I know I’ve said cruel, cruel things about California peaches in the past, but I’d like to make a qualified walkback today.

(I know, I know: EDGE OF YOUR SEAT.)

My fruit guy at the Eastern Market warned me a while back not to expect much during peach season. Their whole crop was KO’d by the crazy spring weather. But they are offering an alternative – white peaches from Cali. This would normally leave me cold, but I trust my fruit guy. They were hard, but had a nice peachy fragrance. I took them home.

Thirty-six hours later, they were soft and people? These were some seriously good peaches. And white! What will they think of next.

This is my super-favoritest time of year, foodwise. Every breakfast is peaches, blueberries and melon. Every lunch is vegetable frittata. Dinner is…well, today it was a tomato-corn pie, made with the last of Saturday’s fresh mozzarella from Zingerman’s. What a life. It doesn’t take much to make me happy.

Which is, perhaps, one reason I can’t even say how many shits I do not give about Chick-fil-A. As we all know from the occasionally updated Gay Agenda, fast food is tacky and fattening, and many of my gay friends and acquaintances are superb cooks. Nevertheless, if you didn’t see the slideshow Cooze unearthed yesterday, of politicians enjoying fried chicken products, it’s worth a look. Huckabee is showing the difficulty of lasting weight loss, it seems. Mike! Stop digging your grave with a knife and fork! Grilled chicken, no bread, and lose the waffle fries.

And now that we’ve switched to politics, a very good column by Brian Dickerson at the Freep, who’s been gone too long this summer. It’s about the stealth endorsements of Michigan’s Right to Life, and two Oakland County judicial candidates who say they forgot to mention the endorsement when directly asked:

Because all judicial races are nominally nonpartisan, all voters participating in either the Democratic or Republican primary next week will be able to cast their vote in the circuit court contest. My surmise is that Christ and Sakwa want conservative Republicans voters to know they’re in Right to Life’s corner, but would prefer that Democrats and independent voters remain ignorant of the RTL connection.

But let’s not go into the weekend with thoughts of single-issue voting! Let’s do it with Animals talking in all caps. This one.

Happy weekend, all. I’m going to a Tigers game.

Down the tunnel, under the river and out into the gun-free (or gun-fewer), single-payer health care world of Windsor! America Junior! Now this is what I call a midweek palate-cleanser.

And why am I here? Because I got a note from our sometime commenter Jason T., who is in the neighborhood honeymooning with his new bride, Denise. They came over from Pittsburgh, where they were wed this past weekend. I should probably add they’re not honeymooning in Windsor, but in the Ontario coastal area of Lake Erie, where it’s pretty and Canadian. They thought it might be fun to get together. And I agreed, so here we are, in some faux-English pub, with a Morris Minor permanently parked outside and some rather mediocre fries. (Not that this stopped me from eating a bunch of them.) My eye keeps getting snagged by the TV over Denise’s shoulder, which is tuned to something called TSN, which I believe stands for The Sports Network. (This is Canada, after all.)

And can you believe it? They’re not covering gymnastics or swimming or very special stories about pluck and grace under pressure. They’re covering rowing. What a miracle.

When I got home, I tried to find CBC or some alternative to NBC. Nothing. People, THIS IS NOT A FREE COUNTRY.

Jason and Denise and I went to a couple of places in Walkerville, a neighborhood of Windsor so called because it exists in the shadow of the Hiram Walker distillery, which during Prohibition was a little like having Gus Fring’s underground meth lab operating across the street. They took the tour. So should we, some lazy winter Sunday.

Why am I facing 10 p.m. as a puddle of fatigue? Maybe because I woke up at 3:15 a.m., laid awake until 6, dozed fitfully until 7 and then called it quits. Fortunately, some good bloggage.

What divers look like, mid-dive.

Another excellent Detroitblog, on one day of police activity.

And if you haven’t seen Stephen Colbert riding dressage, you are missing something wonderful.

Yeesh, a wearing day. Let’s go for some links and leave it at that, eh?

I wish I could code stuff like this.

Seriously, when we talk about how to do news for a distracted, digital audience, this is the sort of thing they’re talking about, although granted, this isn’t exactly news-news, but more of an argument on behalf of the Democratic National Committee. Content aside, it’s just a cool way to pack a lot of information in a fast, clickable presentation. Thanks, Eric Zorn‘s second, Megan Crepeau.

Ever do a Google image search for “bite the medal?” You should.

The London Olympics Sap-o-Meter. Funny.

Sorry for the short shrift, but I’m done.

I read the news today, oh boy. Actually, I heard it — one of those long-drive-to-Lansing days. Mitt Romney described Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, said “culture” is the reason for the gulf between Israel’s and the Palestinians’ GDP, made a serious factual error (the GDP figures), and otherwise had one of those days where, if it had been had by Barack Obama, would have been accompanied by screeching, real hysterical screeching, on the right. Because it was the other way around, it was accompanied by a sober report on NPR in which the reporter explained, in reasonable tones, the “controversy” attached to calling Jerusalem the capital of Israel.

And that’s the way it was on the drive home.

As always, don’t just consider the source, consider the audience. Romney was speaking to a group of rich donors at the King David Hotel. It must have been successful; he is said to have left with more than a million bucks in his pocket.

Enough time passes between presidential elections that I forget stuff. Is this the way presidential candidates are supposed to behave “on foreign soil,” a phrase we hear a lot at times like this. Because that struck me, even considering the audience, as a rather obnoxious speech. But what do I know?

Back to the mind-numbing palliative of men’s gymnastics. Boy, are these guys not my type — short, musclebound, as hairless as a baby’s ass. I keep thinking of real-world applications for this level of physical mastery. Many years ago, I read a column in the American Spectator — perhaps the only good thing I ever read in that rag — about Rudolf Nureyev, after he died of AIDS. It was a snotty column, but there was an eyewitness account in there, about a rooftop party busted by the cops, and somehow Nureyev ended up on the other side of an air shaft or narrow alley, and the cops said, “Get back over here.” The dancer gave them an arrogant look and leapt back across the gap like a gazelle, which somehow reduced whatever had brought the cops there to the level of ashing your cigarette on the sidewalk. That’s when it would be good to be a gymnast. You never know when you might have to jump across an air shaft or turn a few handsprings.

As it is, most of us will only go to parties with people who will have a few and then reprise their role as Sally Bowles in “Cabaret.”

Meanwhile, what the hell with this Jonah Lehrer guy? It’s not enough that he blew it. He had everything, and he blew it. I get really tired of these entitled little shits with their book contracts and their think pieces and all the rest of it. Don’t make stuff up. It’s not so hard.

OK, time to watch the end of these gymnastics, and try to pretend I don’t already know the U.S. team collapsed like a muscular little house of cards.

OK, I’m just going to say it: Synchronized diving, while an impressive display, is not a sport. It’s a stunt. An awful lot of the competitions we’ll be seeing in the next two weeks aren’t sports. But what the hell, let’s watch ’em.

As a former equestrian, I’m sensitive to this charge. “You ride a horse? Oh wow, I bet that’s really hard — for the horse.” My reply was always that if golf is a sport, then riding is, too. And for the next two weeks, the Obscure Sport/Stunt Color Commentators Union will see full employment, and we’ll get to repeat their lines at work: “As usual, the Chinese set the standard for synchronized diving.” Try it out.

Diving is a sport, I should add. Surely, synchronizing with another diver is an added skill. But honestly, after watching for a while, I think it’s all about another opportunity to show beautiful bodies in bathing suits.

How was your weekend? Mine was fine. Sailing, cooking, shopping — basically the perfect summer trifecta, made even better by the fact all the shopping was for Kate, and I didn’t wave to face a fitting-room mirror. We went to Forever 21, one of the higher circles of hell. All I can do, shopping there, is think of how wretched the lives are of the people who sew this shit. How is it possible to grow the cotton, harvest the cotton, process the cotton, dye and loom the cotton, cut it, sew it, blah blah blah until this row of tank tops hangs on a rack in Troy, Michigan, priced at 2 for $8? But it’s undeniably a good place to buy cheap dresses for a teenager, so here we are, and here I am on an ottoman in the fitting-room area, and a girl across the row steps out in a dress that is the full trifecta of sluttyville — short, tight and low-cut. What’s worse, it’s sort of shirred, too, and the seam cleaves the crack of her ass. She looks at the mirror, and seems to be trying to make up her mind.

Her friend steps out of the adjacent fitting room. “Oh. My. God. That is so awesome. You look so hawt.” I’m thinking, nope, what you need is a nice sheath in a non-stretchy fabric. Something that skims the body, but doesn’t hug it like a drowning swimmer. Raise the neckline two inches — a scoop, not a plunge — and I’ll give you the mid-thigh hemline. Then you’ll look like a pretty lady and not Tatiana Petrovna, Russian prostitute.

She went back into the room, and emerged a few minutes later with a hot pink tight/shirred/short/STRAPLESS number, which was even worse. Her friend agreed THIS was the dress.

I guess she had a date for a sex party or something.

Kate got two dresses that were sorta Betty Draper-ish. Plus some fierce boots from Nordstrom’s anniversary sale, and a new pair of skinny jeans. I think we’re done for a while.

Back to the Olympics.

But first, some bloggage? Sure.

When it gets very hot in the Carolinas, our Coozledad finds little reward in farm work, which is good for us, because he blogs instead.

A very very long read from Outside. I opened the print window — it was broken into so many takes I got tired of clicking through — and lost the original story. But it’s a great story, about a veteran who walked into the Bob Marshall Winderness and hasn’t been seen since.

And while it’s wrong to laugh at children, someone obviously needs to point this girl in a new direction, and maybe this will be the turning point.

The week awaits! Let’s make it a good one.

I don’t know about you guys, but all I really want to do today is watch bears fish for salmon. It’s 11 p.m. as I write this, but still plenty of daylight in Alaska. I haven’t seen any of the bears catch anything yet, although a couple of small fish have jumped. The bears stare at the water with a certain comical level of concentration.

I can’t deny it: These bears are my husband. It’s why I can’t stop looking. I recognize the concentration.

And now it’s the next day, and you can see how my writing hours are going these days. Well, last night was Project Runway, and I made an actual dinner (stuffed portobello mushrooms on the grill, plus corn on the cob). It included wine. I got tired. So now, a sugary breakfast (lotsa fruit), and a lot of coffee, and let’s see what the new day reveals to us. (Pause.) It just revealed a commotion outside, which I thought was a late-retiring raccoon, but no: A blue jay and a grackle, mixin’ it up on the deck. I think the grackle won, because the jay just took off. The grackle strutted around for a bit, ate an ant, preened its feathers. These birds are hard to love, but they certainly have attitude to spare.

In the meantime, this is what was revealed on my morning media run:

The Instagrams of Wall Street. Evocative and depressing. (Who wants to work on those trading floors? Hell. On earth.)

Every so often I consider doing one of those 23 and Me DNA scans, but didn’t I read somewhere it’s a big joke? Can’t remember. (Can’t remember much these days.) But somewhere along the line, perhaps I’d meet some interesting ancestors.

Via Hank, that rare treat, a Michael Kinsley column, and a good one. It starts with the victory of gay marriage and asks what will be the next thing we’ll look back on and wonder how we ever tolerated it otherwise. Kingsley’s nominee:

My own favorite nominee will win me no friends: high school football. In 20 years I think it may seem incredible that loving parents used to send their kids out to bang their heads against each other in the certain knowledge that this was damaging their still-growing brains. “Certain knowledge” may overstate the case now. But this smells just like smoking, about which the evidence dribbled in until it was undeniable. Let me add (for my own self-protection): I hope I’m wrong.

This week was the 45th anniversary of the Detroit riots. I will look at any picture of this event, any time, ever. Here’s a slideshow.

Late add: If you’d like to die of Cute today, the Green Bay Packers participating in a long-standing start-of-summer-practice tradition — riding kids’ bikes to the stadium.

Enjoy your weekend, eh?

Sorry I’ve been such a no-show these last few days. Mostly it’s tunnel vision, mixed in with a soupçon of laziness and a big dash of emptyhead. This summer has been wearying, and at some point I want to lay in the news like a swimmer in the shallow surf. Just let it wash over me, but not necessarily have anything to say about it.

In other words, I’m getting stupider. Just a while ago I poured dishwasher soap into the designated slots, started the machine, turned around and put the soap in the refrigerator.

But the season is still enjoyable. Today the three of us met up for dinner at a pizza place not far away, two of us on bikes, and that’s something you don’t do in January, fo sho.

So I have to ask: Why isn’t this getting more attention? Graham Spanier, the former Penn State president who should be sitting at home in a dark room covered with sackcloth and ashes, seems to have landed on his feet. He’ll be working for the government, on “projects related to national security.” As Paul Campos said over at LGM, “Because if there’s one thing Graham Spanier knows how to do it’s to make sure that sensitive information doesn’t fall into the hands of the wrong people.”

It’s really true, isn’t it? Once you’ve passed a certain threshold of success — a shifting, shadowy threshold — you can no longer fail. You’re incapable of failure. You land on your feet. Always. Where is that threshold?

One of my fellow cyclists posted this on Facebook today: The case for the “Idaho stop.” Or, to put it another way — acknowledging reality.

Hank was at the poolside NBC party in Los Angeles the other day, the one that She-Who disrupted by her very presence. He reports she was tiny and spray-tanned from head to toe. The New York magazine reporter asked her why she and her family couldn’t stay off TV. Because they believe in “living life vibrantly,” she said. Noted. (Bzzzzz.)

Obviously, my energy hasn’t yet returned. But I’m recovering, eh?

Open thread until I get my act together. On the table today? How Anglo-Saxon are you?

Or whatever else you’d like to talk about. Back in full strength tomorrow, promise.

All linkage today. Despite my best efforts, Monday continues to be le day du suck. But now it’s over. So there’s that.

One from me: Andy D. and the Detroit Bus Company. A fun guy.

We’ve come a long way, but we have a lot further to go: Sally Ride’s sexual orientation isn’t exactly the first line of this obit — it only looks that way, because of the way the Telegraph makes its online presentation — but still. We’ll know we’re done when such news is in the last two paragraphs, where it usually is.

Final poses with the Paterno statue, a slideshow. I like No. 8.

Lately I’ve been reading Mitch Albom’s sports columns, to see if they suck, too. They do. Lots of rhetorical questions, the midpoint I’m not saying this, but I am saying that hands-in-the-air gambit, the usual.

Coffee, food, work.

A Grand Rapids Saturday night. And why are we in Dutchistan? Because we have to pick up Kate at camp about 45 minutes northwest of here on Sunday, so what the hell. This is the second year in a row we’ve made homecoming eve a couple’s getaway in west Michigan, so I guess it’s a tradition now.

And yes, we’re at the Amway again. A million Rainbow Girls are checking in. As far as I can tell, they’re called Rainbow Girls because they favor Vera Bradley garment bags and duffels, which make a vivid color mashup on the luggage carts, along with the coolers in bright primary shades, because who can travel without a cooler? A few seem to be packing special stuffed animals as well. Rainbow Girls are the teen-girl version of Demolay, right? And Demolay is a Masonic thing? Whatever. All I know is, it’s 5 p.m., and some of them are loafing around the lobby in flip-flops and T-shirts, a few more in cocktail dresses and platform sandals, and a few more in floor-length gowns, which makes me wonder what the hell is on the agenda for tonight. But not enough to keep us hanging around, not when there’s a tapas place to be patronized.

I have to say, before I go on, the downtown is surprisingly oxygenated. Fort Wayne could learn a thing or two from this place. Clubs, bars, restaurants everywhere, lots of people out walking around. The tapas place was full. A few of the patrons were young women wearing tiaras and sashes. I thought they might be Rainbow alumane. A closer look revealed they were bachelorettes.

I don’t want to say this started with “Bridesmaids” because obviously it didn’t, but the movie seems to have breathed new life into the idea of going out with your besties the week before your wedding, eating tapas, getting shitfaced and otherwise bonding. If you can’t afford Vegas, Grand Rapids will do. For what it’s worth, these groups were well-behaved, but then, the sun hadn’t set yet. Back at the hotel, there were more — two more parties, one of which was uniformly dressed in outfits I disapprove of, in the sense that they defied the advice I offer to my daughter. Which is: “If you want to dress sexy, you have three choices — tight, short or low-cut. Choose one, two at the absolute most. All three and you cross the line into slutty.” (Actually, I think Michael Kors tells the contestants on “Project Runway” the same thing. Is the tangerine queen a mother at heart?) The woman waiting for the elevator with me had chosen all three, in a stretch-lace minidress that had the extra detail of being rendered in a eye-popping day-glo highway-hazard orange. It puzzled me until I remembered the electronic-music festival — it shows up under black lights at crummy nightclubs.

Well, a girl wants to be seen.

As it turned out, the crushing fatigue, and the effects of a half-bottle of pinot grigio, couldn’t keep me awake past 11, so who knows how these parties ended up? As it turned out, the cable channels were running “Batman Begins” and “The Dark Knight,” so what the hell, why not enjoy this giant HD hotel TV for a few minutes? Caught a bit of both. and all I can say is: What a mess. Heath Ledger was great, the rest incoherent, but I don’t go into these things with an open mind. And I only watched about 30 minutes.

Do I have any bloggage? Not much. I didn’t read the Sunday papers very closely, and I cannot stand to even consider the news from Aurora until we have more of it — I have seen this particular movie too many times to do more. One observation, though: I was watching the shaky cellphone video taken that night from the theater, marveling at a few things, including:

Why is this on TV? It shows nothing, is of poor quality, and mainly reveals that the person shooting didn’t have the sense to take cover when blood-soaked people began staggering out of a movie theater. If everyone’s going to be a journalist, they ought to know that many newsrooms have a closet with riot gear. For a reason.

Here’s another video, if you have 12 minutes: “Goat Years,” a short I saw at a film festival a few weeks back. A Detroit story about love, loss and goats. One goat, actually:

Happy Monday, all.