Today is Alan and Kate’s birthday (49 and 9), which means that when I finish the story I’m working on, I have to go downstairs and bake a cake, then make spaghetti and meatballs. Also, I should probably pay some bills. And do a lot of other stuff, but not spend much time blogging.

So here’s something to consider: INDIANAPOLIS (AP) – Men who live in rural Indiana often use condoms incorrectly, according to a new study that Indiana University sex researchers say underscores the shortcomings of sex education in Indiana’s public schools. Almost half the 75 men statewide who answered the survey’s questions about their latest sexual encounters with women admitted waiting too long to put on a condom or taking it off too soon.

Next time someone snickers at the banana demonstration, just remember: In the Hoosier state, they need that training.

The new issue of Wired just arrived in my mailbox, addressed to me in my three-part married name — which I only use in bylines. I didn’t order it. Did you?

Take credit, so I can thank ya proper.

You’ve heard of a bad hair day? I woke up having a bad hair, face and body day. The dreaded triple! And, ironically, on the first day in many that I actually feel pretty good, my cold having been defeated by the superior forces of Immune System Systems, Ltd. My plan for early this morning was to rake leaves under the dreary gray sky. Then I saw myself, and thought, not even that, until I get a shower, a little mascara and a two-week juice fast.

Of course I feel this way. It’s November. My birth month, Kate’s birth month, Alan’s birth month — one long sprint from Halloween to the holidays. Anyone would fall apart midway through.

But speaking of women and their looks. I saw Queen Noor the former Lisa Halaby (sorry, but I find it impossible to call American women by their phony-baloney Arab-royalty titles, particularly when they rule over a place like Jordan) on Anderson Cooper the other day. She is a beautiful woman, in the Grace Kelly mode — an American girl elevated to a profoundly un-American place, and seemingly rather conflicted over it. She was talking about the bombing in Amman, of course, not saying much of any real interest; I recall something about Jordan being like one big family. So my attention wandered to her perfectly made up and chemically frozen face. I’m not one of those women who can read plastic surgery at a glance — it’s just not that interesting to me — but it’s hard not to notice when a woman is speaking of a tragic bombing in her adopted country and she can’t seem to make a facial expression of concern about it.

It was remarkable. Her lips were moving, and occasionally her eyebrows would make a heroic move of a millimeter or two, but otherwise, her face was as animated as porcelain. She seemed to know this, and was compensating by moving her head instead, little darting motions here and there that never gave the camera operator problems, but presented the semi-illusion of a spirit behind the words.

Very strange. I’ve never been a beauty, so I never had to worry about the Tragedy of Losing One’s Looks. (Like Nora Ephron, I’ve found that I tend to gain them over time.) It frequently seems beauty masks a howling void of insecurity.

I read somewhere that Lisa’s husband had a thing for the nannies. Figures.

OK, bloggage:

The Journal Gazette back in the Fort has been doing a lively series of editorials lately, “When One Party Rules,” addressing the county’s decades-long path under an insurmountable GOP majority. It’s been amusing, if for no other reason than this: The GOP likes to market itself as the party of frugal spending and lean government, when in truth they’re as greedy as any profligate Democrat administration, when given the chance to feed at the public trough.

But this editorial points out one of my favorite strange quirks of Indiana law, one that never failed to get a jaw-dropping reaction from newly arriving reporters in my time there: In the Hoosier state, county sheriffs are in charge of collecting delinquent taxes. And to make it worth their while, they get to skim 10 percent off the top of any monies collected.

Not for their office-administration fund, mind you. For the Support Your Local Sheriff’s Bahamian Vacation fund. For his (or her) personal salary.

As my ex-colleague Bill said, when he heard this: “Where are we? Medieval France?”

P.S. How much extra did the Allen County sheriff earn through this little fringe benefit in 2004? Only $128,334.

Nice work if you can get it.

Now to the showers, before I break any more mirrors around here.

The season remains remarkably warm — only one frost so far, by my reckoning — but it’s nearly Thanksgiving and, hence, time for the Bringing In of The Rosemary, our fall ritual, when we try to preserve our favorite aromatic herb for the winter cooking season. Only one problem, or not-problem, this year: The rosemary did rather well over the summer. We’ll have to move it for Thanksgiving dinner, or else Alan won’t be able to sit down.

