Can’t decide whether to ride my bike to this morning’s meeting. Sun is out, skies are clear after a bangin’ thunderstorm last night, but the temperature’s going right back to 90 again today. Which means I’ll arrive a sweaty mess, but? It’s summer, and it already feels too short. I’m going.

Maybe I’ll swing by Grosse Pointe South High School on my way home, see if any movie trucks are there. They’re shooting something called “LOL” with Demi Moore and Miley Cyrus. “Scream 4” is shooting nights somewhere in the Farms, at some rich person’s giant house. And there have been Hugh Jackman sightings here and there; he’s making “Real Steel” in the neighborhood, as well.

“Real Steel” with Hugh Jackman — it only sounds like a porno movie. It’s sci-fi, something about robots. The dirty version will star Jack Hugeman. It’s one crazy Hollywood summer here for sure.

Since I have to leave early, a boring vacation slide show. I finally got around to uploading our Montreal pictures.

This is the Basilique Notre Dame de Montreal. We enforced a rule that no one was permitted to call it “the church where Celine Dion got married.” You are similarly forbidden:

One afternoon drenching rains drove us into the contemporary art museum. They were hosting some sort of avant-garde film exhibit, empty room after empty room showing stupid film loops. I was far more interested in the atmospherics of the dark rooms than anything else. Kate contemplates Art:

A bike ride out to the islands took us past Habitat 67. If Stalin had a sense of humor, this is the sort of concrete housing he’d have built in the Soviet Union:

The Jazz festival was just getting under way when we were there. There are guidebooks:

“Pour les nuls.” Doesn’t “dummy” cross all languages? I guess not.

Some bloggage for the table? Sure:

Has the leak really stopped? I’m skeptical. Extremely.

Is Mark Williams for real? This guy is taken seriously? Are you kidding me?

Kwame Kilpatrick finally cops a feel on the woman he’s supposed to be touching — and gets written up for it.

Time to slurp coffee and run out the door. Have a great weekend, all.

Yesterday was one of those days reading Facebook made me feel stupider. A number of Friends of the NN.C Empire noted that George Steinbrenner managed to die during the Year of No Estate Tax, saving his heirs millions. And one of their friends — because I hope I don’t have friends this dumb — wondered if we might see a rash of rich-old-people suicides, as the year draws to a close.

And then, with a soft click and faint buzz, a compact fluorescent bulb went on over my head. Elevator pitch!

After enjoying a holy and prayerful Christmas with his family, a rich man considers suicide on New Year’s Eve, to avoid the fearsome Death Tax. He stands on a bridge built with stimulus money, ready to take the leap, when he’s approached by the angel ghost of Ronald Reagan, who convinces him to wait. The two visit a world where the man’s grandchildren nod on heroin binges with Kennedy offspring, having been relieved of the burden of earning a living. The man wonders what happened to his old hero when the ghost tells him this isn’t the result of confiscatory death taxes but the relaxation of social norms in place for generations. They go back in time and kill the inventor of birth control, several labor leaders, and all the filthy hippies they can find, for God. They return to the present, and there is no President Obama, just a thousand-year GOP reich, er, democratically elected government, which is lean and funded by a 3 percent flat tax on income.

“How can I get out of paying this 3 percent?” the man asks, as Reagan prepares to depart. The Gipper ghost winks and says, “That’s for the sequel” and disappears to the sound of ringing bells across the land.

So, it needs a little work. But I think it has promise for one of those right-wing movie-making projects. Mel Gibson can play the lead. I’m pretty sure he’ll be available.

Actually, I didn’t have much time for Facebook yesterday. It was crazy busy, interrupted by a trip downtown to check an election filing that wasn’t downtown, I learned, but in Lansing, and on the web to boot. OK. But a trip downtown is never wasted, especially when you can visit the Coleman A. Young Municipal Center. And find a street parking spot. I drove home along Jefferson, just for the hell of it — freeways are fine for getting where you need to go in a hurry, but the scenery’s better at street level. The town’s not looking any better than it did the last time I took the long way home, but it’s not looking worse. In this economy, that counts as redevelopment. Hang in there, crazytown.

