For the first time in ages, Alan and I are going to a Halloween party. Actually, we’re going to a killer Halloween party, Theatre Bizarre’s “The Initiation” at the Masonic. Costumes are mandatory. The ticket says those that obscure identity entirely are preferred. So. Hmm.

Alan, ninja shopper, immediately hit Etsy and fell hard for the plague doctor getups. He likes the idea of placing aromatic herbs in the snout to cleanse the miasma from the air, probably a good idea among the throngs at the Masonic.

As for me, he suggested this rabbit mask, perhaps worn with my black wool tail coat and my riding boots, for a March hare vibe, although I think it would also be arresting with a black velvet cocktail dress I might be able to wedge myself into. The price is ridiculous, but we’ve had a little good fortune lately, and I could justify it as an art purchase, as I’d certainly hang it on the wall afterward. Who doesn’t want a demonic leather rabbit face looking down on them in the living room?

Looking through the rest of the offerings from this particular shop, I wonder what sexual proclivity I might be advertising with my rabbit mask, unbeknownst to me. The rabbit is a symbol of fertility, after all. I’d hate to be followed home by some sort of Furry variant.

The Theatre Bizarre documentary trailer is online, and is entertaining, although you are warned of an outburst of profanity toward the end, so — NSFW, unless you’re using headphones. But some great imagery.

Sweet, sweet Friday. I thought you’d never get here. Only about three hours of assorted this ‘n’ that, and then the rest of you is mine-all-mine. The school year schedule has settled in, with a couple of new activities that virtually guarantee I will never nap again. Although Kate is the one I feel for — her homework load is ridiculous. On back-to-school night the counselor said two hours is standard for a student with a basic course load, and add an hour for honors classes. Her extracurricular is music, but not at school; she was prohibited from auditioning for jazz band because she’s not enrolled in the music program. (During what hour of the day? I wondered.) So she’s doing the youth program at the DSO, which is going to be great, but is demanding at a whole new level.

I guess it’s pointless to object, because this is The Way Things Are These Days, but it still bugs me. Every so often I read something worrying about the things teenagers can see on TV these days. TV? If your kid has time to watch TV for longer than a few minutes at a time, he’s not doing his homework.

So. Before I leave, a few words about fat.

When Mark Bittman wrote, the other day, that the campaign against fast food will have to be conducted at the cultural level and patterned after the one against smoking, I shifted in my seat a little. That’s partly because I enjoy an Egg McMuffin from time to time, and also because if you’re waging war against corporations in the name of public health, the collateral damage is going to be human.

Many fat people will tell you their condition is the last acceptable prejudice, and I don’t doubt it. People who would drive nails through their tongues before allowing it to speak the word “nigger” have no problem casting casual slurs at fat people, seeing it not as a thing one cannot change but as a character flaw. They have a point. We all know how to lose weight, and to the extent we don’t, well, it’s our choice. I’d argue that we all have character flaws, and if we’re lucky, they’re not visible to the world. We watch baroque pornography online, or harbor vile thoughts about others. We’re wearing our special underwear right now. We cheat on our taxes. We stole our best friend’s girlfriend, or maybe we just had a quickie that one time. We dream, late at night, about getting in the car, draining the bank accounts, and heading west without a word to those left behind.

This is all prompted by a discussion I find not just ridiculous but offensive, i.e., is Chris Christie too fat to be president? Michael Kinsley:

He is just too fat. Maybe, if he runs for president and we get to know him, we will overlook this awkward issue because we are so impressed with the way he stands up to teachers’ unions. But we shouldn’t overlook it — unless he goes on a diet and shows he can stick to it. … Controlling what you eat and how much is not easy, and it’s harder for some people than for others. But it’s not as difficult as curing a chemical addiction. With a determined, disciplined effort, Christie could thin down, and he should — because the obesity epidemic is real and dangerous. And the president inevitably sets an example.

There are many reasons to think Christie shouldn’t be president, but this isn’t one of them. And oh, I know — I’ve chuckled at fat-Rush Limbaugh jokes with the rest of you. And I laffed out loud at Cooz’s most recent expression of lyrical genius, filed just moments ago. But I’m going to decline to participate in the fat-bashing this time.

(Oh, and Michael Kinsley? How casually you state that fixing disordered eating patterns is less difficult than “curing” a chemical dependency. You quit heroin by not taking heroin ever again. A fat person trying to lose weight still has to eat. A while back my health-care searching kicked up a story out of Australia, in which a number of fashionistas told the truth and nothing but the truth about what they eat. One drinks hot water all day long before sitting down to a 1,200-calorie dinner. Another confesses to taking a daily over-the-counter cold medicine, because her doctor told her it would boost her metabolism by a tiny amount. That’s as fucked-up as any McDonald’s habit.)

Let’s end the fat hate. Just for a while, to see how we like it. And because I’m not totally dour on the subject, I’d like to unearth one of my favorite SNL sketches of all time, Bill Clinton at McDonald’s:

I love it because it gets to the truth about both Clinton and so many fat people — they are that way because their appetites, for everything, are large. I always thought Clinton’s fondness for chunk-making food was an expression of his essential generosity and love of people. Not to mention salt and grease.

So, some quick bloggage:

Lance Mannion considers Archbishop Timothy Dolan, darlin’ of the right.

You all were right about Officer Pepper Spray yesterday; I just wasn’t keeping up with the story. Jon Stewart takes it one step further.

And now, I’m off to (almost) start the weekend. Enjoy yours.

Someone has probably sent you videos of the Occupy Wall Street protests this week in New York. This clip is popular, 40 seconds that ostensibly shows two women being pepper-sprayed for no apparent reason, although I’ve run it a few times and can’t find the moment of truth. Besides, I’m sure someone has it from another angle. Every other person there was carrying a camera.

We live in a world more photographed every day, and still, we miss stuff all the time. All the cameras in New York City, and only one captured the first plane hitting the World Trade Center. Probably hundreds were trained on the buildings when the second plane hit, and yet, conspiracy theorists continue to insist we don’t really know what happened. Did anyone ever see the plane that hit the Pentagon? The command center of the vast American military, and all I recall was a grainy security-camera image of a blur and a fireball. No wonder the truthers were able to beat that dead horse for a decade.

I knew a photographer in college who was summoned to testify about some photos of alleged police brutality he’d taken at a demonstration. As he remembered the experience, the cross-examination was short. How many frames can your camera shoot? Five per second with a motor drive. How many frames on a roll of film? Thirty-six. How many frames does a film camera capture? Twenty-four per second. Thank you, that is all.

A plane crash-lands in the Hudson River, in a city packed with tourists and cameras, and one building’s security cam gets a clear shot, and only a glimpse between buildings. Today’s cell phones can capture video in high-definition. I can have mine out and ready to roll in a matter of seconds, and I don’t think I’ve ever shot anything worth shooting.

And yet, does a day go by when someone isn’t embarrassed or done in by a single photo? Scarlett Johansson can’t resist snapping a private shot of her fine fanny, and soon it’s out there and nearly crashes the internet. Two Detroit cops are on the hot seat for photos taken outside a traveling strip club/party bus called the Booty Lounge. I don’t even see where they did anything wrong; the picture could have been a photobomb for all I can tell. But it was on the club’s Facebook page, and so it must be atoned for.

Last night NPR had a piece on the crackdown on anonymous internet commenters; more newspapers are making a connection with Facebook or some other real-name network, and now comments on stories must be made under one’s actual name. Part of me applauds this — a self-respecting sewer rat wouldn’t hang in most newspaper comment section — while the rest wonders what this will mean in a world where we’re supposedly accountable for every utterance, online or off, along with every embarrassing photo ever taken of us, ever.

My guess is, soon it won’t matter. Or maybe we’ll all simply change our names.

The final day of my hell week, and pals, I can’t wait for it to end. Happy Thursday.

I’m missing the TEDxDetroit event as we speak. I came down to the wire on my reservation before finally taking a look at my calendar and saying, eh, not this year. Last year’s event was a mixed bag, to be expected in a daylong conference, but by the end, I grew tired of marketers with jokey, goofy websites that describe themselves as “networking ninjas,” not to mention many conceptual artists and anyone with “incubator” or “empower” on their resume.

Last year’s event ran the gamut from Dale Earnhardt Jr. Jr. to some woman who, as near as I could tell, was a presenter because she runs an aerobics studio that uses Bollywood film-score music as the soundtrack. When she led the stage in a group dance to “Jai Ho,” I checked my watch, noted the lovely day in progress outside, and left.

I wish the conference well. Might try to watch it on the live stream.

I see Fort Wayne had a TED this year. Glancing at the speakers list, looks like a lot of the same phenomenon. Well, Nathan Myhrvold has only so many dates on his calendar.

Today is the last ridonkulous day of my week. If I can motor through it, tomorrow should be an improvement, and Friday a downright coast. We’ll see. In the meantime, a little bloggage:

In today’s Daily Snicker, a headline that would go a long way toward making me forgive the Free Press for Mitch Albom.

David Letterman’s Top 10 Chris Christie fat jokes. Eh, not funny enough.

I’m pleased to report that only one person in my Facebook network copied and pasted THAT STUPID ALL-CAPS THING ABOUT FACEBOOK CHARGING. (Favorite line: IT’S TRUE THIS WAS ON THE NEWS.) I would only like to point out that Facebook already charges. And they’re the ones getting the better end of the deal.

A final word: Amazon just sent me another gift card, my monthly skim from you kind people, shopping through the Kickback Lounge. It’s never a lot of money — $38.82 this month — but it’s always enough to remind me how lucky I am to have such great readers. Of course the money is re-spent with Amazon, which gives me cool things to read and talk about here, contributing to a loop of wonderfulness. Thanks to all of you who take the time to do so.

Mariam Charara, one of my students from last year, got married in May, and as part of their engagement-photo package, she and her fiancé Hussein, both avid Red Wings fans, took some pictures at the Joe:

As you can see from the brand, it got them named the team’s official Facebook fans of the day yesterday. The last I checked, 850 people “liked” the photo, and 89 had left comments. Eighty-eight were cheery and supportive. One wasn’t:

I don’t like. I see this as a provocation. Arabs will never integrate themselves into the american culture, believe me. When they will be numerous, Arabs will try to impose their culture to America, and when you will become aware, it will be too late. So wake up. We had the same problem in France, and now… it’s too late.

Actually, this is probably good news. One jerkoff among 90 hockey fans? The Pope himself might call that a miracle. To me, it’s a reflection of the utterly unremarkable nature of the scene; you see young women like Mariam all over the area, and all over the sports venues. When I took Kate to a Tigers game a few years ago, we sat behind a father with three daughters, each wearing a team jersey and hijab in matching colors.

And it’s too funny to imagine someone could look at a picture of a Lebanese-American woman dressed in a Red Wings jersey and blue jeans, capering in front of their arena, and draw the conclusion that Arabs are trying to impose their culture on the U.S. Because of course this is a very common sight in Beirut.

Mariam’s career goal, by the way, is to be the first hijab-wearing hockey beat writer in the NHL, and my guess is, she’ll make it.

I have about six hours of work to fit into a four-hour bag, so I’m going to have to get out of here. A few quick blogends:

From one of Sweet Juniper’s side blogs: Urchin with puppies.

Something Gawker is indispensable for: Telling me about parts of the internet I would never visit, but still want to be briefed on.

One reason to give Barack Obama a second term. There is no way Mrs. Mitt Romney will turn herself out like this.

Ta ta.

I can’t tell you enough what a good time Saturday’s Tour de Troit was, even though I rode all by my little lonesome, the other two-thirds of my family SO busy with THEIR lives they couldn’t be bothered to rise at dawn and take a three-hour bike ride with mom. But so what? I do lots of things alone, and found plenty of people to talk to among the 4,000 or so rolling along with me. The weather was perfect and the route was great — Detroit high to low, crack houses to manor houses, with a lap of Belle Isle and a crisp McIntosh apple thrown in. And lunch. With beer. None of which I drank, as it was 11 a.m. and I had a day of chores ahead. So I found a table of thirsty-looking guys, and gave them my final food and drink tickets.

I should have given my extra ticket to Dexter. He could have put one of his 37 specialized bikes into the van, driven up and rolled on out with me. Would have been a crazy early start for a night owl like him, though. Maybe next time.

I just realized what-all my week will entail, looked at my calendar and groaned. If I miss a day this week, don’t bother with search parties. It’s just me, exhausted and weeping, trying to make a 50-hour week run with five hours of sleep, nightly.

But so we can get it started in the same fashion it will likely end, how about a bunch of tossed-off bloggage?

We seem to be on a capital-punishment jag here, so one more, a column about what it was like to be in the crowd outside Troy Davis’ execution. Sounds a lot like the Tim McVeigh death carnival in 2001, i.e. a reporter-to-protestor ratio of about 10:1, and not much news to report other than, “it’s going to happen in two hours” and “it happened 20 minutes ago.”

It did jog my memory, however, to when my friend Ron French (with whom I worked at TimFest) covered an execution of a Michigan man in Florida, years previous. There’s a wire-service reporter at those things who, like the Atlanta reporter linked above, has seen more men lose their lives than an infantryman in a war zone. The protestors, pro and con, all know one another, shake hands and ask after one another’s kids. They keep their signs in their car trunks, and some of them are looking a little worn out.

The wire-service reporter told a story about how, back in the electric-chair days, the liner on the chair’s cap finally wore out, probably from overuse. It’s a sea sponge which is saturated in salt water before it’s fitted on the condemned man’s head, and aids in conducting the charge through the body. When it wore out, some genius at the prison, probably looking to save taxpayer dollars, replaced it with a common cellulose sea sponge. Which burst into flames during the event, upsetting everyone and very likely hastening the era of lethal injection.

A few of you have asked, in the past, what my problem is with Jennifer Granholm, who always looked so smart and presentable on “Meet the Press” while she was governor of Michigan. I think my Wayne State colleague Jack Lessenberry gets to the heart of it in his review of what seems to be her laughably awful memoir. A friend of mine suggested some staged readings might be fun to do, and with passages like this, of course I’m waving my hand in the air, volunteering to play Jenny:

Actually, the book, which is subtitled The Fight for Jobs and America’s Economic Future, is so appallingly bad it is weirdly fascinating, starting with the weird, stilted dialogue it claims were real conversations, mainly between husband and wife.

What they actually sound like are Ayn Rand characters who have learned a whole lot of psychobabble. (“His words finally pierced my hard, self-pitying armor. It was my ego that was sucking me down.” Finally, she told him “Thanks for caring so much.”)

Mark Bittman takes on the “junk food is cheaper than broccoli” canard and finds: No, it’s not. This is not exactly a state secret, which we’ve discussed here many times before — oh, my little smartlings, you make this job so rewarding — but I have to pull back at his solution, which is to turn Mickey D’s into the new Philip Morris. Just what the culture war needs: Another front.

Finally, one for Cooz: A chapter from North Carolina’s history of social engineering, i.e., aggressive sterilization programs for the poor, feeble-minded and, of course, promiscuous. The reveal is who presided over these programs for decades — one Wallace Kuralt, father of Charles the Beloved.

And now I must get moving. Happy week to you. As for me, I just hope to endure it, and make a few deadlines.

In the wayback internet years of the ’90s, there used to be a list floating around, a database of last-meal requests on Texas’ death row. I think it was maintained by the Department of Corrections itself, and made for an interesting time-waster. It could be hard to read, however, as it revealed the condemned as human beings rather than monsters.

They asked for chicken-fried steak and country biscuits, barbecue and collard greens, carnitas with rice and beans. One took nothing but holy communion; another opted for a blueberry pie. There were a depressing number of cheeseburger-and-fries combos, a few genuine puzzlers. But it would seem that in this one thing, Texas honored the traditions of execution in human history, i.e., on the last day of your life, you are allowed this human comfort. (Within reason. I believe requests for alcohol are denied, and my guess is, no one gets to smoke anymore.)

I can’t find the list now, because it’s been bigfooted by the latest news out of the People’s Republic of Whack ’em and Stack ’em: No more last meals.

Lawrence Russell Brewer, one of the men convicted of the dragging death of James Byrd Jr. in 1998, went whole-hog on his last-meal request, ordering:

…two chicken-fried steaks with gravy and sliced onions; a triple-patty bacon cheeseburger; a cheese omelet with ground beef, tomatoes, onions, bell peppers and jalapeños; a bowl of fried okra with ketchup; one pound of barbecued meat with half a loaf of white bread; three fajitas; a meat-lover’s pizza; one pint of Blue Bell Ice Cream; a slab of peanut-butter fudge with crushed peanuts; and three root beers.

And what happened? See if you can guess:

The meal outraged State Senator John Whitmire, a Houston Democrat and chairman of the Senate Criminal Justice Committee. In a phone call and letter to the executive director of the state prison agency, Mr. Whitmire asked that the agency end the practice of last meals or he would get the State Legislature to pass a bill doing so.

The prison agency’s executive director, Brad Livingston, responded hours later, telling Mr. Whitmire that the practice had been terminated, effective immediately, and that death row inmates scheduled for execution would receive the same meal served to other inmates in the unit.

What a spectacularly dickish move. On everyone’s part. Brewer certainly abused the prison’s hospitality, so to speak. Where did he put all that food? It turned out he didn’t put it anywhere; he ordered it and didn’t eat it. It “made a mockery” of the process, Whitmire said, and added:

Mr. Whitmire said his opposition to last meals had little to do with the cost of the meals, when the state budget is stretched thin. He said it was a matter of principle. “He never gave his victim an opportunity for a last meal,” Mr. Whitmire said of Mr. Brewer. “Why in the world are you going to treat him like a celebrity two hours before you execute him? It’s wrong to treat a vicious murderer in this fashion. Let him eat the same meal on the chow line as the others.”

Maybe in another generation, Texas will have passed the Get as Good as You Gave Act, which specifies that the execution be performed using the same method as the crime, perhaps preceded by a few hours of torture (for the deterrent factor).

We give a condemned man a choice of last meal, Sen. Whitmire, because we’re better than the condemned. On the last day of his life, we’re extending the little niceties of civilization as a way of showing the man about to die what he rejected. We let him meet with a clerical representative of his choice to show we live by the values we kept and he rejected.

Not any more. Enjoy your macaroni and cheese.

Oldest execution joke in the book: Condemned man faces firing squad. Commander offers a final cigarette. Punchline: “No thanks, I’m trying to quit.”

Sweet, sweet Friday, how I’ve missed you. But before I have my first cocktail, I must do some work. So, for today, only one bit of bloggage, an open question:

Who ARE these people?

Have a great weekend, all. Tour De Troit tomorrow! Fingers crossed for good weather.

Kate’s band played a gig Sunday, providing entertainment at a rest stop on the Tour de Ford, a bike tour/fundraiser for indigent patient care in the Henry Ford Health Systems.

I immediately dashed off a note to my old pal, hospital administrator Dr. Frank Byrne, thanking the entire health-care industry for all they do to help struggling kid bands get that all-important experience. Po is down to a power trio now, following the resignation of their vocalist, but they still sound pretty tight, and even though the other band on the bill was more of a crowd-pleaser, with their classics-heavy repertoire, Po got showmanship points for being pretty girls, and for not having to read their lyrics off a music stand. (Hey, I’d have had to read the lyrics to Cole Porter tunes, approximately the same interval of composition-to-performance as it is for a kid of today to sing “Sunshine of Your Love.”)

But perhaps the greatest thrill came at the end, when most of the cyclists had already rolled through, eaten their bananas and apples, refilled their CamelBaks and headed out for the next leg. An old woman who lives nearby tottered up and demanded that we TURN IT DOWN. You’re not really a rokker until someone tells you to turn it down. She stayed for a good half hour, bitching at a security guard about how THIS HOSPITAL IS TERRIBLE FOR THE NEIGHBORHOOD, etc. To which I can only speak from experience: One, if you think an operating hospital is bad for your neighborhood, try a shuttered one, and two, obviously she was lonely and wanted someone to talk to. Poor old angry lady. Someday she’s going to be glad there’s an ER across the street.

So. Horrible-busy day, and I’m thinking we should do some tasty bloggage and dash — the equivalent of a piece of toast on the run for breakfast. Soooo…

With apologies to your aviation fans out there, I have never understood air shows. I guess it takes all kinds, but the thought of craning my neck for a few hours to watch pilots do loop-de-loops has always seemed downright boring. (You are free to have the same opinion about watching horses jump fences.) The more modern air shows, which amp up the thrills with dangerous stunts and gimmicks like extreme low-altitude “racing” — you’d have to walk me there with a loaded shotgun at my back. And here’s why. That is all.

This was a hard story to read, about the new poor. It’s hard not to believe this is the twisted root of something, and it ain’t the Tea Party and it ain’t whatever else you might think it is:

It’s hard to find some of the poorest residents in Pembroke, Ill. They live in places like the tree-shaded gravel road where the Bargy family’s dust-smudged trailer is wedged in the soil, flanked by overgrown grass.

By the official numbers, Pembroke’s 3,000 residents are among the poorest in the region, but the problem may be worse. The mayor believes as many as 2,000 people were uncounted, living far off the paths that census workers trod.

The staples that make up the town square are gone: No post office, no supermarket, no pharmacy, no barber shop or gas station. School doors are shuttered. The police officers were all laid off, a meat processing plant closed. In many places, light switches don’t work, and water faucets run dry. Residents let their garbage smolder on their lawn because there’s no truck to take it away; many homes are burned out.

A new populist revolt? I don’t see why not.

But let our hearts be light on this Monday in the still-fair month of September. Was it Moe who nominated the story about Gordon Ramsey’s porn dwarf double dying in a badger den as best headline ever? This may well top it.

Ugh, I’m growing to despise Mondays. I hope yours is tol’rable.

I work a lot for others during the week, much of it for little or no compensation, and in return I ask for only one thing: Saturday. Saturday is mine, for Eastern Market visits and maybe a little urban exploration (in the bland, non-lawbreaking sense), and that’s how I ended up at the Rust Belt Market last weekend, in search of pie. This guy’s pies, specifically. But it would be silly to just pop in and out for pie, so I took a stroll through the market, which is kind of an offline Etsy — vintage clothes, handmade this, hipster that. Very Detroit-as-new-Brooklyn. Not quite the epicenter, but there is no epicenter. Still, a good place to put your cultural feelers out and get a sense of the millennial/late-X generation in their salad-days prime. What are you into, young folks? What moves you?

Just this: Food and bikes.

I’m not a fan of the writer Caitlin Flanagan, but she made an observation a while back that’s stuck with me. I’m sure I’ve mentioned it before, but indulge me: Imagine two young women — a housewife of the ’50s and her closest equivalent today. Quiz both on their attitudes about food and sex. You’ll find the ’50s housewife has many opinions about how you should live your sex life, but honestly doesn’t care what you eat — that’s your business. Whereas a 21st century woman is likely to be precisely the opposite. Are those eggs organic? Is your beef grass-fed? Those tomatoes — locally grown? But who you sleep with, and what you do in your bedroom? Who cares?

The good news about the foodie revolution is, the world is a much tastier place. You can get a better meal, or make yourself one, today than you could a generation ago, and certainly more so than in the ’50s. For all the concerns about pesticides and hormones and feedlots and the like, the fact remains that a stroll through even an unhip, pedestrian suburban grocery chain is a revelation of food unknown to even 25-year-old me, and I like to think I got in on this stuff early. My mother-in-law thought mangoes were green peppers. Today: Actual mangoes. A good thing.

The bad news is that it can get awfully tiresome, and I think we’ve gone down this road here before. When Anthony Bourdain says Alice Waters has a touch of the Khmer Rouge about her, it’s funny because it’s true. She’s the one who suggested $4-per-pound organic grapes should not be considered out of reach in any nation where poor people buy $100 sneakers, after all.

But getting back to the good news, it’s also given rise to a generation of young foodie entrepreneurs, many flying below the radar of the health inspectors, in food trucks and market stalls, trying to change the world with empanadas or bagels or whatever. The pie guy I visited was very much of this tradition, with his artistic tattoos — a chef’s knife on his forearm, among many — and his unexpected flavor combinations. Oh, and his T-shirt: “Fuck cupcakes. Eat pie.” I bought three slices at $2.50 per — salted caramel apple, peach mango (hold the green peppers) and blueberry lemon. Elsewhere in this market you could buy artisanal coffee and other snacky things; at the Eastern Market you could buy everything, including a nosh from my favorite new stop, the People’s Pierogi Collective (their slogan includes the word “revolutionary,” but I can’t remember it now).

Elsewhere in the market, I looked through a booth that sold make-your-own necklace systems, with various charms and suchlike. It seemed half the charms had bicycle themes — chains and chainrings, spokes, wheels. I see bike-themed tattoos everywhere, too, “fixie forever” on a muscular calf, or “fuck cars,” one word to a leg, something for motorists to see as you flash past them on your fixie. Bike culture is strong in Detroit, a flat city with many miles of eye-popping sights. But it’s crazy strong among younger people, who commute on sticker-covered, beat-looking-but-fast-moving bikes and lock them to any old thing with chains heavy enough to swing at crackheads, should the need arise.

Meanwhile, there is $70,000 in county parks money lying on the table in my community, waiting for the cities to pick it up and use it to buy mainly paint and signs to designate bike routes (not paths, mind you, just routes) through the five Pointes. I predict it will sit there until it grows mold and expires, because the police chiefs are fretting about the need for a traffic study first, and why can’t we all just ride on sidewalks, anyway? The suburbs always move behind the city. Although I hear everybody enjoys pie.

So, not much bloggage today, but may I say one thing? I’m extremely uncomfortable about much of the commentary I’m hearing about whether She-Who did or did not bang a University of Michigan basketball player when she was young and single and the calendar read 1987. I’m getting the strong feeling this Joe McGinniss book is a steaming pile of crap, and I don’t care how respectable he is. If the big talker you come up with is that she slept with a black guy when she was 23, you are only Kitty Kelley with a better publicist. The discussion I heard yesterday bugged me on several levels, including but not limited to noting it happened “just nine months before her marriage to Todd,” misuse of the word “fetish” and whoa, MANDINGO!!!!!

I’m disappointed in Garry Trudeau for making this a week’s worth of “Doonesbury” and I really, really resent the way it makes me feel like defending her. That said, some of the comments on this thread are sort of funny.

The first serious review of the book I’ve seen. Doesn’t sound like a must-read.

After 10, gotta go. Happy Thursday, all. The weekend is drawing nigh.

Believe it or not, I can’t watch everything on TV and read everything on the internet. So it wasn’t until yesterday — and last night in particular — that I was able to read much about Michele Bachmann and her interesting thoughts about Gardasil, the HPV vaccine. As you know, I have a part-time gig gathering health-care news. I’ve been reading about Gardasil for years now, and I’m well-aware of the debate, such as it is, about the vaccine against human papillomaviruses 6, 11, 16 and 18, which are the culprit in most cases of cervical, anal and other cancers of the down-there regions.

Early work on HPV vaccines was done in Australia, and the doctor credited with being the original discoverer is a national hero, decorated with Medal of Freedom-type laurels in his homeland. I get the feeling that under a President Bachmann, he’d be clapped in leg irons and shipped to Gitmo for crimes against humanity. That’ll teach the inventor of the Slut Shot.

That’s what lots of social conservatives call it; I believe the term was coined by an anti-vaccine activist, Barbara Loe Fisher. She has a blog (but of course) called Vaccine Awakening. Here’s the entry on the top of it today, from a few days ago, just to give you a sense of the tone:

Vaccine Wake Up Call for Parents: Your Children Are Being Taken

Every mother has had the nightmare. We dream our child, who we love more than we thought we could love anyone, has been taken away by strangers and cannot be found. The cold fear rises up from our stomach into our throats as we search, endlessly, to find the child we would give up our own life to protect from harm.

Whew. To be fair, I think Fisher is against pretty much all vaccines, especially the childhood ones that have never proven to be linked to autism and other complications. But her charming turn of phrase on the Slut Shot is all social conservatives like Bachmann need, really. There was a story in the New Yorker a few weeks back, about Bachmann and the alternate history she believes, all that stuff about the founding fathers and their tireless work to end slavery, and how she can use a few dog-whistle phrases that catch the ears of her fellow travelers:

I’m a mom, and I’m a mom of three [daughters]. And to have innocent little 12-year-old girls be forced to have a government injection through an executive order is just flat out wrong. That should never be done.

Innocent 12-year-olds forced to have a government injection! That’s not a dog whistle, that’s a klaxon. Your innocent 12-year-old will have her arm stripped naked and readied for the long, hard government injector. She’ll turn her head away, her lip will tremble, but there’s no stopping the relentless spike. And then, with a gasp and a tear, the tender flesh yielded and the burning poison poured into her body…

And if you don’t get the undertone of sweet virgins receiving hot vaccine injections, “government” is in there, too. Big bad government, everyone’s favorite boogieman. (I’ve reached a point now that as soon as I hear the phrase “government schools” in a conversation, I flip a switch in my brain, adopt a half-smile and remember an urgent appointment on the other side of the room.)

But it’s the sex angle that flips their switches; if this were a vaccine against a virus that causes liver cancer, no matter how much money Rick Perry got from its manufacturer, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Because, you see, there’s a perfectly good preventative against cervical cancer already. It’s called an aspirin. Hold it between your knees until your wedding night (to another aspirin-clencher), and there’s no need for any of that nonsense. See? Problem solved.

It wasn’t until I saw this clip from the Daily Show that I fully grasped the existential weirdness of the event where Bachmann made her comments. I think it’s safe to say that her remarks were fully in keeping with the tone of the CNN debate. No, “debate.” The national anthem? Are you kidding me?

As I have related here before, I was there when CNN was launched, June 1, 1980. I toured the facility with Ted Turner himself. The question asked by every reporter there, in one form or another, was “how on earth will you fill 24 hours a day with news?” I guess the answer is both “you won’t” and “with this.”

Back to Gardasil. Just once, I’d like to see this group of Republicans, whom you’d think would have learned something from the past few years of wide stances and Appalachian Trail hikes, acknowledge some simple reality about human sexuality. Just once I’d like to see some brave conservative say out loud, “You know, maybe cervical cancer is too high a price to pay for sleeping with the wrong person. And now we have this vaccine.” The thing is, I’m sure many are saying it. I’m sure millions have had their daughters vaccinated, and perhaps one day even their sons. They just can’t talk about it, because y’know, SLUT SHOT.

OK, time to get the day under way. A little bloggage:

Neil Steinberg: Let’s take these lunatics seriously. Not a bad idea.

Haven’t checked in with Jon Carroll for a while. What’s he up to? Still bringing the silly as well as silly can be brought. A few thoughts on shoe-selling copy.

And if you’re not a comments reader, you should know we heard from Alex yesterday afternoon, and he is fine, but finds it hard to type with a clothespin on his finger, but he appreciates all our well-wishing. Here’s wishing him some more wellness, and y’all, a happy Wednesday.

Welcome to Sunday morning, every newspaper fan’s biggest day. The morning stretches before you, with thousands and thousands of words to choose from. Here are the two that arrived at my house this week:

As you can see, the Freep took its 9/11 package pretty seriously. They’re doing this more often of late — making a magazine-style front page, with only one story, rather than the traditional layout. And for a day like Sunday, lots of papers did the same.

I gotta say, this photoillustration didn’t do much for me. Of the thousands of images to choose from — and you can see the other newspaper, above, for some lovely ones — they dig up the same old greatest hits and screen them over a flag, but OK, artistic choice, whatever. And as it turns out, the illustration is a perfect match for the copy. Anyone? Anyone?

How could we have possibly expected anything else? I knew you-know-who would have something to say about it; in the clever words of one of you on my Facebook page (Baldheaded Dork, I think), Mitch made his bones as the Grim Reaper’s toastmaster, and this was a very big banquet. But there were other people involved in this decision, to make this the most prominent story in the paper, to back it with the judgment of a dozen editors. Someone, many someones, read this and said, “Yep, this is what our readers want.”

I said the illustration perfectly captured the story. Mitch Albom’s column was a virtual cliché salad with a side of mush, served up with his standard tricks, italics, repetition and those dumb, one-sentence paragraphs he loves so much.

Like this.

And like this:

They are dead. He is dead. We are alive. We are changed.

They are dead.

You wish this anniversary could change that. You wish 10 years was some sort of MAGIC release date, that the murdered souls of Sept. 11 could return, their suffering ended, their incinerated bodies recreated from the dusty air of lower Manhattan and the rubble of the Pentagon and the muddy earth of a Pennsylvania field, allowed to pick up their lives wherever they were headed that morning, to the office, to the subway, to breakfast, to another city.

They are dead. That will never happen. Their children are teenagers now. Their teens are adults. They exist only in memories, in family stories, in photo albums and attic boxes and troubled dreams.

No roll call today will bring them back — not even one read by presidents and governors. No etching of their names in a memorial will re-animate them. They stand as the fallen.

What the hell is he talking about? I wish an anniversary could bring the dead to life? Sure, why not? I also wish I had a dog that didn’t poop or pee. I wish I had a money tree in my yard. I wish Ashley didn’t die. I wish I had some all-caps MAGIC I could call on, but most of all, I wish I had Mitch Albom’s job, which is to churn his MAGIC pot of hackneyed usage and faux-profundity once a week in the op-ed section of what was once a respected newspaper and is now just another heat ‘n’ serve from the Gannett kitchen.

I love some of these clauses — not even a roll call “read by presidents and governors” will bring them back. A better hack would have stopped at presidents. It’s the “and governors” that gives the line its comedy.

It so happens that all the columnists were called upon to contribute something, and no one, even the good ones, hit anything out of the park. But Mitch pegged the needle on the Smarm-o-Meter, once again, by observing that yes, yes, we have changed, and yet, life and love does, and always will, go on.

Because we weren’t sure about that before. You know, there was an attack on American soil, and maybe all life would have stopped, and taken the love with it.

This guy is paid $250,000 a year by the Freep, I’m told. For that sum, he is apparently not required to make a phone call to one of the dozens of smart people, many of them clergy, who would pick up for him, who might have offered a new perspective or original observation about this tragedy. He’s not required to say something that hasn’t been said a thousand times. He just phones this shit in, and collects the check.

It wouldn’t be so bad if this nonsense were confined to Mother’s Day and Valentine’s Day and other more fitting holidays. But this was a profound national tragedy, and this is what he comes up with. I ask you.

Compare what he said with this brief passage from Bill Clinton’s speech at Shanksville, Pa. this weekend. That’s how you speak a simple message from the heart, people.

Ugh.

For a palate cleanser, I suggest you read Michael Heaton’s account of covering the story as a working reporter. Might be a little inside baseball for you civilians, but I enjoyed it. The hardhat gambit! Genius.

Or, you could read the final, definitive apology of the guy who started the “tourist guy” Photoshop hoax. He’s Hungarian, a nation that our own Alex often informs us has a distinct sense of humor. Let’s invade them, and fix that.

Since we were talking about it last week, whaddya know — a piece on graphing calculators.

This I present without comment.

And with that, I should wrap up and move out.

* Today’s headline explained.