I can see this Sandusky trial is going to be…a trial. I think I’m going to have to read the weekly summaries, because I can’t take too much more of this daily stuff. Especially stuff like this:

“Sandusky was standing right up against the back of the young boy with his arms wrapped around (the boy’s) midsection in the closest proximity I think you can be,” McQueary said. “I was extremely alarmed, flustered and shocked.”

At one point, McQueary said, he returned to his locker and slammed the locker door “in an attempt to say someone’s here, ‘break it up.'”

I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: None of us knows how we would react in such a situation. But my god, I’m growing tired of all the harrumphing and locker-slamming and eye-averting that went on in this case. I think, every time, of the women I know, the mothers. I could tick off a dozen 110-pounders who, if they saw such a thing, would have rushed in like those little birds you see in the spring driving crows away from their nests. They would have Heisman’d that old perv and taken the boy out under their fierce little wings, and if anyone tried to stop them, well, then you’d see the fingernails.

But again, we don’t know what we’d do. We only hope we’d do better.

For Detroiters and visitors: The owner/chef at Supino’s Pizza gives you a few options for local dining, in GQ. Did I mention Hank Stuever is coming to visit in a couple of weeks? Hank, what looks good to you?

I hope I’m recovered by then. Went to the doctor today, for the second time in a week. I told her my head felt like I was wearing a diving bell at all times, that Alan was complaining about how loud I was setting the TV volume, that I drove an unknown number of miles yesterday with my turn signal on, because I couldn’t hear the thing clicking at me.

“Ear infections take their time to resolve,” she said.

“I don’t say this often, seriously,” I replied. “But I want a more powerful antibiotic. Not the carpet bomb. Just something with a little higher octane.”

So, a Z-pack. Fingers crossed.

And so, bloggage:

Worst songs of all time: Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey.” Worse than “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife?” Worse than “Watchin’ Scotty Grow?” Yeah, I think so.

Farewell from inside the diving bell.

Catching up on the second viewing of the last episode of “Mad Men.” I seem to be swimming against much of the critical tide here, but I thought it was great. A great season, and while the final chapter didn’t include any severed feet or fistfights or “Zou Bisou Bisou,” it was a fitting end to the run. Truth be told, the show is starting to make me nervous, as we’re up to mid-1967 now, and I remember a great deal of this stuff.

Not that I didn’t recall the Kennedy assassination and the rest of the various collisions between history and this particular fiction, but this stuff I remember — my sister bringing home “Revolver,” the Richard Speck murders, when hemlines suddenly climbed past the knee. In the dramatis personae of the show, I’m Bobby Draper, and sometimes I feel as though just as many actors have played me through the years.

And while Matt Weiner is younger, he has a good eye for this sort of thing, or at least the sense to hire the right writers. I was 10 years old and living in suburban Columbus, but he captured the pivotal nature of the era, how everything was one way and the next, another. The episode ends in May 1967 and in two months, Detroit will be in flames. The summer of love is about to begin and next year, all hell will really break loose — student revolts in Europe, Chicago, more riots. Next year will be the final season, and it’s a fitting year to end it.

Although Weiner might not. He might flash forward to 1974. Or die of petulance over the summer. You never know. And that, my friends, was three paragraphs of pretty much nothing. But if you’re a “Mad Men” fan, you’ve already read 10 recaps by noon on Monday, so why bother?

I heard a report about day one in the Jerry Sandusky trial on the way home today. Yeesh, did I ever need a shower after that one. Did you know that in Sandusky’s “culture,” it’s common for men and boys to shower together? The culture, I gather, is “athletics,” and to some extent, I agree — one of the very puzzling things about jocks, to me, is their willingness to shower together and make don’t-drop-the-soap jokes. As to whether men shower with boys, late at night, after everyone’s gone home, just you and me kid, and Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked? — I guess more will be revealed on that score. I can hardly wait.

But do not despair! Some fine bloggage today, courtesy of Hank, who unearthed a 1992 essay by Martha Sherrill, written on the 20th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, and asking, What if Watergate had never happened? Well….

Elizabeth Taylor is dead. She was never saved from drugs and booze and overeating by the Betty Ford Center, because the Betty Ford Center does not exist, because Betty Ford remained a perfectly happy golf widow in Grand Rapids, Mich., who sometimes acted a little silly at Christmas parties. …Edmund Morris was able to finish the second installment of his Theodore Roosevelt biography because he never got tied up doing Ronald Reagan, since Ronald Reagan, after an unsuccessful run at the presidency in 1976, quit politics. He was wholly satisfied that a good conservative — Spiro T. Agnew — had finally made it into the White House. Reagan resumed a successful career in television, and in 1980 accepted the part of Blake Carrington on “Dynasty.” He dyed his hair gray.

It was a wonderful life after all.

Ninety degrees both days of the weekend. It might as well be 12 below, but I forced myself out in it just the same. As my recovery from Inflated Head Syndrome seems to have stalled — yes, mom, still taking the antibiotic, and hoping for a miracle — I thought a slow bike ride might be in order. Very strange, riding a bicycle with one’s head hovering about 10 feet above the action, but there you are. It felt like a balloon on a very long string. And so, when I turned, the bike would go a few feet before YANK the string would correct the course of the balloon, and the balloon would bob along until YANK the next turn and is it really this hot? Because if 2012 is going to be another summer of 2011, it will be a long one.

BOB.YANK.

But I got my banking done. So there’s that.

Also saw “Prometheus” with the fam, in 3D ‘n’ ev’rythang. It was a sprawling, beautiful hunk o’ disappointment. Very nice to look at, with a story that made no sense. I don’t think I’m spoiling anything here, because I’m only going with the first-act material: Cave paintings from around the ancient world all seem to suggest an alien visitation, so off our brave explorers go in their entertaining mix of ethnicities and attitudes in the year 2093, to find this extraterrestrial culture. They’re aided by a robot played by Michael Fassbender, who was the greatest thing about the movie, because, duh, Michael Fassbender.

This is tied to the original “Alien,” of course, and if you’re wondering where you saw these scenes before, of an entertainingly mixed crew waking from cryo-sleep and eating a grumpy breakfast together, well, that’s where. It just seemed so much…better the first time around. “Alien” was the first movie that made me consider what a deep-space work vessel would look like, and what sort of crew such a space truck might have. Of course, “Alien” is 30 years old now, and millions of young moviegoers haven’t seen it.

And I don’t care what anyone says. The big gross-out scene in “Prometheus” isn’t fit to touch the hem of John Hurt’s garment in the original chest-burster scene from “Alien.” I think they actually had to peel me off the ceiling of the theater after that one.

That, in the end, might be the biggest single flaw with “Prometheus” — everything’s an homage, a callback, and update of and to something that was truly original. Which made it disappointing.

(Was “Alien” really original? Film critics always point out it’s not a sci-fi movie, it’s a haunted-house movie. Granted. But it was an original sci-fi/haunted-house mashup, at least.)

So, bloggage? Sure:

Some of you may have noticed Cooze has been a bit testy of late. He has an excuse — Balto’s been missing. But the story has a happy ending, told as only he can. (Why does Verlyn Klinkenborg bore the shit out of us in the pages of the New York Times with his dispatches from yonder, while Cooze has only a blog? I ASK YOU.)

Here’s something very strange — a near-novella-length post by a gay Mormon, coming out of the closet on the occasion of his 10-year wedding anniversary, and yes, he’s married to a woman. He calls himself a unicorn. I refer to one of Nance’s Truths, i.e., there is no mystery in life deeper and more inexplicable than the human heart. I’m sure this will be jumped on by the anti-gay marriage crowd. I don’t really care what they do. I hope his wife is content, and she certainly states that she is, multiple times. (The violent smiles in the photos have an air of creepiness to them, I have to say.) Just something to read.

And so the week begins. Fingers crossed for full health by its end.

Making’ mozzarella.

Fresh open thread for Friday. I finally got to the doctor today, to learn I have? An ear infection. Like a little kid, yes. I even got the little-kid medicine, amoxicillin. But only five hours after swallowing the first dose, the pain is markedly reduced on one side of my head and I hope will be entirely gone on both by tomorrow.

Antibiotics. I avoid them at much as possible, but when you need them, they are miraculous things.

So I spent the evening doing memo-writing instead of blogging. You take what you like from the internet and discuss it at will, eh? I’m hoping I’ll be back at 100 percent by Monday.

I wasn’t going to write about the new restrictions on extra-large sugary soft drink sales in New York City, and then MMJeff brought it up elsewhere, and so let’s thrash, shall we?

I don’t have strong feelings on it one way or another. The subject of obesity comes up from time to time here, and we’ve run through the usual reasons. The more I think about it, the more I look at photos from my youth and marvel at how few people, even among my parents’ friends, were seriously overweight — well, I don’t have any answers, just a few hunches. And I think portion size is a big part of it.

I think portion size is one of those insidious things. It creeps up a little at a time. We’re told to fill our plates, and we do — even though the plate is two inches bigger than the ones we grew up eating from. It’s bigger because kitchens are bigger, and kitchen tables are bigger, and everything is bigger because otherwise, what will motivate you to buy a new set of dishes? You need that stuff.

Anyway, as I’ve probably stated here a million times, I grew up drinking those little 6.5-ounce Cokes. Sometimes my mom would buy the 12-ounce six-packs, or the 16-ounce Pepsi six-packs. Returnable bottles. We had little plastic caps to reseal them. You never drank a whole bottle by yourself. A six-pack kept four of us happy for a week.

New York City is a small place, and even the millions who live there comprise only a fraction of the country’s population. But it’s the Temple Mount of our culture — almost everything starts there. I think Mayor Bloomberg knows this. I don’t think he’s doing this with any serious policy effect in mind; I think he’s just trying to start a conversation.

In 1979, I started my first newspaper job. I was in an seven-person department, and four of us smoked. A guy I walked by several times a day had an ashtray the size of a hubcap on his desk, and he filled that sucker up, every day. Alan and I went to New York 22 years later, when the city was the largest one in the country with a city-wide smoking ban. We saw the Mingus Big Band in a low-ceilinged, basement club, and left two hours later remarking on how nice it was to not be reeking of cigarettes. Michigan now bans smoking in nearly all public places. Who thinks this is a crazy intrusion of the nanny state now?

In my lifetime, we’ve vanquished cigarettes, or at least put them in full retreat. Bad food may be the next front in the war, and should be, given how disproportionately it effects affects the poor, the young and the powerless.

Does banning gigantic sody-pops look like a solution? No. But it’s a conversation-starter. I’m willing to have it.

Good lord, this plague is persistent. Every time I think I’m out of it? IT PULLS ME BACK IN. So I have no bloggage today. Do you?

When did it start? With Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial? Let’s say it did. I know many of us are long-ish in the tooth here, and will remember how that design was greeted when it was revealed as the winner of the competition. It was “a black gash of shame,” a “ditch,” a slap in the face of veterans who survived that most complicated conflict, not to mention those who died there. And by a woman (!) with an Asian name (!!), no less. Splutter, splutter.

And then it was built, and opened, and the bitching stopped, replaced by sniffling. Who could look at the Vietnam memorial and not be moved? And what made it so? The names.

I’ve seen individual names before on monuments, but only on local ones. Had a national monument ever made the attempt to note every single soul lost in a conflict like this? And the design was perfectly suited for it — the shorter panels capturing the lost in the early years, and as you walked along, the panels got larger, the toll higher, peaking around 1968 or so, and then petering off as we lost our will to throw fresh bodies into that particular grinder, and drew down forces.

You’d think the memorial’s first year would have been enough to shut the critics up, but no — we started tarting it up immediately, so as to silence the various constituencies involved. First, a bunch of flags. Then, the bronze of the three soldiers (I guess for those who couldn’t read?). Then, the bronze of the nurses, so women weren’t forgotten. At the end, they couldn’t diminish the wall’s power. Because of the names. Because here, finally, you could see the final toll of our southeast Asian misadventure: That guy, that guy, that guy. Your brother, his dad, her cousin.

(Was this about the same time we stopped commemorating the prematurely or abruptly deceased with flowers on their headstones, and started doing so with flowers, and teddy bears, and other stuff, at the place where they died? I seem to remember it that way.)

After that, even after all the bitching and the retrofitting, it seemed unthinkable to erect another memorial without the names. Give Maya Lin that, along with all her other honors: She demolished the heroic tradition in war memorials. We’ll see no more bronze generals riding horses for a good long while.

The memorial for the Oklahoma City memorial went up with almost dismaying speed after that tragedy. I read a critical piece — by which I mean “criticism,” because “review” just sounds weird in this context — about it in one of the New York papers around the time it opened. The critic didn’t like it, and was very lucid in laying out his reasons, the biggest one being that you can go through the whole thing and never get any real sense of why this event happened. Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols are in there, but the context in which they made their attack — the paranoid right wing politics that were floating around talk radio at the time — is nowhere to be found. The critic made a strong case that a certain amount of time needs to pass before we can fully understand these things, and that the people with the most fraught emotions should not be too involved. They have crazy ideas — like that the very mention of the perpetrators of tragedies shouldn’t have their photos anywhere in the building.

But come on — if you can’t keep a plot in Oklahoma City empty for a few years, how are you going to do the same thing in lower Manhattan? And the events of September 11, 2001 dwarf OKC. There was no way a 9/11 memorial wasn’t being built in our lifetimes, but it was equally certain that getting it done would be a monster.

The memorial, by itself, was the easy part. The museum, now, that’s another matter:

It seemed self-evident at the time: A museum devoted to documenting the events of Sept. 11, 2001, would have to include photographs of the hijackers who turned four passenger jets into missiles. Then two and a half years ago, plans to use the pictures were made public.

New York City’s fire chief protested that such a display would “honor” the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. A New York Post editorial called the idea “appalling.” Groups representing rescuers, survivors and victims’ families asked how anyone could even think of showing the faces of the men who killed their relatives, colleagues and friends.

The anger took some museum officials by surprise.

“You don’t create a museum about the Holocaust and not say that it was the Nazis who did it,” said Joseph Daniels, chief executive of the memorial and museum foundation.

It’s happening all over again. Maybe this is why we put up all those bronze generals — unanimity. But now we have this culture of memorializing where everybody gets named, and everybody gets a voice and a vote, and an implicit promise that they’ll see the finished product before too many years pass. We’ve also learned that designs are only literally set in stone, but they’re always able to change something.

I’m not sure what I’m groping for here, except maybe that the critic of the OKC memorial was onto something — it’s too soon. We won’t know what we need to say about 9/11 for another generation at least. But this is Manhattan real estate we’re talking about here, and you don’t leave that vacant for long.

Or maybe it’s just the Nyquil talking.

Looks like Scott Walker will live to fight another day. Disappointing, but not surprising.

Have a good Wednesday, all. It’s the middle of the week. I hope my ears unplug by then.

I went to bed last night at 6:30 p.m. and stayed there for 12.5 hours. Open thread today. But before the anniversary disappears in the rear-view mirror, a musical tribute to Ten Cent Beer Night. For those of you who can’t watch video, a sober narrative.

Calling the doc today. I’m beginning to think I need stronger drugs.

Sometime early in the first cocktail hour — one of seemingly millions of cocktail opportunities last week — a gentleman of Anishinabe Indian heritage directed me to the far side of the shrimp station, where a vodka company had set up one of those ridiculous exercises in branding. You gotta see this, he said.

Three attractive servers stood behind a bar made entirely of perfectly clear ice, decorated with flowers and flanked by two large frozen vertical S’s. You gave your martini order to one, who shook it up and handed it to one of the flankers, who gave you a frosted glass, then climbed a stepstool and motioned for you to hold your glass under a spout at the bottom of the S. She then poured your drink into a funnel frozen into the ice, and it snaked through a tube and exited at the bottom, into your glass. Quite cold.

“That’s very clever,” I said. My new pal said he thought so, too. We talked some more and I said I didn’t want to keep him from networking and I’d see him around. I stepped out onto the 800-foot-long porch of the Grand Hotel to sip my cranberry Grey Goose martini, and thought about how this very island belonged to the Anishinabe, and not all that long ago. Then the world revolved around the sun a couple hundred times, and here we were, May 29, 2012, and I was just served a French vodka martini in the largest summer hotel in the world in the company of one of those folks, and he works for a high-end grocery store and I work for a think tank.

What a weird world it is.

I’ll have more to say about the conference; I’m still sorting it out in my head and on my desk. It was a pretty lavish affair and I met a lot of people and heard a lot. On the final day I was felled by a virus of undetermined lineage. I spent Friday and Saturday writhing in misery back home in my guest room, but seem to be on the mend now. I am at least cheery enough to have gotten a mighty chuckle out of the fact I spent most of the past week hearing that DETROIT IS BACK, BABY and today the city’s Grand Prix came thisclose to being called on account of a pothole.

In the meantime, my only bit of bloggage is this: What am I bid for this lovely portrait of Andrew Breitbart as a knight?

Have a great week.

Not exactly scintillating stuff, but what the hell, every click counts: Yesterday’s story.

I have to tell you: I understand the thinking here, but there’s something dispiriting about making the case for treating little children well on a dollars-and-cents level. On the other hand, that’s how our society values everything, right? The important thing is, it gets done.

And now, the head goes down for the final day of maximizing, incentivizing, and other verbified nouns. In two hours, Tom Friedman! What is two hours in units of Friedman?