I’m sure we’re all very sorry to hear the site of Brian Stouder’s upcoming vacation is now a muddy bog. But we’re more amused by his reaction:

We’ll see how this plays out; our plans are for after the 4th of July. If nothing else, I definitely wanna see that Paul Bunyan restaurant.

The cry of the Midwestern Clark Griswold: Carry on regardless! It’s just a flesh wound!

The weather here’s been no picnic, but a fraction of the misery of Wisconsin’s — or even Indiana’s. A big storm system smashed through here Sunday night, but gave the east side the slip, mostly. A few limbs down, nothing worse. It’s pouring at the moment, which lately feels like par for the course. At least it’s not 94 degrees, like yesterday.

When we kick off with the weather around these parts, it means we are tapioca on topics. The end of the school year happens in 3-2-1, and as usual, it blots out the household sun. I’m looking forward to sleeping past 7 a.m., not looking forward to swinging the maternal whip of get-off-the-couch-and-go-outside-it’s-a-beautiful-day. So far I’ve resisted the pull of the upwardly mobile summer — enrichment camps and lessons in lifetime sports. I’m a firm believer in down time as a restorative, and all those camps and lessons can quickly feel like a different form of school. She has to learn to swim, and I’d like her to learn to sail, but so far I haven’t packed her off to High-Q Acres for pre-algebra training. If she refuses to get off the couch this summer, the next one might be a different story, however.

One thing I’m trying this year: A summer reading list. Part of the commodification of the tween years has been a veritable explosion in targeted literature — chick lit for 12-year-olds. It’s enough to keep a kid occupied for months, but I aim to shove it aside from time to time. I had my Nancy Drew, she has her Beacon Street Girls, but I had a “suggested summer reading” list, handed out at the end of the school year. It was strongly implied that there might be a quiz in September (there never was), but it was enough to make me pick up “Animal Farm,” “Johnny Tremain” and a few other classics of the children’s/young adult room at the library. I’m making my own list, and welcome suggestions for an 11-year-old reading at the outer edge of her age range. So far I’ve got some Jack London on there, and thought about “Little Women,” but was amazed to rediscover what a brick it was. Five hundred pages of antique language and exhaustive period detail can bog down even a bright reader of the modern age. I tried to recall when I read it, and the dread set in — I’d read a Reader’s Digest condensed version! Illustrated! What a fraud I am. It’s still on the bubble; I may reread it myself. “Tom Sawyer” is on the list, too.

Any ideas?

Off to do some chores. Back in a bit.

A cyclist! He’s got my vote:

Eric Zorn wonders whether he looks stupid in a bike helmet, ignoring the fact everybody looks stupid in a bike helmet, including Lance Armstrong.

Finally saw “Swingtown.” Snap judgment: It doesn’t have legs, but I give them credit for trying. There’s no reason to let premium cable have all the shows about adults; broadcast has to find something outside of the police/law procedural and the escalating CSI grossfest.

One of the things that bothers me is the ostentatious “hey, we’re in the ’70s now” shots. Sure, the people are going to wear ’70s clothes and the men are going to have ’70s sideburns and the women are going to drink Tab. But when I saw a quick closeup of these, I thought they were trying way too hard:

Closeups of shoes are for significant-to-the-plot shoes, and unless those Dr. Scholl’s Exercise Sandals are going to be very important in a future episode, this was just show-offy. I do have an idea of how Dr. Scholl’s might be the pivot upon which the plot turns; after all, like every other woman who was young in that era, I owned a succession of pairs. They were my default shoe all summer long, and I loved them beyond all reason.

You bought them in drugstores, along with other fine Dr. Scholl’s products. They cost $15, and had their own end-cap display, at the bottom of which was a series of molded plastic footprints you used to find your size. The “exercise” gimmick said that if you wore them, your feet had to clench the toe ridge with every step, thus exercising your legs. Huh. Whatever. I never noticed any specific toning action, but maybe I wasn’t clenching them correctly. For me, they were wooden flip-flops, and by midsummer the rubber had worn off the heel and everywhere you went, your shoes announced you before your arrival. In the era’s shag carpet, it was no biggie, but on wooden floors it was like beating a drum. I can still hear my friend’s grandmother’s crabby voice ringing in my ears, complaining about our “clompy shoes” as we came inside their summer cottage for our endless supplies of Dr. Pepper and turkey sandwiches.

Maybe the teenage-girl character who wears these will stumble upon her parents and their new neighbors in dishabille, struggling into their Qiana fashions after hearing her clomp-clomp approach. That would justify the closeup.

By the way, Dr. Scholl’s started making them again a few years ago. Back in the day they came in three colors — navy, red and bone. I was a bone girl. But in a spasm of credit card-enabled nostalgia, I just visited the Dr. Scholl’s website and I see they’ve expanded their color palette; now they’re available in such racy colors as Cheeky Pink and Wine. I thought about it for a long time and opted for tan. It was the only color on sale, and the shoes are no longer offered in bone. Once a bone girl, always a bone girl. (I suffer the Curse of Neutrals.)

So, some Monday bloggage?

Neely Tucker finds one of the oddest car clubs in America — for the misbegotten, better-off-dead Chevy Cavalier. I liked it because, down low in a lengthy story, he gets to the point of custom-car culture. It’s not about buying something fancy off the showroom floor. It’s about finding something cheap, something you can afford, and little by little, turning it into something all your own:

A quick history of customized cars in pop-culture America:

After World War II, GIs came home with a little money in their pocket and a new sense of working with mechanics. Out in Southern California, they bought old beaters, mostly from Ford. Like a ’29 Model A Roadster, or anything after ’32 with the flathead V-8. Something wasn’t right with the engine but, hell, they could fix that. Get out the tools, ratchet, ratchet. Honey, crank it when I tell you to. Right. Give it some gas. Good. Good. Slam hood, wipe hands on a rag. Take it out on the strip and turn the quarter faster than anything else alive.

The hot rod was born out of reworked junk. That was part of the glory of it, the great young male joke on respectable society.

We mentioned the Dymaxion House a few weeks back, so this seems apt: A New Yorker profile of Buckminster Fuller, which answers a lot of questions for me:

Fuller was fond of neologisms. He coined the word “livingry,” as the opposite of “weaponry”—which he called “killingry”—and popularized the term “spaceship earth.” (He claimed to have invented “debunk,” but probably did not.) Another one of his coinages was “ephemeralization,” which meant, roughly speaking, “dematerialization.” Fuller was a strong believer in the notion that “less is more,” and not just in the aestheticized, Miesian sense of the phrase. He imagined that buildings would eventually be “ephemeralized” to such an extent that construction materials would be dispensed with altogether, and builders would instead rely on “electrical field and other utterly invisible environment controls.”

Wow. I wonder what it would be like to take a shower in that house.

Cops storm a Detroit art gallery. It’s almost too rich with possibility for words, but it turns out, they were only looking for after-hours drinking. In commando gear. Because, you know, in a city like Detroit, after-hours drinking in an art gallery is a crime that requires a SWAT response.

You know why people think raising kids is so expensive? Because they read shit like this, about the nursery for the Pitt-Jolie royal twins:

They even installed two pink crystal chandeliers for the girls at a cost of $899 each.

I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t regret not getting a pink crystal chandelier for my nursery. She had to make do with one of those dumb infant-stimulation crib mobiles. But today she’s an A student. Let’s see where the Jolie-Pitt babies are in 11 years, eh?

Happy Monday.

Time I went to bed last night: 1:10 a.m.

Time the next-door neighbor’s home alarm — a klaxon horn mounted on the outside of the house, 40 feet from my pillow — went off, not due to an intrusion but to someone forgetting to turn it off before going out for morning coffee: 6:10 a.m.

You have a nice day, too.

So you can guess the mood I’m in this morning, on a day forecast to be 92 degrees at its peak, with the usual oppressive humidity. Sorry, Dexter, but I don’t think I’m going to be attending the Red Wings victory parade today. Although the idea of a nice long nap on the ice might sound pretty good by then.

There are those who are energized by parades and crowds, and those who are not. I’m in the latter group, which is unusual, because I’m a classic Myers-Briggs extrovert. But crowds frequently send me into a funk; who are these awful people, and are any of them living near me? I’m likely to think. And do they have exterior home alarms?

I think I should go back to bed. Enjoy Lance Mannion’s take on “Weeds,” here. Did anyone see “Swingtown,” and if you did, what did you think? And here’s a writer’s trick: When all else seems inadequate, try a lede like this:

Let me be blunt: “You Don’t Mess With the Zohan” is the finest post-Zionist action-hairdressing sex comedy I have ever seen.

The Boston Globe allegedly did it first, when it described “Shakes the Clown” as “the ‘Citizen Kane’ of alcoholic clown movies.”

Back to bed. Back, probably, later.

Short shrift today, folks. We’ve entered the last days of the school year, which mean more work for mother, and practically no work for the student in the house. Today is the safety/service picnic, and I’m a driver/chaperone/fruit salad contributor. Also, I worked a seven-hour news-farming shift last night, and I don’t want to see my keyboard for another 12 hours. Discuss what you like. I hear Hillary’s finally throwing in the towel, which is gracious of her because, you know, she could have taken it to the streets of Denver, and tear gas could have been involved. I’m thinking what happened to Hillary is what happens to people who live in a human cocoon, surrounded by ass-kissers and pillow-plumpers who either a) spend all their time covering their own; or b) telling you what you want to hear. When Sonny Corleone shouted at Tom Hagen that he wasn’t a wartime consigliere, he was speaking for everybody at the head of a losing team: Tell me the truth!

Too bad no one did. On to November. Remember, look past the fence.

Bloggage:

Detroit should change its motto to “defining new ways to be fucked up, every day” — someone pried an 8-foot statue of Jesus from the cross on the side of a church, and I don’t think they were re-enacting the 13th station of the cross. Best guess for a motive is, the statue is green, and the thieves probably thought it was copper. (It wasn’t.) America, behold your future!

Sweet Juniper’s dad has the second kid in cloth diapers, and he was feeling a little smug about it. Was:

…Yesterday I had the misfortune of going down into the basement during the spin cycle of that initial rinse. Our washing machine empties into a basin during the spin cycle. As desensitized as I have become to all things scatological over the past few years, nothing—nothing—could have prepared me for what was pulsing into the wash basin. Vomiting out of the tube was this butterscotch-tinted gray liquid, quickly filling the room with the humid perfume of pickled baby shit that had marinated in a brine of cold urine for a week. I watched it rise in the basin as the washing machine spun. Just when the vile brew threatened to spill over the top it began to subside in a roaring, fecal Charybdis above the drain. I swear I heard the voices of demons or lost souls calling desperately to me from the gurgling ferment.

That man is a good writer.

When I lived in Indiana, and I was about to attend my first Indy 500, I went prancing back to the sports department to pick up my press pass. Ooh, how exciting! The old geezer who covered, I think, golf and some other boring sport looked at me and shook his head sadly. He’d been to the race, he said. Once. He took his kids; they had great seats right on the main stretch. The race started, that thrilling moment when 33 cars go into that first turn like a flock of fighter jets flying in tight formation, and then this happened on the second lap:

Right in front of the biggest part of the crowd, right in front of his kids. The old sportswriter bundled his hysterical children into the car while they were still clearing the track, drove back to Fort Wayne and never felt the need to attend Indiana’s signature sporting event again. Those sitting close told stories much like this:

I see a driver being carried on a stretcher into the infield hospital. I am close enough I could have reached out and touched him. He is burned so badly there is no way to tell who he is. The figure is barely recognizable as a human being. I have never been able to get that image erased from my memory.

This particular writer is given to melancholy and hand-wringing; maybe this is why.

Off to hunt up my melon baller. So I can ball some melons. Shut your mouth. Back later.

Mommy woke up with a stomachache today, so mommy’s going back to bed to clutch a pillow and moan. Fortunately, mommy found some bloggage for you first, because mommy knows you folks love bloggage the way kittens love playing with string, and the way mommy likes referring to herself in the third person.

Anyone catch the speeches last night? If McCain doesn’t fire his production designer, or whoever is responsible for putting him in front of that green backdrop, he won’t get out of the gate. Someone on another blog said it looked like a post-game presser, and that’s just about perfect. He looked old, out of it and unable to get through a sentence without a third look at the ‘prompter. Even the chants sounded like they were started by a guy just out of camera range, holding up a sign. Obama hits the ground running with his rainbow coalition of smiling young people — whom you could see! while he was speaking! because they were seated all around him! — and looked like Secretariat warming up on Belmont Day.

Permit me to say: The contrast was startling. Discuss.

Elsewhere:

The worst time to be a feature writer is when a big hard-news story is breaking. Everyone else is wading through New Orleans, and you’re writing a think piece on Whither the Creole Restaurants. A head of state is assassinated, touching off a shooting war, and you’re gathering notes on whether the widow’s mourning dress sent some sort of coded message to the insurgents.

Worst of all was post-9/11. Who gives a shit about a movie opening the following Friday? (Ask the people who made “Zoolander,” which I believe had that unlucky designation, although it had other problems as well.) I met someone who had a book published that very day; it’s hard for him to discuss it now without a wince. But features editors soldiered on, gamely trying to take the pulse of a freaked-out nation, searching for the shopping/fashion/culture angle. The Wall Street Journal was particularly ham-fisted in that crazy time, as I recall. There was a piece on how expensive it was to cook your own meals — because everyone was staying in after 9/11, cocooning and reconnecting with the neglected home fires — when a set of All-Clad cookware cost $900 and lemongrass- and truffle-infused oils were something like a million dollars a quart. Someone had six friends over for dinner, and it cost $700! The horror!

Well, OK.

Now that the economy is in the tank again, but in a different kind of way, these travails-of-rich-people stories are popping up again. You can’t really fault the big papers for running them; who else is supposed to respond to all those Van Cleef & Arpels ads in the A section? They know their readership.

Here’s one from this past Sunday’s NYT:

The wealthy don’t generally speak publicly about their finances, in good times or bad. It’s in poor taste, for one, and their employers could fire them for talking even a little. But people who provide services to the wealthy — lawyers, art advisers, personal trainers and hairstylists — say they are getting an earful about their clients’ financial anxieties.

Interviews with the people who actually see the bank statements, like divorce lawyers and lenders, say their clients are definitely living on less than they did a year ago, regardless of how expansive the definition of “less” may be. Hairstylists and private jet rental companies say the wealthy are cutting back on luxuries like $350 highlights and $10,000-an-hour jet rentals. Even nutritionists and personal trainers notice a problem. The wealthy are eating more and gaining weight because of the stress.

I love those killer little end-of-paragraph lines, and details like these:

On a spring afternoon, a half-dozen hairstylists to the very wealthy talked about how customers are stretching their $350 highlights and $150 haircuts to every eight weeks instead of six weeks. Some women are cutting out highlights entirely, saying they would “rather be brunettes.”

Brave, brave rich people! Not afraid to make the hard choices!

Ted Nugent proves how far you can go after you flunk Comp 101:

Gather around, high school and college graduates, and listen good — real good. What I am about to tell you will help you immensely throughout the rest of your lives if you commit to practicing Uncle Ted’s proven modus operandi for a quality of life.

It’s full of the usual dipshittery:

Be intelligently and effectively defiant. Defiance is the very spirit that gave birth to this country when our forefathers fought against overwhelming odds, signed the Declaration of Independence and fired the “shot heard ’round the world.” Lock and load. Really.

Of course, when Ted had the opportunity to fight against overwhelming odds, locking and loading all the while, he chose to poop his pants. I don’t think people can be reminded of this enough.

Thinking of Ted Nugent makes my stomach hurt more. Back to bed.

Summer is party time, and it won’t be long now before we can’t open a magazine without hearing about some rapper’s coming-out party in the Hamptons, where guests sampled hors d’oeuvres made from fetal veal, served by waitresses dressed as mermaids, who swam around the perimeter of a fountain with trays held high. Upon arriving, everybody walked through a footbath of Cristal, just to get their toes all tingly and refreshed. At midnight, fireworks erupted from the ass of the ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s David, and as a lovely parting gesture, everyone got a goody bag contained gift certificates for round-the-world cruises and Lancome’s summer line of eye shadow. In Style will have all the photos.

Someone will bitch about the fetal-veal canapés. It’s not included in their Zone diet plan, or something.

Sunday morning I did my Alter Road loop ride, about 12 miles, maybe a little less. Alter Road makes a 90-degree turn at its southeastern terminus, and there’s a park there — Mariner’s Park, little more than a parking lot, a field and a fishing plaza overlooking Windmill Point, where Lake St. Clair narrows and becomes the Detroit River. It’s never deserted; no matter when I come there are always at least a few people with rods set in the brackets, trying their luck.

On Sunday, the white bass were biting with a vengeance. Everybody’s bucket was full, and those who had double hooks on their lines were bringing them up two at a time. A party atmosphere prevailed among this mostly middle-aged and older crowd — old-school floating from a boom box, lots of laughing and comparing the biggest on the stringer. One lady brought a portable grill, and was firing it up to make some lunch with the abundant catch.

No one asked me to either party, but I think I’d rather attend the second one. From the looks of the clothes everyone was wearing and, especially, the cars in the parking lot, no one here had a lot of dough. (There was one aging Ford Taurus that looked like it was, literally, held together with silicon sealer, Bondo and superglue.) But they sure were having a good time. It was the ten thousandth reminder that parties don’t turn on the food, the venue or even the occasion. Parties turn on the guest list, and the spirit everyone brings to the event.

Something to remember when you’re planning your Fourth of July soiree.

As for me, I was up early on an empty stomach. Package 2 of the 50th birthday present from my doctor is the usual blood work. You know I’m going to put off opening Package 3 for as long as possible, but the nurse was very stern: “We’ve had several patients who refused to accept this present, who are now seeing oncologists.” Got it. Anyway, after an hour spent with a growling stomach, cooling my heels in various waiting rooms, I rewarded myself with scrambled eggs with black beans and salsa, basically a breakfast burrito without the tortilla. And now I feel at one with the world and in love with all humankind. What a way to start Monday.

So, a bit of bloggage? Sure:

Hank Stuever tackles the question that’s been keeping you up nights: Just who wrote ‘Footprints,’ anyway? It should not surprise you to learn that lawsuits are involved.

The Chinese take the Soviets’ place as medal-mongers. Just one more thing I hate about the Olympics:

The American and Chinese (rowing) programs are drastically different.

In this Olympic year, about 60 United States rowers receive monthly stipends of $1,200 from the U.S.O.C. Last winter, they trained together for about four months, all expenses paid, but for the most part, they pay their own way.

Some, like Matt Muffelman, work part time. He is an associate at the Home Depot in Ewing, N.J., where he answers gardening questions like, “Are those mums squirrel-proof?” and “Where is the mulch?”

In non-Olympic years, most United States rowers work full time or attend school, often following training schedules prepared by coaches who live elsewhere. Some stop rowing.

Bryan Volpenhein won a gold medal in the men’s eight at the 2004 Olympics, then moved to Seattle for culinary school, preparing for what he called “real life.” Now 31, he returned last spring to the national team’s base in Princeton, N.J., where it rents boathouse space. Some rowers live communally, but Volpenhein house-sits for a professor. For meals, they fend for themselves.

Needless to say, the Chinese do not fend for themselves.

Someone — Jolene, maybe? — wondered if I had anything to add to the Michigan delegate fiasco, how the story was playing here, and the answer is: Not loudly. The fact is, we have bigger fish to fry — it’s hard to overstate how bad the local and state economy is at the moment; we’re heading into “Roger & Me” territory — and that’s good news for the architects of this bloody fiasco, who have largely escaped punishment. I’m not tight with the Hillary camp, but I’d think they’re smart enough to see the writing on the wall and settle for the 50 percent solution reached over the weekend. Brian Dickerson at the Freep has more, but I think the best course of action is to say, “We made our point,” sit down and shut up.

I won’t say anymore, because like I said before, I’m feeling in love with mankind this morning, and want to stay that way. Despite what the self-portrait, taken just moments ago, suggests:

Have a merry Monday.

Because the New Yorker was made for ink-on-paper reading and it arrives days and days late here, I didn’t get to the George Packer essay everyone was talking about until Saturday. I read it poolside, presumably in the presence of actual conservatives, based on recent election results.

“The Fall of Conservatism” lays out, perhaps too optimistically for my money, how the political movement that defined my adulthood lost its way and now teeters like a shack on the beach awaiting November’s hurricane. My initial reaction: Well, we’ll see. Pat Buchanan gets the money-shot quote, paraphrasing Eric Hoffer: “Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket.” I’ve seen the racketeers for some time now; it seems like a hundred years ago that I started telling people the success of buffoons like Ann Coulter and Rush Limbaugh indicated the right had run out of steak and was selling nothing but sizzle, but obviously I was wrong about that one. Packer mentions in passing the two great rocky shoals conservatism wrecked itself on — Iraq and Katrina, but these were only rocks that showed above the waterline. It’s one thing to argue that government is always incompetent; it’s quite another to staff government agencies with incompetents and then, when they’re revealed as such, yell, “See!? See!?”

I might add that it’s one thing to praise business and unfettered capitalism like some sort of god, and quite another to look the other way when corrupt financial markets can drain billions from American pockets and reward the perpetrators, but that’s another discussion.

Here’s what struck and saddened me: The way the GOP gained power through what Kevin Phillips called “positive polarization.” Divide and conquer, basically, but not only divide — demonize. People who disagreed with you weren’t just wrong, they were evil. In the midst of it, a woman called my newspaper and informed my editor she would be canceling her subscription because a certain female columnist had described herself as a feminist, and this was simply too much to be endured. Packer thinks it’s on its way out. I can only hope so:

Yet the polarization of America, which we now call the “culture wars,” has been dissipating for a long time. Because we can’t anticipate what ideas and language will dominate the next cycle of American politics, the previous era’s key words—“élite,” “mainstream,” “real,” “values,” “patriotic,” “snob,” “liberal” — seem as potent as ever. Indeed, they have shown up in the current campaign: North Carolina and Mississippi Republicans have produced ads linking local Democrats to Jeremiah Wright, Barack Obama’s controversial former pastor. The right-wing group Citizens United has said that it will run ads portraying Obama as yet another “limousine liberal.” But these are the spasms of nerve endings in an organism that’s brain-dead.

We’ll see. I lived in deep-red country for 20 years and learned to get along with people who considered a self-described feminist to be a she-devil. Part of my belligerent attitude of late has to do with leaving that place for a more purple-hued environment, but I worry that positive polarization has caught me, too. I certainly wouldn’t pay for a newspaper that carried Ann Coulter’s column. Maybe that’s the real legacy of the last 40 years: We disagree, therefore, you suck.

Anyway, I think Roy gets it right: Do not count out this movement, even with half its teeth missing, syphilis overtaking its bloodstream and the odor of the grave emanating with every howl:

The conservative heavy thinkers to whom Packer gives much credence may feel as if the world has passed them by, but the racketeers really run the show. As formerly grumbling conservative operatives learn to love McCain and go all-in for the big win, philosophy is the least of their concerns, and their whither-conservatism thumb-suckers become mere padding for pages filled with stories about Obama’s Muslim past, inability to bowl, and other such boob-bait. If you think they can’t pull it off because their approach lacks intellectual vitality, you may be overthinking the whole thing.

Josh Marshall makes some good points, too.

That’s what I did on Saturday, when I had to readjust my pool chair six times to find the right balance between out-in-the-sun (too bright to read) and under-the-umbrella (too cold to concentrate). It didn’t even touch 70, but the pool was open (and heated) and by god, we were going. The lifeguards sat around glumly in sweats, hoping no one needed saving. Sunday was warmer and Monday was downright hot — upper 80s. I went to sleep last night with all the windows open and the ceiling fans on, and woke up 90 minutes later with the blinds banging and cold air rushing in to reclaim us. Again. Current temperature: 48, and fuck you very much, Canadian air mass. Frost warning (!!!!!!!) tonight.

As the previous post demonstrates, I finally took up Alan’s fancy shotgun and took my chances on the skeet range. The double I got on that station wasn’t typical, but I did pretty well — hit maybe 30 percent of the faces of my enemies rendered in brittle ceramic clay pigeons, some fairly tough. I didn’t get any of the “rabbits” — targets launched to roll along the ground — but I came close, and I nailed a few in the incredibly satisfying ways they blow apart. I thought “vaporizing in midair” was my favorite, but then I experienced “breaking into three pieces, each spinning off on its own symmetrical trajectory,” and that was the new standard of excellence.

For what its worth, none of the targets carried the face of the president. Hey, I’m evolving!

So, bloggage of a related note: Anyone see “Recount”? What did we think? I found it surprisingly engaging for being unafraid to take on fairly complicated legal concepts, but nearly unwatchable just the same, if only for its arousal of the old we disagree/you suck anger. I came away hoping someone learned a lesson or two in that mess, and maybe, by 2006, we did — the corrupt GOP establishment that nearly turned Ohio 2004 into a rerun of Florida 2000 was ejected on its ear. But the elements that let the fiasco happen are, most likely, still in place somewhere. I thought Gore did the right thing at the time, but when I see what actually happened as a result of that election, maybe not so much.

Skipped Rob’s torture session this morning, so I’m off to ride my bike until my legs fall off. Make merry in the first day of quasi-summer, when the furnace will likely come on.

You guys are having such a good time in the comments I’m thinking I should just turn the wheel over to you. Surely you have more to say than I do. I just wrote eight paragraphs of an obituary of Edward Kennedy, then thought Jeez, let the man die first. Then I went back to bed for an hour. I need a very long bike ride and I plan to take it, but before I do so, let me fish this comment by mild-mannered Jeff out of the comments previous and hold it up to the light:

OK, i finally got around to reading the second page of the “purity ball” story and looking at the slide show. For the record, “ewwwww.”

Having typed that, i gotta type this — have y’all been to any Midwestern ceremonial of any of the following: Job’s Daughters, Rainbow Girls, DeMolay, Key Club, Eastern Star, Knights of Pythias, Civil Air Patrol (yes, especially their youth dept.), Grange youth auxiliary, or DAR? I’ve ended up sitting through all these and more doing the opening prayer or singing a solo at the request of the new officer installation or something. They’re all off-kilter rehearsals for weddings and even, in a dim sort of way, funerals, and they share elements of the kitschy and creepy all wound up in Enlightenment symbolism and patriotic fervor and a vague kind of practical mysticism that may use the name “Jesus” with some emphasis but isn’t worried about being Christian at all.

What i find most fascinating (as opposed to appalling) about this is how it’s another expression of the “Bowling Alone” phenomenon in American society — these are events that replace what used to be spread through a whole nine-month, Sept./May programmatic year of youth organizations that you joined and worked through the offices for . . . 12 officers for a group that had maybe 20 members at most meetings.

Those ongoing organizations are fading fast, and “events” are getting cobbled together to replace them, like . . . the Purity Ball. Concentrated kitsch and intense focus on a relationship that needs to play out over time, not find an artificial focus on one evening.

I still laugh at the horror-stricken look on my wife’s face when i pointed out to her, decades after, the Freudian aspect of the major service clubs in her high school for boys and girls — I kid you not, Key Club and Lockets. No points for guessing which was which!

I used to date a boy who was in DeMolay, if an eighth-grader carrying on a long-distance correspondence with a gawky geek in southern Ohio can be called “dating.” I met him when I was in Ironton visiting a friend, and he came to Columbus for a DeMolay convention. I kept saying, “DeMo-wha-?” and I’m still not sure what, exactly, it is, although it has something to do with the Masons. Fortunately, they have a website, which explains:

DeMolay is an organization dedicated to preparing young men to lead successful, happy, and productive lives. Basing its approach on timeless principles and practical, hands-on experience, DeMolay opens doors for young men aged 12 to 21 by developing the civic awareness, personal responsibility and leadership skills so vitally needed in society today. DeMolay combines this serious mission with a fun approach that builds important bonds of friendship among members in more than 1,000 chapters worldwide.

Jeff’s right. One thousand chapters or not, these outfits are dying dying dying. They don’t fit with modern life. Those ladies’ clubs where dowagers gathered in flowered hats to discuss gardening and good works? Going and gone. When I was a columnist, every so often I’d accept a speaking invitation from the Rotary or Lions or (my favorite) the Optimists, and it was like One Hour in Middle-Management Hell. I was frequently struck by the rituals — the group singing, the pledge of allegiance, the pledge of brotherhood, repeated loudly. (Roar lions, roar lions! Bite ’em bite ’em bite ’em!)

It didn’t work out with Mr. DeMolay. I hope he found a nice Rainbow Girl and settled into a nice southern Ohio life. I will always remember him fondly, though, because he took me to see “A Clockwork Orange.”

Since we’re letting others carry my load today, let’s toss it to Michael Musto:

There seem to be more publicists working the Sex and the City movie than hairdressers gathered around Burt Reynolds’ noggin trying to make his shit look real.

Man, I’ll say. Is there a photograph of the Fightin’ Four walking toward the camera in color-coordinated outfits that hasn’t been published yet? It’s like a downmarket version of “The Wire” blitz last winter. And the movie doesn’t open for another week! I may have to go on entertainment-section hiatus to get through it.

Bossy has fallen in love with Rachel Maddow. I haven’t, although I like her fine. She’s strangely compelling to watch, mainly because of the disconnect between her confidence in her ideas and expression, and her plain discomfort in her TV makeup and pearl-gray jacket. She looks like a man who wandered, jacketless, into a restaurant with a dress code, and has to wear one out of the lost-and-found box. I know she probably doesn’t normally spend a lot of time thinking about the semiotics of the smoky eye, and neither do I, so I’ll leave that to her makeup artist. But she was on “On the Media” talking about those jackets, and she said MSNBC finds them for her. MSNBC doesn’t need my financial support, so I won’t take up a collection, but I’d like to suggest they buy her another two or three of them, preferably in deeper colors that will flatter her fine skin. If I were dressing her I’d also put in a word for a necklace or two, maybe some very very subtle silver earrings, but that would probably burn her flesh the way the smoky eye seems to. Bossy has unearthed a picture of her in Buddy Holly frames, and she looks perfectly natural. That’s what she should wear on the air.

(When I was on TV, people were always giving me advice about my turnout. I said to myself, “Boy, I hope I never waste time picking apart TV-news outfits.” Shows what I knew.)

A few of you reader folks have been saying, in comments, that I’m a liberal/socialist for supporting Obama, and I’d like to correct that, although I wonder why I bother, because I suspect some of you would describe anyone to the left of Dick Cheney as such, but here goes: I’m not supporting the Democratic ticket, whatever it shapes up to be, for lots of specific policy reasons. I want us to start developing some sort of solution to the health-care mess, and to get out of Iraq, and to figure out what we’re going to do with the part of the country that has been cut out the American bargain in recent years. That’s a heavy load, and I don’t know if the Illinois senator can carry it all on those slender shoulders of his. But I do know this: No one running for president today can be worse at the job than the current occupant of the Oval Office. So all the talk about whether Obama’s ready or if he’s been tested or if he did something in Chicago that isn’t absolutely kosher good-government best-practices seems irrelevant at this point. All the candidates are imperfect, but for Republican in particular to say, “He’s not qualified,” after eight years of blood-drenched fiascos just seems, I dunno, galling. I’m not getting a tattoo. I’m not buying a T-shirt. But I’m pulling the lever with the sense that whoever wins will be an improvement, and some will represent more improvement than others.

That’s why John McCain is putting as much distance between himself and George W. Bush as is humanly possible, and that’s why, barring a disaster, Obama’s the favorite to win. Yes, it’s that bad. Get the hook.

Back tomorrow. More rested, I hope.

My husband should have been an archaeologist. He really has the knack. Putting in our garden in Fort Wayne, he turned up half an ancient horseshoe and an Indian-head penny. Replacing some bushes here a couple years ago, he found a St. Joseph figurine someone had buried, probably in hopes of selling the place.

Then, yesterday, while planting a rosebush for our anniversary, look what turned up:

Two half-pint milk bottles, 3-cent deposit, property of Dairy Container Corp., Detroit, Mich. I suspect they were dropped there by the workers pouring the foundation back in 1947. I found several on eBay and other sites, just like it, in the $10 price range. But I’m not going to sell ’em. They’ll make cute little vases for the roses, whenever they come. If they come. Did I mention we had a frost warning last night?

And that the pool opens in a week?

Thought about Obama on my bike ride today, and something I learned riding horses:

When approaching a fence, do not look at the fence. Find a focal point beyond the fence, and look at that. What is a fence, anyway? A stride in the air. Keep your rhythm, don’t pick pick pick at the reins, go forward confidently, and stay focused on that spot beyond. Never ever look down; did you know the human head weighs eight pounds?

If you do it right, you should go ba-dump ba-dump ba-dump and-jump ba-dump ba-dump and-turn, and find the next focal point.

(This is also where we get the expression “take it in stride.”)

This is how I’m approaching November. The election is the fence, but I’m looking at Thanksgiving, to raising my glass with best wishes to President-elect Obama and his family. Early signs are encouraging, but it wouldn’t surprise me if a Jack Russell terrier ran out on the course and started nipping at our heels, but I’m looking to November. I’m ready to wash these Republicans right out of my hair. (Ever see a horse kick a dog? This happened to my trainer once. She turned a horse out in the paddock one morning, and it went scooting off, kicking up its heels, which attracted the Jack Russell, who rushed in to put a stop to such frivolity. The next thing she saw was the white blur of the terrier, Triscuit, flying through the air. Thud. She ran to Triscuit, who was lying in the dirt, apparently dead. “Oh my God! Triscuit!” As she mourned, Triscuit’s eyes opened, blinked a few times, and then she hopped to her feet and trotted out of the ring. What horse? What kick? For purposes of this story, I think we should change Triscuit’s name to Michelle Malkin.)

I expect the next few months will be nasty, brutish and very very long, but I’m staying focused on Thanksgiving. HBO is running promos for “Recount,” and in one, Bob Balaban, playing Ben Ginsberg, intones, “The stain of the Clinton administration is being washed away…” That’s how I’m thinking about the campaign. The stain-scrubbing.

You’ve probably all read this Peggy Noonan column by now. The stopped clock on one of her twice-a-day sweet spots, or early rope-a-dope to break the horse’s rhythm? I put nothing beyond this administration and its apologists, but maybe this is just Peggy, angling for some better TV work. There’s always a good living in criticizing your own tribe — you’re a Fresh New Voice Unafraid to Challenge Conventional Wisdom. She’s got an IRA to stock, too.

A wee bit o’ bloggage:

God, this is so creepy it makes my skin crawl. We’ve discussed “purity balls” here before, but this shit is positively Islamic, only grosser:

Loss tinged many at the ball. Stephen Clark, 64, came to the ball for the first time with Ashley Avery, 17, who is “promised” to his son, Zane, 16. Mr. Clark brought Ashley, in her white satin gown, to show her that he loved her like a daughter, he said, something he felt he needed to underscore after Ashley’s father left her family a year ago.

It’s too bad Ashley’s father left. He could probably have shared in the four fat goats and six laying hens the elderly Mr. Clark paid for her “promise” to his teenage son.

OK, back to work. Make merry!