So much good bloggage today, let’s just get to it and let it guide the comment conversations today, eh? I’ll be housebound for much of it, anyway. I’m working on a story and apparently I’m afflicted by some odd aphasia, where I tell people “I’d like to talk to A and B about X and Z,” and they hear, “Blah blah blah and please don’t feel you need to call me back before October. I understand it’s vacation season, and besides, I am a mere freelancer.”

Also, I’m getting Comcast phone service today. I’m hoping this will halt the death of one acre of forest, slaughtered to send me mailings for the Comcast Triple Play, but who knows? I’m just hoping for a prompt technician.

OK, then. First we have a tale of the bargains to be found on the local real-estate market:

DETROIT — One dollar can get you a large soda at McDonald’s, a used VHS movie at 7-Eleven or a house in Detroit.

The fact that a home on the city’s east side was listed for $1 recently shows how depressed the real estate market has become in one of America’s poorest big cities.

And it still took 19 days to find a buyer.

(That’s another Ron French special, btw. A lesser writer would have overlooked the 19-days part. Always with the great detail, that Ron.) At first blush, this isn’t that surprising — I’ve written about $100 houses in Detroit before, so $1 isn’t that much of a stretch, and what’s more, I’d bet there are at least a few unloved parcels at bargain-basement prices here and there in most American cities. What makes this house so of-the-moment is that it sold not two years ago for $65,000. But the new owner couldn’t or wouldn’t pay the mortgage — fraud is always a strong possibility — and once it was empty, it was as attractive to the scrapping vultures as a fresh dead heifer is to the real kind. They started from the outside and worked their way in:

“The siding was the first to go. Then they took the fence. Then they broke in and took everything else,” [said a neighbor.]

The company hired to manage the home and sell it, the Bearing Group, boarded up the home only to find the boards stolen and used to board up another abandoned home nearby. Scrappers tore out the copper plumbing, the furnace and the light fixtures, taking everything of value, including the kitchen sink.

Click through and enlarge the picture and take note of the dying ash tree on the park strip, too. That’s the new arboreal symbol of southeast Michigan, and don’t get smug about it — sooner or later the emerald ash borer is coming to your town, too.

How bad is it in Detroit? Even the dead are leaving town:

CLINTON TOWNSHIP– At precisely 8:57 a.m., under an overcast sky, Francesco and Francesca Imbrunone were re-laid to rest. A man in a dark suit stood over their remains proclaiming that they “await the resurrection.”

If that promise holds true, then it would be, in a way, the Imbrunones’ second resurrection. As it happens, the couple was buried nearly 50 years ago in Detroit’s Mount Olivet Cemetery on the city’s east side. Then their grandchildren decided to disinter them, move them to the leafier suburbs and bury them again this particular morning.

Five grand, the grandchildren spent, so they won’t have to cross 8 Mile to visit their ancestors. This one is ridiculous, to be sure, and a look at the accompanying video only confirmed what I suspected — these are the thin-lipped suburbanites who say, in public, sorrowful words about “convenience” and “safety,” but as one poster on the DetroitYES forums pointed out, Just imagine what their private conversations were like when they came to the conclusion to move Grandma & Grandma. Yes, I can just imagine. The route between their new homes and the ancestral burying ground is hardly the road to the Baghdad airport. Of course they mention the inevitable car breakdown. Car breakdowns are like car backfires — spoken of often, but scarcer by the year. But you can’t tell that to someone willing to drop five grand to never have to see the city at less than freeway speeds again.

For the record, I have yet to “visit my parents” since their interment at Union Cemetery in Columbus. So part of my puzzlement is a cultural disconnect with the idea of primping graves forever; isn’t memory enough?

Finally, a clue to why, perhaps, the city is dying: German technology bent to the task of? Anyone? Engine performance? Hydrogen fuel cells? Rechargeable batteries to power green cars? No. Reproducing the sound of a V-8 engine (inevitably described as “throaty”). Why? Because people are stupid, that’s why:

Eberspacher GmbH and its Novi-based North American subsidiary have developed technology that replaces a muffler with a speaker inserted into the exhaust system. That speaker — a heat restraint version of a typical stereo speaker — emits sound waves that can either silence engine noise or tune it so that even a quiet hybrid sedan can roar like a classic muscle car.

Widespread use of such a system could solve two issues facing automakers as they strive to offer smaller, more fuel-efficient and hybrid vehicles: Consumer perception that quiet cars offer poor performance; and concerns that hybrids, which are silent at slow speeds, pose a safety hazard to the blind because they use engine noise to identify moving vehicles.

I’m amazed how often I hear this, anecdotally: “But I like a car with that deep rumbly sound.” Oh, bite me. When we were in Monterey, the peninsula filled with motorcyclists, there for a road race in nearby Salinas. Alan said it was a Formula I of bikes, and the idea of thousands of them in town was enough for one art gallery on Cannery Row to close pre-emptively, “due to excessive noise.” But guess what? There was hardly any noise. It turns out that aficionados of European road bikes — BMWs, Triumphs, Ducatis — don’t measure their manhoods in decibels. That’s for those tattooed lardasses on Harleys. (Apologies to any tattooed lardasses in the readership; I’m just venting.)

So, just to sum up: Speakers in your mufflers. It’s times like this I think of “Idiocracy,” the prelude, where the best minds of science are bent not to the problem of declining IQs, but hair loss and erections.

Are we done ranting? I guess.

A little more bloggage, HT Roy: The Guardian’s gallery of LOLBush, at the Olympics. Stupid, but mildly amusing.

A bit testy this morning? Why yes, yes I am. I’m taking Poynter.org off my bookmarks, or at least restricting myself to the RSS feed, which cuts out all the b.s. links surrounding Romenesko’s media news. If I see one more Jill Geisler essay on “newsroom leadership,” I may explode.

Off to make phone calls. Enjoy your day.

Why this city is a great place to be a journalist, or just a newspaper reader:

The mayor of Detroit is in jail.

And boy, does he look pissed.

When we were in San Francisco, Kate asked how cold it got there in the winter. Easy enough to check in the land where they invented wi-fi, and lo it was revealed, the chart of average monthly temperatures a gentle undulation, like something lapping a Caribbean beach. If it were a hill, it wouldn’t even make a cyclist breathe hard.

“Let’s check how that compares with us,” I told her, and a few keystrokes later we beheld the brutal sine wave of average Detroit temperatures. It was one of those tell-me-again-why-I-live-here moments.

And yesterday was one of those tell-me-why-I-live-here days. Hot and muggy, the sort of day where pumping up the tires on the bike sends sweat pouring down your face. Over the years, I find my sweat glands closing — I now have a cool, dry handshake, something that eluded me throughout my dewy youth, when I was doing a lot of job interviews — everywhere but from the neck up. I guess this is another sign of creeping geezerism, but it makes me feel like the human sprinkler, schvitzing like a firehose pointed at the sky. I came home from the gym with a wet head, looking like Scary Sweaty Woman, and it set the tone for the day, spent mostly indoors, glaring at the thick air outside.

I got out to vote, of course, stopping a moment to marvel at the brave souls who volunteer to be poll workers, a 14-hour day in Michigan. Turnout was barely noticeable, but they still seemed to be in a dither. They’re always in a dither — there’s something about the rituals of voting combined with the natural ditherhood of senior citizens that makes the process seem ridiculously complicated. First you fill out a request for a ballot. Then you sign in, have your ID checked, get your name crossed off the list, get a ballot and step into the privacy booth to fill it out. Our precinct uses optical-character scans — the fill-in-the-oval, paper-ballot method — and along with your ballot you’re handed a complicated modesty shield, a cardboard folder with strategic cutouts, designed to let you feed your ballot into the machine without revealing a single oval to prying eyes.

Only there are never any prying eyes, and frankly, I don’t care if they see who I voted for. I’m an open book. The folder is cumbersome, and once I tried to reject it at the source. “That’s not necessary,” I said. “I know the procedure.”

Klaxon horns might as well have sounded. A voter is rejecting the folder? Unleash the hounds! The lady looked so flummoxed I finally said, “Well, OK,” took it and did my bit like a good citizen. Some rules aren’t worth the trouble of breaking.

Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick pulled it out. It was close, however; if there had been only one opponent instead of two, I’m confident she would have gone down in flames. Alan was listening to her victory speech, and she said she planned on staying in Congress until she was damn good and ready to leave. In some cities they pretend to serve at the pleasure of the electorate, but not here. (Well, at least she’s honest, because that’s how long she’ll be there.)

My own Michigan House district was a livelier race. The seat was opened up by term limits, with a 10-candidate scrum to fill it. The most interesting race was the Republican primary, where a well-funded Grosse Pointe CPA with three names pulled out a decisive victory over a couple city councilmen and assorted novices. She was the victim of last-minute robo-calling; a woman’s voice with a heavy southern accent (yeah, I know — weird) said she wasn’t really a CPA nor a member of the Fraternal Order of Police, as claimed on her campaign literature. Two rounds of calls went out, both with female voices, suggesting a tone of nasty gossip. Fingers are pointing on the blogs, but so far no one accepts responsibility.

Anyway, she won. Water under the bridge.

Today looks clearer and a few degrees cooler — hello, high pressure — so I’m headed out to enjoy it. In the meantime, I hope the rest of you are reading Coozledad’s blog, Rurritable, with his amusing accounts of life on his North Carolina farm. The animal pictures are the best, as C’dad spurns the usual Holsteins and Yorkshires in favor of cattle with horns and emus. (What is that cow wearing in that milking photo, dude? A girdle?) I also like his animal naming, a true sign of a vegetarian farmer. The current calf is Calpurnia, and she’s growing up at her mother’s side, unusual for a dairy calf on most farms. She’ll be a well-adjusted and contented cow when it’s her turn, I expect.

