A rare Saturday night out for the NN.C Co-Prosperity Sphere, and it was a glorious one (if a little chilly). Off to Ann Arbor to see Andy Bey, then a little dinner. The rule in Ann Arbor is, generally, this: Students can have as much of the town as they want, but Main Street belongs to the grownups.

There are exceptions, some cheaper restaurants and clubs that draw undergrads. But what I had in mind was dinner at a place where I had lunch on a June day last summer, and recalled as a sophisticated restaurant where two adults who hadn’t had much face time lately could share expensive food on white plates with the sauce dribbled artfully around with a squeeze bottle.

And I can’t say it wasn’t that, exactly, except that it was full of students.

Dressed-up students, sure. Upperclassmen, I’m fairly certain. But unquestionably sub-B.A. students, many wearing $200 jeans and swingy tops, yakking on cell phones and drinking selections from a cocktail menu that featured Pink Ladies and Key Lime Pies. It looked like Carrie Bradshaw and about 100 of her closest friends.

To say it was culture shock would be an understatement; I recall wearing a rotating selection of pilled shetland-wool sweaters with either turtlenecks or oxford buttondowns (at least in JANUARY), Levis and hiking boots from a shoe factory down the road in Nelsonville, Ohio. They had red laces, and everyone seemed to have been issued a pair with their student IDs.

Most of all, though, I remember drinking beer. Buckets of cheap beer we bought by the pitcher, with only rare exceptions. I don’t recall eating tapas, certainly, or whatever its equivalent was in 1978. If I had the money to buy a nightcap snack from the Bagel Buggy, I was lucky. A steak sandwich at the Pub was an unimaginable luxury. Are you sensing a theme here? Yes: Poverty.

I wasn’t above selling plasma for beer money. It was always in short supply. And that was the situation with nearly everyone I knew. Many were from well-to-do homes, but no one had the sort of parental blank check that would allow for dressup Saturday nights at places where wine starts at $8 a glass. Everyone scraped by. But it was no biggie. We had it all in front of us.

Bricks-and-boards shelving, beater cars, secondhand couches and draft Stroh’s — that’s what college was. (And, for many of us, that’s what young adulthood was.)

As we were leaving, I asked the busboy — busman, that is — what the hell. He spoke with an accent. “Spoiled keeds,” he said, hoisting his tray. “They tell their parents the books cost $300, and they cost $200. And they spend the rest here.” He couldn’t talk long, though; it was a busy night. I don’t know if his kids will go to college, but I’d say the odds are good, based on their father’s willingness to spend a Saturday night bussing tables with his eyes open.

And I wonder about all these young Carrie Bradshaws, accustomed to such high living. What happens when they get jobs and start out at the entry-level salary? How will they know how to make $5 buy three days’ worth of food, until payday arrives? (My tip: Learn to love peanut-butter sandwiches.) Maybe they’ll stay on the parental dole after graduation, too. They probably feel like the world belongs to them, but it doesn’t.

The world belongs to the hungry. I’m betting on the busboy’s kids.

Bloggage:

You wonder if, in the final moments, if this man saw Death in the eyes of a panicked Labrador: Beware of falling dogs.

My earliest lessons in how tetchy newspaper ad managers could be were learned at, well, my earliest newspaper job, at the Columbus Dispatch. They were always monkeying with ads that tried to push the boundaries a little. And it was a tough job, considering the paper ran ads for strip clubs, adult movie theaters, escort services and the like.

Things crept in, anyway, and it was always funny to compare before-and-after changes. The adult-movie ads, for instance, had to be business-card size, no pictures, and titles and screening times only. But after a time they started allowing limited review quotes. And so, between editions, “Full er*ction — Hustler’s highest rating!” would become “Hustler’s highest rating!”

My all-time fave was for a stunt performer at Columbus Motor Speedway, the city’s stock-car track: “Bennie Koske, ‘the human bomb,’ will blow himself and a car up Sunday night!” Oops. In the second edition, he would “blow up a car and himself.” Which, really, is much better grammar.

But one ad in particular was a problem, and it was for one of the James Bond movies. This one. The art was of Roger Moore, framed between the legs of a babe with a bodacious can. Braver papers ran the picture whole; the Dispatch (and many others) cropped her at mid-thigh.

I thought of this when I started noticing internet ads on newspaper sites for “Imagine Me and You,” which looks like we should call it “Lipstick Mountain.” From the trailer, it seems to be about a woman whose lesbian affair interferes with her upcoming wedding. But I noticed two versions of the ad. This one:

And this one:

Only problem is, I noticed both ads on the same newspaper websites. Damn. Seems to be a vertical-horizontal question.

