Alan took advantage of some fine weather and a 40-percent-off sale at the nursery, and replaced some browning shrubs in front of the house Sunday. Years ago, while preparing the bed for what became our vegetable patch in Fort Wayne, he turned up a Model T wrench, part of a horseshoe and an Indian-head penny. On Sunday, he found the statue pictured above. My saint knowledge is pretty spotty, but even I know that’s St. Joseph; the carpentry tool at his feet gives him away. However, only in the last couple of years did I learn why he’s the saint most likely to be buried in the front yard of a recently sold house.

We turn again to Snopes. Ahem: Those trying to sell a home often feel in need of a miracle when a quick sale fails to materialize. Folklore purports to have the remedy: Bury a plastic statue of St. Joseph in the yard, and a successful closing won’t be long in the offing. Realtors across the nation swear by this.

I don’t know who buried it, or how many changes of ownership back it dates from, but I’d be willing to bet it’s from the most recent sale, the one to us. No, I don’t know if it came from a kit, available for $9.95, including the statue, the prayer, “instructional materials” and a free real-estate listing.

Nothing is more boring than another person’s religious views and I’ll spare you mine, but I think I turned another corner in my journey away from the church of my upbringing when Kate asked what the deal was with this ritual. I thought for a moment and said it was a superstition. God is a vast mystery, but if there’s one thing I think I know about whatever God is, it’s this: God doesn’t give a fat rat’s ass about the real-estate market.

Nor baseball games, although for all the signs of the cross and eyes raised to heaven on Saturday, it was still nice to win. I watched most of the game and found the waiting was getting on my nerves — c’mon, win already — so I took the dog for a walk in the ninth inning. As we came home up our block, I heard shrieking from half a dozen houses within earshot. By the time I got home, I was able to watch the game-winning homer from several different angles. According to the superstitions of many baseball fans, I actually brought on that homer by taking the dog for a walk.

Spriggy and I will be doing our best for the Tigers in the series. Anything to keep our real-estate values stable.

This photo by Fred R. Conrad was on Page One of the New York Times today. I looked at it a long time last night; it’s not exactly “The Garden of Earthly Delights” but there’s a lot to see.

The woman in the pumpkin-colored sweater is clearly what the photographer was aiming at. Her open face, and its expression of pain and bewilderment, is the story in a single image. But I love the woman in the dark blazer that we can see over her left shoulder, looking at the photographer with a suspicious scowl — damn media ghouls! The little boy’s blue T-shirt reads BUCKLEY. It’s a private school for boys on the upper east side. The school’s website suggests they have a blue-blazer dress code, so his casual dress pegs the time period as late afternoon. And the plump Latina holding his hand? Everything about her says “nanny.” Look at the grip she has on him; this is a woman who knows her job. There’s a woman at far right, out of focus, in a pale trench coat. She has a goofy smile on her face, but we’ll make no judgments about her, beause pictures lie. Another out-of-focus man talks on the phone directly behind the boy, and he’s wearing a uniform. I’m thinking doorman. And because this is New York, note how many people are moving, especially the woman on the left, holding a white bag. Look at the length of her stride. New York is the only place where my usual walking pace (brisk) is frequently too slow for the flow of traffic. People in New York always have someplace they gotta be. Gotta make some money. Gotta pay that nanny.

Another day of keyboard-clattering for me, so how about some quick bloggage?

Desperate times call for desperate measures: Aggrieved that younger, prettier and more fecund celebrities are stealing her Mother Bountiful thunder, Madonna picked an African country, parachuted in with her entourage and left with the ultimate party favor: an African baby of her own. (She’ll never be a brunette again. And look for her to wear lots of white from here on out, so the baby photographs better, riding on her hip.) I’m puzzled by one thing, though: The child is not an orphan. He lost his mother at birth, but his father is still alive, and is said to have approved the adoption. If Madonna is such a champ philanthropist, why not write a check to dad, make him a rich man, and let the child be raised by his own father? I’m sure what Madonna spends on dry cleaning in six months could set the whole village up in style. And I’m sure, in gratitude, dad and the other villagers would be happy to provide children for photo opportunities well into the future.

Just wondering.

Forget what all those jerks say about the internet making film criticism obsolete. We’ll always need the good ones. It wasn’t until “The Departed” was released, and Roger Ebert didn’t review it, that I realized he wouldn’t live forever. I’m sure that thought occurs to Ebert himself several dozen times a day lately, but in the meantime, he’s recovering, and I hope he has a few more reviews in him before he goes to the screening room in the sky.

I tried to read “Snow” and couldn’t get past the first chapter. Of course, Orhan Pamuk just won the Nobel Prize. Back to the old drawing board.

I keep a weather-radar widget on my computer desktop. Yesterday, bands of green blobs marched across the screen from west to east. Today, cottony white ones. Sigh. And so it begins.

It’s at this point in the day — Kate off to school, me still unshowered — that I pause to recheck the calendar and figure out everything I have to do in the next eight hours or so. Today the answer is: Oy. A lot. As much as I’d like to stay here on the couch, chin in hand, looking pensively at the fall color outside the window, alas I cannot. So I’m giving myself until the end of my current cup of coffee to get something up, and that’ll just have to do, my little cupcakes.

It isn’t helping that the sky is darkening by noticeable degrees as I write. The streetlights just came on, which means a downpour is moments away. I hope the adult supervisors released Kate from her morning safety-patrol station early; I’d hate for her to walk the remaining two blocks in wet shoes. (Yes, my daughter is in the safety patrol. She sought out the sign-up sheet on her own. I’m thinking it may portend a career in law enforcement, in which case I plan to be one of those old ladies who smokes pot on the sun porch of the nursing home, “for my glaucoma,” just to drive her insane.)

The rain is the result of winter approaching. Tomorrow it’ll be 20 degrees colder and by Friday, when the American League playoffs come to town, the forecasters say we may see a few snow flurries. I wonder if that’ll take the starch out of the A’s, who are probably unused to snow flurries on a baseball field. We shall see. I maintain no opinion on the outcome of the series, other than a generic, “Go, us.” It’s fun to be in a baseball town at playoff time, though; everyone’s in caps with the Olde English D and there’s a certain merriment in the air. If you’re fortunate enough to live in a Sunbelt state or somewhere that property values are rising, well, you live in a different place. It’s glum here in the Mitten, where the economic gloom and doom is nearly apocalyptic. A house down the street with the same square footage as ours just sold for $60K less than we paid not even two years ago. Families are swallowing hard and making tough decisions: Ride it out or cut and run? Fall is always a little melancholy, but this is something new.

So I guess I’m saying we could use a World Series run right about now, if not for distraction than just because it’s nice to get a little good news in the morning paper.

The WashPost has a story on the Ohio governor’s race, where, surprise surprise, “the culture wars are being eclipsed as a voting issue by economic worries.” Well, it’s about goddamn time. The Republic nominee, Kenneth Blackwell, is running in part on the usual mixed grill of “values voter” issues — abortion and, especially, keepin’ fags from marryin’ up. Buckeye voters are saying that stuff doesn’t matter, not this year, and it gives me hope for the future of not only my native state, but all the rest except possibly Florida and Texas, which are lost causes anyway. I’m neither the first nor the last to point out that these are ultimately the most cynical of issues, a Red Scare for the new millennium. We have bigger fish to fry. Or, put another way, when families are wondering if they even can even afford fish to fry, all the rest is just static.

My friend Jennifer Brunner is running for Blackwell’s old seat, Ohio Secretary of State, the one he disgraced with the 2004 Ohio election debacle. Here’s hoping it’s a landslide.

Coffee’s gone. The shower awaits, and the day’s sprint.

Had a little bidness yesterday at the Guardian Building. I’d admired its Deco exterior from the street a time or two, but was unprepared for the glories of the lobby. It’s Deco, but colorful; if Deco were a force in Mexico, it would look like this, the vaulted lobby ceiling:

There’s a lot of vaulted-ness, in fact, which contributed to the building’s nickname — the Cathedral of Finance. People forget that in the ’20s, Detroit was Silicon Valley. Hustlers, dreamers, entrepreneurs, sharpies looking to get rich quick and working men just looking for a good day’s wage poured into the city and in large measure, they all got what they wanted. In the bargain, Detroit got some of the world’s finest pre-Depression architecture (although Chicago got more).

I like architecture of this period because it suggests a world where nothing existed but possibilities. You don’t find much public-space art like this anymore:

That mural is called “Michigan” and ignoring the obvious slight — Hey, where’s the U.P.? — it suggests a place where we knew how our bread was buttered. On the southeast corner:

And over in the southwest:

Farther north are nods to mining and fishing. Is that a full-strength economic-development package, or what? No wonder that goddess in the middle is holding two horns of plenty. There was enough to go around. (Not reported: Sometime before this mural was painted, rapacious timber tycoons clear-cut the towering white pines that covered entire state. I mean, denuded it. It was an environmental disaster befitting Russia in the 20th century or China in the 19th. Beware, Pacific Northwest. On the other hand, that pine rebuilt Chicago after the fire, and provided the seed money for the auto industry. I wish they’d left a little behind, however.)

At the bottom of the Mitten is the state’s motto: Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam, circumspice. If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you.

And that, really, was the highlight of yesterday. So let’s do the bloggage, segueing smoothly from the Guardian building to the Guardian newspaper, and its report on yet another eating disorder: orthorexia.

Which is? An obsession with eating only “pure” food, to the point of obsession and mental illness:

Most orthorexics, would, like Hackney, find it difficult, if not impossible, to visit an average restaurant. They spend hours each day thinking and talking about food, making meal plans, scanning the latest food research on the internet, visiting organic farms for “perfect” produce and slowly preparing, serving and chewing their food. One orthorexic I came across in California hadn’t eaten out in years and consumed nothing but grains: primarily popcorn. Another was so obsessed with organic food that she spent hours in the healthfood shop, arguing with the assistants over which foods were packaged using organic paper and adhesive and were therefore “uncontaminated.”

There are so many ways to be crazy in our culture, it’s a miracle anyone’s sane, isn’t it?

Now I’m out to rake leaves. As I do, I will comfort myself with thoughts of how pleased I am to be living in a country with a mature, long-sighted president whose diplomatic skills are second to none and will surely guide us through the current North Korea maybe-nuke crisis with the sort of genius he’s shown so often in the past.

I mean, speaking of crazy.

I tired of the Foley story 36 hours ago, even as it continues to amuse. It has sprung so many Hydra-heads — the political angle, the internet angle, the cover-up, the closet, the late-arriving “clergyman” who fondled our offender — that you really can’t cover it concisely anymore. Underneath it all is the Disgust: Well, what can you expect from those people? They have sex in toilets, after all.

I think about that last one a lot. In recent years, gay writers along the political spectrum have tried to wrestle it to the ground, and it seems to be a losing battle. Even if all gay men were upstanding and Cleaveresque (“Ward, I’m worried about the Beaver.” “Oh, Wally, you know he’s just a red-blooded American boy.” “That’s what I’m worried about.”) some straight people are simply going to be repulsed by the idea of what two men do in bed together. The fact that gay people feel the same way about what men and women do doesn’t bother them at all, so I advise gay people to take the same approach: Don’t worry about it and carry on.

Far more pervasive is disgust over the man/boy thing. I’d imagine most straight people would be a lot quicker to accept gay people if these stories would stop popping up. Priests and altar boys, congressmen and pages — unequal partners, lopsided in power, the corrupt elder sucking the juices (sorry) out of the innocent younger.

Every day brings some heterosexual version of this in the papers, but we ignore that. Only stories contaminated with gay catch our eyes.

I think it bugs us because it’s one of the big themes in humanity’s master narrative. Sex is a threshold everyone crosses with a partner. In most cases, one partner has crossed it before. Many believe it’s best to do it this way, avoid the two-fumbling-ignorant-teenagers model for one in which it’s at least possible to have some real pleasure, some instruction in how it’s supposed to go. All over the world, fathers take their sons to brothels for their first go-round; I’ve known a couple of these sons. In fact, when I think back, I remember lots of these lopsided cases among my peers — a babysitter stopping off for a quickie with her employer as he drove her home, an intern with a mentor. Nearly all ended without lasting damage, even as the parties believe what they did was wrong. It was just something that happened. As Donald Rumsfeld says, freedom is messy. I guess, if we really wanted to prevent it, we could structure our society so it never happens — keep young people under lock and key until they take wedding vows, dress girls head-to-toe in concealing clothing to avoid arousing temptation, impose religious sanctions on those who stray. It would look a lot like…never mind.

Add homosexuality to the mix, and you’ve really got a powder keg. Is there a creature with more sexual energy than a teenage boy? How about one who knows his feelings are wrong and bad and forbidden — just look at how dad sneers at those fags on “American Idol” — but still wants to express them? He doesn’t understand what goes where, who does what, how it works, and what’s more, other men seem to just know — about him, that is. A boy craves a teacher, and all of a sudden, here’s this friendly congressman who remembers his name, asks about his family, pays compliments.

Just so you understand: I think adults should keep their mitts off teenagers. I think they should avoid even thinking about it. I don’t care how hot Scarlett Johansson is. That’s for Benecio Del Toro to think about, not you. But I also think that if we want this to happen less often, we might try giving gay teenagers in particular another door to walk through, one that doesn’t lead to public bathrooms and wooded areas in parks and other venues of shame and concealment. You won’t save every one from the Rep. Foleys of the world, but you might save a few.

Bloggage:

Foley was the very picture of self-loathing, of the corrupting closet: Here in Florida, where people knew him longest and best, friends said he kept his sexuality quiet because the most influential forces in his life, his parents and the political world he thrived in, would not accept him otherwise.

“I never asked outright because I thought it would be inappropriate,�? said Billy Brooks, a town council member in Palm Beach who was Mr. Foley’s high school guidance counselor. “I suppose if I had my druthers, I would have said, ‘Let’s get it out and get it over with.’ It was always bubbling under the surface.�?

Did you know the Catholic Medical Association still teaches that “overprotective mothers” are a common element in the backgrounds of gay men? Uh-huh, along with this: “If the emotional and developmental needs of each child are properly met by both family and peers, the development of same-sex attraction is very unlikely.” Thanks. And get out there and play some football, ya fairies!

The perils of live TV reporting, at least in Columbus. Thanks to Marcia.

Don’t bother spending $30 on “State of Denial.” Slate has condensed it down to the good parts.

I only met R.W. Apple Jr. — “Johnny” to all — once. He was a FoKWF (Friend of the Knight-Wallace Fellowship) and spoke at a conference our class hosted, on food writing. I recall his talk was a disappointment; he spoke of fusion cuisine, of which he disapproved. But he was jolly and funny and you just knew he’d be a blast to have dinner with. The Calvin Trillin profile in The New Yorker might have been on the stands that very week, and remains the single best source for understanding his legend. For a roundup of all the tributes, Romenesko is the best starting place.

Craigslist is the place to go for several things: Free classifieds that skew to younger eyeballs, casual sex hook-ups and pornography of a different sort:

I need someone who can correct,explain grammatical errors,show grammer rules and using more complicated words to rewrite my essays through e-mail.
My short essay will be included not over 500 words.
I need someone help me over 3 or 4 months, and you can return my assignment the next day or the day after next day.
I will pay 2 dollars for per assignment.

Two dollars. Not even five. Not even a medium latte.

Try Bangalore, bub. We pay union wages here.

Busy day, plus I’m coming down with something. I’m off to buy zinc and pick up dry cleaning, but I leave you with bloggage:

NN.C is in its sixth year of Proudly Bringing You the Irrelevant and Uninteresting, but my thirst for online shenanigans remains unslaked. And so this week comes the soft launch of Grosse Pointe Today, a learn-as-I-go experiment in web-based hyperlocal community journalism. I’m not looking for congratulations as much as I am feedback, so if you go over there, pretend you live here and tell me what would make you visit such a site on a daily basis. My ambitions are not so much to be the next William Randolph Hearst as Mitch Harper, only with less politics.

Columnist goes toe-to-toe with publisher, and publisher blinks. To paraphrase Homer Simpson (“Kill my boss? Dare I live the American dream?), Carl Hiaasen is truly living it. The American Dream, that is.

Scalzi has a list of Mark Foley’s next ten heart-rending personal disclosures.

Off to head this rhinovirus off at the pass.

FoleyFest continues. Having failed with the “well, Bill Clinton did it too” defense, we now find Focus on the Family taking a new tack (HT Talking Points Memo):

Colorado Springs, Colo. — Focus on the Family Action Senior Vice President of Government and Public Policy Tom Minnery issued the following statement today about the scandal involving ex-Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla:

“This is yet another sad example of our society’s oversexualization, especially as it affects the Internet, and the damage it does to all who get caught in its grasp.”

Something I have learned: When someone says, “This is not a time to be talking about politics,” that means it’s an excellent time to do just that. Oh, and check out the internet-made-him-do-it defense. Damn internet! This is almost too good.

As tempting as it is to say, today, that GOP stands for “gang of pedophiles,” precision requires that I point out former Rep. Mark Foley isn’t, technically, a pedophile. Pedophiles are sexually attracted to children, and it seems Foley was jonesin’ for post-pubescent boyflesh in the form of teenage congressional pages. The correct term for this attraction is “ephebophilia,” which is, unfortunately, a word practically nobody knows.

Now you do. I didn’t know it myself until a few years ago, when a bunch of Catholic priests introduced it to the world.

Foley’s still a creep — I couldn’t get through the IM record of his shenanigans without gagging — but you know, I think we ought to be precise in our language.

So maybe Gaggle of Perverts works better, eh?

But as many have pointed out, and many more will point out in the future, it’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up.

I see now that the greatest mistake of my career was not moving to Florida straight out of college. It is certainly the nation’s most fertile soil for weird stories, which grow like its tropical vegetation.

Whenever news breaks in south Florida, I think of my old pal Carolyn, who is surely at her desk at the Palm Beach Post as we speak, directing coverage of both the family-values Republican pervert and the sticky-fingered priests, both local stories.

And to think, she prepped for this in Fort Wayne, Indiana, where you’re lucky to get a yarn like this once every two years, if not five. Courage, Carolyn! I’m sure you’ll get a few hours of sleep before local resident Rush Limbaugh is found walking naked down Ocean Drive.

Ron’s series continues. Today’s focus is Big Pharma:

When General Motors Corp. CEO Rick Wagoner has nightmares, they might be about Toyota. Then again, they might be about Mae Gumbinger.

General Motors will pay about $16,000 for drugs this year for Mae and her husband, GM retiree Ralph Gumbinger, the equivalent of giving the couple a new Chevrolet Malibu.

The story is full of little jaw-droppers; every story about GM is full of jaw-droppers. Most Americans simply don’t understand just how big this company is, which is the underlayment for a certain what-can-you-do attitude you find around here among GM workers (most people) and those whose fortunes are tied to it (everyone). The company is the Nimitz, a giant aircraft carrier plowing through heavy seas. It can take a few torpedoes. If it can’t exactly turn on a dime, well, it’s unsinkable too.

Or so people believe. Please, no Titanic jokes.

Anyway, those jaw-droppers: GM spends $17 million a year — $17 million! A year! — on erectile dysfunction drugs. Sixty percent of the money spent on antibiotics is flushed down the toilet, because they’re prescribed for conditions that don’t respond to antibiotics. In 1999, seven years ago, half of GM employees were getting name-brand drugs, even when generics were available. The introduction of a generic equivalent for Zocor, a cholesterol-lowering statin drug, presents the opportunity for GM to save $100 million a year.

(Again: $100 million. For one drug. This is one big company.)

The passage about Zocor is unclear, but seems to imply that workers have a choice to switch to the generic; “education and financial incentives” are the plan to get more of them to do so. How about this for a financial incentive: Switch to the generic or pay for it out of your own pocket, bub. I’ve had drug plans like that, and I know they’re out there. The day Zocor went off-patent earlier this year, pharmacy benefits managers all over the country were on the phone to the generic drug plants in India at 12:01 a.m., wondering when those pills were going to start rolling out, and how soon could they get them. When $100 million is at stake, you play hardball.

Unless of course, the choice is part of a labor contract, which is entirely possible. Defiance, Ohio, my husband’s hometown, is a GM town, and its retirees are common in my mother-in-law’s social circle. They whine like toddlers over the idea of a $5 co-pay for prescription drugs, because they used to pay nothing, and now they have to pay something.

As this NYT column points out, Most families in the 1950’s paid their medical bills with ease, but they also didn’t expect much in return. After a century of basic health improvements like indoor plumbing and penicillin, many experts thought that human beings were approaching the limits of longevity. “Modern medicine has little to offer for the prevention or treatment of chronic and degenerative diseases,�? the biologist René Dubos wrote in the 1960’s.

But then doctors figured out that high blood pressure and high cholesterol caused heart attacks, and they developed new treatments. Oncologists learned how to attack leukemia, enabling most children who receive a diagnosis of it today to triumph over a disease that was almost inevitably fatal a half-century ago. In the last few years, orphan drugs that combat rare diseases and medical devices like the implantable defibrillator have extended lives. Human longevity still hasn’t hit the wall that was feared 50 years ago.

Most of those retirees, once upon a time, would have taken their gold watch, shuffled off to Florida, played a little golf and quietly expired by their 70th birthday or thereabouts. Now they’re living to vast old ages, helped along by technological and pharmaceutical wizardry. Now it’s time to pay. Especially if you’re taking drugs for restless legs syndrome.

Oh, well. Don’t want to bore you all silly.

Last Saturday was a fine, sunny one, and I spent my Saturday bike ride stopping at garage sales. (Does this negate the aerobic exercise? I choose to believe it doesn’t.) Scored a nice cut-glass wine coaster and a silverplate serving piece, seen here:

It holds a 9-by-13 baking dish; you can practically see the potatoes au gratin in it now, can’t you? It was black with tarnish, and as you can see, a little elbow grease works wonders. I paid $6 for the two items, and overheard a conversation among the proprietors:

“Can you imagine? He offered me a dollar. I told him, ‘I would rather throw this away than let you have it for a dollar!’ He made me so mad.”

This is not a useful attitude to have in business, is it? Certainly not in garage sales. The bargain in a garage sale is simple: You offer crap you don’t want anymore, in hopes that others will not consider it crap, and will pay you a little bit of money for it. “A little bit of money” — this is the garage-sale bargain, at least my garage sales. You can set your prices wherever you want, but you’d better be willing to come down a little. Many don’t seem to understand this. Case in point: I stopped at a sale not long ago, and immediately spotted a small nightstand. I can use one of those. It was from the L.L. Bean cottage collection, and was brand-new, still wrapped in plastic. A hand-lettered sign said: “Amazing bargain! Was $299, now $199!” Which seemed pretty damn high, but OK, let’s take a look. I opened the drawer, which slid out smoothly, and revealed the original price tag: “WAS $299, NOW $199.”

In other words, someone made a bad purchase, couldn’t use it, and now wants to get their money back. All of their money back. You’ve got to be kidding.

The silver piece was priced at $5. I offered $4. She agreed. Now it has a new home and Thanksgiving to look forward to. I bet that nightstand is still in the original seller’s basement, waiting for the next inflationary spike to make $199 look like a bargain.

Not happening. There’s a generic equivalent now: Ikea. It’s the 21st century, and it’s every man for himself.