Another OID story breaking this morning: The Detroit city crime lab, closed two years ago for egregiously sloppy operations, continues the tradition in limbo: Although its contents were supposed to be transferred to the state police, not all were, and case files, bagged evidence, live ammunition and much more was left in the building. What’s worse, like all abandoned buildings in the city, it was eventually penetrated, and when the Freep investigated, found it standing open to anyone with the wherewithal to walk past the collapsed fence and through the front door. They could help themselves to anything inside. Mind you, these are not crimes of ancient history; as many of those quoted in the story point out, files from 2008 are still very much in play in an appeals timeline. Wonderful. You don’t find quotes like this every day:

“It’s incomprehensible that any law enforcement agency would not be mindful to preserve evidence,” Wayne County Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny said.

This reminds me of the open-abandoned schools story, a few years back, when the district was closing public schools the way you close your house in the morning when you go to work — with a locked door and absolutely no attempt to secure, preserve or otherwise protect the extensive contents within. The scrappers, urban explorers, vandals and others got in almost immediately, and had big fun looting and destroying them. Jim at Sweet Juniper had a heartbreaking post about finding recent records in there, complete with photographs and Social Security numbers, terrible stories of abuse and neglect. He wrote about his fruitless efforts to get anyone in the city school administration to care. He finally took the initiative to burn the files himself.

That’s the problem: A story like the crime lab shouldn’t remind you of anything. Regrettably, it’s all too common here. Sigh. This is why I cannot watch police procedurals anymore, especially the gore-porn variety that’s so popular now. Even in functional cities, the idea that today’s tea-party civic environment would allow Marg Helgenberger to noodle around with gunshot testing, “just on a hunch,” makes me nuts.

OID, dark-humor division: Head of an agency that spent $200K in federal money earmarked for the poor on office furniture says, What are you looking at me for? Speaking of quotes you don’t see every day:

“I, Shenetta Lynn Coleman, do not order furniture. I do not order equipment. That was not my job. I have a staff person who was responsible for that. If I don’t know about it, then there’s nothing I can do about it. I cannot be in 29,000 places at once.”

I’ve never trusted people who talk about themselves in the third person, or who feel the need to remind you of their name. No, Nance doesn’t like that one little bit.

When Al Gore’s son was ticketed for speeding, going 100 in his Toyota Prius, I’m sure some enterprising soul at ToyMoCo spent some time wondering if there was a way to monetize the news, or if they even needed to bother — just putting “100 mph” and “Toyota Prius” in the same sentence without a negative was probably worth a few hundred more sales right there. At least.

So I wonder what the folks at Ford are saying as they pass this photo around world headquarters today. On the one hand: Narco-traffickers. On the other? God damn.

I’d best shove on out of here, what with the holiday weekend comin’ down and all. Yes, we’ll be at Movement for part of it. If you’d told me in January that I’d be sitting in my living room on May 27, listening to my furnace run, I wouldn’t have believed you. But there it is. Have a pleasant long weekend, and a solemn Memorial Day observance, if that’s what you have planned. I’m just hoping for a thin glimmer of sunshine.

It looks as though I won’t be seeing “The Hangover, Part II.” Sequels are my least-favorite genre; too often they’re naught but a well-paid, no-sweat victory lap for filmmakers too shameless to do anything more than rehash the original. It sounds like this one is particularly shame-free, basically a scene-by-scene remake with new locations:

To follow up his hit 2009 film “The Hangover,” which earned $467.5 million worldwide and became the top-grossing R-rated comedy of all time, writer-director Todd Phillips worked with co-writers Craig Mazin and Scot Armstrong to produce a sequel script that used the original film as a literal template. As a result, both films revolve around three friends (played by Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis) who find themselves tracking down a missing acquaintance the morning after a wild, drug-fueled night none of them can remember. (Even the two films’ trailers are identical.)

Mazin says he, Armstrong and Phillips first met to brainstorm ideas for the sequel last January at Phillips’ house in Malibu. “We talked about everything — even if we should start the movie with the same fateful phone call [the main characters receive in the first film],” says Mazin, who says the new film’s Bangkok setting was determined by Phillips. “The more we thought about it, we realized that people weren’t going to come to ‘The Hangover Part II’ because they were looking for a reinvention of the comedy plot. They were interested in how these characters would react, but to a worse situation.”

Yeah, that’s what I’m interested in, fershure. Just one question: Is the monkey the tiger, or the baby?

