I had a post all ready to go, but Comcast is constipated this morning. So I’m off to the morning grind, and I’ll try to catch up via the library’s connection in a couple hours, eh?

Until then, talk amongst yourselves.

A few culture notes, because I don’t think enough neurons are firing in my head to handle anything other than arts and entertainment at the moment:

Despite everything I expected, I’m enjoying “Game of Thrones.” I generally despise anything involving broadswords and magic, and GoT has a lot of the former, less of the latter, plus boobs (this being HBO). The characters tend toward ridiculous names, but are helpfully color-coded — the Peroxide Twins, the Strawberry Blonde Clan — or are recognizable enough that I can keep them straight from scene to scene, like Mayor Carcetti on “The Wire,” whom we learned last week was a eunuch. (He’s gossips and schemes. You know how eunuchs are.)

No one is more surprised by this than I am. I’m not a fan of David Benioff, who’s co-writing this thing, and haven’t been since I saw him speak at Michigan way back when. There’s way too much exposition-through-dialogue — Lord Dyphtherion, how go affairs at your castle Wickershamshire? Is your brother still recovering from the injuries suffered in that joust with dark knight Bubonicus? What was at stake? Some significant titles and land? — but Benioff knows everything sounds better in a British accent. And once you’ve got the initial sorting by hair color and subplot, it’s no harder to follow than any soap opera. I’d like a little more magic, though. I assume it’s coming. I hope it won’t be too silly.

As different from “Game of Thrones” as chalk is from cheese, “Treme” is back for its second season, now examining Katrina-scarred New Orleans from a distance of a year and change. This is when residents knew for sure just how much the rest of the country cared about them (not much) and when the overstressed institutions of social order, mainly the police department, began to break down. I’m so bummed Ashley Morris isn’t alive to see this, but fortunately, the people at the Back of Town blog are breaking down each episode for us, and if you’re not following along there, you’re missing something. I recommend it over any professional “Treme” criticism, including this Salon piece (spoilers galore), which boiled down to: I didn’t like this scene, ergo, suckitude.

Y’all know what a David Simon fan I am; I will put my little hand in his and follow him anywhere. But generally, I’m finding this season better than the first, and not just because I know everyone now. Detroit is New Orleans in a colder climate, with a disaster that struck in slow motion, rather than in meteorological form. But they have a great deal in common, and the questions Simon is asking are the same ones anyone with open eyes asks when they live around here, about responsibility, complicity and all the rest of it.

(The scenes with the crazy chef, Enrico Brulard, I can only attribute to Simon’s bromance with Anthony Bourdain, although they’re plenty entertaining. I love food and respect the craftsmanship that goes into preparing it well, but watching Brulard fuss over dishes was a useful reminder not to worry too much about anything that will be in the municipal sewer system in 24 hours.)

Finally, “The Killing” is starting to grate. (All these shows run on Sunday night, when I’m working. Thank my lucky stars for DVRs and on-demand cable) It started out so well, and now in episode six or seven or something, all I’m looking forward to is the end, when the red herrings are shoveled off the deck and we find out who done it, and I’m already worried we’re in for some late-arriving character who will come bearing a suitcase full of deus ex machina. I’m already tired of so much, which I’m now realizing is mainly clichés served up by Enrico Brulard, with artful presentation and some garnish you don’t recognize — the Female Detective Who’s Married to Her Job, the Innocent Party With a Secret, etc. And the rain! Lord, the rain. I know it rains in Seattle, and I know it rains a lot, but presumably people come equipped for it, and occasionally bother to put their hoods up.

I’ve seldom been as thoroughly hooked by anything as I was by the first two episodes of “The Killing.” I’ve seldom been so disappointed by what came afterward.

Your thoughts? It’s sweeps month, you know.

A little bit of bloggage:

Jim Cramer, profiled in the NYT magazine, discusses his joust with Jon Stewart, which wasn’t really a joust at all. Mr. Whinypants says:

“As soon as he started, I realized Stewart was on a mission to make me look like a clown. I didn’t defend myself because I wasn’t prepared. What was I supposed to do, talk about how often I had been right? Praise myself? Get mad? I was mad, but I didn’t want to give the audience any blood. The national media said I got crushed, which I did, and made me into a buffoon.” He looked at his plate and shook his head. “You have a whole body of work and then — ” He signaled the waitress for more coffee. “Stewart was the prosecutor, and I was Exhibit A. But what was the crime? What did I do wrong? I wasn’t running Fannie or Freddie. I wasn’t in charge at Countrywide. CNBC was completely good. Better than the Department of Justice. What I did every night was call these bad actors out. I sat there with Stewart and thought: He’s never even seen my show. He doesn’t even know what I do.” He paused for a moment. “Obviously I didn’t know what he does, either.”