It’s oddly shaped, I know; this one nearly died when we were in Ann Arbor, and I cut away half of it in my rehabilitation efforts, but it pulled through and now it’s quite the bush. When the sun hits it, the way it is in the picture, the whole room smells like rosemary. Which has your Glade Plug-Ins beat, if you ask me.

Anyway, if you need some rosemary and you’re in the neighborhood, you know where to come.

Another windstorm in progress as I write this, the third in a week. A gale is blowing up out of the south, and another truckload of leaves is assembling itsef in the various leeward spots of our property. It’s the gales of November! But it gives me an excuse to stay inside and get caught up on some work. Which is starting to pile up, again.

Alan came home for lunch a while ago — he’s doing some caulking project on the boat, now on a cradle down at the marina, which only goes to show you don’t need water to be a boat widow. Anyway, he came in and said, “All the way home I drove behind a pickup with Truck Nutz.” Nothing like a pair of oversized artificial testicles affixed to a motor vehicle’s rear undercarriage to say, “I’m a fun-lovin’ guy.” It made me wonder if people just naturally anthropomorphize their cars, or if this is something implanted by advertising.

I’ve known women who refuse to buy a minivan to shuttle their three or four kids around, but have no problem with an oversize, lumbering, Suburban-type SUV, on the grounds that driving one is evidence of spiritual death, while the other indicates one still has a little rock’n'roll in one’s soul. People of all genders give their cars names and nicknames, credit them with “taking care of me” in this or that tight spot, give them little dashboard pats.

I suppose cowboys did this with horses, but horses are at least animate. A car is just a tool. You don’t give your cordless drill a funny name, do you?

On the other hand, drills can’t be further customized with antenna strippers, antenna soldiers and nut sacks.

OK, so we’ve exhausted that idea. (I need coffee.) Let’s go right to the links:

Unsafe driving on the streets of Paris. Unrelated to current events there, just a little piece of famous cinema verite. It’s pretty good, but I remember seeing the same idea, only with a bicycle, that I found about ten times more thrilling. Maybe it was the Guns ‘n’ Roses soundtrack, or maybe it was that there were so many people to either run down or get killed by.

More commentary on the Detroit mayoral race, from a writer whose book I’m on the reserve list for. Why not buy it? Because I can no longer afford books.

Back to work!

If you Google “crazy religious lady,” you find that the Trading Spouses meltdown is your top hit. For those who missed it: Enjoy.

Is there an MP3 mashup? But of course.

Thanks to the invaluable Television Without Pity. Which, I notice, also gets an acknowledgment in Laura Lippman’s latest novel, “To the Power of Three.” Those folks are onto something.

An interesting column in yesterday’s Free Press, probably the best single postmortem on Detroit’s mayoral race, which had a surprise ending. For you out-of-towners, I’ll try to boil it down to its essence:

The young incumbent, Kwame Kilpatrick, aka “America’s first hip-hop mayor, had a rough first term, with lots of embarrassing stories about his profligate personal spending. You might recall the shameful saga of the red Lincoln Navigator. He was challenged in this election by Freman Hendrix, who basically ran on the adulthood platform.

It goes without saying both of these men are African American, and Democrats. The August primary set up the November runoff, and Hendrix ground Kilpatrick in the dirt. He had an enormous lead, which he didn’t so much squander as watch himself lose, inch by inch, until Tuesday.

But how big was the lead, really? Here’s what I found interesting: Two telephone polls shortly before Election Day showed Hendrix maintaining a comfortable lead. Only one, a low-budget exit poll, called the election for Kilpatrick. And it all hinged on the telephone:

“All the phone polling you saw was among people with landlines,” Grebner said. “Among those people, Kwame lost badly. But much of Detroit relies on convenience store cell phones and those are Kwame’s voters. But you can’t poll them.” Kiska, the University of Michigan-Dearborn instructor who got it correct, is more succinct. “My best judgment is you can’t do telephone surveys in the city of Detroit,” Kiska said. He said that in addition to the growing number of cell phones, which pollsters can’t call, there’s a distrust of the establishment media. Pollsters are considered an extension of that media.

During the fellowship, we had a seminar at Michigan’s venerable Institute for Social Research, in which this topic was discussed at some length. What is a household when there’s no landline? Anything you say it is.

