So I was watching coverage of the beer summit last night, and wondered what they were really talking about. They looked so uncomfortable — how can you drink beer in a suit? And from those stupid mugs? If you’re going to have a beer summit, at least loosen the ties and get out some real pilsner glasses. Did they have another round, after the photographers were shooed away? One after that? I recalled some of my icebreakers for that particular social situation.

I can recite from memory the “famous” statement from the Budweiser label. Here goes; I’ll let Professor Google vet my accuracy later:

This is the famous Budweiser beer. We know of no other beer produced by any other brewer which costs so much to brew and age. Our exclusive Beechwood aging produces a taste, a smoothness and a drinkability you will find in no other beer at any price.

(And…perfect. Although Anheuser-Busch spells it “Ageing.” And they use the serial comma after “smoothness.” Bah.)

Now, see, I’d do that. Then Henry Louis Gates, because he’s an academic, would stand and recite a poem. “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” something like that. Sgt. Crowley, being a man of the people, would do the “show me the money” scene from “Jerry McGuire,” but only the Tom Cruise part, because if he tried to imitate Cuba Gooding Jr., that would be racist. Then I’d do my knock-the-matchbox-over-with-your-nose gag, if we could find a matchbox. And by then, we’d be singing “Midnight Train to Georgia” and peace would reign in the valley.

I wonder if they’ll ever figure out a way to show our brain hard drives in fragmented form, so we can really see how much space is occupied by stuff like the Budweiser label and the choreography to Gladys Knight & the Pips songs, while we forget key phone numbers and the date of our wedding anniversary.

What’s your best party gag? Please, those who have seen others in my repertoire? Hold your filthy tongues.

They screened the films from our part of the 48-hour challenge last night. It’s entirely possible our group — one of four — was aberrant, but if it wasn’t, I’d say we’re contenders. Having done it twice now, and knowing how difficult it is, I’m tempted to give everyone a pass just for showing up, but, well, hmm.

Technology is an amazing thing. For not very much money, you can own a fancy digital video camera, a computer and the software to put together a movie — a short, or even a feature — that looks a lot like the ones you see in theaters. The rest of it, however, is a different kettle of fish. Whatever else you can say about our story, at least it had a beginning, middle and end, at least it wasn’t acted by people who appeared to have been dragged in off the street, and at least it didn’t feature some hairy guy trimming his beard, dropping the clippings into a glass of water, and drinking the water. I don’t know what genre that was; maybe there was an Andy Warhol division I didn’t know about.

Next stop: The city awards, a week from Saturday. Fingers crossed.

So, a bit of bloggage? Let’s see what’s out there.

I was reading about Annie Leibovitz’s financial problems — good lord, how many houses does one woman need? — when I remembered a charming story an editor of my acquaintance told me: He saw the world’s most famous celebrity photographer in an airport, approached her, slobbered the usual praise, then handed her his cheap point-and-shoot digital and asked if she’d snap a picture of him. She was amused and said sure. Now he has an Annie Leibovitz picture of himself. Do you?

Michael Pollan on the rise of cooking as entertainment — for the viewer. I’ll be reading “Out of the Kitchen, Onto the Couch,” but not until this weekend. Because that’s when Sunday magazines should be read. On Sunday.

Journalists! I think I found the all-purpose four words that precede every bullshit trend story. Ready? For many, it seems… Click if you dare!

Something else I’ll be doing this weekend: Making mango margaritas. I found a local source for cheap, soft Mexican mangos, and I’ve been making mango agua fresca all week. Now that the weekend’s here, time to add a little tequila. Happy Hour starts at 7. See you there.

This is the time in summer when my body clock finally readjusts to not having to get up at 7, and I frequently manage to sleep clear ’til 8. Woo. I will have five weeks of this until I have to start getting up at 7 again. Alan sometimes wonders why I don’t sleep until 9 or later, and the answer is: I can’t. I wish I could, but I can’t. That’s the insomniac’s torment: It’s not that you don’t want to. It’s not that you’re not tired. You just can’t.

Lately I’ve been noodling around with a short story about a man who starts to hate his otherwise wonderful wife because she can sleep and he can’t. I worry that it would seem far-fetched to readers who aren’t sleep-disordered. But as one who has for years lain [Crusty Old Editor -- is that the correct form of the verb?] beside a man who is troubled by sleeplessness only once in a blue moon, I don’t think so. You lie there, the day’s obligations already settling on your shoulders like a hod full of bricks, and think, Are you going to keep doing that? That steady, rhythmic breathing? Don’t you know there’s a war going on? Is the roof leaking? What if advertising falls another 15 percent this quarter, then what? Can we afford private health insurance? WHY ARE YOU ABLE TO SLEEP THROUGH THIS?