Oh, the bull’s name: Llewd. Best bull name ever.

My fascination with the Detroit News’ Tax Blog grows by the day, as it seems to be building to an inevitable conclusion: Everyone in Detroit owes the IRS something. For now, some owe more than others, including Aretha Franklin, whose money problems don’t interest me as much as the engineering of her evening wear; she keeps showing up in these strapless numbers. Why can’t we harness this power for the struggling automotive sector, I ask you?

That’s it for me, folks. Off to the library.

Last summer when Alex visited we drove past Theatre Bizarre, a place that lives up to its name. I first found it after taking Kate and a friend to the state fair in 2005. We drove out of a gate onto a city street called, fittingly enough, State Fair, and saw what looked like the remains of a ’30s carnival arrayed across two or three city lots:

This is the main stage. There’s more.

Now, I’m not stupid. I knew this was the work of art students, not actual carnies. But the illusion was pretty great — the faded banners for the fat lady and other freaks, and the signs for the Ghost Train and Hell Mouth dotted with incandescent bulbs (every eighth one burned out) looked amazingly authentic. Maybe some of them were. I don’t know what was salvage and what was new, but I doubt Hollywood could have done a better job.

I went home and hit the Google. Not nearly enough was out there, but I learned Theatre Bizarre was the venue for one pretty epic Halloween party a year, and not much else. So when Alan and I found ourselves at liberty on Saturday, and the local alt-weekly had a listing for an event there, I knew where we were going, even if we couldn’t quite pull off the costuming as Hairy Man and the Fat Lady. (We went in our customary Land’s End/Ann Taylor Grosse Pointe Squaresville togs.)

The party was the Squared Circle Review, and the best capsule definition is “Mexican-style wrestling, heavy metal, retro-carny acts and old-school burlesque,” and if that’s a pretty wordy capsule, so be it. But that’s what it was — a wrestling ring was erected in the biggest open space in front of the stage, and that’s where Gunther T. Strongman took on six clowns, and Roxi Dlite did her striptease, and the fire-eaters and hoop-twirlers ate fire and twirled hoops. The main stage was for A Mayonnaise Graveyard and Downtown Brown. I’m sorry we missed Polka Madre from Mexico, but I can’t stay up all damn night; when we left at 1 a.m. the Snake vs. Cat wrestling bout was still going on, with a three-piece band led by an electric violin providing the improv soundtrack.

We really need to get out more.

What interests me most in all this is Theatre Bizarre. We ran into one of Alan’s co-workers there, who knows more about it, and she said the space belongs to a guy who buys and renovates houses, and the Theatre Bizarre project is just a way to fill some vacant lots in one of the city’s most blighted neighborhoods. (We went around the block on our way out, and the street directly behind the TB is straight out of the haunted forest. A rat ran across the road in front of our car. I think Central Casting sent him.) He lives in one of the adjacent properties and is content to let this epic stage set — a couple of Flickr sets for your amusement — sit vacant most of the year.

As I have marveled many times: Only in Detroit can artists be real-estate developers.

Around the corner is the Stone House Bar, a biker bar in a building said to have once been a hangout for the Purple Gang. I think that’s next on our urban exploration. I hope they make a decent cheeseburger there.

So, a bit of bloggage:

Time magazine is slowly putting their archives online, and it was there I found this story from 1960, about the first public revelation of the Grosse Pointe point system, the codified tool of discrimination used to keep the Wrong People out of our neighborhood in the postwar expansion. Of course I’d heard about it, but I didn’t know the details, which are fascinating:

Unlike similar communities, where neighborhood solidarity is based on an unwritten gentleman’s agreement, Grosse Pointe’s screening system is based on a “written questionnaire, filled out by a private investigator on behalf of Grosse Pointe’s “owner-vigilantes.”

The three-page questionnaire, scaled on the basis of “points” (highest score: 100), grades would-be home owners on such qualities as descent, way of life (American?), occupation (Typical of his own race?), swarthiness (Very? Medium? Slightly? Not at all?), accent (Pronounced? Medium? Slight? None?), name (Typically American?), repute, education, dress (Neat or slovenly? Conservative or flashy?), status of occupation (sufficient eminence may offset poor grades in other respects). Religion is not scored, but weighed in the balance by a three-man Grosse Pointe screening committee. All prospects are handicapped on an ethnic and racial basis: Jews, for example, must score a minimum of 85 points, Italians 75, Greeks 65, Poles 55; Negroes and Orientals do not count.

Interesting that Jews had the highest bar to jump (all to move into a place with zero synagogues), at time when the concentration camps were still a new revelation.

