(Please, hit “play” before you start reading. It’s important for the overall effect.)

Ssh. The mayor’s chief of staff is sending him love notes. Let’s listen in:

“I still want to be in your arms, kiss you, hug you, love you. Wishing you were my husband.”

…”I have wanted to hold you so badly all day, but I was trying to stay focused on work. …I’m in my office. Do you want me to come to yours or you coming to mine?”

…”This is one of those little things I just had to tell you. Last night when I was laying on your shoulder in the car and you held my face and sang whatever song it was, that felt so good. It was just one of those little moments when you just made me fall some more!”

… “Just FYI now that I’m tipsy and will say anything: one thing that is sticking with me from Saturday was when I asked you why it felt so good, and you told me because I was your lady, that for whatever reason, was something that stayed with me real strong! Crazy, huh?”

…”In case you haven’t noticed, I’m madly in love with you too! More and more everyday! I can’t believe how much more it grows. Is there a limit?”

As Laura Berman points out, the mayor’s responses were somewhat, er, less ardent:

“Damn! Thank you!”

or

“Ditto”

She says she wishes he’d be “her husband.” He replies that she’ll always be “my girl.” Hmm.

Yes, the city was abuzz yesterday, and it wasn’t from everyone’s phone being set to vibrate. The text-message scandal, which was first about sex and then about bid-rigging and then about perjury, swung back to sex in a big way. Both papers posted the once-was-lost, now-is-recovered secret document, the one that, when presented to Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick’s lawyers last fall near the conclusion of a whistle-blower lawsuit, caused them to shit their pants and open the city’s wallet. For a while, you kept getting Server Busy/Try Again messages on the website, but sooner or later, anyone could get the gist — this was the oldest story in the world, played out on the latest technology. Cross my heart — the Fox anchor read the phrase “good head” on the 10 p.m. news, although they bleeped “head.” (She said she wanted to give him some, but didn’t know how to ask permission. He replied that — duh — she didn’t need it.)

A little titillation’s a dangerous thing. If this scandal starts being about sex again, Kwame wins. Because everyone has a sexual skeleton in their closet, and everyone thinks there-but-for-the-grace-of-God, etc. When, at its heart, this story is about malfeasance in public office, not to mention criminal stupidity. Once again: Didn’t anyone in this administration have a lick of discretion? Hasn’t anyone seen a Mafia movie? Doesn’t anyone understand that some things you just don’t commit to paper or e-paper?

And finally, who can write this much with their thumbs? (These were two-way text pagers, with QWERTY keyboards, but tiny ones, for thumb-typers only.) I mean, why write “good head” when “bj” has only two letters?

Pfft. OK, you can turn Billy Paul off now. (Unless you, like me, are sort of enjoying the groove. Love a good cheatin’ song.)

No bloggage today, folks. I’m under three deadline guns at the moment. Oh, wait — there’s this, thanks to Moe in the comments previous. Now that the Texas funda-crazy story is reaching the wait-did-we-perhaps-act-too-rashly phase, it’s useful to read and remember: These people don’t deserve to have dogs, much less children.

If you’ve thrown a trout at me lately, or challenged me to match wits in the there/their/they’re test, or compared taste in books and movies, you’ve probably not heard back. I’m getting acquainted with the Ignore button on Facebook. I’m thinking of ignoring Facebook entirely. Don’t take it personally.

I’ve just about decided I’m too old to fully understand the Face (as the kids are calling it), and for once, that’s not a bad thing. I’d rather read a book; pity the soul who’d choose to spend that time on Facebook. Before I joined, I asked people why I needed to, and they all boiled down to “because you can keep in touch with all your friends.” Well, I can keep in touch with them now, and I don’t have to give up my privacy. I was finally convinced by a fellow journalist, who said he used the Face to get a full news cycle jump on the competition for a breaking story. I’m all for that, sure. But once I joined, then I had to learn to use it. The next thing I knew I was adding applications, lobbing Wall posts back and forth and otherwise wasting time. Just what the internet needs: Another way to waste time.

Lately the apps writers have been more aggressive. Someone challenges you to a trivia test, you take it, and to get your results, you have to pass a page inviting your friends to take it, too. I generally unselect everybody and pass it by, but lately they’ve been requiring me to pick a minimum number. Screw that. So: Ignore. Ignore, ignore, ignore. (Like all resolutions, I have problems keeping this one. Added a friend this morning.)

If anyone knows a secret about the Face that I’m missing, I’m interested.

