I watched a little of the Kennedy wake, and a little of the Kennedy funeral mass. Both seemed like pretty standard affairs as these things go, if a bit funnier — those Irish like a wake to be celebratory, and Teddy’s certainly was. Lance Mannion found a nice clip, here, lengthy but worth the time. I surfed around and checked out the opposition. The reaction ranged from silence to the usual Mary Jo Kopechne Mary Jo Kopechne blah blah blah. (The ones with college degrees said Bork Bork Bork blah blah blah.) I’m amazed at how so many people who claim a fierce belief in God also cling to the idea that God sent Kennedy’s soul straight to hell for “murdering” Kopechne, as though they missed that part about forgiveness for all sinners, even Kennedys. I’m also amazed at how many people expressed the belief that in a just world, Kennedy would have “died in prison” for his crime in 1969, which shows a rather tenuous grasp of sentencing guidelines, too.

At the heart of it all was something else, I think — an ugly resentment of the talented and fortunate. We all suffer to some extent — who hasn’t felt envy? — but at the end of Kennedy’s life even those who disagreed with him would have to admit he spent at least some of it living by the words he spoke so memorably at his brother’s funeral, 41 years ago:

My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it.

You can argue with how he went about it. But not with the effort.

At the other end of the spectrum, I also caught up with “Project Runway.” The challenge was to create a maternity dress for one of those actress-models whose face I only see in supermarket checkout lines. Rebecca Romijn? Yeah. The last name is pronounced Romaine, like the lettuce, which, in pregnancy, she looks like she’s finally adding a little grilled chicken to. Brave, brave actress-model. Anyway, it’s early in the competition, which means the worst competitors are still there, many of whom treated Romijn’s condition the way Scarlett O’Hara’s contemporaries did — as something to avert your eyes from and get all ooh-ick over. They had great fun playing with the preggo pillows they were issued to tie to their dress forms; a few couldn’t figure out where they should go. Another said of Romijn, “she’s in her second semester, or whatever.” How hilarious. You’d think none of them had mothers themselves, and based on one of their designs, which was used as inspirations chickens and eggs, maybe not.

He’s the guy who got booted. “What woman wants to look like a chicken?” asked Heidi Klum, mother of four. The winner was a woman. Ha ha ha.

And then it was “Sunshine Cleaning,” which shows you what great actors can do with a slight little script, but I liked it just the same. How can you not like Amy Adams, adorableness incarnate? My neighbor in Fort Wayne cleaned houses, and in just a few years’ worth of chats, gave me enough material for five novels. She was always discreet, but just the broad outlines were amazing. One client told her how they’d bought their house cheap, because it was nearly a teardown, so trashed had it been by previous owners. Oh? Yes, those same owners had deserted it, first by mom and then by dad, both of whom moved out of state and left their two inconvenient teenage children to take care of themselves for their final year or two of high school, sending money every so often. The kids took their abandonment issues out on the house. The authorities never knew. Now there’s a movie.

What am I writing about today? Hell if I know. Best skip to the bloggage:

A friend posted this on Facebook over the weekend: Afterbirthers Demand to See Obama’s Placenta. Yes, the Onion. Yes, funny.

I’ll say it again: I remember when Spike Lee criticized Michael Jackson for altering his “negroid nose.” How things change.

And now it’s Monday. Sigh. Last week of summer vacation for someone I know.

Life is good. And colorful.

Jeez, it’s cold. August 28th, it’s just above 60 degrees outside and we’re looking at a day of rain. The acorns are falling on the roof with such violence it sounds like we’re under sniper fire. The squirrels come down and eat them on the deck, leaving the shells to embed themselves in your sandals (which it’s almost too cold to wear) so you track them through the house, and find them later, shrieking, “Is that BUNNY POO?”

But it’s not. In fact, Ruby seems more or less trained to go in her cage, although that hasn’t really been tested. All I know is a) she hasn’t gone outside the cage, and b) when I put her in her cage, she goes. She hasn’t hopped to her cage to eliminate when the urge hits, which is the gold standard for me. This will do for now. Her explorations are a little nerve-wracking, as she doesn’t come when called or make any noise, so tracking her down for caging before an extended absence from the house can be an exercise in frustration — there’s a reason the captain warns Luke of gettin’ the rabbit in him, and I don’t need to explain that reference, do I?

What a great movie.

I’m not complaining about the weather, exactly. I’m just whining a little bit. The weekends of warmth are dwindling, and we haven’t really had too much of it. Still, this beats January with a stick. And the lake’s nice and full again. I’ll take it.

I can’t stop thinking about this poor woman in California, the one abducted at 11 and kept as some creepazoid’s slave for 20 years. The latest is, he’s given at least one interview from jail, and oh I can’t wait for the next six weeks of Nancy Grace now:

Mr. Garrido gave a telephone interview from jail to station KCRA in Sacramento, saying, “In the end, this is going to be a powerful, heartwarming story.”

“My life has been straightened out” in recent years, he said. “Wait till you hear the story of what took place at this house. You’re going to be absolutely impressed. It’s a disgusting thing that took place with me at the beginning, but I turned my life completely around.”

The story goes on to note postings from a blog, in which he writes, “I have produced a set of voices by effectively controlling the sound to pronounce words through my own mental powers.” Great. Another untreated schizophrenic sex offender left to wander the world for most of his life. I suppose the shitstorm will fall upon the parole officers or other corrections personnel who failed to notice he had a “compound” in his back yard with three prisoners. I’m sure MichaelG can tell us more about the caseload a California parole officer carries in a slow week, much less one in a state with no money. (And I believe this municipality is Michael’s, or was, as well.)

The interview is really a trip, combining Garrido’s insanity with a certain TV preacher delivery. And now this girl, this woman, gets to live the rest of her life. Remember, God loves us all very very much!

I should dig up some bloggage, but I’m too lazy right now. I just ordered Snow Leopard and am about to order a new, ginormous hard drive for my laptop, so now I’m going to plan all the new software I’m going to install, and how carefully I’m going to store my data, and how everything is going to be tagged and filed and where I can find it when I need it, including pictures and music and video. No more digital slovenliness for me, no sir.

OK, no bloggage, but this anecdote from one of Alan’s co-workers, who stopped at a Detroit IHOP for a very late dinner a couple Fridays ago, and was met at the door by a security guard, who first asked if he was carrying any weapons and then subjected him to a pat-down search before allowing him into the inner sanctum of pancakes. God, I love this town.

Have a good weekend, all. See you Monday.

My schedule’s been all bollixed up these days, and I keep missing my 10 a.m. exercise class, Pumping Iron for Cougars and a Few Fat Girls Like Me. So last night I went to Pilates for the first time. Mat Pilates, aka the kind you do in a class, as opposed to the one you do on the special machine, which is called a Reformer.

“Despite the somewhat medieval name,” begins the About.com article about the Pilates Reformer, and that phrase says it all. Isn’t every exercise program an attempt at reform, as it was practiced in the medieval age? Pilates, I found, will reform you fast. Whether you will be aware of your reformation is another matter, however. It depends on whether you can see through the film of sweat pouring into your eyes as you observe your teacher holding herself in the shape of a V, balancing as lightly on her butt as a bird balances on a wire. “Hold it for a moment,” she purrs, holding it for several moments.

The teacher had a lilting accent that I suspect was Brazilian. Those Brazilian babes invented the naked bathing suit, and I guess this is how they stay in shape for it. All I know is, my ass was thoroughly kicked, and today I’m swallowing ibuprofen.

Yoga is like this, too. I used to think of yoga as a gussied-up form of stretching. Due to my freakish anatomy — I’m all torso, with an inseam of about 18 inches, a human basset hound — I can easily get into plow position, even without a warmup. About 10 minutes into my first yoga class, struggling to balance on one leg, a sheen of perspiration popping out all over my face, I thought, goddamn, so much for relaxation. I also lack the ability to do the things yoga teachers are always crooning about: Find your center and empty your mind. The only place I ever successfully emptied my mind while using my body was on horseback, and the feeling was so wonderful, and fleeting, that I’m still suspicious of it. (Nothing like jumping eight fences at a good clip and then having no memory of it to flip you out.) Find me a person who can empty their mind at will, in a darkened room with yoga music playing in the background, and I’ll show you a person who needs some more to think about.

Bloggage? Sure.

The reaction to Ted Kennedy’s passing was about what you’d expect — and yes, Roy did the roundup — but for sheer amusement, yesterday was a good day to see why I keep Rod Dreher in the folder called Idiots.

At 7:14 a.m.: The tragic life of Ted Kennedy: All the potential for greatness he possessed he squandered because of his inability to transcend his own all too human weaknesses. Chappaquiddick was only the worst of it. He did, of course, achieve a kind of greatness, and one shouldn’t try to take that away from him. But it’s hard to think of him this morning without thinking about what might have been had he been able to bear the burden of history and his slain brothers’ legacies. He could have done so much more with what he had been given.

Commenters pile on, say, essentially, WTF? At 2:51 p.m., When Ted Kennedy redeemed himself: You never really know about people, do you? …I’m glad it’s up to God to judge the eternal fate of human souls, because only He can know the whole story.

At 6:28 p.m., Ted Kennedy as Don Draper. It’s the best of the lot: But given how accomplished Kennedy was as a legislator, I do wonder how much we have lost because a Ted Kennedy is not really possible today — meaning how many talented but deeply flawed men never go into public life because they couldn’t survive the moral judgment of the public regarding their personal sins and failings, and no longer have the protective veil of social hypocrisy to shield themselves.

Hours later, still more: On abortion, a once-Catholic Ted Kennedy. He used to oppose abortion, then “grew in office.” I guess he was right the first time then, eh?

For a much better take, I prefer Lance Mannion’s Ted and me. I excerpt, but just go read.

Off to cougar class. If I can still move.

A note to my right-of-center readers: I kept my mouth shut about Ronald Reagan. (I did not keep my mouth shut about daughter Patti’s fairly repulsive essay for People magazine, but a girl has her limits.) I understand he was important to many people, who found him to be an inspirational leader. I don’t believe that the dead should never be spoken ill of, but I thought I could extend Reagan a decent interval of silence.

I don’t expect that much courtesy from the other side in the matter of the late Sen. Edward Kennedy. The corpse isn’t even cold, and I’ve already read my first Mary Jo Kopechne crack. But I’m willing to let them surprise me, and if they don’t, I’m sure Roy will have the roundup.

In the meantime, I recommend the NYT obit, here. Nicely done.

Text and audio of his eulogy for brother Bobby is here. It’s the only one I could find that was untainted by some YouTube impresario’s addition of sappy music. When will people learn? When the facts — or the text — are powerful, let it speak for itself.

Short one today, dawgs. Today was school registration, which bit into my blogging time, and I still have buttloads of work to do today. Besides, I want to introduce you to someone. This is Ruby:

She’s the newest member of our household. Kate has clamored for a bunny for a while now, but I told her it was out of the question with a terrier in the house, even a very old one. When I stopped at the vet to pick up Spriggy’s ashes, I saw a flyer on the board seeking a new home for Ruby. I’m a big believer in fate in animal/human relationships, and this one seemed to fit the bill. I was a little taken aback by the home Ruby was leaving, a gracious mansion on the lake and loving owners whose lives can no longer accommodate her. I told Ruby, “You are moving to a more proletarian neighborhood,” and the owner had the good manners to laugh (and throw in the cage and all supplies free). But hell — Ruby’s a damn rabbit. She no longer has a water view, but she will find a new family of human suckers willing to peel her carrots for her. So far, she’s mainly been preoccupied with hopping, sniffing and exploring. (I’m thinking of spraying her with Endust and letting her take care of the nooks and crannies under the furniture.)

Her name, of course, comes from the Max and Ruby books, which we all loved when Kate was little. I briefly considered Coozledad’s rabbit-naming system, adopted after he took in some rescue rabbits and was informed, by the shelter administrator, that rabbits were “vermin.” The bunnies were named Ethel Merman Vermin and William Tecumseh Sherman Vermin. But I didn’t think Kate would get the joke.

So Ruby it is.

Not much bloggage today, but what I have is good: My name is Roger, and I’m an alcoholic. Ebert does A.A.

And I do work.

The first story that kicked up in my health-care searching last night was this, about the GOP’s “seniors’ health care bill of rights.” Taking a page from the Contract with on America playbook, Michael Steele has evidently found what he thinks is the key to elderly America’s heart.

I finally saw Jon Stewart’s takedown of Betsy McCaughey last week (parts one and two), although I’m sure she wouldn’t describe it as such. At the end of it, I couldn’t help but share Stewart’s frustration (and yes, I’m sure it was engineered to elicit just this response): It’s possible — maybe — to have an honest discussion about health policy reform. But it’s impossible when lying liars like McCaughey and her BFF Sarah Palin hog the spotlight with death panels and death books and SAVE MY DOWN SYNDROME BABY OH MY GAW.

The NYT has a profile today on Ezekiel Emanuel, Rahm’s brother, a physician and bioethicist, who is advising the Obama administration, or trying to:

Largely quoting his past writings out of context this summer, Betsy McCaughey, a former lieutenant governor of New York, labeled Dr. Emanuel a “deadly doctor” who believes health care should be “reserved for the nondisabled” — a false assertion that Representative Michele Bachmann, Republican of Minnesota, repeated on the House floor.

Former Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska has asserted that Dr. Emanuel’s “Orwellian” approach to health care would “refuse to allocate medical resources to the elderly, the infirm and the disabled who have less economic potential,” accusations similarly made by the political provocateur Lyndon H. LaRouche Jr.

In fact, Dr. Emanuel has written more than a million words on health care, some of which form the philosophical underpinnings of the Obama administration plan and some of which have enough free-market elements to win grudging respect from some conservative opponents.

The debate over Dr. Emanuel shows how subtle philosophical arguments that have long bedeviled bioethicists are being condensed, oversimplified and distorted in the griddle-hot health care debate. His writings grapple with some of the most complex issues of medical ethics, like who should get the kidney transplant, the younger patient or the one who is older and sicker?

Yes, who? Because of course now every single person who needs an organ transplant gets one. No one dies or pulls the strings available to a very rich person with a private plane idling on the tarmac and unlimited resources. The system is perfect now. Let’s keep it that way. Let’s pass a constitutional amendment, in fact — call it Trig’s Law.

Have none of these gasbags heard of the QALY? The quality-adjusted life year is a means for assessing the value of health interventions in the big picture of a patient’s long-term outlook. It’s been around a long time, and it tries to analyze, more or less numerically, whether it’s smarter to give a liver transplant to Steve Jobs or a 70-year-old end-stage alcoholic. It doesn’t consider that Jobs gave us the iPod and has a lot of dough, only who is more likely to get more productive years of life out of the procedure. It is a tacit acknowledgment of what no one, including Michael Steele, seems willing to admit: Life is a terminal disease, and sometimes it makes little sense to spend a few more hundreds of thousands of dollars extending it for one more week.

I think they know this. What makes them uncomfortable is this: There are no firm answers. What works for one patient might not work for the next. It changes from year to year; I’m old enough to remember when Mickey Mantle got his liver transplant, and the debate then was whether he “deserved” it, having destroyed his factory-issued liver with a lifetime of drinking. Livers were scarcer then. In another 20 years, they may be grown in labs from your stem cells, and be the equivalent of expensive hothouse tomatoes. But more to the point: Does anyone think it — QALYs, money, how good your insurance coverage is — isn’t a factor in thousands of health-care decisions made every single day?

Even more to the point: What’s their alternative? And we’ve already heard “allow cross-state competition between insurers.” What’s the second item on the list? P.S. We’ve heard “tort reform,” too, a total red herring — malpractice costs amount to about 1 percent of total health-care expenditures, and I’d like to see the hands of those who believe drug-addicted doctors who make mistakes in surgery shouldn’t be punished. OK, then.

Sorry to start off on such a sour note, but I was still thinking about this hours after scraping the top of my skull off the ceiling. I think this graf, deep in the WSJ story, says it all:

The Republican statement highlights an irony in the health debate, as illustrated during some of the emotional town-hall meetings this month: Many Americans say they fear a government takeover of health care, even as they resist any cuts to Medicare, the federal government’s largest health program.

Grr.

And now I have a meeting — best thing about meetings for hyperlocal journalism? you can get there on your bicycle — so no real bloggage today. Besides, all I want to talk about is Ann-Margret’s awful singing, and you “Mad Men” fans know what I’m talking about.

Back later.

A few vacation snaps, because isn’t that what you’re supposed to do?

Everybody knows Sue, the T. rex at the Field Museum in Chicago. I tell Kate, “When I was a kid, T. rex were always depicted standing up on their back legs, like Godzilla. This is considered a far more accurate pose, based on analysis of the skeleton. More birdlike.”

Kate says, “Uh-huh,” as though nothing in the world could be more boring. Just once I want a kid who acts like she went to a private school, one of those little success robots with the firm handshake for adults and a reply that lets you know they’re paying attention to everything you just said.

Anyway, here’s Sue:

Alan notices something else about her. Her armature:

“They could have used some crappy clamps, but this is sculptural. Look at the detail.” Each one of the vertebrae has a different attachment to the spine support. It’s simultaneously Victorian and modern, very cool.

Of course, that’s the Field, too — a place that honors the natural world by putting on display hundreds of dead animals. Signs here and there remind us it was a different world once upon a time, before television and hidden-camera technology. Seeing a stuffed wildebeest at the Field was the only way lots of people got to see a wildebeest at all. I think it’s a testament to the work they do that people still see wildebeests there.

I like the Lions of Tsavo myself. Those were some bad-ass lions.

Then it was up the Michigan coast for some beach time. True fun fact: Earlier this year I wrote a story on the tax incentives for making films in Michigan. A guy from the office that handles liaison work with Hollywood swears he has answered this question from California more than once: “Can’t you see Wisconsin from your side of Lake Michigan?” Um, no:

That was a pretty windy day. Lousy for kayaking. Alan, being a resident of the Auto Theft Capital of North America, knows how to protect his property:

Sometimes people say, “Couldn’t a skinny person slide under the Club and paddle away?” I suppose so. But they couldn’t remove it without destroying the cockpit coaming. It’s all about making your stuff more complicated to steal than the next person’s.

