On the first of every month, I:

1) Verify and repair the permissions on my hard drive;
2) Empty the trash on my hard drive;
3) Throw my contact lenses away and start wearing a new pair.

I have no idea why I do the first two, except that someone told me it’s a good idea, like flossing. OK, whatever. The contact lens thing still bugs me, though. I believe I paid $300 for my first pair of Bausch & Lomb SofLens, in the early ’80s, or approximately $50,000 in today’s dollars. That was two months’ rent for me, but so worth it. They were revolutionary! B&L bought magazine ads with a photo of water droplets on a pane of glass. “Can you tell which is the Bausch & Lomb SofLens?” the copy ran. No, you couldn’t. That was also the experience of millions of early adopters when they dropped one of the slippery little buggers on the sink. But unless you were a millionaire, you learned to tell them apart; after all, each one cost $150.

That was only the beginning. There was a whole chemistry set of solutions that came with them — cleaners, storage, disinfectant, a weekly soak that involved tablets fizzing in little plastic vessels. Or you could go for heat disinfection, which meant boiling your lenses for a few minutes. Both were a pain in the ass, but the contacts were wonderful. You didn’t get that squint the hard-lens wearers all had, and soft ones could never “pop out,” which happened frequently. It was common, at the time, to walk into a room and find one or two or three people on their hands and knees, searching a shag carpet for a tiny piece of plastic, which might or might not be found. If it was, the grateful party would scurry off to the bathroom for a re-insertion or, depending on his or her comfort with carpet germs, merely pop it in the mouth for a re-wet and do it on the spot.

That was pretty gross. But it happened all the time. What were you going to do? Carry it home in your pocket? Lenses, hard and soft, were expensive. You could buy insurance for contacts.

Hank Stuever once wrote me about losing a lens when he was a kid, on a hayride. His mom took him back to the scene of the crime to look for it, hours later — expensive! — and they actually found it, a single contact lens on a hay wagon, which must be the modern equivalent of the needle in a haystack. And what did young Hank do next? Squirted some solution on it and put it back in his eye. I understand Hank’s mother is now a nun. If she’s ever nominated for sainthood, I think the fact her son isn’t known today as the blind TV critic should count as one of her miracles. (Finding it could be No. 2.)

I wore my last pair of contacts for five years. I’ve always been scrupulous about care, and I didn’t wear them every day, but often enough that my optometrist gaped in horror when I told him how long it had been since I’d re-upped. In that time, he informed me, pretty much the entire industry had gone to two-week or four-week, even daily disposables. You bought lenses by the box now, and it was important to throw them away on schedule, lest you tempt eye infections. Part of me thinks yeah yeah and wants to mention all those shag carpet lens searches, and once I did. My current optometrist replied with a confession to having once retrieved a lens from the sink drain at a college party, rinsing it a little under the tap, and popping it back in.

But you don’t need to do that anymore, she added. Lenses are cheap now. Kate wears daily-wear and I, month-long multifocals, and my total expenditures for both of us, including solution, probably is about what I paid for my first pair of SofLenses and all their attendant solutions. Today she told me she was coming to the bottom of her box, and would I please order more, the way you ask the designated grocery-buyer in the household to put ketchup on the list.

I spared her the 700-word lecture you just read. Why bother?

A little bloggage before I go? Sure:

My former colleague Dave Jones, an Ohio State grad and now a sportswriter in Pennsylvania, speaks to the Jim Tressel affair from the place where it matters most. Mr. Albom, this is how you stir emotion in a sports column. Not the way you do it.

This story — about how one guy, Joshua Kaufman, was able to retrieve his stolen laptop, using a program called Hidden — just about sold me on it. Funny, too.

In keeping with today’s theme of God I Am So OLD, may I just say that reading today’s news, about Andrew Anthony Weiner and the underpants-boner picture, only underscores the above. God, I remember when John Tower was run off the reservation for drinking too much and hitting on women. Imagine, in 1989, being told that the news in 22 years would involve whether an elected official did or did not send a photo of his wing-wang — with his phone! — to a woman, and that the stories the morning of June 2, 2011 would be led by the elected official’s failure to categorically deny whether that was his wing-wang.

I hope I live another 22 years. God knows what we’ll be talking about then.

Happy Thursday, all.

Should have known the good weather wouldn’t last long. I’m sitting in my living room in utter gloom, all the shades wide open, and it’s as dark at 9 a.m. as it will be at 9 p.m. What could it be? Why, more rain on the way. Yippee, rain.

Alan took the boat out for its shakedown over the weekend, and said the lake is full of floating logs and other debris washed down in recent deluges. Which immediately sent me spinning back to 1973 and my first visit to Michigan. I’m 15, and my friend Paul has invited me and two other girls to his cottage in the Les Cheneaux Islands, in the U.P. Every night we tuck a couple 12-packs of Stroh’s under our arms and go to someone else’s cottage to party, or else they come to us. This involves much night boating under the blackest skies and brightest stars I’ve ever seen. Paul knows the water and can navigate the whole area without lights, but every night as we leave his grandmother warns us about “deadheads.” The winter was tough, the spring rains heavy — you might be reading about 1973 elsewhere this week, as the Mississippi floods — and the retreating ice tore up a lot of docks, leaving their timbers still floating here and there. That’s a deadhead. You don’t want to hit one in your boat, and responsible boaters, when they spot one, are expected to tow them to shore, if possible. They are the car-swallowing potholes of the seas.

Paul’s grandmother, Cor, had a very distinctive voice, and as soon as we got out of the house we’d repeat her warnings to one another, in the Cor voice: “Why, your mother and John Pumphrey were coming home one night, and they found a piano crate! Floating in the channel at Dollar Island! Thank God John was using the spotlight! That’s what I’m talking about! You just never know!”

We never used the spotlight. We didn’t hit any deadheads, although “watch out for floating piano crates” lived for years as an in-joke in our gang. And now I’m telling her stories. And somewhere Cor is laughing.

Rain coming any minute now. Come on, rain.

I shouldn’t complain. ROGirl just posted this Daily Mail photo spread of mind-boggling images from Joplin. How on earth do you survive something like that? And speaking of mind-boggling, it’s worth a scarce NYT click-through for the photo with this story; the caption tell us the photographer captured the image “from outside her front door before seeking shelter.” That would have to be the case, because otherwise, that camera would be 15 miles away, under where the flying cow came to rest.

Yeesh. Let’s skip to the bloggage:

Lance Armstrong’s clay feet continue to erode. I made up my mind a long time ago that St. Lance was almost certainly dirty, but that doesn’t negate the good he’s done, or tried to do, does it? Would he be an effective fundraiser for cancer if he were merely the 20th-best cyclist in the world? Complicated people, complicated questions. But simply dirty; I just don’t see how it could be any other way.

A friend of mine ruined “The Sound of Music” for me some years back, by pointing out the obvious: “Captain Von Trapp is old enough to have a daughter who is 16 going on 17, right? And Maria is a novitiate at the abbey, so she’s how old? Eighteen, maybe 19? The nuns keep calling her a girl, anyway. So when he marries Maria, he’s choosing a wife who is barely older than his daughter. And the daughter calls her ‘mother.’ Sorry, too creepy for me.”

I had never thought of this. The only thing that bugged me was how a landlocked country like Austria could have a navy. (Answer: The Austro-Hungarian Empire.)

Anyway, she sent me this yesterday, a letter to friends announcing the end of the engagement between the captain and Baroness Schraeder:

Please, friends, don’t worry about me. While I was a bit startled to be thrown aside for someone who flunked out of nun school, I assure you that I will be fine, and my main pursuits in life shall continue to be martinis, bon mots, and looking fabulous. You’ll also be glad to know I have retained custody of the Captain’s hard-drinking gay friend, Max. Anyone who gets tired of sing-a-longs should feel free to look us up.

A few notes on “King Lear,” a play you can’t even begin to understand until you’re 40, and maybe not even then.

And with that, I’m going to put a pork shoulder in the crock pot with some cumin, onion and dried peppers, add a little water and see what comes out in a few hours.

If nothing else, I hope my students learn from me how to write a lead (“lede” to you journos) for a story when circumstances will dictate you’re going to be among the last to file. It isn’t supposed to be like this for online news; we’re the hypercaffeinated tweeters filing via 3G and wifi so that you learn things in more or less real time.

But in this case — the school board meeting following the firings of the principal and his underling — that wasn’t going to happen. Our competition at Patch goes to meetings with a wifi stick on her laptop, and covers them via Facebook updates. Mixed results on that one, I’d say. If it’s a hot meeting, it works. Otherwise it amounts to public note-taking. But last night was a big ol’ foregone conclusion. What was the board going to do? Beg them to stay? And when the reporter is a college student and the editor leaves the meeting to go immediately to her other job, we’re not going to beat TV, and we’re not going to beat Patch, and we’re not even going to beat the papers. So write a fancy lede, play up the atmosphere, and go for the fourth-paragraph chop. (Not quite a Miller Chop, but it’s there.)

Jeez, I’m tired. Worked yesterday from 9:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., with a two-hour break to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and wonder why I don’t have time to write a novel. If I did, I’d call it “Porno Principal,” because that’s a great title.

Needless to say, I didn’t see Barry O’Bama’s speech in Ireland yesterday, but at the urging of our own mild-mannered Jeff, I looked it up on the White House’s website. It sings on the page, so I’m sure it danced a merry jig with the first great orator of the 21st century delivering it:

My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas. And I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.

Good one.

Since I have nothing much to report today, here’s some bloggage y’all can chew on:

Toe-suckin’ Dick Morris was disinvited from a GOP event at the request of the governor, and he ain’t happy about it: “Apparently free speech has its limits in Snyder’s Michigan.” Oh, shut up. If it’s that damn important, say it on a street corner, no one will stop you. Please note this is about a local issue — the Ambassador Bridge — and not necessarily about deep divisions within the party. Morris is the bridge owner’s latest paid mouthpiece, which may indicate how tone-deaf he is.

And what did Mrs. O’Bama wear on her trip to Ireland? Dunno, but T-Lo is on the case for her stop in England. I think she looks smashing, but what’s up with Camilla’s hat? That seems a bit much. Maybe she has alopecia.

And with that, I must move over to the other pile of copy on my virtual desk, and get to real work. Tuesday is the new Monday.

Your blogmistress had a ridiculous weekend. See here and here.

This wasn’t an investigation like my tougher colleagues love to do, where they dig dirt for weeks or months and then deliver a giant dirt sculpture in the shape of a pointing finger — j’accuse! — on a few hundred thousand doorsteps on Sunday morning, about a crooked mayor or an asleep-at-the-switch commission. Here, a guy got caught doing something bad and got fired, a story that was going to break sooner or later, but broke sooner. But it was a story with much dirt involved, and it went off like a grenade. Wreckage is still falling. I will be distracted for a while.

In between, I went for a bike ride and then to the movies. This was a beautiful, sunny, warm weekend, and the yard sales were as plentiful as dandelions. One in particular featured a whole table of NWT items — new with tags, for those of you who don’t eBay enough to know the lingo. Three wallets, still with Marshall’s price tags on them. Candleholders, ditto. And so on. Some people can never resist a bargain, who figure you never know when a gift will be required — a last-minute birthday invitation, an extra guest on Christmas morning with nothing to open. Some people are compulsive shoppers. Some people are bad at returning things they discovered they didn’t need. I considered two hurricane-style candle holders in cobalt blue, then, in the spirit of the day, decided I didn’t need them. And so I rode home, showered and headed to Royal Oak to meet a couple friends and see “Everything Must Go.”

Coincidentally, it’s about a yard sale. It’s, y’know, a metaphor, but it works. Will Ferrell plays a guy forcibly evicted from his house by his wife, who has changed the locks and temporarily left the premises. So he sets up housekeeping on the front lawn, with all the stuff she threw out. Based on a Raymond Carver story, so it involves alcohol, and it takes place in a world you and I would recognize, where people do stupid and self-destructive things for no good reason, and where when people change, they change from A to B rather than A to Z. Your average low-budget indie drama.

Or dramedy, I should say — it’s actually very funny in a don’t-laugh-out-loud sort of way, a wry comedy of human failing, and to me, the revelation was Ferrell, because I am not a fan. Not even a little bit of one. But that was a very fine performance. There’s a moment where Ferrell sells a fishing rig he bought but never used. NWoT, if you will, and it reminded me of how much crap we buy and never use, or hardly use, and how it weighs us down. Also, that I need to have a garage sale.

So, some bloggage:

The exit of Mitch Daniels, and the entrance of Mr. Excitement, Tim Pawlenty, from and to the GOP presidential race is bringing new attention to $P, who went on a Fox show called “Justice With Judge Jeannine” and ran her mouth for a while. She called Barack Obama our “temporary president,” whatever that means. I clicked the YouTube link hoping for a 30-second highlight reel, noticed it was the whole 14-minute segment, and immediately clicked away, but not before I heard the introduction, and saw She-Who reply to the welcome blather with, “As always, thank you, Judge.” Two things: One, when you’re making news for your appearance on shows with names like “Justice With Judge Jeannine Pirro,” it’s only a matter of time before you’re putting on an apron and making eggs with some Regis Philbin equivalent; and two, my very first direct observation of class difference in America, as a child, was by watching courtroom re-enactment shows on Channel 10 in Columbus, and noting that the better-spoken parties referred to the judge as “your honor” while the rednecks called him “judge.” I stand by my 8-year-old self’s observation.

You won’t have Mitch Daniels to kick around in 2012. And, are Republicans losing their grip on reality? Finally, Roger Ailes and the monster he created. (Fox News, Not $P.) Discuss.

And finally, I close with movie bloggage:

It’s been 20 years since the release of “Thelma & Louise.” My, my. I have to say, I liked that movie pretty well, and young Brad Pitt — yummy.

The Free Press may have been covering Aretha Franklin in Chicago, but I was at the somewhat less glamorous spring concert of the Brownell Middle School instrumental-music students. Three grades, many combinations and recombinations — 6th-grade strings, 7th- and 8th-grade band, etc. The show ran past 90 minutes, mainly from all the shuffling, but no one cared. Kate’s ensemble, the jazz band, went last. They’re the only purely extracurricular music group in the school, this being a district that believes in arts education, a fading concept in today’s miserly public-school culture. The saddest scenes in this season’s “Treme” are of the New Orleans children in band class, learning how to keep time with finger snaps, because their instruments haven’t traveled down whatever tortuous path, through however many sticky-fingered bureaucrats, to make it to the band room just yet.

No problem with that here. The instruments (rented, mostly) gleam. The director told a story about rehabilitating the school’s harp for a particular number, with the help of a private teacher. Does your school have a harp? I’d imagine that’s a luxury for most. Kate had a little moment in a number called “One Flight Down” (not the Norah Jones song), where she had to carry the rhythm section for a series of baby-step improvisations by trumpet and sax players. It was nice. I told her so, afterward. She said her hand had been cramping and she couldn’t hear herself, so she assumed she’d screwed it up. Where do girls learn this sort of effortless self-effacement? From other girls, if my memory serves. Think too highly of yourself, and you’re stuck-up. The trick is to effusively praise all your friends while deflecting any compliments: I love your hair. It’s so pretty. I wish I had your hair. My hair is so ugly. Or, alternatively: Your thighs are so skinny, I wish I had legs like yours. But my hair is awful. You have better hair. They spend all their time creating an ideal self, made from parts of all the other selves they see around them. How long does this last? Until age 30 or so, I think.

Anyway, I saw Paul Clemens there. Reminded me he ignored my last e-mail, if it even made it past the spam filter. What author flogging a book wouldn’t want valuable publicity from a hyperlocal website? I mean, so what if he’s been on “The Daily Show,” I run GrossePointeToday.com, which draws tens of eyeballs every day. Well, at least now I know he’s in the Brownell phone directory.

I read that Aretha story, linked above. I expect the Freep will be covering all of Aretha’s concerts from now on, sort of a deathwatch deal, although as they point out, she seems healthy and in good voice. I hope this is the last time we’ll see the phrase “triumphant return” in a headline, however. That’s another one of those journo-clichés that has no opposite; everyone’s return is triumphant, or else it’s not noted. Charlie Sheen’s better-received Chicago show, after his Detroit disaster, was probably called a triumphant return to the one-man-train-wreck stage.

A long week, and I’m glad it’s over. We had another bank robbery here, right around the corner from my house, in fact. I have to stop reading about these things on Facebook, because it makes my eyes cross, some of the ignorant stuff people say. For instance: “Too bad no one had a gun, so they could have blown the guy’s face off.” Yeah, that is a virtual guarantee of a happy ending to any armed robbery, don’t you agree? Guy walks into a bank and sticks it up, and some dime-store avenger pulls his own gun, and for what? To keep a federally insured financial institution from losing a couple grand. Of course it would have gone well, because the avenger is able to pull his piece without attracting attention, his aim is true, and the worst anyone gets is a bad dry-cleaning bill. The things some people must fantasize about. It makes you shudder.

Not much bloggage today; I’m tapioca. But a little:

For the first time, a majority of Americans support gay marriage. Enjoy your island while it lasts social conservatives; you’re no longer connected to dry land, and the tide is rising.

Unless, of course, the Rapture occurs this weekend. Then you might be OK.

First comes grandchild, then comes marriage — OK, with different kids, but still. $P is a mother of the groom. Congratulations and happiness to the non-embarrassing members of the family.

And with that, I’m late and must run. Happy weekend, all.

I had a colleague back in the day. Southern guy. Had a way with profanity, which always sounds better in a drawl. “How you doing, Steve?” I’d ask.

“I’m busier’n a dawg with two dicks, that’s how I’m doin’,” he’d say.

One day he answered, “Wahl, I really wish I hadn’t put a hunnert pounds o’ Turf Builder on my lawn this year.”

Yeah? Why is that?

“Cuz I’m mowin’ twice a week. It’s growin’ like Cambodia.”

Whenever I consider my lawn in spring — untreated with Turf Builder, I might add — I consider that phrase. Growin’ like Cambodia. For six weeks it’s done nothing but rain. I’m watching a robin hunt at the moment, and it’s the size of a chicken, so plentiful are earthworms at the surface of the saturated turf. The world is so green it’s positively Irish, and even though I know it won’t last, I’m going to enjoy it a while. If nothing else, it’s too wet to mow.

Not that that will stop the lawn services. Thursday is the day my neighbors on both sides have their appointments, and for about an hour, you cannot have a conversation in my bedroom with the window open. It’s maddening. I tell myself to consider the alternative. I tell myself that with a four-man crew, they’re done quickly. I tell myself many other things, many featuring swear words. If I really wanted peace and quiet, I’d move to the ghetto. Gunfire makes far less noise than you’d think, and it’s over faster.

Since Alan got into shooting, that’s been the big revelation: Real gunfire sounds nothing like it does in the movies. In movies, shotguns go boom; in real life, they go crack. In fact, all guns crack, pretty much, at least the ones I’ve heard. I remember Westerns of old, when in gunfight scenes every fourth shot was sweetened with that ricochet sound effect — pop pop pop p-chew. Actually, Westerns are veritable aural forests of wrong sounds. The guns sound wrong, and the horses are always neighing. Spend any time at all around horses, and you realize they’re actually pretty quiet animals. They nicker at feeding time and blow their noses from time to time, but you can go weeks without hearing one neigh. A few of the mares would whinny when they were in heat, but once I moved to a professionally run barn, where the mares are given hormones to keep that sort of thing in check, you never heard it.

(Lest you think this sort of thing is cruel to the mares, I can say only this: Wait until one stops dead in front of you, spraddles her hind legs, raises her tail and “winks” at the gelding you’re riding. You’ll change your mind.)

And lest you think I have the wrong shotgun, one sunny afternoon in Fort Wayne the cops shot a charging pit bull with their cop-issue pump-action shotgun, and it also sounded like a crack. A very loud one, but nothing like the throaty boom you hear on TV.

Good lord, where am I going with this? You can tell it’s Thursday, the most sleep-deprived of the week. I keep pouring coffee in, but only nonsense comes out.

So let’s check in with the writers who got more sleep last night, shall we?

Daily Mail love: The UK tabloid says John Edwards is very mad at his baby mama, for not destroying their sex tape. It further says the tape was made in Indianapolis, and helpfully includes a shot of the downtown skyline, with this cutline:

Sex and the city: Edwards and Hunter made the sex tape in a hotel room in Indianapolis

I would have written something different:

Sex and the city: Bad things happen in Indianapolis hotel rooms. Ask Mike Tyson.

Or maybe:

Naptown: The Edwards sex tape was made in Indianapolis, because there’s nothing else to do there.

I know, I know: Not true. Just teasing the next Super Bowl city.

The boy who shot his neo-Nazi dad to death speaks. Big surprise: Dad was a violent shit. I don’t know what sound that one made, but maybe it was that of his family’s souls being freed from bondage.

Jon Stewart rounds up your NewtNews of the week. Includes the glitter bomb and angry Iowan.

Any Detroiters interested in biking the bridge? Fifty-five bucks seems a little steep, unless it’s for charity or something. And presumably, as with all things bridge-related, Mr. Moroun will take a big taste. And I have to carry my passport…to go halfway across the bridge? Nothing about this makes sense.

OK, time to salvage what I can of this day. Enjoy Thursday.

The other shoe has dropped, and it’s a precious little hand-crocheted bootie: Arnold Schwarzenegger has a 10-year-old child with a “household employee,” although you might prefer the Coozledad version: He got caught with his dick in the maid. How surprised am I by this? Not even one tiny bit; you don’t even have to pay slight attention to the gossip sheets to know the former governor of California was notorious for his wandering pee-pee. No, today I want to talk about something else: D-I-V-O-R-C-E.

I found this passage telling in the L.A. Times story:

Friends of Shriver, 55, (said) she had been unhappy for years but made no move until after her parents died and Schwarzenegger finished his term as governor. Her father, Sargent Shriver, died Jan. 18, nearly a year and a half after the death of her mother, Eunice Kennedy Shriver.

The Kennedys are America’s most famous Catholic family, and Catholics frown on divorce — or used to. Certainly they did in Eunice and Sargent’s generation, which might be the last one that did. Infidelity was no reason to break up a marriage, as virtually every Kennedy woman could tell you. It was something men did and women suffered in silence, thanking God that at least they were the wife and not the mistress. Because mistresses come and go. Wives, children, family — that was permanent.

Infidelity with a love child attached? That was one for the priest’s counsel, but maybe even Eunice would have yielded on that one. Because that has to be the deal in any marriage with an “understanding” at its heart: You better wrap up, dude. The fact he didn’t does more to call his judgment — on everything — into question than almost anything else. He’s 63, the kid is 10, which means all this happened to him at an age when he should have been well-past being swept away on a tide of hot blood. What an ahs-hole. As Arnold might say.

But back to divorce. Whether or not Maria knew about this child, she surely knew about the tomcatting. But she waited until her parents were gone, and then gave him the heave-ho. After Alan’s mother died, leaving both of us officially and entirely parent-less, someone told me that only now were we free to be entirely ourselves. (Alan took up skeet-shooting, if that means anything.) Maria chose to become a divorceé (or she will, presumably).

In my lifetime, divorce has gone from a social stigma — see Helen Bishop of “Mad Men” — to perfectly acceptable, and even preferable to staying together for the kids, at least if it means constant fighting. People only look at you askance after your second or third divorce, and maybe not even then. I know many Catholics who’ve divorced, had annulments, and remarried in the One True, one of those things that used to be a shameful secret and take years to get, complete with humiliating “testimony” about the most intimate details of your married life. Now it’s mainly a matter of filling out a lot of forms and writing a check. Never have I known a Catholic who’s pursued an annulment and failed to get one, not even after years of marriage and multiple children. (When my BFF asked for one, I noticed one of the questions I was asked as a witness was whether the couple in question used artificial birth control. I tried to make my answer as emphatic as possible, figuring this was the express lane to approval: “Of course they did.”)

Our new openness about the big D has brought with it one rather smelly side effect, however: Everybody now feels entitled to hear the details of yours, and offer opinions. I have a feeling that when the full story on Mr. and Mrs. Mitch Daniels is out there, it will be nothing big, just a rare female case of what used to be called pussy madness. (I ask you: If you had to wake up every morning and look at that guy on the next pillow, wouldn’t you say, “Oh, it’s you again” each and every day?) They got divorced, they married again. Happens all the time.

So, some fast bloggage:

My favorite single comment on all this came from an anonymous poster at New York magazine:

What is not being said that Arnie actually traveled back in time to impregnate this woman. Her child will be the savior of humanity and will have to fight his own father for the future of mankind.

A few weeks back, a beauty salon owner in Dearborn was shot to death in a robbery, in which the thieves stole only human hair extensions. Astoundingly, it’s a trend. NYT is on the story:

“They’re selling it to stylists who work out of their house, they’re selling it on the street, they’re selling it out of the car,” said Ms. Amosu of My Trendy Place. “People who don’t want to pay the prices will buy it from the hustle man. It’s like the bootleg DVDs and the fake purses. But this is a quality product.”

I always find the underground economy interesting. It’s pure id.

There is much to admire about French culture, which has given the world great cuisine, wonderful fashion and the fine art of whiling away hours in cafés. But this shit is disgusting. I couldn’t have less sympathy for the guy. Enjoy prison, monsieur.

Off to plod through Tuesday, under another iron-gray sky. Relent!

A few culture notes, because I don’t think enough neurons are firing in my head to handle anything other than arts and entertainment at the moment:

Despite everything I expected, I’m enjoying “Game of Thrones.” I generally despise anything involving broadswords and magic, and GoT has a lot of the former, less of the latter, plus boobs (this being HBO). The characters tend toward ridiculous names, but are helpfully color-coded — the Peroxide Twins, the Strawberry Blonde Clan — or are recognizable enough that I can keep them straight from scene to scene, like Mayor Carcetti on “The Wire,” whom we learned last week was a eunuch. (He’s gossips and schemes. You know how eunuchs are.)

No one is more surprised by this than I am. I’m not a fan of David Benioff, who’s co-writing this thing, and haven’t been since I saw him speak at Michigan way back when. There’s way too much exposition-through-dialogue — Lord Dyphtherion, how go affairs at your castle Wickershamshire? Is your brother still recovering from the injuries suffered in that joust with dark knight Bubonicus? What was at stake? Some significant titles and land? — but Benioff knows everything sounds better in a British accent. And once you’ve got the initial sorting by hair color and subplot, it’s no harder to follow than any soap opera. I’d like a little more magic, though. I assume it’s coming. I hope it won’t be too silly.

As different from “Game of Thrones” as chalk is from cheese, “Treme” is back for its second season, now examining Katrina-scarred New Orleans from a distance of a year and change. This is when residents knew for sure just how much the rest of the country cared about them (not much) and when the overstressed institutions of social order, mainly the police department, began to break down. I’m so bummed Ashley Morris isn’t alive to see this, but fortunately, the people at the Back of Town blog are breaking down each episode for us, and if you’re not following along there, you’re missing something. I recommend it over any professional “Treme” criticism, including this Salon piece (spoilers galore), which boiled down to: I didn’t like this scene, ergo, suckitude.

Y’all know what a David Simon fan I am; I will put my little hand in his and follow him anywhere. But generally, I’m finding this season better than the first, and not just because I know everyone now. Detroit is New Orleans in a colder climate, with a disaster that struck in slow motion, rather than in meteorological form. But they have a great deal in common, and the questions Simon is asking are the same ones anyone with open eyes asks when they live around here, about responsibility, complicity and all the rest of it.

(The scenes with the crazy chef, Enrico Brulard, I can only attribute to Simon’s bromance with Anthony Bourdain, although they’re plenty entertaining. I love food and respect the craftsmanship that goes into preparing it well, but watching Brulard fuss over dishes was a useful reminder not to worry too much about anything that will be in the municipal sewer system in 24 hours.)

Finally, “The Killing” is starting to grate. (All these shows run on Sunday night, when I’m working. Thank my lucky stars for DVRs and on-demand cable) It started out so well, and now in episode six or seven or something, all I’m looking forward to is the end, when the red herrings are shoveled off the deck and we find out who done it, and I’m already worried we’re in for some late-arriving character who will come bearing a suitcase full of deus ex machina. I’m already tired of so much, which I’m now realizing is mainly clichés served up by Enrico Brulard, with artful presentation and some garnish you don’t recognize — the Female Detective Who’s Married to Her Job, the Innocent Party With a Secret, etc. And the rain! Lord, the rain. I know it rains in Seattle, and I know it rains a lot, but presumably people come equipped for it, and occasionally bother to put their hoods up.

I’ve seldom been as thoroughly hooked by anything as I was by the first two episodes of “The Killing.” I’ve seldom been so disappointed by what came afterward.

Your thoughts? It’s sweeps month, you know.

A little bit of bloggage:

Jim Cramer, profiled in the NYT magazine, discusses his joust with Jon Stewart, which wasn’t really a joust at all. Mr. Whinypants says:

“As soon as he started, I realized Stewart was on a mission to make me look like a clown. I didn’t defend myself because I wasn’t prepared. What was I supposed to do, talk about how often I had been right? Praise myself? Get mad? I was mad, but I didn’t want to give the audience any blood. The national media said I got crushed, which I did, and made me into a buffoon.” He looked at his plate and shook his head. “You have a whole body of work and then — ” He signaled the waitress for more coffee. “Stewart was the prosecutor, and I was Exhibit A. But what was the crime? What did I do wrong? I wasn’t running Fannie or Freddie. I wasn’t in charge at Countrywide. CNBC was completely good. Better than the Department of Justice. What I did every night was call these bad actors out. I sat there with Stewart and thought: He’s never even seen my show. He doesn’t even know what I do.” He paused for a moment. “Obviously I didn’t know what he does, either.”

Tell it to someone who cares, Jim.

The last people in the world to discover Donald Trump is not what he seems, speak:

“The last thing you ever expect is that somebody you revere will mislead you,” said Alex Davis, 38, who bought a $500,000 unit in Trump International Hotel and Tower Fort Lauderdale, a waterfront property that Mr. Trump described in marketing materials as “my latest development” and compared to the Trump tower on Central Park in Manhattan.

“There was no disclaimer that he was not the developer,” Mr. Davis said. The building, where construction was halted when a major lender ran out of money in 2009, sits empty and unfinished, the outlines of a giant Trump sign, removed long ago, still faintly visible.

Mr. Davis is unable to recover any of his $100,000 deposit — half of which the developer used for construction costs.

“Revere” — what a strange word to use in that context.

A long piece on Hillary Clinton’s term as SoS that I haven’t read yet, but plan to. Over the weekend, maybe.

Which will start soon. Enjoy yours.

Perhaps in keeping with yesterday’s theme of bad neighbors, I found this story about a 10-year-old boy who shot his neo-Nazi dad to death strangely moving:

At a meeting the day before he was shot, Mr. Hall hoisted a swastika banner, not far from his newborn’s bassinet. His 10-year-old son listened as Mr. Hall spoke of finding rotting bodies on the border and discussed fears of being attacked with “AIDS-infected blood” if the group was to rally in San Francisco.

After the meeting, members drifted outside to smoke and drink.

The boy sat nearby on the steps. Was he having a good time? a reporter asked. Yes, he said, though he was annoyed by his four younger sisters. But he was the eldest, he added, and a boy. “And boys are more important,” he said.

That night, Jeff Hall apparently went out with some of his members. He arrived home about midnight and, four hours later, the police received a call about shots fired.

The boy shot his father in the wee small hours. Read the story, though, and you see that the family was already the subject of a reporting project on the neo-Nazi movement, which explains the many observed details of its particular family life, which ran from hate rallies to baby showers.

That is, of course, the story of many families, the way the daily details of our life are each member’s version of “normal,” whether it’s the way we eat dinner or what we hang on our walls. Try to imagine many of the details of those wonderful stories we told yesterday from the perspective of the people on the other side. Everything’s relative.

If I sound like I’m not making sense this morning, there’s a good reason. Kate is off on another of her last-year-of-middle-school weekend trips, and I was up at some ghastly hour to drop her at yet another idling bus. Destination: Chicago, for some choir thing, plus the usual — Navy Pier, cruise on the river, Magnificent Mile, etc. This isn’t even the last one, either. In another month, there’s a day trip to Cedar Point to celebrate the end of it all. I should travel this much.

Anyway, I came home, fell back into bed and woke up at 9:30 from a dream that immediately slipped out the window, and the sense that I’d wasted half the day. In some ways, I have. So time to publish and get outta here.

Fortunately, I have some bloggage:

Thanks to my former colleague Bob Caylor for this story, with a sentence that’s surely the best one in a month of News ‘n’ Sentinels:

For a politician, he was exceptionally unconcerned about appearances, from the unmade bed to the explicit images of male-female couples performing sex acts that flickered on the screen of the room’s muted television throughout the interview.

Long made short: One of those crazy people who file for local office actually won his primary, and now the party is trying to get him disqualified. He’s claiming a right-wing conspiracy, “like Hillary Clinton said about Bill,” only the party trying to get him booted from the ballot is actually the Democratic one. I thought Bob handled it deftly, but then, he’s had lots of practice.

The Onion imitates life:

“Since last week, the number of people who have incorrectly stated that all SEAL members must do 300 pull-ups in a minute, earn advanced calculus degrees from MIT, and be able to hold their breath underwater for an hour, has been extraordinarily high,” said Pentagon press secretary Geoff Morrell, adding that the comment, “I heard you need to be able shoot a quarter from a mile away after running for four hours straight,” has been idiotically uttered in more than 65 percent of discussions related to the military operation.

Finally, Mississippi flooding photos, from the Atlantic’s In Focus picture blog. As a former resident of a city that floods, I thought you couldn’t surprise me with a flood picture. Turns out you can.

Off to the boatyard! Mast goes up today. Maybe something on the fun tomorrow.

Party of family values news roundup:

The rehabilitation of Callista Flockhart Bisek Gingrich, her transformation from painted tart to forgiven sinner, begins today with a wan, halfhearted profile in the NYT. This “curious tale of Washington reinvention” seeks to humanize her with details like this:

At 45, 22 years her husband’s junior, Mrs. Gingrich always looks perfectly composed. She favors an almost retro look — platinum hair teased and sprayed, bold-colored suits accessorized by a triple strand of pearls or eye-popping diamond jewelry. In college, friends say, she once signed up for an 8 a.m. bowling class and rolled a 200 wearing a pencil skirt.

Well, good luck with that.

At least some of Mitch Daniels’ reluctance to declare for president may be due to this little-discussed detail from his biography, according to the HuffPo:

In 1993, Cheri Daniels left her husband with their four daughters and married another man in California. She returned a few years later, reconciled with Daniels, and the two were remarried in 1997. That is, in a nutshell, the story. The national press first picked up on it last year when it was buried at the bottom of an 8,600-word Weekly Standard profile.

But much is unknown. Why did she leave Daniels? Why did she come back? That she would be reluctant to publicly answer such delicate questions in front of the nation seems only natural.

The former first family of California, the red-blue union of Maria Shriver and Arnold Schwarzenegger, appears headed for Splitsville with the announcement of their separation yesterday.

These are very apples-oranges items, I realize. To be sure, Daniels and Schwarzenegger have never been culture warriors in the classic sense, and Daniels is infamous in his own party for calling for a ceasefire, so that it can deal with more pressing matters of finance. Of course, when challenged he collapsed like a house of cards, but give him points for trying.

And Schwarzenegger, as the Republican governor of a blue state, wouldn’t even be recognized as one by much of the rest of his party. Not that it stopped them from giving him star-making opportunities at their national conventions. In California, divorce is just another step on the road of life; this is where Ronald Reagan got his, after all.

But Gingrich is gonna have to take every shot aimed at his hypocritical ass, and he’s going to have to smile about it, too. No one manipulated the cultural-conservative wing of the party more shamelessly, while getting his ashes hauled extramaritally, as he did, and as gleefully. Who was it who tied Woody Allen and Susan Smith to the other party? Who led the charge against Bill Clinton? That is one dirty bed he made; now it’s time to lie in it.

In politics, nothing is precisely as it seems, and I’m sure even Gingrich doesn’t think he has a prayer of ever living in the White House, but he’s going to enter the race for his own reasons, which have to do with selling books, upping his speaking fee, and otherwise enriching Newt Inc. After all, someone has to jump into this field, just to give it some credence:

I used to tell my Republican friends that if they didn’t live by the family-values sword, they wouldn’t have to die by it. Never did any good. The upside was too attractive. True story: I once attended a Dan Quayle rally when he briefly ran for president in…when would that have been? Maybe 2000? I interviewed some people in the crowd, asked them what it was about Quayle that enthused them. To a (wo)man, they all said some version of this: “His marriage.” His marriage to the antimatter Hillary Clinton, Queen Marilyn the Angry. Go figure.

I should get this show on the road. It’s trash day here in the Woods, and I just watched the fourth or fifth raggedy cyclist roll past my recycling bin, looking for empties worth returning for deposit. Sorry, guys, but all that’s in there is three from Trader Joe’s, which I’ve given up on anyone bothering to return. Michigan stores only have to return deposit on brands they sell, so until someone in the house who will remain nameless breaks his habit of sampling interesting beers from TJ’s, we’ll be eating 60 cents on every six-pack.

Some bloggage for you as I slip out of the room:

I say this periodically, I’m saying it again: What is happening in Mexico these days is the most criminally undercovered story of the year. Maybe it gets more ink in the border states; you tell me. But every single night I run across these stories in my searching (“drug” is part of my search string), and they’re just jaw-dropping. May I remind you, today’s story is tame, comparatively. Usually they’re about mass graves and the dismemberment of corpses, which is simply routine — it’s a terror tactic the drug gangs use. Last week police were collecting the pieces of a woman whose body was chopped to pieces, then distributed throughout “an affluent Mexico City neighborhood,” if I recall correctly.

The 10 worst states to be a woman. Indiana is No. 4. Red meat for lefties; the red-state version would call it the 10 best states to be an Embryo-American.

I need to leave you with something light, so how about some snark from Roy? Hail Caesar!

And have a good day.