This past weekend was the reunion of the Knight-Wallace Fellows, all classes; the Running of the Fellows, if you will. Excuse me, but whenever I spend time with those folks, I feel called upon to be droll. Ann Arbor, and Wallace House in general, is a very droll place. Someone’s always chuckling dryly. The executive director is a big fan of editorial cartooning, and every term the New Yorker’s cartoon editor comes in for a visit, as well as Pat Oliphant. Oliphant is soft-spoken and a little shy, and prefers to draw his way through his seminar. One or two are always suitable for framing, and are hung in our little clubhouse:

I didn’t do every event this year, but I missed this guy at the last reunion, and was told I might as well have missed Bruce Springsteen at MemAud, c. 1975, again:

That’s Ralph Williams. He’s a rock star at Michigan, or was until he retired a couple years ago. I took one of his classes back in the day, on the Old Testament. (His lecture on Job had to be relocated to a larger hall, so all the parents could attend.) His “last lecture” packed the house back then, and there’s a reason for that. He is to lectures what ducks are to water. Big, booming voice, expressive hands, amusing asides — give him a topic and he’ll go extemp for an hour without breaking a sweat. I forget his formal topic, but the gist was the complaint of all people who remember what was, confronting what is, worried about what will be — the explosion of information, the dearth of meaning. He read some Thucydides, some Shakespeare, some Gore Vidal, mixed well, baked for 45 minutes and sent us on our way with a head full of intellectual muffins, or something. I try not to worry about things I have no control over, but he did make some thoughtful points, the main being that our democracy is based on concepts that are in eclipse at the moment, including respect for other views and the time it takes to pay attention and learn about the nation’s business. Whereas, just now, I checked three Twitter feeds and my Facebook while I tried to think how to finish this sentence. Clearly I am not cut out for Congress. Then again, at least half of the people who have represented me over the years weren’t, either.

I never know what to do when people inform me the world is in grave danger. Wring my hands. Nod sympathetically. But mostly I go make a cup of coffee.

I stopped at Ikea on the way home, and didn’t go to the dinner that night. The required energy level ultimately gets wearing, so I just went shopping. Ikea was full to the rafters with people who were not speaking English, so many that I suspected one of those overnight shopping excursions from a European capital, like they used to have to Gurnee Mills. But I think they were new Americans of various sorts — university people, immigrants, others with an eye toward making fortunes here after they’ve found a cheap couch. Which reminded me of another chat I had in Ann Arbor, with a business professor. She is one of those people with a brain like a computer; ask her a question, she blinks twice, the hard drive spins behind her eyes and she gives you a concise, informed answer.

She also has no obvious emotional triggers. I recall, seven years ago, asking her about Burma. Fort Wayne was at the time, and still is, absorbing large numbers of Burmese refugees, and the U.S. was going its usual route — economic sanctions and lots of talk about tyranny. She blinked twice, the hard drive spun, and she said China, while no fan of the military junta that rules the place, was going ahead and forming trade partnerships, in the interest of having a friendly neighbor between it and the Bay of Bengal. Guess which one would likely prevail. (The Obama administration took a turn away from this policy last year. GOP, help me out — was this part of the Apology Tour?)

Anyway, she marveled at how many of her students — masters candidates, mind you, at a top-10 business school — are amazingly ill-informed, read little news, either in newspapers or offline. She said she recently discussed exchange trading in class, how a person who is buying and selling commodity contracts has to be well-informed in general, has to know how a storm brewing here might affect the harvest there, what the stress of a natural disaster might do to a shaky ruler (speaking of Myanmar), etc. The class response? Crickets. Bottom line: Expect further rug-pulling by Asia, and learn Chinese.

Which seems a good time to skip to the bloggage, highlighted by one of our own college students:

Eighteen-year-old Indiana University freshman dies after aspirating vomit. Why yes, he’d been drinking. (At Ball State, if that sort of thing matters to you.)

Jon Stewart, national treasure, and why he is funnier than you. (He has writers. A lot of writers. And good ones.)

Speaking of someone who probably wasn’t snoozing through b-school, Gretchen Morgensen talks sense about the continuing housing mess, and the arguments against “let it crash.”

Speaking of which, I’d better go attend to my so-called career before it does the same. The week awaits.

Almost forgot: Why I do not follow sports. It just breaks your damn heart, every time. If that isn’t a completed catch in the end zone, I’m Sarah Palin.

Not to belabor a topic, but:

Poking around the web yesterday between students, I found a long story from the Fortune magazine archive on the Oddly Familiar Case of the Agees in Boise. It suggests that the Cunningham-Agee co-prosperity sphere is a complicated entity, and what happened during their time in Idaho wasn’t something that summarizes easily into a paragraph or two, although if you have to bottom-line it, as the CEOs say, this probably works for a nut graf:

A few things are obvious. Agee nearly wrecked the company and thoroughly destroyed his already shaky reputation as a corporate manager. In the simplest terms, he tried to turn Morrison Knudsen — a bridge, dam, and factory builder — into a railcar and locomotive manufacturer, and failed spectacularly: Last year the company lost $310 million on sales of $2.5 billion. Important customers became disillusioned with Agee — one called his railroad business plan “cartoonish.” Top executives mutinied. William P. Clark, a former Reagan adviser Agee put on the board, conducted an investigation that prompted Agee’s dismissal. A score of shareholder suits have been filed against Agee, the company, and the board.

But the very next sentence acknowledges:

This isn’t a tidy tale of good and evil, though. Behind the devastation of Morrison Knudsen is a complicated mix of ancient feuds, foolish gambles, and personal insecurities. There are clashing cultures, religious fervor, bad luck–even the terrifying specter of a black rose.

OK, I’m reading the rest. And I did. And I could almost see it from Mary’s side: She was raised by her priestly co-parent to go forth into creation and, armed with the secular world’s golden ticket to power — her Harvard MBA — do something different. Do something good. No, do something Good. Capital-G good. And on her very first job, she falls in love with a married man and watches while he ruins her career, drags her name through People magazine while at the same time giving her an express pass (which she stuffed into her purse with her golden ticket, and sorry for this metaphor salad here) to another sort of life, filled with luxury and private planes and trips to Lourdes and the Vatican, no small thing for a religious girl. I bet she saw the latter, the papal audiences and the like, as payback for her professional ruination.

On the other hand, no one forced her to sit for all those interviews with People, which she was doing as recently as just a couple of years ago, when her daughter graduated from — where else? — Notre Dame. And then I found this passage:

In 1991, Mary was diagnosed with a form of cancer–non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, she told the Detroit Free Press the following year. Despite four lumps in her neck, she refused biopsies and chemotherapy. Mary says that on October 2, the Feast of the Guardian Angels, the lumps disappeared. (“I believe the angels went before almighty God and said, ‘This woman is doing something good. Give her a chance,’ ” she reportedly said.)

Granted, that’s a big “reportedly” there, and granted, out of context it’s impossible to know whether this line was delivered with a wink, a wordier version of somebody up there likes me! It’s the “almighty” in there that makes me think she was serious, and with that? Well, I stopped sympathizing. I think it was MMJeff who posted something on Facebook a while back, a cartoon of someone in the midst of a terrible calamity, the caption reading, “Remember, God loves you very much, and has a wonderful plan for your life.” But this is, in a nutshell, what bugs the crap out of me about these folks. Because if you believe that — that guardian angels plead your case before almighty God, who grants up-or-down cancer reprieves like some celestial caesar — than you have to accept the flip side, that on Christmas Day 2004, He looked down from heaven and said, “Eh, I’m drowning a few hundred thousand of these yo-yos. What the hell, most of them are Hindu anyway. Let’s have a tsunami!”

And when you start accepting that, that the Lord truly works in mysterious and extremely fucked-up ways, then it’s just a short hop to my neighborhood, where God, if he exists at all, is so unknowable he’s like a version of the crazy guy down the street with a plate in his head, Boo Radley with a lot more power. Or as my friend Lance Mannion says, “Any God that would destroy the World Trade Center to reveal George Bush’s true purpose in life isn’t worth worshiping.”

So, bloggage. Parents, everything you fear about sending your children to college is true. Seen yesterday at Wayne State:

It’s a movie, of course, rated R for “strong crude and sexual content, nudity, pervasive language, drug and alcohol abuse.” That’s entertainment.

Via Roy and Scott Lemieux at LGM, a new blog I’m enjoying: Gin and Tacos. Or rather, ginandtacos.com. Worth reading all the way through, but this post on the anti-vaccine movement spoke to me in particular, mainly because of the map. I dunno the design thinking behind the microscopic type, however; maybe begone, grandma.

Finally, a correction: Steven Slater’s story cannot be verified. Repeating, Steven Slater’s story cannot be verified. This is kind of major.

Eating breakfast, heading out for another redonkulous day. Enjoy your weekend.

Another day, another dispiriting defeat for the Thomas More Law Center. You may not have heard of this regional oddity, a right-wing legal action team founded by Tom Monaghan, the Domino’s Pizza tycoon turned religious crusader. The Wiki passage on its founding gives you the gist:

The Center was founded in 1999 by Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, and Richard Thompson, the former Oakland County, Michigan prosecutor known for his role in the prosecution of Jack Kevorkian, and who now serves as the Law Center’s President and Chief Counsel. Among those who have sat on the Law Center’s advisory board are: Senator Rick Santorum, former Senator and retired Rear Admiral Jeremiah Denton, former Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, noted Catholic academic Charles Rice, former Fortune 500 CEO Mary Cunningham Agee, and Ambassador Alan Keyes. Santorum has played a crucial role in promoting intelligent design through his Santorum Amendment; however, following the Center’s defeat in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case (see below), Santorum resigned from the Law Center’s advisory board. Originally, the Law Center’s funding came from Monaghan’s Ave Maria Foundation, but is now primarily financed by contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations.

Richard Thompson prosecuted Kevorkian with such gusto, single-mindedness and, um, failure, that he was eventually turned out of office in conservative Oakland County, no small feat. Fortunately, Monaghan was able to be his sugar daddy and help him land on his feet in a job better-suited for his talents, i.e., losing more cases, but this time on behalf of God. The Thomas More Center was the prime mover in the Dover intelligent-design case (which it lost), the Terry Schiavo fiasco (lost), and various actions seeking to stop taxpayer-supported institutions from offering same-sex domestic-partner health-care benefits (lost).

They don’t always lose; it successfully defended an Ann Arbor high-school girl who wanted to condemn homosexuality in a class discussion. Yay, them. People should be free to be idiots. Otherwise, well, it’s hard to push Republi-God’s case in a pluralistic democracy. How do you keep raising money when you keep losing, I wonder? I guess when you’ve positioned yourself as the Last Best Hope of Republi-God, losing doesn’t necessarily hurt your cause; in fact, it’s proof that wallets need to open that much wider.

Interesting to see “former Fortune 500 CEO Mary Cunningham Agee” on that list. I spent a few hours digging her up last winter, when I was researching the Detroit Economic Club book; Bill Agee was on the club’s board for a while, and the whole tawdry Bill-and-Mary show unfolded right here in the Metro. I even stumbled across the Gail Sheehy series about St. Mary, and… I’m getting ahead of myself.

To those who might not remember: Right around 1980, Bill Agee, then president of Bendix, then an auto supplier of some note, hired a pretty young protege, Mary Cunningham. She was a newly minted Harvard MBA and had long blonde hair and the sort of gleam in her eye that can only come from a girl whose primary male caretaker growing up was a Catholic priest (a cousin of her divorced mother). Soon, cruel rumors began to swirl through the company, that Agee and Cunningham were doing the after-hours horizontal mambo in the executive suite, or wherever they had moved their mentor-protege relationship at cocktail hour. The rumors gained momentum when they were picked out of the crowd at the Republican National Convention by a TV camera, which showed them gazing fondly into one another’s eyes in a way that anyone with five minutes of experience in male/female relationships would recognize as distinctly unbusinesslike.

Well. Then Agee stood up at the company’s annual meeting and, without being asked, addressed the rumors. Nothing to them, he assured the stockholders. That gave every business journalist in earshot permission to start writing about them, and the cat exited the bag.

Some stories are all about timing, and this one broke at the precise moment women were starting to elbow their way into corner offices, with all the attendant gossip about just how they got there — on their backs, of course. It also happened when Gail Sheehy, the writer of giant zeitgeist tomes, was already in a pretty deep relationship with Cunningham, researching a story on this very phenomenon — successful businesswomen, that is. So, when the story about her and Agee started to roll, Sheehy quickly batted out a three-part series on Cunningham that was widely syndicated in American newspapers.

I was just starting my career at the time, so young and callow I blush to remember. I recall reading the series and seething with sympathy for poor, poor Mary. Not surprising; I could find it with some deep Googling, but I’m pressed for time this morning, and this Time summation is pretty dead-on:

Written by New Journalist Gail Sheehy (Passages), the series unblushingly depicts Cunningham as an angel, awesomely gifted, scrupulously moral and out to improve the world through humane capitalism; it is laced with enough mawkish prose and gratuitous personal detail to make Harold Robbins blush. As the scandal mounted, for instance, Sheehy reported: “Mary Cunningham sat in her hotel room at the Waldorf. She could not eat. Every so often, she stepped into the bathroom to vomit.” Also: “The mildew of envy is a living, corroding organism in the corridors of power.”

I didn’t see this at the time. I saw Cunningham the way Sheehy did, a victim of jealousy and all that blonde hair. The story finally played out with Cunningham leaving Bendix for Seagram’s, where she could improve the world through the humane selling of liquor, I guess. Agee made some bonehead moves at Bendix and ended up losing the company. And — I know you will be as shocked as I am — Bill and Mary got married. Yes, they’d been in love all along. I can’t find a cite for this, but I believe they deployed the old “no, we weren’t sleeping together, but the ordeal pushed us into one another’s arms” defense. A People story at the time gets to the point:

She says now, “Maybe the world is just a little young yet to understand the difference between a profound love for someone that you work with and for, out of sheer respect for their professional talents, and being in love.”

Yes. Yes, that’s it exactly.

And then they kind of went away. When I looked them up this past winter, the first thing I found was the picture taken at the convention; looking at it with eyes 30 years older was a revelation. Of course these people were in love; it was so plainly written on their faces that anyone sitting nearby would have moved out of respect for their privacy and fear of getting hit by a flying shoe when they started tearing one another’s clothes off. Then I found the Sheehy series, and marveled at its ridiculousness, but also at its spot-on portrayal of a type I’ve come to know well since — the Catholic saint who is not sinning, oh no. This body does its own thing, but the mind — the soul — is always looking toward heaven. They are pure, pure beings consisting mainly of light and stained glass, and if one or two of the windowpanes get a little grimy, well, we’re all human, aren’t we?

But I was most amazed by this: After Agee lost Bendix, after he married Mary (and converted to Catholicism, under the instruction of Mary’s guardian priest), he went to Morrison Knudsen, the Idaho company that built the Hoover Dam, and ran it into the ground. There was a story from one of the Idaho papers that said Agee tried to do his job from Pebble Beach, which Mary preferred over Boise, flying back and forth on the company jet a few times a week. And then both of them withdrew to a quieter level of business, him running a small charitable foundation, her something called the Nurturing Network, which supports women in problem pregnancies. Contrary to the More Center’s Wikipedia entry, I don’t think she ever reached Fortune 500 CEO status. (A where-are-they-now piece from 2005 adds another priceless detail: Homeschooling. Naturally.)

So this epic love story played out, in other words, with two embarrassing corporate train wrecks and a comfy life financed by golden parachutes? Mary is using her Ivy League MBA to essentially run a crisis pregnancy charity? That, friends, is the waste of a good college education.

Maybe she can give the Thomas More people some tips.

Bloggage? There might be some, but I’m running late. I’m meeting my students this week, so another chunk of office hours awaits. If you found something interesting you’d like to share with the class, leave it in comments. I have to get dressed and catch a rabbit.

Have a great day, all.

It is, at the moment, blowing about 30 miles per hour. So the local police sent out a text alert to tell all subscribers that it’s windy. Police are never happy about sharing information with the stinging little gnats who share it with the rest of the community, but these alerts — touted as a valuable community-information tool — are turning out to be the guy who sends you that thing everyone was sending around two weeks ago, today: Hey, have you seen this issue of the Onion, the one they did after 9/11? It’s awesome!

Earlier this summer a restroom weenie-wagger turned up in one of the parks, peed on a little boy and slipped away. I got the text alert three days after the story had been in both dailies and both weeklies. You can see why I deduct my cell service as a business expense.

The po-pos here aren’t so bad, though; it’s just hard to get the idea of “urgency” to stick with people who don’t share your particular definition of it. Journalists in general love urgency; it’s our dirty little secret, how much we love to pound our keyboards on deadline or take dictation over a two-way radio, and– I’m dating myself, aren’t I? Alan worked Friday night, and came home with a nail-biter about how the pop-music writer nearly didn’t get his review of the Eminem/Jay-Z show in the paper, because 42,000 Twittering/texting/Facebook-updating fans had hogged all the extant bandwidth. He couldn’t get a foothold on the groaning, overloaded data cloud, and as minute after minute went by and the presses began straining to start, he–

I interrupted: “Why didn’t he just dictate?”

“What?”

“Well, he could call to tell you he couldn’t get his story uploaded. It couldn’t have been that long. I would have told him to dictate it to me. You could get it done in 10 minutes, easy.”

It’s been seven years since I’ve spent any significant time in a newsroom. My husband? Just sighed.

I still think it could work. It’s not a thousand-word analysis on the midterm elections. It’s a few paragraphs about a hip-hop concert. You could rattle off half of it without even hearing it: “Forty thousand fans roared their approval when Lady Gaga appeared on a special throne set apart from the crowd.” (This is true, but a pas de deux with Flickr has turned up no photo proof.) And so on.

Dictation — and its impish twin, rewrite — is one of those things that’s gone for good, along with other antique technologies like using a cell phone for talking. But I think it’s relevant. What is a TV reporter giving an ad-lib standup from the scene of breaking news but dictation by a prettier person? I’ve said this before: I’m interested in how the newest news-carrying technology (the web) uses the language not of old technology (newspapers), but of even older technology (really old newspapers). I can exclusively reveal this because sometimes I watch TMZ, which uses as its framing device a newsroom meeting, everybody sitting around pitching their stories to the boss. And even that is old, because the people are smiling and happy. Today’s newsroom meeting is a grim affair of reading budgets and waiting to see whose turn it is to have a bucket of shit dumped on their head; as my funny fellow Fellow Rob said as we left a Detroit Free Press morning meeting back during our magic year of sabbatical, “Have you ever seen so many miserable people in one place in your life?”

Jeez, I sound like an old fart whittlin’ at the cracker barrel. Time to move on.

As I slept very very badly the night before, I turned on that Alex Gibney doc on HBO last night to keep me company while I worked. “My Trip to al-Qaeda,” based on Lawrence Wright’s book “The Looming Tower” and stage show derived from it, wasn’t Gibney’s best work, but it was very good, and I’m sorry more of you don’t get HBO, so you could watch it. I was reminded anew of my reaction to the book, the way it underlined how many our reactions to 9/11 — from the invasion of Iraq to the Patriot Act to the current lowbrow sideshow over the so-called mosque at Ground Zero — were pretty much by the book dictated by Osama bin Laden himself. He said, “Please don’t throw me into the briar patch,” and that’s what we did. Meanwhile, even the smart Republicans I know still refer to “Obama’s apology tour,” suggesting everyone’s taking their talking points from Fox News these days.

Why do we have such a hard time grasping situations more complicated than a bumper sticker? It’s depressing.

Bloggage?

A memory of his mail-carrying days, from our own Coozledad. I’m stealing his description of the local weekly newspaper, “a sort of support group for people suffering from ideopathic morbid ineducability.”

Zorn says he saw the Daley exit coming when the city failed to get the Olympics.

The Baltimore Sun uses the word “limn” in a headline. As a former copy editor, I see the appeal immediately — a four-letter word with a head count of three.

Off to work. Office hours and a haircut today. Oh, and an interview, too.

The weather last Thursday was give-me-a-break hot, the sort of heat that makes you irritable because it’s already September, for cryin’ out loud and DO WE REALLY DESERVE 94 DEGREES? REALLY? Then a front blew through — and I do mean blew — and 15 minutes of horizontal rain later, it was fall. Justlikethat. The temperature on Saturday didn’t touch 70. Weirdest thing.

To me, it was perfect. I’m like a brick house at this time of year — it takes me a while to lose my heat. And anyway, it was only an early warning. Eighties again today. Then 70s, and then we march for real toward the dying of the light. At the Eastern Market Saturday I ran into Jim from Sweet Juniper. He said this was the peak weekend for the market; by next week the blueberries will be gone, then the peaches and tomatoes, and “before you know it, it’s six months of root vegetables.”

They should put that on our license plate, a special foodie edition: Six months of root vegetables. I’d buy that.

One of the things I did on my time away from the blog, and the internet, and all the rest of it was, well, two things, actually. I did some reading, and I did some thinking. I carried Laura Lippman’s latest, “I’d Know You Anywhere,” through Cedar Point, reading while the girls stood in line for the coasters. I went in with about half the book already under my belt, figuring these little intervals would be plenty to keep me covered for two days of coaster-waiting. It was not. I churned through the whole second half in one afternoon. Folks, we have a page-turner on our hands.

“Lippman’s best!” would be my blurb, but that’s just me. I think I wrote before, in discussing the disappointment of Scott Smith’s second novel (“The Ruins,” which featured an evil talking plant) as compared to his first (“A Simple Plan,” which featured evil talking people), that there’s little in life as mysterious and ultimately terrifying as the human heart, but it’s the hardest thing to write about in a world where crime fiction routinely features albino monks and deranged thrill killers. Readers who have been numbed by those “The Girl Who Owned the Bestseller List” doorstops might find Lippman’s main character, the hostage and sole survivor of a spree killer, a pale sister to Lisbeth what’s-her-name, but I ask you: What’s harder to write? A page-turner about a genius hacker who can sniff out buried urges, stage a hidden-camera rape (of herself!) to turn it to her advantage and crack the tightest computer security in the world? Or one about an average girl who survives a harrowing ordeal mostly by being sort of average?

Which is to say, Laura writes about real women in extraordinary situations, and still makes the action tense and complex. This is genre fiction, and certain tropes are expected, but they were in short supply here, or at least they felt integral to the story. An ordinary woman, behaving not like an ex-Delta Force commando, but pretty much like…an ordinary woman. And yet still you can’t put her story down. Read, enjoy, and try to figure out how she pulled it off. Not an easy thing to do.

Then I got home, and drew down my Amazon gift-card balance* with two purchases — “Freedom” and “Last Call,” both of which strike me as keepers. I read the NYT’s review of the former with my jaw steadily dropping toward my chest, and put it down thinking, jeez, get a room. But I still want to read it. I was one of those who read and loved “The Corrections,” Jonathan Franzen’s last novel, although I was equally entertained by the author’s ability to shoot his own foot off. This was the announced-and-withdrawn Oprah selection, after Franzen was a little too upfront with his ew-the-proletariat act. It was also, oddly enough, key to my first souring on post-9/11 blogger triumphalism. Jeff Jarvis wrote at the time that he’d bought the book, but couldn’t bring himself to read it in the Wake of the Day that Changed Everything, because he found blogs so much more satisfying and engaging. Show me a man who’d rather read Instapundit than Franzen, and I’ll show you a real idiot.

Which sort of leads to my second activity of the weekend — the thinking. I spent a lot of time marveling, “It sure is nice not being online this weekend.” (Although I was, but not much.) I considered how much I enjoy reading for pleasure, how refreshing it is to give your focus to lines on a page and sustain it for an hour or more at a time. Hank wrote earlier this summer about another book, “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” that seems to capture this longing for just a little more time in the slow lane, ignoring YouTube and blogs and all the rest of it.

Hank notes:

One of my favorite things Bill wrote (and apparently one of David Carr’s favorites, too) was about the onslaught of “Did You See?” that infected our culture in the mid-2000s. (I like to write it as Didjusee?) It was about the beginning of the Internet all-you-can-eat buffet and the end of people actually reading or considering all the links they were clicking on or re-linking (now called retweeting). It no longer mattered. The question was only “Didjusee what so-and-so wrote on Slate?” “Didjusee the Lindsey Lohan video on TMZ?” “Didjusee what Mitt Romney told the Times?” Didjusee? Didjusee?

Ah, but did you read it as well? Usually no.

I want to read more. I want to write different things. I want to stop caring about viral video or what someone wrote on Slate. On today, the first day of school, the first day of Adult Summer (this still-warm, kid-free few weeks we grownups can enjoy before the weather turns for good), the beginning of a new year, it seems the right time to make a few resolutions.

So, some bloggage:

While we’re on the subject of Laura Lippman, from her own blog, a few thoughts about physical vs. digital books, and the frankly creepy digital triumphalism that has a lot in common with? See above.

Something I did not know until this weekend: There’s a film version of “The Big Valley” in production right this minute, and it almost shot in Michigan. “The Big Valley” was very popular with my high-school crowd, and yes, I guess you could say we watched it ironically. We each had a role; I was Audra Barkley, a girl too tempestuous to tame. I still occasionally run across an episode on the Western channel, and while I can see its many flaws clearly, I still think it’s a hoot and I see now why it was the embryonic gay men in my gang who singled it out — it had Barbara Stanwyck and Lee Majors, attitude and sex. The former was always ordering bad guys off her place with a shotgun, the latter posed a lot in chaps.

We had a party every Christmas in its honor — the Barkley party, cowboy hats and six-guns required. I’d suggest one for the release of the film, but alas, Jerrod and Nick are dead, Heath lives in the U.P. year-round and no one knows where Victoria is these days. That leaves me, Audra. Guess I’ll get some false eyelashes and give it a go.

And now my work week begins. Enjoy yours. Enjoy Adult Summer.

* If I haven’t mentioned lately how much I appreciate those of you who order your Amazon through my store, earning me a small kickback, let me do so now: I appreciate you.

As I believe I mentioned earlier, my absence the past day is the result of my fulfillment of a promise to Kate earlier in the year: Yes, I would take her and three of her friends to Cedar Point, and we would do it this week, aka Michigan Week, the week before Labor Day, when Ohio and Indiana schools are back in session but the Mitten, which starts after Labor Day by law, dammit, is not. Lines are miraculously short, the weather still irritatingly hot, and while it doesn’t feel like we have the park to ourselves, all the other people here seem to be wearing Tigers-branded sportswear.

Yesterday I struck up a conversation with two women wrangling seven-count-’em-seven little boys outside the changing rooms at the water park. “Where are you from?” the oldest boy asked, polite and sweet right down to his side-parted hair. “Detroit,” I said. “So are we!” he replied. “What part?” I asked. “Grosse Pointe!” they all said. Small world.

And so here we are. Drinking coffee on the balcony of our suite while the teenagers sleep. Soon they’ll be up and I’ll be pouring calories down their throats, and we’ll be off to ride the coasters we didn’t ride yesterday, plus extra rides on the ones they did ride yesterday, which was most of them.

I shouldn’t like this place, but I do. The prices are still on the reasonable side of steep, the service on the pleasant side of surly-seasonal, the views lovely, the grounds clean, the maintenance evident, the wifi free. I may even ride a coaster today, maybe, in keeping with my geezer status, the Blue Streak. Less terrifying than the big guns — the Millennium Force and, of course, the Dragster:

For now, I hear a rumbling from the bedroom; time to break out the granola bars and yogurt and get set for another day of high-speed and high-pitched yakking. It’s a wonderful life, and I’m grateful for it. Have a great weekend, all, and I’ll see you back here after Labor Day.

P.S. Yes, I know I should have been at the Eminem/Jay-Z concert last night. I wasn’t. See above.

Lately I’ve been spending too much time reading right-wing blogs and Facebook pages. Usually I leave this dirty job to Roy Edroso, but one or two have gotten under my skin and I can reliably be found checking in here and there. It’s like sneaking cigarettes when you’re trying to quit.

You wonder who the 18 percent are who think the president is a Muslim? I found a few. They use words like “usurper” a lot, not a common vocabulary word for those who insist that this or that “needs warshed.” But it’s one of those dog-whistle words; Google “obama usurper” and you get 101,000 results. This is a typical usage, blah blah blah birth certificate blah blah blah. Google “obama muslim usurper” and you get even more — 559,000.

Then I read this latest blog by Roger Ebert, and a phrase jumped out at me:

This many Americans did not arrive at such conclusions (about Obama being Muslim, or the Antichrist) on their own. They were persuaded by a relentless process of insinuation, strategic silence and cynical misinformation. Most of the leaders in this process have been cautious to avoid actually saying Obama is a Muslim. They speak in coded words and allow the implications to sink in. I recently watched Glenn Beck speaking at great length about Obama’s Muslim father, but you would not have learned from Beck that the father, who Obama met only once, was not a practicing Muslim in any sense.

Strategic silence. Yes, that’s it exactly. This, when I pick it apart, is why I’ve reached the point where I feel more or less permanently furious at about half the country. I lived in Indiana for 20 years, feeling like a drag queen in Salt Lake City, but I got used to it. I used to believe that I could call many of them friends, that they had something to offer. We disagreed, but, I would tell myself, they had arrived at this point in time via a different path than mine; of course they reached some different conclusions along the way. (This was not always an indulgence granted in return.) When they lost the presidential election, I figured they’d be sore about it, but I didn’t anticipate a two-year temper tantrum, aided and abetted by their highly paid mouthpieces, who smirk through their silence when their idiot minions roar about Marxism and socialism and Muslim usurpers.

Ebert thinks Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin may announce their intent to run for office when the former appears in the latter’s state on — would you look at that? another coincidence — September 11. I disagree. I think the chance these two will step off the Col’ Col’ Cash Express is slim verging on none. I think we’re due another stupid rally and more tiresome stories in the papers. But I think his concluding point is apt: It’s time for responsible Republicans to put up or shut up. Remember when John McCain gently told that crazy lady that no, his opponent wasn’t a Muslim? I get the feeling the powers that be in the Republican party look at that moment and smack their foreheads: No wonder we lost. The money, and the mojo, comes from the crazies, and who cares if they get every little fact right? Facts are too easy to refudiate, whereas urban legends can be posted endlessly on Facebook, e-mailed around the globe and otherwise allowed to slide.

By the way, may I just say one more thing before I leave? I read not long ago that Sarah Palin was unintentionally conjured by women like me, who “looked down on” women like her and the millions she mangles speech for. Because we are elitists. Because we know what “semiotics” means. Because we say, “that car needs to be washed” and don’t buy Cool Whip, or whatever. Well, if that’s true, I’m very sorry, believe me I am, but let’s not go all holier than thou just yet, shall we? Who, may I ask, referred to the cervical-cancer vaccine as “the slut shot,” and said that any girl receiving it would take it as an e-ticket to Promiscuityville? Who sent me sheafs of letters after I returned to work following the birth of my child, informing me I was an abusive mother? How many times have I been told I’m part of the “culture of death?”

Maybe they didn’t mean anything by those charming comments. If so, like Mitch McConnell, I take them at their word.

OK, enough ranting. I need to get some work done today. Bloggage? Maybe:

Via Hank, a mall that’s dealing with its teen problem sonically, via a device that emits sounds irritating to young ears. (What? When there’s all those Billy Joel CDs lying around?) You know what I fear as I age? The loss of my sense of smell. Kate’s always identifying mystery odors in our house that I can’t detect. I feel as though I’ve started down the path toward Foul-Smelling Old Ladyhood, and there’s no turning back.

Via LA Mary, some video of creatures who dance better than I do: A dog. And a baby. Yes, another dancing baby. I know, I know. But this baby is amazing.

And via Gawker, this is pretty amazing, too. For those of you with powerful processors, I recommend Arcade Fire’s new video, which is interactive and Googlerific. Yes, by all means you should enter the address of your childhood home.

Errands! Editing! E-mail! I have an e-ticket to the grindstone.

A question for you frequent fliers: Do you ever fly first class?

I don’t travel often, but I fly at least once or twice a year, and in all that time, I’ve been seated in first class only once. It was when the puddle jumper from Key West to Miami broke down on the runway. (Add “do you smell jet fuel?” to the list of things you don’t want to hear two stewardesses murmuring to one another back by the galley.) I missed my connection, and I was rebooked back to Columbus in first. Without going into too much detail about what happened on my last night in Key West, let me just say that a first-class seat going home felt like a gift from… well, not from God. God would never have rewarded bad behavior that way.

But it was wonderful. The wide seat, the halfway-decent food, and especially the Bloody Marys, which started on the ground and continued without so much as a raised eyebrow until I drifted off into a lovely nap somewhere over Tennessee — it all felt positively luxurious, at least as compared to the conditions in steerage. (And this was 1980. Conditions in steerage weren’t all that bad.)

I had a friend at the time who traveled often for business, and always flew first-class. It was company policy that the consulting work they did had to include the expensive ticket, and she always said that if I ever needed to travel as much as she did, I’d understand why. Oh, I understand.

Over the years, I’ve known many people who brag of their ability to get upgraded to first, either through strategic deployment of frequent-flier miles, shameless flattery of gate agents, or equally shameless lying about bad knees and hips and pounding migraines. One guy just had the gift, he said; he had mastered the combination of grovel and assertive confidence that made the person with the power helpless before the request, and would unhook the velvet rope to the front of the aircraft.

