Happy Bloomsday.

If I were a clever blogger, I’d write this entry in the style of “Ulysses,” but sorry — I haven’t read it. (Lance Mannion, take it away!) Always wanted to. Hope to, someday. But on numerous tries, I’ve failed to get much past stately, plump Buck Mulligan, and you know where he shows up.

Once, in a newsroom far, far away, I admitted to never reading “Ulysses.”

“Really?” asked one of my colleagues archly. “You haven’t?” Like this was unusual.

“Really. Have you?”

“Oh, sure,” she said. I asked when.

“Oh, you know…” She fluttered her hand a bit. “High school.”

The smoke alarms trembled as the fumes of her burning pants wafted through the room. She knew enough about “Ulysses” to know she’d made a grave mistake. No one reads “Ulysses” in high school, even a great one. An ambitious teacher might do a side unit on the book for honors students with a few excerpts, but face it — the book is the Mt. Everest of literature for a reason.

The Columbus Dispatch book critic once announced he was going to read it, and just to make sure he finished, he was going to read it in public, a chapter a week, discussing it in a weekly column he called Nighttown Journal. He got through, I believe, chapter three, maybe four. Then Nighttown Journal quietly disappeared. I e-mailed him once, asking if he ever finished it. His reply was sheepish. You know what he said.

On Bloomsday — June 16, the day upon which the events of the novel occur, for you non-English majors — celebrations are held throughout Dublin, including public readings at places mentioned in the text. Our own John C, who lived in Detroit until recently, suggested we do something similar in October, on Elmore Leonard’s birthday. Call it Dutch Day, and lead a group on an odyssey through the city, stopping at places mentioned in his books to read aloud. I think this is a tremendous idea. For one thing, I’ve actually read all the books involved.

Yesterday I had a bit of business to do at a shopping center right around lunchtime, and found myself passing under the exhaust vents at a well-known Chinese chain restaurant distinguished by twin horses at the front door. It didn’t smell greasy, it smelled grill-y and delicious. Friends, I may be the last American extant to have never eaten there, so it was time to rectify the situation. We have terrible Chinese food choices in the Pointes, and I’ve been jonesin’ for some chicken fried rice forever. So I went in and ordered the very same.

Twelve minutes later, the waitress deposited a five-gallon bucket of it under my nose.

It’s been a long time since I had my first portion-size shock, at a Mexican chain place. To be sure, it was mostly lettuce. Then came Bucca di Beppo, but they at least say up front that the dishes are meant to be shared. But it doesn’t take a genius to make a few connections, and one is: Restaurant meals in general have many more calories than their homemade equivalents. People eat more restaurant meals every year, for a variety of reasons. Put them together and you get a reasonable answer to the question posed by Richard Simmons’ vanity license plate: YRUFAT?

I try to be a libertarian about some things, but I have my limits. If they’re going to serve this much in one portion, then I want to see a calorie count on the menu. (Best online estimate: 960.) Sorry, folks, but you’re part of the problem. And don’t give me that “our customers want it” crap. Portion size is determined by economies of scale. Rice is cheap, and it’s easy to cover it with flavorful fat, serve it by the truckload and charge $7.50 a plate for a food cost of probably less than a buck.

I ate less than half. The rest is in my refrigerator. And I’m not going back. I resent being slopped like a hawg.

Bloggage: Everybody knows the Michigan tax incentive is leading to lots of film production here, but it wasn’t until yesterday I learned that scripts are now being vetted for content, and — sorry — but cannibalism is now out:

“This film is unlikely to promote tourism in Michigan or to present or reflect Michigan in a positive light,” wrote Janet Lockwood, Michigan’s film commissioner. Ms. Lockwood particularly objected to “this extreme horror film’s subject matter, namely realistic cannibalism; the gruesome and graphically violent depictions described in the screenplay; and the explicit nature of the script.”

Yes, no one will come to Michigan if they think we’re lousy with cannibals, but have you seen the calorie counts at that Chinese joint lately? Whew, through the roof. Rustic man-pig is far more slimming. Anyway, the NYT Cityroom blog asks where cinema would be if New York had such picky standards:

King Kong (1933)

After arriving in New York via luxury steamer, the giant simian genially poses for photographs while held in mock chains at his Broadway unveiling. At a subsequent cocktail party in his honor, Kong briefly dons a waiter’s white jacket (it didn’t quite fit, to say the least!) and hands out canapes to startled and then amused guests. Later he takes a stroll through the city and discovers that the elevated trains are experiencing a bottleneck near 30th Street. Using hand signals, he helps clear it up, receiving a jaunty wave from a thankful conductor in response. Finally, he scales the Empire State Building to take in the view, cleaning a few windows and reaching into one woman’s apartment to help her arrange her furniture, before arriving at the top, where he is joined by Ann Darrow. The two take in the dawn while discussing their hopes and dreams for the future.

Ha. Off to the salt mines. God knows who wants to take a bite out of me today.

It’s fish fly season in the Pointes:

I think these are very cool, as bugs go — non-biting, non-pooping, mellow and beautiful — but they drive some people crazy. It’s the numbers. There is something a little unnerving about a cloud of huge bugs swarming every light, or even anything vaguely light-colored. Frequently you hear of cars sliding through intersections on a road covered with their carcasses. And then there’s the smell, which is distinctive but not overpowering. They bring the odor of the bottom with them to the surface. To me, it’s the smell of early summer.

This is from Saturday morning, under a security light at ThreeCapitalLetters Bank. I expect there’ll be a new fee for their cleanup on my next statement.

Seeing as how we were discussing him only last week, it seems fitting to kick things off today with the recent unlucky turn of events for the Painter of Light (registered trademark, all rights reserved). Which was? Oh, a little drunky-drivey over the weekend. No word on his BAC, and the story says the California Highway Patrol isn’t releasing it, although it does say he submitted to a blood test. Around here, they ask you to take a breath test, and you may refuse, although if they think you’re drunk, they can easily get a warrant for a blood draw, and then they add a refusal ticket to the mixed grill of misery you just ordered.

I’ve known quite a few people who’ve faced DUI charges in their time, and about half were the wakeup call that yes, you have a drinking problem. Here’s hoping Kinkade seeks help for not only his drinking, but also for the voice from the yawning void inside him that shrieks, YOU SELLOUT, YOU FILTHY WHORE at him in the wee hours. Yes, the one that drives him into the arms of the lady on the neon sign, the one under the blinking COCKT IL , the S and the A having burned out years ago. Strength and courage, Painter of Light.

Fun fact to know and tell: When Susan Orlean was writing her profile of Kinkade for the New Yorker, he challenged her to a wager that he would have a show in “a major museum,” sometime in their lifetime. Money on the line: One million dollars. She told this story at a seminar at Wallace House during my fellowship year at the University of Michigan, and at the time, and we all had a laugh over a) the ridiculousness of the boast; and b) the chance, however slim, that Orlean might be called upon to pay up, because of course even successful journalists are poor, relative to art tycoons like Kinkade. (Obviously, this was before the world learned about her house.)

Thanks to the first link in that previous paragraph, I found this LATimes story, which suggests Kinkade has not only a drinking problem but an impulse-control problem, too, even allowing as how the two go hand in hand:

And then there is Kinkade’s proclivity for “ritual territory marking,” as he called it, which allegedly manifested itself in the late 1990s outside the Disneyland Hotel in Anaheim.

“This one’s for you, Walt,” the artist quipped late one night as he urinated on a Winnie the Pooh figure, said Terry Sheppard, a former vice president for Kinkade’s company, in an interview.

Oh, well. A fellow human being’s delamination should not be cause for glee. So let’s not.

I don’t know if any of you noticed, but Holly Haimerl, Duncan “Whitebeard” Haimerl’s daughter, stopped by in the comments yesterday to direct us to the Legacy.com obituary on her father. She adds, It is very heartwarming to keep finding positive comments about my Dad on the net.

I got caught up with “Treme” yesterday, and I don’t want to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t, but let me just say this of Creighton Bernette, the character inspired by our own late community member, Ashley Morris: Lovely. And if you’re not reading the Back of Town blog, that’s your go-to place for Treme discussion. Dexter, do not miss Ray Shea’s excellent post on the use of music as a counterpoint to the narrative. I had an early inquiry about participating in this blog, I never really pursued it, and I’m glad I didn’t, because I’m not good enough to hang back of town. Also: Dark Brown Waffles, doing much excellent analysis.

Touchdown Jesus burns, spectacularly. Who knew statues could burn? When they’re made of fiberglass, they burn like the fires of hell. Thanks, Cooz.

Another redonkulous day of chores and obligations. Have at it, all. I’m off to, among other things, find out how two teenagers drove their car into the lake at 5 a.m. Kids, a tip: Tell your dad you lost control in a cloud of fish flies. Even money says it’s true.

Love getting back to Ann Arbor, even on a stifling day like Saturday. It was for a baby shower, and aren’t those fun. One of my mother’s family stories was about the shower when she was expecting me. It was a brunch, and my aunt made pink ladies. That’s a cocktail that requires egg whites, and after a few rounds, whoever was cooking thought she didn’t want to let all those yolks go to waste, and threw them in with the eggs to be scrambled, which made them hard and rubbery. Pink ladies also require grapefruit juice, and this being before the ruby-red sweet grapefruit was the standard cocktail mixer, the drinks were quite sour and pucker-y.

