I’m pretty much done caring about the Jill Abramson story, but in looking at various photos of her today, I think I recognize something in her — the late-middle-age don’t-give-a-fuck woman. She has three tattoos, she rides in the back of pickup trucks. She’s “brusque.” She obviously hasn’t had any face work done, or seems to pay a great deal of attention to her hair and makeup. She went riding with the Knight-Wallace Fellows, in Argentina. The gauchos take you galloping across the pampas on unreliable horses. It’s a hot, sweaty, dusty experience that leaves you all three of those things, and it’s pretty glorious.

A woman after my own heart.

I’m recognizing this period looming in my life. My daughter is ready to fly the coop; in a year she’ll be a legal adult and she already acts like one. I told people that if the bankruptcy judge allowed a single piece of art to be sold from the Detroit Institute of Art, I would get a detail from “Detroit Industry” tattooed on my back, and dammit, I might do it. I’ve considered, in the last few months: Taking a hip-hop/ballroom/belly dance class, buying a Cadillac or maybe an El Camino, selling the house and getting a loft in a shitty neighborhood, selling my great-aunt’s silver because what the fuck am I doing with it. I’ve stopped trying to perfect the pomegranate martini in favor of two fingers of Bulleit rye, neat. In other words, this may be the last period of my life that resembles youth before old age arrives, so why not? Sooner or later the grave will take us all; do you really want to die never having owned a $170 bra made in France?

The day the bus broke down, I was drawing near my office on my bike and thought, somewhat sheepishly, Dorthea Nall would never, ever do this. On the other hand, Dorthea Nall held a full-time job when the other mothers stayed home. Most of her friends were years younger than she was and even when she was old, she was never old, if you get my meaning. So she may well have ridden a bike to work in Detroit, too. She just didn’t get the chance.

In more other words, I have to say, there’s a lot to recommend being a difficult woman. Abramson will land on her feet, and in the meantime, she can say she never curbed her brusqueness to satisfy a Sulzberger.

And with that, I’m drawing this curtain. Story’s already played.

I just registered Kate for the ACT, her second try. Her first try gave her a very good score, excellent even, but we must try again, because one or two more points might open a magical door to a money source. All I can think, as I hand my credit card over, is this: Education in this country is effed. Totally.

But this is a good problem to have. As we go into the weekend, I leave you with this amusing commencement speech that no one actually gave:

There are so many terrible pop songs out there now that babble on about being true to yourself and loving you for you. And because young people are stupid, they buy into that shit and distort it and come to the misguided notion that having high self-esteem means never acknowledging that you have a shitload to work on. Take it from me. Whenever I get pissed, I usually kick the wall or throw something. And when my wife says that I shouldn’t have to do that, you know what my excuse is? That’s just who I am. That is the shittiest excuse in history, and people use it all the time. Oh hey, I’ll be three hours late to your wedding. SORRY THAT’S JUST WHO I AM. Not only does that mean you suck, it actually romanticizes your sucking. You actually expect people to be charmed by your suckage. That’s a cool trick!

Happy weekend, all. It won’t crack 70 degrees here.

I’ve been reading the Jill Abramson story. That’s the New York Times editor who was abruptly cashiered today, or so the story is shaping up. I read the first news-alert piece today from the NYT, which called the transition “unexpected.” My first thought was, someone has cancer. But now it appears, via Ken Auletta at the link above, that it was a more prosaic reason:

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories.

Pushy. Well, that’s what leaning in will get you.

Abramson is a big supporter of the Knight-Wallace Fellows, and visited Ann Arbor when I was there. She’s smart and personable and has a truly distinctive voice, this sort of nasal New York drawl, if that makes sense. (You’ve heard of people who have “a face for radio?” Well, she has a voice for print, but she made a joke about it, so she gets points.) She answered every question directly and seemed truly comfortable in her skin. The Times had recently taken some flack about publishing photos from the horrible ambush of American contractors in Iraq in 2004, where the bodies were dragged and burned and hoisted up for public view like charred barbecue. She explained why they made the call they did. Beyond that, I don’t what to say other than she was right to point out the pay discrepancy.

You could make the argument that the NYT had been overpaying for a while, and it was just bad timing that Abramson took the editor’s job when the publisher decided the salary had to return to earth. But she was also underpaid when she was managing editor, and apparently there’s a deputy m.e. who earned more than she did. I have a feeling this is a more-will-be-revealed thing.

So. Many years ago, I made a dismissive remark about cats in a column. I’m not a cat hater, but I’ve never had one of my own, and I guess I fell for the cruel cat stereotype that they’re aloof and would happily watch their masters writhe on the ground in pain, asking only that the hoomin please leave some food out before heading to the hospital. I got a note for a woman who claimed her cat had awakened her — by jumping on her chest and meowing loudly — during a break-in at her house. I forget the cat’s name, but I did a hooray-for-Mr.-Jinxy column and that was that.

Evidently heroism runs in the gene pool. I had no idea.

Not much more to add today, but there’s this: The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad has three songs on Bandcamp, which you may listen to and download, if you’re so inclined. They were produced by my friend Jim Diamond, who did them gratis because he’s a mensch. He said they added some percussion in post, and Kate played the cowbell. “Move closer to the mic, Kate, I need more cowbell,” he said, noting that’s the first time he’s ever spoken those words in his career. It got a big laugh. I expect the DVAS won’t be to everybody’s liking, but I hope Borden digs ’em, because he knows his girl groups.

As for the lyrics, I have only this to say: Johnny Cash didn’t really shoot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

Happy Thursday, all.

A few little Moments in Detroit ™ have befallen me lately. I should share:

Since the weather turned warm, I’ve been doing some so-called last-mile commuting, which is what urban planners call it when you ride a bike to a transit stop, load it onto the bus or light rail or whatever, then unload it at your destination stop and finish the last leg to your office. It’s great so far; the building manager overruled the security guard who told me I had to leave the bike chained to a parking meter outside, so I take it up to the office. At lunchtime, I’m no longer confined to the Subway and Rub Pub on either side of our building, or even the places farther away — I can ride to the Eastern Market and get a slice of Supino’s pizza or a sandwich from the Russell Street Deli, which has Subway beat by a unit so large, it no longer makes sense to measure it in miles.

Last Friday I was cruisin’ into work on the bus, looking forward to the weekend, when an alarm started beeping in the engine compartment. The driver got on the horn with HQ, then pulled over and told us we’d be waiting for another bus or a repair, whichever came first.

This was the point when I realized just how important last-mile commuting is. I took the bike down from the rack and announced it was time for Plan B. I rode off Jefferson and into a terrible neighborhood, one burned-and-blighted house after another. And then, as though into Emerald City, I was in Indian Village, a stately neighborhood of older homes. A few blocks of this and back into the dodgy districts. Five men walked toward me, spread across the road, and I wondered if it was wise to stay on course. Decided to smile and wave, and they smiled and waved back, just a pod of local rummies getting their morning drink on, it looked like.

Then, huzzah, a bike lane. And a cemetery, final resting place of Sonic Smith. Some deteriorated light industrial, a new high school, this, that, a casino, downtown and my office. Five miles, roughly. I should do this more often. A perfect morning for a little bike ride.

Then today I had to appear on a local radio show, to discuss this story. I walked into the lobby, and who should be there but Sixto Rodriguez, the “Searching for Sugarman” guy. He’d just stopped by to make a cash donation.

“I really like your show, Craig,” he said. I guess he didn’t want to wait for another pledge campaign. A guy I know who used to work at the station says he does it all the time — just swings by from time to time to drop a fifty into the tip jar. Now that’s what I call public-radio support.

Rodriguez gives away a lot of his money. His daughter quotes him as saying once you have the food-clothing-shelter part handled, all the rest is icing. He shares the icing.

So, now I’m watching a few days of 80-degree weather blow out with a thunderstorm, with a 25-degree drop ahead for the next few days. We put the boat in Friday. Balls.

Some good bloggage today. Let’s start with a category called Fiery Oratory. Emily Bazelon reviews Glenn Greenwald’s new book in Slate:

A million jokesters have invited the NSA to listen in on their calls about feeding the cat or picking up the kids, noting that most Americans aren’t doing anything exciting enough to interest the government. You are missing the point if you’re in this camp, Greenwald urges:

Of course, dutiful, loyal supporters of the president and his policies, good citizens who do nothing to attract negative attention from the powerful, have no reason to fear the surveillance state. This is the case in every society: those who pose no challenge are rarely targeted by oppressive measures, and from their perspective, they can then convince themselves that oppression does not really exist. But the true measure of a society’s freedom is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists. … We shouldn’t have to be faithful loyalists of the powerful to feel safe from state surveillance. Nor should the price of immunity be refraining from controversial or provocative dissent. We shouldn’t want a society where the message is conveyed that you will be left alone only if you mimic the accommodating behavior and conventional wisdom of a Washington establishment columnist.

…Reading about all the disclosures again, woven together and in context, I couldn’t decide which was worse: the NSA’s massive, grim overreach, in the hands of Director Michael Hayden—or the complicity of almost every other entity involved, private as well as public. “PRISM is a team sport!” trumpeted one NSA memo. Too true: Other memos and slides show Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft easing the way toward surveillance of their users. (Twitter was the exception in this case.) When the Guardian and the Washington Post broke that news, the tech companies tried to argue otherwise based on a technicality. But looking back, the documents “give the lie to Silicon Valley’s denials of cooperation,” as Greenwald writes.

I will be reading this, most likely. Eventually. After I read everything else I’m supposed to read. Someone recently recommended “Hellhound on His Trail,” the story of the manhunt for James Earl Ray, describing how great it was, etc., and all I could think was, dammit, another one.

More fiery oratory, from Gene Weingarten, speaking at Joe McGinniss’ memorial service:

Listen:

When a writer enters into an agreement with a source to tell his story, there is always an accompanying covenant. This will be acknowledged by, you know, every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on. In return for fair and objective reporting, the subject is promising to tell the truth. If the subject lies to the writer, all bets are off. The degree to which this principle attaches is directly proportional to the enormity of the lie that was told.

He’s speaking of the teapot tempest that followed a New Yorker piece that was about “Fatal Vision,” called “The Journalist and the Murderer.” The writer, Janet Malcolm, implied that McGinniss had betrayed Jeffrey MacDonald somehow, and… Just read the link.

I was in a group looking at some data regarding Michigan’s charter schools when someone recollected that charters were supposed to be educational trailblazers, and that’s why they were freed from many of the constraints traditional schools have — so they could run ahead and blaze a trail.

Not so much anymore. Not in New York, anyway:

A primary rationale for the creation of charter schools, which are publicly financed and privately run, was to develop test kitchens for practices that could be exported into the traditional schools. President Obama, in recently proclaiming “National Charter Schools Week,” said they “can provide effective approaches for the broader public education system.”

But two decades since the schools began to appear, educators from both systems concede that very little of what has worked for charter schools has found its way into regular classrooms. Testy political battles over space and money, including one that became glaringly public in New York State this spring, have inhibited attempts at collaboration. The sharing of school buildings, which in theory should foster communication, has more frequently led to conflict.

And some charter schools have veered so sharply from the traditional model — with longer school years, armies of nonunion workers and flashy enrichment opportunities like trips to the Galápagos Islands — that their ideas are viewed as unworkable in regular schools.

Finally, I know Christopher Columbus long ago lost his luster with most people, but I was raised in Columbus, Ohio, and I will always read a story about the old Genoan. And this one is pretty interesting; scientists think they might have found the wreckage of the Santa Maria.

A lot for a Wednesday, I know, but hey — eat up.

Well, this is what I call an eventful Monday, I guess: Went in expecting a couple-three hours of deadline work and the rest the more off-deadline sort, but it didn’t work out that way, and here it is, after 7 p.m., and I’m just opening a bottle of wine and considering that somewhere along the way I accepted another big freelance project — a book. Custom publishing, not some art inspired from my soul, but it will go a good ways toward paying off the back yard, and it’ll be wrapped up by summer’s end.

Down side: I have to relearn how to eat a horse. Although I seem to remember the most important part — one bite at a time.

Of course, what good is a book when soon we’ll all be living in Waterworld?

A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported on Monday. If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.

Global warming caused by the human-driven release of greenhouse gases has helped to destabilize the ice sheet, though other factors may also be involved, the scientists said.

What wonderful news! And yes, there’s a bright side:

The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.

We won’t outlive this, and likely our children won’t, either, and after that? Eh, I’ll be dead. Let ’em figure it out.

At what point did mankind become self-aware enough to worry not only about the world we live in, but the world we might leave our grandchildren and great-grandchildren? We may never see them, but don’t they matter? Perhaps in a lifetime, the units of time become so baroque and meaningless — in Washington it’s the week; in other places the day, and I’m sure we’ve all been through some spells where just getting through one hour after another is enough. Eternity is hard except in the very abstract sense, where we dwell with Jesus in really comfortable clothing with elastic waistbands.

Of course, for business, it’s quarter. Break the tape, have a couple drinks and work on the next spreadsheet. And if you did it without giving a shit about what you’re pumping into the air or water, you sleep so much better.

I should add that I’m not holding myself up as some sort of paragon. The world will judge me as a typical 20th/21st century American, who used too much and threw away too much and ate beef from a million farting steers and was basically a plague upon the earth for about a billionth of a nanosecond of the universe’s time. I’ll be swallowed up.

Probably by rising seawater. But not yet! They can’t find me in Michigan, not until the backup from the Great Lakes tops Niagara Falls, by which point I’ll be ashes and it’ll be someone else’s problem.

Not to be all morbid or anything. But seriously: We broke the planet. Good job, humankind! Let’s party.

I have no bloggage today; it seems all anyone publishes on Mondays are recaps of Sunday-night television. When did the recap become a thing? The idea that someone who had actually watched an episode of this or that show might want to read 1,000 words telling them what they already know. At least many are entertaining to read.

Oh, well. It works for Fox News.

Happy Tuesday, all. I’m going to be running from one end of it to the other.

No breakfast in bed for me yesterday; I get up earlier than everyone else in the house every day of the week, and Sunday is the one day of the week I can linger in the gym. Isn’t Mothers Day supposed to be about what mothers want?

So I got up, walked the dog, made pancakes-bacon-coffee for the house and was en route to hitting the weight rack and Pilates before anyone else was even moving. Now it’s late afternoon, and I’m barbecuing ribs. Also: Mac and cheese and collard greens. If that sounds more like a Fathers Day menu, you’re not alone, but it’s a lovely day and it just seemed to require ribs.

But the big project today is the back yard, which is finally starting to shape up. The decision last fall to cover the bare ground with leaf mulch paid off; with that and the steady snow cover, we didn’t have nearly the mud problem I anticipated. And now the plants are going in. Wendy has grass to pee and poop in — sod, but it really made more sense than waiting on seed to sprout. We loaded up on bedding plants at the Eastern Market, and with any luck, we’ll have a pretty nice place to hang after a couple of weeks. We have furniture and a fire bowl and, depending on the landscape architect’s inspiration (that would be Alan) a nice varied landscape of this and that.

Somewhere in there was a nice Delmonico steak and some sautéed morels. That’s Livin’.(tm)

I spent some time paging through social media today, where many people were posting photos of their mothers — the still-young ones, the old and stooped ones and the faded black-and-whites of mothers already gone. It reminded me that time is fleeting, and so are morels. Sauté them in butter, then.

What went on in your world?

A bit of bloggage before the week begins:

Alaska isn’t really the Alaska you see on reality television.

Michael Sam’s boyfriend. Whoa — nice abs.

Monday awaits. Attack it.

How hipsterism settles into kitsch: Ten years ago this town couldn’t catch a break. Today, Detroit tsotchkes everywhere.

I’m writing a story tonight, not my favorite kind (the ones with funny, quotable, interesting people) but something closer to its opposite (the ones with spreadsheets and ten million cross tabs), which means I am scowling, squinting, cursing and wishing for a monitor as big as the Ritz. Or at least as big as Al Gore’s. All of them.

So let’s go to some lively bloggage, and welcome the weekend.

One of those New Yorker casuals, “Missed Connections for A-holes.” Yep:

We made small talk in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s. You said that you literally could not live without the salsa you were buying. I wish we could talk again. You used “literally” incorrectly. It really pissed me off. I wish you could literally not live without that salsa, because then I’d take it from you.

Love the Oatmeal. The story of a very bad parrot.

I’m enjoying last week’s “This American Life.” Subject: Getting high. I’m sure a few of you folks might like it. Back to this spreadsheet, and have a great day, everyone.

College graduation in Michigan was last week, which means summer-intern season is underway downtown. And while it’s still a bit chilly (grrr), Thursday is supposed to be nearly 80, which means all the pieces are clicking into place for another fabulous summer in Fun City.

A couple of the development firms have gone whole-hog into summer internships, which they see as an opportunity to shape young minds to love Detroit, not the regular, non-summer Detroit, but a special enhanced Detroit, its pillows plumped just for them.

They poured a bunch of white sand at Campus Martius park a couple weeks ago, so the kids can have a “beach.” One building with a second-floor overhang has installed outdoor seating clusters, not lawn chairs but living-room style, separated by dog topiaries. There’s a private bike-sharing service for them. One building has an outdoor chess set, with pieces the size of trash cans.

It so happened I was out and about today, at one of the new-style “co-working” places that are all over town — usually a raw space fitted out in reclaimed wood with cubicles and lots of fun add-ons, like full kitchens and employees’ dogs. We looked at one for Bridge when we were moving downtown, but opted for something a little more traditional — journalists sometimes have to make phone calls in privacy, although we were the original co-workers, in my opinion.

My walk there took me past a high-rise apartment building with more living-room seating arrangements out front and that most essential detail of new-urbanist life: Bike racks. Lots of them.

One can be heartened by the new life flowing into downtown Detroit and still find a lot of this stuff silly. I suppose everyone dreams of landing a job in a free-food, bring-your-dog paradise like Google, but realistically, only a lucky very few ever will. So what is this Playskool-colored, toys-toys-toys summer-fun interlude for?

I remember my first real job after college. I spent the first weeks walking into walls, wondering where the fun had gone. We used to sit around the Ohio University Post scrawling graffiti on the wall and re-enacting light-saber battles using a pile of discarded fluorescent tubes the physical plant guys never took away. At the Dispatch, half the staff was a thousand years old and worked on the editorial page, writing six-paragraphs welcomes to spring and St. Patrick’s Day.

So I hope the new summer interns have fun here this summer, digging their toes in the sand and eating sandwiches under the dog topiary. For whatever casualness they have brought to the workplace at large, I’m grateful — it’s nice to have pantyhose more or less permanently off the work-wardrobe budget. And I hope they all get jobs when the internships are over. Maybe some will be in Detroit. Sorry to say it, kids, but: The winters suck.

Not a lot of bloggage today, but this was satisfying in a mean way: Pete Coors can’t understand the kids and their fondness for craft beers, aka beer that doesn’t taste like chilled urine:

Coors said he is baffled about trends that show the more expensive craft beer market growing by about 7 percent, the light premium beer market staying flat and the economy beer market with brands such as Pabst Blue Ribbon and Keystone dropping by 7 percent or even into double figures.

“In this economy that is difficult to understand,” Coors said. “But people are staying at home now, not buying cars or houses. They have money to spend. They want to spend it on something that they think has more value. … You talk about the millennials. The world is very different.”

A while back, Kate’s bass teacher and I were chatting about the use of guns in self-defense, and we agreed that as irritating as it is to have your stuff stolen, neither of us were willing to kill another human being over a television set. Not so in Montana. Good lord, but I’m growing to despise these lunatics.

And now we’re sliding toward the weekend. Every week, this miracle happens.

I cannot tell a lie. I set aside a little chunk of time to blog today, and things went awry. Not in the usual sense of awry, but rather, because I started reading this amazing Los Angeles Times story about the very strange marriage of Donald and Shelly Sterling. I haven’t said much of anything about Sterling, because what’s the point? It’s just a sideshow made for social media and the paint-by-numbers columnists who come in their wake. Racism, it turns out, is bad. Duh.

But, while it’s perfectly obvious that Sterling is a horrible person, and we should expect nothing less from him, it’s less perfectly obvious just how weird his personal life is. Really, I couldn’t tear my eyes away:

Donald Sterling openly kept a string of mistresses and in at least one case, had a woman sign a contract acknowledging that he would never leave his wife and giving up the right to sue for palimony, according to court filings and testimony.

Sterling “is happily married, has a family and has no intention of engaging in any activity inconsistent with his domestic relationship,” read a “friendship agreement” signed by Alexandra Castro in 1999.