I ask because there’s always a pause during boarding when you have to stand in the aisle right inside the door, and you can examine the lucky 16 or 20 or however many who have the good ticket, and while there are always the obvious candidates — the women with expensive jewelry, the guys whose innate imperiousness screams CEO, Sarah Palin — there are always a few wild cards, too. The ratty-looking guy with the enormous stomach — does he absorb the extra cost as a comfort measure? Because I wouldn’t want to pack that basketball into coach, either. The kid staring out the window with no evident parent — an unaccompanied minor? Someone tell her it’s not like this, and not to get used to it, she’s just getting the parental-guilt upgrade.

David Sedaris once wrote amusingly about flying first-class transatlantic on Air France — I guess when you sell books like that guy, your publisher doesn’t mind paying — and being asked if he’d mind if the crew seated someone next to him, someone who spent the entire flight sobbing. Having flown transatlantic in coach, I can say that if that kind of midflight upgrade doesn’t cheer you up, you’re probably suicidal. My transatlantic flight nearly featured a mutiny; a bigger seat would have made it that much easier to bear. (Confidentially, I’ve always wanted to make that crossing on a no-name freighter, maybe in an unused crew cabin. I could get some reading done and stroll on the deck twice a day.)

But the best comment on the subject was, of course, “The Airport,” one of the best “Seinfeld” episodes ever. I’d like one of those ice cream sundaes.

Bleh day, bleh me, bleh bloggage:

Said it before, saying it again: You should add Planet Money to your bookmarks. Especially if you’re not much of a money person.

“Deliverance,” the novel, reconsidered. I missed this last week, but the novel’s been out for decades — the reconsideration didn’t get stale in seven days.

Tonight marks the official announcement of the end of the war in Iraq. Years ago, when my crappy newspaper planned a special Victory in Iraq issue, my husband spoke up at the meeting and said it was a ridiculous idea, and that we’d be there for years. It got him scowled at, but it’s good to know he was right.

And here comes another hurricane. Time to get to work.

It’s good to get away from time to time — visit your buddies, observe the strange ugliness of the Bronze Fonz, swing over to Madison for pitchers on the terrace at the Wisconsin Union. Planned correctly, and with a lot of driving, a good weekend can be as much fun as a weeklong vacation. I’m grateful to all who hosted, cooked, drove and otherwise extended Dairyland hospitality.

The souvenir of the weekend — besides a mild hangover — was one of these, a Himalayan salt plate. I didn’t spend $60 for the big chunk, but I figured for $18, I could take a chance that my disk of pink rock salt might be an interesting addition to my batterie de cuisine. It certainly was an interesting addition to the TSA workers’ Sunday, as it got my bag yanked and hand-searched:

“Do you have ashes in here?” the guard asked.

“No, but I have a disk of Himalayan rock salt,” I said. “It probably has lots of minerals in there, too. Should I unwrap it?” He said I didn’t have to go that far, but he got a chuckle that anyone would buy a chunk of salt to serve food on. Obviously someone who doesn’t watch the Food Network.

Here it is, in case you’re wondering:

Impulse purchases — they’re what make our economy strong.

I’ll be getting away a little later this week, too, taking Kate and three friends for a two-day Cedar Point adventure. We chose this late date on the advice of fellow Michiganders, who swear by the secret week before Labor Day, when Ohio and Indiana kids are back in school and the Mitten rules the peninsula. Short lines for roller coasters, etc. We shall see. I think the only thing we can reasonably hope for is good weather. Fingers crossed.

For the moment, however, it remains stifling. The last few days started wonderfully, with bright blue skies, low humidity and reasonable temperatures, but once again, something happened and the heat settled in on Saturday. I am ready to wear something that doesn’t need to be white and absorbent. I guess I’ll have to wait a while for that.

Can’t have too much summer, I guess. So let’s skip to bloggage:

Because I don’t expect the relatives of exceptional people to be exceptional as a default, I am not surprised to learn that Martin Luther King’s extended family is a little, how you say, daft. But I found this story on Alveda King, Glenn Beck’s new BFF, to be instructive:

Alveda is dismissive of (Coretta Scott King), who died in 2006, saying, “I’ve got his DNA. She doesn’t, she didn’t … Therefore I know something about him. I’m made out of the same stuff.”

Oh.

(And may I just say, it was wonderful to be [mostly] away from the internet for two days, and thus be spared Beckapalooza? I may throw my laptop away.)

Things you shouldn’t do when you’ve been drinking: Try to climb out on a window ledge on the 22nd floor to take a picture.

Finally, something that frosted my cookies last night and continues to do so: The egg industry says it’s time to say farewell to poached and sunny side up. Because how can they possibly keep 50 million damn chickens healthy? I’m now paying $2.50 a dozen at the farmer’s market I guess, what? Permanently.

Must run — manic Monday.

Bronze Fonz, Milwaukee riverfront.