Well, this is typical. You take one day off and news breaks all over the place. The state legislature passed its redistricting legislation yesterday. I used to live in the 13th Congressional district; now I live in the 14th. Behold the 14th, via the Detroit News, and you can click it bigger, if you’re a poli sci student:

My state House district has been similarly FUBAR’d, and right now I have to chase that down for my other site. So sorry, but I gotta go.

John Conyers is my new representative, by the way, who will be stretched from Lake St. Clair to southwest Detroit all the way up to Pontiac. I ask you.

OK, play amongst yourselves and I’ll be back tomorrow, and possibly later today.

I know some of you who visit don’t check back for the comments, so here’s something you missed yesterday:

That’s Beartooth Pass, Montana Wyoming, four days ago. I’ve gone through snow in the mountains in June before, but not that much of it. I’m sure it’s lovely, and I’m sure the views are grand, but photos like this remind me how much I’m a flatlander. Once the ground gets high enough that you can fall from it and die, I have to fight the urge to lay face-down and hang on for dear life. Although then you miss all the pretty scenery.

I think that picture was MarkH’s. I hope it was. If not, I’m breaking someone’s copyright.

So. I made time for “Game of Thrones” and “The Killing” finales, finally, and I really don’t have much to add to the chorus. By way of comparison, I think these few paragraphs from Gawker sum it up pretty well. Essentially, one show played by the rules and one didn’t, and if you read any further, know here be spoilers, but let’s get to it:

I’m always interested in shows like “The Killing,” which arise out of a different TV culture. The original was Danish, called “Forbrydelsen,” and if I cared to, I could probably dig up the statistics, but let me retrieve them from memory instead: It was so popular the entire country ground to a halt for an hour every week, for an estimated economic impact of nine trillion kroner. For the finale, you could have walked naked down the main street in Copenhagen, and no one would have noticed. Even the mermaid statue was watching. And so on. All of which should bode well for the American remake, and for a while, it did. The series started out great, and for a few weeks, I totally got it. I loved it, in fact. It was “Prime Suspect,” another crime-story import, with more rain. Lots more rain, in fact. We’ve discussed the rain before, haven’t we? Too much rain.

Here’s something I — we — should have considered, however: There’s nothing on TV in Denmark. Oh, sure, Danes have satellite and cable and all the rest of it, but I bet most of their programming is imported. You just don’t think of Denmark when you think of groundbreaking entertainment, and while it’s western Europe and presumably their culture would be recognizable to us, it’s also one of those places where I wouldn’t be surprised to hear that “Dallas” is still popular. Or “Baywatch.” Or that their “(Insert name of country)’s Got Talent” franchise just crowned an operatic soprano, or a viola player, or a contortionist. Like us, but not. Skewed.

I’ve never been to Denmark, so I can’t say with any authority what their national character is like, but reaching into my big bag of national-character stereotypes, I come up with Gloom, and Individual Industry, and Self-Effacement. Probably they’re so pathetically grateful to get their very own competently produced murder-mystery series, produced in their native language, that they didn’t care that it strung them along for the entire series and then didn’t reveal the killer in the final episode. They don’t mind tuning in next season. It’s a national duty.

Because that’s what happened, if you didn’t hear. After however-many episodes of teasing and misleading and enough red herrings to make lunch for all of Scandinavia, the series ended with…more uncertainty! Another switcheroo! It might have been Billy Campbell, but it probably wasn’t!

You’ll have to wait another year to find out who the real killer was, in other words. Well, you will. And maybe you. But I’m so far out of this show, I might as well have moved to Denmark.

Here’s something Veena Sud (Danish for “fucks with your head”), the creator of the original series and executive producer of the American remake, didn’t consider: We eat murder for breakfast here. Every day in the United States of America, people die on TV, a whole army of them. We peek through their windows and watch them enjoying life, not knowing there’s a killer outside waiting to end it all. We watch them bound and tortured, begging for their lives. Once they’re dead, we tunnel into their wounds to watch their spleens explode. If we’re going to invest a whole series in just one murder, it better pay off. Because we don’t have time for this shit, otherwise.

Fun fact to know and tell: Copenhagen’s murder rate is roughly four per 100,000 population. It’s a city of 2 million, give or take, which means 80 homicides a year. Eighty! There were 361 murders in Detroit, year before last, a city of 800,000. As American as apple pie.

Which is not to say we’re callous about it (although we are). Just that you promised something you didn’t deliver. The show’s tag line, after all, was: Who killed Rosie Larsen? And you didn’t answer the question.

So the hell with Rosie. Bad things happen to prostitutes. Which “CSI” teaches us, three times a week.

“Game of Thrones,” now, that was a series with a payoff. OMG DRAGONS, and not just any dragons, but wee baby dragons! This show changed my mind about fantasy fiction, the whole damn genre. I’ve never been able to get into it, for a number of reasons, but the main one is magic. What’s the point of following a story if the writer’s hole card is magic? Write yourself into a corner? Have your character cast a spell and enchant his way out of it. I’m also not fond of dwarves, or swords, or krakens, or British accents as the all-purpose go-to tongue of the realm. But “Game of Thrones” gave me all of that, and wisely kept the magic at bay until the final moments, and then: Whoa.

(I will say, they kind of wimped out. In the book, Daenerys emerges from the ashes of her husband’s funeral pyre with the baby dragons actually nursing at her breasts. I suspect it would have been too hard/expensive to render with CGI, though.)

The “Game of Thrones” finale settled all the extant story lines and set up the second season with several strong new ones. I’m totally hooked. Now I need to decide whether I want to read the books, or let the show reveal the story to me. My sister’s on the final one, and I asked her, “So, has winter arrived yet?” And no, it hasn’t. The dragons aren’t even full-grown yet. I don’t know if I have the patience for all those pages of exposition. We’ll see.

The hour is drawing late, so let’s go blogging:

I’ve been reading about David Mamet’s conversion to the right wing, but I obviously haven’t read enough details, or at least not the ones revealed in Christopher Hitchens’ review of his new book. The man hasn’t had a political conversion, he’s gone mad:

Part of the left’s savage animus against Sarah Palin is attributable to her status not as a woman, neither as a Conservative, but as a Worker.

What? Life’s too short to waste on this one. I’d rather watch “The Killing” spin out the Larsen case for another 25 episodes or so.

OID: Boy, 7, steals stepfather’s car to go see his bio-dad, leads police on chase.

And as we’re running long today, I think that’s it. We just had a thunderstorm, followed by sunshine. Which means, boys and girls? Yes, humidity! Nothing like having a bad hair day to look forward to.

I’ve been wanting my interns to work on a short video piece — yet another skill the 21st century journalist needs — and last night was our opportunity. I got the three of us aboard a 40-foot racing yacht for a night of it.

It was strictly a fun race, so there’d be no yelling or cursing if one of them got in someone’s way. The boat was big enough that there’d be little need for scrambling and anxiety. The rain earlier in the night blew off and left a lovely evening. The yacht club was having a Hummer-making competition. The crew included a friendly pit bull who helpfully barked at all passing boats. Everything went great — we even won the race — until it came time to back into the slip at the end. The skipper delicately maneuvered into position, hit reverse, and was greeted by a loud, menacing-sounding clatter from below, accompanied by a crew member’s observation that we were taking on water, fast.

Long story short: Some coupler had sheared off from the transmission, and damaged the stuffing box, the point where the drive shaft passes through the hull. That’s where the water was coming in.

Oh, well.

Fortunately, there were other sailors within shouting distance, and we were able to hand-pull ourselves into the slip to offload the journalists and the pit bull. Then it was a short tow to the hoist and dry dock. No biggie, the skip said: “Better it happens here than on the way to Chicago.”

My biggest regret: I had already stowed the cameras — they were in the bag that was getting wet below, in fact — and missed capturing the incident. It wouldn’t have really gone with the narrative, but it might have made for an entertaining parting gift for our host.

And by then, there wasn’t time to sample a Hummer. FML!

