So, with Kate out of the house for a spell, we have found we cannot leave well enough alone. I’ve been feeling my next pet out there looking for me for some time, and I’m thinking I may have found her.

This is Wendy:

I’m not sure if we’ll get her; there are a couple of other applications in for her, but I’m hopeful. I went down to the shelter in Detroit to meet her Thursday, and man — you think you’ve seen it all, and then you visit a Detroit animal shelter. I honestly don’t know how people who work in these places do it, but I expect it’s a matter of getting hardened, and also deaf. Not to mention growing accustomed to, for example, people like the woman who walked in midway through my application interview, looking for a place to drop off her cat, which needed to be euthanized. She was old, in her 60s at least (although it’s possible she was just a 45-year-old crackhead, or ex-crackhead), with several tattoos of spiders crawling up her neck and across her face. Alternating-color nail polish. Deeply wrinkled. She didn’t want the cremation option at $130, because she didn’t have the money. She didn’t want to see the cat afterward either, lord no.

Here were some of the interview questions:

Did I understand that dogs required veterinary care that could total $100 a year or more?

Where would the dog sleep? Inside?

Was I employed?

How did I intend to treat chewing or destructive behavior? (“Um, chew toys?”)

What would we do with the dog if we had to leave town?

Who would be responsible for her care?

And so on. I felt myself rising in esteem with every inquiry, and stood there, next to Spider Woman, in my Bermuda shorts and clean black T-shirt thinking, “These people are not going to kick too hard about us not having a fenced yard.”

In fact, I think we may have vaulted to the top of the list. I tried to get another picture of Wendy during our visit back in the kennel, but she wouldn’t hold still. I think I captured the most important part, though:

She’s not quite a year old, and has spent the last four months at the shelter. She was picked up as a stray, and had an old fracture of her right foreleg surgically repaired to the best of the vet’s ability. The office staff seem to think very highly of her, and like all Jack Russells, she thinks very highly of herself, too.

We’ll see. If she goes home with us, it won’t be for another week, as I have to take a short work-related road trip next Wednesday (photo posting only, I fear). This didn’t seem to be a problem.

Wendy, you silly pup. Are you my next dog?

No bloggage tonight. I’m thinking about dogs right now.

Well, I will not deny it: This is outrageous. I know, I know — no one is looking at your stuff, nor mine, but this is outrageous.

However, at the moment I’m just going to let shit slide. I’m now on vacation, and I’m in shit-sliding mode. You discuss. I’m still in absorption mode on this one.

What I can’t let slide is this column by Virginia Postrel, on the possible liquidation of Detroit’s art museum. Every idiot libertarian I’ve ever known has had a big googly-eyed crush on her, but this hits a little close to home:

Parochial interests aside, however, great artworks shouldn’t be held hostage by a relatively unpopular museum in a declining region. The cause of art would be better served if they were sold to institutions in growing cities where museum attendance is more substantial and the visual arts are more appreciated than they’ve ever been in Detroit. Art lovers should stop equating the public good with the status quo.

The cause of art. Hmm, what do you suppose that is? Postrel thinks our collection would be better off in those two artistic oases — Los Angeles and, get this, Dallas. God, what an odious twit.

I really need to go on vacation. So I think I will.

To repeat: Next week, five from the ancient archives. They suck, but they will suck free of charge, as always. I’ll be back, live and in the flesh, June 17.

OK, it’s decided: Next week will be one of Ancient Archives, selections from the work of a newspaper columnist who toiled in relative obscurity in the northeast corner of Indiana. You might like ’em, you might not, but at least you’ll have fresh entries to comment on, and under, every day.

I have three lined up so far. If I can find two more that don’t turn my stomach — and so, so many of them do; I see only the flaws — we’ll have a week’s worth.

A difficult day, spent mostly staring at the mockery of a cursor, which had this to say: Blink. So let’s get to some bloggage, because it’s good today:

Only in Detroit! Teenagers walking to school look down an alley, and see the astonishing sight of a man having sex with a pit bull, so they do what any kid would do: Take out their phones and shoot some video. After showing it to a school security guard, police came to the scene and found the man sitting on the ground naked, but he took off. From here the story becomes a little murky, but it appears the man was taken to the psych ward, the dog to a shelter, and the final verdict, from the man’s brother, is that he had “mental issues, and also drug issues.” But of course. And because this is local TV news, there had to be a shot of the reporter getting tough with the brother. I hate local TV news. (That link explains why, admirably. It’s not enough to bug people who don’t want to be interviewed on a nothing story. You have to bug and bug and bug, and make sure the camera catches it all.)

Meanwhile, if great news photos had been taken with an iPhone.

It’s the new dance craze that’s sweepin’ the nation: Artisanal distillery. A natural for Cooz, I think.

