A very smart per­son who liked to por­tray him­self as oth­er­wise — yes, I’m talk­ing about you, Rob Daumeyer — once told me the secret to busi­ness report­ing: All sto­ries are busi­ness sto­ries. Find the money angle and empha­size it enough to sat­isfy your boss, then tell the rest of the story. A good story is a good story; don’t get in its way and all will be revealed.

That’s a wise out­look, and it’s one rea­son I enjoy my night-shift edit­ing job, surf­ing the great dig­i­tal media land­scape in search of sto­ries of inter­est to our cor­po­rate clients, who are in the health-care trade. Many of these are four-graf snooz­ers on ABC Biotech being bought by XYZ Pharma, but sev­eral times a night I find real gems, great sto­ries that just hap­pen to be health-related. As Rob pointed out, almost every story has a money angle. That’s also true for health-care sto­ries. If a doc­tor appears some­where in the story, you’re good to go. Every hos­pi­tal in your town is more crammed with pathos, humor, greed and plot twists than any news­pa­per can carry.

All this by way of point­ing out one I found last night, from The Hindu, an English-language paper in India. It’s about the ele­phant in the Chi­nese liv­ing room, which coughs and smells like an ash­tray:

Eyes shin­ing and lips aquiver, the bride stands along with her fam­ily at the entrance to a five star hotel in down­town Kun­ming, the cap­i­tal of China’s Yun­nan province. Out­fit­ted in lay­ers of meringue-like white lace, she hands out wel­come gifts to the wed­ding guests who pull up in a steady stream of flashy cars.

The gifts con­sist chiefly of cig­a­rettes. Later on in the fes­tiv­i­ties the bride lights the cig­a­rettes of all the male guests, a com­mon rit­ual at Chi­nese wed­dings that is sup­posed to auger well for the newlywed’s abil­ity to have chil­dren.

Would you not kill to see this? I mean, can you even imag­ine the sight of a bride mak­ing the rounds of her own wed­ding with a Zippo? I won­der if this is done casu­ally — if she min­gles through the guests, light­ing every­one up — or if it’s more of a rit­ual, with all the men lin­ing up with a Marl­boro dan­gling from their lips, and she flits, bride-like, down the line. We could spend all day dis­cussing how this became a rit­ual in the first place, how putting flame to a tube of a known car­cino­gen some­how became a fer­til­ity rit­ual. (I sus­pect Hol­ly­wood, and all those post-coital cig­a­rettes.) Or we could just enjoy the essen­tial weird­ness of our big world, and feel grate­ful that we live in it, at a time when you can read The Hindu online.

The rest of the story, by the way, is about what hap­pens when all those guests have been smok­ing for a few decades:

Chi­nese soci­ety today is in a cri­sis. The cri­sis is to do with the health of the world’s most pop­u­lous soci­ety and the cul­prit is tobacco. With an esti­mated 350 mil­lion smok­ers, China is both the largest pro­ducer and con­sumer of tobacco, account­ing for a third of the world’s smok­ers. Accord­ing to offi­cial sta­tis­tics, the coun­try sells around 1.6 tril­lion cig­a­rettes a year.

The WHO says smok­ing related dis­eases kill one mil­lion Chi­nese annu­ally and if unchecked this num­ber could dou­ble by 2020. With incomes in China ris­ing steadily over the last few decades, so has the aver­age daily con­sump­tion of cig­a­rettes per smoker from around four in 1972 to 10 in 1992 to nearly 15 today. Smok­ers are also begin­ning to develop the habit at ever younger ages with a stag­ger­ing 100 mil­lion smok­ers esti­mated to be under the age of 18.

But despite the alarm­ing evi­dence, many in the Chi­nese gov­ern­ment claim the coun­try can­not afford to quit smok­ing, given the value of the tobacco indus­try to the Chi­nese econ­omy. Cig­a­rette com­pa­nies not only gen­er­ate tens of thou­sands of jobs (up to 100 mil­lion Chi­nese are directly or indi­rectly depen­dent for their liveli­hood on the tobacco indus­try) but are also among the top tax pay­ers, con­tribut­ing $30 bil­lion or eight per cent of total cen­tral gov­ern­ment rev­enue in 2005.

It’s the old­est story in the world: Oops, we did it again.

So, some blog­gage:

Yes­ter­day I said I love the inter­net. Some­times I hate it. The story of Alli­son Stokke is one good rea­son to. It’s about a teenage ath­lete of some accom­plish­ment who has become the new Cindy Mar­go­lis on the strength of one photo of her look­ing very pretty (or hawt, as you kids like to say) at a track meet. And then, well…

Three weeks later, Stokke has decided that con­trol is essen­tially beyond her grasp. Instead, she said, she has learned a dis­tress­ing les­son in the unruly momen­tum of the Inter­net. A fan on a Cal foot­ball mes­sage board posted a pic­ture of the attrac­tive, ath­letic pole vaulter. A pop­u­lar sports blog­ger in New York found the pic­ture and posted it on his site. Dozens of other blog­gers picked up the same image and spread it. Within days, hun­dreds of thou­sands of Inter­net users had searched for Stokke’s pic­ture and leered.

The wave of atten­tion has steam­rolled Stokke and her fam­ily in New­port Beach, Calif. She is rec­og­nized — and stared at — in cof­fee shops. She locks her doors and tries not to leave the house alone. Her father, Allan Stokke, comes home from his job as a lawyer and searches the Inter­net. He reads mes­sage boards and tries to pick out poten­tial stalk­ers.

Argh. (And in case you’re won­der­ing, yes, I con­sid­ered not link­ing to the photo. But what was the first thing I did after read­ing that story? Look for the photo. And what is the one thing my edi­tors used to do that drove me insane when I worked in news­pa­pers? Decline to pub­lish some­thing widely known/available else­where, on the grounds of moral or eth­i­cal purity. I try to live in the reality-based world. Any­way, I looked at the photo and said, “That is a girl who takes great care of her­self.” Your reac­tion may be dif­fer­ent.)

For­tu­nately, though, we can con­sole our­selves by turn­ing our atten­tion spans, now whit­tled down to a sub-toddler level, to more amus­ing pic­tures like this. Look, some­thing shiny and funny!

That’s it for now. Tune in tomor­row for our semi-whatever salute to “Ode to Bil­lie Joe”!

God, I love the inter­net. New time-wasting site: TSGTV.

Need­less to say, a tad NSFW.

Last week the Freep had a story about the out­go­ing Detroit school super­in­ten­dent — “out­go­ing” because he’d been fired in March — still dri­ving a Ford Explorer that was part of his com­pen­sa­tion pack­age. So far, so good, your basic tawdry story of a pub­lic ser­vant declin­ing to unclasp the teat when told to, but, as so often hap­pens here, the punch­line to this joke was buried far down in the story. The Explorer is one of two cars the super­in­ten­dent is enti­tled to use, the other being a Lin­coln Town Car with a secu­rity detail attached.

Yes, the super­in­ten­dent of schools rolls with mus­cle. The board mem­ber quoted said he had no prob­lem with that, because there were some crazy peo­ple at those school board meet­ings. A few weeks ago, a mem­ber of the audi­ence threw a hand­ful of grapes at the board after a vote she dis­agreed with. (Ques­tion: Does the superintendent’s secu­rity detail pledge to take a grape for the boss?) But maybe for good rea­son: Yes­ter­day the out­go­ing supe was indicted, in Dal­las, for mis­cel­la­neous finan­cial shenani­gans. Was a yacht involved? Oh, of course: Sir Veza II, if you’re keep­ing score at home.

(Yacht names in indict­ments are like pulling your jacket up to hide your face from pho­tog­ra­phers on the perp walk — they just make you look more guilty. Last week Terry Gross inter­viewed some­one who’d writ­ten a book about Randy “Duke” Cun­ning­ham, the crookedest ex-congressman in all the land. The yacht Cun­ning­ham was liv­ing on, the very kind favor extended by a defense con­trac­tor, was called The Dukester. Is that a guilty name or what? Note to self: If one plans to accept a yacht in lieu of dirty money, have the sense to name it some­thing dumb and innocu­ous, like Tran­quil­ity Base, or Wind­surfer. Even Liq­uid Refresh­ment is tempt­ing fate.)

I remem­ber in Fort Wayne, when the super­in­ten­dent sent flow­ers to some woman on his expense account; we wrote sto­ries for days and days, which prompted let­ters to the edi­tor for more days and days, won­der­ing how long the tax­pay­ers of Allen County were going to carry this sort of out­ra­geous spend­ing and blah blah blah. I won­der what they’d do with two cars, a secu­rity detail and an indict­ment? Faint dead away, I expect.

Kind of a mixed bag today, appro­pri­ate for a day promis­ing tem­per­a­tures in the upper 80s. Lord knows I have work to do, but I spent some time yes­ter­day con­tem­plat­ing two per­sonal essays detail­ing bad expe­ri­ences — Jon Carroll’s account of being kept awake by drunken Sher­pas in a Nepalese tea­house, and James Lileks’ dis­ap­point­ment with a meal at a Thai restau­rant.

If that’s all I told you about the two pieces, which one do you think had a higher prob­a­bil­ity of bug­ging the crap out of you? The first one, of course. Just the setup sounds like some­thing you’d hear from J. Peter­man — Seinfeld’s J. Peter­man, that is. Ah yes, Elaine, I recall when my bride and I hon­ey­mooned on Ever­est, and the tea­house we bunked in was invaded by par­ty­ing Sher­pas imbib­ing rak­shi, their native moon­shine… And yet, you read the col­umn, and not only do you not get that feel­ing, that cry-me-a-river-asshole feel­ing of a per­son com­plain­ing about hav­ing an exotic expe­ri­ence in an exotic land you will never, ever visit, much less be able to write sen­tences like this about: “We were four weeks into the jour­ney when we came to Pang­boche, a charm­ing town at 14,000 feet…” You not only don’t get the feel­ing, you sym­pa­thize. Poor Jon and Tracy in that smoky hut! Rude Sher­pas! The least they could have done was expand the hole in the ceil­ing. It’s the kind of story I wish I could tell, but never could, and not because I’ve never been to Nepal. I lack the self-effacement gene.

But I’ve had many bad meals in restau­rants — who hasn’t? — and yet, read­ing Lileks whine about his own, which involved being served chicken thighs in his curry, instead of the expected white meat, left me think­ing this guy should change his name to Bab­bitt and get it over with. (Let’s leave aside the plain fact that the thighs are where the flava lives on a chicken, and that many Thai recipes call for thighs by name [Lefty and Righty, per­haps]; some peo­ple just don’t like dark meat.) I think it’s the ridicu­lous, out-of-proportion hos­til­ity over what was, in the grand scheme of things, no big deal, the sense that Lileks brought not just a gun to a knife fight, but a high-powered sniper rifle, which he used on the restau­rant owner long after the fight should have been con­cluded, digested and sent into the sewer, so to speak.

Your impres­sions may dif­fer. Share them if you like. Oh, and be advised that the Thai-food anec­dote comes about halfway through the big wad o’ text. And since you’ve been so good, here’s a bonus Jon Car­roll story, head­lined “The Afghans Next Door” but should have been called “Canapés for the Rev­o­lu­tion,” which was in the sub­head. Cheese puffs?

Fred Thomp­son is run­ning for pres­i­dent, some say. It’s a pity that James Wol­cott already summed him up in a phrase, when he called him a grumpy old dog fart­ing on the front porch.

A few days ago I wrote about archi­tec­tural sal­vage in Detroit. Well, not all of it is sal­vaged — some just gets thrown in the woods, as Detroit­blog points out.

And that is all. Good day to every­one.

Alan gazes wist­fully at a club that will prob­a­bly never have him as a mem­ber.

That’s the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, by the way. Isn’t it pretty? (OK, so you can’t actu­ally see it, but take my word for it. It’s pretty.) I love that tower, a great land­mark when you’re out on the water, and easy on the eyes, too. (And I’m kid­ding about them not admit­ting the likes of us. They’re not all that exclu­sive, and besides, we’ve never tried.)

On Sat­ur­day, it rained. Sun­day, like­wise. But Mon­day, the hol­i­day, was clear and bright and, well, you see the pic­ture. A per­fect day. We sailed close along the coast, and I put the binoc­u­lars on the big houses, while con­tem­plat­ing a heist story in which the thieves would hit the houses in Jan­u­ary, then make their get­away by snow­mo­bile, over the ice. We passed a giant freighter called Fed­eral Yukon, whose stern announced its hail­ing port: Hong Kong. I guess that makes it a salty, unless they’re talk­ing about the obscure port of Hong Kong, Min­nesota. It’s a bulk car­rier, our “Know Your Ships” guide said. BCs carry every­thing from taconite pel­lets to potash. (Kind of makes you won­der if the Edmund Fitzger­ald would have a song writ­ten about it, had it been car­ry­ing potash. Hard to rhyme that one with­out sound­ing stu­pid.)

Here’s a stern shot of the Fed­eral Yukon. Note that diag­o­nal struc­ture ris­ing over the aft deck. It took me a minute before I fig­ured out what it was; the blaze-orange lozenge within was the clue. It’s the lifeboat. Orange for vis­i­bil­ity, enclosed for sur­vival, it looks like a tiny sub­ma­rine, noth­ing as pic­turesque as the Titanic lifeboats, those big open row­boats staffed by freaked-out mem­bers of the White Star Line. But then, I guess by the time you reach the lifeboats, being pic­turesque is no longer a con­cern. I’d like to know the launch­ing pro­ce­dure, and why it’s up on that struc­ture. I’d imag­ine there’s a stair­way to a rear hatch, and it deploys auto­mat­i­cally if it ever reaches the water, with all souls on board kiss­ing their asses good­bye.

I’d love to take a trip on one of these suck­ers, and write about it. Please, no hello-sailor jokes.

Last week­end we saw the Best Actress per­for­mance, so this week­end it was For­est Whitaker’s turn. “The Last King of Scot­land” was fine enough, and the Oscar was well-deserved, a real game-set-match turn, but I think I’ve OD’d on Africa movies for a while. Black sav­ages, unspeak­able vio­lence, death-by-machete bru­tal­ity, flawed white heroes — is there ever a vari­a­tion on this theme? Why can’t some­one make a film of “King Leopold’s Ghost”? At least then we’d know where the natives got the inspi­ra­tion for all that limb-severing.

So, the blog­gage:

Not much today — I stayed away from dig­i­tal devices most of the week­end — but I found yet another time-waster: Over­heard in the Office, along with its sis­ter sites Over­heard in New York and Over­heard at the Beach. As an enthu­si­as­tic and unapolo­getic eaves­drop­per, I love this stuff. I may sub­mit my most recent gem, over­heard at the video store:

First guy, hold­ing DVD box: This one shows a hot chick with a sword.
Sec­ond guy, hold­ing DVD box: This one just has a bunch of dudes on it.
First guy: So this one wins.
Sec­ond guy: Totally.

Twelve-zip? Isn’t that sup­posed to be a foot­ball score? On the other hand, a lop­sided blowout is proof your team won, so I won’t com­plain. It was hot, sunny and our seats were in the shade, if a lit­tle high up for foul-ball action. And how often do you get to see a triple? That was in the fifth, after which the Tigers were up 10-0.

Com­er­ica Park — an anti­mat­ter ver­sion of Ford Field, known locally as Home of the Losers.

As should be blind­ingly obvi­ous to reg­u­lar read­ers, I’m not a sports fan, but if I were, I’d be a base­ball fan. It has all the advan­tages — a sea­son that runs through the pleas­ant ones of the nat­ural world, play­ers that are good-looking but not mutant freaks (depend­ing on their steroid pref­er­ences), beer. My term edit­ing sports copy ran through most of base­ball sea­son, and many of the peo­ple in the news­room in the 5 a.m. hour were base­ball fans, so I have these pleas­ant mem­o­ries of a very quiet place punc­tu­ated by the click­ing of com­puter keys and a dis­cus­sion of the pre­vi­ous day’s games between Andrew (Yan­kees fan) and Rick (Indi­ans fan). Rick was my boss, and tol­er­ated even the stu­pid­est ques­tions I had about the game; it was like he was instruct­ing the daugh­ter he didn’t have (and who was older than him, but never mind that). He explained walk-off homers and the fierce power of the play­ers’ union, sac­ri­fice fly balls and saves, and ruled on whether “mid­sum­mer clas­sic” should be up. (It should, so: Mid­sum­mer Clas­sic.)

If I’d had another sea­son with him, I might have under­stood why Sean Casey was inten­tion­ally walked in the third, but I’m afraid my under­stand­ing of the game remains at the kinder­garten level. Oh, so what? There’s beer.

A Mus­lim fam­ily sat a row over from us, although I’m sure I’m get­ting the rela­tion­ships wrong. Four girls approx­i­mately the same age (12-13-ish), all in head­scarves, dressed American-style mod­est: long pants, but jeans; T-shirts, but with long-sleeved under­shirts. One girl wore Ben Wallace’s Pis­tons jer­sey with match­ing head­scarf, another chose Tigers blue/orange. Must be some of those mod­er­ate Mus­lims we’ve been hear­ing about lately. Also, sports fans.

And now the week­end is nearly here, and I have to catch up on all the stuff I put off when I was doing weekend-type stuff ear­lier in the week. We have now entered the Twi­light Zone of the school year, in which no learn­ing hap­pens, replaced by the whirl­wind of end-of-year par­ties, pic­nics and gift envelopes for the teacher. Jeez, what­ever hap­pened to an apple and a nice note say­ing “thanks for doing your job”? I don’t begrudge Kate’s teacher his gifts, but the first two weeks of every June is like my last year of high school.

OK, I’m offi­cially bag­ging it. I’m dis­tracted by Project Playlist. I’m try­ing to put together a list called Men You Should Avoid, based on my thun­der­struck rev­e­la­tion that I own — and love — two songs that are basi­cally about women who are in love with bums.* Not as in “ras­cally guys,” but “train-hopping hobos with­out a job, or any hope of hold­ing one.” So now I have to comb the inter­nets for “Wives and Lovers” and god­damn, but did any­one ever invent a bet­ter pro­cras­ti­na­tion tool than the inter­net? Didn’t think so.

Also, I just dis­cov­ered Brewer & Shipley’s ver­sion of “Witchi-Tai-To” on iTunes. And you thought they were one-hit won­ders.

Have a good week­end. Back after it.

* “Gen­tle on My Mind” and “Rainy Night in Geor­gia,” if you’re inter­ested.

Good news: The divorce lawyers will have to find some other cou­ple to put asun­der. I only had to warn Alan to stop yelling once. And he did. But now the deed is done, the boat floats for another sea­son and even­tu­ally it’ll be rigged (with NEW sails) and we can go sail­ing. It seems like a lot of work, and it is, but let me point out the cur­rent price at the gas dock: $3.99/gallon. The wind, I remind you, is free.

I promised pic­tures. But I haven’t moved Pho­to­shop over to the new machine. So some thumb­nails to save band­width. (Click if you want to see them big­ger.)

That’s the last bit of bottom-painting, and Alan lying down to whis­per sweet noth­ings to his mis­tress. Not much in the way of pic­tures, but what can I say? It was hot. And I was help­ing raise the mast.

And today comes another flake-out. I’m a chap­er­one for the pay­off on Kate’s year of ser­vice on stu­dent coun­cil — Tigers v. Angels at Com­er­ica. The fore­cast is for bright, sunny skies and unsea­son­able warmth, sun­glasses weather. Take me out to the ball­game. But I leave you with…bloggage:

Jon Car­roll was there dur­ing the ’60s (although, he notes, much of it took place in the ’70s), and con­trary to the stan­dard wit­ti­cism, there’s a lot he remem­bers. And thank God for that:

I was work­ing for Rolling Stone in 1970, which should have meant that I was at the white hot cen­ter of what­ever the hell it was. I was assigned to go cover a press con­fer­ence announc­ing some­thing called the Toronto Peace Fes­ti­val. The press con­fer­ence was at the Jef­fer­son Air­plane (as they then were) house on Fol­som. John Lennon was sup­posed to be there but wasn’t.

So I was lis­ten­ing to these peo­ple describ­ing the event, which would of course be free and would have every fab­u­lous group you ever heard of, and there would be a big area right at the cen­ter of the fes­ti­val that would be brightly lit because, on the last night of the show, our alien broth­ers were going to join us. In a space­ship. With gifts.

There was such a fine silence in the room. The late Michael Grieg, a won­der­ful Chron­i­cle reporter and an old beat­nik who had seen it all, asked softly, “alien space­ships?” Nods all around. So we all knew we were cov­er­ing the biggest story of our life­time, or we were lis­ten­ing to crazy peo­ple.

I have been giv­ing the Freep a cer­tain amount of abuse lately, so let me call out some­thing I enjoyed, a story and short video on Jim Dunne, known in the trade as an “autorazzi,” because he stalks the reclu­sive and takes pic­tures, only he’s after cars, not peo­ple. Yes, you can make a liv­ing at it; he raised seven chil­dren on the pro­ceeds of auto-espionage, and had the sort of brass ones you need for the job. He once pur­chased a small strip of land with a fine view of Chrysler’s prov­ing ground in Ari­zona and shot with impunity for some time before he was found out and foiled. (I bet he sold the prop­erty to Chrysler with a twin­kle in his eye, and for a fat profit.) Note the fool-the-autofocus cam­ou­flage on the cars in the video, a com­mon sight around the Motor City. Inside joke: the “dis­grun­tled exec­u­tive” who speaks from the dark­ness in the video is GM’s Bob Lutz.

It’s a boy! And he has grandfather’s dead, soul­less eyes! (Joke stolen from a Metafil­ter thread, I think.) Happy birth­day, Samuel David Cheney, and con­grat­u­la­tions to both your mom­mies.

Spring is here, which means it’s time for the Der­ringer clan to do its semi-annual flir­ta­tion with divorce. Yes, it’s boat-launching day. I thought this event had lost its drama once we got the kinks out; last year’s launch, and even autumn’s melan­choly take-out, went bet­ter than expected. But this year lin­ger­ing knee pain com­pli­cates mat­ters, and the tem­per­a­ture is pre­dicted to be a blaz­ing 85. Will this day end in curs­ing, tears and lawyers? Tune in tomor­row.

Two bits of blog­gage, one short, one long:

Like drip­ping ice, like descend­ing smog, there was karma all over the build­ing Tues­day night — and still the Red Wings almost shook it off, they fought to the chok­ing fin­ish. But in the end, it was cov­ered in feath­ers and spoke with a beak. This, friends, is the kind of prose that makes you a national trea­sure.

The Yak is the Detroit Free Press’ big furry ani­mal. Its job is to encour­age chil­dren to read the paper, via its ongo­ing fea­ture, Yak’s Cor­ner. When the Freep and my ex-employer were both Knight Rid­der papers, we ran Yak’s Cor­ner, too. I guess, in the Freep sale and sub­se­quent dis­so­lu­tion of KR, the Yak was not con­sid­ered cor­po­rate prop­erty, because it’s still in the Freep.

One time, to pro­mote the fea­ture at some convention-center show the paper was involved in, the Freep loaned the Yak cos­tume to our news­room in Fort Wayne. It arrived in a big case on wheels, and was taken to the man­ag­ing editor’s office, whose job it was to find an occu­pant. She needed some­one who was both slim and had noth­ing bet­ter to do on the week­end, and found her ideal can­di­date in Name Redacted.

Redacted tells the story bet­ter than I do, but the bot­tom line is: It was a dis­as­ter. The suit was claus­tro­pho­bic, and the chil­dren were hor­ri­ble; they espe­cially liked run­ning full-tilt into the poor Yak, try­ing to knock it down. Or they’d beat on the suit with their fists to pro­voke a reac­tion. Imag­ine being inside this thing — hot, sweaty, try­ing to see out the fur-screened peep­hole, besieged by brats who will prob­a­bly not grow up to be daily news­pa­per sub­scribers. The Yak had an escort, the teenage daugh­ter of an edi­tor also in atten­dance. After a good deal of this tor­ture, Redacted started to feel the suit clos­ing in, so to speak. She turned to the escort and said, “GET YOUR MOM,” only it sounded like “Mmmf mfuf mmmffm” and so the escort did noth­ing. “PLEASE, PLEASE GET YOUR MOM” came out “MMFF MFFM mfm­fuf mffmf” and the tor­ture con­tin­ued. Finally, the Yak bolted from the hall, ripped the head off the cos­tume, climbed into her car in a state of barely restrained panic and vom­ited down her shirt.

This would have been a sight to see. I only wish my life was this cin­e­matic.

I men­tion this only because when­ever I see a video like this one, I think, “If they made me do that, I’d puke, too.”

Back later, with pic­tures.

Today’s ques­tion:

What was your wed­ding like?

I ask because I want to know how the gen­er­a­tional divide works here. We got mar­ried late in life, planned it our­selves and spent a lit­tle less than $5,000, at the time about half the aver­age cost in the U.S. and enough to buy two — but only two — Martha Stewart-style wed­ding cakes at cur­rent prices. I thought it was a pretty nice wed­ding, but then, I was the guest of honor. There were things I’d do dif­fer­ently today, but on the whole, I thought it worked OK. I re-learned the most impor­tant les­son of any party, whether it’s for a bris, a mar­riage, a wake or a keg­ger — it’s not the food or the booze or the flow­ers or the table dec­o­ra­tions, it’s the guest list. You can throw a great party for prac­ti­cally noth­ing, if you have the right friends. (And I’m not talk­ing about get­ting your friends to design the invi­ta­tions, although that’s a big help.) Which is one rea­son I’m so baf­fled by the MegaWed­ding phe­nom­e­non.

I’ve been to one of these affairs, and it was very nice, but it was the first of my expe­ri­ence that had a theme. You wouldn’t think a wed­ding would need a theme — Bob and Sue Get Mar­ried would seem to do the trick — but this one’s was Candy. The exe­cu­tion was sly and clever. The invi­ta­tion came in a box made of white choco­late. Table assign­ments were on all-day suck­ers. The entrance to the out­door area where they did the deed was flanked by giant “bou­quets” of licorice whips, suck­ers and the like. There was an inter­mezzo course of cock­tails named for candy bars. The table­top can­dles sat in glasses crusted with rock candy. The place­mats were peppermint-swirled. Toward the end of the night I picked up a lovely petit-four and nearly broke a tooth. It was a sou­venir can­dle. Whoops, too many choco­late mar­ti­nis.

And while I remem­ber all of it vividly, when we talk about that week­end, we inevitably recall the elderly guest who had seem­ingly spent his entire 401(k) hav­ing his face lifted, con­toured with implants and, I don’t know, buffed to a high sheen. Which is not to say a theme is unim­por­tant, just that peo­ple were talk­ing about the guy with the facelift. (Note: I hope they’re not talk­ing about the drunk who tried to eat the can­dle.)

All this by way of point­ing you to this inter­view with Rebecca Mead, author of “One Per­fect Day: The Sell­ing of the Amer­i­can Wed­ding.”

Mead’s book is said to be the first to tackle the Amer­i­can wed­ding racket the way Jes­sica Mit­ford did the funeral indus­try, which I find aston­ish­ing. Granted, I was long in the tooth and a prac­ticed cynic by the time I tied the knot, but I hope, for the future of our coun­try, that most brides-to-be could see through the naked greed and pol­ished b.s. of so much of what you’re ped­dled between the she-says-yes and the I-dos. I recall one small item among many. It was a col­lec­tion of small rings of not-particularly-precious metal, each attached to a rib­bon. You — or your des­ig­nated pas­try chef — baked them into a cake with the rib­bons stream­ing out. This cake was to be served at a bridal shower, where each brides­maid would grab a rib­bon and pull, thereby reveal­ing her des­tiny. (Each ring car­ried a dif­fer­ent sym­bol.) Accord­ing to the adver­tis­ing, it was said to be the hot new “tra­di­tion,” but all I could see was a cake that would be a pain in the ass to bake and then dis­in­te­grate when six girls yanked its guts out. Crumbs every­where and a ruined dessert — that’s a wed­ding for you.

But then I recall the brides I’ve known who fell into real depres­sions after their wed­dings were over, after they returned from the hon­ey­moon, opened all the gifts, put them on the shelf and said, “Now what?” It’s like nobody told them a wed­ding is fol­lowed by a mar­riage, which lasts a lot longer and fea­tures hors d’oeuvres only occa­sion­ally.

In the inter­view, Mead men­tions In Style Wed­dings, the spe­cial edi­tion of the con­sumer mag­a­zine that always fea­tures a celebrity bride on its cover. She doesn’t men­tion that for the longest time, this par­tic­u­lar match was cursed — sev­eral con­sec­u­tive cou­ples broke up before the ink was dry. Even the zillion-dollar cake couldn’t save them. Imag­ine that.

So, blog­gage before a busy day gets up and run­ning:

Bill Maxwell left the St. Peters­burg Times in 2004 to teach jour­nal­ism at Still­man Col­lege, an his­tor­i­cally black school in Alabama. It didn’t go well. The story is very sad.

When Alan was Fea­tures edi­tor in Fort Wayne, some­times our daily down­load of how-was-your-day-dear involved issues of, how you say, taste. The rebel­lious world of youth cul­ture was always try­ing to shake up the squares in Fea­tures. I can’t tell you how often he’d have to waste time get­ting an exec­u­tive rul­ing on whether Big Dick & the Pen­e­tra­tors could go in the club list­ings. (And those rul­ings usu­ally went all the way up the chain of com­mand, because if there’s one thing edi­tors can do well, it’s avoid mak­ing deci­sions.)

The Cherry-Poppin’ Dad­dies were another prob­lem. Once Big Dick & the Pen­e­tra­tors had been cleared, on the grounds that the sort of peo­ple who were likely to be offended by the name wouldn’t be por­ing over the fine print in the Where To Go list­ings, you’d think the Cherry-Poppin’ Dad­dies wouldn’t be a prob­lem, either. But you never knew when that one would wash up on the shores of some fem­i­nist copy edi­tor whose lips would com­press to a thin line and whose flag would be raised, the one embla­zoned, “No retreat, no sur­ren­der.”

Any­way, I’m won­der­ing how many edi­tors are, even as we speak, pass­ing the buck up the chain of com­mand for a rul­ing on the hot new craze that’s sweepin’ the nation, i.e.:

Corn­hole.

Do not laugh, but be pre­pared to snicker, as you learn a few facts about the game. Did you know, for instance, that Cincin­nati is “crazy for corn­hole?” Did you know there’s a com­pany called the Ohio Corn­hole Com­pany? Did you know that Geauga Lake, the north­west Ohio amuse­ment park, is offer­ing an All-American Corn­hole Toss on the mid­way this year?

Man, just as Borat’s act is over, too.

Corn­hole is basi­cally bean­bag toss, and gets its name from the grain that fills the bags (corn, not beans). Some peo­ple choose to call it “Baggo,” but that’s prob­a­bly because they’re, you know, homo­pho­bic.

Oh, wait. Baggo. Never mind.

It was Fam­ily Movie Week­end, but I was the only one who saw all three — “Hair­spray” for all three of us, “Shrek the Third” for Kate and me and “The Queen” for the adults. The lat­ter was the only one worth dis­cussing; I wish I’d had time to watch it again, if only to re-examine how they worked the magic, mak­ing a ter­rific, watch­able two-hour movie about an idea (what are the uses of tra­di­tion?) and where the action con­sists mostly of peo­ple talk­ing on the phone. I guess you do it with killer per­for­mances, and every nice thing any­one ever said about Helen Mir­ren was deserved, and then some.

Dur­ing that week in 1997, around day four or five, when it seemed the entire world had taken leave of its senses over Princess Di, I stepped off the crazy train. I think I dis­em­barked around the time Mother Teresa died, and she was treated like a crack-house O.D. Maybe not exactly, but def­i­nitely not top-o’-the-newscast. In other news at this hour, we go to Cal­cutta… The local Border’s had a “con­do­lence book” you could sign, sit­ting on a table with a box of Kleenex. The audi­ence at the big Labor Day classic-car auc­tion lined up to throw glad­i­o­lus blos­soms into the back seat of a Rolls-Royce that Diana had rid­den in pre­cisely once. It was clear this had gone from gen­uine feel­ing to a sort of mass hys­te­ria. I didn’t give much thought to how the royal fam­ily was deal­ing with all of this, beyond acknowl­edg­ing the obvi­ous — the clue­less­ness of their non-reaction reac­tion; the Parade Before the Flow­ers, which inspired that rar­ity, a truly mem­o­rable and funny Mau­reen Dowd line (“they looked like they were judg­ing a dog show”). “The Queen” isn’t jour­nal­ism, God knows, only a smart, edu­cated guess about what they were think­ing, based on what they did, but it has the feel of some­thing that could be the truth. (Wow, talk about your qual­i­fiers.)

Hon­estly? I even felt a tiny bit of empa­thy for James Cromwell as Prince Philip, who was obvi­ously there for comic relief and to lay down the law on such burn­ing ques­tions as How Do We Fly the Royal Stan­dard. His way of cop­ing with Diana’s children’s grief? Take them for a walk in the Scot­tish high­lands. Some­day the princes will grow old, and they’ll look back and say: There are worse ways to grieve.

How­ever, even “The Queen” was swept away by the third-to-last Sopra­nos episode last night, “The Sec­ond Com­ing.” It would seem the ducks are com­ing home to roost.

This just in: I dropped a half-gallon pitcher of orange juice on the floor this morn­ing. Did the lid come off, allow­ing all 64 ounces to go all over the god­damn place? Do you even need to ask?

In a sign my luck may be chang­ing, how­ever, Alan was there to help me clean up, and I had a back-up in the fridge. For those of you keep­ing track at home.

OK, then.

When I was a Hoosier, two of my favorite peo­ple in town were Jerry and Linda Van­derveer, who ran an archi­tec­tural sal­vage busi­ness on the unglam­orous south side. If an old house was slated for demo­li­tion, they’d go in, strip every­thing that could be car­ried away and take it back to the Wood Shack, cor­ner of Baker and Fair­field. If you were restor­ing a house and wanted some 1912-era vent cov­ers, or pocket doors, or crys­tal door­knobs or what­ever, you went to see them. Their place didn’t look big from the out­side and was claus­tro­pho­bic within, but it had its own kind of order. Doors were in one room, mold­ings in another, eight or nine fire­place man­tels lean­ing up against a wall in var­i­ous states of repair/restoration.

A busi­ness like that depends on a cer­tain amount of ongo­ing demo­li­tion, and like most rust-belt cities, the Fort had its share. But when you’re talk­ing about vacant old houses wait­ing to be torn down, Detroit is Mecca. And where Jerry and Linda were one of only a few, if not the only ones, doing the job in Fort Wayne, here there are dozens.

I stopped in at one of these places in Royal Oak last year, run by a woman with more artis­tic sen­si­bil­i­ties. She not only stripped the stuff, she restored it, recom­bined it with other pieces and did a brisk busi­ness mak­ing a lot of cot­tages up north look very shabby-chic. But con­sid­er­ing the abandoned-building busi­ness here includes not only houses but archi­tec­tural mas­ter­pieces from the glory days, I really shouldn’t be sur­prised by some of the stuff that turns up. And yet, I always am.

Det­News colum­nist Neal Rubin offers an atyp­i­cal, but by no means unheard-of exam­ple today: What am I bid for a pair of solid bronze, 9-and-a-half-foot doors once used on a bank vault and designed by archi­tec­tural leg­end Albert Kahn? They’re in good shape, con­sid­er­ing they spent the last half-century in some guy’s garage. They now reside in Toledo, where a sal­vage expert took them after retriev­ing them from the garage, but they’re still under­uti­lized. She wants $38,000 for them, pocket change for the sort of hedge-fund plu­to­crat who’d go for such a thing. Ship­ping is steep — $1,000 — but likely less than what UPS would charge you to move 1,200 pounds of bronze from Toledo to your front house.

This is like when the peas­ants lopped the heads off the stat­ues on the Notre Dame cathe­dral dur­ing the French rev­o­lu­tion, and they found them in some guy’s base­ment a cou­ple hun­dred years later. Sorta.

Are you in a Fri­day mood? I’m in a Fri­day mood. So take 9 min­utes, 28 sec­onds and enjoy this clipfest of 100 movies, 100 quotes, 100 num­bers. Once you get the idea, see if you can antic­i­pate the big ones. The only ones I pre­dicted accu­rately were 50 and 44 (big clue in the freeze frame below). “Ben-Hur” fans will be at an advan­tage in the 40s, too:

Are you hav­ing fun? Good. Because I have to get some work done. Enjoy.