Question: Are riots so often sparked by police action because a) a situation is simmering anyway, and the police, already in place to keep things in control, don’t have to go very far to reach the edge? or b) cops are easily provoked by “law and order” edicts to abuse power? or c) some combination of the two?

I’m going with C. Let me hasten to add that I’m opposed to riots of all sorts, and the trendy common usage of describing them as “uprisings” gets on my nerves, unless you’re talking about rigid authoritarian states. That said, the 1967 Detroit riots were an obvious pushback against an iron-fisted and institutionally racist police department. (But it’s still not an uprising.) The precipitating incident, as everyone knows, was a raid on an after-hours bar in a black neighborhood. The Stonewall riots were started by a police raid on a gay bar. Many of us remember the police riot of 1968 Chicago, during the Democratic convention. The London riots, continuing as we speak, began after police shot a young man resisting arrest.

The problem is, whatever the precipitating incident, it’s swiftly overrun by looting and the appearance of a sort of rioting professional, young men with high testosterone levels and no place to express it; a mob scene becomes a big mosh pit, only more dangerous and with tear gas, billyclubs and fire.

London calling: From the Big Picture blog, a lot of pictures from ground level. Note the evacuation of the pet store — hamsters and guinea pigs and rats being taken to a safe place. When the one great scorer comes to write against our species, I hope he devotes a chapter to our stewardship, for good or ill, of others. (Species, that is.)

The hour, it grows late. Let’s skip on to the bloggage:

From the LATimes, a great interview with one of my favorites, Buck Henry:

Then there’s the pop culture echo chamber in film and TV; everything is a reference to something else, as if it’s embarrassing to be authentic.

That’s the horror of it. The great films were generic to themselves. I see it as the Conan O’Brien effect. He’s like the senior in your college class who always knows how to make a joke about whatever it is you say or read, until it becomes an end in itself. College kids 50 or more years ago wanted to become Hemingway. Thirty years ago they wanted to come here and write a series that would make them incredibly rich. [Now] the highest possibility is to work for a late-night talk show and maybe even become [a host] themselves. All these Harvard guys who just want to make late-night jokes about the culture.

The stock cliché shot of trouble on Wall Street — brokers with hands on their faces.

Angelina Jolie is, we all know, one of the most beautiful women in the world. Based on the evidence of this photo, would you still like to see her naked? I think this is what a certain type of beauty — the worldwide-superstar kind, when a living human being is seen by others almost entirely via pixels or other manipulated image — requires: Good bones, but basically, a blank canvas. I’m struck by the color of her skin, and yeah, yeah, skin cancer premature aging blah blah blah, but I’ve never seen a pallor quite that pallid on a person who wasn’t clinically dead. Her arms and legs look like pipe cleaners, but the dress fits her the way it would a model, which is to say, she’s a walking hanger. And of course she still has that great jawline and mouth.

Everything the male gaze would want in a woman can be added by the makeup, wardrobe or special-effects departments, or in post-production. What was it Norma Desmond said? We didn’t need words, we had faces! That’s good, because that’s what she has.

Contrast with Christina Ricci, an actor who’s been far plumper in the past. She’s very thin in this picture, but it’s that last five or 10 pounds that keeps her on the right side of wowza.

Where are the editors, chapter a billion: The Detroit News asked L. Brooks Patterson, the Oakland county executive who was never snowed by Kwame Kilpatrick’s bullshit, to review the latter’s new memoir, published this week. He writes:

There’s not a page that doesn’t reference Kilpatrick’s personal relationship with his “spirit,” or his “creator,” or his “petition to God” — all the way to the last page where he “surrenders to God’s will.” I thought I had picked up by mistake Pope Benedict’s autobiography.

A funny line, but “by mistake” belongs at the end of the sentence. Word order is very important in comedy: Take my wife. Please. I guess “I thought I’d mistakenly picked up Pope Benedict’s autobiography” might have worked, but “by mistake” is a phrase that goes on the end of sentences, like a little apology caboose. “I picked up your coffee by mistake,” not “I picked up by mistake your coffee.” Am I the only one who hears this stuff? Hello, is this thing on?

Ai-yi-yi, what a week. Better get it moving.

Years after seeing its wonderful, flippy trailer, I finally got to see “Teeth” this weekend, on IFC’s free on-demand channel. It’s a horror movie about a girl with vagina dentata, i.e, a real mouth down there. Great premise, imperfect execution.

I think it was a pacing problem — there are four distinct wham-o scenes in which young Dawn O’Keefe’s snapper gets to show what it’s capable of, but after the first, it’s kinda downhill. OK, so it bites, and bites hard. What are you going to do with that? We discover it only does so when it’s not being treated with respect — a little feminist twist on things that I appreciated, but I wanted to see more possibilities explored. Give a girl a biting vagina, and I expect her to be deployed as a CIA sex-assassin by the third act. Although, from the look on her face in the final shot, it’s not far away.

And when that is the high point of your weekend? Seeing a movie about a girl with a toothy vagina? That’s when you know you’re middle-aged.

This was the other one:

“Lord, you are the source of every good thing,” Mr. Perry said, as he bowed his head, closed his eyes and leaned into a microphone at Reliant Stadium here. “You are our only hope, and we stand before you today in awe of your power and in gratitude for your blessings, and humility for our sins. Father, our heart breaks for America. We see discord at home. We see fear in the marketplace. We see anger in the halls of government, and as a nation we have forgotten who made us, who protects us, who blesses us, and for that we cry out for your forgiveness.”

When I lived in Indiana, these folks were always insisting that I honor and respect their faith, nay, their “deeply held” faith. Find the word “deeply” in an American newspaper, and nine times out of 10, “religious” follows it. And for the most part, I did. When a carload of Christian college students was involved in a terrible crash and credited prayer with saving their lives, I put it in the story (mentioning seat belts and air bags in the next paragraph). Their respect for the way I think public life should be conducted would be radically different, I suspect. But this bullshit just tears it. May I see the hands of everyone who believes Rick Perry would be crying out for God’s forgiveness under a McCain/Palin administration? Yes, thank you, it’s as I suspected.

I’ve never been comfortable with the Bill Maher approach to religion; the world is a confusing and difficult place, and people take comfort where they can. But unlike the president, I know a preening bully when I see one. Rick Perry, you’re on notice:

As usual, Roger Ebert is on the beam.

In other news at this hour, a squirrel just spent a few minutes walking around on the skylight directly over my head, allowing me a rare look at the underside of a squirrel. It was a male, if you’re interested. I mention this only to note that it’s hard to stay too pissed about anything on a fine summer morning when breakfast included blueberries and peaches.

And today is Monday, which means (groan). So skedaddle I must, and I will see you soon. But a bit of bloggage first:

When I heard the follow-up to the Chrysler Super Bowl commercial would be the gospel choir featured therein doing their own cover of “Lose Yourself,” I ain’t gonna lie: I groaned. But the video is out, and it’s not terrible, nor is the cover. Such a distinctive-looking town; you can see all the Hollywood DPs who have been coming and going here for the last few years have loved it so.

I guess I have to read this Michele Bachmann profile in the New Yorker. It’ll arrive in dead-tree form about the time we’re heading north — think I’ll save it for the long drive.

And oh, hell, why not: Because we all need a little bunny in our lives, the daily bunny. Not to be confused the daily otter.

OK, now I’m leaving. See you tomorrow.

Kate’s pediatrician laid a fact on me the last time we saw her that I’ve been mulling ever since: About 80 percent of Michigan residents suffer from some form of seasonal allergies.

“It’s because of the humidity,” she said, which didn’t make too much sense, but I didn’t challenge her. Not because I’m not a doctor-challenger — the world needs more of those, and I’m happy to do my part — but because I was relieved that she thought that was the cause of Kate’s occasional headaches, and furthermore, that we didn’t need to do any expensive diagnostics to confirm this. Because of the 80 percent thing. When you hear hoofbeats, think horses, not zebras. You get headaches during allergy season, exactly like one of your parents? Eh, you probably have allergies, too. She takes an over-the-counter antihistamine daily, and that takes care of it, for the most part.

The parent who also gets headaches isn’t me. I am apparently in the 20 percent who doesn’t have allergies. Everyone else? When the spring flowers bloom, when the autumn leaves rot, when the summer’s goldenrod sways in the breeze, sending its pollen out to drive 80 percent of you insane, I remain immune. Lucky, lucky me.

I told the pediatrician this. “Wow, I feel really lucky now,” I said. “Because I’ve never been allergic to anything.” She looked at me with that look doctors get when you say things like that.

“Seasonal allergies can present at any time of life,” she said. If this were a movie, that line would be staged like a gypsy curse, with visual effects and maybe a spooky echo.

Because my eyes are burning and itchy. They’ve been that way for days. At first I thought my contacts were inside out. Nope. Sweat running in my eyes? A likely culprit, but I doubt it. Not enough sleep? It’s happening on days when I grabbed close to nine hours the night before. What could be the problem? What?

The other day I was working in the yard and paused to drag the back of my hand across my forehead, which had an immediate effect on my eyeballs. It all came clear: Oh, riiiight.

Granted, it’s possible it was some other plant-based irritant, like oils from one of the weeds I was pulling up. But using the standard layman’s medical diagnostic technique of dividing the first thing that pops into your head by something some guy you know told you once, I feel confident I have now joined the 80 percent. I hope someone else grew out of their own allergies at the same moment, just so we can keep it all even.

At this point I’m glad it’s just the eyes. Because I hate feeling like I have a cold all the time.

Actually, I’ve suspected for some time that I had a mild hops allergy. The first beer of the night used to give me a stuffy nose. I experimented for a while with different brands, but it was one of those things where after a while, I sort of lost the thread of the scientific method. Drinking beer will do that.

Why are the eyes so vulnerable to all of our ills? Is it the watery-goo thing, or the windows-of-the-soul factor? Last night, I was doing some reporting for an assignment I’m working on for a magazine. I was in the midst of a crowd of drug addicts, all 12-stepping it, and I was sitting there letting the impressions accumulate — the smell of cigarettes, that rode-hard-and-put-up-wet look so many of these folks have, even in sobriety. I caught the eye of one of them. Like that guy, I thought. He looks like he’s still stoned. Bad eyes on that one. A few minutes later, the leader of the meeting singled him out.

“Get out of here,” he ordered. “Don’t come here to nod. Dirty on benzos, you are.” A subsequent urine test confirmed it. Huh.

Boy, you can tell it’s August, can’t you?

On to the bloggage!

There’s something about that ReasonTV badge on the microphone that makes Matt Damon’s smackdown of this twit so much sweeter.

Mittens Romney, Mr. Maturity. Right.

For you Game of Thrones fans, an effects reel from the house that did all those amazing painted backdrops. And to think David Benioff said the hardest thing about that project was working with horses.

With that, I think I’m off to eat a late breakfast. Happy Tuesday, all. I hope the heat wave is breaking.

Where has Maker Faire been all my life? I can’t believe it took us this long to find, and how did I — an individual acquainted with a fair number of youngish hipster types — miss it, along with the distinct Brooklyn/Detroit/steampunk-ish/sustainability vibe?

Got me. Note to self: Pay closer attention to the world around you.

In the meantime, this iPhone takes crappy pictures, sometimes. Here’s a couple other snaps of the dino-dragon, which was driveable:

Alan and I agreed that the design detail we liked best was the use of tires for its leathery skin. Other high points: The life-size mousetrap and, of course, the fire-breathing pony. Note the two hipsters running the pony, Pinky McHair and Mr. Kilt. I kept telling Alan he needs a kilt, but not some silly plaid one. One like the guy in the picture, in basic black, khaki or olive, like the pants he buys from Brooks Brothers. It’s hard for a guy to rock a kilt, but he could do it, because he’s stocky and hairy, which means his testosterone is not in doubt.

“OK,” he said. “I’ll wear it with plaid underwear.”

That would totally work.

The weather all weekend was hot and hotter and muggy and ick. I’m currently recovering from a couple hours of yard work, not even anything particularly strenuous, but done in the sort of heat that makes one grumpy and tired, it felt like a marathon. But after a few days of attention, the place is looking better, inside and out. And very shortly I will make the last cherry pie of the season. I am fully enjoying summer.

But I don’t have much to say, today, beyond general mourning over the debt deal, so let’s go quickly to the bloggage:

Another royal wedding. Now these are some English people — none of that pan-Eurotrash who showed up at the last one. It looks like the groom, a rugby player, had his nose relocated by a head butt. (Correction: At least eight head butts. Or whatever.) Fixing it would be a pussy move, however, so he wears it proudly. Is it just me, but is Auntie Camilla wearing the same fascinator she wore to her stepson’s wedding? And oh look, there’s Cathy Cambridge in yet another safe neutral. Looking at Princess Anne, it’s useful to remember that of all the athletes at the 1976 Olympic Games, she was the only one not required to submit to gender testing. (She was part of the British equestrian team.) Now look at her — the very picture of mature femininity.

The bride looks nice, but that’s to be expected. Note how she turns her head left to kiss the groom; a wise move, as going the other way would run her smack into that broken nose. I wish them much happiness.

From New York magazine, Frank Rich on the Murdochization of the US:

…a Times reporter who wrote a routine news story on a Fox News ratings lull was punished by having his headshot distorted into an anti-Semitic caricature worthy of Der Stürmer for display on the morning show Fox & Friends (a misnomer if ever there was one). Other victims have had it far worse, including the often-­defenseless obscure citizens who cross O’Reilly’s radar screen because they have views he abhors, at which point his producer stalks them for an on-camera ambush. (It was left to the Post, however, to trash a former O’Reilly Factor producer with whom he settled a sexual-harassment suit in 2004.) O’Reilly’s now-departed tag-team partner in Fox News vigilantism, Glenn Beck, excoriated the nearly 80-year-old CUNY sociologist Frances Fox Piven so often in the past few years (mostly for an essay she had written about poverty in 1966) that she had to fend off death threats. George Tiller, the Wichita abortion doctor who was called a “baby killer,” among other epithets, on 29 episodes of The O’Reilly Factor, was assassinated while at church in 2009.

Stay classy, Fox.

And finally, one from behind the NYT paywall, but maybe you’ve got the golden key:

The man behind all that hysterical anti-Sharia legislation is a Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn. One guy, with “a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam,” wags this dog:

Working with a cadre of conservative public-policy institutes and former military and intelligence officials, David Yerushalmi has written privately financed reports, filed lawsuits against the government and drafted the model legislation that recently swept through the country — all with the effect of casting Shariah as one of the greatest threats to American freedom since the cold war.

Ugh, Monday awaits, and it’s going to be a very very long one. Enjoy yours.

The other day I was riding my bike to the library, a trip of less than a mile, brevity I was grateful for, as it was approximately 450 degrees outside. I was thinking how cold the spring had been, and oh well, Michigan, what are you gonna do, and then I saw this dead squirrel on the sidewalk ahead, splayed. This was in a park.

“Wow, that squirrel died looking just like a pelt. Weird.”

I came closer. The tail twitched, and the dead squirrel jumped up and scampered to safety. It reminded me I’d seen this once before, on a similarly hot day. The squirrel was lying on a picnic table. Every dog I’ve had has sought out cool surfaces to press their bellies on; Spriggy had a tile hearth spot he liked, our old German shepherd Agnes preferred the foyer. So I guess it’s not so strange, and even though I’d gone through my entire life without seeing it until recently, animals do adapt. I did make note that all the ones I’ve seen doing it are the black-coated ones we have around here, who anecdotally seem smarter and more aggressive than their gray cousins.

Then my old neighbor in Fort Wayne, Earl Bowley, posted this on his Facebook. Taken at a local restaurant on, yes, a hot day:

Planking squirrels. What will they think of next?

Its name is Walter, I’m told. Now you know.

Rained all night here, and at the moment all I really want to do is stare out at the puddles, drinking coffee. It’s been so blazing hot of late, the sun so relentless, that it’s nice to raise the blinds for a change and dig it. Or as a certain Seattle-bred left-handed guitar god sang, lay back and groove on a rainy day. (Hendrix must have done little else, in Seattle.) However, we’re promised a 90-degree day once the low pressure moves through, so my guess is, the primary activity of the day will not be grooving, but sweating.

A couple of book notes: I’m working my way through the nightstand selection, “Punching Out: One Year in the Life of a Closing Auto Plant,” and enjoying it very much. Recommended for those of you who’d like to discuss the auto industry, or even the manufacturing economy, with anything other than bumper-sticker phrases. (“The UAW killed GM, really, it’s very simple.” And so on.) The overwhelming impression I get is that building cars and everything large made of metal is anything but, and I stand in awe of the people who do. “Punching Out” is the story of the disassembly of Budd Wheel, a major stamping plant a few miles from my house, which closed for good in 2006. The plant’s equipment was then cut apart and sold, piece by piece and press by press, to companies which then shipped all these items to places like Mexico and India and so forth, for reassembly at other plants, where the evolution of the economy hasn’t quite caught up with ours. Which is to say, where there’s still a growing need for factories and workers.

The author, Paul Clemens, wrote a short version of this for the NYT op-ed page some years back, and I linked to it then. The idea of scrapping, from the illegal street to the respectable factory level, is a pervasive theme in Detroit, and has been for a while. When Kate was still in Brownies, we took a tour of the Ford estate in Grosse Pointe Shores, where Edsel and Eleanor, son and daughter-in-law of Henry, built their Cotswold mansion. The guide pointed out all the details that had been taken from great houses in the real Cotswolds — flooring from this one, windows from that — and I had to smile. Sometimes it seems there’s a finite amount of wealth in the world, and all it does is travel the globe, being bought and sold by those with the means and the need to do so. It’s not that Detroit is a ruin; it’s that its wealth has been taken elsewhere, leaving, in Clemens’ memorable phrase, the working class mopping up after itself.

I sound like a commie, don’t I? Well, I’m just thinking out loud, watching the puddles dimple.

The hour, it grows late. Let’s jump to bloggage, shall we?

“Bridge & Tunnel,” the “Jersey Shore” that wasn’t. A good read from the Village Voice about kids these days, on Staten Island.

I love these things, known on the ‘nets as supercuts: A montage of movie pep-talk-in-the-mirror scenes. Language NSFW.

Tea Party douche who lectures the president on financial responsibility, sued by his ex-wife for $100K in back child support.

House-cleanin’, verb-studyin’, other writin’ awaits the day. Enjoy yours.

First, a housekeeping note:

Light posting over the next two days. When I agreed to take Kate to see her beloved Vans Warped Tour in Cleveland — the Detroit date came while she was at summer camp — I thought it was possible it would be an uncomfortable experience. I hadn’t planned on an epic heat wave, but oh, well. Summer — what are you going to do?

We leave in two hours. First stop: Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame. Then a nice air-conditioned hotel, then Blossom Music Center tomorrow. It’s a pretty cool setting — grassy swards and the like — and I’m finger-crossing that we have no sudden fierce thunderstorms, which this sort of weather breeds.

This will be the second of three summer concerts we have planned, and yes, I am the best mom ever. First was Matt & Kim in Detroit, tomorrow this, then next week, yet another date with Anarbor in Pontiac. This is the first headlining show for Anarbor, and they’re offering a special VIP-level ticket. It gets you in early for a meet ‘n’ greet with the band, a signed poster, the usual. The price for all this swag? Twenty bucks. I hear Bon Jovi had a similar pricing level on their last tour, closer to $1,500. I could pass this one off on Alan. It’s his turn and it’s on a night when he could go, but I feel as though Mike the guitarist and I are likethis (see above).

On the other hand? Pontiac.

Matt & Kim was a good show, very energetic. Their greeting to the crowd: How the fuck are you, Detroit?! It went on from there, with f-bombs, mf-bombs and the like dropped into every utterance. I told Kate that the use of profanity is a little like cooking with hot peppers. A little enhances everything and makes the flavors pop, but too much is simply numbing. Matt & Kim, a couple of ex-Pratt art students whom you’d think would know a thing or two about understatement and subtlety, showed very little in that regard. On the other hand, they hardly stand out. Enhance your vocabulary, rokkers.

So I’m taking my last few moments of calm to read more about the phone-hacking scandal. We have careers ending in disgrace and now, a body count. One thing missing, however — how difficult was this, and is it still possible to do? Does anyone know? And just to provide a perfect illustration of how paranoid thinking can always justify itself, the scandal has given fresh life to? Yes, the anti-vaccine crowd. The trail goes: Andrew Wakefield, the author of the original vaccine-autism link study, which has since been discredited, was attacked hard by Murdoch’s Times of London; James Murdoch sits on the board of GlaxoSmithKline, a British pharmaceutical company; ergo, the fix is in!!!!!!

Yappy chihuahua runs off a pair of armed robbers. Good dog!

Not the best mugshot ever, but a contender.

Gotta get dressed for the road. Rok on, all.

When the YouTube video of Michele Bachmann’s husband started circulating, the one that purported to show what a screaming queen he was, it was of such low quality, it was hard to see. Stupid cell phones; is this what killed the Flip? Then I watched it again, and OK, it’s there — he’s the kind of man who throws his hands in the air and wiggles them around as a way of greeting others. Swish, for sure. Gay? Jury might still be out. Then I watched it again, and thought, Nance, you are slipping. Mr. Gay from Gaytown, right there. Population: Him.

I’m embarrassed it took me three viewings to pick it up.

And then this morning I watched the clips from last night’s Daily Show, and hello, Mary. The relevant portions start around 3:30, although you should watch the whole thing, so you can behold the misery etched on the face of one of Dr. Queerton’s “patients,” who went to him (he’s a clinical psychologist) for how-not-to-be-gay therapy. His specialty. Yes, the irony is downright cartoonish, isn’t it? And while I know it helps to laugh at people like this, that laughter is really the only defense possible against such sparkly queens and their enablers, like the Bachmanns, I still get pissed. I’m more aware of the time slipping past every year, but I really, seriously cannot wait until we look at these two, and all their ilk, as the 21st century equivalent of people who sold bleaching creams to black people in the 20th. They aren’t just ridiculous figures, they are evil. Speaking of Satan.

I’ve known gay people who get these sort of mailings from their parents, helpful books and brochures and spiritual advice on how not to be gay, on how to reform and renounce or, if you can’t do that, to simply live a celibate life, as Jesus is calling you to do. I’m pretty sure that even though they’re laughing when they tell me about it later, that they weren’t laughing when they got the mail that day. They likely weren’t laughing at the Thanksgiving table last year, or at Christmas, or whatever. One of them told me that when he came out to his family, his father started going to Mass daily — a daily Communicant, as the good Cat’liks say — to pray for his son’s deliverance from evil.

So no, I can’t laugh at the Bachmanns anymore. Although I do crack a smile, imagining their sex life.

Meanwhile, relationship advice from a gay man. Pretty sane, I’d say. (But language makes it NSFW.)

Looks like we’ve transitioned into the bloggage, then? Let’s hop to it:

So, a friend from way back in the day called the other night, and mentioned going to the Ohio State Fair. Which made me think of Miss Citizen Fair, about which I’ve bored you before, but led me to google the phrase “You are Miss Citizen Fair.” Hit No. 1: Me, in 2007. Hit No. 2: Bob Greene, two years later.

I’m not sure what this means, but it certainly freaked my cheese. We traffic in a certain amount of nostalgia here, but I hope it’s distinct from the Greenian school of Everything Was Better Then. The column linked above is from Bob’s book about the good ol’ days of the newspaper business, when Bob fell in love. In fact…

It was a time when newspapers were still such a fundamental part of everyday American life that there really were too many young women on the fairgrounds who fit the Miss Citizen Fair profile, too many young women for us to narrow down the field.

Too many young women walking around the Ohio State Fair carrying copies of that morning’s local newspaper. It was utterly common: a person at the fair, young or old, carrying the latest edition. It’s what people did: Purchase a paper every day, and carry it around with them.

Yeah, yeah. And men wore coats and ties to a baseball game. We get it.

Emmy nominations today, but nothing for “Treme.” Sorry, Khandi Alexander.

And as the hour grows late, I think I will fly.

I guess the Wall Street Journal thinks of its Saturday Review section cover these days as the place for the essay-as-sharp-stick. First the Tiger Mom, now this: “The Divorce Generation,” a cri de coeur from Generation X:

For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: “When did your parents get divorced?” Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.

OK, Susan Gregory Thomas, I’m in. Tell me about it. And she does, and it stings — it’s no fun when your parents split up, no matter what. She deals a few anecdotes off the deck, standard procedure for a personal essay, and then starts down her own story’s path. I had a feeling what was coming, thanks to the subhed (“Having survived their own family splits, Generation X parents are determined to keep their marriages together. It doesn’t always work.”), but I was willing to come along for the ride.

One aside here: I understand the existential pain of the Gen-Xer, really I do. People think of the baby boom as this monolith of demography, but it isn’t. When we talk about baby boomers, we’re really talking about the early boomers, those born, oh, 1946 to 1951, say. The ones who were old enough to actually experience the ’60s as we commonly think of them. The year of my birth, 1957, was technically the peak of the boom, but we were the little siblings of the leading edge. Sally Draper was an early(ish) boomer; I was Bobby Draper. They were psychedelia, we were disco. My older siblings worried about being drafted, we led the New Traditionalism, reviving everything from prom to Greek life on campus to blackout drinking. And so on.

So I get that Gen-X-ers feel neglected by the media, by history, etc. But I will also say that when it comes to pouting and resentment, man, some of these folks really peg the needle. And being a world-class pouter and resenter myself, I know what I’m talking about. But for now, let’s not go there; this is just in the interest of full disclosure.

“Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.” Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents’ marriages.

…No marital scenario, I told myself, could become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me to embed my children in the torture of a split family. And I wasn’t the only one with strong personal reasons to make this commitment. According to a 2004 marketing study about generational differences, my age cohort “went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history.” Census data show that almost half of us come from split families; 40% were latch-key kids.

The boldface is where she started to lose me. Never mind quoting a marketing study; never mind the “one of the most” fudge words. Has this woman read American history? Un-parented and un-nurtured children were as common as ticks for most of it. Pioneer-era orphans wandered the woods like feral monkeys. The boom periods of modern cities in the early 20th century were marked by children roaming the streets while their parents worked or drank or otherwise suffered as infantry troops in the industrial revolution. It’s one reason the social-work movement was born. I’m sorry her father was neglectful and her mother preoccupied with her own misery, but presumably she had enough to eat.

And then we’re off down the path of her happy marriage, with the ominous clouds bulking on the horizon, and before too long, I see where she went wrong:

When I had my first child at 32, I went into therapy for a while to sort through, among other things, just why the world—as open and wonderful as it had become with my child’s presence—had also become more treacherous than I ever could have imagined. It wasn’t until my daughter was a few months old that it dawned on me that when the pediatricians and child-care books referred to “separation anxiety,” they were referring to the baby’s psyche, not to mine.

The thought of placing her in someone else’s care sent waves of pure, white fear whipping up my spine. It occurred to me that perhaps my own origins had something to do with what a freak show I was. After hearing about my background for some time, my distinguished therapist made an announcement: “You,” she said, “are a war orphan.”

I know this woman. I’ve met her many times. To some extent she’s like all of us with our tender newborns, terrified that if we let them out of our sight for even a moment, they will burst into flames. But the hormones ebb, and we get over that. We learn that other caregivers are not just convenient, but necessary for the long journey to begin — the child’s long journey, that is, to independence. Even as infants, they profit from interaction with others.

She reminds me of a friend’s sister-in-law, who actually endangered her daughter’s muscle development by refusing to not only let others care for her, but to even put her down, so she could crawl and toddle and explore the world. She was ordered by her pediatrician: Lighten up.

OK, let’s cut to the chase:

I had married the kindest, most stable person I’d ever known to ensure that our children would never know anything of the void of my own childhood. I nursed, loved, read to and lolled about with my babies—restructured and re-imagined my career—so that they would be secure, happy, attended to. My husband and I made the happiest, most comfy nest possible. We worked as a team; we loved our kids; we did everything right, better than right. And yet divorce came. In spite of everything.

In other words, she lived for her children, and stopped sleeping with her husband. In spite of everything.

John Rosemond, the parenting expert, gets on my last nerve these days. My newspaper ran his column for years, and I watched him evolve in that time from a reasonable moderate to a right-wing scold, but the core of his advice is still sound, and it boils down to this: Attend to your marriage. Do what you need to do to keep it appealing for both parties, and the kids will take care of themselves. In fact, they’ll do better than if you make them the center of your world. Be authoritative and confident, but most especially, love your spouse. Susan Gregory Thomas concentrated on her comfy nest and forgot about her husband. It happens. It’s maybe a natural reaction to being the children of Don and Betty Draper’s divorce. She overcorrected.

Which leads us to the second divorce story of the day, Bethany Patchin’s:

In August 1999, Bethany Patchin, an 18-year-old college sophomore from Wisconsin, wrote in an article for Boundless, an evangelical Web magazine, that Christians should not kiss before marriage. Sam Torode, a 23-year-old Chicagoan, replied in a letter to the editor that Ms. Patchin’s piece could not help but “drive young Christian men mad with desire.”

The two began corresponding by e-mail, met in January 2000 and were married that November. Nine months later, Ms. Torode (she took her husband’s name) gave birth to a son, Gideon. Over the next six years, the Torodes had four more progeny: another son, two daughters and a book, “Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception.”

You read that right: Four kids in six years, from the book of Duggar, Chapters 1-5. Full quivers, full households, full hearts. Until, oops, reality intruded:

In 2006, the Torodes wrote on the Web that they no longer believed natural family planning was the best method of birth control. They divorced in 2009. Both now attend liberal churches. Ms. Patchin — that is her name once again — now says she uses birth control, and she even voted for Barack Obama for president.

“I was 19 when we got married,” Ms. Patchin said by telephone from Nashville, where she and her former husband live and share custody of their four children. “And I was 20 when we had Gideon. My parents weren’t anti-birth-control; they were pretty middle-ground evangelicals. So I kind of rebelled by being more conservative. That was my identity.”

The Patchin-Torode co-prosperity sphere learned some hard lessons: That children are stressers, and that having four so close together — they came as two sets of Irish twins, and yes, she was nursing when the younger ones were conceived — is particularly so. Also, that having to postpone sex so often isn’t good for a young couple. As Torode put it:

“Wanting to make love to your spouse often is a good thing, but (natural family planning) often lays an unfair burden of guilt on men for feeling this,” the Torodes wrote. And it is “a theological attack on women to always require that abstinence during the time of the wife’s peak sexual desire (ovulation) for the entire duration of her fertile life, except for the handful of times when she conceives.”

In other words, viva modernity! Sometimes God’s plan involves birth control.

I feel bad for both of these couples. I feel bad for their kids. I wonder if it’s possible that we’ll ever find a happy medium that doesn’t involve swinging past it, clinging to a pendulum. But I think I like the Patchin-Torodes more. Or maybe I just haven’t read their first-person essay yet.

I’ve gone on too long, I fear. Any bloggage?

Nope, I think I’m tapioca on that front. Post some of your own if you like, but me, I’m off to work.

Atul Gawande linked to the obesity report released yesterday and suggested it was reasonable for fat to be an issue in the next presidential campaign. I gotta say, just a glance at the stats was jaw-dropping, and he may be right.

I tell my journalism students, when considering data, the news is in the change. This is a lot of change in a short time:

Twelve states now have obesity rates above 30 percent. Four years ago, only one state was above 30 percent. … Twenty years ago, no state had an obesity rate above 15 percent. Today, more than two out of three states, 38 total, have obesity rates over 25 percent, and just one has a rate lower than 20 percent. Since 1995, when data was available for every state, obesity rates have doubled in seven states and increased by at least 90 percent in 10 others. Obesity rates have grown fastest in Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee, and slowest in Washington, D.C., Colorado, and Connecticut. …Adult obesity rates increased in 16 states in the past year and did not decline in any state.

This isn’t change over the course of a generation. This is change in, what, five years? Appalling. What is most disheartening is how swiftly this is becoming an economic issue. Michigan is now No. 10, down from 1995’s ranking, when we were tied for fourth, but that’s mainly because everyone else surged (particularly the American south). In that time, we still managed to increase our obesity rate 77 percent, from 17.2 percent to over 30 percent. Final, the-news-is-the-change comparison:

“Today, the state with the lowest adult obesity rate would have had the highest rate in 1995,” said Jeff Levi, Ph.D., executive director of TFAH.

That’s only 16 years ago! I remember 1995! (I was 30 pounds lighter.) So, a question for the room: Why? I’ve always believed complex problems do not have simple answers, but off the top of my head, I can think of a double handful of reasons that have all dovetailed, one way or another, to drive the problem: Portion size, the loss of cooking skills, an aging population (we gain weight as we grow older), agricultural policies that encourage the production of crops that become cheap, calorically rich additives (I’m looking at you, corn). Fast food, restaurant food in general, 20-ounce soda, a culture that cements overeating in place by encouraging portion sizes once only found in stuff-your-face contests. Taco Bell runs specials from time to time, which packages six deluxe tacos in a single combo meal. Six. For one person. Supersize it, biggie-size it, etc.

I mentioned economics. I live in an affluent area, where people are generally normal-size. There’s a running club for kids. I see people exercising with their children. People are always bitching that the nearest Whole Foods is too far away. I walk through Kate’s school during class change, and fat kids are distributed in about the same proportions as they were when I was young — one in 10, maybe, one in 15. I drive past Detroit schools at dismissal time, and half the kids are waddling.

Gawande says this is a presidential issue because of health costs, obviously. Twenty-seven percent of Army recruits are disqualified from enlistment because of obesity.

In other news at this hour, my pants felt loose yesterday, so I stepped on the scale. Down five pounds. How the hell did that happen? Short answer: Summer cycling, plus an absent kid means I don’t feel obligated to make the dishes she prefers. Last night’s dinner was a frittata with sautéed spinach, garlic and goat cheese. Took me 10 minutes to make.

Well, having children will pack on the pounds. Every mother knows this.

A few more tasty bits of bloggage, then I’m off to edit video.

Every copy-desk chief knows you have to have at least one pervert on the crew, someone who will see the dirty joke in everything. It saves you from some of the more embarrassing exampled detailed here. (Although it doesn’t save you from one of the worst of my career, the time a front-page story reported a phone number for some worthy charity effort, and transposed digits sent readers to a sex line. For that one, the only cure is the plain old boring rule of copy editing: Last thing you do before releasing a page with a phone number? DIAL THE NUMBER.)

Here’s another question for the room: I’ve been reading a lot of stories of late about children misbehaving in public. This column is typical, and pretty restrained, as these things go; I’ve read some truly nasty rants from others, whose day can apparently be ruined by the presence of one whiny kid in a public place. I was always pretty lucky in this regard; Kate wasn’t much of a misbehaver when she was little, and the few times she cried in public, I whisked her out of there so fast, trailing apologies in my wake, that once I startled a couple at a nearby table, who weren’t even aware there’d been a baby in the room.

But I only had one, and a girl, and an easy keeper at that. And a restaurant is not an airport, or an airplane, the latter two of which are far harder to leave. Since then, I’ve aged, and mellowed, and now I’m far more likely to be that couple in the restaurant. I have tune-out skills, and I accept that children are part of the human family, and that overhearing an occasional blowup in a mall or elsewhere is part of the price we pay for a public space. (In any event, I find them far less offensive than hearing some Neanderthal shout curses into his cell phone, an increasingly common occurrence these days.) So my question is: Are kids really worse than they used to be, or does the internet simply give more people a place to complain about them?

Also, I direct your attention to this blog from Lisa Belkin at the NYT, which provides a counterpoint from the mother of a particular noisy child.

OK, the weekend is officially in progress. I might make it to the pool today. Enjoy yours, whatever the weather.

Joel Achenbach, the WashPost blogger, is on vacation this week, and his substitute has gone spelunking in his career, via Lexis-Nexis. She posted a story of Achenbach’s from 1985, which was Twitter-flagged by the editor who handled it, none other than the legendary Gene Weingarten of the Miami Herald; from its tone and length, it can only be from Tropic, that paper’s Sunday magazine.

Got all that? Anyway, it’s from 1985, 26 long years ago, another era in the newspaper biz. The internet was confined to college campuses (and only the faculty offices of the computer-science department, at that), the Herald and its parent company, Knight-Ridder, were absorbing workers jettisoned from Viewtron, a failed experiment to deliver the news via computer, still a rare appliance in American homes. There would be a few more glory years in the newspaper biz yet, where a smart editor could find a local story (the opening of South Florida’s first sperm bank), assign a smart young writer (Achenbach), and come up with this long, meandering story about how it works and who the people are behind it, told through Achenbach’s visit to the facility, and his attempt to make a deposit.

I know a guy who had performance anxiety at a sperm bank — he tells it as a very funny dinner-party story — so every word of the long opening anecdote rings true:

Do sperm scream? wonders Mr. Posterity as he sits in the sperm bank. He is alone in a room so bright he cannot find a shadow. In his hand is a large cup. The doctor has asked him to produce within 15 minutes. He has already wasted five.

…The doctor at the sperm bank has been thoughtful enough to leave a girlie magazine in the room (it’s the only thing in sight with any trace of color). But when Mr. Posterity flips the pages he can barely focus, the Girls of Texas are bending over backwards to help him in this wretched moment, but all he sees is paper.

…Voices come from outside the door. It is the doctor and another person, laughing at something, probably something not very funny. Mr. Posterity makes a mental note that the door does not lock. He is trying to be cool about this whole thing, but he wonders if perhaps a lock would have been a good idea, a lock and chain and a hefty deadbolt, and maybe the room could have been down a long hallway or in the basement — jeez, he could have just mailed it in, no hassle.

Eventually cold logic takes over, and Mr. Posterity steels himself, realizing that there would be no greater humiliation than to exit the room with nothing to show for his time. He had vowed to be productive. He had vowed to be manly.

And so . . .

When he leaves the room he is wearing his dark shades. He is not proud. More than ever, the cup seems needlessly vast, a virtual bucket, mocking him. This is a tense moment and he wants to look slick, but the cup is proving awkward, he isn’t sure how to hold it. He decides to grip it close to the stomach, the way he holds a Bud at a party.

This is why I got into the newspaper business, to be able to write like this and get paid for it. This is what newspapers used to do — some of them, anyway. We would publish pieces like this on a Sunday, and no one would ask, as they would in later years, “But what’s the utility here? Can we include a sidebar on the sperm bank’s hours and rates? This seems awfully long. Are we being self-indulgent here? I mean, really, who cares?”

No one asked those questions because this was a Sunday-magazine piece, and that’s what Sunday magazines did. They gave people lounging in their living rooms, drinking coffee, surrounded by sections of the fat newspaper, something to read they wouldn’t get Monday through Saturday. Maybe people were busy then; I’m sure they were, in fact. But we figured, hey, Sunday — if it’s going to run any day of the week, this is when it should run. These were, to some extent, the experimental John Cage pieces. They required commitment from readers, a more sophisticated reader’s eye. They assumed at least a few Monday-morning phone calls, from some pissed-off old lady or evangelical, who simply cannot believe that in her newspaper, which she pays for, the thing she invites into her home, there’s a story about a reporter with a several-hundred word lede drolly detailing how he jerked off into a cup. And so on.

The day was dawning, however. If the Herald editors had looked to the east, they would have seen a pinkening sky as the new era approached. Or, to switch metaphors abruptly, Pandora had already opened the box, and the harpies were pouring out. Competition. Declining literacy rates. Something that was called, in meetings, “time starvation.” Falling ad lineage. The last ones out of the box would be the bean-counters, the number-crunchers, the people who could put an essay like this through an analysis and say, yes, while personally they had enjoyed this immersive visit to the sperm bank, really, research shows that the average reader only spends 17 minutes with the paper, maybe less, and was this really where the paper wanted to put its resources? When there was real news to cover?

For a while around this time, everyone wanted suburban readers, those wealthy boomers spending like drunken sailors on everything from home improvements to cars to dinners out, and so came the birth of Neighbors, zoned editions pegged to the compass points of individual metro areas. No one at Neighbors would scorn your suburban town board meetings, no sir, and we covered the crap out of them, but that didn’t pay off, either. Sunday magazines went first — rotogravure printing, long deadlines, scarce advertising, and those nice people at Parade and USA Weekend were offering their product practically free. Neighbors came later. Cut, cut, cut, trim, trim, trim. Retiring employees weren’t replaced, others were bought out, some laid off. Cut, shrink, deny, sell, consolidate, reduce. A new publisher arrived in Fort Wayne. When Alan, the features editor, met her, she asked how many staff he had in his department. Eight, he replied, and she made a face, like, are you kidding me? There are three now.

You’ve heard all this before. I’m oversimplifying. I’m telling the story from only one perspective. It’s boring. It’s ancient history. It’s water over the dam and under the bridge. Both Weingarten and Achenbach still have jobs, still write long-form pieces rich with style and detail, only they do them at the Washington Post, one of the tiny handful of papers that still swings for the fences from time to time. There’s still lots of good writing out there, and a lot of it — I’m always struck, on a day like today, how much I can be distracted by great pieces, on the web, in books, in Kindle Singles. I have too much to read, really; it’s hard to get work done sometimes.

But this one took me back. I should look forward. So that’s that.

Let’s get to the bloggage, which is scarce today:

According to one blogger who found this yesterday, it is “comedy gold.” I’ll say: Marcia Clark opining on the Casey Anthony trial, calling it “worse than O.J.!” Considering the O.J. case was booted in large part because of Clark’s prosecutorial missteps, that’s a pretty big contention. (If you haven’t read “The Run of His Life,” Jeffrey Toobin’s account of the O.J. case, I highly recommend it. Marcia might gain some valuable insight.)

The stolen babies of Spain. Taken, it seems, as political retribution, later just for cash, with the help of doctors, nurses and nuns. Unbelievable.

Outta here. Have a great Thursday.