One of the things we did last weekend was go to the Titanic exhibition at the Henry Ford. It’s exactly the sort of exhibit I despise — timed entrance (NO EXCEPTIONS), gimmicky (your “boarding pass” contains an Actual Passenger Name), ultimately sort of meh. Its official name is “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibit,” and unfortunately, I’m not an artifact person. I’ve been ruined by CGI and, frankly, my own imagination — nothing about a 100-year-old piece of china does it for me.

But this is a modern exhibit, which means it is “interactive,” and in this case, it meant there was a giant iceberg — presumably refreshed every night — you could put your hands on. And that was marred for Ms. Grammar and Usage Nitpicker by the legend on the wall nearby:

“Iceberg Right Ahead!”

I don’t care how loud he yelled it, those words shouldn’t be capitalized. They knew that sort of thing in 1912.

It could have been the fact the whole space was elbow-to-elbow that got on my nerves. We saw “Woman Holding a Balance” by none other than Johannes Vermeer two weeks ago at the DIA, walking right in and standing in front of it as long as we liked, occasionally stepping aside to let others peer at it.

And yes, I am Mrs. Nose-in-the-Air. Because, y’know, Vermeer and James Cameron’s mythology.

Would we have cared so much about the Titanic if it weren’t, as we’re told over and over, the height of luxury? Or was it the fact several of the richest people in the world we among those who went down, and all their money couldn’t save them? Ultimately, I just don’t care all that much. And I thought the “stand on the bow” photo-op gimmick was silly — and a gouge. The person on my boarding pass died, by the way. Kate was Madeline Astor, and lived.

So: Change of subject.

You all know how much I love a good montage scene on the TV box. There was a nice one in Sunday’s “Breaking Bad,” and here it is:

Some of the imagery may be confusing, if you’re not a BB fan, but trust me — it all works. Or maybe I just love that song. Tommy James? Shondells? You were among the good ones.

I agree with Neil Steinberg: We shouldn’t mock Romney’s religion. Believe it, don’t believe it, but keep your mouth shut. We’re supposed to be better than that.

Think I’ll watch the First Lady’s speech. Is it Hump Day already? How’d that happen?

I’ve been sitting here noodling over a post and can’t get my brain started. This is a sign I should go upstairs and read something instead.

Would you like a small link? Cinemagraphs, i.e., animated gifs with most of the obnoxiousness taken out. These are from the Minnesota State Fair.

An interesting review of Tyler Hamilton’s new book about St. Lance. Looks like the noose is tightening, not that it matters anymore.

“Breaking Bad” fans, what did we think of the finale? The “Crystal Blue Persuasion” montage was great, but then, I’ve always loved that song.

I had a great weekend; did you?

Hey, all.

In honor of the spirit of Labor Day, not much of a post today, but a link to a very nice Labor Day column by Brian Dickerson, the only columnist worth reading in the Free Press. If y’all looking for tips on how to write a personal column with a larger point, read this little gem — fewer than 500 words, simple, sincere.

Albom could take a lesson, but he won’t.

Happy Labor Day, all

I don’t think it’s ever going to rain here again. I can’t tell you how often this summer I’ve watched healthy storm systems blow out of the Plains, gain a little strength on the hop over Lake Michigan, and immediately start dissipating. Like hurricanes. By the time they reach us, they’ve become a few widely scattered showers. Followed by another high pressure system that will stay for a few days.

I mean, I’m grateful the heat has finally eased up (even though it’s going to be 94 today), but man — this weather is sort of boring. And there’s no water left anywhere.

Upside: No mosquitos. Although we’re still having a West Nile outbreak. And thanks to the hurricane, gas is now $4.20 a gallon. But hey! J.C. Burns is coming for dinner on Monday, so what’s not to love?

OK, then. Much of the news from the convention has been flying over my head; I just don’t have patience for a) these events; and b) the way they’re covered, with every gotcha moment blown up like a party balloon and batted around until the next one comes along. And so, while I heard and disapproved of the peanuts-thrown-at-the-black-CNN-camerawoman story yesterday, I tried to let it roll off.

Then, today, a read a very detailed account of the incident. And this is disturbing:

“I was just about to put on my headset when someone started throwing peanuts at me,” she told me. “I didn’t understand what was going on.” She recovered enough to ask one man, “Are you out of your damned mind?” A pair of older white men walked to the railing preventing people from falling down into the camera pit. One hurled more peanuts at her and taunted, “Here! Want some more peanuts?”

Then they actually started hitting her with them. “This is what we feed to the animals at the zoo!” he continued. While his partner laughed, the thrower leaned over the railing as if he WAS at the zoo and snorted, “Here’s some more peanuts.”

My friend continued, “It was like they were heckling me.” It became clear to her these people were enjoying her torment. Two African-American cameramen and a female Caucasian reporter came over to investigate the fracas, but none had clearly heard what the men said. CNN security arrived by coincidence and set off after them.

(If that narrative is confusing, click the link and read the whole thing. It’s told in the first person by a friend of the camera operator.) That isn’t a tossed-off moment. That’s a deliberate, sustained bout of extreme obnoxiousness. What’s worse is the official reaction:

Then a pair of people who identified themselves as RNC officials came to apologize — or offer what to them passed as such. “These must have been alternates,” one said. “Our delegates would never do anything like that.”

Oh. OK.

However, believe it or not, that wasn’t the most offensive thing I read today. It was this, which may be a little confusing as well, as that link is to part of an interview posted yesterday by the National Catholic Register, with Fr. Benedict Groeschel, a Franciscan friar who appears to be making a rather vile explanation for child sexual abuse in the One True:

Part of your work here at Trinity has been working with priests involved in abuse, no?

A little bit, yes; but you know, in those cases, they have to leave. And some of them profoundly — profoundly — penitential, horrified. People have this picture in their minds of a person planning to — a psychopath. But that’s not the case. Suppose you have a man having a nervous breakdown, and a youngster comes after him. A lot of the cases, the youngster — 14, 16, 18 — is the seducer.

And it gets worse from there. At one point, he refers to Jerry Sandusky as that “poor guy.”

The NCR has taken the interview down and apologized copiously, as has the friar. He’s playing the I’m-an-old-man card: My mind and my way of expressing myself are not as clear as they used to be.

That might be, but I still say it explains a lot.

OK, it’s Mitt’s acceptance speech, so I guess I have to watch it. You guys pick it up in the comments, eh.

And happy Labor Day weekend. You deserve a day off.

The cleaning lady came today, and did such a good job I walked around the house for two hours, perching on the edges of chairs and glaring at dust motes, lest they land somewhere and screw everything up. We hired this woman to come in twice a month last winter, when I was working three jobs and figured the choices were:

1) Build up a head of resentful steam over the condition of the bathroom, which is used only by Alan and Kate and is technically their responsibility; or

2) Hire someone else to clean it.

It’s been my experience that life will deliver many, many opportunities to be resentful of one’s loved ones, most of them more important than the condition of a bathroom, so I reversed my long-held vow that I would always clean my own house and gave it over to someone else. Her deep-set Slavic eyes haunt me into a tip, most weeks. Our house never gets that bad between visits. I hope she doesn’t run across too much evidence of American sloth when she’s here.

I’m so middle-class, it’s disgusting.

My neighbor in Fort Wayne cleaned houses. She left me with a collection of anecdotes I will treasure forever — the couple whose intervals between visits could be counted by the number of shoes left by the back door; the ones who refused to even clean up the blowing tumbleweeds of dog hair, and in fact let their infant crawl around on the floor in the midst of them; oh, and a few more. (Some came from another neighbor with the same job, who once told me of the uncomfortable conversations she had to have with some clients, about how she would NOT rinse out their bloodstained period panties, because it’s a BIOHAZARD, and do it yourself, you lazy bitch.)

Eh, it was one of those days. Lovely outside, and I did get out for a bit of it, but mostly it was nose/grindstone/other stuff. Redeemed by dinner, yes: Grilled salmon and Mark Bittman’s spicy-sweet green beans. Which you should run out and make, because damn, they’s good. Now we’re watching “Cedar Rapids” on HBO: “I do a pretty fair impersonation of Omar on the HBO program ‘The Wire.'” I hope the people on “The Wire” think that’s as funny as I do.

So, bloggage?

Why are babies so damn cute? So we’ll have more of them, I guess. (After you watch it once, watch it again and note the hand movements of the girl on the left. Babies are so smart.)

The 10 oddest items in the GOP platform. No. 2:

“Ideological bias is deeply entrenched within the current university system. Whatever the solution in private institutions may be, in State institutions the trustees have a responsibility to the public to ensure that their enormous investment is not abused for political indoctrination. We call on State officials to ensure that our public colleges and universities be places of learning and the exchange of ideas, not zones of intellectual intolerance favoring the Left.”

When I’m 100, I hope I’m…not alive to do stuff like this.

Happy Thursday, all.

OK, so: St. Lance.

Let’s get my prejudices on the table right up front. I have always thought Lance Armstrong was dirty, at least since I learned how dirty cycling is, which was sometime after his first Tour de France win, and before his last one. I can’t say there was any crushing moment when this dawned on me — I don’t idolize sports figures as a rule — but more of a cynical oh well there goes that one moment.

It always boiled down to this, for me: The sport is dirty, top to bottom, and has been for years. One by one, the titans of the sport have gone from deny-deny-deny to a mumbling OK-yeah-I-did-it-too. And we’re supposed to believe this one guy, this cancer survivor who won seven years in a row, wasn’t? I’ll grant you: None of this is based on hard evidence. I’ll grant you: He never had a positive test. I’ll grant you all of that. I only offer in return: So much smoke, and this guy isn’t on fire?

So I spent much of the weekend reading this and that. Liked this. Liked that. Liked this other thing. Came away thinking mostly the same thing: He was dirty, but the whole sport was dirty. He did what it took to win, and that’s what it took.

He always seemed like something of a jerk. Left his wife and kids, had a couple of kids with a girlfriend, the latest girlfriend. But who cares? Is he running for pope? No. He seems to believe fiercely in the idea that a cancer diagnosis isn’t a death sentence. This is good. He seems to be one of those guys who thinks that exercise will stave off the Grim Reaper more or less forever. He’s half-right, but he’ll learn the other half soon enough. In the meantime, I guess what I’m wondering is, why did we decide people could only be one thing? Good, or bad? He was the best dirty rider in a dirty sport for a very long time, and now this means no one can admire him? Who decided that?

But I don’t admire him. At the same time, I know that if he’s being railroaded, it’s entirely plausible this is the way to do it.

Which hardly counts as any sort of revelation, but we’re talking about a cyclist here. So let’s give it what it’s worth.

So, bloggage?

Ohio State fans? Some of you people — I just don’t know what to say.

I’ve been trying to watch the convention, but I just can’t. Someone bring me up to date, eh?

And happy Wednesday.

Been doing a lot of biking the last couple of days. And the best kind — not the all-out, I-will-be-fit-and-live-forever kind, but the goin’-somewhere-with-friends, got-an-errand-to-run kind. Both involved coming home after dark, which is falling earlier and earlier. Alas. But is there anything sweeter than a night bike ride? Just easy pedaling, my lights flashing, enjoying the night. A bunny flushes out at the limits of the headlamp. It’s cool. Hardly anyone is out in a car, as the sidewalks have been rolled up at their customary 9 p.m.

You don’t even get too sweaty. So I’m just rolling. And soon I need to go back to work, having spent most of the past 18 hours in something that resembles it.

Which is why I have virtually no bloggage! The last time I checked the news, Paul Ryan was milling around on a stage in Tampa with a kid wearing a cheesehead. What’s THAT about?

Why don’t we just toss up an ANIMAL TALKING IN ALL CAPS and call it a day?

See you tomorrow?

I never met Neil Armstrong, but as a native Ohioan, I always felt I knew him at a different level than those who weren’t. I don’t have any particularly acute memories of his first steps on the lunar surface; I dozed until my mom shook me awake for the big moment, after which I dozed off again. I was at a friend’s house when the Eagle landed, and her father — her father, not her mother — shed a few tears.

“Maybe I paid for a few screws,” he said, wiping his eyes.

