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.