Kate’s pediatrician laid a fact on me the last time we saw her that I’ve been mulling ever since: About 80 percent of Michigan residents suffer from some form of seasonal allergies.

“It’s because of the humidity,” she said, which didn’t make too much sense, but I didn’t challenge her. Not because I’m not a doctor-challenger — the world needs more of those, and I’m happy to do my part — but because I was relieved that she thought that was the cause of Kate’s occasional headaches, and furthermore, that we didn’t need to do any expensive diagnostics to confirm this. Because of the 80 percent thing. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. You get headaches during allergy season, exactly like one of your parents? Eh, you probably have allergies, too. She takes an over-the-counter antihistamine daily, and that takes care of it, for the most part.

The parent who also gets headaches isn’t me. I am apparently in the 20 percent who doesn’t have allergies. Everyone else? When the spring flowers bloom, when the autumn leaves rot, when the summer’s goldenrod sways in the breeze, sending its pollen out to drive 80 percent of you insane, I remain immune. Lucky, lucky me.

I told the pediatrician this. “Wow, I feel really lucky now,” I said. “Because I’ve never been allergic to anything.” She looked at me with that look doctors get when you say things like that.

“Seasonal allergies can present at any time of life,” she said. If this were a movie, that line would be staged like a gypsy curse, with visual effects and maybe a spooky echo.

Because my eyes are burning and itchy. They’ve been that way for days. At first I thought my contacts were inside out. Nope. Sweat running in my eyes? A likely culprit, but I doubt it. Not enough sleep? It’s happening on days when I grabbed close to nine hours the night before. What could be the problem? What?

The other day I was working in the yard and paused to drag the back of my hand across my forehead, which had an immediate effect on my eyeballs. It all came clear: Oh, riiiight.

Granted, it’s possible it was some other plant-based irritant, like oils from one of the weeds I was pulling up. But using the standard layman’s medical diagnostic technique of dividing the first thing that pops into your head by something some guy you know told you once, I feel confident I have now joined the 80 percent. I hope someone else grew out of their own allergies at the same moment, just so we can keep it all even.

At this point I’m glad it’s just the eyes. Because I hate feeling like I have a cold all the time.

Actually, I’ve suspected for some time that I had a mild hops allergy. The first beer of the night used to give me a stuffy nose. I experimented for a while with different brands, but it was one of those things where after a while, I sort of lost the thread of the scientific method. Drinking beer will do that.

Why are the eyes so vulnerable to all of our ills? Is it the watery-goo thing, or the windows-of-the-soul factor? Last night, I was doing some reporting for an assignment I’m working on for a magazine. I was in the midst of a crowd of drug addicts, all 12-stepping it, and I was sitting there letting the impressions accumulate — the smell of cigarettes, that rode-hard-and-put-up-wet look so many of these folks have, even in sobriety. I caught the eye of one of them. Like that guy, I thought. He looks like he’s still stoned. Bad eyes on that one. A few minutes later, the leader of the meeting singled him out.

“Get out of here,” he ordered. “Don’t come here to nod. Dirty on benzos, you are.” A subsequent urine test confirmed it. Huh.

Boy, you can tell it’s August, can’t you?

On to the bloggage!

There’s something about that ReasonTV badge on the microphone that makes Matt Damon’s smackdown of this twit so much sweeter.

Mittens Romney, Mr. Maturity. Right.

For you Game of Thrones fans, an effects reel from the house that did all those amazing painted backdrops. And to think David Benioff said the hardest thing about that project was working with horses.

With that, I think I’m off to eat a late breakfast. Happy Tuesday, all. I hope the heat wave is breaking.

Where has Maker Faire been all my life? I can’t believe it took us this long to find, and how did I — an individual acquainted with a fair number of youngish hipster types — miss it, along with the distinct Brooklyn/Detroit/steampunk-ish/sustainability vibe?

Got me. Note to self: Pay closer attention to the world around you.

In the meantime, this iPhone takes crappy pictures, sometimes. Here’s a couple other snaps of the dino-dragon, which was driveable:

Alan and I agreed that the design detail we liked best was the use of tires for its leathery skin. Other high points: The life-size mousetrap and, of course, the fire-breathing pony. Note the two hipsters running the pony, Pinky McHair and Mr. Kilt. I kept telling Alan he needs a kilt, but not some silly plaid one. One like the guy in the picture, in basic black, khaki or olive, like the pants he buys from Brooks Brothers. It’s hard for a guy to rock a kilt, but he could do it, because he’s stocky and hairy, which means his testosterone is not in doubt.

“OK,” he said. “I’ll wear it with plaid underwear.”

That would totally work.

The weather all weekend was hot and hotter and muggy and ick. I’m currently recovering from a couple hours of yard work, not even anything particularly strenuous, but done in the sort of heat that makes one grumpy and tired, it felt like a marathon. But after a few days of attention, the place is looking better, inside and out. And very shortly I will make the last cherry pie of the season. I am fully enjoying summer.

But I don’t have much to say, today, beyond general mourning over the debt deal, so let’s go quickly to the bloggage:

Another royal wedding. Now these are some English people — none of that pan-Eurotrash who showed up at the last one. It looks like the groom, a rugby player, had his nose relocated by a head butt. (Correction: At least eight head butts. Or whatever.) Fixing it would be a pussy move, however, so he wears it proudly. Is it just me, but is Auntie Camilla wearing the same fascinator she wore to her stepson’s wedding? And oh look, there’s Cathy Cambridge in yet another safe neutral. Looking at Princess Anne, it’s useful to remember that of all the athletes at the 1976 Olympic Games, she was the only one not required to submit to gender testing. (She was part of the British equestrian team.) Now look at her — the very picture of mature femininity.

The bride looks nice, but that’s to be expected. Note how she turns her head left to kiss the groom; a wise move, as going the other way would run her smack into that broken nose. I wish them much happiness.

From New York magazine, Frank Rich on the Murdochization of the US:

…a Times reporter who wrote a routine news story on a Fox News ratings lull was punished by having his headshot distorted into an anti-Semitic caricature worthy of Der Stürmer for display on the morning show Fox & Friends (a misnomer if ever there was one). Other victims have had it far worse, including the often-­defenseless obscure citizens who cross O’Reilly’s radar screen because they have views he abhors, at which point his producer stalks them for an on-camera ambush. (It was left to the Post, however, to trash a former O’Reilly Factor producer with whom he settled a sexual-harassment suit in 2004.) O’Reilly’s now-departed tag-team partner in Fox News vigilantism, Glenn Beck, excoriated the nearly 80-year-old CUNY sociologist Frances Fox Piven so often in the past few years (mostly for an essay she had written about poverty in 1966) that she had to fend off death threats. George Tiller, the Wichita abortion doctor who was called a “baby killer,” among other epithets, on 29 episodes of The O’Reilly Factor, was assassinated while at church in 2009.

Stay classy, Fox.

And finally, one from behind the NYT paywall, but maybe you’ve got the golden key:

The man behind all that hysterical anti-Sharia legislation is a Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn. One guy, with “a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam,” wags this dog:

Working with a cadre of conservative public-policy institutes and former military and intelligence officials, David Yerushalmi has written privately financed reports, filed lawsuits against the government and drafted the model legislation that recently swept through the country — all with the effect of casting Shariah as one of the greatest threats to American freedom since the cold war.

Ugh, Monday awaits, and it’s going to be a very very long one. Enjoy yours.

I bet Coozledad is building one of these in the back pasture.

(It’s a fire-breathing dragon/dinosaur thingie. You know you want one.)

Sorry. I thought I published this two hours ago. Is my face red.

Two of the most charming letters I got as a newspaper columnist in Indiana were in response to something I wrote about my ignorance of agriculture in general, and the farm economy in particular. That was many years ago, and I’m not as green (ha) as I once was, but it always appalled me that most people can discuss crap like Hollywood box-office figures, but don’t know how their food is produced, or what a pork belly is.

The letters were about corn detasseling, and detailed the particular misery of this rural job, which is traditionally done by teenagers in that shadowland of the early teens, when they’re physically able to work but unable to get hired by most employers. And corn detasseling — the laborious removal of the pollinating part of the plant — is work in the truest sense of the word, a day spent reaching and snipping and sneezing and suffering for $8 an hour. It’s only exploitative if you consider any manual labor so, because the kids do it willingly and $8 an hour, while not a king’s ransom, is good money for a 14-year-old, working steadily. Kids can make a thousand bucks in a season.

One of the letters came with helpful diagrams and cartoon drawings of the writer, wearing wet blue jeans.

