It’s a 30-mile jaunt through the ghetto, peeps. And it starts any minute now.
What, your gourmet nut market doesn’t feature a Jacko impersonator? Move to Detroit.
Again! I swear I published this at 10:30 a.m. Apologies. Maybe it’s a bug, or maybe the bug is me.
The city of Pontiac closed its police department forever this week — no money. Policing the unfortunate city was turned over to the county sheriff’s department, and I hope they go with God on this one, because Pontiac is a pretty rough town, and they may need divine intervention to make it work.
Meanwhile, I visited the home page of my former employer this morning, and saw the cops were driving the hostage rescue vehicle around for National Night Out festivities last night. The website being a p.o.s. I can’t link, but it just so happens I have a photo of that vehicle which I took way back in 2003, during a flood:
As you can see, its high clearance makes an excellent flood-navigation vehicle, although most often, you see it in this situation:
Hey, kids! Ever want to see the inside of a real tank?
The city of Defiance, Ohio, has one of these, too — we saw it in the Halloween parade. I think it was the year they were talking about closing the city’s swimming pools for lack of funds, but I’m not sure.
Do any of you Hoosiers know if this thing has ever been used to rescue a hostage, or is it just trundled around as a gas-guzzling vehicle of diplomacy, like an armored limousine?
I’ve been covering city governments long enough to know that the money for these items rarely comes from the general fund. Homeland Security likes to sprinkle dollars around the hinterlands from time to time, in the event al-Qaeda ever targets northwest Ohio. And never count out a hungry police chief when it comes to finding grant money or weak spots in the armaments of the county treasury. Remember, Fort Wayners, when the Ku Klux Klan rallied at the courthouse in the ’90s? It was a greenmail dream come true for every badge in both city and county. The courthouse, as courthouses tend to do, sits smack in the middle of town, but it’s a county building, so you had two forces elbowing for the right to be on the front lines. The sheriff’s department got to be the primary perimeter around their building, and they turned out in riot helmets and shields so new you could almost see the ghosts of the price tags on them. The city protected the area around the courthouse, and I think the entire force was there, likely on overtime. So few people actually showed up, the police-to-rallier ratio was about 3-to-1. But nothing bad happened, so every penny was defensible. Right?
Ah, it was the ’90s. We had so much, then. Riot shields, functional police departments, rising property values. The good ol’ days.
I still count the column I wrote about that rally among my favorites. Couldn’t find it today at gunpoint. Newspaper columns, like the good times, aren’t made to last.
Folks, the coffee ain’t working today. Let’s pop down to the bloggage, shall we?
Bradley Cooper speaks French, Mila Kunis speaks Russian. The translated title of her movie, “Friends With Benefits?” “Sex Friendship.” Some things just don’t translate. Did I ever tell you about my friend in Paris, who sent me the titles for the porn listings in the local weekly? American porn producers favor dirty versions of existing movie titles (“Pumping Irene”), whilethe French go for a more clinical approach. One, as I recall, used a verb that means “to break in” or “to enter with violence,” for a title that ran, “I’m breaking into you sans Vaseline.” Ick.
The big tree Morgan Freeman finds a letter under in “The Shawshank Redemption” was torn asunder by a storm this week, prompting a wire-service story. Best reader comment? Ooh, you gave the ending away!!! How long are spoiler alerts required for a movie made in 1994?
And that’s all I have today. Off to drink more coffee.
Where has Maker Faire been all my life? I can’t believe it took us this long to find, and how did I — an individual acquainted with a fair number of youngish hipster types — miss it, along with the distinct Brooklyn/Detroit/steampunk-ish/sustainability vibe?
Got me. Note to self: Pay closer attention to the world around you.
In the meantime, this iPhone takes crappy pictures, sometimes. Here’s a couple other snaps of the dino-dragon, which was driveable:
Alan and I agreed that the design detail we liked best was the use of tires for its leathery skin. Other high points: The life-size mousetrap and, of course, the fire-breathing pony. Note the two hipsters running the pony, Pinky McHair and Mr. Kilt. I kept telling Alan he needs a kilt, but not some silly plaid one. One like the guy in the picture, in basic black, khaki or olive, like the pants he buys from Brooks Brothers. It’s hard for a guy to rock a kilt, but he could do it, because he’s stocky and hairy, which means his testosterone is not in doubt.
“OK,” he said. “I’ll wear it with plaid underwear.”
That would totally work.
The weather all weekend was hot and hotter and muggy and ick. I’m currently recovering from a couple hours of yard work, not even anything particularly strenuous, but done in the sort of heat that makes one grumpy and tired, it felt like a marathon. But after a few days of attention, the place is looking better, inside and out. And very shortly I will make the last cherry pie of the season. I am fully enjoying summer.
But I don’t have much to say, today, beyond general mourning over the debt deal, so let’s go quickly to the bloggage:
Another royal wedding. Now these are some English people — none of that pan-Eurotrash who showed up at the last one. It looks like the groom, a rugby player, had his nose relocated by a head butt. (Correction: At least eight head butts. Or whatever.) Fixing it would be a pussy move, however, so he wears it proudly. Is it just me, but is Auntie Camilla wearing the same fascinator she wore to her stepson’s wedding? And oh look, there’s Cathy Cambridge in yet another safe neutral. Looking at Princess Anne, it’s useful to remember that of all the athletes at the 1976 Olympic Games, she was the only one not required to submit to gender testing. (She was part of the British equestrian team.) Now look at her — the very picture of mature femininity.
The bride looks nice, but that’s to be expected. Note how she turns her head left to kiss the groom; a wise move, as going the other way would run her smack into that broken nose. I wish them much happiness.
From New York magazine, Frank Rich on the Murdochization of the US:
…a Times reporter who wrote a routine news story on a Fox News ratings lull was punished by having his headshot distorted into an anti-Semitic caricature worthy of Der Stürmer for display on the morning show Fox & Friends (a misnomer if ever there was one). Other victims have had it far worse, including the often-defenseless obscure citizens who cross O’Reilly’s radar screen because they have views he abhors, at which point his producer stalks them for an on-camera ambush. (It was left to the Post, however, to trash a former O’Reilly Factor producer with whom he settled a sexual-harassment suit in 2004.) O’Reilly’s now-departed tag-team partner in Fox News vigilantism, Glenn Beck, excoriated the nearly 80-year-old CUNY sociologist Frances Fox Piven so often in the past few years (mostly for an essay she had written about poverty in 1966) that she had to fend off death threats. George Tiller, the Wichita abortion doctor who was called a “baby killer,” among other epithets, on 29 episodes of The O’Reilly Factor, was assassinated while at church in 2009.
Stay classy, Fox.
And finally, one from behind the NYT paywall, but maybe you’ve got the golden key:
The man behind all that hysterical anti-Sharia legislation is a Hasidic Jew in Brooklyn. One guy, with “a history of controversial statements about race, immigration and Islam,” wags this dog:
Working with a cadre of conservative public-policy institutes and former military and intelligence officials, David Yerushalmi has written privately financed reports, filed lawsuits against the government and drafted the model legislation that recently swept through the country — all with the effect of casting Shariah as one of the greatest threats to American freedom since the cold war.
Ugh, Monday awaits, and it’s going to be a very very long one. Enjoy yours.
I bet Coozledad is building one of these in the back pasture.
(It’s a fire-breathing dragon/dinosaur thingie. You know you want one.)
The other day I was riding my bike to the library, a trip of less than a mile, brevity I was grateful for, as it was approximately 450 degrees outside. I was thinking how cold the spring had been, and oh well, Michigan, what are you gonna do, and then I saw this dead squirrel on the sidewalk ahead, splayed. This was in a park.
“Wow, that squirrel died looking just like a pelt. Weird.”
I came closer. The tail twitched, and the dead squirrel jumped up and scampered to safety. It reminded me I’d seen this once before, on a similarly hot day. The squirrel was lying on a picnic table. Every dog I’ve had has sought out cool surfaces to press their bellies on; Spriggy had a tile hearth spot he liked, our old German shepherd Agnes preferred the foyer. So I guess it’s not so strange, and even though I’d gone through my entire life without seeing it until recently, animals do adapt. I did make note that all the ones I’ve seen doing it are the black-coated ones we have around here, who anecdotally seem smarter and more aggressive than their gray cousins.
Then my old neighbor in Fort Wayne, Earl Bowley, posted this on his Facebook. Taken at a local restaurant on, yes, a hot day:
Planking squirrels. What will they think of next?
Its name is Walter, I’m told. Now you know.
Rained all night here, and at the moment all I really want to do is stare out at the puddles, drinking coffee. It’s been so blazing hot of late, the sun so relentless, that it’s nice to raise the blinds for a change and dig it. Or as a certain Seattle-bred left-handed guitar god sang, lay back and groove on a rainy day. (Hendrix must have done little else, in Seattle.) However, we’re promised a 90-degree day once the low pressure moves through, so my guess is, the primary activity of the day will not be grooving, but sweating.
A couple of book notes: I’m working my way through the nightstand selection, “Punching Out: One Year in the Life of a Closing Auto Plant,” and enjoying it very much. Recommended for those of you who’d like to discuss the auto industry, or even the manufacturing economy, with anything other than bumper-sticker phrases. (“The UAW killed GM, really, it’s very simple.” And so on.) The overwhelming impression I get is that building cars and everything large made of metal is anything but, and I stand in awe of the people who do. “Punching Out” is the story of the disassembly of Budd Wheel, a major stamping plant a few miles from my house, which closed for good in 2006. The plant’s equipment was then cut apart and sold, piece by piece and press by press, to companies which then shipped all these items to places like Mexico and India and so forth, for reassembly at other plants, where the evolution of the economy hasn’t quite caught up with ours. Which is to say, where there’s still a growing need for factories and workers.
The author, Paul Clemens, wrote a short version of this for the NYT op-ed page some years back, and I linked to it then. The idea of scrapping, from the illegal street to the respectable factory level, is a pervasive theme in Detroit, and has been for a while. When Kate was still in Brownies, we took a tour of the Ford estate in Grosse Pointe Shores, where Edsel and Eleanor, son and daughter-in-law of Henry, built their Cotswold mansion. The guide pointed out all the details that had been taken from great houses in the real Cotswolds — flooring from this one, windows from that — and I had to smile. Sometimes it seems there’s a finite amount of wealth in the world, and all it does is travel the globe, being bought and sold by those with the means and the need to do so. It’s not that Detroit is a ruin; it’s that its wealth has been taken elsewhere, leaving, in Clemens’ memorable phrase, the working class mopping up after itself.
I sound like a commie, don’t I? Well, I’m just thinking out loud, watching the puddles dimple.
The hour, it grows late. Let’s jump to bloggage, shall we?
“Bridge & Tunnel,” the “Jersey Shore” that wasn’t. A good read from the Village Voice about kids these days, on Staten Island.
I love these things, known on the ‘nets as supercuts: A montage of movie pep-talk-in-the-mirror scenes. Language NSFW.
Tea Party douche who lectures the president on financial responsibility, sued by his ex-wife for $100K in back child support.
House-cleanin’, verb-studyin’, other writin’ awaits the day. Enjoy yours.
Sometimes I think you could write an entire local-TV newscast consisting entirely of the words and phrases “controversial,” “what you don’t know can hurt you” and “hidden dangers.”
As I mention here regularly, one of my income streams comes from a part-time job finding news about health care. Five nights a week, I venture out on the internets with a string of search terms as long as your arm. In the several years I’ve been doing this, I’ve seen the crisis in newspapers up close, and pals, it ain’t pretty. Fewer daily papers are paying close attention to health care and health care policy at all, and more are running the sort of syndicated garbage that allows them to fill their health pages with story after story about weight loss and, of course, hidden dangers:
Backyard barbecues are a big part of summer fun, but avoiding their hidden dangers is key to staying healthy and enjoying a cookout, a doctor suggests.
What are the hidden dangers? The doctor, from an outfit called Chicago Healers, ticks them off: You could get burned! You could get food poisoning! You might not know how to turn the grill off and on! And oh, the cancer that awaits you!
I saw this Sunday night on the USA Today website. Granted, this was the weekend, and it is the summer, but bishpleeze.
I have always, always despised journalism that assumes I’m a moron. (Except when it’s appropriate.) And in general, I just roll my eyes, turn the page, or click away. But later that night, I had a local newscast on, just some babbling to keep me alert, and the weekend anchor said, “Summer is barbecue season, but before you light that grill, you need to be aware of the hidden dangers that come with cooking outside.” The same goddamn press release! With a graphic! Telling us, yes, you need to cook your meat to a safe temperature, and make sure you know how to turn the grill off and on, and consider grilling vegetables instead, “a healthy alternative to meat.”
Every year, the day after Thanksgiving, this same station and hundreds of others like it will run a similar piece about the hidden dangers of leftovers. Did you know you should heat your gravy to a rolling boil before it’s safe to eat? True dat.
On the other hand, there is a way to do fluff well. The Wall Street Journal has a regular feature called “What’s Your Workout,” which on paper sounds ghastly, but is almost always executed well. They look hard for people who manage to cram fitness into hyper-busy schedules, and while there’s always a certain number of douchebags who ride $3,000 bicycles or work with $100-an-hour trainers, there’s also the guy who made a list of 20 workouts he can do in an hour, all with amusing names like “the Rhianna” (paddleboarding) or “Alex McCandless” (stair climbing), then throws Dungeons & Dragons dice to pick one. No re-rolls; what the dice say, goes. It mixes it up and makes the dice the bad guy.
There was another one, earlier this year, about a guy who could do an entire hotel-room weights workout using the wall and his briefcase.
And that concludes today’s episode of Bitching With Nance. This is what happens when you start writing before the coffee kicks in.
No, wait, let’s bitch some more: Remember earlier this year, when we discussed “Modernist Cuisine?” Someone called its author/editor, Nathan Myhvold, a patent troll, a term that was meaningless to me. Until last night, when “All Things Considered” did a shortened version of last week’s “This American Life,” which I’m working my way through now. It would appear “Modernist Cuisine” was supported, at least in part, by its author’s company’s patent trolling, which gives me just one more reason not to buy the book(s), which I wasn’t going to buy anyway. Worth your time.
And finally, a good story that’s a smile all the way through: Detroitblogger John on Fred’s Key Shop, a locksmith business, decades old, in the heart of the city:
“We get these calls from senior citizens that are going senile — ‘You gotta come change my locks, ’cause all the food’s moved around in my cupboards.’ We had this one lady, we were going there to change her locks three and four times a year — ‘Somebody’s been in my underwear drawer.’ You go out there and you change the locks and you don’t really charge them nothing.”
Other elderly people grow too weak to turn the key in their lock and think it’s broken. Murphy says the locksmiths will take it apart, grease it and loosen it, and leave without charging them. “I’m not going to charge some 90-year-old lady because she can’t turn the key.”
They’ve gotten Tigers fans into their locked cars, only to find out they’re broke. They let them go on their word. One showed up at the shop a few days later and not only paid his bill but also brought a case of beer as a thank-you.
“It always comes back, you know, good karma,” he says of the occasional free work. “You get it back if you give it.”
Let that be the parting thought of the day. Give it, and get it back. Someday.
Here’s something I see more often these days — a lament for dangerous playgrounds. Frequently the argument has an undercurrent of hostility; I recall one by a father of two that basically boiled down to, these kids today could all use a few more broken arms, but I’m sorry, I can’t find it now. Most of the people advocating it seem well-intentioned enough, although I note they tend to live in the land of the anonymous “some” who are ruining childhood, but not for attribution.
That many of the Some may be made of straw and live in the Land of Oddly Articulate Taxi Drivers occurs to me, yes.
Here’s how the argument goes: Children’s playgrounds are being, or have already been, ruined. By lawyers, by — finger quotes — experts, but mostly by Some, who want to take all the risk out of childhood, and hence, all the fun.
There’s some truth to this, at least to the bare fact of ruination, although I wonder how much it has to do with risk and how much with money. But I’ve seen some pretty wan playgrounds in my time. The one at a nearby elementary school in Fort Wayne had a single piece of equipment on it — something that looked like a folded slice of Swiss cheese, with a total height of maybe five feet. I gather you climbed on it. Not that I ever saw a child do so.
But something else happened along the way, and playgrounds started getting fun again. When I was a kid, I played at the elementary at the end of my block. There were four or five different playgrounds, sized for the range of grades, and if I remember correctly, they were basic — swings and monkey bars and slides and see-saws, anchored to asphalt. If you fell, you fell hard, although that was rare. But it happened. My major dread of the playground was being dumped from the high position on the see-saw; I had a friend who specialized in it, with a truly perverse timing that suggests she had a bright future in torture of all sorts.
By the time Kate was born, the playground had changed. The “playscape” had come on the scene — sprawling constructions that mimicked kid-size castles, with spiral slides, swinging footbridges, climbing walls and all manner of things you could swing on, jump from and otherwise exhaust your energy and imagination.
A few of our favorites: Planet Westerville, near my sister’s house in suburban Columbus; Kids Crossing and Foster Park’s playground in Fort Wayne; and a Kids Crossing clone here in Grosse Pointe Woods’ Lake Front Park.
One thing all these playscapes had in common was some sort of soft footing underneath, usually wood chips, although I’ve also seen sand and shredded rubber. I honestly never gave these a thought, other than to be grateful for them. It seemed like, oh, progress, the way a padded dashboard is progress, and seat belts, and bike helmets.
I’m now informed I was all wrong. Modern playgrounds destroy children’s natural risk-taking impulses:
When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.
“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”
His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.
Excuse me, but New York Times? What a crock of shit. I can go a long way with this movement — yes, kids must take risks to grow; no, playgrounds shouldn’t be made entirely risk-free — but when you need to tuck “stunted emotional development” in there, hiding behind that big “may,” I’m going somewhere else to play.
The story goes on with the usual reporting; a Norwegian psychologist consults her clipboard and identifies “six categories of risky play” and then we get to the inevitable sources for these types of it-seems-one-way-but-it’s-really-not stories — an evolutionary psychologist. The more bullshit I find in the world, the more I can trace back to evolutionary psychology, the talk radio of soft-science scholarship.
“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.
“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”
I always wanted to use “posit” as a verb. So here goes: I posit that all this hand-wringing over too-safe playgrounds is perpetrated by a handful of people who really don’t like children all that much. As I said before, it’s important that kids take risks and try new things, but this barely disguised yearning for them to fall from the top of the monkey bars and break bones is deeply hostile. To them I say: OK, your kid goes first. And if you don’t have any, shut up.
Somewhat related, an old treat found while Googling: Sweet Juniper’s Jim on the unique nature of Detroit playground culture.
Let’s hop to the bloggage, so I can get dressed for weights class:
I do not use special soap on my crotch. There, I said it! Nevertheless, Vagisil would like to sell me some, using some lamely “provocative” viral videos they want everyone to post on their Facebooks and be outraged by. I look at these and think, More good voice work for actors. Huzzah.
I used to be lonely, in my discussions with fellow Elmore Leonard fans, when the topic of film adaptations would come up. “Of course, ‘Get Shorty’ was the best adaptation of a Leonard novel,” someone would say, to nods all around. No! No! I screamed inwardly. “Get Shorty” was a huge improvement over all that came before, and a breakthrough, but no way it’s the best, because that title belongs to “Out of Sight,” and this guy agrees with me, so er’body just shut up.
So, two videos:
You wanted to tussle; we tussled. My favorite scene from “Out of Sight”:
And a video I worked on with my summer interns. I’m not much of a video producer, and it’s hard for me to teach this stuff, because I barely have a handle on the technology, and what I see in my head is so different from what appears on the monitor. Still: The assignment was to do a slice-of-life video aboard a Mackinac racer. We were invited out for a Thursday night of fun-type racing. Took two small cameras, the Flip and the GoPro, mostly handled by the interns. And virtually all the audio turned out like that in the first 10 seconds — spoiled by a persistent roar of wind. (Cheap mics are the bane of cheap cameras.) I fixed it by going back a few nights later with my good USB mic, going belowdecks, and reconducting the interview in acoustically cleaner conditions. My critique of the video is: Too many cut-off heads, too few detail closeups to cut away to, not enough of a narrative arc — it plays like a sketchbook. On the other hand, given the raw materials, I don’t think it turned out too-too badly. Tell me what you think, and have a great weekend. Stay cool.
I can’t let fishfly season go by without at least one photo documentation:
That’s from a few days ago, the typical leavings of a single night. They’re pretty much done now, but they had one last hurrah last weekend, when the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was playing on the shores of Lake St. Clair. It was a two-night gig. The first night they played the first half of the program and took intermission while night fell and the hatch came. Within minutes, the insects covered the players’ music — they’re attracted to anything white — and, it’s safe to say, were probably arousing a wide gamut of emotions among them, as well as the audience. The following night they dropped the intermission and shortened the program, so as to get everything wrapped before the disaster movie started.
Stupid goddamn Mondays. I worked, on something, all damn weekend. Except for Saturday night, when we went to the Concert of Colors down at the orchestra hall for the Don Was All-Star Detroit Revue. It wasn’t bad, and if it skewed old, well, that was the audience. Martha Reeves was the finale, still workin’ it after all these years. Her voice is shot, but she was able to shake it on down for “Dancin’ in the Street,” helped along by a vigorous horn section and the love of the crowd. They rolled out a cake for her 70th birthday, happening that very night, and she didn’t look entirely thrilled about it. Kate came with us, which I thought was game of her. I am shlepping her to Cleveland on Tuesday for the Warped Tour, so she owes me one.
Warped will not be held in an air-conditioned orchestra hall, either. In fact, the forecast for the rest of the week is for temps in the 90s. Groan.
So as I must away, a brief bit of bloggage and we’ll try to do better tomorrow.
Why there are more typos in books. Duh:
Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of fulltime copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.
I have an RSS feed that picks up every mention of Grosse Pointe on Twitter, excluding “Grosse Pointe Blank,” a cult movie that will live forever in film geekdom. It blew up overnight with a story in the Detroit News, about our school district’s rejection of a Head Start program at one elementary. But all the tweets were from automated feeds aimed at stock traders. I couldn’t figure out why, until I remembered the elementary principal’s name — Penny Stocks. A useful reminder how much of what we now rely on to tell us what people want to know is run by robots.