I’ve lived in open-primary states all my life — first Ohio, then Indiana, now Michigan — and have been immersed in GOP Nation for so long that I can’t remember when voting wasn’t complicated. To vote offensively, or defensively? How strategic does my ballot need to me? Vote for someone, or against someone else?

We have a primary coming up in just under a couple weeks. There are a few interesting races on the table, and apparently I’m not the only one who’s strategizing.

Our state house district is reliably Republican, but no longer a lead-pipe cinch. Six Republicans and four Democrats are running for the seat opened by a term-limited exit. Normally I’d vote in the Republican primary, just for that feeling of not being disenfranchised, but the U.S. congressional seat is in play, and that one’s more interesting.

The current occupant is the Detroit mayor’s mother, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, an imperious, high-handed dame who behaves as though the seat was bequeathed to her by God. Unfortunately, her son’s problems have many suburbanites slavering to punish him by booting his mom from office — at least, if I’m reading the sudden appearance of yard signs for her opponent, Mary Waters, along such unlikely thoroughfares as Lake Shore Road in Grosse Pointe.

Here’s Waters’ TV ad, with Mrs. K’s famous meltdown of a couple summers back.

And here’s how the mayor is greeted in his hometown by a crowd of hockey fans, certainly a heavily suburban crowd. This is a fairly restrained response, based on what I’ve heard in private conversations.

Today brings fresh outrage for the ‘burbs: The mayor’s being investigated for allegedly shoving a sheriff’s deputy, who was trying to serve a subpoena on his good friend Bobby Ferguson. This happened at the home of the mayor’s sister, who is married to Bobby’s cousin, and yes, others have noted that nepotism seems to be a theme with these folks.

Anyway, I’m not sure which ballot I’ll request. It depends on whether the Republican spot for the state House seat looks to be in serious play. I don’t think it is — I think it’s going to a nice blonde lady whose qualifications include “in line to be the first female commodore of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club.” Oh, how nice. Meanwhile, Kilpatrick and Waters “sparred,” as they say, on a local public-affairs show last weekend, and the former sneered to the latter, “You couldn’t carry my bra.” And people wonder why I like living here.

Of course, it would help if one of the weeklies would cover the race, but they’re too busy covering a new swimming pool opening. (Headline: Splish, splash! Zero-entry pool opens)

Dunno if you non-subscribers can read this, but there’s an interesting piece in the WSJ today announcing the “end of the Reagan Revolution,” i.e., a return of government regulation. After a bellyful of Chinese lead, the mortgage-and-banking fiascos, collapsing freeway bridges and various other train wrecks, voters are saying, “You know, maybe the endlessly creative marketplace isn’t the best overseer for this stuff.” And I know you can read this AP piece about the same issue, in tighter focus:

WASHINGTON - One of the worst outbreaks of foodborne illness in the U.S. is teaching the food industry the truth of the adage, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.”

The industry pressured the Bush administration years ago to limit the paperwork companies would have to keep to help U.S. health investigators quickly trace produce that sickens consumers, according to interviews and government reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The White House also killed a plan to require the industry to maintain electronic tracking records that could be reviewed easily during a crisis to search for an outbreak’s source. Companies complained the proposals were too burdensome and costly, and warned they could disrupt the availability of consumers’ favorite foods.

The apparent but unintended consequences of the lobbying success: a paper record-keeping system that has slowed investigators, with estimated business losses of $250 million. So far, nearly 1,300 people in 43 states, the District of Columbia and Canada have been sickened by salmonella since April.

When we were in Cali, garden to the U.S., this was a very big story. Tomato growers were worried about losing their shirts while investigators tried to find the needle in the haystack. Meanwhile, consumers refused to buy tomatoes, restaurants pulled them from their menus and the nation twiddled its thumbs. Good thing the availability of our favorite foods wasn’t disrupted.

OK. Friends, I am looking out the window at what appears to be a lovely day. Time to exercise the Freelancer’s Option, and go enjoy it. Good weekends to all.

The incidents of scrap-metal thievery are great enough in number that they make a bona fide trend story, but I’m finding them lacking something, say, a sense of outrage. You can pile up the details all day, and there are scores — the theft of a green plaster statue of Jesus from the outside wall of a church, mistaken for copper; the stripping of a landmark fountain on Belle Isle, a six-figure repair for maybe $200 in scrap; the “NO METAL” signs on houses and commercial buildings around the city; the catalytic-converter gangs that can cut yours from your car without tripping the alarm — but still not get a sense of how bad it is.

A couple weeks ago, I heard an NPR piece on the theft of manhole covers in Philadelphia. A driver can hit an open manhole and do hundreds or thousands of dollars of damage to a car, but a cyclist can do the same thing and die. So you might say I paid close attention to this. The reporter interviewed a spokesman for a trade association of metal recyclers, who, in the tradition of weasel spokesmen everywhere, said scrap buyers bear no responsibility for this trend, and perhaps the cities most affected should work harder to secure the valuable ($20 in scrap, hundreds to replace) items, or maybe replace them with something less valuable, like fiberglas.

This being radio, and public radio at that, I waited in vain for the reporter to ask, “Are you telling me that a buyer has no obligation to raise questions when someone brings in five manhole covers reading ‘City of Philadelphia’ on them? Because I’d really like to get you on the record here.”

The linked story above has no scrap-metal spokesman — maybe he was busy doing a Black Mass or something — but it does mention the usual feeble effort of the city to crack down:

Last year, Detroit tightened its ordinance on scrap sales by requiring all dealers to produce paperwork and a video of all scrap sale transactions. “It has reduced copper theft in the city of Detroit,” said Bettison. “But now many of the scrap thieves go outside the city to sell their stolen metals.”

Well, that’s comforting.

As usual, Jim at Sweet Juniper has a beautifully written piece that captures the agony perfectly;

With China’s voracious demand for raw materials and the shocking increase in value of recyclable metals over the past few years, increased scrapping and theft are no surprise. But in places like Detroit the problem is so vast, fighting it seems almost futile, like those farm workers beating away the locusts in Days of Heaven. Occasionally a scrapper will die cutting a live wire, but six more step forward to take his place.

You see scrappers all the time in their beat-down old cars and trucks filled with metal: aluminum siding, radiators, steel fixtures, copper piping. I often see them inside Detroit’s wide-open and abandoned historic structures. Most artifacts of architectural significance have long been pillaged (for example, the terracotta lions from Lee Plaza that passed through the Ann Arbor antique market before being incorporated into new condo developments in Chicago). But there is still some rusty metal to be ripped away from the walls in most of these buildings. While showing that BBC documentary crew around a few weeks ago, we came across a mini van filled with metal driving around inside the old Fisher Body 21 plant. They are like maggots feeding on wounds; parasites devouring the viscera of this dying city.

We’ve already heard of aluminum docks around our lake place in south-central Michigan being stolen. Are scrappers taking your city apart, too?

No bloggage today — it’s already time to get changed for twice-weekly weight class, which recently went to a new teacher who believes it’s not weightlifting until the bar is sagging, apparently. Kill me now. If an open manhole cover doesn’t kill me first.

Every so often Lance Mannion mines his old notebooks for blog entries. Well, I don’t have old notebooks, but I do have NN.C. I started this site in part because it would require me to write something every day, to keep a journal of sorts, to keep a notebook in one form or another. So here’s something I turned up in my search for the Dexter column yesterday. Be glad you don’t know me in real life, for I am, apparently, insufferable.

This is from February 7, 2002:

Yesterday one of our neighbor’s kids stopped by. Middle-schooler, collecting information for a school paper on peregrine falcons.

“There’s been a peregrine falcon in our neighborhood,” he said.

“No way,” I told him. “Not around here. You’re almost certainly confusing it with a hawk. Red-tailed, Cooper’s, one of those. They’re big, they look like falcons.”

He insisted it was a peregrine. I insisted it couldn’t be. We had a short argument over whether they roost in trees in populated areas. I suspected I was putting him off, so I told him he ought to check out the Raptor Chapter, a non-profit that does rehabilitation on injured birds of prey. “Do you have the number?” he asked. I invited him in while I fetched the phone book. Alan walked in at this point. “Connor here thinks he’s seen a peregrine falcon in the neighborhood,” I said. “No way,” he said. Etc., etc. “Besides, they’re migratory,” I said. “They’re on the coasts at this time of year.” Connor said they weren’t. “I think you’d better check your research,” I told him.

Alan wondered what I was doing with the phone book. “I’m looking up the Raptor Chapter number for him.”

“The Raptor Chapter? They didn’t have the permits! The duck dicks shut her down,” Alan said.

“Shut her down? Janie? When?” I said.

“While back,” he said. “Of course we ran a couple paragraphs inside, after all that stuff we’ve been writing about her all these years.”

At this point I looked at Connor, who appeared somewhat dazed, no doubt thinking, Why the hell did I ring the doorbell of these lunatics? “I have a field guide, if you’d like to check it,” I said, gently. “Or you could call the Indiana DNR. They have lots of information. Guy name of John Castrale runs the peregrine reintroduction program.”

Finally, the thought occurred to me: “Why did you stop by, Connor?”

“I wanted to ask if you’d seen the falcon,” he said.

“Uh, no,” I said. And with that, he left. If I could have that five minutes to live over, I’d do it differently.

Bloggage:

I have a friend who works in TV news here, and whenever I bitch about the pathetic journalism — and fourth-rate star power — of local anchors, he rolls his eyes and give me a jaded, what-can-you-do look. However, I think even he would be appalled by news of a Detroit news anchor participating in a crooked deal between a sludge treatment company and the city council, and I hope on behalf of journalists everywhere, this paragraph made his eyes pop out:

Stinger, who joined Fox 2 as an investigative reporter in 1997 and became an anchor in 2004, was paid about $325,000 a year by Fox 2 Detroit in 2005, according to divorce records.

Actually, as TV-news anchors are paid — she anchored the morning news show — this is pocket change. All to look pretty. No wonder every Miss America contestant wants that gig.

Kids these days. Adults these days. Sheesh.

Early exit this morning — it’s back to the gym for mommy.

It was shortly after 7 Friday night that I wondered whether we were doomed. We’d gone into the Detroit Windsor International Film Festival Challenge knowing we’d have to make a film in 48 hours — no more than eight minutes, incorporating several assigned elements, in one of six genres, this last to be chosen randomly. Those were: Action-adventure, horror-thriller, crime, sci-fi, mockumentary and chick flick. We had vague ideas of a story for five. Some we liked better than others, and only one seemed un-doable with our standing team (chick flick). The rules would allow us to throw back one genre, but we would be required to take the next one. Before our two representatives went to the assigning event, we told them that if they drew chick flick to draw again, and we’d take whatever we got.

Diane, one of our reps, called a few minutes after arrival with bad news. Two more genres had been added: Superhero and musical. Musical? Musical?! We counted ourselves very lucky to have a musician on our team, but making an original musical in 48 hours seemed more daunting than a chick flick. We had a new bete noire. Diane spun the wheel, and it came up…Superhero.

We took it. The worst-case scenario of spinning again and getting Musical was too much to risk.

I’m not going to tell the whole story here — it was an entertaining and interesting weekend, and I’d like to tell it somewhere I have a chance of getting paid, but here are the highlights:

Our required elements were these:

We had to use the Ambassador Bridge and one more location, which was determined by throwing a dart at a board. Ours hit the campus of the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. We had to have a used-car salesman in there somewhere. We had to use a “for Dummies” book as a prop. And our line of dialogue was a real gem: “What’s that? It smells like cheese.”

It’s hard to make a superhero movie without tights, capes, special effects and the ability to drop women off tall buildings. Believe it or not, we had a green screen, but with only 48 hours to work with, it couldn’t be the foundation of our movie. So our superhero had to be antiheroic, reluctant. To compensate, we honored the other conventions of the genre — we gave him an origin story, an adversary (the guy with the limo) and a happy ending.

The bottom line of fast filmmaking is, you can’t be too picky. Good enough frequently has to be good enough. You have no, or barely any time to rewrite, reshoot or even think very much about what you’re doing. But we were fortunate to have a great crew, entirely assembled from Craigslist. Michael, our director, said several times how amazed he was by the power of Craigslist. I concur.

We finished, but just barely. Remember that scene in “Broadcast News” we talked about a while back? It was just like that. I was the Joan Cusack character. We left our headquarters in Royal Oak with the bare minimum to turn in (a mini DV tape; no time for the DVD burn) at 6:32 p.m., headed for the dropoff just north of downtown at 7 p.m. We made it with 9 minutes to spare. But three teams finished after we did. My favorite was the last one, which by my watch arrived at 6:59 and change: A Chrysler Pacifica rolls up, its door opening before it was fully stopped. Out jumps one guy and sprints for the building at top speed. Another guy jumps out behind him, ditto. Behind him was a third guy, running a little slower, holding an open Mac PowerBook with an attached remote hard drive — still burning the DVD. After all were away, the driver backed into a parking place, got out, shook his head and said, “This car will never be the same.”

More as the week develops. Screenings are next Sunday, when we find out if we placed. In the meantime, just remember: It’s not a movie until someone yells, “Let’s get a move on, people! We’re losing light!”

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

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

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

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

A quick skip to the bloggage, then:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, some Monday bloggage?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Happy Monday.

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

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

Bloggage:

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

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

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

That man is a good writer.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So, a bit of bloggage? Sure:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have a merry Monday.

Almost enough to make you forget that sore knee.

Although now my shoulder is sore, too.

Oops. Debbie Stabenow’s husband suffers from Eliot Spitzer’s Disease.

I see at least two only-in-Detroit details in the following paragraph; see if you can spot them:

Thomas L. Athans was stopped Feb. 26 by undercover officers investigating a possible prostitution ring in a room at the Residence Inn near Big Beaver and Interstate 75. Athans paid a 20-year-old prostitute $150 for sex in a Troy hotel but was not arrested, according to police reports obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by The Detroit News. The police report said officers observed Athans enter a room under surveillance and leave 15 minutes later. Detectives followed and stopped Athans’ silver 2002 Cadillac DeVille on Interstate 75 near Square Lake Road.

UPDATE:
Well, at
least the
girl dresses for
Michigan weather: