Summer colds are the worst. There’s always a likelihood they will happen during the loveliest days of the season, meaning you’ll have the poisoned feeling of lying on your bed all day, too weak to do much more than watch “Mad Men” season-one episodes on your iPad, while the sun shines outside and the leaves wave in a gentle breeze.

On the other hand, why the hell not? It was a great season.

And now, as the weekend wanes and the forecast calls for Monday with a chance of Tuesday, I think the corner has been turned. Paid a bunch of bills and took a short, slow bike ride that didn’t reduce me to a puddle of snot, so evidently the rumors are true: These things aren’t fatal.

In the meantime, I love stories like this. A note from my old boss, Richard:

So I’m sitting in the passport office in the Northfield Township Office in Glenview, explaining to the supervisor why I can’t find a passpost I got more than 22 years ago. I mentioned I moved at least a dozen times since then and that it was in a box somewhere. I mentioned Fort Wayne among my moves.

“Fort Wayne?” she asked. “Do you know Nancy Nall?”

“I hired Nancy Nall,” I answered.

“I love her blog,” she responded.

She knew you weren’t feeling well yesterday and even asked about Kate.

In even more coincidental weirdness, it turns out the passport supervisor also worked with Richard’s wife at a cooks’ store in the Chicago suburbs. Her name’s Jill. Hi, Jill! Glad you met Richard. It’s a tiny little world, ain’t it?

A slow weekend, but there were some outings. Kate’s band played at a bar in Hamtramck. I love their neon; I tried to capture Kate outside and failed miserably, although I had a good time blowing this picture up huge and noting all the noir details:

The guy passing by, waving. The car parked at the curb has a Maine license plate The gas station in the background, where a beatdown was happening as we arrived. (Like good urbanites, we ignored it and hurried inside before the gunfire started. As Elmore Leonard once wrote, if it isn’t our business, it’s probably dope business, and dope business isn’t our business. Paraphrasing.) The light on the glass block above the door. The mysterious black spots on the sidewalk — are they petrified gum? How do they survive, year after year? And of course the model closed her eyes.

The neon got blown out because I metered off the street light. One of these days I’ll learn to take a decent picture.

And one of these days I’ll take some shots of the back yard, which is now more or less fully planted and operational. Later this week, maybe.

I also need to get cracking on my book project. Photos might be more common over the summer.

Hopping to bloggage, one thing my malady this weekend allowed for was to finish Ta-Nehisi Coates’ “The Case for Reparations.” It seems everyone needs to preface their remarks about it by saying “it’s really long,” and it is, but it’s not preposterously so — maybe 15,000 words, and well worth the hour or so it takes to read. His through-line is the story of African Americans in Chicago, and I don’t have much to add to Neil Steinberg’s thoughts, and he didn’t have much to add other than: read the thing. At least we owe this much:

Broach the topic of reparations today and a barrage of questions inevitably follows: Who will be paid? How much will they be paid? Who will pay? But if the practicalities, not the justice, of reparations are the true sticking point, there has for some time been the beginnings of a solution. For the past 25 years, Congressman John Conyers Jr., who represents the Detroit area, has marked every session of Congress by introducing a bill calling for a congressional study of slavery and its lingering effects as well as recommendations for “appropriate remedies.”

A country curious about how reparations might actually work has an easy solution in Conyers’s bill, now called HR 40, the Commission to Study Reparation Proposals for African Americans Act. We would support this bill, submit the question to study, and then assess the possible solutions. But we are not interested.

I didn’t join in the Maya Angelou mourning last week; I generally don’t get too upset when 86-year-olds leave the world behind. But I was delighted by this video of Dave Chappelle in conversation with her, and you might be, too.

Now off to, as Grantland calls it, fight night in Westeros. Have a good week ahead, all.

I’ve lost a bit of weight. Not much — I still have 12 pounds to go before the CDC no longer considers me overweight — but enough that my clothes don’t fit right anymore. As much fun as it is to be able to insert your fist between your stomach and waistband, it’s equally a pain to have to keep hitching your pants up. So I’ve been rewarding myself with a little shopping. The closeout place I like for cheap workout gear and this ‘n’ that has been throwing one of these into their delivery boxes:

Speaking of losing weight. Let’s see if we can count all the silliness just on the front of the label. These are “dark chocolate covered real fruit juice pieces.” Please explain how juice, a liquid, can come in a “piece.” Then there’s the mysterious açai berry, which I’ve been seeing in my junk mail for a couple years now — apparently it’s a superfood, or a weight-loss aid, or something. But there’s blueberry in there, too; I have to assume it’s juice, so… this is a mixture of acai and blueberry juice, somehow pieced out and covered with dark chocolate. It’s a “natural source of flavanol antioxidants.” What is this stuff, anyway? It’s health-food candy. It’s not a Snickers bar, it has antioxidants! Antioxidants go in pursuit of free radicals in your body, which everybody knows are rilly, rilly bad. So eat the candy. Guilt-free.

It was tasty, I’ll give it that. Sixty-five calories.

Getting back to the CDC and its body-mass index, which has been criticized for being stupid and inaccurate: I’m going to keep trying to lose, but entirely without any pressure or expectation; the BMI is just a guideline. After years of being nauseated by my thighs (but not enough to lose my appetite), I’ve decided to accept them. I’ve said before that the truth of being female in this culture is, the body you hate today will be the one you wish you still had tomorrow, and I’m going to appreciate mine while it still works and is still relatively pain-free. Strength, flexibility, balance, fun — if it hits on at least three of those cylinders most of the time, I’m going to call it a good day.

Yoga helps with all of this, which may explain its popularity. But for someone like me and, maybe, you — those of us whose heads tend to go buzz buzz buzz all the livelong day — it provides a solid hour in which the sole command is: Pay attention. I have a couple of good teachers at the moment, who are gentle and kind and walk that careful yoga line between too little and too much woo-woo. The other day I was sitting in the deepest twist I could muster, concentrating on breathing and back muscles, and reflected that most of us pay attention to our stomachs and genitals and not much else. I’m willing to believe that breathing deeply in this twist somehow makes my internal organs happy. How can thousands of years of flexible little Indian dudes be entirely wrong?

I can’t get on the antioxidants bandwagon, but I will eat their candy when it comes along.

Sorry to be boring.

A little bloggage:

We’ve discussed the wedding-industrial complex here many times, but I thought this blog post from Esquire.com made an important point: As a proportion of wealth, the typical American wedding is far more expensive than the Kanye/Kardashian affair in Florence over the weekend. And then there’s this part:

The culture that demands a big wedding hurts the poor worst of all. In 2005’s “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage,” Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas explained why even women who didn’t have much money wanted a lavish wedding. “Having the wherewithal to throw a ‘big’ wedding is a vivid display that the couple has achieved enough financial security to do more than live from paycheck to paycheck, a stressful situation that most believe leads almost inevitably to divorce. Hosting a “proper” wedding is a sign that the couple only plans to do it once, “given the obvious financial sacrifice.” This is the equivalent, financially, of cutting of your arm to demonstrate how strong you are. The needs of a big wedding also leads to poor people marrying later and less often than rich people, which brings with it a host of negative socioeconomic consequences.

Yup.

This man is a hero:

The father of a young man gunned down Friday during the rampage in Santa Barbara said he is asking members of Congress to stop calling him to offer condolences but nothing more for the death of his only child, Christopher Michaels-Martinez.

“I don’t care about your sympathy. I don’t give a s— that you feel sorry for me,” Richard Martinez said during an extensive interview, his face flushed as tears rolled down his face. “Get to work and do something. I’ll tell the president the same thing if he calls me. Getting a call from a politician doesn’t impress me.”

If a few more people said that to a few more members of Congress, daily, things might change in Washington. Maybe.

Let’s go out on a bitter laugh; the Onion nails it with just the headline: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

I try to stay away from the internet for at least 24 hours of every weekend, but the news of the mass shooting in Santa Barbara penetrated a lot of my defenses. As soon as I heard the rough outlines of the story — young man with extensive internet history does horrific crime, displaying ties to an internet subculture? How could it not be an internet story?

It’s also not particularly hard to see that when the story touches on the lowest slime-swamps of the internet — the so-called men’s rights movement, and no, I don’t recommend googling — the commentary is going to be fairly horrifying. The Santa Barbara mass murder is particularly so. Here’s a walkthrough, if you’re interested.

And here’s a quote attributed to one of Charlotte’s neighbors, the novelist Thomas McGuane: “I like young girls. Their stories are shorter.” Google that one, and it turns up time and again in quote collections; it’s supposed to be funny. I remember reading it years ago, maybe stripped of the context, although that part I don’t remember. I always thought it was horrible, because it’s so obvious what he’s saying here: Young girls won’t bore you quite so long before you get to fuck them.

I mean, am I missing something here? I’m a feminist, and not a crazy one, but I’m not stupid. Here’s another amusing quote: The problem with women is, they have all the pussy. They say that a lot in Texas, I’ve heard.

The case of Elliot Rodger seems to suggest a guy who, shall we say, internalized fun statements like that and went off in the wrong direction. Well, that’ll happen.

Of course, this story has nothing to do with sexism or cultural static, it’s about mental illness. It’s not about guns, either, or so the zeitgeist has ordained, because the guns were legally obtained.

For the millionth time: America has made its bloody bed, and now we have to lie in it.

Memorial Day evening right now. I can hear fireworks going off in the distance. It doesn’t sound like organized stuff, so I can only imagine some misguided soul believes he’s lighting fuses because yeahhh, America!!!! and not because of dead soldiers. It was a pretty good weekend, all around. Kate and her band were supposed to play at a local bar for some sort of lesbian fun-stravaganza, but at the last minute the phone rang. It was Kate at the bar, telling me the show was cancelled, their part of it anyway.

“We got carded at the door,” she said. The bar has a strict 21-and-over policy, and they would. Not. Bend. She was totally bummed, and so was I, as it’s been a long time since I’ve partied with a bunch of gay women, and was sort of looking forward to it.

“The least they could have done was tell us before we got all our equipment unloaded,” she said. I’ll say.

How was yours? It finally turned warm here, and the last of the yard is now planted. Photos to come.

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice. Most people think Martin Luther King said that, but it was someone named Theodore Parker. No matter. It’s one of those things to keep in mind when the bastards are getting you down, and also when you consider news like this: Support for same-sex marriage is at 55 percent of the current Gallup poll, and more than 80 percent among young people.

I have to be careful what I say here because of my job, but I think the following is simply a statement of fact: On no social issue of my lifetime has popular opinion shifted so quickly and so radically as same-sex marriage. I’m too lazy to look up the poll before this one, but it was less that 55 percent. And the one before that was less than that.

OK, wait: It’s as close as Wikipedia, which, we must always say, is ALWAYS TOTALLY ACCURATE NO WAIT, shows the movement over time. Something to also keep in mind: Eleven states (including Michigan) had ballot measures on the issue in 2004, widely believed to be a tactic to boost Republican turnout in what was a tight presidential election year. Ten years ago, support was down in the 30s, and most of the ballot initiatives banning it passed in a cakewalk.

Today, the Michigan judge’s ruling overturning the 2004 ban is under a stay, while the attorney general seeks to delay it, citing the will of the people. The people 10 years ago, that is.

All of which leads me to Rod Dreher, who (one of our number said in a private email) is swiftly headed toward John Derbyshire country, if not on race than on gay folks and maybe both. He’s utterly unhinged on the subject, and can’t even get his facts straight:

Another day, another federal judge throws out traditional marriage:

Um, no. Everyone is free to be traditionally married, still. I’m traditionally married myself, 21 years last week. The ruling expands the institution to same-sex couples. More:

Does Judge Jones really think that the sexual complementarity of marriage, which has been the basis of marriage in all places and in all times, until only two decades ago, is fit for history’s garbage dump?

Again, no one is throwing out traditional marriage, in all its sexual complementarity. There are simply more people who can do so. Can’t these people read, or has the red they’re seeing obscured their vision?

Roy has more. When the meltdown comes, well, I’ll be watching.

Not much bloggage today; I didn’t get much reading time. But this:

The only time I watched a mixed-martial arts bout (on TV, at a bar), I was so grossed out I had to turn away. So none of this surprises me.

It’s almost the long weekend. Enjoy it.

I just deleted a spam comment from a user called EXTREME BIGGER PENIS. Does that work? Has it ever worked? Is there an individual in the history of the internet who said, “Yeah, that’s just what I’m in the market for,” and clicked? Obviously someone must have, or they wouldn’t keep trying.

Maybe EXTREME BIGGER PENIS is like $170 French bra — just one of those things you dream about, but never really expect to have.

Hope everyone’s weekend was great. Mine was pretty good, although I didn’t go to the market. Sunday was Flower Day, which really means Flower Weekend, which means I’d turn back if I were you. Seemingly every suburban family in metro Detroit descends on the market, each dragging a wagon behind, intent on buying a yard’s worth of bedding plants at discount prices, while also stopping for lunch and absorbing the Authentic Urban Atmosphere ™ in the bargain.

A friend of mine was up bright and early and thought he could get in and out at 7 a.m. Sunday. No dice.

Ah, well. What I did instead was grill a little and drink some wine. Watched two movies — “Let the Fire Burn” and “Twelve Years of Slave,” which was sort of an all-bummer double feature. I liked the both, but “Let the Fire Burn” will stay with me longer. It’s a remarkable piece of work, about the MOVE disaster in Philadelphia in 1985. I recall paying a lot of attention to it when it happened, because the two Philly papers were part of Knight-Ridder, my own paper’s parent company, and lots of people in Fort Wayne had some sort of connection to the place.

But I was too young and ignorant to truly grasp the horror of what happened, too quick to accept the journo-description of MOVE as “an activist group,” which is not what they were. They were, “Let the Fire Burn” makes clear, a like-minded group of crazy people who were dedicated to, and desirous of, a lethal confrontation with police, who screwed up their end of things in every way possible.

If you lived through it, you know what happened: Something like 30 square blocks of working-class Philadelphia burned, because MOVE was dug in to the last man (last child, really), and the cops wanted no survivors. It’s a horrible, tragic story, told entirely — and this is why I think it will stay with me — through contemporaneous video. There are no talking heads, no looks back through the lens of time, but rather, archival news footage and public-TV video of a post-disaster inquest, the sort of thing no one pays attention to outside of the immediate circle of those affected. It gives it a you-were-there immediacy, and if you’re paying attention, you are simply astounded.

“Twelve Years a Slave,” on the other hand, was simply a well-made, well-acted and well-written bummer from the first frame to the last. I feel about the same way that I did after watching “United 93” — glad I saw it, even gladder that I never have to see it again.

Ever.

Other than that, it was the usual weekend: Cooking, exercise, shopping, errands. And so we notch another week off the indefinite number we are allotted. I wish I had more money to travel; it would be nice to notch out a few in some place like Istanbul or Beijing.

Bloggage? Sure:

Chihuahuas! On the loose, gettin’ in trouble! In Arizona!

This NYT piece on “trigger warnings” is getting beaten up all over the internets. I don’t want to pile on, but I’d be interested in hearing alternate views.

And so we launch ourselves into another Monday. Here we go.

I’ve been reading the Jill Abramson story. That’s the New York Times editor who was abruptly cashiered today, or so the story is shaping up. I read the first news-alert piece today from the NYT, which called the transition “unexpected.” My first thought was, someone has cancer. But now it appears, via Ken Auletta at the link above, that it was a more prosaic reason:

As with any such upheaval, there’s a history behind it. Several weeks ago, I’m told, Abramson discovered that her pay and her pension benefits as both executive editor and, before that, as managing editor were considerably less than the pay and pension benefits of Bill Keller, the male editor whom she replaced in both jobs. “She confronted the top brass,” one close associate said, and this may have fed into the management’s narrative that she was “pushy,” a characterization that, for many, has an inescapably gendered aspect. Sulzberger is known to believe that the Times, as a financially beleaguered newspaper, needed to retreat on some of its generous pay and pension benefits; Abramson had also been at the Times for far fewer years than Keller, having spent much of her career at the Wall Street Journal, accounting for some of the pension disparity. Eileen Murphy, a spokeswoman for the Times, said that Jill Abramson’s total compensation as executive editor “was directly comparable to Bill Keller’s”—though it was not actually the same. I was also told by another friend of Abramson’s that the pay gap with Keller was only closed after she complained. But, to women at an institution that was once sued by its female employees for discriminatory practices, the question brings up ugly memories.

Pushy. Well, that’s what leaning in will get you.

Abramson is a big supporter of the Knight-Wallace Fellows, and visited Ann Arbor when I was there. She’s smart and personable and has a truly distinctive voice, this sort of nasal New York drawl, if that makes sense. (You’ve heard of people who have “a face for radio?” Well, she has a voice for print, but she made a joke about it, so she gets points.) She answered every question directly and seemed truly comfortable in her skin. The Times had recently taken some flack about publishing photos from the horrible ambush of American contractors in Iraq in 2004, where the bodies were dragged and burned and hoisted up for public view like charred barbecue. She explained why they made the call they did. Beyond that, I don’t what to say other than she was right to point out the pay discrepancy.

You could make the argument that the NYT had been overpaying for a while, and it was just bad timing that Abramson took the editor’s job when the publisher decided the salary had to return to earth. But she was also underpaid when she was managing editor, and apparently there’s a deputy m.e. who earned more than she did. I have a feeling this is a more-will-be-revealed thing.

So. Many years ago, I made a dismissive remark about cats in a column. I’m not a cat hater, but I’ve never had one of my own, and I guess I fell for the cruel cat stereotype that they’re aloof and would happily watch their masters writhe on the ground in pain, asking only that the hoomin please leave some food out before heading to the hospital. I got a note for a woman who claimed her cat had awakened her — by jumping on her chest and meowing loudly — during a break-in at her house. I forget the cat’s name, but I did a hooray-for-Mr.-Jinxy column and that was that.

Evidently heroism runs in the gene pool. I had no idea.

Not much more to add today, but there’s this: The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad has three songs on Bandcamp, which you may listen to and download, if you’re so inclined. They were produced by my friend Jim Diamond, who did them gratis because he’s a mensch. He said they added some percussion in post, and Kate played the cowbell. “Move closer to the mic, Kate, I need more cowbell,” he said, noting that’s the first time he’s ever spoken those words in his career. It got a big laugh. I expect the DVAS won’t be to everybody’s liking, but I hope Borden digs ’em, because he knows his girl groups.

As for the lyrics, I have only this to say: Johnny Cash didn’t really shoot a man in Reno, just to watch him die.

Happy Thursday, all.

A few little Moments in Detroit ™ have befallen me lately. I should share:

Since the weather turned warm, I’ve been doing some so-called last-mile commuting, which is what urban planners call it when you ride a bike to a transit stop, load it onto the bus or light rail or whatever, then unload it at your destination stop and finish the last leg to your office. It’s great so far; the building manager overruled the security guard who told me I had to leave the bike chained to a parking meter outside, so I take it up to the office. At lunchtime, I’m no longer confined to the Subway and Rub Pub on either side of our building, or even the places farther away — I can ride to the Eastern Market and get a slice of Supino’s pizza or a sandwich from the Russell Street Deli, which has Subway beat by a unit so large, it no longer makes sense to measure it in miles.

Last Friday I was cruisin’ into work on the bus, looking forward to the weekend, when an alarm started beeping in the engine compartment. The driver got on the horn with HQ, then pulled over and told us we’d be waiting for another bus or a repair, whichever came first.

This was the point when I realized just how important last-mile commuting is. I took the bike down from the rack and announced it was time for Plan B. I rode off Jefferson and into a terrible neighborhood, one burned-and-blighted house after another. And then, as though into Emerald City, I was in Indian Village, a stately neighborhood of older homes. A few blocks of this and back into the dodgy districts. Five men walked toward me, spread across the road, and I wondered if it was wise to stay on course. Decided to smile and wave, and they smiled and waved back, just a pod of local rummies getting their morning drink on, it looked like.

Then, huzzah, a bike lane. And a cemetery, final resting place of Sonic Smith. Some deteriorated light industrial, a new high school, this, that, a casino, downtown and my office. Five miles, roughly. I should do this more often. A perfect morning for a little bike ride.

Then today I had to appear on a local radio show, to discuss this story. I walked into the lobby, and who should be there but Sixto Rodriguez, the “Searching for Sugarman” guy. He’d just stopped by to make a cash donation.

“I really like your show, Craig,” he said. I guess he didn’t want to wait for another pledge campaign. A guy I know who used to work at the station says he does it all the time — just swings by from time to time to drop a fifty into the tip jar. Now that’s what I call public-radio support.

Rodriguez gives away a lot of his money. His daughter quotes him as saying once you have the food-clothing-shelter part handled, all the rest is icing. He shares the icing.

So, now I’m watching a few days of 80-degree weather blow out with a thunderstorm, with a 25-degree drop ahead for the next few days. We put the boat in Friday. Balls.

Some good bloggage today. Let’s start with a category called Fiery Oratory. Emily Bazelon reviews Glenn Greenwald’s new book in Slate:

A million jokesters have invited the NSA to listen in on their calls about feeding the cat or picking up the kids, noting that most Americans aren’t doing anything exciting enough to interest the government. You are missing the point if you’re in this camp, Greenwald urges:

Of course, dutiful, loyal supporters of the president and his policies, good citizens who do nothing to attract negative attention from the powerful, have no reason to fear the surveillance state. This is the case in every society: those who pose no challenge are rarely targeted by oppressive measures, and from their perspective, they can then convince themselves that oppression does not really exist. But the true measure of a society’s freedom is how it treats its dissidents and other marginalized groups, not how it treats good loyalists. … We shouldn’t have to be faithful loyalists of the powerful to feel safe from state surveillance. Nor should the price of immunity be refraining from controversial or provocative dissent. We shouldn’t want a society where the message is conveyed that you will be left alone only if you mimic the accommodating behavior and conventional wisdom of a Washington establishment columnist.

…Reading about all the disclosures again, woven together and in context, I couldn’t decide which was worse: the NSA’s massive, grim overreach, in the hands of Director Michael Hayden—or the complicity of almost every other entity involved, private as well as public. “PRISM is a team sport!” trumpeted one NSA memo. Too true: Other memos and slides show Google, Yahoo, Facebook, and Microsoft easing the way toward surveillance of their users. (Twitter was the exception in this case.) When the Guardian and the Washington Post broke that news, the tech companies tried to argue otherwise based on a technicality. But looking back, the documents “give the lie to Silicon Valley’s denials of cooperation,” as Greenwald writes.

I will be reading this, most likely. Eventually. After I read everything else I’m supposed to read. Someone recently recommended “Hellhound on His Trail,” the story of the manhunt for James Earl Ray, describing how great it was, etc., and all I could think was, dammit, another one.

More fiery oratory, from Gene Weingarten, speaking at Joe McGinniss’ memorial service:

Listen:

When a writer enters into an agreement with a source to tell his story, there is always an accompanying covenant. This will be acknowledged by, you know, every journalist who is not too stupid or full of himself to notice what is going on. In return for fair and objective reporting, the subject is promising to tell the truth. If the subject lies to the writer, all bets are off. The degree to which this principle attaches is directly proportional to the enormity of the lie that was told.

He’s speaking of the teapot tempest that followed a New Yorker piece that was about “Fatal Vision,” called “The Journalist and the Murderer.” The writer, Janet Malcolm, implied that McGinniss had betrayed Jeffrey MacDonald somehow, and… Just read the link.

I was in a group looking at some data regarding Michigan’s charter schools when someone recollected that charters were supposed to be educational trailblazers, and that’s why they were freed from many of the constraints traditional schools have — so they could run ahead and blaze a trail.

Not so much anymore. Not in New York, anyway:

A primary rationale for the creation of charter schools, which are publicly financed and privately run, was to develop test kitchens for practices that could be exported into the traditional schools. President Obama, in recently proclaiming “National Charter Schools Week,” said they “can provide effective approaches for the broader public education system.”

But two decades since the schools began to appear, educators from both systems concede that very little of what has worked for charter schools has found its way into regular classrooms. Testy political battles over space and money, including one that became glaringly public in New York State this spring, have inhibited attempts at collaboration. The sharing of school buildings, which in theory should foster communication, has more frequently led to conflict.

And some charter schools have veered so sharply from the traditional model — with longer school years, armies of nonunion workers and flashy enrichment opportunities like trips to the Galápagos Islands — that their ideas are viewed as unworkable in regular schools.

Finally, I know Christopher Columbus long ago lost his luster with most people, but I was raised in Columbus, Ohio, and I will always read a story about the old Genoan. And this one is pretty interesting; scientists think they might have found the wreckage of the Santa Maria.

A lot for a Wednesday, I know, but hey — eat up.

Well, this is what I call an eventful Monday, I guess: Went in expecting a couple-three hours of deadline work and the rest the more off-deadline sort, but it didn’t work out that way, and here it is, after 7 p.m., and I’m just opening a bottle of wine and considering that somewhere along the way I accepted another big freelance project — a book. Custom publishing, not some art inspired from my soul, but it will go a good ways toward paying off the back yard, and it’ll be wrapped up by summer’s end.

Down side: I have to relearn how to eat a horse. Although I seem to remember the most important part — one bite at a time.

Of course, what good is a book when soon we’ll all be living in Waterworld?

A large section of the mighty West Antarctica ice sheet has begun falling apart and its continued melting now appears to be unstoppable, two groups of scientists reported on Monday. If the findings hold up, they suggest that the melting could destabilize neighboring parts of the ice sheet and a rise in sea level of 10 feet or more may be unavoidable in coming centuries.

Global warming caused by the human-driven release of greenhouse gases has helped to destabilize the ice sheet, though other factors may also be involved, the scientists said.

What wonderful news! And yes, there’s a bright side:

The rise of the sea is likely to continue to be relatively slow for the rest of the 21st century, the scientists added, but in the more distant future it may accelerate markedly, potentially throwing society into crisis.

We won’t outlive this, and likely our children won’t, either, and after that? Eh, I’ll be dead. Let ’em figure it out.

At what point did mankind become self-aware enough to worry not only about the world we live in, but the world we might leave our grandchildren and great-grandchildren? We may never see them, but don’t they matter? Perhaps in a lifetime, the units of time become so baroque and meaningless — in Washington it’s the week; in other places the day, and I’m sure we’ve all been through some spells where just getting through one hour after another is enough. Eternity is hard except in the very abstract sense, where we dwell with Jesus in really comfortable clothing with elastic waistbands.

Of course, for business, it’s quarter. Break the tape, have a couple drinks and work on the next spreadsheet. And if you did it without giving a shit about what you’re pumping into the air or water, you sleep so much better.

I should add that I’m not holding myself up as some sort of paragon. The world will judge me as a typical 20th/21st century American, who used too much and threw away too much and ate beef from a million farting steers and was basically a plague upon the earth for about a billionth of a nanosecond of the universe’s time. I’ll be swallowed up.

Probably by rising seawater. But not yet! They can’t find me in Michigan, not until the backup from the Great Lakes tops Niagara Falls, by which point I’ll be ashes and it’ll be someone else’s problem.

Not to be all morbid or anything. But seriously: We broke the planet. Good job, humankind! Let’s party.

I have no bloggage today; it seems all anyone publishes on Mondays are recaps of Sunday-night television. When did the recap become a thing? The idea that someone who had actually watched an episode of this or that show might want to read 1,000 words telling them what they already know. At least many are entertaining to read.

Oh, well. It works for Fox News.

Happy Tuesday, all. I’m going to be running from one end of it to the other.

I cannot tell a lie. I set aside a little chunk of time to blog today, and things went awry. Not in the usual sense of awry, but rather, because I started reading this amazing Los Angeles Times story about the very strange marriage of Donald and Shelly Sterling. I haven’t said much of anything about Sterling, because what’s the point? It’s just a sideshow made for social media and the paint-by-numbers columnists who come in their wake. Racism, it turns out, is bad. Duh.

But, while it’s perfectly obvious that Sterling is a horrible person, and we should expect nothing less from him, it’s less perfectly obvious just how weird his personal life is. Really, I couldn’t tear my eyes away:

Donald Sterling openly kept a string of mistresses and in at least one case, had a woman sign a contract acknowledging that he would never leave his wife and giving up the right to sue for palimony, according to court filings and testimony.

Sterling “is happily married, has a family and has no intention of engaging in any activity inconsistent with his domestic relationship,” read a “friendship agreement” signed by Alexandra Castro in 1999.

Shelly Sterling was well aware of her husband’s affairs, Castro wrote in court papers. On one of their first dates, she and Sterling dined with Shelly in the couple’s Malibu mansion and then went as a trio to a movie where Donald held his mistress’ hand, according to Castro.

…Castro signed five separate agreements saying that she understood Sterling was happily married and that any disputes between them would be resolved in private arbitration, court filings show.

In 2002, Castro ended the relationship, in part, she wrote in court filings, because he reneged on a promise to have a child with her. Sterling asked her to come back, according to court papers, and when she refused, he sued, demanding the return of a four-bedroom million-dollar home in Beverly Hills.

And so on. None of this matters a whit in the grand scheme of things, but it’s always interesting to see how billionaires live their lives. (Any way they want, but to a degree most of us wouldn’t even begin to recognize.)

Anyway, you should read it. If you don’t have time, read the Slate summation.

And if you’re not into that, just swing by Tom & Lorenzo and see what they have to say about the Met Gala dresses. Lure: It’s the first break in their infatuation with Lupita Nyong’o.

And we can all come back after hump day.

At the moment, my alleged Jack Russell Terrier is snoozing on Alan’s lap. Alan is also snoozing. And I’m reading a story paddy’o sent over today, thinking about animals and how they do what they do. The story is about a Jack Russell named Chuck. From Slate:

Then came a late winter day in February. I was restacking a heap of awkwardly cut logs that had been sitting behind the barn for a season or two, and Chuck sat to watch. I flinched when a rat suddenly leapt out, but Chuck moved decisively; applying her small teeth to the nape of its neck, severing its spinal cord with surgical precision. She sat over the dead rat and looked me in the eye, perfectly still except for the wagging stub of her tail.

I kept working and the rats streamed out, Chuck killing them one by one, all her muscles tensed with the passion that had been bred into her by a slightly mad clergyman—a man named John Russell—over a century ago. When three slipped out at once, Chuck anticipated their hopeless angles of escape, killing the third just as it made it to the high grass, its two companions still twitching with their broken necks, their tiny mouths open in shock.

By the time I pried the last log from the frozen dirt, she had killed 14 rats, and the corpses littered the field. She turned her back and went to find my mother.

Wendy is getting better at stalking squirrels. The other day she tumbled with one in the back yard, but isn’t as efficient at killing them as Chuck. Maybe that’s because she’s showing a very non-terrier behavior — pointing. She lowers her head, raises her tail and will. Not. Be. Moved. For long moments on end, she will stand, frozen, waiting for one of her quarry to make a wrong move.

One of these days she’ll get one. Just not yet.

I wonder what sort of mix is in Wendy’s blood. She looks like a JRT, but she doesn’t really act like one — she’s not as aloof as a good terrier generally is, and Spriggy certainly never pointed anything other than his nose into one of Kate’s friend’s North Face jacket. (And not into the pocket, either. He ate his way through the fleece in pursuit of a Reese’s Cup she had zipped in there.)

You all know how much I love watching specially bred animals doing the things they were specially bred for. It’s just one of those things.

And now I have the depleted-Monday catching-up-on-Sunday’s-teevee blues. One more piece of bloggage and I’m off to the rack, but it’s a good one: Libertarians have taken over Keene, N.H., being jerks with extreme prejudice:

The activists selected this New England-cute city of 24,000 for liberation mostly because it lies within that flinty bastion of Yankee individualism known as New Hampshire, where “Live Free or Die” is carved into the collective granite.

Back in 2003, a libertarian-leaning group called the Free State Project decided that this small state could be a liberty lover’s paradise if enough like-minded people settled here. (The movement, by the way, tends to attract white males, according to Carla Gericke, the group’s president, a white South African who has lived for many years in this country. “I’m the token African-American,” she joked.)

A dozen years in, the Free State Project is about three-quarters of the way toward achieving its goal of having 20,000 people commit to relocating to the state, after which it will “trigger the move.” The project has already influenced the statewide conversation at times — partly because of “early movers” like Ian Freeman, a Floridian who bought an old white duplex on Leverett Street several years ago and quickly set out to push local buttons.

Y’all chew on that while I slink off to slumber. See you in the ayem.