(FML, for you people who spend less time online than I do, stands for “fuck my life,” shorthand for a certain sort of whining. Given that it’s most often used when someone has lost car keys and the like, I think it’s entirely fitting here — we had a great evening out, capped by a genuinely interesting near-sinking incident, but it’s FML because there wasn’t time to order an alcoholic milk shake.)

I’m going to have to make one of those this weekend. They were invented at this club, the story goes, by the 75-year-old bartender, Jerome Adams.

And now it’s already growing late, and I have to skedaddle. Slept until eight! ayem! this morning, which makes me feel like I can bend steel with my bare hands. Instead, I’m going to ride my bike to my Friday morning meeting, followed by weights class at the gym. My weekend begins Friday morning.

Bloggage? Let’s see if we can’t scramble a little:

I’m really glad I didn’t watch the Anthony Weiner resignation fiasco.

An extremely, extremely difficult read: The bravest woman in Seattle, a Stranger account of a woman’s courtroom account of her rape, and that of her partner, before an intruder stabbed the latter to death in their home one night. Very graphic, heartbreaking. HT: Mary Helmes Sheely

Because after that we need a major palate-cleanser, Tom & Lorenzo on the Royal Ascot hats. Yeah, baby.

A great weekend to all. It’s clear and temperate outdoors here at the moment. Can’t wait to get outside in it.

I’ve largely stayed out of the Anthony Weiner story. It seemed to require a level of commitment I’m increasingly unwilling to make, particularly for a story that required me to look at a boner. Nothing against boners in general; I just… well, let’s say that I’m really tired and I have a headache and I just ate a full meal and I have to get up early tomorrow and leave it at that.

But now all has been revealed, so let me just throw a few things out there, and maybe you all can run with them:

Lesson No. 1: You can look like this and still have your husband act out sexually like a teenager. In fact, you could almost argue that it’s more likely to happen.

Lesson No. 2: I remind you, in case you wonder what sort of people are on the other side, that Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, the Indian/Pakistani beauty referenced above, was widely whispered to be a lesbian during her time as Hillary Clinton’s assistant. Because of course Hillary must be one, and who else would an aging lesbian choose to have carrying her BlackBerry than a young, beautiful lesbian? I don’t need to tell you who was doing the whispering. Always useful to remember that whatever Weiner did, at least he didn’t do it while telling unmarried people they should practice abstinence, while cruising men’s bathrooms and insisting he’s not gay, etc. On the other hand, you want people you generally agree with to behave themselves. Sometimes they don’t. These are not mutually exclusive positions. Grow up.

Lesson No. 3: Of all the jokes made about this, the James Franco bit from Jon Stewart might be best of all.

Lesson No. 4: Remember Photomat? Fotomat? Those little kiosks in parking lots where you could drop off your film and, three days later, pick up your vacation pictures? I can’t remember what the value-added element was over standard drugstore photo processing; probably the drive-through aspect. Anyway, if we still relied on other human beings to develop our pictures, there’d be less of this nonsense going on. Each of those little digital cameras is a Pandora’s box containing all the misery in the world.

Lesson No. 5: MSNBC needs to embed shorter Rachel Maddow clips. Nevertheless, this is pretty good, especially once she gets to the Post-Bill Clinton Modern American Political Sex-Scandal Consequence-o-Meter.

Lesson No. 6: I saw Dexter on Facebook yesterday, predicting the New York Post would use WEINER ROAST in a headline today. No. No, no, no, no, no. Something far better. Lesson: Don’t ever try to second-guess a great tabloid.

And with that, I’m done talking about boners. I don’t want to think about boners for a while. Whatever the world is poking me with on the great standing-room-only subway of life, it better not be a boner. So let’s hop to the more amusing bloggage:

A father notes his son is totally embarrassed when he, dad, waves at son’s passing school bus. So he decides to make a game of it, and starts dressing in costume for the morning waves, a different one every day. Of course he kept a blog. Note that dad is missing a leg. That doesn’t have anything to do with this — he lost it in a motorcycle accident, a little googling reveals — but it did come in handy on pirate day.

The Coozledads have a new foster child at their vegetarian petting zoo. A crow.

Not quite OID, but D-centric: There’s a fight going on here, which most of you probably haven’t heard about, on a proposed second bridge between the U.S. and Canada across the Detroit River. I’ll boil it down as succinctly as I can: The current bridge, the Ambassador, is privately owned, and has helped make its owner, a grumbling octogenarian who lives on the American side (in Grosse Pointe Shores!), a billionaire. The state of Michigan believes any crossing that important should be in public hands, and preferably international hands. Both sides agree the Ambassador needs replacing, but the owner wants to build the second one himself right next to the current one and keep it the title, and the state, along with Ontario’s provincial government, wants to build it a mile or so downstream, to keep trucks from rumbling through the heart of Windsor, among other reasons. Lately, the grumbling octogenarian has gone on a PR campaign. He hired Dick Morris, of all people; you know, Mr. Charming? The latest move: Sticking mock “eviction notices” to the front doors of the residential neighborhood most affected by the proposed new bridge. Charming:

Dolores Toth, 81, who has heart problems, began to shake after reading the notice, said her son, Steve. “How low can you go?” Steve Toth said. “This isn’t something you do, I don’t care who you are.”

And with that, I’m outta here. I need to take a picture of my underwear and mail it to someone.

Perhaps in keeping with his recent presentation as Barnacle Bill the Sailor, Kid Rock showed up to a press conference in Detroit yesterday on a standing paddleboard. Er, a paddle surfboard. Whatever. A board that you stand on, while propelling yourself with a long-handled paddle. You’ve seen them. They’re a thing now.

He was accompanied by two Red Wings, but I don’t think that has anything to do with the paddling, except that they’d be familiar with holding long sticks.

I’m well-acquainted with paddle sports; our household owns not one but two kayaks. My first marital argument, I remind you, came on our honeymoon, when we squabbled over my front-seat driving in a two-person kayak on Monterey Bay, the front being the passenger seat in paddling. The woman guiding the tour suggested we were both too strong to be in one boat, and no, it wasn’t an omen or anything.

Everything I know about paddling suggests standing is a dumb way to do it. A paddler will encounter a strong current crossing the Detroit River — although less so on that side of Belle Isle, the city park/island where the presser was held — and you want to be low, so that your body doesn’t becomes a sail, taking you someplace you don’t want to go. Also, no PFDs on any of them. Bad role modeling, gentlemen!

A quick Google tells me stand-up paddle surfing is a Hawaiian practice that allows a surfer to see more of what’s coming, wave-wise, which makes perfect sense. On flat water far from a coastline, it’s just a way for everyone to say, “Hey, look who’s coming across the water” and avoid the frequently ungraceful exit from a boat in front of a bunch of cameras.

If they really wanted to look cool, they’d have showed up on horses.

The above demonstrates a problem with modern life. In the past, if I wanted to know something about standing paddleboards, I’d have called someone. We’d have chatted for a while. Maybe I’d get a story idea out of it, maybe not, but it would involve one person talking to another. Now, a quick clatter on the keyboard, all questions are answered, sometimes in way more detail than I ever sought, but no contact with a fellow human.

This technology, it is wonderful, but not 100 percent.

It is Friday, Friday, time for fun-fun-fun-fun, so let’s go to the bloggage. I have a mind to ride my bike to my morning meeting, which means I have to get out of here early.

The mayor of Warren, a suburb here, is sensitive about his age, and a quick Google image search (sorry for bad-mouthing you two paragraphs ago, Professor G.) suggests why — he is an odd-looking duck, given to coloring his hair, twice-daily exercise and a stated preference for dating younger women. This has bugged some people for a while, and this week, some challengers in the current election cycle sued to require him to tell the world how old he is. I can’t wait to hear the final figure.

A biopic about Dick and Liz (which I don’t need to explain to my elderly readership, do I?) is in the works, directed by my man Marty. I’m so there.

Gin & Tacos looks back at one of the odder events of the Cold War — Mathias Rust’s landing of a Cessna on Red Square 24 years ago.

Finally, a great story out of Florida by none other than one of our commenting community, John Wallace:

Today St. Lucie County Sheriff Mascara announced the arrest of a (Subway) sandwich shop employee who was selling marijuana as well as sandwiches to people who asked for “extra meat.”