Shelly Sterling was well aware of her husband’s affairs, Castro wrote in court papers. On one of their first dates, she and Sterling dined with Shelly in the couple’s Malibu mansion and then went as a trio to a movie where Donald held his mistress’ hand, according to Castro.

…Castro signed five separate agreements saying that she understood Sterling was happily married and that any disputes between them would be resolved in private arbitration, court filings show.

In 2002, Castro ended the relationship, in part, she wrote in court filings, because he reneged on a promise to have a child with her. Sterling asked her to come back, according to court papers, and when she refused, he sued, demanding the return of a four-bedroom million-dollar home in Beverly Hills.

And so on. None of this matters a whit in the grand scheme of things, but it’s always interesting to see how billionaires live their lives. (Any way they want, but to a degree most of us wouldn’t even begin to recognize.)

Anyway, you should read it. If you don’t have time, read the Slate summation.

And if you’re not into that, just swing by Tom & Lorenzo and see what they have to say about the Met Gala dresses. Lure: It’s the first break in their infatuation with Lupita Nyong’o.

And we can all come back after hump day.

At the moment, my alleged Jack Russell Terrier is snoozing on Alan’s lap. Alan is also snoozing. And I’m reading a story paddy’o sent over today, thinking about animals and how they do what they do. The story is about a Jack Russell named Chuck. From Slate:

Then came a late winter day in February. I was restacking a heap of awkwardly cut logs that had been sitting behind the barn for a season or two, and Chuck sat to watch. I flinched when a rat suddenly leapt out, but Chuck moved decisively; applying her small teeth to the nape of its neck, severing its spinal cord with surgical precision. She sat over the dead rat and looked me in the eye, perfectly still except for the wagging stub of her tail.

I kept working and the rats streamed out, Chuck killing them one by one, all her muscles tensed with the passion that had been bred into her by a slightly mad clergyman—a man named John Russell—over a century ago. When three slipped out at once, Chuck anticipated their hopeless angles of escape, killing the third just as it made it to the high grass, its two companions still twitching with their broken necks, their tiny mouths open in shock.

By the time I pried the last log from the frozen dirt, she had killed 14 rats, and the corpses littered the field. She turned her back and went to find my mother.

Wendy is getting better at stalking squirrels. The other day she tumbled with one in the back yard, but isn’t as efficient at killing them as Chuck. Maybe that’s because she’s showing a very non-terrier behavior — pointing. She lowers her head, raises her tail and will. Not. Be. Moved. For long moments on end, she will stand, frozen, waiting for one of her quarry to make a wrong move.

One of these days she’ll get one. Just not yet.

I wonder what sort of mix is in Wendy’s blood. She looks like a JRT, but she doesn’t really act like one — she’s not as aloof as a good terrier generally is, and Spriggy certainly never pointed anything other than his nose into one of Kate’s friend’s North Face jacket. (And not into the pocket, either. He ate his way through the fleece in pursuit of a Reese’s Cup she had zipped in there.)

You all know how much I love watching specially bred animals doing the things they were specially bred for. It’s just one of those things.

And now I have the depleted-Monday catching-up-on-Sunday’s-teevee blues. One more piece of bloggage and I’m off to the rack, but it’s a good one: Libertarians have taken over Keene, N.H., being jerks with extreme prejudice:

The activists selected this New England-cute city of 24,000 for liberation mostly because it lies within that flinty bastion of Yankee individualism known as New Hampshire, where “Live Free or Die” is carved into the collective granite.

Back in 2003, a libertarian-leaning group called the Free State Project decided that this small state could be a liberty lover’s paradise if enough like-minded people settled here. (The movement, by the way, tends to attract white males, according to Carla Gericke, the group’s president, a white South African who has lived for many years in this country. “I’m the token African-American,” she joked.)

A dozen years in, the Free State Project is about three-quarters of the way toward achieving its goal of having 20,000 people commit to relocating to the state, after which it will “trigger the move.” The project has already influenced the statewide conversation at times — partly because of “early movers” like Ian Freeman, a Floridian who bought an old white duplex on Leverett Street several years ago and quickly set out to push local buttons.

Y’all chew on that while I slink off to slumber. See you in the ayem.