Vacation, she is over. I tried very very hard not to pay any attention to the news beyond the important stuff. I ducked in and out of Facebook, just to make sure August is still the month where we care about what the First Lady wears to the Grand Canyon. I also tried not to write too much, just read and think. What I thought was…I should do some more writing. DIfferent writing, anyway. I say this every year. This year I should do it.

When we were in Chicago, we encountered European tourists, at least assuming that a knot of German-speaking people rolling their bags around hotel lobbies are tourists. On my sole trip to Paris in the ’80s I saw a poster in a travel agency, with the usual national icons touting trips around the world — the pyramids for Egypt, Great Wall for China, etc. For the United States, a cowboy rode a bucking bronco, surely a long shot for three days in Chicago, and certainly for a leaf tour through Vermont. What a big country this is; I never get tired of exploring it. I just run out of money.

So, what did I miss? More health-care debate? Meh. I kept up with that via my editing job, which continued through the week. (Long story.) And I thought about it a lot on Friday, when Kate’s mild earache turned into real pain, and we made a detour through an urgent-care center to learn what I already knew: She had an ear infection, and she needed antibiotics. As these things go, it wasn’t so bad — she saw a physician’s assistant, stayed out of the E.R., etc.; we must observe cost-control efficiencies — but once again, it semi-infuriated me. I still think it’s a very real possibility that our little family will be without health insurance within the next few years, because pals? Even with two college degrees, we cannot afford a $1,500 a month nut for health care. No matter what we cut, no matter what we sell. It can’t be done. That’s my personal bottom line.

So now it’s onward into the week, which, as is usual for post-vacation, too much sorting of mail and too little reflection on memories. Except here, maybe. So there’s that.

Bloggage? Sure: Roy on the National Review’s sudden fondness for long-distance psychoanalysis. Funny.

I did a little reading on this model-catfight-blog business, and I still think the most amazing detail is that someone managed to speak to an actual human being at Google, much less get them to reveal an anonymous blogger. They cancelled my AdSense contract, and I still have no idea why; I contacted them about a copyright theft and had to do the entire business through filling out forms. I’m not sure they even actually exist in corporeal form — I think the whole business is a hologram.

Oh, and the new season of “Mad Men” got under way in my absence. What do we think so far?

I think it’s time for breakfast.

We have no cell service, and no USB cord for picture-showin’, but we do have internet. This is just a fresh thread to make room for the ripostes to Jeff, who moments ago dropped this dead mouse on the table:

I continue to be fascinated by how easily folks accept calling Palin stupid and crazy. Couldn’t be sexism, since it’s liberal folk calling her those two traditional marginalizing labels for women who won’t behave properly, so it just must be true. Fascinating.

Jeff? Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And sometimes stupid and crazy? Is just that.

Raining, but the skies are clearing. Might not be a beach day, but it could be a Saugatuck day.

No no no no no I don’t want to step out on the glass carbuncle on the Sears Tower observation deck. But be my guest, dear.

For a Friday when I’m racing to complete a long to-do list ahead of leaving on a much-needed vacation, just some bloggage today. I’ll be in and out of here next week as the spirit moves me; it may move me a lot, or not at all, but I’ll be connected via e-mail and cell, and I’m sure you folks will think of something to talk about in my absence. Note to Chicagolanders — and yes, Peter, I’m looking at you — we’ll have a table Saturday evening at a tapas place in Lincoln Park, so if you want to come, e-mail me for the deets.

So, let’s get to it:

I’m not a fan of Caitlin Flanagan, but there were a few snickers in this piece, ostensibly looking at a new biography of Helen Gurley Brown. It takes a turn into more contemporary figures toward the end, but I don’t want to spoil the surprise.

A friend sent me this YouTube clip a few months ago; it’s part of a longer piece for Current TV (don’t do any work for them near the North Korean border), in which Ira Glass talks about storytelling, but as usual, it’s about something more — about soldiering on when you don’t feel like it — and you should invest five minutes of your time in it.

A friend of mine makes this sound effect when things don’t go well — MWAH-mwahhh. If he could read this story, he’d make it now. Just to entice you to click:

LOCKPORT, N.Y. (AP) – Police say a Buffalo-area tow truck driver was juggling two cell phones – texting on one and talking on another – when he slammed into a car and crashed into a swimming pool.

HT: Rob Kantner, FB friend.

Off to the bank, on the bike. Errands + exercise = multitasking.