You know how we’re always talking about the importance of learning from one’s mistakes? And how important — and difficult — it is to teach this lesson to our children? A story came across my radar today that’s one long teachable moment.

This is a TV story, but I can give you the rundown: Football boosters at a local high school decide the team needs a new playing surface. The usual procedure for this would be to make a plan, set a budget and start raising funds.

But no. Five boosters banded together, mortgaged their houses for the cash, paid $300,000 for the turf — in blue, if you can imagine — and then started raising money to get their houses out of hock.

You can guess the rest. The fundraising isn’t going so well. In fact, it’s going spectacularly badly, and now five families expect to be facing foreclosure in less than a month.

I think the TV piece was designed to build sympathy for them, but even the TV reporter couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for it. It didn’t help when the one booster/homeowner said he did it “for community.” God save us from people who think the basis of community is blue Astroturf. The guy’s affect was so flat that I have to think the wolf isn’t all that close to the door. Because nobody could be that dumb, could they? And if this guy was really in danger of losing his house because of a titanically dumb wager on the willingness of the community (which he helped build with that turf) to join him in his quest for blue turf, why isn’t he under his bed crying?

Now you know why prostitutes get the money up front. There’s nothing like getting something before you’ve paid for it to cool someone on the idea of, well, paying for it.

The weekend awaits! As does a low-key week off for yours truly. Kate and I will be doing a little traveling, first to the Hoosier state and then to the Buckeye. Jeff, you know how to find my number; buzz me if you might want to share a soda pop.

Some linkage? Sure:

Me, on a new idea about teen pregnancy and its relation to poverty.

Some eye candy for the ladies and the homosexshul gennlemens: 33 things to love about men’s water polo. Rawr!

Finally, Kate and I saw “Beasts of the Southern Wild” tonight, and so should you.

Great weekend, all. Spotty blogging next. But I’ll be around.

(Tried to write something last night, found myself plumb out of gas after a day of bothering people on the phone, researching tax policy and exchanging emails about the election. Wouldn’t you? Now 6:47 a.m. Let’s see how this goes.)

Early morning, hoping for rain. The radar is encouraging, but it’s been a lying bitch for weeks now. The lawn is still green(ish), but that’s due to the sheltering effects of the front-yard oak, not sprinkling. Honey Boo Boo chile don’t sprinkle, and look, look! It’s taken only hours for me to internalize Honey Boo Boo and, in essence, justify whatever dollars were spent on producing that carnival of American entertainment. And I didn’t even watch much of it. Alan vetoed it after a few minutes, but I caught a bit here and there — the family ultrasound of HBB’s older sister, who is pregnant. HBB’s mother, June, revealed she’d been 15 when she’d first become a mother, which was presumably before she married her husband, Sugar Bear, and certainly before she started attending auctions to buy outdated or fell-off-the-truck packages of Chips Ahoy, another little snippet I caught. After the ultrasound, we learned that the family refers to a woman’s genitals as her biscuit.

“Because when you get a biscuit — a good biscuit, like at Hardee’s — you can kind of pull ’em apart…” — June throws her head back and laughs, and thanks! Thanks, June and Honey Boo Boo! Now I can never eat a biscuit again. Although I had a neighbor once who called that same thing a muffin, and I still eat those.

In time, it will pass. The American freak show. I bet they don’t so anything like this in Turkey.

I desperately need coffee. I should have exercised this morning. Maybe a bike ride later? I’m hungry. This is my brain in the early morning — Travis Bickle without the guns: I tried several times to call her, but after the first call, she wouldn’t come to the phone any longer. I also sent flowers but with no luck. The smell of the flowers only made me sicker. The headaches got worse. I think I got stomach cancer. I shouldn’t complain though. You’re only as healthy, you’re only as healthy as you feel. You’re only as…healthy…as…you…feel.

It takes three to make a trend, but I think we have a good start on making naked DUI into a Thing.

First, the Rev. Peter Petroske, Catholic priest, arrested and suspended for driving through Dearborn naked and drunk, and I really wish I knew more, but I don’t. There’s a lot about Fr. Petroske’s background in the story. Commenters who say they knew him say he’s a great guy. The priesthood is stressful. I hope he gets the help he needs.

And then, today, Randy Travis, upon whom I once had a 10-minute crush, before the gaydar kicked in, now reduced to raving in the back seat of the squad car, naked and drunk and threatening to kill the cops.

I do not mean to make light of what is obviously a couple of miserable human beings, but it’s odd how these things come in clusters. I’ve been naked and I’ve been drunk, sometimes at the same time, but I’ve never considered going for a drive while in that condition. And for that, the world can be grateful.

I sense we’re already lowering the tone.

So here’s this: Gawker had a little exchange with Henrik Rummel, aka Boner Rower. He is one hell of a good sport:

What was your initial reaction when the story of your boner hit the internet? Have you gotten a lot of feedback? New fans?

I laughed very hard! I woke up my girlfriend and told her the story. Then I told everyone else I knew, except my parents.

Wise choice, kiddo. Now your mom will never find out.

I can’t tell you how happy I am that gymnastics is over. I don’t know how many more plucky brats I can handle. These track athletes are much more my speed, although I don’t really get the obsession with makeup some of these women have. When I’m sweating, false eyelashes are the last things I want to worry about, but then, it is worldwide television and there’s a lot of money lying on the ground for a fetching athlete to pick up, whether or not she’s a winner. So: Plucky brats bad, lanky brats with false eyelashes good.

Failing that, you can always go for a reality-TV show. What do you call a vagina?

Coffee. Cooooffffeeeee…..

Election night, and the returns are coming in, pretty much as expected. Pete Hoekstra will running against Debbie Stabenow in the fall. Gary Peters will be my new congressman. The Detroit Institute of Arts will most likely get the small tax millage that will allow them to stay open. And my phone will stop ringing. Four more calls today, one coming as late as 3:30 p.m. I was ready to kill. I could have let the all go to voicemail, but our landline rings so infrequently, to have it chirping all day just chaps my ass. So I pick it up, and immediately hang up. And this, my friends, is a first world problem.

The only seriously contested races are small enough that they won’t have clear winners until tomorrow. If only there were a news product that could reveal these things bright and early, that we could read over coffee.

Here’s one: The utterly FUBAR’d mess of the 11th district, left behind by one-time presidential candidate Thaddeus McCotter. The evident winner — at this hour — is inevitably described as a “reindeer farmer,” which he is. I’d like to know more about him, but he’s given virtually no interviews. That’s because it came out some time ago that hey, he’s an actor:

Bentivolio, a Milford teacher, had a prominent role in a low-budget Michigan-made film — “The President Goes to Heaven” — released last year that pokes fun at a fictional character based on Republican former President George W. Bush.

In the 85-minute satire, Bentivolio is the chief physician at a place called the North Oakland Medical Center, where the fictional president has had a stroke and lies in a coma but is able to hear and understand those around him.

The nurses berate the comatose president for ordering the planes to be flown into the towers, killing their loved ones. A conspiracy theorist on a TV screen details the urban myths about “our allies” being responsible for the attack.

And the comatose president, whom the viewers can hear but the actors can’t, says he knew something was in the works, but “only Dick knew all the details.” (An apparent reference to former Vice President Dick Cheney.)

I would like to party with Kerry Bentivolio, reindeer farmer. And he’s very, very likely to be going to Washington by the end of the year.

So.

Because I have an RSS feed set up to search “grosse pointe,” I got this column yesterday, which isn’t about GP at all, but Mitt Romney, and contains this lovely turn of phrase:

Who is Mitt Romney? He’s a public figure for whom, as Gertrude Stein said of Oakland, there’s no “there” there. He’s a shape-shifter, an identity hijacker, a human being who would rather appear to be than actually be. He’s the living incarnation of the self-seeking, ethos-free, “always be closing” vacuousness of the hedge fund set. He’s the Golem of Grosse Pointe, the Dybbuk of Darien, the animated spirit of vapid wealth. He is soulless and amiably amoral ambition made flesh as a candidate for the highest office in the land.

The Dybbuk of Darien — now there’s a movie.

It seems I had more to blog today, but I didn’t write it down. Maybe it will come back to me tomorrow. Oh, I remember: Hank on Honey Boo Boo. A classic. (Link fixed.)

