Another day, another dispiriting defeat for the Thomas More Law Center. You may not have heard of this regional oddity, a right-wing legal action team founded by Tom Monaghan, the Domino’s Pizza tycoon turned religious crusader. The Wiki passage on its founding gives you the gist:

The Center was founded in 1999 by Tom Monaghan, founder of Domino’s Pizza, and Richard Thompson, the former Oakland County, Michigan prosecutor known for his role in the prosecution of Jack Kevorkian, and who now serves as the Law Center’s President and Chief Counsel. Among those who have sat on the Law Center’s advisory board are: Senator Rick Santorum, former Senator and retired Rear Admiral Jeremiah Denton, former Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn, noted Catholic academic Charles Rice, former Fortune 500 CEO Mary Cunningham Agee, and Ambassador Alan Keyes. Santorum has played a crucial role in promoting intelligent design through his Santorum Amendment; however, following the Center’s defeat in the Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District case (see below), Santorum resigned from the Law Center’s advisory board. Originally, the Law Center’s funding came from Monaghan’s Ave Maria Foundation, but is now primarily financed by contributions from individuals, foundations, and corporations.

Richard Thompson prosecuted Kevorkian with such gusto, single-mindedness and, um, failure, that he was eventually turned out of office in conservative Oakland County, no small feat. Fortunately, Monaghan was able to be his sugar daddy and help him land on his feet in a job better-suited for his talents, i.e., losing more cases, but this time on behalf of God. The Thomas More Center was the prime mover in the Dover intelligent-design case (which it lost), the Terry Schiavo fiasco (lost), and various actions seeking to stop taxpayer-supported institutions from offering same-sex domestic-partner health-care benefits (lost).

They don’t always lose; it successfully defended an Ann Arbor high-school girl who wanted to condemn homosexuality in a class discussion. Yay, them. People should be free to be idiots. Otherwise, well, it’s hard to push Republi-God’s case in a pluralistic democracy. How do you keep raising money when you keep losing, I wonder? I guess when you’ve positioned yourself as the Last Best Hope of Republi-God, losing doesn’t necessarily hurt your cause; in fact, it’s proof that wallets need to open that much wider.

Interesting to see “former Fortune 500 CEO Mary Cunningham Agee” on that list. I spent a few hours digging her up last winter, when I was researching the Detroit Economic Club book; Bill Agee was on the club’s board for a while, and the whole tawdry Bill-and-Mary show unfolded right here in the Metro. I even stumbled across the Gail Sheehy series about St. Mary, and… I’m getting ahead of myself.

To those who might not remember: Right around 1980, Bill Agee, then president of Bendix, then an auto supplier of some note, hired a pretty young protege, Mary Cunningham. She was a newly minted Harvard MBA and had long blonde hair and the sort of gleam in her eye that can only come from a girl whose primary male caretaker growing up was a Catholic priest (a cousin of her divorced mother). Soon, cruel rumors began to swirl through the company, that Agee and Cunningham were doing the after-hours horizontal mambo in the executive suite, or wherever they had moved their mentor-protege relationship at cocktail hour. The rumors gained momentum when they were picked out of the crowd at the Republican National Convention by a TV camera, which showed them gazing fondly into one another’s eyes in a way that anyone with five minutes of experience in male/female relationships would recognize as distinctly unbusinesslike.

Well. Then Agee stood up at the company’s annual meeting and, without being asked, addressed the rumors. Nothing to them, he assured the stockholders. That gave every business journalist in earshot permission to start writing about them, and the cat exited the bag.

Some stories are all about timing, and this one broke at the precise moment women were starting to elbow their way into corner offices, with all the attendant gossip about just how they got there — on their backs, of course. It also happened when Gail Sheehy, the writer of giant zeitgeist tomes, was already in a pretty deep relationship with Cunningham, researching a story on this very phenomenon — successful businesswomen, that is. So, when the story about her and Agee started to roll, Sheehy quickly batted out a three-part series on Cunningham that was widely syndicated in American newspapers.

I was just starting my career at the time, so young and callow I blush to remember. I recall reading the series and seething with sympathy for poor, poor Mary. Not surprising; I could find it with some deep Googling, but I’m pressed for time this morning, and this Time summation is pretty dead-on:

Written by New Journalist Gail Sheehy (Passages), the series unblushingly depicts Cunningham as an angel, awesomely gifted, scrupulously moral and out to improve the world through humane capitalism; it is laced with enough mawkish prose and gratuitous personal detail to make Harold Robbins blush. As the scandal mounted, for instance, Sheehy reported: “Mary Cunningham sat in her hotel room at the Waldorf. She could not eat. Every so often, she stepped into the bathroom to vomit.” Also: “The mildew of envy is a living, corroding organism in the corridors of power.”

I didn’t see this at the time. I saw Cunningham the way Sheehy did, a victim of jealousy and all that blonde hair. The story finally played out with Cunningham leaving Bendix for Seagram’s, where she could improve the world through the humane selling of liquor, I guess. Agee made some bonehead moves at Bendix and ended up losing the company. And — I know you will be as shocked as I am — Bill and Mary got married. Yes, they’d been in love all along. I can’t find a cite for this, but I believe they deployed the old “no, we weren’t sleeping together, but the ordeal pushed us into one another’s arms” defense. A People story at the time gets to the point:

She says now, “Maybe the world is just a little young yet to understand the difference between a profound love for someone that you work with and for, out of sheer respect for their professional talents, and being in love.”

Yes. Yes, that’s it exactly.

And then they kind of went away. When I looked them up this past winter, the first thing I found was the picture taken at the convention; looking at it with eyes 30 years older was a revelation. Of course these people were in love; it was so plainly written on their faces that anyone sitting nearby would have moved out of respect for their privacy and fear of getting hit by a flying shoe when they started tearing one another’s clothes off. Then I found the Sheehy series, and marveled at its ridiculousness, but also at its spot-on portrayal of a type I’ve come to know well since — the Catholic saint who is not sinning, oh no. This body does its own thing, but the mind — the soul — is always looking toward heaven. They are pure, pure beings consisting mainly of light and stained glass, and if one or two of the windowpanes get a little grimy, well, we’re all human, aren’t we?

But I was most amazed by this: After Agee lost Bendix, after he married Mary (and converted to Catholicism, under the instruction of Mary’s guardian priest), he went to Morrison Knudsen, the Idaho company that built the Hoover Dam, and ran it into the ground. There was a story from one of the Idaho papers that said Agee tried to do his job from Pebble Beach, which Mary preferred over Boise, flying back and forth on the company jet a few times a week. And then both of them withdrew to a quieter level of business, him running a small charitable foundation, her something called the Nurturing Network, which supports women in problem pregnancies. Contrary to the More Center’s Wikipedia entry, I don’t think she ever reached Fortune 500 CEO status. (A where-are-they-now piece from 2005 adds another priceless detail: Homeschooling. Naturally.)

So this epic love story played out, in other words, with two embarrassing corporate train wrecks and a comfy life financed by golden parachutes? Mary is using her Ivy League MBA to essentially run a crisis pregnancy charity? That, friends, is the waste of a good college education.

Maybe she can give the Thomas More people some tips.

Bloggage? There might be some, but I’m running late. I’m meeting my students this week, so another chunk of office hours awaits. If you found something interesting you’d like to share with the class, leave it in comments. I have to get dressed and catch a rabbit.

Have a great day, all.

So, every year in August there’s this thing in Detroit called the Dream Cruise. People in classic cars take over the outside lanes of Woodward Avenue between 9 Mile and… I dunno, a few miles beyond that. Loop around, rev their engines, etc. It’s very grass-roots; it went on for a while before it became an official event, and they don’t even shut down Woodward to non-cruise traffic. (Although you’d be a fool to try to drive anywhere in the area for the whole weekend.)

My friend Michael has his office on Woodward, and while in past years he’s avoided the place like nuclear waste, the last couple he’s decided to embrace it, and hold a client-appreciation party Friday and Saturday. We went on Friday. You can find Dream Cruise photo galleries all over the web, but I give you but one:

I guess this is a 1957 Chevy custom job. The year of my birth! A friend of mine got one — not the limo, heh — from her classic-car-crazy father, for her 16th birthday. I drove it a couple of times, although its totally cherry condition made me nervous; if my friend’s dad knew how much she liked to party during her lunch breaks, he never would have given her the keys. If you ever saw a turquoise and white ’57 Chevy tooling around northwest Columbus and environs in the mid-’70s, that might have been us.

Truth be told, I don’t really get classic-car restoration and cultivation, but then, my husband has a boat, so I guess I really do.

A few years ago I did a story on hybrid drivers who “hypermile” — try to get the best possible gas mileage out of their vehicles. One was a big domestic-industry booster, and drove a Ford Escape hybrid. He and a few of his hypermiling friends put a little unit together and rolled in the Dream Cruise, and got booed. He was genuinely stung, but I think he underestimated the douchiness of the local boosters. Classics are a tricky business, as thousands of inheritors of lovingly restored Packards or Model Ts have discovered when they tried to put their dad’s baby on the market and were greeted with a parade of yawns. The classic-car buyer is middle-aged or older, and interested in recapturing his lost youth, i.e., the car he seduced his girlfriend in when he was 17. For people who are 45 today, that was only circa 1980 or so, and I’m sorry, but for my money that’s when the magic went out of the market for good. The Honda Accord and Toyota Corolla of that era were great cars, but it’s hard to imagine anyone getting teary-eyed over a restoration of one today.

