Today was…a day. A long one, with many events happening in it. It included driving through three howling thunderstorms, the kind where you put your wipers on top speed and still lose sight of the taillights in front of you between swishes. In sane parts of the world, this is when drivers slow down, because you never know where the puddle lies that will send you hydroplaning into eternity. Also, because it’s good to know where the driver ahead of you is, and when they’re disappearing in the course of a second, tops, it’s wise to slow down.

So of course Michigan’s insane motorists were blowing past me at 60-plus. Passing on the right, because it’s INTOLERABLE that this woman is driving 50 in what is, after all, just some rain.

OK, but enough of that. A north wind is blowing away the lingering heat and it might be in the 50s by morning. Scratch the early a.m. swim workout and pencil in cycling. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I was away from the net most of the day, and so I missed the Anthony Weiner dick-pic story AND the royal baby’s unveiling. Fortunately, the internet kept up. Gents, when should you send a lady a dick pic and hey, it’s a royal baby.

I long ago lost track of the national punditry about Detroit’s bankruptcy, but Jonathan Chait got off a good line in his piece. It’s the last one in this graf:

Ze’ev Chafets, a native of the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, borrowed “Devils Night” for the title of his 1991 book about the city and its political culture. He compared Detroit to a liberated colony, whose politics was defined by continued resentment of the departed white occupier. White and black politics were locked into mutually reinforcing pathologies. Whites fled the city, blamed blacks for its destruction and, in many cases, gloated in its failures. Hostility toward the white suburbs shaped Detroit’s politics, which frequently amounted to race-to-the-bottom demagogic contests to label the opposing candidate a secret tool of white interests, with the predictable result on the quality of government. The worse Detroit got, the more whites hated and feared, fueling black racial paranoia, which made the city worse still. (Some national commentators recently suggested that Mitt Romney be brought in to turn around the city, which is a bit like suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu would make a great Prime Minister for the Palestinians — hey, he’s from around there!)

Chafets’ book is very good, and I’ve read it twice — once before we moved here and once after. Yes, he wrote a fawning bio of Rush fucking Limbaugh, but “Devil’s Night and other true tales of Detroit” is worth your time.

I have to duck out now, however, as I’m a) exhausted, on several levels; and b) out of time. Let’s try for more tomorrow.

This summer hasn’t been dry like the last one. In fact, as we’ve all been complaining about lately, sometimes the humidity has been suffocating. Since I’m walking a dog again, I’m paying more attention to the lawns and hedgerows around the neighborhood. And this is what I’m seeing:

Toadstools. Everywhere. One of my Facebook friends uploaded a photo of something that looked like an inflamed penis with extra-awful gonorrhea — bright red, oozing something brown at the top. “All over the lawn,” she notes. Lovely.

Fortunately, the dog has no interest in them. But I’m seeing all sorts of varieties. I know very little about mushrooms, fungi and the rest of it. I know they’re not morels, though.

Want some more pictures? Here’s something shipped along by a friend, who found it in his mother’s belongings:

You northeast Indiana journos will recognize the unmistakable, but un-bylined, prose style of the late Jim Barbieri. He could always get excited by a good fire.

I was out in the world today, hanging with a couple of former G-men for a story. We came across one of the Detroit Blight Authority projects. Man, these people aren’t screwing around:

They cleared a sizable block, a truly cursed one, plagued not only with empty, burned-out houses but also an ad hoc dump. The authority cleared the houses, cleared the trash, cleared much of the brush and trees. The plan is to grade it all when it’s done, then plant with a special grass/wildflower mix that doesn’t grow over a foot high. You get a sense of how much they’ve taken down by the pile of wood chips behind it. It’s not a total scalp job; there are still plenty of trees left. But there will be fewer places to hide for drug-using, trick-turning and other malfeasance. The sound of that industrial chipper was something to hear. The proprietor of a drug house nearby certainly seemed impressed by it.

And with that, I’m tapped. Slept badly, but up extra early to at least get a workout in. Which I did, but I’m paying with gritty eyes at 10 p.m. Some bloggage:

Remember crack babies? A long-term study on them just ended. Guess what it found? Ahem:

The team has kept tabs on 110 of the 224 children originally in the study. Of the 110, two are dead – one shot in a bar and another in a drive-by shooting – three are in prison, six graduated from college, and six more are on track to graduate. There have been 60 children born to the 110 participants.

The years of tracking kids have led Hurt to a conclusion she didn’t see coming.

“Poverty is a more powerful influence on the outcome of inner-city children than gestational exposure to cocaine,” Hurt said at her May lecture.

I am shocked, shocked to learn the state of Indiana lies to its residents. But not really:

But an honest analysis gets in the way of politics, particularly when we are talking about an ambitious Republican governor like Mike Pence.

One can only hope that, at some point, the public at large will begin to ‘get’ the games and lies opponents of healthcare reform have been playing ever since the enactment of the Affordable Care Act. When you have a situation like what we are seeing in Indiana, it becomes difficult to understand how anyone could avoid acknowledging that the disingenuous behavior of the anti-Obamacare forces truly knows no bounds.

Taking my gritty eyes to bed.

The president gave a few remarks about race last Friday. They were excellent, in my opinion, but perhaps you feel otherwise. Discuss if you want, but I’m more interested in picking grammar nits.

This nit in particular:

Along the same lines, I think it would be useful for us to examine some state and local laws to see if it — if they are designed in such a way that they may encourage the kinds of altercations and confrontations and tragedies that we saw in the Florida case, rather than diffuse potential altercations.

I see this all the time. I think whoever transcribed the president’s extemporaneous (yep, no Teleprompter!) remarks should have written “defuse.” You defuse a bomb, which is what an altercation is. Diffuse, as a verb, means to spread over a wide area. No one gets this, and yes, people, it drives me crazy.

Everyone must have their own areas of expertise, where mistakes made by others rankle more. After the Newtown massacre, I was struck by how many gun nuts fixated on minor errors regarding gun technology in others’ comments: Anyone who doesn’t know the difference between an automatic and semi-automatic is not someone we need to listen to. Just the other day, I saw a reference to “a male horse” in news copy, and thought congratulations, you know what a dick looks like. We’ll handle the tricky stallion vs. gelding question tomorrow.

I want to be more aware of these things. And I want the world to learn the difference between defuse and diffuse.

So, did everyone have a good weekend? I feel like mine was all full of Win, as we somehow managed to not lose power after a series of rip-roaring storms blew through Friday night. I made a pound cake and a cucumber salad. Ate ribs. Enjoyed a good time on a patio with citronella candles. Did a little work. The older I get, the more fun I have with stuff like this. I can’t believe there are people who would rather go to P. Diddy’s white party in the Hamptons than a decent backyard barbecue in the rest of the world. But that’s me.

Bloggage? Sure. Bob Garfield winds up and lets ABC have it, for hiring Jenny McCarthy to co-host “The View.”

Alan says he sees these trucks rolling around town, moving giant aluminum ingots here and there. The NYT explains how Goldman Sachs is gaming regulations to manipulate the market in its favor.

Finally, I knew this guy, via friends. He was a husband and father, warm, funny and smart, as well as fat and diabetic. In recent years, he had a health scare, and cleaned up his act — dropped 40 pounds, got his diabetes under control, started going to the gym daily. In this country, at this moment in time, such an accomplishment isn’t truly real until you’ve cemented it with a public display — a road race or other athletic contest. (Newspapers have these stories on a user key, I’m convinced; they’re positive and inspirational. There was one in the Freep just last week.) So, he entered one of those trendy mud obstacle courses, finished, went to the medical tent, collapsed and died.

This is not to blame Rick for what happened to him, or the race for being the venue. It’s just to say that maybe improving one’s own health, losing weight and one’s bad habits, is reward enough. Maybe that’s the lesson here. Two girls lost their father, a wife lost her husband, and no participant’s ribbon will bring him back.

Be careful out there. And have a good week.

Hard to describe just how miserable it is outside at the moment. I imagine those of you who live in Louisiana, south Florida or some other tropical-summer shithole know what I’m talking about, but: Man. All the windows are steamed, and it’s 9:30 p.m. I guess it’s been this humid and hot before, but every time it happens, it seems like the first time.

Wendy and I went walking, and I’m sorry we did, as 20 minutes of slow ambling left me draining sweat for maybe the fourth time today. It should break by the weekend. Let’s hope so.

I’ve been thinking today about passive aggression, and how much I hate it.

It goes back to the police dispatcher in the Zimmerman case, who, when Zimmerman said he was planning to get a little closer to this kid in the hoodie, said, “OK, we don’t need you to do that.” Some have interpreted this as the dispatcher saying not to get out of the car, which I think is what s/he was indeed trying to say. But it’s hard for people to give direct orders.

Part of the cringing humor of “Office Space” came from the boss, Bill Lumbergh, played by Gary Cole, and his oozy, greasy passive aggression: Oh, oh, and I almost forgot. Ahh, I’m also gonna need you to go ahead and come in on Sunday, too… He never says, “Come in on Sunday.” He says, “I’m gonna need you go come in Sunday.” No wonder Zimmerman ignored him. I hate that shit.

Oh, why are we even talking about this. Jenny McCarthy has been added to the cast of “The View,” a passive-aggressive move if I ever heard one. The New Yorker blog has more, but it’s pretty clear to anyone who has been paying attention. Good to know network television has no problem hiring a health crackpot.

“We store a lot of anger in our thighs,” and other ludicrous things said by yoga teachers. Not necessarily true, but oh well.

Mitch Daniels, now a president of a major American university.

Finally, remember Alanis Morissette’s “Ironic?” Remember how wrong it was? Well, someone fixed it.

Have a good Wednesday. I’ll be traveling, with sketchy posting.

I said this was going to be a crazy week, and I was right. Posting may be spotty from here on out.

But as long as everyone’s talking about Zimmerman trial jury member B37, here’s a story about her before she was infamous. (WashPost, story quotas may apply.)

I’ll be back. Eventually.

I can’t believe I was ever naive enough to think, when I moved in with Alan, “I’m so glad this is happening. Now I’ll only have to make the bed every other day.”

Alan, like lots of people, thinks of bed-making as the ultimate Sisyphean task: What’s the point in doing it when you’ll have to do it again tomorrow? Whereas I believe even a spotlessly clean room looks dirty if there’s an unmade bed in it. (Unless it’s occupied by someone.)

My mother insisted I make my bed every day, and I remember what a pain it was in the time of chenille bedspreads and other troublesome fabrics. You had to get everything smooth underneath, then bring up the spread and laboriously tuck it under the pillow. It looked neat until someone sat on it, sometimes moments later.

Then came the era of the down comforter, an unheard-of luxury in my youth. Then came the fiberfill comforter, for the allergic. We all learned what a “duvet” is. Bed-making is now a matter of yanking up the sheets, then yanking up the duvet, which fluffs itself up and settles back down, not precisely straight but that’s OK, that’s the point. If you have any sort of technique at all, you can make a bed in a matter of seconds. No, I don’t truck in sham pillows and accent pillows and all the rest of that crap. Yank, yank, position pillows, done.

So of course, no one in my house will do it. I can occasionally threaten Kate into compliance, but she is her father’s daughter.

All of which is to say that I just washed the duvet cover and had to put it back on — ALWAYS IT’S ME, WHO DOES THESE THINGS — and thought this must be the only part of bed-making any more that’s difficult.

Do you make your bed? Why or why not?

And how was your weekend? The rain let up and the heat moved in. I did a little yard work until I got dizzy. Walked the dog. Rode a fast 15-miler. Baked a cherry pie, grilled a pork tenderloin. Basked in the glory of summer.

And I do not have any specific thoughts on the Zimmerman trial. Like Eric Zorn, I see enough ambiguity in the evidence that I find reasonable doubt a disappointing, but understandable, conclusion. What I mostly believe is that we’re headed for another round of culture warrin’, and I’m not looking forward to that. I also think so-called stand-your-ground laws need a thorough rethinking. (And yes, I understand this wasn’t part of the defense.) I hate the idea that someone who considers himself a neighborhood guardian goes out armed with a weapon loaded with hollow-point bullets.

The worst of all is, there’s a huge part of the country that looks at the death of an unarmed teenager and shrugs.

We could talk about the breathless NYT story on campus hook-up culture.

Or we could all chuckle over Hank Stuever’s very clever pairing of “The Newsroom” and “Here Comes Honey Boo Boo” in his Sunday column.

Busy week ahead. Enjoy yours.

It seems to be documentary-film week around this place, so let’s roll with it.

A few weeks ago, Dexter first sent me the trailer to “Oxyana,” a new doc about the opiate culture in a West Virginia town called Oceana. The filmmaker, Sean Dunne, was director of “American Juggalo,” and “Oxyana” is his first feature. It seemed worth keeping an eye on.

Then I watched the trailer.

You get a sense of what it’s about at a molecular level – the heart-stopping beauty of the mountains, the primitive music, and the rural poverty-porn imagery. But a couple of the sound bites brought me up short: The 23-year-old claiming “half (his) high-school class” is dead of overdoses, and the unseen one who claims he’s seen 9-year-old children shooting dope.

Both of these claims, I’d wager, are exaggerations. Evidently there were more. From an interview Dunne did with a West Virginia public-radio reporter:

Lilly: “Also in the documentary, there were people that spouted out percentages, numbers, information about homelessness, overdoses, hepatitis C cases, babies born on methadone and so on. How did you verify that information?”

Dunne: “That’s the thing. This isn’t a film that is meant to be informational in that way. It’s meant to be immersive. It’s meant to show the up close and personal of what drug addiction looks like. These are stories from the people down there. These are their perspectives. These are people dealing with this every day. We didn’t question those things we just we were a vessel to their voice.”

Oh, spare me. Don’t bother me with the facts. Here’s just one of the distortions:

Some of the statistics that went unverified by the production crew included, things like, 70 to 80 percent of people in the town have hepatitis C because of intravenous drug use.

According to the Office of Epidemiology and Prevention Services between 2007 and 2011 Wyoming County saw less than 5 chronic hepatitis C cases.

To me, this is just another version of the cheap reporter’s trick of underlining the most tragic facts in a story with Albomian bombast. Believe me, the horrors of opiate abuse in southern Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia are easily portrayed with simple facts that don’t require passing along whoppers about hepatitis C.

A film blogger on a PBS site makes the point:

But not everyone does it so well. And when I watched Oxyana, I was bothered by the lack of context and long, languid shots of that dirty old town and its beautiful blue hills.

I sometimes didn’t know what I was watching. Or didn’t know why I was watching what I was watching.

After the film was over, in the Q&A, Dunne spoke of how he went to West Virginia a few times to film, with one trip lasting several weeks (maybe it was a couple of months.)

But how the hell are you going to make a truthful document of a complex problem that’s destroying real lives if you’re skimming the surface, with a few drive-by days of filming?

Yeah, what he said.

I think what has happened is, the technology for this sort of filmmaking is now ridiculously cheap; you can make a beautiful-looking film with a DSLR, consumer-level software and whatever talent you bring to things. But telling a story is not nearly so easy. It requires skill, empathy, intelligence, wisdom and a lot of other things. You can’t do it by just turning your camera on a beaten-up poor West Virginian and letting him or her talk, unchallenged. Calling it “immersive” is just excuse-making.

Oh, am I grumpy today? Maybe so. Here’s some comic relief: Apply for an Indiana marriage license as a same-sex couple? Risk jail:

Currently the state’s electronic marriage license application specifically designates “male applicant” and “female applicant” sections for gathering required background data.

“In Indiana the law clearly states that one man and one woman are the only two who can apply for a marriage license and can have a marriage ceremony performed,” Coffey explained.

Those who were to submit false information on the marriage license could face up to 18 months in prison and a potential fine of up to $10,000.

Don’t think it would happen, but who knows? This is Tippecanoe County we’re talking about.

Is it Wednesday already? Really?

Too many years ago, back when Knight-Ridder was a going concern, the mandarins of the chain had a nationwide reporting project going, called Real Voters, or some such. I think this was 1992, when Bill Clinton, George Bush and Ross Perot were running. The idea was to use the vast resources of our chain to tap into the wellspring of the people’s wisdom, etc.

One of our reporters wrote a piece on three different couples. The young couple were worried; the old couple were worried; the middle-aged couple figured things would work out. And no, I don’t think this was a function of their age. The latter couple had seen a lot of shit, figured they’d see more, but they had jobs, a house and a decent life, and they were grateful.

I recognized them from the photo. I passed their house several times a week. They often sat in their garage, door up, in lawn chairs, drinks in hand, watching the world go by. They looked content with the world.

I think it was the garage-sitting that did it. Nothing like a seat among the comforting odors of the lawn mower and garden tools to instill a deep feeling of calm. At least in a Midwesterner. I know there are parts of the country where a garage is a rarity, but not here. I’ve waited out thunderstorms in a garage. I’ve sheltered in them. And I’ve enjoyed hospitality in quasi-garages converted to man caves.

Which is why my mouth dropped when I read this story in the DetNews, about “concerns” in Dearborn over too much use of garages as social spaces. It pushes cars out, “clogging side streets.”

Oh, puh-leeze. Garages are indeed social spaces in Dearborn, and have been for some time. Arab-Americans bought the little houses there, raised big families in them, and needed extra space for the usual reasons — to get away from someone bugging you, to invite in neighbors without going to a whole lot of trouble, and especially for smoking hookahs, which is very much a part of the social scene there. Those things put out more smoke than a three-alarm fire; you really wouldn’t want one in your house.

See this very amusing video, “Arab-American Cribs,” for an illustrative glance.

Of course there are toxic comments on the story — it does involve Arabs, after all — but a surprising number of supporters. Detroit was known for years for big families in small houses. Some people just got used to chillin’ in the garage.

Some good bloggage before I finish dinner:

American health care, THE GREATEST IN THE WORLD. Well, at least as it pertains to the bill. Especially for maternity care:

When she became pregnant, (Renée) Martin called her local hospital inquiring about the price of maternity care; the finance office at first said it did not know, and then gave her a range of $4,000 to $45,000. “It was unreal,” Ms. Martin said. “I was like, How could you not know this? You’re a hospital.”

Midway through her pregnancy, she fought for a deep discount on a $935 bill for an ultrasound, arguing that she had already paid a radiologist $256 to read the scan, which took only 20 minutes of a technician’s time using a machine that had been bought years ago. She ended up paying $655. “I feel like I’m in a used-car lot,” said Ms. Martin, a former art gallery manager who is starting graduate school in the fall.

Like Ms. Martin, plenty of other pregnant women are getting sticker shock in the United States, where charges for delivery have about tripled since 1996, according to an analysis done for The New York Times by Truven Health Analytics. Childbirth in the United States is uniquely expensive, and maternity and newborn care constitute the single biggest category of hospital payouts for most commercial insurers and state Medicaid programs. The cumulative costs of approximately four million annual births is well over $50 billion.

And though maternity care costs far less in other developed countries than it does in the United States, studies show that their citizens do not have less access to care or to high-tech care during pregnancy than Americans.

Sigh.

Neil Steinberg, stripped of most of his columns, makes his single count. On gay marriage, so be advised it’s satisfying for supporters, less so for others.

Finally, I mostly ignore my old newspaper, mainly because its content embarrasses me, most days. But spurred by Alex’ posting of a link over the weekend, I looked up the columnist who replaced me. Taking his cue from a right-wing website, he wonders if the military can survive “the pinup police.” The subhead is particularly witless, which I assume he didn’t write: Who will inspire the troops, now that they can’t ogle Betty Grable?

This is all pegged to an order by Chuck Hagel that military facilities be purged of materials that can be degrading to women. What a world these people live in, that they imagine barracks draped with Betty Fucking Grable. (The paper’s illustrations also included Rita Hayworth, as I live and breathe.) I’d like to post what I imagine is a more typical contemporary pinup — a Hustler Beaver Hunt winner spreading her shaved labia, with a buttplug inserted just for laffs — over the paper’s copy desk, and see how many people find it beautiful and inspiring.

I was embarrassed by this column, yes. But also pissed off. And ashamed that there’s a 20-year interval on my resume that says I worked for this fishwrap.

I’m in northern Michigan again, with very unreliable wi-fi and all the rest of it. But I have enough to tell you I heard the news of today’s SCOTUS decisions entirely via Christian/talk radio, and may I just say: Boy, that was different. If you are, like me, pretty much all-NPR-all-the-time, you should give it a try sometime.

Their take: It’s the end of the world as we know it. If I were a Secret Service agent, my hair would be gray by now. The focused hatred of the president is hard to fathom. Also: Alex Jones makes Glenn Beck sound like Eric Sevareid.

Back when I can be back.

On edit from McDonald’s wifi: I’m having a problem in which all comments, even from trusted regulars, are going to moderation. (And the obvious spam is not being auto-spammed.) Might be a delay or two in today’s discussion, but I’ll keep up as I can.

I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. Reading reviews of the new Kanye West album, that is. I’m not trying to be down with the kids, or up on the Kardashians, but it seems everywhere I turn there’s news about “Yeezus,” i.e., the album, and I’m just…just…well:

New York magazine:

Shock, surely, is the point. Kanye wants to get under our skin, to rile and appall. In recent years, we’ve had a lot of dark-tinged music about sex: the brooding boudoir R&B of the Weeknd, the glum sex raps of Drake. West means to deliver the ultimate in “bummer sex” — unfiltered nastiness, set to a punishingly bleak soundtrack. The problem, ultimately, isn’t moral; it’s aesthetic. Kanye’s a wack rake. If he has a weakness as an artist, it’s his rapping, his stiff flow and sometimes awkward rhymes. When he tries to come on like a rogue, the corniness is accentuated: “Baby girl, he’s a loner/ Late-night organ donor”; “I’m a rap-lic priest/ Getting head by the nuns”; “Eatin’ Asian pussy/ All I need was sweet and sour sauce.” In the words of that rock critic Barack Obama, he sounds like a jackass.

Grantland:

On “Blood on the Leaves,” he revives the soul-sampling, love-’em-and-leave-’em crowd-pleaser of “Gold Digger.” Only this time, instead of Jamie Foxx’s sunny Ray Charles impersonation, West provocatively deploys Nina Simone’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” in a song that finds him complaining that he can’t force one of his “second-string bitches” to get an abortion because of all that religious “Jesus Walks” stuff. On “I’m in It,” the thoughtful messages of Watch the Throne are perverted into a devilish dancehall-accented treatise on the pleasures of multicultural sport-fucking. (“Uh, black girl sippin’ white wine / put my fist in her like a civil rights sign” is the queasiest lyric on a record with lots of competition for the distinction.) On “I Am a God,” the anti-materialism of “All Falls Down” from his 2004 debut, The College Dropout, is negated by a campy stew of clanking, Sprockets-y industrial-rock portentousness and West’s overplayed petulance about the painfully slow service at French-ass restaurants.

The Wall Street Journal:

At Monday’s event, he said having YouTube display his videos next to other people’s would be like a store stocking Louis Vuitton next to lesser brands. “I don’t want to be in that context,” the rapper said while introducing his album to the crowd with a characteristically breathless and topic-hopping statement. “I got this new strategy: It’s called no strategy. I got an idea how to sell more music: It’s called make better music.”

The New York damn Times:

Mr. West is angry, all right. In “Black Skinhead” he snarls, “I’ve been a menace for the longest/But I ain’t finished, I’m devoted,” over a track that switches between a blunt glam-rock drumbeat and a distorted synthesizer line. In “New Slaves” he’s furious at the segregation his mother’s generation faced, at corporations trying to control him, at profit-making prisons, at the media (of course) and — after many songs on previous albums that proudly itemized his collection of designer clothes — at the way designer labels are marketed to those who can’t afford them.

I don’t even know what this shit means anymore. I only know I don’t want to hear this record. Not even a little bit. Eating Asian pussy without sweet-and-sour sauce? Sampling “Strange Fruit” to bitch about your groupie problems? Why doesn’t someone clock this idiot and put us all out of his misery?

I’m writing this in early evening, having laid the groundwork for dinner this morning. Wednesday is Alan’s late night at the office, but he sometimes gets home before 9, so let’s be optimistic. Then the day unfolded, events that included:

Suspension of the Hoffa dig;
The exit of the mayoral front-runner due to filing errors, his disqualification upheld by two courts;
Plans for a new hockey arena, to be partially funded with public money

I’m probably forgetting something. But now I’m wondering if he’ll ever come home.

We’ve been having a string of perfectly lovely, perfectly perfect days, the kind where you think you should be wearing sunscreen just sitting on the couch. So of course we’re going to be smothered starting this weekend — high ’80s and chance of storms, which means humidity of the sort that makes mold grow in the elastic of your bra. Tomorrow night should be the last of the perfection, so I’m going out.

So, some bloggage:

Back to Grantland for something I fear is true: Season six of “Mad Men” was a disappointment. Since we were talking about what we’ve been watching lately.

Well, if Paula Deen thought Anthony Bourdain was tough on her before, wait until he gets a load of this.

And with that, I’m uncorking a bottle and about to enjoy a lovely evening. Hope your Thursday is what you want it to be.