Life is starting to move very quickly, and will for the next month. Tomorrow, Kate takes her first AP test, and may I just say? AP classes are a big fuckin’ racket that I wish had never been invented. She’s hated the thing all year, and now she’s making herself nuts for a class that most likely won’t be accepted for credit by whatever college she ends up at; it costs $80; and it’s 3.5 hours long. Three! And a half! Hours! I didn’t have a college test that long in my entire career.

And of course, the great irony: The better the college you’re aiming for, the more AP classes you need. The better the college you’re aiming for, the less likely the college is to accept AP classes for credit.

Well. In 24 hours it’ll be all over. And then we go to the weekend, when Kate will be at a two-day practice for Europe. Then finals (taken early, because Europe). Then Kate goes to Europe, and Alan and I go on vacation for a week, and then the summer gallops before us like a nymph you chase through the woods. How is this possible? It was 40 degrees yesterday.

All of which boils down to: It’s a bad time to have only half one’s vision. But I’m gettin’ ‘er done. Dinner tonight: Grilled flank steak, potatoes, and a lovely orange-avocado salad. I made the salad for our dinner party Saturday and thought: I should make this more often. So I am. Sweetness, silkiness, and a superfood. Part of me thinks bad things can’t happen to anyone who’s had a good dinner the night before. Best of luck to Kate Wednesday.

But I think I’ll duck out for a Wednesday-night ride at the Hub, down in Detroit. Girl needs some exercise from time to time.

Bloggage? Maybe:

Don’t follow this link, or you may not come up for air for hours — the fallout from a recent “Kitchen Nightmares” about a Scottsdale dump I’m tempted to travel to see. Maybe Scout or someone on the ground can give us some recon.

Josh Marshall on what you need to know about the IRS scandal.

Throb, eye, throb! I’m done.

Oh, wait: Today is my 20th wedding anniversary. Happy two decades to us.

We had a bit of a server problem last night that cut into my blogging time, so not much today. But how can any of us think about ANYthing else than the death of Dr. Joyce Brothers? How is it possible this icon of my childhood is gone? Actually, how is it possible she was still alive? She died at 85. Old, but not that old.

Once upon a time, every time you turned on a talk show, she was there, offering advice with the imprimatur of her doctorate. She outranked the ad hoc wise women like Ann and Abby, but she wasn’t all credentials, right? I remember her being common-sensical and wise.

I interviewed her once. Some book, probably. At the end of the interview, I mentioned Gilda Radner, and she laughed about Roseanne Rosannadanna and the sweatball story. You have to like a person who can have a laugh at their own expense.

And after a day of computer-monitor staring, frankly, my eyes are athrob. So let’s take it away, comments.

And so, 10 days or so after having a surgical procedure I still hesitate to describe bluntly, lest the few remaining readers of this blog barf and run screaming for the exits, it’s back to work.

I’m still, as Marsellus Wallace said, pretty far from OK, but I’m mending. The redness in my eye is gone (thanks, prednisone) although the pupil remains dilated (atropine eyedrops) and will for another few days. Still basically blind on that side, but I’m assured this will resolve itself. I’ve started driving again, gingerly — short hops only. I did a little freeway piece on Sunday in light traffic, but it was jarring enough that I’m putting that aside for a while. The depth perception I’m growing used to, but the blind side is still too dangerous for the sort of combat-driving conditions one can expect on a Detroit interstate.

But I’m hale and hearty enough that we threw a little dinner party Saturday, and I managed not to fall into the grill or anything. (I had a hell of a time getting my mascara wand back into the tube this morning, however.) So Monday I’m back at it. Which is today.

I’m still feeling a little giddy about being sprung from facedown life, frankly. The night of the day I was cleared to stand up, I went to bed early, swallowing two ibuprofen and a melatonin on the way. I slept like a corpse for eight hours and rose feeling 10 years younger, or maybe 15. Recovery, even from something minor like a cold, always gives you that ESCAPED AGAIN feeling of having beaten something, and you walk around grateful for everything from a warm breeze to a hot cup of coffee. I hope it lasts, although I know it won’t.

So a lot happened last week.

I’m amazed that so few media outlets, in their coverage of the Cleveland kidnapping cases, are failing to mention, or mentioning only obliquely, the case of Ariel Castro’s daughter, now serving a 25-year sentence in Indiana for attempting to slash the throat of her own 11-month-old daughter. As one of you noted in the comments last week, it seems there’s a long history of craziness in that clan, or maybe it’s just, in the trite phrase, a history of violence.

One of the movies I watched during my facedown recovery — or started to watch, but didn’t finish — was “Goon,” a comedy about a hockey enforcer. The decent cast did what they could, and it had promise, but like so many Apatow-influenced movie projects these days, failed to find its way. Funny is funny, but there’s only so much you can do with one punchout after another, and I abandoned it around the 30-minute mark. Reading about the late Derek Boogaard in the New York Times a year or so ago sort of spoiled hockey goons for me for good. His family is now suing the NHL, which will be an interesting case to watch.

Finally, enjoy: A video made for the bid to get Detroit selected as the next X Games venue. Very well-done in the usual manner, which is to say every rust stain is a brushstroke of paint on our ruined masterpiece of a city, etc. But inspiring in its own way:

So we’re back, we’re all back, and let’s see how the week goes, eh?

It might be because I’m sitting here with one eye blown out from the dilation solution and the other with its smeary Macular HoleVision, but I’m thinking this will be my last blog until post-op. I’ve got some chores that must be done beforehand, and I’m going to do them.

But right now it’s a lovely evening, and I’m watching Alan install my new Shimano pedals on the new bike. A robin just went flap-flap-flap over my head, or it might have been a dragon. I feel really fucking weird right now.

“Don’t go out,” Alan counseled. “If you got in a wreck, the ER staff would be drilling into your skull, looking for the cerebral hemorrhage.”

Fortunately, for you? I have some great bloggage today:

Oh, wait — I have an update. The good eye with the floaters is merely having an age-related floater-thing problem. “No tears in the retina!” the chirpy ophthalmologist said, having lost her condescension from the last visit. Instead, she praised my good sense in having everything checked out 48 hours before the surgical event.

“So, am I just going to have to live with this?” I asked. FYI, my good-eye vision is of a translucent spider straddling a world speckled with black pepper.

“They’ll either migrate to another part of the eye, or your brain will learn to ignore them,” she said. Fucking bloody hell.

So, back to the bloggage:

My former congresswoman, reppin’ in Washington:

Washington — Former U.S. Rep. Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick said Monday she was ready to boldly go where others have not gone before and called for an international probe into space aliens.

After a day of hearing testimony from believers in alien life forms, Kilpatrick offered up herself to launch an effort with other countries to bring to light the existence of extraterrestrials.

“It’s important that we work with foreign governments,” an impassioned Kilpatrick said after she and five other former members of Congress heard nearly eight hours of testimony. “There’s been 10 or 15 already identified who have acknowledged this existence. I want to be part of that.”

If you can’t quite figure it out, this is her, out of a job, taking a gig with an alien-chasing organization that rented out the National Press Club to hold “congressional-style hearings” on extraterrestrial issues. Persons who resemble congressional representatives will then be YouTubed into eternity, scowling at witnesses giving valuable testimony on this vital issue. Extra-weird detail:

Also in the audience were a man and woman from Chicago wearing metal headbands with quartz to better conduct communication with extraterrestrial life.

All in all, I still prefer her to Mark Souder.

Those of you who are fans of Roy Edroso will enjoy this interview with None Other, which includes a clip of his band, the Reverb Motherfuckers. Roy bought Adrianne and me dinner when we were in Washington last fall, and I just lurve him to death. So there’s that.

Pinterest fails. Because Pinterest fails.

If Russell Brand really writes this well, I want to know why he’s a bleh musician and actor and not a writer. Because based on this, he’s a pretty fair writer.

Finally, I’m only a few chapters through The Prophets of Oak Ridge, but I’m really looking forward to the rest of it — a story of how three people penetrated the Oak Ridge Security Complex, and by “three people,” I mean a drifter, a house painter and an 82-year-old nun. So far, it’s a gripping yarn. Hope you enjoy it, too.

So that’s it for me. I have a big box of furniture to unpack, a lot of loose ends to tie up and a laser knife to go under. See you when I surface. Whenever that is.

To the stated complaints of a few of my Facebook friends, I’ve cut back on my once-weekly excoriations of Mitch Albom. I just felt like I was running out of things to say about him, and it started to feel like a waste of time. But what the hell, he’s still out there, writing and collecting a fat paycheck. And so here I go.

Mitch on Sunday:

I recently visited my wife’s family in Mexico.

“You’ll stay with us,” they said.

“Which of you?” I asked.

“All of us,” they said.

At first, I thought this was a language barrier thing, the way these particular relatives say, “I love you too much” (translation: “so much”), or the way they pronounce “Meetch.”

But as it turned out, when they said “all of us” they actually meant “all of us.”

They live in the middle of Mexico City.

In a family compound.

Let me start by violating my three-paragraph rule for quoting others’ work, but when you pad out your Sunday column with white space and all those one-sentence paragraphs, you’re asking for it.

And let’s also set aside, for now, the stupid and offensive joke at the Mexicans’ expense for calling a different pronunciation of “Mitch” a “language barrier.” Because I’m hoping that once the guy leaves the family compound, they have a good laugh at how he pronounced “huitlacoche.” In fact, I hope they served him some. But I digress.

Mitch, it turns out to the surprise of not one sentient being who read the first few lines, thinks family compounds are the best:

It’s such a loving, embracing environment, that inevitably, I wondered, “Why don’t we live this way in the States?’”

And then I remembered.

We used to.

Yes, we did. It was not uncommon, once upon a time, for children to sleep four to a room and grandma to have a little room off the kitchen. We lived that way for one reason: Because more people were poor, and there was no safety net, and anyone who thinks it was all fun and games should talk to the people — 99 percent of them female — who bore the brunt of all that loving and embracing. Because it came with a lot of cooking and butt-wiping, too. Mitch’s wife must come from some money in Mexico, because the compound he’s describing — four walled houses sharing a common inner courtyard — is not exactly the way the rank and file lives in North America’s largest Third World city. So let’s allow there’s a goodly amount of loving and embracing there, with the harder work left to maids.

Finally Mitch gets around to acknowledging maybe family togetherness isn’t all beer and skittles, with this:

According to the 2010 census, 4.4% of American households are multi-generational. That’s up from 3.7% 10 years earlier, or about 1 million households.

I’m guessing it is because of the economic downturn, foreclosures pushing families under one roof. But it’ll be interesting to see once we get used to having grandmas and grandpas and cousins and in-laws around, how fast people will want to disengage.

My guess is, they’re going to want to disengage pretty damn quickly. I’ve known my share of big families sharing small spaces, and it left me with a new appreciation for a room of one’s own with a door that closes. And those were only large mom/dad/kids families. Add some in-laws and grandmas, and I don’t see how anyone stays sane.

But of course, the ultimate irony to all of this is Mitch Himself, a man who has apparently made the choice to remain childless. He married his girlfriend after Morrie Schwartz persuaded him to make a little more time for non-work life, but it never went further than that. From time to time he’ll write about his nieces and nephews, but if he has any regrets about not increasing the Albom family through birth or adoption, he only shares them when he’s envying someone else’s arrangements, and even then he doesn’t seem to get it. Why don’t families live together anymore, he whines, without noting that he never let anything other than work guide his decisions.

I hear he has a big house. He could take in a few family members, if he’s missing ‘em so badly.

And there’s a one-sentence paragraph for you.

Oh, my, more rain today. A beautiful day yesterday, but I had to work. Today I filled the prescriptions for the eyedrops I have to start taking two days before my surgery, which brought it all home a bit more. Along with the typos. And the testiness about Albom.

But for now, let’s let this all go. And get some bloggage:

Big language warning on this, but worth your time for some of the excellent obscenities trotted out to abuse this InfoWars dipshit, caught trying to do a standup in Boston by a passerby. Who had his own camera. And let him have it: I’m the smart guy, because I’m not telling people the FBI blew up the Boston Marathon, you fucking shitheel.

I’m thinking that story is going to get the Boston Globe at least one and maybe several Pulitzer Prizes this time next year, and one might be for this great tick-tock in Sunday’s paper.

Although I also liked this piece from the Sunday NYT, on the thwarted dreams of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, and how readily the hole in his heart was filled by the radical posing he pursued next.

And now it’s on to Sunday evening, pork tenderloin on the grill and “Mad Men.” Let’s have a good week.

It was a long day, and it rained for most of it. Rained, rained and rained some more. Barely cracked 40 degrees. Still, it’s hard to keep a good baseball game down:

Yep, great seats for the Tigers. So that happened.

Just one piece of bloggage today: This piece of shit.

People tell me I should ignore Politico, and I mostly do, but when I read a story that bad, I just get testy. What purports to be a keen examination of Jill Abramson’s tenure as editor-in-chief of the New York Times is such a steaming pile of sexist crapola, I just go ber….serk.

As Billy Jack would say.

Abramson speaks in a slow drawl — “the equivalent of a nasal car honk,” according to Ken Auletta, who profiled her for The New Yorker. It gives her the impression of being distant, almost bored. But the condescension is often noted by others present at meetings. On at least one occasion, sources said, an editor has privately approached Abramson to recommend she apologize to the offended party.

I’ve heard Jill Abramson speak. I didn’t find it condescending. But then, I don’t work for Politico.

I’d rather think about baseball.

A Lansing day. A long one, but a good one. Alan had a similar one. Which is to say, it was a hot dogs-on-the-grill-and-a-bag-of-chips sort of evening. Then we remembered we had some McClure’s pickles in the fridge, and the evening improved.

Yeah, more rain.

Let’s take a look at what the Internet tide washed up on NN.c’s beach, then.

I strengthened all my important passwords around the new year, but obviously someone needed to at the AP — a hack of the Associated Press Twitter account touched off a brief 100-point drop in the Dow when the hackers tweeted a prank about the White House being bombed. Everything recovered, but as the linked story points out, it’s time for Twitter to start getting serious about security.

My former colleague Jack Lesssenberry had a good commentary on Michigan Radio yesterday. He touched on something that has always bugged me about the current discussion of public education, that schools aren’t doing a better job at turning out workers for the new economy. I see their point, but, well. There was an education summit in Lansing Monday, and the state school superintendent said something about it. Jack put his finger on it:

What (superintendent Mike) Flanagan said that bothered me so much was this. “Most of us in education have grown up with an ethic that was something like this: Education for Education’s Sake. That’s just silly.”

Well, excuse me, Dr. Flanagan, but no, it’s not silly. There’s nothing wrong with education for education’s sake—if that means teaching people how to think, and how to learn.

You didn’t used to have to explain that to people, but I guess you do, now.

Speaking of learning how to think, may I break out of my rainy slough of despond to ask, calmly, WHERE THE HELL DO THEY GET THESE PEOPLE, AND WHY AREN’T THEY WEARING STRAITJACKETS?

Not that I am grumpy.

Again, sorry for the no-show yesterday. I went to the Michigan SPJ awards, and you know how those things go. Woo. Actually, it was fairly dull, but Bridge got some stuff, and I got to lift a glass with my colleagues and eat rubber chicken. #winning

And then the skies opened, and it rained and rained and rained some more, until it stopped and started raining again. It’s raining now. Radar suggests I’m going to continue to do so for a while.

Well, wasn’t I complaining about how dry it’s been? I believe so. This is what happens when you complain. You get what you asked for.

But it was warm this morning before the rain came, so I went for a lunchtime bike ride. It was very windy, enough that I could actually feel the bike move in the gusts. It’s good to be back on two wheels, even for just a lunch hour.

Surgery is scheduled for May 2, so you’ll have me around a little longer than I previously thought. I’m sure that will be the week the spring will finally burst forth in all its delayed glory. I’ll spend it staring at the floor. Or the mattress. God, I hope they give me serious drugs.

What do we think of the bombing suspects? I think it’ll be interesting to see how long it will take to find them. Via Twitter, the Reddit people already found White Hat Guy in a separate photo — see him walking around the corner at the left side of the flame, minus his backpack, strangely unmoved by the spreading chaos. I guess it could be a fake, but I dunno — it’s what Tim McVeigh did.

More will be revealed, as always. Let’s hope it’s revealed soon.

I have some bloggage, yes:

I love dogs as much as anyone, but even I can’t help but think this isn’t the greatest idea ever — a law to allow dogs in restaurants. Because what could possibly go wrong with a bunch of dogs on leashes around people carrying trays of hot food? Really.

Two pieces on fear, vis-a-vis Boston: Some perspective, from my friend Dave Jones, and a little scolding, from Gawker.

But that’s it, for now. Enjoy your weekend, all.

Well, I don’t know what there is to say today other than oh, this again.

There’s apparently a lot more to say, if you’re watching cable news. You know what I love best about C-SPAN? How, when they’re covering a big news event live, like a presidential inauguration or something similar? They shut up. They assume their audience have functional brains and don’t need to have every detail pointed out to them, nor do they need some eyewitness dragged in off the street to say that people were screaming, not when they can observe this fact by simply watching the video, the one that’s running without commentary.

Because they’re not stupid.

I really, really tire of Wolf Blitzer. Why is he always the first guy they go to in these breaking-news deals? He’s awful. So, change to MSNBC, and OMG, it’s Al Sharpton. He’s so freaky-looking since he lost all that weight. It transformed him into the original lollipop person, a giant head balancing over these narrow shoulders.

You wouldn’t think an event like this would need so much embellishment — the meaningless noting that yes, Boston calls itself “the Hub,” of the universe, yes. etc. There’s a subway, too — it’s called the T? I know why this happens. It’s the same reason people jabber through uncomfortable silences, but here’s a thought — let’s just let the silence happen. Sometimes silence is all you need to hear. Sometimes silence is far more eloquent.

We all know how the next 24 to 36 to 48 to 72 hours are going to go. Let’s let them happen. And let’s talk about it.

And if you don’t want to do that, here’s some Asian carp. You know, we’ve proven many times that when we want to make a species extinct, we can do it pretty easily. So why don’t we want to do it with this one?

Let’s mop up the blood.

Before anyone gets twisty knickers, let me begin by stipulating that Roger Ebert was a fine, fine man and deserved a glorious funeral fully celebrating his amazing life. But I keep coming back to this essential conflict. Ebert, on March 1 of this year:

I consider myself Catholic, lock, stock and barrel, with this technical loophole: I cannot believe in God. I refuse to call myself a atheist however, because that indicates too great a certainty about the unknowable.

Roger Ebert’s funeral was Monday at Holy Name Cathedral in Chicago.

It so happens his statement pretty much describes me, although I wouldn’t go with the “lock, stock and barrel” part. My morals and values were shaped by my Catholic upbringing, but I can no longer say with confidence there’s a God watching over us all. I, too, stop short of atheism, because it requires the same certainty. If anyone asks, I say I’m a hopeful agnostic who welcomes a sign from on high, as long as it falls short of Job’s. Well short.

This is what I have always called cultural Catholicism, which is like secular Judaism — yes to the Seder, no to the synagogue. Catholics and Jews have suffered historic prejudice, and this may be why people can shed the belief, but keep the tribalism. Whatever. I don’t go to church anymore, ask very little from it and admire the good works the church still does, bringing God to some truly godforsaken places.

But when I made inquiries about having Kate baptized in the One True, I was presented with a series of conditions — membership in a congregation, my marriage affirmed by the priest, and only then would the original sin be expunged from her baby soul’s criminal record.

And I considered this and decided, you know, I don’t even believe this stuff anymore. And that was that. Guilt dogged me into bringing her back for a while when she was around 2 or 3, and still, the flame could not be coaxed to grow. And then the Scandal broke, and it was game over.

I still feel Jesus out there from time to time, but I don’t mistake it for religion.

So Roger Ebert’s funeral was yesterday. I asked the internet, via Twitter, how a man who wrote, “I cannot believe in God” qualified for a cathedral sendoff, and the best answer I got was, “because he was a member.” He certainly lived a life many Catholics would find admirable, full of kindness and charity and love and joy. But every Mass that is celebrated contains the profession of faith, the Nicene Creed, which begins with these lines:

We believe in God, the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
and all that is seen and unseen.

Ebert also said this, about death, in a blog entry after his disfigurement:

I know it is coming, and I do not fear it, because I believe there is nothing on the other side of death to fear…I was perfectly content before I was born, and I think of death as the same state.

Those must have been some very strange prayers Monday, for the soul that animated Ebert’s life and consciousness, and especially the Nicene Creed, which ends:

We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come.

I hope someone had enough of a sense of humor to add, “Or, y’know, whatever.”

And if you’re wondering why I can’t turn my head to this mild inconsistency, this is what was going on in the Archdiocese of Detroit yesterday:

A Detroit professor and legal adviser to the Vatican says Catholics who promote gay marriage should not try to receive holy Communion, a key part of Catholic identity.

And the archbishop of Detroit, Allen Vigneron, said Sunday that Catholics who receive Communion while advocating gay marriage would “logically bring shame for a double-dealing that is not unlike perjury.”

Never ever ever ever ever going back.

Neil Steinberg attended the funeral, and asked much the same question:

Mass was officiated by a trio of priests — Monsignor Daniel Mayall, parish pastor of Holy Name, the Rev. Michael Pfleger, St. Sabina’s firebrand and the Rev. John F. Costello, special assistant to the president of Loyola University, who delivered a homily that showed off his Jesuit training by explaining — without ever drawing attention to the fact he was explaining — a question perhaps on the mind of many: how Chicago’s most famous agnostic and public doubter of all doctrines ended up being delivered up to heaven at the city’s preeminent Catholic cathedral.

The answer: He found God — well, a version of God, Costello said, “a new God, one of ironic compassion, of overpowering generosity, of racial love” — at the movie theater.

Change of subject!

I think I may have mentioned, Kate’s bass teacher, Dan Pliskow, is well into his 70s and a wealth of information about jazz history in this very jazzy city. He played in the house band at the Playboy Club for a time in the early ’60s. He recently started uploading his vast photo archive to the Internet, and I asked if he had any Bunny pictures. He did:

Click to enlarge, gents. But he also had this in the file:

Speaking of Catholic priests. When the club opened, it was announced that the Bunnies would work for no base wage, tips only. The unions responded by picketing the club during its preview run, and a few malcontents slashed tires and convertible tops of visiting guests. They didn’t screw around. Although you should spare no tears for the Bunnies, who earned dolla dolla bills, y’all, for as long as they could tolerate the heels, the smoke and the mobsters.

Everyone always looks at the boobs in those outfits. I think what makes them is the cuffs and collar.

Sorry for no update yesterday. We were invited to a “Mad Men” party and it ran through my blogging time. And so the week begins.