I had one of those days yesterday. Spent: Talking on the phone, leaving messages, sending a million emails and mostly hoping we don’t bomb fucking Syria.

Even though I know we’re going to bomb Syria. How many times do we have to learn this lesson? Or rather, how many times does it have to be taught before we learn?

At the end of it, I rode my bike through some seriously bombed-out neighborhoods adjacent to GP. As usual, it was eye-popping. In two adjacent blocks, this:

View Larger Map

And this:

View Larger Map

And these photos were taken on a good day. All that vacant land is now covered in knee-high grass. The bankrupt city only mows a few feet back from the sidewalk and at the corners, so you can see cars coming. And yet, people were sitting on their porches, talking to their neighbors, smiling and laughing. This is not a nightly event in my neighborhood.

In my web work today, though, I found an awful lot of tasty linkage. Let’s get to it.

The Daily Beast isn’t good for much, but I enjoyed this piece on “Breaking Bad” and its dependency on our stupid health-care system. The short version: Breaking Bad Canada.

I don’t generally follow links to stories that promise me Pat Robertson has OMG’d in his pants again, but this latest one made it all so clear to me: This man is senile. He’s senile and no one wants to say anything to him, because he’s the boss. I bet he wanders the backstage areas of the “700 Club,” talking to the walls, and everyone leaves him alone because they think he’s at prayer. Imagine what he says when he doesn’t think the cameras are on. And where can I get my special AIDS-spreading hand-slicing ring?

While we’re at the megachurches of the world, this made me laugh. Because I am a bad, bad person. (How does a guy presumably demonstrate enough bird-savvy to get a permit to own bald eagles and then take them into indoor spaces and let them fly around? You could see that one coming a mile away.)

Today’s Only in Detroit story: Father and daughter caught trying to bring $270,000 in cash through Metro Airport.

Finally, the March on Washington at 50 roundup. When MLK Day became a national holiday, a friend wondered how long before we’d see “I Have a Dream, and Now You Can Too!!!” January mattress sales. In our lifetimes, I predicted. Not quite, but we’re getting there.

I think we’ve all heard about the King estate’s zealous guardianship of its copyright on the man’s writing and image, but here’s a wrap-up. Personally, I have no problem with a dead artist’s work supporting his immediate family, but once we get into the second and third generation, I think it’s a good thing copyright is not indefinite in this country. (Unless you’re Disney, of course.)

Finally, because eagles crashing into windows and babbling old bigots and the like might lead you to think I’m some sort of monster, let’s close with this genuinely good-news story that isn’t sappy or Albom-ish in any way. Quick, read it before the man himself makes it that way. From New Jersey:

Surveillance video from the Buddy’s Small Lots on Route 23 showed four young men entering the closed store Sunday night, taking a few goods and — wait for it — paying for them in full.

They didn’t know it at the time, but they were caught on camera doing the right thing.

A report from News 12 New Jersey about the incident spread far and wide, appearing on local TV stations across the U.S. The Huffington Post called them “accidental burglars,” and the store’s management wanted to offer them a reward.

Who were these mystery men? New additions to William Paterson University’s football team, school officials told NJ.com.

We’re on the downslope of the week, folks. Let’s enjoy it.

“Low Winter Sun” just aired its third episode, and I am watching out of a sense of duty — it was shot here in Detroit, the story relocated here (from Britain, I understand), friends worked on the crews, etc. My tax dollars at work. I want it to succeed. So far? Not an unqualified success.

I do give Ernest Dickerson, who directed the first two episodes, a great deal of credit for finding the visual interest in the city. He gets the ruin thing, of course, but that’s not all he gets. The cameras have found some largely unseen (even by locals) corners, particularly down near the end of Alter Road, one of my favorite bike routes. He sees the way someone who’s been here a few times (but hasn’t been jaded to it all) sees, so I can’t complain about the look of the show or its setting.

What has bugged me are the local touches to the dialogue, all of which sound like they were gleaned from a one-sheet sent over from the Free Press features department. One character cuts down another, saying something like, “You haven’t gotten a thrill like that since you were 15 and got a blow job hand job at the Dream Cruise,” truly a laugh line, as the Dream Cruise is attended almost exclusively by older people who generally have to plan for blow jobs hand jobs, with medication.

This week, there was an exchange about coneys. Detroit has two next-door neighbor coney islands in the middle of town, American and Lafayette, and allegedly there is a great tribal thing over which one you patronize. You know me, I’m just a tourist here, but I find both equally gross, and I keep waiting for someone to point this out in the many stories I’ve read about this great dividing line. (Interestingly, I have never, not once, heard a native express a preference for one over another, although they’re always doing so in newspaper and magazine stories. Whatever.)

I keep thinking about “The Wire,” in which the city of Baltimore was, as the critics like to say, a character in the story, and the difference between it and “Low Winter Sun.” I think it comes down to David Simon and his writing staff’s deep familiarity with the place. Simon, of course, worked as a police reporter there for years, and had a long embed with the homicide squad. That’s how you get wonderful details that became plot points and other great moments in the show — the Sunday truce, the exchange between the tourists and the stoop-sitting corner kids about the Poe House, and the two cops eating crabs in an interrogation room, one scooping out the guts with his fingers and reproving the other for being too much of a pussy to eat them.

It’s the difference between really knowing a city and only being here for the scenery and tax credits.

Last week on “Low Winter Sun,” one cop tells his partner that he took a woman “across the border, to Windsor.” No one would say that here; they’d just say Windsor, or across the border. Not both. That’s forgivable, though, because most non-Detroiters don’t know where Windsor is, and judging from how often the Canadian border is even left off locator maps in major newspapers, maybe we should be glad the line wasn’t, “I took her across the Canadian border, to Windsor, Ontario. That’s a province in Canada, Frank, not exactly equivalent to a state in the U.S. More a regional thing.”

I’m going to keep watching, because the show isn’t bad. I only wish they’d hire a local to read the scripts first. (I think I’m available.)

So, speaking of local weirdness, I was amazed by this story in today’s Freep, about a longtime political fixer — sort of a professional connector — suing a judge over an unpaid bill. The fixer, a woman named Jean West, brokers appearances by candidates running for office at local churches, senior centers and neighborhood groups. This was the part that hit me:

The 77-year-old plaintiff, a retired nurse who dived into politics after helping the first black woman get elected to Detroit’s City Council, called it a first. Never in her 43 years of working on campaigns had she ever gone unpaid, she said, despite her old-school methods.

When candidates seek her services, West brokers deals with a verbal contract and a handshake, promising to get them into as many Detroit churches as possible. And when she wants to get paid — her typical fee is $350 per week — the clients meet her in her backyard or at her dining room table and pay her, usually in cash.

No invoices. No formal contracts. She gets paid.

She’s suing for $3,500. Do you think the attention she’ll draw from the IRS will be worth that much?

Via Jeff the MM, one of those great Telegraph obits, of Col. Julian Fane, deceased at 92, a war hero:

On May 28 they received a message to make a break for it and head for Dunkirk. Fane, at the head of a small group of men, managed to slip away in the darkness. He was wounded in the arm by a mortar bomb as they scrambled through hedges and over ditches, guided by the flashes of guns on the coast and the light from burning farm houses.

At 3am they hid up in a barn and grabbed some sleep. During the day, the Germans arrived and the farmer climbed up a ladder and whispered to them to stay concealed under the straw. The next night, Fane and his men crept past an enemy bicycle patrol which was fast asleep under a hedge beside a towpath.

On June 2, after covering more than 20 miles of enemy-held country, he was standing in the doorway of a small terrace house close to the beach when a bomb fell nearby. The house collapsed and he was blown into the street.

His party reached Dunkirk in time to be evacuated back to England. Fane received the first of his MCs for his part in the fighting withdrawal.

Finally, I have nothing to say about a certain Disney pop tart a few years past her sell-by date, and her activities of the past couple of days, but before you write her off entirely, ask yourself whether this girl still lives inside her somewhere, and how she might be encouraged to reassert herself.

In the meantime, I just wish she’d put her damn tongue back in her mouth.

Man, am I beat, and I’m not sure I know why. No, I do: 85 degrees, rain allegedly on the way but probably not. I love sun and summer as much as anyone, but a little cool breeze would be welcome right now.

On the other hand? Still summer.

I do feel like I’m a little empty after all the Leonard stuff, and so, let’s just go with some linkage, which has been piling up in the last couple of days.

A big talker around here today, still shocking to consider: There are an estimated tens of thousands of stray dogs in Detroit. The shelters can’t hold them all, the police can’t deal and in the midst of all this misery you can still find wonderful details like this passage:

Aggressive dogs force the U.S. Postal Service to temporarily halt mail delivery in some neighborhoods, said Ed Moore, a Detroit-area spokesman. He said there were 25 reports of mail carriers bitten by dogs in Detroit from October through July. Though most are by pets at homes, strays have also attacked, Moore said.

“It’s been a persistent problem,” he said.

Mail carrier Catherine Guzik told of using pepper spray on swarms of tiny, ferocious dogs in a southwest Detroit neighborhood.

“It’s like Chihuahuaville,” Guzik said as she walked her route.

Chihuahuaville!

Meanwhile in animal news, The Chronicle of the Horse has been sold, and the staff is not pleased. And while I know you don’t care, I thought this passage was funny:

Since Bellissimo, 51, purchased the Chronicle in mid-July, readers have been venting in the magazine’s online forum, a kind of country club for mannered and fanatical horse enthusiasts. To even register as a commenter, one must answer trivia questions like: “If Mr. Ed was an off-the-track Thoroughbred, we might have seen one of these when he was flapping his lips with Wilbur.” (Answer: Tattoo.) Or: “If the farrier shoes three geldings in front and trims four more, how many shoes does the farrier need?” (Answer: Six.)

Dogs? Animals? WENDY. Playing the crabapple game:

And if you missed the late comments yesterday, our own LAMary, playing “The Weakest Link” some time back:

Now, however, I have to go drink some wine. It’s feeling like medicine right now.

The thing about the death of most 87-year-olds is, their heyday is usually long past. The other day Kate was mourning the loss of Ray Manzarek, and I pointed out the Doors stopped making music more than 40 years ago. Acknowledge great work when its maker passes, sure, but don’t soak your pillow with tears. We live in the age of the internet. Everybody’s best work is right here at our fingertips.

Elmore Leonard, though — he’s an exception. At 87, he got a lot more years than our allotted threescore-and-ten, and made them count. He was working, and writing exceptionally well, until the very end. I don’t think “Raylan,” “Djibouti” or “Road Dogs” (his last three novels) belong in his very top rank, but they were still better than 90 percent of the crime fiction published today, still very entertaining reads. If I’m doing work like this past my 80th birthday, I will die happy.

Leonard has been dead less than 24 hours, and already I’m tired of reading his 10 tips for writing, which is a good lesson, but if you really want to learn how to write, just read his books. Figure out how he does it.

In “Unknown Man #89,” a process server is looking for a man and thinks he may have found his wife. She’s an alcoholic, drinking the afternoon away at he Good Times Bar in the Cass Corridor in Detroit. (Just those details alone — the name of the bar and the neighborhood — tells you something, at least if you’re a Detroiter.) See the way he captures a drunk’s speech patterns, how they laugh at their own jokes and go off on their little verbal jags. Less observant writers make it all about slurring. Later on, he sets up a showdown at a bar, deep in a black neighborhood, called Watts Club Mozambique. It’s midafternoon, hardly anyone in the place, when the shit starts to go down:

The manager and the lady bartender, in the pen of the U-shaped bar, standing by the cash register, didn’t move. It it wasn’t a robbery, they assumed it was dope business. The employee in the cloakroom stood by the counter of the hall door. No one in the place screamed; no one said a thing.

