An actual hour to spare at the end of the day? Well, then, it must be time to jump into something I signed up for months ago — “A History of the World Since 1300,” the Coursera offering I thought I’d take a whirl at.

It is, I figure, the closest I will ever get to Princeton.

Also, I’m writing more about education these days, and online education is a comer. One principal I talked to says every kid in school today should take at least one online class, because that is the future. Who am I to deny the future? Hello, Coursera.

The first shock, however, was as old as 1975, when I first went through the checkout line at the College Book Store in Athens, Ohio: The textbook was something like $80. But you people have been particularly wonderful about using the Kickback Lounge lately, and I have enough Amazon credit built up that it became a what-the-hell purchase. It arrived today, and it’s a very nice textbook, I guess, which is my way of saying: I hope I can sell it in December.

Today’s lecture was in four parts, which is unbelievably convenient, as I was able to watch one part during lunch, another couple before and after my shower, and the last one while I made dinner. “People and Plunderers” was the title, beginning with the concept of wealth and ending with Genghis Khan. Professor Jeremy Adelman is a smooth-lecturin’ Canadian who uses words like “portmanteau” and if he’s unnerved by talking to a camera instead of a classroom amphitheater (because there is no way this isn’t one of those giant classes), he gives no sign.

Because you guys helped pay for the text, I’ll keep you updated on my progress. For now, I need to read Chapter 11.

I have 70,000 classmates, by the way. Are you one of them?

Actually, Genghis was a good end to the day, which wasn’t one of the best in recent memory. Besides the usual annoyances, there was the external stuff — the enervating public discussion about the 47-percent story, plus an armed robbery in Grosse Pointe that…well, I need a new sentence for this. Tell you what: I’m going to italicize all the words that make this story a migraine headache:

On Sunday morning, two young girls, 14 and 11, were walking home from church when they were accosted by a man who shoved one to the ground, showed a gun and stole her cell phone before running off. Oh, and did I mention this? The girls were white, and the man, in addition to being 250 pounds, was black.

Which means that any story about this event will grow repulsive comments like metastasizing cancer, each tumor more irregular around the edges than the last. But because this is Grosse Pointe, it can’t stop there. This was the follow by one of the largest news outlets in the state, yes, which saw fit to mention that the father of one of these girls showed up at the GP city council meeting the following night and had the gall, can you imagine, to call Detroit “a third world country.”

The incident is causing concern among residents of the community, a city that stands in stark contrast, both demographically and economically, to its neighbor Detroit.

Really? There’s a blinding observation for the second paragraph of your story, bub.

Yech, sometimes I think I should have stayed in Columbus. Or moved to San Diego.

So let’s move on to the bloggage, most of which was made obsolete by the terminal velocity of the Romney story. But there was one passage in the David Brooks column that I think needs to be put in neon somewhere:

The final thing the comment suggests is that Romney knows nothing about ambition and motivation. The formula he sketches is this: People who are forced to make it on their own have drive. People who receive benefits have dependency.

But, of course, no middle-class parent acts as if this is true. Middle-class parents don’t deprive their children of benefits so they can learn to struggle on their own. They shower benefits on their children to give them more opportunities — so they can play travel sports, go on foreign trips and develop more skills.

People are motivated when they feel competent. They are motivated when they have more opportunities. Ambition is fired by possibility, not by deprivation, as a tour through the world’s poorest regions makes clear.

And what the hell, here’s The Onion: Romney Apologizes To Nation’s 150 Million ‘Starving, Filthy Beggars’

Outta here, pals. I have stuff to read. Happy hump day.

If you want to get some honey, then you don’t go killin’ all the bees. Amirite, Joe Strummer?

I’m having a Scotch tonight for my friend Ben Burns, whose funeral was today. Half the town was there; I arrived 20 minutes before the service started and had to sit in the balcony. A bagpiper played on the steps of the big Presbyterian stone pile on the lakefront, one of those too-GP-for-words churches, although Ben wasn’t like that at all. He grew up on a dairy farm up near the Thumb and lived all over the U.S. before he came back to Michigan and worked his way up to the editor-in-chief’s position at the Detroit News. I didn’t meet him until just a few years ago, long after he’d left the paper (sale to Gannett; need I say more?). He was one of the three partners in GrossePointeToday.com.

It was a beautiful service that struck a delicate balance between sadness and celebration. Ben was 72, past the usual threescore-and-ten we consider a full life, but it still seemed too soon. He’d been living with a blood condition for 15 years when it morphed into leukemia, and he died in less than two weeks. Two weeks! He was scheduled to teach a class at Wayne this term. I got the email, went to see him in the hospital and missed him. Left a note. Called him, but he was resting and not taking calls. So I wrote him a note, mailed it and he died the next morning. Two weeks. You think you have time for these things, but people? You don’t.

