More photos from the weekend, just to get them off the iPhone and into the world.

Alex is the only property owner on his little lake who lets his shoreline remain more or less natural. “Frogs live in there,” he said. How could he mow a frog’s house? Thanks, iPhone, for your panorama option:

You can click it to big it.

Alex also has a stray cat who has taken to more or less permanent residency in his gardens, killing rodents as her rent. Her name is Sissy, and don’t let Alex tell you it’s really Pussy, because it’s Sissy. Here she is:

Sissy. Sissy the cat.

You guys have been so good about posting links I feel like I can’t bring you anything you haven’t seen yet. But I have a little.

From the WashPost, Gene Weingarten sends an open letter to his new boss:

Back in 1982, when I was an editor at Tropic, the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, the publisher asked us to run a story on our cover about the winners of The Silver Knight award, which was given out every year at a gala to the most promising high school seniors in the Miami area. The Silver Knights were a fine and noble enterprise, but the event was run and financed by Knight-Ridder, the corporate owners of The Miami Herald; Herald stories about the Silver Knight awards were inevitably uncritical, nakedly celebratory, and drenched in self-promotion. We at Tropic declined to run the story of the awards on the grounds that we were a small magazine trying to establish a feisty, pugnacious identity, and being a corporate suckup toady lickspittle didn’t fit in with our plans. The publisher glowered, muttered something about insubordination, and steered the story to another, less visible section of the paper. We went unpunished.

Wikipedia tells me that one of the Silver Knight winners that year was little Jeffrey Bezos of Miami Palmetto High School. Haha.

You and I briefly crossed paths as younger men, and I dissed you. I guess it’s clear who won that race.

We had a similar award at the News ‘n’ Sentinel, the Sterling Sentinel award, but not even one section that could get out of the self-promotional story-writing.

Rembert Browne visits Detroit. I’m a little tired of these pieces, but OK. His heart is in the right place.

Having endured only one episode of “To Catch a Predator,” and learning to my horror that it was part of a long-running series, and finding myself in the very uncomfortable position of feeling sorry for some of these poor saps, all I can say is: This couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Late night, early morning. Let’s all have a good Wednesday.

Kate was born two months after my next-door neighbor had her second child, and decided to quit full-time dental hygienin’ and start her own business and otherwise craft a working-mother-of-small-children income. Which meant she had time to babysit Kate along with her own, Allison (two years older) and Drake (the new baby), and I could go back to work knowing my precious infant was in good hands.

And so Kate spent the first seven years of her life living next door to these two kids, with whom she spent half of her days, even after preschool started.

In other words, they were the three musketeers. Here’s Halloween 1997:

I don’t know why that picture is so small; I need to rescan it. (Pre-digital.)

It turns out if you keep feeding and watering children, they’ll grow. Five years later:

And two years after that:

I’m not sure why Drake was a ghost in both these years, except that it’s pretty easy. Here’s 2008, a non-Halloween shot:

And then it was 2013, and Allison graduated from high school, and we went to Indiana for her party. She’s headed for Oregon to get a job and find herself and do the things when you’re 19 years old. One last picture:

I’m hoping Allie gets the Purple Dreadlocks scholarship at Reed College. She’s smart enough.

It was a great trip, brief as it was. The near-perfect weather has made the farm fields of Ohio and Indiana emerald-green and perfect. The new Fort-to-Port road between Toledo and Fort Wayne means no more white-knuckle passing of semis on two lanes. Alex’s garden looks like a Thomas Kincaid painting. The party featured beers buried in piles of ice, and vividly-frosted cupcakes. If anyone had a better time on Sunday, I don’t know how.

Then came Monday, and these were the events, which will be the bloggage. Because I don’t trust myself to express opinions about them:

The Washington Post was sold to the founder of Amazon.com. I see several possible outcomes of this, and many are not good.

The collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts is being formally appraised as part of the city’s bankruptcy process, prompting morons all over the globe to express ignorant opinions that drive me insane, which is why I ask that you not read, for example, the stupid ones under this Gawker item, because it will make you insane if you have even a few facts about the situation in your head.

Elmore Leonard had a stroke. He’s recovering, but still. Eighty-seven. Stroke.

Oh, and did anyone read this Sunday piece in the NYT about the artificial-joint cartel? You Hoosiers should check it out; it’s a necessary counterpoint to the bootlicking local coverage.

All of which is to say, Monday is behind us and let’s hope the rest of the week improves.

Taking a break today; I’m in Fort Wayne for a graduation party, and not coming home until Monday.

Until then, this is what’s happening in Detroit: “Transformers 4” is shooting downtown. But Detroit isn’t Detroit. The production constructed an elaborate set in a vacant lot — of Hong Kong. There are photo galleries at Deadline Detroit and the dailies, certainly better that this crappy shot I grabbed Saturday after my bike ride. But you can see the Chinese billboards (fake) and the Tom Ford sign (ditto). Somewhere back in that mess is Mark Wahlberg and Michael Bay, making a shitty movie.

See you Tuesday.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you…

the many moods…of WENDY:

It’s so much fun to have a dog in the house again, seeing how she’s different from and the same as the last one. Having an excuse to get up and take a walk at noon, instead of reading something you’ve been putting off. Someone to talk to. Taking her to the dog park at the end of the day, where she can amuse herself for 20 minutes by throwing a crabapple in the air and catching it. She must have learned to play by herself when she was in the shelter; it’s like working out in a 4-by-8 cell, using only your own body weight.

So.

Of all the artistic regrets in my life, one of the biggest is that I never learned to appreciate opera. I don’t think the ship has sailed, but a window has closed; I’m just never going to get the art form like a lifelong fan. My sister dated a boy in high school whose family was sort of aggressively Italian, and I remember her playing “Pagliacci” in her room for a few weeks. But other than pop-culture moments here and there, the whole thing mostly escapes me.

Joe Queenan wrote one of his famously misanthropic columns a few years ago, about liking opera because it’s one place where the fans do not put up with bullshit. Ever. Think of all the times you’ve seen cowlike American audiences give standing ovations to mediocre performances, and contrast that to opera where, so Queenan said, getting booed offstage is a fairly common occurrence, especially in Europe, where they know their opera. He cited a famous case where a male lead was handed off to an understudy between acts, because the star just wasn’t making it, and the audience was in open revolt.

That’s a crowd I can identify with.

So imagine my delight and vexation to read this New York Times story — oh, how I hope you haven’t used up your 20-article quota this months yet, but what am I saying? It’s Aug. 2 — about a spectacular debacle in Bayreuth, Germany, where a radical reimagining of Wagner’s Ring cycle didn’t go over well:

When Frank Castorf, the avant-garde German director responsible for this confounding concept , took the stage with his production team, almost the entire audience, it seemed, erupted with loud, prolonged boos. It went on for nearly 10 minutes, by my watch, because Mr. Castorf, 62, who has been running the Volksbühne (People’s Theater) of Berlin since 1992, stood steadfast on stage, his arms folded stiffly, he sometimes jabbed a finger at the audience,essentially defying the crowd to keep it coming.

This “Ring” was presented as “a metaphorical story of the global quest for oil,” and the accompanying photo shows a giant Mt. Rushmore featuring Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. I’ve never seen the Ring cycle, or even a little bit of it, so I’m not sure where he’s going with that, but I loved the detail that “for no clear reasons singers smear one another with crude oil.”

And you’ve heard about the fat lady singing? Holy shit:

My earnest attempt to be open-minded about this baffling “Ring” almost foundered for good near the end of “Siegfried” when (you can’t make this up) a monster crocodile swallowed the poor Forest Bird in one big gulp.

This last scene, of course, is the ecstatic love duet between Siegfried, our rambunctious hero (who, by the way, instead of forging a sword assembles a semi-automatic rifle), and the smitten Brünnhilde. In this production, at the most climactic moment in the music the stage rotated to reveal two of those monster crocodiles busily copulating.

Looking hungry after sex, the squiggling reptiles, their jaws flapping, headed toward Siegfried and Brünnhilde, who were singing away.

That would be so awesome, I don’t think I could handle it. I’d be the one screaming BRAVO among all those boos.

Another week gone by, another Friday looms. Oh, let me kiss Friday’s sweet lips.

We’ve mentioned the pile of pet coke on the Detroit River here before, but short version: A company owned by the Koch brothers (yes, this rhyming gets a little strange) is storing large piles of petroleum coke — a byproduct of oil sands refining — on the banks of the river here. It’s a dirty fuel, bound for countries where dirty fuels aren’t a problem.

A couple weeks ago, a local journalist wrote a column about it in the Wall Street Journal, boiling down to, what’s the problems? Jobs! And if you squinted and cocked your head, you could see it that way. If you were inclined to put stock in passages like this:

In fact, Detroit Bulk Storage has handled the material to the letter of state and federal regulation. To minimize dust, the pet coke is treated with an epoxy at the Marathon site before being transported in covered trucks to Detroit Bulk Storage. There, a water truck routinely wets down the material before it is loaded on barges.

