This story starts with two people:

Charles Pugh, Detroit city council president;
Laura Berman, Detroit News columnist;

There are more players, but let’s introduce them as the story plays out. Pugh is a former television “journalist,” in the sense that he was most recently part of the local Fox affiliate’s fun ‘n’ smiley weekend morning news team. As I’ve mentioned here before, he once worked at WKJG in Fort Wayne.

So the city has been going through a protracted financial crisis, a serious, national news-making one, with lawsuits and deadlines and in the middle of this, Pugh takes the opportunity to release a 48-minute video on YouTube called “Charles Pugh’s 60-Pound Weight Loss Secrets.” Because he did lose 60 pounds over the course of the last year, and boy is he proud of it.

Berman wrote a column for the News that, while taking care to congratulate Pugh on his accomplishment, because that’s sort of the modern equivalent of freeing a nation from an oppressive dictator, gently chided him for maybe not keeping his eye on the ball:

Green tea and spinach for lunch are terrific. And so is Pugh’s single-minded passion for improvement. If only he would channel that same missionary spirit to saving the city he’s been elected to help lead.

You ask me, it was a very gentle chiding. Maybe super-gentle. It attracted an admirer in the person of Josh Sidorowicz, who happens to be an intern — an intern! — at Automotive News this summer. He tweeted that admiration, adding, “Too bad @Charles_Pugh has been such a disappointment for the city of Detroit so far.”

Well.

Evidently Pugh’s weight loss has left less padding over his sensitivity nerve, because he immediately started a tweet-fight with Sidorowicz (an intern!) defending his priorities and calling Sidorowicz “offensive and inaccurate.”

The kid didn’t back down, so Pugh became a tweetin’ machine, a string hilariously captured in this Jalopnik post, until, perhaps emboldened by getting a Free Press reporter fired earlier this year, he took it to a higher authority:

@joshsidorowicz Josh, do you think the folks at Automotive News would be interested in your inaccurate, offensive commentary? Just curious?

What a cheap little bully. So this is what it’s come to: City still falling apart, but if you want to get the city council president hot under the collar, remark that maybe his abs aren’t all that important. See what happens.

Pugh has already said he’s one-and-done and won’t be re-upping with the city council, so I’m thinking he’s laying groundwork to host his own weight-loss infomercial show.

So, bloggage:

Owe $4 million from your doomed-from-the-start presidential campaign? Sounds like you need a little bit of Tuscany!

After Monday’s SCOTUS news, I’m giving the individual mandate odds of zilch. Please, prove me wrong, universe.

And if you missed this in the comments yesterday, don’t miss it now: Sorkinisms, with an echo in the room. Good one.

I think it’s obvious that five years of working until 1 a.m., rising at 6 a.m., and stumbling through the day like a zombie? Has ruined my sleep hygiene. Thursday morning my eyes popped open at 4:30 a.m. Weren’t going to close, either. So I grabbed the iPad, read the entire internet, and when I was no closer to sleep than I’d been before and it was 6 a.m., said screw it and headed out into the young day. Rode the bike to the park, swam laps for 30 minutes and rode home, for an I’m Better Than You score of, what? You tell me. If only I weren’t 20 pounds overweight and had the knees of a octogenarian — I could have made it a triathlon morning.

And now it’s 9:30 p.m., and if I don’t fall asleep in the next 20 minutes, I’ll call this day a success.

And the thing is? It seemed I had something more interesting to say, but after a day spent online and on the phone, all I clipped was this link:

If you use the Google — and we all do — you’re probably doing it wrong. Here’s how to do it better.

I think I’m going to have to move some things around, or I’ll never recover this blog’s mojo. I come to it at the very time of day when I’m feeling most tapped out. And yet somehow, something gets published, most days.

Even though, many days, things must be carried along by a photo of a raccoon with its head caught in a sewer grate.

How can such grimy, icky animals be so damn cute?

Something serious, but very much worth the read: Why sexual assault victims do the crazy, contradictory, counterintuitive things they frequently do.

And with that? Zzzzzz.

I may be stepping in it here, because I admit to never having seen “The Vagina Monologues” performed live. I’ve read the essays/stories that form the heart of the play, but so far, I’ve never been so hard up for entertainment, even in the depths of February, to attend a performance.

Here’s my prejudice: It always seemed so… calculated. It’s one of those plays designed to be something the squares don’t get and the hip get too well. It’s just so easy. There’s hardly any rehearsal needed. It’s a just-add-water theatrical event: Recruits some local actresses for the heavy-lifting monologues, mix in a few famous faces, dress everyone in red, light the podium from below and curtain up. Everyone reads from a three-ring notebook. The performance itself is a benefit for a sexual-assault treatment center or a domestic-violence shelter or wherever, so everyone feels good about being there. And before you know it? There’s Mrs. Mayor McSnoot, talking about her pussy! It’s Famous Anchorlady, saying cunt! And that? Is entertainment!

I remember when they did it in Fort Wayne the first time; you’d have thought the theatrical community was performing “King Lear” as a nuclear warhead made its way toward the city. So brave! Standing up for Art is a city full of Philistines! Because isn’t that what matters? And is that Famous Anchorlady up there, talking about her vagina? Have you ever seen such a thing?

Just so you know. This is my prejudice. I prefer my plays with plots, snappy writing, maybe some decent costuming, definitely some good acting.

When Rep. Lisa Brown spake the V-word on the floor of the Michigan House last week, and her male colleagues responded by silencing her from speaking for a day, it was probably inevitable that they would arouse the publicity-seeking spirit of Eve Ensler, always looking for a fresh angle for her now 16-year-old franchise. So, as Eddie Murphy used to say, they brought this shit on themselves.

And what shit it was! Three thousand people, carrying signs about bushes and ladybits and whatever other euphemisms you can think of. And Ensler herself:

“I’m over dudes who can’t even say vagina,” she said. “I’m over the Michigan state Legislature … censoring and rebuking and removing Lisa Brown. My vagina’s got decorum.”

She called on all women to participate in “One billion Rising,” on Feb. 14, 2013. On that day, she urged women to leave their jobs and their schools and go to the streets to dance.

“I want you to take over this place,” Ensler said. “I want you to dance for vaginas and life.”

Call me a cynic, but when someone tells me to dance for vaginas, I’m so far outta here, they need another name for it.

But I did find this giggle, deep in the Wikipedia entry. Shoutout, LA Mary:

Harriet Lerner, renowned in the field of women’s psychology, points out the “psychic genital mutilation” embedded in the play’s title, which ignores the clitoris and labia, and should more accurately be called “The Vulva Monologues.”

Damn right.

So, to the bloggage:

I meant to post this yesterday, but forgot: Simon Dumenco on the fly in the Facebook ointment:

Zuckerberg might argue that the concept of “cringeworthy” oversharing is meaningless to digital natives, and that personal privacy/boundaries are fuddy-duddy notions that will diminish as everyone gets more comfortable with their lives becoming open (Face)books — and as old fogies who still care about privacy/boundaries shuffle off this mortal coil. Fine. Maybe that’s true. And maybe a lot of people won’t log out of Facebook on their Apple devices for fear of oversharing.

Then what? Well, that’s where the Law of Diminishing Returns comes in. Because a massive flood of new Facebook “shares” from iOS users will become a nightmare in another way: The noise will increasingly drown out the signal.

I know I keep saying, in regard to Mitch Albom’s Sunday column, “this is a new low,” but folks? Srsly? This is a new low. If it took him 10 minutes to write, he spent three of them scratching his ass.

Hey, Nancy Friedman and other Nancys who read this: Did you know there’s a Nancy Tumblr, and it apparently uses only panels from the Bushmiller era? Nancy is Happy — go there now.

And finally, Hank reviews the new — the latest — Palin family train wreck:

As you might assume, being Bristol Palin means a life of continued anguish and suffering. In her somnolent Lifetime reality show, “Bristol Palin: Life’s a Tripp,” which premieres Tuesday night, we keep hearing about the painful glare of media attention that snapped on nearly four years ago when her ­values-preaching mother, Sarah Palin, ran for vice president on the Republican ticket just at the time a teenage Bristol was pregnant with a son. That glare never ended, mostly because Bristol keeps reaching to turn the switch back on.

Yeah, yeah — like taking candy from a baby, but what else are you supposed to do when the baby just hands it to you?

And now the week is under way. It’s supposed to be in the mid-90s for the next two days. I hope I hold up. You, too.

Michigan’s whack driver-education system does seem to have some good aspects. We’ve embarked on a six-month period called the “level 1 license,” which means Kate can only drive with one of us in the car with her. It’s going to take at least that long before I’m satisfied she’s ready. Although I had my first experience with her yesterday, and so far? So good. Clutches are difficult.

We started in a parking lot, then transitioned to some straight neighborhood streets in Detroit, followed Mack all the way to the Eastern Market, skated through downtown’s fringe, lapped Belle Isle and came home on Jefferson through a driving thunderstorm. Hit one curb, stalled about 50 times, but got through it intact. The next time will go better. Experience is all.

Now would be the time to trade for an automatic, but some part of me simply refuses. I’m a stick-shift girl, and I want my progeny to be, too. #pointlessvanities

Otherwise, it was a pleasant Father’s Day weekend. I bought a beautiful fish at the market, so pretty I thought it would speak to me from its bed of ice. Yellow-tail snapper, come to mama. It was more of a challenge than I would have liked — should have had the guy clean it all the way, rather than just de-gutting it — but it tasted nice, especially with a citrus beurre blanc and some rice and peas on the side. Must put more fish in the ol’ diet, and if they’re this good, it’ll be a pleasure.

And if my life is as boring as this, why am I bothering keeping this stupid blog?

Probably so we can all discuss the news of the day, like the First Lady’s links to a white family in the south, via the peculiar institution. Very interesting story, shedding light on the shared ancestors of two families of different races, in a way that suggests the real antebellum south, not the “Gone With the Wind” variety:

(The slave) Melvinia was a teenager, perhaps around 15, when she gave birth to her biracial son. Charles was about 20.

Such forbidden liaisons across the racial divide inevitably bring to mind the story of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Mrs. Obama’s ancestors, however, lived in a world far removed from the elegance of Jefferson’s Monticello, his 5,000-acre mountain estate with 200 slaves. They were much more typical of the ordinary people who became entangled in America’s entrenched system of servitude.

In Clayton County, Ga., where the Shields family lived, only about a third of the heads of household owned human property, and masters typically labored alongside their slaves. Charles was a man of modest means — he would ultimately become a teacher — whose parents were only a generation or so removed from illiteracy.

Melvinia was not a privileged house slave like Sally. She was illiterate and no stranger to laboring in the fields. She had more biracial children after the Civil War, giving some of the white Shieldses hope that her relationship with Charles was consensual.

What a crazy country.

Or we could talk about Obama’s immigration move last week, which I think was brilliant, but you may disagree.

Or we could talk about Rodney King, dead at 47, after what sounds like a not-very-happy life.

Or we could just acknowledge: With Monday, another week begins. Hope yours is great.

I think I’ve mentioned here before that one of my college classmates was Peter King, now a bigfoot sportswriter at Sports Illustrated. Another was Jay Mariotti, this guy. You should read that link; apparently life has taken a turn for the former Chicago Sun-Times scribe, who quit the paper in a huff after becoming convinced the web was the future.

Things have gone downhill from there, as the Gawker post points out. It’s so hard to reconcile this image of Jay with the guy I knew in 1978, whom I recall as quiet and hard-working. Well, things change.

Another classmate, one who yearned to be a famous sportswriter with every fiber of his being, was this guy. He wanted it so bad he sued the Plain Dealer for racial discrimination, although it never went anywhere. Now I see he’s landed on his feet, having published a book about cereal:

Even the most miniscule detail about breakfast cereal impacts Gitlin and his passion for pouring bowls.

About 20 years ago, he said he sat down for a spoonful of Alpha Bits and, much to his horror, Post had removed the sweetening.

“I was stupefied,” he said. “I went in my room and cried. Very soon after that they took Alpha Bits off the market, and when it returned it was pre-sweetened again. Post understood the error of their ways.”

That story’s from the Plain Dealer. Good to see they don’t hold a grudge.

What a long, tiring day it was. Spent most of it at a conference in Lansing. I still have to write about it, so I guess I shouldn’t say too much, other than this: The lunch was very good, the lunch entertainment even more so — a rapping organic gardener. No, I am not kidding. Did you know farmin’ ain’t easy? Did you know he gots to have his kohlrabi, spinach and chard, and the rest of the rhyme probably included the word hard? It so happened I’d just listened to an interview with Ice-T on NPR on the way in; he has a documentary film about the birth of rap and hip-hop he’s promoting. I wonder what rhyme Ice-T could do for kohlrabi. The rappin’ gardener:

And then I get home and discover the real news in Lansing yesterday was in the state legislature, which silenced a female representative for a day after she said the word “vagina” on the floor, and no, I’m not kidding about that, either. I encourage you to watch the video and tell me if you think she was out of line. My only complaint is a technicality; the male legislators pushing this bill don’t want to be in her vagina, they want to be in her uterus, but as we’ve discussed here before — we’ve discussed everything, haven’t we? — a lot of people like to throw the word vagina around, and many of them do so incorrectly. As L.A. Mary once said, “We’re really talking about the vulva, aren’t we?” If Lisa Brown had said that, however, I’m sure the entire House of Representatives would have burst into flames.

The lege isn’t exactly covering itself with glory in recent days.

But while we’re talking about ladyparts, I must say, I’ve grown to like “Girls,” after its somewhat rocky start, and I think this Onion AV Club piece gets the show (along with “Enlightened”) exactly right. If nothing else, I admire Lena Dunham’s willingness to bare her highly imperfect body week after week after week, knowing the sort of shit that’s talked about her on the internet:

The world of entertainment still, all too often, values women only as objects of beauty to be placed on screen and ogled. I have no problem looking at a beautiful woman, but the world is full of other women who have profound, intelligent, often hilarious things to say, and Dunham is very quietly making a space for those voices on TV, in a way that’s revolutionary both in terms of the show’s gender politics and in terms of its presentation.

Or look at it this way: If this show was called Guys, and its showrunner/protagonist was in every other way similar to Dunham/Hannah—a dorky, slightly overweight guy who bumbled his way through Brooklyn, trying to find his purpose and working his way through a calamitous love life—would any of these criticisms have popped up? Would the people being uncharitable toward Girls have been uncharitable toward that series?

Lena Dunham’s body is no worse than that of Seth Rogen, Jonah Hill, Jason Segal or any number of young male protagonists we’re expected to believe are sexually successful with women who look like Elizabeth Banks and Mila Kunis. And her love interest on “Girls” is actually in her league, in many ways. So fuck all that.

The decline and expensive fall of the Michigan film tax incentives, by moi, complete with sidebar, also by moi.

But that’s no note to leave on. So let it be this: Great weekends to all!

Ears still ringing, but maybe…a tad less? It’s possible. Anyway, today I decided to stop obsessing over it. Kate and I celebrated the last day of school by riding bikes down the road to our favorite burger joint, which has the advantage of the best onion rings in town. We arrived around 7:30, and I hoped at least one of the bar TVs would be tuned to “Jeopardy!,” but no dice. It was dueling entertainment shows, both of which had “exclusive” photos of Matthew McConaghey’s wedding. The photos were identical. No one knows what “exclusive” means anymore, I guess.

Usually I use bar TV as an opportunity to practice my lip-reading. It’s amazing how much you can pick up without the captioning on, and given the way my hearing is of late, it’s probably a useful skill to start working on.

The big news today is that the new bridge to Canada is finally a done deal — it will be announced Friday, everyone seems to agree — with no help from the legislature. The governor has made this thing a priority since he was elected, but the troll who owns the old one has stopped at nothing to mess up the works. Finally, with the Canadian government picking up every dime of the construction cost, it looks like it’s going to happen through something called an interlocal agreement. So here we are, about to announce a major piece of infrastructure that will bring jobs, improve trade and otherwise polish the state’s finally brightening economic picture and? The cheese — the governor — stands alone. Today, the legislature warned him to not dare spend a dime of public money on it. American public money, anyway.

This is what the American public has come to: A half-billion dollar asset that everyone agrees is desperately needed, and a local county commissioner calls it “a government bridge.” Thanks, you tea party numbskulls.

Somebody’s weeping over this, and it isn’t Jesus.

Let’s skip to the bloggage, so I can go nurse my ringing head:

A particularly good Colbert bit the other night. I like the ones where he seems to be on the verge of cracking up himself.

T-Lo write their last Mad Style of the season. It should not pass unnoticed.

And with that, I’m off to bed. I have to get up early tomorrow.

I can see this Sandusky trial is going to be…a trial. I think I’m going to have to read the weekly summaries, because I can’t take too much more of this daily stuff. Especially stuff like this:

“Sandusky was standing right up against the back of the young boy with his arms wrapped around (the boy’s) midsection in the closest proximity I think you can be,” McQueary said. “I was extremely alarmed, flustered and shocked.”

At one point, McQueary said, he returned to his locker and slammed the locker door “in an attempt to say someone’s here, ‘break it up.'”

I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: None of us knows how we would react in such a situation. But my god, I’m growing tired of all the harrumphing and locker-slamming and eye-averting that went on in this case. I think, every time, of the women I know, the mothers. I could tick off a dozen 110-pounders who, if they saw such a thing, would have rushed in like those little birds you see in the spring driving crows away from their nests. They would have Heisman’d that old perv and taken the boy out under their fierce little wings, and if anyone tried to stop them, well, then you’d see the fingernails.

But again, we don’t know what we’d do. We only hope we’d do better.

For Detroiters and visitors: The owner/chef at Supino’s Pizza gives you a few options for local dining, in GQ. Did I mention Hank Stuever is coming to visit in a couple of weeks? Hank, what looks good to you?

I hope I’m recovered by then. Went to the doctor today, for the second time in a week. I told her my head felt like I was wearing a diving bell at all times, that Alan was complaining about how loud I was setting the TV volume, that I drove an unknown number of miles yesterday with my turn signal on, because I couldn’t hear the thing clicking at me.

“Ear infections take their time to resolve,” she said.

“I don’t say this often, seriously,” I replied. “But I want a more powerful antibiotic. Not the carpet bomb. Just something with a little higher octane.”

So, a Z-pack. Fingers crossed.

And so, bloggage:

Worst songs of all time: Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey.” Worse than “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife?” Worse than “Watchin’ Scotty Grow?” Yeah, I think so.

Farewell from inside the diving bell.

Catching up on the second viewing of the last episode of “Mad Men.” I seem to be swimming against much of the critical tide here, but I thought it was great. A great season, and while the final chapter didn’t include any severed feet or fistfights or “Zou Bisou Bisou,” it was a fitting end to the run. Truth be told, the show is starting to make me nervous, as we’re up to mid-1967 now, and I remember a great deal of this stuff.

Not that I didn’t recall the Kennedy assassination and the rest of the various collisions between history and this particular fiction, but this stuff I remember — my sister bringing home “Revolver,” the Richard Speck murders, when hemlines suddenly climbed past the knee. In the dramatis personae of the show, I’m Bobby Draper, and sometimes I feel as though just as many actors have played me through the years.

And while Matt Weiner is younger, he has a good eye for this sort of thing, or at least the sense to hire the right writers. I was 10 years old and living in suburban Columbus, but he captured the pivotal nature of the era, how everything was one way and the next, another. The episode ends in May 1967 and in two months, Detroit will be in flames. The summer of love is about to begin and next year, all hell will really break loose — student revolts in Europe, Chicago, more riots. Next year will be the final season, and it’s a fitting year to end it.

Although Weiner might not. He might flash forward to 1974. Or die of petulance over the summer. You never know. And that, my friends, was three paragraphs of pretty much nothing. But if you’re a “Mad Men” fan, you’ve already read 10 recaps by noon on Monday, so why bother?

I heard a report about day one in the Jerry Sandusky trial on the way home today. Yeesh, did I ever need a shower after that one. Did you know that in Sandusky’s “culture,” it’s common for men and boys to shower together? The culture, I gather, is “athletics,” and to some extent, I agree — one of the very puzzling things about jocks, to me, is their willingness to shower together and make don’t-drop-the-soap jokes. As to whether men shower with boys, late at night, after everyone’s gone home, just you and me kid, and Joey, have you ever seen a grown man naked? — I guess more will be revealed on that score. I can hardly wait.

But do not despair! Some fine bloggage today, courtesy of Hank, who unearthed a 1992 essay by Martha Sherrill, written on the 20th anniversary of the Watergate break-in, and asking, What if Watergate had never happened? Well….

Elizabeth Taylor is dead. She was never saved from drugs and booze and overeating by the Betty Ford Center, because the Betty Ford Center does not exist, because Betty Ford remained a perfectly happy golf widow in Grand Rapids, Mich., who sometimes acted a little silly at Christmas parties. …Edmund Morris was able to finish the second installment of his Theodore Roosevelt biography because he never got tied up doing Ronald Reagan, since Ronald Reagan, after an unsuccessful run at the presidency in 1976, quit politics. He was wholly satisfied that a good conservative — Spiro T. Agnew — had finally made it into the White House. Reagan resumed a successful career in television, and in 1980 accepted the part of Blake Carrington on “Dynasty.” He dyed his hair gray.

It was a wonderful life after all.

I wasn’t going to write about the new restrictions on extra-large sugary soft drink sales in New York City, and then MMJeff brought it up elsewhere, and so let’s thrash, shall we?

I don’t have strong feelings on it one way or another. The subject of obesity comes up from time to time here, and we’ve run through the usual reasons. The more I think about it, the more I look at photos from my youth and marvel at how few people, even among my parents’ friends, were seriously overweight — well, I don’t have any answers, just a few hunches. And I think portion size is a big part of it.

I think portion size is one of those insidious things. It creeps up a little at a time. We’re told to fill our plates, and we do — even though the plate is two inches bigger than the ones we grew up eating from. It’s bigger because kitchens are bigger, and kitchen tables are bigger, and everything is bigger because otherwise, what will motivate you to buy a new set of dishes? You need that stuff.

Anyway, as I’ve probably stated here a million times, I grew up drinking those little 6.5-ounce Cokes. Sometimes my mom would buy the 12-ounce six-packs, or the 16-ounce Pepsi six-packs. Returnable bottles. We had little plastic caps to reseal them. You never drank a whole bottle by yourself. A six-pack kept four of us happy for a week.

New York City is a small place, and even the millions who live there comprise only a fraction of the country’s population. But it’s the Temple Mount of our culture — almost everything starts there. I think Mayor Bloomberg knows this. I don’t think he’s doing this with any serious policy effect in mind; I think he’s just trying to start a conversation.

In 1979, I started my first newspaper job. I was in an seven-person department, and four of us smoked. A guy I walked by several times a day had an ashtray the size of a hubcap on his desk, and he filled that sucker up, every day. Alan and I went to New York 22 years later, when the city was the largest one in the country with a city-wide smoking ban. We saw the Mingus Big Band in a low-ceilinged, basement club, and left two hours later remarking on how nice it was to not be reeking of cigarettes. Michigan now bans smoking in nearly all public places. Who thinks this is a crazy intrusion of the nanny state now?

In my lifetime, we’ve vanquished cigarettes, or at least put them in full retreat. Bad food may be the next front in the war, and should be, given how disproportionately it effects affects the poor, the young and the powerless.

Does banning gigantic sody-pops look like a solution? No. But it’s a conversation-starter. I’m willing to have it.

Good lord, this plague is persistent. Every time I think I’m out of it? IT PULLS ME BACK IN. So I have no bloggage today. Do you?

When did it start? With Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial? Let’s say it did. I know many of us are long-ish in the tooth here, and will remember how that design was greeted when it was revealed as the winner of the competition. It was “a black gash of shame,” a “ditch,” a slap in the face of veterans who survived that most complicated conflict, not to mention those who died there. And by a woman (!) with an Asian name (!!), no less. Splutter, splutter.

And then it was built, and opened, and the bitching stopped, replaced by sniffling. Who could look at the Vietnam memorial and not be moved? And what made it so? The names.

I’ve seen individual names before on monuments, but only on local ones. Had a national monument ever made the attempt to note every single soul lost in a conflict like this? And the design was perfectly suited for it — the shorter panels capturing the lost in the early years, and as you walked along, the panels got larger, the toll higher, peaking around 1968 or so, and then petering off as we lost our will to throw fresh bodies into that particular grinder, and drew down forces.

You’d think the memorial’s first year would have been enough to shut the critics up, but no — we started tarting it up immediately, so as to silence the various constituencies involved. First, a bunch of flags. Then, the bronze of the three soldiers (I guess for those who couldn’t read?). Then, the bronze of the nurses, so women weren’t forgotten. At the end, they couldn’t diminish the wall’s power. Because of the names. Because here, finally, you could see the final toll of our southeast Asian misadventure: That guy, that guy, that guy. Your brother, his dad, her cousin.

(Was this about the same time we stopped commemorating the prematurely or abruptly deceased with flowers on their headstones, and started doing so with flowers, and teddy bears, and other stuff, at the place where they died? I seem to remember it that way.)

After that, even after all the bitching and the retrofitting, it seemed unthinkable to erect another memorial without the names. Give Maya Lin that, along with all her other honors: She demolished the heroic tradition in war memorials. We’ll see no more bronze generals riding horses for a good long while.

The memorial for the Oklahoma City memorial went up with almost dismaying speed after that tragedy. I read a critical piece — by which I mean “criticism,” because “review” just sounds weird in this context — about it in one of the New York papers around the time it opened. The critic didn’t like it, and was very lucid in laying out his reasons, the biggest one being that you can go through the whole thing and never get any real sense of why this event happened. Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols are in there, but the context in which they made their attack — the paranoid right wing politics that were floating around talk radio at the time — is nowhere to be found. The critic made a strong case that a certain amount of time needs to pass before we can fully understand these things, and that the people with the most fraught emotions should not be too involved. They have crazy ideas — like that the very mention of the perpetrators of tragedies shouldn’t have their photos anywhere in the building.

But come on — if you can’t keep a plot in Oklahoma City empty for a few years, how are you going to do the same thing in lower Manhattan? And the events of September 11, 2001 dwarf OKC. There was no way a 9/11 memorial wasn’t being built in our lifetimes, but it was equally certain that getting it done would be a monster.

The memorial, by itself, was the easy part. The museum, now, that’s another matter:

It seemed self-evident at the time: A museum devoted to documenting the events of Sept. 11, 2001, would have to include photographs of the hijackers who turned four passenger jets into missiles. Then two and a half years ago, plans to use the pictures were made public.

New York City’s fire chief protested that such a display would “honor” the terrorists who destroyed the World Trade Center. A New York Post editorial called the idea “appalling.” Groups representing rescuers, survivors and victims’ families asked how anyone could even think of showing the faces of the men who killed their relatives, colleagues and friends.

The anger took some museum officials by surprise.

“You don’t create a museum about the Holocaust and not say that it was the Nazis who did it,” said Joseph Daniels, chief executive of the memorial and museum foundation.

It’s happening all over again. Maybe this is why we put up all those bronze generals — unanimity. But now we have this culture of memorializing where everybody gets named, and everybody gets a voice and a vote, and an implicit promise that they’ll see the finished product before too many years pass. We’ve also learned that designs are only literally set in stone, but they’re always able to change something.

I’m not sure what I’m groping for here, except maybe that the critic of the OKC memorial was onto something — it’s too soon. We won’t know what we need to say about 9/11 for another generation at least. But this is Manhattan real estate we’re talking about here, and you don’t leave that vacant for long.

Or maybe it’s just the Nyquil talking.

Looks like Scott Walker will live to fight another day. Disappointing, but not surprising.

Have a good Wednesday, all. It’s the middle of the week. I hope my ears unplug by then.