Anyway, I mention all this because of this story I saw in today’s Wall Street Journal, about the death of two girls on a detasseling crew, electrocuted when they touched irrigation equipment that had been electrified by a recent lightning strike. Very sad, but for those of you who know nothing about it, a useful reminder of what goes into the agri-economy:

Early-morning fields are typically covered with dew, and frequently muddy from rain, so workers are wet all morning. Then, as the July sun rises higher, the fields begin to steam and the workers are soaked with sweat all afternoon. The work—reaching up to stalks between five and eight feet high while walking through uneven dirt for ten miles—is exhausting.

…Although the childhood injury rate on farms fell 59% from 1998 to 2009, according to the National Farm Medicine Center in Marshfield, Wis., agriculture still generates the second-highest fatality rate among youth workers, and a fatality rate that is nearly six times the average across all industries. Last summer, two teenage boys died in a grain-bin accident 50 miles north of Sterling in Mt. Carroll.

And that, friends, is how you make hybrid seeds. The hard way. (Oh, and while we city slickers may pronounce that particular part of the corn plant to rhyme with “hassle,” both my correspondents pointed out that the people who do it say “tossle.”)

Speaking of manual labor, I see in the comments from yesterday, Basset and Dexter are discussing Ben Hamper, whose column, “I, Rivethead,” briefly ran in Mother Jones magazine when Michael Moore was briefly editing it in the ’80s. Funny they should bring it up, as I kept one of those columns — the one about Bruce Springsteen, faux working-class hero — in my “Great Moments” file for years. Great Moments was the collection of good writing I kept to page through in moments of boredom or down time, or when I was truly strapped for inspiration. A lot of people have made a lot of accurate observations and charges about Michael Moore over the years, about his willingness to bend the truth or substitute his own bullshit for someone else’s, and about his own faux working-class hero act, but whatever help he gave Hamper, a true working-class voice, will absolutely go on the credit side of the karma ledger. I always thought it was amusing that Moore flamed out at that bastion of lefty preening, Ma Jones, so quickly. I’m sure he was a jerk to work with, and I’m sure they had good reasons to give him the hook. But I still recall Hamper’s withering takedown of Springsteen, how in about 800 words he brought me closer to factory life than any mournful tune about closin’ refineries by you-know-who.

And I especially remember his simple observation that if you stand at the entrance of any auto plant, anywhere, and look around, you will see a bar, maybe two. Ever since, whenever I pass a plant, I look for the bar, and he’s right — it’s never far away. Elmore Leonard had an amusing passage in one of his books about the stop-off, as essential to a line worker’s end-of-shift ritual as the shower. There was a story in one of the papers here a while back, where someone observed that GM actually tried to buy one of those bars to close it down, and the owner wouldn’t sell. Owning bars that cater to certain communities — gay men, blue-collar workers — is like owning a gold mine.

That used to be true of newspapers, too, but not so much anymore. As one of my editors mourned, upon coming home from a conference, “I used to play poker half the night at these things. Now everybody gets up early and goes jogging together.”

Sigh.

OK, the day — and FINANCIAL DISASTER FOR THE ENTIRE COUNTRY — awaits, and a big one it is. Lunch downtown, then yet another concert with Kate, this one with the meet-and-greet. Yes, I am insisting on a picture with the band. I paid my money, too.

Bloggage? Too tired to look at the moment. Post your own, if you’re so inclined. I’ll be back after the weekend, or maybe from Saturday at the market.

The other day I was riding my bike to the library, a trip of less than a mile, brevity I was grateful for, as it was approximately 450 degrees outside. I was thinking how cold the spring had been, and oh well, Michigan, what are you gonna do, and then I saw this dead squirrel on the sidewalk ahead, splayed. This was in a park.

“Wow, that squirrel died looking just like a pelt. Weird.”

I came closer. The tail twitched, and the dead squirrel jumped up and scampered to safety. It reminded me I’d seen this once before, on a similarly hot day. The squirrel was lying on a picnic table. Every dog I’ve had has sought out cool surfaces to press their bellies on; Spriggy had a tile hearth spot he liked, our old German shepherd Agnes preferred the foyer. So I guess it’s not so strange, and even though I’d gone through my entire life without seeing it until recently, animals do adapt. I did make note that all the ones I’ve seen doing it are the black-coated ones we have around here, who anecdotally seem smarter and more aggressive than their gray cousins.

Then my old neighbor in Fort Wayne, Earl Bowley, posted this on his Facebook. Taken at a local restaurant on, yes, a hot day:

Planking squirrels. What will they think of next?

Its name is Walter, I’m told. Now you know.

Rained all night here, and at the moment all I really want to do is stare out at the puddles, drinking coffee. It’s been so blazing hot of late, the sun so relentless, that it’s nice to raise the blinds for a change and dig it. Or as a certain Seattle-bred left-handed guitar god sang, lay back and groove on a rainy day. (Hendrix must have done little else, in Seattle.) However, we’re promised a 90-degree day once the low pressure moves through, so my guess is, the primary activity of the day will not be grooving, but sweating.

A couple of book notes: I’m working my way through the nightstand selection, “Punching Out: One Year in the Life of a Closing Auto Plant,” and enjoying it very much. Recommended for those of you who’d like to discuss the auto industry, or even the manufacturing economy, with anything other than bumper-sticker phrases. (“The UAW killed GM, really, it’s very simple.” And so on.) The overwhelming impression I get is that building cars and everything large made of metal is anything but, and I stand in awe of the people who do. “Punching Out” is the story of the disassembly of Budd Wheel, a major stamping plant a few miles from my house, which closed for good in 2006. The plant’s equipment was then cut apart and sold, piece by piece and press by press, to companies which then shipped all these items to places like Mexico and India and so forth, for reassembly at other plants, where the evolution of the economy hasn’t quite caught up with ours. Which is to say, where there’s still a growing need for factories and workers.

The author, Paul Clemens, wrote a short version of this for the NYT op-ed page some years back, and I linked to it then. The idea of scrapping, from the illegal street to the respectable factory level, is a pervasive theme in Detroit, and has been for a while. When Kate was still in Brownies, we took a tour of the Ford estate in Grosse Pointe Shores, where Edsel and Eleanor, son and daughter-in-law of Henry, built their Cotswold mansion. The guide pointed out all the details that had been taken from great houses in the real Cotswolds — flooring from this one, windows from that — and I had to smile. Sometimes it seems there’s a finite amount of wealth in the world, and all it does is travel the globe, being bought and sold by those with the means and the need to do so. It’s not that Detroit is a ruin; it’s that its wealth has been taken elsewhere, leaving, in Clemens’ memorable phrase, the working class mopping up after itself.

I sound like a commie, don’t I? Well, I’m just thinking out loud, watching the puddles dimple.

The hour, it grows late. Let’s jump to bloggage, shall we?

“Bridge & Tunnel,” the “Jersey Shore” that wasn’t. A good read from the Village Voice about kids these days, on Staten Island.

I love these things, known on the ‘nets as supercuts: A montage of movie pep-talk-in-the-mirror scenes. Language NSFW.

Tea Party douche who lectures the president on financial responsibility, sued by his ex-wife for $100K in back child support.

House-cleanin’, verb-studyin’, other writin’ awaits the day. Enjoy yours.

Sometimes I think you could write an entire local-TV newscast consisting entirely of the words and phrases “controversial,” “what you don’t know can hurt you” and “hidden dangers.”

As I mention here regularly, one of my income streams comes from a part-time job finding news about health care. Five nights a week, I venture out on the internets with a string of search terms as long as your arm. In the several years I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen the crisis in newspapers up close, and pals, it ain’t pretty. Fewer daily papers are paying close attention to health care and health care policy at all, and more are running the sort of syndicated garbage that allows them to fill their health pages with story after story about weight loss and, of course, hidden dangers:

Backyard barbecues are a big part of summer fun, but avoiding their hidden dangers is key to staying healthy and enjoying a cookout, a doctor suggests.

What are the hidden dangers? The doctor, from an outfit called Chicago Healers, ticks them off: You could get burned! You could get food poisoning! You might not know how to turn the grill off and on! And oh, the cancer that awaits you!

I saw this Sunday night on the USA Today website. Granted, this was the weekend, and it is the summer, but bishpleeze.

I have always, always despised journalism that assumes I’m a moron. (Except when it’s appropriate.) And in general, I just roll my eyes, turn the page, or click away. But later that night, I had a local newscast on, just some babbling to keep me alert, and the weekend anchor said, “Summer is barbecue season, but before you light that grill, you need to be aware of the hidden dangers that come with cooking outside.” The same goddamn press release! With a graphic! Telling us, yes, you need to cook your meat to a safe temperature, and make sure you know how to turn the grill off and on, and consider grilling vegetables instead, “a healthy alternative to meat.”

Every year, the day after Thanksgiving, this same station and hundreds of others like it will run a similar piece about the hidden dangers of leftovers. Did you know you should heat your gravy to a rolling boil before it’s safe to eat? True dat.

