It reads: Closed for Labor Day weekend. The party restarts Monday or Tuesday.

In the meantime, you “Deadwood” fans might want to read Lance on the subject: Deadwood and the Libel of George Hearst.

Homegirl Kate Moss, waiting for the rebound

From the Department of Well at Least She Can Score Some Good Drugs Here comes the morning’s gem:

Guess which local municipality is the recipient of an extraordinary valentine in the September issue of W magazine? “Detroit is coming back, reborn as one of the most vibrant cities in the world,” proclaims W, the chic fashion monthly published in New York.

And here I thought fashion-magazine lies were confined to touting anti-aging formulas that turn back the clock.

But no, this is W, which is no mere fashion magazine. The salute to Detroit — and please, note the razor wire on the fence behind Kate in one of the most vibrant cities in the world — comes as part of a 54-page spread, which is sort of W’s signature. They were the ones that brought you that weird Brad-and-Angelina photo thing, in which they seemed to be impersonating a ’50s couple who hated one another. Then there was the similiar-size Madonna thing a couple months ago, a tryout of the costumes from the equestrian portion of her current show. (I was looking at those photos online while IMing with a guy in San Francisco, who was doing the same thing. “What if Madonna f*cked a horse?” he wondered. “Would anyone care?”) Both were sort of the ultimate statement on fashion-magazine editorial copy, in the sense that they contained little useful information — captions, location notes, where-to-buy info. Just pictures: Here’s a horse. Here’s Madonna regarding the horse lustfully. Here’s Madonna lying down on the horse, smoking a cigarette. (Which led to the what-if question.) Now we have 54 pages on Detroit, an equally strange choice to devote that much editorial space to. Although, it seems, there is amusing copy to go with it:

“I don’t know who I’m more in love with, Kate Moss or Detroit,” (photographer Bruce) Weber is quoted as saying in a short bio.

I guess there are some fashion facts in this layout, but on the whole, it just seems creepy. The Metro Times is not amused, and makes some very good points along the way.

It’s an all-media bloggage bouquet today: Local press critic Jack Lessenberry on the decline of the Detroit dailies.

And some comic relief, via Mitch Harper via Gawker, demonstrating that when it comes to being provincial, no one quite does it like Indianapolis. That’s a restaurant review, and from the headline (”Ooh la la”) to the little details (the critic notes each table has its own “brass pepper grinder”), it’s a delight. I shouldn’t spoil the surprise, but for those who won’t click through, I have to single out this:

The menu has many words in French, my undergraduate minor. But it’s been a while, so I asked a waitress for a few interpretations. It’s lucky I did. Otherwise I might have accidentally ordered goose liver pate as an appetizer.

Heavens to Pierre!

I suppose, having left Laura Lippman’s latest over there on the nightstand for so long — I finished it weeks ago — I oughta say something about it. Laura reads this blog, pops in once in a while, and generally offers good advice when asked and anyway, I wrote about “The Ruins,” so I should also write about “No Good Deeds.”

For me, it’s the old praise/pan problem. Pans are easier, and “No Good Deeds” deserves praise. High praise. It’s the Best Tess Yet — Tess being, of course, Tess Monaghan, Lippman’s serial character. (She’s been writing so-called standalone mysteries every other book, in recent years.) I used to think the best thing about mysteries and crime fiction was, they didn’t ask too much of the reader and so we wouldn’t ask too much of them. That was a long time ago, before I read Elmore Leonard and John D. MacDonald and Martin Cruz Smith and any number of cut-above genre novelists. I didn’t realize how accustomed I’d become to good mysteries until I read a bad one, which I did this week: “The Abortionist’s Daughter.” Great title, lousy everything else. I guessed whodunit not long after the character was introduced, flipped ahead to confirm my suspicion and took my time getting through the rest of the story. I put it down whenever it got on my nerves or required a suspension of disbelief I didn’t want to make, and the last one made me put it down for good. Every so often I want characters in fiction to break the fourth wall and speak the truth; I wanted Lt. Sipowicz on “NYPD Blue” to tell his little boy, “Mommy died because she got the lead in a sitcom next season,” for instance. The only thing that could have saved “The Abortionist’s Daughter” for me would be for one of its characters to say, “Hey, who left all these herrings lying around? And why are they all red?”

So, back to Tess, and Lippman. I guess it’s common knowledge that Lippman is the best girlfriend of David Simon, the executive producer of “The Wire,” and everything critics say about him when they’re tripping over themselves to top last season’s superlatives can be said of Lippman, too: She doesn’t make up stories so much as she reveals what makes stories happen. That is, her genre is as much social realism as it is crime, and “No Good Deeds” is her most successful so far at demonstrating how the characters got where they are — how Tess’s boyfriend, Crow, happened to bring home a street kid he met working a flat-tire scam outside a Baltimore soup kitchen; how the street kid happened to have knowledge of a recent murder of an assistant U.S. attorney; how the people investigating that crime do their jobs; and, of course, because Lippman was a victim of clueless newspaper management, how those stories get covered in the proverbial first draft of history. (I don’t think I’m giving anything away to reveal: Not very well.)

I don’t know what you look for in fiction, but for me as a reader, one of the deepest satisfactions is watching a writer get better over time. Tess’ stories keep getting better — more involved, yes, but not ridiculously so. Just deeper and more satisfying. There’s still a long weekend of summer left. You could do worse than to spend it with Tess.

This just in: The freak show, long banished from polite state fair midways, seems to be making a comeback.

OK, I can’t say for sure. Every lifestyles editor knows you need three to make a trend, and I’ve only been to one state fair this year. So make of that what you will. The freak show was a busy part of the Ohio State Fair midway in my youth; I attended once. There was a man there with hanging tumors all over his body, and I forget his Nom de Freak — Snake Man, whatever — who took the microphone and gave a canned, insincere-souding statment about the horror of his condition, which had a polysyllabic name I cannot recall. The shock of seeing his skin was momentary, though. What freaked me out was this: He smoked a cigarette. My dad smoked cigarettes. It was a more unifying gesture than any phony speech could arouse.

Not long after that — I guess this would have been around 1970 or so — the freak show sort of slipped away. There was a growing sense that it was wrong to put human beings on display like zoo animals, and mainstreaming meant there were more job opportunities than those available in carny culture. (I once patronized a credit union with a real bearded lady teller. She shaved, though.) And the subtext of the shows — that these conditions were curses thrown down by God — dissipated as more people trooped onto talk shows to “raise awareness” of this or that once-unspeakable condition, from cancer to sexual dysfunction. The idea of hiding in a tent and charging admission to look upon one’s hermaphroditic sexual organ seemed impossibly …quaint. Why go for small change when you can get a book contract? Anyway, I saw “Freaks” and at some point it boils down to this: We all gotta make a living.

So I don’t know what’s behind this attraction at the Michigan State Fair. Reality television? Carnivale? Who knows? I always overthink these things. (Actually, when you think about it, the freaks market should be at rock-bottom. What possible appetite for freakishness, in any area of life, can’t be satisfied by the internet or Discovery Channel? Or real life? As my colleague Mike Harden once said (paraphrased): “In my day, we had to pay extra to see the fat lady and the tattooed man. Today they walk freely among us on the midway.” But there she was, Little Linda, with a tape-loop barker reel and a fairly low admission price. Kate and her friend wanted to go in. I briefed them the way any 21st-century parent would: “She’s a person just like you, so don’t stand there and stare. Say hello. She’s just small.”

So they paid their money, walked behind the barrier and exchanged hellos with a Haitian woman with dwarfism.

Of course they were disappointed. Can you guess why? They expected to see someone small enough to sit in your hand, like the painting on front of the attraction. (The painting of Little Linda also features a rather impressive rack, which I’d wager was also no match for reality, although I didn’t ask.) “But the sign says she’s 29 inches tall,” I pointed out. Kids never read the fine print.

I hope Little Linda found the trip to Michigan worthwhile. It’s hard out here for a dwarf, and everybody else in this state, these days.

Now this guy…

…this guy wasn’t a freak at all, just a guy on stilts in a tree costume. The girls wouldn’t go near him, and I can see why. I don’t know what he was about, sorry. Maybe something about the emerald ash borer.

UPDATE: Treeman, identified.

Fairs are all about wholesome family entertainment, so of course they clamored for tickets to walk through a gaping head wound into the Fallen Giant, a giant inflatable dead guy. It was hard to get a read on it from the ground. The website is more instructive — by day a “lightly educational” walk through a giant inflatable dead guy, by night a “scare event” in which pygmies chase you out the exit, in the giant’s armpit. The girls pronounced it cool. I just found it unnerving:

And there were rides and junk food and animals and the milk-a-cow exhibit and the bottomless-glass-of-chocolate-milk booth. We saw the Miracle of Life tent, which will make a vegetarian of anyone. And the pig races were a special treat, if only for a glance at the grandstand, which included an orthodox Jewish couple (don’t eat the pig) sitting next to a Chinese family (eat every part of the pig), as well as a Sikh in a turban (don’t eat the pig or any of his barnyard friends) and a Kentucky-sounding family hootin’ and hollerin’ to “Cotton-Eye Joe” and all the Arkansas hog-calling jokes (eat the pig? Hail yeah!). This is my America.

Finally, inspired by Detroitblog’s recent series of posts on the State Fair neighborhood, I took a little driving tour of the area as we headed home. He did not lie. The whole area is going back to prairie, with some of the most astonishing decay you can see in the city. In a single block, we saw three burned houses, still standing, the worst sort of hazard a neighborhood can have, but apparently not high on the city’s list of demolition priorities. This was the best of the bunch:

“Wow,” said Kate’s friend. “This is a bad neighborhood.”

It certainly was, although probably not an unsafe one for a drive-through. Still, I had two little girls with me, one not even my own. We headed home to suburbia, having met the country and the city, just a few miles away.

…just served us…nuts. Yeah, that’s it.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, well, get educated, whydontcha?

Once upon a time, on a vacation …26 years ago? Sounds about right… I took a pedicab. It was in Key West, in September. Note to all: Never visit Key West in September. Not only is it hurricane season, it is hot like you wouldn’t believe. I mean: LIKE YOU WOULDN’T BELIEVE. It was a strange vacation in lots of ways, but the keyword most firmly attached to that week is: Hot.

I was visiting my friend Jeff, who with his friend Dennis, a Japanese/Hawaiian drag queen, had set off from San Francisco to live in America’s other gay Mecca and see what they could see. It was a disappointing experience; they could only afford a crappy shotgun-shack rental without air conditioning. Really. The front half of the duplex was occupied by the Stop Domestic Violence poster couple; he bounced her off the walls whenever his blood-alcohol level reached .10, which was around 1 in the afternoon. Next door was a large extended family that, I am not exaggerating, fought with one another at top volume from sunup until the wee hours, stopping for about four hours between 3 a.m. and 7. In between were Jeff and Dennis and their single fan, which ran all the time. The rule was: Never turn the fan off for any reason, because the last time anyone did that, it almost didn’t start again. Periodically it would sloooooww down and all conversation would cease — we’d stare at the fan, willing it to start back up, please please please don’t die don’t die — and the force of our collected thoughts would somehow give it the strength to start whirring again.

For this reason, we spent most of the week going out. We started at this place on Duval where a friend of Jeff’s was bartender (if you don’t know what it means to know the bartender, particularly back in the days when inventory wasn’t tracked quite so closely, you don’t know what you were missing — hic), and then we moved somewhere else for the Tea Dance, and then to the Monster, and finally to another place called, I think, Delmonico’s. Something like that. It was the same people in every place, and I wonder now why we bothered moving. We drank Myers’s gimlets — dark rum over ice with lime juice. We drank them like water, they were so delicious, and I’ve only had a few since then. When I do, it catapults me back to that week in Key West so thoroughly that I have a conditioned response: I start to sweat.

Anyway, where was I? Oh yeah, the pedicab. On my last night in town, it seemed to be even hotter than usual. On our way from the Tea Dance to the Monster I said, “Let’s take this pedicab. My treat. It’ll be nice not to have to walk.” And so I hailed the first one I saw, operated by some dreamy-looking hippie woman. We climbed in, and she set off.

The first thing we noticed is, we seemed to be moving really, really slowly. The other people from the tea dance were passing us, and they were walking. And it’s not like anyone was walking fast; it was still about 89 degrees, with 2,000 percent humidity. I had hoped for a breeze in my face, but the closest thing we got to that was the air stirring from people passing us on foot.

“Um,” I said to the woman. “We’re moving kind of slow.” She turned and gave me a stoned smile. “Yes,” she said. “Isn’t it nice? It’s sooo hot.”

We sat there and sweated. What the hell? You pay for a service and this seemed to be pretty bare minimum. She didn’t seem to be exerting herself; her legs pumped with the lazy cadence of someone out for a Sunday meander through the neighborhood — no, slower. Pump. (Pause.) Pump. (Pause.)

There’s no real punchline to this story, although I thought we’d arrive at the Monster in just enough time to make the en masse move to Delmonico’s. But as we got out I swore off pedicabs. I mean, if I’m going to be dragged through the world by another human, I want to see some goddamn effort. Not to be a Brit in pre-revolutionary China, but chop chop, my good man.

Now I see Detroit is getting its first pedicab service. Guy’s going to run it with his son, at a price of $1 a block. With my recent interest in cycling, I think this might end up being my retirement business. Today I make one promise to my someday-clientele: I will go faster.

Mitch Harper over at Fort Wayne Observed has been hosting some light patter about Vera Bradley bags, one of the Fort’s cottage-industries-made-good. They’re not my cuppa — I’m a Coach girl, and probably always will be — but you have to give them the Knuckle Punch of Respect for their success.

Anyway, Mitch found a column in some Arkansas weekly making fun of the grannyish bags, and replied with a wire photo of the very fashion-foward Kirsten Dunst carrying one, albeit on a dress-down day.

As a professional journalist, however, I need to point out that he chose the wrong picture. This is the one he wanted:

There’s ma girl Kirsten, showin’ the Vera luv. And you thought they were just for your grandma.

A few months ago, in my neverending quest to bore the crap out of every last reader I had, I mentioned I was having slow-drain problems. All slow-drain problems, in my experience, go back to a single source — hair. Maybe in some specialized environments (Jame Gumb’s basement, a morgue) they have other causes, but in a house with two women, you can pretty much count on what you’re going to find when you go a-plumbing.

Our long-haired reader and correspondent Mindy suggested that I buy myself a gadget called a Zip-It, that it would spare us much grief the next time the drains ran slow. It so happened that this weekend the planets aligned and gave me slow-running drains and an errand to an Ace hardware store, sole distributor of the Zip-It, according to Mindy. I snatched one up for $2.99. It’s a long (18 inches or so) strip of flexible plastic with sharp teeth pointed upward. The directions were simplicity itself: Insert into drain all the way to the hilt and remove. No twisting, fiddling or other technique required.

I got it home, stuck it in the drain and pulled it out. With it came an enormous wad of greasy hair. Halle-freakin’-lujah. I disposed of the repulsive nodule in the toilet and turned on the water to rinse away the rank drippings.

Within seconds, the water backed up. Where before the drain was running slow, now it wasn’t running at all. Further attempts with the Zip-It were fruitless. Apparently my removal of one clog had dislodged another one, out of its reach. I considered several options, including calling Mindy to tell her this amusing story. Instead I told Alan. He fetched a drain snake — which I didn’t know we had — and stuck it down the drain. He reported finding one obstruction at three feet and another at five, and now the drain is clear again.

