I’ve lived in open-primary states all my life — first Ohio, then Indiana, now Michigan — and have been immersed in GOP Nation for so long that I can’t remember when voting wasn’t complicated. To vote offensively, or defensively? How strategic does my ballot need to me? Vote for someone, or against someone else?

We have a primary coming up in just under a couple weeks. There are a few interesting races on the table, and apparently I’m not the only one who’s strategizing.

Our state house district is reliably Republican, but no longer a lead-pipe cinch. Six Republicans and four Democrats are running for the seat opened by a term-limited exit. Normally I’d vote in the Republican primary, just for that feeling of not being disenfranchised, but the U.S. congressional seat is in play, and that one’s more interesting.

The current occupant is the Detroit mayor’s mother, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, an imperious, high-handed dame who behaves as though the seat was bequeathed to her by God. Unfortunately, her son’s problems have many suburbanites slavering to punish him by booting his mom from office — at least, if I’m reading the sudden appearance of yard signs for her opponent, Mary Waters, along such unlikely thoroughfares as Lake Shore Road in Grosse Pointe.

Here’s Waters’ TV ad, with Mrs. K’s famous meltdown of a couple summers back.

And here’s how the mayor is greeted in his hometown by a crowd of hockey fans, certainly a heavily suburban crowd. This is a fairly restrained response, based on what I’ve heard in private conversations.

Today brings fresh outrage for the ‘burbs: The mayor’s being investigated for allegedly shoving a sheriff’s deputy, who was trying to serve a subpoena on his good friend Bobby Ferguson. This happened at the home of the mayor’s sister, who is married to Bobby’s cousin, and yes, others have noted that nepotism seems to be a theme with these folks.

Anyway, I’m not sure which ballot I’ll request. It depends on whether the Republican spot for the state House seat looks to be in serious play. I don’t think it is — I think it’s going to a nice blonde lady whose qualifications include “in line to be the first female commodore of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club.” Oh, how nice. Meanwhile, Kilpatrick and Waters “sparred,” as they say, on a local public-affairs show last weekend, and the former sneered to the latter, “You couldn’t carry my bra.” And people wonder why I like living here.

Of course, it would help if one of the weeklies would cover the race, but they’re too busy covering a new swimming pool opening. (Headline: Splish, splash! Zero-entry pool opens)

Dunno if you non-subscribers can read this, but there’s an interesting piece in the WSJ today announcing the “end of the Reagan Revolution,” i.e., a return of government regulation. After a bellyful of Chinese lead, the mortgage-and-banking fiascos, collapsing freeway bridges and various other train wrecks, voters are saying, “You know, maybe the endlessly creative marketplace isn’t the best overseer for this stuff.” And I know you can read this AP piece about the same issue, in tighter focus:

WASHINGTON - One of the worst outbreaks of foodborne illness in the U.S. is teaching the food industry the truth of the adage, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.”

The industry pressured the Bush administration years ago to limit the paperwork companies would have to keep to help U.S. health investigators quickly trace produce that sickens consumers, according to interviews and government reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The White House also killed a plan to require the industry to maintain electronic tracking records that could be reviewed easily during a crisis to search for an outbreak’s source. Companies complained the proposals were too burdensome and costly, and warned they could disrupt the availability of consumers’ favorite foods.

The apparent but unintended consequences of the lobbying success: a paper record-keeping system that has slowed investigators, with estimated business losses of $250 million. So far, nearly 1,300 people in 43 states, the District of Columbia and Canada have been sickened by salmonella since April.

When we were in Cali, garden to the U.S., this was a very big story. Tomato growers were worried about losing their shirts while investigators tried to find the needle in the haystack. Meanwhile, consumers refused to buy tomatoes, restaurants pulled them from their menus and the nation twiddled its thumbs. Good thing the availability of our favorite foods wasn’t disrupted.

OK. Friends, I am looking out the window at what appears to be a lovely day. Time to exercise the Freelancer’s Option, and go enjoy it. Good weekends to all.

Talked to a couple of old friends in the past few days. One recently had a hysterectomy, and it went well. She described the moment when the doctor came in to her hospital room and announced she could be released, just as soon as the surgical packing was removed from her vagina — gauze, mostly.

“You know that trick where the magician pulls out a long string of scarves, and it just goes on and on and on?” she said. “It was like that, only grosser.”

The other one told a few stories about her work life, which are the best stories ever. I’d pay money to see her one-woman show someday, and maybe I will. If you want to collect good stories about people, don’t bother becoming a bartender. Become a house cleaner instead. Better stories. One of my editors used to say a mailman knew more about your life than any other stranger who touched it. I say it’s your house cleaner, who knows the state of your marriage from the remains of your romantic dinners for two, and certainly by the number of votive candles arrayed around your bathtub. This friend used to clean empty houses for Realtors, and could tell the ethnicity of the former owners with astonishing accuracy:

“Asians lived there,” she said. “Long black hairs in the bathroom, lots of spilled rice in the pantry.” Indians left behind cooking smells, and favored certain paint colors. (White folks like neutrals.)

The best story she told me was about a lovely house in an upscale suburban area that one of her clients picked up very very cheap. It had been trashed, she said, by the previous owner’s children. It seemed that one day mom ran off with her boyfriend and moved to a faraway state. Then, a few months later, dad accepted a job in another distant city. When the teenage children, who were entering their junior and senior year of high school, objected to the relocation, he said, “OK, you kids can live here until you finish school. You’re old enough to take care of yourselves. I’ll send you some money. Bye.” You can imagine what happened: It became party central, a cushy crash pad for every local kid who needed a place to drink, get high or get laid. And over time, no doubt egged on by the effectively orphaned tenants, the place was very nearly destroyed — they threw cans of house paint out the window onto the driveway to see what it would look like, let the pool go back to nature, wrecked the furniture and carpets, punched holes in the walls and so on. Rehabbing it was a six-figure job, and it was practically a new house to begin with.

That should be a movie, don’t you think? The most interesting stories are be-careful-what-you-wish-for stories.

I have the bestest friends.

Bloggage:

My new rock-star husband, Don Was — yes, Rodney Crowell, while I will always love you, it’s all over between us — was in the Metro Times last week. I missed the show he was promoting, The Don Was Detroit Super Session, and yes I am kicking myself. But he’s so generous in his interviews, which is one reason I love him. They just go on and on and on, and he says so many interesting things. I bring this up because we were talking about the Jill Sobule album-financing deal a while back, and lo, guess what happened:

MT: Other than the Todd Snider project, do you have anything else major coming up?

WAS: Well, just before that, I finished an album with Jill Sobule. She did the original “I Kissed A Girl,” but she shouldn’t be judged on that. She’s a really deep songwriter — both funny and profound. She has a devoted fan base, and she had a “telethon” on her website where fans could contribute as little as $18, for which they got a T-shirt and an early download of the album. For $10,000 — which some people actually bought — you got the hyper-platinum package which allowed you to come and sing background vocals on the album. And she raised $85,000 in about three weeks. Then we made that album — recorded and mixed it — in less than two weeks. Same basic principle. And, you know, there’s just, something about it – that immediacy.

And also in the Metro Times, one of the Starbucks that’s closing is the one on Jefferson in Detroit. Alas, it was beloved by someone other than the usual nobodies:

Long before Renee Zellweger’s brief marriage to country “singer” Kenny Chesney, long before Jack White married model Karen Elson while floating down a Brazilian river, the movie star and the rock star were, as your grandparents might have called ‘em, an item. Zellweger spent much time in Detroit, in fact, which was a shocker to us regular folk who spotted her wandering about in supermarkets and dining in restaurants like someone who is, as she calls herself, “just kind of normal”… “Oh, yeah,” she says, drawing the “yeah” out with a few extra vowels. “I’d like to say hi to my friends at the Starbucks on Jefferson. Nice guys.”

A little housekeeping: I’m now on Twitter, as NNall. Like Facebook, I don’t quite get it, but maybe I can figure it out.

The Starbucks closing list is now public, and I’m pleased to see our local isn’t on it. I’m generally pleased with Starbucks, except when I am not. I won’t rehash all the standard bitching about the mermaid, because it doesn’t matter; Starbucks introduced dark roasts to much of America, and give them that at the very least. If it’s much more difficult to palm off a watery brown tincture as something worth your $1.25, then they’ve done the world a service.

Of course there’s a downside. I saw it last week in the Las Vegas airport, on a short layover when all I wanted was a great big cuppa strong black coffee, and got stuck in line behind the eight pickiest people in the world. When one opened with, “I’d like two tall skinny soy lattes, one just a tad cooler than the other,” I threw up my hands and sought out a fast-food place down the row.

Once upon a time America drank coffee. And America was strong. An America that drinks tall skinny soy lattes — one just a tad cooler than the other — is an America that is, dare I say, French.

Ah, well. I have bigger fish to fry today. Picked up the dog yesterday, and could feel his bones poking through his coat. He’d been off his feed most of the week, the vet said. OK, can’t blame him — abandonment in one’s dotage is probably grounds for a hunger strike. Since he’s gotten home, he’s done nothing but eat. And then sometime last night, he got up and pooped on the dining room floor. Which is either the beginning of the end, or just evidence of a senior citizen’s discombobulated constitution. I’m going with the latter. Poor old man. In seven weeks, he’ll be 17. Deaf, mostly blind, but still swingin’.

Speaking of dogs, let’s swing into some tasty bloggage today with one I’ve been carrying around a while. I don’t know how many of you read the NYT’s magazine cover story weekend before last, the one on psychotropic pharmaceuticals for pets, but it made me laugh so hard I nearly had my own dining-room accident:

Aggression is a feline problem too. A few weeks after visiting Dodman, I went to the home of a man in West Los Angeles whose pet was on Prozac. The owner, Doug, asked me not to use his last name because he didn’t want business associates to know about what he called his “cougar psycho little miniature stalker” — Booboo the cat.

Booboo was apparently poisoned by an unfortunate dried-flower-eating incident, which led to the onset of, I dunno, catzophrenia:

From then on Booboo was different. He would periodically ambush Doug. Over time, Doug noticed that attacks were more likely if he smelled at all abnormal — for instance, if he had been near a woman wearing perfume — so he would take a shower after coming home and then change into his designated cat-wrangling outfit.

…Doug led me up the stairs in his house to the second floor. He donned a pair of khakis that he had lined with heavy-gauge ballistic nylon and washed up because he had shaken hands with me. He crept toward the master bedroom, where Booboo was permanently quarantined behind a door that had been remounted to swing outward to facilitate quick escapes by Doug. “Just behind this door lurks the Tasmanian devil,” Doug said before slipping inside. I squatted at ground level and watched through a transparent doggy door. The 400-square-foot room had a walk-in closet, a four-poster bed and a floor-to-ceiling view of Beverly Hills mansions dotting a scenic canyon. The suite belonged entirely to Booboo, though Doug said he was now able to sleep over a few nights a week. Booboo slinked past the window and gave me a steady gaze. He had a tuxedo coat, mostly black but with patches of white on his feet, underbelly and forehead. Doug scooped him up and they nuzzled face to face. “He’s just warm, soft and fuzzy, and he purrs, and he’s cuddly,” he murmured.

The theme of the story: These critters wouldn’t need all these drugs if we, their owners, weren’t quite so crazy ourselves. Good reading.

Those who can get back to the land, do. Those who can’t, delegate. Another reason to hate California foodies:

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden? That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves. Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

Here’s a story that’s been getting some play here of late, about a Michigan woman who escaped from prison in 1976 (drug charges), went straight, assumed a new identity and was found 30 years later living the good life in the suburbs of San Diego. The question is, of course, how do you treat a self-rehabilitated soccer mom whose original crime was non-violent but whose escape from custody remains unpunished? As one, the howl goes up in Michigan: Send her back to prison, for a very very very long time!

I am not among those howling. Of course she deserves punishment; the state has to do something. But jailing her again seems pointless, and what’s more, I know of a punishment that will a) hurt; b) hit her where she lives; and c) help the state of Michigan. Among many other things. And it is? Ahem. Fine her.

Fine her big. If her family wants her on the outside so bad, make them pay a hearty sum. Half a million, say. Or more. Why is this so hard? You’re welcome. Just call me Solomon.

Off to the gym, which I am dreading.

There’s a church here. You probably have a church. If you’re like most Americans, somewhere in your church you hear the phrase “Father, son and Holy Spirit.” In church here, they say, “Organic, humane and sustainable.”

It’s sort of annoying; I think food should nourish, not polish your ego. But it makes for some tasty lunches. Yesterday: Cheese from Cowgirl Creamery, bread from the Acme Bread Company, sausage from some place next door, wine ditto, chocolate ditto. We ate it on the observation deck overlooking the bay, outside the Ferry Building:

(There was supposed to be a photo here, but like I said: Our internet connection is spotty and imperfect. Couldn’t upload to Flickr.)

I don’t mean to clog up your time with these updates, which aren’t that interesting. But I needed an entry to hang this bit of bloggage on, which is worth clicking through just to see the picture: Internet sting nets ‘World’s Greatest Dad’.

Off to Monterey today.

Every so often Lance Mannion mines his old notebooks for blog entries. Well, I don’t have old notebooks, but I do have NN.C. I started this site in part because it would require me to write something every day, to keep a journal of sorts, to keep a notebook in one form or another. So here’s something I turned up in my search for the Dexter column yesterday. Be glad you don’t know me in real life, for I am, apparently, insufferable.

This is from February 7, 2002:

Yesterday one of our neighbor’s kids stopped by. Middle-schooler, collecting information for a school paper on peregrine falcons.

“There’s been a peregrine falcon in our neighborhood,” he said.

“No way,” I told him. “Not around here. You’re almost certainly confusing it with a hawk. Red-tailed, Cooper’s, one of those. They’re big, they look like falcons.”

He insisted it was a peregrine. I insisted it couldn’t be. We had a short argument over whether they roost in trees in populated areas. I suspected I was putting him off, so I told him he ought to check out the Raptor Chapter, a non-profit that does rehabilitation on injured birds of prey. “Do you have the number?” he asked. I invited him in while I fetched the phone book. Alan walked in at this point. “Connor here thinks he’s seen a peregrine falcon in the neighborhood,” I said. “No way,” he said. Etc., etc. “Besides, they’re migratory,” I said. “They’re on the coasts at this time of year.” Connor said they weren’t. “I think you’d better check your research,” I told him.

Alan wondered what I was doing with the phone book. “I’m looking up the Raptor Chapter number for him.”

“The Raptor Chapter? They didn’t have the permits! The duck dicks shut her down,” Alan said.

“Shut her down? Janie? When?” I said.

“While back,” he said. “Of course we ran a couple paragraphs inside, after all that stuff we’ve been writing about her all these years.”

At this point I looked at Connor, who appeared somewhat dazed, no doubt thinking, Why the hell did I ring the doorbell of these lunatics? “I have a field guide, if you’d like to check it,” I said, gently. “Or you could call the Indiana DNR. They have lots of information. Guy name of John Castrale runs the peregrine reintroduction program.”

Finally, the thought occurred to me: “Why did you stop by, Connor?”

“I wanted to ask if you’d seen the falcon,” he said.

“Uh, no,” I said. And with that, he left. If I could have that five minutes to live over, I’d do it differently.

Bloggage:

I have a friend who works in TV news here, and whenever I bitch about the pathetic journalism — and fourth-rate star power — of local anchors, he rolls his eyes and give me a jaded, what-can-you-do look. However, I think even he would be appalled by news of a Detroit news anchor participating in a crooked deal between a sludge treatment company and the city council, and I hope on behalf of journalists everywhere, this paragraph made his eyes pop out:

Stinger, who joined Fox 2 as an investigative reporter in 1997 and became an anchor in 2004, was paid about $325,000 a year by Fox 2 Detroit in 2005, according to divorce records.

Actually, as TV-news anchors are paid — she anchored the morning news show — this is pocket change. All to look pretty. No wonder every Miss America contestant wants that gig.

Kids these days. Adults these days. Sheesh.

Early exit this morning — it’s back to the gym for mommy.

If you haven’t seen this, you gotta see this:

He quit rather than lower flag for Helms.

I’ve spent so much time on this blog complaining about other columnists, I should probably send a little love to the good ones. So indulge me:

Who are your favorite columnists, Nance?

There have been many over the years. I always liked Mike Harden, although he was sometimes uneven. (As are all columnists.) Carl Hiaasen had some gems, but was mostly Florida-centric, and so the bulk of his newspaper work was lost on me. Dave Barry, of course, but only in the early, funny ones. (That’s a joke.) Gene Weingarten. But through it all there was one guy I read religiously. His weekly column moved on the wire on Mondays, and I would actually wait for it, start checking around the time it usually moved, be sad if it wasn’t on time.

Pete Dexter.

Dexter is sort of famous in journalism circles. He wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News when that paper was unique among American newspapers, a tabloid with a real sense of humor about itself, and I guess he wrote your typical big-city newspaper column. Then he fell in with Randall “Tex” Cobb, whom most of you know as the evil biker in “Raising Arizona,” and the two of them got into a pretty serious bar fight. As Wikipedia tells the tale [citation needed]:

(Dexter) began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in which thirty drunken Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats and upset by a recent column, beat the writer severely.

Now that’s what you call reader feedback.

Anyway, Dexter spent a lot of time in the hospital, and then recovering at home, and somewhere along the line he relocated to Sacramento and then to Seattle, and there were novels and screenplays and a National Book Award, and this is about the time I started reading him. I think the first piece was in the mid-’80s, for Playboy, about a guy at the Philadelphia Inquirer who rebelled against being screwed over by management. He did so by erecting a puppet theater on his desk, and every so often a new puppet would appear that bore a strong resemblance to a top editor at the Inquirer. He arranged them in tableaux; my favorite was one where all the puppets knelt before the editor puppet. The Inquirer was, of course, a Knight-Ridder paper, and I was at another K-R property, one where the BS skills were quite as well-honed as they were in Philly, but I recognized it the way I do my own bedroom. It was a perfectly told story of life in a certain sort of newsroom at a certain sort of time, and I fell in love.

Anyway, over the years, Dexter wrote some of my favorite columns ever, but the best of them all was about Mike Tyson after one of the Holyfield losses, a grand tale of tragedy rendered in 650 words or so, and I’ve been waiting years to see it anthologized. Just the other day I learned that Dexter’s had an anthology out for a solid year and a half, and boy do I feel dumb. So I rush down to the library and get a copy, only to flip it open and discover there’s no table of contents, no index, no division by (or even acknowledgment of) publication, no nothing. The first column is 1 and the last one is 82, and if I’m going to find Mike Tyson, I’m going to have to start at the beginning and read right through to the end, and…

…OK. I’m starting to see the reasoning here.

But I have a bad feeling. I have flipped and flipped and flipped through “Paper Trails,” and Tyson’s name hasn’t jumped out at me. Neither has the word “puppet.”

A few years ago, I went into the Sacramento Bee archive (Dexter’s home base at the time) and bought the Tyson column, and ran it here on the blog, a total copyright violation, for which I received the following angry response from the paper’s lawyers: Silence. No one reads this blog.

But I noticed something. I had that column printed out and pinned to a wall in my cubicle at work, and whenever I felt in need of inspiration I’d take it like a vitamin, so after a while I got to know its phrasing pretty well. And when I saw the SacBee version, something was different. He’d described the people who flocked around Tyson after his success as “pimps, whores and gangsters,” a phrase some helpful editor recast as “men.” But remember: It’s the internet that’s killing newspapers.

[Long pause.]

OK, this is going to bug me all day. I just went into my hard-copy archives — the CD-ROM backups I did of this site back before it was a blog — and found the file on the first try. Here was the edited phrase:

By the time he went away, Tyson had replaced D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney with an assembly of men who are there to this day and will be there as long as the smell of money is in the air.

That’s a real copy-editor’s trim, that. You can sit with one all day and explain how “D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney” and “pimps, whores and gangsters” are parallel phrases, that they match rhythmically, that making this change is like playing “shave and a haircut” and then “fifteen dollars and forty-three cents, plus applicable taxes.” They don’t hear it. All they hear is some supervising editor dressing them down because an old lady called and is canceling her subscription after needing her smelling salts. Also, one of the pimps, whores or gangsters might sue.

Rant over.

Anyway, this is what I’ll be reading on the plane.

Bloggage:

Things I just learned: Coozledad has a blog! (Suggestion: Disable the SnapShots preview. Irritating.)

However, I think we have a job for Coozledad’s bull: U.S. exports cigarettes, bras, bull semen to Iran. I had a neighbor in Fort Wayne who bought bull semen, to inseminate his herd of comely Black Angus heifers. It arrived in straws frozen in liquid nitrogen, sometimes transported by a pretty vet student from MSU, and if you’re thinking that’s the setup for a dirty movie, why shame on you.

I’ve lived so long, I remember how Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen met. (She sent a nude photo of herself to his hotel room. How romantic.) So I guess it’s not surprising she would have a boob job on live national television. In Germany. During prime time. I guess they don’t have HBO there yet.

Off to do paying work. Enjoy your lovely summer day, if you have one.

The other day I was listening to a story on NPR, about people stuck driving the guzzliest gas guzzlers, and what they were doing about it. I was struck by one man’s interview. He drove a Ford Excursion, the biggest SUV evahr, the station-wagon equivalent of an F-350 SuperDuty pickup truck. The man explained that he needed an extra-large vehicle; he and his wife had five children between them, “so we had no choice” but to buy the Excursion.

Five plus two is seven. That’s how many seats he needed. By my reckoning, that means he could have chosen just about any minivan, and a large number of other SUVs with third-row seating, nearly all of which get better gas mileage than the Excursion. But he had no choice.

Of course, as all adults know, there’s always a choice. It’s just difficult to make sometimes. For instance, yesterday I could have chosen to have something lean and protein-y and vegetable-heavy for lunch, but instead I had a cheese quesadilla. Then I had two Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies for dessert. If only it had been mandatory, but it was a choice. Some of you are feeling smug and superior, the same way I felt about Mr. Excursion. If it makes you feel any better, I went fiber-heavy for dinner (black beans) and took a long bike ride in penance. That was a choice, too.

I hate choices. I especially hate the way they’ve become the behavioral equipment of fiber. Been in an elementary school lately? “Make good choices” is the new “eat from all four food groups.” Earlier this year Kate was scolded by a teacher for the following: A boy threw down a book, and it took a funny bounce and hit a girl in the leg. She gave out a loud, cartoon-y howl of pain, hopping around on one foot, and Kate laughed. Laughing, the teacher said, was “a poor choice.” I wonder what George Carlin would do with that one.

We rail about wanting more control over our world, which means more choices. And then the vacuum cleaner dies, and we go to Sears. First we choose a price range, then we choose a brand, then we choose bagless or not, onboard tools or not, upright or canister, until our heads spin and we howl with pain and go eeny-meeny-miney-moe. There have been times, while buying a household appliance, that I wished I lived in the old Soviet Union. I would have happily gotten on a list and stood in line for five hours if, at the other end of the line, there was one vacuum cleaner, and the choice was: Take it or leave it.

Grumble, grumble.

OK, bloggage:

A particularly smelly Metro Mayhem today: Boy, 1, shot during fight over glasses. Eyeglasses, that is. (Huge, heavy sigh.) And they were probably knockoffs.

Christopher Hitchens speaks ill of the dead, and boy did they deserve it. Jesse Helms, of course.

Oh, and if you have time, prepare to waste it now: Look at what everyone’s uploading to Flickr, in real time, on a rotating globe. Don’t blame me when nothing gets done. (HT: Vince.)

Now, I choose to go to work and write more mediocre prose. Leave a better comment. (It shouldn’t be hard.)

A few short items this morning before I start packing for the Christian Burning Man:

We’ve been visiting our lake cottage in Branch County less and less over the years, and perhaps you’d like to know why. OK.

Our next-door neighbor there, who bought the cottage built by Alan’s uncle, tore it down this year. No harm in that — it’s small and had a powder-post beetle infestation at one point. It probably needed doing. Of course we knew they’d put up something much bigger, but we were hopeful it would be, er, in character with the neighborhood. They decided on a prefab Swiss chalet. Other houses on the strip had been brought there in pieces, so there was a precedent. Can they get the truck to the lot without major damage? Oh sure, no problem.

The chalet went in this week. Their truck driver backed his semi across our front lawn and without so much as an oops, flattened two 10-year-old river birches Alan planted when Kate was a baby. Number of profuse apologies that have arrived at this address, or that of my sister-in-law, in the interim: Zero. Simple acknowledgment? None.

That’s it, in a nutshell.

We’ve told Spriggy that if he’d care to entrust us with his share of Leona Helmsley’s $8 billion, we’ll take very good care of it. Jeez, what a bitter old crone — $12 million for her own Maltese wasn’t enough, I suppose. I love dogs as much as you do, maybe more, and let me tell you: $12 million for a single dog deeply misunderstands the nature and needs of all dogs. You can argue with the foundation setup — I suppose there’s always someone who needs to hear the spay/neuter argument again — but at its heart it’s the work of a true misanthrope, in love with the poochies but not a dime for humanity. You know what I think? I think it’s because LA Mary couldn’t get her the strawberry preserves she wanted for her hotels. It queered her on two-legged creatures once and for all.

Inside baseball: Hank Stuever on why Clay Felker mattered:

Appreciate Clay Felker? It’s all anyone ever did, who wanted anything to do with magazines. Was it emulation, or was it envy, or was it a fantasy — working for the perfect place, the perfect editor, at the perfect time?

When I started freelancing, I had a simple goal: To do as much work as possible for editors who could help me improve. Needless to say, I never met Clay Felker.

Metro mayhem: Someone stole the copper plumbing from one of the city’s most visible landmarks. A six-figure repair bill for a few bucks in scrap metal.

John Scalzi printed one of his famous sunset pictures and included his cat, so I LOL’d it. No one will get it:

Bonus: Stay at Scalzi’s for a little perspective on the military service/electability track record.

That should keep you. I’ll be in and out until I leave for the airport, so, y’know, whatever. Oh, and thanks for all the SF recommendations, folks. I neglected to mention, this trip is basically a rerun of our honeymoon lo those many years ago. (Alan: “You sure you don’t want a diamond ring?” Me: “I want a two-week honeymoon more.”) You brought back memories and gave me some new ideas. You guys are the best.

A small task for you today, my little fuzzy peaches, at reader request.

Let’s solve the health-care crisis. To quote a well-known public figure: Yes, we can.

I ask because I received an e-mail from a reader last week, with a link to a story with this non-inflammatory headline — Canadian Health Care We So Envy Lies In Ruins, Its Architect Admits. Ahem:

As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates’ comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few. But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn’t an American and hasn’t held office in over three decades.

Castonguay is credited as the man who first conceived of Quebec’s provincial single-payer system, which eventually spread across the country and became the Canadian system we know today. In a story that begins by implicitly scorning the anecdote as a public-policy driver, the anecdote of Claude Castonguay (what a wonderful name) is given great weight, although his ideas about how to fix the Canadian system boil down to a pretty tame set of recommendations:

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

In my night-shift editing I read half a dozen pieces like this a week. Everyone has an idea how to fix American health care, but no one has the idea. Personally, I don’t believe the system is fixable in the state it is now. But I’m always willing to read one more idea. My favorite is the Wall Street Journal, which has some of the best health-care reporting in the world, but a whack editorial page bought and paid for by the American Medical Association. And my single favorite piece on that page in recent months was last year sometime, suggesting we could all learn something from the Amish, who don’t believe in health insurance, and who use such radical cost-containment practices as chipping in for one another and, my personal favorite, dickering.

Oh, how I can’t wait for the day when I dicker with my doctor. I bet he can’t, either. Unmentioned in the admiring WSJ editorial are the other documented Amish health-care cost-containment practices, which include alternative medicine (herbalists, midwives, etc.), bus trips to Mexico for the Third World option and, frequently, quackery. The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette had a pretty good series a few years ago, where a reporter followed one of these caravans. Among the anecdotes was a woman who’d had a serious ankle injury requiring reconstructive orthopedic surgery, and the incision stubbornly refused to heal, with chronic infections. (Dr. Nance would prescribe a hospital stay with heavy antibiotics to knock down the infection, followed by a rigorous home-care program emphasizing keeping the wound clean, with instruction for all her caregivers. Oh, and diabetes testing. This is just off the top of my head.) Her Mexican doctor advised removing all the surgical screws on the theory they were causing her infections, followed by poultices. I don’t know where the Amish woman is now. My guess is either pushing up daisies, or coping with life as a 19th-century amputee.

(A further note, also from the WSJ: Dickering doesn’t solve everything. Also, let’s recall the tragic case of the Amish Cook, who dropped dead at 66 from an aortic aneurysm, diagnosed by her herbalist as an iron deficiency, IIRC.)

I don’t mean to be flip, I really don’t. I’m glad the reader sent the link along. I know there’s no simple answer to this problem, or any answer. But here’s what I know:

A health-care system where a poor kid with asthma has to take three buses and a subway to his clinic doctor, and a doctor’s wife can get spa-level care while recovering from her breast augmentation — is not a good system.

A health-care system that rewards doctors more for choosing dermatology as a specialty (with all those lucrative, pay-out-of-deep-pockets anti-aging patients) than primary care (with all those poor kids with asthma) — is not a good system.

A health-care system where insurance is connected to your job, with no contingency for job loss other than COBRA — is not a good system.

There is no perfect system, and there might not even be a very good one. Life is a terminal disease, and some of us have trouble facing this fact. There may be no way to balance the truly miraculous technological and pharmaceutical advances that are driving the cost of health care into the stratosphere with the fact hardly anyone can pay for it. But maybe there’s a better way. This is your job today, little commenters of mine: Let’s fix it! You know we can!

And if you’re not up to it, in the bloggage, two internet-related stories about the campaign:

From Saturday’s WashPost, a woman offended by the Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail tries to track it back to its source, with more success than you’d think.

And in Sunday’s NYT, a piece on DIY attack ads by freelancers.

Both worth your time. And just for laughs:

A bunch of white kids fight the “Barack Hussein Obama” thing by taking “Hussein” as their own middle names, an “I am Spartacus” sort of protest. I am Salman Rushdie!