First day’s conference rock star: Fareed Zakaria, whose act, polished though it may be, was still pretty good.

Meanwhile, here’s a cake in the shape of the state of Michigan. I didn’t eat any:

Back to work!

A friend of mine, one of the filmmaking crew, used to tell his wife, when she pointed out what a ridiculous, expensive, frustrating hobby he had, “At least I’m not a Civil War re-enactor.”

I have one for Alan now: At least I’m not a steampunk enthusiast.

God bless these nice ladies and their hobby, but I left the World Steam Expo in Dearborn Saturday deeply happy I didn’t let this lady talk me into buying a corset, even at two-for-one pricing:

She was very nice, and did her job well; she almost had me convinced that a simple navy pinstriped corset was just the accessory to spice up a shirt-and-jeans combo, and oh, what it does for your back! I told her I’d think about it while I took a lap of the vendors’ area, and left without returning. As you might expect, there were a lot of corsets on display, or rather, there were a lot of enormous bosoms teetering atop whalebone stays. There were also more top hats and cutaway jackets than you could count, masks, weird goggles, baroque jewelry and this sort of thing:

It’s a “weapon” of some kind. I guess this is all predicated on some sort of sci-fi genre, but whatever it is, I can’t get into it. “It’s goth for geeks,” one T-shirt read. But I had other places to go.

Specifically, here:

Yes, it’s the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, aka Movement, aka Techno Fest. Note that there’s nobody on stage. That’s because all the movement was being controlled by a DJ standing behind one of the pillars. Techno — what a deeply predictable and extremely monotonous genre. We sat through hours of this stuff, and soon I could predict when the bass drops were coming based entirely on how bored I was. It was like watching a puppet show with no story or dialogue, just dancing puppets. I can enjoy this stuff in small doses, but an entire afternoon and evening of it only underlined why it helps to be stoned out of your gourd to fully appreciate it. Fortunately, we stuck to the bitter end — Kate was bound and determined to see some dubstep act that was last on the program — and Alan and I stayed at the main stage for these guys:

Public Enemy! Now in their 25th year, a fact they reminded the audience, most of whom were embryos or less at the beginning of that time frame, about 6,000 times. I give them respect for lasting, respect for being who they were in 1987, major respect for “Fear of a Black Planet” and “It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back,” but when Flavor Flav takes a moment to pimp his soon-to-open soul food restaurant, I got a little impatient.

Speaking of which, I had to love the line in the linked story, above, about the project:

“We season the actual chicken and then bread it so it’s almost like a double whammy,” said Harmon.

I’m not holding out much hope for that one.

But it was a good show, and when it was over, I was very glad to get home and feel the beat resonate in my bones.

I hope your weekend was very fine. As I mentioned last week, I’m off for the great white Up North first thing Tuesday, and will be there most of the week. Look for something, but not much, here.

Summer is officially under way. Let’s make it a good one.

Watching the National Geographic Geography Bee, hosted by Alex Trebek. Of the 10 finalists, only one is a white male and one is female; all the rest are Americans of Asian (or south Asian) descent. The first ones eliminated were? The white boy and the girl (who is Indian). Hello, future masters! Enjoy this crazy country.

This is ridiculously hard. I’m getting about one question in eight. I really need to brush up on my Asian peninsulas.

It’s killer when they get eliminated, too. I imagine a Tiger Mom screeching backstage about how they’re going to get into Harvard NOW, eh, Mr. Smart Guy?

And with that, I will dispense with the ethnic stereotypes.

The four finalists left were asked the capital of Uzbekistan. Or, as we know it, Uz-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.

The answer is Tashkent.

I’m already feeling weekend-y; are you? What I mean by that is, I’m just thinking about reading, doing a little biking, hoping the air-conditioning doesn’t break down and stopping in at Movement, aka the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, for a little dubstep.

Or, as my boss says: It’s potato-salad season! And I’ll be making some.

A note about next week: Light posting, maybe non-existent posting, maybe some pix. I’ll be on Mackinac Island, attending the Detroit Regional Chamber’s annual public-policy conference. It’s Tuesday through Thursday, so with travel and all the rest of it thrown in, I’ll be lucky to crank out a few shots of the Grant Hotel and blue coastlines. But you never know.

Until then, some bloggage:

The peculiar smarminess of online mourning, by the great Monica Hesse at the WashPost.

The best of prom 2012, compiled by Buzzfeed.

Have a great long weekend, all.

Yesterday I rolled out of my driveway at 6:20 a.m., worked all day in Lansing, drove back, picked up Kate at driving school for a timed-to-the-minute dash to an audition downtown, sat through that, tried to eat dinner at one place and couldn’t, found another place, ate, drove home, remembered her bike was still at the driving school, drove back there, loaded it up and came home, by which time it was 8:40 p.m.

After which, I was in no mood to blog.

So, a blow-off day. Open thread for those of you who feel a need. Some conversation-starters:

An indelible image of the president and a little boy touching his head.

Paul Fussell, RIP. A book of his essays on war, which I found remaindered or maybe in a used bookstore somewhere and now can’t even recall the title of, kept me rapt during a long-weekend camping trip years ago. Of course, I read “The Great War and Modern Memory” and his great, guilty pleasure, “Class,” as well as his ex-wife’s bitter-but-amusing memoir, “My Kitchen Wars.” All recommended.

A sweet little story about a sweet little girl in Detroit, who found a $100 bill and turned it in to her teacher, rather than keep it for herself. She’s been repaid many times for her basic honesty and decency, with this great OID detail:

The $100 bill Breanna found, by the way, turned out to be counterfeit, and was confiscated by the Secret Service.

Oh, and yours truly on state vaccination policy. We already allow parents to opt out of pediatric immunizations for just-don’t-want-to reasons, and now the legislature wants to excuse health-care workers from flu shots. Because a co-sponsor doesn’t like “mandatory things.” Oh.

Carry on!

I should leave this stuff to Roy, but I recently started reading Rod Dreher’s blog again. God knows why, because he often drives me nuts, but evidently I need a certain amount of that stuff in my daily run, and Lileks isn’t doing it anymore. Today, he takes on a wrenching New York magazine piece by Michael Wolff on the long, slow decline of his mother.

It was brutal, and I couldn’t get all the way through it. The headline was brilliant: “I love you, Mom.” Sub: “I also wish you were dead.” Sub-sub: “And I expect you do, too.” If you’ve already been through this, you know the way these things go — the pain, the suffering, the indignity and, worst of all, the towering, senseless expense — $17,000 per month in nursing care for Wolff’s mother, who hasn’t been able to walk, talk or take care of herself for a year and a half. He goes on about this and that at some length before announcing he’s planning a different exit strategy for himself, and he’s pretty blunt about it:

Not long after visiting my insurance man those few weeks ago, I sent an “eyes wide open” e-mail to my children, all in their twenties, saying this was a decision, to buy long-term-care insurance or not, they should be in on: When push came to shove, my care would be their logistical and financial problem; they needed to think about what they wanted me to do and, too, what I wanted them to do. But none of them responded—I suppose it was that kind of e-mail.

Anyway, after due consideration, I decided on my own that I plainly would never want what LTC insurance buys, and, too, that this would be a bad deal. My bet is that, even in America, even as screwed up as our health care is, we baby-boomers watching our parents’ long and agonizing deaths won’t do this to ourselves. We will surely, we must surely, find a better, cheaper, quicker, kinder way out.

Meanwhile, since, like my mother, I can’t count on someone putting a pillow over my head, I’ll be trying to work out the timing and details of a do-it-yourself exit strategy. As should we all.

Dreher reads this, and sniffs: “Appalling.” He goes on to lay out his own situation, with his father:

He is 77, and in poor health, though not suffering from dementia. He’s got a bad heart, and all kinds of aches and pains, the result of a rough-and-tumble country-boy life (e.g., he used to rodeo as a young man). He is in near-constant pain in his hip, and has to use a cane to get around. I don’t know when he has last felt good. You can’t believe the medicines the poor man has to take every day, just to maintain. He’s getting too feeble to do much more than sit in his chair.

And all I could think was: Do you have any idea how easy you have it? A father with “all kinds of aches and pains” who is still lucid and ambulatory? As these things go, that’s a blessing from heaven. When my parents died, I decided the measure of a good end of life was the brevity of the interval between creaky-but-taking-care-of-yourself, that is, perpendicular to the floor, and bedridden-and-entirely-dependent-on-others, i.e., parallel to it. For my mother, this interval was five years, for my father, about two weeks. If you can have a conversation with your parent? If you aren’t smelling their pee, or if they’re still in their own house? That is wealth beyond rubies, and when the crisis comes, if you have a lucid, kind and pragmatic medical team to advise you? You are even richer. Alan’s mom spent a few months in assisted living before pitching forward onto her noggin and raising a subdural hematoma that eventually proved fatal. This still required an ambulance ride to Toledo on Christmas Day so that another medical team could state the obvious and send her home to hospice, where she died a few days later.

My point vis-a-vis Dreher being: If you could read that essay and still find the writer’s honestly stated vow to not inflict that on his own children “appalling,” well, I need to stop reading this sort of bullshit, because life is too short.

And I don’t need to remind you who we have to thank for setting common sense back a few more decades, do I? (She-Who!!!) Wolff, again:

I do not know how death panels ever got such a bad name. Perhaps they should have been called deliverance panels. What I would not do for a fair-minded body to whom I might plead for my mother’s end.

The alternative is nuts: to look forward to paying trillions and to bankrupting the nation as well as our souls as we endure the suffering of our parents and our inability to help them get where they’re going. The single greatest pressure on health care is the disproportionate resources devoted to the elderly, to not just the old, but to the old old, and yet no one says what all old children of old parents know: This is not just wrongheaded but steals the life from everyone involved.

And that is not appalling at all. It’s just the truth.

I’m not really in as bad a mood as I might seem to be. My advance medical directives are pretty clear. They say, “…and I understand these actions may result in my death.” Ego te absolvo.

While we’re there, another good read from NYMag, not so grim: An account of George Romney’s run for president in 1968 and, along the way, the beginning of the end of moderate Republicanism. My fellow Michiganders probably know all this well, but I was a mere girl then, and I didn’t know all the details, many of which are both sad and funny, as this story about the start of Romney’s campaign, in fall 1967, with a tour of ghettos in 17 cities, where the candidate talked about civil rights. That was, shall we say, a message that fell on deaf ears:

In Watts one day, Romney and Lenore were sitting in the back of a sedan, being chauffeured to the airport by a local driver, with Romney’s bodyguard riding shotgun. According to a story that circulated all through the campaign, Romney leaned forward: “Say, what is that word they keep saying to me? I don’t understand, it begins with an M…” The driver and the bodyguard racked their brains as Romney tried to pronounce it, working his western consonants around an inner-city accent. Then the driver straightened up and said, “Governor, I think what they’re saying is”—and here he let his voice get kind of ghetto—“mo’fucka.” And then, because Romney was legendarily a Mormon and these vulgarities may have been somewhat beyond him, the driver clarified: “Motherfucker, sir.” And Romney sank back into his seat, like a part of the car that had been mechanically retracted.

Wow.

A great Bridge yesterday if you’re interested in the ins and outs of municipal finance, addressing the burning issue — yes! I went there! — of fire service. In some ways, firefighters are like dentists, victims of their own success at upgrading building codes and preaching prevention. Fewer fires are being fought — half as many in 2010 as there were in 1977 — but you still need a force down in the firehouse. The question is what kind, and how do you train and work them? You can hit the main Bridge link in this paragraph, or the individual stories in the RSS feed over there on the right rail.

Eye candy: Classic children’s literature as minimalist posters.

Finally, how the Hawaiian authorities gave the birther-curious Arizona secretary of state a taste of his own medicine. Hilarious. (And hey, it appears to have worked.)

Happy Wednesday to you.

Let’s all get a gun! It’s the self-defense craze that’s sweepin’ the nation. Click that link, and read about a unique family tragedy (aren’t they all? Unique?) out in the ‘burbs, in which a 74-year-old woman killed her 17-year-old grandson, and no one can exactly say why.

She was afraid of the kid, her lawyer said. The kid wasn’t threatening at all, his father said. He said “from Arizona,” I should add, because that’s why the boy was living with his grammy — to finish high school here, which he should have done this spring. His parents had already decamped for sunny Scottsdale, but the boy stayed behind.

Here’s what we learned today: She emptied the clip into him. He was said to have “approximately” eight entrance or exit wounds, two slugs in his body and the 911 operator heard three more shots after he called for help.

I’m interested in knowing a lot more about this case. But the main thing I already know is: Some people shouldn’t have guns. Probably most people shouldn’t have guns. And yet: Everybody and their damn brother has a gun.

Folks, I got a couple irons in the fire at the moment, and have little energy or inclination to blog. How about a picture? The other day I went out looking for Detroit blight, and found myself on the same street where I took the French journalists four years ago. They wanted to see the $1 houses, and they saw some. The street was bad then, and it’s worse now, well over half gone, with the few holdouts looking sad and increasingly tenuous. This one sort of broke my heart, because it’s so classic from the outside. Probably was someone’s dream house, not even that long ago. And now? Well.

It is looking like a beautiful week, however. Enjoy it.

First things first: None of the animals in the previous photo were for eating. (At least not yet.) I was, as always, most charmed by the baby goats, which were either pygmies or baby pygmies or maybe from some breed known only as Cute. They weren’t much larger than cocker spaniels, and came directly to the fence for scratching and nibbling. One grabbed the drawstring on my pants and backed away with it until he’d untied the knot. How did goats get so smart? They’re just another agricultural cash crop, and yet, I can’t think of a dumb one among those I’ve met along the way.

Certainly even a dumb goat is smarter than your average Florida congressman, it seems. I was arrested by this story in the NYT Sunday, which just about ruined a beautiful Sunday morning. It’s about a GOP plan to defund the American Community Survey, the data-gathering exercise that provides a wealth, literally, of facts about life in these United States. But because government is no longer of/by/for the people in some folks’ mind, but instead comprised of nosy parkers, this must be stopped:

“This is a program that intrudes on people’s lives, just like the Environmental Protection Agency or the bank regulators,” said Daniel Webster, a first-term Republican congressman from Florida who sponsored the relevant legislation.

…Each year the Census Bureau polls a representative, randomized sample of about three million American households about demographics, habits, languages spoken, occupation, housing and various other categories. The resulting numbers are released without identifying individuals, and offer current demographic portraits of even the country’s tiniest communities.

It is the largest (and only) data set of its kind and is used across the federal government in formulas that determine how much funding states and communities get for things like education and public health.

For example, a question on flush toilets — one that some politicians like to cite as being especially invasive — is used to help assess groundwater contamination for rural parts of the country that do not have modern waste disposal systems, according to the Census Bureau.

I’m just…astounded by the ignorance of that quote. “Just like the Environmental Protection Agency or bank regulators.” And not, say, the Transportation Safety Administration, or the FBI if your names is Hussein, or anything like that.

It gets worse. Actual, non-brain dead American companies and institutions are protesting this, saying they need the data to know where to open stores, to use just one example. Rep. Webster tells them they need liberty, not information. (Actual words, yes.)

Can anyone guess when Webster was elected to Congress? Anyone? Not you again, Brian. Let’s see if someone else knows.

That turned my eyeballs inside-out for a while, so I needed to read this thing in the Sun-Times to right myself. It’s a sharp, but not rant-y, piece about the Joe Ricketts/Obama attack thing from last week, written by a sportswriter. I’d like to lay aside the content for now and just examine why I liked it. I think it’s because Rick Telander actually takes a stand, with a minimum of caviling and equivocation and hand-wringing. This used to be commonplace, and like a lot of things, you don’t really notice it’s going away until one day you ask yourself why so many newspaper columns are on-the-one-hand-this, on-the-other-hand-that, who-is-correct-only-time-will-tell exercises in not offending anyone. This is like a fresh slap of Aqua Velva, it is:

Everybody named Ricketts has been scurrying for cover since the bombshell dropped, with the conservative Ricketts kids semi-distancing themselves from their father and his right-wing dirty dealings.

But the Rickettses don’t come one at a time; they march as a group, and they’re right of center by design. They bought the Cubs with the family trust, so, as the saying goes when the dowry gets passed along, Own it, kids!

Or it might just be that I’d just read Mitch Albom phoning in another Sunday op-ed piece, and this one stood out.

Finally, transgendered children? Really young ones? Worth a read.

How was your weekend? I got back to the gym and am paying for it now, but it’s a good pain. Beside the glorious weather, I was lucky to catch a glimpse of a couple of just-out-of-the-nest robins, still with their speckled breasts and what-the-hell expressions. Better grow some tailfeathers, kids — it’s a bird-eat-worm world out there.

A busy week awaits, but it appears summer is really here. Let’s hope it’s a great one.

Baby goats! And ducks and lambs and calves…

Joumana Kayrouz is the T.J. Eckleberg of Detroit. For a couple of years now, her face has dominated every third billboard across the metro area, advertising her services as a personal-injury lawyer. This seems to be what she looks like more or less au naturel:

She has an arresting appearance, with white-blonde hair, lashes and brows. This was her first billboard image:

Lately a new billboard is replacing it. Through the miracle of technology, she’s grown a giant pair of lips:

I crossed the street behind this bus yesterday, and up close, you can see how crappy the Photoshopping was; they didn’t even try to match her actual lips:

I hope she’s a better lawyer than her art director was a Photoshop artist.

And that is your Friday eye candy (if you like wax lips). But it starts us off on a thematic foot, as our first bit of bloggage today involves the subject of how women look. I realize calling Rush Limbaugh a vile sack of pus is like calling the ocean wet, but Laura Lippman posted this today, and it left me wondering, for the thousandth time, where the bottom of this man’s loathsomeness really is. By WashPost blogger Melinda Henneberger, she notes her (extremely mild) reaction to the Time magazine breastfeeding cover, and Limbaugh’s reaction to it. Ahem:

First, Limbaugh pronounced me “a classic inside-the-Beltway feminist, classic professional feminist. You know what that means.” I do?

“See, TIME Magazine blew it,’’ Limbaugh explained. “You know why it’s not working with the feminist women? Because the woman on the cover of TIME Magazine was too pretty. I call your attention once again to Undeniable Truth of Life Number 24. Dare I speak it again? Brian’s nodding his head yes. Feminism was established so as to allow unattractive women easier access to the mainstream. Here is Melinda Henneberger, who’s somewhat trying to be funny here, but in all comedy, there is a grain of truth, and she’s quite upset.

This is what Melinda Henneberger looks like. Just, y’know, for reference.

Finally, Donna Summer is dead, and I won’t apologize for enjoying her music. Disco had its day, it came and went, and sorry, but the Bee Gees were only the worst part of it. Summer wasn’t the best, but she was pretty good. I could never bring myself to hate disco. It was pop dance music, and a huge relief from the self-important blowhard rock’n’roll of the time. (All we are is dust in the wind, right?) And then punk came along and was a huge relief from disco. It all passes away, eventually. Right, D?

Have a great weekend, all.

Do you and your partner squabble over what to watch on TV in the evenings (assuming you’re so inclined; of course I spend my evenings reading great literature, and thinking deep thoughts)? I ask because I’m trying to sample the first few minutes of “My Big Fat American Gypsy Wedding” and my husband just referred to TLC as “the hillbilly channel.”

I take offense! The L clearly stands for “learning.” And I am learning about American gypsies.

And these people are some serious hillbilly gypsies.

As a reporter, your only connection with gypsies is the semi-annual press releases issued by the police department, about traveling home-improvement scams — old women who get only half their house painted (or painted with watery paint that disappears after a single rain), people who get their wallets lifted when someone comes inside for “interior measurements,” the usual. So it’s a little odd to see a show about people who make their living by buying a load of asphalt in the morning, and go door to door throughout the day, trying to sell it. Somewhere this must work, but man, these aren’t my people. I keep yelling at the screen to slam the door and call the Better Business Bureau.

They certainly do favor a ridiculous style of wedding dress. Tonight they’re making some poor pregnant teenager drag 75 pounds of satin, tulle and Swarovski crystals around Nowhere, W.Va., and all to be married in a tiny church, followed by a reception at what looks like a VFW hall.

And that will be our dose of reality TV for the night, the week, and most likely the month, if not the rest of the year. America is such a freak show; no wonder we’re on top of the world.

Another work-at-home day, but not so much bloggage today. But a little, both rants of a sort:

First, Gin and Tacos on that magical threshold beyond which an American plutocrat cannot fail. In this case, it’s Jamie Dimon:

I guess that whole “maximizing shareholder value” thing, the Commandment that has done more to turn this country into Dogpatch than anything else in the last three decades, doesn’t apply when it comes to doling out money at the top.

We might expect that the shareholders would be inclined to save money rather than spend it, and certainly to avoid rewarding people who perform so poorly. But a stockholders’ meeting is little more than a boys’ club operating under the pretext of a transparent process of corporate governance. The kind of heavy-hitting institutional shareholders who decide these votes – mutual fund managers, fellow banking executives, and so on – are either in Dimon’s position or expect to be there someday if they can make it to the other side of the shark tank. Perhaps getting to the top, into a position like Dimon’s, is so difficult and unpleasant that the people who manage to do it feel entitled to endless compensation to make it all seem worth it.

And here’s Angry Black Bitch on just another day in the Missouri legislature, which this week honored native son Rush Limbaugh:

Limbaugh arrived with 40 state troopers (did my tax dollars pay for that?) and was smuggled into the Capitol where Republican lawmakers and their staff greeted him much like North Koreans used to greet Kim Jung Il…and then Limbaugh was honored at an invitation only ceremony on the House floor that was closed to the public.

The other day at work we were looking at the current electoral-vote breakdown for the November election, and someone remarked that calling Missouri a toss-up is wishful thinking in the extreme. It’s as much a part of the modern confederacy as Mississippi. Looks like it.

With that, the hour grows late and bed beckons me. I hope I dream of anything but gypsies, Jamie Dimon or the sex tourist from Cape Girardeau. A good Thursday to all.