A remarkable story in yesterday NYT asked a question I’d never even considered:

What’s your beauty budget?

Hmm. Well, OK, let’s see if we can tote it up: Haircut/color every six weeks, roughly $100 including tip. Eyebrow wax when I’m feeling sorry for myself, ahem bathing-suit area maintenance ahem in summer. Say, $200 a year. “Product” when I run short of it — shampoo, sunscreen, soap, drugstore-line makeup. A wildly inflated guess on that would be $200 a year. Add it all up, and I’d say between $1,000 and $1,200 a year, and I feel damn guilty about that hair color, but hey, I’m in the Gray Zone, and I’m not giving up this early.

Still, I’m practically a hairy-legged hippie compared to Ginger Grace, 40, a real-estate agent in Beverly Hills. Her scorecard:

Every other day: hair blown out, 45 minutes, $65. Twice a week: personal trainer, one hour, $80. Twice a week: eyebrow waxing, five minutes, $30. Twice a week: thigh treatment, 45 minutes, $125. Weekly: hiking with trainer, two hours, $150. Weekly: Zone Diet food delivery, $250. Twice a month: pedicure (with manicure), one hour, $40. Twice a month: facial, one hour, $160. Twice a month: massage, one hour, $125. Several times a month: makeup and eyelash application, $145. Monthly: photo facial, 15 minutes, $500. Every six weeks: hair color, two hours, $450. Every three months: hair cut, 45 minutes, $140. Twice a year: Botox and Restylane, one hour, $1,000.

The “thigh treatment” is some sort of “electrical-current thing,” she says, and adds that she considers herself a hairy-legged hippie, at least by local standards: “I am probably the only person in Los Angeles who doesn’t see a chiropractor, an acupuncturist or a nutritionist, but it’s so youth-driven here that maybe I should.”

Good lord. I’m sure a Beverly Hills Realtor makes a pile of dough, but that adds up to $12,000 a year. You see where we got the term “high-maintenance.” She gets her eyebrows waxed twice a week? Someone needs to learn how to work a pair of tweezers. And those prices! Four hundred fifty bucks for hair color? A haircut for $140? A hiking coach? As someone who’s hiked many miles, maybe I can save Ms. Grace some money. Psst: Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Thank you. We’ll be passing the hat later.

I guess the upside is, Ms. Grace is a fetching gal with tingly thighs. Still. I’d rather tour Asia with the 12 grand. I could stay long enough to grow an inch of gray roots.

I suppose I should spend some time thinking about the Supreme Court, but to be honest, I don’t have the caffeine in me just yet. And at this point I really should be praying for my immortal soul, having just committed the unpardonable sin of buying a 10-year-old an iPod Nano. Rest assured, I have an elaborate rationalization for it, which I’ll share upon request, but for now the sight of her sitting at the park-bus stop with white buds in her tender ears is already making me think I made a terrible, terrible mistake.

Have a great weekend.

Who’s your favorite Spice Girl?

She needs a new dress, but I vote for Ginger. She looks like she’s been around, but still has her optimism. That’s how a woman in her 30s should look.

Posh is the new Scary. A guy could put an eye out on one of those plastic hooters.

And if you’re wondering, here’s the news peg: They’re going back on tour.

One of my old boyfriends had a father who used to take the family on long car trips. Like lots of dads, he didn’t like to stop once he got a head of steam going. For anything. He made them — we’re talking four boys here — pee into Coke bottles; only number two would get him to pull over.

That said, he was a kitten compared to Mitt Romney:

Before beginning the (12-hour drive with the family from Boston to Ontario), Mitt Romney put Seamus, the family’s hulking Irish setter, in a dog carrier and attached it to the station wagon’s roof rack. He’d built a windshield for the carrier, to make the ride more comfortable for the dog.

Then Romney put his boys on notice: He would be making predetermined stops for gas, and that was it.

The ride was largely what you’d expect with five brothers, ages 13 and under, packed into a wagon they called the ”white whale.”

As the oldest son, Tagg Romney commandeered the way-back of the wagon, keeping his eyes fixed out the rear window, where he glimpsed the first sign of trouble. ”Dad!” he yelled. ”Gross!” A brown liquid was dripping down the back window, payback from an Irish setter who’d been riding on the roof in the wind for hours.

