I’ve spent so much time on this blog complaining about other columnists, I should probably send a little love to the good ones. So indulge me:

Who are your favorite columnists, Nance?

There have been many over the years. I always liked Mike Harden, although he was sometimes uneven. (As are all columnists.) Carl Hiaasen had some gems, but was mostly Florida-centric, and so the bulk of his newspaper work was lost on me. Dave Barry, of course, but only in the early, funny ones. (That’s a joke.) Gene Weingarten. But through it all there was one guy I read religiously. His weekly column moved on the wire on Mondays, and I would actually wait for it, start checking around the time it usually moved, be sad if it wasn’t on time.

Pete Dexter.

Dexter is sort of famous in journalism circles. He wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News when that paper was unique among American newspapers, a tabloid with a real sense of humor about itself, and I guess he wrote your typical big-city newspaper column. Then he fell in with Randall “Tex” Cobb, whom most of you know as the evil biker in “Raising Arizona,” and the two of them got into a pretty serious bar fight. As Wikipedia tells the tale [citation needed]:

(Dexter) began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in which thirty drunken Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats and upset by a recent column, beat the writer severely.

Now that’s what you call reader feedback.

Anyway, Dexter spent a lot of time in the hospital, and then recovering at home, and somewhere along the line he relocated to Sacramento and then to Seattle, and there were novels and screenplays and a National Book Award, and this is about the time I started reading him. I think the first piece was in the mid-’80s, for Playboy, about a guy at the Philadelphia Inquirer who rebelled against being screwed over by management. He did so by erecting a puppet theater on his desk, and every so often a new puppet would appear that bore a strong resemblance to a top editor at the Inquirer. He arranged them in tableaux; my favorite was one where all the puppets knelt before the editor puppet. The Inquirer was, of course, a Knight-Ridder paper, and I was at another K-R property, one where the BS skills were quite as well-honed as they were in Philly, but I recognized it the way I do my own bedroom. It was a perfectly told story of life in a certain sort of newsroom at a certain sort of time, and I fell in love.

Anyway, over the years, Dexter wrote some of my favorite columns ever, but the best of them all was about Mike Tyson after one of the Holyfield losses, a grand tale of tragedy rendered in 650 words or so, and I’ve been waiting years to see it anthologized. Just the other day I learned that Dexter’s had an anthology out for a solid year and a half, and boy do I feel dumb. So I rush down to the library and get a copy, only to flip it open and discover there’s no table of contents, no index, no division by (or even acknowledgment of) publication, no nothing. The first column is 1 and the last one is 82, and if I’m going to find Mike Tyson, I’m going to have to start at the beginning and read right through to the end, and…

…OK. I’m starting to see the reasoning here.

But I have a bad feeling. I have flipped and flipped and flipped through “Paper Trails,” and Tyson’s name hasn’t jumped out at me. Neither has the word “puppet.”

A few years ago, I went into the Sacramento Bee archive (Dexter’s home base at the time) and bought the Tyson column, and ran it here on the blog, a total copyright violation, for which I received the following angry response from the paper’s lawyers: Silence. No one reads this blog.

But I noticed something. I had that column printed out and pinned to a wall in my cubicle at work, and whenever I felt in need of inspiration I’d take it like a vitamin, so after a while I got to know its phrasing pretty well. And when I saw the SacBee version, something was different. He’d described the people who flocked around Tyson after his success as “pimps, whores and gangsters,” a phrase some helpful editor recast as “men.” But remember: It’s the internet that’s killing newspapers.

[Long pause.]

OK, this is going to bug me all day. I just went into my hard-copy archives — the CD-ROM backups I did of this site back before it was a blog — and found the file on the first try. Here was the edited phrase:

By the time he went away, Tyson had replaced D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney with an assembly of men who are there to this day and will be there as long as the smell of money is in the air.

That’s a real copy-editor’s trim, that. You can sit with one all day and explain how “D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney” and “pimps, whores and gangsters” are parallel phrases, that they match rhythmically, that making this change is like playing “shave and a haircut” and then “fifteen dollars and forty-three cents, plus applicable taxes.” They don’t hear it. All they hear is some supervising editor dressing them down because an old lady called and is canceling her subscription after needing her smelling salts. Also, one of the pimps, whores or gangsters might sue.

Rant over.

Anyway, this is what I’ll be reading on the plane.

Bloggage:

Things I just learned: Coozledad has a blog! (Suggestion: Disable the SnapShots preview. Irritating.)

However, I think we have a job for Coozledad’s bull: U.S. exports cigarettes, bras, bull semen to Iran. I had a neighbor in Fort Wayne who bought bull semen, to inseminate his herd of comely Black Angus heifers. It arrived in straws frozen in liquid nitrogen, sometimes transported by a pretty vet student from MSU, and if you’re thinking that’s the setup for a dirty movie, why shame on you.

I’ve lived so long, I remember how Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen met. (She sent a nude photo of herself to his hotel room. How romantic.) So I guess it’s not surprising she would have a boob job on live national television. In Germany. During prime time. I guess they don’t have HBO there yet.

Off to do paying work. Enjoy your lovely summer day, if you have one.

The other day I was listening to a story on NPR, about people stuck driving the guzzliest gas guzzlers, and what they were doing about it. I was struck by one man’s interview. He drove a Ford Excursion, the biggest SUV evahr, the station-wagon equivalent of an F-350 SuperDuty pickup truck. The man explained that he needed an extra-large vehicle; he and his wife had five children between them, “so we had no choice” but to buy the Excursion.

Five plus two is seven. That’s how many seats he needed. By my reckoning, that means he could have chosen just about any minivan, and a large number of other SUVs with third-row seating, nearly all of which get better gas mileage than the Excursion. But he had no choice.

Of course, as all adults know, there’s always a choice. It’s just difficult to make sometimes. For instance, yesterday I could have chosen to have something lean and protein-y and vegetable-heavy for lunch, but instead I had a cheese quesadilla. Then I had two Pepperidge Farm Bordeaux cookies for dessert. If only it had been mandatory, but it was a choice. Some of you are feeling smug and superior, the same way I felt about Mr. Excursion. If it makes you feel any better, I went fiber-heavy for dinner (black beans) and took a long bike ride in penance. That was a choice, too.

I hate choices. I especially hate the way they’ve become the behavioral equipment of fiber. Been in an elementary school lately? “Make good choices” is the new “eat from all four food groups.” Earlier this year Kate was scolded by a teacher for the following: A boy threw down a book, and it took a funny bounce and hit a girl in the leg. She gave out a loud, cartoon-y howl of pain, hopping around on one foot, and Kate laughed. Laughing, the teacher said, was “a poor choice.” I wonder what George Carlin would do with that one.

We rail about wanting more control over our world, which means more choices. And then the vacuum cleaner dies, and we go to Sears. First we choose a price range, then we choose a brand, then we choose bagless or not, onboard tools or not, upright or canister, until our heads spin and we howl with pain and go eeny-meeny-miney-moe. There have been times, while buying a household appliance, that I wished I lived in the old Soviet Union. I would have happily gotten on a list and stood in line for five hours if, at the other end of the line, there was one vacuum cleaner, and the choice was: Take it or leave it.

Grumble, grumble.

OK, bloggage:

A particularly smelly Metro Mayhem today: Boy, 1, shot during fight over glasses. Eyeglasses, that is. (Huge, heavy sigh.) And they were probably knockoffs.

Christopher Hitchens speaks ill of the dead, and boy did they deserve it. Jesse Helms, of course.

Oh, and if you have time, prepare to waste it now: Look at what everyone’s uploading to Flickr, in real time, on a rotating globe. Don’t blame me when nothing gets done. (HT: Vince.)

Now, I choose to go to work and write more mediocre prose. Leave a better comment. (It shouldn’t be hard.)

A few short items this morning before I start packing for the Christian Burning Man:

We’ve been visiting our lake cottage in Branch County less and less over the years, and perhaps you’d like to know why. OK.

Our next-door neighbor there, who bought the cottage built by Alan’s uncle, tore it down this year. No harm in that — it’s small and had a powder-post beetle infestation at one point. It probably needed doing. Of course we knew they’d put up something much bigger, but we were hopeful it would be, er, in character with the neighborhood. They decided on a prefab Swiss chalet. Other houses on the strip had been brought there in pieces, so there was a precedent. Can they get the truck to the lot without major damage? Oh sure, no problem.

The chalet went in this week. Their truck driver backed his semi across our front lawn and without so much as an oops, flattened two 10-year-old river birches Alan planted when Kate was a baby. Number of profuse apologies that have arrived at this address, or that of my sister-in-law, in the interim: Zero. Simple acknowledgment? None.

That’s it, in a nutshell.

We’ve told Spriggy that if he’d care to entrust us with his share of Leona Helmsley’s $8 billion, we’ll take very good care of it. Jeez, what a bitter old crone — $12 million for her own Maltese wasn’t enough, I suppose. I love dogs as much as you do, maybe more, and let me tell you: $12 million for a single dog deeply misunderstands the nature and needs of all dogs. You can argue with the foundation setup — I suppose there’s always someone who needs to hear the spay/neuter argument again — but at its heart it’s the work of a true misanthrope, in love with the poochies but not a dime for humanity. You know what I think? I think it’s because LA Mary couldn’t get her the strawberry preserves she wanted for her hotels. It queered her on two-legged creatures once and for all.

Inside baseball: Hank Stuever on why Clay Felker mattered:

Appreciate Clay Felker? It’s all anyone ever did, who wanted anything to do with magazines. Was it emulation, or was it envy, or was it a fantasy — working for the perfect place, the perfect editor, at the perfect time?

When I started freelancing, I had a simple goal: To do as much work as possible for editors who could help me improve. Needless to say, I never met Clay Felker.

Metro mayhem: Someone stole the copper plumbing from one of the city’s most visible landmarks. A six-figure repair bill for a few bucks in scrap metal.

John Scalzi printed one of his famous sunset pictures and included his cat, so I LOL’d it. No one will get it:

Bonus: Stay at Scalzi’s for a little perspective on the military service/electability track record.

That should keep you. I’ll be in and out until I leave for the airport, so, y’know, whatever. Oh, and thanks for all the SF recommendations, folks. I neglected to mention, this trip is basically a rerun of our honeymoon lo those many years ago. (Alan: “You sure you don’t want a diamond ring?” Me: “I want a two-week honeymoon more.”) You brought back memories and gave me some new ideas. You guys are the best.

A small task for you today, my little fuzzy peaches, at reader request.

Let’s solve the health-care crisis. To quote a well-known public figure: Yes, we can.

I ask because I received an e-mail from a reader last week, with a link to a story with this non-inflammatory headline — Canadian Health Care We So Envy Lies In Ruins, Its Architect Admits. Ahem:

As this presidential campaign continues, the candidates’ comments about health care will continue to include stories of their own experiences and anecdotes of people across the country: the uninsured woman in Ohio, the diabetic in Detroit, the overworked doctor in Orlando, to name a few. But no one will mention Claude Castonguay — perhaps not surprising because this statesman isn’t an American and hasn’t held office in over three decades.

Castonguay is credited as the man who first conceived of Quebec’s provincial single-payer system, which eventually spread across the country and became the Canadian system we know today. In a story that begins by implicitly scorning the anecdote as a public-policy driver, the anecdote of Claude Castonguay (what a wonderful name) is given great weight, although his ideas about how to fix the Canadian system boil down to a pretty tame set of recommendations:

Castonguay advocates contracting out services to the private sector, going so far as suggesting that public hospitals rent space during off-hours to entrepreneurial doctors. He supports co-pays for patients who want to see physicians. Castonguay, the man who championed public health insurance in Canada, now urges for the legalization of private health insurance.

In my night-shift editing I read half a dozen pieces like this a week. Everyone has an idea how to fix American health care, but no one has the idea. Personally, I don’t believe the system is fixable in the state it is now. But I’m always willing to read one more idea. My favorite is the Wall Street Journal, which has some of the best health-care reporting in the world, but a whack editorial page bought and paid for by the American Medical Association. And my single favorite piece on that page in recent months was last year sometime, suggesting we could all learn something from the Amish, who don’t believe in health insurance, and who use such radical cost-containment practices as chipping in for one another and, my personal favorite, dickering.

Oh, how I can’t wait for the day when I dicker with my doctor. I bet he can’t, either. Unmentioned in the admiring WSJ editorial are the other documented Amish health-care cost-containment practices, which include alternative medicine (herbalists, midwives, etc.), bus trips to Mexico for the Third World option and, frequently, quackery. The Fort Wayne Journal Gazette had a pretty good series a few years ago, where a reporter followed one of these caravans. Among the anecdotes was a woman who’d had a serious ankle injury requiring reconstructive orthopedic surgery, and the incision stubbornly refused to heal, with chronic infections. (Dr. Nance would prescribe a hospital stay with heavy antibiotics to knock down the infection, followed by a rigorous home-care program emphasizing keeping the wound clean, with instruction for all her caregivers. Oh, and diabetes testing. This is just off the top of my head.) Her Mexican doctor advised removing all the surgical screws on the theory they were causing her infections, followed by poultices. I don’t know where the Amish woman is now. My guess is either pushing up daisies, or coping with life as a 19th-century amputee.

(A further note, also from the WSJ: Dickering doesn’t solve everything. Also, let’s recall the tragic case of the Amish Cook, who dropped dead at 66 from an aortic aneurysm, diagnosed by her herbalist as an iron deficiency, IIRC.)

I don’t mean to be flip, I really don’t. I’m glad the reader sent the link along. I know there’s no simple answer to this problem, or any answer. But here’s what I know:

A health-care system where a poor kid with asthma has to take three buses and a subway to his clinic doctor, and a doctor’s wife can get spa-level care while recovering from her breast augmentation — is not a good system.

A health-care system that rewards doctors more for choosing dermatology as a specialty (with all those lucrative, pay-out-of-deep-pockets anti-aging patients) than primary care (with all those poor kids with asthma) — is not a good system.

A health-care system where insurance is connected to your job, with no contingency for job loss other than COBRA — is not a good system.

There is no perfect system, and there might not even be a very good one. Life is a terminal disease, and some of us have trouble facing this fact. There may be no way to balance the truly miraculous technological and pharmaceutical advances that are driving the cost of health care into the stratosphere with the fact hardly anyone can pay for it. But maybe there’s a better way. This is your job today, little commenters of mine: Let’s fix it! You know we can!

And if you’re not up to it, in the bloggage, two internet-related stories about the campaign:

From Saturday’s WashPost, a woman offended by the Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail tries to track it back to its source, with more success than you’d think.

And in Sunday’s NYT, a piece on DIY attack ads by freelancers.

Both worth your time. And just for laughs:

A bunch of white kids fight the “Barack Hussein Obama” thing by taking “Hussein” as their own middle names, an “I am Spartacus” sort of protest. I am Salman Rushdie!

I learned of George Carlin’s demise from an e-mailer who used the seven dirty words as the subject line. (Good to know my spam filter’s every bit the ace I suspected it was.) I’m sorry to hear the news. Carlin was a genius. He may still have been at the end, but the last HBO special I saw wasn’t very funny — he came across as bitter and angry, which can work, but didn’t this time.

The thing is, I’d just heard him in an NPR interview, and he was hysterical, so I don’t know what happened. He was famous for his dirty-words routine and could work blue with the best of them, but he always did it askance, light-heartedly — the biggest laugh in the seven-words routine is just two of them: “Tater tits.”

It’s early, and I can’t quite think yet — maybe I’ll have more to add later. But this is an open thread for George, the first hippie stand-up comic. RIP.

I’ve been reading the news from the Mississippi basin.

(That sounds like the first line of a bad blues song, doesn’t it? Been readin’ the news from the Mississipp’ / Say the levees there done los’ they grip. Maybe we need some other music.)

Anyway, I’ve been paying attention to the situation along America’s mightiest river, and I’ve come away with an overwhelming impression:

I’ve read all this before.

As most of you know, I used to live in Fort Wayne, Indiana. Fort Wayne is laughingly called the Summit City — it’s near the continental divide no one takes pictures from, and it really was the highest point in the Wabash-Erie canal system. Now that’s sort of a joke name, because this is a summit that floods. A lot:

That’s from the summer 2003 flood. Fort Wayne had a big flood in 1982. The president stopped by to pretend to throw sandbags, and my newspaper won a Pulitzer Prize. (This was before I got there, I am required to mention.) That was the Flood of the Century, Until the Next One. There was flooding in 1985 and, it seemed, every year or three afterward. Every year, when the waters receded, something would be done to make sure it never happened again. The Army Corps of Engineers was permitted to denude a pretty urban riverbank and replace the sycamores and cottonwoods with riprap. Houses in the flood plain were bought and razed. Chins were stroked, opinions aired. And every few years: Another flood.

I will say this: Fort Wayne city officials really knew their floods. They had it down pat — what streets would flood at what river level, how to scramble a sandbag crew, where to deploy them. But floods can be tricksy things. That one in 2003 — that was a summer flood, a single-river flood (the city has three), in neighborhoods that never flooded before, due to a weather system much like the one plaguing the Midwest this month. Sixteen inches of rain fell in the St. Marys River watershed in about a week, and the next thing you knew? You guessed it.

Here’s what I learned about floods: They are nature’s most boring natural disaster. No TV-reporter standups in the howling wind, no piles of wreckage to pose next to — it’s approximately like watching a toilet overflow. It’s coming up it’s coming up it’s coming up oh man there it goes. Worst is when it recedes. The smell, oy you can’t believe. And while a hurricane or tornado takes your wedding album and scatters it to the winds, a flood covers it with raw sewage, along with your carpet, your drywall and everything else. Nothing like a wedding album that smells like poop. Now there’s a metaphor.

The same stories get written every time. The NYT’s Dan Barry discovered the sandbag crews, a story that’s been done approximately 12 million times in Fort Wayne. I could write one now from my own mental boilerplate:

They came from neighborhoods that still stand high above the rising waters, to help those that face inundation. They park their cars outside the city’s garage on Lafayette Street and go inside, where they are assigned to crews to fill, close and stack 25-pound sandbags on dump trucks. Some will follow the trucks to Lakeside, where the bags will be used to strengthen dikes along the…

See? It’s like I can do it in my sleep now.

Another story we wrote over and over was the “Fort Wayne responds to flooding elsewhere” story, almost always pitched as a “our hearts are so big, and we’ve been there ourselves, and so we help others.” Carnack-like, I predict I can find one in one of the dailies in the last week, and…

…whaddaya know, I was right:

The Fort Wayne area, one known for its giving spirit, has now sent 20 Red Cross volunteers to flood-stricken areas in southern and central Indiana, Iowa and, by today, perhaps Illinois, said Amanda Banks, spokeswoman for the local chapter.

I covered the Iowa flooding of 1993, a trip the photographer and I called the Day Late and Dollar Short Tour, easily one of the most misbegotten reporting trips I’ve been on, but I’ll spare you the details. We arrived in Iowa several days after the water had receded, and wrote about the cleanup, which was awful. Some houses had been inundated to their third row of shingles. One guy showed me his washing machine, which had stood in an alcove off the kitchen. It was full to the lid with filthy water. We interviewed a parachuted-in salesman selling cleanup systems — a variation on bleach, basically. We were the last reporters to arrive, and we got the last stories, along with a six-pack of canned drinking water, donated by the closest Anheuser-Busch brewery. Apparently they can convert the line to water-only for just these occasions.

Good times, good times.

Anyway, sorry about all those people in their own personal watery hell. If you really want to help, donate a dumpster. They’re going to need about a million of them. Also: Slate explains the sandbag. Because, you know, it needed doing.

So, bloggage:

Sorry I Missed Your Party, a blog that rounds up other people’s party pictures from Flickr. You will fear for your country.

It’s the summer solstice! And I’m about to spend the next 48 hours on this insane movie challenge. < last minute cold feet > What have I done? What have I gotten myself into? < / last minute cold feet> Play amongst yourselves, and I’ll see you if and when I return.

Proof that a woman’s worst enemy is almost always another woman:

As a distant observer of fashion, but a close student of the semiotics of female power, I am a little puzzled by Michelle (Obama’s) frequent choice of sleeveless dresses at official moments. She is an attractive woman, whose height gives her a commanding presence, and it is clear that she puts effort into toning those upper arms. So the dresses look good; but this is not about pretty. She is in her forties, and the sleeveless sheath is the province of younger women, and/or socialites; it works for cocktails or a barbeque, but not church or work. (And yes, she is clearly channeling Jackie Kennedy. But Jackie’s clothes — and everyone’s in the early 1960s — were a lot more grown up and sophisticated.) The sleeveless bit seems too casual, and maybe a little too revealing for the role she is currently playing, and the one to which she aspires. Successful First Ladies — and here Laura Bush is a good model — manage to convey a careful mix of distance and familiarity.

Meow! Maybe Mrs. O. wants to demonstrate her lack of Kill Whitey tattoos. (Note that I am not so catty as to reproduce a photo of Mrs. Bush in one of her fun, distantly familiar outfits. But TBogg did.)

I expect we’re in for a great deal more of this. As a frumpy resident of the frumpiest part of the heartland, I only recently learned the meaning of “style” when used as a verb. My daughter’s friends, all cable-TV subscribers, “put together outfits” for one another, holding them up on hangers with necklaces and accessories draped over them. “Who are you wearing” is not a question for Jame Gumb anymore.

But you know what I like about the way Mrs. Obama dresses? That it looks like she does it herself. Maybe she doesn’t, but there’s a certain pleasant simplicity to her style, like she has a closet full of good, classic clothes and flattering accessories that she could put on in the dark and still stand an 80 percent chance of looking fine. I’m tired of all this batshit Pat Field “Sex and the City” sartorial lunacy. Michelle Obama wears her clothes; they don’t wear her.

In other words, she doesn’t need Andre Leon Talley, and if she has half the brain she took to Princeton, she’ll keep a few million miles between the two of them.

I’m always running out of here early on Tuesdays and Thursdays, but after weeks of dragging myself through Rob’s 10 a.m. torture sessions at the gym, I’m finally feeling — if not seeing — some results. So I’m giving it priority. But I’ll be back later, to fill out the ideas for the last two genres in the DWIFF challenge — mockumentary and chick flick. (Groan.)

I know you guys have come to expect something fresh and new every day here, but the day’s tasks are piling up like cordwood and something’s gotta give.

What’s more, NN.C is taking a brief road trip to a primitive land with no wi-fi, and will not be back until Monday. I’ll leave the doors unlocked here, and y’all can play. Something we might talk about:

More discussion of Obama’s bike helmet.

Habeus corpus — not dead yet.

You’ve all seen that human-ovulation-caught-on-film thing, right? Well, if not, here it is. Shy little ovum!

Mischa Barton: Why?

Finally, a dispatch from our Wisconsin correspondent, in the western suburbs of Milwaukee:

i spent a lovely 15 minutes or so in the basement today with the boys while we waited for the latest tornado siren to stop howling. i’m not complaining, mind you. in greendale’s R section, close to the root river, water levels were up to the bottom of the stop signs. a small town south of here is just waiting for its dam to break–it’s not a question of if it happens, just when. westbound I-94 to madison is closed because one of the rivers is flowing onto the freeway now. (earlier this week, they closed that stretch down and parked semis loaded with sand at regular intervals to provide downward force to offset the upward force from the floodwaters directly beneath.)

but: not complaining. our basement, for the moment, is dry. still, we feel a little shellshocked.

Stay dry, Deb. Good thoughts to all of you caught in the deluge. Me, I’ll be back late Monday/early Tuesday.

EDIT: Oh, this is nice — Ashley Morris, David Simon and tomorrow’s commencement speech at DePaul, from the ChiTrib.

At 5:20 a.m., my neighbor goes out.

“Vroom!” goes the full-size SUV under my bedroom window, open to the cooling breezes of late spring.

At 5:30 a.m., someone drops off a child across the street; this neighbor baby-sits. The two adults stand in the driveway having a conversation. Their voices aren’t raised, but in the still morning they might as well be in bed with me.

Ten minutes after this, an automatic sprinkler system erupts. Sure, we’ve had rain out the wazoo these last few days, but those things are on timers and not easily overridden. “Hisssssss,” goes the sprinkler head. “Ticka-ticka-ticka.”

Sometime after that, my neighbor returns from his morning errand. The V-8 conquerer of highways comes back up the driveway. And a few minutes after that, my mattress dips. It’s my wonderful child, crawling in for five minutes of cuddles before we both have to get up, because it is, after all, a school day. Time to get up.

I have to change my life. Have. To. Change. By Thursday I’m so sleep-deprived I’m nearly hysterical. I feel as though I spend my life catching naps, which are invariably interrupted. You might have read about recent storms in the Midwest? Storms are followed by chain saws and wood-chippers. You’ve heard of the green revolution? That means three rounds of big trucks rumbling through the neighborhood on trash day (garbage, recycling, yard waste). Every lawn service uses gas-powered blowers, edgers and weed whips. Don’t get me started on the ice-cream truck.

And on those days when everything comes together for me, when I can sleep through the sprinklers and the SUV and everything else? Sometimes this requires me to go sleep in the guest room on the other side of the house. Those neighbors have a sprinkler, too, but sleep later. But there’s a line of arbor vitae along that side of the property, excellent nesting habitat. One blue jay greeting the day is all it takes.

Oh, don’t mind me. I’m just ranting. And starting tomorrow, my life will be changed. Yes, at long last, EndofSchoolFest 2008 is over, and I can sleep until I feel like getting up. Learning effectively ended a week ago, and since then it’s been party, party, party. Today, the last day, is a half day — it’s all over at lunchtime.

“Why are they even having school today?” I said over raisin bran at 7:30. Grumpily. (Yeah, go figure.) “What on earth are you going to do?”

“There’s a breakfast, and then a helicopter lands on the playground.”

Jesus Christ, and then what? Hannah Montana steps out and plays a four-song set? Bill Graham presents the Playboy Bunnies? No, it lands, everybody gets to look at the instrument panel and ask questions, and it takes off. One of her classmates’ father is a Coast Guard officer on the rescue chopper, and it’s just a treat for the kids. This is its second visit in three years. I talked to the Coastie’s wife at a school function a while ago. What sort of missions does that thing fly? I wondered. She said they evacuate a lot of sailors with chest pains from Great Lakes freighters, a procedure that, if you did it to me, would push me from mere chest pains to a full-blown heart attack. Nothing like being hauled up to an orange chopper in a basket to make a day interesting.

The promotion ceremony was sweet, though. And no one said a word about the flip-flops.

So, bitching aside, howzabout some bloggage:

Michelle Obama, “baby mama.” Yup. First the crazy negro fist bump, and now this. That clip of the Fox News host asking if the Obamas’ knuckle punch was “a terrorist fist jab” is overused — find it yourself on YT; I’m sure there are eight billion copies up there — but it reminded me of the first thing I ever read about this greeting. It was a story in which some baseball player was quoted as saying his secret to toughening up him mighty man-paws was soaking them in his own urine. The team’s manager was asked for a response, and he said, “Oh, no one really cares. Although no one shakes his hand anymore, either. We mostly just give him the fist.”

Personally, I’m all for handshake alternatives. In the labs at the Centers for Disease Control, I’m told, it’s considered very bad form to offer a handshake; the preferred greeting is the elbow bump.

Of course, if Fox News existed in Canada, we could fine them into the stone age. Not a good idea.

Bobby Jindal rides the Catholic Crazy Train all the way to Exorcism Station:

Whenever I concentrated long enough to begin prayer, I felt some type of physical force distracting me. It was as if something was pushing down on my chest, making it very hard for me to breathe. . . Though I could find no cause for my chest pains, I was very scared of what was happening to me and Susan. I began to think that the demon would only attack me if I tried to pray or fight back; thus, I resigned myself to leaving it alone in an attempt to find peace for myself.

Now I kinda hope McCain does ask him to be his running mate; this could be fun.

Guess what I can hear? A helicopter! Time to get to work:

You can’t get out of school without a final rule being shoved down your throat. The final rule of today’s Promotion Ceremony was handed down yesterday — no flip-flops. Screw it. Our student has a special new pair of flip flops with sparkly straps to go with her new dress, and she’s wearing them, and if anybody makes a stink about it they’re going to be dealing with me, and mama don’t take no mess. There’s a point at which all the stupid rules of school become unbearable, and they don’t even apply to me. I’ve sat silent through No Squirt Guns at the Class Picnic (violation of the weapons policy) and No Untwisted Paperclips (ditto) and a punishment system that frequently involves writing, but on this one I’m a scofflaw.

(The punitive-writing thing bugs me in particular. Say you’re, oh, a software designer. Were your child to misbehave while in my care, I would not make him or her design software as a punishment. And yet, teachers think nothing of assigning painful essays as punishment for breaches of conduct large and small, and then wonder why kids despise writing.)

I shouldn’t complain. I don’t have to wrangle a few hundred kids who’d much rather be at the pool. I frequently marvel that teachers stay sane at all, and don’t begrudge them two or three end-of-day cocktails one little bit. Keep in mind this is a middle-class suburban district where kids are, generally speaking, still respectful of adults (in public, anyway) and will behave if ordered to do so. Still. Squirt guns? Please.

In other domestic news at this hour, we have a resident wild thing — an opossum. (The writer within insists I call it by its formal name on first reference.) I think it’s living under the deck by day and it needs to be removed, but I caught a glimpse of it in the driveway last night and damn — it’s the size of a Ford F-150. For once I was grateful for the dog’s ailing eyesight, because I was able to call him inside before he saw that mofo lurking out by the birdbath. A fight between those two would have been ugly. Alan has a live trap at the lake house, weaponry from last fall’s Groundhog Wars (score: Groundhog 1, Humans 0), and it’s coming here a.s.a.p. I like to live in peace with the natural world, but I’m wary of the damage a beast like that can do. And I read that in possums, “senescence is rapid.” I don’t want that sucker dying under my deck.

A quick skip to the bloggage, then:

I’m sorry, but when I see a headline reading Baby born with penis on back, man oh man am I clicking that one. If more babies were born with extra penises growing out of their backs, the newspaper business would not be in the fix it is today. For the squeamish, this appears to be one of those incompletely-absorbed-fetal-twin situations, and the kid seems to be fine after surgery, even though he lost a second career as a coat rack.

My favorite blogger, Roy, is taking a few days off to have eye surgery. This seems as good a time as ever to re-promote “Detached,” our friend James Burns’ graphic novella about his own eye surgery.

My congresswoman, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, is the Detroit mayor’s mother and is, I have assumed, as cemented into the job as my last congressman. The Free Press says maybe not — her son’s troubles have given mom some challengers, one of whom released an ad on the internets this week. In typical old-media fashion, the Freep didn’t provide a link. I’m going to assume it was an oversight, but here it is, and it’s a goody. (It uses the infamous “y’all’s boy” meltdown, seen in longer form here.)

You’ve probably all seen this by now, but just in case not, the NYT looks at the popularity of re-virginization surgery among European Muslim women. Show me a culture that values chastity over everything else in young women, and I’ll show you a sick culture. Nothing in this story changed my mind. Funny line:

But hymen repair is talked about so much that it is the subject of a film comedy that opens in Italy this week. “Women’s Hearts,” as the film’s title is translated in English, tells the story of a Moroccan-born woman living in Italy who goes to Casablanca for the operation.

One character jokes that she wants to bring her odometer count back down to “zero.”

I’ve always thought you could judge a group by what they compared their women to — cows (as in why buy one when you get the milk for free), shoes (you wouldn’t buy a pair without trying them on) and now cars. I ask you.

Off to walk around threateningly on the deck. Maybe I can scare the possum away. Ha.