And then a thunderstorm happened. And this happened. Click the link; there’s a video.

“We had a ship in to load some of the inventory,” said Daniel Cherrin, spokesman for Detroit Bulk Storage. “When loading the inventory they have to break the seal of epoxy (a spray used to hold down dust) to load the vessel. On that day there was a storm and wind that moved in. It carried some of that into the air as a result.

“You could say it was a perfect storm where they were loading the vessel (with petcoke) and it broke away into the wind. That’s what people saw.”

The stuff was only here for a few weeks, and the perfect storm hit, sending a cloud of dust all over Windsor. Sorry, Canada!

Guys, I’m having my midweek slump. I should give you a dog picture. Wendy loves Alan:

Now you know the truth: We own a recliner.

I remember, many years ago — and how many of these entries contain that soporific phrase? — a great reporter I worked with was doing a story about a teenage kid whose death some months before had become a cause for his parents.

The boy had been found hanging from a tree at a nearby park, his pants pulled down. Police ruled it a suicide, but the parents were insistent he had done nothing of the sort. It had to have been some strange assault that had turned into a homicide. My colleague was preparing a story on a third possibility — it was an accident.

Accidental because, as you sophisticates out there surely know by now, the death was caused by autoerotic asphyxiation. He was choking himself while masturbating, and lost control of the situation. It’s pretty common among those who practice “breath play” alone. It’s the ultimate “kids, don’t try this at home” sex game.

We’ve all heard about it by now; it’s almost common knowledge, but in the early ’80s, I found it astounding. The reporter was similarly amazed by the practice, and found only a few experts who could explain it to him. At the time, some sex researchers were on a campaign to educate law enforcement and coroners, because an incorrect cause-of-death determination could mean the difference between a life insurance payout and a denial. The people who do this aren’t suicidal; in fact, you might say they’re filled with a lust for life. They just chose a foolish way to masturbate.

I thought of that today when a local artist/provocateur played a prank, installing a giant can of Crisco under the Joe Louis memorial known everywhere as the Fist. Photo at the link. To “ease the pain of bankruptcy.” It was naughty, obviously, but I was amazed at how widely it was understood. In the years since my introduction to autoerotic asphyxiation, almost all non-Amish adults know now that some people like to stick their whole hand into some other person’s body, and it requires some heavy-duty lubricant.

I blame AIDS and the internet. Although some remain innocent. This was on the local Fox affiliate’s Facebook page, under a picture of the installation:

Local artist Jerry Vile has created something he calls “Vessel of Hope”. He hopes it may in some way ease the pain of having the Detroit bankruptcy shoved into our faces. Can anyone explain what this means???

At last count, it had been shared 1,545 times. I’m glad there are a few people left in the world who’ve never heard of such a thing. Long may they run.

Brian Stouder alert: Here’s a link to a podcast of an Indianapolis radio show last week, on the current charter/voucher school situation in Indiana. One of the guests is my old radio co-host Mark the Shark, who is also a school board member, and I am pleased to say he came out guns blazing and didn’t give an inch the whole hour. I find it hard to listen to many podcasts while I’m doing something else — something about the concentration required — but this one held my interest.

Wednesday already? Time flies when you’re working.

Don’t you just love it when you’re having a great day — not a birth-of-children, I’d-like-to-thank-the-Academy day, but a solid winner just the same — and you get a call from your spouse, and that spouse is having pretty much the opposite? Because, say, your new dog peed on the bed and then the floor drain in the basement backed up?

It still wasn’t enough to wreck my day. That’s how good mine was.

Any other dog owners have a bed wetter? How’d you fix it, beyond closing the door to the bedroom? The internet isn’t being very helpful.

The sewer problem was fixed in the usual fashion. All while I was in Ann Arbor. The day simply couldn’t get any better.

I don’t want to dump this stuff on Alan, but it so often happens during my shift that I can enjoy not being there for one minor disaster.

Bloggage? Yep.

A fascinating WashPost piece on a kid who was homeschooled, wished he wasn’t, and had to fight to go to a public school and try to catch up with his peers:

Powell was taught at home, his parents using a religious exemption that allows families to entirely opt out of public education, a Virginia law that is unlike any other in the country. That means that not only are their children excused from attending school — as those educated under the state’s home-school statute are — but they also are exempt from all government oversight.

School officials don’t ever ask them for transcripts, test scores or proof of education of any kind: Parents have total control.

Powell’s family encapsulates the debate over the long-standing law, with his parents earnestly trying to provide an education that reflects their beliefs and their eldest son objecting that without any structure or official guidance, children are getting shortchanged. Their disagreement, at its core, is about what they think is most essential that children learn — and whether government, or families, should define that.

While some national advocates fight for the right of parents to educate their children at home, Powell thinks children — most urgently, his siblings — should have the right to go to public school, too.

A story you don’t read every day, that’s for sure.

Indiana voters sent Tony Bennett — not the singer, the state school superintendent — packing last year. And now the good stuff is coming out:

Emails obtained by The Associated Press show Bennett and his staff scrambled last fall to ensure influential donor Christel DeHaan’s school received an “A,” despite poor test scores in algebra that initially earned it a “C.”

“They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work,” Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12 email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence’s chief lobbyist.

I look forward to seeing how my former employer’s editorial writer will figure out a way to call this “troubling,” but ultimately be OK with it.

Pot found on Justin Bieber’s tour bus at the Detroit-Windsor crossing. By my recollection, that makes two — someone in Rihanna’s entourage was nailed for the same thing a while back. Don’t any of these people talk amongst themselves?

Last weekend in July, and we had a September weekend — weirdly chilly and windy, with the sort of rain you get when autumn’s on its way. (I suppose autumn is always on its way on the great wheel, but you know what I mean.) Bottom line: I’m sitting in front of my open window in a sleeveless T-shirt, longing for a hoodie.

In July.

Not that I am complaining. I did plenty of sweating in the gym today.

I haven’t mentioned this yet, because BORING, but I started working with a trainer not long after my eye surgery, and today, almost three months later, I’m starting to feel the results. It used to take three weeks in the weight room to see musculature asserting itself again; now it’s three months. The faster time goes, the longer it takes, evidently. I say “feel” over “see,” because at this point that’s all I’m really interested in. I want to stop feeling like a blob, I want to bend over and straighten up and be aware that the armature handling this task is up to the job. I chose to work with a trainer instead of doing it on my own because the whip on my back is part of the process, and Stephanie the Sadist mixes things up enough that I don’t get bored. I will keep a gym date with a relative stranger, but not a date with myself. Perversely, spending more money at the gym is making me value visits there more highly. Surely there’s an economics principle at work here.

So I read Frank Bruni’s column today on the very same subject, and after my customary first reaction (how did this guy get a column in the New York fucking Times?), I had my second one (there’s five minutes of my life I won’t get back), and then fixated on this passage:

There’s a trainer at my gym who routinely gives clients graphic details of his libidinous escapades. There’s a trainer who travels with and to certain clients, who can’t be without him. There’s a trainee who exercises, if you can call it that, in a full coat of makeup, never smudged by sweat. There are teenagers dropped off by their parents, who apparently believe they owe their children not just good educations but six-pack abs.

How did this happen? And when? Fifteen years ago I didn’t know a single person who had a personal trainer; then, suddenly, every third friend had one. Personal trainers are like automatic tellers: one minute they didn’t exist, the next they were everywhere, and considered indispensable.

Pure Andy Rooney, that. On the other hand, what did I say a few paragraphs back? BORING.

What else happened this weekend? The sweet corn is now at the market. So we can all enjoy that.

So, bloggage?

I used to think of Caroline Kennedy as my doppelganger, born a mere two days apart as we were. Now I find her insufferable. Or maybe it’s just this stupid fawning profile of her, again in the NYT. The byline is Jacob Bernstein, son of Carl and Nora; presumably he was raised amongst his parents’ famous friends, so how can he write a passage like this without barfing all over his own keyboard?

A few years ago, Mr. Hughes made an offhand comment that he and his partner, Dr. Richard Friedman, a psychiatrist who directs the psychopharmacology clinic at NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital, made a ritual of competing in Swim for Life, a 1.25-mile event in Provincetown, Mass, that raises money for AIDS and women’s health charities. “She said, ‘Oh, I’d really like to do that,’ ” Mr. Hughes said.

And so, Ms. Kennedy did. “She just showed up and changed in a gas station and came out and did the race,” Mr. Hughes said. “It was pretty choppy, and she did a terrific job. I’m happy to say I beat her. But just barely.”

Although this correction is a hoot:

An earlier version of this article misstated Edwin Schlossberg’s profession. He is an interactive designer and artist, not an architect.

Good to know.

