Too much weekend for me, which is not to say I partied too hard or ate like a Roman, only that the weekend’s weekending pushed the work I usually do on the weekend off to the side, which means… you get the idea. It’s going to be a long one, so today is a write-off, blog-wise.

And what did we do this weekend? Traveled back across the Mitten to pick up Kate from camp. We needed to be there too early to work an early-morning departure, so we spent the night in Grand Rapids. There’s something about the phrase “a night in Grand Rapids” that says, “Screw the cost! Let’s splurge!” and so we stayed at the Amway Grand Hotel, the finest lodgings to be had in Dutch west Michigan, or so we’re led to believe from the brochures.

I practiced the phrase, “I’m at the Amway” in my head a few dozen times, but could never escape that little frisson that millions feel with any mention of the name. Amway may have done for Grand Rapids what Eli Lilly has done for Indianapolis, what General Motors did for Detroit, what any (large corporation) has done for (name of city). So I guess people get a different feeling there, but for me, the word will always be attached to those phone calls you get from a friend, sorta — you know, that guy you used to party with, but he was really more Paul’s friend than yours, even though he gave you a ride that one time. Anyway, he called the other night, and asked to come over, and you said OK, although your spidey-sense was already a-tingle. And then he shows up, sits down, accepts a beer and immediately asks, “How would you like to join an organization that can make all your financial dreams come true?” And at that moment, you want to stick an icepick in your ear and end it all, because oh God, it’s the Amway pitch.

I’m no fan of Jennifer Granholm, and went into the 2006 gubernatorial race with my eyes and mind open. The first time I saw the Republican nominee and Amway scion Dick DeVos in action, was at a town-hall meet-the-voters thing on TV. A woman rose and asked how she was to stay in Michigan, with her family’s third-generation plumbing-supply business in such dire straits with the weak economy. (And this would be before the bad stuff started; I assume they’re long-gone by now.) What were these candidates offering her? Jenny gave some canned answer, and then DeVos turned to her, crinkled his salesman eyes, and said, “I grew up in a family business too, Laurie.” I yodeled an expletive at the TV, snapped it off and resigned myself to four more years of Granholm.

Anyway, Dick Jr., the unsuccessful would-be governor, is the mirror image of his dad, whose kingly portrait hangs in the lobby, along with that of his partner, Jay Van Andel:

Terrible picture, and I apologize, but the light was all wrong.

Anyway, I’ll have more tomorrow. In the meantime, tell your own Amway story, if you have one.

…has gone Hollywood.

Atul Gawande linked to the obesity report released yesterday and suggested it was reasonable for fat to be an issue in the next presidential campaign. I gotta say, just a glance at the stats was jaw-dropping, and he may be right.

I tell my journalism students, when considering data, the news is in the change. This is a lot of change in a short time:

Twelve states now have obesity rates above 30 percent. Four years ago, only one state was above 30 percent. … Twenty years ago, no state had an obesity rate above 15 percent. Today, more than two out of three states, 38 total, have obesity rates over 25 percent, and just one has a rate lower than 20 percent. Since 1995, when data was available for every state, obesity rates have doubled in seven states and increased by at least 90 percent in 10 others. Obesity rates have grown fastest in Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee, and slowest in Washington, D.C., Colorado, and Connecticut. …Adult obesity rates increased in 16 states in the past year and did not decline in any state.

This isn’t change over the course of a generation. This is change in, what, five years? Appalling. What is most disheartening is how swiftly this is becoming an economic issue. Michigan is now No. 10, down from 1995’s ranking, when we were tied for fourth, but that’s mainly because everyone else surged (particularly the American south). In that time, we still managed to increase our obesity rate 77 percent, from 17.2 percent to over 30 percent. Final, the-news-is-the-change comparison:

“Today, the state with the lowest adult obesity rate would have had the highest rate in 1995,” said Jeff Levi, Ph.D., executive director of TFAH.

That’s only 16 years ago! I remember 1995! (I was 30 pounds lighter.) So, a question for the room: Why? I’ve always believed complex problems do not have simple answers, but off the top of my head, I can think of a double handful of reasons that have all dovetailed, one way or another, to drive the problem: Portion size, the loss of cooking skills, an aging population (we gain weight as we grow older), agricultural policies that encourage the production of crops that become cheap, calorically rich additives (I’m looking at you, corn). Fast food, restaurant food in general, 20-ounce soda, a culture that cements overeating in place by encouraging portion sizes once only found in stuff-your-face contests. Taco Bell runs specials from time to time, which packages six deluxe tacos in a single combo meal. Six. For one person. Supersize it, biggie-size it, etc.

I mentioned economics. I live in an affluent area, where people are generally normal-size. There’s a running club for kids. I see people exercising with their children. People are always bitching that the nearest Whole Foods is too far away. I walk through Kate’s school during class change, and fat kids are distributed in about the same proportions as they were when I was young — one in 10, maybe, one in 15. I drive past Detroit schools at dismissal time, and half the kids are waddling.

Gawande says this is a presidential issue because of health costs, obviously. Twenty-seven percent of Army recruits are disqualified from enlistment because of obesity.

In other news at this hour, my pants felt loose yesterday, so I stepped on the scale. Down five pounds. How the hell did that happen? Short answer: Summer cycling, plus an absent kid means I don’t feel obligated to make the dishes she prefers. Last night’s dinner was a frittata with sautéed spinach, garlic and goat cheese. Took me 10 minutes to make.

Well, having children will pack on the pounds. Every mother knows this.

A few more tasty bits of bloggage, then I’m off to edit video.

Every copy-desk chief knows you have to have at least one pervert on the crew, someone who will see the dirty joke in everything. It saves you from some of the more embarrassing exampled detailed here. (Although it doesn’t save you from one of the worst of my career, the time a front-page story reported a phone number for some worthy charity effort, and transposed digits sent readers to a sex line. For that one, the only cure is the plain old boring rule of copy editing: Last thing you do before releasing a page with a phone number? DIAL THE NUMBER.)

Here’s another question for the room: I’ve been reading a lot of stories of late about children misbehaving in public. This column is typical, and pretty restrained, as these things go; I’ve read some truly nasty rants from others, whose day can apparently be ruined by the presence of one whiny kid in a public place. I was always pretty lucky in this regard; Kate wasn’t much of a misbehaver when she was little, and the few times she cried in public, I whisked her out of there so fast, trailing apologies in my wake, that once I startled a couple at a nearby table, who weren’t even aware there’d been a baby in the room.

But I only had one, and a girl, and an easy keeper at that. And a restaurant is not an airport, or an airplane, the latter two of which are far harder to leave. Since then, I’ve aged, and mellowed, and now I’m far more likely to be that couple in the restaurant. I have tune-out skills, and I accept that children are part of the human family, and that overhearing an occasional blowup in a mall or elsewhere is part of the price we pay for a public space. (In any event, I find them far less offensive than hearing some Neanderthal shout curses into his cell phone, an increasingly common occurrence these days.) So my question is: Are kids really worse than they used to be, or does the internet simply give more people a place to complain about them?

Also, I direct your attention to this blog from Lisa Belkin at the NYT, which provides a counterpoint from the mother of a particular noisy child.

OK, the weekend is officially in progress. I might make it to the pool today. Enjoy yours, whatever the weather.

Joel Achenbach, the WashPost blogger, is on vacation this week, and his substitute has gone spelunking in his career, via Lexis-Nexis. She posted a story of Achenbach’s from 1985, which was Twitter-flagged by the editor who handled it, none other than the legendary Gene Weingarten of the Miami Herald; from its tone and length, it can only be from Tropic, that paper’s Sunday magazine.

Got all that? Anyway, it’s from 1985, 26 long years ago, another era in the newspaper biz. The internet was confined to college campuses (and only the faculty offices of the computer-science department, at that), the Herald and its parent company, Knight-Ridder, were absorbing workers jettisoned from Viewtron, a failed experiment to deliver the news via computer, still a rare appliance in American homes. There would be a few more glory years in the newspaper biz yet, where a smart editor could find a local story (the opening of South Florida’s first sperm bank), assign a smart young writer (Achenbach), and come up with this long, meandering story about how it works and who the people are behind it, told through Achenbach’s visit to the facility, and his attempt to make a deposit.

I know a guy who had performance anxiety at a sperm bank — he tells it as a very funny dinner-party story — so every word of the long opening anecdote rings true:

Do sperm scream? wonders Mr. Posterity as he sits in the sperm bank. He is alone in a room so bright he cannot find a shadow. In his hand is a large cup. The doctor has asked him to produce within 15 minutes. He has already wasted five.

…The doctor at the sperm bank has been thoughtful enough to leave a girlie magazine in the room (it’s the only thing in sight with any trace of color). But when Mr. Posterity flips the pages he can barely focus, the Girls of Texas are bending over backwards to help him in this wretched moment, but all he sees is paper.

…Voices come from outside the door. It is the doctor and another person, laughing at something, probably something not very funny. Mr. Posterity makes a mental note that the door does not lock. He is trying to be cool about this whole thing, but he wonders if perhaps a lock would have been a good idea, a lock and chain and a hefty deadbolt, and maybe the room could have been down a long hallway or in the basement — jeez, he could have just mailed it in, no hassle.