Alan, who lived closer to Wapakoneta, Armstrong’s northwest Ohio hometown, went with his family for the astronaut’s homecoming. Tens of thousands packed the streets of the northwest Ohio farm town for the big parade. He remembers drinking Mountain Dew rebranded as Moon Juice.

Later, after he’d retired from the space program, Armstrong returned to Ohio to live, teaching at the University of Cincinnati. He gave very few interviews (but some). He was that increasingly rare bird in American life — the truly self-effacing man. He knew his role in history, and participated in responsible scholarship to document and preserve the experience. He talked to serious journalists on significant anniversaries, cooperated with an authorized biography, but never, ever capered for an outsize share of the glory. What many are saying this weekend is true: The space program was one with many, many moving parts, and he was only one of them. His insistence that he not take more credit than was his due may seem strange to us now, at a time when so many publicity hounds bay for the spotlight, but once upon a time this was known as character.

About 10 years or so, I ran across a column about NASA written by an English journalist. It portrayed Armstrong as a bitter recluse, a grouchy crank whose tossed-off quip that he hoped someday his footprints on the lunar surface would be erased was evidence of something approaching mental illness. You’d think an Englishman would recognize modesty when he saw it, but by then we were well into the LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME LOOK LOOK AT MEEEEEE era, and maybe he just couldn’t imagine how a man could be satisfied with a college professor’s salary and pension when he could make zillions on the speaking circuit.

Later, I interviewed Armstrong’s biographer, James Hansen, a Fort Wayne native and Purdue graduate. He said he thought the astronaut chose him for the job because Hansen was essentially a science journalist, not a personality profiler, and Armstrong wanted to make sure the whole team of geeks got their due. I think he was right. (I haven’t read the book.)

Someone in my Facebook network posted a wry observance Sunday morning, noting that the story of the birth of Snooki’s baby was already No. 1 on Yahoo’s most-read news index, while Armstrong’s death was at #5. That says a lot, right there.

I asked Hansen to tell me something about the moon landing I might not already know. He said that in parts of the Muslim world, it is believed that Armstrong heard the Islamic call to prayer while on the lunar surface, and immediately upon returning to earth, sought out the proper religious authorities and converted to Islam. (It’s true. The rumor, that is.) Armstrong had to issue a statement a few years back. Apparently these Muslims believe he lived in Lebanon, which is true, but Lebanon, Ohio, near the former home of Kash’s Big Bargain Barn, not Kashi’s Falafel Palace.

Anyway, an amusing nugget that, if I’d ever met the man in person, I’d have liked to ask him about. However, the fact he would have just as soon keep mum about it is fine.

A good weekend around these parts. I spent some of it thinking about St. Lance the Imperfect; maybe that’ll be gelled by tomorrow.

In the meantime, have a great week. Not much bloggage to speak of, but thanks to Little Bird for finding the invisible bike helmet, which is either genius or a well-produced prank.

If you’re near Isaac, stay safe.

Long green for long beans.

I’m watching Project Runway — the long-awated “real women” challenge, so we can see all these bitches melt down at the sight of a B-cup — and it seems the right night for a mostly links post, eh? And I have some good stuff.

Serena Williams in a tight dress. Man, she looks fierce. Those thighs should be registered as a lethal weapon in most states. She could kill a man with ’em. But I have to say: I can’t WAIT until those hoof-shoes go out of style.

An ex-NPR reporter launches a new website:

“I feel like I am, as a reporter in the Capitol, lied to every day, all day. There is so little genuine discussion going on with the reporters. … To me, as a reporter, everything is spin.”

You DON’t say.

We had a good package in Bridge this week, on land use in Michigan, specifically the question of how much land should be in public hands, i.e., the DNR’s. Start here, and follow the “previous coverage” links if you want to know more.

I’m indebted to Jolene for finding two worth reading in this month’s Atlantic, Ta-Nehisi Coates’ essay, “Fear of a Black President,” and a much shorter, livelier essay on why Fox News-babes are so…painted.

Marinated flank steak for dinner. Man was it good. I’m going to miss grilling season. Good thing it will last a while.

A great weekend to all.

UPDATED: An OID and one great photo essay for you cat lovers out there.