The moral of the story is: Mindy is a long-haired LIAR. What works for me may not work for you. Although Alan says we should keep the Zip-It and give it another try. He was intrigued by reports of its apparent initial success, as illusive as it turned out to be. Who knows — maybe a regular poking with the Zip-It will keep the drain snake in its hole the next time.

Bloggage:

Tim Rutten at the L.A. Times has a theory about the Reuters photo doctoring I hadn’t considered, but makes sense the more I think about it: Blame the bean-counters. Works for me!

When the New York Times publishes a report from Indiana, of course I’ll pay attention. But this thing made no sense to me at all.

This week’s going to be tops in busy. Partly cloudy, chance of no-shows here and there.

Doing a massive office cleaning today, and I’d like some advice: What paper should you save? Really. Do you ever really need some of this stuff again? I’m saving anything that might come up in a tax audit, brokerage statements, sentimental “I Love My Mom” drawings from Kate, but the rest is going into the shredder.

A ruling, please, on some of these items:

** My property tax assessment (not the bill).
** Disclosure documents for our mortgage — the “good faith estimate” stuff, not the closing statements.
** A book report on “We’ll Race You, Henry: A story about Henry Ford.” I’m telling myself I’m saving it for the check-plus-plus/”outstanding!” grade, but I think I’m really saving it because I can’t believe my child is learning about Henry Ford and not Eddie Rickenbacker.
** An old copy of O magazine. I don’t think I’m ever going to write for them.

UPDATE: OK, this is a keeper:

Chez Panisse, downstairs dinner menus for the week of May 17-22, 1993

…Tuesday, May 18, $45
Salmon steamed in fig leaves
New garlic soup a la James Beard
Duck grilled over vine cuttings with garden salad
Neapolitan cherry savarin

We went on the BART from our hotel in San Francisco. We arrived early, and so explored the record stores on Telegraph Avenue. It was there I learned that the Metal category had about two dozen sub-categories, each one occupied by one and no more than two bands. Because god forbid Speed should get mixed in with Death.

Our honeymoon — ah memories.

Middle age, it is so wonderful. One is able to say, “I don’t have a clue” with no trace of embarrassment or self-consciousness. One is not surprised by one’s own cluelessness, nor is one distressed by it. On some things, we Simply Don’t Know.

All this by way of saying I have no clue what’s going on in this Ramsey case thing, other than perhaps this: John Mark Karr is a dark angel sent from hell to prove that watching cable news is a total waste of time. For once, this may be a case where it pays to wait for the Time/Newsweek version. Let them sort all this crap out. But my own clueless gutcheck says this guy is your basic crazy creep, and he probably didn’t do it, although he did lots of other things he should be locked up for.

I’m glad I got to see his pictures, anyway. It’s not every day you get to gaze upon a real live pencil-neck geek. Some miscellaneous bloggage before you Jessica Fletcher types work out the case in the comments:

As usual, Dahlia Lithwick is a treasure: You have to feel sorry for John and Patsy Ramsey. They were overmatched by forces outside of their control from the get-go. If the initial police investigation in 1996 into the murder of their daughter, JonBenet, had been competent, or even minimally professional, they might not have spent the last decade under an “umbrella of suspicion.” If Patsy had been less viscerally creepy—instead of a pageant queen who seemed to be living vicariously through her tricked-out daughter—and if both parents’ demeanors had been slightly more in keeping with what we expect from the grief-stricken middle class, the Ramseys might not have lost the national media at “hello.” If only they’d recognized early on that they couldn’t outsmart, outfox, or outmaneuver that media, they might have found some peace.

Jack Shafer exonerates the media.

The WashPost’s roundup is pretty comprehensive.

Ready, set, go get ‘em tigers.