I’m thinking it’s a day for another links’n’stuff post, because Mondays suck, and this one sucked audibly.

So:

There was a time in American journalism when you couldn’t say “boner” in the newspaper. You still can’t. Online, you put it in a headline. Poor guy. Or maybe not.

Great Olympic moments, nostalgia edition: When Tyson Gay became Tyson Homosexual.

It’s election day in Michigan. The phone rang incessantly all weekend. Robocalls. Today I came home and found four on the machine, answered two more, and found another on the machine after I stepped out for a while. I’m ready to call in an airstrike on the whole Wayne County Commission.

More tomorrow. At least I hope so.

Yeesh, this heat is getting on my last nerve. The last few days have been less hot than it’s been in the worst weeks of summer, but so muggy my glasses steamed when I got out of the car last night. My scalp never feels entirely dry, and that spot at the base of the skull? Swampy. Ick.

So when Alan accepted a night at Comerica Park as part of an automotive media event Friday night, I was highly dubious. “Field box or suite?” I asked. Suite. He thought so, anyway. I enjoy a night at the ball park as much as the next girl, but it was 91 degrees at 6 p.m. Even the most casual business casual is miserable in weather like that.

I settled on khakis and linen, but needn’t have fretted. Because it was, indeed, a suite. And General Motors’ might be the second-best in the whole joint:

Let me put it this way: One of the GM people brought her son and another boy. After a couple innings, they went next door to get an autograph, having spotted Willie Horton sitting a few feet away, in the owner’s suite.

Add the air conditioning and the food, and all I can say is, this is civilization. Of course, now I’m spoiled for the field seats more or less forever.

Tigers won, 10-2. But you Clevelanders already knew that.

The rest of the weekend went swimmingly. Eastern Market (sweaty scalp) followed by errands (sweatier) followed by gym (total schvitz-a-thon) followed by cooking and shower and cocktails with friends. I indulged in a little Laphroaig, not my usual summer drink, but oh well. I thought it tasted oaky and peaty. Alan took a sip and said, “lavender and manure.” For this you pay $9.75 for 1.5 fingers, but it lasted a good long while.

And now to the bloggage. Because it seems we’ll never see the end of our peculiar American insanity, I offer the following as a cautionary tale:

Ugh.

After last week’s bite-the-medal photo array, I offer…kiss the medal. I guess it beats “swing it around your head and smack someone on the head with it,” but it does make for some repetitive photography.

This picture, however, of the first woman from Saudi Arabia to ever compete in an Olympic Games, sort of touched my heart. The look on her face. She didn’t last two minutes, but I have to think she did some good for somebody in that time.

Onward to the new week. Still enjoying summer, despite its best efforts to kill me.

I know I’ve said cruel, cruel things about California peaches in the past, but I’d like to make a qualified walkback today.

(I know, I know: EDGE OF YOUR SEAT.)

My fruit guy at the Eastern Market warned me a while back not to expect much during peach season. Their whole crop was KO’d by the crazy spring weather. But they are offering an alternative – white peaches from Cali. This would normally leave me cold, but I trust my fruit guy. They were hard, but had a nice peachy fragrance. I took them home.

Thirty-six hours later, they were soft and people? These were some seriously good peaches. And white! What will they think of next.

This is my super-favoritest time of year, foodwise. Every breakfast is peaches, blueberries and melon. Every lunch is vegetable frittata. Dinner is…well, today it was a tomato-corn pie, made with the last of Saturday’s fresh mozzarella from Zingerman’s. What a life. It doesn’t take much to make me happy.

Which is, perhaps, one reason I can’t even say how many shits I do not give about Chick-fil-A. As we all know from the occasionally updated Gay Agenda, fast food is tacky and fattening, and many of my gay friends and acquaintances are superb cooks. Nevertheless, if you didn’t see the slideshow Cooze unearthed yesterday, of politicians enjoying fried chicken products, it’s worth a look. Huckabee is showing the difficulty of lasting weight loss, it seems. Mike! Stop digging your grave with a knife and fork! Grilled chicken, no bread, and lose the waffle fries.

