I bought a giant sunflower head at the farm market last week, and finally got around to hanging it from one of the trees. It took the squirrels a day to strip it bare and leave it in pieces on the ground. This guy was so excited he was like Ramona Quimby, who took a single bite out of each apple in an entire box, on the grounds the first bite is always the best.

Click to enlarge. These black squirrels are aggressive bastards, but this one will have a very glossy coat.

My iPhone’s been giving me problems for a few weeks, and Saturday I finally managed to organize myself into a trip to the Genius Bar. The Genius Bar is the only part of the Apple experience I don’t like, and the part I don’t like is the name. Also, that you have to make an appointment, but that’s a byproduct of success. I don’t think I’ve been in an Apple store in the last five years when it hasn’t been crowded.

So I get to the Genius Bar, and I tell them my sad tale of woe. He stops me one-third of the way through the narrative and says, “OK, you get a new phone. Hang on, I’ll get you one.”

This is the typical G.B. experience for me: I have a problem, they give me a new one. Alan’s computer has had its motherboard, hard drive and wifi innards replaced over the years, all without data loss. For a while I wondered if I’d get a thrilling new third-generation iPhone, but no, they replaced my second-generation model out of old inventory, or maybe it was reconditioned — they can’t tell, and neither can I. Anyway, I got a brand-new phone, and since I’d backed up the old one the day before, all I had to do was plug it into my laptop when I got home, wait a few minutes, and unplug it with everything exactly the way it was on the old one, minus the problems but including my home-screen photo of Eastern Market vegetables and custom ring settings.

In the middle of this, a man about my age approached the G.B. “I downloaded the new software for the iPod Touch, and when I reloaded it, it blew up the iPod,” he groused. “Spent an hour on the phone with tech support.”

The Genius looked regretful. “OK, you get a new one,” he said, whisking it away.

The curmudgeon caught my eye. “I was going to get an iPhone,” he said. “But not now! This settles it!”

I said nothing, but he went on. “This is ridiculous! Thing just quit!”

I said, “You’re getting a new one.” The Genius walked up at this point, unwrapping a new iPod Touch.

“Is that some reconditioned job?” the old fart said.

“I don’t know,” the Genius said. “They don’t tell us. It could be brand new, or it could be factory reconditioned. If it doesn’t work, we’ll replace it, too.”

“It has scratches on it!” crowed Mr. Grouchypants.

“Oh, no,” said the Genius, before it was pointed out the scratches were on the box, and the iPod was indeed shiny and twinkling.

“What if this blows up, too?” asked Grouchypants.

“We’ll replace it, but if that happens, the problem’s with your computer,” the Genius said. “We’ll take a look at that, if you like.” Grouchypants fell silent. Aha! Probably a PC user.

To be sure, an hour on the phone with tech support can turn anyone into a jerk — it certainly does me. But I doubt he’d get better service, or a new device, from Sony. Wait until he goes home, syncs it up and realizes, hey, I have a new iPod now. I wonder if he’ll feel guilty for jerkitude. Unlikely.

Encroaching jerkitude is a hazard of middle age. Your back hurts, your ass sags, you can’t get waited on in a deli without wearing a purple pashmina and a metallic gold tote bag, so often the logical reaction is: I think I’ll lash out at the next person forced to interact with me. I’m going to blow Dentu-Creme breath all over his or her unlined face. I try to remember this when someone is a jerk to me. (Not always successfully, I should add.) Add a keyboard and internet connection to the mix, and it’s a wonder anyone is ever civil.

I love my new phone. It’s shiny and unscratched. And it, unlike the last one, can find a wifi signal.

The boat haul-out went pretty well. The boat is out, anyway. The marina added a bunch of security since we were last there in the spring; there are now card keys and beeping gates. I don’t know if they’ve had theft problems, but it would be a miracle if they didn’t, as boats can be hard to secure and much of what’s valuable about them sits out in plain sight. Last year we passed a handsome cruiser with a high-end flat-screen TV bolted to the outside bulkhead, facing the cocktail deck. Maybe the owner found blue skies and sea gulls boring, or maybe he wanted to work on his tan while he watched golf, but a smart thief could have a field day stripping that vessel clean.

