When Alan and I were in Argentina with the Fellows a few years back, we were amazed at how many ’60s-era Ford Falcons we saw on the road. We called them “Aunt Dorothy cars,” in recognition of the last woman we knew who drove one.

It turns out most of them only look like 1960. One of our guides told us the story of how Ford continued to make the Falcon in Argentina for years after the last model rusted to pieces in the States. Still, it was strange seeing that retro old-lady styling and round taillights around every corner.

So I was highly amused by this story in the News today — Argentine family restores their Falcon wagon and loves it so much they drive it 10,000 miles to Dearborn, just to say so in person. Unannounced, I might add:

It would be an understatement to say that the Percivaldis caught Ford by surprise when they pulled up to the Glass House around noon Thursday. The family trooped in to tell their story to a bewildered guard at the front desk.

“He didn’t know what to do,” Diego said.

As always, the good stuff is in the details — how Diego, the father, skirted the high-crime regions of South America on his drive north, and their impressions of the U.S. See if this sounds familiar:

The couple said they also are amazed by the food. “When you drive down the street anywhere in America, you see all these restaurants, hotels, motels, churches and theaters. It isn’t like that in Argentina. The portions of food are so big; if we keep eating all this food, we are going to die,” Diego said.

They’re all flying home, and sending the Falcon by freighter.

It is finally spring here in Michigan, and we’re trying to make our space a little nicer. The enormously expensive back-strip landscaping is fleshing out nicely, and we’ve added a couple bird feeders. Of course this attracts not only the wrong birds — if I wanted mourning doves, I’d have put on a funeral — but squirrels. My experience firing a shotgun last week leads me to fantasize about more interesting target practice, preferably on those little bastards. The other day I wondered idly what they might taste like.

It turns out squirrel cookery is in Alan’s immediate bloodline. His parents used to go hunting together, and sometimes brought home a bag of them. “I remember my mom would boil them, and then fry them,” he said. Alan’s mom was a humble cook with a limited repertoire, but I give her points for guts and pluck for even trying to cook a squirrel. (Although, to be sure, boiled-then-fried sounds positively vile.) Turns out I’m not the only one giving this critter some thought:

(Squirrel) meat is selling faster than butchers can get it, not least because it is currently nesting season. Ever since Kingsley Village Butchers in Fraddon, Cornwall, began offering grey squirrel two months ago, it has shifted up to a dozen a day.

That’s from the Telegraph. The British can be very strange.

The story goes on to reveal the astonishing price English butchers are fetching for “tree rat:”

At £3 to £4 for one, the shop-bought variety is hardly an obvious answer to keeping the lid on an escalating grocery bill.

Jeez. At current exchange rates that’s almost $7 per squirrel. Alan and I split a one-inch Delmonico from time to time, which at current prices costs us around $14. And for that we can get two squirrels? The dollar is weak, but please.

But that’s not what I want to talk about today. Via Nervous Rod Dreher, a profile of Marston Hefner in GQ magazine, teenage son of you-know-who:

Marston doesn’t actually live in the Mansion—not anymore, not since his parents split up in 1998 and his mom, the blond Playmate Kimberley Conrad (January ’88), moved into a more modest house that adjoins the property. He’s 18 now, about to graduate from high school, a tall and lanky kid with heavy brows, watchful, slightly sad eyes, and a complexion that says “I spend too much time playing video games.” He has none of his dad’s swagger or mothlike attraction to the bright lights of Hollywood—which you could attribute to a young man struggling to define himself in opposition to his famous father, or to the fact that they just don’t spend that much quality time together these days. Marston doesn’t make it over every day. He’s usually here on Thursdays, though, for…backgammon night?

Nervous Rod thinks the kid is a slack zero, because of course GQ is the last authority in all things, and because he disapproves of Hugh Hefner. I’m a parent, too, and I had a different reaction: Marston Hefner is turning out about as well as can reasonably be expected, a typical child of a parent who blots out the sun, his odds in life perhaps 50-50 — his money will provide him cushion and opportunities, while the essential weirdness of his upbringing and its attendant pitfalls will try to take him down.

And while I’m always happy to see a freelance writer getting some work, I’m less fond of hit pieces against people who don’t deserve it, and while the hit wasn’t aimed at young Marston, he’s certainly collateral damage in passages like this, in which the writer interviews Hef pére:

Did you ever try to explain the fact that, just after the separation, you started dating seven blond women?

“Not really. What is there to say?”

There was never any conversation about monogamy or marriage?

“What kind of conversation would that be?”

What kind of signal does that send?

“I think the signal that it sends, quite frankly, which the boys liked, was that instead of somebody replacing mama, I dated a bunch of girls.”

After about forty-five minutes, Hef appears to be losing steam. I turn off the tape recorder, and he rises from the couch. As he does, he rips the kind of fart that one does not even attempt to hide from. No one in the room blinks.

News flash: Hef was a lousy father, and 82-year-old men fart unexpectedly. Wow. I bet Ronald Reagan was the picture of refinement at that age, too. (And, to be sure, not much of a father, either.)

Let’s just hope they had better taste in picking the mothers of their children.

Nice David Edelstein appreciation of Sydney Pollack, actor.

OK, Friday. I’d looked forward to a long, relaxing bike ride today, and in the last half-hour three e-mails arrived that will see to it I’m desk-bound for half the day. Better get to work. Enjoy your weekend, and I’ll see you back here after.

Summer is why there are no good DVDs to rent in the fall. I cannot express in strong enough words how much I am not looking forward to “Sex and the City” — this kind of sums up one reason — and I am a person who enjoyed “The Devil Wears Prada.” Is that actually a cougar necklace? And Kim Cattrall actually wears it? On her body?

Boy, I can’t wait for October, a chilly weekend for staying in with the season’s first hearty soup and a nice bottle of wine, and nothing at Blockbuster except “The Love Guru.”

Busy morning, back later. Feel free to bitch about crappy movies.

My commitment to saving gas is so pathetic as to be comical — I mean, a fair-weather cyclist who works from home is hardly capable of a real sacrifice in fossil-fuel consumption — but I’m trying to approach it with some level of seriousness. And I’ve set a goal: The one-month tank of gas. Fourteen gallons in 30 days.

It’s not that far-fetched. I made it to three weeks between fill-ups recently without making myself a hermit in the bargain. If you can go three weeks, you should be able to go four, right? Here are my main rules and strategies:

1) Combining trips. If I’m going to Royal Oak for a meeting, I try to think of other stuff I can do while I’m out there. I mean, besides eat lunch. If the trip takes me past Costco (and most do), I make a stock-up stop.

2) Telling my dear only child, “Can’t you ride your bike? Lansing’s not that far. ”

3) It’s difficult to shop for a week of groceries on a bicycle, but easy to get a day’s worth. I pretend I’m French and live in a tiny Paris walkup with a refrigerator the size of a shoebox.

4) All shopping excursions requiring the car get a second, third or fourth look. All chances to interact with other human beings I don’t even question. The idea is to save gas, not become a crazy miserly energy tyrant.

5) You can fit more on the back of a bike than you think, if you have the right bungee cords. It does make the thing a little light up front, however. And carrying home certain loads — a few bottles of wine, a big bag of dog food — make you look like a crazy person who lost her driver’s license to multiple drunk-driving convictions. But it’s fun to be crazy. At least people get the hell out of your way.

6) Finally — and this is huge in Detroit — I started driving the speed limit. There’s an essay in that, because absolutely nobody in this town, in the state, does so. The default driving style is fast, cheap and out of control, and while it can be fun, it doesn’t exactly make the real-time mileage gauge on the dash track a nice steady number. Driving the speed limit in Detroit is like being an atheist in Colorado Springs. People not only look at you funny, they think you’re with al-Qaeda.

If none of these strategies seem particularly earth-shattering, well, you lived through the ’70s, too. It’s hard to make you younger folks understand how unsettling that era was, and prices aside, it was unsettling. Stations closed at 5 p.m. Some areas restricted sales to every other day depending on last name or plate number. Lines at the pumps stretched a block or more. And it happened so fast — one day gasoline was an expense for most households the way coffee was an expense, and suddenly it turned into a mortgage. I drove to Cleveland with some friends for a day trip during this period, and we delayed topping off the tank. As we turned for home, we entered a strip of gas stations near the freeway entrance, and justlikethat, they all turned off their lights and closed for business, and it was like that all over town. We had to spend the night, like pioneers stranded by a blizzard.

For teenagers accustomed to getting a couple days’ driving out of a dollar’s worth of gas, it was shocking.

A few years later came the big coal strike that led to voluntary restrictions on electricity use, deep into one of the coldest winters on record, and certainly in my lifetime. I think of that era as cold, dark and expensive, and it changed my energy-use behavior forever. I’ve never bought a car without at least considering its gas mileage. I never set the thermostat above 68. I watch my tach as closely as I watch my speed, and shift to minimize RPMs whenever possible.

This sort of era can turn you crabbed and mean; the dark side of thrift is miserliness, a refusal to share in any sort of bounty for fear of a coming shortage. But I’m sympathetic to those caught flat-footed. Many of my neighbors are in the automotive business, and many drive enormous, hulking, high-profit-margin vehicles that are surely running them to the poorhouse, one tank at a time. (Remember, this is the industry that, when confronted with the early Honda subcompacts, offered as competition the Chevy Vega and Ford Pinto.) Many are younger than I am, and don’t remember the fun old days. Ah, well. As my parents responded to my whining then with stern reminders of the deprivations of the war years, so too do I nod in sympathy, as I roll past on pedal power.

How do you save gas without being totally anal about it?

By the way, today I’m having lunch on the patio at the Detroit Golf Club — a planning session for our movie challenge entry, next month. See Rule #4, above. I’m so starved for a non-family human interaction I’d drive to Ypsilanti for donuts with Mitt Romney. (Downside: Again, it’s not even 50 degrees yet. Maybe they’ll have to serve us our coffee in thermal casks.)

A bit o’ bloggage:

In addition to the big essay on conservatism, I also read this in the New Yorker this weekend, about Katie Couric’s travails as anchor of the CBS Evening News. I read it with the same sense of awe I have whenever I think about the evening network news — that somewhere in this country there are still people with nothing better to do at 6:30 p.m. than watch 22 minutes of old-skool network news. So, I think, does Nancy Franklin, who wrote the piece:

The evening news continues to have value for millions of people, but millions more are now turning to the Internet. Increasingly, and in more ways than one, there is an end-of-the-day feeling to the nightly-news half hour—there’s ad after ad for products that treat all the things that go wrong with your body after you’re fifty, and in the broadcast itself there’s the endless use of the tired phrase “pain at the pump,” for stories on fuel prices, and always, in stories about pharmaceutical companies or warnings about drugs, the same shot of pills moving rapidly along a conveyor belt.

Our witty pal Alex once described the overarching theme of network news as “somewhere, someone younger than you is spending your tax dollars on things you wouldn’t approve of,” and that’s word, too. Later:

But I don’t think that people want less news; they want, I believe, the same kind of informed passion and doggedness that TV-news people displayed while covering Hurricane Katrina, and they want anchors to go deep into issues. Who knows, young people might turn on their TVs in droves if news organizations had a few choice strands of Michael Moore’s DNA in them, and pointed out when, say, a public official wasn’t telling the truth. Jon Stewart is a lightning rod both for people who decry the notion that young people get their news from watching “The Daily Show,” and for people who think that his (and Stephen Colbert’s “The Colbert Report”) is the only current-events show worth watching. I’m not a Stewartite, but when Dick Cheney denies making certain statements about the war in Iraq and Stewart shows three video clips that prove he’s lying, I think he’s providing a real service to the country, and I’d like to think that that’s what his fans are responding to.

That’s exactly right. I’m late to the Jon Stewart fan club, and I certainly wouldn’t want to see him on a network newscast — it would ruin his magic — but I’d drive an SUV to Ypsi to see him do an author interview before I would, say, Brian Williams. (His dissection of Jonah Goldberg is a minor classic.) Stewart brings a level of honesty to the table that so-called professional journalists either can’t or won’t, because they interpret “objectivity” so strictly that they can’t call a spade a spade. Haven’t they figured out that the people they cover are wise to this? How many books does Scott McClellan have to write before it gets through: Sometimes the people behind the podium? Are LYING. It’s not bias to point this out. It’s, um, journalism.

Well, don’t want to start ranting.

Why newspapers are dying: Because they think there’s no room for ALL the “Sex and the City” movie-premiere fashion pictures. But Jezebel does.

The morning, she is slipping away. Better go select my long underwear for visiting the golf club on the 28th DAY OF DAMN MAY, FOR GOD’S SAKE. Have a good one.

Whoever had “torn lateral meniscus” in the knee-injury pool, please see the cashier to collect your winnings.

Because the New Yorker was made for ink-on-paper reading and it arrives days and days late here, I didn’t get to the George Packer essay everyone was talking about until Saturday. I read it poolside, presumably in the presence of actual conservatives, based on recent election results.

“The Fall of Conservatism” lays out, perhaps too optimistically for my money, how the political movement that defined my adulthood lost its way and now teeters like a shack on the beach awaiting November’s hurricane. My initial reaction: Well, we’ll see. Pat Buchanan gets the money-shot quote, paraphrasing Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” I’ve seen the racketeers for some time now; it seems like a hundred years ago that I started telling people the success of buffoons like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh indicated the right had run out of steak and was selling nothing but sizzle, but obviously I was wrong about that one. Packer mentions in passing the two great rocky shoals conservatism wrecked itself on — Iraq and Katrina, but these were only rocks that showed above the waterline. It’s one thing to argue that government is always incompetent; it’s quite another to staff government agencies with incompetents and then, when they’re revealed as such, yell, “See!? See!?”

I might add that it’s one thing to praise business and unfettered capitalism like some sort of god, and quite another to look the other way when corrupt financial markets can drain billions from American pockets and reward the perpetrators, but that’s another discussion.

Here’s what struck and saddened me: The way the GOP gained power through what Kevin Phillips called “positive polarization.” Divide and conquer, basically, but not only divide — demonize. People who disagreed with you weren’t just wrong, they were evil. In the midst of it, a woman called my newspaper and informed my editor she would be canceling her subscription because a certain female columnist had described herself as a feminist, and this was simply too much to be endured. Packer thinks it’s on its way out. I can only hope so:

Yet the polarization of America, which we now call the “culture wars,” has been dissipating for a long time. Because we can’t anticipate what ideas and language will dominate the next cycle of American politics, the previous era’s key words—“élite,” “mainstream,” “real,” “values,” “patriotic,” “snob,” “liberal” — seem as potent as ever. Indeed, they have shown up in the current campaign: North Carolina and Mississippi Republicans have produced ads linking local Democrats to Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor. The right-wing group Citizens United has said that it will run ads portraying Obama as yet another “limousine liberal.” But these are the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that’s brain-dead.

We’ll see. I lived in deep-red country for 20 years and learned to get along with people who considered a self-described feminist to be a she-devil. Part of my belligerent attitude of late has to do with leaving that place for a more purple-hued environment, but I worry that positive polarization has caught me, too. I certainly wouldn’t pay for a newspaper that carried Ann Coulter’s column. Maybe that’s the real legacy of the last 40 years: We disagree, therefore, you suck.

Anyway, I think Roy gets it right: Do not count out this movement, even with half its teeth missing, syphilis overtaking its bloodstream and the odor of the grave emanating with every howl:

The conservative heavy thinkers to whom Packer gives much credence may feel as if the world has passed them by, but the racketeers really run the show. As formerly grumbling conservative operatives learn to love McCain and go all-in for the big win, philosophy is the least of their concerns, and their whither-conservatism thumb-suckers become mere padding for pages filled with stories about Obama’s Muslim past, inability to bowl, and other such boob-bait. If you think they can’t pull it off because their approach lacks intellectual vitality, you may be overthinking the whole thing.

Josh Marshall makes some good points, too.

That’s what I did on Saturday, when I had to readjust my pool chair six times to find the right balance between out-in-the-sun (too bright to read) and under-the-umbrella (too cold to concentrate). It didn’t even touch 70, but the pool was open (and heated) and by god, we were going. The lifeguards sat around glumly in sweats, hoping no one needed saving. Sunday was warmer and Monday was downright hot — upper 80s. I went to sleep last night with all the windows open and the ceiling fans on, and woke up 90 minutes later with the blinds banging and cold air rushing in to reclaim us. Again. Current temperature: 48, and fuck you very much, Canadian air mass. Frost warning (!!!!!!!) tonight.

As the previous post demonstrates, I finally took up Alan’s fancy shotgun and took my chances on the skeet range. The double I got on that station wasn’t typical, but I did pretty well — hit maybe 30 percent of the faces of my enemies rendered in brittle ceramic clay pigeons, some fairly tough. I didn’t get any of the “rabbits” — targets launched to roll along the ground — but I came close, and I nailed a few in the incredibly satisfying ways they blow apart. I thought “vaporizing in midair” was my favorite, but then I experienced “breaking into three pieces, each spinning off on its own symmetrical trajectory,” and that was the new standard of excellence.

For what its worth, none of the targets carried the face of the president. Hey, I’m evolving!

So, bloggage of a related note: Anyone see “Recount”? What did we think? I found it surprisingly engaging for being unafraid to take on fairly complicated legal concepts, but nearly unwatchable just the same, if only for its arousal of the old we disagree/you suck anger. I came away hoping someone learned a lesson or two in that mess, and maybe, by 2006, we did — the corrupt GOP establishment that nearly turned Ohio 2004 into a rerun of Florida 2000 was ejected on its ear. But the elements that let the fiasco happen are, most likely, still in place somewhere. I thought Gore did the right thing at the time, but when I see what actually happened as a result of that election, maybe not so much.

Skipped Rob’s torture session this morning, so I’m off to ride my bike until my legs fall off. Make merry in the first day of quasi-summer, when the furnace will likely come on.

Almost enough to make you forget that sore knee.

Although now my shoulder is sore, too.

This might be the ultimate in navel-gazing, but if nothing else, it’s pretty cool.

Turns out you can open DICOM files — a medical standard, according to J.C. the Genius — with a free program called iRad.

UPDATE: John suggests this post needs a soundtrack. I agree. Press play, but be warned, song is NSFW, but pretty funny. (And the title shown isn’t the name of the song, probably obscured for bot-foiling purposes.)

I suppose you people think you’re going to start a euphemisms-for-privates thread down in the comments. Well, you’re right. I’ll start with a brief anecdote:

An old neighbor of mine had a cousin who worked at a medical answering service, the people who pass your messages along to the doc on call. Because they’re calling the doctor out of a sound sleep and/or off the golf course, they’re instructed to ask minimal questions about the problem. So one night this woman calls and simply doesn’t want to say why she wants her gyno to get back to her ASAP. Hem, haw, etc. Finally the cousin says, “If you won’t tell us anything at all, we’re not allowed to call the doctor. Really, it’s OK” and the woman blurts out “MY TWAT ITCHES!” and hangs up.

They all had a good roll around the floor laughing at that one, and then the doctor, who was in the building, stops by for his messages. They’re still laughing, he asks why, they tell him and he says, “Hmm, I guess no one told her the medical term. Muffin.”

That story doesn’t read as funny as it tells, especially early in the morning with no alcohol, but that’s my contribution: Muffin.

And that’s it, because now I have to get ready for my long-overdue MRI of the right knee, which has been hurting for a year now. My MRI order reads “internal derangement,” which describes me many days, I think. Anyway, I think I’ll take a shower, shave my legs and strip all metal from my body. I’ll likely be back, but if you’re not — have a great long weekend.

Jon Carroll wrote a column about mulch earlier this week. It so happens that I came across not one but two mulch crews on my bike ride yesterday. Mulch is absolutely essential for suburbia to exist, right up there with gasoline and espresso. Ninety percent of it is useless and/or decorative; there’s no reason for a well-established tree to have a collar of mulch rising halfway up the trunk, although it does make mowing around it easier. So finding, say, a teenage maple with mulch piled at least eight inches high at its base is as easy as looking out the nearest window. Over winter mulch will compact, degrade, etc., and in the spring a crew comes around and adds three more inches. Since it only lost one or maybe two inches over the winter, this is a net gain for the mulch pile, and you see some really stupid-looking mulch setups. I’m not a gardener, but my guess is, this can’t be good for the tree. If your feet needed to be wet you might wear wet socks, but adding wet pants is certainly unnecessary, and would be like laying out a welcome mat for pests that like moist, dark places to burrow. But no one asks me. I’m just the dumb lady rolling past on the bicycle.

Anyway, one of the mulch crews I saw yesterday was typical, a bunch of dark-skinned men speaking Spanish. I wondered the same thing I wonder when I pick up, oh, say a small rendering of a stained-glass window featuring praying hands and the “Footprints” verse, all executed in lovely plastic with “made in China” stamped on its base. I think of the sweatshop factory, the miasma of hot plastic coming from the non-OSHA-approved machinery, a life measured out by coffee spoons while this crap goes by on the conveyor belt. I wonder what the person who made it thought of the distant Americans who will display this in their homes. And so I wondered about how mulch is used in the Spanish-speaking world, if the village in Chihuahua or Guatemala or wherever these men came from contains mulch, what they thought when they learned that Americans in one of the wettest places on the planet grind up old trees and heap them up around the trunks of other trees for reasons no one can precisely fathom.

I told myself I was going to think of story ideas on this bike ride, by the way, showing I’m capable of procrastination even in my recreation.

Bloggage: From my ace advertising source JohnC, I know the term for detailed photographic advertising placed on high-rise buildings is a “wrap.” (GM frequently wraps the RenCen; this was for the All-Star Game in 2005.) So. Warner Bros. building in Burbank gets a wrap promoting Madonna’s new album. Worker therein notes that his office seems to be in Madonna’s vagina, more or less. Post gets linked on Metafilter. Hilarity ensues: I used to work there until I got my pink slip. And so on, and on, and on.

GOP operative gives the gender version of the “well, there’s black people, and then there’s n*ggers” defense, here.

One of my favorite newspaper blogs is the Detroit News’ Tax Watchdog, written by reporter Robert Snell and dedicated to the proposition that if you throw a rock in southeast Michigan, you’ll hit a tax deadbeat, and many of them are famous. At the top of the blog today, Anita Baker, on the hook for $481K and change. Bonus: A picture of her Grosse Pointe house.

I also liked this audio slideshow about Red’s Jazz Shoe Shine Parlor, a Detroit institution.

The News is rich this week: I also learned that Sam Wagstaff, the man who discovered, promoted and loved Robert Mapplethorpe, did a three-year stint at the Detroit Institute of Arts as a curator, where he promoted avant-garde pieces such as “Dragged Mass Geometric”: Conceptual art at its highest and most abstruse, “Dragged Mass Geometric” involved two bulldozers lugging a 35-ton slab of granite across the verdant sweep of the museum’s north lawn, with the goal of embedding it in the earth.

Snicker.

And now, off to the gym for Rob’s Torture Class, which I skipped Tuesday for my meeting, which means it’ll be even more torture-ific. Send moral support.