Much talk on the gossip sites about “The New New Face,” the cover story in New York magazine this week. It tells the story behind, among other things, Madonna’s cheek implants, and how and why plastic surgeons believe the future of face work isn’t the lift, but the stuffing. Nut graf:

Through some unholy marriage of extreme fitness and calorie restriction (and maybe a little lipo), women have figured out how to tame their aging bodies for longer than ever. You see them everywhere in New York City: forty- and fiftysomethings who look better than a 25-year-old in a fitted little dress or a tight pair of jeans. But this level of fitness has created a new problem to which the New New Face is the solution—gauntness. Past a certain age, to paraphrase Catherine Deneuve, it’s either your fanny or your face. In other words, if your body is fierce (from yoga, Pilates, and the treadmill), your face will have no fat on it either and it will be … unfierce. It was only a matter of time before a certain segment of the female population would figure out how to have it both ways, even if it means working out two hours a day and then paying someone to volumize their faces, as they say in the dermatology business. As a friend of mine recently pointed out, there is now a whole new class of women walking around with wiry little bodies and “big ol’ baby faces.” And they look, well, if not exactly young, then attractive in a different way. A yoga body plus the New New Face may not be a fountain of youth, but it’s a fountain of indeterminate age.

Sigh. Bring back the matron, I say.

And finally, another late-arriver, from Sunday’s NYT, about Europeans in the U.S. this summer, buying luxury goods like hungry locusts in a fresh alfalfa field. We noticed this phenomenon in San Francisco last month, where every street-corner conversation was in German or French, and the line out the Apple store was a block long. At one point I finally cracked in the chill and headed to the Levi’s store in Union Square to pick up a pair of long pants. I had to elbow my way past half the population of Stuttgart to get to the fitting room.

“Surely these people can buy Levi’s in Germany,” I said to the clerk.

“Not at these prices,” she said, explaining that the U.S. price was, to Europeans, about a 66 percent savings.

This is your country in 2008, America: Vietnam for Germans. And the dollar’s still falling.

Buy Detroit real estate! It’s cheap even in dollars!

Have a swell Tuesday. And Michiganders: Don’t forget to vote.

A mostly photo post today, because I’m lazy.

On Saturday I went kayaking. I’m sort of on an exercise binge, at least to the extent that I’m capable. A true exercise binger would have been undaunted by the brisk wind from the west, and would have dug in and headed out to the shipping channel for a quick there-and-back, damn the rollers, but not me. I stayed in the canals and collected data for my eventual master’s thesis on boat naming.

You can make a study of these things. Once upon a time boats were named for monarchs (Queen Mary), nobler ideas (Courage, Intrepid) or people who’d earned the privilege (Edmund Fitzgerald, Harry S. Truman). These aren’t names you’ll see in your local marina, unless you live in Liverpool or Norfolk or some such. For the average boat-owning American, naming the vessel is less high-minded and more fun, an occasion that calls for all the creativity they can muster. Like most creativity, though, it’s kind of predictable, and tends to fall into broad categories. Most common is puns and wordplay:

Some boaters can’t get over how the first two syllables in “nautical” make a homophone of “naughty.” People drink beer on boats and wear brief swimwear; naughtiness is frequently uppermost in mind. Also, basic facility with lines and knots is a requirement of the job, and so “knotty” is sometimes deployed in its place. We had a boat docked nearby our first year called the Knotty Lady, with the name spelled out in a font that looked like ropes. Alan once overheard the owner’s wife saying, “It says on our contract that if the boat isn’t removed from the water by November 1, they’ll do it for you. Isn’t that nice of them?” Perhaps Dumb Lady would have been more appropriate.

Bertram is a big manufacturer of motor yachts. I don’t think this is one of them:

More wordplay. It says something about the world of boating that you can drive around in a vehicle with a giant advertisement on the back saying, essentially, “There’s a good chance I’m drunk.” For the record, the law of the Michigan sea says you can drink aboard, but you can’t operate while drunk. Imagine driving down the highway, knowing you can legally raise a bottle in salute to a passing cop, as long as you won’t blow .08. (The funniest car-accident photo I ever saw was from a small paper in Indiana, showing a beater that had run off the road. Emblazoned across its trunk lid: “Daved and confused.” Go Dave!)

Many boat owners, in choosing names for their vessels, emphasize the mental-health angle:

Walk through any marina, and you’ll find versions of this: Seaclusion, Serenity, Escape, Cool Breezes, Hakuna Matata, In Recess. (The more jargon a job has, the more likely it’ll turn up on a stern somewhere. Lawyers in particular are guilty of this, but I bet if we’d explored the yacht basin in Sausalito, I’m sure we would have found at least one Offline and Away Message.) Skippers like to emphasize how chill they are, which lasts until the next set of bills comes, or one hits a rock. In my time on the water, I’ve witnessed beautiful watercraft pounded into near-splinters by heedless teenagers, squabbling crew members, screaming couples, fires onboard, near-sinkings. Somehow, you never see boats named Divorce Court or Poor House. Huh.

Also, note: This is Tranquillity II. Some people only have one name in them; all over the nation’s waterways are the Three B’s IV, Gone Fishin’ III, etc. Boats are distinct from one another; this just seems wrong to me.

I’m baffled by this one:

Inside joke/reference, I guess. Maybe Christine got a palimony settlement from Andrew Lloyd Webber. Maybe she got the house in the divorce, leaving her ex with this consolation prize.

Local color plays its part. This is a terrible name for a boat:

What’s the point? It moves fast? It would fit for an iceboat, but the last thing most people want to think about during summer sailing season is the Red Wings. But then, a boat is like a little floating nation with a single monarch, who gets to have it his/her way. So there.

Another local reference. Anyone get it?

It’s a Kid Rock lyric:

Buy a yacht with a flag sayin’ chillin’ the most
Then rock that bitch up and down the coast

Kid Rock is a local hero. He’s got a big hit now (“All Summer Long”) that name-checks northern Michigan, every Mitten Stater’s favorite summer-vacation spot. In the video…

…he drives a classic mahogany speedboat, which I will bet a sawbuck is not an original but one of those jillion-dollar reproductions. My friends Paul and Mark had a boat like that, and still do. It was a Chris-Craft, named The Kid. Here it is, in a scene from a summer day much like the ones in the video, only no one is pole-dancing or displaying breast implants:

I don’t know who that girl is. She looks drunk.

Anyway, Kid Rock’s boat name in the video is also a reference to that song about chillin’ the most, but not, I’m happy to say, something like Rockin’ That Bitch. It’s just the song title: Cowboy.

Then there’s ours:

Alan’s a jazz fan. I favored this name, and suggested Kind of Blue as an alternative. I thought Boplicity would be cool (it’s a Miles Davis song), even though no one would get it, and probably pronounce it “Bopple City.” Long after our friend J.C. designed this new name for us and it was installed, Alan revealed his secret second choice: Box of Rain.

I didn’t even know he liked the Grateful Dead.

Bloggage:

Fascinating story in Sunday’s NYT magazine on trolling (the internet variety). What awful people.

That Obama-is-skinny story was made even worse over the weekend, after Maureen Dowd echoed its central premise and money quote, taken from a Yahoo politics message board. In both the WSJ and the NYT, it was reported as, “I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.”

In its full version, it reads: “Yes I think He is to skinny to be President.Hillary has a potbelly and chuckybutt I’d of Voted for Her.I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.” Hmm. The story appeared Friday, which tells me Maureen Dowd is still writing her Sunday column on Friday morning — not unheard of, certainly, but if she’s going to cut it that close, she should check the blogs first. That thing had been stripped by piranhas by noon.

Can I just say that few things drive me as insane as people who write “I’d of voted for…?” It’s my “supposebly.”

And that’s it for today. Monday. Another one. Sigh.

I’ve lived in open-primary states all my life — first Ohio, then Indiana, now Michigan — and have been immersed in GOP Nation for so long that I can’t remember when voting wasn’t complicated. To vote offensively, or defensively? How strategic does my ballot need to me? Vote for someone, or against someone else?

We have a primary coming up in just under a couple weeks. There are a few interesting races on the table, and apparently I’m not the only one who’s strategizing.

Our state house district is reliably Republican, but no longer a lead-pipe cinch. Six Republicans and four Democrats are running for the seat opened by a term-limited exit. Normally I’d vote in the Republican primary, just for that feeling of not being disenfranchised, but the U.S. congressional seat is in play, and that one’s more interesting.

The current occupant is the Detroit mayor’s mother, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, an imperious, high-handed dame who behaves as though the seat was bequeathed to her by God. Unfortunately, her son’s problems have many suburbanites slavering to punish him by booting his mom from office — at least, if I’m reading the sudden appearance of yard signs for her opponent, Mary Waters, along such unlikely thoroughfares as Lake Shore Road in Grosse Pointe.

Here’s Waters’ TV ad, with Mrs. K’s famous meltdown of a couple summers back.

And here’s how the mayor is greeted in his hometown by a crowd of hockey fans, certainly a heavily suburban crowd. This is a fairly restrained response, based on what I’ve heard in private conversations.

Today brings fresh outrage for the ‘burbs: The mayor’s being investigated for allegedly shoving a sheriff’s deputy, who was trying to serve a subpoena on his good friend Bobby Ferguson. This happened at the home of the mayor’s sister, who is married to Bobby’s cousin, and yes, others have noted that nepotism seems to be a theme with these folks.

Anyway, I’m not sure which ballot I’ll request. It depends on whether the Republican spot for the state House seat looks to be in serious play. I don’t think it is — I think it’s going to a nice blonde lady whose qualifications include “in line to be the first female commodore of the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club.” Oh, how nice. Meanwhile, Kilpatrick and Waters “sparred,” as they say, on a local public-affairs show last weekend, and the former sneered to the latter, “You couldn’t carry my bra.” And people wonder why I like living here.

