In recent years, the influx of red-winged blackbirds to our area has prompted some non-official but civic-minded soul to post signs along the heavily used lakefront sidewalk. The birds defend their nests aggressively, and joggers and pedestrians were getting head-pecked. They nest near our lake cottage, and I know they prefer a water view, preferably a swamp, so I wasn’t thinking about head protection when I rode my bicycle down Mack Avenue, a business strip about a mile from any water, or even a backyard water fountain.

Fortunately, I was wearing some anyway. It’s a strange feeling, a bird attack — the bonk isn’t much, especially through a styrofoam-lined plastic hat — but the accompanying aggression call and the wings flapping so close to your eyes summon up a deep lizard-brain response. I’ve known two people in my life who have an unreasonable fear of birds, and for the first time, I understand why. The little fuckers are what’s left of dinosaurs, after all.

If you have red-winged blackbirds in your neighborhood, beware. They don’t play.

So. I recently bookmarked the Daily Beast. Again. In my old age, I’m becoming very stingy with bookmarks, and if your site doesn’t deliver, I’m totally out of there. But they keep hiring good people, and occasionally publishing something worth reading, and I keep thinking they’re worth a daily visit, and then, today, I read something like this:

Headline: Clooney Breakup’s Red Flags. Subhed: Fans thought she’d get him to the altar, but Barbie Nadeau says the flameout of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor and his showgirl squeeze started months ago.

Really? Fans thought that? I’m a George Clooney fan, and how well I recall those days of …sometime in the last couple of years, when I would call my fellow Clooneyheads and say, “You know, I think this is the One. I think she’ll get him to the altar.” And we were so astounded when they broke up that I’m now going to read this piece, in the authoritative voice of Barbie Nadeau, who was scanning the heavens for warning signs of this flameout. She saw it coming months ago. And so:

The 50-year-old graying stallion announced that he and his 32-year-old Italian showgirl have called their fairytale romance quits.

One sentence — not even a compound one — and three clichés/tropes. A graying stallion, a showgirl, and a fairytale romance. I can’t count the times I read Kate bedtime stories about middle-aged actors, Italian beauties of indeterminate careers and how they fell in love for a year or so.

Sad as it may be, it’s fair to say that “Cloonalis” was probably doomed from the start.

I’m totally sad about Cloonalis.

Since they first fell into each others’ arms in 2009, there’s been much speculation that perhaps Canalis was the siren who could finally wrestle America’s most eligible bachelor to the altar. The two seemed inseparable, and Clooney had passed several coupledom milestones with Canalis, like vacationing with her parents and bonding with her girlfriends. They had been effectively joined at the hip from the beaches of Mexico to the red carpets of the Kodak Theater for two full years. He stood by her side when she was questioned about her role in a prostitution ring in Milan, and she accompanied him to the Emmys when he won the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award.

I love these details, presented with a straight face. He stood by her side when she was questioned about her role in a prostitution ring. I remember when Alan and I passed that coupledom milestone, too.

But it doesn’t take more than a glance through the recent tabloids to see a number of red flags foreshadowing this breakup.

Oh, do we really need to do this? The Daily Beast, deleted.

Which seems as good a time as any to skip to the bloggage. First, a twofer from two of our favorite WashPost writers, not necessarily in the WashPost. Gene Weingarten’s reply to a journalism grad student who asked him how he’d built his personal brand over the years:

The best way to build a brand is to take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot. Then, apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question. You want a nice, meaty sizzle.

She’ll get an A on her project and probably miss the point entirely.

Hank Stuever in the Stranger, the Seattle alt-weekly, for its annual Pride Week-pegged gay issue. The theme — You’re doing it wrong — inspired his essay on “Glee,” which says everything that needs to be said:

If Glee was in touch with the reality of being gay—which can have its dark side—it would make the cruelly honest decision to switch off the Auto-Tune and razzle-dazzle and show a bunch of kids in a choir room singing badly but believing they’re great.

I didn’t hate this show immediately, but I soured early on, although I stuck through season one. (If nothing else, Rachel Berry’s “Don’t Rain on My Parade” was worth the trip.) I gather that in season two, it devolved into Very Special Episode territory almost immediately, which might mark a new record in the trip from smart-and-hip to dumb-and-predictable. Kate’s 8th-grade choir did “Don’t Stop Believin'” for their spring concert this year, which makes the circle complete — now “Glee” influences show choirs, instead of the other way around. (The crowd started to cheer when they heard the now-familiar choir arrangement, which made me want to stab everyone in the throat.) Anyway, worth a read.

Newspaper columnists like to write personal essays they think readers will find warm and funny, but they should all just give it up, because they’ll never be as good as the best personal essay-writin’ bloggers. That is all. EDIT: For some reason, this link isn’t working at the moment. Hope for a revival when their server comes back up — or whatever the problem is, gets fixed.

And that is all. Happy weekend. I’m off to see Matt & Kim tonight at the Majestic.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate lawn services? If not, let me say so now. Again. Both my adjoining neighbors employ them, both visit on Thursday mornings, and at the moment, it sounds like the neighborhood is under attack by a swarm of angry hornets. They are running, all at once, a stand-up mower, a gas-powered blower and a power edger.

The good news: It’s over quickly. And it makes for quieter weekends. Still.

The gas blowers are the devil’s device, and I say that as one who owns an electric one. The decibel level is approximately that of a 747 engine six inches above your head, and…

…silence. These guys get faster every week. Whew. On to torture someone else.

Here’s something else: Those stupid edgers make my mowing job easier. It’s easy to find the property line between the Derringers, who don’t give a shit if the sidewalk has a nice sharp delineation, and everyone else.

A friend of mine who used to live in Grosse Pointe Park planted his park strip — the grass strip between the sidewalk and street — in vegetables. I wonder what my neighbors would do if I tried that, although I’m sure there’s already an existing ordinance forbidding such frippery. There was a house in Fort Wayne I passed on my dog walks that had cleverly incorporated vegetables and other food crops in the regular flower beds, with the flowers. Very clever. You’d be looking at some zinnias and then note the climbing beans standing in the background. That’s the sort of gardener I’d like to be, if I were the sort to garden, period.

So, I see the feds finally brought Whitey Bulger to heel, the legendary Boston mobster who was the basis for the Jack Nicholson character in “The Departed.” He was living in Santa Monica, a big improvement in the weather department, I’d say, although it was also an apartment building, and we’ve discussed neighbor problems before. One said his longtime girlfriend was “sweet,” but that he was a jerk and had “rage issues.” It must be hard to be a baller and then, suddenly, not-a-baller. Henry Hill didn’t do so well in witness protection, and we all saw the last scene in “Goodfellas.” It’s just noodles and ketchup in Nowheresville, forever and ever.

Boy, today is not getting off to a good start, is it? Thursdays rarely do. So let’s get to the bloggage, and then say the hell with it:

A nice New York Times piece on the Indiana economy, which is not all it seems, or at least not all that’s touted by the guv and his supporters:

Workers here have done a backward slip-slide for more than a decade. Median income is falling — by 15 percent in the last decade. The so-called real unemployment rate, which includes those too discouraged to look for work, stood at 17.4 percent last year. And the percentage of Indianans who participate in the work force has dropped in the past two years, much faster than in Illinois and Ohio to the east.

“Indiana has touted jobs numbers, the governor has been happy to talk about it, but the reality is that they don’t pay nearly as much as the old union manufacturing jobs,” said John Ketzenberger, president of the Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan group. “People in Indiana are working harder and longer for less.”

In other words, the same old story. Quel surprise.

And I have nothing more. I am calling in empty today. Got some tasty linkage? Leave it in comments.

I have to say: I totally don’t get the Roger Ebert “controversy” over tweeting (I still wince, using that as a verb) a mildly critical comment about a dead guy, a few hours after he died.

The dead guy, Ryan Dunn, is part of the “Jackass” crew, a bunch of young men who do heedless, outrageous stunts on camera and release them as movies, which people pay to see. I guess that makes him an actor, although “personality” seems to be a better word for it. Whatever, I think we can all agree one line we don’t want in our obituaries is “was famous for inserting a toy car into his rectum.” But there you go.

You can read about what happened elsewhere, if you haven’t already — Dunn died and gossip sites posted photos taken hours earlier, of Dunn drinking at a Philadelphia-area bar, while police agencies weighed in, estimating that Dunn was traveling far in excess of posted speed limits, maybe as fast as 100 mph. Adding 2 + 2, Ebert said on Twitter, “Jackasses don’t let friends drink and drive.” A “firestorm” ensued, led by the Jackass crew member Bam Margera, and blah blah blah, now it’s a full-fledged “controversy.”

For what it’s worth, I thought Ebert’s partial walkback was artfully done, and contained just the right amount of apology, which boiled down to, “maybe there’s a time for observations like this, but it’s not in the immediate aftermath of a painful event, and I’m sorry I did.” I rather wish he’d gone further and said, “maybe we should all stay away from Twitter and Facebook for, like, a week. See if the world goes on without it. See how we feel about it.” But he didn’t. Alas.

But yesterday must have been a slow news day, because in my perambulations around the web last night, it seemed every major news outlet had a little piece on it. None of them said what I feel like saying, however, so I’ll say it now:

What the hell?

It seems to me that when you make a living doing outrageous things, when you’re an edgy envelope-pusher and toy-car-up-the-butt shover, when you’ve made a nice buck making the mothers of 13-year-old boys around the planet hate your guts for reasons so obvious they don’t even bear repeating here, when you’re known far and wide as a very fast driver and you pose for photos in bars slurping up liquor with your buddies — when you’re all that, and you then die in a fiery car crash, and the worst thing anyone says about you is a mild observation of the obvious, well, maybe you got off easy. Someone else died in that crash, a Jackass hanger-on who was a passenger in the car, which makes you guilty of second-degree murder in many states. You have now officially lost all claim to my sympathies. Jackass.

But also, this: You can track the outrage over this along demographic lines, don’t you think? The younger you are, the more likely you are to be offended that an old man said something mean about a young man who died so tragically, so unfairly. Young people have a hard time believing they will ever die, ever ever ever, and dislike being reminded they will. Plus, old people disapprove of “Jackass” because they’re old and their bones break easily. I remember riding in an elevator at the Columbus Dispatch after the Who concert tragedy in Cincinnati, and listening to some geezer copy editor thunder about these young people “trampling their own kind,” as though that’s what the stampede was about — hey, screw those people if they can’t stay on their feet, I wanna get Roger Daltry’s sweat on me! No one ever did that at a Benny Goodman show, by cracky. I seethed. I kept my mouth shut. I’m sure, had Twitter existed, I’d have marched to a computer and said something stupid about it.

Well, every generation has its Jimi Hendrix moment, I guess. The lesson remains: Friends don’t let friends drink and drive.

A little bloggage today?

Jon Stewart runs down the list of Fox News lies. Very funny.

Newt Gingrich: The other diamond earring drops.

Michele Bachmann’s first dude, Marcus. Fascinating.

Another busy day awaits, but today it pays me some actual money (I hope). So off to do it.

I know some of you who visit don’t check back for the comments, so here’s something you missed yesterday:

That’s Beartooth Pass, Montana Wyoming, four days ago. I’ve gone through snow in the mountains in June before, but not that much of it. I’m sure it’s lovely, and I’m sure the views are grand, but photos like this remind me how much I’m a flatlander. Once the ground gets high enough that you can fall from it and die, I have to fight the urge to lay face-down and hang on for dear life. Although then you miss all the pretty scenery.

I think that picture was MarkH’s. I hope it was. If not, I’m breaking someone’s copyright.

So. I made time for “Game of Thrones” and “The Killing” finales, finally, and I really don’t have much to add to the chorus. By way of comparison, I think these few paragraphs from Gawker sum it up pretty well. Essentially, one show played by the rules and one didn’t, and if you read any further, know here be spoilers, but let’s get to it:

I’m always interested in shows like “The Killing,” which arise out of a different TV culture. The original was Danish, called “Forbrydelsen,” and if I cared to, I could probably dig up the statistics, but let me retrieve them from memory instead: It was so popular the entire country ground to a halt for an hour every week, for an estimated economic impact of nine trillion kroner. For the finale, you could have walked naked down the main street in Copenhagen, and no one would have noticed. Even the mermaid statue was watching. And so on. All of which should bode well for the American remake, and for a while, it did. The series started out great, and for a few weeks, I totally got it. I loved it, in fact. It was “Prime Suspect,” another crime-story import, with more rain. Lots more rain, in fact. We’ve discussed the rain before, haven’t we? Too much rain.

Here’s something I — we — should have considered, however: There’s nothing on TV in Denmark. Oh, sure, Danes have satellite and cable and all the rest of it, but I bet most of their programming is imported. You just don’t think of Denmark when you think of groundbreaking entertainment, and while it’s western Europe and presumably their culture would be recognizable to us, it’s also one of those places where I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that “Dallas” is still popular. Or “Baywatch.” Or that their “(Insert name of country)’s Got Talent” franchise just crowned an operatic soprano, or a viola player, or a contortionist. Like us, but not. Skewed.

I’ve never been to Denmark, so I can’t say with any authority what their national character is like, but reaching into my big bag of national-character stereotypes, I come up with Gloom, and Individual Industry, and Self-Effacement. Probably they’re so pathetically grateful to get their very own competently produced murder-mystery series, produced in their native language, that they didn’t care that it strung them along for the entire series and then didn’t reveal the killer in the final episode. They don’t mind tuning in next season. It’s a national duty.

Because that’s what happened, if you didn’t hear. After however-many episodes of teasing and misleading and enough red herrings to make lunch for all of Scandinavia, the series ended with…more uncertainty! Another switcheroo! It might have been Billy Campbell, but it probably wasn’t!

You’ll have to wait another year to find out who the real killer was, in other words. Well, you will. And maybe you. But I’m so far out of this show, I might as well have moved to Denmark.

Here’s something Veena Sud (Danish for “fucks with your head”), the creator of the original series and executive producer of the American remake, didn’t consider: We eat murder for breakfast here. Every day in the United States of America, people die on TV, a whole army of them. We peek through their windows and watch them enjoying life, not knowing there’s a killer outside waiting to end it all. We watch them bound and tortured, begging for their lives. Once they’re dead, we tunnel into their wounds to watch their spleens explode. If we’re going to invest a whole series in just one murder, it better pay off. Because we don’t have time for this shit, otherwise.

Fun fact to know and tell: Copenhagen’s murder rate is roughly four per 100,000 population. It’s a city of 2 million, give or take, which means 80 homicides a year. Eighty! There were 361 murders in Detroit, year before last, a city of 800,000. As American as apple pie.

Which is not to say we’re callous about it (although we are). Just that you promised something you didn’t deliver. The show’s tag line, after all, was: Who killed Rosie Larsen? And you didn’t answer the question.

So the hell with Rosie. Bad things happen to prostitutes. Which “CSI” teaches us, three times a week.

“Game of Thrones,” now, that was a series with a payoff. OMG DRAGONS, and not just any dragons, but wee baby dragons! This show changed my mind about fantasy fiction, the whole damn genre. I’ve never been able to get into it, for a number of reasons, but the main one is magic. What’s the point of following a story if the writer’s hole card is magic? Write yourself into a corner? Have your character cast a spell and enchant his way out of it. I’m also not fond of dwarves, or swords, or krakens, or British accents as the all-purpose go-to tongue of the realm. But “Game of Thrones” gave me all of that, and wisely kept the magic at bay until the final moments, and then: Whoa.

(I will say, they kind of wimped out. In the book, Daenerys emerges from the ashes of her husband’s funeral pyre with the baby dragons actually nursing at her breasts. I suspect it would have been too hard/expensive to render with CGI, though.)

The “Game of Thrones” finale settled all the extant story lines and set up the second season with several strong new ones. I’m totally hooked. Now I need to decide whether I want to read the books, or let the show reveal the story to me. My sister’s on the final one, and I asked her, “So, has winter arrived yet?” And no, it hasn’t. The dragons aren’t even full-grown yet. I don’t know if I have the patience for all those pages of exposition. We’ll see.

The hour is drawing late, so let’s go blogging:

I’ve been reading about David Mamet’s conversion to the right wing, but I obviously haven’t read enough details, or at least not the ones revealed in Christopher Hitchens’ review of his new book. The man hasn’t had a political conversion, he’s gone mad:

Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.

What? Life’s too short to waste on this one. I’d rather watch “The Killing” spin out the Larsen case for another 25 episodes or so.

OID: Boy, 7, steals stepfather’s car to go see his bio-dad, leads police on chase.

And as we’re running long today, I think that’s it. We just had a thunderstorm, followed by sunshine. Which means, boys and girls? Yes, humidity! Nothing like having a bad hair day to look forward to.

From the people who brought you the $400 vacuum cleaner, behold the $450 fan:

Yes, it’s the Dyson “air multiplier.” Saw these in a Best Buy the other day, and to be sure, $450 is the price only for the two on the right. The little one on the left is a steal at $300. They were putting out a lot of air, I’ll give ’em that. What makes them worth a price like that? Why, they have no blades. What’s wrong with blades? “Buffeting” — it says right there on the display. No blades, no buffeting.

Of all the things to dislike about room fans, buffeting never occurred to me. Dust on the blades, yes, about a million other things, but not buffeting. Anyway, for $450, you can buy an air conditioner, although the Dyson Air Multiplier is certainly more stylish. I like that blue. I hate to go off on yet another reverie of nostalgia here, but thinking about fans makes me think of a few times in the past when they were significant factors in my quality of life. They were not times when I could afford $450 for air multiplication. My first term at college was a summer session; I left for Athens one week after high-school graduation, and landed in the middle of the steamiest, hottest summer in southeast Ohio in many years. No AC in the dorms, only two of which were open for the small residential community — one for men, one for women. A fan was an absolute necessity, and there was something wonderful about turning it on in the evenings, leaving the room for a while, and returning after dark to feel that blessedly cool, cool breeze.

(Fans told you who had dope; if it was turned around, blowing out, and especially if there was a pillow stuffed into the part of the window it didn’t fill, someone was blowing marijuana smoke out of their room.)

That was a hot summer, but not the hottest. That was reserved for Key West in September, where I went to visit a friend one week in 1980. He and his roommate had an un-air conditioned apartment; can you imagine? In Florida? They called it the hovel, and it was, but for a week it was our hovel. The fan ran constantly, on high, the only thing that made it inhabitable at all. It was dying, and the first lesson I learned was DO NOT TOUCH THE FAN. If it was ever turned off, or even turned down, it might not start up again. Sometimes it would slow down, and all conversation would cease as we turned our worried eyes to look. Would this be it? It ran down, down, down, sometimes so slow you could see the blades turning, but then, huzzah! It found its power again, and we’d applaud.

The other thing we did in that apartment was listen to the neighbors fight. The people in the front of the house were scary; he bounced her off the walls, and she would scream and cry. The people next door were merely hilarious, Florida crackers who slept briefly for a couple hours before and just after dawn, after which they’d rise and resume yelling at one another, which they did non-stop. “My boy ain’t no dummy!” “Shut up!” “YOU shut up!” And so on.

Because it was so hot, we went out a lot. Myer’s rum gimlets we drank, at three different bars, including the famous Monster, on Front Street. One night Jeff walked me to the front door, then said he was going back out. To the baths, of course, for the nightcap that would kill him a few years later. He said he never regretted any of it, and I believe him.

That fan’s in a landfill somewhere. Oh, the stories it could tell.

So how was your weekend? We went to Ohio, to celebrate my nephew’s graduation from Ohio State. It rained, and was plenty steamy there, too, but tolerable. Reading the paper Sunday I learned that soon you’ll be able to carry guns pretty much everywhere, including bars, a law that every newspaper, every tavern-owners’ group, opposed, because what really goes with guns, anyway? Liquor, that’s what. Also, the legislature is going to allow fracking — hydraulic fracturing, to extract oil and natural gas from rocks — in state parks. Not state land, mind you, state parks. Where you go to have a picnic, or show your kids what camping is like, or to drink in some natural beauty. I imagine we’ll see logging in Yellowstone in my lifetime, at this rate.

Is “Beautiful Ohio” still the state song? We had to learn it in grade school:

Drifting with the current down a moonlit stream
While above the heavens in their glory gleam
And the stars on high twinkle in the sky
Dreaming of a paradise of love divine
Dreaming of a pair of eyes that looked in mine
Beautiful Ohio, in dreams again I see
Visions of what used to be.

I see visions of a time before they treated their state parks as mining camps.

OK, enough nostalgia! Monday is always a killer, so let’s get to it:

Brian Dickerson, in the Freep, addresses the nightmare I linked to last week, that of the family riven by false sexual-abuse charges, and takes note of the weak-willed and cronied-up judges who aided and abetted the case, surely the worse miscarriage of justice to come down the pike since…the last one.

In the WashPost, Henry Allen identifies America’s problem: WASP rot.

Also in the WashPost, yet another story pointing out the obvious, which will be branded class warfare. Go enjoy your state parks, peasants! (Hope the water at the pump doesn’t catch fire.)

I’m off. Happy week to all.

I’ve been wanting my interns to work on a short video piece — yet another skill the 21st century journalist needs — and last night was our opportunity. I got the three of us aboard a 40-foot racing yacht for a night of it.

It was strictly a fun race, so there’d be no yelling or cursing if one of them got in someone’s way. The boat was big enough that there’d be little need for scrambling and anxiety. The rain earlier in the night blew off and left a lovely evening. The yacht club was having a Hummer-making competition. The crew included a friendly pit bull who helpfully barked at all passing boats. Everything went great — we even won the race — until it came time to back into the slip at the end. The skipper delicately maneuvered into position, hit reverse, and was greeted by a loud, menacing-sounding clatter from below, accompanied by a crew member’s observation that we were taking on water, fast.

Long story short: Some coupler had sheared off from the transmission, and damaged the stuffing box, the point where the drive shaft passes through the hull. That’s where the water was coming in.

Oh, well.

Fortunately, there were other sailors within shouting distance, and we were able to hand-pull ourselves into the slip to offload the journalists and the pit bull. Then it was a short tow to the hoist and dry dock. No biggie, the skip said: “Better it happens here than on the way to Chicago.”

My biggest regret: I had already stowed the cameras — they were in the bag that was getting wet below, in fact — and missed capturing the incident. It wouldn’t have really gone with the narrative, but it might have made for an entertaining parting gift for our host.

And by then, there wasn’t time to sample a Hummer. FML!

(FML, for you people who spend less time online than I do, stands for “fuck my life,” shorthand for a certain sort of whining. Given that it’s most often used when someone has lost car keys and the like, I think it’s entirely fitting here — we had a great evening out, capped by a genuinely interesting near-sinking incident, but it’s FML because there wasn’t time to order an alcoholic milk shake.)

I’m going to have to make one of those this weekend. They were invented at this club, the story goes, by the 75-year-old bartender, Jerome Adams.

And now it’s already growing late, and I have to skedaddle. Slept until eight! ayem! this morning, which makes me feel like I can bend steel with my bare hands. Instead, I’m going to ride my bike to my Friday morning meeting, followed by weights class at the gym. My weekend begins Friday morning.

Bloggage? Let’s see if we can’t scramble a little:

I’m really glad I didn’t watch the Anthony Weiner resignation fiasco.

An extremely, extremely difficult read: The bravest woman in Seattle, a Stranger account of a woman’s courtroom account of her rape, and that of her partner, before an intruder stabbed the latter to death in their home one night. Very graphic, heartbreaking. HT: Mary Helmes Sheely

Because after that we need a major palate-cleanser, Tom & Lorenzo on the Royal Ascot hats. Yeah, baby.

A great weekend to all. It’s clear and temperate outdoors here at the moment. Can’t wait to get outside in it.

I spent the early hours of Bloomsday — happy Bloomsday, all, especially you, stately plump Buck Mulligan — riven with insomnia, so I took the chance to catch up on some reading. First, Michelle Goldberg’s closer look at Michele Bachmann as something other than comic relief. Although lord knows, you have to laugh. First, a scene-setter with Bachmann at a 2005 town-hall meeting, and what happened when two lesbians tried to have a conversation with the congressional candidate:

A few dozen people showed up at the town hall for the April 9 event, and Bachmann greeted them warmly. But when, during the question and answer session, the topic turned to gay marriage, Bachmann ended the meeting 20 minutes early and rushed to the bathroom. Hoping to speak to her, Arnold and another middle-aged woman, a former nun, followed her. As Bachmann washed her hands and Arnold looked on, the ex-nun tried to talk to her about theology. Suddenly, after less than a minute, Bachmann let out a shriek. “Help!” she screamed. “Help! I’m being held against my will!”

Arnold, who is just over 5 feet tall, was stunned, and hurried to open the door. Bachmann bolted out and fled, crying, to an SUV outside. Then she called the police, saying, according to the police report, that she was “absolutely terrified and has never been that terrorized before as she had no idea what those two women were going to do to her.”

GOP front-runner! Yes!

Actually, a more useful response is not to mock. Dave Weigel points out that it’s far wiser to look closer and try to figure out where she got so many of her crazy ideas. Like the one about the slave-owning founding fathers “working tirelessly” to end slavery. That one comes from a man she describes as an intellectual mentor, John Eidsmoe, a professor at the law school at Oral Roberts University, and yes, they have one there:

In books by Eidsmoe and others who approach history from what they call a Christian worldview, this is a truism. Despite his defense of the Confederacy, Eidsmoe also argues that even those founders who owned slaves opposed the institution and wanted it to disappear, and that it was only Christian for them to protect their slaves until it did. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible,” he wrote.

Weigel notes there’s always a market for historical revisionism, and he’s right about that. Particularly for those who backed history’s losing horses, it’s always nice to see, a few years down the road, a critical re-examination of the race that shows your horse was misunderstood, or slipped a mickey in the saddling area, or whatever. You could almost argue that history is revisionism, that no one has a monopoly on truth, and that when you look at things with different eyes, a story looks different. But whether facts do or do not equal truth, this seems a stretch.

Off-topic, but via Ta-Nehisi Coates, a few notes on Shelby Foote’s own peculiar historical myopia.

Then I read, or reread, having skimmed it earlier in the evening, an ex-CIA guy’s account of how the Bush administration requested the agency go after Juan Cole, the University of Michigan scholar and influential Middle East blogger who rose to prominence as one of the most well-informed critics of the Iraq war and related fiascos. I was struck by this passage:

Professor Cole said he would have been a disappointing target for the White House. “They must have been dismayed at what a boring life I lead,” he said.

I don’t doubt it. Cole was one of our seminar speakers the year I spent in Ann Arbor, and my overwhelming impression is that he was a college professor right out of Central Casting’s nerd closet, a multilingual wonk whose idea of fun was to stay up all night reading al-Jazeera and other Arab and Israeli news sources in the original languages. In fact, after that year, when I was doing a brief job tryout at Minnesota Public Radio, I suggested him as a guest for a morning news show. The producer said she’d asked before, and that he declined all live interviews before lunchtime, as he slept late after his overnight web perambulations, and couldn’t be articulate at an early hour.

But I also don’t doubt the administration would do such a thing, either. He was pretty relentless. I bet Cheney was behind that one.

By then I was feeling rather sour, so I read my old college pal Mark’s project, in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, on military suicides. Very grim. Suicide is now the leading cause of death among active-duty personnel. Not what you’d call a day-brightener, and by now daylight was only a couple of hours away.

So I slept a little. Still, I could use something silly at the moment. Time to stop by Cute Overload, where they did not disappoint. A kitten video! Yay.

This is the very last, final, no-more-after-today day of school. Yesterday was a half day, today was a half day. Why not have one last full day and call it a year? Dunno. You’d have to ask an administrator. The only event of the day is yearbook distribution and the talent show, and from now until the day after Labor Day, I am free to sleep until I feel like not sleeping, which I estimate will be 45 extra minutes a day. My nature is to be an early riser, and even sleep deprivation doesn’t really get in the way of that. Dammit.

I keep meaning to change the nightstand book to “Game of Thrones,” which I just finished reading on the iPad. Despite my oft-mentioned distaste for fantasy fiction, I have to say, it’s worth the trip. Not a lot of style in the prose, but the plot makes up for it. As an introduction to e-reading it’s a little frustrating, as the technology doesn’t accommodate my flip-around style, but I’m getting used to it. My sister has taken to her Christmas-gift Kindle like a duck to water, and now reports paper books get on her nerves. Not so much with me, but she has a six-month jump on me. And for those of you who are watching the series, I can only say, DO NOT MISS THE FINALE SUNDAY. You won’t believe the cliffhanger. Or maybe you will. The foreshadowing’s been there all along, but even I was wowed.

OK, at nine minutes to quitting time, I’m slapping some frosting on this misbegotten cake and calling it done. They can’t all be masterpieces. Next time, more sleep.

I was trolling the iTunes app store yesterday and saw the new iPad edition of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” It’s a true e-book, featuring video clips, interviews, and more. Here’s the bulleted list:

A powerful filmed performance of the entire poem by Fiona Shaw, synchronised to the text

Complete audio readings of the poem, also synchronised to the text, by T. S. Eliot himself, Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, and Viggo Mortensen

Comprehensive interactive notes to guide the user through the poem’s many references

Over 35 expert video perspectives on the poem, filmed in partnership with BBC Arena, including contributions from Seamus Heaney and Jeanette Winterson

Original manuscript pages revealing how the poem took shape under Ezra Pound’s editing

And while it looked interesting, the budget is simply too tight this summer for a $14 multimedia exploration of a poem I’ve studied on my own and in classrooms many times. (Did you know April is the cruelest month? True dat.) But it made one thing clear: My hopes that the tablet computer might ease my textbook bill when Kate gets to college are well and truly dashed. The $85 psych 101 textbook will no doubt be the $120 e-textbook by 2015. All that will be reduced is the weight in her backpack.

One of my partners in GrossePointeToday.com is married to a textbook salesman, and I asked her once why they’re so goddamn expensive. (Don’t get me started on net weight; I could work up a sweat bench-pressing Kate’s algebra book this year.) The short answer: Because they contain a lot of expensive material that has to be licensed from the content creator — photos and research and the like. The ink and paper isn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things. In e-book, true e-book publishing, that money will go to pay Fiona Shaw and Viggo Mortensen, I guess.

Still, Laura Miller says the… app? e-book? is a huge creative success, for a number of reasons:

First, “The Waste Land” is difficult; even T.S. Eliot acknowledged this in 1922, when he decided to publish notes along with the poem. Touch Press’ version comes with even more notes (by B.C. Southam), illuminating the complex web of literary allusions in those immortal 434 lines. The usual titles at the top of e-book bestseller lists don’t call for this sort of exegesis. There’s not much call to dig deeper unless the book in question has some depth. I don’t really need anyone to help me read a Stieg Larsson thriller, and I don’t plan to be ruminating on it much once I’m done.

… Instead, the people willing to shell out a premium for “The Waste Land” app are more likely to be older, the sort who feel they could have gotten a lot more out of the poem in college if they’d only been a little less distracted by the temptations that assail freshman English majors. Eliot’s poem is a bit daunting, but undeniably powerful, I told myself when a group of friends arranged a staged reading several years ago. I wish I knew it better, now that I’m more able to grasp its nuances. A new edition often provides the occasion for such revisits, which is one reason why publishers keep commissioning new translations of “Inferno” and “Madame Bovary.”

Sounds like I’m the target demographic. Too bad my classes were canceled this term and I have less spending money.

Which reminds me: I need to get to work. Fer real. I’m late today because I was editing a student intern’s report of a lively city council meeting last night. He mentioned the city’s contribution to “the Divine Plan Foundation.” I stared at this for a minute or two, tried to call him (no luck), then called the city manager, who gently explained it was the defined plan under consideration, i.e., the pension obligation.

Sometimes there isn’t enough coffee in the world.

I have no bloggage of note today, do I? No, I have this:

My friend Lance Mannion on David Mamet and his much-ballyhooed turn to the right.

And now, must run. Kate forgot her Spanish textbook for the turn-in today, so I’ll take the opportunity to cycle over there. While hefty, it’s still manageable.

Be good, all.

A story last week out of Fort Wayne brought back a lot of memories. You can read it if you like, but here’s the gist:

A young woman, Kylee Furnish, a senior at one of the suburban high schools, completed her graduation requirements a few months early and joined the Marines. She finished her basic training and came home to participate in her commencement ceremony. Of course she expects to wear her dress blues. The school says no, cap and gowns only. This passage gets to the heart of the matter:

The district cannot place itself in a position where it makes some exceptions for some students but not for others, (the district spokesman) said.

“I understand she is a Marine and I understand that is dear to her and her family’s heart,” she said. “But if we let one student do that we would set a precedent for years to come.”

The district will give Furnish a cap and gown, (the spokesman) said, and is fine with Furnish wearing her uniform underneath the gown.

I saw some version of this story in every public-school district — there are four in Allen County — in the years I was there, and I’m sure there were dozens more that didn’t make the papers. The watchword was “zero tolerance,” the practice was “no exceptions,” and it applied to everything, paired with draconian punishments. Here’s one I heard in a scholarship interview: A junior with a over-4.0 average (something you can do with A-plus grades and AP enhancements), cruising to finish as a valedictorian or salutatorian, has a friend who’s caught drinking at a football game. Pressed to name his confederates, he fingers the honor student. Like the young man of good character he was raised to be, he tells the truth and admits his crime. Bam, instant suspension for the rest of the semester, which means he’s bundled off to “alternative school,” the one reserved for juvenile offenders. Sorry, son, we don’t do AP chemistry here, so his GPA takes a hit it never recovers from.

Here’s another: An exchange student from some eastern European country takes his camera into the locker room after a team practice one day, goofing around. There are one or two shots of his classmates in towels, one of a kid laughing, holding his hands over his naughty bits in the shower. Unacquainted with both American attitudes about nudity and our peculiar fear of CHILD PORNOGRAPHY, he develops the film in his photography class and distributes pictures to his teammates. Big mistake. This brings the harpies down on him. They can’t really suspend him — he’s a living symbol of cultural exchange and international brotherhood — so they double down and throw the book at everyone, including every single kid who’s in a picture, on the grounds they did not immediately alert the administration of this serious breach of school policy. One of the parents surreptitiously taped her meeting with the principal. He asked her son, “Jason, do you often pose for nude photos taken by other boys?”

Here’s another: A kid takes a Thermos of screwdrivers aboard a bus to Cedar Point for a junior class trip. The thermos is passed up and down the aisle, surely mitigating the intoxication possibilities but multiplying the number of lips that touch the forbidden elixir. Of course they’re found out, and of course the investigation concentrates on getting all the names on the table. One of them is a girl much like our scholarship student above, a guided success missile, and her mom’s a lawyer. No one’s keeping this girl out of the Ivy League. I don’t recall how this one played out, as it was under the radar of media coverage, but my vague recollection is that alternative school was traded for something less injurious to her grade-point average.

My point: Zero tolerance and zero deviation from stated policies and sentences are comforting to, and easy for, the people who make rules, but it makes for lousy learning. It’s especially cruel for young women like Kylee, the Marine, and it makes no sense whatsoever. What’s more, the spokeswoman’s explanation is complete and utter bullshit. One exception doesn’t “set a precedent for years to come.” It’s just an exception. A Marine dress-blues uniform is every bit as formal and appropriate in a graduation setting as a polyester cap and gown. Change the rule to allow military uniforms, if need be; the number of exceptions will be tiny, anyway. Letting one kid walk in her Marine uniform doesn’t mean you have to allow another kid to wear her band uniform, or his Wendy’s uniform, or a clown suit, or whatever. The kid survived Parris Island; surely commencement can survive her.

(I should point out that this particular district is hardly Berkeley East. It’s East Allen, probably the reddest part of a red county in a red state, and to call it a pro-military region is like saying you can find soybean fields there.)

Here’s the other thing policies like this do: They breed a culture of distrust on both sides. When there’s no mitigation possible, everyone digs in. The two honor students I mentioned had been raised to respect their elders and relate to them as adults who could be trusted to act in their best interest, which is how they, the adults, presented themselves as authority figures. Like a golden retriever who’s been groomed and petted all its life, these kids suddenly found themselves snubbed on a tight leash to be kicked. The takeaway lesson: It’s best to lie. If you want to wear your uniform, put it on under your robe, then take the robe off as you take your first steps onto the stage. (I doubt Kylee did this, but if she had, huzzahs to her.)

Grr.

The theme today is in keeping with the bloggage today, a Free Press series on the nightmare suffered by a family when various forces collided to make authorities believe the parents were sexually abusing their children, particularly their severely autistic daughter. It’s a tale right out of Kafka. A strong element is something called “facilitated communication,” where an aide “guides” the hand of an uncommunicative autistic person on a keyboard, to “unlock” the messages within. (You’re thinking, “Oh, like a Ouija board?” So did I.)

The Wendrows believed that FC — despite being widely debunked by educators and researchers — helped unlock hidden literacy in their mute daughter.

Beginning in middle school, they pushed FC, threatening to sue the school district if it didn’t hire a full-time aide to facilitate their daughter. They requested that she be placed in mainstream classes. On her own, the girl couldn’t match the word “cat” to a picture of a cat, draw a circle or count to five.

But when she used FC, the results seemed astounding. With a facilitator guiding her arm, the child who had never been taught to read was suddenly writing poetry and English essays, taking history exams and doing algebra. The middle-schooler who couldn’t put on her coat without help was typing about her plans to become a college professor.

And soon after that, she was typing, with the help of an aide, a high-school graduate with one-count-em-one hour of training, that her dad was touching her. Part 1 is astounding, part 2 — about the police interrogation of her brother, who has Asperger’s — even worse.

OK, I’m way late this morning, I know. Kate was off at 6:45 a.m. to Cedar Point and I went back to bed, for an early taste of the sweet, late-sleeping mornings of summer. Sue me.

But work awaits. So I’m off.

Kate’s band, Po, had a gig this weekend. No one starts at Carnegie Hall, so they played at an elementary-school ice cream social. These are end-of-year events avidly looked forward to by one and all, put on by the PTOs, the last party before school dismisses for the year. And what did it do Friday but rain, pushing every activity inside. Po got a space about the area of a king-size bed in the corner of the gym and was but one entertainment option for the K-5 audience:

If you are reminded of Spinal Tap’s gig for At Ease Weekend at the Air Force base, you’re not the only one. The traffic cones were Alan’s idea, and pure genius. Still, we got a few rugrats bolting across the “stage.” Thankfully, none tripped on any cords or toppled speakers.

It was a success. They sounded tight, the technical problems were fairly minor, and Liz, the singer, remembered to introduce the band before the final song. She didn’t call Kate “the Bootsy Collins of Brownell Middle School,” but you can’t have everything. They kept their cool in trying conditions. As Marty, the guitarist’s father, says, every show is worth 10 lessons. Someday they will look back on this and laugh. Because this is funny:

When Kate showed up at jazz-band practice with that guitar strap, one of her fellow middle-school musical smartasses asked if it came with free pot. Truth be told, I didn’t associate it with rasta colors when we bought it; we were only looking for a light enough color that it could be signed by her idols; she sometimes takes it along to concerts for autographs, and the ones in black leather with fake bullets on them won’t show a Sharpie stroke. Oh, well — everyone needs some signifiers that will allow others to leap to erroneous conclusions about them. This is hers.

The other thing we did this weekend was see “Super 8.” Up front, may I stipulate that I’m not a fan of Steven Spielberg, nor of J.J. Abrams, nor of all the movies I’ve seen it compared to, from “Stand By Me” to “The Goonies” and whatever. I’ve avoided everything since “E.T.,” which — hello — I didn’t like. Sue me, I’m a Scorsese girl.

But one should see more films without knowing fact one about them. Given my druthers, I’d have gone for “Midnight in Paris,” but Alan said let’s pick a family movie for once, and all three of us haven’t seen one together since “True Grit” back at Christmastime, so “Super 8” it was. I’m happy to say I enjoyed it quite a bit, while acknowledging its flaws and calculations. Maybe this is adulthood.

Flaws: Jeez, it was loud. We got there early, and sat through the expected slate of previews, which meant summer blockbuster hopefuls. “The Green Lantern,” “Real Steel,” “Captain Marvel,” etc. Those were loud, too. Loud and explode-y and louder still. I understand the appeal of a summer popcorn movie, but criminy. It was fun seeing the glimpses of Detroit in “Real Steel,” which was shot here last summer — the empty parking lot at the Pontiac Silverdome, and Cobo Hall, where the robot fights happen. The special effects in all these films are astonishing, of course, and were as well in “Super 8,” which featured a train derailment that seemed to go on for five minutes and defied the laws of physics, but oh well.

The marketing strategy for this thing seems to be not to reveal too much, to rely on Spielberg + Abrams = Magic, so I won’t reveal too much, either, except to note the pure calculation of setting the story in 1979, which allows parents of today to tell their children on the walk back to the car that yes, men really did wear their hair like that, with sideburns that looked like moss growing across their face. Yes, “My Sharona” really was a hit on the radio way back when, and a rush job on getting film developed was three days. And what is film? Well, it’s uses a chemical reaction to light to… never mind. We have cell phone cameras now, and iMovie. And digital effects.

Because it’s Monday, on to the bloggage:

Someone posted this long-ish essay by Roseanne Barr on Facebook over the weekend, and while I’m not a huge fan of hers, it’s definitely worth a read, if the antics of crazy people in showbiz are your cup of tea. I watched a couple seasons of “Roseanne” when it was on, but evidently not the one(s) featuring George Clooney. He was on this show? What did he play? And this shows that whatever her crazy-bitch faults, Barr at least retains her sense of humor:

The end of my addiction to fame happened at the exact moment Roseanne dropped out of the top 10, in the seventh of our nine seasons. It was mysteriously instantaneous! I clearly remember that blackest of days, when I had my office call the Palm restaurant for reservations on a Saturday night, at the last second as per usual. My assistant, Hilary, who is still working for me, said – while clutching the phone to her chest with a look of horror, a look I can recall now as though it were only yesterday: “The Palm said they are full!” Knowing what that really meant sent me over the edge. It was a gut shot with a buckshot-loaded pellet gun. I made Hil call the Palm back, disguise her voice, and say she was calling from the offices of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman. Instantly, Hil was given the big 10-4 by the Palm management team. I became enraged, and though she was uncomfortable doing it (Hil is a professional woman), I forced her to call back at 7.55pm and cancel the 8pm reservation, saying that Roseanne – who had joined Tom and Nicole’s party of seven – had persuaded them to join her at Denny’s on Sunset Boulevard.

As though living through a tornado wasn’t enough, now it can follow up maiming injury with rare infection:

Several people who were injured when a tornado devastated Joplin, Mo., last month have become sickened by an uncommon, deadly fungal infection and at least three have died, although public health officials said Friday that a link between the infection and the deaths was not certain. …The fungus that causes the infection, which is believed to be mucormycosis, is most commonly found in soil and wood, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which is studying samples from the eight Joplin patients. “It is a very aggressive and severe infection,” said Dr. Benjamin Park, chief of the epidemiology team in the C.D.C.’s Mycotic Diseases Branch. “It is also very rare.”

Actually, despite the human suffering, I find this interesting. Soybean rust, a crop disease, was making its slow way north from South America until we had an active hurricane season a few years back, and the storms picked up the spores and deposited them in the U.S. Presumably this is what happened here. Not much can resist a 180-mile-per-hour wind.

With that, I take my leave. Lovely day in progress, time to join it.