Why conservatives hate the Citibike program in New York, in one Venn diagram. This is actually hilarious to watch unfold. We’ll see how it goes.

It appears all the good has been bred out of the Kennedy line. Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is an anti-vaccine advocate. Lots of links to follow in that one, so I won’t quote any of it.

Back to packing, and that damn cursor.

Michelle Rhee was the big speaker at Mackinac today. Judging from my social-media feeds, it was either a huge success or, well, this:

There exists very little difference between her “reform” scheme and the broken system she seeks to fix. Both sides of this argument seek to reinforce a one-size-fits-all educational program that, to quote The Simpson’s Superintendent Chalmers, prepares the next generations for “tomorrow’s mills and processing plants.”

Thrive in a school envisioned by Michelle Rhee and you’ll likely make an ideal Secretary of State employee or insurance claims adjuster.

This is from Jeff Wattrick, who is covering the conference for Deadline Detroit. He’s not 100 percent my cup of tea, but he brings a certain zing to an event that encourages a sort of complacent, polite, inside-the-Beltway, respectful coverage that, frankly, it doesn’t always deserve.

The Center for Michigan is celebrating a big win up north, however — after about a year of work, a significant bump in early-childhood education funding is a done deal — $65 million a year more, to help another 10,000 kids attend high-quality preschool. A lot of shit is going down in Michigan at the moment that is unsettling — the DIA stuff is only the start of it — but this is good news.

Sorry for the late update, but it was one of those days where I hit the tape and collapsed into a heap. Eighty-eight degrees yesterday had something to do with it. Thursday had something to do with it. Laziness had something to do with it. And now I sit here on Friday morning, coffee at hand, and think: Cronuts? Well, OK.

What is a cronut?

A cronut, if you’re unfamiliar, is the new hybrid pastry — half croissant, half doughnut — that is sweeping New York. Or would be sweeping New York, if people could get their hands on them. As of today, the only place cronuts are sold is at the Dominique Ansel Bakery in Soho, where people now line up down the block as early as 6 a.m. — two hours before opening — for the chance to snag one of the 200 cronuts the bakery produces daily.

People will line up for pastry in other places, but they have to be Krispy Kreme.

We got to talking about doughnuts at dinner the other day. Alan revealed that a long, filled doughnut — long as opposed to round — is known as a “lunch stick” in northwest Ohio. This just goes to show you can spend nearly all of the last 25 years with a person and still not know everything about them. Why lunch stick? Who knows? Alan’s Defiance family is full of those country expressions — calling a green pepper a mango, calling lunch dinner, etc.

The other thing they’re known for is refrigerating everything. Alan once bought a dozen warm Krispy Kreme on the way to the lake one Saturday. Everyone had one upon arrival, and he went off to do some chore. When he came back for a second, they’d already been put in the refrigerator, i.e., ruined. Refrigerating doughnuts is the work of a woman who fears ants in the kitchen more than a cold, slimy KK.

Do cops still eat doughnuts? The ones I see are more likely to be eating Mexican food.

Speaking of public-safety workers, I wonder why Detroit firefighters even bother anymore. A short video on a blaze at one crappy corner liquor store that ended up critically injuring two firefighters. And then the ambulance didn’t show within 15 minutes. I ask you.

OK, time to wrap. Or rather, time to take the Slate news quiz and score miserably.

Have a good weekend, all.

You guys were talking in comments yesterday about finding caches of old porn under the rafters of one another’s houses, which is the standard hiding place, or was. (As my old neighbor the cleaning lady could tell you some folks just leave it lying around and expect the help to put it away.) It reminded me of a story I’m sure I’ve told before, but these things will happen as we all get old, right? Anyway: Some friends of mine rehabbed an old farmhouse west of Columbus, probably dating from the mid’19th century. As part of the kitchen restoration, they pulled off the mantelpiece for the fireplace. And found two items:

1) An addressed, stamped, but apparently never delivered invitation to a high-school graduation. You could almost see that it must have been part of a stack of them, and slipped off the top and down between the mantelpiece and the wall. How many hurt feelings did that lead to, you wonder?

2) A pamphlet, absolutely authentic and almost perfectly preserved, for a patent medicine that pledged to cure young men of the urge toward self-abuse. It went on for several pages about the dangers of this practice, how it could lead to a loss of vigor and general malaise, irritability, etc. I wondered how the homeowners came to pick it up at their local pharmacy — a bad-tempered teenage son, perhaps, paired with some spotted sheets? An embarrassing moment walking in on the boy at work in the bathroom? Who can say. The despairing mother confides in a druggist; he proffers some literature. I wonder if she ever bought any of the stuff. I wonder what it might have contained.

History tells us most likely it was alcohol. Which, when you think about alcohol’s relationship with human sexuality, is sort of funny. He probably switched to the livestock.

I started to write yesterday about the news that broke Friday, that the city-owned collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts could be at risk of liquidation should the city declare municipal bankruptcy (which most believe is a foregone conclusion). Opinion about the emergency manager’s statement on this is all over the map — it’s a trial balloon, it’s a negotiating technique, it’s a bargaining chip, it’s madness, it’s about time. At this point it’s safe to say that if you’re planning a trip to visit the Rivera murals, you don’t need to rush, but you never know. This will be in court for eleventy jillion years if it gets that far, but at this point, all I know to do is sigh heavily.

As you can imagine, the usual racists have stood up and thundered that those ghetto hood rats don’t deserve a great art museum, so why not sell every last watercolor. Some have said, “Oh, cheer up — it’ll just go to another bunch of museums,” which strikes me as one of the dumber things said in the last 72 hours, and that’s saying something. If the unthinkable happens, and some or all of it is sold to satisfy pensioners and bondholders, it’s pretty obvious it would go into the drawing rooms of Ron Lauder and Barry Diller, et al. I think about “Detroit Industry,” the Rivera murals, painted by a Trotskyite, commissioned by an aristocrat, celebrating the working class. It’s about the most recognizable single piece in the building, and the single best artistic distillation of what Detroit is, what it was, that probably exists today. (OK, a ridiculous statement, but I’m no critic.) I wonder what would happen to that.

Elsewhere here in the land where anything can happen, a disgraced former Supreme Court justice, a Democrat, was sentenced to 366 days in prison for bank fraud, i.e., shenanigans on a short sale. I have zero sympathy, but I don’t wish her ill. She’ll spend her year in a Martha Stewart federal prison for well-behaved lady criminals and be home in time for next year’s Memorial Day barbecue, and maybe even Christmas, with good behavior. She retains a generous state pension and the luxurious Florida home that led to all this crap.

I’ll tell ya — real estate never leads people down the paths of righteousness, does it?

I am on a dedicated campaign to get out from under my mortgage sooner rather than later — we went to a 15-year note two years ago, and I make extra principal payments — so I guess the fact the market is recovering should be good news for us, but somehow I don’t think so. Basically, real estate is the devil. I look forward to the communal apartments my old age surely has in store.

A short work week, and already we’re at Wednesday? How’d that happen? Happy Hump Day to you, too.

I signed up for another group ride Friday. It runs the full length of Woodward Avenue, from the Fist to Pontiac and back. That’s 54 miles and it rolls in about a month. I’m not worried about my legs, but I am worried about my butt and hands. Time to toughen ’em both. So I headed out for a little toughening Monday. It was a good day for it — overcast and cool, a holiday so little traffic.

I put the chain on the big ring and let ‘er rip, with the intention of riding out for an hour and then coming back at the same pace, hoping to cover around 20 miles. I reached the outer limits of my safe-solo-travel-into-Detroit circle at 40 minutes, then came back the long way around, which is to say, in one 1.5-hour period, it was blight and industry and wealth and water and — as always, because this is Detroit — lots of liquor stores.

Didn’t quite make 20 miles. Google said I rode 17.5. But a good start.

And if there’s anything more boring than someone else’s workout, I don’t know what it is. But that was the weekend: It started with kundalini yoga and ended with beef on the grill. Funny what you can do in three days, without doing all that much other than eat and recreate a bit.

Well, there was the Liberace biopic. Not all that great, but it had its moments.

I had more to this entry, a few words about the big news here over the weekend — the potential of the sale of the DIA collection — but somehow I got signed out, and lost it all.

With that as an eff-you from my own site, I’m leaving early. Let’s hope it’s not an omen for the rest of the week.

Amid the throngs of suburbanites, a demonstration. Because sure, there’s PLENTY of parking.

Man, if you’re an editor? You don’t get paid enough money. I’m covering for my vacationing boss this week, and I’m just amazed at how much a modern editor has to think about. Content, of course, but also: Photos. Headlines. Tags. Scheduling and placement. Links. Where everything goes. It calls on a whole different set of skills, and if they’re rusty, well, in today’s world you can squeak “oil can” through your clenched jaw all day, and no one will hear you.

And did I mention I’m half-blind? Things are finally, slowly starting to resolve themselves in the ol’ eyeball, and the extra vision is yet another thing to get used to — the increased definition is almost worse than last week’s total blurrification. But of course, improvement is welcome.

And then this afternoon, another bike ride — faster this time. A hot sweaty mess when I got home, but hot sweaty mess means a lukewarm shower and a small scoop of ice cream for dessert.

We’re having a busy week anyway. Bridge has a new partnership with the Free Press, and it launched today with a couple of stories I’d be interested in anyone’s thoughts on. My colleague Ron had to be in California to accept an award, so we sent him down to Vallejo and Stockton, the largest cities in the U.S. to declare bankruptcy — so far. Detroit’s Chapter 9 filing is seen as a foregone conclusion, so that’s the angle for us. Californians? Thoughts?

(I think I swapped the links there — the Stockton story is linked to Vallejo above, and vice versa. But the first link is the main story, so you can start there.)

And with that, we are into the bloggage, I guess.

Frank Bruni isn’t my favorite writer by a long shot, but even when you strip away all the Bruni from this story out of Columbus, just the bare facts are infuriating: A gym teacher at a Catholic high school in Columbus, fired after her mother’s obituary mentioned her female life partner among the survivors. A parent dimed her out — anonymously — and that was that. I hope she sues, I hope she wins, and I hope she crushes that place like Godzilla.

A funny story out of Tampa on one of those sovereign-citizen types.

Finally, a slide show, via Hank: The Naval Academy plebes, for their final act of plebe year, climb a spire on campus that has been coated with grease. Yes, shirtless young men climbing a greased obelisk-like structure. Great pix.

Oh, so tired I am. Guess where I’m going?

Spring has finally deigned to arrive, and it appears to be a pretty good one. Saturday I rode in the Cycle Into Spring, a group ride put on by the same people who do the Tour de Troit in the fall. Whenever I think group rides are a waste of money, I think of the police escort and the wonderful feeling of rolling through under the red lights. Worth $25, in my opinion. Ten bucks extra bought lunch: Three sliders and two sides from Slow’s, the barbecue place.

All in all, a perfect morning. I’d planned to go to the Eastern Market early, but even at 7:30 a.m., the freeway exit was backed up for a quarter mile. I ducked out and opted for breakfast at the Jefferson Avenue IHOP, where one of Alan’s colleagues had to submit to a full body search to be seated after midnight one night when the tunnel was backed up.

No body search. In fact, hardly any other customers. But it made for a nice early breakfast. IHOP — the classics never change.

And the ride was quite nice. I went with a friend, who stayed to my right and kept the blind side filled with a friendly presence. Twenty miles in three hours. It was a cinch. Then sliders, then home, then a nap. And that’s what I call a Saturday.

How was yours?

I would have taken some pictures, but I’d recently edited this column, and am thinking you don’t always have to take a picture to prove you were there.

Although sometimes you have to take a picture. This is Jerry, who helped us get the mast up:

The wind vane at the top of the mast got whopper jawed in the raising, so Jerry went aloft to straighten it out. This was a new one. Brave Jerry. We tipped him.

Do I have some bloggage? I do:

The Atlantic photo blog delivers again. Great pictures.

A video of a wolf pack howling. Those of you who have cats — I’m interested to know how they respond to this.

What is going ON with this episode of “Mad Men?” If you have a clue, share.

Well, I found a better FalconCam. Campbell Ewald is an ad agency in Warren with a building that stands out in its field, so to speak, rising several stories over the usual inner-ring suburban low-rise sprawl. They’ve had peregrines visiting for a while now, but this year they finally got a nesting pair, and they have the HD video installation such a bird requires. The greatest-hits video blog is here, and the link to the livestream is here. The eggs hatched only this week, with one to go.

It’s really quite arresting, watching the parents come back to the nest with a dead bird in hand to do the regular feedings. I think they’re doing an eat-and-regurgitate thing for now, which makes sense.

As Campbell Ewald is an ad agency, the people running this are a little too cute for my taste. After only a day of occasional checks, I’m growing tired of the memes and anthropomorphizing, but oh well, it’s their camera. They can brand-build with it all they want, I guess.

Of course, now the 20th-century technology of Fort Wayne’s FalconCam looks pretty dim, but the chicks are older, and moving around the nest more, so there’s that.

And there’s bloggage:

A friend is doing some canning, and recalled the single best canning headline ever. Photo is just the lagniappe.

I recall the Freep slobbered all over this place when it debuted, so it’s only fitting they cover the inevitable failure. Yes, it’s another Mike Binder project, which I am shocked, shocked to see didn’t fly. Isn’t Los Angeles just DYING to eat shitty coney dogs? Binder obviously has passed the point of success — let’s call it the Binder Point — where forever after, no matter how many times you screw up, you can no longer fail. Lagniappe: At the time I’m posting this, the local “iconic” potato-chip brand name is misspelled in the story. Because it’s so iconic.

This happened to the son of a woman I worked on a project with a few years back. I get the feeling it happens every year, somewhere. Because BROTHERS.

Hump day is behind us, so let’s float down the other side.