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.

Today was…a day. A long one, with many events happening in it. It included driving through three howling thunderstorms, the kind where you put your wipers on top speed and still lose sight of the taillights in front of you between swishes. In sane parts of the world, this is when drivers slow down, because you never know where the puddle lies that will send you hydroplaning into eternity. Also, because it’s good to know where the driver ahead of you is, and when they’re disappearing in the course of a second, tops, it’s wise to slow down.

So of course Michigan’s insane motorists were blowing past me at 60-plus. Passing on the right, because it’s INTOLERABLE that this woman is driving 50 in what is, after all, just some rain.

OK, but enough of that. A north wind is blowing away the lingering heat and it might be in the 50s by morning. Scratch the early a.m. swim workout and pencil in cycling. We’ll see.

In the meantime, I was away from the net most of the day, and so I missed the Anthony Weiner dick-pic story AND the royal baby’s unveiling. Fortunately, the internet kept up. Gents, when should you send a lady a dick pic and hey, it’s a royal baby.

I long ago lost track of the national punditry about Detroit’s bankruptcy, but Jonathan Chait got off a good line in his piece. It’s the last one in this graf:

Ze’ev Chafets, a native of the Detroit suburb of Pontiac, borrowed “Devils Night” for the title of his 1991 book about the city and its political culture. He compared Detroit to a liberated colony, whose politics was defined by continued resentment of the departed white occupier. White and black politics were locked into mutually reinforcing pathologies. Whites fled the city, blamed blacks for its destruction and, in many cases, gloated in its failures. Hostility toward the white suburbs shaped Detroit’s politics, which frequently amounted to race-to-the-bottom demagogic contests to label the opposing candidate a secret tool of white interests, with the predictable result on the quality of government. The worse Detroit got, the more whites hated and feared, fueling black racial paranoia, which made the city worse still. (Some national commentators recently suggested that Mitt Romney be brought in to turn around the city, which is a bit like suggesting that Benjamin Netanyahu would make a great Prime Minister for the Palestinians — hey, he’s from around there!)

Chafets’ book is very good, and I’ve read it twice — once before we moved here and once after. Yes, he wrote a fawning bio of Rush fucking Limbaugh, but “Devil’s Night and other true tales of Detroit” is worth your time.

I have to duck out now, however, as I’m a) exhausted, on several levels; and b) out of time. Let’s try for more tomorrow.

Sorry for the no-show yesterday. We had to go to Kate’s summer camp one last time, so she could play her final concert with the camp’s international jazz ensemble:

They had a concert Tuesday night at a club in Detroit, then Wednesday at camp, as recruitment for next year’s European travelers. As you can see, it’s your standard big-band setup, and they played a repertoire of classics from the genre. The highlights, for most of the crowd, were the finale – “Sing, Sing, Sing,” which they KILLED – and just before that there was a Dixieland strut:

When Kate was unpacking last week, she pulled a tambourine from her bag. “What’s that for?” I asked. She waved me off — “Oh, this…thing.”

I found out, Tuesday night, what the thing was. As she played an electric instrument, she needed something else for the walkabout. And so, TOTALLY EMBARRASSED TO DEATH, that’s what she played.

She really doesn’t mind being in the back line. Not much of a showboat, this one.

It was almost 10 when we left the sunset coast of Michigan, 1:30 when we pulled in the driveway. So no blog.

Well, the showdown between the Detroit emergency manager and the city’s creditors has come to this: Chapter 9 municipal bankruptcy, filed late Thursday, the largest ever. As this is, as we say in the trade, a developing story, I’ll keep my mouth shut. However, let’s all keep a good thought for at least one of our commenting community, who is a city employee and probably feels his nearing retirement is on a fast-descending elevator at the moment.

Just to give you a sense of the scale involved, here you go:

A Chapter 9 filing would leave the restructuring to (Detroit emergency manager Kevyn) Orr and a federal bankruptcy judge and could take years, experts say, despite hopes by the governor and Orr that the case can be wrapped up in a year. A bankruptcy judge could trump the state constitution by slashing retiree pensions, ripping up contracts and paying creditors roughly a dime on the dollar for unsecured claims worth $11.45 billion.

Detroit, always blazing a path. Just not the one you always want. This is a good analysis of the stakes — very high.

Any more bloggage before we stumble out of this suffocating week? Just this: Lewis Black, rallying the New York troops against the menace that is Texas.

Heat is supposed to break today. God, let’s hope so.

If I were a trout, I’d be fat and happy these days. But I’m not.

Asking whether Mercury is in retrograde — it is — may be only a slightly more ridiculous way to ask what the hell is going on and why is everything so screwed up, but it works for me. Let’s run down the woes, shall we?

Plane crash in San Francisco
Train crash in Quebec
Massacre in Egypt

And so on. My car required a heart-clutchingly expensive repair to the steering. On a bike ride last Saturday, both my partner and I got flat tires. Everyone I know is falling off ladders or bonking their heads on open cabinet doors. The dog was in a lather all day, begging to go outside. Where it was a mere 88 degrees with tropical humidity.

I had no ride to pick up the car, but I did have a bicycle (flat fixed). An enormous storm was building in the southwest, so I set out to get there as quickly as possible on an extremely unpleasant route through a bike-hostile suburb. Which I hate. But I made good time, paid the heart-clutching bill, threw the trusty bike in the back and thought, you may not be the best way to get around town in January, but you haven’t cost me $1,700 lately.

All of which adds up to: I am tired. So not much from me tonight. Kate and I saw “The Kings of Summer” tonight, an uneven but sweet film about three boys who run away from home and move into a house of their own construction in an Ohio glade. The Plain Dealer newspaper boxes and Berea fire trucks identified the venue as northeasterly, but a climactic scene with a copperhead had me rolling my eyes — I don’t think they’re found anywhere near Cleveland. That’s one of those things an Ohio girl knows: There’s very little to fear in the Ohio woods, although once a DNR photographer was killed by a rutting buck, who gored him.

So, bloggage?

The look on this woman’s face as she listens to the Indiana governor is simply priceless.

The new Google Maps app ad was shot here. Our crazy town.

Five theories for why Justin Bieber hates Bill Clinton.

And with that, I head for the sack and hope Thursday is a bit less expensive.

Hey, I just realized I took a long weekend, and didn’t post a word. Sorry about that. It wasn’t my plan, but there’s something about a long holiday weekend that makes blogging seem like a waste of time. I took Friday off, too, which was a wonderful non-day day hereabouts — did coffee with a friend, the gym, not much else — and so: No blogging.

Forgive, please.

One thing we did do was watch some movies. Two Detroit docs, in fact, both of which should have an audience beyond the Wayne County borders. “Burn” was the first, and you’re going to have to look hard for it, as it doesn’t appear to have had any sort of theatrical release outside of maybe the major cities. (You can watch it on iTunes, however. Probably Netflix too, if not now, eventually.) Subtitled “One year in the battle to save Detroit,” it’s a deep-embed piece on Detroit firefighters, currently some of the hardest-working, and shat-upon, people in the municipal work force.

Which is not to say that others aren’t hard-working and shat-upon. Just that firefighters, and police, risk their lives to do their jobs, most days.

If you’ve never been here, it’s hard to describe the essential weirdness of a city that’s emptied as quickly as this one has — hundreds of thousands just between the last two census cycles. Very few people are buying houses, relative to the ones who are leaving them behind. That leaves thousands, tens of thousands, standing vacant. First they’re stripped of metal, then architectural details, then bricks. Drug dealers move in, homeless people move in, animals move in. And, very likely, eventually they burn. A firefighter describes the varieties of arson — for profit, for thrills, for revenge.

Into these infernos rush Detroit firefighters, who are known for their skill and aggressive tactics. The problem is, what they’re rushing to save is, in large part, not worth saving. All these houses are essentially piles of tinder waiting for a spark. The scenes in the firehouse are contrasted with the offices of the new fire commissioner, who moved from Los Angeles to take this thankless job. How do you manage a force to cover 139 square miles of broke-ass city? How do you deploy your equipment, all of which is falling apart?

Forget your fantasies about public-safety workers retiring at 50 with a fat pension — a lot of these guys are true graybeards, kept on because the department isn’t hiring and what else are they doing to do? (Answer: Their side jobs, which most of them have.) One guy, whose final year is sort of a throughline in the film, states at one point that he has 11 days left, the sort of declaration that would be a death sentence in a fictional drama about a fire department. He’s old enough that his job is, basically, driving the truck and connecting the hose. Which he does well, considering he’s already 60 years old.

“Burn” is distinguished by its use of technology — helmet cams take you into the middle of the fires. The list of camera operators is long, which appears to attest to how many photogs were shlepping around town with various characters. The result is an impressive look at life in Detroit, and maybe in the rest of the world soon enough, when we hit the wall of revenues vs. expenditures, and privatization can’t quite make it work.

On the other hand, you can’t help but notice how much effort is expended fighting fires in buildings no one gives a shit about. And you notice how put out the guys are upon hearing of a new let-it-burn policy for those houses. Firefighters live to fight fires, it seems, and it doesn’t matter where, exactly, they are.

Anyway, for a $4.99 rental? You could do worse.

Elsewhere we saw “Louder Than Love,” a considerably more homemade film, about the brief, glorious run of the Grande Ballroom. (And yes, I expect Prospero to shout out in 3, 2, 1…) The Grande was one of those happy accidents, an inner-city venue that caught a wave, from 1967-70, hosting the greatest bands of the era passing through, while nourishing a few locals like, oh, the MC5. I went in not expecting much and was entertained, but there was a lot not to like, too. I grow a little weary of sex/drugs/rock’n’roll stories that don’t acknowledge there were a few casualties along the way, but there are none to be found here. The audience, at least some of whom were Grande audience members, laughed and clapped approvingly at every drug and sex reference, flattered and happy to be so.

Which is another way to say: I grew tired of people saying, “Wow. That was totally awesome.”

On the other hand, there were some wonderful artifacts, most notably an apparently contemporaneous recording and film of the Who playing “Tommy” at the Grande, before it was released. It was amazing to see Keith Moon spinning his sticks and calling, “A son! A son! A son!”

At the end of both films, though, I was left thinking that documentaries are great, but they’re not journalism. You have to keep that in mind.

And here is a WSJ review of a current book on the Detroit rock scene, then and now, probably behind a pay wall. It’s a little WSJ-ish, but it’s almost an exact counterweight to “Louder Than Love” and its cheerful boosterism.

But if you just need a little more rock ‘n’ roll, Michael Heaton talked to David Spero, a former manager of Joe Walsh who spent some time on the road with the Eagles:

“Glenn (Frey) was always two people. When he was being an Eagle . . . let me put it this way, he used to wear a T-shirt that read ‘That’s Mr. Asshole to you.’ But when he wasn’t being an Eagle, he was pure fun. So funny and so much fun to be with.“

Oh.

What else was the weekend? Fireworks, hamburgers, the usual. Oh, and Kate? Is home. It’s like she never left, but maybe that’s just the laundry basket talking. We’re still getting the download. I think she had a great time.

I hope your weekend was wonderful. At the one-third mark, the summer is going pretty well.

One question for the journalists. Is this Sun-Times front page merely clueless, or offensive, or what? Am I the only one who found the R/L thing pretty damn blockheaded, considering the airline? Just wondering: