I think I mentioned a few times that I received a Misfit Shine for Christmas — it’s a “wearable,” the latest thing for fitness/health nerds. You put it somewhere on your body, and it tracks your activity level. It sounds simultaneously Orwellian and narcissistic, but I have to say, it got me through the winter and reminded me many times that it wouldn’t hurt to take the stairs. Of a thousand little modifications is a 10-pound weight loss made.

Of course, such a silly-sounding item does have its detractors. I’ll admit it’s silly, but it’s my kind of silly. I need an extra boot in the ass. The longer I live, the more I think the most important lesson is: Whatever works, works. Don’t ask too many questions if it’s working.

But. I’ve learned the Shine can be gamed. Wear it on different parts of your body, and it responds differently. If I tuck it into my bra, I get mad points — it interprets normal jiggling as the exertion of a sprinter. If I wear it on my wrist, it’s much more realistic. On a necklace sort of splits the difference.

All of which makes me wonder what might be coming, now that Apple’s unveiled Healthkit, a health-statistics tracking system that sounds positively Big Brother, except that it could conceivably also save your life.

From the advance look, it appears to do everything but stick a thermometer up your ass, and keeps track not only of the stuff it can read from a wearable — your pulse, temperature and the like — but also recent test results. (Your doctors will upload to the app. Theoretically, anyway.)

It’s simultaneously sort of cool and, frankly, a little frightening. This “cloud” we’re all trusting — what is it, really? Sort of like Jesus’ dad’s house — a place with many mansions, where our only hope is to have a health profile so boring and ordinary no one wants to tinker with it.

On the other hand, say you’re wearing an iWatch or whatever, and it detects a troublesome heart rhythm in your pulse hours before it drops you like a rock? It might be worth the invasion of your pulse-rate privacy, right?

Or it might just be a way to make sure that all your records are with the patient they’re supposed to follow. I doubt they are now.

So. A steamy day downtown today. I took a couple of walks and felt like I’d been misted with canola oil and grime. Summer is here. The children’s sandbox has been opened at Campus Martius Park:

Enjoy it, kids. The real world is nothing like this, except when it is.

So tired, I might die. Talk tomorrow?

Summer colds are the worst. There’s always a likelihood they will happen during the loveliest days of the season, meaning you’ll have the poisoned feeling of lying on your bed all day, too weak to do much more than watch “Mad Men” season-one episodes on your iPad, while the sun shines outside and the leaves wave in a gentle breeze.

On the other hand, why the hell not? It was a great season.

And now, as the weekend wanes and the forecast calls for Monday with a chance of Tuesday, I think the corner has been turned. Paid a bunch of bills and took a short, slow bike ride that didn’t reduce me to a puddle of snot, so evidently the rumors are true: These things aren’t fatal.

In the meantime, I love stories like this. A note from my old boss, Richard:

So I’m sitting in the passport office in the Northfield Township Office in Glenview, explaining to the supervisor why I can’t find a passpost I got more than 22 years ago. I mentioned I moved at least a dozen times since then and that it was in a box somewhere. I mentioned Fort Wayne among my moves.

“Fort Wayne?” she asked. “Do you know Nancy Nall?”

“I hired Nancy Nall,” I answered.

“I love her blog,” she responded.

She knew you weren’t feeling well yesterday and even asked about Kate.

In even more coincidental weirdness, it turns out the passport supervisor also worked with Richard’s wife at a cooks’ store in the Chicago suburbs. Her name’s Jill. Hi, Jill! Glad you met Richard. It’s a tiny little world, ain’t it?

A slow weekend, but there were some outings. Kate’s band played at a bar in Hamtramck. I love their neon; I tried to capture Kate outside and failed miserably, although I had a good time blowing this picture up huge and noting all the noir details:

The guy passing by, waving. The car parked at the curb has a Maine license plate The gas station in the background, where a beatdown was happening as we arrived. (Like good urbanites, we ignored it and hurried inside before the gunfire started. As Elmore Leonard once wrote, if it isn’t our business, it’s probably dope business, and dope business isn’t our business. Paraphrasing.) The light on the glass block above the door. The mysterious black spots on the sidewalk — are they petrified gum? How do they survive, year after year? And of course the model closed her eyes.

The neon got blown out because I metered off the street light. One of these days I’ll learn to take a decent picture.

And one of these days I’ll take some shots of the back yard, which is now more or less fully planted and operational. Later this week, maybe.

I also need to get cracking on my book project. Photos might be more common over the summer.

Hopping to bloggage, one thing my malady this weekend allowed for was to finish Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations.” It seems everyone needs to preface their remarks about it by saying “it’s really long,” and it is, but it’s not preposterously so — maybe 15,000 words, and well worth the hour or so it takes to read. His through-line is the story of African Americans in Chicago, and I don’t have much to add to Neil Steinberg’s thoughts, and he didn’t have much to add other than: read the thing. At least we owe this much:

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”

A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.

I didn’t join in the Maya Angelou mourning last week; I generally don’t get too upset when 86-year-olds leave the world behind. But I was delighted by this video of Dave Chappelle in conversation with her, and you might be, too.

Now off to, as Grantland calls it, fight night in Westeros. Have a good week ahead, all.

I go through that entire brutal winter without so much as a sniffle and then, just as the sweet, sweet summer is dawning, I get a cold — sore throat, the whole nine. Yesterday I came home from work, crawled into bed, and didn’t get out until Alan brought me Thai takeout.

And today I am absolutely slammed.

So open thread for today and maybe tomorrow.

I’ve lost a bit of weight. Not much — I still have 12 pounds to go before the CDC no longer considers me overweight — but enough that my clothes don’t fit right anymore. As much fun as it is to be able to insert your fist between your stomach and waistband, it’s equally a pain to have to keep hitching your pants up. So I’ve been rewarding myself with a little shopping. The closeout place I like for cheap workout gear and this ‘n’ that has been throwing one of these into their delivery boxes:

Speaking of losing weight. Let’s see if we can count all the silliness just on the front of the label. These are “dark chocolate covered real fruit juice pieces.” Please explain how juice, a liquid, can come in a “piece.” Then there’s the mysterious açai berry, which I’ve been seeing in my junk mail for a couple years now — apparently it’s a superfood, or a weight-loss aid, or something. But there’s blueberry in there, too; I have to assume it’s juice, so… this is a mixture of acai and blueberry juice, somehow pieced out and covered with dark chocolate. It’s a “natural source of flavanol antioxidants.” What is this stuff, anyway? It’s health-food candy. It’s not a Snickers bar, it has antioxidants! Antioxidants go in pursuit of free radicals in your body, which everybody knows are rilly, rilly bad. So eat the candy. Guilt-free.

It was tasty, I’ll give it that. Sixty-five calories.

Getting back to the CDC and its body-mass index, which has been criticized for being stupid and inaccurate: I’m going to keep trying to lose, but entirely without any pressure or expectation; the BMI is just a guideline. After years of being nauseated by my thighs (but not enough to lose my appetite), I’ve decided to accept them. I’ve said before that the truth of being female in this culture is, the body you hate today will be the one you wish you still had tomorrow, and I’m going to appreciate mine while it still works and is still relatively pain-free. Strength, flexibility, balance, fun — if it hits on at least three of those cylinders most of the time, I’m going to call it a good day.

Yoga helps with all of this, which may explain its popularity. But for someone like me and, maybe, you — those of us whose heads tend to go buzz buzz buzz all the livelong day — it provides a solid hour in which the sole command is: Pay attention. I have a couple of good teachers at the moment, who are gentle and kind and walk that careful yoga line between too little and too much woo-woo. The other day I was sitting in the deepest twist I could muster, concentrating on breathing and back muscles, and reflected that most of us pay attention to our stomachs and genitals and not much else. I’m willing to believe that breathing deeply in this twist somehow makes my internal organs happy. How can thousands of years of flexible little Indian dudes be entirely wrong?

I can’t get on the antioxidants bandwagon, but I will eat their candy when it comes along.

Sorry to be boring.

A little bloggage:

We’ve discussed the wedding-industrial complex here many times, but I thought this blog post from Esquire.com made an important point: As a proportion of wealth, the typical American wedding is far more expensive than the Kanye/Kardashian affair in Florence over the weekend. And then there’s this part:

The culture that demands a big wedding hurts the poor worst of all. In 2005’s “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage,” Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas explained why even women who didn’t have much money wanted a lavish wedding. “Having the wherewithal to throw a ‘big’ wedding is a vivid display that the couple has achieved enough financial security to do more than live from paycheck to paycheck, a stressful situation that most believe leads almost inevitably to divorce. Hosting a “proper” wedding is a sign that the couple only plans to do it once, “given the obvious financial sacrifice.” This is the equivalent, financially, of cutting of your arm to demonstrate how strong you are. The needs of a big wedding also leads to poor people marrying later and less often than rich people, which brings with it a host of negative socioeconomic consequences.

Yup.

This man is a hero:

The father of a young man gunned down Friday during the rampage in Santa Barbara said he is asking members of Congress to stop calling him to offer condolences but nothing more for the death of his only child, Christopher Michaels-Martinez.

“I don’t care about your sympathy. I don’t give a s— that you feel sorry for me,” Richard Martinez said during an extensive interview, his face flushed as tears rolled down his face. “Get to work and do something. I’ll tell the president the same thing if he calls me. Getting a call from a politician doesn’t impress me.”

If a few more people said that to a few more members of Congress, daily, things might change in Washington. Maybe.

Let’s go out on a bitter laugh; the Onion nails it with just the headline: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

I try to stay away from the internet for at least 24 hours of every weekend, but the news of the mass shooting in Santa Barbara penetrated a lot of my defenses. As soon as I heard the rough outlines of the story — young man with extensive internet history does horrific crime, displaying ties to an internet subculture? How could it not be an internet story?

It’s also not particularly hard to see that when the story touches on the lowest slime-swamps of the internet — the so-called men’s rights movement, and no, I don’t recommend googling — the commentary is going to be fairly horrifying. The Santa Barbara mass murder is particularly so. Here’s a walkthrough, if you’re interested.

And here’s a quote attributed to one of Charlotte’s neighbors, the novelist Thomas McGuane: “I like young girls. Their stories are shorter.” Google that one, and it turns up time and again in quote collections; it’s supposed to be funny. I remember reading it years ago, maybe stripped of the context, although that part I don’t remember. I always thought it was horrible, because it’s so obvious what he’s saying here: Young girls won’t bore you quite so long before you get to fuck them.

I mean, am I missing something here? I’m a feminist, and not a crazy one, but I’m not stupid. Here’s another amusing quote: The problem with women is, they have all the pussy. They say that a lot in Texas, I’ve heard.

The case of Elliot Rodger seems to suggest a guy who, shall we say, internalized fun statements like that and went off in the wrong direction. Well, that’ll happen.

Of course, this story has nothing to do with sexism or cultural static, it’s about mental illness. It’s not about guns, either, or so the zeitgeist has ordained, because the guns were legally obtained.

For the millionth time: America has made its bloody bed, and now we have to lie in it.

Memorial Day evening right now. I can hear fireworks going off in the distance. It doesn’t sound like organized stuff, so I can only imagine some misguided soul believes he’s lighting fuses because yeahhh, America!!!! and not because of dead soldiers. It was a pretty good weekend, all around. Kate and her band were supposed to play at a local bar for some sort of lesbian fun-stravaganza, but at the last minute the phone rang. It was Kate at the bar, telling me the show was cancelled, their part of it anyway.

“We got carded at the door,” she said. The bar has a strict 21-and-over policy, and they would. Not. Bend. She was totally bummed, and so was I, as it’s been a long time since I’ve partied with a bunch of gay women, and was sort of looking forward to it.

“The least they could have done was tell us before we got all our equipment unloaded,” she said. I’ll say.

How was yours? It finally turned warm here, and the last of the yard is now planted. Photos to come.

Last year the Grosse Pointe schools got a lot of bad local publicity, and a little bad national publicity, over the spectacular mishandling of a speech by Rick Santorum at one of the local high schools.

Long story short, the superintendent got played by the teenage Young Americans for Freedom chapter. They allegedly raised the money to pay Santorum’s $18,000 speaking fee — something I don’t believe for a minute — and came to the principal with the request he speak during school hours. Even though there was a perfectly fine policy right there in the rule book saying clubs have to hold these sorts of functions after hours, the principal said yes, then no. The YAF recognized the giant blinking neon sign over that one, and exploited it. There were a few days of yadda-yadda, much of it truly embarrassing, and finally, the sage of Pennsylvania was permitted to speak.

No one remembers what he said, although I’m sure it’s Googleable. Oh, here it is: He challenged them to lead.

Even the YAF must have figured it wouldn’t be able to fool the administration two years in a row, and this year’s speaker was a great deal less sexy: Steve Forbes. Yep, that guy. Parents were presented with an opt-out option, but the hell with that, I figured, let the young people behold this sage of the late-20th-century GOP and hear his lessons.

The Freep said he gave the young people “an economics lesson.” It was not “be born rich, fail to save the family business from the rocky shoal of the internet, then fall back on a still-considerable personal fortune,” but rather, the virtues of a flat tax. What a letdown, although I’m sure Forbes himself was absolutely thrilled that someone wanted to pay for this message, one he’s been delivering since much of his audience was in utero. Loved this detail from the story:

Asia Simmons, 15, of Harper Woods and Chloe Ribco, 14, of Grosse Pointe Woods described the talk as cool and interesting.

(Kate Derringer, 17, disagreed, calling Forbes’ address “really boring.”)

Reporters got a little more out of him, asking about the Detroit bankruptcy. Guess what he said?

Forbes predicted that Detroit could recover quickly after bankruptcy with the right approach, namely a lower tax burden.

Do these guys ever get tired of beating this drum? I guess not, when a trip to Michigan on a lovely spring day is dangled in front of them.

Kate said he also praised corporations for the good work they do. Funny. Kate’s been working almost a year for a corporate-owned ice-cream restaurant that shall remain nameless, and we’ve used it several times to illustrate the need for unions in this country. Once ice cream season slows down in the fall, hours get cut way back — totally understandable. But along with the cold weather came a new wrinkle: On-call hours. Workers are expected to make no other plans for their on-call shifts and stand ready to come in if summoned, but if not summoned? No pay.

“Now you know why labor needs a voice,” I told her many times last winter, sometimes humming “Solidarity Forever.” I’ve also counseled her to quit and find something better, but it appears, like her mother, Kate never found a rut she couldn’t love. (I think that line originates with Laura Lippman.)

So, then, as the opening weekend of summer yawns before us, some bloggage:

I recall when this art theft happened. My friend Adrianne said she’d written a paper on “The Storm on the Sea of Galilee” and had spent a lot of time in front of the canvas, absorbing its composition. She felt a real wound when it and 12 other works were plucked from the Gardner Museum walls and taken who-knows-where; it was an early lesson in the power of public art, one I’ve thought of many times as Detroit’s own art collection has been threatened.

Now it turns out they think they found at least some of the pieces — in the hands of organized-crime figures with Italian names. And here I thought those folks were all about Lladro.

Have a great holiday weekend, everyone. Let’s enjoy every last burger.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Most people think Martin Luther King said that, but it was someone named Theodore Parker. No matter. It’s one of those things to keep in mind when the bastards are getting you down, and also when you consider news like this: Support for same-sex marriage is at 55 percent of the current Gallup poll, and more than 80 percent among young people.

I have to be careful what I say here because of my job, but I think the following is simply a statement of fact: On no social issue of my lifetime has popular opinion shifted so quickly and so radically as same-sex marriage. I’m too lazy to look up the poll before this one, but it was less that 55 percent. And the one before that was less than that.

OK, wait: It’s as close as Wikipedia, which, we must always say, is ALWAYS TOTALLY ACCURATE NO WAIT, shows the movement over time. Something to also keep in mind: Eleven states (including Michigan) had ballot measures on the issue in 2004, widely believed to be a tactic to boost Republican turnout in what was a tight presidential election year. Ten years ago, support was down in the 30s, and most of the ballot initiatives banning it passed in a cakewalk.

Today, the Michigan judge’s ruling overturning the 2004 ban is under a stay, while the attorney general seeks to delay it, citing the will of the people. The people 10 years ago, that is.

All of which leads me to Rod Dreher, who (one of our number said in a private email) is swiftly headed toward John Derbyshire country, if not on race than on gay folks and maybe both. He’s utterly unhinged on the subject, and can’t even get his facts straight:

Another day, another federal judge throws out traditional marriage:

Um, no. Everyone is free to be traditionally married, still. I’m traditionally married myself, 21 years last week. The ruling expands the institution to same-sex couples. More:

Does Judge Jones really think that the sexual complementarity of marriage, which has been the basis of marriage in all places and in all times, until only two decades ago, is fit for history’s garbage dump?

Again, no one is throwing out traditional marriage, in all its sexual complementarity. There are simply more people who can do so. Can’t these people read, or has the red they’re seeing obscured their vision?

Roy has more. When the meltdown comes, well, I’ll be watching.

Not much bloggage today; I didn’t get much reading time. But this:

The only time I watched a mixed-martial arts bout (on TV, at a bar), I was so grossed out I had to turn away. So none of this surprises me.

It’s almost the long weekend. Enjoy it.

Sometime when I was away these past, what? Thirty years? My hometown’s nickname became “C-bus.” Yep, it’s a thing.

I don’t understand it. When I was writing my return address on letters and bill payments all those years ago, I went for “Cols., OH.” When I referred to the city to my out-of-town friends, I’d sometimes call it Cowtown, which was the trendy, ironic preference of the time. But ultimately, it’s only three slurry syllables, and C-bus is silly.

Detroit has a million nicknames, though, and it only has two syllables. But Columbus always suffered from what one of my editors called State Capital Syndrome, that being the bland, centrally located city that was a compromise between the two or three brawnier cities in the same state. Think Harrisburg, Lansing, etc. But in the 21st century, the brawny have been laid low and the nerd cities are in their ascendancy. And so Columbus, white-collar city of state government, higher education, insurance and science think tanks, gets its own hipster diminutive. C-bus.

I’m sort of glad I don’t live there anymore. I couldn’t say that with a straight face.

One final note: When I was there, the lost, economically exiled children of Youngstown would hold a vast party in C-bus, called Y-town is My Town. Speaking of industrial brawn being laid low.

So a quick skip to the bloggage:

Dinesh D’Souza, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

If it’s spring, it’s time for falcon cams. I went looking for some last night and it looks like Fort Wayne’s is up and running. So is Lansing.

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all. Or anyone else.

Bedtime. Have a good hump day.

I keep meaning to tuck my Russian grammar book into my bag on mornings when I take the bus, and forgetting. After the phone gets boring, I end up looking out the window, and today I decided I’d been too hard on “Twelve Years a Slave.” I found myself thinking about Michael Fassbender, who plays an exceptionally cruel slave master.

His performance captures not only the cruelty (the easy part), but the way slavery corrupted everyone it touched. It’s kind of a brilliant performance, in fact, as his character, Epps, has to beat, rape, humiliate and otherwise be almost one-dimensional in his insane evil. And yet, there’s something behind his eyes that says, this isn’t easy for me, either. How the hell did he do that? I guess that’s what great acting is.

And with that, I feel like I’ve said what there is to say today. It was an enervating day, but it ended with grilled chicken and a black-bean salad thing I sort of made up on the spot, and it was great. Could be a lot worse.

So let’s get to the bloggage:

You Lynda Barry fans take note: She’s alive and well and teaching at the University of Wisconsin. Alan and I saw one of her plays in Chicago early in our courtship; it remains a wonderful memory.

Gordon Willis, an artist with sepia, is dead.

I was struck by the photo accompanying this story about Flint’s fiscal problems. I recall being there a few years ago on assignment, taking a turn off a main drag into a neighborhood and being shocked — it looked like rural Mississippi, or something close. The picture captures it well.

I need to sleep. See you in the morning, all.

I just deleted a spam comment from a user called EXTREME BIGGER PENIS. Does that work? Has it ever worked? Is there an individual in the history of the internet who said, “Yeah, that’s just what I’m in the market for,” and clicked? Obviously someone must have, or they wouldn’t keep trying.

Maybe EXTREME BIGGER PENIS is like $170 French bra — just one of those things you dream about, but never really expect to have.

Hope everyone’s weekend was great. Mine was pretty good, although I didn’t go to the market. Sunday was Flower Day, which really means Flower Weekend, which means I’d turn back if I were you. Seemingly every suburban family in metro Detroit descends on the market, each dragging a wagon behind, intent on buying a yard’s worth of bedding plants at discount prices, while also stopping for lunch and absorbing the Authentic Urban Atmosphere ™ in the bargain.

A friend of mine was up bright and early and thought he could get in and out at 7 a.m. Sunday. No dice.

Ah, well. What I did instead was grill a little and drink some wine. Watched two movies — “Let the Fire Burn” and “Twelve Years of Slave,” which was sort of an all-bummer double feature. I liked the both, but “Let the Fire Burn” will stay with me longer. It’s a remarkable piece of work, about the MOVE disaster in Philadelphia in 1985. I recall paying a lot of attention to it when it happened, because the two Philly papers were part of Knight-Ridder, my own paper’s parent company, and lots of people in Fort Wayne had some sort of connection to the place.

But I was too young and ignorant to truly grasp the horror of what happened, too quick to accept the journo-description of MOVE as “an activist group,” which is not what they were. They were, “Let the Fire Burn” makes clear, a like-minded group of crazy people who were dedicated to, and desirous of, a lethal confrontation with police, who screwed up their end of things in every way possible.

If you lived through it, you know what happened: Something like 30 square blocks of working-class Philadelphia burned, because MOVE was dug in to the last man (last child, really), and the cops wanted no survivors. It’s a horrible, tragic story, told entirely — and this is why I think it will stay with me — through contemporaneous video. There are no talking heads, no looks back through the lens of time, but rather, archival news footage and public-TV video of a post-disaster inquest, the sort of thing no one pays attention to outside of the immediate circle of those affected. It gives it a you-were-there immediacy, and if you’re paying attention, you are simply astounded.

“Twelve Years a Slave,” on the other hand, was simply a well-made, well-acted and well-written bummer from the first frame to the last. I feel about the same way that I did after watching “United 93” — glad I saw it, even gladder that I never have to see it again.

Ever.

Other than that, it was the usual weekend: Cooking, exercise, shopping, errands. And so we notch another week off the indefinite number we are allotted. I wish I had more money to travel; it would be nice to notch out a few in some place like Istanbul or Beijing.

Bloggage? Sure:

Chihuahuas! On the loose, gettin’ in trouble! In Arizona!

This NYT piece on “trigger warnings” is getting beaten up all over the internets. I don’t want to pile on, but I’d be interested in hearing alternate views.

And so we launch ourselves into another Monday. Here we go.