First things first. Let’s have a kiki:

Some of the language in that video is NSFW, but hey, it’s the Scissor Sisters. I need to get in a gay frame of mind, because “Project Runway” is starting, and I’m giving it a try this season. I got a little pissed when the girl with the Skrillex hair won, she and her series of flowy, drapey, dress-like outfits. They were very wearable, if you were a six-foot-tall skeleton with no tits whatsoever.

I’ll tell you, the first flowy-drapey thing that wins, I’m totally outta there. Although I can see the crowd includes an insane Japanese guy with an afro, so I have high hopes.

[Long pause.]

And with that, I must confess: I fell asleep on the couch in the second half hour of “Project Runway,” it’s now Friday morning, and I just learned that your generic crazed American madman in Aurora, Colo., killed 14 people at a midnight showing of the new Batman movie.

I thought we were done with that in this country. Guess not.

Now CNN is reporting the casualties include children as young as 6. Because that’s where you take a 6-year-old these days — to a midnight screening of a dark, violent comic-book movie. Which is not to say any parent shares the blame for this. Only, as they say on the internet, smh.

(Shaking my head, for you geezers.)

Watching CNN, the choppers are circling what looks like an apartment building. Presumably, that’s the killer’s house. It looks like the kind of place you see in every city in the land. If I were looking to hide in plain sight, I’d move into one of those — maybe a dozen units, every one the same, window air conditioners, neighbors only known as a collection of thumps and noises on the other side of a wall. Maybe that’s what he was after.

Not much bloggage now, but maybe one fitting piece — Alex Pareene on “The Newsroom,” Aaron Sorkin’s hugely disappointing HBO show. I’ve given it four chances, but I have to agree with Pareene:

Even his sparkling banter is one-note. His characters always say exactly, precisely what they mean, at all times. There’s no subtext, no irony, nothing ever left unspoken in his dialogue. His characters don’t even get to be sarcastic without someone asking them if they’re being sarcastic. Everyone alternates between speechifying, quipping and dumbly setting up other people’s quips. It’s exhausting.

I’m imagining how the crew from “The Newsroom” would cover this tragedy. Probably with much rushing around, and a dramatic moment where someone has to decide whether there’s a 15th victim, based on sketchy reports. Then the plucky intern would slam down the phone and say, “I just talked to the anesthesiologist! She’s out of surgery, and she’s alive!” That actually happened in the last episode, which dealt with the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. I actually guffawed. Because, as a journalist who’s tried to contact many doctors in the course of my work, I can tell you with absolute confidence that you don’t just ring up the anesthesiologist after trauma surgery. Unless, of course, the anesthesiologist is the caller’s college roommate’s father, and she just happens to have the number of his cell phone, and he answers it, and he decides talking to the media is a great idea. (And yes, that connection has been used a time or two so far, in only four episodes. What a well-connected group of journalists.)

The Today show just went to a commercial. I guess what that means is, it’s not that important a story.

Have a good weekend, all.

Oh, and for those who watched: Was “Project Runway” any good?

Eh, I don’t know how much gas I have left in the tank tonight. How about some bloggage for an all-link post, eh?

(I went shopping after work. Trying on pants always takes it out of me.)

Has your neighborhood had any major blackouts this year? Get used to them.

Is having two Detroits — one relatively prosperous and safe, the other impoverished and lawless — a good thing? After all, a few years ago, it was all impoverished and lawless.

Clip art. Old clip art. Very entertaining.

Zzzzzz.

So, let’s try this again:

In our time together, Alan and I have stayed in a few dumps. At least until Kate was born, we preferred a less restrictive type of vacation, unbound by too many plans. We had a destination, but getting there was part of the fun, and we never knew where, exactly, we’d be stopping.

In those pre-cell phone, pre-internet days, our method was to find a quickie-mart on the outskirts of town, check the Yellow Pages for hotels/motels, and call from a pay phone until we found a vacancy. Ninety percent of the time, everything was fine; I still remember the night we spent in Rochester, Minn. — with many, many lodging options, thanks to the Mayo Clinic — as the one and only time I’ve been convinced a ghost was in the room with us. I woke up, heard footsteps on the scrunchy carpet, was able to see the whole room clearly with my night-dilated pupils, had no fear whatsoever, thought hmmm, I guess someone died in the clinic with unfinished business in this hotel, went back to sleep.

Maybe it was a dream. DON’T THINK SO.

The worst was in some Wyoming town — Cody, maybe — where we were delayed getting into Yellowstone. It was raining in Cody, snowing at the east entrance to the park, and all we had to do was kick around this ersatz wild-west town and wait for it to stop. The first night, I found the Yellow Pages ad: For all your tropical fish and lodging needs, it read. Ha! Hipster adventure dead ahead! We arrived at a weird, rambling house, full of fish as advertised, but more of a bed-and-no-breakfast than a hotel. Our room was in what had been the dining room. The ceiling over the bed bulged with water stains. Every time the toilet in the room above flushed, I heard dripping noises. I slept fitfully as the guest above drained his or her bladder repeatedly, and I waited for the ceiling to collapse and dump a load of human shit on our heads.

We found a far better place the next night. Went to the rodeo.

Another memorable place was in Iron Mountain, Mich., where we stopped on our way home from Isle Royale. “In-room movies,” the sign outside advertised. I figured this meant HBO. It did not. It meant that if you wanted to watch a movie, you went to the desk and were given a VCR and allowed to choose from a cardboard box of tapes. Actually, you could choose from two boxes — the second one held the porn. No judging! We didn’t watch any movies, but admired the carved bear out by the road.

This trip, Alan made a reservation at what looked like a charming place on the Muskegon River, near Newaygo. The plan was to drop Kate off at camp, towing the drift boat, then cut east to the big river and float it for a couple of days. Things were going just fine when we arrived; there was a big gazebo in the back, overlooking the river, with a burbling water feature full of frogs. I settled in with “The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet” and the time passed. Some more time passed. Where was the clerk? She was supposed to be a few minutes late, but… Alan checked the note on which he’d scribbled the details. He’d made the reservation for next week, not this. Oops. Well, we know how to handle this, although now we do it without the Yellow Pages.

We ended up at another riverfront place, a kozy-kabins deal right out of “Lolita.” The choices were: Big smelly room, smaller smelly room, “new” smelly room. I chose small-smelly when it became clear there were no queen-size mattresses in the place, no matter how big the room was. We checked in — cash only — and the owner told Alan it would be $5 extra for the TV. No, I don’t know why; probably something to do with the dish.

“Are you sure? Don’t come asking me after 8 o’clock,” she said.

Finally, we got into the room, where I washed my hands and discovered? No towels. Back to the office.

“I don’t normally provide those,” she said. But she found some. They were clean, something I was absurdly grateful for.

We headed out, launched the boat, and found it was a lovely day for a float, if only there had been more water in the river. We had to drag over about a dozen gravel bars, but otherwise, it was Wild Kingdom — a dozen great blue herons, even more kingfishers, a mink or two cavorting streamside and the coup de grace of two bald eagles, although the second one might have been the first one, circling around for another fly-by. That picture yesterday was a deep, slow stretch. Lotsa cliff swallows in that sand bank.

Back to the dump, and guess what we discovered? No soap, either. Well, it’s always fun to visit a Walgreen’s in a strange place. You really get a feel for a town that the tourist places don’t give you.

Day two we walked around Pentwater and Ludington, just to see what the sunset side was like. (Answer: Hot. Sunny.) And then home. Just a couple of days, but it felt like longer. In a good way, honest, although we’re not making that mistake with the hotels again.

So, some bloggage?

If you read only one more Paterno story, read this one from the New York Times.

In Coozledad’s world, “In the Heat of the Night” is a documentary.

And if you read nothing more about Mitt Romney’s Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Weekend, make it this. Funny.

Finally, the lifeguard’s dilemma as a parable of outsourcing.

I’m off to bed.

These parental obligations sneak up on me. I’d forgotten, until late afternoon, that I’d agreed to take Kate to yet another nightclub show, and so off to St. Andrew’s Hall we went in the dinner hour, for the Summer of Ska tour — the Maxies, Suburban Legends, Big D and the Kids Table, Reel Big Fish. I took my iPad and made real progress in the nightstand book, mainly because there was no wi-fi network to hop onto. I gotta tell you: I’m tiring of e-books. The constant availability of other distractions — email, Twitter, Facebook — as close as a touch is giving me, has given me, the attention span of a toddler. There are times in reading all but the least challenging books when you need to buckle down, reread, flip back a few pages, and sometimes put it aside and think for a minute or two. Everything about the iPad/Kindle Fire discourages such things.

On the other hand? I just pre-ordered the new Laura Lippman, which will be on my device the day it’s released. Curse you, modernity! Curse your conveniences!

Also, it’s a lot harder to read a book in a dark nightclub. Well, I’ll have both.

A brief announcement: I’ll be taking the rest of the week off, for a mini-break with my husband following the deposit of our offspring at summer camp. Fortunately, I have some linkage for you.

First, two from yours truly: A piece on creating local food systems in Michigan, and an interview with the director of the Eastern Market. Something interesting I’d never considered before, from the latter piece, a Q-and-A:

Is it possible to imagine a world in which this 20 percent of small-scale producers can compete with large-scale producers? Yes, it’s already happening, with beer. In 1980, we had 101 breweries, and microbreweries were less than 1 percent of American consumption. In 2012, we went past 2,000 breweries for the first time since the 1880s, and microbreweries are just under 10 percent of market share by value. The only growing part of the American beer economy is microbreweries, and what’s especially impressive is, it’s consumer-driven demand, not government regulation. And despite massive advertising budgets, (big corporate brewers) haven’t been able to stop losing market share. That’s inspirational.

Nice analogy there.

OID: Dance with a cop, get shot to death. Without anyone even pulling a weapon:

Adaisha Miller, who would have turned 25 Monday, was dancing with Officer Isaac Parrish, 38, when she hugged him from behind during the fish fry, said police. A .40-caliber handgun, held in Parrish’s waist holster, fired and struck Miller in the lung and heart.

This has been going around for a few days, but maybe you haven’t seen it yet: A tick-tock on the reporting of the ACA decision, by the editor of Scotusblog. Very long, but very interesting. Explains how the sausage-making of live-TV breaking news is done, along with a lot more, including the fact the site was targeted by hackers in a DDoS attack that very morning. Some people. I mean.

Off to work, laundry and packing. Have a great week, all. Back Monday.

Today’s theme? Massive mutilation of the human corpus. You’ve been warned.

First, from the world of journalism, one of my Facebook network posted this story. Tell me what you think:

Eeeeeewwwww!

Monica Thayer had been on the job just six days when she got scalped. Literally.

Her long brown hair caught in a machine at an auto parts plant in Barberton, Ohio, the Akron Beacon Journal reported, pulling her in and ripping off her scalp from her eyebrows backward to her neck.

The story’s by an L.A. Times-er, but a read indicates it wasn’t so much reported as read, rewritten and packaged for a new kind of news consumer — one who sees a grievous injury suffered by an $8-an-hour factory worker, new on the job, with no health insurance not as an outrage, but as a freakish event to make a person say Eeeeeewwwww!

Let’s see if we can write one even worse. I’ll go first:

The Indians are long-gone from northeast Ohio, but an unlucky factory worker learned the hard way that their harshest punishment is very much alive.

Who can top that? The woman, by the way, is still in the hospital. We need another revolution in this country, goddamn it. I nominate the writer of that travesty, one Connie Stewart, as cannon fodder.

But let’s move on. Because we’re not done yet. Fireworks injuries in Macomb Oakland County:

A paraplegic man’s leg was blown off as he sat in his wheelchair setting off explosives on the Fourth of July.

“I believe he had been lighting fireworks on his lap then setting them down on the ground before they went off,” said Hazel Park Police Chief Martin Barner. “He lit one device that then slipped between his legs and went off.” The force of the explosion severed the man’s left leg just below the knee and blew it about 50 feet across the street where it hit a neighbor’s house.

There were “many beverage bottles” at the scene, but the cops were unclear on whether alcohol was a factor.

I really don’t know what to say about this, except that the one story I covered in my career that involved people being blown to bits — and I never went to a war zone — involved fireworks.

The guy lived, as far as I can tell.

Finally, not exactly a human-mutilation story, unless we’re talking about pulling your own hair out, but your tax dollars at work:

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, a scientific agency that typically studies weather, climate change and other environmental matters, recently posted a statement on its website denying the existence of mermaids.

The post, titled “No Evidence of Aquatic Humanoids Has Ever Been Found,” states that “the belief in mermaids may have arisen at the very dawn of our species” and details a short history of mermaid mythology.

Neither NOAA nor any other federal agency has ever issued a statement about a mythical creature before, so what prompted this public denial?

A two-hour Animal Planet special called “Mermaids: The Body Found.”

Isn’t that nice? Don’t you feel comforted?

Two more days of this heat, and with any luck Sunday will be bearable.

I think I’ve mentioned Thaddeus McCotter, current dead-duck congressman for a few of the western ‘burbs, from time to time. Local politics here is frequently weird and worth talking about just for the entertainment value, but McCotter was mainly just baffling to me. When he announced he was running for president last year, I guffawed — I’d barely heard of him, and I live here.

Anyway, things went about as you’d expect on that front. He did win a lovely consolation prize from the state legislature, which gerrymandered him a fine district that is even more rock-solid GOP than it was before, enabling him to stay in Congress without working very hard and, y’know, build the brand for 2016, or whenever.

Our own Connie lives there. Maybe she’s seen him around.

Anyway, this year he was faced with the task of submitting signatures for re-election, a rote duty that could have been accomplished in an afternoon by two half-bright staffers in the right location. Instead, his office turned in a batch of petitions loaded with photocopied and duplicated signatures, so clumsily rendered the fraud was evident at a glance. The early estimates were that something like 80 percent would be thrown out, and while there was talk of an investigation and a brave write-in campaign, after just a couple of weeks McCotter announced he was withdrawing from the race, leaving the only legit candidate a Tea Party rookie who raises reindeer for Christmas festival displays and advocates that all U.S. military bases on foreign soil be closed.

Through it all, I kept asking people, basically, what the hell? And no one could really say why.

Today the DetNews dropped a hilarious story about what might have been distracting McCotter from his job. What else? Hollywood:

As U.S. Rep. Thad McCotter’s short-lived presidential run fizzled last year, the Livonia Republican turned to another aspiration: writing a TV show.

“Bumper Sticker: Made On Motown” starred McCotter hosting a crude variety show cast with characters bearing the nicknames of his congressional staffers and his brother. They take pot shots about McCotter’s ill-fated bid for the White House while spewing banter about drinking, sex, race, flatulence, puking and women’s anatomy. It features a cartoon intro and closing snippet with an Oldsmobile careening through Detroit and knocking over the city’s landmarks. The double-finned car has a Michigan license plate reading: “Made on MoTown.”

I urge you to click through and behold the story of a man having the world’s worst midlife crisis, not to mention a serious crush on S.E. Cupp, who, when contacted, said she didn’t want to talk about him.

Personally, I think he should try to get a meeting with Charlie Sheen. Between the two of them, they might get something going.

I read this story on the iPad when a 5 a.m. thunderstorm blew through the neighborhood, and feared I would wake Alan with my giggling.

How was your Fourth? Ours was hot and hotter and hotter still. Went sailing, grilled out, saw “Moonrise Kingdom.” If you saw fireworks, I hope they went better than San Diego’s.

Back to work.

One of those evenings when you curse your life — a long day, the Lansing to/fro drive, capped by a school-board meeting in which they immediately went into closed session and stayed there for TWO HOURS.

I passed the time with no wi-fi connection, no iPad…why, my God, it was like some primitive hellhole where all I had to read were a bunch of old crap in a file marked “writing” in my Documents folder.

Evidently I had a guest-blogging stint at the Detroit News during Hurricane Katrina:

Apres le deluge, the backlash.

This past week has been emotionally exhausting. Anyone with a heart bigger and softer than a pebble has had it wrenched by the images beaming out of New Orleans — the frightening chaos, the infuriating bumbling, the misery of the afflicted.

And then there are…the rest of us.

A friend of mine was in her office Friday, and overheard two cube-mates discussing an incident from the ruined city, in which a brother shot a sister in a dispute over a bag of ice.

“What do they need ice for?” one wondered.

“Mixed drinks,” the other cracked.

It’s natural, when bad things happen to other people, to search for a reason. Everyone does it; it makes us feel safer. Of course it’s terrible that woman was raped, but she shouldn’t have been walking home after dark, especially not in that neighborhood. No wonder the Turners’ son is on drugs — his mother stuck him in daycare when he was six weeks old. Joe’s heart attack shouldn’t have come as a surprise to anyone who’s seen him put away a pepperoni pizza.

Needless to say, we would never walk home after dark through that neighborhood, put a newborn in daycare or eat pork sausage so heedlessly. So of course these things will not happen to us.

I’ve always thought of this phenomenon as “distancing,” the way a herd skitters away when the lions take a straggler. I’m waiting for the distancing from the events in New Orleans to assert itself.

It’s already starting. Officials lamely protest that those who suffer in the city were told to leave ahead of time, for cryin’ out loud. Callers to talk radio wonder who told those morons to live below sea level, and in a hurricane zone no less. The obsession with looting — in a city where old people are dying in wheelchairs for lack of help — will only grow, until the plundering of an abandoned Wal-Mart will take on the gravity of an al-Qaeda-led sacking of the Smithsonian.

Finally, on Friday, came the ultimate: It is reported, intoned Randall Robinson on The Huffington Post, that black hurricane victims in New Orleans have begun eating corpses to survive. That this came from a so-called “internationally respected foreign policy advocate and author” and an African American makes me fear for whatever foreign policy he’s advocating for.

Get a grip, Mr. Robinson. Other than your passive-voice “reporting,” there’s not a shred of evidence anyone is eating dead bodies. I’m sure there are still some ramen noodles left down at the Wal-Mart.

I’m sure someone out there believes him, though, and it only puts more distance between us and the unfortunates there. They loot, they chose a foolish place to live and now they’re field-dressing drowning victims. It’s all the justification many people need to change the channel, turn the page and otherwise move on to a more comfortable place, ignoring the truth: Like it or not, we’re all in this together.

What tripe! (Although I like that line about sacking the Smithsonian. I am capable of vanity.) Who was this woman? So strange to come across one’s earlier writing-self; I’m reminded of a quote attributed to the author of “Mandingo,” who refused to rewrite anything. “Do you expect me to return to my vomit?” However, sitting there waiting for the goddamn closed session to be over, it reminded me of the Colorado wildfires, and the thing you’re not hearing today, from the rest of the country: Gee, why’d you choose to live in such a tinderbox-y place, eh? The people of New Orleans had to put up with that over and over and over, up to and probably including today.

I think I might have brought it up myself. A useful reminder that one can be a douchebag oneself, every day.

Coasting into the holiday, I am. I hope your flag cake is moist and delicious, and if you live in a city affected by power outages, that you have some. Here’s a column by my Harrisburg buddy on the final lesson of Penn State (for some). I liked it; maybe you will, too.

A hot weekend, capping a hot week, and looking forward to a hot week ahead, perhaps punctuated by? Storms. We missed the Friday-afternoon blow that currently has tens of thousands in Fort Wayne without power, and continued on to the eastern seaboard and has hundreds of thousands without power, so I guess that means that if we make it through the holiday and through to the weekend with electricity, we will be very lucky people indeed.

My editor is headed for San Francisco on vacation this week. “Where it’s 60 degrees,” he’s said, more than once. This weather doesn’t agree with him. Nor with anyone else.

But hey! Independence Day is nearly upon us. I have a big box of blueberries from the market, so if I can get a big box of raspberries somewhere on Monday or Tuesday, I can make one of those flag cakes you see on the cover of Good Housekeeping.

I had a pleasant weekend, due in part to the heat. When it’s too hot to do anything, there’s not much to do but ride your bike to the park, find a lounge under one of the big umbrellas, and chill with an old Elmore Leonard paperback. (Can’t take the iPad to the pool, yo.) I swam for a while, then read until it got out of hand, heatwise, even under the umbrella. It was actually quite relaxing, except for the ride home. All that blazing-hot asphalt really takes it out of you.

Meanwhile, I got you some bloggage.

I hope you can read this, a great WSJ piece on “The Girl From Ipanema,” on the 50th anniversary of the song’s release. It includes a photo of the actual GfI, but not the best fact I learned about the song along the way, that the English lyrics take considerable liberties with the original Portuguese. There’s a passage in the latter that describes her bundas, her bottom: More than a poem, the most beautiful thing I have ever seen.

One of my colleagues at Bridge, Rick Haglund, takes apart the president’s “private sector is doing fine,” comment, for which he has received such a raft of it:

While polls show Americans are dissatisfied with the economy, the president had a point. Corporate profit margins are at record levels. In Michigan, the automakers are churning out billions of dollars in earnings.

The private sector has created 4.3 million jobs in the past 27 months. But the United States is still down nearly 5 million jobs since the Great Recession started in December 2007.

But it’s not just the number of jobs that determines a healthy economy. It’s also about income growth, and most Americans haven’t seen much for years.

CNN has a disturbing story suggesting the depth of the conspiracy in the Penn State case. St. Joe was in the thick of it, if it’s to be believed. Quel surprise.

And now the week begins. Stay cool.

Long day yesterday, followed by long night, followed by no blogging in the evening, so this will be short. However, when you wake up, open the paper’s website and are confronted by two headlines, this…

Detroit bus drivers seek bedbug relief

…and this…

Michigan officials fight drunk driving with talking urinal cakes

…I know you guys will have lots to talk about.

As it turned out, last night’s activity was the Detroit News’ Michiganians of the Year awards, and the editor, in his greeting remarks, mentioned the staffers left back in the newsroom to produce the Daily Miracle. Sounds like they might have had more fun.

Also, I recommend Stephen Colbert on the ACA ruling yesterday. Especially for the poster of John Roberts holding a pink gavel.

And I just looked at the forecast for the next week. Bleh. Better put nose to grindstone. So I can pay the electric bill, assuming the power doesn’t go out.

Nora Ephron died today. I didn’t even know she was sick. I guess this is terrible news, but not — Ephron got her threescore and ten, plus one (that means she was 71, for those of you who don’t speak Bible), and to be frank, she wasn’t writing as well as she once did, although Ephron on a bad day was better than most people on their very very best.

My bestie Deb once wrote a column that named Ephron as her role model, in the same way that Ephron named Dorothy Parker as her own. As it turned out, we both — Deb and I — had our chance to sit at her feet, however briefly, and warm ourselves in her glow.

I’ve said here before that Ephron wrote great essays as a young woman, stuff that I read and reread and re-reread, internalizing them and turning her phrases over and over, secreting my own nacre over them until they became stepping stones to my own voice as a writer. I’m serious: I’m the writer I am in part because Nora Ephron was the writer she was, not the greatest ever, but a voice I envied and aped — casual, funny, smart, confessional. I wanted to be her, and while I couldn’t be the 1941-born Jewish daughter of screenwriter/playwrights in Los Angeles, imitating her for a while helped me become the 1957-born Catholic daughter of a couple of ordinary parents, with whatever voice that became.

This stuff is important. I can’t quite explain why.

Her essays for Esquire and New York, compiled in “Crazy Salad” and “Scribble, Scribble” are what I’ll remember her for. Her essay on the development of the first vaginal deodorant was genius, as were the ones on the Pillsbury Bake-Off, consciousness-raising and working for the New York Post, among many others. That’s the Nora I wanted to be.

Later she made her way to Hollywood, and that’s what most of the obits I’ve seen so far have in the lead — her scripts for “Silkwood” and “When Harry Met Sally,” “You’ve Got Mail” and others. To be sure, she wrote some great movies, but her direction was always sort of meh and many of the films she’s best known for were likewise. She was always about making a living, and you make more money as a screenwriter and director than as a magazine essayist. But one thing that always struck me? How those early essays kept popping up in her later work. I watched “Julie & Julia” and caught many lines that I’d read decades previous in her pieces about cooking.

She came back to them, in an even lighter way. “I Feel Bad About My Neck” was a collection so slight it would blow away in a breeze, but it was still fun to read. (I think I did so, standing up, in a Border’s outlet.) It was her first collection in years, and if it wasn’t “Crazy Salad, Redux,” it was like sitting down with an old friend and discovering she still had it, that she could make jokes about lettuce and cookbooks and why dietary cholesterol has nothing to do with serum cholesterol.

She could be maddening; she moved in elite circles, and wrote about their “problems” in ways that suggested aggravated cluelessness. There was a piece about being a resident of the Apthorp, an upper west side apartment building that was rent-stabilized when Ephron moved in, in the 1970s, and eventually squeezed tenants like her out. I remember she said she had a five-bedroom — five bedrooms! — apartment for some ridiculous price, and oh what a tragedy it was to lose it. Cry me a river, etc. (A five-bedroom apartment in the Apthorp today? Nearly $15 million.)

But this is all water under the bridge now. Something you might not know about her: She had a listed phone number, and she answered her own phone. One year, Robert James Waller, the author of “The Bridges of Madison County,” was supposed to speak in Fort Wayne, and I planned to cover it. I reread Nora’s essay, “Mush,” about Rod McKuen, and then I called her and asked if she had any thoughts or advice or, y’know, what am I doing calling Nora Ephron? Mistake mistake mistakemistakemistake. She laughed and we chatted about Waller’s mush and its relation to McKuen’s mush, and she said I couldn’t quote her but that I should enjoy myself and write something good.

Waller cancelled, but it was hardly a wasted assignment. I talked to Nora.

Bloggage today? How about this? A jumping-off point for many things — not all things — Nora. And let’s leave it at that.

UPDATE: This is a really well-done remembrance, with the bonus of lots o’ links. And this.