I once interviewed a guy in Fort Wayne with an underground garage, a real Batcave with secret entrance and everything. He was into Corvettes, and had at least a dozen down there, all medal-winning restorations. He didn’t do them himself, but wrote the checks for others to do so, then drove away to the car shows. “Let me show you something,” he said, raising the hood on a 1970s-era monster, one of those with a 427 or 454 or some ridiculous V-8 like that. He pointed to spots inside the engine compartment with sloppy paint overspray. There was also a big, splattery drop of a totally different color.

“I saw that, and about hit the roof,” he said. “And my guy tells me, no, this was the quality of workmanship for the mid-’70s. When they’re judging, they look for those details.” Someone tell the UAW. This cracked me up.

Lots of Corvettes in the Dream Cruise, needless to say. About a million Mustangs, of every shape and size. Chrysler Plymouth Barracudas, Super Bees, all that rumbly muscle stuff. I looked in vain for a ’66 Corvair, the car I learned to drive in, the car my mother (and I, and all of us) loved, the reason she never trusted Ralph Nader again. And then I looked at Kate. Bored. To. Death.

I have to teach this girl to drive a stick shift in a couple years. It would be nice if she would show at least a minimal interest in the pedals.

So, some bloggage? Let’s see what we’ve got:

The stem-cell ruling. Sigh. Conservative jurisprudence — proudly marching backward! I hope this guy is right.

Miners trapped for months, a 60-mile-long traffic jam that hasn’t moved in more than a week — and so the human race plods onward.

Man, I’m gonna kill the inventor of the gas leaf blower. For now, though, I think I’ll go to the gym.

Well, that’s one way to man up a minivan.

I try to engineer my week so that Fridays belong to me and only me. I start working on Sunday afternoons, and I front-load my work week to the point that by Wednesday, I am starting to get a little breathing room. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but if all goes as planned, by noon Friday, I’m cruising.

Sometimes it doesn’t go as planned. Last Friday, I got a call from one of my friends from my fellowship year, an Israeli who’s now U.S. bureau chief for Yedioth Ahronoth, the largest daily (I think) in Tel Aviv. Could I put together something quickly on the Flint Slasher? For actual money? Anything for you, Adi. (And anything for a little money. I spend so much time writing for little or nothing, I’d forgotten what that’s like.) And so off I rolled around lunchtime, cruising for Genesee County instead.

And? A very sad place. Granted, I was on the po’ side of town. I remember, after “Roger & Me” insulted conservatives with the suggestion that perhaps capitalism isn’t win-win for everyone, reading something specific to Flint in one of their ideological house organs, which arrived by the truckload at my paper’s editorial page. Yes, downtown Flint retail was dead, the writer said, but that’s because everyone was shopping at the brand-new mall, etc. etc. Perhaps. (That’s certainly what happened in Fort Wayne.) And surely a comprehensive tour of the area with experts would have revealed a fuller picture of the place. But I drove around a bit, and my overwhelming impression was Springsteenian: Foreman said these jobs are goin’, boys, and they ain’t comin’ back to your hometown. In Detroit, the ruin is Roman — you can see what was once a great city under the decay. In Flint, the disaster befell someplace far more ordinary. Which made it starker, and sadder.

The term for these sorts of excursions is “parachute journalism.” I was happy to pack my chute and leave at the end of the day. And the result? Your basic fly-by visit by some empty suit.

Poor Adi. Deadline was 2 p.m. Saturday, but that was for the final, finished product. Translation is a bear, especially on deadline.

And so the week begins. It’s a special one for one of our group: Laura Lippman’s latest, “I’d Know You Anywhere,” drops tomorrow, and oh, how the praise has flowed. Amazon says it will be arriving by tomorrow, but hasn’t shipped yet. “Three Stations,” which I also pre-ordered and is published the same day, has shipped. So I’ll pay twice for shipping. But I’m happy to give my fave writer all-important “velocity” in first-week sales.

A little bloggage? Ohhh-kay:

An outsider experiences fair food, swoons. A nice wrap-up of what’s being deep-fried this year.

The Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts, reconsidered.

I noticed this when I was in Ann Arbor a few years back. It blew my mind then, and still does: College students who check in with their parents multiple times a day. I called my mom once a week, and that was because we had free long distance (Ohio Bell was our family’s coal mine).

And now, having flown by, I must fly. Ta ta.

Paul Fussell’s great book on American social class stratification — titled, duh, “Class” — is pretty out of date in the details by now. Written at the dawn of the go-go ’80s, it missed how much that decade changed the relationship between class and money, never mind the ’90s and ’00s, which blew it out of the water.

But a lot of the details are timeless, including my biggest takeaway, which is probably not unique to him, but he gets credit for being the first writer to point it out to me: The hallmark of the middle class is fear. Fear of slipping a rung, either in reality or just in the eyes of others. It explains so much about how middle-class Americans dress, talk and otherwise comport themselves.