One thing I’ve noticed, since the Detroit bankruptcy thrust our little town into the national spotlight, is how utterly wrong so many people are about so much, how even fairly straightforward facts elude many writers. WDET’s blog addresses just one of these. You can quibble the way a couple of the commenters did, but the main point stands.

It’s time to let the Tiger Stadium site go, says on Freep writer. I have to say, I agree.

With that, I’m going to get a jump on what’s shaping up to be a pretty busy week. Take care, all. It feels like a dangerous world these days, but maybe it’s just the chill.

Whoa, but I owe you guys a lot, don’t I? Sorry. I’ve been distracted, and in the final analysis, hey: It’s summer. When someone asks me if I’d like to spend an evening drinking on a patio and listening to music, I’m not going to say, sorry, gotta blog. We’ve had a pretty excellent summer so far, and this is one where I’m keenly aware of its brevity.

But before I go any further, let me just say how grateful I am that you guys are willing to carry the freight when I’m off seeing “World War Z.” It helps.

So, speaking of which — “World War Z,” that is. I liked it! Maybe my expectations were too low, but I thought it was far better than the weak two stars most critics gave it. The opening scenes of the initial zombie attacks were fucking terrifying, impossible to watch without thinking of any other disaster that could get people running through the streets and looting grocery stores. The later stuff, in which Brad Pitt wanders the world in search of zombie patient zero, weren’t as good, but they were good enough. And may I just say? I appreciated the PG-13. I’m tired of watching limbs being lopped off with squirting arteries. I’m just as happy to have them lopped off out of the frame. I understand that lopping was done; I do not need a surgical tutorial.

All the way home from the theater, I snapped my jaws, zombie-style. Everyone else in the car got a little tired of it.

As for Hooters? It was fun. The waitresses were all adorable, very early-’60s Playmate wholesome. Lotsa smiles and friendliness to man and woman, child and adult, alike. Kate — in the middle of looking for her first paying job — said, “Should I work here?”

Alan said, “I don’t think they’re looking for Daria.” Although personally, I think that would be hilarious — a Daria Hooters waitress. (Link added for you non-MTV fans.)

As for the food? Eh. The unanimous verdict: “This is not the best chicken sandwich I’ve had in my life, but far from the worst.”

So. In addition to all the other crap going on this week, I was in Ann Arbor for a meeting Thursday morning, stepped into the ladies’, went to sit and heard a heart-clutching plunk — yep, after years of laughing at people whose phones land in the toilet, it finally happened to me. It slipped out of the back pocket of my pants. No, I don’t have a waterproof case. Yes, I’ve been meaning to get one. Yes, I immediately spun around and snatched it out — thank god I hadn’t peed yet. The prognosis is still iffy, but it’s looking good. A day in a bag of rice seems to have worked its magic, although all through the meeting, Siri was drunk on toilet water. It kept flashing her message screen, and saying things like, “Nancy, I’m sorry but I can’t find that location in Africa. Should I search again?” or “Nancy, there is no Wide Avenue in Ann Arbor.” Very distracting. But I think she’s sobered up. Cross all fingers.

So, some bloggage? Yep.

Remember Tom Nardone, who runs the Mower Gang, which everyone and his brother, including me, has written about? Now the full truth is revealed: How Tom actually makes his living when he isn’t mowing parks. HE SELLS SEX TOYS. ON THE INTERNET The walk through his warehouse was one of the highlights of that assignment; it reminded me that very early on in my residency here I almost answered an ad to write catalog copy for him, but the money was too low. Everyone who tours PriveCo is offered a gift from the clearance shelf, but I couldn’t accept, and besides, who wants a purple plastic dildo with a rheostat dial on the bottom? There’s a reason it’s on the clearance shelf.

I wonder what Anthony Bourdain was offered.

My entertainment came from watching the pickers in the warehouse, filling mail orders. There’s just something about watching a 300-pound man (named Tiny) plucking penis-shaped chip-and-dip trays off a shelf to mail to a bachelorette party in some distant state. It makes you happy you went into journalism.

Also, this: Stacy Keibler has the best stems in the world. I’d kill for legs like hers. How does she do it?

Have a great weekend, all.

In the never-ending stream of Excuses for Lame Blogging, add this:

Tonight the three of us, plus one of Kate’s friends, had two peak experiences:

1) First visit to a Hooters, ever; and

2) “World War Z.”

I have to say, I enjoyed them both. And both beat swimming the Detroit river.

I promise better tomorrow.

EDIT: What. The HELL.