In other movie news, this is one of those days when I wish all of us lived in the same town, so we could have a big field trip to the Sarah Palin movie, and yeah, we’d go to the unrated screenings with all the potty-mouthin’. I know you all batted around the title thing yesterday, but until last night I hadn’t read all the details about this thing. Like this:

(Director Stephen K.) Bannon dramatizes the theme of Palin’s persecution at the hands of her enemies in the media and both political parties, a notion the former governor has long embraced. Images of lions killing a zebra and a dead medieval soldier with an arrow sticking in his back dramatize the ethics complaints filed by obscure Alaskan citizens, which Palin has cited as the primary reason for her sudden resignation in July of 2009.

I hope the zebra is a really pretty one, with great hair. Oh, what I’d pay to watch this in a dark theater with Coozledad at my elbow.

In keeping with the spirit of an exhausted morning, some all-showbiz bloggage:

Back of Town, the “Treme” blog, discusses Sunday’s episode, with a great photo including our very own Ashley Morris. Playing his drum.

Women falling down in romantic comedies:

Finally, auxiliary showbiz: Diplomacy is hard, but at least you get to dress up pretty often. This makes back-to-back bowtie dinners for the Obamas in England, and Michelle looks pretty damn good, once again. I hope no one muffed the toast this time.

Should have known the good weather wouldn’t last long. I’m sitting in my living room in utter gloom, all the shades wide open, and it’s as dark at 9 a.m. as it will be at 9 p.m. What could it be? Why, more rain on the way. Yippee, rain.

Alan took the boat out for its shakedown over the weekend, and said the lake is full of floating logs and other debris washed down in recent deluges. Which immediately sent me spinning back to 1973 and my first visit to Michigan. I’m 15, and my friend Paul has invited me and two other girls to his cottage in the Les Cheneaux Islands, in the U.P. Every night we tuck a couple 12-packs of Stroh’s under our arms and go to someone else’s cottage to party, or else they come to us. This involves much night boating under the blackest skies and brightest stars I’ve ever seen. Paul knows the water and can navigate the whole area without lights, but every night as we leave his grandmother warns us about “deadheads.” The winter was tough, the spring rains heavy — you might be reading about 1973 elsewhere this week, as the Mississippi floods — and the retreating ice tore up a lot of docks, leaving their timbers still floating here and there. That’s a deadhead. You don’t want to hit one in your boat, and responsible boaters, when they spot one, are expected to tow them to shore, if possible. They are the car-swallowing potholes of the seas.

Paul’s grandmother, Cor, had a very distinctive voice, and as soon as we got out of the house we’d repeat her warnings to one another, in the Cor voice: “Why, your mother and John Pumphrey were coming home one night, and they found a piano crate! Floating in the channel at Dollar Island! Thank God John was using the spotlight! That’s what I’m talking about! You just never know!”

We never used the spotlight. We didn’t hit any deadheads, although “watch out for floating piano crates” lived for years as an in-joke in our gang. And now I’m telling her stories. And somewhere Cor is laughing.

Rain coming any minute now. Come on, rain.

I shouldn’t complain. ROGirl just posted this Daily Mail photo spread of mind-boggling images from Joplin. How on earth do you survive something like that? And speaking of mind-boggling, it’s worth a scarce NYT click-through for the photo with this story; the caption tell us the photographer captured the image “from outside her front door before seeking shelter.” That would have to be the case, because otherwise, that camera would be 15 miles away, under where the flying cow came to rest.

Yeesh. Let’s skip to the bloggage:

Lance Armstrong’s clay feet continue to erode. I made up my mind a long time ago that St. Lance was almost certainly dirty, but that doesn’t negate the good he’s done, or tried to do, does it? Would he be an effective fundraiser for cancer if he were merely the 20th-best cyclist in the world? Complicated people, complicated questions. But simply dirty; I just don’t see how it could be any other way.

A friend of mine ruined “The Sound of Music” for me some years back, by pointing out the obvious: “Captain Von Trapp is old enough to have a daughter who is 16 going on 17, right? And Maria is a novitiate at the abbey, so she’s how old? Eighteen, maybe 19? The nuns keep calling her a girl, anyway. So when he marries Maria, he’s choosing a wife who is barely older than his daughter. And the daughter calls her ‘mother.’ Sorry, too creepy for me.”

I had never thought of this. The only thing that bugged me was how a landlocked country like Austria could have a navy. (Answer: The Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

Anyway, she sent me this yesterday, a letter to friends announcing the end of the engagement between the captain and Baroness Schraeder:

Please, friends, don’t worry about me. While I was a bit startled to be thrown aside for someone who flunked out of nun school, I assure you that I will be fine, and my main pursuits in life shall continue to be martinis, bon mots, and looking fabulous. You’ll also be glad to know I have retained custody of the Captain’s hard-drinking gay friend, Max. Anyone who gets tired of sing-a-longs should feel free to look us up.

A few notes on “King Lear,” a play you can’t even begin to understand until you’re 40, and maybe not even then.

And with that, I’m going to put a pork shoulder in the crock pot with some cumin, onion and dried peppers, add a little water and see what comes out in a few hours.

If nothing else, I hope my students learn from me how to write a lead (“lede” to you journos) for a story when circumstances will dictate you’re going to be among the last to file. It isn’t supposed to be like this for online news; we’re the hypercaffeinated tweeters filing via 3G and wifi so that you learn things in more or less real time.

But in this case — the school board meeting following the firings of the principal and his underling — that wasn’t going to happen. Our competition at Patch goes to meetings with a wifi stick on her laptop, and covers them via Facebook updates. Mixed results on that one, I’d say. If it’s a hot meeting, it works. Otherwise it amounts to public note-taking. But last night was a big ol’ foregone conclusion. What was the board going to do? Beg them to stay? And when the reporter is a college student and the editor leaves the meeting to go immediately to her other job, we’re not going to beat TV, and we’re not going to beat Patch, and we’re not even going to beat the papers. So write a fancy lede, play up the atmosphere, and go for the fourth-paragraph chop. (Not quite a Miller Chop, but it’s there.)

Jeez, I’m tired. Worked yesterday from 9:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., with a two-hour break to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and wonder why I don’t have time to write a novel. If I did, I’d call it “Porno Principal,” because that’s a great title.

Needless to say, I didn’t see Barry O’Bama’s speech in Ireland yesterday, but at the urging of our own mild-mannered Jeff, I looked it up on the White House’s website. It sings on the page, so I’m sure it danced a merry jig with the first great orator of the 21st century delivering it:

My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas. And I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.

Good one.

Since I have nothing much to report today, here’s some bloggage y’all can chew on:

Toe-suckin’ Dick Morris was disinvited from a GOP event at the request of the governor, and he ain’t happy about it: “Apparently free speech has its limits in Snyder’s Michigan.” Oh, shut up. If it’s that damn important, say it on a street corner, no one will stop you. Please note this is about a local issue — the Ambassador Bridge — and not necessarily about deep divisions within the party. Morris is the bridge owner’s latest paid mouthpiece, which may indicate how tone-deaf he is.

And what did Mrs. O’Bama wear on her trip to Ireland? Dunno, but T-Lo is on the case for her stop in England. I think she looks smashing, but what’s up with Camilla’s hat? That seems a bit much. Maybe she has alopecia.

And with that, I must move over to the other pile of copy on my virtual desk, and get to real work. Tuesday is the new Monday.

Your blogmistress had a ridiculous weekend. See here and here.

This wasn’t an investigation like my tougher colleagues love to do, where they dig dirt for weeks or months and then deliver a giant dirt sculpture in the shape of a pointing finger — j’accuse! — on a few hundred thousand doorsteps on Sunday morning, about a crooked mayor or an asleep-at-the-switch commission. Here, a guy got caught doing something bad and got fired, a story that was going to break sooner or later, but broke sooner. But it was a story with much dirt involved, and it went off like a grenade. Wreckage is still falling. I will be distracted for a while.

In between, I went for a bike ride and then to the movies. This was a beautiful, sunny, warm weekend, and the yard sales were as plentiful as dandelions. One in particular featured a whole table of NWT items — new with tags, for those of you who don’t eBay enough to know the lingo. Three wallets, still with Marshall’s price tags on them. Candleholders, ditto. And so on. Some people can never resist a bargain, who figure you never know when a gift will be required — a last-minute birthday invitation, an extra guest on Christmas morning with nothing to open. Some people are compulsive shoppers. Some people are bad at returning things they discovered they didn’t need. I considered two hurricane-style candle holders in cobalt blue, then, in the spirit of the day, decided I didn’t need them. And so I rode home, showered and headed to Royal Oak to meet a couple friends and see “Everything Must Go.”