Middles love euphemism (“Excuse me, but where is your powder room?”). They like their labels on the outside of their clothes, so everyone knows they bought the right designer purse or necktie. They fret over the condition of their lawns and the shine on their cars. Etcetera. And so it was that I picked up my Detroit News today and immediately identified the area’s biggest residential foreclosure as a distinctly middle-class house. Hell, it might even be proletarian. Who else would build an $18 million, 13,777-square-foot house in a subdivision, complete with bowling alley and “custom wine tasting and cigar rooms?”

“It’s like going to Disney World,” said real estate agent Chris Knight, who has sold the home twice. “It’s a phenomenal, one-of-a-kind special property. Waterfalls, ponds all over the place, streams. Lots of Venetian plaster walls. Imported this, imported that …”

Venetian plaster, you say? It’s so much…classier than regular plaster.

The story reminds us this pile of Venetian plaster — inevitably described as “a mansion” — is not alone in its sad little subdivision, Turnberry Estates:

A third of the subdivision’s homeowners have either faced foreclosure in the past two years or had mortgage problems, public records indicate.

Since March 2008, one house was lost to foreclosure; three were scheduled for sales but avoided them; and two foreclosure sales are pending — including (former Detroit Lion) Charles Rogers, according to the Legal News. The former No. 2 NFL draft pick faces a sale Aug. 31 after defaulting and owing $1.17 million, according to a Wednesday notice in the Legal News.

Turnberry Estates has to stand for something bigger; the writer in me demands it. Nowhere do you see so much evidence of how disconnected wealth and responsibility got in the last 25 or so years than you do in housing — not just in these vulgar money pits but even in more modest upscale homes (always homes, never houses), with their media rooms and enormous closets and wine cellars and poker rooms and all the rest of it. I knew a guy who built a 10,000-square-foot house when he married a woman who had two daughters. They needed the space, he said; they would have a live-in housekeeper to watch the girls when they wanted to do impulsive newlywed things like go out to dinner or fly to New York for the weekend or whatever.

They’re divorced now. But you knew that.

My house is 2,000 square feet. The people who built it raised seven children here, in three bedrooms. My last house was about the same size. The previous owners had five kids — and one bathroom. My friend with the 10K house had separate bathrooms for each daughter. The first thing they did after moving in was convert a dead-air space into a deluxe closet.

Do I sound resentful? I’m not. Enjoy your money, rich people. But when my house is foreclosed upon, I bet it’ll be easier to unload than the $18 million Venetian plaster showplace. Even with a cigar room.

So, some bloggage? Probably we can rustle up some:

The New York Post falls for a wrong-o. Did an accused killer who swallowed rat poison get an emergency liver transplant, as the paper crowed? Um, no. But that is one great headline: Thug’s op is liver worst. Congrats to the greatest copy desk in tab-dom.

Thanks to Rana (I think) for reacquainting me with Tom and Lorenzo, the Project Rungay bloggers who dabble in “Mad Men” on the side. I can take or leave them on the episode guides, but their commentary on the clothes is first-rate. I loved their latest, on Betty Draper last season, including her slammin’ Roman holiday getup. They’ve got great things to say about all the madwomen, though, so warning: You can get lost in that site. But in a good way.

The Michigan oil spill now stretches for 35 miles of the Kalamazoo River, and yes, pals, it looks like we have another BP on our hands. Who could have predicted? And so on.

Kate’s going to the Warped Tour show with her dad tomorrow, and I promised her I’d get her a new guitar strap to collect autographs on. So time to hop to it.

We had a carjacking here in the Woods last weekend, just a couple blocks from my house. Armed carjacking, very scary — a woman leaves a business and goes to her car, parked on one of the busiest thoroughfares on the east side. Gets in, rolls down the windows to let the heat out, a guy dives through the passenger window and puts a gun to her head. Pushes her out the driver’s door, roars off.

Well, they caught him. This is the sequence: After the carjacking, he heads up to Roseville, and tries to rob a woman in a grocery parking lot. In the scuffle, he drops the keys to the jacked car. Steals a delivery truck, abandons that in a chase, heads into an apartment complex, where he hides in one of the units after breaking in. He changes his clothes, helping himself to some of the tenants’, and escapes on a bicycle.

So how did they catch him? He went back for his clothes. You can see how police grow cynical.

Guy was paroled last week. He’s looking at life now. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da.

Violent crime brings out the distancing in all of us. “Distancing” is what I call the phenomenon we all indulge in from time to time: Something bad happens to somebody else, and we try to figure out why that could never happen to us. I never go into that area after dark. I would have left when they said the hurricane was coming. I would never marry an alcoholic. And so on.

Auto theft in general is so widespread in Detroit that you hear a lot of anecdotal comments on how to avoid it. Don’t drive here, don’t buy Chrysler products before a particular model year, etc. Some people go limp — an acquaintance lives in a loft conversion in a sketchy neighborhood, and never, ever locks her car. It’s rifled from time to time, and someday someone might figure out how to get it started and drive it off, but she prefers that to replacing a window every three months.

And now I give you mine: Be just a little more troublesome and/or less attractive to thieves than the next guy. I’d never own one of those $3,000 road bikes, and don’t mind that my unglamorous hybrid bike is a little dirty. It looks dowdy in most bike racks, which is the way I like it. I also drive a stick shift. Someone might try to jack it, but I’m counting on the widespread lack of manual-transmission skills to deter all but the most determined thieves.

Alan thinks this is crazy, but I recently read on the Facebook page of a well-known crime novelist that she practices the same strategy. Hmpf.

If I’m ever shot to death in a carjacking, I’m sure the last words I’ll hear are, “Bitch, what is this shit?”

So, some bloggage for what looks to be a hot, steamy weekend:

Lance Mannion is on vacation, but of course, writers never go on vacation. Get a dune, you two!

The curse of Waterloo continues. Bret Michaels busted for pot in Deliverance, Indiana.

Got a note from Deb — not Deborah, Deb — last night. She lives in Milwaukee. Sue’s out that way, too. They got six inches of rain last night in about two hours, and she was sending the boys out to bail the window wells, which were full to the brim. Is this the most exciting thing to ever happen in Milwaukee? snarks Gawker. Oh, shut up.

Finally, Tucker Carlson keeps earning his reputation as a lying, double-crossing weasel, over and over again. Ezra Klein provides some backstory.

Time for the Friday get-down. Enjoy your weekend.

Mitch Albom got the Red Smith Award from the Associated Press Sports Editors this month. It’s a lifetime achievement award, the sort of thing you get with your gold watch and appointment with the death panel. Mitch, at 52, is probably covering the gray in his hair but nowhere near retirement, but hey! That’s entirely in keeping with his career! By the time Mitch hits what would be retirement age for you or me, we’ll all be watching white smoke pour out of the Vatican chimneys as he’s elected the first Jewish Pope. George Clooney will be working as his houseboy. And so on.

Over time, I’ve reached a sort of peace with Albom — I only get my dander up when he wanders off the sports pages. Which is often. But this isn’t one of those times. Let the APSE give him whatever award they want. I don’t even work for newspapers anymore. They made their bed, and they can lie in it, the feebs.

Then, yesterday, someone sent me this, from Deadspin. Snicker:

…the Happy Meal theology of (Mitch) Albom’s books that would’ve made Jonathan Livingston Seagull want to fly into the nearest wind tower.

I know it’s not just me who hates him. I once batted around the idea of a separate Mitch blog with another Detroit writer, or maybe even pitching a column to the Metro Times, in the grand tradition of Bobwatch, the Chicago Reader’s Bob Greene snarkfest. Among sportswriters, however, I’ve always assumed the dislike of Albom was based far more on jealousy than anything else. The number of sportswriters I honestly respect as writers, period, is pretty low, and I’ll bet the overwhelming secret thought most of Mitch’s colleagues entertain is this: Why didn’t I think of this shit first?

However, Deadspin lays out a pretty good collection of arguments as to why this award is the equivalent of Pia Zadora winning a Golden Globe. Its cornerstone is this Dave Kindred column about why Albom’s 2005 transgression — lavishly covered at the time, I won’t go into it here — ought to have disqualified him for this sort of laurel forever.

Well-argued, but as I said: That’s the APSE’s business. I was more interested in following the other links, especially this one, for which I reserve a comment I know many of you find offensive, but I cannot help myself: Jesus fucking Christ. If I recall correctly, Mitch’s 2005 shenanigans cost this man two weeks’ pay in the final arbitration. I guess not everyone can hold a grudge as long as I can.

Oh, well. Deep breaths. All better now.

Some of you may have noticed these new entries are arriving later in the day than they usually do. I’m sleeping later, plus I’m getting hammered with work from my hyperlocal site. Which is good for me, but may necessitate another schedule rejiggering, because I can’t keep this up.

So let’s skip to the bloggage:

Not quite OID, but close: Little girls set up lemonade stand, which is robbed. (Note to self: GREAT MOVIE SCENE.) In what newspapers love to call “an outpouring,” they’re finding this is probably the best thing to happen to them, ever.

Coozledad, remember when you said you found a worthless eHow article on burning pellets in a wood stove? One of the writers speaks:

“I was like, ‘I hope to God people don’t read my advice on how to make gin at home because they’ll probably poison themselves.’

“Never trust anything you read on eHow.com,” she said, referring to one of Demand Media’s high-traffic websites, on which most of her clips appeared.

Finally, a sweet story for cat lovers. Because you know what a softy I am in my tiny black heart.

Happy Thursday. Where did the damn week go?

“Diversity,” the way it’s used now, is such a damp, earnest word, a good thing promoted into something we need to “celebrate.” Which is why I haven’t made tracks to the Concert of Colors, “Metro Detroit’s Diversity Festival,” in the time we’ve been here. I envisioned a lot of old white men in dreadlocks and young black men in rasta tams, both nodding along to some faux-African world-music thing made with puzzling indigenous instruments.

But a couple years ago I learned that Don Was shows up every year, to lead a cavalcade of Detroit acts in a single show, spanning a wide range of genres and representing almost every corner of the area’s musical heritage — you know, a diverse show — that I started thinking this might be worth my time.

Last year he dug up Question Mark. Huh. Didn’t know he was a local.

And while Saturday was beastly hot, it wasn’t so hot you couldn’t move, and so we headed downtown. The Don Was All-Stars were performing on the main stage of the orchestra hall, free of charge, and it seemed air-conditioning might be involved. It was. And it was quite the show, 15 different performers spanning the range from rock to blues to trip-hop to… I dunno, I get lost in all these genres.

There was this guy, Andre Williams, and be advised that link takes you to a trailer for a recent documentary about him, that the clip autoplays, and the language is NSFW from about the first second. There was also Alberta Adams, who is now 93 years old and performs from a wheelchair. But there was also Ingray, young and loud described as having recently relocated to Detroit from Bosnia (please, hold your witticisms). They played “Immigrant Song.” Doop & the Inside Outlaws brought the country. By the time Kim Weston came out for the finale, in what looked like one of her old Motown gowns, you really couldn’t say you hadn’t been entertained.

As the crowd was filing out, the MC said, “Stop in next door. They’ve got some Punjab house music going.”

Alan said we should. I was dubious. It sounded like everything I’d feared, but it turned out to be the revelation of the night. These guys:

This is Red Baraat, self-described as “bangin’ bhangra and brass funk,” but if that doesn’t help, let me try: If Desi Arnaz left Havana bound for New Orleans, but was detoured through Amritsar, this is the band he would have assembled when he landed. Soprano and baritone saxes, trumpet, trombone and yes, that’s a sousaphone. But the centerpiece is Sunny Jain, the band’s founder, on the Indian dhoul drum. At first I thought we wouldn’t get in, because the crowd was so dense. It turned out there were plenty of seats available because everyone was in the standing-room space in front of the stage, dancing ecstatically. Well, not everyone was ecstatic. One guy was voguing. Some were shaking their bottoms. A couple tried to do a variation on the jitterbug. But most people just moved where the dhoul took them. We saw only three numbers, and left the hall raving, CD-buying fans. A good dhoul player can do that, I guess.

The CD is good, but the show is better. Here’s the tour schedule. If they’re coming to your neighborhood, you are commanded to go.

And that was the weekend, besides the usual pie-baking and a Friday-night movie excursion. Cherry and blueberry, and “I Am Love,” which left me thinking Tilda Swinton is worthy of being the new Meryl Streep (she speaks Italian with a Russian accent, and top that, Ms. Yale School of Drama) and that cherry-pitting is the most tedious job in the summer kitchen. I recommend both, preferably at once — pie and movies.

Bloggage:

The Catholic Church is marking the 50th anniversary of the birth-control pill by advocating no birth control other than “natural family planning.” Because birth control is bad, except when it’s their birth control, in which case it’s just fine. I have really fallen far, far away from the church of my baptism, because when I read stuff like this…

“Why does the church do this?” Ponkowski says to about 10 young couples taking a required pre-marriage class. “It wants us to have the best life possible.”

…I sprain my eyeballs, rolling them.

I’ve been catching up with old episodes of “Mad Men” in preparation for the new season. I feared I would be losing Betty Draper, who is not my favorite part of the show, but my God, her clothes. Advance publicity for season one would suggest she’s still a part of the show, and what’s more, she recently bought herself some black opera-length gloves. Oh yah.

Finally, this looks interesting. Haven’t read it. I will, as soon as Wild Monday settles into Somewhat Tamer Tuesday. Have a good week, all.

Photo of Red Baraat by Amy Touchette.

Another stifling weekend, although it didn’t start that way. The older I get, the more I feel like all my sweat glands are rerouting to my head. I shlepped my first load from the Eastern Market back to the car, and could almost feel my head turn into a sprinkler, pore by pore.

I’m sure this is yet another age-related horror, but for the time being I’m choosing to see it as a tribute to my thick hair.

Or it might have been the load, which was mostly blueberries and tart cherries, so that pie season may continue in spectacular fashion. I go to a particular stand for both, presided over by a man who’s a bit of a grump, but whose product is superior in every way. A woman walking by asked if she could try one of the tart cherries. He nodded, she popped one in her mouth, and commenced to squealing about how horrible it was, “so sour! How could anyone eat this?!” She was older and, you’d think, of the generation who might actually have baked a pie with her own housewifely hands and know the difference between eating cherries (sweet) and pie cherries (tart), but I guess not. Thank You brand pie filling has been around for a while. Thank you, Thank You, for doing your part to diminish our national supply of food knowledge.

Eh, who cares? More tart cherries for me, although today’s pie is blueberry. So rich in antioxidants, it’s practically a vitamin.

I haven’t written much about the Banksy business of late, mainly because I only recently learned who Banksy is (a real graffiti artist, as opposed to graffiti vandals), and whenever I come late to a story like this, I always fear I’m missing huge chunks of the background, but here goes:

Banksy did two pieces recently in Detroit, at our storied Packard Plant. The abandoned plant is usually called the city’s most notorious and certainly its biggest eyesore, at over three million decaying square feet. Our little gang of filmmakers has shot two shorts there, and it routinely turns up in the national press, perhaps most memorably when a bunch of hooligans pushed a truck out one of its windows and ended up on the front page of the Wall Street Journal.

Anyway, Banksy stole in, did a couple paintings, and stole out, his usual m.o. Apparently, the way you find out about Banksy works is by watching his website, where he posts photographs of it in situ, with enough visual clues to tell you its location. Word was slowly getting around about one of them when the owners of a local gallery arrived with jackhammers and other heavy equipment, and physically removed the entire wall, taking its half-ton bulk back to the gallery, where it’s on public view. They said their concern was that the work be preserved, that sitting out in the lawless Packard site, it was only a matter of time before someone painted over it or otherwise defaced it. And since people have been stealing the plants in bits and pieces for years, it didn’t seem like much of a crime.

(Editorial aside from an admitted art moron: Isn’t that part of the point with graffiti? Its impermanence? Banksy is miles beyond your local bonehead taggers, but he still operates like one. There have probably been hundreds of Banksy pieces covered by building owners who didn’t like what he’d done to their property. I know he’s now famous and chic, but …whatever.)

The gallery owners say they never intended to sell it, just to preserve it, and so far, they’ve been true to their word.

Now comes a party with a lawsuit, claiming ownership and saying gimme back my Banksy. But here’s where it gets weird:

Bioresource Inc. sued 555 Nonprofit Studio and Gallery on Tuesday, asking a judge to force it to return a mural by famed graffiti artist Banksy that it removed from the plant. In the lawsuit, Bioresource Inc. claimed it owns the Packard Plant and that Romel Casab is the company’s president.

Casab has been rumored to be owner of the plant for years. But prior to the lawsuit, the only owner or agent of Bioresource on record was Dominic Cristini, who is in prison in California on Ecstasy charges.

Talk about OID! For years now, I’ve been driving guests past that place, struggling to answer the inevitable question, “Why doesn’t someone tear it down?” At first I assumed the plant, obviously abandoned and presumably in tax forfeiture, was owned by the city, which couldn’t afford to demolish it. (It would cost millions and millions.) I knew there had been until recently one business, Bioresource, operating out of a small part of it, and I once saw Casab referred to as its owner, but I didn’t know until now that the plant’s legal ownership is a mystery. The dispute over one painted wall has flushed out someone willing to be the owner of record, with all that implies — responsibility for doing something to a dangerous hive of lawlessness and anarchy.

So far, the strategy seems to be: Allow the place to be overrun with arsonists, scrappers and all manner of crazy Detroit types, and maybe, in time, it’ll just fall down, and the earth will reclaim it.

My guess is, nothing will be settled by this lawsuit. But if it leads to anything important down the road, I’d say that was a consequence even Banksy couldn’t have predicted.

See, art does matter.

Any more bloggage? Oh, a little:

Lance Mannion went to the post office and got into a chat with some LaRouchies. Do you know what Lyndon LaRouche’s middle name is? Hermyle. Now you know.

Finally, a note of condolence to my friend and old radio co-host Mark GiaQuinta, whose father Ben died yesterday at Mark’s Fort Wayne home at 87. While this obit has some nice moments — Ben was a state legislator for some years — I think I’ll prefer the Facebook notes Mark has started posting, promising more in the days leading up to his Saturday funeral. From today’s, about his experience in World War II. His company was fighting around a German town called Welz in November 1944, in what sounds like the runup to the Battle of the Bulge. They had taken the town and cleared out some snipers and German 88s when something else happened:

As dad stood on a ridge outside the Welz and overlooking a road, he spotted a wounded German writhing in pain from his injuries. Dad then saw a jeep with an American army medic. Somehow he got the attention of the jeep driver and was able to point to the wounded German who was unable to rise from his fallen position. The jeep stopped and the medic and driver attended to the German soldier, lifted him to the jeep and drove him away. Just a few minutes later, and directly in front of where dad stood, something quite dramatic occurred. The door of a camouflaged pill box (a concrete bunker holding a machine gun crew with a small slit for the gun turret) opened and out came the German soldiers with their hands up. With them were a number of women and children who had been hiding in the pill box.

The Germans, having seen the humane treatment offered to their comrade, decided to surrender to dad and his buddies. Had dad not seen the soldier, those in the pill box and certainly some of the Americans advancing toward it would likely have been killed. Think of the changes that have occurred in our lives as the result of dad’s instinct to direct the saving of the wounded enemy soldier. Of course, we will never know what this meant with respect to the Germans and others, but dad probably saved his own life that day. I and my wonderful brothers and sisters can look at loving spouses, our beautiful sons and daughters, and the lives we have been blessed to share with each other and say thank you dad. Your instinct to help another human being gave us each other. We saw that drive to help others many times in the years we had you with us.

Sometimes the most important shots in any battle are the ones you don’t fire.

Off to start another crazy week. Here’s hoping you enjoy yours.

I had just bought a case of Spriggy’s expensive special-diet food shortly before he died last summer, and, going stir-crazy from three days confined largely indoors, it provided a perfect time to do what I’ve been meaning to do forever, i.e., bundle it up and drop it off at the shelter.

Yes, I could have taken it to the Grosse Pointe animal-adoption center, but I was in a more adventurous frame of mind. We headed out for the Michigan Humane Society, the original Animal Cop station house, which sits on the freeway service drive with the usual Detroit architectural details — the parking lot enclosed by chain link topped by razor wire and with a full-time security guard; the multiple signs pointing the way to the correct door, NOT THIS DOOR NO DELIVERIES THIS DOOR ENTER ON FISHER ONLY. There was a particularly strange one telling people to surrender animals only to clearly identified MHS employees; others might want their animals for profit, criminal or “religious purposes,” and might do them harm.

And people wonder why I find this place so interesting.

As we followed the signs to the ONLY AUTHORIZED ENTRY DOOR, two people passed us going the other direction, each holding a young pit bull puppy at arms’ length, the pups stretched out to their full length with puzzled looks on their faces. The cacophony of the doomed (or at least profoundly unlucky) beasts inside started to swell. The lobby wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, although there was a young girl holding a big mutt on a leash, and I couldn’t see anything good coming of it. The dog looked old and very very tired and was in the midst of what looked to be an epic shedding episode. Two worried cats sat in cages on the counter, one nude to the skin at the collar line. A man was negotiating some paperwork with another; I suspect it had to do with the big shedding mutt.

“Can I help you?” someone said. I turned over my 11 cans of Science Diet k/d and three cans of gastrointestinal formula to the clerk, whose expression said this was an unusual occurrence on a 97-degree day. I considered asking for a tour, but it’s clear the place was operating at something shy of battle stations, so we took a long look around and left. “Come on, you guys,” the clerk said, lifting the cats off the counter. I asked about the naked-neck cat. “Flea allergy,” she shrugged; no biggie.

Outside adjacent to the parking lot, a young woman played fetch in a fenced area for a gallumping, black Lab-y looking dog — exercise for one of the lucky ones considered adoptable. Inside the pen was a small shelter/shading structure for longer turnouts. It was decorated: BAD DOG painted graffiti-style on the back wall. It’s always good to keep a sense of humor about your job.

Michiganders, they can always use help.

Just got an e-mail from one of our regulars here. Her sister’s been very sick with some serious intestinal complaints and recently spent some time in the hospital. They come from rural poverty; our friend escaped, sis didn’t. She suffers from subclinical psychological issues and is morbidly obese, but has been able to eke out a hardscrabble living at Wal-Mart. Friend writes:

The next time I hear somebody bitch about why we don’t need health-care reform, they had better fucking look out. I just talked to my sister. She just got her hospital bill: $23,000 and change. The portion for which she is responsible: over $7,000. That is approximately what she has earned thus far this year from Wal-Mart. And she does not qualify for having her bill waived by the hospital because she probably will exceed their poverty threshold, with an annual income that exceeds $11,000. Think about that. Could either of us even live on $11,000 a year, even absent health-care bills in the four digits? And that’s just the hospital bill.

She is having problems again — she’s jaundiced and has been throwing up bile for a couple of days. She sees her doc tomorrow but absolutely refuses to go to the hospital again because she “can’t afford to miss any more work.” (And she can’t afford another hospital bill, either.) She has nothing left in savings and is living paycheck to paycheck. Barely. I’m sending her money as we’re able, but Jesus, what the hell can we really do short of hoping to hit the lottery? We’re not awash in cash either.

I don’t expect her to live a long and healthy life–not with her habits, weight, health history and all the rest of it–but I strongly suspect her death will be hastened by the lack of affordable health care.

Yes, it probably will. It does every day. Just remember: This is the greatest health-care system in the world.

Bloggage? Sure:

Poor Tyson Gay. First his name is changed to “Tyson Homosexual” by the American Family Association, and now this.

OID: How to steal an ATM in Detroit. And not succeed.

We had an old man die in Grosse Pointe yesterday, apparently because of the heat. (Still checking.) What’s the toll where you are? Storms expected later, followed by a 10-degree drop. Hurry, storms.

And have a great day.