OK, time to start the day. I have no bloggage, because I realize I’m posting all my amusing links over on Facebook. Here’s an oldie from last week that still makes me giggle. Detroit, you’re a town with my kind of fun:

Farmington Hills — The Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s chief financial officer will be sentenced next month after he and his wife pleaded guilty to inciting a riot outside an Ohio nursing home.

Have a swell day, all.

The top vote-getter in the Detroit City Council primary in August was Charles Pugh. You Fort Wayners might remember him from his days as a young reporter for WKJG, although he didn’t stay long. He was clearly ambitious, and before long was en route to a bigger markets, until he ended up in his hometown of Detroit.

Most young TV reporters don’t leave much of an impression on me, as infrequently as I watch local newscasts, but like I said — Pugh was ambitious. My main memory of him was a piece he did on the correlation between the Super Bowl and domestic violence, at least three years after it had been debunked, and the debunking had been its own story. The piece was nonsense start to finish, thinly sourced and with the usual domestic-violence victim-advocacy suspects claiming their business always went up during “football season,” etc. The internet was new at the time, and I wrote the news director a note about it via the station’s AOL page, citing the debunking, etc. Crickets. I should add this is typical: Local TV reporting is so glib, and any record of it so fleeting (as I said, this was pre-internet, pre-DVR), that news directors can basically ignore all but the loudest criticism. Mistakes that would get front-page corrections in a newspaper just fly by with a shrug and not even an oops.

I tell you this so you know I’m not inclined to like him, but once I moved here and realized he was a local-media celebrity, I paid special attention. He’d refined his image in the intervening years, acquired the gloss of a big-media-market personality, and was now an out ‘n’ proud gay man. A Freep columnist wrote an admiring profile of him, I guess because it takes a certain amount of courage to be out ‘n’ proud in the black community (although certainly not in the news media). He also has a compelling personal biography, having been raised by his grandmother after both parents died violently (mother murdered, father a suicide) before he was 8 years old. He’d found a high public profile as co-anchor for the weekend morning show, the usual jokey mishmash of wire copy and live standups at pumpkin patches and fireworks venues, etc. The photo that ran with the column was hilarious: The caption said Pugh and his co-anchor were “preparing their newscast,” while the picture showed both sitting in position at the anchor desk, each staring into their own hand mirror with a look of utter absorption.

So when, a year or so ago, rumors started circulating that Pugh was considering a run for city council when his contract expired, I was interested in how it might play out. The big question seemed to be whether his out ‘n’ proud status would hurt him among religious voters, and based on the primary results, the answer was no. It’s pretty amazing to think he beat established incumbents to get the sort of vote totals he did, but until recently, he was very well thought-of.

That all started to fall apart last week, when the newspapers revealed he was about to lose his condo to foreclosure. His initial response was that he was having a cash-flow crisis brought on by having left his lucrative TV and radio jobs (which paid him in the neighborhood of $240,000 a year) to run for council (which would bring him about $80,000, with a $4,000 bump if he again finished at the top of the heap). The second-day stories said no, his financial life had been chaotic for some time; he nearly lost the same condo two years ago, and was served with eviction notices a jaw-dropping 11 times in the previous four years, when he was a renter.

In other words, this is not a guy with a cash-flow problem, but one who is seemingly incapable of managing his own finances, even with an enviable income.

And now I’d like to change direction a bit, because ultimately I don’t really care what sort of journalist Pugh is or isn’t, or what sort of city councilman he will or won’t be. (In Detroit: Bet on will.)

What I want to know is this: What the hell went wrong in this country that Charles Pugh could get a 100 percent loan to buy a $385,000 condo in the first place?

Yeah, yeah — there’s that fat income he was earning. But as we see, his credit history had to be pretty damn dismal. And check out these details:

Records show Pugh paid $385,000 for the condominium in 2005 and took two loans from Countrywide Mortgage the day he assumed ownership. One was for $77,000 and another for $308,000, which has jumped to $331,370 with interest and fees.

According to documents, Pugh was charged 8.25 percent interest, making his monthly payment on his 30-year mortgage payment $2,892. That does not include any insurance and property tax.

That’s 100 percent of the purchase price — no money down. Even knowing this was 2005, the very peak of the madness, when “liar loans” were commonplace and the only requirement for an applicant was a pulse, this still has the power to gall me. Obviously a guy who can’t make ends meet on an income like this is unqualified to be council president in a city in perpetual death throes. Pugh has a lame-ass explanation: “I’m currently going through what thousands of Detroiters are experiencing.” Well, yes, although thousands of Detroiters didn’t manage to screw things up quite so badly on an income of nearly a quarter-mil a year.

But in lots of ways, he’s right — this is what thousands of Detroiters are experiencing. Without his fancy education and income, they fell victim to door-to-door sales by smooth-talking sharpies who promised them free crack, the non-addictive kind. In a way, Pugh is the perfect councilman for this city. He certainly is a perfect representative.

I’m betting he coasts to victory, at or near the top of the field. Just what Detroit needs — another empty suit (but a very stylish one) on city council.

So: Monday. Boat taking-out day. Let’s hope for one with a lack of marital strife. Temperature looks warmish and cloudy. Fingers crossed.

The NYT reports on the New Jersey governor’s race, and states pretty baldly that the incumbent, Jon Corzine, is making his opponent’s size a campaign issue:

It is about as subtle as a playground taunt: a television ad for Gov. Jon S. Corzine shows his challenger, Christopher J. Christie, stepping out of an S.U.V. in extreme slow motion, his extra girth moving, just as slowly, in several different directions at once. …Mr. Corzine’s television commercials and Web videos feature unattractive images of Mr. Christie, sometimes shot from the side or backside, highlighting his heft, jowls and double chin.

The story includes a link to the slo-mo FatCam ad, and maybe I’ve been living in the corpulent Midwest too long, but I don’t see it. He’s a big guy for sure, but I don’t see the moving-in-different-directions part, although it could be my monitor. Like many Americans, almost everything I know about New Jersey I learned from watching “The Sopranos,” and let me just say, Christie is no Bobby Bacala. (Neither is Bobby Bacala; he wore prosthetic flab for much of the series.) But the story raises an interesting point: No language is as minutely fly-specked as campaign ad copy, and surely the ad, which says Christie “threw his weight around,” was designed as a poke in the spare tire.

There aren’t many groups of people you can pick on with impunity, but fat people are one of them, because it’s all their fault, you know. If they wanted to be thin, they could, if they’d just get some exercise, scrape half the food off their plates, park in the far reaches of the lot, have different parents, etc. I suppose, if Christie wanted to make an issue out of it, he could mention that Corzine nearly died in a car crash when the gubernatorial SUV crashed on the Garden State Parkway, and that his injuries were surely exacerbated by the fact he wasn’t wearing a seat belt. The only reason it’s permissible to criticize fatties is because obesity drives up health-care costs, etc. — you’ve heard this before. So do car crashes with unrestrained human beings bouncing around inside.

Of course, that would be seen as extreme dirty pool. Better to fight back with humor, as former Baywatch baby Nicole Eggert demonstrates. On the other hand, humor is likely in short supply in any political campaign. Especially in New Jersey.

Fun fact to know and tell: New Jersey is one of the leanest states, according to CalorieLab Inc., which ranked it 42nd in obesity last year. So says the NYT. I’d never have imagined.

Living in Michigan resets many of your meters, including the Hard Times gauge. We’re in the midst of a California-style budget fiasco, and some of the nickels and dimes the state is looking to pick up are fascinating. There’s a proposal on the table to allow bars to stay open until 4 a.m., if they’re willing to pay $1,500 for an enhanced license. It’s estimated to raise $13 million and change, not enough to make a huge difference, but what the hell. The restaurant business says, “Great idea, but that’s way too much to charge.” Municipalities say, um, no. Just what a hard-drinking state like Michigan needs: More time to drink.

Fun fact to know and tell: The city commissioner of Royal Oak, a suburb with lots of bars and restaurants, is named Terry Drinkwine. I love reality. It’s so much more amusing than fiction.

But for real drama on the hard-times front, you couldn’t beat the scene at Cobo Center yesterday. The city had announced it would be making emergency grants of federal money to families in danger of losing their homes or utilities. They had the means to help about 3,400 families; 50,000 people showed up. The crowd got restless, then angry, and six people had to be taken away by ambulance.

Apparently the problem was rumors that they’d be handing out cash on the barrelhead. Well, that and the 28 percent unemployment rate.

OK, then. I have just enough time to try to beat Eric Zorn at the crossword before I have to go to the gym, in my vain attempt to stave off looking like Chris Christie. At least I’ll have rock-hard abs under all that flab.

Someone is remaking “Red Dawn.” I know, I know: why? It’s perfect the way it is. What could ever top this mid-’80s Cold War paranoid fantasy? What’s the new story, now that the Evil Empire has been defanged and we still have the memory of those indelible performances — Patrick Swayze, at 32, playing a high-school boy; Ron O’Neal as an alternate-reality Che Guevara; and who can forget Harry Dean Stanton behind the wire at the drive-in/re-education camp, hollering “Avenge me, son!”

I can’t answer those questions. All I can say is, thank God Michigan is giving out these fat tax incentives, so the “Red Dawn” crew can come to Detroit and blow shit up:

(If you’re impatient, drag the playhead to the 40-second mark.) I don’t know what other American city would let you get away with that. Fortunately, we have a lot of empty buildings to spare.

On the downside, sometimes a post-apocalyptic wasteland behaves like one.

A little Googling tells me the updated story involves a military invasion of the U.S. by the Chinese. There’s a blog, too, with some great deets. A military convoy was photographed rolling down one of the downtown freeway legs on Sunday, something you likely haven’t seen in Fort Wayne lately.

I’d like to see the Chinese try to take this city. Of course, first they’d have to want to. I envision a scene like Tiananmen Square, only in reverse.

OK, enough small talk. Count me among one of the 1 million subscribers who will miss Gourmet magazine. It hurts even more because I’m a latecomer; I only started subscribing it a year ago. Before then, I thought it wasn’t my cup of expensive tea, but I was stupid not to trust that anything Ruth Reichl put her hands on would be worth my time. Far from being a snooty festival of luxury, it’s a well-written tribute to food and food culture, and the recipes are wonderful.

Kim Severson, another food writer I’d follow anywhere, takes a look at the death of Gourmet in the NYT today, and I think she gets to the heart of it right here:

Although it was easy to paint Gourmet as the food magazine for the elite, it was a chronicler of a nation’s food history, from its early fascination with the French culinary canon to its discovery of Mediterranean and Asian flavors to its recent focus on the source of food and the politics surrounding it.

In the decade since Ruth Reichl took over as editor, she underlined everything from the exploitation of tomato pickers in Florida to dishes like chicken and dumplings that could be on the stove, simmering, in 15 minutes.

That’s what I’ll miss about it, anyway. It really chaps my ass that Gourmet had to fold so that Vogue and Anna Wintour could live to fight another day.

Finally, I took Kate to see “Whip It” over the weekend, another shot-in-Detroit movie that seemed worth our time, and it was, although I’ve now come to see the PG-13 rating as the enemy of parents everywhere. It’s funny — after we came home and Kate went to bed, Alan and I watched the R-rated “Adventureland” on cable, and the latter, while more explicit in its F-bombs and so on, took much of the same material (young-adult sexuality, in part) and treated it with more respect and less snickering than the PG-13 “Whip It.” It’s not that one was exploitive and the other one not, it’s just that “Whip It” had several scenes and dialogue exchanges that seemed tacked on to avoid a straight PG and make the film edgier, somehow. All I know is, I feel more protected by lead actresses who refuse to take their bras off on camera than the MPAA ratings board.

Other than that, however, it was a pretty good little movie, exploring female empowerment through roller derby. I know Jeff Borden’s a big fan, and I had a twinge, remembering our departed Ashley Morris, whose wife Hana was a New Orleans roller girl. (Ashley chose her stage name, and crowned his wife, a native of the Czech Republic, “Soviet Bloc.”) Ellen Page, Drew Barrymore and Kristen Wiig do most of their own skating, and those girls certainly tear it up. I almost — not quite, but almost — forgave the cheesy product placement Barrymore snuck in there. Did you know a roller girl can never wear too much Lash Blast? Now you know.

After two nights, I think I’m finally caught up on my rest for the next few days. Sorry to be getting here late again, but ah well. Now to the giant pile of copy I’ve been putting off editing. Next time you see me, I’ll be cross-eyed and ink-stained. Have a good rest of the day.

So many interesting things in the meeee-dya — every so often I like to say it like the pests who brayed it in my ear all these years — this weekend. I hardly know where to start. As many of you know, Detroit is having a moment in the national spotlight; Time magazine bought a house in town to be home base for its yearlong look at the city. Their first cover story is either this week or last, but I haven’t read it yet (although I bookmarked the blog). I’m catching up with everything else this weekend:

“On the Media” looks at poverty porn with the unnamed but unmistakable presence of Jim Griffioen, aka Sweet Juniper. (The piece slams Time magazine for its drive-by tactics, amusingly.)

The New York Times covers Mayor Dave Bing, the ol’ crepehanger.

Best of all was this WSJ feature, looking at the decline through the lens of a single house, which was once in the swankiest neighborhood in town and today is vacant and recently sold for a four-figure price. This was the part that caught my eye:

In 2005, (a previous owner, the Andrews) found a buyer, Kimberly Carpenter, willing to pay their $189,000 asking price. They were too relieved to question why Ms. Carpenter’s closing documents recorded the sales price as $250,000.

County records show Ms. Carpenter took out simultaneous loans of $200,000 and $50,000 from First NLC Financial Services, a unit of Friedman, Billings, Ramsey Group, an Arlington, Va., investment bank. First NLC specialized in subprime mortgages — loans for borrowers with damaged credit.

At the time, Detroit was swept up in the subprime-lending frenzy that hit much of the country and eventually sparked the financial crisis and deep recession. Lenders became quick to loan to high-risk borrowers.

Ms. Carpenter, 37, says she was buying the house on behalf of her father, Lewis Maxwell, whose own credit record was too blemished. “My father handled all of that,” she says of the financial details. Her father, who worked on the Chrysler assembly line, died of cancer in 2007.

David and Ruth Andrews say Ms. Carpenter paid them $189,000. They say they don’t know what happened to the other $61,000 entered into sales records.

“I have no idea about any of that,” says Ms. Carpenter. “It’s over. It’s out of my head.”

OK, so clearly Carpenter is not the sharpest knife in the drawer, nor does she come from a long line of sharp knives. When I hear the Tea Party people complain that they’re being asked to bail out people who got in over their heads, foolishly signed papers they shouldn’t have signed, I’m sympathetic. But Carpenter at least lost the house and is in a world of financial hurt. Why are the NLC bankers not in jail? That’s what I want to know:

Ms. Carpenter quickly fell behind on her payments. In August, 2006, First NLC Financial bundled Ms. Carpenter’s first loan with a pool of other troubled mortgages and sold them to American Residential Equities, or ARE, a Miami company that specialized in buying bad loans.