Eventually cold logic takes over, and Mr. Posterity steels himself, realizing that there would be no greater humiliation than to exit the room with nothing to show for his time. He had vowed to be productive. He had vowed to be manly.

And so . . .

When he leaves the room he is wearing his dark shades. He is not proud. More than ever, the cup seems needlessly vast, a virtual bucket, mocking him. This is a tense moment and he wants to look slick, but the cup is proving awkward, he isn’t sure how to hold it. He decides to grip it close to the stomach, the way he holds a Bud at a party.

This is why I got into the newspaper business, to be able to write like this and get paid for it. This is what newspapers used to do — some of them, anyway. We would publish pieces like this on a Sunday, and no one would ask, as they would in later years, “But what’s the utility here? Can we include a sidebar on the sperm bank’s hours and rates? This seems awfully long. Are we being self-indulgent here? I mean, really, who cares?”

No one asked those questions because this was a Sunday-magazine piece, and that’s what Sunday magazines did. They gave people lounging in their living rooms, drinking coffee, surrounded by sections of the fat newspaper, something to read they wouldn’t get Monday through Saturday. Maybe people were busy then; I’m sure they were, in fact. But we figured, hey, Sunday — if it’s going to run any day of the week, this is when it should run. These were, to some extent, the experimental John Cage pieces. They required commitment from readers, a more sophisticated reader’s eye. They assumed at least a few Monday-morning phone calls, from some pissed-off old lady or evangelical, who simply cannot believe that in her newspaper, which she pays for, the thing she invites into her home, there’s a story about a reporter with a several-hundred word lede drolly detailing how he jerked off into a cup. And so on.

The day was dawning, however. If the Herald editors had looked to the east, they would have seen a pinkening sky as the new era approached. Or, to switch metaphors abruptly, Pandora had already opened the box, and the harpies were pouring out. Competition. Declining literacy rates. Something that was called, in meetings, “time starvation.” Falling ad lineage. The last ones out of the box would be the bean-counters, the number-crunchers, the people who could put an essay like this through an analysis and say, yes, while personally they had enjoyed this immersive visit to the sperm bank, really, research shows that the average reader only spends 17 minutes with the paper, maybe less, and was this really where the paper wanted to put its resources? When there was real news to cover?

For a while around this time, everyone wanted suburban readers, those wealthy boomers spending like drunken sailors on everything from home improvements to cars to dinners out, and so came the birth of Neighbors, zoned editions pegged to the compass points of individual metro areas. No one at Neighbors would scorn your suburban town board meetings, no sir, and we covered the crap out of them, but that didn’t pay off, either. Sunday magazines went first — rotogravure printing, long deadlines, scarce advertising, and those nice people at Parade and USA Weekend were offering their product practically free. Neighbors came later. Cut, cut, cut, trim, trim, trim. Retiring employees weren’t replaced, others were bought out, some laid off. Cut, shrink, deny, sell, consolidate, reduce. A new publisher arrived in Fort Wayne. When Alan, the features editor, met her, she asked how many staff he had in his department. Eight, he replied, and she made a face, like, are you kidding me? There are three now.

You’ve heard all this before. I’m oversimplifying. I’m telling the story from only one perspective. It’s boring. It’s ancient history. It’s water over the dam and under the bridge. Both Weingarten and Achenbach still have jobs, still write long-form pieces rich with style and detail, only they do them at the Washington Post, one of the tiny handful of papers that still swings for the fences from time to time. There’s still lots of good writing out there, and a lot of it — I’m always struck, on a day like today, how much I can be distracted by great pieces, on the web, in books, in Kindle Singles. I have too much to read, really; it’s hard to get work done sometimes.

But this one took me back. I should look forward. So that’s that.

Let’s get to the bloggage, which is scarce today:

According to one blogger who found this yesterday, it is “comedy gold.” I’ll say: Marcia Clark opining on the Casey Anthony trial, calling it “worse than O.J.!” Considering the O.J. case was booted in large part because of Clark’s prosecutorial missteps, that’s a pretty big contention. (If you haven’t read “The Run of His Life,” Jeffrey Toobin’s account of the O.J. case, I highly recommend it. Marcia might gain some valuable insight.)

The stolen babies of Spain. Taken, it seems, as political retribution, later just for cash, with the help of doctors, nurses and nuns. Unbelievable.

Outta here. Have a great Thursday.

Before too much more time passes, I have to say something about “Treme,” which wrapped its second season this week. Y’all know my conflicts/prejudices. I feel bad about not writing something sooner. Back before the show even launched, I was asked* about contributing to Back of Town, which quickly became the definitive “Treme” blog, but it became obvious I was out of my league there, and anyway, I didn’t have time.