Of course, it would help if one of the weeklies would cover the race, but they’re too busy covering a new swimming pool opening. (Headline: Splish, splash! Zero-entry pool opens)

Dunno if you non-subscribers can read this, but there’s an interesting piece in the WSJ today announcing the “end of the Reagan Revolution,” i.e., a return of government regulation. After a bellyful of Chinese lead, the mortgage-and-banking fiascos, collapsing freeway bridges and various other train wrecks, voters are saying, “You know, maybe the endlessly creative marketplace isn’t the best overseer for this stuff.” And I know you can read this AP piece about the same issue, in tighter focus:

WASHINGTON – One of the worst outbreaks of foodborne illness in the U.S. is teaching the food industry the truth of the adage, “Be careful what you wish for because you might get it.”

The industry pressured the Bush administration years ago to limit the paperwork companies would have to keep to help U.S. health investigators quickly trace produce that sickens consumers, according to interviews and government reports reviewed by The Associated Press.

The White House also killed a plan to require the industry to maintain electronic tracking records that could be reviewed easily during a crisis to search for an outbreak’s source. Companies complained the proposals were too burdensome and costly, and warned they could disrupt the availability of consumers’ favorite foods.

The apparent but unintended consequences of the lobbying success: a paper record-keeping system that has slowed investigators, with estimated business losses of $250 million. So far, nearly 1,300 people in 43 states, the District of Columbia and Canada have been sickened by salmonella since April.

When we were in Cali, garden to the U.S., this was a very big story. Tomato growers were worried about losing their shirts while investigators tried to find the needle in the haystack. Meanwhile, consumers refused to buy tomatoes, restaurants pulled them from their menus and the nation twiddled its thumbs. Good thing the availability of our favorite foods wasn’t disrupted.

OK. Friends, I am looking out the window at what appears to be a lovely day. Time to exercise the Freelancer’s Option, and go enjoy it. Good weekends to all.

The incidents of scrap-metal thievery are great enough in number that they make a bona fide trend story, but I’m finding them lacking something, say, a sense of outrage. You can pile up the details all day, and there are scores — the theft of a green plaster statue of Jesus from the outside wall of a church, mistaken for copper; the stripping of a landmark fountain on Belle Isle, a six-figure repair for maybe $200 in scrap; the “NO METAL” signs on houses and commercial buildings around the city; the catalytic-converter gangs that can cut yours from your car without tripping the alarm — but still not get a sense of how bad it is.

A couple weeks ago, I heard an NPR piece on the theft of manhole covers in Philadelphia. A driver can hit an open manhole and do hundreds or thousands of dollars of damage to a car, but a cyclist can do the same thing and die. So you might say I paid close attention to this. The reporter interviewed a spokesman for a trade association of metal recyclers, who, in the tradition of weasel spokesmen everywhere, said scrap buyers bear no responsibility for this trend, and perhaps the cities most affected should work harder to secure the valuable ($20 in scrap, hundreds to replace) items, or maybe replace them with something less valuable, like fiberglas.

This being radio, and public radio at that, I waited in vain for the reporter to ask, “Are you telling me that a buyer has no obligation to raise questions when someone brings in five manhole covers reading ‘City of Philadelphia’ on them? Because I’d really like to get you on the record here.”

The linked story above has no scrap-metal spokesman — maybe he was busy doing a Black Mass or something — but it does mention the usual feeble effort of the city to crack down:

Last year, Detroit tightened its ordinance on scrap sales by requiring all dealers to produce paperwork and a video of all scrap sale transactions. “It has reduced copper theft in the city of Detroit,” said Bettison. “But now many of the scrap thieves go outside the city to sell their stolen metals.”

Well, that’s comforting.

As usual, Jim at Sweet Juniper has a beautifully written piece that captures the agony perfectly;

With China’s voracious demand for raw materials and the shocking increase in value of recyclable metals over the past few years, increased scrapping and theft are no surprise. But in places like Detroit the problem is so vast, fighting it seems almost futile, like those farm workers beating away the locusts in Days of Heaven. Occasionally a scrapper will die cutting a live wire, but six more step forward to take his place.

You see scrappers all the time in their beat-down old cars and trucks filled with metal: aluminum siding, radiators, steel fixtures, copper piping. I often see them inside Detroit’s wide-open and abandoned historic structures. Most artifacts of architectural significance have long been pillaged (for example, the terracotta lions from Lee Plaza that passed through the Ann Arbor antique market before being incorporated into new condo developments in Chicago). But there is still some rusty metal to be ripped away from the walls in most of these buildings. While showing that BBC documentary crew around a few weeks ago, we came across a mini van filled with metal driving around inside the old Fisher Body 21 plant. They are like maggots feeding on wounds; parasites devouring the viscera of this dying city.

We’ve already heard of aluminum docks around our lake place in south-central Michigan being stolen. Are scrappers taking your city apart, too?

No bloggage today — it’s already time to get changed for twice-weekly weight class, which recently went to a new teacher who believes it’s not weightlifting until the bar is sagging, apparently. Kill me now. If an open manhole cover doesn’t kill me first.

Every so often Lance Mannion mines his old notebooks for blog entries. Well, I don’t have old notebooks, but I do have NN.C. I started this site in part because it would require me to write something every day, to keep a journal of sorts, to keep a notebook in one form or another. So here’s something I turned up in my search for the Dexter column yesterday. Be glad you don’t know me in real life, for I am, apparently, insufferable.

This is from February 7, 2002:

Yesterday one of our neighbor’s kids stopped by. Middle-schooler, collecting information for a school paper on peregrine falcons.

“There’s been a peregrine falcon in our neighborhood,” he said.

“No way,” I told him. “Not around here. You’re almost certainly confusing it with a hawk. Red-tailed, Cooper’s, one of those. They’re big, they look like falcons.”

He insisted it was a peregrine. I insisted it couldn’t be. We had a short argument over whether they roost in trees in populated areas. I suspected I was putting him off, so I told him he ought to check out the Raptor Chapter, a non-profit that does rehabilitation on injured birds of prey. “Do you have the number?” he asked. I invited him in while I fetched the phone book. Alan walked in at this point. “Connor here thinks he’s seen a peregrine falcon in the neighborhood,” I said. “No way,” he said. Etc., etc. “Besides, they’re migratory,” I said. “They’re on the coasts at this time of year.” Connor said they weren’t. “I think you’d better check your research,” I told him.

Alan wondered what I was doing with the phone book. “I’m looking up the Raptor Chapter number for him.”

“The Raptor Chapter? They didn’t have the permits! The duck dicks shut her down,” Alan said.

“Shut her down? Janie? When?” I said.

“While back,” he said. “Of course we ran a couple paragraphs inside, after all that stuff we’ve been writing about her all these years.”

At this point I looked at Connor, who appeared somewhat dazed, no doubt thinking, Why the hell did I ring the doorbell of these lunatics? “I have a field guide, if you’d like to check it,” I said, gently. “Or you could call the Indiana DNR. They have lots of information. Guy name of John Castrale runs the peregrine reintroduction program.”

Finally, the thought occurred to me: “Why did you stop by, Connor?”

“I wanted to ask if you’d seen the falcon,” he said.

“Uh, no,” I said. And with that, he left. If I could have that five minutes to live over, I’d do it differently.

Bloggage:

I have a friend who works in TV news here, and whenever I bitch about the pathetic journalism — and fourth-rate star power — of local anchors, he rolls his eyes and give me a jaded, what-can-you-do look. However, I think even he would be appalled by news of a Detroit news anchor participating in a crooked deal between a sludge treatment company and the city council, and I hope on behalf of journalists everywhere, this paragraph made his eyes pop out:

Stinger, who joined Fox 2 as an investigative reporter in 1997 and became an anchor in 2004, was paid about $325,000 a year by Fox 2 Detroit in 2005, according to divorce records.

Actually, as TV-news anchors are paid — she anchored the morning news show — this is pocket change. All to look pretty. No wonder every Miss America contestant wants that gig.

Kids these days. Adults these days. Sheesh.

Early exit this morning — it’s back to the gym for mommy.

It was shortly after 7 Friday night that I wondered whether we were doomed. We’d gone into the Detroit Windsor International Film Festival Challenge knowing we’d have to make a film in 48 hours — no more than eight minutes, incorporating several assigned elements, in one of six genres, this last to be chosen randomly. Those were: Action-adventure, horror-thriller, crime, sci-fi, mockumentary and chick flick. We had vague ideas of a story for five. Some we liked better than others, and only one seemed un-doable with our standing team (chick flick). The rules would allow us to throw back one genre, but we would be required to take the next one. Before our two representatives went to the assigning event, we told them that if they drew chick flick to draw again, and we’d take whatever we got.

Diane, one of our reps, called a few minutes after arrival with bad news. Two more genres had been added: Superhero and musical. Musical? Musical?! We counted ourselves very lucky to have a musician on our team, but making an original musical in 48 hours seemed more daunting than a chick flick. We had a new bete noire. Diane spun the wheel, and it came up…Superhero.

We took it. The worst-case scenario of spinning again and getting Musical was too much to risk.

I’m not going to tell the whole story here — it was an entertaining and interesting weekend, and I’d like to tell it somewhere I have a chance of getting paid, but here are the highlights:

Our required elements were these:

We had to use the Ambassador Bridge and one more location, which was determined by throwing a dart at a board. Ours hit the campus of the College for Creative Studies in Detroit. We had to have a used-car salesman in there somewhere. We had to use a “for Dummies” book as a prop. And our line of dialogue was a real gem: “What’s that? It smells like cheese.”

It’s hard to make a superhero movie without tights, capes, special effects and the ability to drop women off tall buildings. Believe it or not, we had a green screen, but with only 48 hours to work with, it couldn’t be the foundation of our movie. So our superhero had to be antiheroic, reluctant. To compensate, we honored the other conventions of the genre — we gave him an origin story, an adversary (the guy with the limo) and a happy ending.

The bottom line of fast filmmaking is, you can’t be too picky. Good enough frequently has to be good enough. You have no, or barely any time to rewrite, reshoot or even think very much about what you’re doing. But we were fortunate to have a great crew, entirely assembled from Craigslist. Michael, our director, said several times how amazed he was by the power of Craigslist. I concur.

We finished, but just barely. Remember that scene in “Broadcast News” we talked about a while back? It was just like that. I was the Joan Cusack character. We left our headquarters in Royal Oak with the bare minimum to turn in (a mini DV tape; no time for the DVD burn) at 6:32 p.m., headed for the dropoff just north of downtown at 7 p.m. We made it with 9 minutes to spare. But three teams finished after we did. My favorite was the last one, which by my watch arrived at 6:59 and change: A Chrysler Pacifica rolls up, its door opening before it was fully stopped. Out jumps one guy and sprints for the building at top speed. Another guy jumps out behind him, ditto. Behind him was a third guy, running a little slower, holding an open Mac PowerBook with an attached remote hard drive — still burning the DVD. After all were away, the driver backed into a parking place, got out, shook his head and said, “This car will never be the same.”

More as the week develops. Screenings are next Sunday, when we find out if we placed. In the meantime, just remember: It’s not a movie until someone yells, “Let’s get a move on, people! We’re losing light!”

You can’t get out of school without a final rule being shoved down your throat. The final rule of today’s Promotion Ceremony was handed down yesterday — no flip-flops. Screw it. Our student has a special new pair of flip flops with sparkly straps to go with her new dress, and she’s wearing them, and if anybody makes a stink about it they’re going to be dealing with me, and mama don’t take no mess. There’s a point at which all the stupid rules of school become unbearable, and they don’t even apply to me. I’ve sat silent through No Squirt Guns at the Class Picnic (violation of the weapons policy) and No Untwisted Paperclips (ditto) and a punishment system that frequently involves writing, but on this one I’m a scofflaw.

(The punitive-writing thing bugs me in particular. Say you’re, oh, a software designer. Were your child to misbehave while in my care, I would not make him or her design software as a punishment. And yet, teachers think nothing of assigning painful essays as punishment for breaches of conduct large and small, and then wonder why kids despise writing.)

I shouldn’t complain. I don’t have to wrangle a few hundred kids who’d much rather be at the pool. I frequently marvel that teachers stay sane at all, and don’t begrudge them two or three end-of-day cocktails one little bit. Keep in mind this is a middle-class suburban district where kids are, generally speaking, still respectful of adults (in public, anyway) and will behave if ordered to do so. Still. Squirt guns? Please.

In other domestic news at this hour, we have a resident wild thing — an opossum. (The writer within insists I call it by its formal name on first reference.) I think it’s living under the deck by day and it needs to be removed, but I caught a glimpse of it in the driveway last night and damn — it’s the size of a Ford F-150. For once I was grateful for the dog’s ailing eyesight, because I was able to call him inside before he saw that mofo lurking out by the birdbath. A fight between those two would have been ugly. Alan has a live trap at the lake house, weaponry from last fall’s Groundhog Wars (score: Groundhog 1, Humans 0), and it’s coming here a.s.a.p. I like to live in peace with the natural world, but I’m wary of the damage a beast like that can do. And I read that in possums, “senescence is rapid.” I don’t want that sucker dying under my deck.

A quick skip to the bloggage, then:

I’m sorry, but when I see a headline reading Baby born with penis on back, man oh man am I clicking that one. If more babies were born with extra penises growing out of their backs, the newspaper business would not be in the fix it is today. For the squeamish, this appears to be one of those incompletely-absorbed-fetal-twin situations, and the kid seems to be fine after surgery, even though he lost a second career as a coat rack.

My favorite blogger, Roy, is taking a few days off to have eye surgery. This seems as good a time as ever to re-promote “Detached,” our friend James Burns’ graphic novella about his own eye surgery.

My congresswoman, Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, is the Detroit mayor’s mother and is, I have assumed, as cemented into the job as my last congressman. The Free Press says maybe not — her son’s troubles have given mom some challengers, one of whom released an ad on the internets this week. In typical old-media fashion, the Freep didn’t provide a link. I’m going to assume it was an oversight, but here it is, and it’s a goody. (It uses the infamous “y’all’s boy” meltdown, seen in longer form here.)

You’ve probably all seen this by now, but just in case not, the NYT looks at the popularity of re-virginization surgery among European Muslim women. Show me a culture that values chastity over everything else in young women, and I’ll show you a sick culture. Nothing in this story changed my mind. Funny line:

But hymen repair is talked about so much that it is the subject of a film comedy that opens in Italy this week. “Women’s Hearts,” as the film’s title is translated in English, tells the story of a Moroccan-born woman living in Italy who goes to Casablanca for the operation.

One character jokes that she wants to bring her odometer count back down to “zero.”

I’ve always thought you could judge a group by what they compared their women to — cows (as in why buy one when you get the milk for free), shoes (you wouldn’t buy a pair without trying them on) and now cars. I ask you.

Off to walk around threateningly on the deck. Maybe I can scare the possum away. Ha.