First NLC Financial went into liquidation last January, dragged down by mortgage losses. Its parent company, FBR Group, became Arlington Asset Investment Corp. A spokesman for Arlington said the company can’t locate the original files on the Carpenter loans or comment on the lending decision.

By November 2006, ARE’s collection agents were after Ms. Carpenter for $218,348.53 on the $200,000 mortgage, according to county documents.

Good luck with that, ARE. I wonder where the folks are who pimped a quarter-million dollars to a woman who can’t even say, today, what happened to her. There’s enough blame in this disaster to slice it up like a big fat mortgage tranche. But I’ll be saying this until the end: When you open a store giving away free crack if you sign here and here and initial there, and if anyone expresses reservations you say, “Don’t worry, this is the special non-addictive crack we’re giving away” — when that happens, you really can’t complain that the neighborhood is suddenly full of crackheads.

Oh, well. Onward to the more uplifting things:

I’m not an opera fan by a long shot, but I enjoyed this piece about Peter Gelb, the new director of New York’s Metropolitan Opera. It was worth reading just to pluck this marvelous bit of jargon from the word-sluice: “park and bark,” used to describe singers who can’t act. In usage:

…He has commissioned new productions, some of works seldom seen in New York; signed up new singers, who don’t just “park and bark,” as he puts it, but actually act; and recruited directors from Broadway…

There was also a great piece, by an opera aficionado, looking at Barbra Streisand and her miraculous voice, which was bestowed upon a woman who only saw singing as a way to get to what she really wanted to do — acting. She doesn’t warm up, she doesn’t read music, she processes everything from her gut and ear:

“I hear these melodies,” she said. “I hear horn lines and string lines. That’s what’s fun about recording with an orchestra.” She can sing things, and composer-arrangers like Bill Ross or Jeremy Lubbock have the skill to write them down, she said.

She talked about recording with Marvin Hamlisch. “I can go, ‘That’s not the right chord, no, it has to be an 11th or a 9th or something,’ ” she said. “I just know that the chord has to be in contrast, it can’t just be this.” She sang a sustained husky pitch. “I’ll say: ‘It has to rub. I want that slight rub there.’ ”

It’s funny how, when Streisand was given the chance to just act and not sing, the results were pretty uniformly crapola — “Nuts,” “The Prince of Tides,” and so on — but all agree that what makes her singing special is how very emotional it is, i.e. how much acting she does while singing.

Finally, in the On Language column, a piece on “phantonyms” — words that sound like they should mean something, but don’t. They don’t discuss my personal pet peeve (infamous does not mean “really famous”), but it scratched a very specific itch.

On Language, of course, was William Safire’ column. Who is no longer with us.

Monday, Monday. Can’t trust that day. (If I may be excused a little John Phillips lyric.) Have a good one.

It’s Michiganapalooza, plus a pumpkin with Elephant Man’s Disease.

An embarrassment of riches…

…and the distant thunder of frost. Ack! Mums!

Ruby, our new rabbit, has her first official nickname. Spriggy had approximately a thousand, ranging from Fart in a Hot Skillet to his Indian name, Joe Walks Along. So we like to call our animals by handles other than their given names. But even I was impressed when Alan threw this one out: Miss Lisa Bunnay.

It’s an inside joke going back to the late ’80s, when a bunch of us made a video for a friend’s upcoming wedding. (We edited it using two VCRs, which tells you something.) It was set 20 years in the future, when we had all moved on to other things and the wedding couple had spiraled into rural poverty. (One of my favorite clips is one character’s description of coming upon their house, with all the barefoot kids running around the yard yelling, “Stranger comin’!”) Anyway, I believe my fate was to work as a writer for the “Miss Lisa Bonet Show,” which tells you something. It’s hard to overstate what a cultural Bigfoot Bill Cosby was in the ’80s. I found an old open for “The Cosby Show” on YouTube or Hulu or something, and called Kate over to watch; I’ve long contended that Raven Symone is actually 42 years old, and wanted her to see for herself.

It turns out I was wrong, but seeing anew the overwhelming smugness and self-satisfaction of the whole presentation blew my hair back. The mugging! The preening! You get the idea these people are still ordering coffee, then striking a pose for the roar from the laugh track. We the viewers were just as complicit; we had made a black family sitcom into a juggernaut, and yes, the words “post-racial America” were heard then, too. Phylicia Rashad’s husband proposed to her on national television, and she accepted likewise. She even changed her name for him, which is a form of hubris in and of itself. (It turns out she was right about that one, though — unless I missed something, they’re still married.) Dr. Alvin Poussaint was a paid consultant to every episode, which was like printing “now with oat bran” on a box of donuts. It was extra good-and-good-for-you.

Bill Cosby was in town yesterday, going door to door, pushing education to Detroit parents, who must send their children to some of the worst public schools in the country. Fortunately, we saved a little local color just for him:

The neighborhood celebrating his appearance got an extra dose of excitement when a man hit a tree driving what police say was a stolen van. Officer Leon Rahmaan, a police spokesman, says the man was speeding through the neighborhood about 5 p.m. when he spotted police accompanying Cosby.

Rahmaan says the man made a quick turn, lost control of the van and hit the tree less than two blocks from where Cosby was speaking with residents about keeping their kids in Detroit Public Schools. The man ran from the smashed-up van but was arrested after a brief foot chase.

I loves you, Detroit.

As a parent, I will pause and gives Cosby props for “Little Bill.” It was everything “The Cosby Show” wasn’t — simple, endearing, quiet. Kate loved it when she was little, and I loved watching it with her.

Miss Lisa Bunnay’s next nickname will probably be some version of Greased Lightning. I have never seen an animal so unwilling to follow orders when it’s time to return to the cage.

A little beautiful-day bloggage? Sure:

When life imitates “The Wire.” I usually link to the Metro Times version of Detroitblog’s biweekly dispatches, but one of the additional photos on his blog made me think of “The Wire,” so here you are. It’s about a family of squatters in the most squat-friendly city in North America.

I don’t think I’ll renew Vanity Fair this year. They’re starting to embarrass themselves.

Today’s flash-in-the-pan website (HT: Hank): Keggers of Yore. I think I’m in some of these pictures.

Work. Exercise. The last days of summer. I’m away to do it all.

Life is good. And colorful.

Is there any phrase in journalism more compelling than “fiery crash?” Just saying it makes my mouth water. We had one this morning in Detroit, which followed another Pavlovian term, “high-speed chase.” Rumor has it a TV station had video, which I didn’t see; the TV doesn’t go on until late in the day at Casa NN.C, and that station in particular, the Fox affiliate, gives me bleeding hives.

Besides, if you wait, sooner or later everything goes on YouTube. Note ironic detail: Although the truck was stolen and the driver fleeing police, the crash was actually precipitated by another motorist, who failed to yield and turned left in front of the truck.

I hate police chases. We’ve had a couple of late hereabouts, and while they’ve all ended the way they’re “supposed” to — i.e., with the culprit smashing into something and injuring only himself — it’s only a matter of time before one doesn’t. What if the truck this morning had hit that minivan broadside and killed not only himself, but the people in the van? We’d have multiple deaths for a stolen car, a crime that happens approximately 11 zillion times a day around here. I know police give a great deal of thought to these things and don’t enter into them lightly, but there’s an adrenaline thing that takes over, too.

Pals, I’m working on a story this morning, trying to get it done a day early so I can spend tomorrow prepping for a week of vacay. Why don’t you guys suggest the bloggage today? If I had more time, I’d wade into this account of the fiery crash and parse the odd mix of journalese, euphemism and can’t-talk-very-well-on-live-TV language that comprises the reporter’s stand-up. The driver is “deceased in the vehicle,” which would make a great name for a band. (And note the signs on the post as the cameras pan by: HOUSES FOR SALE $9,000 or best cash offer. Good times.)

You carry the ball for a while, and I’ll be back later.