And now that we’ve switched to politics, a very good column by Brian Dickerson at the Freep, who’s been gone too long this summer. It’s about the stealth endorsements of Michigan’s Right to Life, and two Oakland County judicial candidates who say they forgot to mention the endorsement when directly asked:

Because all judicial races are nominally nonpartisan, all voters participating in either the Democratic or Republican primary next week will be able to cast their vote in the circuit court contest. My surmise is that Christ and Sakwa want conservative Republicans voters to know they’re in Right to Life’s corner, but would prefer that Democrats and independent voters remain ignorant of the RTL connection.

But let’s not go into the weekend with thoughts of single-issue voting! Let’s do it with Animals talking in all caps. This one.

Happy weekend, all. I’m going to a Tigers game.

Down the tunnel, under the river and out into the gun-free (or gun-fewer), single-payer health care world of Windsor! America Junior! Now this is what I call a midweek palate-cleanser.

And why am I here? Because I got a note from our sometime commenter Jason T., who is in the neighborhood honeymooning with his new bride, Denise. They came over from Pittsburgh, where they were wed this past weekend. I should probably add they’re not honeymooning in Windsor, but in the Ontario coastal area of Lake Erie, where it’s pretty and Canadian. They thought it might be fun to get together. And I agreed, so here we are, in some faux-English pub, with a Morris Minor permanently parked outside and some rather mediocre fries. (Not that this stopped me from eating a bunch of them.) My eye keeps getting snagged by the TV over Denise’s shoulder, which is tuned to something called TSN, which I believe stands for The Sports Network. (This is Canada, after all.)

And can you believe it? They’re not covering gymnastics or swimming or very special stories about pluck and grace under pressure. They’re covering rowing. What a miracle.

When I got home, I tried to find CBC or some alternative to NBC. Nothing. People, THIS IS NOT A FREE COUNTRY.

Jason and Denise and I went to a couple of places in Walkerville, a neighborhood of Windsor so called because it exists in the shadow of the Hiram Walker distillery, which during Prohibition was a little like having Gus Fring’s underground meth lab operating across the street. They took the tour. So should we, some lazy winter Sunday.

Why am I facing 10 p.m. as a puddle of fatigue? Maybe because I woke up at 3:15 a.m., laid awake until 6, dozed fitfully until 7 and then called it quits. Fortunately, some good bloggage.

What divers look like, mid-dive.

Another excellent Detroitblog, on one day of police activity.

And if you haven’t seen Stephen Colbert riding dressage, you are missing something wonderful.

Yeesh, a wearing day. Let’s go for some links and leave it at that, eh?

I wish I could code stuff like this.

Seriously, when we talk about how to do news for a distracted, digital audience, this is the sort of thing they’re talking about, although granted, this isn’t exactly news-news, but more of an argument on behalf of the Democratic National Committee. Content aside, it’s just a cool way to pack a lot of information in a fast, clickable presentation. Thanks, Eric Zorn‘s second, Megan Crepeau.

Ever do a Google image search for “bite the medal?” You should.

The London Olympics Sap-o-Meter. Funny.

Sorry for the short shrift, but I’m done.

I read the news today, oh boy. Actually, I heard it — one of those long-drive-to-Lansing days. Mitt Romney described Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, said “culture” is the reason for the gulf between Israel’s and the Palestinians’ GDP, made a serious factual error (the GDP figures), and otherwise had one of those days where, if it had been had by Barack Obama, would have been accompanied by screeching, real hysterical screeching, on the right. Because it was the other way around, it was accompanied by a sober report on NPR in which the reporter explained, in reasonable tones, the “controversy” attached to calling Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

And that’s the way it was on the drive home.

As always, don’t just consider the source, consider the audience. Romney was speaking to a group of rich donors at the King David Hotel. It must have been successful; he is said to have left with more than a million bucks in his pocket.

Enough time passes between presidential elections that I forget stuff. Is this the way presidential candidates are supposed to behave “on foreign soil,” a phrase we hear a lot at times like this. Because that struck me, even considering the audience, as a rather obnoxious speech. But what do I know?

Back to the mind-numbing palliative of men’s gymnastics. Boy, are these guys not my type — short, musclebound, as hairless as a baby’s ass. I keep thinking of real-world applications for this level of physical mastery. Many years ago, I read a column in the American Spectator — perhaps the only good thing I ever read in that rag — about Rudolf Nureyev, after he died of AIDS. It was a snotty column, but there was an eyewitness account in there, about a rooftop party busted by the cops, and somehow Nureyev ended up on the other side of an air shaft or narrow alley, and the cops said, “Get back over here.” The dancer gave them an arrogant look and leapt back across the gap like a gazelle, which somehow reduced whatever had brought the cops there to the level of ashing your cigarette on the sidewalk. That’s when it would be good to be a gymnast. You never know when you might have to jump across an air shaft or turn a few handsprings.

As it is, most of us will only go to parties with people who will have a few and then reprise their role as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret.”

Meanwhile, what the hell with this Jonah Lehrer guy? It’s not enough that he blew it. He had everything, and he blew it. I get really tired of these entitled little shits with their book contracts and their think pieces and all the rest of it. Don’t make stuff up. It’s not so hard.

OK, time to watch the end of these gymnastics, and try to pretend I don’t already know the U.S. team collapsed like a muscular little house of cards.

OK, I’m just going to say it: Synchronized diving, while an impressive display, is not a sport. It’s a stunt. An awful lot of the competitions we’ll be seeing in the next two weeks aren’t sports. But what the hell, let’s watch ’em.

As a former equestrian, I’m sensitive to this charge. “You ride a horse? Oh wow, I bet that’s really hard — for the horse.” My reply was always that if golf is a sport, then riding is, too. And for the next two weeks, the Obscure Sport/Stunt Color Commentators Union will see full employment, and we’ll get to repeat their lines at work: “As usual, the Chinese set the standard for synchronized diving.” Try it out.

Diving is a sport, I should add. Surely, synchronizing with another diver is an added skill. But honestly, after watching for a while, I think it’s all about another opportunity to show beautiful bodies in bathing suits.

How was your weekend? Mine was fine. Sailing, cooking, shopping — basically the perfect summer trifecta, made even better by the fact all the shopping was for Kate, and I didn’t wave to face a fitting-room mirror. We went to Forever 21, one of the higher circles of hell. All I can do, shopping there, is think of how wretched the lives are of the people who sew this shit. How is it possible to grow the cotton, harvest the cotton, process the cotton, dye and loom the cotton, cut it, sew it, blah blah blah until this row of tank tops hangs on a rack in Troy, Michigan, priced at 2 for $8? But it’s undeniably a good place to buy cheap dresses for a teenager, so here we are, and here I am on an ottoman in the fitting-room area, and a girl across the row steps out in a dress that is the full trifecta of sluttyville — short, tight and low-cut. What’s worse, it’s sort of shirred, too, and the seam cleaves the crack of her ass. She looks at the mirror, and seems to be trying to make up her mind.

Her friend steps out of the adjacent fitting room. “Oh. My. God. That is so awesome. You look so hawt.” I’m thinking, nope, what you need is a nice sheath in a non-stretchy fabric. Something that skims the body, but doesn’t hug it like a drowning swimmer. Raise the neckline two inches — a scoop, not a plunge — and I’ll give you the mid-thigh hemline. Then you’ll look like a pretty lady and not Tatiana Petrovna, Russian prostitute.

She went back into the room, and emerged a few minutes later with a hot pink tight/shirred/short/STRAPLESS number, which was even worse. Her friend agreed THIS was the dress.

I guess she had a date for a sex party or something.

Kate got two dresses that were sorta Betty Draper-ish. Plus some fierce boots from Nordstrom’s anniversary sale, and a new pair of skinny jeans. I think we’re done for a while.

Back to the Olympics.

But first, some bloggage? Sure.

When it gets very hot in the Carolinas, our Coozledad finds little reward in farm work, which is good for us, because he blogs instead.

A very very long read from Outside. I opened the print window — it was broken into so many takes I got tired of clicking through — and lost the original story. But it’s a great story, about a veteran who walked into the Bob Marshall Winderness and hasn’t been seen since.

And while it’s wrong to laugh at children, someone obviously needs to point this girl in a new direction, and maybe this will be the turning point.

The week awaits! Let’s make it a good one.