Coincidentally, it’s about a yard sale. It’s, y’know, a metaphor, but it works. Will Ferrell plays a guy forcibly evicted from his house by his wife, who has changed the locks and temporarily left the premises. So he sets up housekeeping on the front lawn, with all the stuff she threw out. Based on a Raymond Carver story, so it involves alcohol, and it takes place in a world you and I would recognize, where people do stupid and self-destructive things for no good reason, and where when people change, they change from A to B rather than A to Z. Your average low-budget indie drama.

Or dramedy, I should say — it’s actually very funny in a don’t-laugh-out-loud sort of way, a wry comedy of human failing, and to me, the revelation was Ferrell, because I am not a fan. Not even a little bit of one. But that was a very fine performance. There’s a moment where Ferrell sells a fishing rig he bought but never used. NWoT, if you will, and it reminded me of how much crap we buy and never use, or hardly use, and how it weighs us down. Also, that I need to have a garage sale.

So, some bloggage:

The exit of Mitch Daniels, and the entrance of Mr. Excitement, Tim Pawlenty, from and to the GOP presidential race is bringing new attention to $P, who went on a Fox show called “Justice With Judge Jeannine” and ran her mouth for a while. She called Barack Obama our “temporary president,” whatever that means. I clicked the YouTube link hoping for a 30-second highlight reel, noticed it was the whole 14-minute segment, and immediately clicked away, but not before I heard the introduction, and saw She-Who reply to the welcome blather with, “As always, thank you, Judge.” Two things: One, when you’re making news for your appearance on shows with names like “Justice With Judge Jeannine Pirro,” it’s only a matter of time before you’re putting on an apron and making eggs with some Regis Philbin equivalent; and two, my very first direct observation of class difference in America, as a child, was by watching courtroom re-enactment shows on Channel 10 in Columbus, and noting that the better-spoken parties referred to the judge as “your honor” while the rednecks called him “judge.” I stand by my 8-year-old self’s observation.

You won’t have Mitch Daniels to kick around in 2012. And, are Republicans losing their grip on reality? Finally, Roger Ailes and the monster he created. (Fox News, Not $P.) Discuss.

And finally, I close with movie bloggage:

It’s been 20 years since the release of “Thelma & Louise.” My, my. I have to say, I liked that movie pretty well, and young Brad Pitt — yummy.

The Free Press may have been covering Aretha Franklin in Chicago, but I was at the somewhat less glamorous spring concert of the Brownell Middle School instrumental-music students. Three grades, many combinations and recombinations — 6th-grade strings, 7th- and 8th-grade band, etc. The show ran past 90 minutes, mainly from all the shuffling, but no one cared. Kate’s ensemble, the jazz band, went last. They’re the only purely extracurricular music group in the school, this being a district that believes in arts education, a fading concept in today’s miserly public-school culture. The saddest scenes in this season’s “Treme” are of the New Orleans children in band class, learning how to keep time with finger snaps, because their instruments haven’t traveled down whatever tortuous path, through however many sticky-fingered bureaucrats, to make it to the band room just yet.

No problem with that here. The instruments (rented, mostly) gleam. The director told a story about rehabilitating the school’s harp for a particular number, with the help of a private teacher. Does your school have a harp? I’d imagine that’s a luxury for most. Kate had a little moment in a number called “One Flight Down” (not the Norah Jones song), where she had to carry the rhythm section for a series of baby-step improvisations by trumpet and sax players. It was nice. I told her so, afterward. She said her hand had been cramping and she couldn’t hear herself, so she assumed she’d screwed it up. Where do girls learn this sort of effortless self-effacement? From other girls, if my memory serves. Think too highly of yourself, and you’re stuck-up. The trick is to effusively praise all your friends while deflecting any compliments: I love your hair. It’s so pretty. I wish I had your hair. My hair is so ugly. Or, alternatively: Your thighs are so skinny, I wish I had legs like yours. But my hair is awful. You have better hair. They spend all their time creating an ideal self, made from parts of all the other selves they see around them. How long does this last? Until age 30 or so, I think.

Anyway, I saw Paul Clemens there. Reminded me he ignored my last e-mail, if it even made it past the spam filter. What author flogging a book wouldn’t want valuable publicity from a hyperlocal website? I mean, so what if he’s been on “The Daily Show,” I run GrossePointeToday.com, which draws tens of eyeballs every day. Well, at least now I know he’s in the Brownell phone directory.

I read that Aretha story, linked above. I expect the Freep will be covering all of Aretha’s concerts from now on, sort of a deathwatch deal, although as they point out, she seems healthy and in good voice. I hope this is the last time we’ll see the phrase “triumphant return” in a headline, however. That’s another one of those journo-clichés that has no opposite; everyone’s return is triumphant, or else it’s not noted. Charlie Sheen’s better-received Chicago show, after his Detroit disaster, was probably called a triumphant return to the one-man-train-wreck stage.

A long week, and I’m glad it’s over. We had another bank robbery here, right around the corner from my house, in fact. I have to stop reading about these things on Facebook, because it makes my eyes cross, some of the ignorant stuff people say. For instance: “Too bad no one had a gun, so they could have blown the guy’s face off.” Yeah, that is a virtual guarantee of a happy ending to any armed robbery, don’t you agree? Guy walks into a bank and sticks it up, and some dime-store avenger pulls his own gun, and for what? To keep a federally insured financial institution from losing a couple grand. Of course it would have gone well, because the avenger is able to pull his piece without attracting attention, his aim is true, and the worst anyone gets is a bad dry-cleaning bill. The things some people must fantasize about. It makes you shudder.

Not much bloggage today; I’m tapioca. But a little:

For the first time, a majority of Americans support gay marriage. Enjoy your island while it lasts social conservatives; you’re no longer connected to dry land, and the tide is rising.

Unless, of course, the Rapture occurs this weekend. Then you might be OK.

First comes grandchild, then comes marriage — OK, with different kids, but still. $P is a mother of the groom. Congratulations and happiness to the non-embarrassing members of the family.

And with that, I’m late and must run. Happy weekend, all.

I had a colleague back in the day. Southern guy. Had a way with profanity, which always sounds better in a drawl. “How you doing, Steve?” I’d ask.

“I’m busier’n a dawg with two dicks, that’s how I’m doin’,” he’d say.

One day he answered, “Wahl, I really wish I hadn’t put a hunnert pounds o’ Turf Builder on my lawn this year.”

Yeah? Why is that?

“Cuz I’m mowin’ twice a week. It’s growin’ like Cambodia.”

Whenever I consider my lawn in spring — untreated with Turf Builder, I might add — I consider that phrase. Growin’ like Cambodia. For six weeks it’s done nothing but rain. I’m watching a robin hunt at the moment, and it’s the size of a chicken, so plentiful are earthworms at the surface of the saturated turf. The world is so green it’s positively Irish, and even though I know it won’t last, I’m going to enjoy it a while. If nothing else, it’s too wet to mow.

Not that that will stop the lawn services. Thursday is the day my neighbors on both sides have their appointments, and for about an hour, you cannot have a conversation in my bedroom with the window open. It’s maddening. I tell myself to consider the alternative. I tell myself that with a four-man crew, they’re done quickly. I tell myself many other things, many featuring swear words. If I really wanted peace and quiet, I’d move to the ghetto. Gunfire makes far less noise than you’d think, and it’s over faster.

Since Alan got into shooting, that’s been the big revelation: Real gunfire sounds nothing like it does in the movies. In movies, shotguns go boom; in real life, they go crack. In fact, all guns crack, pretty much, at least the ones I’ve heard. I remember Westerns of old, when in gunfight scenes every fourth shot was sweetened with that ricochet sound effect — pop pop pop p-chew. Actually, Westerns are veritable aural forests of wrong sounds. The guns sound wrong, and the horses are always neighing. Spend any time at all around horses, and you realize they’re actually pretty quiet animals. They nicker at feeding time and blow their noses from time to time, but you can go weeks without hearing one neigh. A few of the mares would whinny when they were in heat, but once I moved to a professionally run barn, where the mares are given hormones to keep that sort of thing in check, you never heard it.

(Lest you think this sort of thing is cruel to the mares, I can say only this: Wait until one stops dead in front of you, spraddles her hind legs, raises her tail and “winks” at the gelding you’re riding. You’ll change your mind.)

And lest you think I have the wrong shotgun, one sunny afternoon in Fort Wayne the cops shot a charging pit bull with their cop-issue pump-action shotgun, and it also sounded like a crack. A very loud one, but nothing like the throaty boom you hear on TV.

Good lord, where am I going with this? You can tell it’s Thursday, the most sleep-deprived of the week. I keep pouring coffee in, but only nonsense comes out.

So let’s check in with the writers who got more sleep last night, shall we?

Daily Mail love: The UK tabloid says John Edwards is very mad at his baby mama, for not destroying their sex tape. It further says the tape was made in Indianapolis, and helpfully includes a shot of the downtown skyline, with this cutline:

Sex and the city: Edwards and Hunter made the sex tape in a hotel room in Indianapolis

I would have written something different:

Sex and the city: Bad things happen in Indianapolis hotel rooms. Ask Mike Tyson.

Or maybe:

Naptown: The Edwards sex tape was made in Indianapolis, because there’s nothing else to do there.

I know, I know: Not true. Just teasing the next Super Bowl city.

The boy who shot his neo-Nazi dad to death speaks. Big surprise: Dad was a violent shit. I don’t know what sound that one made, but maybe it was that of his family’s souls being freed from bondage.

Jon Stewart rounds up your NewtNews of the week. Includes the glitter bomb and angry Iowan.

Any Detroiters interested in biking the bridge? Fifty-five bucks seems a little steep, unless it’s for charity or something. And presumably, as with all things bridge-related, Mr. Moroun will take a big taste. And I have to carry my passport…to go halfway across the bridge? Nothing about this makes sense.

OK, time to salvage what I can of this day. Enjoy Thursday.

First thing this morning: Editing an intern’s story for the website. What a joy to handle copy that doesn’t require major surgery. Give me a kid whose only story notes are “learn the difference between citizens and residents,” and I can teach that one something.

My online dictionary has them as virtual synonyms, but my online dictionary is full of shit. Citizens carry passports, residents only a driver’s license. Do not make this mistake in your daily writing again. Tomorrow we’ll tackle “convince” and “persuade.”

Kate’s been having a grind of it lately, between school and track and having a spring cold. But she’s holding up her end with more aplomb than I would have mustered at her age, so I was looking for some little reward I could offer her for the homestretch of the year. Tickets to the Movement festival downtown over Memorial Day weekend? Better ask first; kids her age have strong ideas about what’s cool and what’s lame, and for all I know, techno and electronica is the latter. This would be one of those affairs where we’d go along; no way am I turning my kid loose in the middle of something like this without at least one adult within shouting distance. What would I say as she left the car? “No ecstasy, honey!”

But as I said: Better ask first. She and her friends have complicated flow charts of the various sects of youth culture; you should hear them expound on the difference between hipsters and scenesters, both of which they disapprove of and neither of which I could confidently identify. The last time I asked what a scenester was, it involved “some girl, and she takes a picture of herself with her webcam, and she’s like holding up her hand like a claw, and underneath it says dinosaurs go rawr.” OK, whatever.

Maybe I should put it this way: I’d like to go to Movement. Maybe she’d like to come along.

Would you?

I have Russian homework to do, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

Hungover owls. To fill the gap left by Fuck You, Penguin, I guess. (Forget electronic music; this is what I should be schooling my kid in — coming up with one amusing idea broad enough to sustain a single quickie book sold at Urban Outfitters and hello, University of Michigan B-school! We’d spend her college fund on a boat.)

To give the oft-abused Mitch Albom his due, I will admit that of all his media personae, he plays best on the radio. In that universe of outsize jerkoffs, his regular-guy act, false though it may be, resembles something approaching normalcy. So I’m sure that if I’d heard this on-air confrontation with local right-wing host Frank Beckmann, I’d have been on Team Mitch. Beckmann, a Limbaugh manqué whose act I caught once (lasted about three minutes, snapped it off, never went back) has been claiming Albom’s staunch defense of the Michigan film incentives constitute some sort of journalistic conflict of interest, because one of his books is a movie-in-progress. Albom has stated before that he gets paid — has already been paid, in fact — no matter where the project shoots, and his interest is strictly for the local people who will work on it.

Can I get it on the record? I agree with Mitch Albom. Yes, I AGREE WITH MITCH ALBOM. He’s right about this. “Have a Little Faith” could shoot in Cleveland or Toronto or Timbuktu, and it won’t make no never-mind to his end. He’s already moved on to shuffling headshots of who will be his next on-air portrayer, having already used up Hank Azaria and Michael Imperioli. (I’ve got five bucks on Shia LaBeouf, although this is a — snicker — Hallmark production, so they will probably go a little cheaper.) I’m sure I still would have laughed at this exchange:

Albom’s tenor went airborne a few times, and when he commented that Beckmann “wasn’t knowledgeable” about the issue, Beckmann’s baritone boomed out, “Oh, so I’m stupid?”

Then: “Of course, you’re knowledgeable, Mitch. It must be a burden to carry that around.”

I wouldn’t have been able to resist that fat soft one up the middle. Yes, you’re stupid, Frank. This isn’t a hard one to figure out. Ultimately, though, this is like a war between two people you can’t stand. Whoever wins, you win.

