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.