Spring, she is here, tra la. The forsythia is in full bloom, the air soft enough for sandals. Sandals! In the laundry this afternoon I was pairing wool socks. Seasons change two ways — gradually and all of a sudden.

So what did we do? Drove to the grocery with the sunroof open. Yee-haw.

Eh, you’re not here to read what I did on an unseasonably warm day. You want to while away your Good Friday with bloggage:

See the video that made my 9-year-old giggle so hard I feared she’d wet the couch. It’s violent and contains mild profanity, so we’re right on schedule to be watching “The Godfather” together in a year or two, don’t you think? And thanks, Eric Zorn, for pointing us to “The Easter Bunny Hates You.”

Mapping religion in America is a fascinating time-stealer, if an educational one. I’m only sorry the maps won’t blow up larger.

Why I’m glad this doofus is no longer my congressman, part of a never-ending series.

Our long local nightmare has ended: Public-radio pledge week, which was public-radio pledge fortnight here, is finally over. The good news/bad news ratio: They exceeded their “revised goal.” The goal was revised, and pledge time lengthened, after the station got a bit more than half their original goal. (It’s like the Soviet Union, isn’t it?) Station officials blame a poor local economy, and claim the general manager’s being under indictment for embezzling from his last public-radio employer? Had no effect. Well, it is Detroit.

And ye shall be remembered, with, I dunno, some teddy bears ‘n’ stuff, and a big card, and a poster, all destined to be turned to mush the first time it rains, which was last night. I am moved to say what I always say at times like these:

Makeshift Memorial would be a really cool name for a band.

Random bloggage: An eye-popping anecdote at the end of Jack Lessenberry’s column in Detroit’s Metro Times this week:

Anyone who knows any history can see that we are making the same mistakes in Iraq as we did in Vietnam, or worse … except that so few of us know any history. Once recently, I asked some swaggering “we’re-gonna-win-in-Eyerak” guy why he thought it was different from Vietnam.

“What we did in Vietnam was run away before we were there long enough for our military to have a chance to win,” he said.

He doesn’t mention how old this person is. I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt and assume…oh, 16 or so. Too young to know our involvement in Vietnam spanned, what? Twelve years? Yes. Three times the length of our WWII campaigns. Amazing. If I were a taxpayer in his school system, I’d want my money back.

When you think of occupations that might be useful to have among your friends, you probably think of the old favorites — bail bondsman, lawyer, income-tax preparation specialist. And if you don’t mind mooching off your friends, then by all means, these are good friends to have. (And if mooching bothers you, it’s best to be something useful yourself. Tit-for-tat.)

But I’m here to suggest another job you’ll want to have in your friend bank — graphic designer. When I think of the favors done for us over the years by our good friend J.C. Burns, I am abashed. Resume design (going back to the days of Letraset), wedding invitations, the look of NN.C through three generations (including hosting services, ah me) and now — watercraft labeling services.

Above is the old name of Alan’s boat, which is a story in itself. Our little Sea Sprite started life as a salty, over on the Chesapeake Bay. This we knew when we bought it, from someone who had then taken her to Lake Erie, where we mistakenly thought St. Michaels was. Dumb, dumb, dumb, I know, but a reasonable assumption when a guy tells you the boat was named after his mother. Maybe it was — maybe there were two Mary Ms, and he just happened to buy a boat that came with mom’s name already in place. Whatever. All I know is, once we brought it here, we knew it was time for something new, a name to match the boat’s new chapter and home port. (Which is sort of a quibble too; I’ll explain in a minute.)

Boat names used to be painted by a guy with stencils on a ladder; now they’re rendered in vinyl, sometimes with graphics, by someone in a shop with computers. So we called upon our friend J.C., who can now add “for boats” to his website, which already offers design services “for print, for CD covers, for menus down the street so we get free food.” It’s all done in Adobe Illustrator, e-mailed from Atlanta, burned on a CD, taken to St. Clair Shores, rendered in vinyl and transferred today to the vessel, which will soon be floating in Lake St. Clair. Let’s swing a bottle of virtual champagne together as we rechristen this watercraft…

Suitable for a jazz fan like Alan, no?

About that hailing port. The Woods are, technically, landlocked, the only one of the Pointes with no waterfront. Our city’s waterfront park, where we keep Lush Life, is actually in St. Clair Shores. But since it’s city property, we’re going to fudge the technicalities and say its hailing port is Grosse Pointe Woods, legally if not actually. Besides, you see landlocked ports on boats all over the lake — including places like Novi and Troy, which are a damn sight farther inland.

Anyway, I think it looks great. Today just happens to be J.C.’s birthday. Thanks, buddy! Another one in the favor bank. I hope someday I can pay back even one of them.

BREAKING NEWS! Proof was shot to death overnight here in the D. At a club on 8 Mile, no less. Needless to say, Proof is a hip-hop artist, because otherwise he’d have a name like Bob Smith. He was DOA at the hospital, so I guess it’s safe to assume he wasn’t shot in the fleshy part of the thigh, which was last week’s comic relief on “The Sopranos.”

I recommend that link, which at this moment has the rushed, get-me-rewrite tone of a reporter breathlessly dictating a hot scoop from the cop shop. And there are priceless details: Proof was Eminem’s best man at his cursed January wedding, already defunct. He served as Em’s “on-stage hype man,” whatever that is. And this is the second Eminem posse shooting in recent months; Obie Trice was shot while driving on the Lodge freeway on New Year’s Eve.

Amazing: Proof’s Wikipedia entry already has his date of death on it. By my estimation, he’s been dead barely five hours. The amazing internet.

Please don’t take my somewhat sardonic tone for a lack of appreciation for the finality of death. Every man’s violent death diminishes me, etc. But when you participate in a culture that lionizes violence and gun-toting and all the rest of it, a certain amount of this is, how you say? Inevitable. This is one reason part of me roots for Eminem, who seems to be trying to be a grown-up. I doubt he was in that club, but what do I know?

IMMEDIATE UPDATE: Some sources claim we’re having a rap war. Oh, joy.

My finger is still bandaged and I’m stuck in the waiting room of the VW dealer for the better part of the morning. Fortunately, they have high-speed internet available, which makes it more like Purgatory with bad coffee, rather than Hell itself. So until later today, please accept these tasty morsels of bloggage:

Someone please tell me what the difference is between your garden variety, Tony Soprano-type extortionist and the American Family Association? Because I really don’t know.

The Duke lacrosse scandal in two takes: Because that’s what lacrosse players do, in Slate, and because coddling university administrators let them get away with it, in the NYT.

Just when you think a business has no conscience, along comes a case that shows you it has no heart, either.

American Sharia: Christians sue for the right to be intolerant. Because Jesus would want them to.

In all my years in the newspaper business, there was one segment of the newsroom I reserved special sympathy for — the copy desk. It seemed that in my 20-year arc in Fort Wayne, their workload increased far more than the writers’ did. As space for news shrank, space for copy-editor busywork grew. It was not uncommon, when I was editing, to write three or four headlines for the same story — main, lead-in, “overline” and jump page. Plus a cutline, frequently. Plus a bunch of other stuff. Well, copy editors, get ready for yet another chore: the Google hed.

See, I told you that silver pitcher was worth $8.

NOTE: I had a much longer post here, about the Page Six gossip thing, and “Sweet Smell of Success,” and the NYT story about lymphatic filariasis. And it meandered here and there and hither and yon, and I went to close a tab in my browser. Instead of hitting command/W, I hit command/Q, the Q and the W being so close to one another and all. I quit the browser and lost everything.

It’s because I have a Band-Aid on my thumb; it throws my whole game off. I have a Band-Aid on my thumb because I sliced it cutting up tenderloin for the dinner party. It’s still bleeding, intermittently. Probably needs a stitch. Yeesh.

I think the moral of this story is: Dinner parties are dangerous.

But don’t the sunflowers look nice?

I don’t know about you, but I find this story hilarious. Even the headline is funny: The billionaire, the Post and the $220G shakedown; Page Six writer wanted $$$ to stop inaccurate coverage.

Read on, and learn about Jared Paul Stern, a petty-tyrant gossip columnist who put the screws to one Ron Burkle, managing partner of Yucaipa Cos., leveraging $220K — pocket change for a billionaire, I’m sure the columnist figured — against a pledge to stop writing lies about him.

You start reading a story like this, and you expect to learn that Burkle was a closet case of some sort, that the writer had the goods on him — compromising photos, a recorded phone call involving falafels and a Shower Massage, whatever. But no:

The false items included a Jan. 1 report that Burkle flew Tobey Maguire, girlfriend Jen Meyer and blonde actress Sarah Foster in his private jet to Aspen, Colo., where they “vacationed at Burkle’s mansion.” Burkle does not own a mansion in Aspen, did not fly his private jet to Aspen, and didn’t vacation with Foster, Maguire or Meyer.

Gossip journalism must be a strange world, sort of a parallel universe where people look roughly the same as you, but cut them and their blood is green and the world has two suns. Get this: Burkle and his lawyers have repeatedly written and or told The Post’s attorneys, editors and management that the articles and items about him on Page Six are inaccurate but to no avail.

I love this. You can open the paper to learn you have been credited with an Aspen mansion you don’t own, have your lawyer call the paper’s lawyer to say so, and still — no dice.

You can probably guess what happened here. Burkle went to the feds, they wired up his apartment and a meeting was called with the ink-stained extortionist, who apparently never saw an episode of “The Sopranos” and doesn’t know how to phrase a shakedown delicately:

An exasperated Burkle finally said, “How much do you want?” after Stern said he could control coverage by Richard Johnson, the column’s chief writer, and his staff. “Um, $100,000 to get going and then you could get it to me on a month-to-month, maybe like $10,000,” replied Stern. “Okay, that’s a great deal,” said Burkle.”

It goes on, and every word is fabulous. There’s even a minor character appearing in the third-to last graf named “Sessa von Richthofen.” Too, too funny.

Bloggage:

I once had a brief acquaintance with a dog breeder; I think her specialty was Australian shepherds. We hadn’t known each other long before I learned something pretty important about her: She took breeding absolutely seriously. She would neuter, spay and, if necessary, euthanize any animal she believed was not a credit to the breed. She had elaborate tests she did on her young dogs, taking away their food when they were eating and other provocations. If any reacted in what she considered an aggressive or dangerous manner, it had a date with the vet. If it was lucky it would only lose its fertility.

As the owner of a 20-pound juvenile delinquent, I was a little taken aback, but she explained it quite reasonably: You do no one any favors by keeping bad dogs in the gene pool, and in fact much of the damage done by bad dogs is directly due to human unwillingness to make the tough call. The day one of her Aussies knocked her down and growled in her face, she calmly got up, leashed the offender and took him away for a lethal shot of night-night medicine. It was, in the long run, the humane solution.

So I was a little surprised to read that Oakland County is jumping on the no-kill bandwagon. I mean, it’s a sweet idea, but is it realistic? Many dogs come to shelters because they’re problem children — yes, due to idiot owners, but problems just the same. Maybe it’s better to turn out the lights in a painless way.

A Free Press columnist points out the obvious:

Oakland County Executive L. Brooks Patterson, the tough-talking ex-prosecutor who spent decades trying to legalize capital punishment in Michigan, now says he wants to abolish the death penalty outright. For puppies, at least.
…I’ve no idea whether this is a realistic goal, and I doubt that Patterson does, either. But I’m certain he’s doing the right thing, because if you’re offered a policy choice between killing puppies and saving puppies and you have to think about it for more than, say, 0.5 seconds, you have no business in elective politics.

Yup.

And finally, the good people of Indiana continue to entertain the nation on the subject of DST. In case you wondered, yes, the whole idea of clock-tinkering started and ended with high-falutin’ east coast snobs:

It is now April. At 6 a.m. it is still dark. In June, it might still be light outside at 11 p.m. Children have always asked, “Can’t we please stay out until dark?�? This June, if your answer is yes, it might be near midnight before they come home.
…When one hobnobs with East Coast snobs and then becomes the governor of Indiana, he might have to do things to prove that he is still a blue-blood elitist. “Hey, look, we in (fly-over) Indiana change our clocks, too! Now we’re just like you. … Will you still invite me to Martha’s Vineyard this summer? Can I still go duck hunting with you in Connecticut? … Please?�?

Can I still go duck hunting with you? I stand agog.

Have a swell weekend.

Ah, me. Eminem filed for divorce today. Was it just yesterday that my hairdresser and I were marveling at the quiet tastefulness of Kim’s wedding turnout, remarking that once you set aside the idea of a woman with two children marrying her baby daddy (the first one) for the second time IN WHITE, she really looked nice as a brunette? No, but it wasn’t much earlier than that. They didn’t even make the 90-day mark.

I’m disappointed. The second wedding seemed like the ultimate triumph of hope over experience. Older, wiser, sadder, but more mature — so much water under the bridge, much of it laced with cocaine residue and the usual celebrity-life detritus. Em remarried Kim even though, during their long estrangement, she’d gotten all strung out and had a baby with another guy. (He adopted the child.) Their own daughter was in the wedding. She was four years old when they married the first time. Maybe she was in that one, too.

Here’s something I learned a long time ago, and still have to relearn, occasionally: No one — no one — is qualified to judge the quality of a marriage except for the people in it. We are certainly free to have colorful opinions about it, particularly if the people involved were given to public pronouncements about what marriage is, ought to be, or should be shaped by the law to resemble, but the truth? We just don’t know. As a wise man — I believe it was Charlie Rich — said way back in 1970-something, “No one know what goes on behind closed doors. Behiiiind cloooosed do-orrrrs.”

I keep hoping to see Eminem in the wild. This is the first time I’ve lived in a city large enough to sustain a working population of famous people, and you know, it would be amusing to see Em oh, squeezing grapefruits at the Eastern Market, or somethin’. I found a discussion board online devoted to such topics, and the best anyone was able to do was say they saw him filling a sports car with gas at a station somewhere in Sterling Heights. One of my friends here knows someone who was in a bar in the city one night near Christmas, and overheard some woman sitting at the bar, singing along with the carols on the sound system. “She’s pretty good,” he told the bartender. “Do you know her?”

“Sure I know her,” said the bartender, whose name was Reeves. “That’s my sister, Martha.”

That never happens to me. I mean, not ever.

The not-so-gory details, in PDF.

Bloggage: Couric will become the first solo female anchor on an evening newscast, which in 2006 is a little like saying she’s been given her own channel on CB radio. My thoughts exactly, Tim Goodman.

Busy day today, which means maximum procrastination. Away with it.

A few reasons I wouldn’t mind being a wire editor: You boost your chances of running the “current affairs” category on “Jeopardy!” You learn fascinating facts about Burkina Faso. And, occasionally, the job is grimly hilarious:

A man became so hooked on the “dance drug” ecstasy that he took 25 pills every day for more than four years, doctors revealed yesterday. Throughout his 20s, he was estimated to have taken more than 40,000 ecstasy tablets, the highest-ever recorded intake.

Dr Fabrizio Schifano, one of the doctors who assessed the man, known as Mr A, at St George’s Medical School, London, said: “He repeated himself all the time, couldn’t keep appointments and found it difficult to go the supermarket because he couldn’t remember what he had already put in his trolley.” Dr Schifano, one of the doctors who wrote about Mr A in the journal Psychosomatics, said yesterday: “He was addicted and his life revolved around the drug.”

This explains trance music, too.

Like many mischievous little boys, Spriggy doesn’t go to the barber any more than he has to. He normally doesn’t see the groomer until later in the spring, but they had an opening and the day was warm; who doesn’t believe they’d be better off with less clothing on a fair day?

The weather has since turned chillier. Bad idea.

Still, every haircut reveals a new dog. We see, once again, that he’s no show specimen — his head is too large for his body. His ears seem to get larger every year. (Once upon a time they folded over in cute little triangles; now he’s Yoda Boy.) Sometimes he sprouts new spots that go away during the next Furry Period. This time they cut his eyebrows down, so his eyes look bigger and his face more vulnerable. Needless to say, he is workin’ that for all the cheese nibbles and peanut-butter bread crusts he can.

At least he’ll be suitable to greet this weekend’s company. Any suggestions on what I should make for dinner? I’m stumped.

Bloggage:

Bob Caylor, mentioned in the Jim Barbieri piece below, weighed in today with his own appreciation, shorter than mine and more affectionate. Recommended: As the wide world judges a man, he may have been a relentlessly agitated fish in too small a pond. But Bluffton was better off for his devotion.