Hello, I’m tired. Greenfield Village was wonderful. I followed the wise parent’s guide to driving on field trips and kept my mouth shut. And so I learned that when you’ve had botox, the first thing you should do is call a meeting and make it a family secret, because your kid is going to talk about it with her friends.

Good thing I have no secrets, because God knows they’ve certainly been discussed in back seats en route to field trips.

I was supposed to be a Learning Team Leader, or something, for my group as we wandered through the complex, and lord knows I tried, but history is one of those things that most people don’t appreciate until they’re 40, and I can’t do anything about that. What was significant about the printing press in colonial America? the kids were instructed to answer. I gave them the talking points and tried to explain the bigger picture — the power of information, cheaply and easily disseminated throughout society, but when you’re 11, even the internet isn’t a comparison. The wheel turns.

It is interesting to see what others find interesting. One girl was fascinated by the looms, a boy by the farmhouse garden, my own by — lord knows why or how — the millinery shop. I think it was the hatpin collection that did it. That’s some lethal-looking history.

And now, I prepare to collapse in a heap. Thanks for all the recipes. Next on the to-do list, sifting through them all and printing the best-sounding ones. Another item for the to-do list — just what I need.

Actually, I do. I’m coming to the end of a few projects this month, and need to repack the schedule for a few more. Maybe a cookbook — Two Days in May: Cookin’ With Nance’s Commenters — available in .pdf form for download.

What’s good to blog about when you’re tired? How about YouTube? This one’s going around this morning:

Surprise! A radio talk-show host who failed high-school history. Color me astonished. It wouldn’t have been so bad if he’d just admitted it early on and shut up; everyone has holes in even their basic education, and one of the hallmarks of adulthood is being able to say, “Really? I didn’t know that. Why didn’t I know that before? How interesting.” But he couldn’t, and he did the cable two-step: When in Doubt, Just Keep Yelling.

Next, I always wanted to do those Ann Landers “confidentials,” so today, CONFIDENTIAL to JoodyB: Did you get to the Was (Not Was) show in the Twin Cities? If not, a brief guerilla clip of one of the show’s best jokes, the “Sunshine Superfly” mashup, captured in Boston:

That’s a tiny stage.

You want more? Here’s a golden oldie, Anita Bryant getting a faceful of pie, not from the Florida sunshine tree:

Question for the room: When did pies in the face become the universal gesture for “I mock you, but I don’t find you dangerous enough to shoot”? Is it a vaudeville thing, or does it go back earlier than that?

Non-YT bloggage:

Star Jones: “If I punched every bitch who called me fat, it would be dead bitches all up and down the highway.” No need to click through; that’s the punchline.

Wear a T-shirt with a mild witticism about underage drinking? Get suspended!

Off to buy bagels. Enjoy your weekend.

You younger readers may want to sit down for this next part: Once upon a time, the only thing you needed for great sex was a can-do attitude and a filthy mind. All the other stuff that goes along for the ride — raw oysters, lingerie, a firm mattress, bourbon — is just frippery. Fun frippery, sure, but not necessary. How this universal human experience of joy came to be seen as wanting, I have no idea. Maybe someone thought plain old sex was too ’70s, too granola, too hairy-legged or something. When I learned young people were piercing their tongues for the express purpose of “improving” oral sex, I could only shake my head and recall the old joke, about what a man says after the worst bj of his life. (“That was great.”) I tell you this so you can know where I’m coming from when I tell you what I found in my Sunday newspaper ad insert, among the grocery ads. Yes, it’s a marquee position for KY’s latest concoction, a “couples lubricant” called Yours & Mine.

(And yes, let me pause for a moment to imagine the many geezers I toiled under in the newspaper business — the same ones who fretted over every too-high hemline in a fashion story and too-suggestive title in the movie listings — peeing their pants over this. Alas, they are no longer in a position to turn down advertising, even pre-print, and needless to say, if “Sexual Perversity in Chicago” were being made into a movie today, no one would have to change its title to “About Last Night” for fear of not being able to advertise it. It might help if they cast someone other than Demi Moore and Rob Lowe, however.)

At this point, I’d like to add a little musical accompaniment:

Now that I’m a geezer myself, of course I wondered why “he” needs a lubricant at all, unless Yours & Mine is just an elaborate cover for a gay thing, in which case I don’t think they’d be advertising with salad dressing and barbecue sauce.

But as you can see, the hook isn’t just that there are two flavors here. Hers is “thrilling,” his is “exciting,” and then there’s a strong hint that together, they’re greater than the sum of their parts — “one amazing reaction.” Are they referring to plain old friction, or is this like one of those tricks Brian Cranston pulls in “Breaking Bad”?

The ad is coy, the website, even more so. (Warning: Extreme Flash-heavy.) My guess is, there’s some sort of chemical reaction when they get together. What sort, I don’t know, but I can speculate. Perhaps the baking soda/vinegar kind, or maybe the Mentos/Diet Coke variety. I hope it’s not aluminum foil and toilet cleaner, as that would be very unsexy. But you never know. I think drilling a hole in your tongue isn’t exactly the height of erotica, and you’ve seen what I know.

Someone with a deeper background in advertising might like to weigh in and tell us about how difficult it is to sell sex products in traditional media. The old-line MSM may be dying, but they still wrangle millions of eyeballs on a daily basis, and successfully placing an ad like this — one that frankly sells the sex, not “feminine comfort” or some other euphemism — is no small accomplishment. Even if the pitch has to be made to, er, married couples. On the website, two mini-ads feature “Mr. and Mrs.” couples, and the tagline is “Couples that play together…stay together.”

In other words: Do it for the children!

Speaking of marital relations, Jenna Bush’s wedding went off without a hitch (that we know of), and the pictures (that we saw) were lovely. An old pro of the wedding racket told me once all brides either gain or lose weight going into the big day, and it seems Jenna was a loser — she really looks sensational in her dress. The party-girl beer fat is gone now that she’s grown up a bit. She’s taking hubs’ name, settling down in Baltimore and we won’t hear from her again until the baby or rehab. It’s NotJenna I’m a little worried about now:

I see her sister picked out a meh dress and made her put flowers in her hair — entirely within her rights as the bride — but there’s something about that smile that looks a little …off. And why is she doing that thing with her shoulder?

Recent rotator-cuff surgery? Mainlining “America’s Next Top Model” reruns? Or just whatever mom takes every morning to get through her days?

Not much bloggage today, but there’s this: Yet another first-the-earth-cooled explanation of the credit crisis, in simple enough language that a toddler could understand, via This American Life. It’s my firm belief that if Barack Obama started talking about Wall Street in language like this, John McCain would surrender by June 1 and, if we were really lucky, we might be able to rush Washington with pitchforks and torches. In the meantime, listen and simmer.

Some broad has a column about Indiana in the Washington Post. “What you need to know,” or something. It’s twinned with a piece by some guy writing the same thing about North Carolina. They both say their states are a mass of contradictions. Meh. I think they need to get better writers.

But this is it, Indiana — an extraordinary primary in this year of years, so drink it up. I was on the phone with Mark the Shark last week (I was on the phone with a few Hoosiers in the past week; see above), and he was reminiscing about the time he snuck out of lunch at Bishop Luers to see Robert Kennedy’s car drive past, the last time the Indiana primary mattered. Mark the Shark wears hearing aids now. The next time this happens, you could be dead. Drink. It. Up.

Then enjoy the familiar feeling of the day after, when your ardent lover of the past few weeks has moved on and now ignores your number on the caller ID. “Indiana who?” he or she will say, if you get through. “Oh yeah — one of those ‘I’ states.” Like …oh, Iowa.

During my chat with Paul Helmke, we talked about his famous Theory of Horizontal Stateitude, which I believe we’ve discussed here before. To wit: Ohio, Indiana and Illinois are three states divided the wrong way. The upper third of each has more in common with one another than the rest of their own territory, ditto the central and southernmost thirds. The north of each is blue-collar and ethnic (Cleveland, Gary, Chicago), the central a frontier of the Mid-Atlantic states (Columbus, Indianapolis, Springfield, the south a remnant of the Dixie/Appalachia that lies below. It’s an interesting theory, imperfect in parts, but sound as a whole. He reminded me of Indiana’s role in the 1920s-era KKK, which many people see as evidence of a deeply entrenched racism, but that’s too facile. The Klan’s big issue in the ’20s was anti-immigration and stamping out the menace of Popery. When they made a play to take over the state’s Republican party, it was the northern-third party members who put a stop to it.

He also reminded me of the influence of foreign policy on this insulated, heartland area. His family were all Democrats “until Woodrow Wilson invaded the Fatherland,” and all the good Germans turned Republican overnight. “And I’m hearing from a lot of Republicans who plan to vote Democratic in the fall,” he said, over disgust with the Iraq war. Goes to show you things change everywhere, even in Indiana.

So how are the rest of you on this fine spring day? Speaking of demographic and historical influences, I saw a bumper sticker the other day. It read: “Turkey: Take responsibility for the Armenian genocide,” which counts as a sentiment you don’t hear expressed much in other parts of the country. Yesterday, while poking around Sweet Juniper’s related sites, I ordered this from his photo store. It looks as thought it was taken in the Dequindre Cut pre-renovation, although I could be wrong. Title: “Feral dog, Albanian graffiti.” Yes, there’s an Albanian presence in Detroit. Yes, that’s the country where the fake war was in “Wag the Dog,” a place so reliably obscure the writers believed it could pass as “one of those ‘A’ countries,” and it did. Not here.

OK, enough half-assed sociology. On to the bloggage:

The 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of all time might be funny, but I didn’t get beyond No. 50 — for Annuale, the once-a-year period. It seemed unfair to the other ad parodies to have to compare with that one. Love the pink ax.

A survey of newspaper editors around the world reveals they believe the newspaper of the future will be free (congratulations, folks, it already is); have more opinion and comment (groan, because of course they’re doing such a bang-up job competing with the internet on that one already); and that “some traditional editorial functions will be outsourced” (more errors). A limping industry falls into its future.

Celebrity “journalism” is great fun and all, but I miss the days when all we did was take Sean Penn’s picture when he was leaving a restaurant with Madonna. Poor Mischa Barton (a phrase I never thought I’d write).

For those of you who missed the Tom Cruise/Oprah interview last week, Bossy has a recap.

Off to the gym. Be good, now.

It’s standard for parents of children my age to mourn the loss of their Widdle Girl, as the less-widdle adolescent begins to make her appearance. And, truth be told, I sometimes take out the box of baby pictures and get a little wistful. Mostly, though, I look on a successful passage out of elementary-school as an affirmation that at least we made it this far. And then we work, again, on those pesky time-telling skills.

I missed this story when it went around a couple weeks ago: Columnist Lenore Skenazy, who lives in New York City, did a shocking thing.

Skenazy recently left her 9-year-old son, Izzy, at Bloomingdale’s in midtown Manhattan with a Metrocard for the subway, a subway map, $20, and told him she’d see him when he got back home.

And guess what? He made it. But Skenazy suffered a few wounds of her own:

As she wrote in her column about Izzy’s big adventure: “Half the people I’ve told this episode to now want to turn me in for child abuse. As if keeping kids under lock and key and helmet and cell phone and nanny and surveillance is the right way to rear kids. It’s not. It’s debilitating — for us and for them.”

Izzy had been bugging his mom for a while to let him try it. The reaction was predictable; Skenazy anointed herself America’s Worst Mother afterward, and I get the sense she was waiting to do so. But so what? I, as America’s Second-Worst Mother, salute her.

Say what you want about Michael Moore, and “Bowling for Columbine” might have been mean to poor old Charlie Heston, but he hit on a very important truth in that movie, and hardly anyone talked about it: Americans are constantly spoon-fed a diet of Fear, and it shows in the decisions they make, including how they raise their kids.

One day last winter, I called Kate at a friend’s house, a friend who lives one (1) block away. I’m sitting at my bedroom window now, and if there weren’t a house in the way, I could see this friend’s house. I told her it was time to come home. Two minutes later, headlights swung into the driveway — my neighbor, dropping Kate off.

Later I said, “Please, just let her walk home. It’s one block. She won’t freeze.” I assumed Kate had asked for a ride because it was cold outside. But no: “Oh, really, I don’t mind. If anything happened to her, I’d never forgive myself.” The chances of something happening in one block are, as Skenazy points out, about the same as being struck by lightning, but ah well.

“What do we pay outrageous taxes for, if not for safety?” I replied. She pointed out that taxes don’t buy safety, and she’s right. But fear doesn’t, either. Sometimes you just have to take your chances in the world. Paul Campos, a Rocky Mountain News columnist, wrote of Skenazy:

Skenazy notes that one acquaintance told her that he requires his daughter to call home after she has walked the one block to her friend’s house, even though they live in a typically crime-free suburb.

Other parents informed her they don’t allow their children to walk alone to the mailbox.

This kind of thing encourages children to see the world in fear-ridden terms, and to grow up to become the sort of people more interested in having their government protect them from largely imaginary threats than in preserving their civil liberties.

Here’s Rod Dreher, the banner-carrying Crunchy Conservative, a man whose very existence is defined by fear and whining, showing his faith in his fellow man:

John Podhoretz told me once that growing up in NYC in the big bad Seventies, he used to take the subway around by himself when he was not much older than Matthew is now. And that that wasn’t unusual. Nowadays, though, you’d be out of your mind to let your kid do that in NYC, which is vastly safer than it used to be. Or if not out of your mind, at least that kind of behavior would be extremely unusual.

This was in the midst of a big post about how his own children can’t go around the neighborhood unsupervised, but can in his Louisiana hometown. (For some years now, Dreher’s been threatening to go off the grid and retreat to a plot of organically farmed land, to encase his family in the warm cotton batting of no television and homeschooling. I wish he’d just pull the trigger and put the rest of us out of our misery.) Note the twisted logic: John Podhoretz navigated the city safely when it was far more dangerous. Now it’s far, far safer, but if you let your kids do it today, “you’d be out of your mind.”

I live in a suburb so safe that the vandalism of a For Sale sign makes the newspaper. (Seriously: The headline was “Sign bent.”) I may live to regret it, but just for today, I’m going to assume my taxes buy something other than potholes and lousy city government. Fly free, little bird.

(Oh, and about those time-telling skills: Of course Kate can tell time. She just loses track of it. One condition to the freedom I give her is, she has to be home on time. Inevitably, she forgets.)

More on America’s Worst Mother, and her blog, Free Range Kids, where you can read the column that started it all.

So, bloggage:

While we’re on the subject, I wasn’t offended by Miley Cyrus’ back, either.

God bless America? No, god DAMN America! And John McCain asked for his endorsement.

My Indiana alma mater’s circulation: 24,196. One-year drop? More than eight percent. I confess, my jaw dropped.

Back to work.

This is something I read in Sunday’s NYT magazine; the story was about Moody’s bond- and security-rating service:

To get why (Moody’s stratospheric growth) is impressive, you have to think about all that determines whether a mortgage is safe. Who owns the property? What is his or her income? Bundle hundreds of mortgages into a single security and the questions multiply; no investor could begin to answer them. But suppose the security had a rating. If it were rated triple-A by a firm like Moody’s, then the investor could forget about the underlying mortgages. He wouldn’t need to know what properties were in the pool, only that the pool was triple-A — it was just as safe, in theory, as other triple-A securities.

Over the last decade, Moody’s and its two principal competitors, Standard & Poor’s and Fitch, played this game to perfection — putting what amounted to gold seals on mortgage securities that investors swept up with increasing élan. For the rating agencies, this business was extremely lucrative. Their profits surged, Moody’s in particular: it went public, saw its stock increase sixfold and its earnings grow by 900 percent.

By providing the mortgage industry with an entree to Wall Street, the agencies also transformed what had been among the sleepiest corners of finance. No longer did mortgage banks have to wait 10 or 20 or 30 years to get their money back from homeowners. Now they sold their loans into securitized pools and — their capital thus replenished — wrote new loans at a much quicker pace.

Mortgage volume surged; in 2006, it topped $2.5 trillion. Also, many more mortgages were issued to risky subprime borrowers. Almost all of those subprime loans ended up in securitized pools; indeed, the reason banks were willing to issue so many risky loans is that they could fob them off on Wall Street.

But who was evaluating these securities? Who was passing judgment on the quality of the mortgages, on the equity behind them and on myriad other investment considerations? Certainly not the investors. They relied on a credit rating.

You may have to read this a few times to absorb it. Go ahead. When you’re ready, come back and ask yourself how often you’ve heard someone of late say, “The mortgage mess is very simple — people didn’t pay their mortgages.” I think of this as the Stupid Simple Meme. A SSM reduces a complex issue to something that can be fit on a bumper sticker, and conveniently transfers 100 percent of the blame to the most powerless saps on the stage.

The bankers? They were just doing what comes nacherly — making money. How can we blame a business for making money? That’s what businesses do! And if they did it by churning fees, by ignoring the simplest due diligence in vetting loan applications, by marketing through outright lies? Details, details. The bad people are the ones who didn’t pay their mortgages.

The disaster in New Orleans? It was the fault of the people who chose to live below sea level, and the deaths were a natural result of people who simply refused to leave. (Are you listening, the Netherlands?) Granted, not everyone had Ashley Morris yelling in their ear for the last three years, but I’m still amazed at how many people shrug their shoulders at what happened there, who say it was simply inevitable, an act of God, something no levee could have held back.

(In case you think I’m only singling out right-wing Simple Stupids, the left has them, too: Remember “the cure for homelessness is housing”? Yeah, even 20 years ago it seemed a little pat.)

I have a new rule: Whenever anyone says, “It’s really very simple…” about a complicated problem, I stop listening.

Anyway, why bother? VRSA is going to get us all, and remember, folks: It came…from…Michigan! Mm-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha.

(What is VRSA, you ask? Why, it’s MRSA, only with a V, for Very Very Very Scary.)

Actually, that story is worth reading, if only for yet another fascinating Detroit factoid:

Metro Detroit has a history of antibiotic resistance. Illegal drug users 20 to 30 years ago injected antibiotics with heroin in a misguided effort to avoid getting contaminated by dirty needles. As a result, many local bacteria developed resistance to penicillin and its relatives, such as methicillin.

Can you tell it’s Grumpy Monday around these parts? The weather has turned — and just as the redbuds were emerging, dammit — and we’re promised two-thirds of a week when we’ll be lucky to see 50 degrees, joy oh joy. We spent the last day of mild temperatures opening the cottage, which was both uneventful (no squirrels came down the chimney and decomposed under the pillow, like last year). Unfortunately, the shared dock has become a real problem. What was originally agreed upon as a sensible policy — two boats per cottage, back when a boat was an outboard with a 10-horse motor on the back — is now ridiculous. When did a recreating family of four come to need a ski boat, a pontoon and two Jet-Skis? A pox on all their houses; when gas goes to $5 a gallon maybe we can have a little water to actually swim in. I kept my head down, raked leaves and scrubbed things. There’s something about cleaning that empties the head and calms the spirit. Add a leaf fire, and things get just about perfect.

Bloggage? Oh, a little:

A few weeks ago I wondered what would happen to a newspaper if you took away paper, ink, trucks, Teamsters and the like. Answer: The Capital Times of Madison, Wis., which becomes an online-only paper very soon. Future: Very very murky. (This was the plan for my alma mater, derailed when Knight Ridder derailed itself. Never happened, but I will still watch this transformation with interest and, i fear, dread.)

The photo with this story kind of startled me, because as soon as I looked at it, before I even registered who was in it, I said, “Oh, huh. Indiana.” It has to do with the color and height of the cloud ceiling, something about that color of brown, I dunno. For a second I even thought it was Fort Wayne, and if pressed, I’d have said it was on Pontiac Street, beside the old Rialto theater. No, it was Anderson, but still: Indiana. Weird.

Not much, I know, but hey — it’s Monday. Give me some time to get rolling.

There are farmers’ markets that are basically foodie self-esteem polishers, and markets that aren’t (I’d link to the South Side Market in Fort Wayne here, but it’s so “aren’t” it doesn’t even have a website). Detroit’s Eastern Market is somewhere in between. The long winter precludes locally grown produce much of the year, but there’s a major produce hub in the city, and lots of wholesalers use the market to offload stuff that’s just a little too close to its sell-by date, so even in the dead of winter you can get some bargains on grapefruit.

But there’s always a healthy percentage of mom-and-pop outfits, and a few weeks ago I paused at one in the furthest-flung shed, where a portly Lebanese man stood behind a booth offering “extra extra virgin olive oil.”

“Extra extra virgin?” I said. “I spend all this time learning olive oil grading, and now there’s a new one?” He wasn’t amused. “Try some,” he said, gesturing to a basket of oil-soaked croutons. I told him no and asked what made it so virginal. “I make it here from my family’s olive trees, in Lebanon,” he said. “It is the best.”

I thought for a moment about how a guy would go about importing just his family’s personal olives, what sort of border inspection would be involved, the problems of transporting delicate produce halfway around the world, etc. Then I looked at the bottles. It was a cold morning, and the oil had congealed in the bottles to a murky green glop. “You take it home, it warms up, it is fine,” he said. No salesmanship, just plain statements and a certain rock-solid dignity. This is why I stay out of animal shelters; I would select all the one-eyed, three-legged puppies and kittens. It was $15 for a liter. What the hell.

I took it home and put it on the shelf. Four hours later, the glop had diseappeared, and the oil was a lovely yellow-green. I tipped a little into a saucer. Waiters and foodies are always gassing on about olive oil — how you can cook with this grade and not that one, how this one is fruity and this one is acidic, how the Italian product differs from the Spanish, etc. — but I confess I’ve never been able to taste huge differences in them, unless the bottle had been spiked with peppercorns and garlic. I buy 90 percent of my olive oil from Costco, and rely on the vinegar to carry the day on the salad. It just so happened, this day, I had a loaf of fresh Italian bread. Broke off a piece, dipped it in the oil, and…

Well. My mouth went to Lebanon for a few moments. It wasn’t Hezbollah’s Lebanon, but a sunny place in the country, with a view of the ancient hills. I rested in the shade of a tree with a gnarled trunk as big around as a 200-year-old oak, but it was still warm enough that the breeze was like breath, and…

Blinked. Back in Michigan. Friends, that was some butt-kicking olive oil. I actually licked the saucer. I’ve heard that Mediterranean fisherman sometimes begin their day with a shotglass of the stuff, instead of coffee. I’m going to start doing that. Or maybe pouring it on my cereal.

I mention this because? Not sure why. I have to go make tiramisu in a few minutes — Bossy’s coming to Detroit tonight — and I need to get in a food head. Not that I will be putting olive oil in my tiramisu, mind you. It’s just fun to think about food on a Friday.

It beats thinking about politics, but Bryant Gumbel offered an in-between stop this week. On his HBO “Real Sports” show, he profiled Barack Obama, basketball player, featuring footage of Obama playing then (in Hawaii) and now (with some friends, in long Adidas exercise pants, not shorts). He’s not bad, I have to say, quick and crafty for a 46-year-old, a real (dare I say?) team player. Gumbel made a mention of Obama’s game being a factor in “basketball-mad Indiana,” and I wondered if he was right. Indiana loves basketball, true. But it doesn’t love all basketball.

It’s safe to say the Hoosier game is the Knight version — no showboating, no star antics, very Larry Bird-in-college. The NBA style, the ghetto game, not so much. Obama made an interesting comment about basketball being a black art form much like jazz, paraphrasing from memory, “individual improvisation within a defined structure.” Improvisation starts with an I, and you know what they say about where that letter appears in “team.” Beware, Obama. Tread carefully.

Only one bit of bloggage before I tiramisu (yes, it IS a verb), but I recommend you treat it with extreme caught: typeracing! I had no idea I could type 70 words a minute — if only my brain worked that fast.

Have a good weekend, all.

The New York Times, with its unerring knack for finding the stupidest people in any non-New York venue it chooses to cover, finds a few in Kokomo:

“We hold onto a lot of traditional values,” said Brian L. Thomas, 39, as he bought a cup of coffee along the courthouse square here on Wednesday. “Saying you’re ready to change is probably not the best or only thing you would want to say around these parts. Frankly, we want it to be like it used to be.”

Many of the two dozen voters interviewed in this central Indiana manufacturing city of 46,000 expressed queasiness over the notions of change that both Democratic candidates have proudly pledged elsewhere. Though residents bemoaned economic conditions that have taken away thousands of factory jobs and given the state the 11th-highest rate of foreclosures, they also said they worried about doing things — anything — very differently.

“What are we going to change to?” asked Ron O’Bryan, 58, a retired auto worker who said he was still trying to decide which Democrat to vote for in the May 6 primary. “You mean change to some other country’s system? What do you think they mean?”

Jeremy Lewis, a 28-year-old window washer, said simply, “Old-fashioned can be in a good way.”

“We want it like it used to be” — that’s Indiana in a nutshell. They could put that on the license plates. When Ron O’Bryan still had a job in the factory, I guarantee someone in town was mourning the good ol’ days when you made your living the good way, on a farm, and spent the evenings shellin’ peas and drinkin’ lemonade.

Other things Kokomo has found amusing: Old Ben, the world’s largest “preserved” steer (photos here; he doesn’t look that big), and, of course, the world’s largest sycamore stump. Perhaps if Obama presented himself as an attraction — world’s first black presidential candidate to be a serious contender, maybe.

I’ll tell you one thing, however: All three of these guys got the Obama e-mail, and believe every word. Maybe spending all your time in North Carolina is a better idea.

OK. All this talk of celebrity sightings yesterday reminded me of a thread on Metafilter Monday, about “Expelled,” the latest attempt by the religious right to condemn Michael Moore’s tactics by aping them. The argument bores me, but I was struck by a few comments about Ben Stein sightings in the wild:

I once saw Ben Stein in an airport, wearing a suit and some kind of hipster foot apparel. There weren’t very many people around, and as a journalist who has met my share of very famous people, I generally know how not to behave around them. But as I’d been amused by Ben Stein’s Money — the game show that turned anti-Semitism into a laff ryot — I gave him a little nod and smile when I walked past him. He whipped his head away with an absolutely exasperated look, as if I’d been a paparazzo from TMZ. Puh-leeze.

For a long time, the editorial department in Fort Wayne paid for a subscription to the American Spectator, and I used to read it with a mounting sense of wonder. (It’s where I learned the word “poofter,” in fact; R. Emmett Tyrell turned homophobia into a laff ryot.) One of my favorite features was Ben Stein’s Diary, which was always exactly the same from month to month. Ben would go about his life, much of which at that time involved acting in commercials and making personal appearances based on being that-guy-from-Ferris-Bueller. He always wrote of his life as an ongoing delight, how lucky he was to fly first class and be fed delicious food from craft services, how people would come up to him in airports and say “Bueller…Bueller” and it was just so wonderful to have these great fans. Who could possibly object to people in public telling you they’d seen you in a movie? It was just so, so great to be Ben Stein, etc. etc.

Glad to know there was no end to his lies, either.

Another recurring theme in Ben Stein’s diary was his overwhelming love for his little boy, Tommy, whom he and his wife adopted late in life. He called him “my little angel.” Tommy was terribly spoiled, but it pleased Ben to spoil him; he liked being rich and being able to fill Tommy’s life with gimcracks and geegaws, and so he did. When I first read about “Expelled” it occurred to me that Tommy should be a grown man by now, so I wondered where he might have ended up. Hmmm:

Ben Stein writes in the current November/December 2001 issue of The American Spectator that “Our son, God love him, has basically stopped going to school…he’s surly, and desperately unhelpful…He has gotten so self-obsessed and self-referential, so utterly unconcerned about anyone but himself, he’s a walking time-bomb for self-demolition. So, he’s going to have to go to boarding school.”

This distraught, clearly loving father writes that upon his return from a recent trip:

“Tommy is in his room sitting at his fancy computer…playing his goddamned Everquest, the worst thing that ever happened to him, a literal curse, a drug that eats away at every drop of energy and initiative. It’s a sort of online ‘Dungeons and Dragons,’ and he loves it beyond description. He can stay on forever…He is simply a demon at it. And we are the demon facilitators because we are so happy he’s not using marijuana, we keep letting him play his evil Everquest.”

That was around 2001. In a 2005 entry, it appears Tommy has gotten over Everquest and moved on to drag-racing on public streets with his dad:

Tommy wanted to race again. We did. Again, I peeled, and he didn’t. This time he got way ahead of me. Alas, moments later a police cruiser appeared behind him with its lights flashing. The car pulled Tommy over and I followed them. But the police, staring at me intently, motioned to me to stay in my car. They then went over to Tommy. Then they came to me. “We’re just giving him a warning, because we know who you are and we like you,” said a policeman. “But you should talk to your son. He refuses to admit he did anything wrong.”

Well, he learned from the best, Tommy did.

Trivia note: Ben Stein’s Diary was among the sources plundered by White House plagiarist Tim Goeglein. I’d love to know which part.

Oh, and by the way, a letter to the editor in Newsweek this week:

In your April 14 Periscope interview with Ben Stein (“You Say You Want an Evolution?”), one of Stein’s responses contained a serious error: He said, “There are a number of scientists and academics who’ve been fired, denied tenure, lost tenure or lost grants because they even suggested the possibility of intelligent design. The most egregious is Richard Sternberg at the Smithsonian, the editor of a magazine that published a peer reviewed paper about ID. He lost his job.” Sternberg has never been employed by the Smithsonian Institution. Since January 2004, he has been an unpaid research associate in the departments of invertebrate and vertebrate zoology at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History. Dr. Sternberg continues to enjoy full access to research facilities at the museum. Moreover, Stein’s assertion that Sternberg was removed from a Smithsonian publication is not true. The Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington is an independent journal and is not affiliated with the Smithsonian.

Randall Kremer, Director of Public Affairs
National Museum of Natural History
Smithsonian Institution
Washington, D.C.

Bloggage? Oh, a little:

Village Voice gossip Michael Musto dug up a SFW nude photo of Charlton Heston. Not a bad one, either.

WDET, our local public-radio affiliate, had a fascinating story last night on this guy, Orville Hubbard, Dearborn’s racist mayor. Never lost an election in his life, never met a non-white person he wanted to live next door to. A truly vile man, a politician to the bone. They played some sound recordings of the guy, which included a gem where he called Irish Catholics “the worst,” because “they’re so prejudiced.” You can listen here.

The Comics Curmudgeon gets off quite a few zingers in any given week, but his one about the Family Circus is the best.

And with that, pals, I’m off to work, the gym, Trader Joe’s, Target… The list is endless, but most destinations will be reached by bicycle. Envy me, world — I’m preparing for peak oil.

…to Indiana. That has to be an unfamiliar ring to it, and believe me, I know. I spent 20 years there and frequently felt like the rest of the country would have a problem finding it on the map. Needless to say, I never felt it as keenly as during presidential election years, when the state was consistently ignored. The Republicans took it for granted, the Democrats chalked it up as impossible, and with a May primary, always chiming in well after the nominations were decided.

Once I wrote a column about never being in the crowd when Prince and the Rolling Stones decided to stop by the little nightclub an hour after the arena show was over and, you know, jam for a few hours. I now understand this is my destiny. It’s not the screwups of party leaders who led to the Michigan primary fiasco; it was me, moving to the state in 2005. I’m sorry.

If you didn’t see Brian Stouder’s comment in the last thread, see it now:

So last night, I’m at Red Cross with a needle jammed into each arm for about 2 hours, watching the election returns…and the nurse, noting that the pundits’ incessant yammering has mesmerized me, matter-of-factly says “I just can’t believe that Barack Obama refused to be sworn into the Senate with his hand on a bible!”….which broke the trance I was in, and made me look up. I said something like – it’s a good thing you can’t believe that, because it’s NOT TRUE!…which drew a puzzled look – and then the retort “well – he’s a Muslim, you know”……..and then, remembering that I was immobile and still a long way from the completion of the donation, I paused and took a breath. After conversationally mentioning that I had read that same e-mail (which elicited a big nod from the nurse), I said that the thing is just completely untrue – at which point I drifted back to the glow of the tv, and the nurse wandered away.

I had a similar experience a few weeks ago, with an aging-queen hairdresser, and he was similarly stubborn. He knew these things were true because he’d read them in an e-mail. I told him that not only were they not true, I reeled off a few websites where he could easily check the facts. Sensing an uncomfortable moment with a paying customer, he crashed into territory we could all agree on — how fabulous Mrs. Obama looks. Sigh.

Well, that’s the downmarket Obama smear. Moving up, we find the He’s Friends With People Who Hate America meme, coming on very strong in Minneapolis these days — both Lileks and his pals at Powerline are banging the drum about Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers, describing them as “friends,” which is interesting. Friendship, in this case, seems to boil down to “served on a board with,” or “attended a fundraiser for.” What world do these people live in, I wonder?

Here’s a more novel twist, from — who else? — a former speechwriter for Dan Quayle, who brings a certain girls-bathroom vibe to the discussion. Having recently learned that Julie Nixon Eisenhower is supporting Obama, she wonders:

Perhaps we humans are psychologically limited in our options, to following in the footsteps of, or rejecting and rebelling against our various patrimonies. Or, given the linked picture, perhaps the fact that she looks like a carbon copy of her mother — a bit mad, but with a little more iron about the jaw — suggests that she is not her father’s daughter after all. The picture is more shocking than the deed. Trisha Nixon Cox, (the blond, putatively less ambitious, “pretty one”) still looks like the girl America knew, and, recognizably, has given her campaign donations to John McCain.

Wha-? Via Roy, who adds, “Many NRO scribes betray a stunted view of life and human nature, but Schiffren’s actually seems heavily informed by fairy tales about princesses and wicked stepsisters.”

God, I thought we’d be shut of this business by now. When we lived in Indiana, we were, dammit. The world’s just going straight downhill.

Anyone watch Obama’s speech last night? What’s with the Abercrombie & Fitch product placement behind him? And for any of you wondering who the gorgeous blonde was who greeted him immediately afterward, it was Mrs. John Mellencamp, “model and spokeswoman.” Probably the best-looking woman in Indiana. Not locally grown.

Back after more coffee and some exercise. It’s a sleepy morning ’round these parts.

To the people who ruined our back yard, sometime in the ’80s:

Look, I understand. It was a different time. Gas was cheap, no one talked about climate change, and you liked to hit the open road in your RV. And, after all, it was your house. You could do what you wanted. For the record, I support your right to screw up what became my property 20 years later. Even though it was a really, really stupid thing to do. (Stipulated: It was a really, really stupid thing to buy, as well. The last kick the newspaper business gave me was relocating my husband to Detroit in the middle of the damn winter, at a time when we absolutely needed two sets of parental boots on the ground to make our life together work. We were, as they say, over a barrel, and inventory was a little tight.)

On paper at least, it must have made sense to pick up the garage and rotate it 90 degrees, then pave pretty much everything that was left. You needed RV parking, not grass. Grass was for golf courses, RVs were for pavement, and so you did what you thought you needed to do.

Even though it wrecked the yard. You putzes:

Little by little, within the constrains of our meager budget, we’re trying to undo the damage. That strip along the back fence used to be gravel, but we paid a fortune last year to have it dug out and filled with decent topsoil. It’s now our kitchen herb garden and (shh) a raspberry patch. But until we a) save a contractor’s child from drowning*; or b) write a best-selling novel, the garage will have to stay there. But I have a plan B. It involves a strong thunderstorm, a trip away, and this tree:

It’s the one in the middle, the one covered with ivy. It’s an ash, and like many of the ashes around here, it’s dead. Because it’s back behind the owner’s garage, he doesn’t pay much attention to it. They painted that garage last year, and when the owner came back to trim some limbs so the painters could get to it, I asked if he was starting the removal process. He looked startled; why would he want to remove it? “Well, it’s dead,” I pointed out. He honestly didn’t seem to have even considered such a thing.

Here’s what I’m hoping: That some day when we’re both gone, that tree will come crashing down on our garage, hard enough to make it a total loss. Then we’ll have a little seed money to tear it down and rebuild from scratch. Ideally we’d do so at the end of the driveway, where it belongs, but I’d settle for expanding it to encompass that concrete pad on the far side of the structure, where you can see my car’s butt:

Alan recently got a new car, so that’s the “old car” spot. Yes, because even though that may look like a two-car garage, alas it is not. It’s a 1.8-car garage, or at the moment, one-car/one-boat. Not the boat you see, although that one lives in there, too, so I guess it’s one-car/two-boats. Whatever.

* This sorta worked for our neighbors. They gave a landscaping contractor a big down payment on fixing their back yard a few years ago, and he absconded with the dough and used it to feed his drug habit. One day last spring he turned up on their doorstep, 12-stepping it through the “making amends” part. He ended up transforming their back yard into a place of glory, giving them far more than their money’s worth. It’s sort of like a modern version of winning the lottery.

Anyway, that concludes today’s spell of grumpiness. I see you folks have taken to speculating on the Pennsylvania primary. OK, I’m in: Clinton by…7 points. And Pennsylvania comes off looking as bad as Michigan. Or like a horizontal version of Indiana.

Brief bloggage:

I can’t believe I ever liked Richard Cohen. I mean: Can’t. Believe.

Back to my big monster writing project, which is mostly research, which is turning up fascinating factoids, including this: Della Reese’s original first name was “Delloreese.” Imagine that.

Did the president really tell the pope he gave an “awesome speech”? Sigh. “Awesome” is one of those words I banter with my 11-year-old about. I tell her I’m really not being a language cop or anything, oh no not me, but it’s a crying shame how we took a perfectly fine word like awesome and stretched its meaning to cover, well, let me give a recent example:

“Have you tried the breadsticks? They’re awesome.”

I’m not opposed to using “awesome” in its slangy sense, but in using it in casual conversation with the damn pope, George Bush has plumbed new depths. See, the Vicar of Christ’s business is awe. He claims to speak for God on earth; he wants to literally be awesome. Awe is, after all, a “feeling of reverential respect, mixed with fear or wonder.” Reverence. Respect. Wonder. That’s the pope’s stock in trade, and our president uses the word the way skaters do, while praising one another’s half-pipe moves.

OK, then. A couple of pix from Michael G, regular commenter and, today, citizen journalist. (Can you feel the awesome?!) They’re from his California perambulations, and of interest to us because? Because we all drink Two Buck Chuck from time to time, and yes, folks, this is where they make it. Note the Napa Valley, “Sideways”-style charm of the entrance to the Bronco Wine Co.:

As Michael writes:

Bronco is not your typical yuppie winery. There is no sign, no tasting room, no tour, no nuthin. They seem to be a tad shy. Shy to the extent that the property is surrounded by a border of barbed wire topped fencing and screened by very close set cemetery trees. I don’t know the proper name. They’ve always been “cemetery trees” to me. The front gate has a guard shack. This is a quite large facility and the only way to distinguish it from all the other processing plants and packing sheds along 99 is the huge tank farm out back.

Seen here, at a bit of a distance:

The road was narrow and there was no place to stop so I took the pix as I drove by. There’s a blurry one of the warmly welcoming entrance to the property and the hospitality room cleverly disguised as a guard shack and one of the caves, I mean tanks where the product is aged. I know TBC has to be referred to by Bronco as “product” rather than wine. You can tell by looking at the place.

So there you are, but as it turns out, there is nothing to be seen at Chuck’s house and that’s just the way they want it. Still, how many people have actual pictures of the place?

Every time I drive around Detroit, I’m reminded anew that we make things here, and making things ain’t pretty. I won’t recall, yet again, my husband’s adventures with industrial food production in Napoleon, Ohio, except to say that it put him off Campbell’s Soup and frozen pizza for life. But making anything on a factory scale is pretty grim; no wonder people like to tell themselves lies about free-range chicken and artisanal cheese. So much easier not to think about.

And that, my friends, is it for me today. Got a couple of projects that require close attention, and I need to give them some. So go forth and have, dare I say, an awesome day.