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Glad that’s cleared up.

Danny, ever the stir­rer of foul things, wants to throw down. From the pre­vi­ous thread comments:

Hey, Nance, I was at the zoo a few weeks ago and we were check­ing the Pan­das (yes the World Famous San Diego Zoo, of course) and one of the keep­ers and I were chat­ting. She said that the Panda was indeed a bear and that if it felt threat­ened it would attack.

The rea­son I men­tion this is I seem to remem­ber a few years ago that you said that a cer­tain edi­tor whom you were fond of sent you a lit­tle blurb (car­toon panda with a thought bub­ble?) on your copy explain­ing how it really wasn’t a “panda bear.” Was that because your usage of the word “bear” was incor­rect with the word “panda” or was it because the edi­tor thought it was a sloth and not a bear?

Because it’s not ursine, is what I was always told. But keep in mind, Danno, that was in the Pleis­tocene era of jour­nal­ism, when you could still find a glue pot and a green eye­shade some­where in the news­room. Need­less to say, it was long before Pro­fes­sor Google, which explains:

After almost a cen­tury of debate, sci­en­tists were finally able to test the genes from pan­das and deter­mine that they are actu­ally a species of bear.

Well, that’s a relief. Or maybe not. It’s always dif­fi­cult when your long-held beliefs are chal­lenged. Next you’ll be telling me it’s OK to say “first annual.” Then it’ll be time to hang up the ol’ jock.

I also learned in the overnight com­ments that the one, the only Scott Lemieux was in Detroit Metro ear­lier in the year. Did he call? Did he arrange a meetup for D-town fans of LGM? Noooo. And to think, this is the man whom Lance Mannion’s wife, the Blonde — who made a ghostly apparition-like appear­ance in yesterday’s entry, under her pre-internet name, Miss Mont­gomery — raved so wildly about when she met him in per­son last year, at some New York blog thing. (Some­times it sucks to live in the Mid­west. Detroit blog things just aren’t the same.I kept press­ing for details:

“But what was Roy like? Was Roy every­thing you dreamed he’d be?”

“Who? Oh, he was OK. But Scott Lemieux was hilarious.”

As should be plain, I am a lit­tle dis­com­bob­u­lated this morn­ing. I fre­quently am on Fri­day, when I hit the week’s fin­ish line like one of those marathon­ers who can­not go one more step. The week was full of drudgery, but pay­ing drudgery, so it had to be done. I did a 900-word Q-and-A on Tues­day and Wednes­day — Tues­day for the inter­view with Mr. Big Stuff and Wednes­day for the writ­ing. I always think Q-and-As, i.e., sto­ries writ­ten entirely in the subject’s own voice, will be eas­ier. All you have to do is record your talk, tran­scribe what they say, edit it down, slap an intro­duc­tory para­graph on the top, turn it in, send the the invoice. Well. I tran­scribed close to 3,000 words, which took hours, and then dis­cov­ered some­thing about Mr. Big Stuff: He doesn’t do tan­gents, apple-polishing, blather. He spoke in com­plete sen­tences, even com­plete para­graphs. The mild headache of tran­scrip­tion — he spoke slowly enough that I was gen­er­ally able to keep up with the sound file — was replaced by the big one of trim­ming. Ugh. I felt wrung out and run over, but I made dead­line. Yay me.

On the plus side, I had an errand that took me out to Belle Isle, Detroit’s won­der­ful park-in-the-river. Like every­thing here, it’s tragic, too — much of it is neglected and closed and on its last legs. But a pretty lady doesn’t get unpretty just because her dress is torn. It was a gor­geous day, sunny, winds out of the south at a flag-snapping clip; it was a plea­sure just to make the cir­cle drive and take it all in. Guess what was in Blue Heron Lagoon? A blue heron.

A lit­tle blog­gage before I go? Sure:

Crocs are on their last…legs, I guess. Why do peo­ple hate Crocs so? I don’t own them, but I don’t care if you do. It helps if you’re around young girls, upon whom they look per­fectly fine and make cute pool shoes. My own young girl, at 12, now scorns them, pre­fer­ring a Ferragamo-knockoff san­dal I found for her this-summer “good shoes.” She wore them to the Green Day con­cert ear­lier in the week, one of those moments when you can see what she’s going to be when she grows up. Shud­der. A lit­tle more child­hood, please.

I won’t be shav­ing my eye­brows off. Bad hip­ster doo­fus, apparently.

Or you guys can dis­cuss Sonia Sotomayor, if you like. The few moments of the con­fir­ma­tion hear­ings I was able to endure threat­ened to explode my brain. Jon Stew­art sums it up nicely.

Folks, I’m going to Ann Arbor. Enjoy your weekend.

Posted on Friday, July 17th, 2009 at 9:11 am
in Current events.

Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.

45 responses to
“Glad that’s cleared up.”

  1. jcburns said on July 17th, 2009 at 9:57 am

    We inex­plic­a­bly have a urban, hip-hop savvy blue heron at Lake Clara Meer (in Atlanta’s Pied­mont Park) that we see most morn­ings on our before-it-gets-too-damn-hot strolls.

    Also, I couldn’t help but chuckle at this video, which seeks to take the suf­fer­ing of print jour­nal­ists and turn it into, uh, a late night ‘Save the Chil­dren’ infomer­cial or some­thing. News­pa­per jour­nal­ists, once bound­less reser­voirs of self-deprecating humor, might have just enough left in the tank to be amused. Off to buy an AJC. Maybe.

  2. Colleen said on July 17th, 2009 at 10:01 am

    Detroit just makes me sad.

  3. mark said on July 17th, 2009 at 10:29 am

    Wait until you see Detroit, and most of the mid­west, after cap and trade. We lost our labor inten­sive indus­tries to lower cost coun­tries. The energy inten­sive indus­tries will soon follow.

    Sotomayor wil get 90 or so votes in the Sen­ate. Repub­li­cans tra­di­tion­ally give def­er­ence to the pres­i­dent on the “advice and con­sent” thing, after show­boat­ing for a while. The unfor­tu­nate “wise latina woman” com­ment, which means basi­cally noth­ing in terms of her fit­ness for the Court, res­onates poorly with the pub­lic, or so opin­ion polls sug­gest. She’s being flogged beyond rea­son with it to chip away at Obama’s pop­u­lar­ity, not to under­mine her nom­i­na­tion, I think.

    As a con­ser­v­a­tive, I’m con­tent with Sotomayor. Her opin­ions fall well within a broad main­stream and, for some­one on the bench so long, she has writ­ten lit­tle that is note­wor­thy and noth­ing that has been trans­for­ma­tive. She may turn out to be a reli­ably “lib­eral vote” but, like the man she replaces, not an intel­lec­tual force. And while we will never know what pri­vate assur­ances she gave to Obama, she may be some­what unpre­dictable on repro­duc­tive free­dom issues.

  4. Jenine said on July 17th, 2009 at 11:00 am

    My brows are fine, no dec­i­ma­tion con­tem­plated here. But gotta love the sassy advice in the last line of that eye­brow col­umn: “Before shav­ing off both eye­brows, we sug­gest doing just one to see if it suits you.” Ha!

  5. Danny said on July 17th, 2009 at 11:27 am

    {Ahem}

    Nance, glad I could help.

    {cracks knuck­les}

    Now let’s con­tact that old edi­tor of yours and let him know … that is unless a seance is required. I don’t do Santeria.

  6. MarkH said on July 17th, 2009 at 11:31 am

    I’m not an attor­ney, but I couldn’t have said it bet­ter, mark. Let’s get this vote over with and seat her. The 2nd Cir­cuit fire­mens’ dis­crim­i­na­tion rul­ing was reversed, so that should be off the table. As I mar­veled at her tap-dancing abil­i­ties, it seemed she may not be pre­dictable in other issues as well.

  7. Catherine said on July 17th, 2009 at 11:35 am

    Well, those big ol’ black and white pan­das may be bears, but the Red Pan­das are not in fact bears. Some­thing like a skunk or a weasel. And how do I know this? Remem­ber Shifu, the Red Panda voiced by Dustin Hoff­man in Kung Fu Panda? Don’t ever say Dream­works didn’t teach ya nuthin.

  8. coozledad said on July 17th, 2009 at 11:35 am

    When my younger sis­ter was about four, she found a pair of tweez­ers, and aping mom, cleared a cou­ple of impres­sive swathes through both eye­brows. I was the one who first saw her, sit­ting on the floor with a hand­held mir­ror, try­ing to deter­mine if she’d been too bold . When she saw the look on my face, she began to shriek. I had to run like hell to get out of the house find a secluded spot to laugh my ass off and wait for mama to calm down.
    I always kept that image in my head, espe­cially at fam­ily din­ners when the barely masked blood sport of casual put-downs would start to gear up.

  9. Danny said on July 17th, 2009 at 11:44 am

    Cather­ine, I know what you mean. I learned a lot of things from Looney Tunes regard­ing the physics of tra­jec­tory motion and elas­tic col­li­sions (think Road Run­ner and Tas­man­ian Devil). Later on in engi­neer­ing school, these con­cepts came in handy.

    Mary, I asked a coworker about “jolly hock­ey­sticks” and he said that the term’s gen­e­sis was as a descrip­tor for sporty girls at all female board­ing schools who played field hockey.

  10. Catherine said on July 17th, 2009 at 11:51 am

    In more zoo news, one of the SF gay pen­guins left his part­ner for a female with lots of real estate: http://​tinyurl​.com/​l8ppz8

  11. Danny said on July 17th, 2009 at 11:52 am

    Cooz, when my wife was about 13 or 14, her older, pot-head brother told her he knew how to do a shag hair­cut. It was easy. Just swoop all of the hair over from the back of your head to the front and cut evenly. It sounded like a good idea at the time.

    Oh and when I was about 9 or 10, I went to the bar­ber after watch­ing Charl­ton Hes­ton in “The War­lord.” I thought that this was a cool hair­cut and Ralph the bar­ber and my dad agreed and so it was a done deal. Mom was not so happy (she actu­ally cried).

  12. coozledad said on July 17th, 2009 at 12:01 pm

    Funny, That hair­cut is vir­tu­ally the only option I have now. That, or Miller from Repo Man:
    http://​www​.youtube​.com/​w​a​t​c​h​?​v​=​X​4​Q​K​i​Yar9pI

  13. MichaelG said on July 17th, 2009 at 1:00 pm

    There’s noth­ing wrong with “first annual”. It’s a per­fect exam­ple of the hope­ful tense.

    My daugh­ter has had long curly hair all her life. Most of it any­way. There was a short excep­tion. One warm sum­mer when she was around five it took us weeks to per­suade her to let Mommy cut it short. Finally, reluc­tantly she acqui­esced. Later that day we went to Safe­way. An old lady looked over the newly shorn Steph and, in that old lady way, said “What a hand­some lit­tle boy you have.” Life was mis­er­able around the house for a while after that. Hair’s been long ever since.

  14. derwood said on July 17th, 2009 at 1:03 pm

    This is why I like this blog so much. I learned Pan­das were bears and I get a Repo Man ref­er­ence in the same thread!

    daron

  15. Danny said on July 17th, 2009 at 1:22 pm

    Ah, the hair­cuts of our youth. Here are two good ones of our good friend Lori and her brothers.

    In this first one, we have Lori look­ing like a big brother to her two lit­tle broth­ers. Her com­ment on this one was “I don’t know what to say other than that — I am A GIRL!”

    And then there is this vin­tage 80’s photo. Holy Flock of Seag­ulls. Duran, Duran called and they want their hair back!

    EDIT: She would kill me if she knew I shared these. Let’s not tell her.…shhhhhhh!

  16. moe99 said on July 17th, 2009 at 1:42 pm

    My mother ruled how my hair would look until I got to high school in 1966. Before then it was pixie cuts, done by some of Defiance’s finest hair­dressers. So the hair grew for two years, until sopho­more year of high school, Mom told me that if I wanted con­tact lenses, I had to cut my hair. So I received a mod hair­cut where one side was longer than the other. But, of course, boys only like girls that had long hair, even if the short haired girls wore contacts.

    Mis­sion accomplished.

  17. Jolene said on July 17th, 2009 at 2:06 pm

    A pro­pos of noth­ing in par­tic­u­lar, I hap­pened across this very charm­ing arti­cle about Barack Obama’s birth and boy­hood. I’ve read so many sto­ries about him that I’m sur­prised I hadn’t come across this before. Enjoy.

  18. Dorothy said on July 17th, 2009 at 2:53 pm

    Danny that sec­ond one needs to be sent to awk​ward​fam​i​lypho​tos​.com. Immediately!

    And Jolene thank you for send­ing that link. I have a very happy and sat­is­fied feel­ing after read­ing that article!

  19. 4dbirds said on July 17th, 2009 at 3:26 pm

    Meh, every­one knows Obama was born in either Kenya or Indone­sia. :-)

  20. Sue said on July 17th, 2009 at 3:50 pm

    I’m sur­prised no one’s jumped on mark’s 10:29 a.m. “pri­vate assur­ances” com­ment. That should have got­ten responses from at least three peo­ple. Every­one on vacation?

  21. moe99 said on July 17th, 2009 at 4:15 pm

    Sue, Nah. It’s so silly as not to be wor­thy of note or com­ment. I never thought Bush got pri­vate assur­ances from his nominees.

  22. alex said on July 17th, 2009 at 4:35 pm

    Pri­vate assur­ance, Supreme Court is mine!

    O, what a fore­taste of lib­eral times.

    We’ll have abor­tions, and fem­i­nize God.

    And cas­trate the white man and drench him in blood.

  23. Kirk said on July 17th, 2009 at 4:36 pm

    Pan­das offi­cially were not bears in the eyes of sci­ence when I told Nancy that (at least I think I was the one).

  24. Rana said on July 17th, 2009 at 6:38 pm

    Awk­ward Fam­ily Pho­tos is a won­der­ful site. I don’t know which is bet­ter, the awk­ward charm of the poses, or enjoy­ing how much fam­ily mem­bers can look alike.

    I had short hair through­out my child­hood, no doubt due to my mother’s unwill­ing­ness to deal with the fine, eas­ily snarled hair my brother and I inher­ited from our father. (She had long, straight, Indian-like hair for a while, before the winds of Col­orado prompted to her to have it cut into a Sas­soon bob.) Like many short-haired girls I’m sure, I was misin­den­ti­fied at least once as a boy, to my great annoy­ance, and promptly grew my hair long and pierced my ears as soon as I entered high school. Only a year after enter­ing col­lege I had it cut very short, and since then it’s hov­ered between chin and shoul­der length. I still regret some­what not tak­ing advan­tage of my col­lege stu­dent sta­tus to buzz it off com­pletely or dye it a really strange color. You can get away with that sort of stuff at that age; now it would be more trou­ble than it’d be worth.

    We will not speak of the feath­ered era…

  25. Rana said on July 17th, 2009 at 6:40 pm

    Oh, with regards to pan­das, even though they are bears, call­ing them “panda bears” instead of “pan­das” just sounds wrong. Sim­i­larly, I call griz­zlies “griz­zlies,” rather than “griz­zly bears.”

    On the other hand, short­en­ing “teddy bears” to “ted­dies” would be more con­fus­ing than not.

  26. Danny said on July 17th, 2009 at 7:36 pm

    Polar bears.

    Now inter­est­ingly enough, polar bears can mate with griz­zlies. The com­bi­na­tion is some­times called piz­zly bear or gro­lar bear. This reminds me that Napolean Dynamite’s favorite ani­mal is a liger (lion/tiger hybrid).

  27. LA Mary said on July 17th, 2009 at 7:57 pm

    I think crocs are fine for gar­den­ing. You can hose them off.

  28. Rana said on July 17th, 2009 at 8:01 pm

    *try­ing very hard to not come up with an “I am so 12″ response to the notion of “piz­zly bears.”*

  29. Danny said on July 17th, 2009 at 8:46 pm

    Rana, hehe.

    Every­one, remem­ber how I dis­cov­ered a new group that I liked about a year ago (The Cran­ber­ries) and remem­ber how they had already recorded every­thing they were ever going to record and bro­ken up and how I was like Rumpel­stilt­skin? Well I got that beat…

    Today I dis­cov­ered another new group … Faces. And they’ve only been dis­banded for 35 years.

    In my own defense, I will say that Rod Stew­art was also a solo act dur­ing his tenure with Faces. So it’s kinda under­stand­able, right?

    EDIT: Wal­ter Conkrite has passed. RIP, Walt.

  30. moe99 said on July 17th, 2009 at 8:53 pm

    Ok you Hoosiers, is it true that back in the ’60’s the album by the Kings­men, Louie, Louie, was banned for sale in Indi­ana because the offi­cials thought there were dirty lyrics in the song? I remem­ber some­thing like that, but since I was from NW Ohio at the time, I thought I would check with actual residents.

  31. Kirk said on July 17th, 2009 at 8:55 pm

    They were even bet­ter when they were the Small Faces, pre-Rod.

  32. Jen said on July 17th, 2009 at 9:36 pm

    I had short hair until I went to col­lege. My mom and aunt had very short hair, so I copied their style. I was mis­taken for a boy a cou­ple of times, and my mom and aunt were mis­taken for men a few times. In high school, I was quiet a punk and cut my hair really short and spiked it up. (A very butch look, accord­ing to my hus­band.) That, and the fact that I went to my junior prom with my gal pal Erin, prob­a­bly led to those rumors of me being a les­bian. (Erin and I still laugh about that.) I’ve always been pretty con­fi­dent about myself, so being mis­taken for a boy and hav­ing rumors about my sex­u­al­ity didn’t really bother me much.

    I grew my hair long in col­lege, and real­ized it was a pain in the butt. I wear it pretty short now, but in a more fem­i­nine cut than in high school. I get tons of compliments.

  33. Dexter said on July 18th, 2009 at 1:59 am

    I’m tossin’ my AA sobri­ety token away, cuz Kid Rock has unveiled BADASS BEER !!

    http://​www​.freep​.com/​a​r​t​i​c​l​e​/​2​0​0​9​0​7​1​7​/​N​E​W​S​0​5​/​9​0​7​1​7​0​3​0​5​/​?imw=Y

  34. moe99 said on July 18th, 2009 at 10:12 am

    Off to the Laven­der Fes­ti­val in Sequim:
    http://​www​.laven​der​fes​ti​val​.com/

  35. Jim Breiner said on July 18th, 2009 at 12:12 pm

    Belle Isle was sad and bro­ken down back in 1965. But dur­ing the 1920s and 1930s, peo­ple from Cleve­land, like my Dad and his fam­ily, went there for vaca­tion visits.

  36. Danny said on July 18th, 2009 at 1:27 pm

    I would asso­ciate Kid Rock more with Dumb-Ass or Punk-Ass

    Dex­ter, wait ’til some­one of more tal­ent puts out a brew. Like Robert Plant or Jimmy Page: Robert’s Red Ale, Plant & Page Pil­sner, Led Zep­pelin Lager.

    I’m just sayin’…

  37. LA Mary said on July 18th, 2009 at 1:58 pm

    Danny, dis­cover Wilco.

  38. MichaelG said on July 18th, 2009 at 2:28 pm

    Ken Levine has a short and won­der­ful obit on Wal­ter Cronkite.

    http://​ken​levine​.blogspot​.com/

  39. Dexter said on July 18th, 2009 at 3:49 pm

  40. caliban said on July 19th, 2009 at 1:05 pm

    This is entirely to hilar­i­ous not to share:

    http://​www​.thes​tate​.com/​e​d​i​t​o​r​i​a​l​-​c​o​l​u​m​n​s​/​s​t​o​r​y​/​8​6​9​6​4​5.html

    Which part of whited sep­ul­cher escapes the gov­er­nor? I’m pretty sure it was only two spe­cific Moun­tains of Cul­ture he was reclaim­ing in Buenos Aires, and they were actu­ally Tetons. The Fam­ily. The Fel­low­ship. The Mafia. The Cosa Nos­tra. Except mob­sters, in gen­eral, have been patri­otic in a psy­cho­pathic way. These guys think they answer to each other and God has signed off on it. If you shit the bed, Vit­ter and San­ford and a bunch of otd­her Pharisees.

    Chip Pick­er­ing was hav­ing sex with a female mem­ber of the fam­ily whose busi­ness funded his entire polit­i­cal career. Oh, and Chip is the one son of the ulti­mate 20th Cen­tury racist Mis­sis­sippi judge.

    Any­way, three data points make a trend. And these jerks call the house on C Street a church for tax pur­poses. I’d say any politi­cian that’s ever vis­ited the “church” should be chem­i­cally cas­trated and waterboarded.

    And here’s all any­body really needs to know about the health care debate:

    http://​www​.wash​ing​ton​monthly​.com/​a​r​c​h​i​v​e​s​/​i​n​d​i​v​i​d​u​a​l​/​2​0​0​9​_​0​7​/​0​1​9​1​44.php

  41. MichaelG said on July 19th, 2009 at 1:19 pm

    Where’s Michael Jack­son? Did they ever bury him?

  42. Dexter said on July 19th, 2009 at 3:29 pm

    Amanda Rodrigues may be breath­ing a sigh of relief…

  43. LA Mary said on July 19th, 2009 at 3:39 pm

    MichaelG, Jacko isn’t really dead. He’s work­ing in the Best Buy in Los Feliz.

  44. MichaelG said on July 19th, 2009 at 7:29 pm

    Thanks, Mary. For a minute there I was worried.

  45. Dorothy said on July 19th, 2009 at 9:23 pm

    Just one more rea­son I love to hang out here: the two com­ments just above this one.

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