, who called up and waved their wal­lets around. Never fear, though; the names have been changed. And yes, the story con­tains the phrase “deeply offended.”

Mov­ing out of Michi­gan, the NYT looks at the embry­onic Al Franken for Sen­a­tor cam­paign. A Marge Gun­der­son moment within: “I jumped ya twice in Thief River Falls,” said a middle-age woman in greet­ing at the pre-speech party in a tent next to the Ted Mann Con­cert Hall at the Uni­ver­sity of Min­nesota here. The seem­ing infer­ence of long-ago sex­ual con­gress would cause deep blush­ing else­where, but it actu­ally meant that Faith Rud and Mr. Franken had bonded in a far more pro­foundly Min­nesotan way: she had used jumper cables to revive his Volk­swa­gen bus on a cold night long ago after a col­lege gig.

If I ran the world, or at least its news­pa­pers, I’d do this more often — use a well-written essay on the fea­tures front, rather than yet another story remind­ing read­ers to apply sun­screen lib­er­ally. Here’s a nice one, on celebrity, photography’s piti­less gaze and the pic­ture of Dorian MJ.

The heat has bro­ken! Humid­ity, outta here! Think I’ll go celebrate.

I don’t give a fat rat’s ass about Michael Jack­son. Hon­estly, in a per­fect world? He would have been con­victed side-by-side with the kid’s mother. They’d have to share a cell.

Now that would be justice.

That said, I watched a lit­tle of the post-verdict blah-blah on CNN. They held and held and held on a tight shot of peo­ple cel­e­brat­ing. These were Jack­son fans, or “sup­port­ers” as they’re called in CNN-speak, and they were exul­tant, oh yes they were. All I could this was: Does he actu­ally still have fans? I mean, even if he’d never been accused of any­thing worse than fail­ing to clean the chimp cages on a reg­u­lar basis, are we to believe the guy’s work is wor­thy of fans and fan­dom? NPR just called him the “king of pop.” By my reck­on­ing, that makes Aretha Franklin the Grand Priest­ess and Philosopher-Queen of Pop. That touches off a whole episode of tltle infla­tion. Please.

Miles Davis beat his wife. But he made great music. Ray Charles was a heroin addict. But he made great music. Sid Vicious stabbed Nancy. But he remade “My Way” in a way that wasn’t great, but was dif­fer­ent and auda­cious enough to qual­ify as real cre­ativ­ity, even if it was heroin cre­ativ­ity. Michael Jack­son sleeps with boys, and his music sucks. Peo­ple, grow up.

Oy, a busy one behind me and another one ahead, made oddly unset­tling by the great, preg­nant clouds that wad­dled over the area all day, refus­ing to rain — on our house, at least. There were squalls and show­ers here and there, but mostly just oppres­sive humid­ity. Today, more of the same. Think I’ll work out early, then stay inside, dust­ing things.

Also, writ­ing. I think I have a new gig, which won’t make me famous but will put me in a very nice place, byline-wise, on a reg­u­lar basis. More as it unfolds. And last night was the inau­gural meet­ing of a long-delayed impulse my local friend John and I had a while back — a writer’s group that meets reg­u­larly to exchange, cri­tique and work­shop one another’s work. The first meet­ing was small, but heart­en­ing. Only we need a new venue. Cof­fee houses seem like such a won­der­ful solu­tion, until you con­front their noise level. One of our mem­bers has a hear­ing loss in one ear, and do you have any idea how loud a com­mer­cial cof­fee grinder is, not to men­tion those indus­trial steam­ers? Good lord, but it’s like a fac­tory in there. Next time: The library.

No blog­gage today, because it’s all about the king of you-know-what. Maybe later. Until then, ta.

On Sat­ur­day Kate and I rode our bikes to a nearby garage sale, lured by the promise in the clas­si­fied ad of Amer­i­can Girl swag. (Yes, we’ve arrived at Amer­i­can Girls. Don’t ask me what I think about it. Yet.) We found what I’d feared — some woman had arrived a full hour before the open­ing bell and bought it all — but as usu­ally hap­pens at garage sales, we found some­thing else: A stack of Nancy Drew mys­ter­ies, includ­ing sev­eral of the older titles. “The Secret of the Old Clock,” “The Bun­ga­low Mys­tery,” etc.

Just open­ing a Nancy Drew title stored in someone’s base­ment for a few years brings not the whiff of mildew but of chlo­rine, so embed­ded is Nancy with my mem­o­ries of sum­mer, when I went through them like pop­corn. My first expe­ri­ence with librar­ian dis­ap­proval came when I asked where I could find her in the school library. “We don’t have any,” she all but hissed. “Those are junky books. They’re writ­ten in about half an hour, and they don’t have any­thing to offer.”

I was shocked. Nancy Drew had noth­ing to offer? The girl with the tit­ian hair, the snappy blue road­ster, the acces­sory boyfriend? I couldn’t imag­ine how any­one could arrive at such a conclusion.

The librar­ian was right — the books are junky. They prob­a­bly were writ­ten in half an hour. But they were won­der­ful dashed-off junk, and I plan to spend a chunk of this sum­mer with my stash (of course I bought them all), get­ting reacquainted.

You can read any num­ber of fond appre­ci­a­tions of Nancy Drew by baby-boom women else­where. I’m cut­ting this one short. If the books are, indeed, junkier than I remem­bered, I will report this fearlessly.

God, am I tired. It’s been try­ing to rain here for weeks, and never quite get­ting around to it. When it does, it’s like angry tears — given grudg­ingly and stopped as soon as pos­si­ble. We need a night and a day of gen­tle soak­ing, but it’s not in the fore­cast. But last night we had a mini-thunderstorm, which barely made a noise but for the SPLAT SPLAT SPLATTING of rain on the bath­room sky­light at 4:18 a.m. Noth­ing like being awak­ened at 4:18. You know first light is com­ing in 40 min­utes, so the chance of another REM cycle is scant. The brain fills with Mon­day thoughts — What do I have to do today? Did I make a list? Are my good jeans clean? Should I work out first thing, or after lunch? Is George Bush still pres­i­dent? What do we have for lunch? Will Ohio ever find that miss­ing $215 mil­lion? — and ohhhh, but the next thing you know the birds are tweet­ing and you have to get up in 90 min­utes and it’s stopped rain­ing and might as well go make some cof­fee but no! Sleep is com­ing! And then it comes, and the alarm rings 30 sec­onds later.

So, let’s cut right to the bloggage:

Shake­ups, rein­ven­tions, hurt feel­ings, secret memos left on the copier — boy, do I not miss the news­pa­per busi­ness. That said, it would be inter­est­ing to work for Michael Kins­ley, because at least when he shakes things up, you get the feel­ing there’s a func­tion­ing brain behind it. What he’s plan­ning for the LAT edi­to­r­ial page sounds long over­due, and I hope it works.

The Poor Man — snicker: June 11 (Bloomberg) � In a sur­prise move expected to send shock­waves through the world of TV jour­nal­ism, CNN, the orginal cable news net­work, and NBC, which owns cable chan­nels MSNBC and CNBC, announced a deal to con­sol­i­date their news orga­ni­za­tions into a sin­gle giant news net­work. By pool­ing their jour­nal­is­tic resources, the orga­ni­za­tions will be able to offer deeper cov­er­age of the most impor­tant sto­ries of the day, and will be bet­ter equipped to com­pete with cur­rent cable news cham­pion FOX News. The new net­work — to be called Where the White Women At?, or WWWA — is set to debut this week.

I was a lit­tle bleah on “The Come­back” when it debuted last week on HBO, but I needn’t have been. After last night, I think it’s going to be great. Lisa Kudrow is a tal­ented, tal­ented actress.

Ya bum! Buy a cup of cof­fee or get off that wi-fi!

Lately I’ve been fairly suc­cess­ful at wean­ing myself off read­ing the Fort Wayne papers. I still check them daily, but don’t often click past the main page. There’s increas­ingly less there there, I regret to say. And, as always, they’re show­ing their provin­cial­ism — I think there’s been a story about the IPFW mastodon public-art project most days since it opened in May.

You want to know if a trend is over? I thought to myself. Check if it’s got­ten to Fort Wayne yet.

No sooner were the thoughts out of my head than I passed a gaily painted frog in a Grosse Pointe com­mer­cial strip. Then another. And another. And oh my, but we’re off to the races again.

I guess this trend started with the Chicago Cows on Parade, fol­lowed by Cows on Vaca­tion in South Car­olina, Cincinnati’s pigs, San Francisco’s hearts, Buffalo’s buf­falo and Toronto’s moose and, oh, here’s a list. Go look up your own links.

I don’t know why frogs for Grosse Pointe. Maybe Toledo had some left­overs. Maybe because we were set­tled by the French. The fundraiser is called Frogs*Fur*Friends and has some­thing to do with the twin ben­e­fi­cia­ries — the Children’s Home of Detroit and the G.P. Ani­mal Adop­tion Soci­ety — but beyond that, I don’t really know why frogs.

As for the photo above, this being Michi­gan, some­one felt they had to honor the long-running Michigan-Michigan State foot­ball rivalry. I’ll leave it to Eric to explain, with that exquis­ite Ann Arbor con­de­scen­sion, why it’s not really that big of a rivalry. At least for Michigan.

And now for the bloggage:

Lance and Nance hit the Amer­i­can Street. An imper­fect entry, but a start. I think he’s too mean to Amy, but then, he’s recov­er­ing from a virus.

Some­one really hates Mitch Albom.

Remem­ber the good ol’ days, when peo­ple had good val­ues and respected human life from the moment of con­cep­tion to nat­ural death, and dis­played liv­ing pre­ma­ture babies as a car­ni­val attraction?

Another hot Sun­day lolls out­side the win­dows. Have a good’un.

Stems and seeds today — but for a good rea­son. Lance and I have been asked to con­tribute to The Amer­i­can Street, and I spent much of today think­ing about what we should write about. I want to do a point-counterpoint chit-chat post along the lines of Slate’s Break­fast Table (do they even still do that?), some­thing that would cap­ture the sparkling nature of our reg­u­lar e-mail exchanges, because we’re so witty and smart ‘n’ stuff.

I sent Lance one draft of an open­ing vol­ley, and an sug­ges­tion for next week, and he wrote back: “I’m sick. I think we got some bad stromboli.”

Well, OK. Some­times you just can’t sparkle.

I think the Lance ‘n’ Nance pairup starts Sun­day. When it’s up, I’ll link.

Also, I’m read­ing a new Fred Busch book, “North,” and I’d like to get back to it. I agreed to take Kate to the pool today pre­cisely for the hour or so of read­ing time it offered. I’ve only been three times, but already I love the Grosse Pointe Woods pool and some­day soon I’ll tell you why. But not yet.

For­tu­nately, bloggage:

Well, now we know why Evan Bayh has a Flickr account. He’s water­ing the ground for a 2008 pres­i­den­tial run. I hope he does bet­ter than poor Dick Lugar.

One of the most inter­est­ing things about tech­nol­ogy is how reg­u­lar folks adapt it to their own ends. The ChiTrib tells us how GoogleMaps is spawn­ing its own cot­tage indus­tries. (Although I couldn’t get hous​ingmaps​.com to load.)

You all have a good weekend.