Tell it to someone who cares, Jim.

The last people in the world to discover Donald Trump is not what he seems, speak:

“The last thing you ever expect is that somebody you revere will mislead you,” said Alex Davis, 38, who bought a $500,000 unit in Trump International Hotel and Tower Fort Lauderdale, a waterfront property that Mr. Trump described in marketing materials as “my latest development” and compared to the Trump tower on Central Park in Manhattan.

“There was no disclaimer that he was not the developer,” Mr. Davis said. The building, where construction was halted when a major lender ran out of money in 2009, sits empty and unfinished, the outlines of a giant Trump sign, removed long ago, still faintly visible.

Mr. Davis is unable to recover any of his $100,000 deposit — half of which the developer used for construction costs.

“Revere” — what a strange word to use in that context.

A long piece on Hillary Clinton’s term as SoS that I haven’t read yet, but plan to. Over the weekend, maybe.

Which will start soon. Enjoy yours.

Perhaps in keeping with yesterday’s theme of bad neighbors, I found this story about a 10-year-old boy who shot his neo-Nazi dad to death strangely moving:

At a meeting the day before he was shot, Mr. Hall hoisted a swastika banner, not far from his newborn’s bassinet. His 10-year-old son listened as Mr. Hall spoke of finding rotting bodies on the border and discussed fears of being attacked with “AIDS-infected blood” if the group was to rally in San Francisco.

After the meeting, members drifted outside to smoke and drink.

The boy sat nearby on the steps. Was he having a good time? a reporter asked. Yes, he said, though he was annoyed by his four younger sisters. But he was the eldest, he added, and a boy. “And boys are more important,” he said.

That night, Jeff Hall apparently went out with some of his members. He arrived home about midnight and, four hours later, the police received a call about shots fired.

The boy shot his father in the wee small hours. Read the story, though, and you see that the family was already the subject of a reporting project on the neo-Nazi movement, which explains the many observed details of its particular family life, which ran from hate rallies to baby showers.

That is, of course, the story of many families, the way the daily details of our life are each member’s version of “normal,” whether it’s the way we eat dinner or what we hang on our walls. Try to imagine many of the details of those wonderful stories we told yesterday from the perspective of the people on the other side. Everything’s relative.

If I sound like I’m not making sense this morning, there’s a good reason. Kate is off on another of her last-year-of-middle-school weekend trips, and I was up at some ghastly hour to drop her at yet another idling bus. Destination: Chicago, for some choir thing, plus the usual — Navy Pier, cruise on the river, Magnificent Mile, etc. This isn’t even the last one, either. In another month, there’s a day trip to Cedar Point to celebrate the end of it all. I should travel this much.

Anyway, I came home, fell back into bed and woke up at 9:30 from a dream that immediately slipped out the window, and the sense that I’d wasted half the day. In some ways, I have. So time to publish and get outta here.

Fortunately, I have some bloggage:

Thanks to my former colleague Bob Caylor for this story, with a sentence that’s surely the best one in a month of News ‘n’ Sentinels:

For a politician, he was exceptionally unconcerned about appearances, from the unmade bed to the explicit images of male-female couples performing sex acts that flickered on the screen of the room’s muted television throughout the interview.

Long made short: One of those crazy people who file for local office actually won his primary, and now the party is trying to get him disqualified. He’s claiming a right-wing conspiracy, “like Hillary Clinton said about Bill,” only the party trying to get him booted from the ballot is actually the Democratic one. I thought Bob handled it deftly, but then, he’s had lots of practice.

The Onion imitates life:

“Since last week, the number of people who have incorrectly stated that all SEAL members must do 300 pull-ups in a minute, earn advanced calculus degrees from MIT, and be able to hold their breath underwater for an hour, has been extraordinarily high,” said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell, adding that the comment, “I heard you need to be able shoot a quarter from a mile away after running for four hours straight,” has been idiotically uttered in more than 65 percent of discussions related to the military operation.

Finally, Mississippi flooding photos, from the Atlantic’s In Focus picture blog. As a former resident of a city that floods, I thought you couldn’t surprise me with a flood picture. Turns out you can.

Off to the boatyard! Mast goes up today. Maybe something on the fun tomorrow.

Maybe you read John Wallace’s comment yesterday about his awful neighbors finally moving out. He and his wife sat on the porch for the load-out, listening to a custom mix of farewell music. He didn’t tell you he also took pictures:

Ha ha. The girl is 17 and pregnant. Pray for her baby.

We’ve all lived in places like this, haven’t we? Or rather, we’ve all had neighbors like this. It’s part of the motivating force that gets you to finally stop screwing around, pull up your socks, dress for success and move the hell out of these places. Alternate strategy: Start a campaign of merciless pressure to get them to move out. Whatever works.

I had a guy who lived behind me in Fort Wayne, on the Dayton Avenue side. David Hall. His sole claim to fame was that he ran for city council one year, put up to the job by some prankster pissed off at the incumbent, whose name was Dede Hall. He — the prankster, I have to think — paid for a few signs in the same colors as Dede’s, and posted them here and there. Dede had nothing to worry about, but as usual, he got a few votes from those who left their reading glasses in the car. Those people, I can assure you, didn’t live nearby.

Here’s the difference between those people and you: They fight outdoors. When Kate was a toddler, I was putting her into her car seat when David’s baby mama stormed out the front door, child in her arms, pursued by David, and they proceeded to have a shoving match on the lawn. One night a few people got in an argument in the same spot. I know we drop occasional F-bombs here, but I also know some of you read this on filtered computers that can be tripped by too many of them. So for the fine Anglo-Saxon no-no word, we’ll substitute “fork.” This is how it went:

Fork you.

Fork you.

And so on. One morning I came out for a bike ride and found a young man parked in front of my garage, blocking it. He was sound asleep, a drink in his hand, his other nestled in his pants for warmth. I knocked a few times, trying to wake him up, but all he did was shift a bit in his seat and turn his face the other way. I gave up and called the police, and when I returned from my ride, the car was being hitched to a tow truck and he was on his way to the lockup. It wasn’t David, but it was probably one of his pals.

He moved out, leaving his long-suffering mother behind. She was a nice woman. Things improved immediately.

Which seems as good a time as any to link to this mugshot I keep forgetting about: Kelly Gene Gibson of Fort Wayne, after his 48th arrest for huffing paint. I don’t know where he lives, but if it’s on Dayton Avenue, my former neighbors have my sympathies. Alan dug up this story on the city’s frequent flyers at the jail, and he was in there, too.

So, some bloggage:

Hank Stuever watches “Becoming Chaz,” the documentary about Cher’s daughter’s sex-reassignment surgery, and gets right to the good parts:

Cher looms distantly and mostly unseen, providing still more fertile OWN fodder — when mother-daughter issues become mother-son issues. When she at last makes herself available for a single, awkward interview, we are treated to the galling spectacle of a 66-year-old woman with that much cosmetic surgery describing her bewilderment at her son’s fixation on image, body and identity.

It’s weird when you see an obviously professional photographer shooting pictures on Saturday, and then see the piece he was shooting for — and one of the pictures — a few days later. And then I read the story, and find the mother of one of Kate’s friends quoted therein. No great shakes on the story, just one of those things.

She-who and He-who — it’s complicated.

A soft-spoken member of our community with a single link to the Gingrich clan says he values that relationship and doesn’t want to endanger it by saying anything publicly, but this line from his email yesterday is too good not to share:

When I read about him, I want to kill people, break things, blow up large animals, eat small ones alive, build meth labs, drink rotgut whiskey and smoke crack while Guns N’ Roses’ “Appetite for Destruction” plays at 11 in the background.

And the fact that U.S. news media do not respond in exactly the same way I do shows just how incredibly sick and fucked up this country is.

A quote like that is too good to go to waste. Happy Wednesday, all.

Party of family values news roundup:

The rehabilitation of Callista Flockhart Bisek Gingrich, her transformation from painted tart to forgiven sinner, begins today with a wan, halfhearted profile in the NYT. This “curious tale of Washington reinvention” seeks to humanize her with details like this:

At 45, 22 years her husband’s junior, Mrs. Gingrich always looks perfectly composed. She favors an almost retro look — platinum hair teased and sprayed, bold-colored suits accessorized by a triple strand of pearls or eye-popping diamond jewelry. In college, friends say, she once signed up for an 8 a.m. bowling class and rolled a 200 wearing a pencil skirt.

Well, good luck with that.

At least some of Mitch Daniels’ reluctance to declare for president may be due to this little-discussed detail from his biography, according to the HuffPo:

In 1993, Cheri Daniels left her husband with their four daughters and married another man in California. She returned a few years later, reconciled with Daniels, and the two were remarried in 1997. That is, in a nutshell, the story. The national press first picked up on it last year when it was buried at the bottom of an 8,600-word Weekly Standard profile.

But much is unknown. Why did she leave Daniels? Why did she come back? That she would be reluctant to publicly answer such delicate questions in front of the nation seems only natural.

The former first family of California, the red-blue union of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger, appears headed for Splitsville with the announcement of their separation yesterday.

