There comes a time, when one is burning the candle at both ends, when it’s wise to snuff out one end, at least. I’m wondering if it’s entirely healthy to be checking the iPhone for updates on how Obama did at Notre Dame when your only child is trying on swimsuits at Macy’s. Decided the president, and the world, could get along without me for the afternoon.

This was in Ann Arbor, by the way. We went over to deliver Saturday’s sleepover guest back home, and stayed to check out the fairy doors. We found two; here’s one:

Here’s a Flickr page compiled by someone with more time, initiative and enthusiasm for the Ann Arbor-ness of the whole fairy-door concept, something I can’t quite explain. Fortunately, others already have.

What’s so Ann Arbor about fairy doors? You’d have to be there, but let me put it this way: One of the places we found one was a bookstore called Crazy Wisdom, your basic alt-lifestyles depot, up to and including the upstairs tearoom for the monthly witches’ meeting. Their fairy door was in the astrology section, which in this place was a little like classic literature.

I love Ann Arbor. These are my peeps.

After checking out of the news cycle I tried very hard not to pay attention to Barry at the Dome, but it was impossible. My quick verdict: Meh, although what he said was probably all he could say, and it seemed to go over pretty well. If it had been my commencement, I’d have felt badly used — is there any other issue where everything that can be said, has been said? But some people made it the elephant in the room, and it had to be acknowledged. Dialogue? Good luck with that. The very reason this issue is still around is that some people think “dialogue” consists of saying one thing over and over, maybe changing the wording slightly, but giving not an inch. Entering this debate is like being slowly strangled to death.

I gave up my hopes for a compromise on reproductive-health issues when the so-called conscience clauses went on the table. In this day and age, I can scarcely imagine there’s a health-care worker out there “forced” to participate in abortions against their will, but I can bet there are a lot of pushy, nosy, pious little jerks behind pharmacy counters who can’t fill a prescription for birth-control pills without running to confession afterward, and to the extent this person’s “conscience” had to be protected — well, that’s where I leave the discussion table.

I’m a hard-liner now, and I learned it from example.

I see Randall Terry is a Catholic now. Talk about a fish the Pope should have thrown back in the rancid pond that spawned him. I covered the Fort Wayne Operation Rescue arrest-a-thon, back in the day, and I believe Terry was either there or bestowing his support from afar, like Burt Reynolds in “Citizen Ruth.” When H-hour came, I watched a woman crawl under the belly of a police horse to take her place on the welcome mat of the clinic they’d chosen to blockade. Now I’m going to see a person lose a hand, I thought, in the fraught few seconds it took a very nimble horse to pick his way through that mess of humanity without hurting anyone. These were some very bad people.

One of the local leaders, as I recall, had infertility issues in his marriage. He, too, thought birth-control should be illegal. Proud to be an American!

I have a dentist appointment in 20 minutes, so I best floss ‘n’ go. One bit of bloggage you will enjoy, from the Wall Street Journal: Why you should never ever ever ruin Scotch whiskey with ice, a position I can back 100 percent, and have ever since a nice lady waylaid me in the duty-free mall at Heathrow and poured me a little sample shot of 12-year-old Macallan, neat. It was as sweet as candy, as complex as a Russian novel. I haven’t taken ice, or water, in Scotch since. And I still drink Macallan. That was some effective marketing.

ADDED: Didn’t I once call myself journalism’s canary in a coal mine? Ahem:

For decades, successful newspaper reporters and editors have looked forward to university fellowships as a chance to take a mid-career sabbatical and recharge their batteries. But the crop of fellows set to enter this year’s most prestigious programs, whose names are just now being announced, shows how much that pattern is changing. …“People are afraid that if they leave, at a time when newspapers are laying people off, their jobs won’t be waiting when they come back — and they’re right to think that,” said Charles R. Eisendrath, director of the Knight-Wallace Fellows at Michigan.

Yes, I’d say they are. Still, I wouldn’t have traded that year in Ann Arbor for all the job security in the world. It was, in every good way, a life-changing experience.

I know I’ve spent most days in recent weeks opening with a whine about how much work I have to do and how I shouldn’t be wasting time blogging, and today? Today will be no different. Maybe I should just put it on a user key. For now, accept a macro:

[Whining boilerplate.]

In my defense, there is much to do and much to cover of late. The big news here is the Twilight of the Dealerships, and as you might expect, the Reaper is not sparing us. Go ahead and scoff, but what’s happening here is…well, it’s very bleak. Families who have been in business selling cars for decades are going to be stepping off a cliff in just a few weeks. History is so much less alarming when you’re watching it on television. Living through it can be a real bitch.

But hey, the Red Wings won last night. There’s always that.

So let’s go bloggage-plundering, shall we?

As you might expect, Obama killed at ASU yesterday. Here’s a YouTube link to the first part of his speech. You only need to get through 4:00 and change to hear the joke that cuts the legs off their stupid diploma-mill pretentiousness. Of course, the Daily Show was funnier, and meaner.

And then there was this, waiting for him at home. Sasha is my favorite Obama.

Brian wants you all to read this very nice profile of Robert Gates, from the WashPost. A taste:

In a small building next to the tarmac, an officer briefed the defense secretary on the four deceased troops arriving that evening. They had been driving along a rutted road near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, when their Humvee hit a powerful roadside bomb.

Gates flashed with anger, according to people with him that day. He had spent most of his tenure in the Pentagon pushing to replace Humvees in Afghanistan and Iraq with Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles, built to withstand such blasts. “Find out why they hadn’t gotten their goddamn MRAPs yet,” he snapped at his staff.

Clad in the black suit he had worn to work that morning in the Pentagon, Gates climbed into the cargo hold of the white 747 bearing the remains. From the ground, troops could see the defense secretary as he knelt, alone, by the flag-draped transfer cases. Five minutes passed.

Prayer is private (or should be). But I’d love to know what he said to God. (I bet it wasn’t, “Sorry for the blasphemy.”)

Funny story about what happens when police respond to a report of a black panther crouching menacingly in a culvert. They draw their Tasers! They approach! They fire! And then…well, I hope they laughed.

And now I see the morning is waning and I still have too much crap to do. Be good, and we’ll try for a little more calm next week.

Guys, I have my first meeting with my Wayne State class in a few hours, and of course I have a combination of stage fright and impostor’s syndrome, that feeling that you’re going to ask for everyone’s attention, only to be interrupted by two goons with badges who will come through the door and arrest you on suspicion of being a big ol’ fraud.

In other words, I’m a bit nervous and distracted. Fortunately, there’s some good bloggage in the world.

First up, another absolute gem from the anonymous scribe who writes in the Metro Times under the pseudonym Detroitblogger John, probably because in his day job at the News or Free Press they have him on the better-parenting beat. It’s a story about the attempted rehabilitation of one of the most notorious strip clubs on Eight Mile Road, the All Star Gentleman’s Club:

(The new manager) was a DJ at All Star for years before convincing the owners to pour a quarter-million dollars into its renovation — a gamble to convert a ghetto dive into a glitzy club. They made him general manager.

First thing he did was ban pot smoking in the bar. Then he tore down the VIP wall, turning what was essentially brothel space into a display area with little privacy. Next, he ruthlessly culled the crew of strippers.

“When the bar went upscale, I had to let go of a lot of girls I really care about because they’d gotten on in years, gained 30 to 40 pounds, 33 years old now,” he says. “In the old days you had a little longevity dancing. Now you burn up a girl in a few years.”

Just one of ten thousand gems within. OK, one more:

“Lots of things let you know not to let somebody in,” he says. “Twelve guys wearing white T-shirts with the dead guy on their T-shirt and they just came from his funeral — uh-uh, you’re not coming in here, baby, ’cause I know what happens. They want to grieve, and ‘grieve’ means pouring alcohol on the floor and slapping girls around.”

Highly recommended. Be a mensch and hit the MetTimes site for the traffic, then cruise over to Detroitblog for the extra photos, which are borderline NSFW.

Elsewhere, I have to take back at least some of the mean things I’ve said about Rod Dreher over the years, because he’s how I found part one of a Naples Daily News series on the ongoing train wreck of Ave Maria, Tom Monaghan’s little Catholic outpost down in Florida. It’s a big country and there’s room here for everyone, but talk about things that would make Jesus Christ say, “Jesus Christ,” here’s this:

When Kathy Delaney moved a year and a half ago with her two teenage sons from Maryland to Ave Maria, she believed certain rights remained unalienable.

Elections, she thought, followed the rule she’d known all her life: Her vote counted as much as anyone’s. Delaney could only assume the government of her new town operated the same. …What Delaney didn’t know is that Ave Maria’s founders already had decided how the town northeast of Naples would be ruled. They would have the power to control the town forever. This power, some say, is so great, it might be unconstitutional.

Long story short: Monaghan and his co-developer successfully lobbied the Florida legislature — the members of which would find a lot in common with the tricking strippers at the All Star Gentleman’s Club — into passing them their own little law regarding Ave Maria’s governance:

The law gives Monaghan and Barron Collier Cos. more power than any Florida developer in at least 24 years, power perhaps not seen since the days of the early 20th century land boom. The law makes landowners, not registered voters, the ultimate authority in Ave Maria. The law ensures Monaghan and Barron Collier Cos., as the largest landowners, can control Ave Maria’s government forever.

Or, to put it another way, move to Ave Maria, exit the United States of America. The whole series is here. Years ago, I sent an e-mail to Carl Hiaasen’s Miami Herald address — in other words, I spit down a well — suggesting Monaghan would be a good person to base a character on in one of his novels. However, I don’t think even he could have dreamed up a twist like this.

Oh, look: Sarah Palin has figured out a way to keep herself in the news that doesn’t involve parading her daughter and grandson around the morning talk shows — she’s “writing a book.” God help her editor:

“There’s been so much written about and spoken about in the mainstream media and in the anonymous blogosphere world, that this will be a wonderful, refreshing chance for me to get to tell my story, that a lot of people have asked about, unfiltered,” the Alaska governor and 2008 vice presidential candidate said during a brief telephone interview Tuesday with The Associated Press.

Palin’s logorrhea is truly a thing of beauty. Not just written about, but also spoken about. Not just in the mainstream media, but in the anonymous blogosphere world. This won’t just be a chance to tell her story, but a wonderful, refreshing chance (because God knows, this woman really has been forcibly kept from microphones, hasn’t she?) to tell her story, unfiltered.

I suggest her publisher really and truly leave it unfiltered. Give her a microphone and a stenographer and let the story rip. The book will weigh in at 1,200 pages and be so boring no one will get past chapter one.

And now, you must please excuse me, because I have to go obsess over my syllabus and handouts. If you see those goons coming to arrest me, try to distract them.

I’ve never been a fan of his fiction, but I’m thinking maybe Harlan Ellison is a man worth admiring:

Nine years ago, Mr. Ellison sued Internet service providers for failing to stop a user from posting four of his stories to an online newsgroup. Since settling that suit, he has pursued more than 240 people who have posted his work to the Internet without permission. “If you put your hand in my pocket, you’ll drag back six inches of bloody stump,” he said.

Now there’s a copyright warrior I could march into battle with. Sooner or later something will cut him down; I’ve come to the realization that the gurus are right, you can’t fight free, even law-abiding people don’t think it’s stealing when the person on the other end is just some face on a back cover, and anyway they’re probably rich and I’m not, so go ahead and download their book onto your Kindle, what’s the harm?

I’m getting ahead of myself.

The NYT looks at the latest frontier in copyright theft — books. Until now, stealing books didn’t pay, so to speak, but with the Kindle and other e-readers, the doors are open:

Sites like Scribd and Wattpad, which invite users to upload documents like college theses and self-published novels, have been the target of industry grumbling in recent weeks, as illegal reproductions of popular titles have turned up on them. Trip Adler, chief executive of Scribd, said it was his “gut feeling” that unauthorized editions represented only a small fraction of the site’s content. …An example of copyrighted material on Scribd recently included a digital version of “The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” a collection of fairy tales by J. K. Rowling. One commenter, posting as vicious-9690, wrote “thx for posting it up ur like the robinhood of ebooks.”

I’m trying to separate my intellectual reaction from that of my gut, which thinks vicious-9690 is most likely a 300-pound jerkoff with one hand buried in his pants and the other in a box of Froot Loops or, as Stephen King puts it succinctly later in the story:

“The question is, how much time and energy do I want to spend chasing these guys,” Stephen King wrote in an e-mail message. “And to what end? My sense is that most of them live in basements floored with carpeting remnants, living on Funions and discount beer.”

I suspect King is wrong, that there are Russian and Chinese and American hackers working on sites to sell the Twilight novels for half off the retail e-reader price. Or maybe not — maybe this is all a matter of the cheap and sleazy undercutting the talented and successful. “The robinhood of ebooks” says a lot about the ignorant mindset of the people who do this, as Robin Hood took from the rich and gave to the poor. I’ve known a few authors in my life, and they range from middle class to upper-middle. A few more can’t quit their day jobs (usually teaching). All of them work harder than most of us, and if you saw what they earn for every copy they sell, you’d be amazed — it’s far less than you probably think. The Stephen Kings and Stephenie Meyers and J.K. Rowlings are rare exceptions.

So bully for Ellison and his 240 takedown letters. He may be fighting a losing battle, but he’s on the side of the angels. (I sent a takedown letter of my own a while back. It was a beautiful feeling.)

So, a little bloggage? Sure:

Of all the things written about Elizabeth Edwards, this is the best. And the saddest: It’s from Double X, the spinoff of the XX blog at Slate, which I’m still exploring.

As someone who wrote about the Vanessa Williams/Miss America explosion a thousand years ago, there’s something about seeing a headline like this — Pageant Double Standard? Steamy Photos of Miss Rhode Island Won’t Threaten Her Crown — that makes me feel 1,001 years old.

Dear Tom Friedman: In the past eight years my feelings about you have moved from admiration, to grudging admiration, to dislike, and now to contempt. With good reason, you greedy bastard.

We saw the preview for “Up” at the movies the other day. I can’t wait. Roger didn’t have to.

I have so much work to do this week I feel pre-emptively crippled by it. So I think I’ll do a little, right now.

Despite my best efforts, not to mention my nearly superhuman powers of procrastination, I cannot read everything on the internet, so this mustard thing nearly slipped past me. Can it be true? Did Sean Hannity actually poke the president as a fancypants elitist for having ordered “spicy mustard…Dijon mustard” on his cheeseburger? Video evidence confirms he did. Wow. I’m impressed.

It so happens I have a little experience in this area — mustard-related class issues, that is. Alan’s dad was tickled by the Grey Poupon commercials Hannity references in that segment, the one where the two Rolls-Royces pull up beside one another and the fancypants poofters inside borrow mustard. So one year for Christmas, as a joke, Alan bought him a jar. His mother took him aside later and said, “You shouldn’t have spent all that money,” having perhaps, like Sean Hannity, absorbed the wrong lesson from the ad. Of course Grey Poupon and other Dijon mustard isn’t expensive at all. It’s just…spicy. And brown. When those ads started running, when the Great Democratizing Push of Dijon Mustard began in the 1980s, mustard was yellow and that was that.

Oh, hell, you’re all graybeards like me. I don’t need to tell you this.

The Rolls-Royce ads worked the way ads are supposed to — they branded Dijon mustard as the choice of Rolls-Royce passengers everywhere, even as Kraft (its owner) was selling it to the masses for a couple bucks. I most often use it in salad dressings of all sorts. It really enlivens a potato salad, if you ask me, and it is the only choice for deviled eggs. In my opinion, Obama’s greater mustard sin was putting it, or any mustard, on a hamburger. I don’t think mustard and beef go together anywhere except on a hot dog. A friend of mine who once worked at McDonald’s told me there’s a strict order to the condiment application there, and that mustard always goes on top of the ketchup blob, because mustard, even plain old McDonald’s yellow mustard, is too strong a flavor to directly touch the meat.

In fact, if you put me in a dark room under a single hot light and sweated me, I’d lay out my whole condiment/meat philosophy: Ketchup, and only ketchup, is for hamburgers, and mustard, and only mustard, is for hot dogs. The start of grilling season at our house really begins with the ritual Sneering at Alan’s Condiment Choices for his Hebrew National, dramatized here by Clint Eastwood:

I like a single stripe of Plochman’s and a few chopped onions, m’self, although I’ve been known to use Dijon and even sweet relish, but never, ever ketchup. Some things are sacred. (Before you Chicagoans weigh in, let me just say that so-called Chicago-style dogs are gross, too — cucumbers? Tomatoes? Bitchpleeze.)

The Straight Dope tackles the mustard question with customary flair, here.

And that’s gotta be the end of it for me, today. I finally scored a new printer, and had planned to start a new Friday feature called Embarrassing Pictures, but I’ve been so busy I haven’t had time to figure out the scanning function, and the work will not let up until mid-afternoon, at which point I’m going to celebrate with a few garage sales, not an owner’s manual. Besides, I know you people love nothing better than a big discussion about nothing — thanks for all those ringtone updates early in the week, btw — so I’ll let you take it from here.

Or maybe we’ll end up talking about torture again. Or stress tests. Or whatever. All I know is, I gotta lotta copy to edit in about two hours. You have a good weekend, you Rolls-Royce driving poofters, you.

Against my better judgment, Kate and I have started watching “America’s Next Top Model” on Wednesdays. I figure it’s best to introduce potentially damaging cultural influences myself, so that she can learn the proper response to this nitwit propaganda — jeering mockery from the couch.

And so far, so good. I mean, what other possible reaction can there be to listening to that idiot panel of judges ganging up on these long-stemmed fillies for “not knowing your angles” or having “the wrong planes in your face.” As dumb as these girls are to line up for such treatment, theirs is the lesser sin compared to the rancid misogyny from the alleged adults in the room. And having never paid much attention to Tyra Banks until she was profiled in the NYT magazine not long ago — as a worthy competitor to Oprah, no less — I have only this to say: WTF? Why does she do that stupid caroling-voice thing in every other sentence? Of course, Oprah does that, too, so I see where she gets it.

I’m hoping that someday my progeny will be able to transfer these important life skills to judging photos like this. I don’t think Lucian Freud could have painted a more devastating portrait of decadence.

(It was Donald Trump, in fact, whom I first heard use the phrase “top model,” in reference to the first Mrs. T. Who never was a top model.)

I am down on celebrities these days. I turn to them for comic relief when politics gets to be too much, and what do they do? Disappoint me, every time, and yes, I’m including you, Oprah:

Chastising a celebrity is an exercise in futility. You feel like a kitten being held by the scruff of its neck, scrabbling wildly in the air without drawing blood. Pointless as this may be, though, I will try to talk some sense into Oprah Winfrey, who has decided to go into business with vaccine skeptic Jenny McCarthy.

Zingy lead, but he’s right — it’s ultimately pointless. That women like McCarthy, who not only claims childhood immunizations caused her son’s autism, but that she “cured” it through brave, “alternative” therapies, get soapboxes like this is not only unfair, but infuriating. I respect some aspects of alternative medicine. I’m not totally in bed with the AMA. (If I was, I’d hope they pay better.) But there’s an ugly undercurrent to causes like this that chaps my ass. If Jenny McCarthy can “cure” her kid’s autism, why can’t you? You must not care enough. After all, you got your kid vaccinated in the first place. I’m glad Arthur Allen, at the Slate link above, does not spare the details:

(McCarthy’s) boyfriend, actor Jim Carrey, is even more clueless. At the rally last year, I asked Carrey to give an example of a childhood vaccine we could dispense with. Tetanus, he said. That answer did not reflect a strong—or any, really—grasp of infectious diseases. Children who get tetanus—fortunately, it has been extremely rare in the United States since tetanus vaccination began in the 1920s—suffer horrendous pain, arch their backs, and go into terrible spasms before dying. It’s a very natural disease, to be sure, because the germ causing tetanus lives in dirt. It’s a germ that will be with us forever, and the only way to prevent it is through vaccination.

I wonder where these popculch dim bulbs stand on Gardasil, the cervical-cancer vaccine. In Hollywood, I’d guess you’re far more likely to know someone with HPV than autism. My guess is, they’re on board with it. Ditto with the push for an AIDS vaccine. No one is suggesting chickenpox parties for AIDS, or that pertussis and measles are no big deal, because once upon a time, everyone used to get them.

Perhaps our time spent saying the magic words along with Tyra — “four beautiful ladies stand before me, but I have only three photos in my hand” — will serve as early training on how to judge these pretty airheads who are so hard to avoid. It will be…a vaccination of sorts.

So, a little bloggage:

General Mills finds bloggers to be oh-so-much-more-compliant than pesky journalists. Ahem:

Bloggers, particularly moms, are an audience of such growing importance to General Mills that the consumer-goods company has built a formal network to feed them free products and enable them to run giveaways for their audiences.

MyBlogSpark has recruited more than 900 bloggers — over 80 percent are moms — to register to be eligible for everything from sampling campaigns to product coupons to news of a new ad campaign. General Mills plans to use the network to promote its wide portfolio of products in the food and beverage, beauty, home, electronics, health and automotive categories.

General Mills can be confident the program will fill blogs with positive reviews. One of the requirements for participation reads: “If you feel you cannot write a positive post regarding the product or service, please contact the MyBlogSpark team before posting any content.”

Or risk losing your free cereal, I’d guess.

Bright shiny objects! Get them out of my field of vision! The NYT looks at the science of concentration. (Confession: I downloaded a program called Freedom, which disables all your computer’s links to the outside world — e-mail, internet, instant messaging — and can only be turned off by rebooting the machine. Of course I haven’t used it yet. Give up Google? How would I live? No wonder I can’t write anything of consequence.)

But I can write this. And now it’s off to the gym. Have a swell day, all.

Over the years, I’ve gradually lost interest in the Kennedys. My sub-niche of boomers was a little behind the curve for full Kennedy worship — I was 10 when Bobby died — and so even though I remember them, I was a little young to be defined by them. The Kennedys of my formative years will always be the third-generation crowd of cousins, the heroin addicts, party boys/girls, earnest government functionaries and occasional congressfolk of the ’80s. That was the generation that proved no matter how remarkable, even great families have a distinct shelf life. The pluck and ambition that launched the dynasty gets bred out of the line, money and privilege and divorce take their toll, and finally you’re left with Michael Corleone at yet another family party, sneering at Fredo to control his wife. Or the Bush brothers — Neil, Jeb and George. Your choice.

This is not a bad thing, I’m happy to say. America is still very much a meritocracy, and the last thing we need is a royal family, as much as we’ve tried to make the Kennedys our very own.

I also understand that Edward Klein, despite his fancy-pants New York Times-heavy resume, has a stake in keeping the Kennedys on their pedestal, the better to squeeze another book out of them. Even keeping all this in mind, it was possible to read his account, in Vanity Fair, of the Kennedys in 2008-09, confronting the imminent death of Ted, etc., and nearly choke on a passage or three:

Soon a dozen or so members of the extended Kennedy family circle—the senator’s friends, aides, political associates, and hangers-on—were all crammed into the hospital room, and the atmosphere in his V.I.P. suite began to resemble that of an Irish wake or, perhaps more accurately, one of those medieval paintings that depict the death of a great prince. Should it come now, the senator’s death would not be sudden and violent, like those of his three brothers—Joe junior in a plane accident during World War II, Jack and Bobby at the hands of assassins. Rather, it would be like those “good deaths” during the Middle Ages, which were performed, in the words of the French historian Georges Duby, “as on a stage before many spectators, many auditors attentive to every gesture, to every word, eager for the dying man to show what he is worth.”

In that solemn setting, almost the first thing on everyone’s mind was who would lead the Kennedy family after the senator was gone.

The next time I’m in the hospital room of a gravely ill person, I’m going to have to remember this: I’m not in a hospital room, I’m in a medieval painting. That’s necessary, however, to set up the mind-reading second graf, where the assembled are not concerned about the health of the guy in the bed but the far more important matter of who will lead the Kennedy family after he is gone. I don’t know what’s involved with leading a family with 2,836 first cousins — maybe booking weekend use of the Hyannisport house — but then, I’m a pleb. When I visit someone in the hospital, I’m just in a hospital.

It gets better. After Caroline is presented with her uncle’s “dying wish” that she take over the Kennedy chair in the U.S. Senate, well, we know how that turned out:

“Caroline was humiliated; she had expected that the appointment would automatically be hers,” said the Kennedy-family adviser. “In her mind, it wasn’t just that it had been her uncle Robert’s Senate seat, or any other aspect of her legacy; it was that she is a constitutional scholar who has helped secure funding for the New York City school system, that she’s acted as an adviser to her uncle, and that she’s a star of the Democratic Party. It honestly never occurred to her that the seat wouldn’t be given to her immediately. When Governor Paterson failed to react, and made her wait, she seethed.”

Caroline called a number of Democratic power brokers in Washington and Albany, and during those calls she vented her rage. This was a side of Caroline that few people had ever seen, or even suspected. According to one veteran lawyer who spoke with her, Caroline sounded like the old Bobby Kennedy—loud, harsh, and grating. (Caroline Kennedy did not respond to a request for comment.)

Yes, it occurs to me that people talk in this account exactly the way they do in National Enquirer stories. I guess that’s another upside of not being a Kennedy: You don’t have “family advisers” who whisper in the ears of would-be court biographers.

The news that comes from this passage is that Caroline was eventually called back from the brink of loud/harsh/grating by her children, who sat her down and told her she was being a real bitch, thus proving that accusations of bitch-hood are still kryptonite to a certain sort of woman. I’m with Tina Fey, m’self: Bitches get things done. Bitch is the new black. But I suppose, if it proves to a Kennedy that they still live in the United States, it’s not such a bad thing.

The story ends with some silly detail about Ted wearing a hat. Yeesh. (And at this point I think we should save a few of our commenters the carpal-tunnel stress and say: Chappaquiddick, Chappaquiddick, Chappaquiddick. Drunk, drunk, drunk. Teddy, Teddy, Teddy. Stipulated!)

OK, then.

Speaking of politics and dynasties and cancer, I’m sure glad I’m not John Edwards at the moment. How sorry do I feel for him? Listen to the sound the world’s tiniest violin and its terribly sad song. Hell hath no fury, etc. Although you gotta love a woman who tells Oprah “it’s complicated” when asked if she loves her husband. Hell, yes, pretty boy.

As someone pointed out low in the comments yesterday, the CDC came to my rescue, advising schools to stop treating H1N1 like bubonic plague and go ahead and stay open. And so yesterday’s mini-break was all they got, and everyone went back today. May I just say: Whew. It wasn’t a wasted day — we went down to Mexicantown for Cinco de Mayo lunch and had a chat about why middle-school rumors about who actually had the swine flu are evil, counterproductive and most likely just plain wrong. Of course, stopping a middle-school rumor train is pretty much impossible, although it’s a pleasure to take them apart. “My sister knows definitely who it was.” Really? How? “Well, she’s pretty much sure. Because there’s this kid who was sick.” And so on.

OK, we’re at 1,000 words and 20 minutes to 10. Time to start the engines and try to have a productive day of it.

Well, guess who got an automated phone call at 5 a.m. canceling school for the rest of the week? Yes, H1N1 has penetrated our leafy suburb, a “probable” case necessitating the closing of Kate’s middle school until, God help us all, Monday. That’s unless it turns out the kid in question doesn’t have H1N1, in which case it may reopen sooner.

Which means this happened in our house this morning:

* I went back to sleep with plans to stay under the covers until 8 o’clock, an unimaginable luxury;
* The phone rang at 6:50 a.m., from a classmate wondering if we’d heard;
* The phone rang at 7:18 a.m., ditto;
* My conscience began stabbing me a few minutes later, reminding me this is breaking news and I allegedly have a website dealing in that very perishable commodity.

And now I have a kid on my hands the rest of the week.

So that was my morning, part 1. Did I mention I’m going back to the gym with my still-tender knee, too? I am, and you can’t keep me here.

So I’ll be back later in the day. You kids find something to keep you occupied until then.

I have a new plan for retirement: To live somewhere I can ride my bicycle 365 days a year (366 in leap years). I know this boils down to “a place that is unpleasantly hot for a large chunk of that time,” so the plan needs work. But few things make me happier, I realized yesterday, than saddling up for a quick trip to the butcher three blocks away. If only we hadn’t engineered modern life to do away with much of its moderate exercise; maybe the murder rate would be lower.

Detroit is a town that, like Los Angeles, was built to accommodate the automobile, and friends, it ain’t aging well. Every few months I feel the need to say this again, but it bears repeating: This is one ugly town. Not just the decimated city, but also its suburbs, and it’s at times like this I’m ever so glad we chose the Pointes, because it was platted before walking was seen as a sign of weakness, and at least we have the lake. There’s nothing like rolling out one of the big through avenues like Gratiot, six lanes or so, flowing fast and free because it’s at maybe 50 percent of its carrying capacity even at rush hour, while one ugly storefront after another goes past. How does anyone make a living in vacuum-cleaner repair, you wonder, when just finding your store means you have to buck traffic and hunt out a five-digit address that may or may not be on the building? You can almost mark the point, as you drive out from the core, when the idea of the strip mall took hold — a little more setback in return for easier parking out front, six little shops replaced by three larger anchors, if you can call a chain video store an anchor, plus the inevitable Lee Nails. (When was it decreed that all nail shops be run by Asians? How do these ethnic connections to market sectors get made? Is it the same group that says, “OK, Chaldeans — you got the party stores. Jews? Jewelry for you. Macedonians? I hope you like restaurants.” And so on.)

Urban planners point out the inevitable a lot (perhaps to disguise how often “planning” doesn’t got as, um, planned), and say the trend toward dense urban centers is real and has legs, and the sooner individual municipalities start accommodating it, the better. Walkable, bikeable, parking-out-of-sight — this is the future. Turns out people want to rub elbows with their fellow man, after all, preferably in a farmer’s market. We’ll see. But I sure like my bicycle. In about an hour I’m going out to make my cop-shop rounds on it — it’ll be two hours of mostly riding, covering 12 miles or so, work/workout all in one. This is living.

(It helps that people don’t expect reporters to be much more than sweaty and unpleasant.)

So how was your weekend? Mine was fine. We got the boat in the water on Saturday with no arguments or even much yelling, showing that it only takes a few years of practice to get the our routine down, plus the help of a couple of able souls at the marina. The lake is a foot higher this year, a happy turn of events that’s been in the news quite a bit of late. A new study by the International Joint Commission (a group virtually unknown outside the Great Lakes) says the drastically lower levels of recent years are a natural phenomenon, caused in part by ice jams that scoured the St. Clair River bottom — nature’s dredge, in other words. An interesting theory, but at this point all I care about it how nice it is to have a little more water out there.

And so boating season begins. At least four, effectively five, and as many as six months of sailing lies ahead. In other words, as much winter as I just bitched about. Life really is binary.

Bloggage? Not much, buth this:

One of Justice David Souter’s clerks reveals the man you don’t know in Slate, a man who would rather read by the last two foot-candles of winter light than turn on a lamp. Now I feel bad for having made fun of him:

Why would a man who can understand Grokster read by the window rather than turn on a light? Souter has a characteristic New England thriftiness and a distrust of luxury that verges on the spartan. He can keep a suit for decades, and he gently mocked me and my fellow clerks for wearing overcoats in the winter, claiming that his view was shared by that other great Yankee justice, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Souter is also deeply unpretentious. It would never occur to him that because he is a Supreme Court justice he’s entitled to waste a bit of the taxpayers’ electricity. (He once wrote me a note on a napkin I’d left on my desk rather than using a new sheet of paper.)

Souter’s current position on the left wing of the court owes much more to movement by the court and the country than to any lurch on his part. The current court, after all, has seven Republican appointees and has been on a steady rightward drift since the Reagan years. The Republican Party has, too. I think Souter is indeed in many ways a Republican; it’s just that his sort of Republican no longer really exists.

Remember those? I do. I miss ’em.

OK, off to edit my syllabus and fire up the NewsCycle. Have a great week, all.

ADDED: Because Brian brought it up last week — either here or in an e-mail, I don’t recall — an interview with Lenore Skenazy, who advocates off-leash child-rearing. Interesting.

A few suggestions for President Obama’s first Supreme Court nomination:

Bill Ayers (thanks, Gasman);
His wife, the lovely and unrepentant domestic terrorist Bernadine Dohrn;
Squeaky Fromme (after a presidential pardon);
Some homeless guy who now forges signatures for ACORN.

The possibilities are endless, really. I’m putting my money on “a moderate Democrat with XX chromosomes.”

They say David Souter, the retiring justice, hates Washington and aches to get back to New Hampshire. “They” have to say it because, as usual, Souter says nothing. When he was nominated I recall a Mark Russell song about him, called “The Man Who Has No Footprints.” I know there are many people in this country who delight in court-watching, people who in another time would have made excellent Kremlinologists, spending months analyzing body language and position in the May Day photograph, but I’m not one of them. I think their proceedings should be on television, too. All it takes is one Clarence Thomas to queer you on the idea of the Gang of Nine as some sort of council of divine mandarins.

Souter must be insane. I can hardly blame him for hating Washington, but on his current work schedule he can enjoy his New Hampshire home four months of the year, the best four months (in New Hampshire, anyway). The guy must love winter, I guess. Once he’s retired he can go on leaving no footprints up there, year-round. Nothing like Vermont and New Hampshire for privacy protection. Solzhenitsyn found it a nice, cold, media-free simulacrum of Russia. You wonder why more of these camera-shunning Hollywood ninnies don’t buy houses up there — it’s certainly pretty enough. On my sole trip to Vermont, nearly oh-my-god 30 years ago, I recall: Hardly any freeways, every town a small one. (Montpelier is smaller than Grosse Pointe Woods.) Very scenic, general stores, the whole bit. New Hampshire, which we drove across to get to Vermont — much the same, plus an valued-out-of-proportion primary.

Well, godspeed, Justice Souter. The best job in the world, followed by the cushiest retirement. Enjoy it.

Good to see the outstanding Nina Totenberg broke the story. For some media outlets, covering the court is sort of like being on the court — a lifetime appointment. No one can say she hasn’t left big footprints, however. She’s going to be a hard act to follow.

From her report:

Rather than fly home, Souter preferred to drive. He also resisted other forms of contemporary technology and convenience, holding out against the cell phone and e-mail and continuing to write his opinions and dissents in longhand, using a fountain pen.

Another technological stick-in-the-mud! What is it about writing that makes people so loathe to change their ways? (I don’t know how anyone writes in longhand, anymore. My brain moves so much faster than my pen these days it would be like running a race with one foot in a bucket of cement. I can barely write a check anymore.) On the other hand, good for him for spurning e-mail. I watched “Rachel Getting Married” last week. My favorite line, from the addict Kim: “She never responded to my amends e-mail. I hate it when people won’t meet you halfway.” A couple years ago I told a friend her ex-husband had gotten a big job he’d been after for a while. “I’ll have to send him a congratulatory e-mail,” she said. I replied: “Yes, for when only the least you can do will do, the congratulatory e-mail.”

I’m sure you lawyer types will bat this subject around in the comments, so have at it. Please, ladies and gentleman, no hitting below the belt.

NPR had a a piece on Snowball the dancing cockatoo last night, which prompted me to look up his YouTube collection. This being NPR, the story was on research into whether animals really can coordinate movement to music, but me being me, I was mainly interested in the yuks. Snowball’s opening act was to a Backstreet Boys track, but I really prefer his interpretive routine to Stevie Nicks.

I’ve always liked birds like this, although I’d never own one. When Kate was a toddler I used to take her to a local pet store where they had about half a dozen parrots, macaws and cockatoos, none for sale, that talked and interacted with customers without fail. My favorite was Smoky, an African gray, who loved to make this sound: A descending whistle, a muffled explosion and then, “Bombs away!” It reminded me of a parrot in a Carl Hiaasen novel, who’d been liberated from a drug dealer’s home after its owner was shot to death. DEA agents taught it to say, “Duck, shithead!”

A little TGIF bloggage? OK:

Did you know the Keep Your Distance Bug Vacuum not only exists, but is a big seller? Now you do. SkyMall catalogs: The middle-class man’s Archie McPhee.

Finally, if you missed Coozledad’s most excellent description of a day on the farm yesterday, you missed something that prompted a writer with a national profile to e-mail and say, “I’d read a whole book of stories like that.” Me, too, but Coozledad says he lacks the motivation. As a consolation prize, he sends along a picture of the farm’s newest resident, Bodankey:

I can’t top this. Have a great weekend.