The city’s movers and shak­ers — cor­rect that, the city’s movers and shak­ers with school-age chil­dren — are mostly gone this week, leav­ing the city in the hands of the junior var­sity. It’s spring break, and around here, peo­ple don’t hang around wait­ing for the daf­fodils to make an appear­ance. They’re all on beaches through­out the warmer parts of the west­ern hemi­sphere, with a few odd skiers out in Col­orado. We, the thrifty and/or broke, look for less-expensive diver­sions to enter­tain our chil­dren on their hol­i­day. Pen­sacola? No, Michi­gan City! Yes, Indiana!

My neigh­bor Deb and I packed up a cooler of snacks and set three car seats abreast, then headed north and west to the shores of Lake Michi­gan, for its lures of shop­ping (big out­let mall) and nature (Indi­ana Dunes National Lakeshore). Those trav­el­ing with­out kids might throw gam­bling (Blue Chip Casino) into the mix, but when we out­lined our plan for vis­it­ing the casino — “You kids just sit here in the car, help your­self to some juice boxes and don’t talk to any secu­rity guards. Go to sleep when it gets dark and we’ll be out when we’re finished.” — amusingly enough the kids didn’t go for it. So we did the Gap Fac­tory Out­let, Hammer’s Pasta and Pizza (avoid, fel­low trav­el­ers!), the beach, the light­house and Mt. Baldy, a very big sand dune. As hol­i­days go, it wasn’t a bad one. The kids kept the back­seat bick­er­ing to a min­i­mum and squealed very appeal­ingly as they ran bare­foot around the windy beaches. They enjoyed the div­ing duck we saw at the light­house pier and climbed Mt. Baldy with few com­plaints, which is more than you could say about the adults, who wheezed like cheap accor­dions by the halfway point. That is a HILL, I tell you. You stand at the bot­tom and say, “Oh hell, I could do that on crutches,” and then you start up, and you stop to breathe at the halfway point and say, “Well, we’re halfway there,” and then the sec­ond half is basi­cally ver­ti­cal, and it’s sand,which means one step up four steps back, but some­how you climb to the top and it’s worth it. Even with the NIPSCO cool­ing tower off there in the dis­tance. It’s Lake Michi­gan. I’m a Mid­west­ern girl, and the Great Lakes impress me.

And then home. Not a bad day. Kate got four new dresses and a tank­ini out of the deal. How did I give birth to this girly-girl, who looks for­ward to sum­mer not for the outdoor-recreation activ­i­ties but because she can wear dresses every day? When we got home she put on a fash­ion show for her daddy, twirling around to show the action of the skirt. Work it, girl. She also loves her two-piece swim­suit, which she calls “a belly stick-out.”

Life’s funny wheel: I was in Michi­gan City with my friend and neigh­bor Deb. The city used to be home to my best friend, Deb. They have lots of other things in com­mon. Strange coincidences.

The won­der­ful Jon Car­roll is back from his month­long vaca­tion, and men­tioned he’d spent part of it read­ing “Moth­er­less Brook­lyn,” by Jonathan Lethem, which I read last month, too. (I so love being in sync with my heroes.) Any­way, if you didn’t believe me when I said it was a good book, take the con­sid­ered opin­ion of this San Fran­cisco colum­nist: It pur­ports to be a hard-boiled detec­tive story, and it ful­fills all the con­ven­tions of the genre, but it has a lot more on its mind than just solv­ing murders.

The hero is Lionel Ess­rog, an orphan from Brook­lyn who has Tourette’s syn­drome. The book is told from his point of view, which allows Lethem to explore Tourette’s from the inside. Lionel’s obses­sive word­play works as both char­ac­ter rev­e­la­tion and sub­text, a sort of invol­un­tary Greek cho­rus of Freudian slips, illu­mi­nat­ing the dark land­scape like flashes of lightning.

Yeah, that’s about right.

And I’m pretty tired. Let’s con­clude this lit­tle trav­el­ogue with a see-you-tomorrow. Upload. “Once and Again.” Snore.

Do you have the answers? I grabbed that still from “Blow” from the trailer on adcritic​.com. It’s a Quick­Time, but it’s lovely to watch and not pix­e­lated at all. It was a big file — 12 MB — but I want to know the magic involved. Why is it so gor­geous and my QTs are not? What’s the set­ting for gor­geous QTs?

Here’s another: Where would we be with­out our good friends? Nancy P. of Atlanta found this won­der­ful follow-up to the nation­ally tele­vised car chase in Atlanta a week ago. If you don’t have time to fol­low the link, the syn­op­sis is: If you’re a car dealer and really want to hype your expen­sive mod­els, get one stolen and chased on tele­vi­sion. The one-ton Chevy Sil­ver­ado pickup, which a car thief used to lead much of metro Atlanta’s finest on a 45-minute high-speed chase, is now a hot prop­erty. “The switch­board lit up” after the chase, from under­pow­ered motorists want­ing one just like it. The dealer expects to sell it waaay over invoice:

While (a sales­man) is sorry the whole thing hap­pened, he said the truck’s per­for­mance under pres­sure was admirable. “If you notice, while they tried to push him and spin him out, the tires held fast,” he said. I guess it’s not every day you can involve the police and a national cable chan­nel in your unpaid sales force. Is this a great coun­try, or what?

Yet another: Is Jesse Ven­tura crazy? After read­ing all the mate­ri­als con­nected to this dust-up, yet another tiny lit­tle mole­hill made moun­tain­ous by the Min­nesota gov­er­nor, I’m revis­ing my opin­ion. He’s not a peck­er­wood, he’s a crazy peck­er­wood. Again, for the time-challenged, the nut­shell is Jesse’s pissed again, at the Min­neapo­lis Star-Tribune’s out­doors writer for a Sun­day col­umn. That part is inside base­ball for the most part, but what’s fas­ci­nat­ing is the tran­script of a meet­ing between the writer, the staff and the Body. In it, the gov­er­nor leaves much of the heavy lift­ing to his staff, while he goes off on such weird tan­gents as this one:

Ven­tura: …when it comes to hunt­ing — I got your resume. You ever done mil­i­tary service?

Ander­son: I miss the con­nec­tion.

Uh, me too. He comes back to that theme three more times. Then he throws in a ref­er­ence to his wrestling career. Cov­er­ing this guy must be a laff riot. A friend sug­gests some of the governor’s erratic behav­ior may be tied to steroid abuse in his youth. Or maybe Mad Cow Dis­ease, from a high-protein train­ing table. Jesse Ven­tura — the Mad Cow canary in the coal mine!

Still more ques­tions: Is shav­ing Down There another cul­tural phe­nom­e­non I’ve missed out on by liv­ing in Mil­wau­kee? So writes Deb. I can report that yes, it is. All that pornog­ra­phy I scoped out last week had the hair­less pubis as a com­mon theme, and I was as hor­ri­fied as Deb was: The whole idea is too repul­sive for words. Think of the razor stub­ble you get on your CALVES, for God’s sake. Yes, exactly.

One more ques­tion: Is this a joke, or do Mus­lims really do this, too?

See you Monday.

It’s Spring Break this week, and kids are swing­ing from the trees all over the city. I took the dog on a Full Park power walk today, and ran across a lit­tle knot of them back in the woods. Mid­dle school­ers, it looked like, so of course I feared the worst. Your aver­age mid­dle schooler is capa­ble of both sleep­ing with teddy bears and huff­ing sol­vents; what would this group be doing? Smok­ing pot, giv­ing one another blow jobs or just hang­ing out. Answer: The lat­ter, along with some seri­ous bicy­cle acro­bat­ics. They’d gone to some trou­ble to craft a BMX course out of found objects in the woods, and had made a nice jump between two hillocks. One was lying in the gap tak­ing pic­tures as each one took his or her turn in flight. I admired his courage, as I’m sure sooner or later he got hit by a falling friend.

My edi­tor men­tioned see­ing the same thing in a dif­fer­ent venue not long ago, and the kid was crash­ing over and over, leap­ing up after each one to try again. My edi­tor, rid­ing in pain from a torn rota­tor cuff, which he suf­fered after a fairly rou­tine spill, was envi­ous. I know how he feels. It occurred to me today I couldn’t do a cart­wheel at gun­point. Maybe I should try one next time I’m back in the woods, just to be sure.

So it was with this vision fresh in my mind that I came home to dis­cover my child clomp­ing up and down the side­walk in her brand new Junior Rollerblades. Deb was buy­ing them for her own, and gra­ciously agreed to get a pair for her, too. She was attack­ing them with the phys­i­cal fear­less­ness of the preschooler, although to be sure, she was better-armored than Rus­sell Crowe in “Glad­i­a­tor.” She hasn’t really fig­ured out the glid­ing part yet, just stomps around and falls on her butt every 12 feet or so, but I sup­pose she’ll pick it up sooner or later. I grabbed the cam­corder and shot some footage, which has some con­ti­nu­ity prob­lems — the sun went behind a cloud and the tem­per­a­ture dropped mid­way through prin­ci­ple pho­tog­ra­phy, so we’ve got some jackets-on/jackets-off, shadows-and-light dis­crep­an­cies. I don’t care. I got what I needed, marched it inside and edited it while they played Bar­bies. The whole thing rang in at two min­utes, which I fig­ure is just about right.

It was a movie kinda day. I dis­cov­ered film­wise today, although I didn’t have much time to explore the site, only swing by its most mad­den­ing quiz, Invis­i­bles. Here’s the setup, which sounds like pathetic pornog­ra­phy, but isn’t: Basi­cally, an Invis­i­ble is a screen shot from a movie in which some or all of the actors have been com­pletely removed from their cloth­ing. It’s your job to fig­ure out what the movie is. This doesn’t mean naked actors, only empty suits cre­ated by Pho­to­shop whizzes. I think I got ONE cor­rect answer. Is some­one paid to do this? Amazing.

Speak­ing of which, I also found this, a set of dirty pic­tures with the fig­ures removed. This was fas­ci­nat­ing, as I’m as fond of exam­in­ing back­grounds in pho­tos as I am the osten­si­ble sub­jects of the pic­tures. Check out the bed­side lamp in this one. I think my grand­mother had one like that.

I hope this link works, too. It’s a tran­script of some­thing I heard on NPR this week­end. Their search engine is unbear­ably slow, but “Call­ing Dante’s Inferno” made me laugh.

I have to sign off early. There’s Lieu­tenant Fancy’s farewell on the barely breath­ing “NYPD Blue,” plus I have to write the Arts United let­ter. The less said about that, the bet­ter. So I’ll say no more.

Until tomor­row.

So Alan goes in late on Mon­days, and on this par­tic­u­lar Mon­day “Today” had given way to the 9 a.m. hour of chat/Judge Judy/etcetera. Alan had cho­sen chat — Regis and ol’ what’s-her-name. This morning’s musi­cal guest was a reggae/rap fusion artist named Shaggy. “Talk about a cul­ture clash,” Alan said, spec­u­lat­ing what a nation of Celine Dion fans was think­ing of Shaggy’s tune, which included the line, “You stood by me dur­ing my incar­cer­a­tion.” (No, I don’t know what the rhyme was.) Sort of like when the Stones played Ed Sul­li­van. Even as a young’un, I recall think­ing, huh?

Or it could be that Alan’s the one with a cul­tural dis­con­nect. Someone’s buy­ing all those records.

But what­ever his or our dis­con­nect with the world of hip-hop, it’s not as severe as the Jour­nal Gazette’s, which had a piece in Sun­day advanc­ing a con­cert by the Baha Men. The Baha Men, you may or may not know, hail from the Bahamas. So what did they Jour­nal call them through­out, includ­ing in the head­line? Bohemian.

Did our self-appointed local media critic pick up on this, the way he pounces on the slight­est mis­pro­nun­ci­a­tion by a weather per­son (who is, after all, doing an extended impro­vi­sa­tional ad lib)? Nah. Guess the head­line wasn’t big enough. Speak­ing of media crit­i­cism: Dr. Laura was can­celled, finally. I’m shocked she hung on this long, as her show was par­tic­u­larly mer­ci­less in cap­tur­ing her essen­tial per­son­al­ity, described by an LA Weekly writer as hav­ing “all the warmth of a staph infection.”

Today was the first busi­ness day of Day­light Sav­ing Time in the rest of the civ­i­lized world. Here, it’s always East­ern Stan­dard Time, which meant this was the first day of adjust­ing to the new pace of things. It will take approx­i­mately a week or more to set­tle in. I can read the Jon Car­roll col­umn ear­lier, watch TV ear­lier. I won’t be see­ing “King of the Hill” until Octo­ber, because it’s on at the for­merly inconvenient/now impos­si­ble hour of 6:30 p.m. Sun­day. But I’ll catch more Let­ter­man. At least until it’s warm and light enough to start the 5:30 a.m. exer­cise thing again. Frankly, I’m look­ing for­ward to it. I got a 10-mile ride in today after work and felt great. The labored huff­ing I suf­fered Sat­ur­day was not in evi­dence. I was the wind. All you skaters, just step aside.

I for­got to men­tion Fri­day afternoon’s enter­tain­ment. I was flip­ping around look­ing for news and stopped on Fox, which was cov­er­ing a car chase live. In Atlanta. The per­pe­tra­tor was not a mur­derer, rapist or other dangerous-to-humanity felon, but … a car thief. This went on for about 20 min­utes. Appar­ently the think­ing was, we’ve got the tech­nol­ogy. Let’s run with it. So a nation­wide cable chan­nel gave over a third of an hour to a story that might not even have made Page One in Atlanta. They report. You … go figure.

An enter­tain­ing e-mail exchange today with a reg­u­lar cor­re­spon­dent who checks in often, but who shall remain name­less because he might be job-hunting soon, and God knows what a search engine might find. We were talk­ing about drugs: I always love it when I’m around a bunch of guys, and they’re com­plain­ing about how fucked up their past rela­tion­ships were. I tell them “I can top all of them”, and then sit back and lis­ten to their lit­tle geek sto­ries. Then, when it’s time, I pull out about the girl in New Orleans that slowly went from casino black­jack dealer to crack user to crack head to turn­ing a trick with a dealer IN MY HOUSE IN MY BED for some rock. I then col­lect my bets and the con­ver­sa­tion continues.

That girl is in the same place as the guy who played the father on “Alf,” cap­tured today on the cover of the National Enquirer suck­ing on the glass dick, appar­ently on home video. (“Hey, you brought a cam­era? Great! Let me get out my crack pipe and you can get some pic­tures!”) Same as Robert Downey Jr. Same as Daryl Straw­berry, work­ing to see what will kill him first, drugs or can­cer. Mean­while my very own con­gress­man called a man who tes­ti­fied before his sub­com­mit­tee, who’s try­ing to get med­i­c­i­nal mar­i­juana for can­cer and AIDS patients, “evil.” It’s a pub­lic health prob­lem, folks. Deal.

Yeah, I think these are the col­ors I’m look­ing for. Not coin­ci­den­tally, they’re the ones J.C. came up with when he first drafted this site back in Octo­ber of last year. It took him about as long as it took me to walk the dog around the block. That’s why he’s a highly paid graphic artist/computer whiz, and I’m just a word per­son. But I’m get­ting bet­ter at this GoLive stuff — I could prob­a­bly whip up a site like this fairly quickly now, although I lack the artist’s eye of the Burns boy. Alan has it, too (although he cares so lit­tle about this site, he isn’t about to help design it).

A rare non-manic week­end. The secret is plan­ning; also, don’t do any­thing. Laun­dry was wrapped up Fri­day, which left Sat­ur­day free for a 10-mile bike ride, hair­cut and color, gro­cery power shop and ran­dom relax­ation. That sounds like a lot on paper, but really, it was the bare min­i­mum. The bike ride set the tone for a week­end of self-loathing — I’m so out of shape, I dis­gust myself. After writ­ing Fri­day on the prob­lem of child­hood obe­sity, I decided it was time for a lit­tle work on the per­sonal front. I wore my heart-rate mon­i­tor, and was appalled at how eas­ily I moved into the high side of the anaer­o­bic range — in other words, how eas­ily my heart got into “stop, stop, I can’t take any more” ter­ri­tory. Ugh. The hair­cut fol­lowed, a guilty plea­sure for a mil­lion rea­sons. Allow me to name but two: No kid and In Style mag­a­zine. I love In Style, although I wouldn’t admit that to any­one but YOU, dear reader. I love any mag­a­zine with let­ters to the edi­tor like this:

Thanks so much for the cover story on Andie Mac­Dow­ell! She’s been a favorite of mine ever since “Greystoke,” and it was so won­der­ful to see both her beau­ti­ful house and the look of hap­pi­ness on her face in the GORGEOUS pic­tures. How great to see this gifted and tal­ented actress get the recog­ni­tion she deserves!

The issue I read wasn’t a reg­u­lar one; it was the spe­cial edi­tion on makeovers. I learned that I’m hope­lessly out of date. For one thing, I have pubic hair. Very last year. In Style told me that on my next trip to NYC, I should visit such-and-such salon, where all the Sports Illus­trated swim­suit mod­els go “not for the bikini wax, but to go COMPLETELY BARE!” Sorry, no. I don’t care if you can wear a bathing suit with­ough adjust­ing it, and that it improves oral sex for both par­ties. The day I pay a per­fect stranger to slather hot wax on my yoni and then rip out all the hairs by the roots is the day … well, that day won’t come. The most I might con­sider is a lit­tle laser work on the fringes. And I’d have to be extremely drunk. Laser hair salons don’t exist next door to tat­too par­lors, so I guess that’s out, too. But really — can you imag­ine such a thing? When peo­ple talk about it improv­ing sex, I have the same thought as when some­one touts tongue pierc­ings as just the thing for enhanced fel­la­tio. Which is: What’s wrong with reg­u­lar, hairy sex? And plain old fel­la­tio? Gen­tle­men, look deep into your con­science, and make this admis­sion: The day you feel the need for enhanced fel­la­tio is the day you need to admit you’re jaded and corrupt.

Old joke: What does a man say after the worst blow job of his life? Man, that was great.

Found this site Sat­ur­day — Apple’s iMovie gallery, where reg­u­lar old iMovie users, many of whom appar­ently do this sort of thing for a liv­ing, sub­mit their DV movies to show the rest of the broadband-gifted world. I watched half a dozen and quickly real­ized I’m at least as good as these folks, so I pointed them to “Trick or Treat” (you can find the link on the links page, if you have the con­nec­tion to sit through a 7MB down­load) and am eagerly await­ing the ver­dict. This site was big med­i­cine, because if there’s one thing I’ve been crav­ing since I started doing this stuff, it’s a basis of com­par­i­son. I’ve even con­tem­plated start­ing an iMovie users group here in F.W., although it’s fairly low on my to-do list. One of the movies I watched was scenes of the 2000 St. Patrick’s Day parade in Chicago, a flawed effort but proof of what I’ve come to think of as Adrian Lyne’s Rule: When in doubt, go to the sound­track. It used a John Hiatt song I haven’t heard in a while (and had noth­ing to do with St. Patrick’s Day), which sent me on a John Hiatt kick this week­end. I love John Hiatt. I know I’m a big fat tar­get for what he’s sell­ing, but I don’t care. Wade, if you see him in the gro­cery, kiss him for me, and thank him for “Slow Turning.”

Got the gar­den going Sat­ur­day too. Damn the weather. If those god­damn peas freeze in the ground, then so be it. We planted some sugar snaps, a patch of “Cal­i­for­nia mesclun blend” let­tuce and greens, and a cou­ple rows of spinach. Kate helped. She touches worms with­out fear — that’s my girl. Evi­dently she and her dad went to get some top­soil while I was being coiffed. “We went to the dirt store, mommy,” she told me. “And we got cow poop, too. Do you know what dirt is? Cow poop!” I didn’t know that. Today she helped me make a cherry pie, yelling all the while that I should just leave her alone and let her do it her­self, includ­ing heft­ing the bowl of fill­ing, about five or six pounds of cher­ries, Pyrex and poten­tial mess on the floor. “Kate, I’m the teacher here, and you’re the stu­dent. Let me help you,” I said. “NO!” she replied. God, I see a bad moon ris­ing on adolescence.

In response to pop­u­lar demand, I’m start­ing an archive tomor­row. Actu­ally, it’s up today, but all it has in it is a dupli­cate of what you just read. I’m unsure how I’m going to struc­ture it — sug­ges­tions, anyone? — but there’ll be some way you can read pre­vi­ous mate­r­ial if you miss a day or three. The Jan­u­ary, Feb­ru­ary and March archives aren’t up there yet, but April will be pre­served for posterity.

Talk about your great leaps forward.