And in a poor city, like Detroit, where a landline telephone is not necessarily a luxury — you can’t take it with you, and it only makes it easier for people to find you — that can make a big difference.

I was struck, also, but this passage in Desiree Cooper’s column on the election:

Rule No. 1 for campaigning in Detroit: Not all blacks are black. In order to win here, you’ve got to resonate with those citizens of what Michigan State University sociologist Carl Taylor calls the “Third City,” an urban sub-culture born of poverty and neglect. Taylor is the author of several books about urban culture including “Dangerous Society.”

The Third City is held together by common values often at loggerheads with mainstream ones.

Hendrix, I need to add here, is African American but also biracial. In the unspoken game of “who’s blacker?,” he couldn’t compete with Kilpatrick:

The best way to galvanize the Third City is to demonize a white candidate, even where one doesn’t exist. On the street, Kilpatrick supporters referred to Hendrix by his first name, Helmut, a name that betrays his half-Austrian heritage.

“Every man wants to give his wife the best, so what?” said Brenda Keith, 59.

I haven’t lived here a year yet, but I’m not holding my breath for city-suburban cooperation.

OK, then.

Just what the world needs: More distracted people humming the theme from “Godspell” in public spaces.

Have a good weekend.

Today is one of those in-between work days — I have a deadline, but mostly I have a bunch of loose ends that need to be tied up. I need to make an appearance over at the DetNews blog, I need to catch up on e-mail, I need to reassert my land-of-living status with a few parties, I need to do a bunch of crap. So not much today.

But I did see this en route to looking up something else, and thought it had more to say today than I did, so what the hell. You may recall that when the Kansas state Board of Education decided to embrace so-called intelligent design in its recent vote, it also voted to change the definition of science; it dropped the phrase calling it “a search for natural explanations of observable phenomena.”

Last night I was talking to a friend, and said one of the weird things perplexing journalists these days is that, with the flowering of so many partisan news outlets, we can’t even agree on a set of facts upon which to base our assumptions. Were the swift boat veterans stationed anywhere near John Kerry? Did Valerie Plame send her own husband to Niger? And now we get to redefine science (science!), at least in Kansas.

“What we need is more people to say, ‘That’s a bunch of bullshit,’” he said. I think that’s what Three Way News did, rather succinctly:

These people balk at changing the definition of marriage to include same gendered couples but fall all over themselves in a rush to change the definition of science to include, well, the polar opposite of science? These people are worse than zealots, they’re fools. And never forget which party embraces this idiocy. It’s the party of a president who can give a speech to the nation on the danger of bird flu making the jump to humans yet still claims the jury is out on evolution. How exactly does he think that jump will be made? A late inning intelligent redesign of the virus?

Kwame pulled it out. I didn’t think he had it in him, as Hendrix had something like a 19-point lead at one point. Four more years of top-shelf liquor on city expense reports? Depends if he can learn from his mistakes.

More shocking was the race for Detroit city clerk, and in this case the upset really counts as “stunning.” The incumbent referred to herself as “clerk for life,” but nuh-uh, not when the FBI marches into your office and impounds all your absentee ballots. Not even in Detroit. The News has done some very fine work on this story, with blood-chilling anecdotes of the clerk’s “elections ambassadors,” paid workers who descended on nursing homes to “help” Alzheimer’s sufferers fill out their ballots. In private. Oh, the humanity:

Investigations were launched following The Detroit News report that illustrated how legally incapacitated nursing home residents were being coaxed to vote, that people were voting from abandoned nursing homes and vacant lots, that the city’s voting rolls were inflated with more than 300,000 names of people who had died or moved out of the city; and the ambassadors had a practice of hand-delivering ballots from senior citizens and disabled voters that were filled out in private meetings with Currie’s paid election workers. Taylor testified last week that one ambassador, former state Rep. Nelis Saunders, said she could “virtually guarantee” an election win for $1,100. Then on Friday, a bureau of election worker testified that she saw an ambassador coax a confused nursing home resident to complete an absentee ballot. Ambassador Gracie Allen asked twice “Do you want to vote for Jackie?” and when the resident failed to respond, the election worker marked the ballot, according to the testimony.

And in the Woods? Our hotly contested, non-partisan — but terribly polite! — mayoral race? Not even close. The incumbent won in a walk, as did all the council incumbents, who will be joined by a newbie, who won the endorsement of the G.P. News by reminding them strongly of all the other long-time incumbents. Platforms across the board: Why rock the boat? (Because the entire metro area is facing economic Holocaust? Because houses are sitting on the market like last season’s orange sweaters? Just a thought.)

Take heart, though, Michiganders — at least you don’t own a house in Kansas. On a fast track to replace that lovely wheat stalk on the license plate with Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel, its Board of Education is, once again, on a roll: The Kansas Board of Education voted Tuesday that students will be expected to study doubts about modern Darwinian theory, a move that defied the nation’s scientific establishment even as it gave voice to religious conservatives and others who question the theory of evolution.

There’s hope in the Keystone State, though.

In Hillsdale, the new mayor still lives with his parents. He’s 18.

And what’s-a-poppin’ up your way?

ADDED: My friend John down in the Park draws our attention to the quote of the day, from the story about results in Oak Park, an Oakland County suburb. The city voted down a proposal to allow by-the-glass liquor sales, an issue that came up when some strange annexation took in a couple of bars last year. One of them was a karaoke club, whose owner says he will now relocate. Why?

“Karaoke without alcohol — it doesn’t go hand-in-hand,” he said.

Tell it, my brutha.

Oh, and Ferndale approved medicinal marijuana.

Our writing group is experimenting with meeting at restaurants lately, instead of the coffee shop we’d been using for so long. Tonight’s meeting was at an Irish place in Berkley; Tuesdays are Psychic Night — five minutes free with every entree (tip appreciated).

I don’t believe in psychics, although I’ve had some freaky moments with them. At my high-school graduation, a card reader told me I was going to be a writer. An old man read my palm in a Key West bar in 1980, When I was 22 years old. He said “You’ll be married twice and have one child.”

As time passed and it looked like the second half of his prophecy was true, I’ve been wondering who my second husband will be. I’m hoping it’s not a 29-year-old aide in my nursing home, marrying me for my money.

Tonight’s psychic didn’t ask if I had any questions or anything, just looked at me and said, “You’re thinking of quitting something. Don’t quit. You need to keep trying. Don’t give up.” She went on to tell me my parents were standing on either side of me, wishing me well. “They’re in a beautiful place,” she said, evidently an Irish-themed restaurant in suburban Detroit. There was some more about my parents that made no sense at all, including the news that my mother was happily taking care of my father, which struck me as a load of crap, because if you can’t take care of yourself in the afterlife, what’s the point?

“Who is Matthew?” she asked. “Michael? Something like that.”

“No idea,” I said. This was a cheap trick, I thought; who doesn’t know a Michael? She wrapped up by saying my daughter needs loving support (this was a message direct from my mother, she added), and that I must have lost a pregnancy somewhere along the line, “because you were supposed to have a boy, too.” News to me.

Hmm. Well, it was free.

The reading capped a busy day. Election Day is a school holiday in these parts, perhaps so that children can tag along and watch their parents do their civic duty. Which means, in this district, that it’s time for the PTO to screen a kids movie at the Shores Theater — we see a couple-three a year on these isolated days off. Today’s was “Chicken Little,” and I can report it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, but it only goes to show the Pixar standard remains Pixar’s alone.

You know what bugs me in so many kids movies? The inside jokes for the grown-ups. We know the pig character is gay because his mom threatens to take away his Barbra Streisand records, and he gains courage in a tight moment from singing “I Will Survive.” I heard parents snickering appreciatively at these weak witticisms, but I wasn’t one of them. If I’m going to be dragged to “Chicken Little,” I’m going to suck it up and enjoy it on its own terms, and a few wink-winks won’t make it sting any less. In fact, it just bugs me. Again: See Pixar if you want to know how to do it right. A hint: It’s all in the script.

Generally I think people should be free to spend their money the way they want, as long as I’m free to heap derision upon those who do so stupidly.

So: $1,200 dog wedding.

And, a wedding album.

Oh, hell, let’s just go link-a-licious today. You want to know why Indiana regularly runs at the front of the pack for national obesity statistics? Because a large portion of the population thinks this is a suitable breakfast.

Stipulated: Not that Michigan is any better.