Linkishness:

Via Eric Zorn: A great This American Life piece on the Jerry Springer you don’t know. Even if you think you did know him — and many Ohioans do — there’s almost guaranteed to be something here you don’t. A wonderful listen. Click on “full episode” and listen in QT.

I missed this in yesterday’s Freep — an amazing tale of bureaucratic heavy-handedness, or why you should keep up with what the kids are drinking these days. Detroit authorities snatch a UM professor’s 7-year-old away to foster care because the kid was seen drinking a Mike’s Lemonade at a Tigers game. The father said he didn’t know it was alcoholic (and I believe him).

Short shrift today, but deal — it’s 34 degrees outside and I have work to do.

This is something I read in Sunday’s NYT magazine; the story was about Moody’s bond- and security-rating service:

To get why (Moody’s stratospheric growth) is impressive, you have to think about all that determines whether a mortgage is safe. Who owns the property? What is his or her income? Bundle hundreds of mortgages into a single security and the questions multiply; no investor could begin to answer them. But suppose the security had a rating. If it were rated triple-A by a firm like Moody’s, then the investor could forget about the underlying mortgages. He wouldn’t need to know what properties were in the pool, only that the pool was triple-A — it was just as safe, in theory, as other triple-A securities.

Over the last decade, Moody’s and its two principal competitors, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, played this game to perfection — putting what amounted to gold seals on mortgage securities that investors swept up with increasing élan. For the rating agencies, this business was extremely lucrative. Their profits surged, Moody’s in particular: it went public, saw its stock increase sixfold and its earnings grow by 900 percent.

By providing the mortgage industry with an entree to Wall Street, the agencies also transformed what had been among the sleepiest corners of finance. No longer did mortgage banks have to wait 10 or 20 or 30 years to get their money back from homeowners. Now they sold their loans into securitized pools and — their capital thus replenished — wrote new loans at a much quicker pace.

Mortgage volume surged; in 2006, it topped $2.5 trillion. Also, many more mortgages were issued to risky subprime borrowers. Almost all of those subprime loans ended up in securitized pools; indeed, the reason banks were willing to issue so many risky loans is that they could fob them off on Wall Street.

But who was evaluating these securities? Who was passing judgment on the quality of the mortgages, on the equity behind them and on myriad other investment considerations? Certainly not the investors. They relied on a credit rating.

You may have to read this a few times to absorb it. Go ahead. When you’re ready, come back and ask yourself how often you’ve heard someone of late say, “The mortgage mess is very simple — people didn’t pay their mortgages.” I think of this as the Stupid Simple Meme. A SSM reduces a complex issue to something that can be fit on a bumper sticker, and conveniently transfers 100 percent of the blame to the most powerless saps on the stage.

The bankers? They were just doing what comes nacherly — making money. How can we blame a business for making money? That’s what businesses do! And if they did it by churning fees, by ignoring the simplest due diligence in vetting loan applications, by marketing through outright lies? Details, details. The bad people are the ones who didn’t pay their mortgages.

The disaster in New Orleans? It was the fault of the people who chose to live below sea level, and the deaths were a natural result of people who simply refused to leave. (Are you listening, the Netherlands?) Granted, not everyone had Ashley Morris yelling in their ear for the last three years, but I’m still amazed at how many people shrug their shoulders at what happened there, who say it was simply inevitable, an act of God, something no levee could have held back.

(In case you think I’m only singling out right-wing Simple Stupids, the left has them, too: Remember “the cure for homelessness is housing”? Yeah, even 20 years ago it seemed a little pat.)

I have a new rule: Whenever anyone says, “It’s really very simple…” about a complicated problem, I stop listening.

Anyway, why bother? VRSA is going to get us all, and remember, folks: It came…from…Michigan! Mm-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

(What is VRSA, you ask? Why, it’s MRSA, only with a V, for Very Very Very Scary.)

Actually, that story is worth reading, if only for yet another fascinating Detroit factoid:

Metro Detroit has a history of antibiotic resistance. Illegal drug users 20 to 30 years ago injected antibiotics with heroin in a misguided effort to avoid getting contaminated by dirty needles. As a result, many local bacteria developed resistance to penicillin and its relatives, such as methicillin.

Can you tell it’s Grumpy Monday around these parts? The weather has turned — and just as the redbuds were emerging, dammit — and we’re promised two-thirds of a week when we’ll be lucky to see 50 degrees, joy oh joy. We spent the last day of mild temperatures opening the cottage, which was both uneventful (no squirrels came down the chimney and decomposed under the pillow, like last year). Unfortunately, the shared dock has become a real problem. What was originally agreed upon as a sensible policy — two boats per cottage, back when a boat was an outboard with a 10-horse motor on the back — is now ridiculous. When did a recreating family of four come to need a ski boat, a pontoon and two Jet-Skis? A pox on all their houses; when gas goes to $5 a gallon maybe we can have a little water to actually swim in. I kept my head down, raked leaves and scrubbed things. There’s something about cleaning that empties the head and calms the spirit. Add a leaf fire, and things get just about perfect.

Bloggage? Oh, a little:

A few weeks ago I wondered what would happen to a newspaper if you took away paper, ink, trucks, Teamsters and the like. Answer: The Capital Times of Madison, Wis., which becomes an online-only paper very soon. Future: Very very murky. (This was the plan for my alma mater, derailed when Knight Ridder derailed itself. Never happened, but I will still watch this transformation with interest and, i fear, dread.)

The photo with this story kind of startled me, because as soon as I looked at it, before I even registered who was in it, I said, “Oh, huh. Indiana.” It has to do with the color and height of the cloud ceiling, something about that color of brown, I dunno. For a second I even thought it was Fort Wayne, and if pressed, I’d have said it was on Pontiac Street, beside the old Rialto theater. No, it was Anderson, but still: Indiana. Weird.

Not much, I know, but hey — it’s Monday. Give me some time to get rolling.

Photo by Andrea Bossy, with Andrea’s camera.

This was what it boiled down to, after (mumble) bottles of wine and blueberry-vodka shooters — see the young minx with glasses in the front row? in front of the supermodel with glasses? they were her idea — and lo, it was fun. Suddenly it was after midnight and I had to pack my half-eaten tiramisu and go home, and it’s just as well, because after I left, someone went out for White Castles. White Castles, on top of a blueberry-vodka shooter, would have been lethal. And then I would have missed the very picturesque car fire I saw from the freeway, yet another area of urban excellence in which Detroit leads the nation. Good thing it was happening near a tricky interchange, or I might have stopped for a photo.

The company was great, and I’ll be adding links to the b’roll as soon as I sort them all out. The face to my left, Michelle, said she wanted to figure out a way she could spend all her time sewing. She said she made quilts. I’m thinking, OK, very nice, quilts, sewing, yes yes yes. And then I saw some of her quilts, and thought, I sat next to an artist all night long and didn’t know it.

Anyhoo, all thanks to Andrea, our hostess (first face to Bossy’s right), and just because food this good should be spread around, here’s her recipe for…

Fabulous Salmon Spread
(recipe comes from the Complete Book of Hors d’oeuvre, which is out of print)

1 T. butter to grease pan
4 oz. sesame crackers
one stick (1/2 cup) of butter, less whatever you used to grease pan, melted
2.5 pounds cream cheese, at room temperature
4 eggs
1/2 pound smoked salmon (not lox but the smoked fillets that come vacuum sealed)
1/2 cup finely chopped scallions (including some green)
1/4 cup minced fresh dill

Preheat oven to 350 degrees. Use approximately 1 T. of butter to thoroughly coat the bottom and sides of a 9″ springform pan. Crush crackers and dust some up the sides of the pan. Then mix the rest of the crackers with the melted butter, and press into bottom of the pan.

Using an electric mixer, beat cream cheese and eggs thoroughly until completely mixed and smooth. (It’s okay if there are a few tiny bumps here and there.) Crumble salmon (without skin) into the cheese mixture, and add scallions and dill. Beat again until mixture becomes lighter and fluffy. Pour into pan, spreading and smoothing with a spatula.

Bake 5 minutes at 350, then reduce heat to 325 and bake 50 minutes more. If you don’t trust your oven, check for doneness: cake should be just set in the middle. If you’ve opened the oven to check, give it a couple of minutes to heat back up to temperature again, and then turn it off. Do NOT open door. Allow salmon fabulosity to cool completely in oven with door closed. This will take several hours.

If serving the same day, do not refrigerate, as this tastes much better at room temperature. It tastes even better the next day, however, and keeps well for several days, so feel free to make ahead and refrigerate once it’s cooled. (Cover tightly with plastic wrap first.) Just bring up to room temp before serving. Serve with lots of crusty bread for spreading.

This makes a large quantity, suitable for a party. On a buffet table with lots of other foods, this quantity would safely cover 30 people. It’s quite rich and goes further than you’d think.

Also, thanks, Saturn, for being Bossy’s corporate sponsor.

There are farmers’ markets that are basically foodie self-esteem polishers, and markets that aren’t (I’d link to the South Side Market in Fort Wayne here, but it’s so “aren’t” it doesn’t even have a website). Detroit’s Eastern Market is somewhere in between. The long winter precludes locally grown produce much of the year, but there’s a major produce hub in the city, and lots of wholesalers use the market to offload stuff that’s just a little too close to its sell-by date, so even in the dead of winter you can get some bargains on grapefruit.

But there’s always a healthy percentage of mom-and-pop outfits, and a few weeks ago I paused at one in the furthest-flung shed, where a portly Lebanese man stood behind a booth offering “extra extra virgin olive oil.”

“Extra extra virgin?” I said. “I spend all this time learning olive oil grading, and now there’s a new one?” He wasn’t amused. “Try some,” he said, gesturing to a basket of oil-soaked croutons. I told him no and asked what made it so virginal. “I make it here from my family’s olive trees, in Lebanon,” he said. “It is the best.”

I thought for a moment about how a guy would go about importing just his family’s personal olives, what sort of border inspection would be involved, the problems of transporting delicate produce halfway around the world, etc. Then I looked at the bottles. It was a cold morning, and the oil had congealed in the bottles to a murky green glop. “You take it home, it warms up, it is fine,” he said. No salesmanship, just plain statements and a certain rock-solid dignity. This is why I stay out of animal shelters; I would select all the one-eyed, three-legged puppies and kittens. It was $15 for a liter. What the hell.

I took it home and put it on the shelf. Four hours later, the glop had diseappeared, and the oil was a lovely yellow-green. I tipped a little into a saucer. Waiters and foodies are always gassing on about olive oil — how you can cook with this grade and not that one, how this one is fruity and this one is acidic, how the Italian product differs from the Spanish, etc. — but I confess I’ve never been able to taste huge differences in them, unless the bottle had been spiked with peppercorns and garlic. I buy 90 percent of my olive oil from Costco, and rely on the vinegar to carry the day on the salad. It just so happened, this day, I had a loaf of fresh Italian bread. Broke off a piece, dipped it in the oil, and…

Well. My mouth went to Lebanon for a few moments. It wasn’t Hezbollah’s Lebanon, but a sunny place in the country, with a view of the ancient hills. I rested in the shade of a tree with a gnarled trunk as big around as a 200-year-old oak, but it was still warm enough that the breeze was like breath, and…

Blinked. Back in Michigan. Friends, that was some butt-kicking olive oil. I actually licked the saucer. I’ve heard that Mediterranean fisherman sometimes begin their day with a shotglass of the stuff, instead of coffee. I’m going to start doing that. Or maybe pouring it on my cereal.

I mention this because? Not sure why. I have to go make tiramisu in a few minutes — Bossy’s coming to Detroit tonight — and I need to get in a food head. Not that I will be putting olive oil in my tiramisu, mind you. It’s just fun to think about food on a Friday.

It beats thinking about politics, but Bryant Gumbel offered an in-between stop this week. On his HBO “Real Sports” show, he profiled Barack Obama, basketball player, featuring footage of Obama playing then (in Hawaii) and now (with some friends, in long Adidas exercise pants, not shorts). He’s not bad, I have to say, quick and crafty for a 46-year-old, a real (dare I say?) team player. Gumbel made a mention of Obama’s game being a factor in “basketball-mad Indiana,” and I wondered if he was right. Indiana loves basketball, true. But it doesn’t love all basketball.

It’s safe to say the Hoosier game is the Knight version — no showboating, no star antics, very Larry Bird-in-college. The NBA style, the ghetto game, not so much. Obama made an interesting comment about basketball being a black art form much like jazz, paraphrasing from memory, “individual improvisation within a defined structure.” Improvisation starts with an I, and you know what they say about where that letter appears in “team.” Beware, Obama. Tread carefully.

Only one bit of bloggage before I tiramisu (yes, it IS a verb), but I recommend you treat it with extreme caught: typeracing! I had no idea I could type 70 words a minute — if only my brain worked that fast.

Have a good weekend, all.

The New York Times, with its unerring knack for finding the stupidest people in any non-New York venue it chooses to cover, finds a few in Kokomo:

“We hold onto a lot of traditional values,” said Brian L. Thomas, 39, as he bought a cup of coffee along the courthouse square here on Wednesday. “Saying you’re ready to change is probably not the best or only thing you would want to say around these parts. Frankly, we want it to be like it used to be.”

Many of the two dozen voters interviewed in this central Indiana manufacturing city of 46,000 expressed queasiness over the notions of change that both Democratic candidates have proudly pledged elsewhere. Though residents bemoaned economic conditions that have taken away thousands of factory jobs and given the state the 11th-highest rate of foreclosures, they also said they worried about doing things — anything — very differently.

“What are we going to change to?” asked Ron O’Bryan, 58, a retired auto worker who said he was still trying to decide which Democrat to vote for in the May 6 primary. “You mean change to some other country’s system? What do you think they mean?”

Jeremy Lewis, a 28-year-old window washer, said simply, “Old-fashioned can be in a good way.”

“We want it like it used to be” — that’s Indiana in a nutshell. They could put that on the license plates. When Ron O’Bryan still had a job in the factory, I guarantee someone in town was mourning the good ol’ days when you made your living the good way, on a farm, and spent the evenings shellin’ peas and drinkin’ lemonade.

Other things Kokomo has found amusing: Old Ben, the world’s largest “preserved” steer (photos here; he doesn’t look that big), and, of course, the world’s largest sycamore stump. Perhaps if Obama presented himself as an attraction — world’s first black presidential candidate to be a serious contender, maybe.

I’ll tell you one thing, however: All three of these guys got the Obama e-mail, and believe every word. Maybe spending all your time in North Carolina is a better idea.

OK. All this talk of celebrity sightings yesterday reminded me of a thread on Metafilter Monday, about “Expelled,” the latest attempt by the religious right to condemn Michael Moore’s tactics by aping them. The argument bores me, but I was struck by a few comments about Ben Stein sightings in the wild:

I once saw Ben Stein in an airport, wearing a suit and some kind of hipster foot apparel. There weren’t very many people around, and as a journalist who has met my share of very famous people, I generally know how not to behave around them. But as I’d been amused by Ben Stein’s Money — the game show that turned anti-Semitism into a laff ryot — I gave him a little nod and smile when I walked past him. He whipped his head away with an absolutely exasperated look, as if I’d been a paparazzo from TMZ. Puh-leeze.

For a long time, the editorial department in Fort Wayne paid for a subscription to the American Spectator, and I used to read it with a mounting sense of wonder. (It’s where I learned the word “poofter,” in fact; R. Emmett Tyrell turned homophobia into a laff ryot.) One of my favorite features was Ben Stein’s Diary, which was always exactly the same from month to month. Ben would go about his life, much of which at that time involved acting in commercials and making personal appearances based on being that-guy-from-Ferris-Bueller. He always wrote of his life as an ongoing delight, how lucky he was to fly first class and be fed delicious food from craft services, how people would come up to him in airports and say “Bueller…Bueller” and it was just so wonderful to have these great fans. Who could possibly object to people in public telling you they’d seen you in a movie? It was just so, so great to be Ben Stein, etc. etc.

Glad to know there was no end to his lies, either.

Another recurring theme in Ben Stein’s diary was his overwhelming love for his little boy, Tommy, whom he and his wife adopted late in life. He called him “my little angel.” Tommy was terribly spoiled, but it pleased Ben to spoil him; he liked being rich and being able to fill Tommy’s life with gimcracks and geegaws, and so he did. When I first read about “Expelled” it occurred to me that Tommy should be a grown man by now, so I wondered where he might have ended up. Hmmm:

Ben Stein writes in the current November/December 2001 issue of The American Spectator that “Our son, God love him, has basically stopped going to school…he’s surly, and desperately unhelpful…He has gotten so self-obsessed and self-referential, so utterly unconcerned about anyone but himself, he’s a walking time-bomb for self-demolition. So, he’s going to have to go to boarding school.”

This distraught, clearly loving father writes that upon his return from a recent trip:

“Tommy is in his room sitting at his fancy computer…playing his goddamned Everquest, the worst thing that ever happened to him, a literal curse, a drug that eats away at every drop of energy and initiative. It’s a sort of online ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ and he loves it beyond description. He can stay on forever…He is simply a demon at it. And we are the demon facilitators because we are so happy he’s not using marijuana, we keep letting him play his evil Everquest.”

That was around 2001. In a 2005 entry, it appears Tommy has gotten over Everquest and moved on to drag-racing on public streets with his dad:

Tommy wanted to race again. We did. Again, I peeled, and he didn’t. This time he got way ahead of me. Alas, moments later a police cruiser appeared behind him with its lights flashing. The car pulled Tommy over and I followed them. But the police, staring at me intently, motioned to me to stay in my car. They then went over to Tommy. Then they came to me. “We’re just giving him a warning, because we know who you are and we like you,” said a policeman. “But you should talk to your son. He refuses to admit he did anything wrong.”

Well, he learned from the best, Tommy did.

Trivia note: Ben Stein’s Diary was among the sources plundered by White House plagiarist Tim Goeglein. I’d love to know which part.

Oh, and by the way, a letter to the editor in Newsweek this week:

In your April 14 Periscope interview with Ben Stein (“You Say You Want an Evolution?”), one of Stein’s responses contained a serious error: He said, “There are a number of scientists and academics who’ve been fired, denied tenure, lost tenure or lost grants because they even suggested the possibility of intelligent design. The most egregious is Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian, the editor of a magazine that published a peer reviewed paper about ID. He lost his job.” Sternberg has never been employed by the Smithsonian Institution. Since January 2004, he has been an unpaid research associate in the departments of invertebrate and vertebrate zoology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Dr. Sternberg continues to enjoy full access to research facilities at the museum. Moreover, Stein’s assertion that Sternberg was removed from a Smithsonian publication is not true. The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington is an independent journal and is not affiliated with the Smithsonian.

Randall Kremer, Director of Public Affairs
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.

Bloggage? Oh, a little:

Village Voice gossip Michael Musto dug up a SFW nude photo of Charlton Heston. Not a bad one, either.

WDET, our local public-radio affiliate, had a fascinating story last night on this guy, Orville Hubbard, Dearborn’s racist mayor. Never lost an election in his life, never met a non-white person he wanted to live next door to. A truly vile man, a politician to the bone. They played some sound recordings of the guy, which included a gem where he called Irish Catholics “the worst,” because “they’re so prejudiced.” You can listen here.

The Comics Curmudgeon gets off quite a few zingers in any given week, but his one about the Family Circus is the best.

And with that, pals, I’m off to work, the gym, Trader Joe’s, Target… The list is endless, but most destinations will be reached by bicycle. Envy me, world — I’m preparing for peak oil.

…to Indiana. That has to be an unfamiliar ring to it, and believe me, I know. I spent 20 years there and frequently felt like the rest of the country would have a problem finding it on the map. Needless to say, I never felt it as keenly as during presidential election years, when the state was consistently ignored. The Republicans took it for granted, the Democrats chalked it up as impossible, and with a May primary, always chiming in well after the nominations were decided.

Once I wrote a column about never being in the crowd when Prince and the Rolling Stones decided to stop by the little nightclub an hour after the arena show was over and, you know, jam for a few hours. I now understand this is my destiny. It’s not the screwups of party leaders who led to the Michigan primary fiasco; it was me, moving to the state in 2005. I’m sorry.

If you didn’t see Brian Stouder’s comment in the last thread, see it now:

So last night, I’m at Red Cross with a needle jammed into each arm for about 2 hours, watching the election returns…and the nurse, noting that the pundits’ incessant yammering has mesmerized me, matter-of-factly says “I just can’t believe that Barack Obama refused to be sworn into the Senate with his hand on a bible!”….which broke the trance I was in, and made me look up. I said something like – it’s a good thing you can’t believe that, because it’s NOT TRUE!…which drew a puzzled look – and then the retort “well – he’s a Muslim, you know”……..and then, remembering that I was immobile and still a long way from the completion of the donation, I paused and took a breath. After conversationally mentioning that I had read that same e-mail (which elicited a big nod from the nurse), I said that the thing is just completely untrue – at which point I drifted back to the glow of the tv, and the nurse wandered away.

I had a similar experience a few weeks ago, with an aging-queen hairdresser, and he was similarly stubborn. He knew these things were true because he’d read them in an e-mail. I told him that not only were they not true, I reeled off a few websites where he could easily check the facts. Sensing an uncomfortable moment with a paying customer, he crashed into territory we could all agree on — how fabulous Mrs. Obama looks. Sigh.

Well, that’s the downmarket Obama smear. Moving up, we find the He’s Friends With People Who Hate America meme, coming on very strong in Minneapolis these days — both Lileks and his pals at Powerline are banging the drum about Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, describing them as “friends,” which is interesting. Friendship, in this case, seems to boil down to “served on a board with,” or “attended a fundraiser for.” What world do these people live in, I wonder?

Here’s a more novel twist, from — who else? — a former speechwriter for Dan Quayle, who brings a certain girls-bathroom vibe to the discussion. Having recently learned that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is supporting Obama, she wonders:

Perhaps we humans are psychologically limited in our options, to following in the footsteps of, or rejecting and rebelling against our various patrimonies. Or, given the linked picture, perhaps the fact that she looks like a carbon copy of her mother — a bit mad, but with a little more iron about the jaw — suggests that she is not her father’s daughter after all. The picture is more shocking than the deed. Trisha Nixon Cox, (the blond, putatively less ambitious, “pretty one”) still looks like the girl America knew, and, recognizably, has given her campaign donations to John McCain.

Wha-? Via Roy, who adds, “Many NRO scribes betray a stunted view of life and human nature, but Schiffren’s actually seems heavily informed by fairy tales about princesses and wicked stepsisters.”

God, I thought we’d be shut of this business by now. When we lived in Indiana, we were, dammit. The world’s just going straight downhill.

Anyone watch Obama’s speech last night? What’s with the Abercrombie & Fitch product placement behind him? And for any of you wondering who the gorgeous blonde was who greeted him immediately afterward, it was Mrs. John Mellencamp, “model and spokeswoman.” Probably the best-looking woman in Indiana. Not locally grown.

Back after more coffee and some exercise. It’s a sleepy morning ’round these parts.

To the people who ruined our back yard, sometime in the ’80s:

Look, I understand. It was a different time. Gas was cheap, no one talked about climate change, and you liked to hit the open road in your RV. And, after all, it was your house. You could do what you wanted. For the record, I support your right to screw up what became my property 20 years later. Even though it was a really, really stupid thing to do. (Stipulated: It was a really, really stupid thing to buy, as well. The last kick the newspaper business gave me was relocating my husband to Detroit in the middle of the damn winter, at a time when we absolutely needed two sets of parental boots on the ground to make our life together work. We were, as they say, over a barrel, and inventory was a little tight.)

On paper at least, it must have made sense to pick up the garage and rotate it 90 degrees, then pave pretty much everything that was left. You needed RV parking, not grass. Grass was for golf courses, RVs were for pavement, and so you did what you thought you needed to do.

Even though it wrecked the yard. You putzes:

Little by little, within the constrains of our meager budget, we’re trying to undo the damage. That strip along the back fence used to be gravel, but we paid a fortune last year to have it dug out and filled with decent topsoil. It’s now our kitchen herb garden and (shh) a raspberry patch. But until we a) save a contractor’s child from drowning*; or b) write a best-selling novel, the garage will have to stay there. But I have a plan B. It involves a strong thunderstorm, a trip away, and this tree:

It’s the one in the middle, the one covered with ivy. It’s an ash, and like many of the ashes around here, it’s dead. Because it’s back behind the owner’s garage, he doesn’t pay much attention to it. They painted that garage last year, and when the owner came back to trim some limbs so the painters could get to it, I asked if he was starting the removal process. He looked startled; why would he want to remove it? “Well, it’s dead,” I pointed out. He honestly didn’t seem to have even considered such a thing.

Here’s what I’m hoping: That some day when we’re both gone, that tree will come crashing down on our garage, hard enough to make it a total loss. Then we’ll have a little seed money to tear it down and rebuild from scratch. Ideally we’d do so at the end of the driveway, where it belongs, but I’d settle for expanding it to encompass that concrete pad on the far side of the structure, where you can see my car’s butt:

Alan recently got a new car, so that’s the “old car” spot. Yes, because even though that may look like a two-car garage, alas it is not. It’s a 1.8-car garage, or at the moment, one-car/one-boat. Not the boat you see, although that one lives in there, too, so I guess it’s one-car/two-boats. Whatever.

* This sorta worked for our neighbors. They gave a landscaping contractor a big down payment on fixing their back yard a few years ago, and he absconded with the dough and used it to feed his drug habit. One day last spring he turned up on their doorstep, 12-stepping it through the “making amends” part. He ended up transforming their back yard into a place of glory, giving them far more than their money’s worth. It’s sort of like a modern version of winning the lottery.

Anyway, that concludes today’s spell of grumpiness. I see you folks have taken to speculating on the Pennsylvania primary. OK, I’m in: Clinton by…7 points. And Pennsylvania comes off looking as bad as Michigan. Or like a horizontal version of Indiana.

Brief bloggage:

I can’t believe I ever liked Richard Cohen. I mean: Can’t. Believe.

Back to my big monster writing project, which is mostly research, which is turning up fascinating factoids, including this: Della Reese’s original first name was “Delloreese.” Imagine that.

Nothing from me until this afternoon, pals. But I’ll be back. Carry on, play nice, and don’t make mommy stop this car.

Who or what is responsible for museum sleepovers? “Night at the Museum” — inspirational children’s fantasy film or threat to maternal lumbar health? Yeah, whatever. That’s where I was this weekend. At the Henry Ford/Greenfield Village complex.

Remind me to never do it again. There’s nothing wrong with the idea, but the execution’s all wrong. The root problem is, when you put 30 fifth-grade girls together on a warm Saturday with 24 hours of fun activities ahead of them, they get a little excited. So what’s the first rule? No running, no loud voices, no this, no that, no no no. This casts all the chaperones in the role of Joseph Stalin, a familiar one for the modern parent, but not a comfortable one. I had five girls in my mini-group, and all I did was nag. Knock it off, cut it out, don’t make me tell you again.

At some point, there’s a good argument to be made for just turning them out, like yearling fillies. Let them run around the pasture kicking up their heels before you try to teach them anything.

This was my first trip to Dearborn’s big attraction, and between bouts of arm-twisting, I could see why it’s so popular — it really is a fine museum, dedicated to the American experience, particularly in Ford’s lifetime, probably a subject beyond the appreciation of most fifth-graders. Not mine, however. It’s hard to look at some of the exhibits there and at Greenfield Village — Thomas Edison’s workshop, Henry’s Model T, the Wright Brothers’ bike shop — and not be impressed. Here’s Orville Wright in the dunes at Kitty Hawk and he faces the wind in his strange contraption, then cables home to dad: “Inform press.” Henry’s great idea, the assembly line, drops the price of a car by more than 60 percent and his factories create the American middle class.

I wanted more of the dark side, though. These 20th-century titans were as much defined by their flaws as their virtues (as all of us are). There’s a whole section on the civil-rights movement — including Rosa Parks’ bus — but nothing on the Dearborn Independent (that I saw, anyway, and admittedly I didn’t see every part of the place). It would be a tricky exhibit to put together, but I don’t know why someone shouldn’t try.

Day two, spent outdoors at Greenfield Village, was better. Sleep deprivation sapped everyone’s horsing-around energy, so other than having to smack down the incessant blowing of the Weinermobile whistles, we had a nice time. Ran into an avid cyclist in the Wright Brothers’ bike shop, who pointed out the slot in the actual W.B. bike seat in the window. The slotted seat was recently revived for modern cyclists, and is said to relieve a whole set of nasty symptoms, including the dreaded Cyclist’s E.D. And yet, all anybody wants to credit them with is that dumb flying thing.

I left early, however, and ran off to the Detroit Film Center to take a half-day class in lighting. I don’t expect to use it for anything other than appreciating movies, but I learned a thing or two, including:

* Many of the old Hollywood babes had lighting issues written into their contracts, usually specific clauses saying they had to be lit X thousand foot-candles brighter than anyone else. Because they’re stars, dammit, and stars shine.

* No one in showbiz is as bugged by “Hollywood rain” as I am. This is the artificial rain created by sprinklers, usually on sparkling Los Angeles days, so you get the incongruous shot of the stars embracing in a downpour, casting sharp shadows through rainbow sparkles. This is just what rain is, in the movies. Deal.

* Directors of photography carry a bag of tricks that require trucks to haul around, so if you looked in the mirror this morning and didn’t see Kim Basinger looking back, don’t feel bad. Neither did she.

* SunPATH, sun-tracking software, is a sextant in reverse. Instead of using the sun to find your position on earth, you use your position on earth to find the sun.

* Gordon Willis loves wet gutters. The teacher worked with him on “Presumed Innocent,” and said he had a standing order that in all street scenes, the gutters be wet. Crew guys walked around with tanks on their backs, keeping them nice and puddly. They give the scene depth, he said, a nice delineation between sidewalk and street.

Oh, and I also learned the difference between a gaffer and a key grip. But I consider it my secret.

Bloggage? Oh, let’s leave that to you folks. Anyone see “Expelled” this weekend?