I told you so:

Nurse who wanted new life with lover convicted of killing, dismembering husband.

And what are they teaching in nursing school? Ahem:

During the trial, prosecutors said McGuire organized William McGuire’s 2004 death using her expertise as a nurse so she could begin a new life with her lover, her boss at a fertility clinic.

Who knows what menace is creeping down the hospital hall in white shoes?

I was listening to Alec Baldwin tune up on his daughter, trying to think of the worst thing I ever said to my own kid. The list is so long. I try not to lose my temper, but sometimes I do. I’ve never called her a rude, thoughtless little pig, but once when she was a baby, when she was pounding on her high chair tray and shrieking BANANA! BANANA! BANANA! I may have turned to her at hissed, Jack Nicholson-style, “WE DON’T HAVE ANY GODDAMN BANANAS.”

My defense: It was 7 o’clock on a winter morning and I was feeling really, really raw. I tried not to yell; I delivered the line the way Jack did in “Terms of Endearment,” when he’s having his first, disastrous lunch with Shirley Maclaine, and he encourages her to order a drink. “I think you need a lot of drinks,” he says. “To kill that bug up your ass.” (That’s the sequence that ends with the two of them driving his Corvette down the beach, Jack sitting on top of the driver’s seat, steering with his feet, bellowing “Wind in the hair! Lead in the pencil!” Great scene.) But it was pretty menacing; her eyes got big and round, and she stopped yelling for bananas.

I’m glad no one recorded that moment, although I guess I just did. Maybe that’s how Baldwin can get through this; he can call in every marker he has and ask them all to stand up and say, essentially, “I am Spartacus.” I doubt it would work; we promote the myth of the perfect parent relentlessly in this country.

There’s a guy, Tim Goeglein, who writes occasional guest columns for my old newspaper (he’s from Fort Wayne). He has a very big job in the White House, “special assistant to the president,” serving as liaison between the Worst President Ever and conservative special-interest groups. You’d think he’d write an occasional piece about policy or D.C. culture or whatever, but no, for years now he’s been contributing these awful, drippy essays about his sainted parents and how good the good old days were, and blah blah blah. The last one he wrote about mom ‘n’ dad was typical, and I’d like to quote from it for you, but I’m finding that none of his columns appear to be in the paper’s archive. Oh, but here’s Memory Lane for you, a story from the archive in which his name is mentioned. Who do you think wrote this snappy prose?

What did I tell you? What did I tell you? Did I not tell you that Madonna’s insult of Evansville would not pass without some high-ranking weenie embarrassing himself with a totally humorless effort to “change her mind?” I did. Only even I underestimated the weenieosity that would be unleashed. I thought the inevitable blustery response would come from a chamber of commerce official, or maybe the mayor, but nooooo. We have a real U.S. senator getting in on

It cuts off because you only get the first few lines of a story in the paid archive. That’s from 1991. Yours truly, getting the word “weenieosity” in the newspaper.

Back to Timmy. I’d like to quote from one of his columns but I can’t, so I’ll paraphrase the last one from memory: Mom and Dad have been married for many years. Never for one day have they been less than 100 percent devoted to one another. They owe their love to their intense devotion to Jesus Christ, who has rewarded them with a marriage so strong and perfect that it enriches all who behold it. Mother never let a cross word pass her lips, and we could all rely on Father’s quiet wisdom in times of trouble, which we hardly ever had because Jesus was blessing us all the time. And so on.

Listening to Laura Lippman speak last night, she said, “I hate perfect people,” by way of explaining how she approaches the characters in her fiction. Of course, no one is perfect, but many work very hard to convince you they are. I was in my 30s before I was able to get my brain around the idea that a person could be a titan of accomplishment in one area of their life, and a miserable failure in another, and that the latter did not take away from the former. And I’m not talking about being a great father and occasionally putting the water bottle back in the refrigerator with only an ounce left in it. I’m talking about Miles Davis, for example, simultaneously a musical genius and a wife-beater. If you were God, and you had the option of saving Cicely Tyson some black eyes by pushing the “miscarry” button on an embryonic Miles Davis, would the world be a better place without him? I don’t think so.