I don’t know what’s funnier — the extra meat or the fact St. Lucie County’s sheriff is named “Ken Mascara.”

Happy weekend, all. I’m outta here.

Thanks to all who said Movement 2011, aka Detroit’s techno music festival, would be worth the visit. It was. Totally. Excellent people watching, set to the persistent thumpa-thumpa-thumpa of electronica. Let’s not talk, today, about whether it qualifies as “music” or not. Clearly it is. The musicianship consists of weaving these aural tapestries. If you’re accustomed to going to a show where you pay attention to the stage, where there is a clearly identifiable performer playing an instrument or singing or whatever, it can be a little weird, granted. So, is that Poindexter standing behind the sound board the Space Time Continuum, or just their sound guy? The answer to that question is, who gives a fig, because you didn’t go to see them. You went to see this:

This is a version of a common look for girls. The synthetic-fur leg warmers are called “fluffies.” The colors are day-glo, presumably for the black-light possibilities. The semi-nudity? Well, it was everywhere:

This doesn’t bug me, for the most part, which is to say, “as long as it’s not my daughter.” We’re only young once; as Nora Ephron tells young women today, “If anyone young is reading this, go, right this minute, put on a bikini and don’t take it off until you’re 34.” It’s the juxtapositions that unsettle, all this slutwear and stripper gear worn with pacifiers and Oscar the Grouch backpacks. I guess that’s the point. To unsettle. To greedily accept the gifts of adulthood (sex) while clinging to those of childhood (pacifiers, Oscar the Grouch), all while wearing leg warmers made of cheap acrylic.

Then there were these people:

Such fun folks. We went on Saturday. I wish we’d seen Fatboy Slim, but he was the Monday headliner, and Monday it was 90 degrees, and my appreciation of almost everything would have changed under those conditions. For one thing, I’m sure the fluffies would have been left at home. Monday was the day to go sailing, and we did. The farther you got from shore, the more the stifling temperatures were left behind, and it was one pleasant way to pass an afternoon, especially when you knew that the morning’s work was waiting for you when you got back, i.e., red potato salad with caraway, a strawberry-rhubarb pie and some beef tenderloin marinating in sesame oil and soy sauce, ready to skewer and grill with some red pepper, onions and mushrooms. A good ending to a long, fine weekend.

Which had some fine reading, as well. A few links to sample:

From the WashPost, a profile of the oldest competitive female bodybuilder. She’s 74. Check the photos; they’re pretty amazing. The question for me, though, is this: Is looking like that worth eating the way she does, i.e., on chicken breasts, green beans and (gag) egg whites? Worth thinking about, over the next piece of strawberry-rhubarb pie.

Via Roy, a New Yorker profile of the recently departed Gil Scott-Heron, who died last week. I don’t know how I missed this the first time around (last year), a portrait of the artist as a crackhead.

While you’re noodling around at the New Yorker, you might also enjoy Atul Gawande’s commencement address at Harvard Medical School last week.

For those of you reading this back in my native state, the Sports Illustrated package on the sins of St. Tressel. I read it with mixed feelings; thankful I really don’t care about this stuff, and yet, there’s a certain head-shaking mood that pervades it all. Can we do away with college football programs entirely? Or set it up as some sort of minor-league, self-supporting adjunct to higher education (yes, I know it already is) and drop the charade that this has anything to do with college?

EDIT: Oh! Almost forgot! David Von Drehle, aka the Master of Disaster, has filed again, this time setting the standard for the best twister story, ever. Absolutely worth your time, particularly in light of this particularly dumb post from Jeff Jarvis, suggesting articles are now “luxuries” when someone like Brian Stelter has already wandered through Joplin posting to Twitter. Read and compare, tell me which one you prefer. I’m on Team Von Drehle.

OK, another hot one on tap, and I have lots to do. Hitting the ground, running and sweating. Starts now.

Now with wildlife.

Another OID story breaking this morning: The Detroit city crime lab, closed two years ago for egregiously sloppy operations, continues the tradition in limbo: Although its contents were supposed to be transferred to the state police, not all were, and case files, bagged evidence, live ammunition and much more was left in the building. What’s worse, like all abandoned buildings in the city, it was eventually penetrated, and when the Freep investigated, found it standing open to anyone with the wherewithal to walk past the collapsed fence and through the front door. They could help themselves to anything inside. Mind you, these are not crimes of ancient history; as many of those quoted in the story point out, files from 2008 are still very much in play in an appeals timeline. Wonderful. You don’t find quotes like this every day:

“It’s incomprehensible that any law enforcement agency would not be mindful to preserve evidence,” Wayne County Circuit Judge Timothy Kenny said.

This reminds me of the open-abandoned schools story, a few years back, when the district was closing public schools the way you close your house in the morning when you go to work — with a locked door and absolutely no attempt to secure, preserve or otherwise protect the extensive contents within. The scrappers, urban explorers, vandals and others got in almost immediately, and had big fun looting and destroying them. Jim at Sweet Juniper had a heartbreaking post about finding recent records in there, complete with photographs and Social Security numbers, terrible stories of abuse and neglect. He wrote about his fruitless efforts to get anyone in the city school administration to care. He finally took the initiative to burn the files himself.

That’s the problem: A story like the crime lab shouldn’t remind you of anything. Regrettably, it’s all too common here. Sigh. This is why I cannot watch police procedurals anymore, especially the gore-porn variety that’s so popular now. Even in functional cities, the idea that today’s tea-party civic environment would allow Marg Helgenberger to noodle around with gunshot testing, “just on a hunch,” makes me nuts.

OID, dark-humor division: Head of an agency that spent $200K in federal money earmarked for the poor on office furniture says, What are you looking at me for? Speaking of quotes you don’t see every day:

“I, Shenetta Lynn Coleman, do not order furniture. I do not order equipment. That was not my job. I have a staff person who was responsible for that. If I don’t know about it, then there’s nothing I can do about it. I cannot be in 29,000 places at once.”

I’ve never trusted people who talk about themselves in the third person, or who feel the need to remind you of their name. No, Nance doesn’t like that one little bit.

When Al Gore’s son was ticketed for speeding, going 100 in his Toyota Prius, I’m sure some enterprising soul at ToyMoCo spent some time wondering if there was a way to monetize the news, or if they even needed to bother — just putting “100 mph” and “Toyota Prius” in the same sentence without a negative was probably worth a few hundred more sales right there. At least.

So I wonder what the folks at Ford are saying as they pass this photo around world headquarters today. On the one hand: Narco-traffickers. On the other? God damn.

I’d best shove on out of here, what with the holiday weekend comin’ down and all. Yes, we’ll be at Movement for part of it. If you’d told me in January that I’d be sitting in my living room on May 27, listening to my furnace run, I wouldn’t have believed you. But there it is. Have a pleasant long weekend, and a solemn Memorial Day observance, if that’s what you have planned. I’m just hoping for a thin glimmer of sunshine.

Comments turned on now. Don’t know how they got turned off. But J.C. fixed it with his mad webmasterin’ skills. Thanks, John!

I feel like I start every day with a weather report, but this is Michigan, and weather is something you have to pay attention to — brutal in summer and winter, lovely in spring and fall, except for this spring, when it’s been brutal. I’m writing this on Sunday, when it might reach 50 degrees, but probably won’t, and even if it does, it won’t matter, because it’s raining hard, and blowing hard, and, well, balls.

But Friday was very fine, warm and muggy, and good thing, because we celebrated our anniversary that day. Eighteen years. We went to the Dirty Dog Jazz Cafe in Grosse Pointe Farms. What a miracle that place is. The owner, Gretchen Valade, is a jazz fan and heiress, something you don’t always find in one body, particularly one who grew up in the Farms, where estate sales tend to carry lots of Perry Como records, but there you are. A while back she saved the Detroit Jazz Festival with a seven-figure gift. She started a record label to give promising artists a place to get started. And then she opened the Dirty Dog, in the heart of the snootiest of all the Pointes, and there’s not a single thing anyone can object to — two seatings a night, at 6 and 8:30, with live jazz starting at 30 minutes past sit-down and running through dessert. In other words, a perfect evening for an old married couple, because you don’t have to carry the conversation through the whole time. You hit the highlights during cocktails, then settle in to listen to music.

And it’s not a cafe at all, but fine dining. I had the seafood fricassee, Alan the salmon. ‘Twas all good.

Oh, and Ms. Valade’s family fortune? Her maiden name is Carhartt. Yep, the workingman’s first choice in insulated coveralls. I read an interview with her once where she said she always felt inadequate among the other Grosse Pointe debs, because their families were all in cars and other industry, and hers only made blue jeans.

Outside magazine ran a piece a few years ago, about an annual get-together in Alaska, where people who have had near-death experiences in extremely cold weather credit their survival to their Carhartts:

“One time,” says Doug Tweedie, Carhartt’s man in Alaska for the last 25 years, “there was this walrus attacked a guy tying his boat up to a dock somewhere in the Aleutian chain who said what saved him were the black extreme-heavy-duty Carhartts the walrus’s chompers couldn’t bite through.”

Last laughs, anyone?

So here I am on Sunday, doing about the only thing it’s fit to do — watching Kate get her hair colored, and trying out MY BRAND-NEW IPAD SQUEE. Writing via a Bluetooth keyboard I picked up with my Amazon bucks (thank you, all). So far I like it, although it’s odd to use a keyboard and still occasionally have to reach out and touch the screen. I’m going for a certain super-minimalism in my travel gear, and I think this fills the bill. I’ll keep you posted.

Because I have no idea how long the connection will stay this strong, a hop to the bloggage.

From the WashPost, a few ideas for spring cleaning, starting with that particular bane, the engagement ring:

The diamond industry, in its infinite marketing savvy, seems to have convinced young couples that the only way to declare a lifetime commitment is for a man to ruinously spend two or three months’ salary on the proper rock. Men write to me to say that they’re ready to get married, but given school debt and the depressed economy, they simply can’t afford a good enough ring, and they despair whether they’ll ever be able to pop the question. Here’s a secret that the folks at De Beers don’t want young people to know: All you need to do to become officially engaged is tell everyone, “We’re getting married!”

Word on that. I never wanted an engagement ring, and I’m still a plain gold band girl. I once worked with a silly young woman, the sort who read women’s magazines and fell head over heels for all this b.s., and she introduced me to a new concept that must not have caught on, but it did with her — engagement rings for men, too. They weren’t diamond solitaires, but some sort of manly-ish thing. I wonder if she’s still married.

Others from the list — smartphones, tipping and “The Simpsons.”

If you missed Moe’s contribution to last day’s comments, the shortest deposition ever. It reminds me of a motion filing we used to pass around in Columbus, by one of Larry Flynt’s lawyers. It was prompted by a cop’s testimony in a prostitution sting, which involved attempted oral sex in a hot tub. By the time the lawyer had established the depth of the hot tub, the officer’s position in it and the fact the woman was not wearing snorkel equipment, it was pretty much a done deal that the cop was not going to sit still for a physical exam, which is what the filing requested. Case dismissed.

Finally, the columnist for the other paper in Fort Wayne writes about my old zip code without once explaining where, exactly, it is. This might have been in a graphic in the print edition, but not online. Oopsie.

OK, better get out of here before the internet slows again. Upload to server in 3,2,1…

With great anticipation, Alan and I and a few friends checked in at Ye Olde Tap Room, a venerable east-side Detroit bar — across a narrow alley from Grosse Pointe — on Saturday night for their annual celebration of the repeal of Prohibition. The advertised special was five-cent draft beer; the fine print was with purchase of commemorative mug; the even finer print was and the beer is Stroh’s. We opted to go with the pay-full-price-for-something-else plan, and I bet you would have, too.

Guests were encouraged to wear costumes from the roaring ’20s, and many did. Of course the ’20s had been over for some time when Prohibition was repealed, so I’m not sure the true period attire would have been flapper dresses and Tommy guns, but who the hell cares? The place was packed. A fun night, during which I had precisely four ounces too much beer, and abandoned my last round. I used to be able to pound down the lagers like a champ, but they catch up with me quickly nowadays, not in drunkenness but in sheer stomach-filling quantity. All those bubbles. All that sloshing.

This particular bar has a history vis-a-vis Prohibition; for a while it was a speakeasy itself, or “blind pig,” as they’re known around here. I’ve been to one after-hours joint in my life, in Columbus; the scene was very much like the roadhouse scene in “Animal House.” I woke up in bed, fully clothed, between two men, also fully clothed, both of them gay, one of whom was holding a toilet seat like a teddy bear. My last memory was of him wearing it like a necklace; he liked the color. It matched his sweater.

Never again. Now, three is effectively my limit, with some wiggle room depending on the food served. But I don’t begrudge anyone their fun.

What a weekend, even without the excursions. The weather is finally catching up to the calendar, and it’s time to get to work outdoors. Did my first mow of the season, a strange experience on Mother’s Day weekend, to be cutting grass under still-blooming forsythia, but there you are.

My iPad is now in Clinton Township — I’ve watched its progress from China via FedEx tracking — so now it’s time to think a little harder about how I’m going to use it. I read this David Carr story about the dawn of the magazines-on-tablet era with some interest. Especially this part:

Anybody in publishing will tell you that the prices they can charge advertisers for print (and now tablet) subscribers are far above the commodity pricing that rules on Web-based content. As more and more magazines end up in people’s laps, backlighted and without a mailing label, it’s a huge win for magazines, right?

Not so fast, said Robin Steinberg, executive vice president and director of publishing investment and activation for MediaVest. She helps giants like Kraft and Wal-Mart make ad-buying decisions. Ms. Steinberg sent a pre-emptive letter to publishers on April 29 suggesting that she and her clients would not simply go along with the assumption that a digital subscriber should count the same as a paper one.

Although she is on the Audit Bureau board and voted in favor of the changes, Ms. Steinberg made it clear that she wanted her clients to have the flexibility to opt in and out of digital editions. In a tart reminder that these are the early days of the process, she wrote that for media buyers, it was “critical that we determine how copies are qualified and counted when served either traditionally or digitally.”

In other words, same ol’ same ol’. The eyeballs that dollar up are the ones looking at dead trees. Remind me again why we all raced to the web? The rest, well, who can say if they even exist? What’s more:

Getting the kind of data that will satisfy skeptical buyers like Ms. Steinberg will be no small thing. Apple, the clear leader in tablet publishing, has been and will continue to be hesitant about sharing consumer behavior on its device. And no one knows enough about the habits of app readers to say conclusively how engaged they are while browsing through a digital magazine.

So that’s the new metric? I have to be engaged while I browse a digital edition, whatever that means? A while back I made a vow to allow more splash-page ads to run on media sites, rather than clicking them away automatically. I look at it as a small price to pay for free content. Lord knows what the new era will mean.

I’m already a New Yorker subscriber, so I’ll get the iPad edition free. I’ll keep you posted.

A quick skip to bloggage, then:

The anti-abortion crowd frequently plays dirty in its propaganda, although you could point out that that’s sort of the point of propaganda, period. And I know they say the same thing about us. But there’s something so disgusting in this piece, in which the director of one of those “post-abortion” ministries looks at a particular set of facts — the meltdown of a young Steven Tyler, the poor man’s Mick Jagger — and attributes all of it to the fact Tyler’s barely legal girlfriend had an abortion at 16. It’s in his interest to do so, of course; he makes his cheddar convincing women that an elective abortion is roughly comparable to five years in a concentration camp, in terms of how it affects your psyche. But it was nearly impossible to read without fogging the room with the steam coming out of my ears. Mary Elizabeth Williams takes it apart in Salon, so I don’t have to.

Because I don’t want to depart on a bummer note, however, it’s worth reading this short piece, a TED talk by a passenger on Chesley Sullenberger’s miracle landing in the Hudson River. Heartening without being sappy. Take three minutes of your time.

Manic, crazy Monday! I’m gone.