“My mouth feels like an asshole,” my aunt Charlene is said to have announced, right before she stuck her fork upright in her eggs and left the table.

So with this in my family heritage, it seemed a good idea to bring the ingredients for a fruity afternoon cocktail as part of my contribution. The mother-to-be is expecting a boy, to be named Alexander, so I called my libation the Baby Alexander. It’s basically a margarita made with mango nectar and a little bit of lime juice, and it was a big hit. There was also chicken piccata, two delicious salads, wine and cupcakes. No one told episiotomy stories, and we all mooed when the guest of honor unwrapped the breast pump. Women really know how to throw a party.

I wasn’t sure if I had enough mango nectar, so I stopped at Trader Joe’s in Ann Arbor, after first considering Whole Foods. The parking lot at Whole Foods was packed. It’s always packed. I don’t know when it closes, but my guess is, if they stayed open around-the-clock, the parking lot would never have an open space (every other one occupied by a Prius, natch), the well-off denizens of Ann Arbor lining up to throw money at the cashiers. Trader Joe’s is a bit more downmarket, and everybody, and I mean everybody, had brought their reusable bags, so many that I declined a bag at all, carrying my mango nectar and bag of limes out to the car in my wee hands. I can go green with the rest of you Teva-wearing posers, Ann Arbor.

Along the way I watched the lawns, to see if my favorite A2 cultural trait (weeds) is still in evidence, and yes, yes it is. Expensive real estate, crappy lawns — that’s Ann Arbor for you. Lawn care beyond mowing once a month is too bourgeois for that place. If you mow too often, you’re not keeping up with your New York Review of Books subscription. You might even be a Republican. And there would go the neighborhood.

On my way back I stopped at a place that was called, in my time in A2, the Big Ten Party Store. Alan carped at one of my wine purchases the other day, describing it as “cough syrup,” and I needed to come back strong with a decent bottle of something for a dinner menu to be named later. The Big Ten was run by some former Zingerman’s people, and as I recall, stocked mainly wine and cheese, with a few “artisanal” (how I hate that word) beers thrown in, but at lower prices and 15 percent less attitude. Since I left, they changed their name, a huge mistake, because what beats the fun of buying aged Stilton at a place called the Big Ten Party Store?

Anyway, now all employees wear navy-blue lab coats and hover at the periphery of your space, offering helpful opinions, or perhaps to catch you when you faint at the prices. I was expecting to splurge, but when I saw $25 described as “economical,” I knew I was in over my head.

I did linger for a moment at the leg of jamon iberico in the cooler. Price per pound: $100. Not that you would buy that much, but good lord, when I’m buying ham shaved in razor-thin slices and so expensive that dropping a piece on the floor is like lighting a cigar with a tenner, that’s asking for karmic retribution. I don’t have a full professorship at a respected university. This is out of my league.

I selected a $15 beaujolais and got the hell out of there in a hurry.

(This was the cough syrup, by the way, and Alan’s right, it was pretty bad. I don’t know what happened to the label, as the first 10 bottles I bought were so good it became my vin ordinaire, but recently? Ugh.)

Boring, boring, boring, I know. So let’s hop to the bloggage:

Our national debt crisis is solved. I repeat: Our national debt crisis is solved.

Much of the overpriced wine at that place I just described was labeled “organic.” My mistrust of such standards, honed while living through approximately 7,000 food fad cycles, serves me well. The words “grown in China” and “organic” should not be within 12 miles of each other, and now it seems the U.S.D.A. agrees.

David Mitchell has a new book out. Huzzah!

And now, Manic Monday awaits. Onward!

In the People’s Republic, no one is having second thoughts about their vote.

Michigan being one of the last states to start school — by law, it cannot start before Labor Day, the rather thin legislative legacy of my last state representative — it’s among the last to finish, too. The teachers have to oversee their unruly herds for 4.5 more days, including today, and I don’t envy them, because the corrals are in danger of being kicked to pieces. In keeping with the livestock theme, I hope they were all issued cattle prods after Memorial Day.

No, that’s not fair. The end of the school year is as important as any other part of it, even if the tone is distinctly different. Yesterday’s science class was the time-honored Mentos-and-Diet Coke experiment, and next week in math class, they’ll be watching a movie.

“What movie?” the cinéaste parent queried.

“I don’t know.”

“A math movie?” I pressed.

“Who would make a movie about math?” she replied.

Oh, child. How young you are. I’d sign a parental R-rating waver waiver [Yoinks! — ed.] if the teacher screened Pi. Or “Good Will Hunting,” or “A Beautiful Mind,” for that matter. “Stand and Deliver,” “Proof” — there’s no shortage of possibilities, but my guess is, they’ll probably watch something bland and PG, and it’ll likely be “The Blind Side.”

Are there any documentaries about math and its close relationship with madness? Surely that ground has been plowed. Ted Kaczynski was a mathematician, remember, a PhD from Michigan. Go Blue. Many years ago, the New Yorker ran a long profile of two deeply eccentric Russian brothers, one of whom lives in an apartment where they do nothing but tend to a supercomputer that calculates pi, endlessly.

How long will it take Google to find it for me after I type “russian brothers who calculate pi” into my search window? Point-one-seven seconds. Some Russians used their math prowess to more profitable ends. You want a movie? Your head could explode just thinking about stuff like this:

Around the three-hundred-millionth decimal place of pi, the digits go 88888888—eight eights pop up in a row. Does this mean anything? It appears to be random noise. Later, ten sixes erupt: 6666666666. What does this mean? Apparently nothing, only more noise. Somewhere past the half-billion mark appears the string 123456789. It’s an accident, as it were. “We do not have a good, clear, crystallized idea of randomness,” Gregory said. “It cannot be that pi is truly random. Actually, a truly random sequence of numbers has not yet been discovered.”

Not long after this article was published, “Northern Exposure” had an episode in which a young woman blows through Cicely, Alaska, doing this very same work. She is lovely and sane, not Russian and a little bonkers. Which goes to show “Law & Order” writers aren’t the only ones who rip from the headlines.

More math/movie strangeness: Schlock director Paul Verhoeven has a doctorate in math. I hope the class won’t be watching “Showgirls.”

Does today have a theme? Let’s just cut to the damn bloggage, eh?

This South Carolina Senate situation gets weirder by the moment:

Indeed, in a three-hour interview, the unemployed military veteran could not name a single specific thing he’d done to campaign. Yet more than 100,000 South Carolinians voted for him on Tuesday, handing him nearly 60 percent of the vote and a resounding victory over Vic Rawl, a former judge who has served four terms in the state legislature.

“I’m the Democratic Party nominee,” Greene says in the interview at his father’s home on a lonely stretch of rural highway in central South Carolina. “The people have spoken. The people of South Carolina have spoken. The people of South Carolina have spoken. We have to be pro-South Carolina. The people of South Carolina have spoken. We have to be pro-South Carolina.”

Someone punch that guy’s reset button.

A strange piece of e-mail arrived last night, from “Information Technician,” i.e. service -at- vh4rs.com. Subject line: The information you requested. No links within. No attachments. WHOIS lookup ambiguous. The contents of the e-mail, in its entirety:

Recipe: Overnight Fruit Salad

1. Place cabbage on bottom of large salad bowl.
2. Top with pineapple chunks, mandarin orange sections, grapes and raisins. Sprinkle cheese atop.
3. Combine yogurt and sour cream; spread over salad, sealing to edge of bowl
4. Cover and refrigerate for 4 to 24 hours. If desired, garnish with lemon and lime twist, curly endive, and a grape.

I wonder if this is some sort of extremely baroque virus. I wonder, if I prepare and consume this fruit salad, if I will be turned into a zombie. Whatever, I think two cups of dressing sounds like way too much, even for this much cabbage and fruit. What’s the verdict of the crowd?

Whatever, it’s time for me to get a-movin’. Second wind is in progress! The weekend awaits!

UPDATE: No, wait, one more, for any of your Fort Wayners who recall Charles’ Pugh’s brief time as a TV reporter in town. Now that he’s council president here in the D, he’s moved on to costing taxpayers even more money than his salary and the city car he wrecked his first month in office. For his bodyguard. Every Detroit resident I know manages to find their way around the city at all times of day without hired muscle, using naught but their common sense. Not this waste of oxygen. I ask you.

It’s one of those mornings. Just a warning.

These things happen, late in the week. The accumulated lack of sleep piles up until Thursday, when I’m positively dull-witted. Friday I get a second wind, but Thursdays just suck. To quote a recent Kim Severson tweet: The bags under my eyes are so big Delta charged me $25 each. I should be used to working late and getting up early, but friends, I am not. My boss told me once he hasn’t gotten more than four hours sleep since he started his company. I shudder to think.

So, in honor of my lack of functioning brain cells, let’s lower the tone. Let’s talk about…oh, what’s in the file here… Got it! Boobs.

If you’re not online as much as I am, you’ve doubtless missed the story of Debrahlee Lorenzana, who is apparently bringing suit against her former employer, who fired her (she claims) because her smokin’ hotness. The story has been followed mostly by Gawker, and thanks to the miracle of tagging, I can link you to a single page of posts, where you are advised to start at the bottom and read up.

Debrahlee is, indeed, lovely, and it’s easy to see how a bunch of loutish bankers would find her distracting when she strolled through the room. I used to work with a woman somewhat like this — young, beautiful, and a very sharp dresser. It was the latter that made her a head-turner, because most newsrooms are oceans of Dockers and polo shirts and other unfortunate sartorial choices. She was also Asian, and had that almost impossibly tiny frame Asian women frequently have. She was fond of wide, waist-cinching belts, and whenever she walked by, I would think, Somewhere, Scarlett O’Hara is weeping.

Anyhoo, Debrahlee. (I’m going to start calling her “Debbie.” This ridiculous spelling is getting on my nerves.) Debbie’s case is very strange, because her lawyer appears to have tricked her out in a number of plunging necklines and stiletto heels to…what end, exactly? Demonstrate how hot she is? Is this to bolster her case? Because if I were an office manager I’d probably tell her to lay off the V-necks, too. Which reminds me of another one of my former colleagues, a summer intern who once appeared for work in a sheer blouse and a hot-pink bra. You didn’t get the sense she was going for any sort of va-va-voom factor, it was just, y’know, what was clean that morning. The editor who sent her home to change earned her check that week. It was widely believed at the time that she had “some sort of developmental delay,” as the health writer delicately put it. Yes, friends, that was our newsroom — the place that hired mentally challenged interns.

Back to Debbie. She keeps turning up in the news, always with many, many photographs, always with a vague message that seemed to boil down to I am sooo hot. At one point she said she couldn’t help the way she looked, her slender body and her full breasts were “genetic,” and shouldn’t she be able to hold a job like everyone else? She almost had me for a while; the Gorgeous-American community has rights, too.

Then, yesterday, Gawker found the smoking videotape — Debbie featured in a plastic-surgery marketing video shot some years back, asking for “huge, double-D breasts” so she can look like “a Playboy Playmate.” So much for genetics, but you probably already figured that out.

Which brings us to the other boob story of the morning: Did Sarah Palin buy herself a pair? Please please please let this story be true. Please. (I’m dubious, however. She doesn’t look all that enhanced. On the other hand, there is no way those are the natural breasts of a fortysomething veteran of five pregnancies.) If it’s true, it would indicate desperation has begun to nibble around the edges of her steely confidence. And that’s a good thing.

Boobs, male variety: Don’t let the children of gay parents go to our Catholic school! They’ll probably bring porn and dildos to show-and-tell. No further comment needed.

Belated attention to Hank Stuever, who is not a boob, with some suggestions, and a couple musts-to-avoid, for your summer reading list. (There’s a boob-related anecdote within.)

Via Brendan, a Brian Dickerson column on how Michigan might emulate California, but in a good way. Boob factor: The state legislature.

And with that, the caffeine has kicked in and I’m outta here. Off to the gym. To work on my pectorals.

Where is the damn morning going so damn fast, anyway? I’ll tell you where: Into wrestling with the CMS — that’s content management system, to you civilians — at my other site, which ate a story I was working on juuuust as I got to the last paragraph. And let that be (another) lesson to me: Don’t trust Drupal. Just when I think I’ve learned its quirks, it grows a few more. Drupal is a high-maintenance girlfriend given to plate-throwing and slapping. WordPress is your stable, dependable wife who gets dinner on the table without having to be begged.

This site is WordPress. So let’s hop to it, knowing we’ll probably not lose this one. (Bless you, autosave.)

I’m reading around this morning, and I find this L.A. Times column about the Las Vegas Review-Journal, which is starting to file lawsuits over stolen content. Roughly three dozen of them so far, the story says, against bloggers and others who have lifted their stories or photos, either whole or in large enough chunks to make the reader hardly need to click back to the original. The blogosphere is said to be “whirring and sputtering” over it, and I’m not surprised, as when it comes to getting a big hate-on for the evil MSM, you can’t really beat the blogosphere. But here’s the nut graf:

A certain generosity of spirit seldom gets traction in these new media/old media grudge matches. Still, I wonder if we can’t find a bit of middle ground. Can’t we acknowledge that copyright law has a righteous purpose, to protect original content and encourage creators to create even more? Can’t we also admit that a little creative reuse, far from thievery, can drive new attention to good work?

Dude, this is where I live. Come on in, the water’s fine.

You don’t have to be reading me for very long to know that in this fight, I’m going to be closer to the Las Vegas Review-Journal side than the other side. I guess that would include Jeff Jarvis, who is quoted later in the story “bristling” at what he calls “the bogus meme that news stories are being copied wholesale everywhere by copyright thieves.” Hmm. Well. Copied wholesale? Maybe not. But every day I see stories that are quoted at huge, huge length, yes with a link back but one that hardly matters, because the nine paragraphs quoted are all you really need to know. For a while, I was dropping e-mails or comments at some of these sites, reminding them of the concept of fair use. The response was almost always the same — fury, or at least an indignant reply that their quoting was “legal” because they’d credited the story to its original author/source. Many of these bloggers appear to be non-morons, so the only conclusion I can draw from this is that understanding basic copyright principles is simply not in most bloggers’ tool kits.

I have something of an advantage here, because the part-time job I do at night is for an aggregator service. We compile clipsheets for corporate clients, basically one-topic news roundups pertaining to their industry and published to their own intranets at dawn’s early light. My bosses, besides being the nicest people in the world (smooch, smooch), are also very well-versed on copyright law, and are scrupulous about obtaining rights and licenses to the material we republish for our clients. Our clients pay for both our service and those licenses, which ain’t cheap.

A few months ago, searching for a story for this blog, I ran across the “newsroom” section of Michael Moore’s website. I was stunned to find Wall Street Journal A-column stories reproduced in their entirety, down to their identical headlines and photos, on that site, along with the work of many other newspapers and wire services. I sent three polite e-mails asking the webmaster the nature of their licensing arrangements, and received no reply. There’s no advertising on Moore’s site (other than a store selling his own merch), so either he’s carrying the considerable cost of his newsroom out of pocket or risking the fury of people with even better lawyers than the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s.

In the past I have been a sinner, yes. A couple years ago I took a “no copyright violations” pledge here, and I’ve found it amazingly easy to keep. The rule of thumb is elsewhere in the LAT story, and it’s the one I follow, too: No more than three paragraphs, always attribute, always link back.

The punchline of that story is that one of the sued sites was a small-time cat blogger with no advertising. Sometimes a cease-and-desist letter will do just fine. Don’t bring a grenade launcher to a slap fight.

Good bloggage today:

Thanks to MMJeff, who Facebook’d this: How Thomas Kinkade sold the soul of his talent, by a First Things — i.e., Christian — blogger. Contains instructive illustrations of early v. late Kinkade, with this very droll takedown:

The first street scene was painted to capture a very specific place, San Francisco; the second scene was painted to capture a very different place, the consumer’s living room wall.

And thanks to Dexter, who Facebook’d this: Toddler caught on video, sipping a brewski at a Phillies’ game. Longsuffering Phillies fan Joe Queenan would have a very droll takedown line here, but my baseball knowledge falls short. Write your own.

So much for drinking responsibly: Is Smirnoff virally marketing binge drinking, or are there just a bunch of drunk dumbasses on the internet?

Off to study Russian.

A confession: Until Helen Thomas collected her belated gold watch yesterday, I wasn’t even sure who she was working for. Or, rather, “working” for. Her longtime employer, United Press International, doesn’t exist anymore as a wire service. (It’s a website. A pretty thin one, too.) Her wiki bio tells me she quit 10 years ago, after UPI was sold to the Moonies’ media arm, and at the time of her final disgrace this week was employed by Hearst Newspapers. As a columnist.

I had to look a while to find one of her columns; Google is understandably more interested in offering stories about her resignation. But I found one, in the Houston Chronicle. In it, she states that President Obama has a lousy record on press conferences. Here’s a sample:

You are considered a great communicator. So what’s the deal? You are surely well-primed on the issues and headlines of the day. Speeches and well-placed interviews won’t cut it. You should be quizzed.

Ah yes, the familiar “open letter” trope. It seems to have been a favorite:

Get real, Mr. President, cutting Social Security would be a break of trust with the American people.

Millions of Americans cannot live without their Social Security stipends. So don’t tamper with those monthly checks.

From February:

As shown by recent polls there is no question Obama has lost some popular ground because he has been making tough decisions — the difference he has found between campaigning and governing.

Some critics have contended that it was a mistake for the president to emphasize health reform instead of jobs creation in view of the nearly 10 percent unemployment rate. Obama now has made jobs the main focus of the administration.

And so on. Now you see the secret of too much Washington punditry, of almost all punditry: State the obvious, bolster with conventional wisdom, restate the obvious, knock off early. I have no idea what Hearst was paying her for this, but I’m sure it wasn’t that much. With Thomas, for both her and her employers, the point was Thomas, period. Her longevity. Her No. 1 seat in the press room. Her cranky questions. The pecking order of the White House press corps. She ended all press conferences by saying, “Thank you, Mr. President,” which was a tradition started by her UPI predecessor. (Yes, she had one.)

I was making my cop-shop rounds when I heard the news about Thomas, via two officers who were watching the story unfold on cable. I sat in the foyer, paging through the file, eavesdropping. One told the other he didn’t see why this was a story at all. “Everybody knows she’s a liberal,” he said, which goes to show what generations of paint-by-numbers Washington analysis gets you: A population that believes the Helen Thomas affair is somehow about, what? Bias? She’s a columnist. A columnist who isn’t biased isn’t worth reading. I’m still not sure why, exactly, she felt the need to retire so abruptly, except that she’s sort of embarrassing. She’s approaching her 90th birthday and apparently has nothing else to do but work. The only personal biographical detail I can find past her Detroit upbringing has her marrying at the age of 51, with widowhood following 11 years later. If you were her age, wouldn’t you like to hang out in the White House press room all day, waiting for the next round of cupcakes? I would.

And now she’s gone. I was struck by the picture of her in this story. I don’t know whether it’s sad or just an unflattering picture taken at an age when that’s the only kind most of us ever take. I think it’s the hair that bothers me, that Ronald Reagan shade of unnatural brown. I guess she’s free to let the gray grow out now. And say whatever she wants.

So.

The race to fill Mark Souder’s congressional seat is getting a little crowded. No fewer than 16 eager Republicans are clamoring to see who can say “we the people,” “values” and “stop the march toward socialism” louder than the next guy. One is a local TV news anchor — yet another member of the liberal media — who has taken a leave of absence to run. But Nance, I can hear you asking. Won’t this taint him and leave him unable to be an unbiased reporter, in much the same manner as Helen Thomas? No, silly. First of all, this is Indiana. Second, he’s only saying things like, “I will be a solid voice for Christian and conservative values in Northeast Indiana,” nothing about Palestine and Jews. And finally, he’s not a journalist at all.

Srsly. His website refers to his work as that of “a public figure.” Ahem:

While working as a public figure, I have fought for the rights of residents. …My work as a public figure allowed me to see how things work in our nation’s capital.

And so on. Well, that’s nice to know. Most of us who work in daily journalism wouldn’t call news anchors colleagues, anyway. It’s nice to see they’re on board with it, too.

Off to the gym, then work. Have a great Tuesday.

I’m starting to think having my hard drive melt down — which it didn’t, but it’s more easily understandable than “corrupted firmware update that cannot be repaired without a wipe and reformat” — is the best thing that’s happened to me this year, and it’s not because I have a lightning-fast new machine to play with. I’m reintroducing my backed-up data to the new machine slowly, and with careful consideration of each byte. I’m leaving a lot behind, especially in my web browsing.

For every lost bookmark, I’m finding the freedom to turn my back on 10 more, the distractions that helped me turn too many days into a why-didn’t-I-get-more-done trainwreck. My “blogs” bookmark folder now holds 12 URLs (and yes, yours is one of them). News is even smaller; for all the proliferation of news sources in recent years, I’m finding fewer and fewer worth reading.

I’m undecided over my beloved Idiots folder, and am considering trashing the whole thing. It was dwindling with maturity, which is to say, the older I get, the less willing I am to read people who bug me, just for the scab-picking pleasure of it. On the other hand, as an occasional creative writer, I find the doors some people leave open in the centers of their foreheads to be absolutely fascinating. The oil spill has Rod Dreher, whose life seems ruled by equal parts fear and superciliousness, worrying like one of those dogs that will eat off its own leg rather than endure a little itching. As naked glimpses at neurosis go, it’s hard to top, but is it worth the trouble?

We’ll see. I am dropping Lileks, however. Boring. Bossy? Maybe. Sweet Juniper? He’s in for sure; anyone who keeps getting better, I want to be there for. But the charge in all of these is to set the bar high. (And rely on RSS for people on the bubble.)

If it keeps me from frittering away the rest of the summer getting pissed off at something some moron said, it’s worth every penny:

How was your weekend? Mine was fine. Eastern Market early, riding the bike all over, and movie catch-up weekend, in which I took time to watch a few things piling up on the DVR and/or On Demand menus. Watched: “Frozen River,” “Cadillac Records,” “Lovely and Amazing.” Capsule reviews: Excellent, unwatchable, very fine. “Cadillac Records” received uneven reviews at the time, but were generally good, which only goes to show you…something about film critics. I was attracted by the cast; Adrien Brody is one of those actors who could make telephone-book reading interesting, or so I thought. He couldn’t save Leonard Chess, alas. Someone who’s seen it to the end, tell me: Are the Rolling Stones in any other scenes other than the one where they show up at Chess Records, tell Muddy Waters they named their band after one of his songs, and go jam a little? Alan Lomax blows through the first 10 minutes like a dust eddy, then blows out. People show up, announce their names and a few lines that might as well be subtitled, “I play a small but significant role in the popularization of southern blues in the 1940s, ’50s and ’60s, but sorry, I can’t stay onscreen very long, because Chuck Berry is right behind me.”

Here’s the problem with biopics: “Behind the Music” did it better, or shorter, anyway. Standard three-act screenplay structure makes every story too predictable. The early years, the meeting of the Significant Other/Manager/Collaborator, the meteoric rise, the betrayal/setback/fall, the epiphany, the comeback. I think projects like this are almost always overpraised, maybe because critics like the music. I certainly did, in “Cadillac Records.” Alan didn’t, but then, he’s got a hate-on for Beyoncé, who is referred to in our house as Bouncy. Once she shows up as Etta James, what had been just barely holding together simply fell apart.

“Frozen River,” now — that was something else. Excellent writing, excellent direction, both by the same person, Courtney Hunt. Absolutely nothing about it was anything you’d call “entertaining,” and yet, it was a great movie. Go figure. And God bless actors like Melissa Leo, who is unafraid to show her true face to the camera and is, against all odds, beautiful.

And “Lovely & Amazing,” now almost a decade old, was, like all of Nicole Holofcener’s work, great. I can’t wait to see what she does with Laura Lippman’s “Every Secret Thing.”

A little bloggage before I hop to Monday’s mania:

A lovely NYT piece about the artesian wells of central Indiana. A friend with a summer cottage in the U.P. gets his drinking water from a neighbor’s spring, and whenever I stayed with him, that was a weekly task — gathering a few gallon-size jugs and filling them. I wonder if it’s still flowing. Keeping commercial bottled-water interests out of Michigan has been an environmental crusade for some time now, in part to protect the aquifer, in part because bottled water is the stupidest fucking product since canned frosting.

The found poetry of Sarah Palin:

Great destiny, our destiny!
To be reached by—responsibly!
Developing our natural resources, this land,
Blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, and:
Oil and gas! It’s energy!

Finally, a sad story about a woman who fought the good fight in Detroit, and finally couldn’t fight anymore. A story that confirms the value of community policing, and of paying attention to small crimes before the people who commit them graduate to the bigger variety. Unfortunately, the city can’t even handle the big crime anymore. As I said: Sad.

Onward to a police-rounds tour via bicycle. Because my hair still looks good this morning, and needs a case of helmet head. Hope the week ahead is a good one for all.

The American Spectator, a publication which infamously spent itself and whatever intellectual capital it had on an Ahab-like pursuit of the Clintons, took the time today to congratulate Rush Limbaugh on the eve of his fourth marriage, the ceremony set for tomorrow.

The strength and attention span required to splutter over this, I lack at the moment. The latest sacrifice is a 33-year-old “party planner” in south Florida. There’s a job that didn’t exist when I was a youth, else I might have given it a whirl. I certainly planned plenty of parties, although in the spirit of generosity a good hostess requires, I’ll give you my secrets now: Concentrate on the guest list. The right people can make any kegger into a blowout. Whereas with the wrong people, even designer martinis and a naked-woman sushi buffet will fall flat. You don’t need a chocolate fountain if Coozledad has RSVP’d in the affirmative. (And tell him to bring some friends with him.)

Gawker, on the other hand, is approaching this event with the spiritual reverence it requires. They’ve rented a banner-towing plane to fly over his compound, and is asking readers to suggest what the banner should say. My favorite so far: Kathryn, what do you think of England?

Pals, I have reached the end of this week in my customary Friday head: Exhausted, but still with most of a day’s work to go. There are lots of good things to talk about today, so let’s get to it.

This WashPost story about Michele Bachmann gets right to a topic that’s bothered me for a while — how the fragmentation of news media has allowed certain people to build a national image and reputation entirely apart from mainstream media scrutiny. There’s a book in this, not a paragraph from a blog, but this profile is a glimpse at what I’m sure we’ll see in the near future — a presidential candidate who will campaign entirely apart from the networks and major newspapers, speaking only with friendly “journalists” on talk shows and cable-news channels. It might happen in 2012.

On the other hand, you see what happens when you do meet the mainstream media. They quote you accurately:

BP, already bedeviled by an out-of-control well spewing millions of gallons of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, now finds itself with one more problem: Tony Hayward, its gaffe-prone chief executive.

Among his memorable lines: The spill is not going to cause big problems because the gulf “is a very big ocean” and “the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.” And this week, he apologized to the families of 11 men who died on the rig for having said, “You know, I’d like my life back.”

Or this guy:

“We already got one raghead in the White House,” Knotts said. “We don’t need another in the Governor’s Mansion.”

And that is so totally unfair!

And with that, I’m outta here. Final verdict on yesterday: Yes, I popped for a new machine. The old one had corrupted firmware, and for a lot of reasons too boring to go into, I decided to start from scratch. The old one is being repaired, however, and once I get done scrubbing the grime off with a Mr. Clean Magic Eraser, will be gifted to a member of our household who is closing out the final days of the school year with a 4.0 average. We tell her her job is to be the best student she can be, and excellent job performance should be rewarded with bonuses. And now we’ll find out if she reads this blog, because my guess is, when I make this presentation on the last day of school, it will come as a total surprise.

Have a great weekend, all.