So, the I Write Like meme was sweepin’ the internets yesterday, and I paused long enough to plug a few paragraphs in the analyzer, to see which famous writer I write like:

I write like
Leo Tolstoy

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Oh, I do not. Let’s try again:

I write like
William Gibson

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

Hmm. One more time:

I write like
David Foster Wallace

I Write Like by Mémoires, Mac journal software. Analyze your writing!

I’m thinking this is randomizing crap. But entertaining.

Why it sucks to look for work in the digital age.

Finally, a funny from Sara Benincasa. She sounds just like her.

And away we go.

Anybody who’s been to the movies with me knows how much I love a good montage scene. A bad one — and there are so many — not so much, but a good one? Glorious. Nothing like a lot of quick scenes accompanied by music to get a lot of storytelling water carried in a short time. They’re easy to screw up, but when they work, nothing feels more cinematic to me. You can’t do a montage on the stage, nor on the page.

What does a montage do? It collapses time. How did Rocky manage to fly up those museum steps so easily? It was all that training. How do we get the couple from first date to the night of the proposal? A fall-in-love sequence. They’re made to order for any movie or show with lots of characters, because it allows you to put an epilogue on the whole season, or even series, without having to do too much ponderous, expository writing. The rest of the crew will work harder than ever. A good montage is no small trick.

I was hoping to post a clip from one of the most famous, and maybe my favorite of all — the baptism scene from “The Godfather,” but it looks like the copyright police have been out on YouTube lately, and I can’t find an unadulterated cut. But what the hell, you’ve seen it, we’ve all seen it. I remember reading somewhere that the scene was the result of a lot of bad footage from the church scenes. It was too dark except for just a few shots, and Coppola’s editor said, “Hang on, I think we can still save this.” That might be urban legend, but I like it. Sometimes art is an accident.

There’s no doubt David Chase’s second-season ender on “The Sopranos” was an homage to Coppola’s, but a little cheeky, too — his way of saying this Mafia family is as important as the Corleones. But the structure and material is the same — the boss’ families, blood and criminal, contrasted with his criminal activities, which was the engine of the whole series. What makes this special, I think, is the unusual music choice — “Thru and Thru,” a track from the Rolling Stones’ “Voodoo Lounge,” released well into their irrelevant years and one that would have been forgotten along with the rest of the album if not for its bluesy counterpoint to the celebrations of this scene:

As good as that one is, I like “The Wire” montages better. Each season ended with one, because with a Russian novel of a cast, it really is the only way to wrap up everyone’s loose ends. It also underlines that show’s thematic material — the gods will not save us, the war on drugs is a fool’s errand, we do our work and our work does us, etc. And for all of David Simon’s deep, deep music choices in these season-enders, I still like this one best, Jesse Winchester’s “Step by Step,” finishing out season one:

But what brought this on was what happened the other night, channel-surfing. I landed on “Casino,” exactly as this scene was starting:

I’ve seen this a dozen or more times by now, and I always notice something new in it. This time it was the little one-line performances by Nicki’s tipsters. Martin Scorsese is one of the best directors of actors working, but I marvel at how he got just the right note out of each one in this seven-minute sequence, which required about a million setups and actors delivering one line, but perfectly. I like the way the secretary says, “Mint-condition coins.”

Warning that may be too late: Most of these clips contain major profanity, the latter a great deal of it. (Shrug.) Joe Pesci. What are you gonna do?

Sorry I’m late today, but an early phone call and errand sort of upended my schedule. Since I’m late and behind and all the rest of it, no bloggage today. Suggest your own, or recall your ab-fave movie montages. Because I gotta go.

I don’t want to brag or anything, but my Russian studies, as haphazard as they are, are making progress. It’s a scary language, but there’s a logic to it, and it has a puzzle-like structure that is slowly revealing itself. I can read and write fairly well, but speaking, as usual, fails me. Reading and writing require puzzle-solving at whatever speed you’re most comfortable with. Speaking is a speed date with a Rubik’s cube.

A while ago, I was walking with a friend through a downtown festival. One of the musical acts was speaking from the stage in Spanish. Spanish-from-Spain Spanish, as opposed to the Mexican/South American variety, which is more often heard around these parts. My friend is Brazilian, and commented on how beautiful Iberian Spanish is to the ear. I replied that of all the tongues I’ve heard, it is the one that most sounds like blablablablablabla to me. I can pick out a word here and there, if they speak slowly. Penelope Cruz’ Oscar speech? I hear “todos” and “España.” That’s it.

My bilingual friends say Mexican Spanish was invented so that native English speakers can have a hope of finding a doctor in Madrid someday. It’s a slow-moving bus, the equivalent of English in the Deep South: Waaaahll, I reckon… Etc.

But even Spanish is a walk in the Latinate park compared to Arabic, or so I’m told. I read an analogy once not long after 9/11: Hebrew is the Mediterranean, Arabic is the Pacific. You can spend your whole life exploring that one, and not find every cove and harbor.

Kate’s Spanish studies begin in earnest next year. I’m not expecting another 4.0. But I hope someday she can have a chat with Penelope Cruz.

All of which is my way of saying that if you’ve managed to learn a second language — learn as an adult, that is, before after the magic window of childhood brain malleability has closed — my shlyapa is off to you. And I hope that if Russian spies ever move in next door, and you ask where they’re from, and they reply, “Belgium,” you will know they’re lying. (Good lord, people, Russian accents have been lampooned in this country since before Boris met Natasha. Get a clue.)

I’m working long hours this week at my other job, covering for vacations, so I’m looking to minimize my keyboard time today. So let’s cut to the chase, shall we?

Michael Moore’s copyright theft finally gets the attention of someone besides me. Because it happened in Knoxville, hometown of the Ol’ Perfesser, it got a lot more attention than when I wrote about it. But you heard it here first.

By far the weirdest story I read on the health-care news farm last night was this:

In 2008, Dr. (Alexander) Khoruts, a gastroenterologist at the University of Minnesota, took on a patient suffering from a vicious gut infection of Clostridium difficile. She was crippled by constant diarrhea, which had left her in a wheelchair wearing diapers. Dr. Khoruts treated her with an assortment of antibiotics, but nothing could stop the bacteria. His patient was wasting away, losing 60 pounds over the course of eight months. “She was just dwindling down the drain, and she probably would have died,” Dr. Khoruts said.

Dr. Khoruts decided his patient needed a transplant. But he didn’t give her a piece of someone else’s intestines, or a stomach, or any other organ. Instead, he gave her some of her husband’s bacteria.

Dr. Khoruts mixed a small sample of her husband’s stool with saline solution and delivered it into her colon. Writing in the Journal of Clinical Gastroenterology last month, Dr. Khoruts and his colleagues reported that her diarrhea vanished in a day. Her Clostridium difficile infection disappeared as well and has not returned since.

It sort of gives new meaning to the phrase “taking shit from you,” ain’a?

If you missed it, the NYT also caught up to the trailers-for-books trend.

Me, I’m off. As our own mild-mannered Jeff just said on Facebook, I have 10 pounds of Tuesday to fit in a five-pound bag.

Another stifling weekend, although it didn’t start that way. The older I get, the more I feel like all my sweat glands are rerouting to my head. I shlepped my first load from the Eastern Market back to the car, and could almost feel my head turn into a sprinkler, pore by pore.

I’m sure this is yet another age-related horror, but for the time being I’m choosing to see it as a tribute to my thick hair.

Or it might have been the load, which was mostly blueberries and tart cherries, so that pie season may continue in spectacular fashion. I go to a particular stand for both, presided over by a man who’s a bit of a grump, but whose product is superior in every way. A woman walking by asked if she could try one of the tart cherries. He nodded, she popped one in her mouth, and commenced to squealing about how horrible it was, “so sour! How could anyone eat this?!” She was older and, you’d think, of the generation who might actually have baked a pie with her own housewifely hands and know the difference between eating cherries (sweet) and pie cherries (tart), but I guess not. Thank You brand pie filling has been around for a while. Thank you, Thank You, for doing your part to diminish our national supply of food knowledge.

Eh, who cares? More tart cherries for me, although today’s pie is blueberry. So rich in antioxidants, it’s practically a vitamin.

I haven’t written much about the Banksy business of late, mainly because I only recently learned who Banksy is (a real graffiti artist, as opposed to graffiti vandals), and whenever I come late to a story like this, I always fear I’m missing huge chunks of the background, but here goes:

Banksy did two pieces recently in Detroit, at our storied Packard Plant. The abandoned plant is usually called the city’s most notorious and certainly its biggest eyesore, at over three million decaying square feet. Our little gang of filmmakers has shot two shorts there, and it routinely turns up in the national press, perhaps most memorably when a bunch of hooligans pushed a truck out one of its windows and ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Anyway, Banksy stole in, did a couple paintings, and stole out, his usual m.o. Apparently, the way you find out about Banksy works is by watching his website, where he posts photographs of it in situ, with enough visual clues to tell you its location. Word was slowly getting around about one of them when the owners of a local gallery arrived with jackhammers and other heavy equipment, and physically removed the entire wall, taking its half-ton bulk back to the gallery, where it’s on public view. They said their concern was that the work be preserved, that sitting out in the lawless Packard site, it was only a matter of time before someone painted over it or otherwise defaced it. And since people have been stealing the plants in bits and pieces for years, it didn’t seem like much of a crime.

(Editorial aside from an admitted art moron: Isn’t that part of the point with graffiti? Its impermanence? Banksy is miles beyond your local bonehead taggers, but he still operates like one. There have probably been hundreds of Banksy pieces covered by building owners who didn’t like what he’d done to their property. I know he’s now famous and chic, but …whatever.)

The gallery owners say they never intended to sell it, just to preserve it, and so far, they’ve been true to their word.

Now comes a party with a lawsuit, claiming ownership and saying gimme back my Banksy. But here’s where it gets weird:

Bioresource Inc. sued 555 Nonprofit Studio and Gallery on Tuesday, asking a judge to force it to return a mural by famed graffiti artist Banksy that it removed from the plant. In the lawsuit, Bioresource Inc. claimed it owns the Packard Plant and that Romel Casab is the company’s president.

Casab has been rumored to be owner of the plant for years. But prior to the lawsuit, the only owner or agent of Bioresource on record was Dominic Cristini, who is in prison in California on Ecstasy charges.

Talk about OID! For years now, I’ve been driving guests past that place, struggling to answer the inevitable question, “Why doesn’t someone tear it down?” At first I assumed the plant, obviously abandoned and presumably in tax forfeiture, was owned by the city, which couldn’t afford to demolish it. (It would cost millions and millions.) I knew there had been until recently one business, Bioresource, operating out of a small part of it, and I once saw Casab referred to as its owner, but I didn’t know until now that the plant’s legal ownership is a mystery. The dispute over one painted wall has flushed out someone willing to be the owner of record, with all that implies — responsibility for doing something to a dangerous hive of lawlessness and anarchy.

So far, the strategy seems to be: Allow the place to be overrun with arsonists, scrappers and all manner of crazy Detroit types, and maybe, in time, it’ll just fall down, and the earth will reclaim it.

My guess is, nothing will be settled by this lawsuit. But if it leads to anything important down the road, I’d say that was a consequence even Banksy couldn’t have predicted.

See, art does matter.

Any more bloggage? Oh, a little:

Lance Mannion went to the post office and got into a chat with some LaRouchies. Do you know what Lyndon LaRouche’s middle name is? Hermyle. Now you know.

Finally, a note of condolence to my friend and old radio co-host Mark GiaQuinta, whose father Ben died yesterday at Mark’s Fort Wayne home at 87. While this obit has some nice moments — Ben was a state legislator for some years — I think I’ll prefer the Facebook notes Mark has started posting, promising more in the days leading up to his Saturday funeral. From today’s, about his experience in World War II. His company was fighting around a German town called Welz in November 1944, in what sounds like the runup to the Battle of the Bulge. They had taken the town and cleared out some snipers and German 88s when something else happened:

As dad stood on a ridge outside the Welz and overlooking a road, he spotted a wounded German writhing in pain from his injuries. Dad then saw a jeep with an American army medic. Somehow he got the attention of the jeep driver and was able to point to the wounded German who was unable to rise from his fallen position. The jeep stopped and the medic and driver attended to the German soldier, lifted him to the jeep and drove him away. Just a few minutes later, and directly in front of where dad stood, something quite dramatic occurred. The door of a camouflaged pill box (a concrete bunker holding a machine gun crew with a small slit for the gun turret) opened and out came the German soldiers with their hands up. With them were a number of women and children who had been hiding in the pill box.

The Germans, having seen the humane treatment offered to their comrade, decided to surrender to dad and his buddies. Had dad not seen the soldier, those in the pill box and certainly some of the Americans advancing toward it would likely have been killed. Think of the changes that have occurred in our lives as the result of dad’s instinct to direct the saving of the wounded enemy soldier. Of course, we will never know what this meant with respect to the Germans and others, but dad probably saved his own life that day. I and my wonderful brothers and sisters can look at loving spouses, our beautiful sons and daughters, and the lives we have been blessed to share with each other and say thank you dad. Your instinct to help another human being gave us each other. We saw that drive to help others many times in the years we had you with us.

Sometimes the most important shots in any battle are the ones you don’t fire.

Off to start another crazy week. Here’s hoping you enjoy yours.

As everybody knows, you can get some extraordinary real estate in Detroit for a fraction of what you’d pay for it anywhere else. I was delighted to see this story in yesterday’s dailies, about the debut on the market of what most people call the Motown mansion, i.e., Berry Gordy’s house. At $1.39 million — and yes, I think you could make an offer for less, and not have the owner spit in your face — I think it’s tailor-made to be the NN.C Retirement Home, where members of our commenting community can spin out their golden years swapping bon mots poolside. Looks like plenty of room for Coozledad’s animals to keep the grass trimmed, and trust me, as a household we will be no weirder than any other in Detroit.

I encourage you to check out the photo gallery and video. It’s quite an edifice. The listing agent is a friend of a friend, a nice guy with his own fabulous Detroit house, a three-story English Tudor he’s been restoring for over a year now. I think it was originally a Kresge mansion, or the Kresge mansion, or some such. When he bought it, it had tatty carpet throughout and silk draperies rotting to pieces in every window. He pulled up the tatty carpet in the foyer and found craftsman-quality tile underneath. Lord knows what we’d find in Berry Gordy’s old house.

I like the tunnels. I bet those came in handy during Prohibition.

OK, enough levity. Anyone see this, about how wealthy mortgage-holders are more likely to walk away from their upside-down houses? They have a higher default rate than any other income group, although there is a certain amount of apples-oranges comparison going on. But overall, you can color me…wow, astonished. Note:

“(The wealthy) may be less susceptible to the shame and fear-mongering used by the government and the mortgage banking industry to keep underwater homeowners from acting in their financial best interest,” Mr. White said.

Ha ha ha. So you see, if the NN.C Retirement Trust finds itself unable to keep paying the taxes and pool boy, we will have much good company.

The other day I heard someone talking about the parallel narratives that the proliferation of news outlets has led to, as people tune in to their favorite echo chambers and listen to their own custom-crafted stories told to them. In the tea-partying part of the world, for instance, the financial crisis wasn’t caused by over-investment in insane schemes peddled by obfuscating, criminal bankers and brokers who then took odds on the outcome, but by Barney Frank, who forced banks to lend money to poor people, who then screwed everything up. It’s comforting to learn the banking/brokerage class is still at it, more or less.

Ah, the coffee still needs to work its magic, I can see. Let’s cut to the bloggage:

Alan showed me this Best of Craigslist ad the other day, headlined Stately Dutch MILF magnet. It’s for a bike. Enjoy.

These remarks by Sharron Angle are getting a lot of attention in the lefty blogosphere — speaking of like-minded echo chambers — but trust me, this attitude is not rare in her circles, not by any measure. Pregnant by your brother? Turn lemons into lemonade, girly.

And now I have to skedaddle. Have a great weekend. I’ll be avoiding the computer, so it’s best to call. Remember, think about that house. There’s room for everyone.

I had just bought a case of Spriggy’s expensive special-diet food shortly before he died last summer, and, going stir-crazy from three days confined largely indoors, it provided a perfect time to do what I’ve been meaning to do forever, i.e., bundle it up and drop it off at the shelter.

Yes, I could have taken it to the Grosse Pointe animal-adoption center, but I was in a more adventurous frame of mind. We headed out for the Michigan Humane Society, the original Animal Cop station house, which sits on the freeway service drive with the usual Detroit architectural details — the parking lot enclosed by chain link topped by razor wire and with a full-time security guard; the multiple signs pointing the way to the correct door, NOT THIS DOOR NO DELIVERIES THIS DOOR ENTER ON FISHER ONLY. There was a particularly strange one telling people to surrender animals only to clearly identified MHS employees; others might want their animals for profit, criminal or “religious purposes,” and might do them harm.

And people wonder why I find this place so interesting.

As we followed the signs to the ONLY AUTHORIZED ENTRY DOOR, two people passed us going the other direction, each holding a young pit bull puppy at arms’ length, the pups stretched out to their full length with puzzled looks on their faces. The cacophony of the doomed (or at least profoundly unlucky) beasts inside started to swell. The lobby wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, although there was a young girl holding a big mutt on a leash, and I couldn’t see anything good coming of it. The dog looked old and very very tired and was in the midst of what looked to be an epic shedding episode. Two worried cats sat in cages on the counter, one nude to the skin at the collar line. A man was negotiating some paperwork with another; I suspect it had to do with the big shedding mutt.

“Can I help you?” someone said. I turned over my 11 cans of Science Diet k/d and three cans of gastrointestinal formula to the clerk, whose expression said this was an unusual occurrence on a 97-degree day. I considered asking for a tour, but it’s clear the place was operating at something shy of battle stations, so we took a long look around and left. “Come on, you guys,” the clerk said, lifting the cats off the counter. I asked about the naked-neck cat. “Flea allergy,” she shrugged; no biggie.

Outside adjacent to the parking lot, a young woman played fetch in a fenced area for a gallumping, black Lab-y looking dog — exercise for one of the lucky ones considered adoptable. Inside the pen was a small shelter/shading structure for longer turnouts. It was decorated: BAD DOG painted graffiti-style on the back wall. It’s always good to keep a sense of humor about your job.

Michiganders, they can always use help.

Just got an e-mail from one of our regulars here. Her sister’s been very sick with some serious intestinal complaints and recently spent some time in the hospital. They come from rural poverty; our friend escaped, sis didn’t. She suffers from subclinical psychological issues and is morbidly obese, but has been able to eke out a hardscrabble living at Wal-Mart. Friend writes:

The next time I hear somebody bitch about why we don’t need health-care reform, they had better fucking look out. I just talked to my sister. She just got her hospital bill: $23,000 and change. The portion for which she is responsible: over $7,000. That is approximately what she has earned thus far this year from Wal-Mart. And she does not qualify for having her bill waived by the hospital because she probably will exceed their poverty threshold, with an annual income that exceeds $11,000. Think about that. Could either of us even live on $11,000 a year, even absent health-care bills in the four digits? And that’s just the hospital bill.

She is having problems again — she’s jaundiced and has been throwing up bile for a couple of days. She sees her doc tomorrow but absolutely refuses to go to the hospital again because she “can’t afford to miss any more work.” (And she can’t afford another hospital bill, either.) She has nothing left in savings and is living paycheck to paycheck. Barely. I’m sending her money as we’re able, but Jesus, what the hell can we really do short of hoping to hit the lottery? We’re not awash in cash either.

I don’t expect her to live a long and healthy life–not with her habits, weight, health history and all the rest of it–but I strongly suspect her death will be hastened by the lack of affordable health care.

Yes, it probably will. It does every day. Just remember: This is the greatest health-care system in the world.

Bloggage? Sure:

Poor Tyson Gay. First his name is changed to “Tyson Homosexual” by the American Family Association, and now this.

OID: How to steal an ATM in Detroit. And not succeed.

We had an old man die in Grosse Pointe yesterday, apparently because of the heat. (Still checking.) What’s the toll where you are? Storms expected later, followed by a 10-degree drop. Hurry, storms.

And have a great day.

The heat, or maybe the calendar, has brought grackles to the yard. My birdwatching is pretty casual, but I associate flocks of grackles with withering summer days. We’re going on a second week without rain, so with water in short supply, they’ve turned our birdbath into their private spa, strolling around the driveway nearby and scaring off anything smaller, except for a few cheeky robins, who are closer to their size.

And I do mean strolling. These birds don’t hop so much as walk. They are a motorcycle gang. They probably have tattoos under their feathers. Meanwhile, the goldfinches stay away, and even the wrens, my chatty little buddies, seem to have moved a few yards away.

The grackles alternate great splashy baths with foraging through the ground cover for their traditional diet of crap on the ground. Of course, that’s not all they eat, and I feel fortunate to have seen the display described in that link, more fortunate still to have read LAMary’s offhand comment on it:

Grackles never look sweet in illustrations. Ever. I know a very nice person named Robin. If someone was named Grackle, they would likely have a job gassing puppies at the pound.

Grackle’s second in command at the pound would be Heckuva J. Brownie, an idiot manchild. That’s one of my new favorite phrases, having turned up in a recent rewatching of “Barton Fink.” Audrey lays out the secrets of screenwriting for Barton, in this case a B picture featuring wrestlers:

Well, usually, they’re . . . simply morality tales. There’s a good wrestler, and a bad wrestler whom he confronts at the end. In between, the good wrestler has a love interest or a child he has to protect. Bill would usually make the good wrestler a backwoods type, or a convict. And sometimes, instead of a waif, he’d have the wrestler protecting an idiot manchild. The studio always hated that. Oh, some of the scripts were so . . . spirited!

Boy, you can tell I slept badly last night, can’t you? I’ve kicked the thermostat up a degree, so the central air doesn’t have to work quite so hard. It still works very hard, but I woke up before 7 a.m. with no chance of further slumber. Ah, middle age.

Or, given that I spend the hours before bedtime chasing down news, it might be that I was simply disturbed by current events. Like this story. Man hands on misery to man, it deepens like a coastal shelf:

FARIDPUR, Bangladesh — Whenever Bangladeshi brothel owner Rokeya, 50, signs up a new sex worker she gives them a course of steroid drugs often used to fatten cattle.

For older sex workers, tablets work well, said Rokeya, but for younger girls of 12 to 14 — who are normally sold to the brothel by their families — injections are more effective.

“It’s the quickest way to make a girl plump and hide her actual age if she is just a teenager,” Rokeya said, adding that the drug, called Oradexon, is cheap and widely available.

There’s something a little smelly about the story, however, which speaks of users becoming addicted. You can’t get addicted to steroids, can you? They can screw up your body and mind something fierce, but addiction? Meh.

So, as we seem to have already cut to the bloggage, here’s a little more:

Criminals, when disposing of your guns, do yourself a favor and throw your iPhone in there, too. I once found a woman’s DayRunner lying on the sidewalk while walking the dog. I took it home and used all my powers to find its owner, via the advanced investigation technique of looking her up in the phone book. Disconnected. So I started combing through it for an address, and learned so much about her, just from the notes to herself, that it sort of scared me. She had an elderly parent. She was looking for work. The phone disconnection was maybe connected to a sticky note near the back, with the title of a bankruptcy self-help book. There was also a bill in there, with an address, and I dropped it in her mailbox the next day. I don’t think I wanted to look her in the eye.

If anyone ever found my phone, I’d be done for — calendar, contacts, games, text messages, e-mail, even my secret guilty music pleasures, all there for anyone to see. They should call them dumbphones.

How hot is it where you are? Eighty-six here, and it’s not even 11 yet.

But it’s past 10. Time to go, with apologies for aggravated lameness.

I was buying pine nuts at the Eastern Market Saturday, at one of the bricks-and-mortar stores. I was there relatively early, but by no means break-of-dawn hours, and something seemed to be missing. They’re rearranging the checkout area, but it wasn’t that. The crowds? The store wasn’t overrun, but was plenty busy. The sound system clicked to life with the opening hand claps in “Where Did Our Love Go?” and the woman behind me in line began to sing along with Diana Ross.

Of course. The Motown was missing.

It’s hard to overstate how pervasive Motown music is in Motown. Close to half a century since some of these songs were on the charts, and you still hear them, daily, in an average day’s errands. It’s the preferred Muzak in stores all over the Metro, presumably because in a vast, multiracial, frequently acrimonious place, it’s the one thing everyone can agree on. We all like the Supremes. Everyone knows “Mickey’s Monkey.” It doesn’t matter if you go stag, it doesn’t matter if you go drag, you’re sure to have some fun, I’m telling everyone, most every taxi that you flag is going to a go-go. And when you get there, they’ll be spinning some Stevie Wonder.

I hear Motown in the grocery store, Motown at the gas-station pumps, Motown at fancy-dress affairs, because it’s a way of honoring the city’s history and African American population and pre-riots glory, while still getting even suburban toes tapping. There’s a Motown store in the airport, where you enter the Northwest (now Delta) terminal, and of course it’s always playing Motown. I wonder if the clerks go insane with it after a while, or if it just becomes white noise.

You think about Motown the record label, and the way it has squatted over Motown the city, and it’s no wonder most people elsewhere know little about the depth and breadth of music the city has produced, before and after. I understand why you don’t hear Eminem or Kid Rock at the airport, but couldn’t they throw in some John Lee Hooker or White Stripes? The MC5 didn’t have “motherfucker” in all their lyrics. They play Bob Seger, you say, and yes, they do. But for every Bob Seger song, you’ll hear 25 spins of “Tears of a Clown.”

I love this music as much as anyone, but even I can get a little impatient with it. If you’re going to play it that much, give us some B-sides and deep cuts for variety, if nothing else. And stop playing “Tears of a Clown.” I mean it. That one’s about to join “Respect” and “Dark Side of the Moon” on my If I Never Hear It Again, I’ve Already Heard It Quite Enough, Thank You playlist.

So, it sounds like everyone had a nice holiday. We’re having a heat wave in my part of the world — maybe in yours, too. As during cold snaps, now is the time when general-assignment reporters at newspapers all over the affected area pick up their phones and pretend to be deeply engrossed in productive conversations when their bosses stand at the end of the bullpen with that eenie-meenie-minie-moe look in their eyes. No one wants to do this weather story. A good tornado? Sure, I’ll roll on that in a heartbeat. But the heat-wave story makes you stupider just thinking about it, let alone reporting it. You talk to an indulgent ER doctor at a local hospital, one who is perhaps being hazed by his colleagues. He gives you his expert medical opinion on how one might avoid heat exhaustion: Stay in air-conditioned buildings as much as possible. If you must go out, make sure to drink plenty of fluids, but not alcohol or caffeine. Really, water is best. Avoid standing in direct sun — seek shade. If you feel dizzy or otherwise impaired, by all means, stop what you’re doing and rehydrate.

On the metro desk of the Nance Times, we tell people that heat waves are an excellent time to exercise strenuously outdoors, right around 4 p.m. Don’t drink water; in fact, high heat is an excellent time to lose that pesky water weight. Have a beer if you’re thirsty. Have five! Then have a long nap on the front lawn, preferably in direct sunlight.

So, some bloggage for an indoors-in-the-AC day? Sure:

When I was growing up, Cracked magazine was the B-team version of Mad. When did they start running stories like this? It’s actually fairly smart.

What do we think of Floyd Landis’ latest spill on Saint Lance? I find it pretty convincing, but you? Maybe not.

If you’re not reading Coozledad when he gets cranky, you should.

Via Hank: One of the Stranger’s better writers goes to see Gallagher’s act in suburban Seattle. Yeah, he’s still alive. No, it ain’t pretty.

Welcome back to the week. Short one. Yay.

The Johnny and Billy Blues Band, singing “I Walk the Line.”