Have you ever seen such a beautiful thing?

I don’t know about you guys, but all I really want to do today is watch bears fish for salmon. It’s 11 p.m. as I write this, but still plenty of daylight in Alaska. I haven’t seen any of the bears catch anything yet, although a couple of small fish have jumped. The bears stare at the water with a certain comical level of concentration.

I can’t deny it: These bears are my husband. It’s why I can’t stop looking. I recognize the concentration.

And now it’s the next day, and you can see how my writing hours are going these days. Well, last night was Project Runway, and I made an actual dinner (stuffed portobello mushrooms on the grill, plus corn on the cob). It included wine. I got tired. So now, a sugary breakfast (lotsa fruit), and a lot of coffee, and let’s see what the new day reveals to us. (Pause.) It just revealed a commotion outside, which I thought was a late-retiring raccoon, but no: A blue jay and a grackle, mixin’ it up on the deck. I think the grackle won, because the jay just took off. The grackle strutted around for a bit, ate an ant, preened its feathers. These birds are hard to love, but they certainly have attitude to spare.

In the meantime, this is what was revealed on my morning media run:

The Instagrams of Wall Street. Evocative and depressing. (Who wants to work on those trading floors? Hell. On earth.)

Every so often I consider doing one of those 23 and Me DNA scans, but didn’t I read somewhere it’s a big joke? Can’t remember. (Can’t remember much these days.) But somewhere along the line, perhaps I’d meet some interesting ancestors.

Via Hank, that rare treat, a Michael Kinsley column, and a good one. It starts with the victory of gay marriage and asks what will be the next thing we’ll look back on and wonder how we ever tolerated it otherwise. Kingsley’s nominee:

My own favorite nominee will win me no friends: high school football. In 20 years I think it may seem incredible that loving parents used to send their kids out to bang their heads against each other in the certain knowledge that this was damaging their still-growing brains. “Certain knowledge” may overstate the case now. But this smells just like smoking, about which the evidence dribbled in until it was undeniable. Let me add (for my own self-protection): I hope I’m wrong.

This week was the 45th anniversary of the Detroit riots. I will look at any picture of this event, any time, ever. Here’s a slideshow.

Late add: If you’d like to die of Cute today, the Green Bay Packers participating in a long-standing start-of-summer-practice tradition — riding kids’ bikes to the stadium.

Enjoy your weekend, eh?

Sorry I’ve been such a no-show these last few days. Mostly it’s tunnel vision, mixed in with a soupçon of laziness and a big dash of emptyhead. This summer has been wearying, and at some point I want to lay in the news like a swimmer in the shallow surf. Just let it wash over me, but not necessarily have anything to say about it.

In other words, I’m getting stupider. Just a while ago I poured dishwasher soap into the designated slots, started the machine, turned around and put the soap in the refrigerator.

But the season is still enjoyable. Today the three of us met up for dinner at a pizza place not far away, two of us on bikes, and that’s something you don’t do in January, fo sho.

So I have to ask: Why isn’t this getting more attention? Graham Spanier, the former Penn State president who should be sitting at home in a dark room covered with sackcloth and ashes, seems to have landed on his feet. He’ll be working for the government, on “projects related to national security.” As Paul Campos said over at LGM, “Because if there’s one thing Graham Spanier knows how to do it’s to make sure that sensitive information doesn’t fall into the hands of the wrong people.”

It’s really true, isn’t it? Once you’ve passed a certain threshold of success — a shifting, shadowy threshold — you can no longer fail. You’re incapable of failure. You land on your feet. Always. Where is that threshold?

One of my fellow cyclists posted this on Facebook today: The case for the “Idaho stop.” Or, to put it another way — acknowledging reality.

Hank was at the poolside NBC party in Los Angeles the other day, the one that She-Who disrupted by her very presence. He reports she was tiny and spray-tanned from head to toe. The New York magazine reporter asked her why she and her family couldn’t stay off TV. Because they believe in “living life vibrantly,” she said. Noted. (Bzzzzz.)

Obviously, my energy hasn’t yet returned. But I’m recovering, eh?

Open thread until I get my act together. On the table today? How Anglo-Saxon are you?

Or whatever else you’d like to talk about. Back in full strength tomorrow, promise.

All linkage today. Despite my best efforts, Monday continues to be le day du suck. But now it’s over. So there’s that.

One from me: Andy D. and the Detroit Bus Company. A fun guy.

We’ve come a long way, but we have a lot further to go: Sally Ride’s sexual orientation isn’t exactly the first line of this obit — it only looks that way, because of the way the Telegraph makes its online presentation — but still. We’ll know we’re done when such news is in the last two paragraphs, where it usually is.

Final poses with the Paterno statue, a slideshow. I like No. 8.

Lately I’ve been reading Mitch Albom’s sports columns, to see if they suck, too. They do. Lots of rhetorical questions, the midpoint I’m not saying this, but I am saying that hands-in-the-air gambit, the usual.

Coffee, food, work.

A Grand Rapids Saturday night. And why are we in Dutchistan? Because we have to pick up Kate at camp about 45 minutes northwest of here on Sunday, so what the hell. This is the second year in a row we’ve made homecoming eve a couple’s getaway in west Michigan, so I guess it’s a tradition now.

And yes, we’re at the Amway again. A million Rainbow Girls are checking in. As far as I can tell, they’re called Rainbow Girls because they favor Vera Bradley garment bags and duffels, which make a vivid color mashup on the luggage carts, along with the coolers in bright primary shades, because who can travel without a cooler? A few seem to be packing special stuffed animals as well. Rainbow Girls are the teen-girl version of Demolay, right? And Demolay is a Masonic thing? Whatever. All I know is, it’s 5 p.m., and some of them are loafing around the lobby in flip-flops and T-shirts, a few more in cocktail dresses and platform sandals, and a few more in floor-length gowns, which makes me wonder what the hell is on the agenda for tonight. But not enough to keep us hanging around, not when there’s a tapas place to be patronized.

I have to say, before I go on, the downtown is surprisingly oxygenated. Fort Wayne could learn a thing or two from this place. Clubs, bars, restaurants everywhere, lots of people out walking around. The tapas place was full. A few of the patrons were young women wearing tiaras and sashes. I thought they might be Rainbow alumane. A closer look revealed they were bachelorettes.

I don’t want to say this started with “Bridesmaids” because obviously it didn’t, but the movie seems to have breathed new life into the idea of going out with your besties the week before your wedding, eating tapas, getting shitfaced and otherwise bonding. If you can’t afford Vegas, Grand Rapids will do. For what it’s worth, these groups were well-behaved, but then, the sun hadn’t set yet. Back at the hotel, there were more — two more parties, one of which was uniformly dressed in outfits I disapprove of, in the sense that they defied the advice I offer to my daughter. Which is: “If you want to dress sexy, you have three choices — tight, short or low-cut. Choose one, two at the absolute most. All three and you cross the line into slutty.” (Actually, I think Michael Kors tells the contestants on “Project Runway” the same thing. Is the tangerine queen a mother at heart?) The woman waiting for the elevator with me had chosen all three, in a stretch-lace minidress that had the extra detail of being rendered in a eye-popping day-glo highway-hazard orange. It puzzled me until I remembered the electronic-music festival — it shows up under black lights at crummy nightclubs.

Well, a girl wants to be seen.

As it turned out, the crushing fatigue, and the effects of a half-bottle of pinot grigio, couldn’t keep me awake past 11, so who knows how these parties ended up? As it turned out, the cable channels were running “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight,” so what the hell, why not enjoy this giant HD hotel TV for a few minutes? Caught a bit of both. and all I can say is: What a mess. Heath Ledger was great, the rest incoherent, but I don’t go into these things with an open mind. And I only watched about 30 minutes.

Do I have any bloggage? Not much. I didn’t read the Sunday papers very closely, and I cannot stand to even consider the news from Aurora until we have more of it — I have seen this particular movie too many times to do more. One observation, though: I was watching the shaky cellphone video taken that night from the theater, marveling at a few things, including:

Why is this on TV? It shows nothing, is of poor quality, and mainly reveals that the person shooting didn’t have the sense to take cover when blood-soaked people began staggering out of a movie theater. If everyone’s going to be a journalist, they ought to know that many newsrooms have a closet with riot gear. For a reason.

Here’s another video, if you have 12 minutes: “Goat Years,” a short I saw at a film festival a few weeks back. A Detroit story about love, loss and goats. One goat, actually:

Happy Monday, all.

First things first. Let’s have a kiki:

Some of the language in that video is NSFW, but hey, it’s the Scissor Sisters. I need to get in a gay frame of mind, because “Project Runway” is starting, and I’m giving it a try this season. I got a little pissed when the girl with the Skrillex hair won, she and her series of flowy, drapey, dress-like outfits. They were very wearable, if you were a six-foot-tall skeleton with no tits whatsoever.

I’ll tell you, the first flowy-drapey thing that wins, I’m totally outta there. Although I can see the crowd includes an insane Japanese guy with an afro, so I have high hopes.

[Long pause.]

And with that, I must confess: I fell asleep on the couch in the second half hour of “Project Runway,” it’s now Friday morning, and I just learned that your generic crazed American madman in Aurora, Colo., killed 14 people at a midnight showing of the new Batman movie.

I thought we were done with that in this country. Guess not.

Now CNN is reporting the casualties include children as young as 6. Because that’s where you take a 6-year-old these days — to a midnight screening of a dark, violent comic-book movie. Which is not to say any parent shares the blame for this. Only, as they say on the internet, smh.

(Shaking my head, for you geezers.)

Watching CNN, the choppers are circling what looks like an apartment building. Presumably, that’s the killer’s house. It looks like the kind of place you see in every city in the land. If I were looking to hide in plain sight, I’d move into one of those — maybe a dozen units, every one the same, window air conditioners, neighbors only known as a collection of thumps and noises on the other side of a wall. Maybe that’s what he was after.

Not much bloggage now, but maybe one fitting piece — Alex Pareene on “The Newsroom,” Aaron Sorkin’s hugely disappointing HBO show. I’ve given it four chances, but I have to agree with Pareene:

Even his sparkling banter is one-note. His characters always say exactly, precisely what they mean, at all times. There’s no subtext, no irony, nothing ever left unspoken in his dialogue. His characters don’t even get to be sarcastic without someone asking them if they’re being sarcastic. Everyone alternates between speechifying, quipping and dumbly setting up other people’s quips. It’s exhausting.

I’m imagining how the crew from “The Newsroom” would cover this tragedy. Probably with much rushing around, and a dramatic moment where someone has to decide whether there’s a 15th victim, based on sketchy reports. Then the plucky intern would slam down the phone and say, “I just talked to the anesthesiologist! She’s out of surgery, and she’s alive!” That actually happened in the last episode, which dealt with the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. I actually guffawed. Because, as a journalist who’s tried to contact many doctors in the course of my work, I can tell you with absolute confidence that you don’t just ring up the anesthesiologist after trauma surgery. Unless, of course, the anesthesiologist is the caller’s college roommate’s father, and she just happens to have the number of his cell phone, and he answers it, and he decides talking to the media is a great idea. (And yes, that connection has been used a time or two so far, in only four episodes. What a well-connected group of journalists.)

The Today show just went to a commercial. I guess what that means is, it’s not that important a story.

Have a good weekend, all.

Oh, and for those who watched: Was “Project Runway” any good?

Eh, I don’t know how much gas I have left in the tank tonight. How about some bloggage for an all-link post, eh?

(I went shopping after work. Trying on pants always takes it out of me.)

Has your neighborhood had any major blackouts this year? Get used to them.

Is having two Detroits — one relatively prosperous and safe, the other impoverished and lawless — a good thing? After all, a few years ago, it was all impoverished and lawless.

Clip art. Old clip art. Very entertaining.

Zzzzzz.

The stifling heat wave hasn’t been kind to anyone, but the impossible outdoor exercise conditions have sent me back to the pool, so there’s that. Lately I’ve been rising around 6, biking to my city park, which opens for lap swimming at 6:30, doing a half-hour of back-and-forth and then riding home. It all takes a little over an hour, and when I pull into the garage around 7:45 a.m., I have the pleasure of knowing I’m done for the day. It makes sitting in a chair for the next six to eight hours more tolerable.

Today was even better. The pool was set up with 50-yard lanes, a rare treat apparently done for the benefit of the swim team, which comes in later in the morning. You have to be a regular lap swimmer to appreciate a 50-yard pool — it’s the distance where you can really establish a rhythm, stretch out and relax and not have to always be thinking of the wall coming up ahead. Fifty-yard lengths make you feel like an Olympian, even if you’re just plowing along with your usual bad form, lumpy old you.

When I got out, I overheard the lifeguard while I was drying off, talking on his phone. “A body in the river?” he said. “Huh.”

“Huh” is the new “far out.” I miss “far out.”

I forgot about it until my lunchtime news fly-by, and whaddaya know: Two bodies — in pieces — were pulled from the Detroit River this morning, along with a circular saw. The man who called it in had this to say:

“It was not a pleasant way to start the day.”

Thank you, alert citizen! What’s more, this wasn’t even the biggest news of the day. Two dismembered corpses were trumped by a major break in a decades-old series of child murders, the heat wave and a middling-to-serious scandal in the state legislature. I tell you, it’s like living in south Florida in the ’80s.

But as miserable as this heat has been, I’m enjoying summer. Last night’s dinner: Shrimp tossed in a peppery-butter sauce with cilantro, corn on the cob, the last of the weekend’s blueberry pie. Not bad, even if it was a day when I only went outside twice, and then not for long.

So, bloggage?

If you didn’t catch Jon Stewart’s return from vacation this week, you missed a particularly good one.

