At 5:20 a.m., my neighbor goes out.

“Vroom!” goes the full-size SUV under my bedroom window, open to the cooling breezes of late spring.

At 5:30 a.m., someone drops off a child across the street; this neighbor baby-sits. The two adults stand in the driveway having a conversation. Their voices aren’t raised, but in the still morning they might as well be in bed with me.

Ten minutes after this, an automatic sprinkler system erupts. Sure, we’ve had rain out the wazoo these last few days, but those things are on timers and not easily overridden. “Hisssssss,” goes the sprinkler head. “Ticka-ticka-ticka.”

Sometime after that, my neighbor returns from his morning errand. The V-8 conquerer of highways comes back up the driveway. And a few minutes after that, my mattress dips. It’s my wonderful child, crawling in for five minutes of cuddles before we both have to get up, because it is, after all, a school day. Time to get up.

I have to change my life. Have. To. Change. By Thursday I’m so sleep-deprived I’m nearly hysterical. I feel as though I spend my life catching naps, which are invariably interrupted. You might have read about recent storms in the Midwest? Storms are followed by chain saws and wood-chippers. You’ve heard of the green revolution? That means three rounds of big trucks rumbling through the neighborhood on trash day (garbage, recycling, yard waste). Every lawn service uses gas-powered blowers, edgers and weed whips. Don’t get me started on the ice-cream truck.

And on those days when everything comes together for me, when I can sleep through the sprinklers and the SUV and everything else? Sometimes this requires me to go sleep in the guest room on the other side of the house. Those neighbors have a sprinkler, too, but sleep later. But there’s a line of arbor vitae along that side of the property, excellent nesting habitat. One blue jay greeting the day is all it takes.

Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just ranting. And starting tomorrow, my life will be changed. Yes, at long last, EndofSchoolFest 2008 is over, and I can sleep until I feel like getting up. Learning effectively ended a week ago, and since then it’s been party, party, party. Today, the last day, is a half day — it’s all over at lunchtime.

“Why are they even having school today?” I said over raisin bran at 7:30. Grumpily. (Yeah, go figure.) “What on earth are you going to do?”

“There’s a breakfast, and then a helicopter lands on the playground.”

Jesus Christ, and then what? Hannah Montana steps out and plays a four-song set? Bill Graham presents the Playboy Bunnies? No, it lands, everybody gets to look at the instrument panel and ask questions, and it takes off. One of her classmates’ father is a Coast Guard officer on the rescue chopper, and it’s just a treat for the kids. This is its second visit in three years. I talked to the Coastie’s wife at a school function a while ago. What sort of missions does that thing fly? I wondered. She said they evacuate a lot of sailors with chest pains from Great Lakes freighters, a procedure that, if you did it to me, would push me from mere chest pains to a full-blown heart attack. Nothing like being hauled up to an orange chopper in a basket to make a day interesting.

The promotion ceremony was sweet, though. And no one said a word about the flip-flops.

So, bitching aside, howzabout some bloggage:

Michelle Obama, “baby mama.” Yup. First the crazy negro fist bump, and now this. That clip of the Fox News host asking if the Obamas’ knuckle punch was “a terrorist fist jab” is overused — find it yourself on YT; I’m sure there are eight billion copies up there — but it reminded me of the first thing I ever read about this greeting. It was a story in which some baseball player was quoted as saying his secret to toughening up him mighty man-paws was soaking them in his own urine. The team’s manager was asked for a response, and he said, “Oh, no one really cares. Although no one shakes his hand anymore, either. We mostly just give him the fist.”

Personally, I’m all for handshake alternatives. In the labs at the Centers for Disease Control, I’m told, it’s considered very bad form to offer a handshake; the preferred greeting is the elbow bump.

Of course, if Fox News existed in Canada, we could fine them into the stone age. Not a good idea.

Bobby Jindal rides the Catholic Crazy Train all the way to Exorcism Station:

Whenever I concentrated long enough to begin prayer, I felt some type of physical force distracting me. It was as if something was pushing down on my chest, making it very hard for me to breathe. . . Though I could find no cause for my chest pains, I was very scared of what was happening to me and Susan. I began to think that the demon would only attack me if I tried to pray or fight back; thus, I resigned myself to leaving it alone in an attempt to find peace for myself.

Now I kinda hope McCain does ask him to be his running mate; this could be fun.

Guess what I can hear? A helicopter! Time to get to work:

You can’t get out of school without a final rule being shoved down your throat. The final rule of today’s Promotion Ceremony was handed down yesterday — no flip-flops. Screw it. Our student has a special new pair of flip flops with sparkly straps to go with her new dress, and she’s wearing them, and if anybody makes a stink about it they’re going to be dealing with me, and mama don’t take no mess. There’s a point at which all the stupid rules of school become unbearable, and they don’t even apply to me. I’ve sat silent through No Squirt Guns at the Class Picnic (violation of the weapons policy) and No Untwisted Paperclips (ditto) and a punishment system that frequently involves writing, but on this one I’m a scofflaw.

(The punitive-writing thing bugs me in particular. Say you’re, oh, a software designer. Were your child to misbehave while in my care, I would not make him or her design software as a punishment. And yet, teachers think nothing of assigning painful essays as punishment for breaches of conduct large and small, and then wonder why kids despise writing.)

I shouldn’t complain. I don’t have to wrangle a few hundred kids who’d much rather be at the pool. I frequently marvel that teachers stay sane at all, and don’t begrudge them two or three end-of-day cocktails one little bit. Keep in mind this is a middle-class suburban district where kids are, generally speaking, still respectful of adults (in public, anyway) and will behave if ordered to do so. Still. Squirt guns? Please.

In other domestic news at this hour, we have a resident wild thing — an opossum. (The writer within insists I call it by its formal name on first reference.) I think it’s living under the deck by day and it needs to be removed, but I caught a glimpse of it in the driveway last night and damn — it’s the size of a Ford F-150. For once I was grateful for the dog’s ailing eyesight, because I was able to call him inside before he saw that mofo lurking out by the birdbath. A fight between those two would have been ugly. Alan has a live trap at the lake house, weaponry from last fall’s Groundhog Wars (score: Groundhog 1, Humans 0), and it’s coming here a.s.a.p. I like to live in peace with the natural world, but I’m wary of the damage a beast like that can do. And I read that in possums, “senescence is rapid.” I don’t want that sucker dying under my deck.

A quick skip to the bloggage, then:

I’m sorry, but when I see a headline reading Baby born with penis on back, man oh man am I clicking that one. If more babies were born with extra penises growing out of their backs, the newspaper business would not be in the fix it is today. For the squeamish, this appears to be one of those incompletely-absorbed-fetal-twin situations, and the kid seems to be fine after surgery, even though he lost a second career as a coat rack.

My favorite blogger, Roy, is taking a few days off to have eye surgery. This seems as good a time as ever to re-promote “Detached,” our friend James Burns’ graphic novella about his own eye surgery.

My congresswoman, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, is the Detroit mayor’s mother and is, I have assumed, as cemented into the job as my last congressman. The Free Press says maybe not — her son’s troubles have given mom some challengers, one of whom released an ad on the internets this week. In typical old-media fashion, the Freep didn’t provide a link. I’m going to assume it was an oversight, but here it is, and it’s a goody. (It uses the infamous “y’all’s boy” meltdown, seen in longer form here.)

You’ve probably all seen this by now, but just in case not, the NYT looks at the popularity of re-virginization surgery among European Muslim women. Show me a culture that values chastity over everything else in young women, and I’ll show you a sick culture. Nothing in this story changed my mind. Funny line:

But hymen repair is talked about so much that it is the subject of a film comedy that opens in Italy this week. “Women’s Hearts,” as the film’s title is translated in English, tells the story of a Moroccan-born woman living in Italy who goes to Casablanca for the operation.

One character jokes that she wants to bring her odometer count back down to “zero.”

I’ve always thought you could judge a group by what they compared their women to — cows (as in why buy one when you get the milk for free), shoes (you wouldn’t buy a pair without trying them on) and now cars. I ask you.

Off to walk around threateningly on the deck. Maybe I can scare the possum away. Ha.

I’m sure we’re all very sorry to hear the site of Brian Stouder’s upcoming vacation is now a muddy bog. But we’re more amused by his reaction:

We’ll see how this plays out; our plans are for after the 4th of July. If nothing else, I definitely wanna see that Paul Bunyan restaurant.

The cry of the Midwestern Clark Griswold: Carry on regardless! It’s just a flesh wound!

The weather here’s been no picnic, but a fraction of the misery of Wisconsin’s — or even Indiana’s. A big storm system smashed through here Sunday night, but gave the east side the slip, mostly. A few limbs down, nothing worse. It’s pouring at the moment, which lately feels like par for the course. At least it’s not 94 degrees, like yesterday.

When we kick off with the weather around these parts, it means we are tapioca on topics. The end of the school year happens in 3-2-1, and as usual, it blots out the household sun. I’m looking forward to sleeping past 7 a.m., not looking forward to swinging the maternal whip of get-off-the-couch-and-go-outside-it’s-a-beautiful-day. So far I’ve resisted the pull of the upwardly mobile summer — enrichment camps and lessons in lifetime sports. I’m a firm believer in down time as a restorative, and all those camps and lessons can quickly feel like a different form of school. She has to learn to swim, and I’d like her to learn to sail, but so far I haven’t packed her off to High-Q Acres for pre-algebra training. If she refuses to get off the couch this summer, the next one might be a different story, however.

One thing I’m trying this year: A summer reading list. Part of the commodification of the tween years has been a veritable explosion in targeted literature — chick lit for 12-year-olds. It’s enough to keep a kid occupied for months, but I aim to shove it aside from time to time. I had my Nancy Drew, she has her Beacon Street Girls, but I had a “suggested summer reading” list, handed out at the end of the school year. It was strongly implied that there might be a quiz in September (there never was), but it was enough to make me pick up “Animal Farm,” “Johnny Tremain” and a few other classics of the children’s/young adult room at the library. I’m making my own list, and welcome suggestions for an 11-year-old reading at the outer edge of her age range. So far I’ve got some Jack London on there, and thought about “Little Women,” but was amazed to rediscover what a brick it was. Five hundred pages of antique language and exhaustive period detail can bog down even a bright reader of the modern age. I tried to recall when I read it, and the dread set in — I’d read a Reader’s Digest condensed version! Illustrated! What a fraud I am. It’s still on the bubble; I may reread it myself. “Tom Sawyer” is on the list, too.

Any ideas?

Off to do some chores. Back in a bit.

A cyclist! He’s got my vote:

Eric Zorn wonders whether he looks stupid in a bike helmet, ignoring the fact everybody looks stupid in a bike helmet, including Lance Armstrong.

Finally saw “Swingtown.” Snap judgment: It doesn’t have legs, but I give them credit for trying. There’s no reason to let premium cable have all the shows about adults; broadcast has to find something outside of the police/law procedural and the escalating CSI grossfest.

One of the things that bothers me is the ostentatious “hey, we’re in the ’70s now” shots. Sure, the people are going to wear ’70s clothes and the men are going to have ’70s sideburns and the women are going to drink Tab. But when I saw a quick closeup of these, I thought they were trying way too hard:

Closeups of shoes are for significant-to-the-plot shoes, and unless those Dr. Scholl’s Exercise Sandals are going to be very important in a future episode, this was just show-offy. I do have an idea of how Dr. Scholl’s might be the pivot upon which the plot turns; after all, like every other woman who was young in that era, I owned a succession of pairs. They were my default shoe all summer long, and I loved them beyond all reason.

You bought them in drugstores, along with other fine Dr. Scholl’s products. They cost $15, and had their own end-cap display, at the bottom of which was a series of molded plastic footprints you used to find your size. The “exercise” gimmick said that if you wore them, your feet had to clench the toe ridge with every step, thus exercising your legs. Huh. Whatever. I never noticed any specific toning action, but maybe I wasn’t clenching them correctly. For me, they were wooden flip-flops, and by midsummer the rubber had worn off the heel and everywhere you went, your shoes announced you before your arrival. In the era’s shag carpet, it was no biggie, but on wooden floors it was like beating a drum. I can still hear my friend’s grandmother’s crabby voice ringing in my ears, complaining about our “clompy shoes” as we came inside their summer cottage for our endless supplies of Dr. Pepper and turkey sandwiches.

Maybe the teenage-girl character who wears these will stumble upon her parents and their new neighbors in dishabille, struggling into their Qiana fashions after hearing her clomp-clomp approach. That would justify the closeup.

By the way, Dr. Scholl’s started making them again a few years ago. Back in the day they came in three colors — navy, red and bone. I was a bone girl. But in a spasm of credit card-enabled nostalgia, I just visited the Dr. Scholl’s website and I see they’ve expanded their color palette; now they’re available in such racy colors as Cheeky Pink and Wine. I thought about it for a long time and opted for tan. It was the only color on sale, and the shoes are no longer offered in bone. Once a bone girl, always a bone girl. (I suffer the Curse of Neutrals.)

So, some Monday bloggage?

Neely Tucker finds one of the oddest car clubs in America — for the misbegotten, better-off-dead Chevy Cavalier. I liked it because, down low in a lengthy story, he gets to the point of custom-car culture. It’s not about buying something fancy off the showroom floor. It’s about finding something cheap, something you can afford, and little by little, turning it into something all your own:

A quick history of customized cars in pop-culture America:

After World War II, GIs came home with a little money in their pocket and a new sense of working with mechanics. Out in Southern California, they bought old beaters, mostly from Ford. Like a ‘29 Model A Roadster, or anything after ‘32 with the flathead V-8. Something wasn’t right with the engine but, hell, they could fix that. Get out the tools, ratchet, ratchet. Honey, crank it when I tell you to. Right. Give it some gas. Good. Good. Slam hood, wipe hands on a rag. Take it out on the strip and turn the quarter faster than anything else alive.

The hot rod was born out of reworked junk. That was part of the glory of it, the great young male joke on respectable society.

We mentioned the Dymaxion House a few weeks back, so this seems apt: A New Yorker profile of Buckminster Fuller, which answers a lot of questions for me:

Fuller was fond of neologisms. He coined the word “livingry,” as the opposite of “weaponry”—which he called “killingry”—and popularized the term “spaceship earth.” (He claimed to have invented “debunk,” but probably did not.) Another one of his coinages was “ephemeralization,” which meant, roughly speaking, “dematerialization.” Fuller was a strong believer in the notion that “less is more,” and not just in the aestheticized, Miesian sense of the phrase. He imagined that buildings would eventually be “ephemeralized” to such an extent that construction materials would be dispensed with altogether, and builders would instead rely on “electrical field and other utterly invisible environment controls.”

Wow. I wonder what it would be like to take a shower in that house.

Cops storm a Detroit art gallery. It’s almost too rich with possibility for words, but it turns out, they were only looking for after-hours drinking. In commando gear. Because, you know, in a city like Detroit, after-hours drinking in an art gallery is a crime that requires a SWAT response.

You know why people think raising kids is so expensive? Because they read shit like this, about the nursery for the Pitt-Jolie royal twins:

They even installed two pink crystal chandeliers for the girls at a cost of $899 each.

I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t regret not getting a pink crystal chandelier for my nursery. She had to make do with one of those dumb infant-stimulation crib mobiles. But today she’s an A student. Let’s see where the Jolie-Pitt babies are in 11 years, eh?

Happy Monday.

Back and better-rested. Maybe a little housekeeping, to get the blood moving:

In comments from time to time, most lately earlier this week, someone asks why I don’t block the rambling of michaelj/caliban (we all figured that out, right? No, I don’t know why he changed his posting name, either.). The answer is pretty clear to me, but if it isn’t to you, here’s why:

At its best, which is pretty damn often in this blog, the commenting here reminds me of something, a place I once held dear — the bar after work at the Anytown Post. It starts with three reporters bitching about work, and they are joined by two more, which necessitates pushing some tables together. Then a couple editors come over, including one that the original gang of three was bitching about, which changes the subject and increases the tension. Then a couple more, then a state legislator who happens to be unwinding after work, and maybe one of the reporter’s friends from the courthouse. Soon lots of tables are pushed together, the waitress is serving them almost exclusively, and everybody is talking. Maybe there’s one big theme to the main thread, but two people are discussing recipes for barbecue rubs, or the best places to eat cheap in Chicago or New York. Two more are handicapping a local election, and two more are talking about the funny things a bookie said while everyone waited for the jury trying him on gambling charges to deliberate.

(In my experience, he said this: “Dave Thomas may have a few million bucks, but I told him, ‘Dave, you’re still a hillbilly in a thousand-dollar suit.’” This was when a thousand dollars bought a nice suit. The bookie was convicted, after which he told far fewer jokes. Columbus, c. early ’80s.)

Anyway, what’s my role in this? Sometimes I’m in the original group. Sometimes I’m the waitress. If the bar were very long, I’d be the bartender. Sometimes I’m the single sitting nearby who is eavesdropping. I just want the conversation to continue, and to amuse me.

And who is Caliban? He’s the drunk at the bar who walks past the table en route to the bathroom, stops and makes a speech. Sometimes he makes no sense. Sometimes he seems inordinately angry. Sometimes he’s mellow and expansive. Sometimes his fingers go off the home row z c nkx ;lxgd dnc .k,d gkx/

As long as he refrains from insulting the regulars beyond the point of medium teasing, as long as he throws no punches, as long as he keeps stopping in, his money’s good in my bar.

I ban only two people (so far). Even those are still on a case-by-case basis, which is to say, their IPs aren’t blocked — they just go to moderation, where I delete them. One is a very, very angry man who works somewhere at North American Van Lines in Fort Wayne (according to his IP lookup) and is frequently racist. The other is Rich Reynolds, Fort Wayne’s self-appointed media critic, who abused me on a regular schedule (i.e., constantly) for a decade, and still does. (I expect another big outburst after he reads this.) I can always take the abuse, but he regularly swings into wild inaccuracy and targeted lying, and besides, he still has his stupid little website, faxes and approximately 12,000 blogs to post on. The last comment to NN.C submitted from his IP/screen name said, “You are a piece of shit.” That’s as much of a platform I’ll give him, while I await news of his death.

It’s my bar. I’m a magnanimous bartender. But I have my limits, and that’s what they are.

If you’ll allow me a moment of gratitude: I read a lot of blogs, and a lot of comment sections. Of course I am biased, but I think this is one of the best. Really. I’m consistently amazed by how smart and funny everyone is, how often you add real value and good information to whatever we’re discussing. I’m glad I have some people here who don’t agree with me politically, but still chime in — Danny, Jeff the mild-mannered, basset, et al. I’m pleased we’re not an echo chamber of ass-kissing and back-slapping. I’m glad we can disagree in a respectful but not boring manner. I’m glad we can disagree, go home angry and still return, hopeful, the next day. But most of all, I’m astonished by the range our bar pulls in — unchurched ministers in Ohio, urban planners in Nashville, engineers in San Diego, journalists everywhere. For a blog that is, most days, about nothing in particular, I’m honored that you all come to drink here.

Finally, it’s sort of thrilling that every day we reinvent the writer/reader model, twist and reshape the feedback loop and become, in a cliché phrase I used earlier in the week in another context, something greater than the sum of our parts.

That’s why I don’t ban Caliban. You can always skip his posts. Besides, he’s part of our strange community, and I still like him.

That seems a good enough note to start the weekend on. Current temperature: 86. Wind: 17 miles per hour. Humidity: Brutal. Think I’ll go ride the bike. See you Monday.

Time I went to bed last night: 1:10 a.m.

Time the next-door neighbor’s home alarm — a klaxon horn mounted on the outside of the house, 40 feet from my pillow — went off, not due to an intrusion but to someone forgetting to turn it off before going out for morning coffee: 6:10 a.m.

You have a nice day, too.

So you can guess the mood I’m in this morning, on a day forecast to be 92 degrees at its peak, with the usual oppressive humidity. Sorry, Dexter, but I don’t think I’m going to be attending the Red Wings victory parade today. Although the idea of a nice long nap on the ice might sound pretty good by then.

There are those who are energized by parades and crowds, and those who are not. I’m in the latter group, which is unusual, because I’m a classic Myers-Briggs extrovert. But crowds frequently send me into a funk; who are these awful people, and are any of them living near me? I’m likely to think. And do they have exterior home alarms?

I think I should go back to bed. Enjoy Lance Mannion’s take on “Weeds,” here. Did anyone see “Swingtown,” and if you did, what did you think? And here’s a writer’s trick: When all else seems inadequate, try a lede like this:

Let me be blunt: “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” is the finest post-Zionist action-hairdressing sex comedy I have ever seen.

The Boston Globe allegedly did it first, when it described “Shakes the Clown” as “the ‘Citizen Kane’ of alcoholic clown movies.”

Back to bed. Back, probably, later.

Short shrift today, folks. We’ve entered the last days of the school year, which mean more work for mother, and practically no work for the student in the house. Today is the safety/service picnic, and I’m a driver/chaperone/fruit salad contributor. Also, I worked a seven-hour news-farming shift last night, and I don’t want to see my keyboard for another 12 hours. Discuss what you like. I hear Hillary’s finally throwing in the towel, which is gracious of her because, you know, she could have taken it to the streets of Denver, and tear gas could have been involved. I’m thinking what happened to Hillary is what happens to people who live in a human cocoon, surrounded by ass-kissers and pillow-plumpers who either a) spend all their time covering their own; or b) telling you what you want to hear. When Sonny Corleone shouted at Tom Hagen that he wasn’t a wartime consigliere, he was speaking for everybody at the head of a losing team: Tell me the truth!

Too bad no one did. On to November. Remember, look past the fence.

Bloggage:

Detroit should change its motto to “defining new ways to be fucked up, every day” — someone pried an 8-foot statue of Jesus from the cross on the side of a church, and I don’t think they were re-enacting the 13th station of the cross. Best guess for a motive is, the statue is green, and the thieves probably thought it was copper. (It wasn’t.) America, behold your future!

Sweet Juniper’s dad has the second kid in cloth diapers, and he was feeling a little smug about it. Was:

…Yesterday I had the misfortune of going down into the basement during the spin cycle of that initial rinse. Our washing machine empties into a basin during the spin cycle. As desensitized as I have become to all things scatological over the past few years, nothing—nothing—could have prepared me for what was pulsing into the wash basin. Vomiting out of the tube was this butterscotch-tinted gray liquid, quickly filling the room with the humid perfume of pickled baby shit that had marinated in a brine of cold urine for a week. I watched it rise in the basin as the washing machine spun. Just when the vile brew threatened to spill over the top it began to subside in a roaring, fecal Charybdis above the drain. I swear I heard the voices of demons or lost souls calling desperately to me from the gurgling ferment.

That man is a good writer.

When I lived in Indiana, and I was about to attend my first Indy 500, I went prancing back to the sports department to pick up my press pass. Ooh, how exciting! The old geezer who covered, I think, golf and some other boring sport looked at me and shook his head sadly. He’d been to the race, he said. Once. He took his kids; they had great seats right on the main stretch. The race started, that thrilling moment when 33 cars go into that first turn like a flock of fighter jets flying in tight formation, and then this happened on the second lap:

Right in front of the biggest part of the crowd, right in front of his kids. The old sportswriter bundled his hysterical children into the car while they were still clearing the track, drove back to Fort Wayne and never felt the need to attend Indiana’s signature sporting event again. Those sitting close told stories much like this:

I see a driver being carried on a stretcher into the infield hospital. I am close enough I could have reached out and touched him. He is burned so badly there is no way to tell who he is. The figure is barely recognizable as a human being. I have never been able to get that image erased from my memory.

This particular writer is given to melancholy and hand-wringing; maybe this is why.

Off to hunt up my melon baller. So I can ball some melons. Shut your mouth. Back later.

Mommy woke up with a stomachache today, so mommy’s going back to bed to clutch a pillow and moan. Fortunately, mommy found some bloggage for you first, because mommy knows you folks love bloggage the way kittens love playing with string, and the way mommy likes referring to herself in the third person.

Anyone catch the speeches last night? If McCain doesn’t fire his production designer, or whoever is responsible for putting him in front of that green backdrop, he won’t get out of the gate. Someone on another blog said it looked like a post-game presser, and that’s just about perfect. He looked old, out of it and unable to get through a sentence without a third look at the ‘prompter. Even the chants sounded like they were started by a guy just out of camera range, holding up a sign. Obama hits the ground running with his rainbow coalition of smiling young people — whom you could see! while he was speaking! because they were seated all around him! — and looked like Secretariat warming up on Belmont Day.

Permit me to say: The contrast was startling. Discuss.

Elsewhere:

The worst time to be a feature writer is when a big hard-news story is breaking. Everyone else is wading through New Orleans, and you’re writing a think piece on Whither the Creole Restaurants. A head of state is assassinated, touching off a shooting war, and you’re gathering notes on whether the widow’s mourning dress sent some sort of coded message to the insurgents.

Worst of all was post-9/11. Who gives a shit about a movie opening the following Friday? (Ask the people who made “Zoolander,” which I believe had that unlucky designation, although it had other problems as well.) I met someone who had a book published that very day; it’s hard for him to discuss it now without a wince. But features editors soldiered on, gamely trying to take the pulse of a freaked-out nation, searching for the shopping/fashion/culture angle. The Wall Street Journal was particularly ham-fisted in that crazy time, as I recall. There was a piece on how expensive it was to cook your own meals — because everyone was staying in after 9/11, cocooning and reconnecting with the neglected home fires — when a set of All-Clad cookware cost $900 and lemongrass- and truffle-infused oils were something like a million dollars a quart. Someone had six friends over for dinner, and it cost $700! The horror!

Well, OK.

Now that the economy is in the tank again, but in a different kind of way, these travails-of-rich-people stories are popping up again. You can’t really fault the big papers for running them; who else is supposed to respond to all those Van Cleef & Arpels ads in the A section? They know their readership.

Here’s one from this past Sunday’s NYT:

The wealthy don’t generally speak publicly about their finances, in good times or bad. It’s in poor taste, for one, and their employers could fire them for talking even a little. But people who provide services to the wealthy — lawyers, art advisers, personal trainers and hairstylists — say they are getting an earful about their clients’ financial anxieties.

Interviews with the people who actually see the bank statements, like divorce lawyers and lenders, say their clients are definitely living on less than they did a year ago, regardless of how expansive the definition of “less” may be. Hairstylists and private jet rental companies say the wealthy are cutting back on luxuries like $350 highlights and $10,000-an-hour jet rentals. Even nutritionists and personal trainers notice a problem. The wealthy are eating more and gaining weight because of the stress.

I love those killer little end-of-paragraph lines, and details like these:

On a spring afternoon, a half-dozen hairstylists to the very wealthy talked about how customers are stretching their $350 highlights and $150 haircuts to every eight weeks instead of six weeks. Some women are cutting out highlights entirely, saying they would “rather be brunettes.”

Brave, brave rich people! Not afraid to make the hard choices!

Ted Nugent proves how far you can go after you flunk Comp 101:

Gather around, high school and college graduates, and listen good — real good. What I am about to tell you will help you immensely throughout the rest of your lives if you commit to practicing Uncle Ted’s proven modus operandi for a quality of life.

It’s full of the usual dipshittery:

Be intelligently and effectively defiant. Defiance is the very spirit that gave birth to this country when our forefathers fought against overwhelming odds, signed the Declaration of Independence and fired the “shot heard ’round the world.” Lock and load. Really.

Of course, when Ted had the opportunity to fight against overwhelming odds, locking and loading all the while, he chose to poop his pants. I don’t think people can be reminded of this enough.

Thinking of Ted Nugent makes my stomach hurt more. Back to bed.

Danny mentioned yesterday’s self-portrait was Warholized. No, this is: