My current congresswoman is so cemented in office that if I didn’t go looking for her, I wouldn’t know who she is. It’s not like she has to break a nail to keep her seat. It took a threat to her son’s elected office — mayor of Detroit — for me to even see what she looks like; she got up at a rally and had a screechy meltdown that was a high/low moment in the last city election.

My previous congressman was/is similarly cemented in office, thanks to the usual redistricting shenanigans. But he usually has an opponent, and in election years Mark Souder can be counted on to run his usual campaign. A large component is radio ads on right-wing talk stations, with some homey instrumental track and Souder, in his Porky Pig voice, talking about his hometown of Grabill. It’s a farm town in northern Allen County that long ago reached “ruburban” status in its relationship to Fort Wayne. Lots of Amish there, lots of antique stores. Souder’s family business was and is still called a “general store.”

Of course, Souder hasn’t lived in Grabill for decades. He moved away to Washington to be an aide to Sen. Dan Coats, and when he moved back to establish residency for a congressional run, chose to live in Aboite Township, a far less quaint but more affluent bedroom community on the other side of the county, with the singular advantage of having a college-prep curriculum at the local high school, suitable for the upwardly mobile children of a congressman. (It’s also closer to the airport, essential for a commuting dad.) Still, Souder relentlessly trumpets Grabill in his ads, and never mentions Aboite. The ads are the usual values-voter crapola, in the sense values that they talk values endlessly values about values. Values values values. And sometimes the Amish, and of course their fine rural values.

This year, though, Souder has an opponent who, in a different time and with a less shamelessly gerrymandered district, might make him break a sweat. Of course he will win handily, but he’s taking no chances. He started his campaign after the May primary the olde-timey way — by sliming his opponent at every opportunity.

The campaign has been relentlessly ugly, made even more so by the nature of Souder’s opponent. He’s Dr. Tom Hayhurst, a Fort Wayne city councilman and the sort of medical professional who makes Marcus Welby look like Dr. House. My friend Frank Byrne was a partner with Hayhurst when they both practiced pulmonology in town. I remember one day, when we’d had one of our every-six-weeks-or-so lunches, and were getting ready to go back to work. Frank was stalling, which was odd, because he not only liked his work, he always had too much of it. What gives, I asked.

“Oh, I have a get-acquainted visit with a new patient. She couldn’t get along with Hayhurst and asked for a new doc. How the hell am I going to make her happy when she can’t find anything to like about Dimples?” The point of the story being, it’s a rare patient who can’t get along with Dr. Hayhurst. And yes, he has dimples.

He also has deep roots in the community (born and raised in the district where he lives), a middle-class background, a record of military service (Souder, Iraq war hawk, was a conscientious objector) and a modest lifestyle. He and his wife successfully raised two brilliant daughters, one a doctor herself. Along with Dr. Byrne, he started a pulmonology clinic at the local free clinic, so that the poor people hacking up a lung on a frigid January night can see a specialist.

With a decade on city council, he’s not a Washington expert, but not a total greenhorn, either.

So what has Souder found to smear on this sterling character? He’s “rich,” for one, and because he’s retired from practicing medicine, that can only mean the doc is looking for some yuppie hobby in his twilight years and settled on Congress, the way a CEO might decide to take up mountain-climbing in his 40s, doncha know. The ads are pathetic, mean-spirited and desperate, and are revealing Souder for the pathetic, mean-spirited and desperate soul he is. Adding to the nastiness, the National Republican Congressional Committee recently parachuted in and did a “push poll” in the district. Push polling is the when-did-you-stop-beating-your-wife campaign tactic beloved by Karl Rove; no one will release the wording of the latest one, but a Hayhurst campaign worker received a call, and said it asked “whether the person would be more or less likely to vote for Hayhurst if the person knew he supported abortion and amnesty for all illegal immigrants.”

But do they work? Is Souder going to win? Of course he is. A Soviet factory worker couldn’t have a more secure job.

However, if nothing else, it’s making for a more interesting race than usual. I was stunned to see my old boss come creaking out of retirement to write a guest column for both dailies, condemning Souder. While this was hardly the voice of the oracle, it stands in rather glaring contrast to the usual amen-corner newspaper endorsements Souder has collected over the last 12 years. The letters to the editor have been relentlessly anti-Souder. And, mirabile dictu, Hayhurst has raised more money.

I’m not getting my hopes up. But I am paying attention.

Update: Mitch Harper thinks the RNCC poll doesn’t qualify as a push poll, but sounds like more of a fishing expedition to gauge hot-button issues for a late campaign rush. A push poll question would be much nastier than the question above, he believes. How comforting.

…Deadline! However, I’ll leave you with a bonbon, turned up in my searching the other night. (One of my search terms is “drug.”) It falls under the heading of Our Wonderful Democracy. Ahem:

A candidate against longtime Aspen-area Sheriff Bob Braudis, a drinking buddy of the late author Hunter S. Thompson, says a film he made of himself masturbating should not disqualify him from being sheriff.

He said it is a healthy example of performance art.

He goes on to call it “G-rated” and “less explicit than a beer commercial.”

I watched the last gubernatorial debate for my own civic duty last night. Performance art it wasn’t, and my agony was compounded by the B-movie weirdness of it all. Jennifer Granholm looked like a graduate of the Toastmasters Community College, where she earned a Certificate of Attendance and majored in Hand Gestures. Dick DeVos required me to explain to Kate just what “smarmy” means. At one point, he told a woman in the audience that “I grew up in a family business, too,” as though Amway = a plumbing supplier. Both came across as cheap, insincere hustlers, and I have to pull the lever for one of them in just a few weeks.

Then it rained all night and now it’s gray and gloomy. Matches the mood of pretty much everything.

Alan took advantage of some fine weather and a 40-percent-off sale at the nursery, and replaced some browning shrubs in front of the house Sunday. Years ago, while preparing the bed for what became our vegetable patch in Fort Wayne, he turned up a Model T wrench, part of a horseshoe and an Indian-head penny. On Sunday, he found the statue pictured above. My saint knowledge is pretty spotty, but even I know that’s St. Joseph; the carpentry tool at his feet gives him away. However, only in the last couple of years did I learn why he’s the saint most likely to be buried in the front yard of a recently sold house.

We turn again to Snopes. Ahem: Those trying to sell a home often feel in need of a miracle when a quick sale fails to materialize. Folklore purports to have the remedy: Bury a plastic statue of St. Joseph in the yard, and a successful closing won’t be long in the offing. Realtors across the nation swear by this.

I don’t know who buried it, or how many changes of ownership back it dates from, but I’d be willing to bet it’s from the most recent sale, the one to us. No, I don’t know if it came from a kit, available for $9.95, including the statue, the prayer, “instructional materials” and a free real-estate listing.

Nothing is more boring than another person’s religious views and I’ll spare you mine, but I think I turned another corner in my journey away from the church of my upbringing when Kate asked what the deal was with this ritual. I thought for a moment and said it was a superstition. God is a vast mystery, but if there’s one thing I think I know about whatever God is, it’s this: God doesn’t give a fat rat’s ass about the real-estate market.

Nor baseball games, although for all the signs of the cross and eyes raised to heaven on Saturday, it was still nice to win. I watched most of the game and found the waiting was getting on my nerves – c’mon, win already – so I took the dog for a walk in the ninth inning. As we came home up our block, I heard shrieking from half a dozen houses within earshot. By the time I got home, I was able to watch the game-winning homer from several different angles. According to the superstitions of many baseball fans, I actually brought on that homer by taking the dog for a walk.

Spriggy and I will be doing our best for the Tigers in the series. Anything to keep our real-estate values stable.

Live TV is a very dangerous game:

Michael Kinsley wrote a great column, back in the day, about the most boring headlines ever written. The winner was, indeed, stupefyingly boring (“Worthwhile Canadian Initiative”), but what I recall about the piece were the rules he set out for determining degrees of boredom. One was about the story that informs us things are changing in a place nobody cared about in the first place; the example for this was, “Chill falls on warming relations between Australia, Indonesia.”

I think the following falls into that category, although not in the headline, but the lead:

Long a two-funeral home town, Kendallville recently got its third with David Funeral Home.

That’s from the Journal Gazette, in Fort Wayne. Kendallville is one of its, ahem, bedroom communities.

OK, so we’ve established the death theme. Agreed? I’m starting with death because I thought it would be sort of gross to kick off the week-ending blog entry with a discussion of…well, you’ll see.

Alan came home the other day and reported that the syndicated medical column he handled contained a remarkable question: “I hear Elvis Presley died with 37 pounds of impacted feces in his colon. Is this true?” Reader, I know you’ll be as relieved as I am to hear this is, indeed, not true. But it does reveal something about the credulousness of the average person who writes to syndicated medical columns, doesn’t it?

(The ask-the-doc column has been a rich source of newsroom amusement for years. In Fort Wayne an editor kept a computer file of the best questions. Here was my favorite: I seem to be bleeding internally. Sometimes blood will literally pour from my rectum. Could it be something in my diet?)

But back to Elvis and his 37 pounds of poo. If I were giving out MacArthur genius grants, I’d save one for the tireless folks at Snopes.com and their urban-legends reference page. Of course it was the first hit when I punched “elvis presley + ‘impacted fecal material’” into Google.

You should not be surprised to hear that the story didn’t start with Elvis. It was originally John Wayne, and it was 40 pounds, not 37. Snopes does its usual fine job pointing out that the very idea of a human colon packed with the equivalent of a large bag of topsoil is, not to put too fine a point on it, bullshit. The Elvis angle has a germ of truth, in that the King died on the terlet and was massively constipated, mainly because of all the downers he was taking with those fried peanut-butter sandwiches. But they also point the finger of blame where it belongs — the reports of John Wayne’s intestinal problem is frequently followed by a pitch for colonic “cleansing.”

I dunno, maybe an enema might make you feel better. I’d prefer a bowl of raisin bran, a couple cups of hot coffee and a walk around the neighborhood.

The “spa” industry seems to enjoy propagating this crap. I have a very fine aesthetician who gives me an eyebrow wax once in a while. Since I am congenitally incapable of relaxing and not talking while in a room with another person, we make chitchat. She upsells various facial and skin-care services, many of which seem to involve the removal of “toxins.”

“What sort of toxins?” I ask.

“The body’s toxins,” she replies, calmly. Oh, those. She has a technique where she puts suction cups on your body, and “draws the toxins to the surface,” or something like that. It’s at this point I’m glad my eyes are closed and she can’t see me rolling them.

I wonder where the toxins go once they’ve been drawn to the surface. I suspect the colon. Beware.

I loves my readers. Jason had a little time on his hands today. He doesn’t understand why it’s so hard to find Waldo in that NYC picture. He said he found him right away:

And over at Grosse Pointe Today, a profile by its sole proprietor, of another local entrepreneur and his quest to give the world a real electric car. He let me drive it.

This photo by Fred R. Conrad was on Page One of the New York Times today. I looked at it a long time last night; it’s not exactly “The Garden of Earthly Delights” but there’s a lot to see.

The woman in the pumpkin-colored sweater is clearly what the photographer was aiming at. Her open face, and its expression of pain and bewilderment, is the story in a single image. But I love the woman in the dark blazer that we can see over her left shoulder, looking at the photographer with a suspicious scowl — damn media ghouls! The little boy’s blue T-shirt reads BUCKLEY. It’s a private school for boys on the upper east side. The school’s website suggests they have a blue-blazer dress code, so his casual dress pegs the time period as late afternoon. And the plump Latina holding his hand? Everything about her says “nanny.” Look at the grip she has on him; this is a woman who knows her job. There’s a woman at far right, out of focus, in a pale trench coat. She has a goofy smile on her face, but we’ll make no judgments about her, beause pictures lie. Another out-of-focus man talks on the phone directly behind the boy, and he’s wearing a uniform. I’m thinking doorman. And because this is New York, note how many people are moving, especially the woman on the left, holding a white bag. Look at the length of her stride. New York is the only place where my usual walking pace (brisk) is frequently too slow for the flow of traffic. People in New York always have someplace they gotta be. Gotta make some money. Gotta pay that nanny.

Another day of keyboard-clattering for me, so how about some quick bloggage?

Desperate times call for desperate measures: Aggrieved that younger, prettier and more fecund celebrities are stealing her Mother Bountiful thunder, Madonna picked an African country, parachuted in with her entourage and left with the ultimate party favor: an African baby of her own. (She’ll never be a brunette again. And look for her to wear lots of white from here on out, so the baby photographs better, riding on her hip.) I’m puzzled by one thing, though: The child is not an orphan. He lost his mother at birth, but his father is still alive, and is said to have approved the adoption. If Madonna is such a champ philanthropist, why not write a check to dad, make him a rich man, and let the child be raised by his own father? I’m sure what Madonna spends on dry cleaning in six months could set the whole village up in style. And I’m sure, in gratitude, dad and the other villagers would be happy to provide children for photo opportunities well into the future.

Just wondering.

Forget what all those jerks say about the internet making film criticism obsolete. We’ll always need the good ones. It wasn’t until “The Departed” was released, and Roger Ebert didn’t review it, that I realized he wouldn’t live forever. I’m sure that thought occurs to Ebert himself several dozen times a day lately, but in the meantime, he’s recovering, and I hope he has a few more reviews in him before he goes to the screening room in the sky.

I tried to read “Snow” and couldn’t get past the first chapter. Of course, Orhan Pamuk just won the Nobel Prize. Back to the old drawing board.

I keep a weather-radar widget on my computer desktop. Yesterday, bands of green blobs marched across the screen from west to east. Today, cottony white ones. Sigh. And so it begins.

It’s at this point in the day — Kate off to school, me still unshowered — that I pause to recheck the calendar and figure out everything I have to do in the next eight hours or so. Today the answer is: Oy. A lot. As much as I’d like to stay here on the couch, chin in hand, looking pensively at the fall color outside the window, alas I cannot. So I’m giving myself until the end of my current cup of coffee to get something up, and that’ll just have to do, my little cupcakes.

It isn’t helping that the sky is darkening by noticeable degrees as I write. The streetlights just came on, which means a downpour is moments away. I hope the adult supervisors released Kate from her morning safety-patrol station early; I’d hate for her to walk the remaining two blocks in wet shoes. (Yes, my daughter is in the safety patrol. She sought out the sign-up sheet on her own. I’m thinking it may portend a career in law enforcement, in which case I plan to be one of those old ladies who smokes pot on the sun porch of the nursing home, “for my glaucoma,” just to drive her insane.)

The rain is the result of winter approaching. Tomorrow it’ll be 20 degrees colder and by Friday, when the American League playoffs come to town, the forecasters say we may see a few snow flurries. I wonder if that’ll take the starch out of the A’s, who are probably unused to snow flurries on a baseball field. We shall see. I maintain no opinion on the outcome of the series, other than a generic, “Go, us.” It’s fun to be in a baseball town at playoff time, though; everyone’s in caps with the Olde English D and there’s a certain merriment in the air. If you’re fortunate enough to live in a Sunbelt state or somewhere that property values are rising, well, you live in a different place. It’s glum here in the Mitten, where the economic gloom and doom is nearly apocalyptic. A house down the street with the same square footage as ours just sold for $60K less than we paid not even two years ago. Families are swallowing hard and making tough decisions: Ride it out or cut and run? Fall is always a little melancholy, but this is something new.

So I guess I’m saying we could use a World Series run right about now, if not for distraction than just because it’s nice to get a little good news in the morning paper.

The WashPost has a story on the Ohio governor’s race, where, surprise surprise, “the culture wars are being eclipsed as a voting issue by economic worries.” Well, it’s about goddamn time. The Republic nominee, Kenneth Blackwell, is running in part on the usual mixed grill of “values voter” issues — abortion and, especially, keepin’ fags from marryin’ up. Buckeye voters are saying that stuff doesn’t matter, not this year, and it gives me hope for the future of not only my native state, but all the rest except possibly Florida and Texas, which are lost causes anyway. I’m neither the first nor the last to point out that these are ultimately the most cynical of issues, a Red Scare for the new millennium. We have bigger fish to fry. Or, put another way, when families are wondering if they even can even afford fish to fry, all the rest is just static.

My friend Jennifer Brunner is running for Blackwell’s old seat, Ohio Secretary of State, the one he disgraced with the 2004 Ohio election debacle. Here’s hoping it’s a landslide.

Coffee’s gone. The shower awaits, and the day’s sprint.

Ah, yes. There it is. Behind me, once again.

Had a little bidness yesterday at the Guardian Building. I’d admired its Deco exterior from the street a time or two, but was unprepared for the glories of the lobby. It’s Deco, but colorful; if Deco were a force in Mexico, it would look like this, the vaulted lobby ceiling:

There’s a lot of vaulted-ness, in fact, which contributed to the building’s nickname — the Cathedral of Finance. People forget that in the ’20s, Detroit was Silicon Valley. Hustlers, dreamers, entrepreneurs, sharpies looking to get rich quick and working men just looking for a good day’s wage poured into the city and in large measure, they all got what they wanted. In the bargain, Detroit got some of the world’s finest pre-Depression architecture (although Chicago got more).

I like architecture of this period because it suggests a world where nothing existed but possibilities. You don’t find much public-space art like this anymore:

That mural is called “Michigan” and ignoring the obvious slight — Hey, where’s the U.P.? — it suggests a place where we knew how our bread was buttered. On the southeast corner:

And over in the southwest:

Farther north are nods to mining and fishing. Is that a full-strength economic-development package, or what? No wonder that goddess in the middle is holding two horns of plenty. There was enough to go around. (Not reported: Sometime before this mural was painted, rapacious timber tycoons clear-cut the towering white pines that covered entire state. I mean, denuded it. It was an environmental disaster befitting Russia in the 20th century or China in the 19th. Beware, Pacific Northwest. On the other hand, that pine rebuilt Chicago after the fire, and provided the seed money for the auto industry. I wish they’d left a little behind, however.)

At the bottom of the Mitten is the state’s motto: Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam, circumspice. If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.

And that, really, was the highlight of yesterday. So let’s do the bloggage, segueing smoothly from the Guardian building to the Guardian newspaper, and its report on yet another eating disorder: orthorexia.

Which is? An obsession with eating only “pure” food, to the point of obsession and mental illness:

Most orthorexics, would, like Hackney, find it difficult, if not impossible, to visit an average restaurant. They spend hours each day thinking and talking about food, making meal plans, scanning the latest food research on the internet, visiting organic farms for “perfect” produce and slowly preparing, serving and chewing their food. One orthorexic I came across in California hadn’t eaten out in years and consumed nothing but grains: primarily popcorn. Another was so obsessed with organic food that she spent hours in the healthfood shop, arguing with the assistants over which foods were packaged using organic paper and adhesive and were therefore “uncontaminated.”

There are so many ways to be crazy in our culture, it’s a miracle anyone’s sane, isn’t it?

Now I’m out to rake leaves. As I do, I will comfort myself with thoughts of how pleased I am to be living in a country with a mature, long-sighted president whose diplomatic skills are second to none and will surely guide us through the current North Korea maybe-nuke crisis with the sort of genius he’s shown so often in the past.

I mean, speaking of crazy.