You go to work in a place called Watts Club Mozambique, you know how these things play out.

A friend of mine, an English professor, says that when the historians of the future want to know how we lived, the details of our daily lives, they’ll turn to the genre novelists to tell us. They will find a deep vein in Leonard’s work. Take “52 Pickup,” a great slice of ’70s life in Detroit. It’s about an extortion attempt on a successful businessman who’s been having an affair. He runs an auto supplier in Mount Clemens, lives in Bloomfield Village. The girlfriend was in on it, and has turned over some home movies to the two guys running the deal, one of whom is showing him the spliced-together film of him on the Bahamian beach with her, narrating the action:

“Here comes sport now, rum collins for the broad and a Heineken. Loaded and he still drinks beer. That’s your background showing, man. Eleven years on the line at Dodge Main. Couple of shots and a beer every day after the shift, right?”

Loaded and he still drinks beer. Perfect. You can learn more about white-collar and blue-collar lives, and how they intersected in Detroit, from that novel than any dissertation on class boundaries in the Wayne State library.

There’s more, there’s so much more, but I don’t have time to pull down every book and transcribe long passages. I do want to hit some bullet points, though:

** He wrote great female characters, not the way women write them, but the way a man who likes women does. I interviewed him once, and commented on it. He said, “I don’t think of them as women. I think of them as people.” Quick, read “The Switch,” published in 1978, before Hollywood pollutes it forever.

** His villains are great, too. I’m with Matt Zoller Seitz:

His books were tough, but his heart was warm. He liked people. He felt for them. He was able to see through their eyes, no matter how naive or cruel or dumb or scared they were. He didn’t seem to believe in evil, only in stupidity: meaning, you have to be stupid, or stupidly selfish, to be evil. Most of his villains are pathetic and deluded. He never wrote a Hannibal Lecter or Tom Ripley. No masterminds, no puppet masters, no Corleone-style crime lords. His criminals were criminals because they were too dumb or greedy to do anything else, or because they’d fallen into crime a long time ago and never got out. Maybe they were lazy. Maybe they had bad luck. Whatever the explanation, Leonard understood it, even if he didn’t condone it. He believed in free will, but he also had compassion. He got it.

** Speaking of Hollywood. For a writer best-known for his great dialogue, filmmakers hardly ever got his material right. Leonard told the story many times of how he coached Barry Sonnenfeld on how to direct his characters in “Get Shorty,” which many acknowledge as the first adaptation to be worthy of the source material. He told Sonnenfeld no reaction shots, medium shots only and tell your actors that they are saying funny things, but their characters don’t know they’re funny. Personally, I think “Get Shorty” is overrated as an adaptation; it can’t hold a candle to “Out of Sight,” which to this day remains my favorite EL movie, my favorite Detroit movie and my favorite George Clooney movie — the actor was just emerging as a heavy-duty movie star but didn’t act like it and (more important) director Steven Soderbergh didn’t shoot him like one. Can we also say that Soderbergh achieved the miracle of a fine performance out of Jennifer Lopez? Because he did. Her wardrobe in that movie was killer, too. Favorite scene:

And though “Out of Sight” is my No. 1, “Jackie Brown” was also very good. After that, it mostly sucks. Some profoundly so. “Freaky Deaky,” shot in Detroit two summers ago, went straight to video and who can be surprised, when it was uprooted out of its time period and cast with standouts like Crispin Glover? “Killshot” did even worse; thanks, Mickey Rourke and …Joseph Gordon-Levitt? As the bad guy?

** Leonard was refreshingly bullshit-free. About pretty much everything. He always told the truth about writing, anyway. Besides the 10 rules, mainly you just have to sit down every day and do it.

So, I have some links for you:

First and best of all, the Detroit News, bless ’em, re-ran a 1978 piece by the man himself, a deep embed with a Detroit homicide squad. It’s great:

Five a.m. on Terry Street, Detroit’s Northwest side. The fire equipment had left the scene. The gutted two-story colonial stood empty, with its door open, windows smashed, the smell of wet ashes filling its darkness, a faint sound of water dripping in the basement. Someone said the woman found down there, lying on a bed, had been “iced.” A curious verb to use. The woman had burned to death, or had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument. The fire had been started to destroy evidence.

Dick Newcomb, Executive Sergeant of Squad 7, came out of the house with his foot-and-a-half-long flashlight and a photo album of smiling high school graduates in red caps and gowns.

One of them, a 17-year-old girl named Michelle, was at that moment in intensive care at Mount Carmel. She had been found unconscious — severely beaten and bleeding from deep lacerations – in an abandoned house several doors north of the burned-out colonial.

“You can go in if you want,” Newcomb said, “but you’ll smell of smoke all day, have to have your suit cleaned.”

While we’re at the News, a seven-year-old piece by columnist Neal Rubin on EL’s relationship with Woodward Avenue, the city’s spine and east-west dividing line. Again, very good but maybe of less interest outside of Detroit.

A five-year-old profile by Neely Tucker at the WashPost.

Glenn Kenny, to whom I link because lots of you probably don’t know about him. A film blogger, but an appreciator of prose as well. I had to laugh because Abel Ferrara agrees with me about “Get Shorty:”

He rolled his eyes. “God. So studio-ized. Every time they shoot Travolta from a low angle they’ve got the fucking key light giving him a halo.”

I laugh because Ferrara was fired midway through a p.o.s. movie a friend of mine worked on here, and achieved the remarkable feat of being banned from every single restaurant in the Book Cadillac hotel in something like 10 days. And Kenny takes a look at a typical paragraph of EL text, and explains why it’s good.

Here’s an audio piece I did years ago, for WDET, a version of the blog I linked to yesterday. My takeaway: I hate the sound of my own voice.

Finally, the Onion. Because.

Have a good Wednesday, all.

Sorry no new post today; I was out last night and we had some big home-improvement projects going, and work and blah blah blah. But this morning I’m hearing that Elmore Leonard died, and it seems appropriate to have a moment of silence and think about what one might say about that.

For now, though, I think this old entry should suffice. He really was the very, very best.

I didn’t realize until yesterday that it was the 10th anniversary of the great midwest blackout, which I am not going to capitalize and you can’t make me. The Free Press headline writer asked where I was, and OK, I’ll bite:

I was at the pool at Veterans Memorial Park in Ann Arbor, enjoying some idle time before my Knight Wallace Fellowship commenced at the end of the month. Kate and her buddy were enjoying the water slide when suddenly the water stopped sluicing down the chute. There were a few moments of confusion, and then the lifeguards started whistling everybody out of the pool. Power was out, pool was closing. This was around 4 p.m. or so.

So we went home, just a couple blocks away. Power was out there, too. I turned on the battery-powered radio, and learned power was out in a whole lot of places. The NPR reporter’s voice was shaking; just two years after 9/11, it was plain she feared this was a terror attack, and if the terror was lacking for now, it would surely be on its way.

Alan came home, and we assessed the situation. We’d been intending to go back to Indiana in the next couple of days anyway, and with no juice for the foreseeable future, we packed up and hit the road, already low on gas. We pulled off the freeway in Jackson. No power, and hence no working gas pumps. Tried again around Marshall. Nope. On I-69 we dropped our speed to save fuel and crossed our fingers. There’s a truck stop just over the Indiana line with enough gas to fill an ocean. As it hove into view, it hove into view — we could see the lights and the warm glow of civilization.

We coasted in on fumes and filled ‘er up, then filled ourselves with Wendy’s. I reflected that Indiana is out-of-step with its neighbors on so many things, but I’d finally found something I could get behind — it’s even on a different power grid. But that time, it was one that worked.

Most people’s stories of how they weathered important events are boring, and I am no exception. Man, those Wendyburgers tasted good.

Bloggage:

So today, the same guy who did the Crisco Fist art prank pulled another — putting For Sale signs on street lights, public statues and other buildings around the downtown area. As jokes go? Pretty lame, but you can see how the media covered it dutifully. It went a little like this:

(God, I loved that movie.)

Second somebody-explain-this-guy request of the week: I don’t read sci-fi (with a few exceptions), and so know nothing about Orson Scott Card, but I thought he was a generally respected author in the genre, albeit one with a problem with gay people. Now it appears he is, instead, actually nuts. Do these crazy ideas get passed around in a newsletter or something? This is the second or third time I’ve heard the Obama’s Band of Urban Gangs theory.

Over and out. I’m thinking it’s Oberon time.

Kate was born two months after my next-door neighbor had her second child, and decided to quit full-time dental hygienin’ and start her own business and otherwise craft a working-mother-of-small-children income. Which meant she had time to babysit Kate along with her own, Allison (two years older) and Drake (the new baby), and I could go back to work knowing my precious infant was in good hands.

And so Kate spent the first seven years of her life living next door to these two kids, with whom she spent half of her days, even after preschool started.

In other words, they were the three musketeers. Here’s Halloween 1997:

I don’t know why that picture is so small; I need to rescan it. (Pre-digital.)

It turns out if you keep feeding and watering children, they’ll grow. Five years later:

And two years after that:

I’m not sure why Drake was a ghost in both these years, except that it’s pretty easy. Here’s 2008, a non-Halloween shot:

And then it was 2013, and Allison graduated from high school, and we went to Indiana for her party. She’s headed for Oregon to get a job and find herself and do the things when you’re 19 years old. One last picture:

I’m hoping Allie gets the Purple Dreadlocks scholarship at Reed College. She’s smart enough.

It was a great trip, brief as it was. The near-perfect weather has made the farm fields of Ohio and Indiana emerald-green and perfect. The new Fort-to-Port road between Toledo and Fort Wayne means no more white-knuckle passing of semis on two lanes. Alex’s garden looks like a Thomas Kincaid painting. The party featured beers buried in piles of ice, and vividly-frosted cupcakes. If anyone had a better time on Sunday, I don’t know how.

Then came Monday, and these were the events, which will be the bloggage. Because I don’t trust myself to express opinions about them:

The Washington Post was sold to the founder of Amazon.com. I see several possible outcomes of this, and many are not good.

The collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts is being formally appraised as part of the city’s bankruptcy process, prompting morons all over the globe to express ignorant opinions that drive me insane, which is why I ask that you not read, for example, the stupid ones under this Gawker item, because it will make you insane if you have even a few facts about the situation in your head.

Elmore Leonard had a stroke. He’s recovering, but still. Eighty-seven. Stroke.

Oh, and did anyone read this Sunday piece in the NYT about the artificial-joint cartel? You Hoosiers should check it out; it’s a necessary counterpoint to the bootlicking local coverage.

All of which is to say, Monday is behind us and let’s hope the rest of the week improves.

Taking a break today; I’m in Fort Wayne for a graduation party, and not coming home until Monday.

Until then, this is what’s happening in Detroit: “Transformers 4” is shooting downtown. But Detroit isn’t Detroit. The production constructed an elaborate set in a vacant lot — of Hong Kong. There are photo galleries at Deadline Detroit and the dailies, certainly better that this crappy shot I grabbed Saturday after my bike ride. But you can see the Chinese billboards (fake) and the Tom Ford sign (ditto). Somewhere back in that mess is Mark Wahlberg and Michael Bay, making a shitty movie.

See you Tuesday.

We’ve mentioned the pile of pet coke on the Detroit River here before, but short version: A company owned by the Koch brothers (yes, this rhyming gets a little strange) is storing large piles of petroleum coke — a byproduct of oil sands refining — on the banks of the river here. It’s a dirty fuel, bound for countries where dirty fuels aren’t a problem.

A couple weeks ago, a local journalist wrote a column about it in the Wall Street Journal, boiling down to, what’s the problems? Jobs! And if you squinted and cocked your head, you could see it that way. If you were inclined to put stock in passages like this:

In fact, Detroit Bulk Storage has handled the material to the letter of state and federal regulation. To minimize dust, the pet coke is treated with an epoxy at the Marathon site before being transported in covered trucks to Detroit Bulk Storage. There, a water truck routinely wets down the material before it is loaded on barges.

And then a thunderstorm happened. And this happened. Click the link; there’s a video.

“We had a ship in to load some of the inventory,” said Daniel Cherrin, spokesman for Detroit Bulk Storage. “When loading the inventory they have to break the seal of epoxy (a spray used to hold down dust) to load the vessel. On that day there was a storm and wind that moved in. It carried some of that into the air as a result.

“You could say it was a perfect storm where they were loading the vessel (with petcoke) and it broke away into the wind. That’s what people saw.”

The stuff was only here for a few weeks, and the perfect storm hit, sending a cloud of dust all over Windsor. Sorry, Canada!

Guys, I’m having my midweek slump. I should give you a dog picture. Wendy loves Alan:

Now you know the truth: We own a recliner.

I remember, many years ago — and how many of these entries contain that soporific phrase? — a great reporter I worked with was doing a story about a teenage kid whose death some months before had become a cause for his parents.

The boy had been found hanging from a tree at a nearby park, his pants pulled down. Police ruled it a suicide, but the parents were insistent he had done nothing of the sort. It had to have been some strange assault that had turned into a homicide. My colleague was preparing a story on a third possibility — it was an accident.

Accidental because, as you sophisticates out there surely know by now, the death was caused by autoerotic asphyxiation. He was choking himself while masturbating, and lost control of the situation. It’s pretty common among those who practice “breath play” alone. It’s the ultimate “kids, don’t try this at home” sex game.

We’ve all heard about it by now; it’s almost common knowledge, but in the early ’80s, I found it astounding. The reporter was similarly amazed by the practice, and found only a few experts who could explain it to him. At the time, some sex researchers were on a campaign to educate law enforcement and coroners, because an incorrect cause-of-death determination could mean the difference between a life insurance payout and a denial. The people who do this aren’t suicidal; in fact, you might say they’re filled with a lust for life. They just chose a foolish way to masturbate.

I thought of that today when a local artist/provocateur played a prank, installing a giant can of Crisco under the Joe Louis memorial known everywhere as the Fist. Photo at the link. To “ease the pain of bankruptcy.” It was naughty, obviously, but I was amazed at how widely it was understood. In the years since my introduction to autoerotic asphyxiation, almost all non-Amish adults know now that some people like to stick their whole hand into some other person’s body, and it requires some heavy-duty lubricant.

I blame AIDS and the internet. Although some remain innocent. This was on the local Fox affiliate’s Facebook page, under a picture of the installation:

Local artist Jerry Vile has created something he calls “Vessel of Hope”. He hopes it may in some way ease the pain of having the Detroit bankruptcy shoved into our faces. Can anyone explain what this means???

At last count, it had been shared 1,545 times. I’m glad there are a few people left in the world who’ve never heard of such a thing. Long may they run.

Brian Stouder alert: Here’s a link to a podcast of an Indianapolis radio show last week, on the current charter/voucher school situation in Indiana. One of the guests is my old radio co-host Mark the Shark, who is also a school board member, and I am pleased to say he came out guns blazing and didn’t give an inch the whole hour. I find it hard to listen to many podcasts while I’m doing something else — something about the concentration required — but this one held my interest.

Wednesday already? Time flies when you’re working.