This was a huge relief to finally accept. I could enjoy art again without fretting that the artist was a schmuck. Which most of them are.

Which most of us are, actually. At least sometimes. I’ve never yelled at my daughter’s voice mail. But I have it in me.

OK, then:

Last night was great, if only to be in my old neighborhood again. The reading was at Nicola’s Books, an independent book store in the Westgate shopping center, which all you Tree Towners should patronize, because it is an exceptionally good one. Nicola herself took us all out to dinner afterward, which was more generous than we deserved; I knew I should have bought some more books while I was there. We had some publishing-industry gossip, and some journalism gossip, and Laura told us the line she delivers in her cameo in Season 5, Episode 1 of “The Wire.” Ahem: “I’m not the police reporter.” (Or maybe it was, “Do I look like the police reporter?” Can’t recall.) I laughed, because everyone who’s ever worked in a newsroom has heard that line approximately a million times, sometimes in its alternative forms: “Do I resemble an obit clerk?” “Are you mistaking me for the education writer?” or the ever-popular, “Can we give this one to Features?” When I was first given the newsroom mail to open, there was but one firm order: Give as much of this as possible to other departments. Buck-passing — it’s our art form.

OK, I have to get to work now.

We passed a milestone in parent-child relations a couple weeks ago: Kate and I saw a non-animated movie we both enjoyed pretty much equally. It was “The Last Mimzy,” and I have to specify “non-animated” because the Pixar and Wallace & Gromit movies live in a class by themselves. But they only make one or two of those a year, and in between we have lots of weekends and school holidays to fill with moviegoing.

“The Last Mimzy” seduced me in spite of being science fiction, not one of my favorite genres. It was probably the Buddhism themes, that and Rainn Wilson. And while no one would mistake it for “The Departed,” it was no “Princess Diaries,” either.

So, heartened, I’m looking for our next mother-daughter movie date, and am sticking a tentative toe into PG-13 territory. “Dreamgirls” was PG-13, and wonder of wonders, all the sexual references were couched in language that flew miles over the head of my 10-year-old: “You’re knocking off the skinny piece,” in fact, may fly over the heads of many mothers of 10-year-olds. But PG-13 is the realm of the snickering adolescent, and I have to be wary.

I want to take her to see “Year of the Dog,” but I’m wondering at the rating. The reviews are little help (“suggestive references” is all I can find), and there’s no review yet on Common Sense Media, which sounds like it should be one of those sorts of websites, but isn’t. Very …commonsensical, in fact.

Any suggestions for cinematic entertainment as we explore the vast wastelands of Tweendom? You know where to leave ’em.

Have to cut this short today. It’s perfect bike-riding weather, and have a lot to do before heading out to Ann Arbor, where Miss Laura Lippman is reading at a bookstore in my old neighborhood. I get to buy her NYT best-seller, “What the Dead Know,” and perhaps have dinner with her — aren’t you terribly, terribly jealous? (You should be — I’m thinking we might eat at Zingerman’s.)

Bloggage:

Why Jon Carroll is always worth reading:

The tragedy at Virginia Tech this week has provoked lots of deep thinking about What It All Means, because when you’ve got endless airtime to fill, deep thinking is the only alternative to replaying the same five minutes of videotape you’ve played 28 times before. And newspaper columnists have of course weighed in, because we are the world’s leading experts on the Meaning of Everything. We are the FIGJAMs. (“Figjam” is allegedly a nickname given to professional golfer Phil Mickelson by his peers. It stands for “f — I’m good, just ask me.”)

Figjams — I love it.

Alicublog makes a good point: If the Virginia Tech shootings cannot be blamed on guns, well, they can’t be blamed on words and pixels, either.

Fifty-one degrees! Hosanna. I’m out.

I read somewhere that domestic violence is abnormally high in Livingston, Montana. (And I fully realize this may be pure b.s., and something my brain thinks it read, but really just made up.) The reason? The wind. The wind comes pouring off the Yellowstone plateau pretty much all year, and grates on your nerves. Makes people hair-trigger, and they take it out on the people they share quarters with.

Monday was a windy day. I guess it was the remnants of the nor’easter that poleaxed the, um, nor’east. But it just blew and blew and blew. I had a meeting with an editor, and it sounded like the wind wanted to kill us — it was shaking the windows in fury.

I was driving home when I heard first word of events in Virginia. At that point the death toll was 22. But because no day can be so bad that there isn’t room for it to get a little worse, sometime this afternoon came the grim punctuation: A five-year-old girl in the suburbs here was killed on the playground of her elementary school, after being hit by a falling flagpole.

I don’t know what’s happening to me, but it seems like the bad news of any given day can always be made worse by the coverage of the bad news. I turned on CNN in search of a succinct here’s-what-we-know summation, and found Paula Zahn wondering “what sort of counseling students will need” to process their feelings. On the blogs, the usual yapping about guns — hey, let’s arm everyone! Then this will never happen again! (Advice: Move to Detroit, where that’s pretty much the case, and see how well it works. A woman shot at the tires of a truck she thought was tailgating her, and recently said she thought it was entirely justified.)

I’m confining my reading on this story to one or two excellent newspapers. I solemnly promise to avert my eyes from any chin-scratching columnists seeking to explain it all to me, to keep the TV turned off, to change to the hip-hop station if I hear Daniel Schorr rumbling to life on the subject on NPR. On this story as on no other, all I want are facts. I’ll handle my own analysis.

You want to know who finally said something last night that made me feel human again? Jon Stewart, genius. He launched his show by saying something about the day’s awful events, not frowning, just speaking honestly. And then he said something like, “But I’m not going to dwell on this tonight. I’m going to do what I always do. I’m going to repress it, try to forget about it, not think of it at all. And then, in 40 years, someone’s going to spill some juice, and I will explode.” How deft. Acknowledgment, rueful joke, sidestep, and not a patronizing note in the whole thing.

Maybe it’s just the wind getting on my nerves. If you need to vent, go ahead. But if Paula Zahn shows up, she is so banned.

Interesting how much TV reporters chap my ass at times like this. They come on for their live shots with their sad, furrowed brows and I want to throw a brick through the screen. Do they take an extra course in j-school on oleaginousness that we print types didn’t get? Even Brian Williams, a pleasant enough fellow, made me fume, throwing in all those random “tragics” and “shockings.” Like I can’t figure that stuff out.

And yet, study after study shows people feel a bond with their local TV newsies, that they believe them when they say “only on channel 5,” and “as we told you exclusively at 6.” When I was in newspapers, one year the editor rolled out a collection of graphic bugs that had to go in stories where they applied — “only in,” “follow-up,” “breaking,” etc. Nothing else changed, but research had shown readers — our readers, the ingrates — consistently believed TV gave them more exclusives, follow-ups and breaking news. As this was demonstrably false, the editor concluded it must be simply because they were always saying so. And so we had to say so, too.

Oh, don’t mind me. I’m in a terrible mood. It’s the wind.

Also, it’s the taxes. Do I owe? Why, yes. Do I owe a lot? Why, yes, if you consider a sum that would buy a halfway decent European vacation “a lot.” I’ll write a check today, and send it off by mail. Screw e-filing; let some clerk open the envelope and scan it in. Let them deposit my paper check and watch it plod through the banking system before it bears its fruit for continued warmaking on terror. And no, this isn’t making me consider becoming a Republican. The price we pay for a civilized society, etc. I console myself with the fact I made more money than I expected last year. Cold comfort, but.

So, bloggage:

Debuting on my blogroll with a bullet, I give you…Doghouse Riley on Tim Russert, etc. Yes, it’s Imus-related, but it’s also a more bracing dose of public comment than any honored by the Pulitzer board yesterday.

I was working the other night when the news of the New Jersey governor’s car crash first appeared on the NYT website. The story said he was injured, was being treated at a hospital, “expected to survive,” etc. Then it laid out the laundry list: broken femur, six broken ribs on both sides of his chest, broken sternum (!!!), etc. Well, this was obviously no run-of-the-mill accident. Or maybe it was, sans seat belts:

Do you know how we can tell the difference between people who were wearing their seatbelts and those who weren’t, at the scene of an automobile accident? The ones who were wearing their seatbelts are standing around saying “This really sucks,” and the ones who weren’t are kinda just lying there.

Jim Macdonald lays out the grim facts too many people still don’t want to face, preferring to be “thrown clear” instead.

Off to the post office. You know what I’ll be mailing.

A statement, and then a confession:

I will have nothing to say about the death of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., other than the usual: Ah, that’s bad news. A great loss.

Now, the confession: Because I have never read any of his books.

Yes, yes, I know. Heap derision upon me. I once went out with a guy who was such a fan he made “So it goes” his mantra; it was under his picture in his high-school yearbook. I tried to read “Slaughterhouse Five” once and I dunno, it just didn’t grab me. I should try again. Part of it is genre-phobia — I can count the sci-fi books I’ve read and enjoyed on two hands, maybe one. (I’m also allergic to fantasy. I’ve never gotten past page 50 in “The Hobbit,” never mind the trilogy that followed. Say “one ring to rule them all” and I have no idea what you’re talking about.) The rest is just the sort of educational black hole some people have. Alan used to work with a woman who, in 1990-something, had never heard of Oprah Winfrey. Never. I’m like the film buff who never saw “Taxi Driver.” That’s me and Kurt Vonnegut Jr.

Yesterday I heard an interview with Sherman Alexie on our way to Columbus. He said “the hero of Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse Five,'” and I thought, in the split-second before he said the rest of the sentence, “Billy Something.”

That’s what I know. I’ll leave the tributes to others. (Lance promises to have something later.) Sorry.

Here we are in the Buckeye State, where it’s warmer than Detroit. Considerably so, although the threat of piles of snow was replaced by a rip-roarin’ hailstorm that blew through last night. BB-size precipitation, however, not the golf ball variety, which can leave your car looking like someone went over it with a ball-peen hammer. I’m grateful it’s merely covered with shmutz from the tree it was parked under.

So, bloggage?

A lead it must have been fun to write:

A drunk airport worker with a half-empty beer in his vehicle and an unopened can in his pocket flipped his deicer rig on a remote airstrip at Metro Airport on Wednesday afternoon, airport officials said.

Without drunks, the newspaper really would be filled with stories of hero Boy Scouts. Here’s to drunks.

And here’s to a day off with family. If you have something to say about Billy Pilgrim’s creator, you know where to do it.

My neighbors have a big TV. Really big TV. How big is it? Can’t say — I’ve never seen it up close, because I don’t have to. If the curtains are open even a little bit, I can tell what they’re watching with 75 percent accuracy. (Right now, hockey.) And they live across the street and one door down; it’s a good 200 feet or more from my couch to their TV. That’s a big TV.

Big TVs are all the rage, now that the bugs have been worked out, now that they no longer have the footprint of a Volkswagen Beetle. Everybody I know is buying one. (True story: My friends John and Mary bought one, and hired a guy to hang it on the wall. He said he’d just finished a similar job at then-Sixer/now-Piston Chris Webber’s house. [Yes, he’s a Pointer.] He’d hung 13 of them. Thirteen flat-screens in one house! It’s like an episode of “Cribs.”)

Anyway, I guess eventually we’ll have a giant TV, too, once the price drops to $1.98, which it seems on track to do by year’s end. But I won’t feel good about it. I love TV now that TV is so much better than it used to be — thanks, HBO. I love watching DVDs at home. But my TV guilt-meter was calibrated in the days of “Three’s Company,” and there’s something about a giant TV that suggests a world of La-Z-Boy recliners with built-in cupholders and crocheted Kleenex-box cozies. It rings every snob bell I have, and I have a tower full of them. I hate myself. Why? Because part of me wants one, and the other part is covered in shame for doing so.

Here’s the thing about a giant TV: It wants to be on, all the time. I like a TV to be off most of the time. My first and most hard-core TV rule is this: If it’s on, the people in the room must be paying attention to it. If you leave the room for any reason other than a bathroom break or to fetch another beer, it must go off. Once I interviewed some lottery winners, plain old hardscrabble people who woke up one morning $9 million richer, courtesy of the state of Ohio. I caught them after they’d had the money for several months, which is to say, their old house was full to the rafters with new toys, but the new house — 1,000-square-foot master suite, cement pond out back, the works — was still under construction. There was a rock on her finger and a Corvette in his garage, and a giant TV in the living room, which was too small to accommodate it. It was mid-morning, around the time a movie old enough to shave was on TBS. I took a seat to the right of the screen, they sat opposite me. The TV stayed on. When I was talking, they both watched the TV. When they were talking, the one who was talking looked at me, the other one watched TV.

That was a formative experience in giant-TV culture. I still haven’t shaken it.

Oy, we had ourselves a day in the D yesterday. A “workplace shooting,” as they’ve come to be known. Guy fired from an accounting firm on Friday came back on Monday and shot a retiree helping out for tax season and two partners. The retiree died. The other two are still alive. Of course we have a sidebar story on how this might be avoided in the future. Grim humor within: An HR expert says Friday is “traditionally” the day to fire people. Really? I didn’t know that. I tried to think of firings I’ve witnessed, and the only common denominator they all had was the Box. You know the Box, usually a banker’s box, filled by either the fired party (or security) with the detritus of one work life — a few personal files, a stained coffee cup, a framed picture. Is there a sadder sight than a banker’s box with a “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps” mug overturned in the bottom? I don’t think so.

“The Office” has gone a long way toward pointing out the thousand soul-abrading, death-by-a-thousand-cuts indignities of life in cubicle land, but I don’t think they’ll tackle this subject for a while.

I predict [raises finger aloft] that we will come through this blogging thing, turn 320 degrees or so, and out the other side — yes, this is metaphor is intentional — with newfound respect for our unsung friend, the editor. Yesterday’s post was up for hours before I noticed I wrote “…for years I’ve tried very hard to annoy my site statistics.” I meant I ignore them. They’re like the quicksand of narcissism. I’ve read about people who monitor their credit scores daily, who track their eBay feedback nearly as often. And some people track their site stats obsessively, which is one reason I’ve avoided doing so. I mean, I like affirmation as much as the next person, but please.

However, Google Analytics is just out there waiting to be installed and noodled over, and today, my first day with it, was nearly enough to run me off the rails. I have a reader — or else a robo-reader — in Reykjavik. (Holla back, Iceland.) Someone came here via Googling the phrase “what hoody does TI wear in chevy commercial.” (Who’s TI?) And then there are those of you whom I can call by name. One reader in Portland (hey, Vince). One in Cincinnati (Rob!). Forty in Fort Wayne, approximately the remaining readership of the News-Sentinel. I have to stop. I have enough things to procrastinate with.

There are days when I open my newspaper and wonder why any journalist would ever want to work anywhere other than Detroit. The humor in this sentence is so dry it only needs to be watered every 4,000 years:

But, as is often the case with Detroit school board meetings, the evening did not go smoothly.

I’ll say. The meeting wouldn’t have been a pleasant one anywhere; declining enrollment and the continuing train wreck of student performance dictate that many, many schools must close for good over the summer — a jaw-dropping 34. As you might imagine, this plan is not popular. As you might not imagine, the meeting where the closings were finally approved produced mayhem:

Audience members disrupted the meeting by humming in unison and shouting. One person threw grapes at the board, striking Vice President Joyce Hayes-Giles.

Grapes. Humming. Shouting. They had a raucous school board meeting in Fort Wayne a couple weeks ago, and the superintendent threatened to call security because some people spoke out of turn. I wonder what she’d do if she were hit in the forehead with a grape.

Of course, this is not a funny story at all. The sad encapsulation of woe:

Unless schools are leased or sold, by fall the city will have about 64 empty public schools and 11 empty Catholic schools. The closures are a result of declining birth rates, the city’s population decline and the loss of students to charter and nearby suburban schools, which receive the state funds for each student they lure away.

As I read somewhere (I think it was a Jim Harrison novel), if you think a factory smokestack belching fire is ugly, just wait until it isn’t.

Again with the dolorous opening salvo. Not my usual style. But then, if you’d awakened this morning to blowing snow, droopy daffodils and temperatures in the low 30s, you’d be feeling pretty damn bitchy this morning, too. Today’s projected high: 38 degrees. A 38-degree day in January is a gift. A 38-degree day in April is a smack in the face. Today I have to plan my Easter dinner. Checking forecast…oh hooray, it’s predicted to be 39 degrees on Easter Sunday. A beef stew sort of forecast, but no, we’ll have ham and potatoes and deviled eggs and all the rest of it. But I don’t care what anybody says, no pastel linens for me. I’m wearing a black wool sweater, and screw you if you don’t like it.

Busy day for me, a truly multimedia one. I need to make significant progress in projects for the web, print and — yes, really — a book. The latter is only a possibility — a bid, to be precise. But every time I think I’m wasting my time at this freelancing stuff, I look back over the last year and note two things:

1) I made more money last year than I did my last full year in the newspaper business; and
2) Versatile is now my middle name. In fact, I think I’ll change it right now.

Go be my little Easter bunny in the comments. I’m going to put flannel sheets on the bed one last time.

Some years ago, when I was a nervous new mother convinced my offspring would burst into flames if I took my eyes off her for even a minute, I was fortunate to stumble across a great book on keeping your kids safe — Gavin de Becker’s “Protecting the Gift.”

It turns out de Becker and I share the same basic ideas about personal safety. For starters, 98 percent of the people in the world are decent and law-abiding and it makes no sense to stay inside worrying about the remaining 2 percent. Also, that it’s better to teach children coping skills than to overprotect them. He also gives tremendous advice, one piece I’ve taught Kate since she was old enough to listen: If you’re lost, in trouble or need help, ask a woman. Women are hard-wired to protect children. Most adult women are mothers, and even the ones who aren’t are highly unlikely to be predators. Women don’t have the automatic better-not-be-seen-touching-this-strange-kid worries of men. And women don’t just turn a kid over to a security guard and go on shopping. Women wait until the parents are reunited with the kid, and if that doesn’t happen, offer to adopt the wayward imp.

Anyway, I’m wondering if I should reconsider. Two recent stories make me think something’s done awry with the female of the species.

First story: Buncha crackheads hatch a plan to kidnap some dealer they’re convinced has a hundred grand in cash and all the coke they ever dreamed of. Only, hey, it doesn’t go so well, and at the end of this caper, they’re left with two cowering kids on the floor, boys 11 and 13. The woman who’s running the show demands one of her male partners shoot them both. The man refuses. She grabs the gun and gives them both one in the head.

Second story: Police arrest a woman who’s been negotiating via e-mail with a man, who says he wants to come to Detroit and have sex with a 7-year-old. Her 7-year-old. Who, she tells him, has done this sort of thing before. Among the various grim punchlines: She has four other children, three of them girls.

She’s being held on $1 million bond. Here’s hoping she never draws another free breath.

I have no illusions about women behaving badly. It’s just that I expect women to protect children, or at least do them no harm. It’s doubly disturbing when it’s as bad as these cases.

Not that I wish to bring anyone down today. Let’s change the subject abruptly!

I called my sister Monday morning, to wish her a happy birthday. She has entered the great middle zone of birthdayhood — in which the passing years are marked not with cake and presents and maybe a special dinner, but an “eh, another birthday” and maybe a phone call from your sister. I was driving to Dearborn, had left early in anticipation of the terrible Opening Day traffic, but was having a pretty breezy trip, all things considered.

“Opening Day?” she asked. Oh yeah, baseball. They were thinking about other games in Columbus yesterday. Ah, but that didn’t work out so well, did it? Maybe Ohio State should change its marketing slogan to “Florida’s bitch.”

Yesterday was better-suited to baseball, anyway — warm and breezy and springlike. A more typical Detroit O.D. forecast is on its way for the remainder of the week, i.e., temperatures in the 30s and snow flurries. I can’t stand it.

OK, bloggage: Rep. Mike Pence, R-Dumbassville, Ind., compared his heavily fortified stroll through Baghdad (“…with more than 100 soldiers in armored Humvees — the equivalent of an entire company — and attack helicopters circling overhead. The soldiers redirected traffic from the area and restricted access to the Americans, witnesses said, and sharpshooters were posted on the roofs. The congressmen wore bulletproof vests throughout their hourlong visit.” — NYT) to “a normal outdoor market in Indiana.” Ah, yes. I think I can explain.

When I lived in Fort Wayne, I used to visit the Warsaw Street farmer’s market, on the south side. It wasn’t strictly an outdoor market — it took place in a roomy, shed-type building in the shape of an H — but it was pretty close. There I bought the best peaches in five states, chicken and bacon from the slowest-moving elderly farmer you ever saw, pumpkins and flowers in season, the occasional organic vegetable array from Organic Man. There was a guy who sold nothing but garlic, whom I loved. Another guy was Mr. Honey. One or two weekends in June, you could buy 25 pounds of pitted sour cherries quick-frozen with five pounds of sugar, i.e., enough pie filling to last a year. There was an old couple who plainly a) hated one another; and b) had been married for at least 60 years. I loved it fiercely.

And I usually stopped to chat with one or two of the market’s board members, one of whom would always lament that business just wasn’t what it used to be. They were right — the place was a little smaller every year, a few more booths that once sold fresh, homegrown vegetables given over to secondhand clothes or odd, it-fell-off-the-truck canned goods. They were losing a whole generation to supermarket produce, while the yuppies that were a market’s natural constituency lived too far away. Which always led to the second topic of conversation — the neighborhood thing.

The market was in a humble neighborhood that was — let’s just come out and say it — mostly non-white. It wasn’t unsafe. By Detroit standards, it was a raging success story. But it was east of Calhoun and north of Rudisill, and that meant that there were many people who simply wouldn’t feel safe there, even on Saturday morning, and wouldn’t visit unless they had, to bring us back to Pence’s original comment, 100 soldiers in armored Humvees, attack helicopters circling overhead and sharpshooters on nearby roofs.

So I can see where he’s coming from.

Nowadays I visit the Eastern Market. It attracts a different sort of merchant than Warsaw Street. Sellers at the Eastern hawk their goods in loud voices. You haven’t lived until you’ve bought at $2 poinsettia the week before Christmas from a guy bellowing HO HO HO THEY ALL GOTTA GO four feet from your ear.

The day commences. I’m out.

This is what you might call an Oops moment: There was a death in Detroit a few weeks back, of an out-and-proud senior citizen named Andrew Anthos. He was what newspapers typically call a “community activist,” which is code for a type that can range from “diligent writer of letters to the editor” at one end to “raving loon peddling conspiracy theory about the mayor’s secret link to black ops at FEMA” at the other. Anthos — of whom I knew nothing prior to his death — fell at the saner end of the spectrum.

His cause was not gay rights, but, well, wait for it:

For most of the last two decades Anthos frequently rode the bus from Detroit to Lansing to wage a solitary patriotic crusade to light the capitol dome in red, white and blue one night of the year to honor military veterans and police officers. …In an interview with The State News in 2003, Anthos said he wanted to inspire other states to similarly light their capitol domes as well.

So, OK. In late February, the news reports say, he was beaten on the street by a man who hit him on the head with a pipe and left him unconscious in the street. Anthos had just disembarked from a bus, where the same man, the attacker, directed anti-gay slurs at him. “Before and after the beating,” another account went, “the attacker shouted anti-gay slurs.”

Yesterday the autopsy report was released. Are you ready?

Natural causes. Arthritis, specifically:

The Detroit Police Department said it has accepted that Anthos died of natural causes and closed its investigation, saying no witnesses have been found to confirm a beating. … But it was likely a simple movement, not a whack on the head, that felled the man, Schmidt said. “He probably just flexed his neck,” which caused arthritic spurs to compress his spinal cord enough to cause paralysis of his legs. After spinal surgery in the hospital, that numbness later spread to his upper body and caused Anthos to stop breathing, Schmidt said. The only injury noted in the autopsy was a 2-inch-wide bruise on the back of Anthos’ head, which likely came when he fell, Schmidt said. The injury was minor, he said.

The anti-gay slurs? “Raised voices” from the general direction of the back of the bus. The witness to the attack? “Heard a thump,” turned around to see his friend lying on the ground, and a man walking away, nothing in his hand.

This could be the cornerstone of a great law-school class on the value of witnesses. In the meantime, I’m looking forward to the weekend’s how-the-hell-did-this-happen analyses.

Friends, I’m tapped out of everything but muscle aches today. In an amazing turn of events, my arthritic knee is pain-free. My quads, hams and glutes, however, are screaming that I should have sat out at least one set of “climb the stairs by twos” the other day. Off for something milder. Back later.

It’s my blessing and curse to remember writing, the way a fashionista remembers details of an outfit years later (“…and then there was the most extraordinary string of Mikimoto pearls, in graduated sizes, about 18 inches, falling just below the clavicle notch…”). And so I recall, in much greater detail than I’d like, the overheated phrases of an Ann Landers column that ran when I was about Kate’s age. It was about the dangers of the drug scene. Er, drug “scene.” Ann hung quotes on every word that she identified as youth-culture slang, so it was quite the column. I particularly remember her description of a “sick thrill” she called “fruit salad.” The gist: Everyone comes to the party with whatever pills they could “score” on the street or “liberate” from mom’s medicine chest. All the pills are thrown together in a bowl, and everyone at the party swallows a handful.

(At this point I should say that in my youth, which included many brushes with drug culture, I never, ever saw anything resembling a “fruit salad” that didn’t consist of mixed berries and maybe kiwi. Of course, I was behind the bleeding edge of the baby boom, so who knows? As my friend Name Redacted used to mourn, “Pot was a party drug. You lit up a joint, you passed it to the closest person. It brought people together, it made the party more fun. Cocaine is all about shutting people out. You pick whoever you want to suck up to, and invite them to go to the bathroom with you. This isn’t a good thing.”)

(I should also note that when I was Kate’s age, I was reading the daily newspaper. Two of them, in fact, as we subscribed to both the Columbus Citizen-Journal and the afternoon Columbus Dispatch. I still subscribe to two newspapers. Kate doesn’t read either.)

Well, I’m rambling. My aim, today, is to finally give the Ann Landers fruit salad a proper name. I propose: Anna Nicole’s Casserole, or if you’re French, Cassoulet a la Anna Nicole. This is in honor of her autopsy report, released yesterday. Her system was so packed with fun that the Associated Press ran the full list as a sidebar. Seriously. Here’s the text, in its entirety:

The following drugs were found in Anna Nicole Smith’s body during the autopsy, according to the Broward County medical examiner’s office:

Brand Name (Drug) indication

— Ativan (lorazepam): anti-anxiety medication
— Cipro (ciprofloxacin): antibiotic
— Klonopin (clonazepam): anti-seizure medicine also used to treat anxiety
— Methadone: strong painkiller, often used to suppress withdrawal from heroin
— Noctec (chloral hydrate): sedative and sleeping medication
— Robaxin (methocarbamol): muscle relaxant
— Soma (meprobamate): muscle relaxant
— Topamax (topiramate): anti-seizure medication also used to treat migraines
— Tylenol (acetaminophen): pain reliever
— Valium (diazepam): anti-anxiety medication, also used as a sedative and to treat seizures

In addition, she had also taken these around the time of her death, according to interviews and other evidence gathered by the medical examiner’s office:

— Benadryl (diphenhydramine): antihistamine
— Human growth hormone: touted as a muscle-building, weight-reducing agent
— Nicorette (nicotine polacrilex): used to quit smoking
— Tamiflu (oseltamivir phosphate): anti-viral medicine
— Vitamin B12: helps formation of red blood cells

Source: Broward County medical examiner’s office; University of Miami toxicology department

My favorite single item? The B12. It’s one of those health cures I’ve heard about all my life. “I need a B12 shot,” people are always saying. “Really? What does B12 do?” I ask. No one knows. It’s like “toxins.” It’s good for you. Ask no questions.

My second-favorite item: The Tylenol. Talk about feeling no pain!

And finally, bringing up the rear: Nicorette gum. Because it’s important to give up one’s unhealthy habits.

This is better than River Phoenix, who died after a similar heapin’ helpin’ of Anna Nicole’s Casserole. But he was a vegetarian, because red meat can kill you, man.

Lots to do today, not enough time to do it in. Console yourselves, children, with bloggage:

The 10 Worst Rap Album Covers Ever Made. No. 1 belongs in the Smithsonian.

I’m so crushed “Rome” is over. I want to be BFF with Atia. Can’t we do a sequel?

And now, off to the gym. Class is called “Flex Appeal.” I have no idea what this means, but I could use some flexing.