These are very apples-oranges items, I realize. To be sure, Daniels and Schwarzenegger have never been culture warriors in the classic sense, and Daniels is infamous in his own party for calling for a ceasefire, so that it can deal with more pressing matters of finance. Of course, when challenged he collapsed like a house of cards, but give him points for trying.

And Schwarzenegger, as the Republican governor of a blue state, wouldn’t even be recognized as one by much of the rest of his party. Not that it stopped them from giving him star-making opportunities at their national conventions. In California, divorce is just another step on the road of life; this is where Ronald Reagan got his, after all.

But Gingrich is gonna have to take every shot aimed at his hypocritical ass, and he’s going to have to smile about it, too. No one manipulated the cultural-conservative wing of the party more shamelessly, while getting his ashes hauled extramaritally, as he did, and as gleefully. Who was it who tied Woody Allen and Susan Smith to the other party? Who led the charge against Bill Clinton? That is one dirty bed he made; now it’s time to lie in it.

In politics, nothing is precisely as it seems, and I’m sure even Gingrich doesn’t think he has a prayer of ever living in the White House, but he’s going to enter the race for his own reasons, which have to do with selling books, upping his speaking fee, and otherwise enriching Newt Inc. After all, someone has to jump into this field, just to give it some credence:

I used to tell my Republican friends that if they didn’t live by the family-values sword, they wouldn’t have to die by it. Never did any good. The upside was too attractive. True story: I once attended a Dan Quayle rally when he briefly ran for president in…when would that have been? Maybe 2000? I interviewed some people in the crowd, asked them what it was about Quayle that enthused them. To a (wo)man, they all said some version of this: “His marriage.” His marriage to the antimatter Hillary Clinton, Queen Marilyn the Angry. Go figure.

I should get this show on the road. It’s trash day here in the Woods, and I just watched the fourth or fifth raggedy cyclist roll past my recycling bin, looking for empties worth returning for deposit. Sorry, guys, but all that’s in there is three from Trader Joe’s, which I’ve given up on anyone bothering to return. Michigan stores only have to return deposit on brands they sell, so until someone in the house who will remain nameless breaks his habit of sampling interesting beers from TJ’s, we’ll be eating 60 cents on every six-pack.

Some bloggage for you as I slip out of the room:

I say this periodically, I’m saying it again: What is happening in Mexico these days is the most criminally undercovered story of the year. Maybe it gets more ink in the border states; you tell me. But every single night I run across these stories in my searching (“drug” is part of my search string), and they’re just jaw-dropping. May I remind you, today’s story is tame, comparatively. Usually they’re about mass graves and the dismemberment of corpses, which is simply routine — it’s a terror tactic the drug gangs use. Last week police were collecting the pieces of a woman whose body was chopped to pieces, then distributed throughout “an affluent Mexico City neighborhood,” if I recall correctly.

The 10 worst states to be a woman. Indiana is No. 4. Red meat for lefties; the red-state version would call it the 10 best states to be an Embryo-American.

I need to leave you with something light, so how about some snark from Roy? Hail Caesar!

And have a good day.

With great anticipation, Alan and I and a few friends checked in at Ye Olde Tap Room, a venerable east-side Detroit bar — across a narrow alley from Grosse Pointe — on Saturday night for their annual celebration of the repeal of Prohibition. The advertised special was five-cent draft beer; the fine print was with purchase of commemorative mug; the even finer print was and the beer is Stroh’s. We opted to go with the pay-full-price-for-something-else plan, and I bet you would have, too.

Guests were encouraged to wear costumes from the roaring ’20s, and many did. Of course the ’20s had been over for some time when Prohibition was repealed, so I’m not sure the true period attire would have been flapper dresses and Tommy guns, but who the hell cares? The place was packed. A fun night, during which I had precisely four ounces too much beer, and abandoned my last round. I used to be able to pound down the lagers like a champ, but they catch up with me quickly nowadays, not in drunkenness but in sheer stomach-filling quantity. All those bubbles. All that sloshing.

This particular bar has a history vis-a-vis Prohibition; for a while it was a speakeasy itself, or “blind pig,” as they’re known around here. I’ve been to one after-hours joint in my life, in Columbus; the scene was very much like the roadhouse scene in “Animal House.” I woke up in bed, fully clothed, between two men, also fully clothed, both of them gay, one of whom was holding a toilet seat like a teddy bear. My last memory was of him wearing it like a necklace; he liked the color. It matched his sweater.

Never again. Now, three is effectively my limit, with some wiggle room depending on the food served. But I don’t begrudge anyone their fun.

What a weekend, even without the excursions. The weather is finally catching up to the calendar, and it’s time to get to work outdoors. Did my first mow of the season, a strange experience on Mother’s Day weekend, to be cutting grass under still-blooming forsythia, but there you are.

My iPad is now in Clinton Township — I’ve watched its progress from China via FedEx tracking — so now it’s time to think a little harder about how I’m going to use it. I read this David Carr story about the dawn of the magazines-on-tablet era with some interest. Especially this part:

Anybody in publishing will tell you that the prices they can charge advertisers for print (and now tablet) subscribers are far above the commodity pricing that rules on Web-based content. As more and more magazines end up in people’s laps, backlighted and without a mailing label, it’s a huge win for magazines, right?

Not so fast, said Robin Steinberg, executive vice president and director of publishing investment and activation for MediaVest. She helps giants like Kraft and Wal-Mart make ad-buying decisions. Ms. Steinberg sent a pre-emptive letter to publishers on April 29 suggesting that she and her clients would not simply go along with the assumption that a digital subscriber should count the same as a paper one.

Although she is on the Audit Bureau board and voted in favor of the changes, Ms. Steinberg made it clear that she wanted her clients to have the flexibility to opt in and out of digital editions. In a tart reminder that these are the early days of the process, she wrote that for media buyers, it was “critical that we determine how copies are qualified and counted when served either traditionally or digitally.”

In other words, same ol’ same ol’. The eyeballs that dollar up are the ones looking at dead trees. Remind me again why we all raced to the web? The rest, well, who can say if they even exist? What’s more:

Getting the kind of data that will satisfy skeptical buyers like Ms. Steinberg will be no small thing. Apple, the clear leader in tablet publishing, has been and will continue to be hesitant about sharing consumer behavior on its device. And no one knows enough about the habits of app readers to say conclusively how engaged they are while browsing through a digital magazine.

So that’s the new metric? I have to be engaged while I browse a digital edition, whatever that means? A while back I made a vow to allow more splash-page ads to run on media sites, rather than clicking them away automatically. I look at it as a small price to pay for free content. Lord knows what the new era will mean.

I’m already a New Yorker subscriber, so I’ll get the iPad edition free. I’ll keep you posted.

A quick skip to bloggage, then:

The anti-abortion crowd frequently plays dirty in its propaganda, although you could point out that that’s sort of the point of propaganda, period. And I know they say the same thing about us. But there’s something so disgusting in this piece, in which the director of one of those “post-abortion” ministries looks at a particular set of facts — the meltdown of a young Steven Tyler, the poor man’s Mick Jagger — and attributes all of it to the fact Tyler’s barely legal girlfriend had an abortion at 16. It’s in his interest to do so, of course; he makes his cheddar convincing women that an elective abortion is roughly comparable to five years in a concentration camp, in terms of how it affects your psyche. But it was nearly impossible to read without fogging the room with the steam coming out of my ears. Mary Elizabeth Williams takes it apart in Salon, so I don’t have to.

Because I don’t want to depart on a bummer note, however, it’s worth reading this short piece, a TED talk by a passenger on Chesley Sullenberger’s miracle landing in the Hudson River. Heartening without being sappy. Take three minutes of your time.

Manic, crazy Monday! I’m gone.

The weather gave us a break the last couple of days. All my friends were making jokes on Facebook about that odd glowing orb in the sky. Ha ha. I took advantage and did my usual one-hour cruise from my house to Mariner Park in Detroit and back. No one was exercising their pit bull in the field, but the fishing plaza was full, as usual. Someone had their car parked with the doors open, playing old-skool:

You can see why it’s a popular place. The marina to the northeast is in Grosse Pointe Park’s Windmill Pointe Park, for my money the best of the six residents-only parks in the GP. I can’t go there without an invitation — when they say residents-only, they mean it — but I’ve been there enough to get, y’know, a feel of the place. It includes a pool, fitness center, movie theater, etc. Mariner Park doesn’t even have a bathroom, but I have never visited when people weren’t having a good time. People bring hibachis and coolers and sometimes cook the fish fresh out of the water. Hard to go wrong with that.

That whole area down there is great to explore. Much of it is standard dilapidated Detroit ghetto, but even here, it’s location, location, location, and there are many hidden gems down there. I gasped when I first saw this one, a little bit of Newport Beach in the frost belt. It’s on Harbor Island Road, a one-block stretch that is indeed an island, surrounded by canals, reachable by one bridge. The residents could probably gate it if they wanted. Most of it is far more modest housing than this, with a community garden at the end.

This city, it is a complicated place. Not everything is as it seems. I was pleased to get out and see a bit of it yesterday. Today it’s rainy and overcast again. Balls.