And a pretty crummy movie, if its January release is any indication. That’s Piper Perabo in the lead — went to Ohio University, starred in “Coyote Ugly” with assorted supermodels and, well, isn’t an Oscar contender.

Finally, maybe my all-time favorite ad at the Dispatch came after I left, a line of 6-point type buried deep in the classifieds. It was for a piece of buildable land, close to a middle school. “Buz Lukens special!” it crowed. Evidently the classified-ad takers don’t read the rest of the paper.

Jeezus on a damn cracker, this can’t be true: Medved is doing it again?! Yes, according to James Wolcott:

Unable to impugn (“Brokeback Mountain”) on the caliber of its acting, directing, etc, he’s reduced to whining that the film hasn’t been “honestly advertised,” as if he were some consumer advocate. Medved must think moviegoers are bigger idiots than he is. He couldn’t be more wrong. Nobody’s a bigger idiot than he is. …There are no recorded incidents of someone being lured into the cineplex under false pretenses and coming out Gay.

The “false advertising” crapola was what worked for Medved in the “Million Dollar Baby” flap last year, and I guess he figures that pony has a few more miles in him. Do these conservative culture warriors assume their supporters are dumb enough to beliee this, or are they just so cynical they know that of course they don’t, that of course the problem is with those FAGGOTS, but there are certain things you can’t say in public anymore (dammit!), even on the Factor.

I mean, I just can’t keep up.

OK, then.

Got my eyes checked today, just doing my best to keep the world’s “eyewear designers” in business. Seventy million frames in the store, and they all look the same. I considered some Buddy Holly Specials, but decided against embarrassing my friends and family and opted for the Usual — small horizontal frames that identify me as a pain-in-the-ass yuppie twit.

I should have gone for the Buddy Hollys. What ever happened to those frames so big you could spell your name out in little letters down the side?

The doctor said, “Have you considered Lasik?” I nearly fell on the floor. My old optometrist shared my feelings about Lasik: No. I know it’s worked for many, many people, but for me the calculus has always been, expense + lasers in your eyeballs + risk of losing your night vision + still having to wear reading glasses anyway vs. making peace with glasses. I vote for the latter. Wearing glasses is like smoking in that it gives you something to do with your hands, a way to procrastinate when someone asks you a difficult question — you can take them off, twirl them around, polish the lenses, resettle them on your nose…and then answer.

And yeah, sure, sometimes you lose them, knock them off the nightstand and later step on them. I’d still rather wear glasses than have back pain.

And I’d rather you have a good weekend than a bad one.

You’re never too old to learn new stuff, and it wasn’t until I moved to Detroit a year ago that I learned about urban exploration. Which is? Trespassing in abandoned buildings, for purposes of just looking around. (Urban explorers have a code of conduct similar to that of those who explore wilderness. Unfortunately, there are bad apples, many of them armed with spray-paint cans.)

As you might imagine, Detroit is the Mecca of this practice. No other North American city has the number and variety of abandoned buildings, many of them architecturally significant and most badly secured. There’s a hotel of some sort next to Alan’s office that’s just standing wide open; when you walk by you can smell the building’s exhalation of mildew, rot and something else — wino, I guess.

I talked to a few urban explorers when I wrote a story earlier this year on Flickr for Hour Detroit magazine. Lots of them post their pictures there. Because this is pretty obviously illegal, some keep a lower profile. (And some don’t care who knows, because when people leave abandoned buildings wide open, they’re asking for this sort of activity.)

But one of my favorites is the anonymous journalist who runs detroitblog and posts accounts of his explorations there. What a find he had recently, exploring the Donovan/Sanders building before its demolition earlier this month. This is where Motown’s studios were housed — after Hitsville U.S.A. but before they pulled up stakes for L.A. Detroitblog apparently found Marvin Gaye’s office, and posts a couple of items found there, including a “be right back” note in M.G.’s handwriting, and a bill for his wife’s fur storage at Hudson’s; it cost $7 to store and insure a “yellow coat with lynx tuxedo collar and cuffs” in 1967.

Detroitblog notes that Mrs. Marvin Gaye c. 1967 was the former Anna Gordy, Berry’s sister. The breakup of their marriage years later is a pretty good story by itself, but whether there was any inkling of it in the abandoned office in the Donovan/Sanders building, we’ll have to wait to find out.