Gene Weingarten Twittered this under his “should be convicted on mugshot alone” series. I’d call it: Forceps babies, the later chapters.

Better get out of here before lightning strikes. On a day when I can find something nice to say about Mitch, anything can happen.

Happy Wednesday, all.

The other shoe has dropped, and it’s a precious little hand-crocheted bootie: Arnold Schwarzenegger has a 10-year-old child with a “household employee,” although you might prefer the Coozledad version: He got caught with his dick in the maid. How surprised am I by this? Not even one tiny bit; you don’t even have to pay slight attention to the gossip sheets to know the former governor of California was notorious for his wandering pee-pee. No, today I want to talk about something else: D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

I found this passage telling in the L.A. Times story:

Friends of Shriver, 55, (said) she had been unhappy for years but made no move until after her parents died and Schwarzenegger finished his term as governor. Her father, Sargent Shriver, died Jan. 18, nearly a year and a half after the death of her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

The Kennedys are America’s most famous Catholic family, and Catholics frown on divorce — or used to. Certainly they did in Eunice and Sargent’s generation, which might be the last one that did. Infidelity was no reason to break up a marriage, as virtually every Kennedy woman could tell you. It was something men did and women suffered in silence, thanking God that at least they were the wife and not the mistress. Because mistresses come and go. Wives, children, family — that was permanent.

Infidelity with a love child attached? That was one for the priest’s counsel, but maybe even Eunice would have yielded on that one. Because that has to be the deal in any marriage with an “understanding” at its heart: You better wrap up, dude. The fact he didn’t does more to call his judgment — on everything — into question than almost anything else. He’s 63, the kid is 10, which means all this happened to him at an age when he should have been well-past being swept away on a tide of hot blood. What an ahs-hole. As Arnold might say.

But back to divorce. Whether or not Maria knew about this child, she surely knew about the tomcatting. But she waited until her parents were gone, and then gave him the heave-ho. After Alan’s mother died, leaving both of us officially and entirely parent-less, someone told me that only now were we free to be entirely ourselves. (Alan took up skeet-shooting, if that means anything.) Maria chose to become a divorceé (or she will, presumably).

In my lifetime, divorce has gone from a social stigma — see Helen Bishop of “Mad Men” — to perfectly acceptable, and even preferable to staying together for the kids, at least if it means constant fighting. People only look at you askance after your second or third divorce, and maybe not even then. I know many Catholics who’ve divorced, had annulments, and remarried in the One True, one of those things that used to be a shameful secret and take years to get, complete with humiliating “testimony” about the most intimate details of your married life. Now it’s mainly a matter of filling out a lot of forms and writing a check. Never have I known a Catholic who’s pursued an annulment and failed to get one, not even after years of marriage and multiple children. (When my BFF asked for one, I noticed one of the questions I was asked as a witness was whether the couple in question used artificial birth control. I tried to make my answer as emphatic as possible, figuring this was the express lane to approval: “Of course they did.”)

Our new openness about the big D has brought with it one rather smelly side effect, however: Everybody now feels entitled to hear the details of yours, and offer opinions. I have a feeling that when the full story on Mr. and Mrs. Mitch Daniels is out there, it will be nothing big, just a rare female case of what used to be called pussy madness. (I ask you: If you had to wake up every morning and look at that guy on the next pillow, wouldn’t you say, “Oh, it’s you again” each and every day?) They got divorced, they married again. Happens all the time.

So, some fast bloggage:

My favorite single comment on all this came from an anonymous poster at New York magazine:

What is not being said that Arnie actually traveled back in time to impregnate this woman. Her child will be the savior of humanity and will have to fight his own father for the future of mankind.

A few weeks back, a beauty salon owner in Dearborn was shot to death in a robbery, in which the thieves stole only human hair extensions. Astoundingly, it’s a trend. NYT is on the story:

“They’re selling it to stylists who work out of their house, they’re selling it on the street, they’re selling it out of the car,” said Ms. Amosu of My Trendy Place. “People who don’t want to pay the prices will buy it from the hustle man. It’s like the bootleg DVDs and the fake purses. But this is a quality product.”

I always find the underground economy interesting. It’s pure id.

There is much to admire about French culture, which has given the world great cuisine, wonderful fashion and the fine art of whiling away hours in cafés. But this shit is disgusting. I couldn’t have less sympathy for the guy. Enjoy prison, monsieur.

Off to plod through Tuesday, under another iron-gray sky. Relent!