A small market, perhaps, but I know my fellow insomniac.

OK, then. I don’t have much today (yet), but I do have some bloggage, so dig in and enjoy. First, however, a question for the green of thumb:

The books all tell me that if I want my Christmas cactus to bloom at Christmas and not Halloween, I have to put it in a closet on Labor Day, and leave it there until…when? This just seems like planticide. Can one of you plant people help me out? And what do I do when it’s in there? Keep watering? Take it out for a daily 10-minute walk around the yard? Mine has pretty much recovered from a near-death experience with a squirrel — the last time it was allowed outdoors — and this year I think we should go for the big holiday bloom. But this advice sounds crazy. (On the other hand, ignoring it always got me a bloom in October. So there’s that.)

You never notice how many Rs are in the lyrics of “Folsom Prison Blues” until you hear someone who has a little problem with R pronunciation singing it:

HT: Laura Lippman, who probably never shot a man in Weno, just to watch him die.

What would we do without Jon Stewart? I ask you, America. Why can’t the Republicans come even within 25 blocks of the ballpark? Is Dennis Miller the best they got?

Top 10 Foods That Cause Car Accidents. They always blame coffee, while paella acts all innocent and gets away with murder.

And now I must be wollin’ wound the bend myself. Back here later, I think.

Good story in the NYT this morning on food styling for the movies, pegged to “Julie & Julia,” of course. I’m not sure I’ll be seeing J&J, at least not in theaters. I can’t think of a person whose work I enjoy so much in one place and dislike in another other than Nora Ephron. I find her journalism marvelously entertaining; her early pieces were the sort of thing that gave me strength to try writing essays. And yet, I’ve been meh-at-best over nearly every one of her movies, with a few exceptions — “Silkwood” annnnd….I guess that’s it. “When Harry Met Sally” was one of those movies that went down like a bag of potato chips, but gave me the same feeling afterward. (Self-loathing.)

I’m just not a rom-com girl, I guess. My favorites are the off-kilter ones like “Flirting With Disaster,” which can still make me laugh after ten million viewings. Films like “Sleepless in Seattle” and “You’ve Got Mail” — in which I am expected to identify with Meg Ryan and her big blue eyes and her adorableness — make me break out in a rash. (Also, Tom Hanks, love object? Please.)

Here’s the thing: I never believed that a woman as smart and sophisticated as the Ephron on display in her journalism could ever be the women in her movies, despite all the interviews she’s given about staying up late to cry over “An Affair to Remember,” or whatever. I just don’t. It always seemed she was doing it for the money.

Here’s a movie I’d like to see Nora Ephron make: One based on her fabulous ’70s-era Esquire essay, “Dealing With the, Uh, Problem,” about the formulation and marketing of the first vaginal deodorant. Talk about unplowed ground. From that furrow could sprout a hilarious comedy about relations between the sexes, Madison Avenue, feminism, love, sex, period outfits and everything in between. Or what about her equally fabulous piece about the Pillsbury Bake-Off? A movie about the Pillsbury Bake-Off, either documentary or fiction? I’d be there on opening night.

She once eviscerated Rod McLuhanMcKuen and Erich Segal in a piece entitled “Mush,” about how with the right amount of egomania and savvy marketing, you can sell pretty much anything to the American public, especially when the egomaniac doing the marketing is the type we’ve come to call a SNAG (sensitive new-age guy, HT: Christine Lavin). That’s what I think of “You’ve Got Mail” — mush. In fact, now that I think about it, I recall a passage from the vaginal-deodorant piece, in which an ad executive names the target market for FDS: Secretaries and stewardesses. Ephron pauses to say something like, Well, that figures. Scratch a trend no one you know is into, and you’ll find secretaries and stewardesses. Too many of Ephron’s movies seem pitched directly at that demographic.

Oh, well. Everyone has to make a living. I just fear “J&J” will be a little too sugar meringue-crusted, if you follow my drift. Still, the food-styling piece is great — Kim Severson is rarely anything else — with the sort of details I love:

For stylists, the game is all about reading the actors’ appetites and knowing when to employ a few tried-and-true tricks. But really, food styling for movies boils down to doing more prep work than a Hamptons caterer in August.

Mr. Flynn had to debone 60 ducks over the course of “Julie & Julia.”

And, of course, there are other problems. (Eye roll.) Actors:

Two actresses in the 2008 cop thriller “Pride and Glory” were vegan. So Ruth DiPasquale, an assistant property master for the film, called in a vegan chef to help style a big Christmas dinner scene that had a ham as the centerpiece. She ended up piling slices of sham ham made from soybeans near the real stuff, careful to make sure the two versions never touched.

By the way, if I could go to any movie this weekend? “The Hurt Locker,” followed by “Humpday.”

Bloggage:

I love college towns. This one was mine. Southern Ohio is a beautiful place.

There’s nothing like seeing a headline like this — “A Long, Long Post About My Reasons For Opposing National Health Care” — followed by “by Megan McArdle” to make a girl say, “Don’t click on that.” So I won’t.

I’d rather read about William Vollmann than read anything by him. In fact, I tried, once, and couldn’t get past page 10. I’m stupid, I guess.

It’s getting late, and work must commence at some point. Have a good one.

A case of animal hoarding came to light here last week. Someone saw a loose kitten, which led to a conversation with T. Creepy Neighbor, which led to the animal-control people showing up, which is evidently the only agency that knows what the telltale smell indicates. Long story short: The kittens were forgotten in the David Lynchian scene of– are you ready? One hundred twelve live chihuahuas and 150 dead ones.

The dead ones were in freezers. Relax.

We’ve all seen these cases before. I certainly understand the attention paid to them — bizarre is newsworthy, after all — but they always make me uncomfortable. It starts with the unbearable TV coverage, where anchors who are paid half a million dollars a year to look good and act stupid furrow their brows over the teasers: “You’re not going to believe what they found in a Dearborn man’s home!” (Try me. I’ve seen it all, lady.) Then the piece itself, in which neighbors — are they all idiots? Everywhere? — tell the world what they “seen.” Also, what they told the police: “I seen it was looking bad over there, so I told them cops…”

This is followed by the newspapers, stories pitched only slightly more upmarket, filled with helpful, “reader service” details. Click here to download an application to adopt one of the rescued dogs. My personal favorite was “Chihuahua facts,” a sidebar of general information on the breed — size, description, history. Also, this line, which made me laugh out loud: “The live Chihuahuas, many of them shaking and traumatized…” Which would make them different from other chihuahuas how?

Through all of this is the guy’s lawyer, returning all his phone calls, trying to be heard, beating one drum: Hello? MENTAL ILLNESS! We’ll see how it works; most people don’t want to hear stuff like that. The neighbors will be dragged out before the TV cameras to opine he weren’t crazy, while the papers file more helpful sidebars:

Kenneth Lang Jr. simply couldn’t throw anything away – not trash, not feces, not dogs.

I like how she slips the feces in the middle of that series. And then, the Edna Buchanan jujitsu:

Not even the dead ones.

Enough. This poor man. I suggest the Witness Protection Program, perhaps to a place with a big yard, three chihuahuas and a vet who sees to it that everyone is spayed and neutered. Besides, all this talk of nervous little dogs distracts us from the real news of the day, yet another chapter in the long dick of Kwame Kilpatrick. Turns out the former mayor was personal-relationshipping with the federally appointed monitor overseeing the consent decree to clean up the police department. She’s been billing the city $287.50 an hour for years, to the tune of $10 million. Well, that’ll buy a lot of romantic weekend getaways — smart money says she was the woman who enjoyed a $500 “couples massage” with KK in Asheville, N.C., where he was keynoting a MLK Day thing.

Sadly, that also distracts the public from Martha Reeves’ latest antics:

Although Martha Reeves is internationally famous for being the lead singer of the group Martha and the Vandellas she has now decided to use her middle name on the ballot.

The flier reads Martha Rose-Reeves on one side of the flier and Martha-Rose Reeves, with the hyphen in a different spot on the back.

The flier also states, “Elect Martha-Rose Reeves and the Vandellas.”

When asked if the Vandellas were also running for council, she said, “Yes. They are running and dancing in the streets.”

Let me just say it again: I love this town.

So, a bit of bloggage?

Hank Stuever has some big shoes to fill. Congratulations. Also, scroll down to his Madonna entry. Stew bird!

Sarah Palin leaves lesser humorists baffled, but Jon Stewart always seems to step up. (Video link is hosed; I’ll try to fix it when Comedy Central does.) Best single line goes to Gawker, however:

It’s like Peggy Noonan, Jack London, and William Faulkner wandered into the woods with three buttons of peyote and one typewriter, and only this speech emerged.

Meanwhile, Michele Bachmann replaces Sarah Palin as the national sweetheart of crazy.

Breakfast time, then gym time. Then Russian time, then Hammer time!

For our 48-hour film challenge, we needed a car that might be driven by a creep. Of course, we turned to Detroit’s back catalog. (It helped that it was owned by our designated Car Guy, the guy who got us the stretch limo last year.) I became its caretaker, and drove it home overnight. It was a Buick Estate Wagon, seemingly far older than its 19 years. I marveled at its squishy handling, floaty ride and 25-foot-long hood:

It’s hard to imagine anyone was making cars like this in 1990. This was well into the era of the minivan, a veritable Ferrari in comparison. No wonder moms were already opting for Broncos and Blazers. Not that one of those could give you the design filigree of…oh, how about the driver’s-eyeline external turn-signal indicators? Talk about a detail made for the geriatric pilot.

Oh, well. As Kenan the Car Guy said, “You can put a four-by-eight sheet of plywood in back without folding down the seats.” That’s something. I thought about the name: Estate Wagon. It would be the perfect vehicle for a person with an estate, capable of fetching weekend guests at the train station, with all their luggage in the back. It can haul almost as much as a pickup truck, so you can truck lots of mulch to the cutting beds without making extra trips. And when one would like to repair to the lower pasture for a picnic, the servants can go on ahead with the fixings.

The prototype of this vehicle is called Country Squire, after all.

In our case, the car belonged to “Liam Butler, a painter,” the character that was one of the required elements in our challenge. The others were a book and “Why don’t you explain it to me?” and our genre was thriller/suspense. As usual, all I can see are all the script problems, but objectively speaking, I think our entry, “A Little Knowledge,” should be a contender. Our group screening is Thursday; I’ll know more then.

One thing I do know: I never ever ever ever want to shave a deadline that close again. We’re talking seconds.

And now I am exhausted. Having spent the entire weekend more or less ignoring the news other than the weather report for Metro Detroit, it seems I missed a few things. Sarah Palin’s fare-thee-well, for one. Good thing Roy didn’t:

She also attacked Hollywood, which enlists “delicate, tiny, very talented celebrity starlets” in their “anti-Second Amendment causes,” against which “patriots will protect our individual guaranteed right to bear arms.” She warned against “enslavement to big central government,” because “it can’t make you happy or healthy or wealthy or wise,” which comes instead from “God’s grace helping those who help themselves.” She portrayed her resignation as another way of guarding Alaska “like that grizzly guards her cubs, as a mother naturally guards her own.” She also encouraged supporters to “enjoy the ride.”

What? Are you kidding me? Am I going to have to watch this thing, now? Evidently.

No wonder people stop paying attention to the news, if that’s the sort of people you find there.

My morning is crushing, but my afternoon looks better. Back then.

I see more of these around here than I did in Indiana. In Royal Oak the other day:

That is, a Ford Crown Vic Police Interceptor, still the best all-purpose cop car of the era, now retired to the private sector. I assume they’re great on the straightaway, less so in the corners, can idle until the cows come home and have lots of butt-funk and spilled coffee in the seat cushions. Alan and I went to a dinner thing earlier in the year, and sat with someone who drove one, decommissioned from an unknown p.d. somewhere in the area. It needed a good deal of work in the low four-figure price range, he said, but once he got it running right? Awesome.

Of course, like the example above, you always hope you can find one with the black-and-white paint job and cow catcher intact. I wonder if, like an old fire horse, it tries to respond when called for backup.

OK, then. It’s Friday, and my attention is preoccupied with the weekend’s activity, the 48 Hour Film Project, beginning today at 7 p.m., concluding, duh, 48 hours later. I guess this entitles me to display a badge:

Here’s something else I’ve been meaning to post for a while; it came up in my drug searching this week. It’s an AP story about the effective legalization of marijuana in California. If you read the New Yorker story a few months ago, little here is all that shocking, but it’s still…shocking. If you’re old enough to have lived through criminalization, decriminalization, recriminalization and now de facto legalization, it’s hard to believe what it’s come to. You can now get butt-kicking pot over the counter with nothing more than the additional bureaucratic step of getting a winking doctor to write you a scrip. Voters approved medical marijuana use in Michigan last year, so I’m paying close attention.

To be sure, I’m not crazy about this; the last thing the world needs is more impaired drivers. On the other hand? It’s pot. I’m reminded on a nice exchange in “Jackie Brown,” Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget Fonda:

ORDELL I’m serious, you smoke too much of that shit. That shit robs you of your ambition.

MELANIE Not if your ambition is to get high and watch T.V.

In other news that turns up when one of your search terms in “prescription drugs,” an Australian daily is reporting Michael Jackson had a chemo port — essentially, a permanent IV site — in his neck. No link; story’s gone; it must be vile libel. Disregard what I just said.

Thanks to Hank Stuever, who posted it on his Facebook yesterday, this is my daughter’s new favorite YouTube video, and perhaps mine, too:

And finally, speak now or forever hold your peace. If ever a video deserved to go viral, it’s this one:

I remember how crestfallen my Catholic bride friends were, when the priest told them they couldn’t play “Here Comes the Bride” in the church. Wait until they getta loada this.

Off to obsess, worry and have stage fright. Starting gun at 7! Think I’ll go ride my bike.

In the closed and humid little world of newspapering, the sports desk is commonly called the Toy Department, and yes, they resent it terribly. (My feeling has always been: Walk into any newsroom and follow your eyes to the men dressed like overgrown toddlers. Guess where you’ll be.) However, I never thought it was entirely apt, especially when there’s a features department nearby.

What is it with the New York Times, anyway? They aren’t fit to carry the WashPost’s water in features, and every time they try something like this, they only embarrass themselves:

…As this particular summer finally heats up, even citizens who believe that climate control is a God-given right may be questioning whether (air conditioning) has become a luxury they can no longer afford.

Really? This I have to read. First note the weasel words “may be,” a trend-follower’s best friend, along with “seems” and “appears,” a way to spin a trend out of three anecdotes. Then a nod to the obvious — air conditioning is a relatively recent wrinkle in human endeavor, “the great pyramids of Egypt were built al fresco,” blah blah. Then on to the masochists:

Lisa Finkelstein, a freelance editor, stopped using the semi-functional air-conditioning and heating unit in her rented cottage in Tallahassee, Fla., two years ago, mostly for economic reasons.

(Ha ha. As one who shares Finkelstein’s job title, I’d say “mostly for” is entirely b.s. “Entirely for” is more like it. But it gets better.)

“We spent an entire summer getting to know our kids by sitting outside trying to keep our electricity bill down,” said Ms. Holmes, who estimated that the family saved $2,100 last summer; they are repeating the experience this year. “It was very therapeutic and we got closer. We also got thinner — all of our diets changed because we were eating a lot of grilled food. And by the time fall came around, with the change in the economy, we had learned to live off less. So when everyone started talking about how hard things are, we felt like we had already experienced the worst of the worst. It prepared us for the whole year.”

Weight loss! Win-win. I’m sure the kids will look back on their summers of sweaty Monopoly fondly. But there’s more:

“In our social circle, use of the air-conditioner is extremely limited,” said Martin Focazio, who lives in Upper Black Eddy, Pa., and commutes into Manhattan four days a week to his job as a digital media strategist. “It’s not like we’re health-nut crazies or a bunch of dirty hippies dancing naked around the fire. We’re all white-collar geeks living an exurban lifestyle. We just all share the philosophy of rolling with the seasons if you can.”

“In our social circle” = “smug assholes.”

For the record, I get along without a/c as much as possible, too. After all these years in the Midwest, I’ve come to enjoy our warm months. My indoor-temperature comfort zone tops out at 79-80 degrees, however, at which point I flip the switch and don’t feel bad about it for even a minute. I’ve known a few alt-lifestyles types, who try to overthink every economy, and draw squiggly lines around this one (Zen), excluding that one (drudgery), etc. The same woman who gave up her dishwasher because she likes a few minutes of peace and quiet and manual labor after meals wouldn’t dream of washing her lingerie by hand, and vice versa.

It’s all just how you choose to live, that’s all. Finally, we get to my favorite anecdote:

Kim Gorode said her cat became dehydrated from the heat the first summer she went without air-conditioning in her fourth-floor Brooklyn walk-up apartment.

“I had just moved to New York and had no money, and I thought I could get by with fans,” said Ms. Gorode, a 26-year-old who works in public relations.

But about halfway through the summer, Waldo, her orange tabby cat, began vomiting and passing out.

“The vet put him on medication and gave him a saline IV for rehydrating,” she said. The bill for $400 dwarfed the $100 she wound up paying for an air-conditioner.

When in doubt, do it for the kitties.

When my dog was younger, he’d come in from his walks and find the tile hearth, upon which he’d lay belly-down, terrier-style, with his legs sticking straight out behind him. Dog a/c. Smart dog.

Oy, another long day awaits at the end of it, i.e, a seven-hour shift editing health-care news, starting at 6 p.m. I wouldn’t do it without proper a/c on a bet, but what that means is, it’s time to step away from the keys and rest the ol’ wrists. In the meantime, chew on this:

Jon Carroll examines the Tour de France, finds it confusing. Worth reading for one nice simile: Philadelphia Eagles fans are darned Franciscan monks compared with these people. I’ve often wondered how the riders stand the close quarters, m’self.

Gymward bound.

This birther video was going around yesterday; you’ve probably already seen it, but here it is, if not. I can’t decide if it’s hilarious or frightening. The screechy speaker with her sense of wounded entitlement, the masculine YEAHS from the crowd, the hysterical Pledge of Allegiance — scary and funny. “I don’t want this flag to change, I WANT MY COUNTRY BACK.” You want to know who the bitter gun-clingers are? Exhibit A.

Sometimes you wish people could just summon the character to be overtly racist. At least it would be a position with a little risk attached, like Bruce Willis standing in his sandwich board at the beginning of “Die Hard: The One Where They Steal All the Money in the World.” This birth-certificate stuff is just chickenshit. Some of the analysis is so baroque it makes Andrew Sullivan’s obsession with Sarah Palin’s amniotic fluid look practically sane. I urge you to read Timothy Egan’s NYT piece of earlier this week, in which he notes:

When candidate Barack Obama made that comment about bitter people in small towns clinging to guns and religion, he was criticized as a clueless elite from the big city. No one paid attention to the first part of what he said:

“You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration and the Bush administration.”

Every president said he would do something about it, Obama continued, but never did.

Well, exactly. I can’t help but think that if everyone was making a living, we wouldn’t all want our country “back.” Back from what? But then, one should never underestimate the power of a good conspiracy theory. From my earliest days in talk radio, I remember Federal Reserve Frank, who called regularly to alert the world to the vast conspiracy of European bankers — gee, who would those folks be? — who were manipulating world currencies and business and I forget all what. Sometimes he would bring up Ezra Pound, which before this I had only known as a fairly impenetrable poet. Pound was “a very smart man,” F.R. Frank would say, so if he thought the Fed was a problem, why couldn’t I? I should have made him explain “The Cantos” to me.

Anyway, Birthers. Some of the comments at this LGM post get into the so-called nuances of the argument, if it can be called that.

Maybe it’s not the conspiracy, but the lost cause that’s the lure. Suppose, through some miracle, it was somehow found that yes, these people are right, and Obama isn’t qualified to be president, setting off a Constitutional crisis and probably widespread civil unrest. They’d be like the dog that caught the truck. They’re much happier chasing and whining.

Which brings us to another video, which I watched on Slate’s V site with a mounting sense of astonishment. It’s about a woman who describes seeking out the hardest-case shelter dog in L.A.’s hard-case shelter, only to discover, after a brief honeymoon period, that her abused pit bull/dalmatian mix (which she couldn’t keep, by the way — this adoption was only about “saving” it until it could be raised by someone else) was so unstable it wasn’t fit to live among humans. I had to watch it twice to absorb both the amazing quotes (“He had been everything to me in the two weeks I had him”) and the thread of her story, which boiled down to: Insane, abused dog saved from shelter death, attacks people, sent at great expense to “dog sanctuary” in Texas, where it continues to absorb her money at the rate of $50 a month until it dies. Happy ending! “It’s the best thing I could have done.”

No. No, it’s not. The best thing would be for the dog to have been humanely destroyed while still at the hard-case shelter, and for you to be sending $50 a month to a children’s charity. When I used to ride, every so often a girl (always a girl) would get attached to a hard-case horse, a bucker or bolter or biter or spooker or whateverer. Most horses are sweet or at least tractable on the ground, and the rider/owner would anthropomorphize that the animal was fixable, kind of like an abusive husband who only punches when he’s drinking. The cycle of misbehavior would continue until the rider became permanently fearful, which fed the misbehavior, and never mind the idea of taking this beast to a show, ostensibly what everyone was working toward. Finally, it would be time for the trainer to make the Speech, which boiled down to: With no shortage of good horses in the world, why waste time on the bad ones? Put out the For Sale sign, get it done and move on. Some people responded to this, others clung to the lost cause.

Some people like being on the losing side. It explains the romance of the Confederacy. In the case of the Birthers, maybe it all comes from the same root of racism. Or maybe it’s unconscious: I’m a loser, and I deserve to be in accord with other losers. If you spend your days paging through websites that reflect your opinions, or poring over documents with a magnifying glass, it reinforces and distracts you from reality.

Meanwhile, why won’t Sarah Palin offer a sample of her amniotic fluid for DNA testing? What is she trying to hide?

Man, I’m late today. Bloggage? Not bloody much:

Wow. Video link.

I want this garage door. The one with the crocodile.

Jim at Sweet Juniper’s got some great summer ivy pictures, here, here and here. Nature is patient that way.

And Detroitblog features a poor man’s bank, i.e., a pawn shop.

Step away from the keyboard, Nance. I have errands to run.

I set out yesterday on my police rounds via bicycle, which would be my favorite workout of the week if not for all the sweating: I cover 15 miles or so with five cop-shop breaks for rest and entertainment. There’s nothing like finding a report on a neighbor complaining that his neighbor’s garden fountain is too loud to brighten a girl’s Monday, or seeing a grimmer one to fuel the grind to the next station.

But alas, it was not to be. The skies opened en route to the Farms, and I had to cut the whole thing short. I knew it was trouble when I stopped at a corner, and just that gentle braking was enough to make me skid. There’s enough skidding to be done around here in winter, no need to pile it on. As I stood under the sheltering eaves, screwing it up for a drenching, one of those Lance Armstrong types blew past — dressed European-style, head down, lean as…well, as Lance. A rolling Nike commercial. Just do it, it said. So I did.

Got pretty wet. But as my dad used to say, “You’re not sugar. You won’t melt.” (Other dads tell their daughters they’re pretty pretty princesses. My father preferred a different model.)

Ladies and gentlemen, a moment of silence: An F.O.M. has died. Which is? Why, a friend of Mitch (Albom), of course. I first discovered the F.O.M. obit when Warren Zevon left us; I thought the top of my skull would fly off, as Mitch told us all how much the deceased had loved… Mitch. Today’s F.O.M. is typical:

We first got to know each other when our books came out a year apart. We shared the joys and pressures of fast success, asking each other, “So what do we do now?” Frank wasn’t much into sports, but he would quiz me about “DEE-troit,” the accent on the wrong syllable, the “tr” rolling through his Irish brogue and making our industrial town sound like something out of “Finian’s Rainbow.”

“You’re a good fellah,” he would tell me, after we did speeches or book fairs together. To sit next to him was to sit at the knee of a better storyteller than your grandfather. And when I played “Danny Boy” on the piano, he would rise as if singing a national anthem.

That’s Frank McCourt, of course. I strived to see anything that would indicate Mitch had even read the man’s books, but other than the obvious Irish clichés — the word “impish” appears, as does “twinkle” — alas there was nothing. But you don’t have to have read a famous author (McCourt) when you’ve appeared onstage with him, do you?

The last song he did with our band was the cowboy tune “Don’t Fence Me In,” an odd choice for an Irishman. But it seems sadly fitting now, because you couldn’t fence him in…

I love things that are “sadly fitting” in retrospect, and especially when they are sadly fitting in a trite, obvious way, don’t you? It’s so satisfying.

Oh, it’s been a great morning for all the bookmarks in my Idiots folder. Lileks:

As I’ve said before, nothing sums up the seventies, and the awful guttering of the national spirit, than a pop song about Skylab falling on people’s heads. “Skylab’s Falling,” a novelty hit in the summer of ’79.

Wha-? Huh? Once again: What the hell is he talking about? A little Googling, and it seems it’s most likely this, and to call it a “hit” seems to be stretching it, but well, when you’re a soldier in the War on Straw, what’s a stretch, anyway. “Skylab” seems to be by none other than Steve Dahl, whose wife reads this blog from time to time; I hope she gets a kick out of this. I remember Skylab fondly, m’self, as I won an office pool on the splashdown site. My guess: Krakatoa, east of Java.

Lileks is dusting off this week’s meme, popular among conservative libertarians: Damn the torpedoes, on to Mars! Depending on where they fall on the spectrum, libertarians will advocate removing the government from everything from zoning to infrastructure maintenance to education, but if you talk to them long enough, you inevitably find the place where they advocate Uncle Sam just write a blank check, and why? Because they like this thing, that’s why, and so you find yourself talking to a person who doesn’t think the government should build an interstate highway, but should sink billions or trillions into a mission to Mars. Perhaps they all imagine that in another time, they would be the men standing on the prows of ships sailing off to the unknown, in profile to a setting sun. Because they are Libertarians, and they are Free.

I need to stop reading these people, although they certainly don’t disappoint in the blogfodder department, do they?

Bloggage elsewhere: I also need to start following Sarah Palin on Twitter, but maybe that’s what Gawker is for.

Speaking of Sarah: Funny.

Back to Gawker: Rachel Maddow, national treasure.

Off to the gym for death squats. Why do I bother? I’m still fat.

A lovely Friday in Ann Arbor, it was. Who said liberals don’t know how to run anything? The tax rate there is approximately the same as it is in this Republican stronghold, and every time I go over there the place is running like a Swiss watch. I rolled in off the freeway, parked in a high school field, climbed aboard a city bus (which, its signage helpfully informs, runs on combination biodiesel/hybrid technology), and was carried to the downtown art fairs in minutes. I’d like to tell you I spent the day absorbing the hundreds and hundreds of booths in the fine, sunny weather, featuring artists in every imaginable medium, but the truth is, I pretty much went straight to a bar and spent a couple hours there, drinking Bell’s Oberon.

I didn’t drive an hour just to drink alone. My buddy Rob Daumeyer, drove all the way from Cincinnati. Rob is one of those people who’s always telling you how stupid he is, how slow-witted, how thick and dull and sludgy between the ears. I guess that way, when he says something really funny, which he does about once every 80 seconds or so, you think, “He’s pretty funny for a moron,” and then he can steal your wallet. Or something. Needless to say, he is no dummy. Rob was my companion during our wonderful year in Ann Arbor, ’03-’04. He summed up the post-Fellowship experience thusly: “Everyone is so smart here. They’re always talking about literature and art and world affairs. Where I live, people say, ‘You ought to buy a boat,’ and that counts as sparkling conversation.” Maybe it was the Bell’s Oberon, or maybe the delivery, but that cracked me up. And so true — whenever I go to Ann Arbor by myself, I eavesdrop. One day in an Indian restaurant, I tuned my ears to three different tables, where the lunch conversations were: Hugo Chavez, monetary policy at the Fed, and the plight of Iraqi Kurds. No wonder no one there worries about their crabgrass.

Walking back to the bus stop, waiting for the third Bell’s to burn off, I bought a pair of earrings for Kate. I’m wearing them now. What the hell, she already has three times as many as I do.

Note that I have changed the book on the nightstand. Besides Hank’s “Tinsel,” I’ve added T.C. Boyle’s “The Women.” You’d think one of the country’s most respected novelists, writing for a respected publisher, could afford a decent copy editor, and yet, there it is, page 32:

And then someone said, “Here, here,” and they were all lifting glasses…

Groan. I see this mistake so often it makes my head hurt. And no, Danny, we haven’t had a DNA ruling yet — it’s “hear, hear,” not “here, here,” and if anyone wants to mix it up over this one, well bring it on. I’m right.

I bet they don’t make this mistake in Ann Arbor. Where everyone is so smart.

(Elsewhere in the same chapter, Boyle has a female character’s hair sweating under her “caftan.” I guess that’s possible — lots of caftans have hoods — but given that the same character appears later with her head wrapped in a towel, is it possible he meant “turban?” That mistake is almost beyond belief, but you never know.)

Well, just look where all our prowess with the language has gotten us: Every so often, when we’re watching HBO, a promo for “Hung” will come on. The announcer says, “Critics agree: ‘”Hung” is big, wicked fun…’” and Alan yells, THAT’S MY HEADLINE. It is. This is what we cling to, we language wizards.

Meanwhile not all is perfect over there in A2. Street fashion:

She wore a 36C. I could read the size. My mother used to call visible bra straps “slovenly.” I think she got it right.

Maybe she was thinking of Huge Chavez.

Meanwhile, some tastycake bloggage today:

You know those makeshift memorials* left for Michael Jackson. A sizable one grew outside the Motown Museum after M.J. croaked, because if there’s one thing this city embraces like a squishy teddy bear left out in the rain, it’s craziness. You rarely know what becomes of them, but not in this case, because the whole shootin’ match was scooped up, loaded into two open-back limos, taken to the cemetery with a police escort, and buried under a headstone with a nice, tasteful, understated inscription that I think Joe Jackson would be proud of. In the only evidence I’ve seen that maybe someone in Detroit has two brain cells to rub together, the police now call the four-car escort “a mistake.” I’m speechless. Read all about it.

* “Makeshift Memorial” — still a great name for a band. Happy Monday, all.