This is good Scotch. Macallan, 12 years old. Like 80-proof candy.

Ben made the best of his life. He was funny in a quiet, droll way, which made his stories even funnier — like the time he took a woman he was dating to a big, loud party, lost track of her and discovered her in bed with the hostess. He had a big Spinone Italiano named Mac, after a photographer he’d worked with. The photog thought he was having a nervous breakdown, so Ben took him to the psych ward for the rest cure. They had to sit for a few hours, as even psych wards have to practice triage, and it must have been a full moon or something. The photographer watched the passing parade all the time, and when his name was finally called, stood up and decided he was feeling better and wouldn’t be checking in. I guess something in the animal’s face reminded Ben of the photographer, and every time I looked at his big, goofy muzzle I would try to see the picture-taker within. The dog laid by Ben’s hospice bed until the very end. I don’t know what happened to the photographer.

When someone dies, we talk a lot about legacies. Ben’s: Four spectacular children, a beautiful wife, career accomplishments to fill 10 glory walls. (My fave: a photo of him standing next to Arthur Ashe, autographed by the tennis star: “Ben — Stick to basketball. — Arthur.” Ben was 6-feet-8.) And a reputation for friendship and mentorship, service and all-around decency that streamed across the sky like a comet’s trail.

The opening hymn was “Joyful, Joyful We Adore Thee.” The closing was “Lord of the Dance.” Joy. Dancing. That was his life.

(If any of you read the obit I linked to and like it, please know the best parts — the pickle fight, Kwame’s recalcitrance — were Ben’s, written as a brief autobiography for a speech introduction or something a while ago. I wrapped them up with a new top and bottom. I hope he would have appreciated the irony of writing his own obit, but who else would come up with details like being voted one of Metro Detroit’s “most woman-friendly men?”)

No links today. The Macallan is all gone, and I’m headed for bed.

Long green for long beans.

A few years back, I accepted a freelance assignment to interview the three kings of the Detroit restaurant scene. Two of them ran trendy fine-dining establishments, the third a chain of mid- to upper-middle Italian places.

Five or six years later, no one talks about them at all anymore. One went broke, the other reorganized, and the chain is still chugging along. The last time I ate at one I swore I would never spend another penny there, because life is too damn short, and their dedication to serving mediocre food just pisses me off these days.

I think I’ve mentioned before that my biggest disappointment after moving here was the surprisingly lousy restaurant scene. Whenever I mentioned this, people would say, oh you need to try this place out in West Exurbia. It was named restaurant of the year by six magazines and three newspapers! We ate there last month and it was surprisingly reasonable — we got out for under $300.

I don’t want to eat at those places, at least not more often than annually. I want decent, moderately priced places you can drop in on, that won’t cost a fortune. I want a burger place, a pasta place, a Mexican place, a Middle Eastern place, a steak place, a fish place, a few surprises. (I don’t care if I never eat another coney for the rest of my goddamn life, by the way. That’s one burden I’ve been spared, not being a native.) And it’s taken me a while, but little by little, I’ve filled most of these slots. And I’ve found most of them in recently opened places in Detroit.

Last night Alan and I met for dinner at Green Dot Stables, typical of the new sort of place popping up around here. It’s a former Teamsters hangout, and doesn’t seem to have been redecorated under the new regime. No reservations required, just show up. They serve sliders, fries, simple sides and salads — all in tapas-size portions, all served in cardboard trays. The waitress circulates frequently and the menus stay on the table, so if you find yourself still hungry after your initial order, you can throw another $3 slider on the tab, no problem. Drinks come in what looks to be the old Teamsters glassware, only the last time I ordered a summer soda, made with cucumber- and lemon-infused syrup, the chef’s own concoction, something I doubt the union boys were into. It was delicious.

We got out — three sliders, soup for Alan, salad for me, an order of truffle fries later, couple of local craft beers — for $30 on the nose.

The transformation of the local food scene in the last few years has been remarkable. The explosion of urban farms, and the sorts of people who tend them, has led to a new kind of restaurateur, not interested in fine dining so much as good food. There’s a little imitation French bistro we discovered last year, after I sampled the chef’s ratatouille at a cooking demo at the Eastern Market. We pulled up in front and Alan said, “This can’t be right. This place looks like a methadone clinic.” Around back, a little kitchen garden had been scratched out of the ground, and inside they were serving crepes, quiche and the aforementioned ratatouille. You can carry in your own wine, with no corkage fee. Now when I want to go there, Alan says, “Oh, I had lunch there twice last week.” Well, it is near his office.

That’s Le Petit Zinc, if you’re taking notes. Have I mentioned Supino pizzeria, the best thin-crust pie I’ve had in my whole damn life? And even the Park Bar, a place I started patronizing on Kate’s music nights last year, has a Romanian family handling the food, in the Bucharest Grill off in the corner. Try the schwarma. I like the falafel too, but the best in town is the Harmonie Grill, near Wayne State. Ground chickpeas are very cheap; you can almost always feed yourself to bursting for under $10.

I think about those restaurant guys I wrote about, and they seem almost silly now, with their river views and white tablecloths and oh did I mention? Stevie Wonder dropped in last weekend. All I want out of the world these days is something good to eat. I can’t believe it’s taken me this long to find it.

So, bloggage?

I try not to overlink to the NYTimes; I know some of you don’t have subscriptions. But this is a blog post from yesterday, remembering the Chase Manhattan bank robbery that became the basis for “Dog Day Afternoon.” Many fascinating details on many levels; do not miss the slide show. Attica! Attica! Attica!

I found this cringeworthy: Dax Shepherd plays the Michigan game. When newspapers try to be fun and playful, it almost always ends up this way. But maybe you’ll like it.

You know how we’re always talking about the importance of learning from one’s mistakes? And how important — and difficult — it is to teach this lesson to our children? A story came across my radar today that’s one long teachable moment.

This is a TV story, but I can give you the rundown: Football boosters at a local high school decide the team needs a new playing surface. The usual procedure for this would be to make a plan, set a budget and start raising funds.

But no. Five boosters banded together, mortgaged their houses for the cash, paid $300,000 for the turf — in blue, if you can imagine — and then started raising money to get their houses out of hock.

You can guess the rest. The fundraising isn’t going so well. In fact, it’s going spectacularly badly, and now five families expect to be facing foreclosure in less than a month.

I think the TV piece was designed to build sympathy for them, but even the TV reporter couldn’t muster much enthusiasm for it. It didn’t help when the one booster/homeowner said he did it “for community.” God save us from people who think the basis of community is blue Astroturf. The guy’s affect was so flat that I have to think the wolf isn’t all that close to the door. Because nobody could be that dumb, could they? And if this guy was really in danger of losing his house because of a titanically dumb wager on the willingness of the community (which he helped build with that turf) to join him in his quest for blue turf, why isn’t he under his bed crying?

Now you know why prostitutes get the money up front. There’s nothing like getting something before you’ve paid for it to cool someone on the idea of, well, paying for it.

The weekend awaits! As does a low-key week off for yours truly. Kate and I will be doing a little traveling, first to the Hoosier state and then to the Buckeye. Jeff, you know how to find my number; buzz me if you might want to share a soda pop.

Some linkage? Sure:

Me, on a new idea about teen pregnancy and its relation to poverty.

Some eye candy for the ladies and the homosexshul gennlemens: 33 things to love about men’s water polo. Rawr!

Finally, Kate and I saw “Beasts of the Southern Wild” tonight, and so should you.

Great weekend, all. Spotty blogging next. But I’ll be around.

Yeesh, this heat is getting on my last nerve. The last few days have been less hot than it’s been in the worst weeks of summer, but so muggy my glasses steamed when I got out of the car last night. My scalp never feels entirely dry, and that spot at the base of the skull? Swampy. Ick.

So when Alan accepted a night at Comerica Park as part of an automotive media event Friday night, I was highly dubious. “Field box or suite?” I asked. Suite. He thought so, anyway. I enjoy a night at the ball park as much as the next girl, but it was 91 degrees at 6 p.m. Even the most casual business casual is miserable in weather like that.

I settled on khakis and linen, but needn’t have fretted. Because it was, indeed, a suite. And General Motors’ might be the second-best in the whole joint:

Let me put it this way: One of the GM people brought her son and another boy. After a couple innings, they went next door to get an autograph, having spotted Willie Horton sitting a few feet away, in the owner’s suite.

Add the air conditioning and the food, and all I can say is, this is civilization. Of course, now I’m spoiled for the field seats more or less forever.

Tigers won, 10-2. But you Clevelanders already knew that.

The rest of the weekend went swimmingly. Eastern Market (sweaty scalp) followed by errands (sweatier) followed by gym (total schvitz-a-thon) followed by cooking and shower and cocktails with friends. I indulged in a little Laphroaig, not my usual summer drink, but oh well. I thought it tasted oaky and peaty. Alan took a sip and said, “lavender and manure.” For this you pay $9.75 for 1.5 fingers, but it lasted a good long while.

And now to the bloggage. Because it seems we’ll never see the end of our peculiar American insanity, I offer the following as a cautionary tale:

Ugh.

After last week’s bite-the-medal photo array, I offer…kiss the medal. I guess it beats “swing it around your head and smack someone on the head with it,” but it does make for some repetitive photography.

This picture, however, of the first woman from Saudi Arabia to ever compete in an Olympic Games, sort of touched my heart. The look on her face. She didn’t last two minutes, but I have to think she did some good for somebody in that time.

Onward to the new week. Still enjoying summer, despite its best efforts to kill me.

Have you ever seen such a beautiful thing?

The stifling heat wave hasn’t been kind to anyone, but the impossible outdoor exercise conditions have sent me back to the pool, so there’s that. Lately I’ve been rising around 6, biking to my city park, which opens for lap swimming at 6:30, doing a half-hour of back-and-forth and then riding home. It all takes a little over an hour, and when I pull into the garage around 7:45 a.m., I have the pleasure of knowing I’m done for the day. It makes sitting in a chair for the next six to eight hours more tolerable.

Today was even better. The pool was set up with 50-yard lanes, a rare treat apparently done for the benefit of the swim team, which comes in later in the morning. You have to be a regular lap swimmer to appreciate a 50-yard pool — it’s the distance where you can really establish a rhythm, stretch out and relax and not have to always be thinking of the wall coming up ahead. Fifty-yard lengths make you feel like an Olympian, even if you’re just plowing along with your usual bad form, lumpy old you.

When I got out, I overheard the lifeguard while I was drying off, talking on his phone. “A body in the river?” he said. “Huh.”

“Huh” is the new “far out.” I miss “far out.”

I forgot about it until my lunchtime news fly-by, and whaddaya know: Two bodies — in pieces — were pulled from the Detroit River this morning, along with a circular saw. The man who called it in had this to say:

“It was not a pleasant way to start the day.”

Thank you, alert citizen! What’s more, this wasn’t even the biggest news of the day. Two dismembered corpses were trumped by a major break in a decades-old series of child murders, the heat wave and a middling-to-serious scandal in the state legislature. I tell you, it’s like living in south Florida in the ’80s.

But as miserable as this heat has been, I’m enjoying summer. Last night’s dinner: Shrimp tossed in a peppery-butter sauce with cilantro, corn on the cob, the last of the weekend’s blueberry pie. Not bad, even if it was a day when I only went outside twice, and then not for long.

So, bloggage?

If you didn’t catch Jon Stewart’s return from vacation this week, you missed a particularly good one.

I can’t stand Spike Lee, but this is a pretty good interview with him.

Are women worse at parking than men? No. Ask my husband.

Good lord, I’m beat. Have a good Wednesday, all.

These parental obligations sneak up on me. I’d forgotten, until late afternoon, that I’d agreed to take Kate to yet another nightclub show, and so off to St. Andrew’s Hall we went in the dinner hour, for the Summer of Ska tour — the Maxies, Suburban Legends, Big D and the Kids Table, Reel Big Fish. I took my iPad and made real progress in the nightstand book, mainly because there was no wi-fi network to hop onto. I gotta tell you: I’m tiring of e-books. The constant availability of other distractions — email, Twitter, Facebook — as close as a touch is giving me, has given me, the attention span of a toddler. There are times in reading all but the least challenging books when you need to buckle down, reread, flip back a few pages, and sometimes put it aside and think for a minute or two. Everything about the iPad/Kindle Fire discourages such things.

On the other hand? I just pre-ordered the new Laura Lippman, which will be on my device the day it’s released. Curse you, modernity! Curse your conveniences!

Also, it’s a lot harder to read a book in a dark nightclub. Well, I’ll have both.

A brief announcement: I’ll be taking the rest of the week off, for a mini-break with my husband following the deposit of our offspring at summer camp. Fortunately, I have some linkage for you.

First, two from yours truly: A piece on creating local food systems in Michigan, and an interview with the director of the Eastern Market. Something interesting I’d never considered before, from the latter piece, a Q-and-A:

Is it possible to imagine a world in which this 20 percent of small-scale producers can compete with large-scale producers? Yes, it’s already happening, with beer. In 1980, we had 101 breweries, and microbreweries were less than 1 percent of American consumption. In 2012, we went past 2,000 breweries for the first time since the 1880s, and microbreweries are just under 10 percent of market share by value. The only growing part of the American beer economy is microbreweries, and what’s especially impressive is, it’s consumer-driven demand, not government regulation. And despite massive advertising budgets, (big corporate brewers) haven’t been able to stop losing market share. That’s inspirational.

Nice analogy there.

OID: Dance with a cop, get shot to death. Without anyone even pulling a weapon:

Adaisha Miller, who would have turned 25 Monday, was dancing with Officer Isaac Parrish, 38, when she hugged him from behind during the fish fry, said police. A .40-caliber handgun, held in Parrish’s waist holster, fired and struck Miller in the lung and heart.

This has been going around for a few days, but maybe you haven’t seen it yet: A tick-tock on the reporting of the ACA decision, by the editor of Scotusblog. Very long, but very interesting. Explains how the sausage-making of live-TV breaking news is done, along with a lot more, including the fact the site was targeted by hackers in a DDoS attack that very morning. Some people. I mean.

Off to work, laundry and packing. Have a great week, all. Back Monday.