A rare (for me, these days) interlude in Lansing today, which means I was up at 5:30, out the door an hour later, driving through drenching showers 20 minutes later, work/meeting/lunch and finally to the office-furniture store by early afternoon. I was there to buy a used Aeron chair, and yes, I’m expensing it, because that’s how awesome my job is.

It’s absurd, how happy this chair makes me. I’m not the sort of woman who lives to string jewels around my neck or Mercedes up and down my driveway, but good, functional design makes me happy in a very fundamental way.

Speaking of which, I wonder how Deborah’s doing at Beaver Brook. I’m looking forward to seeing how the bathhouse turns out.

On the way home, I stopped at a farmers market for some fruit. I was after peaches and blueberries, but also picked up a cantaloupe and, after a little thought, some of the first apples. I always feel a little bad about the first apples of the season. It means summer is drawing to a close, for starters, and because peaches always are my favorite, the joy I take in the first apples always feels a little like cheating. Yes, cheating. I heard an interview with Mandy Patinkin on Q, Jian Ghomeshi’s radio show, and he said he lives almost entirely in an imaginary world. As a person who feels guilty for cheating on the peaches in the fruit bowl, I identified.

Man, those apples were good, though. It’s a bumper crop this year in Michigan. (Cheap ho’s.)

Bloggage? Sure:

Michigan fails to pass the Medicaid expansion. So far, anyway; it’s what we call a developing story. No, wait, it did pass.

Two medical stories to get your blood pumping today: Four Tennessee infants get rare bleeding disorder because parents refuse routine Vitamin K injection, and a Texas megachurch is ground zero for a measles outbreak. Freedom! Natural!

Off to explore my library’s Freegal music site. Have a good Wednesday, all.

What a weekend. High pressure, unlimited ceiling, temps in the 80s. After a delightful improvement over last summer — Rain! Temperatures in the 60s! IN JULY!!! — it seems 2013’s is going out with what everyone expects and wants. I’m watering for the first time this season. But everything is still juicy.

And with that, I’ve once again violated Elmore Leonard’s No. 1 rule of writing. Oh, well. It’s what Midwesterners do — talk about the weather.

Besides, nothing much else happened, other than the usual weekend-y things — farmers market, dry cleaners, grocery, laundry cooking, exercise, sailing. We took the dog:

She has to wear her life jacket until we can trust her not to take a flying leap after a passing flock of geese. Also, it’s easy to grab her by the handle on top when we need to move her quickly.

As I was in aggressive fun-type mode this weekend, I wasn’t exactly trolling for linkage, although I’m pleased to report Mitch Albom had the day off Sunday and did not write anything about Elmore Leonard, which is a very good thing. They’d still be cleaning the brain explosion from the walls.

However, there is this, from the NYPost, not a paper I read regularly. Call it the confessions of a high-dollar college-admissions counselor:

One father requested that my meetings with his son take place in the Midtown offices of his private-equity group. His son would take the train in from Greenwich and meet me there. I offered to meet the boy somewhere easier, but no. It wasn’t safe, the father explained, as he led me into the vast glass space of his office, where his son was sitting; in fact, he had personally walked to Penn Station to meet his son’s train and escort him here.

Then he took out his checkbook and asked me, in front of the boy, what I’d charge to write his essays.

Oh, and I watched “History of the Eagles,” at least the first part of it; my interest in the solo career of Henley and Frey died in a 1980s aerobics class that used “The Heat is On” once too often. Bill Simmons take on it, linked last week, was pretty much dead on.

And we found our way to “Beware of Mr. Baker,” another rockumentary, but amusing where the Eagles thing wasn’t. Ginger Baker — what a wild man. At first I thought we were going down a path that would lead to another great musician robbed of his treasure by a trick of the copyright laws. He’s broke, he makes no money off the Cream catalog, what an injustice, etc. Later we learn he received $5 million for the Cream reunion, enough to take care of him for the rest of his life — if he hadn’t immediately gone out and spent it on 38 polo ponies and an endowment for a veterinary hospital.

Musicians. Go bloody figure.

Anyway, good Monday to all and a good last week of summer.

From the Who ARE These People file, a Colorado state senator with the charming name Vicki Marble puts her foot so far into her mouth that the drool from her sock could fill a 55-gallon drum.

Short version for non-clickers: At a meeting of the Economic Opportunity Poverty Reduction Task Force, the senator went off on a strange, rambling speech that managed to blame fried chicken and barbecue for African Americans’ health problems, a lack of vegetables for Mexican Americans’ (“I’ve read a study”) and towards the end, goes of on this sort of Tourette-y thing — “freedom,” “personal responsibility,” etc. I’m not usually one for these long, you-must-listen-to-the-whole-thing files, but this one sucked me in. It has the strange magnetism of a public meltdown, which I guess it was, complete with ridiculous apology:

“My comments were not meant to be disparaging to any community,” she said. “I am saddened they were taken in that regard. I take my responsibility seriously and I hope our work on this committee will offer real solutions to the health and financial challenges of our vulnerable populations.”

And in other entries in the same file, we have Scott Lively, and a typically excellent Dahlia Lithwick piece on him — exploring whether he can be prosecuted in this country for fueling the anti-gay movement in faraway Uganda:

Lively has openly bragged of his own role as the “father” of the anti-gay movement in Uganda, calling his campaign “a nuclear bomb against the ‘gay’ agenda in Uganda.” The question is whether all this constitutes mere speech or something more.

Last year Lively was named in a lawsuit brought by the organization Sexual Minorities Uganda, aka SMUG, that included three claims under the Alien Tort Statute, a law that gives “survivors of egregious human rights abuses, wherever committed, the right to sue the perpetrators in the United States.” SMUG, represented in this lawsuit by the New-York based Center for Constitutional Rights, claimed at argument in a motion to dismiss the suit last January that Lively’s actions over the course of a decade resulted in the persecution, arrest, torture, and murder of members of Uganda’s LGBT community. Federal Judge Michael Ponsor heard arguments in Lively’s motion to dismiss, and last January he seemed to suggest that he saw little activity on Lively’s part that wasn’t protected expressive behavior. But last week Ponsor tossed out the motion to dismiss, allowing the suit to go forward.

But that’s enough weight for a Friday. Here’s Coozledad’s favorite stew bird, Madonna, opening a gym overseas. The grill picture will rock you back in your seat. WITH HORROR.

Is it Friday? How can this be? How can it not be?

The thing about the death of most 87-year-olds is, their heyday is usually long past. The other day Kate was mourning the loss of Ray Manzarek, and I pointed out the Doors stopped making music more than 40 years ago. Acknowledge great work when its maker passes, sure, but don’t soak your pillow with tears. We live in the age of the internet. Everybody’s best work is right here at our fingertips.

Elmore Leonard, though — he’s an exception. At 87, he got a lot more years than our allotted threescore-and-ten, and made them count. He was working, and writing exceptionally well, until the very end. I don’t think “Raylan,” “Djibouti” or “Road Dogs” (his last three novels) belong in his very top rank, but they were still better than 90 percent of the crime fiction published today, still very entertaining reads. If I’m doing work like this past my 80th birthday, I will die happy.

Leonard has been dead less than 24 hours, and already I’m tired of reading his 10 tips for writing, which is a good lesson, but if you really want to learn how to write, just read his books. Figure out how he does it.

In “Unknown Man #89,” a process server is looking for a man and thinks he may have found his wife. She’s an alcoholic, drinking the afternoon away at he Good Times Bar in the Cass Corridor in Detroit. (Just those details alone — the name of the bar and the neighborhood — tells you something, at least if you’re a Detroiter.) See the way he captures a drunk’s speech patterns, how they laugh at their own jokes and go off on their little verbal jags. Less observant writers make it all about slurring. Later on, he sets up a showdown at a bar, deep in a black neighborhood, called Watts Club Mozambique. It’s midafternoon, hardly anyone in the place, when the shit starts to go down:

The manager and the lady bartender, in the pen of the U-shaped bar, standing by the cash register, didn’t move. It it wasn’t a robbery, they assumed it was dope business. The employee in the cloakroom stood by the counter of the hall door. No one in the place screamed; no one said a thing.

You go to work in a place called Watts Club Mozambique, you know how these things play out.

A friend of mine, an English professor, says that when the historians of the future want to know how we lived, the details of our daily lives, they’ll turn to the genre novelists to tell us. They will find a deep vein in Leonard’s work. Take “52 Pickup,” a great slice of ’70s life in Detroit. It’s about an extortion attempt on a successful businessman who’s been having an affair. He runs an auto supplier in Mount Clemens, lives in Bloomfield Village. The girlfriend was in on it, and has turned over some home movies to the two guys running the deal, one of whom is showing him the spliced-together film of him on the Bahamian beach with her, narrating the action:

“Here comes sport now, rum collins for the broad and a Heineken. Loaded and he still drinks beer. That’s your background showing, man. Eleven years on the line at Dodge Main. Couple of shots and a beer every day after the shift, right?”

Loaded and he still drinks beer. Perfect. You can learn more about white-collar and blue-collar lives, and how they intersected in Detroit, from that novel than any dissertation on class boundaries in the Wayne State library.

There’s more, there’s so much more, but I don’t have time to pull down every book and transcribe long passages. I do want to hit some bullet points, though:

** He wrote great female characters, not the way women write them, but the way a man who likes women does. I interviewed him once, and commented on it. He said, “I don’t think of them as women. I think of them as people.” Quick, read “The Switch,” published in 1978, before Hollywood pollutes it forever.

** His villains are great, too. I’m with Matt Zoller Seitz:

His books were tough, but his heart was warm. He liked people. He felt for them. He was able to see through their eyes, no matter how naive or cruel or dumb or scared they were. He didn’t seem to believe in evil, only in stupidity: meaning, you have to be stupid, or stupidly selfish, to be evil. Most of his villains are pathetic and deluded. He never wrote a Hannibal Lecter or Tom Ripley. No masterminds, no puppet masters, no Corleone-style crime lords. His criminals were criminals because they were too dumb or greedy to do anything else, or because they’d fallen into crime a long time ago and never got out. Maybe they were lazy. Maybe they had bad luck. Whatever the explanation, Leonard understood it, even if he didn’t condone it. He believed in free will, but he also had compassion. He got it.

** Speaking of Hollywood. For a writer best-known for his great dialogue, filmmakers hardly ever got his material right. Leonard told the story many times of how he coached Barry Sonnenfeld on how to direct his characters in “Get Shorty,” which many acknowledge as the first adaptation to be worthy of the source material. He told Sonnenfeld no reaction shots, medium shots only and tell your actors that they are saying funny things, but their characters don’t know they’re funny. Personally, I think “Get Shorty” is overrated as an adaptation; it can’t hold a candle to “Out of Sight,” which to this day remains my favorite EL movie, my favorite Detroit movie and my favorite George Clooney movie — the actor was just emerging as a heavy-duty movie star but didn’t act like it and (more important) director Steven Soderbergh didn’t shoot him like one. Can we also say that Soderbergh achieved the miracle of a fine performance out of Jennifer Lopez? Because he did. Her wardrobe in that movie was killer, too. Favorite scene:

And though “Out of Sight” is my No. 1, “Jackie Brown” was also very good. After that, it mostly sucks. Some profoundly so. “Freaky Deaky,” shot in Detroit two summers ago, went straight to video and who can be surprised, when it was uprooted out of its time period and cast with standouts like Crispin Glover? “Killshot” did even worse; thanks, Mickey Rourke and …Joseph Gordon-Levitt? As the bad guy?

** Leonard was refreshingly bullshit-free. About pretty much everything. He always told the truth about writing, anyway. Besides the 10 rules, mainly you just have to sit down every day and do it.

So, I have some links for you:

First and best of all, the Detroit News, bless ’em, re-ran a 1978 piece by the man himself, a deep embed with a Detroit homicide squad. It’s great:

Five a.m. on Terry Street, Detroit’s Northwest side. The fire equipment had left the scene. The gutted two-story colonial stood empty, with its door open, windows smashed, the smell of wet ashes filling its darkness, a faint sound of water dripping in the basement. Someone said the woman found down there, lying on a bed, had been “iced.” A curious verb to use. The woman had burned to death, or had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument. The fire had been started to destroy evidence.

Dick Newcomb, Executive Sergeant of Squad 7, came out of the house with his foot-and-a-half-long flashlight and a photo album of smiling high school graduates in red caps and gowns.

One of them, a 17-year-old girl named Michelle, was at that moment in intensive care at Mount Carmel. She had been found unconscious — severely beaten and bleeding from deep lacerations – in an abandoned house several doors north of the burned-out colonial.

“You can go in if you want,” Newcomb said, “but you’ll smell of smoke all day, have to have your suit cleaned.”

While we’re at the News, a seven-year-old piece by columnist Neal Rubin on EL’s relationship with Woodward Avenue, the city’s spine and east-west dividing line. Again, very good but maybe of less interest outside of Detroit.

A five-year-old profile by Neely Tucker at the WashPost.

Glenn Kenny, to whom I link because lots of you probably don’t know about him. A film blogger, but an appreciator of prose as well. I had to laugh because Abel Ferrara agrees with me about “Get Shorty:”

He rolled his eyes. “God. So studio-ized. Every time they shoot Travolta from a low angle they’ve got the fucking key light giving him a halo.”

I laugh because Ferrara was fired midway through a p.o.s. movie a friend of mine worked on here, and achieved the remarkable feat of being banned from every single restaurant in the Book Cadillac hotel in something like 10 days. And Kenny takes a look at a typical paragraph of EL text, and explains why it’s good.

Here’s an audio piece I did years ago, for WDET, a version of the blog I linked to yesterday. My takeaway: I hate the sound of my own voice.

Finally, the Onion. Because.

Have a good Wednesday, all.

Out walking the dog today, and spied a large prescription pill bottle sitting in the grass of the park strip. Litter is unusual here, so I picked it up. It was large because it originally held 120 (!!!) hydrocodone tablets, generic for Lortab. Very similar to Vicodin. Basically, an opiate-based analgesic pain reliever, highly prized on the street, a player in the opiate-misery complex of Rx drug addiction.

But of course this bottle was empty. The name had been torn off the label, as had the prescription number. Only part of the address showed, a street on the west side of Detroit, many miles from here. I checked the date the prescription was filled. Yesterday. But of course.

Alan said I should have kept it and given it to the police, but I didn’t. Just another day in addled America.

Besides, it was a pretty sweet weekend, which is to say nothing terrible happened, and some wonderful weather happened, and I rode 20 miles on my bike and hit the weight rack and the Eastern Market and Whole Foods, and the worst thing I can say about it all is that Whole Foods was out of Green & Black white-chocolate bars. What’s more, there was no empty shelf slot for same, which makes me fear there’s been some sort of coup in Madagascar or something, and the supply has been cut off. That? Would be a disaster.

Speaking of which, I guess everyone has seen the story about the extremely religious family who fled the U.S. to get away from “abortion, homosexuality, in the state-controlled church,” not to mention being “forced to pay these taxes that pay for abortions we don’t agree with.” So they got into their “small” boat — thanks, AP, for not nailing down the length and beam numbers while you were bringing us data about the population of Kiribati (their destination) — set sail for Kiribati, “a group of islands just off the equator and the international date line about halfway between Hawaii and Australia. The total population is just over 100,000 people of primarily Micronesian descent.” They thought that would be the furthest thing they could find from the oppressive, abortion-havin’ U.S. of A.

Only it didn’t work out. Bad weather damaged their boat, and they ended up being rescued by a Venezuelan fishing vessel. The U.S. embassy was arranging their travel home. What a bunch of maroons. The last thing they did before setting sail was welcome an infant into the world.

It takes all kinds, don’t it?

Here’s one kind it takes, too: The rodeo clown dressed as the president, taunting a bull into chasing him while a Missouri state fair crowd howls with laughter.

I’m getting into my Monday head early, aina?

With that, I’m tapioca on bloggage, and “Breaking Bad” is about to start. Because nothing’s as entertaining as the drug trade.

I try to be polite to the Jehovah’s Witnesses who regularly pass through our neighborhood, really I do. They have to do their thing, and I have to do mine, but I don’t see any reason for us to be shitty to one another. Usually they retreat gracefully with a “we have our own church, but thanks for coming, and best of luck. Have a nice day.” A small lie, that, but a pretty pale one. Today’s couple was pushier, though:

“I was shocked by these statistics about internet pornography,” she said, opening her Watchtower. “It says that a new pornographic movie is released every two hours, and someone accesses porn on the internet every minute.”

“Doesn’t really surprise me,” I said. “It’s everywhere.”

“But that means someone could be accessing porn on this very street,” she said. “One of your neighbors.”

I don’t know why that was the tipping point.

“We’re First Amendment absolutists in this house, thanks,” I said. “You have to take the bad with the good.”

The phrase “First Amendment absolutists” shut her mouth, shut the Watchtower, and got off my porch pretty damn quick. We’re the worst sort of heathens.

So. A former college football star — not of one of the big schools, but Grand Valley State — was found dead in the woods a few weeks ago, and today the autopsy reports came back. Cause of death:

LANSING — A former Division II college football star who disappeared in the Michigan wilderness during a late-evening fishing trip died of pneumonia caused by inhaling his vomit, according to an updated autopsy released today.

The report also suggests Cullen Finnerty’s disorientation and paranoia in the woods May 26 may have been exacerbated by a combination of the painkiller oxycodone and chronic traumatic encephalopathy (CTE).

Remember a few years ago, when gay intellectuals started talking about same-sex marriage, and you thought it wouldn’t happen in your lifetime, if ever? Someone said the other day that we’d see the demise of football — at least played at the prep level and especially below — within fewer years than you think. No longer betting against that.

Finally, I leave you with this fine Dahlia Lithwick take on Ken Cuccinelli and his almost unbelievably creepy anti-sodomy crusade:

His critics, including the ladies of The View and Jay Leno, have responded to Cuccinelli’s quest to reinstate Virginia’s anti-sodomy or, “Crimes Against Nature” law, with snickers and winks. The law is plainly unconstitutional—according to both a 2003 U.S. Supreme Court decision and a federal appeals court—and giggling about the attorney general’s creepy preoccupation with Virginians’ consensual oral sex makes for an easy comic target. But that focus obscures the real—even original—sin undergirding Cucinelli’s latest legal push: It’s a call for judges to read statutes to mean what they don’t say; a call for outright judicial activism, for freewheeling judicial interpretation—qualities legal thinkers on the right usually deplore.

A really good piece. Read.

Finally, I keep forgetting to pass along a remark someone made at the party last weekend. Some of my old neighbors read the blog, and one said, “There are two of your commenters I want to ask you about.”

Guess which two?

I’ll let you think about it. Answer, eventually, in comments. Have a great weekend, all.

More photos from the weekend, just to get them off the iPhone and into the world.

Alex is the only property owner on his little lake who lets his shoreline remain more or less natural. “Frogs live in there,” he said. How could he mow a frog’s house? Thanks, iPhone, for your panorama option:

You can click it to big it.

Alex also has a stray cat who has taken to more or less permanent residency in his gardens, killing rodents as her rent. Her name is Sissy, and don’t let Alex tell you it’s really Pussy, because it’s Sissy. Here she is:

Sissy. Sissy the cat.

You guys have been so good about posting links I feel like I can’t bring you anything you haven’t seen yet. But I have a little.

From the WashPost, Gene Weingarten sends an open letter to his new boss:

Back in 1982, when I was an editor at Tropic, the Miami Herald’s Sunday magazine, the publisher asked us to run a story on our cover about the winners of The Silver Knight award, which was given out every year at a gala to the most promising high school seniors in the Miami area. The Silver Knights were a fine and noble enterprise, but the event was run and financed by Knight-Ridder, the corporate owners of The Miami Herald; Herald stories about the Silver Knight awards were inevitably uncritical, nakedly celebratory, and drenched in self-promotion. We at Tropic declined to run the story of the awards on the grounds that we were a small magazine trying to establish a feisty, pugnacious identity, and being a corporate suckup toady lickspittle didn’t fit in with our plans. The publisher glowered, muttered something about insubordination, and steered the story to another, less visible section of the paper. We went unpunished.

Wikipedia tells me that one of the Silver Knight winners that year was little Jeffrey Bezos of Miami Palmetto High School. Haha.

You and I briefly crossed paths as younger men, and I dissed you. I guess it’s clear who won that race.

We had a similar award at the News ‘n’ Sentinel, the Sterling Sentinel award, but not even one section that could get out of the self-promotional story-writing.

Rembert Browne visits Detroit. I’m a little tired of these pieces, but OK. His heart is in the right place.

Having endured only one episode of “To Catch a Predator,” and learning to my horror that it was part of a long-running series, and finding myself in the very uncomfortable position of feeling sorry for some of these poor saps, all I can say is: This couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

Late night, early morning. Let’s all have a good Wednesday.

Kate was born two months after my next-door neighbor had her second child, and decided to quit full-time dental hygienin’ and start her own business and otherwise craft a working-mother-of-small-children income. Which meant she had time to babysit Kate along with her own, Allison (two years older) and Drake (the new baby), and I could go back to work knowing my precious infant was in good hands.

And so Kate spent the first seven years of her life living next door to these two kids, with whom she spent half of her days, even after preschool started.

In other words, they were the three musketeers. Here’s Halloween 1997:

I don’t know why that picture is so small; I need to rescan it. (Pre-digital.)

It turns out if you keep feeding and watering children, they’ll grow. Five years later:

And two years after that:

I’m not sure why Drake was a ghost in both these years, except that it’s pretty easy. Here’s 2008, a non-Halloween shot:

And then it was 2013, and Allison graduated from high school, and we went to Indiana for her party. She’s headed for Oregon to get a job and find herself and do the things when you’re 19 years old. One last picture:

I’m hoping Allie gets the Purple Dreadlocks scholarship at Reed College. She’s smart enough.

It was a great trip, brief as it was. The near-perfect weather has made the farm fields of Ohio and Indiana emerald-green and perfect. The new Fort-to-Port road between Toledo and Fort Wayne means no more white-knuckle passing of semis on two lanes. Alex’s garden looks like a Thomas Kincaid painting. The party featured beers buried in piles of ice, and vividly-frosted cupcakes. If anyone had a better time on Sunday, I don’t know how.

Then came Monday, and these were the events, which will be the bloggage. Because I don’t trust myself to express opinions about them:

The Washington Post was sold to the founder of Amazon.com. I see several possible outcomes of this, and many are not good.

The collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts is being formally appraised as part of the city’s bankruptcy process, prompting morons all over the globe to express ignorant opinions that drive me insane, which is why I ask that you not read, for example, the stupid ones under this Gawker item, because it will make you insane if you have even a few facts about the situation in your head.

Elmore Leonard had a stroke. He’s recovering, but still. Eighty-seven. Stroke.

Oh, and did anyone read this Sunday piece in the NYT about the artificial-joint cartel? You Hoosiers should check it out; it’s a necessary counterpoint to the bootlicking local coverage.

All of which is to say, Monday is behind us and let’s hope the rest of the week improves.

I remember, many years ago — and how many of these entries contain that soporific phrase? — a great reporter I worked with was doing a story about a teenage kid whose death some months before had become a cause for his parents.

The boy had been found hanging from a tree at a nearby park, his pants pulled down. Police ruled it a suicide, but the parents were insistent he had done nothing of the sort. It had to have been some strange assault that had turned into a homicide. My colleague was preparing a story on a third possibility — it was an accident.

Accidental because, as you sophisticates out there surely know by now, the death was caused by autoerotic asphyxiation. He was choking himself while masturbating, and lost control of the situation. It’s pretty common among those who practice “breath play” alone. It’s the ultimate “kids, don’t try this at home” sex game.

We’ve all heard about it by now; it’s almost common knowledge, but in the early ’80s, I found it astounding. The reporter was similarly amazed by the practice, and found only a few experts who could explain it to him. At the time, some sex researchers were on a campaign to educate law enforcement and coroners, because an incorrect cause-of-death determination could mean the difference between a life insurance payout and a denial. The people who do this aren’t suicidal; in fact, you might say they’re filled with a lust for life. They just chose a foolish way to masturbate.

I thought of that today when a local artist/provocateur played a prank, installing a giant can of Crisco under the Joe Louis memorial known everywhere as the Fist. Photo at the link. To “ease the pain of bankruptcy.” It was naughty, obviously, but I was amazed at how widely it was understood. In the years since my introduction to autoerotic asphyxiation, almost all non-Amish adults know now that some people like to stick their whole hand into some other person’s body, and it requires some heavy-duty lubricant.

I blame AIDS and the internet. Although some remain innocent. This was on the local Fox affiliate’s Facebook page, under a picture of the installation:

Local artist Jerry Vile has created something he calls “Vessel of Hope”. He hopes it may in some way ease the pain of having the Detroit bankruptcy shoved into our faces. Can anyone explain what this means???

At last count, it had been shared 1,545 times. I’m glad there are a few people left in the world who’ve never heard of such a thing. Long may they run.

Brian Stouder alert: Here’s a link to a podcast of an Indianapolis radio show last week, on the current charter/voucher school situation in Indiana. One of the guests is my old radio co-host Mark the Shark, who is also a school board member, and I am pleased to say he came out guns blazing and didn’t give an inch the whole hour. I find it hard to listen to many podcasts while I’m doing something else — something about the concentration required — but this one held my interest.

Wednesday already? Time flies when you’re working.

Don’t you just love it when you’re having a great day — not a birth-of-children, I’d-like-to-thank-the-Academy day, but a solid winner just the same — and you get a call from your spouse, and that spouse is having pretty much the opposite? Because, say, your new dog peed on the bed and then the floor drain in the basement backed up?

It still wasn’t enough to wreck my day. That’s how good mine was.

Any other dog owners have a bed wetter? How’d you fix it, beyond closing the door to the bedroom? The internet isn’t being very helpful.

The sewer problem was fixed in the usual fashion. All while I was in Ann Arbor. The day simply couldn’t get any better.

I don’t want to dump this stuff on Alan, but it so often happens during my shift that I can enjoy not being there for one minor disaster.

Bloggage? Yep.

A fascinating WashPost piece on a kid who was homeschooled, wished he wasn’t, and had to fight to go to a public school and try to catch up with his peers:

Powell was taught at home, his parents using a religious exemption that allows families to entirely opt out of public education, a Virginia law that is unlike any other in the country. That means that not only are their children excused from attending school — as those educated under the state’s home-school statute are — but they also are exempt from all government oversight.

School officials don’t ever ask them for transcripts, test scores or proof of education of any kind: Parents have total control.

Powell’s family encapsulates the debate over the long-standing law, with his parents earnestly trying to provide an education that reflects their beliefs and their eldest son objecting that without any structure or official guidance, children are getting shortchanged. Their disagreement, at its core, is about what they think is most essential that children learn — and whether government, or families, should define that.

While some national advocates fight for the right of parents to educate their children at home, Powell thinks children — most urgently, his siblings — should have the right to go to public school, too.

A story you don’t read every day, that’s for sure.

Indiana voters sent Tony Bennett — not the singer, the state school superintendent — packing last year. And now the good stuff is coming out:

Emails obtained by The Associated Press show Bennett and his staff scrambled last fall to ensure influential donor Christel DeHaan’s school received an “A,” despite poor test scores in algebra that initially earned it a “C.”

“They need to understand that anything less than an A for Christel House compromises all of our accountability work,” Bennett wrote in a Sept. 12 email to then-chief of staff Heather Neal, who is now Gov. Mike Pence’s chief lobbyist.

I look forward to seeing how my former employer’s editorial writer will figure out a way to call this “troubling,” but ultimately be OK with it.

Pot found on Justin Bieber’s tour bus at the Detroit-Windsor crossing. By my recollection, that makes two — someone in Rihanna’s entourage was nailed for the same thing a while back. Don’t any of these people talk amongst themselves?