Comments turned on now. Don’t know how they got turned off. But J.C. fixed it with his mad webmasterin’ skills. Thanks, John!

I feel like I start every day with a weather report, but this is Michigan, and weather is something you have to pay attention to — brutal in summer and winter, lovely in spring and fall, except for this spring, when it’s been brutal. I’m writing this on Sunday, when it might reach 50 degrees, but probably won’t, and even if it does, it won’t matter, because it’s raining hard, and blowing hard, and, well, balls.

But Friday was very fine, warm and muggy, and good thing, because we celebrated our anniversary that day. Eighteen years. We went to the Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe in Grosse Pointe Farms. What a miracle that place is. The owner, Gretchen Valade, is a jazz fan and heiress, something you don’t always find in one body, particularly one who grew up in the Farms, where estate sales tend to carry lots of Perry Como records, but there you are. A while back she saved the Detroit Jazz Festival with a seven-figure gift. She started a record label to give promising artists a place to get started. And then she opened the Dirty Dog, in the heart of the snootiest of all the Pointes, and there’s not a single thing anyone can object to — two seatings a night, at 6 and 8:30, with live jazz starting at 30 minutes past sit-down and running through dessert. In other words, a perfect evening for an old married couple, because you don’t have to carry the conversation through the whole time. You hit the highlights during cocktails, then settle in to listen to music.

And it’s not a cafe at all, but fine dining. I had the seafood fricassee, Alan the salmon. ‘Twas all good.

Oh, and Ms. Valade’s family fortune? Her maiden name is Carhartt. Yep, the workingman’s first choice in insulated coveralls. I read an interview with her once where she said she always felt inadequate among the other Grosse Pointe debs, because their families were all in cars and other industry, and hers only made blue jeans.

Outside magazine ran a piece a few years ago, about an annual get-together in Alaska, where people who have had near-death experiences in extremely cold weather credit their survival to their Carhartts:

“One time,” says Doug Tweedie, Carhartt’s man in Alaska for the last 25 years, “there was this walrus attacked a guy tying his boat up to a dock somewhere in the Aleutian chain who said what saved him were the black extreme-heavy-duty Carhartts the walrus’s chompers couldn’t bite through.”

Last laughs, anyone?

So here I am on Sunday, doing about the only thing it’s fit to do — watching Kate get her hair colored, and trying out MY BRAND-NEW IPAD SQUEE. Writing via a Bluetooth keyboard I picked up with my Amazon bucks (thank you, all). So far I like it, although it’s odd to use a keyboard and still occasionally have to reach out and touch the screen. I’m going for a certain super-minimalism in my travel gear, and I think this fills the bill. I’ll keep you posted.

Because I have no idea how long the connection will stay this strong, a hop to the bloggage.

From the WashPost, a few ideas for spring cleaning, starting with that particular bane, the engagement ring:

The diamond industry, in its infinite marketing savvy, seems to have convinced young couples that the only way to declare a lifetime commitment is for a man to ruinously spend two or three months’ salary on the proper rock. Men write to me to say that they’re ready to get married, but given school debt and the depressed economy, they simply can’t afford a good enough ring, and they despair whether they’ll ever be able to pop the question. Here’s a secret that the folks at De Beers don’t want young people to know: All you need to do to become officially engaged is tell everyone, “We’re getting married!”

Word on that. I never wanted an engagement ring, and I’m still a plain gold band girl. I once worked with a silly young woman, the sort who read women’s magazines and fell head over heels for all this b.s., and she introduced me to a new concept that must not have caught on, but it did with her — engagement rings for men, too. They weren’t diamond solitaires, but some sort of manly-ish thing. I wonder if she’s still married.

Others from the list — smartphones, tipping and “The Simpsons.”

If you missed Moe’s contribution to last day’s comments, the shortest deposition ever. It reminds me of a motion filing we used to pass around in Columbus, by one of Larry Flynt’s lawyers. It was prompted by a cop’s testimony in a prostitution sting, which involved attempted oral sex in a hot tub. By the time the lawyer had established the depth of the hot tub, the officer’s position in it and the fact the woman was not wearing snorkel equipment, it was pretty much a done deal that the cop was not going to sit still for a physical exam, which is what the filing requested. Case dismissed.

Finally, the columnist for the other paper in Fort Wayne writes about my old zip code without once explaining where, exactly, it is. This might have been in a graphic in the print edition, but not online. Oopsie.

OK, better get out of here before the internet slows again. Upload to server in 3,2,1…