As we have recently entered the Journey of Orthodontia, Alan signed up for a Healthcare Spending Account this year. I know, I know, we should have done it years ago, but we’re stupid. That big caveat they tell you at the informational meeting — all funds not spent by December 31 are forfeit — always put us off the idea, although in our defense that was before we knew the money could be spent on bourbon, as long as you filed a signed letter saying your doctor told you to relax more.

Once we took the plunge, it was a revelation. They sent us a debit card that we could use to tap the funds at will — pure genius — and I started toting it to the orthodontist’s office, where every month I use it to make a payment on our daughter’s steadily improving smile.

Then a letter arrived: Please document the following purchases, blah blah blah, or risk the deactivation of your card. Apparently the debit-card tapping from an orthodontist’s office sent up the red flags. I understand. I might have been trying to launder that $100 per month through a Roseville ortho’s office by buying little rubber bands, which I then might sell on the street and spend the cash on crack or something. You can’t be too careful.

At our next appointment, I trudged back to the ortho and asked the receptionist for a printout of all my payments so far, so I could make copies, highlight the disputed payments and fax everything back to HQ, so that I could go on spending my own money. She was familiar with my plight.

“This isn’t really bad, as these things go,” she said, indicating it happens quite often. “A lot of plans make it much harder. They’re hoping you just give up, so they can keep the money.”

Every so often, in my health-care news farming, I come across an editorial in which some conservative airily dismisses all concerns about our current system by saying, well, this is what happens when consumers are divorced from the true cost of things, by having everything paid by their insurance. The Wall Street Journal ran an op-ed last year in which the writer praised those savvy Amish, who don’t have insurance and don’t carry debt, and hence go doctor to doctor haggling for the best price on having a rotten tooth pulled or some other elective procedure. What to do when the patient has crushing chest pain is conveniently not explained, nor is the Amish fondness for Mexican border-town doctors, herbalists and other low-cost options that may or may not quack like a duck. The last grafs of these pieces are generally spent genuflecting in the direction of “the market” and its holy healing power.

I wonder what the line item for “abandoned funds” is for this particular company. I wonder what accountant crunched that number. I wonder who came up with the idea. I wonder how they sold it in the meeting.

OK, Grumpypants rant over. It’s a gorgeous day.

Shall we wrangle some bloggage? Get along, little bloggies:

I really don’t want to get into the habit of deconstructing op-ed columnists at my alma mater; Tim Goeglein is enough for me. But I read this piece with a sense of deepening wonder, trying to guess how long it would take the writer to get to the point. I imported it into Word so I could nail it precisely: 582 words. Talk about Grumpypants.

A nice NYT op-ed on what happens to Detroit factories when they close down. Short answer: They’re exported. The longer answer is much more interesting:

In the Budd plant, “press” means stamping presses, and many of them still stand, a couple of stories high, in numbered lines of half a dozen presses each. A Spanish auto supplier, Gestamp, has bought 16 Line for one of its Mexican plants. A couple of Mexican engineers from Gestamp, along with German engineers from Müller Weingarten, the press maker that Gestamp contracted to oversee the 16 Line’s installation in Mexico, have been observing the disassembly. “Their role is to stand there, in awe, and hope they can put it back together when they get it to Mexico,” said Duane Krukowski, General Rigging’s electrical foreman.

For moms only, every word that comes out of our mouths in 24 hours, distilled to two minutes and set to the William Tell Overture. A YouTube link, of course. Funny. Wholesome funny.

There’s nothing a staff writer likes more than an in-joke. In newspapers, we make elaborate fake front pages when people leave or retire. For TV shows, scenes that won’t be shot, but should. For fans of “The Wire,” with a new catch phrase (”meta motherfuckers”), thanks to Ashley.

I’ve come to believe that any movie with Chris Cooper in it won’t let me down, but man, when the NYT calls “The Kingdom” “‘Syriana’ for dummies,” dude, that is cold.

Anyway, if I’m movie-bound at all this weekend, it’s to see “Eastern Promises.”

Lance Mannion takes a look at “On the Road,” and does a better job of it than most people paid to do so.

And that is all. Have a swell weekend.

Well, peace has been restored in the valley — the autoworkers are back on the job and the spin on the contract is, it’s Watershed City and the D Will Rise Again. Before I make you read another sentence of this paragraph, let me assure you a) this won’t be a 500-word thumbsucker on the fine points of the UAW contract; and b) I’m as astonished as you are that I actually give a crap about this stuff now. But that’s living in a company town; you’re all in the same boat.

I always thought one of Hollywood’s genius moves was making box-office figures the new box score, the sort of thing ordinary folks would talk about at the watercooler on Monday. I once wrote a column expressing amazement that I knew more about green-screen special effects than I did about the commodities market, when the former is just entertainment and the latter is intertwined with the food I put on my table day after day. What is a pork belly? Why is corn detasseled? It was all a mystery to me.

(This column brought in some of the best reader mail I ever got, and the answers are “bacon, basically” and “to ensure genetic parentage in seed corn.” One woman drew careful diagrams of the corn plant, demonstrating the tassel’s relationship to the silk on the developing ears. Another reader painted a vivid picture of the misery of detasseling duty, an important supplement to the farm kid’s summer income, and every dollar is drenched in dew, sweat and chapped hands.)

So it is with car-making in Car City. You don’t care, but you oughta know.

As for the contract, all I’ll say is this: General Motors committed to fund a trust that in turn will fund retiree health care, a financial obligation estimated at $50 billion over 80 years. That won’t all be paid in cash, of course — some will come from stock and some from growth of the seed money. But they will pay at least 70 percent of that to get the ball rolling. This, we’re told, will lop $800 to $1,000 off the cost of building each car and take a giant step closer to returning the General to competitiveness. Just roll those numbers around in your head a minute or two: 70 percent of $50 billion, and that’s for retiree health care. (There are two retirees for every GM worker these days, and maybe a fraction more.) And it won’t bring them to real parity with what Toyota pays in wages and benefits, even in this country, although they’re getting closer. Never mind the companies that build cars overseas, who have an edge why? Because western governments overwhelmingly pay for health care. And they can afford this why? Because they’re not flushing a billion dollars a month down Iraqi toilets. Yes, a gross oversimplification. Still.

That is all.

So. Is “The War” over yet? I have no idea. Alan’s watching it while I work in another room, and the boom of howitzers is still intrusive, but not as much as what I’ve come to think of as the Full Ken Burns — sonorous narration, a snip of exquisite music, an old voice telling a quavery story. I was fully seduced by “The Civil War,” but I weary of his one-trick-pony approach to history. Wake me up when “Vietnam” airs, if he manages to get it on the air before 2050 or so.

Actually, that’s the war story I’d like to see, and I’d like to see it before the voices get any more quavery. How many times can we go over the horror of World War II and give our lasting gratitude to the brave men and women who saved the world from genocidal fascism? It’s not like it’s unplowed ground. Meanwhile we’re fighting Vietnam II, and it might help to look again at Vietnam I. Just a suggestion from someone who’s seen enough Pearl Harbor to last a while.

In other TV news, I’m worried about Flower.

The promos for this week’s “Meerkat Manor” have been as subtle as crushing chest pain: It’s the end of an era when tragedy strikes and the Kalahari loses its favorite rose, reads the promo for Friday. And the coming attractions last week featured shots of a puff adder. I don’t think she’ll survive the season. (Although I look forward to the memorial montage, set to stirring meerkat music.) Damn these Animal Planet puppetmasters, making me care about weasels half a world away!

No bloggage today — busy morning — but there’s this: God, I love these West Virginia birth stories.

Later!

Just one question: When Rudy Giuliani took that call from his wife, why didn’t the audience stand up and throw pens at him? What a strange, screw-you moment. For once more or less agree* with the WSJ editorial page.

Anyone like to imagine what that editorial would have read if it had been, oh, John Edwards taking the call? Ball-busting bitch henpecks husband, no doubt. It’s all in how you spin things.

Surly, surly, surly. I can tell it’s Wednesday. Sleep deprivation is starting to catch up, but it’ll be several days before relief beckons from my fluffy pillows. Ah, well. That’s life in these hardscrabble times. A break for blogging, and then we’re back in the saddle.

One of the things I like about Safari, Mac’s Own Browser, is the way it lets you organize bookmarks. I have several folders right on the menu bar: NN.C, News, Blogs, Money, Detroit, Shopping, RSS and Reference. They’re self-explanatory, right? Any questions? I have one rule — no drop-down menu can drop down longer than the depth of the screen, so I cull and refresh regularly. That’s mainly a problem with the News and Blogs folders, but the surprise (for me, anyway) li’l bookmark folder that could is turning out to be Reference. It’ll soon have to be culled, it’s growing so fast. This is where I keep all the handy sites for looking stuff up; as a journalist, of course facts are very important to me. (Yes: Kidding.) But sometimes I just page through some of these sites to turn up Fun Facts to Know and Tell.

Top four on the list: Google maps, Wikipedia, WHOIS lookup, Bartleby. That last one’s toast, most likely; nothing beats the Google in looking up famous quotations, although Bartleby has a bit more authority, I guess. Anyway, I bookmarked it to have Bartlett’s close by, and it sucks, or else it’s incomplete. I just asked Bartlett’s to find me the original source of the phrase “better angels of our nature,” figuring I’d give it a slow pitch right over the middle. Citation not found. Click “all sources” and Bartleby finds it no prob, but by then I could have Googled it and written three more paragraphs. I’ll keep it around, but it’s on probation.

Screenplays — I use this one a lot when I can’t remember a line of dialogue. It only works if the movie’s in the database, however, and lately IMDb’s “quotes” section in individual movies is kicking butt. But let’s give it a try: Ooh, what’s that line John Goodman yells over and over as he’s running down the blazing hotel corridor in “Barton Fink?” I can’t quite recall…I’ll show you…something. Ahh, here it is:

Charlie: Look upon me! I’ll show you the life of the mind!

And as a bonus, here’s the rat-a-tat-tat between the two police detectives investigating a disappearance:

Mastrionotti: Started in Kansas City. Couple of housewives.
Deutsch: Couple days ago we see the same M.O. out in Los Feliz.
Mastrionotti: Doctor. Ear, nose and throat man.
Deutsch: All of which he’s now missin’.
Mastrionotti: Well, some of his throat was there.
Deutsch: Physician, heal thyself.
Mastrionotti: Good luck with no fuckin’ head.
Deutsch: Anyway.

Psst: Don’t even go to “The Big Lebowski” quote page. You’ll be there All. Day.

I warned you.

OK. One little taste:

The Dude: Jesus, man, could you change the channel?
Cab Driver: Fuck you man. If you don’t like my fuckin’ music get your own fuckin’ cab!
The Dude: I had a rough…
Cab Driver: I pull over and kick your ass out!
The Dude: Come on, man. I had a rough night and I hate the fuckin’ Eagles, man!

Ha ha. Moving on, Worldometeres, world statistics updated in real time. I hope you’re not among the 69,792 who will die today.

Hard-to-find 800 numbers, none of which I’ve ever called. How to Beautify a Face in Photoshop. Turns out it ONLY works on photos, damn it all. (Bossy has another P’shop tutorial, which features a picture of her Great Dane. LA Mary, go check it out.

Who is Sick? for the medical writer, or just the geek hypochondriac, in all of us.

Tired of taking calls from an editor? Post a word meter on your site and tell them to talk to the hand.

I did NOT write that/Yes you DID and the Internet Wayback Machine might be able to prove it.

If I ever get a ticket for parking in the old handicapped spots at my local drugstore, which are no longer legal handicapped spots but still have blue lines on them, the ADA Accessibility Guidelines will get it thrown out of court. (And yes, there are other, legal spots, and I never park there. Although sometimes I will take the “expectant mother” space at Kroger, if it’s raining and I’m in a bad mood. Because it’s stupid, that’s why. And I’m hoping, if I’m ever challenged, that I will have the presence of mind to say, “Isn’t it wonderful? I’m expecting twins!”)

The Electric Eclectic, because sometimes you’re just bored.

What’s a reference site you can’t live without? Leave it in the comments. Me, I’m back to work.

* edited from “total agreement,” which was sloppy and inaccurate, earlier.

OK, I said I’d be back, and I’m back, with goodies this time. Not tasty baked goods, but something I stole from somebody else.

WashPost humor columnist Gene Weingarten frequently starts his Tuesday chats with polls. Today he had two — one very serious (on a child-sex-abuse case), the other considerably not (on rating 15 guy-walks-into-a-bar jokes). I recommend the second.

For some stupid reason, he separates the polled into men and women, so choose your poison. And if there’s some reason the links don’t work, because of cookie issues or whatever, go back to the main page and enter that way — it’s near the top.

I was pleased to see I agreed with Master Judge Dave Barry on the three funniest, but we differed sharply on the three lamest. If nothing else, you’ll pick up more than a dozen new guy-walks-in-a-bar jokes.

Some years ago — too many years ago — we had a running office joke with one of our young staff members, Phyllis. She was a sassy young black woman right out of Central Casting, but very funny. I told her she should be an advice columnist, and together we came up with a name for her column: Don’t Be So Goddamn Stupid. Every letter would start with this order, on the grounds that the busy reader may not have time to read the whole answer, and 90 percent of the cure for the problem could be found by following that advice alone.

I had a point when I started that paragraph, but it seems to have slipped my mind. More coffee, please.

Maybe it was this: Phyllis should be advising the United Auto Workers, who, we’re told, want job security, in return for $50 billion to administer their own health plan. Ha. Ha ha ha ha ha ha. Job security! I’m wiping the tears away even as we speak.

My feelings about the UAW and muscular unions in general are not those of a contemptuous libertarian. I think, if we’re perfectly honest about it, those folks created the 20th century middle class, with their shocking idea that owners and managers shouldn’t be the only ones to prosper in a booming industry. The UAW did more for the working class than Ronald Reagan ever did, and they helped elect him, twice. There’s something breathtakingly ballsy in this high-wire act of theirs, throwing GM into the briar patch, but ultimately, they need to listen to Phyllis. This may be little more than face-saving brinksmanship, but please. Just what the world needs — another reason to dismiss union leadership as out of touch with current economic realities.

Of course, you could hardly blame union members if they were baffled at what constitutes economic realities in this or any other business, these days. Right after Delphi filed for Chapter 11, they turned around and gave fat bonuses to the management team, to keep them on board while they went through the ugly process of reorganization. Retention bonuses, these are called. Retain the team that drove the company into bankruptcy, so that they can maybe drive it out. Who wouldn’t scratch their head over that one?

Friends, sorry this is late ‘n’ lame, but I’m not on strike, and in fact, I’ve got a passel of work to do. I leave you with one bit of bloggage: OJ’s girlfriend. Color me astounded. (Hey, check those tan lines!) And discuss, in your inimitable way. I’ll be back in a bit, after seven thousand phone calls and nine interviews.

Nothing like a little smack in the face to start your Monday off right. From a story in my alma mater, the Columbus Dispatch:

Patrick Sims was driving and typing a text message when he fatally struck a bicyclist in Colorado. Ashley Miller was doing the same when she killed a driver in Arizona. And New Yorker Bailey Goodman might have been reading or typing when she slammed into a tractor-trailer, killing herself and four passengers.

Even if you discount the final example — dead men tell no tales — that’s some sobering stuff there. People sometimes ask me why I still drive a stick shift, and I tell them, “Because you have to pay attention.” Also, it occupies your texting hand.

Ah, what a weekend. Lessons learned: Don’t eat braised lamb shanks at 10 p.m., followed by a big cup of strong coffee, if you want to sleep well that night. Also, avoid scallops the next night, unless you want to spend early Sunday morning throwing up. In between was some fine sailing with John C and his wife Mary, on their share-boat Voyageur, which is docked at Windmill Point, Grosse Pointe Park’s public marina. Windmill Point is at the very bottom of Lake St. Claire, where it funnels into the Detroit River. The current is stronger, and the freighters come a lot closer:

But you get a little skyline with your sunsets, imperfectly captured here:

Everybody looks at the sunset, but when you’re on the water, it’s always rewarding to look to the east, too, to see the dark rising out of the lake:

I don’t know if I got bad scallops or just too much fine food in too short a time. My life is so PB&J these days, it’s a shock to the system to see a white tablecloth. Maybe that’s what did it. In any case, it made for a wasted Sunday; nothing like dehydration to take it out of a gal.

So let’s skip to the bloggage:

The pros but mostly cons of mercenaries: “If I’ve got one ambition left here,” (the American officer serving in Iraq) said, “it’s to see one of those showboats fall out.” Out of the helicopter, that is:

In a style now familiar to many living beneath Baghdad’s skies, a Blackwater sharpshooter in khaki pants, with matching T-shirt and flak jacket, sat sideways on the right side of each chopper, leaning well outside the craft. With their automatic weapons gripped for battle, their feet planted on the helicopter’s metal skids, and only a slim strap securing them to the craft, the men looked as if they were self-consciously re-creating the movies of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

Blackwater defends its low-flying, ready-to-shoot posture as a powerful deterrent to attacks on American officials being moved through the capital’s streets. But that posture has become, to the company’s critics, a hallmark of its muscle-bound showiness.

…Contractors say the high profile of their armored convoys, coupled with the covert nature of the insurgents, places a premium on high mobility and rapid response — driving at high speed and in a bullying manner through city traffic and driving on the wrong side of boulevards and expressways, always ready to resort instantly, at the first hint of threat, to heavy firepower.

It is a formula fraught with potential for error. To be overtaken on Baghdad’s airport road by a private security convoy driving at 120 miles an hour, with contractors leaning out of windows or part-opened doors with leveled weapons, waving their fists in a frantic pantomime, is a heart-stopping experience even for other Westerners in armored cars with guards of their own. For ordinary Iraqis, with no weapons and no armoring, it can be pure terror.

No shit. Never mind when they open fire on a carload of civilians.

I guess the UAW didn’t learn from the Detroit newspaper strike: It’s unwise to strike an industry already on the ropes. But hey, they’ll give it a try. Maybe. This all comes with the news the state legislature has one week to get the lead out and put together a budget agreement that will keep state government running into the next fiscal year. “Wouldn’t it be great to have a UAW strike and a government shutdown at the same time?” Alan wondered this morning, a surly note in his voice. Sure. Our house has already lost 18 percent of its value since we’ve lived here; soon it’ll be like Mississippi, only with more snow.

T-minus 12 minutes to strike deadline? Better hit publish and hope for the best.

Not much today, folks. My day hits the ground running at 8:30 and likely won’t come up for air until late afternoon. For something to discuss in my absence, how about the Iraqization of …Belgium? Why can’t we all get along?

I’ll be back when I can. If I can’t, have a great weekend.

Perhaps because the industry is in such a profound slump, I find myself a sucker for newspaper nostalgia — not the “Deadline USA” artifacts of glue pots and fedoras, but the era I was only able to glimpse the tail end of in my earliest days in the biz, that is, the one portrayed in “Zodiac,” a murder mystery in which the San Francisco Chronicle plays a major role.

I’m not a fan of David Fincher — hated “Fight Club,” sorry kids, and thought “Seven” was just tiresome — but with “Zodiac,” I’m softening. It presented a picture of crime I recognize from my newspaper days, and one that stands in opposition to “Seven.” Serial killers tend not to be mad geniuses recreating crime scenes based on Renaissance paintings of the sacrifice of Isaac, say, but just nasty assholes with guns. Crimes are solved, when they are, based on either dumb mistakes made by killers (who tend to be pretty dumb themselves) or lots of not-particularly-cinematic legwork by police. Frequently they’re not solved at all, technically; cases remain open even though cops tell you confidentially that they know who did it, they just don’t have enough evidence to convict. That’s the case of the Zodiac killer, where the circumstantial evidence pointed overwhelmingly to one man, although (we learn in an ending-title sequence) later DNA evidence was inconclusive. That’s how much real crime is — inconclusive, but not.

Like “Mad Men,” “Zodiac” is a painstaking period piece, and it’s possible to get lost in the scrupulousness of its detail — hey, I remember those two-tone mailboxes! Blue IBM selectrics! Corvairs! — and forget what’s going on. But that’s just as well, because what’s going on is a more true-to-life police procedural than most, in the sense that we see not cutting-edge forensics or amazing-coincidence investigations, but turf battles, bureaucratic meddling, reportorial screwups, tough breaks — the usual. A review I read at the time said it “feels long and is meant to feel long.” Titles flash by every couple of minutes: “Two and a half weeks later,” “Four months later,” “Four years later.” The case, like the movie, drags on. Sixties set design gives way to seventies, and then to ’80s. (The main character, as if to underline his obsession-to-the-point-of-lunacy, continues to drive an orange Rabbit through most of these years.)

As this is a true story, I’m not spoiling it to say the conclusion is ambiguous. The star reporter gives in to egomania, then dies of emphysema. (Yes, the smoke-filled newsroom is like a character in and of itself.) The cartoonist loses his job, apparently because of his obsession with the Zodiac case, but we know he would have been dead meat long before this — cartoonists? Like the budget has money for that. But the scene that really got me was one where Jake Gyllenhaal, playing the straight-arrow cartoonist, passes by the bar where Robert Downey, the wastrel reporter, is washing off the day with 80 proof whiskey, along with what looks like half the staff, and they are having a high old time. That’s what I want to remember about newspapers. Not the booze, which took down its share of good people and bad, but the fun. The table in the nearby bar, with the stories you couldn’t get in the paper.

Jon Carroll remembers:

And the movie version of the Chronicle city room was nowhere near as grungy and disorderly as the actual city room. There must have been photographs of the 1969 version around; maybe the moviemakers thought the real thing would be too distracting. (”The truth? You can’t handle the truth.”) The place was awash in paper. The desks were stained and dented. The pillars, shown in the movie as pristine, were covered with old front pages, amusing memos, girlie pictures — was it a hostile environment for women? You bet, but then, so was everywhere else.

The movie shows a little drug use on the premises, which is accurate, more than accurate. There was one reporter who made more or less a full-time living dealing dope. And there was a lot of on-the-job drinking, some of it, like wine-soaked birthday celebrations, entirely sanctioned. And a bar called Hanno’s was virtually an extension of The Chronicle — its telephone number was even printed in the interoffice directory.

The 1969 Chronicle was closer, in both time and ambience, to the Ben Hecht-”His Girl Friday” city rooms of the late ’30s than to the heavily cubicled, almost-tidy room of today.

Sigh.

Bloggage:

Dogfighting in Detroit. Everything you probably didn’t want to know. The accompanying video is excellent, more proof that sometimes print people do TV better than TV people. Usage note: The story at that link contains the phrase “gnashes its teeth” in the lead. May I see the hands of those who know precisely what teeth-gnashing is, and think that is, indeed, what the dog was doing? Thought so. My dictionary says, “to grind one’s teeth together, typically in a sign of anger.” Just a nitpick. What-evuh.

Another usage note: Who can tell me what “angst” means? It’s a German word for…? Anyone? Yes, anxiety. That is, fear. Nowadays it’s a catch-all term for anything that means “not happy.” I’ve given up on this one.

Back later. Have at it.

I was raised a Catholic, one of a long line of Catholics, which is to say, we were not all that Catholic.

We went to church on Sundays and holy days of obligation. We did the sacraments — baptism, first communion, confirmation, confession. My older brother and sister went to Catholic school; but when we moved, the summer before my first-grade year, to a house with an excellent public grade school at one end of the block and a junior high at the other, my parents lost their commitment to Catholic education. (My siblings were released from uniform bondage at the same time.) When we misplaced something, my mother told us to say a prayer to St. Anthony. We lit candles in front of saints’ statues. My dad ran the church softball team.

What we didn’t do: Pray the rosary at home, put a holy water font by the door, display religious art in the house (although there were crucifixes in the bedrooms). When I had a headache, my mother didn’t say, “Offer it up.” My prayer life was pretty childish and never really progressed — I prayed to pass fourth grade and later, for world peace, with a 50 percent success rate. When my later teen years came along, I found it easy to skip church and then stop going altogether, although my mother attended Mass until she couldn’t drive herself anymore.

In our practice, I’d estimate we’re right in the middle of the Catholic continuum, at least for our time. We weren’t holly-lily scofflaws, but it’s fair to say we chose what we wanted in the cafeteria line and didn’t consider ourselves bad Catholics as a result. I was taught the Communion host becomes the actual body and blood of Christ in CCD class, but even as a second-grader, I understood it as a metaphor. I suppose this, by church teaching, makes me a Protestant, but all I have to say is: Please.

One reason I’m so fascinated with Amy’s blog commenters is, they’re the kind of Catholic I never knew growing up. They don’t practice birth control, they march for life, they think Nino Scalia is a great man and are very big on Opus Dei. I’m sure these folks were in my church — there were a few families with 10, 12, 13 kids — but they didn’t stand around afterward talking about it. Of course, there were no blogs then.

So the other day I drop by Rod Dreher’s blog, who converted to Catholicism and then left it for Eastern Orthodoxy, and has written approximately 8 million anguished words about it — he’s quite the hand-wringer. He’s writing about a criminally corrupt priest who died recently:

Samuel Greene was a con man. He was a TV pitchman who got religion and founded the Christ of the Hills monastery in rural central Texas. At some point, he affiliated with the Russian Orthodox Church Outside Russia (ROCOR), which cut him loose after the child abuse scandal happened in the late 1990s. But his trailer-park monastery was quite the spiritual hotspot for a while. When it became known in the early 1990s that there was a miraculous weeping icon of the Virgin Mary there, the monastery began to attract lots of pilgrims — many of them Catholics. I was one of those pilgrims. When I’d go visit a Catholic friend in Austin, we’d drive out to the monastery, and I’d wait in line with the faithful — most of them poor Hispanic Catholics, as I recall — to venerate the miraculous icon. The monks would hand out cotton balls with her sweet-smelling tears on them. The substance was said to be myrrh. Years later, I found one of the cotton balls — this was before the fraud was exposed — and noticed that it smelled acrid and chemical-like. But I didn’t want to accept that it was a fraud.

Needless to say, miraculous weeping icons were not part of my religious experience. I can’t imagine even my faithful mother falling for such bullshit. That even a convert like Dreher could stand in line to “venerate” such a thing seems simply ludicrous to me, makes me want to look at a point on the horizon until someone changes the subject to baseball or the stock market. I was never that kind of Catholic.

Gene Weingarten is the WashPost humor columnist, but every so often he writes a long piece for the paper’s Sunday magazine, frequently of a serious nature. Here’s one that’s nine years old, but I read only recently: Tears for Audrey, about Audrey Santo, a Massachusetts girl who fell into a backyard swimming pool as a toddler, was gravely brain-damaged, and lived the rest of her life without regaining consciousness. She died only recently, and in her short lifetime, became a fixture of religious veneration. People believed she was a “victim soul,” a person chosen by God to suffer for others. People believed she had the power to cure, to heal, and wrote letters asking for her help. In her lifetime, she was displayed to visitors, although — allow me to say “blessedly” — never for profit. Her home was filled with religious statuary, and much of it also wept miraculously. Oil.

Weingarten’s story is very long, but I urge you to read it, if this topic interests you. It’s very deft, very sensitive, and very telling. There’s not a hint of sneering or snarkiness at this bizarre subniche of Catholicism, but as you read it, one thing becomes entirely clear: Her mother was making the “miracles” happen:

In the back yard, the Rev. Mike McNamara is celebrating Mass. Linda Santo takes a consecrated wafer on a brass plate and disappears into the house with it. Every day she gives Communion to Audrey. (Audrey has a feeding tube; the wafer is the only solid food she receives by mouth.)

A few minutes later, Linda returns. There is a peculiar look on her face. She is holding the empty Communion plate gingerly, and replaces it on the altar.

Liquid sloshes out and onto the tablecloth.

“Sorreee,” she whispers to the priest.

After the ceremony, four priests crowd around the Communion plate. It is filled halfway with opalescent yellow oil, maybe three or four tablespoons of it, and on top of that is a large, floating bead of clear liquid. It smells of pure roses, eerily strong. It wafts up and out into the sweltering summer air.

Linda Santo meekly explains that the plate quickly welled up with this substance as she walked alone from Audrey’s bed to the back porch, a trip of some 30 feet.

The priests nod. It is a miracle, everyone agrees.

I mean, come on: Isn’t it obvious? Well, maybe that case. The story is several thousand words long, and lots of people are quoted saying these things are miracles, that this statue “hemorrhaged” oil when Linda Santo wasn’t around, that this happened, that that happened, and sorry, but whatever it takes to believe such things are possible without human intervention, I don’t have it. I’m doubting Thomasina, sorry, Jesus. (For what it’s worth, I also don’t believe in non-religious spiritualism — ghosts, spirits, auras. I figure if I can’t believe a saint can help me find my car keys, I also can’t believe the spirit of my dead grandmother guides my hand when I’m cooking dinner. I also acknowledge I don’t know everything, and am always prepared to be surprised, one of these days.)

Weingarten’s story does find a miracle, by the way. You have to read all the way to the end; it’s very artful. A few weeks back, in his weekly chat, he said he thought the way he ended the story was a mistake, but I think he just needs smarter readers.

I never know what to say when people speak of “miracles” like this, except to go into grad-student mode, and reflect that this is a very old church, that literacy arrived in the congregation fairly recently in the grand scheme of things, and that one way simple people keep their faith alive is by believing in Marian apparitions and the healing power of Lourdes water and mysterious weeping icons. When I’m feeling mean, I think Catholicism married Voodoo and had a baby daughter they called Santeria.

But ultimately I shrug. What can you do? Given a choice between Catholicism, any kind of Catholicism, and, oh, Tim Goeglein’s Bartlett’s Familiar Lutheranism, I know what I’d choose. (The one where I already know the words.)

OK, so as we skip to the bloggage, let’s make sure we preserve the reverent tone, OK?

Britney got some glasses, which explains why she was always forgetting her pants — she couldn’t see!

Headline o’ the day: Bill would ban texting while driving in Michigan. What is happening to freedom in this country? Next they’ll be making it illegal to stick your tongue into electrical sockets.

From my nighttime career farming health-care news, I have learned one thing: No matter how bad I feel, it could always be worse. Ebola is the one that features bleeding from the eyeballs, right? How do doctors distinguish it from PMS?

Sometimes you read a blog for the post, sometimes for the comments. Like here.

Time to go to work. If God doesn’t strike me dead!

An intellectual exercise to start things off today: Anyone care to guess what NN.C community member and DePaul University professor Ashley Morris’ homeowners’ insurance bill is this year? Take a moment before you peek, and really think about it. Ashley lives in New Orleans, sure, although if I recall correctly, I don’t think his house was flooded post-K. (Yes, it’s true — the entire city is not below sea level, as NOLA-hatas like to say.) I’m guessing even your highest guess will be dwarfed by reality, so go ahead and look.

Amazing, isn’t it?

For the record, I think the last check I wrote to State Farm for the usual coverage was for around $575. And my agent apologized because I had to carry more liability than those in adjacent counties, because Wayne County jurors have a history of stickin’ it to the man in civil cases.

As for Ashley, and New Orleans, this is how a city dies. Not in one fell swoop, but from a lot of little players each doing their part to make life there impossible. The rest of you who live in high-potential-disaster areas — California, coastal Florida — what do you pay?

Sigh.

Alan went to the lake Sunday to solve our Shrub Problem*, and discovered we have a Groundhog Problem. Our tiny homemade cottage sits not on a slab but on smaller supports, and over time we’ve had a variety of animals trying to make our floor their roof. Most of these can be banished with rude treatment and some chicken wire, but evidently Mr. G. has already done some major excavation. This will call for, at very least, a trap, and potentially firearms. The plan of attack was outlined for me today: First the humane trap, followed by a release “a minimum of five miles away,” and then, if that doesn’t work, Alan’s dad’s .22 rifle.

“Do you even know how to fire it?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said, sheepishly. “But I had to look up some instructions to figure out how to load it.” And with this ol’ Dead Eye Derringer is going to kill a groundhog. I’m further advised this weapon is “from the ’30s, I think,” a “really nice rifle” and “has one of those cowboy lever-action things.” I can’t wait.

Let’s hope the trap works. I’m reminded of our old neighbor Patrick, who had a raccoon living in his attic. He trapped it, and took it to the park at the end of our street to release it. He then re-set the trap, just in case there were two. The following night, the same raccoon (raccoon with identical scars, anyway) turned up in it again. This time he took it several miles away to a rural area. It took the animal three days to find his home base again. The third time he took it to an adjacent county, and it finally stayed away. I suspect it was run over by a car on its journey home.

True to form, Alan has exhaustively researched groundhog bait preferences. I was told today to shop for cantaloupe, which we will then drench in vanilla extract. Then we made groundhog faces at one another. This will be fun.

*The Shrub Problem: When Kate was a baby, Alan planted a row of boxwood bushes in front of the cottage. They were about shin-high. Now, years later, they’ve been so thoroughly gnawed on by deer they’re now ankle-high, and I’m not kidding. Actually they’re now on their way to a compost heap, because they’ve been replaced by a row of hardy Canadian rosebushes, with lots of thorns. We shall see.

Perhaps because I have not fired a gun at a living thing in my lifetime, a loving God has smiled on me today, and given us all a new Tim Goeglein column to laugh and point at:

This has been a landmark summer in our family. My parents celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Another aunt and uncle celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary. Two other aunts and uncles celebrated their 60th wedding anniversaries. One of my aunts celebrated her 75th birthday. They all live in Allen County; they were, with one exception, all born in Allen County; they were all married in Allen County. Landmarks like these make cities and counties thrive.

The juxtaposition of fading summer against the permanence of those landmarks is remarkable to ponder. Some of my favorite quotes about summertime point up the contrast luminously.

Wow. Most people get over this sort of pondering when they finally set aside their bongs: You mean, in my fingernail, there could be, like, a whole universe? And our whole universe could be, like, in the fingernail of something even bigger? Actually, I’m disappointed in Tim today. He goes to his parents’ anniversary party, mines Bartlett’s, and phones it all in:

It did not hurt things to know that the beauty of the weather combined to make it a special day. “What a beautiful, sunny morning,” wrote Takayuki Ikkaku. “It makes you happy to be alive, doesn’t it? We can’t let the sun outshine us. We have to beam, too!” It was a glory to see my parents so radiant on that day, surrounded by their children, grandchildren, siblings and friends of long standing. “The summer,” wrote the poet Wallace Stevens, “is like a perfection of thought.” All of us kept thinking what a remarkable occasion it all was across four generations and every part of the United States.

Yes, you should not be surprised to learn that the Lord sent his finest weather for Tim’s parents’ party. Nor should you have any doubt that the party was simply wonderful, and went off without a hitch:

I keep thinking about those five hours of my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary party when all the people they love so deeply gathered to eat, drink, dance, talk, laugh and catch up. Henry James wrote: “Summer afternoon . . . the two most beautiful words in the English language.” How right he was. That afternoon gathering could have gone on for hours; it was a pastiche of civility and kindness; of old memories and old friendships; and, most important, of the tenderness that humans have for one another on golden anniversaries.

The tenderness of golden anniversaries? Yes, as opposed to the brutality they show one another on the silver ones, I suppose.

Oh, you can wade through the muck yourselves, if you want.

But I wouldn’t waste your time. It’s a lovely day, and I’m headed out to enjoy it.