As the rest of the boys joined in the howls of disgust, Romney coolly pulled off the highway and into a service station. There, he borrowed a hose, washed down Seamus and the car, then hopped back onto the highway. It was a tiny preview of a trait he would grow famous for in business: emotion-free crisis management.

Call me Tony Soprano, but: Poor Seamus.

One of the first lessons you learn in the newspaper business is how cracked people are about animals. Animals and dead babies, but mainly animals. When something bad happens to a kid, readers are outraged, but if that happens to a dog or cat, multiply the outrage by 10. Or 100. Even stories about bad animals — say, a pit-bull fighting-ring bust, accompanied by photos of menacing-looking pits with scars and demi-ears and spiked collars — will get the phones jingling with bleeding hearts offering to take those poor animals in and retire them to the countryside.

It’s easy to laugh at these folks, and I have, but after a time I came to accept it. We love animals, and this is not a bad thing. I get upset when they’re valued higher than people, but as we see from the case of Mitt Romney, sometimes a dog’s life is nobler and worth more on the karmic scale.

Something I’ve noticed, and it’s entirely anecdotal so take it for what it’s worth, but: The more religious a person is, the lower their regard for animals. Living in Amish country pretty much stripped away every last shred of romance I might have felt for the Amish, but nothing flayed my expectations like learning that the Amish are a prime force behind puppy-mill dog breeding. To them, dogs are just another form of livestock.

And yes, I know how easy it is to go the other way, as a glance down the “pet clothing” aisle at Target will attest. In my dealings with critters, I’ve tried to take my cue from the many excellent professional trainers I’ve been privileged to know, who understand dogs and horses better than anyone. All were kind but firm, and understood a dog is not a child. A dog is a dog.

Still, none of them ever strapped theirs to the goddamn roof of the car.

Strap him to the damn car, is what I say.

OK, bloggage: I told you the glycol story was scary. Not that I would ever say, “I told you so,” but…

I don’t have the patience to read about Amy Winehouse. Someone who knows more, please tell me if I need to care about her or if I can just wait for the obituary.

P.S. I realize this space has been Tops in Lameness of late, but stay with me: I believe we have depths still to plumb.

On my iPod now:

What happened to funk/rock music with horns? What happened to afros like that? Dammit, I want to be 17 again.

Went for a long bike ride yesterday. Temperature: low 90s. Humidity: Merciless. I felt like riding fast and hard, so I did. About halfway through I started noticing people looking at me. Normally people don’t look at me. I’m no head-turner on my best day, and have fully arrived at that state of middle-aged female invisibility where you begin to blend in with the wallpaper. (I’m convinced I could walk into a bank, enter the vault, fill my pockets with cash and walk out unnoticed. At least if the bank is anything like the deli counter.) But I was turning heads. Pigeon crap on my forehead? The vile jiggling of my thighs? A bloody nose? The hint of cleavage even my hydraulic sports bra cannot contain? I turned the final corner, slowed for a cooldown and thought, “Hmm. I don’t think I’ll be cool by the time I hit the driveway.” Parked the bike, went inside, checked a mirror. My face was the color of an overripe tomato. I mean, not just a flush, not just a healthy glow, but the alarming shade people get before their head actually bursts into flames. I looked about to sustain a cerebral hemorrhage.

Ah well — exercise isn’t for sissies. I drank a quart of water, filled a ziploc with ice and sat with it on my head a while. It still took 45 minutes for the flush to clear. I wonder how close I was to actually passing out.

You know those ads that always say, “See your doctor before starting any exercise program”? And how you say, “Yeah, right”? Well, there’s a reason for those, and I think I’ve found it. Onrushing decrepitude is no longer a vague concept; the fragility of one’s body is a fact that must be faced. Your entire youth was the writing of a check that is now being presented for cash.

On the other hand, look at Jack Lalanne. Please. (And note well: Nice package, Jack!)

Speaking of “stakes” at the movies — we were, weren’t we? — I’m looking forward to the new “Die Hard,” if only to see what’s at stake. The first one touched off a furious round of movie-heist inflation, as I believe Alan Rickman was angling to steal something like $600 million in bearer bonds. (For a long time I was convinced “bearer bonds” were a Hollywood fiction, as they seemed such a convenient stand-in for cash and turned up in so many movies. But no, they really exist.) In the second “Die Hard,” I forget what the bad guys were after, except that it involved a squirrely Latin American dictator and perhaps a planeload of drugs worth considerably more than $600 million. And in the third installment, we all remember Jeremy Irons’ plan was to steal all the money in the world. Seriously; they were carting it away in dump trucks — the gold that backed all the G8’s paper currencies. The bad guys evidently planned to enjoy their wealth in a world where money was worthless, and they held all the precious metals.

As far as I can tell from the previews, in the newest “Die Hard,” Timothy Olyphant is threatening to take away everyone’s e-mail and internet connections. Which means the stakes are terrifyingly high, indeed.

As a former Hoosier, of course I took note of Richard Lugar’s big splash yesterday. I always felt conflicted about Dick when he was one of my senators, for reasons that, to fully understand, you had to live here. On the one hand, I took him as he presented himself: Smart, sober, conservative-but-not-crazy Republican who at least seemed to understand that the rest of the world existed, and conducted himself as such. Like so many Indiana office-holders, he is cemented in office. Democrats ran against him for reasons entirely divorced from the crazy idea that they might take his job — name recognition, street cred, whatever. The whole exercise was simply a more polite version of stretching your neck under a guillotine. On the other hand, I remember one year when he actually bought TV ads — I guess he needed to spend some money — and they featured him in a flannel shirt, proclaiming himself a man of the soil. While always a safe message in Indiana, it creeped me out. Donald Trump is more a man of the soil than the brainy Rhodes Scholar Lugar. It suggested there was a cruder sort of calculation inside that silver head. I didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about it — there’s always the point at which you think “at least he’s not Dan Quayle” — but there it was.

Fortunately Doghouse Riley, who still lives there, puts his finger on it pretty squarely:

Somehow nobody asks “Why is it a moderate Republican, a respected foreign-policy expert, takes five years to recognize and moderately object to an utter fucking Republican foreign policy disaster?” Dick Lugar had the opportunity to be the William Morse of his day and party, or at least its Bill Fulbright; his Hoosier seat would have stayed warm, or at least body temp. Instead he goes on providing cover for dingbats at risk of getting mussed in the next election.

Oh my, look — someone stood up to Ann Coulter. (Well, we knew it wouldn’t be Chris Matthews.) Nothing like putting the mother of a dead child up against a fortysomething bullshit artist to say, “Stop making cheap cracks about my dead child” to make some great TV. Coulter plays it cool, but be not fooled — she felt the need to flip her hair about 60 times once she knew who was on the phone. Playing with her long, blonde locks is her tell. Maybe someone will point this out to her (Coulter), and she can make a crack about how at least she HAS hair, unlike that chemo-crone Elizabeth Edwards.

The best writers tell you about something you don’t really care about — in this case, a dead pitcher — and make you care. Jon Carroll on the late Rod Beck:

I loved watching Rod Beck. He was the closer back when the Giants were good. He had a body that did not appear to have encountered the wonders of Pilates; he had an amazing, unapologetic Fu Manchu mustache; he had a mullet so large it seemed to be a separate creature that had agreed, in exchange for considerations, to spend some time on top of his head.

He looked badder than you; he looked badder than anyone. His entire attitude on the mound was aggression. Just the expression on his face as he leaned in to take the sign was malevolent. The hunch of his shoulders was frightening. I saw major league batters bail on a Rod Beck pitch before it was halfway to home plate. “Life is too short,” I could almost hear them muttering to themselves.

The joke y’all are playing on Brian in the comments reminds me of something that happened in Fort Wayne, back when the newspaper business used to be fun and not fraught with doom lurking around every corner.

An editor — let’s call him “Steve Grimmer,” since that was his name — had one of the coveted semi-private cubicles along the newsroom perimeter, which he wasn’t in most of the time, because he did most of his work out on the copy desk. The office/cubicle was for job reviews, plotting coups, etc. Unfortunately, his had a door in the back wall that opened into an alcove where the second-floor vending machines were located. You could get to the machines two ways: Take the long walk around, or the extremely short cut through Steve’s office. Steve was very explicit in his desire that people should not treat his office as a newsroom highway, and we all listened politely and nodded sure, sure Steve, I’ll never cut through your office again, but he left early in the day, so after 1:30 or so, our promises went right out of our heads. After 4 or so, lots of times we didn’t even bother closing the door.

He was good-natured about all this until the Sandwich Incident. Steve brought his lunch one day and left it on his desk while he worked on the copy desk. It was a standard sandwich on white bread, cut diagonally. Someone — the culprit was never fingered — cut through his office, stopped at his desk, took one bite out of each half, put it back in the plastic bag and left the crime scene.

Well. Suddenly this trespassing was not a minor irritation. A memo was written by a higher-ranking boss, forbidding the uninvited from setting foot in Steve’s office. Hints of serious retribution were dropped. This was no laughing matter. A sandwich had been vandalized.

Then Steve went on vacation. We took over his office.

Every day, someone brought in a plate of cookies or brownies, and we had a bake sale on Steve’s desk. A designer set up a series of photos of people using the office for various unapproved activities, and at one point there was a group photo where everyone in the newsroom crammed into the office. The pictures were mounted on a bulletin board on an easel in the middle of the office, under the words, WHAT WE DID ON STEVE’S VACATION.

To his credit, he was very good-humored about it all. Not long after he left the paper, the office was surrendered to the vending-machine highway, and by the time I left it had been equipped with a refrigerator and microwave, and was a de facto cafe.

By that time, cubicles were so plentiful they were no longer coveted. Tumbleweeds were blowing through the newsroom, and a committee was in place working on a plan to move out all the empty desks. Where have all the good times gone?

How should we welcome Brian back?

(When I took screenwriting, we talked a lot about “stakes,” how they have to be high enough to match the action. That is, it makes little dramatic sense to kill four people over a song a rock star has yet to write, to use but one vivid in-class example. It made me think that comedy comes from people fighting over low stakes, as anyone who’s seen at episode of “The Office” can testify.)

Notice I changed the On the Nightstand book. I’ve been waiting for “Imperial Life in the Emerald City” to get off the hot list at the library, and it finally did. Read three chapters at the pool yesterday, where I planned to swim laps. That’s a comment on the lure of the prose, not on my ability to avoid exercise under all circumstances. This account of life in the Green Zone was well worth the wait, and highly recommended. Click on the book in the right rail to read an excerpt from chapter one. Note how, in this Muslim country, in a cafeteria staffed by Pakistanis and Indians, the main protein on the menu was? Yes, pork. It gets better from there.

A little bloggage:

A great YouTube clip, which I won’t embed, but it’s recommended — a waterhole squabble between some lions, two crocodiles and a herd of water buffalo. It’s like high school, especially when the water buffalo come back to kick some lion ass.

If anyone’s interested in reading the WashPost Cheney series, here’s the index page for the whole shootin’ match. Yes, shootin’ IN YOUR FACE.

And thanks to Alex, for picking up this personal souvenir for yours truly at the Chicago gay pride parade last weekend. Click for a larger view:

The New Yorker arrives even later in the week here than it did in Indiana, so it was Saturday before I finished Sy Hersh’s debriefing of Gen. Antonio Taguba in re: Abu Ghraib. This was Saturday morning; I was lying on a lounge poolside, waiting for Kate to swim her event in the Lakeside Swimming Association meet. (Breaststroke; she came in second.) When I finished I put the magazine aside, fumed for a few minutes and then flipped open my phone and started going through the address book, vowing to call the first person who was likely to be awake — it was still early — and tell them how much I have come to loathe the Bush administration and everyone in it.

Lance Mannion’s wife, the Blonde, has a first name that starts with A. So I called the Mannion Manse, in the faraway Hudson River valley. The Blonde answered, and I said, “Have I mentioned lately how much I fucking hate the Bush administration? Have I?”

It occurred to me that I was sitting within earshot of a bunch of other parents, and they may not hate the Bush administration. This is a suburb, after all, and not the sort with a gay pride parade. I recently went through my zip code’s political donations via one of those websites that tracks such things, and discovered I live within walking distance of a lot of people who gave four-figure sums to Rick Santorum and George Allen. Scary. It also occurred to me that even though there were no children nearby, they might not be comfortable with the sort of casual profanity people use in zip codes more supportive of Barack Obama and stricter CAFE standards. I made a quick decision, dropped the profanity, continued the harangue. I mentioned Gen. Taguba, the wholesale looting of the national forests, the castration of the FDA, what an evil evil evil man Donald Rumsfeld is, and so on. (I left out Santorum and Allen, but only because I couldn’t find a news peg.)

“George Bush’s approval ratings are in the 20s?” I barked. “They should be in the teens. In the single digits. Name Redacted, Name Redacted, a few more right-wing feebs, and that’s it.”

The Blonde agreed with everything I said, of course. We affirmed one another’s narrow viewpoints, discussed the kids and the jobs for a bit, and hung up.

And now I have another reason to despise the party in power. They have turned me into that which I hate — a raving loon howling into a cell phone, disturbing the peace in a pleasant setting on a lovely, cool June morning.

Well, they started it!

That was Saturday morning. Saturday afternoon we went to a family reunion/birthday party down Ohio way. It was thrilling to see Alan’s cousin Joanne, always sure to enliven the joint. She used to be chancellor at Fort Wayne’s IU/PU branch campus, and told a funny story about having to defend a purchase order for a few gross of unlubricated condoms, an item that set phones ringing at every stop on the line. They were to hold water samples for a student’s research on declining water levels in Lake Chad, selected because they were cheap, clean, sturdy, could be written upon with a Sharpie, stacked in a carton, etc. Alan’s family is aging at the same rate everyone else’s is, and when the conversation veers into who died, who’s dying, who needs a donor kidney, etc., it’s nice to have someone around who can make small talk about Trojans.

My life is so boring, I should join a book club.

Do I have bloggage? A bit:

Serena Williams can kill a man with her thighs, and don’t you forget it.

Don’t wear your nice jewelry around the plumber. Especially when he has a rap sheet.

I can’t tell you how often I dodged golf balls around Foster Park, a public course that attracts a lot of, shall we say, not-Tigers. I wonder how many cyclists they’re hitting today, with those big drivers. When the gardeners have to wear hardhats — a cautionary tale for those who live near the fairways. (Note: Broken link fixed.)

I’ll be more awake later, when the coffee kicks in.

Since we’re talking about media screw-ups in the comments of another thread, I thought I’d throw this in, so I can get it off my hard drive:

Mike Harden, seen here, is a columnist for the Columbus Dispatch. Some time back he wrote about a minister who works as a full-time eulogist — all he does is funerals. Ripley’s Believe It Or Not apparently found it suitably believe-it-or-not-ish for their syndicated feature, and included it in the illustration. Only, oops, that’s not the minister:

My ex-sometime-colleague Karen Hensel won her second Peabody Award this spring, which was one of two won by Indianapolis TV stations. Indy is, I believe, a top-30 market; Detroit is 11 (again: I believe). My question today: What do we need to do to drop 19 spots?

To call the local newscasts appalling is an insult to other appalling things, like Karl Rove and smallpox. The least-appalling station appeals to about a 13-year-old intellect; the worst (Fox, of course) aims far lower.

I watch Fox.

Actually I don’t “watch” it. But the 10-11 p.m. hour of my shift is frequently the slowest, and sometimes I’ll turn it on for background noise. It follows the usual model — anchor team of blonde woman/black man, live reports from carnage sites, etc. However, it takes its guiding philosophy from “Showgirls,” i.e, when the question is low road or lower, bad choice or worse, dumb stand-up or dumber, they always happily choose door number two. My favorite segment is the Fox 2 Problem Solvers, their “consumer” report. With all the crime, greed, double-dipping and other shenanigans public and private in this city, you’d think they’d have no shortage of material. And yet time and again the bad guy they’re chasing down the street with cameras and microphones is someone who stole a two-figure sum from the muscular dystrophy fishbowl, or gypped a prom couple out of their deposit on the limo.

The absolute nadir was a few weeks ago, when they ripped the lid off some poor old schmuck who was going around town claiming to be the father of Brandon Inge, the Tigers’ third baseman. They had actual hidden-camera footage of this geezer sitting in a restaurant saying, “Yes, he’s my son!” The worst they could pin on him, besides the self-delusion, is that he promised a school group he’d get them free tickets and never came through. It’s painfully clear the old man is just trying to enliven a boring retirement, and here he has this sneering, snarktastic TV hairdo following him to his car, yelling questions at him. You know those “To Catch a Predator” slimefests on “Dateline,” where you kind of end up feeling sorry for the would-be child molesters? This was worse.

So they cut back to the anchor desk, and the two of them are sitting there with expressions like your dog gets when he hears a funny noise, like they’re trying to figure out the proper reaction, but can’t….quite….do it.

Finally, the male anchor says, “I think he needs counseling.” I loved it.

I’ve written before about missing the simple, entry-level training ground of the Fort Wayne TV news market, where reporters are so fresh out of college you can still smell the spilled beer on their clothes, and they make entertaining, puppylike mistakes such as mispronouncing famous place names, misspelling the mayor’s name in the supers and inserting “controversial” in their scripts every five words or so, just to make sure we all understand they’re covering an important story. I’m learning to love the slicker product of the big city.

One of the stations sent its investigative guy, who is flabby and unattractive and famous for getting roughed up on camera by the mayor’s security team, to a public pension-fund conference last month. It turns out Michigan, which is rapidly turning into Mississippi in terms of its economy and public-sector funding crises, sent the nation’s biggest contingent — something like 20 public servants, traveling on the taxpayer’s dime — to this conference.

Which was in Hawaii. Did I mention that?

Aloha! And there’s the flabby TV guy, wearing a Hawaiian shirt, lei and straw hat, bird-dogging these folks around Honolulu. Amusingly, the conference consisted of morning educational sessions, followed by lunch, followed by afternoons left entirely open for “networking,” i.e., shopping and lying on Waikiki Beach. Oh, it was rich, my friends. Seldom has government waste looked so amusing.

OK, so, do we have bloggage?

The Spokesman-Review in Spokane decided not to pick up Randy Cohen’s “The Ethicist” column, after discovering he gave money to MoveOn.org, revealed in that MSNBC story we were discussing yesterday. The Spokesman-review folks were nice to me when I was writing my Big Newspaper Essay last year, and I’m not going to poke them for it — it’s their paper. But I was struck by one phrase in their blog item on the decision yesterday:

After months of discussion, we were prepared to start this Saturday publishing…

That’s the newspaper business, right there. And you wonder why I’m glad I’m not in it anymore.

Have a swell day, folks. And weekend.

Analog life beckons. I’m closing the laptop, hopping in the shower and tending to a few errands with my kid. In the meantime, thanks to Basset for sending along this modern-day horror tale of what it’s like to travel these days; I know it’s not exactly the middle passage, but jeez — so much for the glories of “the market” correcting all that was horrible about air travel, eh?

Also, happy summer solstice, at 2 p.m. eastern. This is a big day for druids. Apparently we have some here. Of course they live in Ann Arbor.

You’ll be reading a bit about this story today and, depending on the farting it provokes, perhaps for a few more. It’s about political contributions by journalists; no surprise that they lean Democratic. Some say journalists shouldn’t be contributing money to anyone, and I’ve heard of editors who forbid their staff from voting in primaries where parties must be declared, but I’m not in that camp. We’re citizens, too. We also have friendships here and there among the public-sector class, and those would seem to have more influence on news coverage than a few $100 contributions. To be sure, I’ve only given to campaigns with some trepidation, and only after reassuring myself I’ll never, ever have to write about this person in the future.

MSNBC didn’t ask me — the sting! — but here’s my full disclosure: I’ve given a total of (I think) around $300 to one candidate, Jennifer Brunner, a Democrat, currently Ohio secretary of state. I’ve known her a long time, and I’d probably support her if she was a Republican, but she’s not. The fact she was swept into office in the 2006 purge of the GOP is only the cherry on the sundae. Part of her job is ensuring that elections are conducted fairly in the Buckeye state, and after the fiasco of 2004 we learned that Larry, Curly and Moe could have done a better job than the previous occupant, who had the nerve to run for governor last year on the faith ‘n’ family values platform. Ha ha, that one was a loser. It turns out the public preferred “competence” and elected Jennifer. Go, Jennifer. Now you know.

UPDATE: Mitch Harper has more on the Fort Wayne angle — two of my former colleagues are in the MSNBC story. It also reminded me I gave some money ($100, I think) to Tom Hayhurst’s unsuccessful congressional campaign last fall. But that’s definitely it. I am a penniless freelancer; I just don’t have the bucks for much of this sort of thing.