*My memory may be faulty here; it might have been another work-of-David Simon blog. One of those.

Also, while it’s true I have an opinion on pretty much everything and can overanalyze with the best of them, I’m claiming my TV more for entertainment these days. I’m reserving the right to sit back and enjoy more. The world isn’t short of people who can slice, dice, unpack, unravel and unwind TV with the best of them, and for this one, I mostly choose not to participate. To fully appreciate, “Treme” requires a knowledge of New Orleans that is both broad and deep, and mine is neither. To illustrate, a sample conversation with the late Ashley Morris:

Me: I love New Orleans. We went there on vacation a few years ago.
AM: Oh?
Me: Yes, we stayed in a guesthouse on Ursulines Street. Run by a couple of gay men.
AM: Well, that narrows it down.

So let Ray Shea and the rest of them at BoT do the heavy lifting. Me, I just watch.

As frequently happens when quality television is involved, second seasons are when the ripening occurs, and that’s been the case with “Treme.” The show started with enormous expectations — anything that followed “The Wire” had to — and swiftly disappointed many by not being “The Wire.” But it was definitely in the mold of other Simon work, which is to say, it was about cities and how they work (and don’t work). You’d think, given where people live in these United States, we might want to see more of this. But the world is also full of people who, when they sit down for a night of telly, want the sweet balm of escapism. There are quite a few more who believe urban America is a hellhole, and seek confirmation in following bullet trails through viscera, because that’s what happens to you when you go there — you get shot.

There’s also been some critical backlash, like this piece, which basically says: Yawn. BO-ring. I disagree, obviously. You don’t need multiple shootings and drug busts to give a show forward momentum. “Treme” runs at a more leisurely pace than “The Wire,” but has no shortage of pleasures, the most obvious of which is the music.

The music this season has been wonderful, and there’s more of it than in season one. Every city has its own soundtrack, but New Orleans’ might be the richest on the continent, and the show goes out of its way to depict it, from high to low, to show how its threads weave together and keep making New Orleans’ musical tapestry so unique. I’ve always thought the most interesting places on the map are those where worlds and cultures collide, and they’ve been colliding in New Orleans, at the end of the big river, for centuries, and nowhere is this more evident than in the music coming out of every window and door. Truth be told, if “Treme” was little more than an excuse to link performances together, I’d probably still watch. (And if Albert and Delmond Lambreaux ever release their mashup of modern jazz and Mardi Gras Indian chants, I’ll probably buy it.)

Some of the efforts to include the city’s other big cultural scene, food, feel more strained. Anthony Bourdain got lots of writing credits this season, and while his pen is talented, I hope he doesn’t quit his day job. The scenes of Janette the chef’s evolution as a culinary artist were my least favorite of the season. (Although I probably will never cook fish again without thinking I should listen to it more.) Also, I’m in full agreement with the writer at Dark Brown Waffles who found Lucia Micarelli’s Annie Tee character a big bundle of who-cares. She spent several episodes struggling to birth an unmemorable song. Which goes to show you that in a musical town, some are bandleaders and composers and some are just players. Annie’s a very fine player. End of that story.

You can quibble over the details, but to me, “Treme” is at its best when it shows what’s wrong — and what’s glorious — about urban America, where the country built its strength and lost its way and now can’t come to grips with. We’re a mobile society; we like to strike it rich and find the next thing. New Orleans — and Baltimore, and Detroit, and many others — are reminders that we can’t just move on, that we owe cities something. The road to figuring that out is what “Treme” is all about.

New York magazine’s critic was kinder than the Atlantic’s. You might want to read.

In bloggage today:

I flipped on Nancy Grace last night for about half an hour while I worked. I’ve never watched more than 30 seconds of the blonde harpy, and I wanted to see if the top of her skull would blow off last night. I lasted longer this time, but not much; this clip should give you an idea why. What the–? Is this typical? If so, Fox isn’t the only cable-news outfit with an embarrassment to apologize for. That Susan Moss person! I’m still traumatized.

My appreciation of Monaco’s new princess continues. I tried to link to a single photo from this slideshow, but failed. If you have time to page through, it’s the very last one that made me laugh out loud, no. 27. Princess Stephanie, in her tobacco-colored tan and wrist tattoo — she’s the French version of Aunt Mimi in “Treme.”

And now, the hour grows late, and I gotta go. Happy Wednesday, all.

I think I mentioned before that the royal wedding in Monaco sort of snuck up on me. I didn’t know the deed had been done until yesterday, but fortunately we live in the age of the amazing internet, when no detail is too small to report, including that the bride allegedly tried to flee Monaco — three times! — in the days before the ceremony, and was prevented from doing so by Prince Albert’s goon squad, who actually confiscated her passport rather than let her get on that plane back to Johannesburg and the chance to have a happier life.

The precipitating incident?

It followed confirmation by palace sources that Albert, 53, was due to undergo DNA tests because of claims by at least one unnamed woman that he has fathered another illegitimate child.

He already has two he acknowledges. The “at least one” became two in some reports, for an even four. I think, as we are obviously dealing with a man with a severe allergy to latex, we can assume there could easily be more. One is said to be a toddler, which means he’s been stepping out on his beautiful blonde broodmare for some time. I don’t often feel pity for women who are richer, taller and that much better-looking than me, but my heart is not made of stone: Poor Princess Charlene.

There are 63 photos in this slide show, and I beseech you to view them all, if you can. It’s the usual royal freak show, but if you can only hit the highlights, well, start with Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, who picked up her outfit at a Target white sale. Princess Charlotte Casiraghi found a far nicer dress at Chanel — it really is a wow — and Auntie Steph has real balls to stand next to her, now that a lifetime of Mediterranean sun and smoking has taken its toll on her once-lovely face. Note, also, Stephanie’s tattoo, which demonstrates she certainly favors the commoner’s side of the bloodline. Like the Middletons, the bride’s family looks perfectly nice and presentable, and probably behaved better at the reception, off in the corner table reserved for the non-Francophone guests. Charlene got a little emotional during the ceremony, and closeups taken in the church showed a tear rolling down her cheek. I have to say, I’ve never seen a more miserable bride.

Sometimes you can see a couple’s whole life in how they kiss. You certainly can with this one.

But man, a spectacular dress. Although, with that bod, she could probably make Grand Duchess Maria of Russia’s outfit look good. He looks awful. I assume we’re headed for the usual marital denouement, followed by a swift annulment from Rome, to keep those tithes coming from the li’l principality that could.

Another zillion pix from the WashPost.

So, how was your weekend? Mine was quite nice. I made an effort to do little work and mostly succeeded. Went for a fast bike ride on a blisteringly hot Saturday and nearly died, but recovered in time to spin the evening away at a venerable biker bar in Detroit called the Stone House. We sat on the front porch while an enormous thunderstorm mostly missed us, then rode home in that yellowy-bruise light that only midwestern thunderstorms bring. Went to the Eastern Market. Barbecued ribs. Cleaned Kate’s room. The usual.

A lot of bloggage piled up over the weekend, so let’s get to it:

Christopher Hitchens filets Michele Bachmann as only he can, or rather, the particular vote-for-me-I’m-from-Podunk attitude she represents:

Where does it come from, this silly and feigned idea that it’s good to be able to claim a small-town background? It was once said that rural America moved to the cities as fast as it could, and then from urban to suburban as fast as it could after that. Every census for decades has confirmed this trend. Overall demographic impulses to one side, there is nothing about a bucolic upbringing that breeds the skills necessary to govern a complex society in an age of globalization and violent unease. We need candidates who know about laboratories, drones, trade cycles, and polychrome conurbations both here and overseas. Yet the media make us complicit in the myth—all politics is yokel?—that the fast-vanishing small-town life is the key to ancient virtues. Wasilla, Alaska, is only the most vivid recent demonstration of the severe limitations of this worldview. But still it goes on.

“All politics is yokel” — that’s a good one.

Jane Scott, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s legendary rock critic, died Monday. She was a legend because she started covering rock ‘n’ roll when she was already middle-aged, at a time when pop music writers were nearly always among the youngest in the newsroom, and because she stuck with it for decades. She was 92 when she died, 83 when she retired, 45 when she covered the Beatles’ first appearance in Cleveland, in 1964. She wasn’t much of a prose stylist, but she was enough of a reporter to know news when she saw it:

“I never before saw thousands of 14-year-old girls, all screaming and yelling,” she recalled later. “I realized this was a phenomenon. . . . The whole world changed.”

The Plain Dealer obit, linked above, contains several links to her past pieces. I get the feeling that by the end, being the senior citizen with a backstage pass was part of her brand, as they say. I grew up in a different city, and didn’t know about her until I got to college, where all the journalism students from northeast Ohio worshipped her. One of my classmates took a chance one day, and showed up at Swingo’s, the hotel where all the rockers stayed when they were passing through Cleveland (seen in “Almost Famous”). She swallowed hard and told the desk clerk, “I’m here to interview Bob Marley.” She was a pretty little peach, and they waved her right up, no doubt used to this sort of thing. She still had to clear the road manager in the hallway, though. She told him she was there to interview Bob for the newspaper.

“You must be Jane Scott,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” my classmate said, walked in and shared a spliff and a conversation with the reggae star, and that’s how the student newspaper from Ohio University snagged an interview it likely wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. She was in and out before the real critic, then 60, showed up. I bet that was a funny scene.

Another good appreciation, from the L.A. Times.

And I guess that’s it for me now. Tuesday is now Monday, so I best get rolling. Have a swell short week.

At every some point on a long drive, the radio fades, you’re tired of whatever you brought to amuse you via the iPod, the old CD you didn’t know was in the car (“Let it Bleed”) has been played twice, and then you turn to your inner resources.

(Five years ago or so, I instituted a summer reading requirement for Kate. For this, she was teased relentlessly by some pinhead little brat from around the way. I overheard Kate defending herself one day: “My mom wants me to have inner resources!” she protested. Can’t say that it worked, down the road. The adjustment to camp that flipped her out the most? Giving up her phone and iPod for TEN WHOLE DAYS.)

It would also seem you also start writing in the second person. Let’s stop that.

Anyway, I was deep in a reverie about something, perhaps related to “Let it Bleed,” when I moved into the orbit of another driver. I was traveling 75, on cruise control. He was traveling 73. I came up behind him to pass on the left. He didn’t move. I gave him a minute or two. He didn’t move. So I went around him on the right.

I HATE doing that. I’m told it’s legal in Michigan to pass on the right if there’s another escape option for the passed driver — basically, if they’re in the center lane of a multi-lane freeway. Most of the freeways around here are like that, so everyone does it, and assumes it’s just legal, period. Certainly the police don’t seem to enforce it. Even after six years, it still freaks me out, and I still hate it. People need to be aware of their speed relative to the flow of traffic, and adjust their lane accordingly. You know, the way I do. Needless to say, the world isn’t perfect, and all our automotive technology serves to do in the grand scheme of things is insulate a driver better from the road around him or her. (A few years ago, a toddler in Detroit died when her neck was caught between the back-seat window and its frame, a confusing and tragic turn of events that raised more questions than any account of it ever answered. It took long minutes for her to suffocate, during which her grandmother — seated, what, 18 inches away? — failed to notice the child was in distress. In what may be the world’s only instance of a useful, clarifying comment left on a newspaper website, a woman who claimed to have witnessed the incident said the driver was listening to recordings of a charismatic preacher at an ear-splitting volume, which continued to play as she finally got a clue and stopped, and the scene descended into chaos. What a fucking surreal sight that must have been.)

Anyway, I passed him. Two minutes later, he passed me on the left, going downhill. Then resumed going two miles per hour slower, still in the left lane.

Options: Speed up to 80, leave him in the dust, put a wide berth between Mr. Left Lane and myself. Or hold my course and speed and growl a little. Guess which one I chose? Do you think I’m an angry person?

I once drove from Fort Wayne to Philadelphia with a co-worker who hated the right lane. “I’m afraid I’m going to hit the guardrail,” she said. I pointed out that we were driving my Honda CRX, a two-seater the approximate size of a roller skate, and that we could put another one abreast of us in the same lane and still not even come close to the guardrail. I mentioned the rules of the road, and safety. This took about the first 30 minutes of her driving leg, and none of it worked. “I guess it’s just one of my quirks,” she said, as drivers passed on the right, throwing furious scowls at us, every one of which was felt by me, the passenger. I tried to perfect an expression that said, “Sorry, but she’s got this phobia; what can you do?” It mixed a half-inch shrug with a demi-eye roll, and wasn’t particularly successful. The next time we stopped for gas, I took the wheel, and did most of the driving thereafter.

Mr. Left Lane passed me again when I had to cancel the cruise for a knot of slower trucks. The hue of his skin and the little Mexican flag he had dangling from the rear-view suggested that perhaps he learned to drive in another nation. Well. That explains everything, doesn’t it, Left-Lane Ortega? Your formative years were spent motoring in Mexico City, and you don’t know that on a wide, well-maintained American freeway, you DO NOT CRUISE IN THE LEFT LANE. THE LEFT LANE IS FOR PASSING. Didn’t anyone teach you that? I thought for a while about the crowded world cities I’ve been in (not many), and how crazy the traffic was. Coming into Buenos Aires from the airport in 2003, the driver of our van took us down the Avenida 9 de Julio, 9 de Julio being Argentina’s independence day but there’s also about that many lanes going in each direction. Wikipedia says seven. I say bullshit. There appeared to be at least 20. Driving it was colorful enough, but crossing as a pedestrian was insane. The light changed, and if you sprinted, you could make it to the median before waiting out another cycle to cross the 20 lanes on the other side. I imagine, if you were driving there, or someplace like it, you wouldn’t pick up the usual courtesies about lane usage.

Another memory from 2003: A fellow Fellow at U of M called her cell and retrieved a voice mail from a friend in Cairo, saying, “We miss you.” To end the message, her friend held his phone up to the traffic noise for a full minute. It made her laugh, and she played it for a fellow Middle East traveler. “Nothing like it,” he said. “Just one long honk, all the time.”

I was considering all this, then surfaced to look for Left-Lane Ortega. Nowhere in sight. He’d exited while I was constructing this elaborate narrative about his sub-par driving skills. And I hadn’t noticed. Oh, well.

Shortly thereafter, it was time to catch my own exit and deposit Kate at camp. I left her in the rehearsal space, where she had to audition for the grand sorting of skills. All around were kids honking saxes and trumpets, her fellow jazzbos. And that was the last I’ll see her until a week from Sunday, although I hope she’ll write.

And it seems I’ve run out of time with this ridiculous run-on blog entry. Eleven hundred words about driving? Who am I, James Lileks?

Just one bit of bloggage:

A new book, a “cultural history of shoplifting,” which interests me because it’s one crime I never, ever indulged in. Nothing is more chickenshit than thievery, in my opinion, but your mileage may vary.

Have a great weekend, all. It’s already in progress, here.

Well, this is typical. You take one day off and news breaks all over the place. The state legislature passed its redistricting legislation yesterday. I used to live in the 13th Congressional district; now I live in the 14th. Behold the 14th, via the Detroit News, and you can click it bigger, if you’re a poli sci student:

My state House district has been similarly FUBAR’d, and right now I have to chase that down for my other site. So sorry, but I gotta go.

John Conyers is my new representative, by the way, who will be stretched from Lake St. Clair to southwest Detroit all the way up to Pontiac. I ask you.

OK, play amongst yourselves and I’ll be back tomorrow, and possibly later today.

I was reading a story the other day about the possibility of Detroit getting a Whole Foods. Yes, the city infamous for not having a Kroger may well be getting a Whole Paycheck. Anyway, the story quoted a regional operations director for the chain named Red Elk Banks.

Native American names aren’t unheard-of here, but they’re unusual. The Indian tribes around here were so well assimilated that the tribe members tend to have names like everyone else’s. But just for the hell of it, I punched Red Elk Banks into the big G.

And whaddaya know, he’s a son of legendary Native American activist Dennis Banks. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, the elder Banks had six children — Janice, Darla, Deanna Jane and Dennis James, born 1962-64; Red Elk, born 1970; and Tatanka Wanbli, born 1971. It’s not often that you see a social movement that drapes so neatly over a watershed like that. I like the difference between the 1970 and ’71 models, between an Indian name rendered in English and Indian name, period.

The reporter called him “Elk Banks” on second reference. That’s wrong, don’t you think?

One of my first encounters with the simmering temper of our own Kirk, who was for decades a powerful force for correct usage on the Columbus Dispatch copy desk, was when a reporter turned in a story from the Ohio State Fair. It quoted a native American named something like “John Yellow Bird,” followed by the phrase, “(his real name).”

Sometimes I think the next time I see Kirk he’s going to have one of those forehead calluses like the crazier al-Qaeda chieftains have, from praying so often. Only his will be from smashing his head against his desk. Although he’s mellowed considerably.

What’s your Indian name? (Speaking of ethnic insensitivity.) I claim …Nancy Chickadee. Lately Alan’s been working one of his industrious little projects around here, trying to attract more black-capped chickadees to our feeder. It’s been an enormous success, and last evening the dogwood was alive with all their yakking, which is not why Alan calls them Nancy-birds, but what the hell, I’ll take the name.

(He calls them Nancy-birds for their two-note song, which I’ve always sounds to me like your mother calling you home for dinner: Nan-cy…din-ner.)

I have to leave early today, and translate an intern’s story into English. I have but one bit of bloggage, thanks to my Facebook friend Neil Steinberg, who is walking down memory lane via the newly digitized Chicago Reader archive. He flagged one of his old pseudonymous Bob Watch columns, about Bob Greene, of course. It’s a goodie, Bob enjoying a baseball strike:

Bob has hied himself to Sarasota, Florida, where he wanders giddily through the abandoned White Sox training center, admiring a red hose, “faded to near-pink on the grass.” Other objects–a batter’s cage, a wooden picnic bench, a glob of paint, a bird–also catch his attention.

There are no seasoned athletes to make rude noises or hurl insults in his direction, and Bob likes it. “Baseball’s message is clearest during moments when there’s no one on the field,” he writes. The next day, he fingers blank jerseys and eagerly awaits the arrival of the nonentity scabs who will wear them in shame.

That guy had such a thin bag of tricks. Those observations of utterly mundane details — the hose, the bench — is vintage Bob. In some ways, I wish he’d write more often, so I could make more fun of him.

And in keeping with our recent discussions, Alan had lunch at a waterfront restaurant yesterday, and overheard this bit of conversation from a nearby table: “New-plane smell is even more intoxicating than new-car smell.” Oh rly?

See you Thursday.

Flooding is the natural-disaster story of the summer season, which is a definite upgrade from spring’s tornados, but, as anyone who’s lived through one can tell you, is no picnic.

Flooding was a hardy perennial in Fort Wayne, which sits at the confluence of three rivers, and despite its laughable name (the Summit City, technically true), floods like a toilet in a jail. When I interviewed there, in 1984, the paper had just won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the flood of ’82. I read the framed front pages that flanked the Big P on the wall and got the strong impression the flood was a rare event, although there had been one in 1978 that ranked right up there.

It flooded in 1985. It flooded so many times before I left in 2004 that the routine, and the slate of stories we always wrote, became familiar. First the parks filled, then certain neighborhoods, almost all poor — I know, I’m astonished too — then a few more neighborhoods. We did stories on the city’s flood command center, where the public-works people dispatched sandbags. We did stories on the sandbagging, on the plucky teens and other volunteers who would come down to the city garage to fill them and stack them. When the Army Corps of Engineers sent their heavy-duty pumps, we wrote about that, too. For a while, the paper went through metro editors the way Spinal Tap went through drummers, and one of them was an out-of-towner. We had a rare summer flood one year, and she said in a meeting she didn’t understand how the St. Mary’s had flooded, it didn’t rain that much. Someone else explained that 16 inches of rain had fallen in the watershed in the last 10 days or so, and from the way she blinked, he knew she didn’t know what a watershed was. I’m sure she learned. Everyone learned.

We had a storm here in May that dumped 2.7 inches of rain in an hour, and some people had basement flooding, much of it raw sewage. A public-works consultant came to the city council meeting to explain about combined sewers and pump failure and all the rest of it, and I felt like a Hoosier again. I was helping my intern, and explained in a whisper what a combined sewer was — storm and sanitary together, bad — and realized I’m a flooding expert. Sort of; I don’t need the jargon explained, anyway. I know what flap gates are. I know you can’t get let combined-sewer runoff go into a lake or river to save a few basements, at least not without a nice fine from the EPA. And I learned something, too; you can let runoff in, but it has to be a 100-year storm, and there better be documentation. (I know what a 100-year storm is; they happen about every five years.)

I covered Mississippi River flooding in 1993. One of the last gasps of ambition of our little paper was this form of foreign correspondence; we didn’t cover national political conventions, but we did cover floods in other cities. I watched people in Iowa reclaim their houses from floodwaters that had reached the gutters, and thought, all in all, I’d prefer fire, assuming everyone gets out of the house safely. Then you don’t have to look at your belongings through a thin film of sewage.

Writing that last line — looking at your belongings under a thin film of sewage — it occurred to me that I’d written all this before. And whaddaya know, I have. Almost at the same time of year. Three years ago.

Maybe it’s time to shut down this blog. Maybe I’ve run out of things to say. Oh, what the hell — it never stopped Mitch Albom or Bob Greene! Onward!

Actually, this is a good time to note that this is a particularly nutso week, and there will be no entry Wednesday. I’m taking Kate to summer camp that day, and we’ll be rolling out at oh-dark something. This is her first such experience, at a fine-arts camp on the other side of the state. (Not Interlochen. Thanks for asking, though.) She may fancy herself a rock ‘n’ rolla, but she’s going to get some discipline in jazz bass first.

So since this seems to be the place for it, some bloggage:

In 2003, a Fort Wayne doctor crashed the plane he was flying, killing his wife and two of his three children. He survived, along with his son, 8 at the time. Terrible tragedy. He rebuilt his life, he and his son recovered, and he remarried. On Friday, he crashed another plane, killing his second wife and himself, although the son survived. Again. He’s very badly hurt, but expected to survive. What are the odds, Pilot Joe?

Did I mention my man Mitch a little while ago? He feeds the needy cookies. Someone else’s cookies, but oh well — I’m sure he paid for them.

Virginia Heffernan at the NYT on content farms, and Google’s new algorithm that allegedly freezes them out. The details are almost unbelievable, but are all true. One of my students had a brief interlude with one. He wrote one article, and was paid 38 cents. A couple CFs picked up the porn principal story, and ran it through some weird copyright-cleanser; a ‘bot changed every few words to synonyms. But there were lots of ads. I hope it paid someone.

OK, off to drink a lot more coffee and see if I can make sense of the day. Enjoy yours.