I can’t stand Spike Lee, but this is a pretty good interview with him.

Are women worse at parking than men? No. Ask my husband.

Good lord, I’m beat. Have a good Wednesday, all.

So, let’s try this again:

In our time together, Alan and I have stayed in a few dumps. At least until Kate was born, we preferred a less restrictive type of vacation, unbound by too many plans. We had a destination, but getting there was part of the fun, and we never knew where, exactly, we’d be stopping.

In those pre-cell phone, pre-internet days, our method was to find a quickie-mart on the outskirts of town, check the Yellow Pages for hotels/motels, and call from a pay phone until we found a vacancy. Ninety percent of the time, everything was fine; I still remember the night we spent in Rochester, Minn. — with many, many lodging options, thanks to the Mayo Clinic — as the one and only time I’ve been convinced a ghost was in the room with us. I woke up, heard footsteps on the scrunchy carpet, was able to see the whole room clearly with my night-dilated pupils, had no fear whatsoever, thought hmmm, I guess someone died in the clinic with unfinished business in this hotel, went back to sleep.

Maybe it was a dream. DON’T THINK SO.

The worst was in some Wyoming town — Cody, maybe — where we were delayed getting into Yellowstone. It was raining in Cody, snowing at the east entrance to the park, and all we had to do was kick around this ersatz wild-west town and wait for it to stop. The first night, I found the Yellow Pages ad: For all your tropical fish and lodging needs, it read. Ha! Hipster adventure dead ahead! We arrived at a weird, rambling house, full of fish as advertised, but more of a bed-and-no-breakfast than a hotel. Our room was in what had been the dining room. The ceiling over the bed bulged with water stains. Every time the toilet in the room above flushed, I heard dripping noises. I slept fitfully as the guest above drained his or her bladder repeatedly, and I waited for the ceiling to collapse and dump a load of human shit on our heads.

We found a far better place the next night. Went to the rodeo.

Another memorable place was in Iron Mountain, Mich., where we stopped on our way home from Isle Royale. “In-room movies,” the sign outside advertised. I figured this meant HBO. It did not. It meant that if you wanted to watch a movie, you went to the desk and were given a VCR and allowed to choose from a cardboard box of tapes. Actually, you could choose from two boxes — the second one held the porn. No judging! We didn’t watch any movies, but admired the carved bear out by the road.

This trip, Alan made a reservation at what looked like a charming place on the Muskegon River, near Newaygo. The plan was to drop Kate off at camp, towing the drift boat, then cut east to the big river and float it for a couple of days. Things were going just fine when we arrived; there was a big gazebo in the back, overlooking the river, with a burbling water feature full of frogs. I settled in with “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” and the time passed. Some more time passed. Where was the clerk? She was supposed to be a few minutes late, but… Alan checked the note on which he’d scribbled the details. He’d made the reservation for next week, not this. Oops. Well, we know how to handle this, although now we do it without the Yellow Pages.

We ended up at another riverfront place, a kozy-kabins deal right out of “Lolita.” The choices were: Big smelly room, smaller smelly room, “new” smelly room. I chose small-smelly when it became clear there were no queen-size mattresses in the place, no matter how big the room was. We checked in — cash only — and the owner told Alan it would be $5 extra for the TV. No, I don’t know why; probably something to do with the dish.

“Are you sure? Don’t come asking me after 8 o’clock,” she said.

Finally, we got into the room, where I washed my hands and discovered? No towels. Back to the office.

“I don’t normally provide those,” she said. But she found some. They were clean, something I was absurdly grateful for.

We headed out, launched the boat, and found it was a lovely day for a float, if only there had been more water in the river. We had to drag over about a dozen gravel bars, but otherwise, it was Wild Kingdom — a dozen great blue herons, even more kingfishers, a mink or two cavorting streamside and the coup de grace of two bald eagles, although the second one might have been the first one, circling around for another fly-by. That picture yesterday was a deep, slow stretch. Lotsa cliff swallows in that sand bank.

Back to the dump, and guess what we discovered? No soap, either. Well, it’s always fun to visit a Walgreen’s in a strange place. You really get a feel for a town that the tourist places don’t give you.

Day two we walked around Pentwater and Ludington, just to see what the sunset side was like. (Answer: Hot. Sunny.) And then home. Just a couple of days, but it felt like longer. In a good way, honest, although we’re not making that mistake with the hotels again.

So, some bloggage?

If you read only one more Paterno story, read this one from the New York Times.

In Coozledad’s world, “In the Heat of the Night” is a documentary.

And if you read nothing more about Mitt Romney’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Weekend, make it this. Funny.

Finally, the lifeguard’s dilemma as a parable of outsourcing.

I’m off to bed.