It’s a 30-mile jaunt through the ghetto, peeps. And it starts any minute now.
In the wayback internet years of the ’90s, there used to be a list floating around, a database of last-meal requests on Texas’ death row. I think it was maintained by the Department of Corrections itself, and made for an interesting time-waster. It could be hard to read, however, as it revealed the condemned as human beings rather than monsters.
They asked for chicken-fried steak and country biscuits, barbecue and collard greens, carnitas with rice and beans. One took nothing but holy communion; another opted for a blueberry pie. There were a depressing number of cheeseburger-and-fries combos, a few genuine puzzlers. But it would seem that in this one thing, Texas honored the traditions of execution in human history, i.e., on the last day of your life, you are allowed this human comfort. (Within reason. I believe requests for alcohol are denied, and my guess is, no one gets to smoke anymore.)
I can’t find the list now, because it’s been bigfooted by the latest news out of the People’s Republic of Whack ’em and Stack ’em: No more last meals.
Lawrence Russell Brewer, one of the men convicted of the dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in 1998, went whole-hog on his last-meal request, ordering:
…two chicken-fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions; a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger; a cheese omelet with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and jalapeños; a bowl of fried okra with ketchup; one pound of barbecued meat with half a loaf of white bread; three fajitas; a meat-lover’s pizza; one pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream; a slab of peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts; and three root beers.
And what happened? See if you can guess:
The meal outraged State Senator John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. In a phone call and letter to the executive director of the state prison agency, Mr. Whitmire asked that the agency end the practice of last meals or he would get the State Legislature to pass a bill doing so.
The prison agency’s executive director, Brad Livingston, responded hours later, telling Mr. Whitmire that the practice had been terminated, effective immediately, and that death row inmates scheduled for execution would receive the same meal served to other inmates in the unit.
What a spectacularly dickish move. On everyone’s part. Brewer certainly abused the prison’s hospitality, so to speak. Where did he put all that food? It turned out he didn’t put it anywhere; he ordered it and didn’t eat it. It “made a mockery” of the process, Whitmire said, and added:
Mr. Whitmire said his opposition to last meals had little to do with the cost of the meals, when the state budget is stretched thin. He said it was a matter of principle. “He never gave his victim an opportunity for a last meal,” Mr. Whitmire said of Mr. Brewer. “Why in the world are you going to treat him like a celebrity two hours before you execute him? It’s wrong to treat a vicious murderer in this fashion. Let him eat the same meal on the chow line as the others.”
Maybe in another generation, Texas will have passed the Get as Good as You Gave Act, which specifies that the execution be performed using the same method as the crime, perhaps preceded by a few hours of torture (for the deterrent factor).
We give a condemned man a choice of last meal, Sen. Whitmire, because we’re better than the condemned. On the last day of his life, we’re extending the little niceties of civilization as a way of showing the man about to die what he rejected. We let him meet with a clerical representative of his choice to show we live by the values we kept and he rejected.
Not any more. Enjoy your macaroni and cheese.
Oldest execution joke in the book: Condemned man faces firing squad. Commander offers a final cigarette. Punchline: “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.”
Sweet, sweet Friday, how I’ve missed you. But before I have my first cocktail, I must do some work. So, for today, only one bit of bloggage, an open question:
Have a great weekend, all. Tour De Troit tomorrow! Fingers crossed for good weather.
Big news out of Georgia yesterday: R.E.M. (or is it REM? Periods or no periods?) is breaking up. To touch on yesterday’s discussion, this seems like the sort of iconic news event for whatever the phenomenon is where you hear something like that and think, “Huh. I thought they were dead.”
I didn’t think R.E.M. was dead, but one of them had some health issues a while back — brain tumor, maybe? A quick glance at the indisputably authoritative Wikipedia says no, it was a brain aneurysm, it was Bill Berry, and he left in 1997, at which point it’s safe to say I was no longer paying attention. “Green” (1988) was the last album I bought, although I think “Automatic for the People” (1992) is lying around here somewhere. A guy I knew in the Fort had a one-night fling with Michael Stipe when they passed through Bloomington on tour.
And when I reread those two paragraphs, I am reminded why one should never tattoo one’s enthusiasms on one’s body. There was a time when I wore the grooves down on “Murmur” and “Reckoning” and the rest of the early catalog, and if the tattooing thing had had any traction then, I might have opted for a discreet “Radio Free Europe” inside an ankle. They were my favorite band in the last time in my life when I thought I needed to make such a designation. Such things are only evident in hindsight, and thank heavens for that, eh?
As (a very small) part of this enthusiasm, J.C. and Sam and I day-tripped to Athens when I visited them in Atlanta one year. We made the drive noticing all the parallels between Georgia’s Athens and Ohio’s, which is where J.C. and I became friends: It’s a college town about 90 miles east of a large city. The road there starts out a traditional interstate, then becomes a plain old four-lane. And once you get there, well, you’ve got your traditional college town, which immediately sets off the ache of nostalgia and familiarity in anyone who ever spent time in one. You want to stop the students on the street and tell them savor every moment and stop snoozing through your comp lit class and you’ll never live like this again (nor want to).
And then we visited the Uga graves — that’s pronounced “ugga” — and the Tree that Owns Itself and ate in one of those places every college town has, probably a vegetarian/locavore/Moosewood hippie trough, and visited a bookstore. Then, while near a courthouse-lawn cannon, Sam said she thought the guns still had some mobility to them, so I put my hands on the barrel of one and pushed down, and whaddaya know, it moved, and poured about a gallon of accumulated rainwater, no doubt mixed with discarded beer and frat-boy pee, onto my shoes.
Then we went home. Now that I think of it, I was probably already pretty much over R.E.M. by then.
The other big news out of Georgia yesterday was the execution of Troy Davis, of which you have probably heard enough to at least make up your mind about the morality of the act. I have rather studiously avoided death-penalty arguments over the years, although I have my opinions about it. In general, I think: Some form of it will always be with us, because Americans are bloodthirsty people. We have almost certainly executed innocent men and women, and we will almost certainly do it again, and maybe the people of Georgia did it last night. And I’m against it, not enough for the Full Prejean but enough that I admire those who make its opposition their life’s work.
My ambitions are more modest — to get people to stop using “electrocute” as a synonym for “shock.” No one recovers from an electrocution.
OK, so: Speaking of Helen Prejean, which makes me think of movies, it’s now September, which means the list of movies I must see is already growing. So far: “Contagion” and “Drive.” Anyone with fewer weekend commitments seen them yet? What am I missing? I was going to avoid “Contagion” on general Paltrow-ish principle, but it’s my understanding she dies early and the rest of the film is “Traffic”-esque, which I loved.
We haven’t discussed the post office here, have we? You’ve probably heard about the organization’s financial problems, which set off the usual clamor in the well-paid flying monkeys of the conservative chattering classes (Roy’s got you covered there). It so happens I needed to get something in hard copy to the other side of the country in a two-day time frame not long ago, and alas, it was a Sunday. (This was a parcel consisting of about 100 pages of paper, letter-size.) My first stop was FedEx, thinking that was my only alternative. No, they couldn’t absolutely, positively get it there overnight, but they could get it there by Tuesday, for … the lady put it on the scale … $54.
“Are you kidding me?” I gasped. Of course not. I rechecked my requirements, found I only needed it to be postmarked by Monday, so I went to the post office the next day, and Express Mailed it for $18. It got there Tuesday, same as the FedEx package would have, for $36 less. Just so you get a sense of what we’re in for, in a USPS-free world.
Everybody saw this yesterday, but just in case you didn’t: Elizabeth Warren, bringing the Awesome.
Alas, work beckons. And the lawn-service trucks just pulled up outside, which means soon I won’t be able to hear myself think, let alone think of jangle guitars. Happy Thursday.
Hm. Newspaper says John Conyers may be vulnerable this time, that the winds of change, redistricting and marriage to a felon might be enough to sink his ship in the Democratic primary. But it’s hard for me to get past the first paragraph, which describes him as “iconic.” That’s my new pet-peeve word, a fancy-sounding adjective thrown in as vocabulary filler when you want to sound smart, like some otherwise inedible foodstuff tossed into the granola.
Iconic (adj.) — having the qualities of an icon.
Icon (n.) — a painting of a religious figure on wood; a person or thing regarded as a representative symbol of something; a symbol or graphic representation on a video display terminal of a program, option, or window.
Is an 82-year-old, cemented-in-office congressman iconic? I guess you could stretch the term that far, but that word, I do not think it means what the writer thought it meant.
Did you know Wikipedia has a page on cultural icons? With photos? Some cultural icons of Austria — wiener schnitzel, strudel, Mozart, Freud, Schwarzenegger. But not Jean-Claude Van Damme? I’m disappointed.
If you read the original story I linked to, you will come across a pollster named “Bernie Porn.” Oh, my.
Someone in my Twitter feed described a 48-year-old actor as “venerable.” That is, “accorded a great deal of respect, esp. because of age, wisdom, or character.” This is Wendell Pierce we’re talking about here. Disallowed. I’m sure he’s a nice guy and a fine actor, but no one under 50 gets to be goddamn venerable.
If the content of this blog is ever published between hard covers, I hope the subtitle is: A sleepy writer in search of coherence, most mornings. How do you come up with things to write about five days a week, Nance? I don’t. I make a pot of coffee, I open the laptop, I drink the coffee and I close the laptop sometime later. How it happens, I’m not sure.
And while it work some days, other days it doesn’t, so let’s go bloggage-ing. I have to be downtown in an hour, and it’s plain I haven’t had nearly enough coffee.
A good read for this, or any day: the absolutely true story of a Holly Golightly for the stripper-embezzlement age.
Terrorism at the pancake house yesterday, a car bomb in the exurbs today. Welcome to WTF America.
Finally, as so frequently happens, when I’m having a bad day, Tom & Lorenzo are having a pretty good one. Note: They are always having a pretty good one. But I loved their Emmy-gown roundups, especially this one, for the great description of Katie Holmes and the photo immediately below, of Kerry Washington, notable because you can so clearly see the big-head/lollipop-people thing that so many film actors have going on. (I have an enormous head, too, but it’s balanced by an enormous body. No Zak Posen gowns for me.)
Me, I’m off to maybe score a black-bean wrap at the Wayne State Wednesday farmer’s market. Maybe that can improve my day.
There are two schools of thought on small-town America — no, three. Briefly:
School 1: Heaven
School 2: Hell
School 3: It’s more complicated than that
See if you can guess which one I favor.
Anyhoo, school no. 2 got a big boost today from the biggest town in the world’s fave newspaper, the New York Times. With the homespun dateline of Mountain Grove, Mo., we learn:
One of the established places here for trading the gossip of the day is Dee’s Place, a country diner where a dozen longtime residents gather each morning around a table permanently reserved with a members-only sign for the “Old Farts Club,” as they call themselves, to talk about weather, politics and, of course, their neighbors.
But of late, more people in this hardscrabble town of 5,000 have shifted from sharing the latest news and rumors over eggs and coffee to the Mountain Grove Forum on a social media Web site called Topix, where they write and read startlingly negative posts, all cloaked in anonymity, about one another.
Color me…unsurprised. I’ve lived too long to be shocked by the fact shiny surfaces sometimes hide ugliness within, or that Mayberry was a myth, or whatever. The part of the story I find interesting is on the second page, in which the chief executive of Topix looks around the room and says, “Who, me?” Like this:
Mr. Tolles …defended it on free-speech grounds. He said the comments are funny to read, make private gossip public, provide a platform for “people who have negative things to say” and are better for business.
At one point, he said, the company tried to remove all negative posts, but it stopped after discovering that commenters had stopped visiting the site. “This is small-town America,” he said. “The voices these guys are hearing are of their friends and neighbors.”
Mr. Tolles also said the site played a journalistic role, including providing a place for whistle-blowing and candid discussion of local politics.
He noted that the Mountain Grove Forum, which had 3,700 visitors on a single day this month, had 1,200 posts containing the word “corruption,” though it was unclear how many of them were true. One resident used the site to rail against local officials, helping build support for a petition-driven state audit of town government.
Only an internet executive could use the presence of a single word to argue that a scuzzy poison-pen message board somehow qualifies as journalism. (Never work harder than cntrl-F, I always say.) Actually, I’m amazed the NYT was able to get him on the horn at all, although hey — they’re the NYT. I bet the people who’ve been the victims of their nastier neighbors on Topix sites haven’t been so fortunate. Perhaps they’ve been told, instead, to start their own thread, to fight words with words, and other helpful advice.
As you know, my experience in journalism runs from lamestream to present-day, and one of the things I struggle with, weekly if not daily, is how much the latter has to learn from the former. I used to be a fan of anonymous posting; I’m not so much anymore. I used to believe a lot of that Jeff Jarvis spiel about throwing it all out there in the name of immediacy and letting the self-correcting internet sort it out; not so much anymore. I’ve learned that readers are busy and time-starved and all that stuff they told us pretty much throughout the ’80s, but they’re also lazy and disinclined to dig deeper for truth, because they have to race down their Facebook news feed to find out what the slacktivist meme of the moment is — change your profile picture to raise awareness of something, or whatever.
I’ll give you an example: We recently went through a bruising battle here over the hiring of a new superintendent of our local schools. A minority of the board didn’t like the internal candidate, pushed hard from the beginning by the majority, and the vote to hire him was 4-3. At the meeting to approve his contract, one of the minority members tossed out the figure $700,000, which he said was the total value of his 2.5-year contract. As near as I can tell, that figure was arrived at by taking his salary, bennies, retirement and office-coffee consumption and multiplying by 2.5, then rounding generously, sort of like the calculation of the street value of a pound of marijuana.
But he said it at the meeting, and the other online news source, Patch, reported it. (My online news source wasn’t there, because this meeting happened between WSU terms, which meant I had no reporters. I was at another meeting, thinking the contract approval would be pro forma and less newsworthy. So in our semi-hiatus month, we didn’t have a story.) They had to, and I don’t blame them — their mandate is immediacy, and it came out of the mouth of a board member. But there it was: The new superintendent is costing the district $700,000, in the subhead.
This then gets bundled into the social-media presentations, and the comments start. Wow! $700,000 — that’s a lot of money! And so on. Where do I apply? I could use $700,000, etc. Two days later, the reporter files a deeper dive into the contract, broken down by salary ($175,000, about what the last supe was making, and entirely in keeping with the marketplace for districts of our size and quality) and other benefits, and now the estimates for the total compensation are about $200,000 per year, or $500,000 over the length of the contract. This story, I should add, gets far less Facebook chatter, perhaps because the original amplifiers are chastened, or maybe because it’s more reasonable.
But I remain convinced there are people in this community who read no further than the subhead and Facebook comments, and believe the new superintendent is earning $700,000 in salary alone. If we had a Topix board here, there would probably be speculation about on-call massage therapists and other, you know, CORRUPTION. What is it they say about truth and lies and which one puts its shoes on faster?
I’m starting to see the benefit in the ol’ skool, where if you wanted to write a letter to the editor, you had to use your full name, the letter was carried by the ponderous U.S. Postal Service and the paper called to verify your identity, all of which gave you many stops on the path to reconsider.
OK, time to go to work, so how about a 180-degree turn with the bloggage?
What we had with our roast chicken Saturday night. Super-duper yum factor. Which should remind us that it’s probably time to fix something from the Minimalist’s greatest hits. Not many wrong turns there.
What Was There, a site that layers historic photos onto Google street-view shots. Oh, you librarians will love this one.
Finally, late-breaking news from Toledo: FBI raids several local IHOPs, reportedly on suspicion of TERRORIST ACTIVITY. I am not making this up. Big hat tip to our treasure, Dexter.
And I think that’s it. Happy Tuesday to all.
Kate’s band played a gig Sunday, providing entertainment at a rest stop on the Tour de Ford, a bike tour/fundraiser for indigent patient care in the Henry Ford Health Systems.
I immediately dashed off a note to my old pal, hospital administrator Dr. Frank Byrne, thanking the entire health-care industry for all they do to help struggling kid bands get that all-important experience. Po is down to a power trio now, following the resignation of their vocalist, but they still sound pretty tight, and even though the other band on the bill was more of a crowd-pleaser, with their classics-heavy repertoire, Po got showmanship points for being pretty girls, and for not having to read their lyrics off a music stand. (Hey, I’d have had to read the lyrics to Cole Porter tunes, approximately the same interval of composition-to-performance as it is for a kid of today to sing “Sunshine of Your Love.”)
But perhaps the greatest thrill came at the end, when most of the cyclists had already rolled through, eaten their bananas and apples, refilled their CamelBaks and headed out for the next leg. An old woman who lives nearby tottered up and demanded that we TURN IT DOWN. You’re not really a rokker until someone tells you to turn it down. She stayed for a good half hour, bitching at a security guard about how THIS HOSPITAL IS TERRIBLE FOR THE NEIGHBORHOOD, etc. To which I can only speak from experience: One, if you think an operating hospital is bad for your neighborhood, try a shuttered one, and two, obviously she was lonely and wanted someone to talk to. Poor old angry lady. Someday she’s going to be glad there’s an ER across the street.
So. Horrible-busy day, and I’m thinking we should do some tasty bloggage and dash — the equivalent of a piece of toast on the run for breakfast. Soooo…
With apologies to your aviation fans out there, I have never understood air shows. I guess it takes all kinds, but the thought of craning my neck for a few hours to watch pilots do loop-de-loops has always seemed downright boring. (You are free to have the same opinion about watching horses jump fences.) The more modern air shows, which amp up the thrills with dangerous stunts and gimmicks like extreme low-altitude “racing” — you’d have to walk me there with a loaded shotgun at my back. And here’s why. That is all.
This was a hard story to read, about the new poor. It’s hard not to believe this is the twisted root of something, and it ain’t the Tea Party and it ain’t whatever else you might think it is:
It’s hard to find some of the poorest residents in Pembroke, Ill. They live in places like the tree-shaded gravel road where the Bargy family’s dust-smudged trailer is wedged in the soil, flanked by overgrown grass.
By the official numbers, Pembroke’s 3,000 residents are among the poorest in the region, but the problem may be worse. The mayor believes as many as 2,000 people were uncounted, living far off the paths that census workers trod.
The staples that make up the town square are gone: No post office, no supermarket, no pharmacy, no barber shop or gas station. School doors are shuttered. The police officers were all laid off, a meat processing plant closed. In many places, light switches don’t work, and water faucets run dry. Residents let their garbage smolder on their lawn because there’s no truck to take it away; many homes are burned out.
A new populist revolt? I don’t see why not.
But let our hearts be light on this Monday in the still-fair month of September. Was it Moe who nominated the story about Gordon Ramsey’s porn dwarf double dying in a badger den as best headline ever? This may well top it.
Ugh, I’m growing to despise Mondays. I hope yours is tol’rable.
Fifty chilly degrees outside, but I’m not in any hurry to get the furnace going. Never mind the A/C was blasting not two weeks ago; as Dexter said in yesterday’s comments, sometimes it’s good just to be a little chilled. I had a roommate once who’d gone through a bout of anorexia, and was still quite thin, and she was cold in all but the hottest weather. Which, for some reason, made my mind go skip-skip-skip and land on Michaele Salahi.
You remember the Salahis — the vulgar social climbers of Washington D.C., who somehow managed to slip the security ring at the White House, enter a state dinner and get to handshake distance with the president. She was a Real Housewife, he was a “vineyard owner” or some such, and both were grifters, basically. The WashPost gossip columnists beat them like a drum for a while, pointing out their trail of unpaid bills and lawsuits, her sketchy resume and his likewise, but it never seemed to faze either of them, and they kept showing up at parties and getting in. Someone kept letting them check into ritzy hotels, ride in limousines and otherwise live the life. I should be so shameless.
This week — and I hope you’re sitting down for this shocking turn of events — they split up, and the way Michaele fitted her husband Tareq in cuckold’s horns was about as bad as it gets. She left him for Neal Schon. Who’s Neal Schon, you ask? Why, he’s the guitarist for Journey. Tareq was further humiliated by his actions when he noticed his wife missing. He called the cops and claimed she’d been abducted, because she left her things behind.
Tareq, hasn’t life with Michaele taught you anything? You leave it all behind when you have to, because there’s always someone with a fresh credit card waiting around the corner. In this case, a “rock icon” (TMZ’s description, not mine), whom Michaele joined on the road in Memphis, where Journey was playing a show with Foreigner.
Just let that soak in for a minute. A pair of high-profile publicity hounds, riven by the fleshly sword of a power-pop arena-band guitarist, now touring with another power-pop arena band. Imagine the crowd at those shows, rising from their $200 front-row seats to shake their Docker’d behinds to “Hot Blooded” and, of course, “Don’t Stop Believin’.” We are in hell, aren’t we?
You had to know things were rough for the Salahis. Why, just this year Michaele was accepted by, and then booted from, VH-1’s “Celebrity Rehab” show, on the grounds she’s not addicted to anything. But they knew that going in! Tareq protested. Michaele wanted to be treated — in a reality-show setting, of course — for her multiple sclerosis, which has been aggravated by the couple’s “ordeal” with the White House.
I have to pause for a minute and just say: I really enjoy wallowing in a good gossip sheet from time to time. Not necessarily the snark blogs — too meta — but the ones like TMZ and the Daily Mail. So retro! There are sources, and there are “close to” sources, but the ones they’re relying on to dish the Salahi dirt are described as “extremely close” to Michaele, which I’m taking to mean it’s Michaele herself. Any woman who wants MS treatment on cable TV would have no problem informing on herself to Harvey Levin. Who else could share the exact wording of this text message, from the icon to the blonde herself: “xxxoooxxxoo Kiss, lick, and a nice stiff one 4 ya lol Neal.”
(May I just say one thing? Any man who sent me anything that lame had better watch his ass. And people? I don’t do LOL. Nor “ya.”)
Anyway, the Kidnapping of Michaele Salahi, a Q-and-A.
And I’m sorry I’m so lame this morning. This is the first five-day week of school, and my new name is Erasmus B. Draggin. One-third of the household is sick, and I fear it might come for me next. So, regular hand-washing, no kisses for anyone and maybe a pot of soup this weekend. I’m thinking Minestrone, but if you have any ideas, you know where to leave ’em.
I work a lot for others during the week, much of it for little or no compensation, and in return I ask for only one thing: Saturday. Saturday is mine, for Eastern Market visits and maybe a little urban exploration (in the bland, non-lawbreaking sense), and that’s how I ended up at the Rust Belt Market last weekend, in search of pie. This guy’s pies, specifically. But it would be silly to just pop in and out for pie, so I took a stroll through the market, which is kind of an offline Etsy — vintage clothes, handmade this, hipster that. Very Detroit-as-new-Brooklyn. Not quite the epicenter, but there is no epicenter. Still, a good place to put your cultural feelers out and get a sense of the millennial/late-X generation in their salad-days prime. What are you into, young folks? What moves you?
Just this: Food and bikes.
I’m not a fan of the writer Caitlin Flanagan, but she made an observation a while back that’s stuck with me. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but indulge me: Imagine two young women — a housewife of the ’50s and her closest equivalent today. Quiz both on their attitudes about food and sex. You’ll find the ’50s housewife has many opinions about how you should live your sex life, but honestly doesn’t care what you eat — that’s your business. Whereas a 21st century woman is likely to be precisely the opposite. Are those eggs organic? Is your beef grass-fed? Those tomatoes — locally grown? But who you sleep with, and what you do in your bedroom? Who cares?
The good news about the foodie revolution is, the world is a much tastier place. You can get a better meal, or make yourself one, today than you could a generation ago, and certainly more so than in the ’50s. For all the concerns about pesticides and hormones and feedlots and the like, the fact remains that a stroll through even an unhip, pedestrian suburban grocery chain is a revelation of food unknown to even 25-year-old me, and I like to think I got in on this stuff early. My mother-in-law thought mangoes were green peppers. Today: Actual mangoes. A good thing.
The bad news is that it can get awfully tiresome, and I think we’ve gone down this road here before. When Anthony Bourdain says Alice Waters has a touch of the Khmer Rouge about her, it’s funny because it’s true. She’s the one who suggested $4-per-pound organic grapes should not be considered out of reach in any nation where poor people buy $100 sneakers, after all.
But getting back to the good news, it’s also given rise to a generation of young foodie entrepreneurs, many flying below the radar of the health inspectors, in food trucks and market stalls, trying to change the world with empanadas or bagels or whatever. The pie guy I visited was very much of this tradition, with his artistic tattoos — a chef’s knife on his forearm, among many — and his unexpected flavor combinations. Oh, and his T-shirt: “Fuck cupcakes. Eat pie.” I bought three slices at $2.50 per — salted caramel apple, peach mango (hold the green peppers) and blueberry lemon. Elsewhere in this market you could buy artisanal coffee and other snacky things; at the Eastern Market you could buy everything, including a nosh from my favorite new stop, the People’s Pierogi Collective (their slogan includes the word “revolutionary,” but I can’t remember it now).
Elsewhere in the market, I looked through a booth that sold make-your-own necklace systems, with various charms and suchlike. It seemed half the charms had bicycle themes — chains and chainrings, spokes, wheels. I see bike-themed tattoos everywhere, too, “fixie forever” on a muscular calf, or “fuck cars,” one word to a leg, something for motorists to see as you flash past them on your fixie. Bike culture is strong in Detroit, a flat city with many miles of eye-popping sights. But it’s crazy strong among younger people, who commute on sticker-covered, beat-looking-but-fast-moving bikes and lock them to any old thing with chains heavy enough to swing at crackheads, should the need arise.
Meanwhile, there is $70,000 in county parks money lying on the table in my community, waiting for the cities to pick it up and use it to buy mainly paint and signs to designate bike routes (not paths, mind you, just routes) through the five Pointes. I predict it will sit there until it grows mold and expires, because the police chiefs are fretting about the need for a traffic study first, and why can’t we all just ride on sidewalks, anyway? The suburbs always move behind the city. Although I hear everybody enjoys pie.
So, not much bloggage today, but may I say one thing? I’m extremely uncomfortable about much of the commentary I’m hearing about whether She-Who did or did not bang a University of Michigan basketball player when she was young and single and the calendar read 1987. I’m getting the strong feeling this Joe McGinniss book is a steaming pile of crap, and I don’t care how respectable he is. If the big talker you come up with is that she slept with a black guy when she was 23, you are only Kitty Kelley with a better publicist. The discussion I heard yesterday bugged me on several levels, including but not limited to noting it happened “just nine months before her marriage to Todd,” misuse of the word “fetish” and whoa, MANDINGO!!!!!
I’m disappointed in Garry Trudeau for making this a week’s worth of “Doonesbury” and I really, really resent the way it makes me feel like defending her. That said, some of the comments on this thread are sort of funny.
The first serious review of the book I’ve seen. Doesn’t sound like a must-read.
After 10, gotta go. Happy Thursday, all. The weekend is drawing nigh.
Believe it or not, I can’t watch everything on TV and read everything on the internet. So it wasn’t until yesterday — and last night in particular — that I was able to read much about Michele Bachmann and her interesting thoughts about Gardasil, the HPV vaccine. As you know, I have a part-time gig gathering health-care news. I’ve been reading about Gardasil for years now, and I’m well-aware of the debate, such as it is, about the vaccine against human papillomaviruses 6, 11, 16 and 18, which are the culprit in most cases of cervical, anal and other cancers of the down-there regions.
Early work on HPV vaccines was done in Australia, and the doctor credited with being the original discoverer is a national hero, decorated with Medal of Freedom-type laurels in his homeland. I get the feeling that under a President Bachmann, he’d be clapped in leg irons and shipped to Gitmo for crimes against humanity. That’ll teach the inventor of the Slut Shot.
That’s what lots of social conservatives call it; I believe the term was coined by an anti-vaccine activist, Barbara Loe Fisher. She has a blog (but of course) called Vaccine Awakening. Here’s the entry on the top of it today, from a few days ago, just to give you a sense of the tone:
Vaccine Wake Up Call for Parents: Your Children Are Being Taken
Every mother has had the nightmare. We dream our child, who we love more than we thought we could love anyone, has been taken away by strangers and cannot be found. The cold fear rises up from our stomach into our throats as we search, endlessly, to find the child we would give up our own life to protect from harm.
Whew. To be fair, I think Fisher is against pretty much all vaccines, especially the childhood ones that have never proven to be linked to autism and other complications. But her charming turn of phrase on the Slut Shot is all social conservatives like Bachmann need, really. There was a story in the New Yorker a few weeks back, about Bachmann and the alternate history she believes, all that stuff about the founding fathers and their tireless work to end slavery, and how she can use a few dog-whistle phrases that catch the ears of her fellow travelers:
I’m a mom, and I’m a mom of three [daughters]. And to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong. That should never be done.
Innocent 12-year-olds forced to have a government injection! That’s not a dog whistle, that’s a klaxon. Your innocent 12-year-old will have her arm stripped naked and readied for the long, hard government injector. She’ll turn her head away, her lip will tremble, but there’s no stopping the relentless spike. And then, with a gasp and a tear, the tender flesh yielded and the burning poison poured into her body…
And if you don’t get the undertone of sweet virgins receiving hot vaccine injections, “government” is in there, too. Big bad government, everyone’s favorite boogieman. (I’ve reached a point now that as soon as I hear the phrase “government schools” in a conversation, I flip a switch in my brain, adopt a half-smile and remember an urgent appointment on the other side of the room.)
But it’s the sex angle that flips their switches; if this were a vaccine against a virus that causes liver cancer, no matter how much money Rick Perry got from its manufacturer, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Because, you see, there’s a perfectly good preventative against cervical cancer already. It’s called an aspirin. Hold it between your knees until your wedding night (to another aspirin-clencher), and there’s no need for any of that nonsense. See? Problem solved.
It wasn’t until I saw this clip from the Daily Show that I fully grasped the existential weirdness of the event where Bachmann made her comments. I think it’s safe to say that her remarks were fully in keeping with the tone of the CNN debate. No, “debate.” The national anthem? Are you kidding me?
As I have related here before, I was there when CNN was launched, June 1, 1980. I toured the facility with Ted Turner himself. The question asked by every reporter there, in one form or another, was “how on earth will you fill 24 hours a day with news?” I guess the answer is both “you won’t” and “with this.”
Back to Gardasil. Just once, I’d like to see this group of Republicans, whom you’d think would have learned something from the past few years of wide stances and Appalachian Trail hikes, acknowledge some simple reality about human sexuality. Just once I’d like to see some brave conservative say out loud, “You know, maybe cervical cancer is too high a price to pay for sleeping with the wrong person. And now we have this vaccine.” The thing is, I’m sure many are saying it. I’m sure millions have had their daughters vaccinated, and perhaps one day even their sons. They just can’t talk about it, because y’know, SLUT SHOT.
OK, time to get the day under way. A little bloggage:
Neil Steinberg: Let’s take these lunatics seriously. Not a bad idea.
Haven’t checked in with Jon Carroll for a while. What’s he up to? Still bringing the silly as well as silly can be brought. A few thoughts on shoe-selling copy.
And if you’re not a comments reader, you should know we heard from Alex yesterday afternoon, and he is fine, but finds it hard to type with a clothespin on his finger, but he appreciates all our well-wishing. Here’s wishing him some more wellness, and y’all, a happy Wednesday.
Well, this sort of defines good news/bad news. I woke up early to find a voicemail from Alex on my phone. Thinking he was drunk-dialing me — the time stamp was 1:47 a.m. — I retrieved the message to confirm.
Hey, just calling from cardiac ICU at Lutheran Hospital!
Whoa. I hasten to add that exclamation point was a cheery whistle past the graveyard, not a dying gasp, but he was there for a reason. After suffering jaw and arm pain, he mentioned it to his partner Harry, who suggested he should maybe stop by an ER and get himself checked out. An EKG, an ambulance ride, and a middle-of-the-night angioplasty left him with a stent and three nights of lodging at the usual inflated prices.
The good news: The tests showed no significant damage to his heart muscle, and he and Harry will finally have some serious motivation to quit smoking once and for all.
He said he welcomes your good wishes and tributes, and will be back snarking with us as soon as he gets a laptop. You can leave them in the usual place.
Sudden glimpses of our mortality are no fun, are they? I visited my ladyparts doctor last month and got the big three of the crone testing package — Pap, mammogram and my first baseline bone scan. The first two came back clean and clear, but the bone scan showed low bone mineral density stopping well short of osteopenia, but dammitall anyway. I’m back on calcium, which I had been taking but quit for a few months, following one too many late-night shifts spent reading about the conditions in Chinese factories. I decided any supplement that couldn’t be sourced to a nice clean North American facility — and none of them can — could be safely replaced with a sharp Cheddar and extra serving of yogurt. I’ve always been a milk drinker. But my test says I need to go back on the C, and so I am. I pause to note there are side effects. I would say I’m as constipated as a Missouri Synod Lutheran, but that would be cruel, so let me just say: There are side effects. And lots of water and vegetables seems to be taking care of them, but still.
I’ve been a weight lifter for years, which I thought would protect me, but it turns out you can’t outrun your gene pool. And old saws like “you still have your health” have a new, sharper meaning.
So, with that, I think it’s entirely appropriate that we go for a silly, fun, life-affirming bloggage collection today, and trash the only thing I’d set aside, which was the usual grumpy Jane Brody column about the obesity epidemic, although here it is, if you want to read it. It’s not all that grumpy, and sort of annoyingly on point, with today’s subject matter.
Laughter is the best medicine, so how about yet another story from Coozledad that made me guffaw? This…
I was wearing a shirt my ex-girlfriend had given me. It was a gauzy Indian prince thing that showed my bluish ribcage and my tiny pale nipples, shrieking for oxygen and nutrients. If you were to hold a pistol to my temporal bone and force me put the same shirt on now, it would look like someone trying to strain an entire village’s yearly production of mozzarella though a decorative cheesecloth.
…is but one of the many knee-slappers therein. Although, C., you need to take another look at your coding. Double-return after your paragraphs. I’m not seeing any breaks.
Cute Overload, just because.
One of those funny sign collections, also just because. But some chuckles are therein.
Feel free to add whatever you like, because obviously I’m scraping bottom here. And it’s Tuesday, which is the second crush day of my week, so I must run. Get well soon, Alex — we need you here.