One thing that’s clear is, Anna Gordy Gaye loved coats made of dead animals: In the handful of documents I grabbed from Marvin Gaye’s overturned desk were receipts for his wife’s purchase and/or storage of an autumn haze mink coat, a Russian sable coat, a chinchilla coat, a chinchilla hat, a tiger coat, a morning light mink coat, a dark brown dyed baum marten shrug, and a tip-dyed sable coat, in addition to business cards from various furriers around the country.

Tiger. Wow. It sure was a different time.

Mindy wrote earlier today and said I haven’t been talking much about the dinner menu lately. Oh, but all I need is a little encouragement, doncha know? Tonight: Crock-pot beef stew, salad and crusty bread. I don’t need to tell you it was good, do I? But I just realized I don’t remember removing the bay leaf, and it wasn’t in my portion, or Alan’s portion, or the stuff I put in Tupperware for tomorrow’s lunch. Those crock pots are amazing, aren’t they? They can tenderize the cheapest cuts and vaporize the bay leaf.

Yesterday: Beef stroganoff. I seem to be self-medicating an iron shortage. Tomorrow: Spaghetti. Just because it’ll be Thursday.

Any more bloggage? Sure: Defamer shows us why women larger than a natural C cup shouldn’t go braless. I always thought that gal was sorta half-trashy, anyway.

That picture of Whitney Houston looking like the crack ho she has apparently become is all over the nets these days. Huh. I have sympathy for drug addicts (to a point), so I say get her into rehab and let’s move on. We have other reasons to have Whitney publicly flayed.

I’m speaking of what she’s done to pop singing.

I just watched the last 15 minutes of the “American Idol” debut, where they humiliate all the people who thought they could sing, but of course they can’t. And six out of seven have Whitney Houston’s Disease, where she reaches for the high notes but warbles around getting there, so that when she screeches, o’er the la-a-a-a-and of the free-e-e-eeee-eee-e-eee…….and the ho-o-oo-o-ome of the…buhuhuhhraaaaaav…..uh!

Why does she do that? And why do people think this is the way you should sing?

Is it a drug thing? Must be.

Not much happening today, so here’s a plate of tasty linkage:

John Scalzi tells the story of how he got out of the newspaper business today, and the story was, er, familiar — manhandled by editors who saw him not as a person but as one of those Fisher-Price people-pegs to be plugged into whatever slot they felt like sticking him in, capped by a coup de grace of his own: Three weeks later I got my formal job offer, and called my editors into a meeting in which I told them I was leaving. They asked if there was anything they could do to keep me; I told them that it seemed unlikely. They asked if they could ask what I was going to be making; I told them. They both blinked; it was more than either of them made. It was their first real encounter with the online world, I suspect, and the first realization that major changes were on their way.

That was 10 years ago. John, some of them still don’t know.

Greg Beato on Fat TV.

Coyotes have much to fear from us, but coyote hunters have more to fear from other coyote hunters, still. A cautionary tale.

Forget that stuff I said last week about foreseeing my death on a bicycle. I saw it for real today — the Grim Reaper will be at the wheel of a late-model SUV, talking on a cell phone.

Two close-ish calls yesterday — at freeway speeds! aiiieeeee!!! — and another today, although today’s would have been merely a fender-bender, caused by a guy coming up in my rear-view mirror who was both talking on the phone and READING SOMETHING he had spread across the steering wheel. He looked up just in time, chirped his tires a little in stopping, then cut across three lanes of traffic to make a U-turn.

So much for evolution.

And just for a jarring transition, how’s this: Yesterday we went rug-shopping. Didn’t buy anything — it was strictly reconnaissance for a down-the-road purchase. But we wandered into one place, and I immediately saw the rug of my dreams. One look told me I couldn’t afford it, but I could certainly appreciate it in the store. Its lines were so delicate they seemed to have been drawn with a Rapidograph, and one pass of the hand over its surface gave the telltale feel of ahhh, silk.

That is one beautiful rug, I thought, drinking in its detail and explaining its excellence to Kate (who couldn’t have been more bored). Time to check the price tag. I was guessing somewhere in the $12,000 range.

No. Thirty-nine thousand dollars.

Now, I know there are many rich people in the world, for whom $39,000 is the equivalent, in our household, of maybe $500. And I know that a $39,000 silk Persian rug costs that much in part because it’s durable, and woven to be an heirloom for generations. But even if I had their money, I still would spend my days fretting. “I hope the dog isn’t throwing up on my $39,000 rug,” I’d think. (Hell, he’d better not even walk on it.) I’d ban shoes and offer foot-washing supplies at my front door. I’d stop serving red wine. I’d put down those little plastic runners beloved by ethnic grandmas all over the U.S. This magnificent piece of art could actually make my house look worse. It would call attention to itself in all the worst ways.

That’s the test, then — not whether you can afford it, but whether you can afford to use it. I happily — relievedly — fall short.

Bloggage:

It’s a tough town: DETROIT — School safety worries resurfaced dramatically Thursday when two students were stabbed in the chest during a fight with another student’s mother outside one of the district’s most prestigious schools, school officials said. I’m sure she had her reasons.

Shelley Winters, a woman after my own heart:

Tough-talking and oozing sex appeal, Ms. Winters was blowzy, vulgar and often pathetically vulnerable in her early films. … Even when she became the dominating force in many of her later movies, Ms. Winters often played vulnerable monsters. …Shrieking, shrewish, slutty or silly, Ms. Winters always seemed larger than life on screen. …Off screen Ms. Winters lived with an equal gusto… With a hearty appetite for food and men, she was not hesitant about naming the actors with whom she had shared a bed…

All the good ones are dying, eh?

I guess it’s obvious why, but I’ve been thinking a lot about design lately — what makes it good, what makes it appealing, what people want from it. This story today, in which the Detroit News took a bunch of Motown everyfolk through the auto show and paid attention to their reactions, made me think about it more:

“The Imperial is gorgeous,” said Detroit teacher Zora Callahan Jones, 48. “If I drove it, it would say I’m a classy lady.”

I think the Imperial is a gorgeous car, too, but one I wouldn’t buy if I had all the money in the world and you held a gun to my head. And the thought of what “it” would say about me, as opposed to what I would think of myself for choosing such an overfed pig of a ride, doesn’t even enter my head. When it comes to cars, the thoughts of the message it might send about its driver is so far off my list of considerations, it’s in another county.

To me, great design — whether in a car, a computer or a hammer — is all about how it facilitates the job it has to do. Form always has to follow function. A great dress should make the wearer look great. A tool should do its job and feel as good in your hand at 5:30 p.m. as it does at 8 a.m. An electronic device should be easy to figure out. A saddle should be comfortable for both horse and rider and put you in a position to facilitate communication between the two.

I used to ride horses, and developed a lot of ideas about design from the time I spent in barns, working over and under those beasts. People have been riding horses for thousands of years, but someone’s always trying to build a better currycomb, so to speak. I was a sucker for geegaws for a time, until I finally figured out that no geegaw can substitute for hard work and understanding, and the whole business is expensive enough that if you can substitute hard work for a $20 geegaw, you’re better off.

Some advances really are — breeches made of modern miracle fabrics are better than those of wool. But spare me the saddle made of synthetic fibers; I don’t care if you can wash it with a garden hose, it’ll never beat leather.

One of the things I really liked about my particular discipline — hunters — was how every piece of equipment had a purpose, or else you didn’t bother with it. Buy me a drink sometime and I’ll tell you how everything worn by the pink-coated foxhunter and his horse has a specific purpose beyond the obvious.

Even the flask. When a person is suffering from a broken collarbone, a little brandy can be a powerful anesthetic.

Enough of that, then. On to the bloggage:

I’m so out of it — how out of it are you? — I’m so out of it that when the news of James Frey’s nonfiction-as-fiction caper broke last week, I had to do some supplemental reading. I’d never even heard of this book, probably because I pay little attention to memoirs and even less to Oprah’s book club choices. And oh dear lord, but if I wasn’t sure I was right before, I certainly am now, if the passage Seth Mnookin quotes in his very fair-minded column about Frey is any indication:

A Man walks out on stage and Everyone starts clapping. I recognize the Man as a famous Rock Star who was once a Patient here. He holds up his arms in triumph and he smiles and he bows and his black leather is shining and his long, greasy black hair is hanging and his patterned silk shirt is flowing … He claims that at the height of his use he would do five thousand dollars of cocaine and heroin a day mixed with four to five fifths of booze a night and up to 40 pills of valium to sleep. He says this with complete sincerity and with the utmost seriousness. … Were I in my normal frame of mind, I would stand up, point my finger, scream Fraud, and chase this Chump Motherfucker down and give him a beating. Were I in my normal frame of mind, after I gave him his beating, I would make him come back here and apologize to everyone for wasting their precious time. After the apology, I would tell him that if I ever heard of him spewing his bullshit fantasies in Public again, I would cut off his precious hair, scar his precious lips, and take all of his goddamn gold records and shove them straight up his ass.

My tolerance for writing this bad ends after one paragraph. (Why does he capitalize “Public?” Me no getta.) More to the point, in all the discussion about whether it’s OK to embellish in a memoir and whether people should get their money back and whether Oprah damaged herself by defending this heap of bilge (no, yes, yes), only Mnookin, a recovering addict himself, seems to see the problem here: Recovery only takes place when one is honest. Isn’t that one of the 12 steps, the “searching and fearless moral inventory?” How can you do that when you’re spinning a web of lies about spending three months in prison, when what you really did was spend a few hours in a police station?

It is to puzzle. I’m not a huge Mary Karr fan, but she gets it exactly right: Call me outdated, but I want to stay hamstrung by objective truth, when the very notion has been eroding for at least a century.

Elsewhere in the theater of Truth and Consequences, here’s one reason to be grateful I never went to work for People magazine. I could have spent the weekend freezing my ass off, standing outside the security perimeter of Eminem’s second wedding.

He remarried his first wife, the mother of his child, the mother of another child (whom Em adopted), his teenage sweetheart, his…god, you can’t call her a “muse,” can you, when he writes stuff like this about her: Sit down bitch / If you move again I’ll beat the shit out of you.

Ah, but that was another country, and besides, the wench is dead. Everyone’s grown up now, they’ve been down the bad roads, and hope springs eternal. The bride wore white. Their daughter was flower girl. Nobody’s perfect, and everyone deserves a second chance. All happiness to them.

…a few car show pix over at Flickr. Mostly, what they show is my incompetence as a photographer.

Well, that was refreshing. Tiring, but ultimately refreshing. The lake is still there, as are the potholes. The drivers, I’m sorry to say, are not accustomed to seeing cyclists at this time of year. It made me wonder if I were run over and killed, if some cheesy local reporter would write, “Ironically, among her last words were a blog posting saying that she intended to ride her bicycle in the unseasonable January warmth.”

Sometimes it’s helpful to think like a journalist. Thinking of your life as a series of embarrassing headlines keeps you from doing many stupid things: MOM NABBED FOR SKINNY DIPPING, say.

OK, then.

So there was this giant butt in this morning’s newspaper. Go ahead, click the link and find the picture — I’ll wait. Back now? (Ha! Back now? I crack myself up.) That is, indeed, a very big, round, badunkadunk. Honestly? I think anyone given that particular serving of the genetic soup should treat it the way this girl is — proudly. I mean, it’s not like it’s something you can hide. And she does have a tiny little waist, eh?

I guess it goes without saying the woman is black. African American women have, I’ve notice, approximately 78 percent less anxiety over how fat they are at any given moment, for which I credit a famously curve-approving culture. (I mean, look at the list of big-butt songs with that story; do any of them say, “You’re a big fat butt-havin’ pig”? No.) If not fat-approving, certainly not fat-phobic.

I’d like to have that badunkadunk. For about a day. I wonder what it’s like to sit on — would it feel all cushiony? Any longer than 24 hours, though, I fear I’d start making mistakes, like knocking over endcap displays in grocery stores if I turned too fast. I’m sure you’d need a special operator’s license.

Enough of that.

I really was going to write about Mrs. Alito’s tears. Not the fact that she had some, which is unremarkable, really, but the reaction to them. There was some particular guffawing from one side and some really dishonest tut-tutting from the other. I mean: Really, REALLY dishonest. To read some of this crap — and I can’t even link to it, because it’s such …OK, here and here will show you a representative pair…requires you to turn off your brain. Totally. You have to forget that these are the folks who can’t stop talking about Hillary Clinton’s dykey lack of femininity and how about that Donna Shalala woof woof and of course there’s this by Kate O’Beirne:

I have long thought that if high-school boys had invited homely girls to the prom we might have been spared the feminist movement.

Note to everyone: When you talk like this, guess what, you don’t get to flutter your fan and get the vapors when people make fun of your nominee’s wife for crying at a public hearing where, heaven knows, no one ever says anything mean.

Is it Thursday already? It is. Have a good weekend.

No posting last night, no posting today. It’s entirely possible I have nothing to say — at least for a while. You don’t really want to know what I think of Mrs. Alito’s tears, do you? And besides, the temperature is due to hit 50 today. I’m going to get my work done, take the bike off the device that turns it into a stationary indoor torture machine and go see what the lake looks like.

If you like, let the comments be your playground. I’ll be back later.