But get out I must, so I will leave you with some bloggage that will tie you up all day:

Nearly 100 fantastic pieces of journalism from 2010, much of which you probably missed. I know I did. Who can keep up with the information barrage? And still, somehow Kim Kardashian pushes her way through. Go figure. Anyway, quality stuff there. You’ll like something in it, I promise.

Is there actually a restaurant in Los Angeles called Pink Taco? And people eat there? Ew.

I didn’t watch the GOP debate last night. Did you? What did I miss? I’m intrigued by this frame grab; are they all pledging allegiance, or what?

That’s it for me, today. Sorry. Friday morning is as busy as Mondays lately. Have a great weekend.

Sorry, late start today. I spent my blogging time writing a column for my other site. It was on a plan to designate bike routes in Grosse Pointe — not paths, mind you, only a few signs and stripes on existing roads — that seems to have stalled. Nothing happens quickly here, but this is approaching ridiculousness. When Fort Wayne outpaces you, you are one foot-draggin’ place, cuz.

Amount of impact I believe this column will have: Zero.

That’s always been my impact as a columnist. It doesn’t bother me, and never has. One of the hazards of being a paid commentator, on anything, is that it doesn’t take much feedback to swell a person’s head, and once that happens, everything you write sounds like it’s being delivered in the Roman senate by some guy in a toga. Remember when Charles Krauthammer laid out a strategy whereby the Bush administration could walk back the Harriet Miers SCOTUS nomination, and three days later, they followed it pretty much like a road map? Remember how his prose continued to be lively, and he didn’t take himself too seriously?

Look, here’s a picture of him with the closest thing to a smile that ever crosses his face. You want to know how old I am? I remember when Charles Krauthammer occasionally filed a lighter piece about raising his son.

On the other hand, you could argue that failing to take myself seriously is what doomed my career. I remember once, sitting in my little semi-private cubicle at work, overhearing a copy editor making a service appointment in the next one over. She was working very hard to impress the person on the other end about how valuable her time was. That’s a phrase that has never crossed my lips — “my time is valuable, too.” (I will say, “life’s too short for this bullshit” from time to time, however.)

On the career front, since many of you expressed concern yesterday: Thanks for it. I batted out a quick 600 words on the Critical Mass ride yesterday and sold it to a local magazine. I also contacted a person who has used me in the past, having heard that she recently lost an assistant just as she’s embarking on a project that will require many fresh new words, and that’s looking good. And I heard from a few more folks privately. I’ll get through this, although I doubt my time will be all that much more valuable.

So let’s make a quick pass through the bloggage. We have some good stuff:

The Situation Room photo, analyzed like the May Day photograph. Thanks, Jolene.

Amazing: Buried in all that Wikileak information, this.

The silver horse’s ass is running for governor of Indiana. I’m sure he will bring his best radio voice to the job. Meanwhile, Gail Collins considers the current occupant of that office:

But about Mitch Daniels. The political world has been abuzz with speculation that he will run for president. Centrist Republicans loved it when he began urging the party to keep its eye on the deficit-reduction prize and stop obsessing about social issues. “Try to concentrate on making ends meet, which Washington obviously has failed to do for a long time, and have other policy debates in other places if you can,” he advised.

He then went home and announced that he would sign a bill to strip Planned Parenthood of Medicaid financing.

Good doggie!

OK, time to get out of here. Have a good half-day, all.

Bad news yesterday — both of the classes I’ve been teaching this year failed to fill for summer term, so I’m not exactly out of work, but my patchwork quilt of income sources just developed a large hole. My income stream lost a tributary, making it more of an income rill. (Rill: a small stream; a shallow channel cut in the ground by running water.) It’s not all that much money, but teaching was one of those things that tended to push other income-earning activities out of the way. In the spinning plates of my career, my freelance-writing plates are wobbling badly; now I have to run back there and give them another push. Just as I get them back up to speed, it’ll be time to teach again, assuming the courses fill in the fall.

Position wanted: Writer who knows what a rill is, plus facility with antique metaphors like plate-spinning and patchwork quilts, seeks paid employment. New and old-media expertise with portfolio that covers journalism to marketing, books to explainer copy in museum displays. Jane of all trades involving a pen.

Better get started on that Critical Mass piece.

Do you have Critical Mass in your city? Doing a little research on it the last few days, I’m amazed at the diversity of its impact. I first heard of it via Jon Carroll’s column in the San Francisco Chronicle some years back, and I gather the Bay area is where it was born. Much of cycling culture has its roots there, and Critical Mass rises out of a certain obnoxiousness born out of unpleasant encounters with cars. We can go back and forth on this and probably will, but it’s fair to say that in cities like San Francisco, or Chicago, New York and a handful of others, motorists and cyclists are the Israelis and Palestinians of transportation, and Critical Mass is a monthly intifada, a deliberate traffic jam of hundreds of cyclists moving through them on a rush-hour Friday, blowing lights, in yo face, saying, essentially, Fuck you.

My school of thought says obnoxiousness is no attitude for diplomacy, but I went on the Critical Mass ride anyway. I can explain rationalize: The Detroit ride is at 7 p.m., not 4:30, an hour when Friday-night Detroit is largely deserted. Our knot of 100 or so made for a pretty small peloton, and I’d be shocked if anyone in a car was delayed for more than one extra cycle of a traffic light.

And man, it was fun. Illegal fun, perhaps, but on the grand continuum of all the illegal fun being had in Detroit on the last Friday of any month, blowing through lights on a bicycle doesn’t even rate.

Breakin’ the law: It’s all relative.

So, bloggage:

I’m continuing to go through the bin Laden mop-up stories, and find nearly all of them fascinating. A sub-sub-ancillary story was the fake Martin Luther King Jr. quote, and this Q-and-A with the woman whose innocent Facebook status update started it all might be worth your time, if that sort of thing interests you. It only interests me in terms of my career as a tester of internet-related bullshit. I guess I’d be suspicious if anyone quoted MLK to me outside of the “content of our character” chestnut, but most of my Facebook friends know better.

I know one of our loyal commenters — I’m looking at you, 4dbirds — is a poker player. Getta loada this. We are all laid low by our vices, one way or another. (And may I just say? Why do lamestream media sites waste FTEs on internet-culture reporters, i.e., the person whose job it is to stay online all day long and report on the Shiba Inu puppies? They will never beat Adrian Chen at Gawker at this game. He is the Dexter Filkins of the internet.)

Eric Z. remembers another daring raid approved by a president — which didn’t go so well.

Ha ha. I promise, no Rickroll or Linda Blair devil-face at the end.

Finally, I keep forgetting to post this, which I shot with my now-obsolete HD Flip camera last weekend, at the Dorais Velodrome in Detroit, reclaimed from nature last summer by the Mower Gang. I could be wrong, but I suspect this was another renegade event, held in a city where doing these sorts of things is so, so easy. Which is one reason I love it. This was the “tiny triathlon,” three laps on the bike, one lap on foot, and finish through the flooded infield.

Off to earn a living. More or less.

I wrote most of what follows over the weekend. So much of it seems dated already; that’s what big news does. However, I will not consider the events of Sunday the way Wolf Blitzer says I should — that I will “always remember” where I was when I heard the news. Great googly moogly, how does anyone stand CNN anymore? There should be room on the dial, shouldn’t there, for one cable network that plays things more or less down the middle, that spares us Lawrence O’Donnell and Megyn Kelly, where producers understand there’s nothing wrong with pictures that don’t have people yakking over them, that when you have nothing to say, sometimes it’s best to say nothing? (Don’t tell me to watch C-SPAN. Please.)

I understand 45 minutes is a long time to vamp in TV time, but there’s a way to do it without making viewers want to kill you, and there’s something about the way Wolf Blitzer does it that makes me insane. It’s some combination of the droning monotone and the expressionless face and the way he doesn’t move more than a millimeter in any direction. He’s the worst of Larry King combined with the sort of faux-seriousness that threatens every anchor, and when you’re paid like these folks, that’s a constant threat. Who would shower that many millions on someone who wasn’t serious?

Yes, yes, the channel-changer. I switched over to David Gregory on NBC. And used the mute function until the big moment.

Let’s gather a little bit of related bloggage, then:

Many excellent tick-tocks out there on the raid. I read this one this morning, but it’s NYT, and you might have used up your monthly access. The WashPost has its own lavish package, and they’re all over the place out there. I think the most important details are these:

1) Some cave, buddy. When it came time to settle in for the long haul, a dialysis patient can’t stay just anywhere.
2) None of this dead-or-alive stuff:

The code name for Bin Laden was “Geronimo.” The president and his advisers watched Leon E. Panetta, the C.I.A. director, on a video screen, narrating from his agency’s headquarters across the Potomac River what was happening in faraway Pakistan.

“They’ve reached the target,” he said.

Minutes passed.

“We have a visual on Geronimo,” he said.

A few minutes later: “Geronimo EKIA.”

Enemy Killed In Action. There was silence in the Situation Room.

Finally, the president spoke up.

“We got him.”

And finally,

3) Where did you get that blazer, Hillary? I’m not much of a tweed girl, but that one’s working for you.

They celebrated bin Laden’s death in Dearborn yesterday.

The Free Press has gone mad. For the last hour, this Mitch Albom column has been the top story on their web package on you-know-what. Yes, a man has died, and Mitch has written about it — I know, crazy! This is what the column says: Nothing. It has many short sentences. It reports what Mitch felt when he heard the news. Amount of reporting it contains: Zero. Eat your baby food, readers.

And now, the weekend’s bloggage:

Predictably, the president killed at the White House Correspondents’ Dinner. You can find the video everywhere; I put this clip on while I got dressed yesterday, followed by this one. There were so many great lines, but this one was my favorite, aimed at Donald Trump:

But all kidding aside, obviously, we all know about your credentials and breadth of experience. For example — no, seriously, just recently, in an episode of Celebrity Apprentice at the steakhouse, the men’s cooking team cooking did not impress the judges from Omaha Steaks. And there was a lot of blame to go around. But you, Mr. Trump, recognized that the real problem was a lack of leadership. And so ultimately, you didn’t blame Lil’ Jon or Meatloaf. You fired Gary Busey. And these are the kind of decisions that would keep me up at night. Well handled, sir. Well handled.

There will be some who will point out that Obama undoubtedly had professionals write this for him. True. So does Jon Stewart, so does David Letterman, and yet these are obviously funny people. You could hand the same script to Mitch Daniels, and I doubt he could sell it. But Obama has such a natural ease about him, he makes it work. There was a moment last year when he singled out Michael Steele in the crowd:

I saw Michael Steele backstage when we were taking pictures — AKA Notorious GOP. Michael, who knows what truly plagues America today — taxation without representin’. My brother. I did a similar routine last year, but it always works.

I’d bet a C-note the “my brother” was pure ad lib. And that got the biggest laugh.

So how was your weekend? Mine was pretty fine. Friday night I did the Critical Mass ride. I’d like to tell you all about it, but as it was winding up it occurred to me I should try to pitch it as a story somewhere, and the very next day I read something in the Wall Street Journal, the Bible of the wealthy and successful, that said trying to cut costs was a losing, depressing game, that if you want more money, you should earn more money. OK, sold.

The ride was fun, though, and moved quite a bit faster than I anticipated. Once I got comfortable with the pace and my place in the crowd, I tried to look around a bit. Most of the neighborhoods were familiar, but individual streets were new. We rolled through southwest Detroit and Mexicantown, and passed a tiny tool-and-die shop, about the size of my house, the smallest I’ve ever seen. One garage door in front, a people door next to it, and not much more. Probably employed fewer than a dozen people, tucked into a streetscape like any other neighbor. Maybe some of the employees walked to work. Gone for what looks like decades now, its facade bleached with time. And there are hundreds like it all over town. People forget it wasn’t just the Big 3 that employed people around here, it was these little widget factories, gone, gone, gone.

And you thought only the American media were this silly:

From the moment Pippa arrived at Westminster Abbey, clad in an audaciously simple cowl-necked ivory sheath that skimmed like a glove over her slender yet shapely figure, the nation swooned; you could almost hear the collective male gasp every time she bent to straighten Kate’s dress.

By the time Friday’s royal wedding service was halfway through, Pippa’s crepe-covered derrière was “trending” wildly on social media site Twitter, and by the day’s end there were three separate Facebook pages dedicated to praise of her posterior – with the “Pippa Middleton *** Appreciation Society” leading the panting field. Many other admirers, however, had eyes only for the tantalising glimpses of cleavage afforded by her dress’s teasing neckline.

Donald Trump is no cause for anyone to gloat:

What Trump actually stands for is an exaggerated sense of victimhood. This is the theme that unites his personal style with the political views he has thus far expressed. Are you tired of being pushed around? Are you tired of our country being pushed around? Trump’s political acuity lies in his ability to take these grievances and turn them into politics. His foreign policy views in essence consist of a pledge to bully other nations. China is “decimating our country.” OPEC is imperiling the economy. And ungrateful Libyans and Iraqis are trying to build a society from oil that is rightfully ours. (“We won the war. We take over the oil fields. We use the oil.”) When Bill O’Reilly, in an interview with Trump, seemed taken aback by the idea that we could simply force OPEC or China to do our bidding, Trump appeared surprised that anyone could view international relations as anything more than a contest of machismo. “The messenger is the key,” Trump told O’Reilly. “If you have the right messenger and they know how to deliver the message … you’re going to scare them, absolutely.”

(Via Zorn. I need to be more scrupulous about my HTs.)

For you Hoosiers, a less butt-kissy look at Mitch Daniels as a probable presidential candidate.

Finally, the president wasn’t the only one who looked impressive last Saturday night. Has there ever been a first lady this lovely? Don’t think so.