On the other hand, there is a way to do fluff well. The Wall Street Journal has a regular feature called “What’s Your Workout,” which on paper sounds ghastly, but is almost always executed well. They look hard for people who manage to cram fitness into hyper-busy schedules, and while there’s always a certain number of douchebags who ride $3,000 bicycles or work with $100-an-hour trainers, there’s also the guy who made a list of 20 workouts he can do in an hour, all with amusing names like “the Rhianna” (paddleboarding) or “Alex McCandless” (stair climbing), then throws Dungeons & Dragons dice to pick one. No re-rolls; what the dice say, goes. It mixes it up and makes the dice the bad guy.

There was another one, earlier this year, about a guy who could do an entire hotel-room weights workout using the wall and his briefcase.

And that concludes today’s episode of Bitching With Nance. This is what happens when you start writing before the coffee kicks in.

No, wait, let’s bitch some more: Remember earlier this year, when we discussed “Modernist Cuisine?” Someone called its author/editor, Nathan Myhvold, a patent troll, a term that was meaningless to me. Until last night, when “All Things Considered” did a shortened version of last week’s “This American Life,” which I’m working my way through now. It would appear “Modernist Cuisine” was supported, at least in part, by its author’s company’s patent trolling, which gives me just one more reason not to buy the book(s), which I wasn’t going to buy anyway. Worth your time.

And finally, a good story that’s a smile all the way through: Detroitblogger John on Fred’s Key Shop, a locksmith business, decades old, in the heart of the city:

“We get these calls from senior citizens that are going senile — ‘You gotta come change my locks, ’cause all the food’s moved around in my cupboards.’ We had this one lady, we were going there to change her locks three and four times a year — ‘Somebody’s been in my underwear drawer.’ You go out there and you change the locks and you don’t really charge them nothing.”

Other elderly people grow too weak to turn the key in their lock and think it’s broken. Murphy says the locksmiths will take it apart, grease it and loosen it, and leave without charging them. “I’m not going to charge some 90-year-old lady because she can’t turn the key.”

They’ve gotten Tigers fans into their locked cars, only to find out they’re broke. They let them go on their word. One showed up at the shop a few days later and not only paid his bill but also brought a case of beer as a thank-you.

“It always comes back, you know, good karma,” he says of the occasional free work. “You get it back if you give it.”

Let that be the parting thought of the day. Give it, and get it back. Someday.

Sorry I’m late today. Tuesdays are nearly as crazed as Mondays, but today wasn’t so bad, as I got to edit an intern’s story about the school board meeting last night, one of the last he’ll do for GrossePointeToday.com, and damn if he didn’t show noticeable improvement over the course of the summer. I can’t work with my interns in a traditional newsroom, where they could watch me work on their stories, observe staff interactions and generally learn the ways of the tribe. I have to handle them via email, phone calls and text messages, only occasionally face-to-face, and that’s a hard way to teach. But check it, the kid hit this one out of the park:

The bad blood continued to boil Monday night (July 25) as the Grosse Pointe school board’s schism widened in the wake of the superintendent search, this time over staffing cuts and the controversial Head Start program for Poupard Elementary.

No chairs were kicked this time, but there was name-calling and accusations. Board member Fred Minturn called president John Steininger a “bully,” while Steininger called out Minturn on missing more votes than any other board member. Steininger turned red in the face while talking about Head Start, as did Minturn. A meeting with a routine agenda ran past 11 p.m., with a full house watching every thrust and parry.

OK, I added “thrust and parry.” He said they watched with “shock and awe.” The fencing term is twee, but meh, it’s better than the other, if only marginally.

Who knows what a parry is? I took a few fencing classes, so I do: It’s the deflection of a blow, particularly in sword fighting. (I always scored the first point in my matches, because I came out after en garde with a quick poke to the chest. My parrying skills lagged, however.) Here’s another term I looked up recently: flotsam and jetsam. I know what it means — trash, basically — but why do they always go together like that? It has to do with maritime law. Flotsam is floating debris of a shipwreck, and is distinguished from jetsam, which describes that which was intentionally thrown overboard, or jettisoned, frequently in times of distress. I guess the distinction comes in when a court is sorting out claims on wreckage of value. But when it’s all afloat around the site of a sunken ship, it’s pretty hard to tell apart, so the words go together.

And that has been your dose of Arcane English Usage with Nance, for this Tuesday. I should have a show on public radio.

OK, Oslo. Let’s talk Oslo. Or rather, let’s talk after-Oslo. I’m going to refrain from piling on Jennifer Rubin, as richly as she deserves it. If you write a column, or a blog, sooner or later this will happen to you, unless you are an extraordinarily careful person, and if you are, you likely don’t have a column or blog (at least not one supported by someone else, that you get paid to write). It’s happened to me, and it’ll probably happen again. The internet wants immediate reaction and analysis, and if you provide it, sooner or later reality will bollix up your hastily jumped-to conclusions. Besides, Stephen Colbert took care of her last night, and that’s a place — at the end of Colbert’s sword — I wouldn’t wish on anyone. So I’ll give her a pass out of sisterhood, and instead make a few random observations:

Some are calling this guy a Norwegian Tim McVeigh, and that sounds about right. Also, he seems to be quite the autodidact, and named several American writers and websites that he found to be really on the beam, including Pamela Geller’s batty belfry, Atlas Shrugged, among others. It reminds me of the time, many years ago, when the talk-radio station I dabbled at (can’t really call it “work”) used to run an overnight show by some lunatic who raved about the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rothschilds, the Federal Reserve — you know the type. I didn’t hear this call I’m about to describe, but my partner Mark did: One night a guy called and, with chilling certainty, told the host he was on his way to Washington to get things done on that front. He said he was carrying the right tools for the job, if you catch his drift, etc. The host, suddenly confronted with apparent evidence that someone out there was taking his carnival act seriously, started buh-buh-buhing, stammering and trying to keep two far-apart plates spinning — the one that contended every word out of his mouth, about stopping these bastards before they take the country down, was God’s honest truth; and the one that said this isn’t the way to do it, which ran counter to his fiery rhetoric about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, etc. Mark, who keeps a sardonic twinkle in his eye most of the time, thought this was quite the entertainment. I don’t know how the call ended, but no one was assassinated in Washington that week, so I guess the caller changed his mind.

Anyway, when that happens — when a crazy person has taken your rhetoric and run with it — it seems that responding is a delicate matter. How not to do it: Sarah Palin’s poor-me act after Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting in April, Geller’s shrieking. How to do it: Bruce Bawer in the Wall Street Journal, who writes:

It is chilling to think that blog entries that I composed in my home in west Oslo over the past couple of years were being read and copied out by this future mass-murderer in his home in west Oslo. …In Norway, to speak negatively about any aspect of the Muslim faith has always been a touchy matter, inviting charges of “Islamophobia” and racism. It will, I fear, be a great deal more difficult to broach these issues now that this murderous madman has become the poster boy for the criticism of Islam.

Good to know.

I said yesterday I was hoarding links. Many have already been posted in comments, but lots of you don’t read those, so apologies if some of them are old to you. In no particular order:

Via Moe and Cooz, Charles Pierce in Esquire on the bomb that didn’t go off. A great, worrisome read.

Another great read, from Michael Kruse at the St. Petersburg Times, one of the last papers that does this sort of thing: How a woman can disappear in plain sight. Not news for anyone with mental illness in their family, but worth your time.

Neil Steinberg posted this on his Facebook yesterday, an oldie from 1997, but still fresh, as a case study in corporate cluelessness, the tale of how Quaker Oats wrecked Snapple. (Remember the Snapple lady, who read customer letters in commercials? She was fired by Quaker. Their “beverage consultant” told the company, “Not everyone in the country starts the morning with a bagel.” Gee, I wonder what that meant.)

A truly spectacular newspaper-correction story.

One of the best Tom & Lorenzo posts ever, on Cathy Cambridge’s wedding gown.

Finally, worth a complete click-through: The insides of refrigerators, a photo essay. Includes one from Fort Wayne, but no clue who it might be.

And that is it, and that is all, and this is me, getting back to real work.

I think it was Dave Barry who, when the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame was still on the drawing board, suggested its singular feature should be volume. People should always be calling the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, telling it to turn itself down, he wrote, in an observation that goes to the heart of what was always my problem with it. Lots of other people have it, too, i.e., how does a cultural movement which still has youthful disaffection and rebellion at its creative heart warrant a hall of fame?

Pretty simple, that one, and you can tick them off if you like. It’s an artistic movement of decades’ standing, incorporating uniquely American strands woven into an original, and new form. It’s a cultural force to this day, and if you don’t believe me, ask Lady Gaga. And from a purely commercial perspective, like a Kiss concert, it’s going to sell a lot of tickets. Sometimes I think the defining emotion of my generation — not the first to rock ‘n’ roll, it goes without saying — is nostalgia, but that’s what happens when your adolescence gives critical mass to a unique cultural force. What do you do in your 20s? (Go punk.) In your 30s? (Start disapproving of hip-hop, which isn’t even music, with all that scratching and sampling, and you call that singing? You might give a nod to the Seattle sound, but honestly, that’s when you stopped keeping up, right?)

What do professional nostalgists love most? A hall of fame. A museum. Put them both in an avant-garde building by I.M. Pei on the shores of a Great Lake, and it’s no surprise that as a business proposition, the Rock Hall, as it’s known on second reference here, is such a draw.

But that’s being unfair, a little, because it’s not just nostalgia being sold here. My advisor for this trip, Michael Heaton of the Plain Dealer, told me not to miss the introductory film that starts the tour, “Mystery Train,” a 12-minute triptych film montage that shows the roots of rock in bluegrass, Texas swing, country, blues, and (my favorite) the field hollers of Southern stoop laborers. Sam Phillips is famous for what he said about finding a white man who sounded like a black man, but the quote of his that always stuck with me was about the time he stopped for a Co’Cola at some backroad southern watering hole, and saw a woman hanging laundry across the road. She was black, and sang as she worked, and Phillips reflected that these folks were the most naturally creative people in the world. Which is two-thirds paternalistic romanticism and one-third true, and when you see the brief shot of black railroad workers knocking rails into place, making the clack of their tools part of the rhythm of the song they’re singing, you can see it plainly. But the film is only 12 minutes, and pretty conceptual. I got it, but I was traveling with two 14-year-old girls who could have used a little more David McCullough-style narration. On to the permanent collection.

I’m not much of a relic person. One Fender Telecaster looks pretty much like every other one, and with the exception of the exceptions — Bo Diddley’s cigar boxes, most notably — the instruments quickly blurred together. It’s the technique, not the tool. But the rest of it charmed me. The clothes and costumes, the programs and posters, the set lists, the scribbled early drafts of classics — it draws you in, and it helps when it’s intelligently arranged and annotated. Video loops at significant stops along the path detail mini-movements like Motown, psychedelia, grunge, rockabilly. Kate liked Sly Stone’s fringed jacket and Jimi Hendrix’ shirts; I liked the spiral-notebook page with the first draft of “Rainy Day, Dream Away.” By the time we arrived at the best of the stage outfits, with David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust wardrobe, Bootsy Collins’ glasses and, yes, Michael Jackson’s glove, more than two hours had passed. And we’d only seen one floor.

Time was running short, so I made the executive decision to head up to the top floor and check out Women Who Rock, a temporary exhibit about guess-what. It was crowded, and I can’t believe we never saw Lady Gaga’s meat dress, now jerky-fied and preserved for the ages, but we got a taste of everyone from Mahalia Jackson to Aretha Franklin to Joan Jett to Debbie Harry to Madonna, and that was enough to fill out the afternoon and bring us almost to closing time.

Next time: Allow more time.

Worth a visit? Absolutely. Worth several. I’d feared the Rock Hall would show the music I love preserved in amber, instead of a living, breathing art form that continues to evolve (although, admittedly, not as quickly or as creatively as it once did). The professional nostalgist would find plenty to wallow in, but nearly as much that says move along now, there’s still more to see.

Oh, and Dave Barry got at least part of his wish: There are outdoor speakers, but they don’t really boom. The only neighbor who would ask it to turn itself down would be the football stadium next door, and you know how those guys like to party.

No bloggage today; I’m hoarding links for tomorrow. It’s Monday and, as usual, I have to run. Some thoughts on Oslo, maybe, and a few more things worth reading for a week that promises to be nearly as miserable as the last. Until then, stay cool.

Here’s something I see more often these days — a lament for dangerous playgrounds. Frequently the argument has an undercurrent of hostility; I recall one by a father of two that basically boiled down to, these kids today could all use a few more broken arms, but I’m sorry, I can’t find it now. Most of the people advocating it seem well-intentioned enough, although I note they tend to live in the land of the anonymous “some” who are ruining childhood, but not for attribution.

That many of the Some may be made of straw and live in the Land of Oddly Articulate Taxi Drivers occurs to me, yes.

Here’s how the argument goes: Children’s playgrounds are being, or have already been, ruined. By lawyers, by — finger quotes — experts, but mostly by Some, who want to take all the risk out of childhood, and hence, all the fun.

There’s some truth to this, at least to the bare fact of ruination, although I wonder how much it has to do with risk and how much with money. But I’ve seen some pretty wan playgrounds in my time. The one at a nearby elementary school in Fort Wayne had a single piece of equipment on it — something that looked like a folded slice of Swiss cheese, with a total height of maybe five feet. I gather you climbed on it. Not that I ever saw a child do so.

But something else happened along the way, and playgrounds started getting fun again. When I was a kid, I played at the elementary at the end of my block. There were four or five different playgrounds, sized for the range of grades, and if I remember correctly, they were basic — swings and monkey bars and slides and see-saws, anchored to asphalt. If you fell, you fell hard, although that was rare. But it happened. My major dread of the playground was being dumped from the high position on the see-saw; I had a friend who specialized in it, with a truly perverse timing that suggests she had a bright future in torture of all sorts.

By the time Kate was born, the playground had changed. The “playscape” had come on the scene — sprawling constructions that mimicked kid-size castles, with spiral slides, swinging footbridges, climbing walls and all manner of things you could swing on, jump from and otherwise exhaust your energy and imagination.

A few of our favorites: Planet Westerville, near my sister’s house in suburban Columbus; Kids Crossing and Foster Park’s playground in Fort Wayne; and a Kids Crossing clone here in Grosse Pointe Woods’ Lake Front Park.

One thing all these playscapes had in common was some sort of soft footing underneath, usually wood chips, although I’ve also seen sand and shredded rubber. I honestly never gave these a thought, other than to be grateful for them. It seemed like, oh, progress, the way a padded dashboard is progress, and seat belts, and bike helmets.

I’m now informed I was all wrong. Modern playgrounds destroy children’s natural risk-taking impulses:

When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.

“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.

Excuse me, but New York Times? What a crock of shit. I can go a long way with this movement — yes, kids must take risks to grow; no, playgrounds shouldn’t be made entirely risk-free — but when you need to tuck “stunted emotional development” in there, hiding behind that big “may,” I’m going somewhere else to play.

The story goes on with the usual reporting; a Norwegian psychologist consults her clipboard and identifies “six categories of risky play” and then we get to the inevitable sources for these types of it-seems-one-way-but-it’s-really-not stories — an evolutionary psychologist. The more bullshit I find in the world, the more I can trace back to evolutionary psychology, the talk radio of soft-science scholarship.

“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.

“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

I always wanted to use “posit” as a verb. So here goes: I posit that all this hand-wringing over too-safe playgrounds is perpetrated by a handful of people who really don’t like children all that much. As I said before, it’s important that kids take risks and try new things, but this barely disguised yearning for them to fall from the top of the monkey bars and break bones is deeply hostile. To them I say: OK, your kid goes first. And if you don’t have any, shut up.

Somewhat related, an old treat found while Googling: Sweet Juniper’s Jim on the unique nature of Detroit playground culture.

Let’s hop to the bloggage, so I can get dressed for weights class:

I do not use special soap on my crotch. There, I said it! Nevertheless, Vagisil would like to sell me some, using some lamely “provocative” viral videos they want everyone to post on their Facebooks and be outraged by. I look at these and think, More good voice work for actors. Huzzah.

I used to be lonely, in my discussions with fellow Elmore Leonard fans, when the topic of film adaptations would come up. “Of course, ‘Get Shorty’ was the best adaptation of a Leonard novel,” someone would say, to nods all around. No! No! I screamed inwardly. “Get Shorty” was a huge improvement over all that came before, and a breakthrough, but no way it’s the best, because that title belongs to “Out of Sight,” and this guy agrees with me, so er’body just shut up.

So, two videos:

You wanted to tussle; we tussled. My favorite scene from “Out of Sight”:

And a video I worked on with my summer interns. I’m not much of a video producer, and it’s hard for me to teach this stuff, because I barely have a handle on the technology, and what I see in my head is so different from what appears on the monitor. Still: The assignment was to do a slice-of-life video aboard a Mackinac racer. We were invited out for a Thursday night of fun-type racing. Took two small cameras, the Flip and the GoPro, mostly handled by the interns. And virtually all the audio turned out like that in the first 10 seconds — spoiled by a persistent roar of wind. (Cheap mics are the bane of cheap cameras.) I fixed it by going back a few nights later with my good USB mic, going belowdecks, and reconducting the interview in acoustically cleaner conditions. My critique of the video is: Too many cut-off heads, too few detail closeups to cut away to, not enough of a narrative arc — it plays like a sketchbook. On the other hand, given the raw materials, I don’t think it turned out too-too badly. Tell me what you think, and have a great weekend. Stay cool.

And? We’ve got three digits: