I think I mentioned before that the royal wedding in Monaco sort of snuck up on me. I didn’t know the deed had been done until yesterday, but fortunately we live in the age of the amazing internet, when no detail is too small to report, including that the bride allegedly tried to flee Monaco — three times! — in the days before the ceremony, and was prevented from doing so by Prince Albert’s goon squad, who actually confiscated her passport rather than let her get on that plane back to Johannesburg and the chance to have a happier life.

The precipitating incident?

It followed confirmation by palace sources that Albert, 53, was due to undergo DNA tests because of claims by at least one unnamed woman that he has fathered another illegitimate child.

He already has two he acknowledges. The “at least one” became two in some reports, for an even four. I think, as we are obviously dealing with a man with a severe allergy to latex, we can assume there could easily be more. One is said to be a toddler, which means he’s been stepping out on his beautiful blonde broodmare for some time. I don’t often feel pity for women who are richer, taller and that much better-looking than me, but my heart is not made of stone: Poor Princess Charlene.

There are 63 photos in this slide show, and I beseech you to view them all, if you can. It’s the usual royal freak show, but if you can only hit the highlights, well, start with Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, who picked up her outfit at a Target white sale. Princess Charlotte Casiraghi found a far nicer dress at Chanel — it really is a wow — and Auntie Steph has real balls to stand next to her, now that a lifetime of Mediterranean sun and smoking has taken its toll on her once-lovely face. Note, also, Stephanie’s tattoo, which demonstrates she certainly favors the commoner’s side of the bloodline. Like the Middletons, the bride’s family looks perfectly nice and presentable, and probably behaved better at the reception, off in the corner table reserved for the non-Francophone guests. Charlene got a little emotional during the ceremony, and closeups taken in the church showed a tear rolling down her cheek. I have to say, I’ve never seen a more miserable bride.

Sometimes you can see a couple’s whole life in how they kiss. You certainly can with this one.

But man, a spectacular dress. Although, with that bod, she could probably make Grand Duchess Maria of Russia’s outfit look good. He looks awful. I assume we’re headed for the usual marital denouement, followed by a swift annulment from Rome, to keep those tithes coming from the li’l principality that could.

Another zillion pix from the WashPost.

So, how was your weekend? Mine was quite nice. I made an effort to do little work and mostly succeeded. Went for a fast bike ride on a blisteringly hot Saturday and nearly died, but recovered in time to spin the evening away at a venerable biker bar in Detroit called the Stone House. We sat on the front porch while an enormous thunderstorm mostly missed us, then rode home in that yellowy-bruise light that only midwestern thunderstorms bring. Went to the Eastern Market. Barbecued ribs. Cleaned Kate’s room. The usual.

A lot of bloggage piled up over the weekend, so let’s get to it:

Christopher Hitchens filets Michele Bachmann as only he can, or rather, the particular vote-for-me-I’m-from-Podunk attitude she represents:

Where does it come from, this silly and feigned idea that it’s good to be able to claim a small-town background? It was once said that rural America moved to the cities as fast as it could, and then from urban to suburban as fast as it could after that. Every census for decades has confirmed this trend. Overall demographic impulses to one side, there is nothing about a bucolic upbringing that breeds the skills necessary to govern a complex society in an age of globalization and violent unease. We need candidates who know about laboratories, drones, trade cycles, and polychrome conurbations both here and overseas. Yet the media make us complicit in the myth—all politics is yokel?—that the fast-vanishing small-town life is the key to ancient virtues. Wasilla, Alaska, is only the most vivid recent demonstration of the severe limitations of this worldview. But still it goes on.

“All politics is yokel” — that’s a good one.

Jane Scott, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s legendary rock critic, died Monday. She was a legend because she started covering rock ‘n’ roll when she was already middle-aged, at a time when pop music writers were nearly always among the youngest in the newsroom, and because she stuck with it for decades. She was 92 when she died, 83 when she retired, 45 when she covered the Beatles’ first appearance in Cleveland, in 1964. She wasn’t much of a prose stylist, but she was enough of a reporter to know news when she saw it:

“I never before saw thousands of 14-year-old girls, all screaming and yelling,” she recalled later. “I realized this was a phenomenon. . . . The whole world changed.”

The Plain Dealer obit, linked above, contains several links to her past pieces. I get the feeling that by the end, being the senior citizen with a backstage pass was part of her brand, as they say. I grew up in a different city, and didn’t know about her until I got to college, where all the journalism students from northeast Ohio worshipped her. One of my classmates took a chance one day, and showed up at Swingo’s, the hotel where all the rockers stayed when they were passing through Cleveland (seen in “Almost Famous”). She swallowed hard and told the desk clerk, “I’m here to interview Bob Marley.” She was a pretty little peach, and they waved her right up, no doubt used to this sort of thing. She still had to clear the road manager in the hallway, though. She told him she was there to interview Bob for the newspaper.

“You must be Jane Scott,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” my classmate said, walked in and shared a spliff and a conversation with the reggae star, and that’s how the student newspaper from Ohio University snagged an interview it likely wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. She was in and out before the real critic, then 60, showed up. I bet that was a funny scene.

Another good appreciation, from the L.A. Times.

And I guess that’s it for me now. Tuesday is now Monday, so I best get rolling. Have a swell short week.

I was reading a story the other day about the possibility of Detroit getting a Whole Foods. Yes, the city infamous for not having a Kroger may well be getting a Whole Paycheck. Anyway, the story quoted a regional operations director for the chain named Red Elk Banks.

Native American names aren’t unheard-of here, but they’re unusual. The Indian tribes around here were so well assimilated that the tribe members tend to have names like everyone else’s. But just for the hell of it, I punched Red Elk Banks into the big G.

And whaddaya know, he’s a son of legendary Native American activist Dennis Banks. If Wikipedia is to be trusted, the elder Banks had six children — Janice, Darla, Deanna Jane and Dennis James, born 1962-64; Red Elk, born 1970; and Tatanka Wanbli, born 1971. It’s not often that you see a social movement that drapes so neatly over a watershed like that. I like the difference between the 1970 and ’71 models, between an Indian name rendered in English and Indian name, period.

The reporter called him “Elk Banks” on second reference. That’s wrong, don’t you think?

One of my first encounters with the simmering temper of our own Kirk, who was for decades a powerful force for correct usage on the Columbus Dispatch copy desk, was when a reporter turned in a story from the Ohio State Fair. It quoted a native American named something like “John Yellow Bird,” followed by the phrase, “(his real name).”

Sometimes I think the next time I see Kirk he’s going to have one of those forehead calluses like the crazier al-Qaeda chieftains have, from praying so often. Only his will be from smashing his head against his desk. Although he’s mellowed considerably.

What’s your Indian name? (Speaking of ethnic insensitivity.) I claim …Nancy Chickadee. Lately Alan’s been working one of his industrious little projects around here, trying to attract more black-capped chickadees to our feeder. It’s been an enormous success, and last evening the dogwood was alive with all their yakking, which is not why Alan calls them Nancy-birds, but what the hell, I’ll take the name.

(He calls them Nancy-birds for their two-note song, which I’ve always sounds to me like your mother calling you home for dinner: Nan-cy…din-ner.)

I have to leave early today, and translate an intern’s story into English. I have but one bit of bloggage, thanks to my Facebook friend Neil Steinberg, who is walking down memory lane via the newly digitized Chicago Reader archive. He flagged one of his old pseudonymous Bob Watch columns, about Bob Greene, of course. It’s a goodie, Bob enjoying a baseball strike:

Bob has hied himself to Sarasota, Florida, where he wanders giddily through the abandoned White Sox training center, admiring a red hose, “faded to near-pink on the grass.” Other objects–a batter’s cage, a wooden picnic bench, a glob of paint, a bird–also catch his attention.

There are no seasoned athletes to make rude noises or hurl insults in his direction, and Bob likes it. “Baseball’s message is clearest during moments when there’s no one on the field,” he writes. The next day, he fingers blank jerseys and eagerly awaits the arrival of the nonentity scabs who will wear them in shame.

That guy had such a thin bag of tricks. Those observations of utterly mundane details — the hose, the bench — is vintage Bob. In some ways, I wish he’d write more often, so I could make more fun of him.

And in keeping with our recent discussions, Alan had lunch at a waterfront restaurant yesterday, and overheard this bit of conversation from a nearby table: “New-plane smell is even more intoxicating than new-car smell.” Oh rly?

See you Thursday.

Flooding is the natural-disaster story of the summer season, which is a definite upgrade from spring’s tornados, but, as anyone who’s lived through one can tell you, is no picnic.

Flooding was a hardy perennial in Fort Wayne, which sits at the confluence of three rivers, and despite its laughable name (the Summit City, technically true), floods like a toilet in a jail. When I interviewed there, in 1984, the paper had just won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the flood of ’82. I read the framed front pages that flanked the Big P on the wall and got the strong impression the flood was a rare event, although there had been one in 1978 that ranked right up there.

It flooded in 1985. It flooded so many times before I left in 2004 that the routine, and the slate of stories we always wrote, became familiar. First the parks filled, then certain neighborhoods, almost all poor — I know, I’m astonished too — then a few more neighborhoods. We did stories on the city’s flood command center, where the public-works people dispatched sandbags. We did stories on the sandbagging, on the plucky teens and other volunteers who would come down to the city garage to fill them and stack them. When the Army Corps of Engineers sent their heavy-duty pumps, we wrote about that, too. For a while, the paper went through metro editors the way Spinal Tap went through drummers, and one of them was an out-of-towner. We had a rare summer flood one year, and she said in a meeting she didn’t understand how the St. Mary’s had flooded, it didn’t rain that much. Someone else explained that 16 inches of rain had fallen in the watershed in the last 10 days or so, and from the way she blinked, he knew she didn’t know what a watershed was. I’m sure she learned. Everyone learned.

We had a storm here in May that dumped 2.7 inches of rain in an hour, and some people had basement flooding, much of it raw sewage. A public-works consultant came to the city council meeting to explain about combined sewers and pump failure and all the rest of it, and I felt like a Hoosier again. I was helping my intern, and explained in a whisper what a combined sewer was — storm and sanitary together, bad — and realized I’m a flooding expert. Sort of; I don’t need the jargon explained, anyway. I know what flap gates are. I know you can’t get let combined-sewer runoff go into a lake or river to save a few basements, at least not without a nice fine from the EPA. And I learned something, too; you can let runoff in, but it has to be a 100-year storm, and there better be documentation. (I know what a 100-year storm is; they happen about every five years.)

I covered Mississippi River flooding in 1993. One of the last gasps of ambition of our little paper was this form of foreign correspondence; we didn’t cover national political conventions, but we did cover floods in other cities. I watched people in Iowa reclaim their houses from floodwaters that had reached the gutters, and thought, all in all, I’d prefer fire, assuming everyone gets out of the house safely. Then you don’t have to look at your belongings through a thin film of sewage.

Writing that last line — looking at your belongings under a thin film of sewage — it occurred to me that I’d written all this before. And whaddaya know, I have. Almost at the same time of year. Three years ago.

Maybe it’s time to shut down this blog. Maybe I’ve run out of things to say. Oh, what the hell — it never stopped Mitch Albom or Bob Greene! Onward!

Actually, this is a good time to note that this is a particularly nutso week, and there will be no entry Wednesday. I’m taking Kate to summer camp that day, and we’ll be rolling out at oh-dark something. This is her first such experience, at a fine-arts camp on the other side of the state. (Not Interlochen. Thanks for asking, though.) She may fancy herself a rock ‘n’ rolla, but she’s going to get some discipline in jazz bass first.

So since this seems to be the place for it, some bloggage:

In 2003, a Fort Wayne doctor crashed the plane he was flying, killing his wife and two of his three children. He survived, along with his son, 8 at the time. Terrible tragedy. He rebuilt his life, he and his son recovered, and he remarried. On Friday, he crashed another plane, killing his second wife and himself, although the son survived. Again. He’s very badly hurt, but expected to survive. What are the odds, Pilot Joe?

Did I mention my man Mitch a little while ago? He feeds the needy cookies. Someone else’s cookies, but oh well — I’m sure he paid for them.

Virginia Heffernan at the NYT on content farms, and Google’s new algorithm that allegedly freezes them out. The details are almost unbelievable, but are all true. One of my students had a brief interlude with one. He wrote one article, and was paid 38 cents. A couple CFs picked up the porn principal story, and ran it through some weird copyright-cleanser; a ‘bot changed every few words to synonyms. But there were lots of ads. I hope it paid someone.

OK, off to drink a lot more coffee and see if I can make sense of the day. Enjoy yours.

Have I mentioned lately how much I hate lawn services? If not, let me say so now. Again. Both my adjoining neighbors employ them, both visit on Thursday mornings, and at the moment, it sounds like the neighborhood is under attack by a swarm of angry hornets. They are running, all at once, a stand-up mower, a gas-powered blower and a power edger.

The good news: It’s over quickly. And it makes for quieter weekends. Still.

The gas blowers are the devil’s device, and I say that as one who owns an electric one. The decibel level is approximately that of a 747 engine six inches above your head, and…

…silence. These guys get faster every week. Whew. On to torture someone else.

Here’s something else: Those stupid edgers make my mowing job easier. It’s easy to find the property line between the Derringers, who don’t give a shit if the sidewalk has a nice sharp delineation, and everyone else.

A friend of mine who used to live in Grosse Pointe Park planted his park strip — the grass strip between the sidewalk and street — in vegetables. I wonder what my neighbors would do if I tried that, although I’m sure there’s already an existing ordinance forbidding such frippery. There was a house in Fort Wayne I passed on my dog walks that had cleverly incorporated vegetables and other food crops in the regular flower beds, with the flowers. Very clever. You’d be looking at some zinnias and then note the climbing beans standing in the background. That’s the sort of gardener I’d like to be, if I were the sort to garden, period.

So, I see the feds finally brought Whitey Bulger to heel, the legendary Boston mobster who was the basis for the Jack Nicholson character in “The Departed.” He was living in Santa Monica, a big improvement in the weather department, I’d say, although it was also an apartment building, and we’ve discussed neighbor problems before. One said his longtime girlfriend was “sweet,” but that he was a jerk and had “rage issues.” It must be hard to be a baller and then, suddenly, not-a-baller. Henry Hill didn’t do so well in witness protection, and we all saw the last scene in “Goodfellas.” It’s just noodles and ketchup in Nowheresville, forever and ever.

Boy, today is not getting off to a good start, is it? Thursdays rarely do. So let’s get to the bloggage, and then say the hell with it:

A nice New York Times piece on the Indiana economy, which is not all it seems, or at least not all that’s touted by the guv and his supporters:

Workers here have done a backward slip-slide for more than a decade. Median income is falling — by 15 percent in the last decade. The so-called real unemployment rate, which includes those too discouraged to look for work, stood at 17.4 percent last year. And the percentage of Indianans who participate in the work force has dropped in the past two years, much faster than in Illinois and Ohio to the east.

“Indiana has touted jobs numbers, the governor has been happy to talk about it, but the reality is that they don’t pay nearly as much as the old union manufacturing jobs,” said John Ketzenberger, president of the Indiana Fiscal Policy Institute, a nonpartisan group. “People in Indiana are working harder and longer for less.”

In other words, the same old story. Quel surprise.

And I have nothing more. I am calling in empty today. Got some tasty linkage? Leave it in comments.

From the people who brought you the $400 vacuum cleaner, behold the $450 fan:

Yes, it’s the Dyson “air multiplier.” Saw these in a Best Buy the other day, and to be sure, $450 is the price only for the two on the right. The little one on the left is a steal at $300. They were putting out a lot of air, I’ll give ’em that. What makes them worth a price like that? Why, they have no blades. What’s wrong with blades? “Buffeting” — it says right there on the display. No blades, no buffeting.

Of all the things to dislike about room fans, buffeting never occurred to me. Dust on the blades, yes, about a million other things, but not buffeting. Anyway, for $450, you can buy an air conditioner, although the Dyson Air Multiplier is certainly more stylish. I like that blue. I hate to go off on yet another reverie of nostalgia here, but thinking about fans makes me think of a few times in the past when they were significant factors in my quality of life. They were not times when I could afford $450 for air multiplication. My first term at college was a summer session; I left for Athens one week after high-school graduation, and landed in the middle of the steamiest, hottest summer in southeast Ohio in many years. No AC in the dorms, only two of which were open for the small residential community — one for men, one for women. A fan was an absolute necessity, and there was something wonderful about turning it on in the evenings, leaving the room for a while, and returning after dark to feel that blessedly cool, cool breeze.

(Fans told you who had dope; if it was turned around, blowing out, and especially if there was a pillow stuffed into the part of the window it didn’t fill, someone was blowing marijuana smoke out of their room.)

That was a hot summer, but not the hottest. That was reserved for Key West in September, where I went to visit a friend one week in 1980. He and his roommate had an un-air conditioned apartment; can you imagine? In Florida? They called it the hovel, and it was, but for a week it was our hovel. The fan ran constantly, on high, the only thing that made it inhabitable at all. It was dying, and the first lesson I learned was DO NOT TOUCH THE FAN. If it was ever turned off, or even turned down, it might not start up again. Sometimes it would slow down, and all conversation would cease as we turned our worried eyes to look. Would this be it? It ran down, down, down, sometimes so slow you could see the blades turning, but then, huzzah! It found its power again, and we’d applaud.

The other thing we did in that apartment was listen to the neighbors fight. The people in the front of the house were scary; he bounced her off the walls, and she would scream and cry. The people next door were merely hilarious, Florida crackers who slept briefly for a couple hours before and just after dawn, after which they’d rise and resume yelling at one another, which they did non-stop. “My boy ain’t no dummy!” “Shut up!” “YOU shut up!” And so on.

Because it was so hot, we went out a lot. Myer’s rum gimlets we drank, at three different bars, including the famous Monster, on Front Street. One night Jeff walked me to the front door, then said he was going back out. To the baths, of course, for the nightcap that would kill him a few years later. He said he never regretted any of it, and I believe him.

That fan’s in a landfill somewhere. Oh, the stories it could tell.

So how was your weekend? We went to Ohio, to celebrate my nephew’s graduation from Ohio State. It rained, and was plenty steamy there, too, but tolerable. Reading the paper Sunday I learned that soon you’ll be able to carry guns pretty much everywhere, including bars, a law that every newspaper, every tavern-owners’ group, opposed, because what really goes with guns, anyway? Liquor, that’s what. Also, the legislature is going to allow fracking — hydraulic fracturing, to extract oil and natural gas from rocks — in state parks. Not state land, mind you, state parks. Where you go to have a picnic, or show your kids what camping is like, or to drink in some natural beauty. I imagine we’ll see logging in Yellowstone in my lifetime, at this rate.

Is “Beautiful Ohio” still the state song? We had to learn it in grade school:

Drifting with the current down a moonlit stream
While above the heavens in their glory gleam
And the stars on high twinkle in the sky
Dreaming of a paradise of love divine
Dreaming of a pair of eyes that looked in mine
Beautiful Ohio, in dreams again I see
Visions of what used to be.

I see visions of a time before they treated their state parks as mining camps.

OK, enough nostalgia! Monday is always a killer, so let’s get to it:

Brian Dickerson, in the Freep, addresses the nightmare I linked to last week, that of the family riven by false sexual-abuse charges, and takes note of the weak-willed and cronied-up judges who aided and abetted the case, surely the worse miscarriage of justice to come down the pike since…the last one.

In the WashPost, Henry Allen identifies America’s problem: WASP rot.

Also in the WashPost, yet another story pointing out the obvious, which will be branded class warfare. Go enjoy your state parks, peasants! (Hope the water at the pump doesn’t catch fire.)

I’m off. Happy week to all.

A story last week out of Fort Wayne brought back a lot of memories. You can read it if you like, but here’s the gist:

A young woman, Kylee Furnish, a senior at one of the suburban high schools, completed her graduation requirements a few months early and joined the Marines. She finished her basic training and came home to participate in her commencement ceremony. Of course she expects to wear her dress blues. The school says no, cap and gowns only. This passage gets to the heart of the matter:

The district cannot place itself in a position where it makes some exceptions for some students but not for others, (the district spokesman) said.

“I understand she is a Marine and I understand that is dear to her and her family’s heart,” she said. “But if we let one student do that we would set a precedent for years to come.”

The district will give Furnish a cap and gown, (the spokesman) said, and is fine with Furnish wearing her uniform underneath the gown.

I saw some version of this story in every public-school district — there are four in Allen County — in the years I was there, and I’m sure there were dozens more that didn’t make the papers. The watchword was “zero tolerance,” the practice was “no exceptions,” and it applied to everything, paired with draconian punishments. Here’s one I heard in a scholarship interview: A junior with a over-4.0 average (something you can do with A-plus grades and AP enhancements), cruising to finish as a valedictorian or salutatorian, has a friend who’s caught drinking at a football game. Pressed to name his confederates, he fingers the honor student. Like the young man of good character he was raised to be, he tells the truth and admits his crime. Bam, instant suspension for the rest of the semester, which means he’s bundled off to “alternative school,” the one reserved for juvenile offenders. Sorry, son, we don’t do AP chemistry here, so his GPA takes a hit it never recovers from.

Here’s another: An exchange student from some eastern European country takes his camera into the locker room after a team practice one day, goofing around. There are one or two shots of his classmates in towels, one of a kid laughing, holding his hands over his naughty bits in the shower. Unacquainted with both American attitudes about nudity and our peculiar fear of CHILD PORNOGRAPHY, he develops the film in his photography class and distributes pictures to his teammates. Big mistake. This brings the harpies down on him. They can’t really suspend him — he’s a living symbol of cultural exchange and international brotherhood — so they double down and throw the book at everyone, including every single kid who’s in a picture, on the grounds they did not immediately alert the administration of this serious breach of school policy. One of the parents surreptitiously taped her meeting with the principal. He asked her son, “Jason, do you often pose for nude photos taken by other boys?”

Here’s another: A kid takes a Thermos of screwdrivers aboard a bus to Cedar Point for a junior class trip. The thermos is passed up and down the aisle, surely mitigating the intoxication possibilities but multiplying the number of lips that touch the forbidden elixir. Of course they’re found out, and of course the investigation concentrates on getting all the names on the table. One of them is a girl much like our scholarship student above, a guided success missile, and her mom’s a lawyer. No one’s keeping this girl out of the Ivy League. I don’t recall how this one played out, as it was under the radar of media coverage, but my vague recollection is that alternative school was traded for something less injurious to her grade-point average.

My point: Zero tolerance and zero deviation from stated policies and sentences are comforting to, and easy for, the people who make rules, but it makes for lousy learning. It’s especially cruel for young women like Kylee, the Marine, and it makes no sense whatsoever. What’s more, the spokeswoman’s explanation is complete and utter bullshit. One exception doesn’t “set a precedent for years to come.” It’s just an exception. A Marine dress-blues uniform is every bit as formal and appropriate in a graduation setting as a polyester cap and gown. Change the rule to allow military uniforms, if need be; the number of exceptions will be tiny, anyway. Letting one kid walk in her Marine uniform doesn’t mean you have to allow another kid to wear her band uniform, or his Wendy’s uniform, or a clown suit, or whatever. The kid survived Parris Island; surely commencement can survive her.

(I should point out that this particular district is hardly Berkeley East. It’s East Allen, probably the reddest part of a red county in a red state, and to call it a pro-military region is like saying you can find soybean fields there.)

Here’s the other thing policies like this do: They breed a culture of distrust on both sides. When there’s no mitigation possible, everyone digs in. The two honor students I mentioned had been raised to respect their elders and relate to them as adults who could be trusted to act in their best interest, which is how they, the adults, presented themselves as authority figures. Like a golden retriever who’s been groomed and petted all its life, these kids suddenly found themselves snubbed on a tight leash to be kicked. The takeaway lesson: It’s best to lie. If you want to wear your uniform, put it on under your robe, then take the robe off as you take your first steps onto the stage. (I doubt Kylee did this, but if she had, huzzahs to her.)

Grr.

The theme today is in keeping with the bloggage today, a Free Press series on the nightmare suffered by a family when various forces collided to make authorities believe the parents were sexually abusing their children, particularly their severely autistic daughter. It’s a tale right out of Kafka. A strong element is something called “facilitated communication,” where an aide “guides” the hand of an uncommunicative autistic person on a keyboard, to “unlock” the messages within. (You’re thinking, “Oh, like a Ouija board?” So did I.)

The Wendrows believed that FC — despite being widely debunked by educators and researchers — helped unlock hidden literacy in their mute daughter.

Beginning in middle school, they pushed FC, threatening to sue the school district if it didn’t hire a full-time aide to facilitate their daughter. They requested that she be placed in mainstream classes. On her own, the girl couldn’t match the word “cat” to a picture of a cat, draw a circle or count to five.

But when she used FC, the results seemed astounding. With a facilitator guiding her arm, the child who had never been taught to read was suddenly writing poetry and English essays, taking history exams and doing algebra. The middle-schooler who couldn’t put on her coat without help was typing about her plans to become a college professor.

And soon after that, she was typing, with the help of an aide, a high-school graduate with one-count-em-one hour of training, that her dad was touching her. Part 1 is astounding, part 2 — about the police interrogation of her brother, who has Asperger’s — even worse.

OK, I’m way late this morning, I know. Kate was off at 6:45 a.m. to Cedar Point and I went back to bed, for an early taste of the sweet, late-sleeping mornings of summer. Sue me.

But work awaits. So I’m off.

One of the mantras I’ve repeated from time to time is a universal truth about marriage: The only people qualified to judge a marriage are the people in it. Marriages — relationships of all sorts — are living things, like gardens. We might feel qualified to walk by and offer advice from the picket fence, but really? It’s none of our business.

So stipulated. But if Mr. and Mrs. Newt Gingrich feel confident enough about the necessity of their presence in public life to shove themselves into my newspaper, I’m not going to feel bad about judging. Right now, the word spreading through the wreckage of the clownmobile caravan of the GOP presidential field is this: It’s all her fault. Or, to put it more crudely: He’s pussywhipped.

And I gotta say, you can spend hours spinning out fantasies about what their intimate moments are like:

He: How was your day, dear?
She: Don’t you dare speak to me.
[Thirty frosty minutes pass.]
He: Look, I’m sorry. You know what lunches with the Wall Street Journal editorial board are like. It ran long!
She: WE used to have lunch together.
He: What, you think I’m having nooners with Dorothy Rabinowitz? Are you insane?
She: That’s it! Take your things to the guest room!
[One hour passes.]
He: I brought you something from Tiffany’s. I’m sorry, honey.
She: You DID fuck her! Wait, are those natural pearls? OK, you can come back.
He: Will you wear your special nightie?
She: They aren’t diamonds. Don’t press your luck.

Ahem:

Among the issues leading to the resignations, according to knowledgeable sources, was the two-week vacation that Gingrich and his wife, Callista, insisted upon taking against the advice of his top political staff. Coming as it did after one of the most disastrous campaign launches in recent memory, it raised questions as to whether Gingrich would be willing to “commit time to the grassroots,” said Tyler.

Well, we all knew this would happen sooner or later. Republican pockets are very deep, and while it was certain that someone would pay to keep the self-proclaimed Smartest Republican in the World out there shaking hands and writing unreadable books, it was probably not going to happen when the money was going for baubles, and the recipient pays you back by describing your next-generation star’s policy proposals as right-wing social engineering. The campaign was doomed from the get-go. The end was humiliating. I think we won’t have Newt Gingrich to kick around anymore.

But I, for one, will miss the photos of Mrs. G’s many fun outfits. Here, an obscured view of Wednesday’s turnout, in canary.

While we’re talking politics, one of our Marks asked what journalists thought of the crowd-sourcing analysis of $P’s Alaska emails. I think: [Shrug.] At some level it’s an acknowledgement of reality; people are going to do this anyway, so invite them to partner with the big boys, maybe? Ultimately, if the things are newsworthy, then let the pros do the work. God knows we need it. If nothing else, there might be some entertainment therein. I expect we’ll find out soon.

And now I have to wrap and follow Alan to the Subaru dealer, where the Outback is getting its 50K checkup. Which reminds me I’m six months late in getting my own, so maybe I should make that appointment, too.

Not much bloggage today; it’s been an exhausting week. But here’s this:

I like that girl. Also: Remember, man, that you are dust, and unto dust you shall return. Maybe even to a Goodwill store.

A great weekend to all.

I’m telling you, if you’re not following the news from Mexico these days, you’re missing one hell of a story:

DURANGO, Mexico — Two gunmen stormed into a drug rehabilitation center in the northern city of Torreon on Tuesday, killing 11 people and wounding two.

…Drug cartels are known to use rehab centers to recruit addicts, leading rival gangs to attack the centers. Dozens of people have died in shootings at centers across Mexico. The worst incident left 19 people dead in Chihuahua city last summer.

Eleven people, justlikethat. And this sort of thing happens pretty much weekly. A later paragraph gives the total body count since President Felipe Calderon started the drug war in 2006: 35,000.

Which sort of set me up for the next story I read this morning, from a dateline closer to home:

Adrian — Ed Schmieding was known for his high-quality flowers, his skill with all things planted and potted. Together with his wife Linda, they sold flowers, Queen Anne’s lace, sunflowers — even ornamental grasses — to local florists. Out in the country northwest of Adrian, the Schmiedings’ property was a hub of horticulture: four greenhouses, dozens of acres over three plots of land, tractors, irrigation — everything a green thumb would want.

But several years ago, things began going poorly. Linda’s back went out, neighbors said, and Ed got throat cancer. They pleaded poverty to the local township, asking for a break on their property taxes.

“He had cancer and he wasn’t making any money from his flowers,” said Al Boggs, Rome Township supervisor. “He went to a cash crop, eh?”

State police now believe Ed and Linda Schmieding, both 60, had one of the largest marijuana production facilities ever discovered in the Lower Peninsula, using their greenhouses and rolling 23 acres to harvest more than 8,000 pot plants, estimated to have a street value of at least $8 million.

The odor of the plants “glistening with THC” was so strong, the story says later, that you could smell it from the road. But it also states that after the Schmiedings scaled back their flower business and presumably went into a better-paying crop, they didn’t ask for any more hardship exemptions on their property taxes. The Schmiedings said they sold to medical marijuana dispensaries, but of course they were in violation of the law, which strictly regulates that stuff. I disapprove of most drug use, but I ain’t gonna lie to you: I hope the Schmiedings beat the rap. Or, at the very least, avoid prison. Michigan spends enough on prisons already. A nice couple from Adrian has no business there. (Assuming they’re nice. One newspaper story doesn’t mean anything, and it may well be that Ed and Linda have a mass grave on those 23 acres, just like the Mexican cartels. I’m just going with a hunch here.)

When does this insanity end? The urge to self-medicate is as old as humanity. We know this. We also know some do it better than others. And we know that some people’s medicine will find a way to them, no matter what its legal status. A lot of those 35,000 corpses in Mexico were in the game — as we “Wire”-heads like to say — but a fair number weren’t, and what of them? What else were the Schmiedings to do? Sell their acreage and move to town, I guess, and sign up for Medicaid when the money ran out. They chose to grow pot.

Y’all know my feelings on the subject:

But good grief, it’s a plant. There has to be a better way.

I still have real work to do this morning, and I’m bound and determined to get to the gym for weights class, so I have to skip early. But let’s see what we have in the way of bloggage:

Nice profile of New York Post columnist Andrea Peyser, shrieking harpy to wandering wee-wees everywhere.

I asked Kate if she wanted feather extensions. “NO,” she informed me, rather firmly. Not a camp follower, this one. Good to know that if she changes her mind, we can always raid her father’s fly-tying supplies.

Ninety-four degrees yesterday, the same for today, maybe a smidge higher. Friday’s high: 70. Welcome to crazytown, but right now, I gotta go.

I’ve largely stayed out of the Anthony Weiner story. It seemed to require a level of commitment I’m increasingly unwilling to make, particularly for a story that required me to look at a boner. Nothing against boners in general; I just… well, let’s say that I’m really tired and I have a headache and I just ate a full meal and I have to get up early tomorrow and leave it at that.

But now all has been revealed, so let me just throw a few things out there, and maybe you all can run with them:

Lesson No. 1: You can look like this and still have your husband act out sexually like a teenager. In fact, you could almost argue that it’s more likely to happen.

Lesson No. 2: I remind you, in case you wonder what sort of people are on the other side, that Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, the Indian/Pakistani beauty referenced above, was widely whispered to be a lesbian during her time as Hillary Clinton’s assistant. Because of course Hillary must be one, and who else would an aging lesbian choose to have carrying her BlackBerry than a young, beautiful lesbian? I don’t need to tell you who was doing the whispering. Always useful to remember that whatever Weiner did, at least he didn’t do it while telling unmarried people they should practice abstinence, while cruising men’s bathrooms and insisting he’s not gay, etc. On the other hand, you want people you generally agree with to behave themselves. Sometimes they don’t. These are not mutually exclusive positions. Grow up.

Lesson No. 3: Of all the jokes made about this, the James Franco bit from Jon Stewart might be best of all.

Lesson No. 4: Remember Photomat? Fotomat? Those little kiosks in parking lots where you could drop off your film and, three days later, pick up your vacation pictures? I can’t remember what the value-added element was over standard drugstore photo processing; probably the drive-through aspect. Anyway, if we still relied on other human beings to develop our pictures, there’d be less of this nonsense going on. Each of those little digital cameras is a Pandora’s box containing all the misery in the world.

Lesson No. 5: MSNBC needs to embed shorter Rachel Maddow clips. Nevertheless, this is pretty good, especially once she gets to the Post-Bill Clinton Modern American Political Sex-Scandal Consequence-o-Meter.

Lesson No. 6: I saw Dexter on Facebook yesterday, predicting the New York Post would use WEINER ROAST in a headline today. No. No, no, no, no, no. Something far better. Lesson: Don’t ever try to second-guess a great tabloid.

And with that, I’m done talking about boners. I don’t want to think about boners for a while. Whatever the world is poking me with on the great standing-room-only subway of life, it better not be a boner. So let’s hop to the more amusing bloggage:

A father notes his son is totally embarrassed when he, dad, waves at son’s passing school bus. So he decides to make a game of it, and starts dressing in costume for the morning waves, a different one every day. Of course he kept a blog. Note that dad is missing a leg. That doesn’t have anything to do with this — he lost it in a motorcycle accident, a little googling reveals — but it did come in handy on pirate day.

The Coozledads have a new foster child at their vegetarian petting zoo. A crow.

Not quite OID, but D-centric: There’s a fight going on here, which most of you probably haven’t heard about, on a proposed second bridge between the U.S. and Canada across the Detroit River. I’ll boil it down as succinctly as I can: The current bridge, the Ambassador, is privately owned, and has helped make its owner, a grumbling octogenarian who lives on the American side (in Grosse Pointe Shores!), a billionaire. The state of Michigan believes any crossing that important should be in public hands, and preferably international hands. Both sides agree the Ambassador needs replacing, but the owner wants to build the second one himself right next to the current one and keep it the title, and the state, along with Ontario’s provincial government, wants to build it a mile or so downstream, to keep trucks from rumbling through the heart of Windsor, among other reasons. Lately, the grumbling octogenarian has gone on a PR campaign. He hired Dick Morris, of all people; you know, Mr. Charming? The latest move: Sticking mock “eviction notices” to the front doors of the residential neighborhood most affected by the proposed new bridge. Charming:

Dolores Toth, 81, who has heart problems, began to shake after reading the notice, said her son, Steve. “How low can you go?” Steve Toth said. “This isn’t something you do, I don’t care who you are.”

And with that, I’m outta here. I need to take a picture of my underwear and mail it to someone.

Perhaps in keeping with his recent presentation as Barnacle Bill the Sailor, Kid Rock showed up to a press conference in Detroit yesterday on a standing paddleboard. Er, a paddle surfboard. Whatever. A board that you stand on, while propelling yourself with a long-handled paddle. You’ve seen them. They’re a thing now.

He was accompanied by two Red Wings, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the paddling, except that they’d be familiar with holding long sticks.

I’m well-acquainted with paddle sports; our household owns not one but two kayaks. My first marital argument, I remind you, came on our honeymoon, when we squabbled over my front-seat driving in a two-person kayak on Monterey Bay, the front being the passenger seat in paddling. The woman guiding the tour suggested we were both too strong to be in one boat, and no, it wasn’t an omen or anything.

Everything I know about paddling suggests standing is a dumb way to do it. A paddler will encounter a strong current crossing the Detroit River — although less so on that side of Belle Isle, the city park/island where the presser was held — and you want to be low, so that your body doesn’t becomes a sail, taking you someplace you don’t want to go. Also, no PFDs on any of them. Bad role modeling, gentlemen!

A quick Google tells me stand-up paddle surfing is a Hawaiian practice that allows a surfer to see more of what’s coming, wave-wise, which makes perfect sense. On flat water far from a coastline, it’s just a way for everyone to say, “Hey, look who’s coming across the water” and avoid the frequently ungraceful exit from a boat in front of a bunch of cameras.

If they really wanted to look cool, they’d have showed up on horses.

The above demonstrates a problem with modern life. In the past, if I wanted to know something about standing paddleboards, I’d have called someone. We’d have chatted for a while. Maybe I’d get a story idea out of it, maybe not, but it would involve one person talking to another. Now, a quick clatter on the keyboard, all questions are answered, sometimes in way more detail than I ever sought, but no contact with a fellow human.

This technology, it is wonderful, but not 100 percent.

It is Friday, Friday, time for fun-fun-fun-fun, so let’s go to the bloggage. I have a mind to ride my bike to my morning meeting, which means I have to get out of here early.

The mayor of Warren, a suburb here, is sensitive about his age, and a quick Google image search (sorry for bad-mouthing you two paragraphs ago, Professor G.) suggests why — he is an odd-looking duck, given to coloring his hair, twice-daily exercise and a stated preference for dating younger women. This has bugged some people for a while, and this week, some challengers in the current election cycle sued to require him to tell the world how old he is. I can’t wait to hear the final figure.

A biopic about Dick and Liz (which I don’t need to explain to my elderly readership, do I?) is in the works, directed by my man Marty. I’m so there.

Gin & Tacos looks back at one of the odder events of the Cold War — Mathias Rust’s landing of a Cessna on Red Square 24 years ago.

Finally, a great story out of Florida by none other than one of our commenting community, John Wallace:

Today St. Lucie County Sheriff Mascara announced the arrest of a (Subway) sandwich shop employee who was selling marijuana as well as sandwiches to people who asked for “extra meat.”

I don’t know what’s funnier — the extra meat or the fact St. Lucie County’s sheriff is named “Ken Mascara.”

Happy weekend, all. I’m outta here.