Finally saw “Swingtown.” Snap judgment: It doesn’t have legs, but I give them credit for trying. There’s no reason to let premium cable have all the shows about adults; broadcast has to find something outside of the police/law procedural and the escalating CSI grossfest.

One of the things that bothers me is the ostentatious “hey, we’re in the ’70s now” shots. Sure, the people are going to wear ’70s clothes and the men are going to have ’70s sideburns and the women are going to drink Tab. But when I saw a quick closeup of these, I thought they were trying way too hard:

Closeups of shoes are for significant-to-the-plot shoes, and unless those Dr. Scholl’s Exercise Sandals are going to be very important in a future episode, this was just show-offy. I do have an idea of how Dr. Scholl’s might be the pivot upon which the plot turns; after all, like every other woman who was young in that era, I owned a succession of pairs. They were my default shoe all summer long, and I loved them beyond all reason.

You bought them in drugstores, along with other fine Dr. Scholl’s products. They cost $15, and had their own end-cap display, at the bottom of which was a series of molded plastic footprints you used to find your size. The “exercise” gimmick said that if you wore them, your feet had to clench the toe ridge with every step, thus exercising your legs. Huh. Whatever. I never noticed any specific toning action, but maybe I wasn’t clenching them correctly. For me, they were wooden flip-flops, and by midsummer the rubber had worn off the heel and everywhere you went, your shoes announced you before your arrival. In the era’s shag carpet, it was no biggie, but on wooden floors it was like beating a drum. I can still hear my friend’s grandmother’s crabby voice ringing in my ears, complaining about our “clompy shoes” as we came inside their summer cottage for our endless supplies of Dr. Pepper and turkey sandwiches.

Maybe the teenage-girl character who wears these will stumble upon her parents and their new neighbors in dishabille, struggling into their Qiana fashions after hearing her clomp-clomp approach. That would justify the closeup.

By the way, Dr. Scholl’s started making them again a few years ago. Back in the day they came in three colors — navy, red and bone. I was a bone girl. But in a spasm of credit card-enabled nostalgia, I just visited the Dr. Scholl’s website and I see they’ve expanded their color palette; now they’re available in such racy colors as Cheeky Pink and Wine. I thought about it for a long time and opted for tan. It was the only color on sale, and the shoes are no longer offered in bone. Once a bone girl, always a bone girl. (I suffer the Curse of Neutrals.)

So, some Monday bloggage?

Neely Tucker finds one of the oddest car clubs in America — for the misbegotten, better-off-dead Chevy Cavalier. I liked it because, down low in a lengthy story, he gets to the point of custom-car culture. It’s not about buying something fancy off the showroom floor. It’s about finding something cheap, something you can afford, and little by little, turning it into something all your own:

A quick history of customized cars in pop-culture America:

After World War II, GIs came home with a little money in their pocket and a new sense of working with mechanics. Out in Southern California, they bought old beaters, mostly from Ford. Like a ’29 Model A Roadster, or anything after ’32 with the flathead V-8. Something wasn’t right with the engine but, hell, they could fix that. Get out the tools, ratchet, ratchet. Honey, crank it when I tell you to. Right. Give it some gas. Good. Good. Slam hood, wipe hands on a rag. Take it out on the strip and turn the quarter faster than anything else alive.

The hot rod was born out of reworked junk. That was part of the glory of it, the great young male joke on respectable society.

We mentioned the Dymaxion House a few weeks back, so this seems apt: A New Yorker profile of Buckminster Fuller, which answers a lot of questions for me:

Fuller was fond of neologisms. He coined the word “livingry,” as the opposite of “weaponry”—which he called “killingry”—and popularized the term “spaceship earth.” (He claimed to have invented “debunk,” but probably did not.) Another one of his coinages was “ephemeralization,” which meant, roughly speaking, “dematerialization.” Fuller was a strong believer in the notion that “less is more,” and not just in the aestheticized, Miesian sense of the phrase. He imagined that buildings would eventually be “ephemeralized” to such an extent that construction materials would be dispensed with altogether, and builders would instead rely on “electrical field and other utterly invisible environment controls.”

Wow. I wonder what it would be like to take a shower in that house.

Cops storm a Detroit art gallery. It’s almost too rich with possibility for words, but it turns out, they were only looking for after-hours drinking. In commando gear. Because, you know, in a city like Detroit, after-hours drinking in an art gallery is a crime that requires a SWAT response.

You know why people think raising kids is so expensive? Because they read shit like this, about the nursery for the Pitt-Jolie royal twins:

They even installed two pink crystal chandeliers for the girls at a cost of $899 each.

I don’t think a day goes by that I don’t regret not getting a pink crystal chandelier for my nursery. She had to make do with one of those dumb infant-stimulation crib mobiles. But today she’s an A student. Let’s see where the Jolie-Pitt babies are in 11 years, eh?

Happy Monday.

Short shrift today, folks. We’ve entered the last days of the school year, which mean more work for mother, and practically no work for the student in the house. Today is the safety/service picnic, and I’m a driver/chaperone/fruit salad contributor. Also, I worked a seven-hour news-farming shift last night, and I don’t want to see my keyboard for another 12 hours. Discuss what you like. I hear Hillary’s finally throwing in the towel, which is gracious of her because, you know, she could have taken it to the streets of Denver, and tear gas could have been involved. I’m thinking what happened to Hillary is what happens to people who live in a human cocoon, surrounded by ass-kissers and pillow-plumpers who either a) spend all their time covering their own; or b) telling you what you want to hear. When Sonny Corleone shouted at Tom Hagen that he wasn’t a wartime consigliere, he was speaking for everybody at the head of a losing team: Tell me the truth!

Too bad no one did. On to November. Remember, look past the fence.

Bloggage:

Detroit should change its motto to “defining new ways to be fucked up, every day” — someone pried an 8-foot statue of Jesus from the cross on the side of a church, and I don’t think they were re-enacting the 13th station of the cross. Best guess for a motive is, the statue is green, and the thieves probably thought it was copper. (It wasn’t.) America, behold your future!

Sweet Juniper’s dad has the second kid in cloth diapers, and he was feeling a little smug about it. Was:

…Yesterday I had the misfortune of going down into the basement during the spin cycle of that initial rinse. Our washing machine empties into a basin during the spin cycle. As desensitized as I have become to all things scatological over the past few years, nothing—nothing—could have prepared me for what was pulsing into the wash basin. Vomiting out of the tube was this butterscotch-tinted gray liquid, quickly filling the room with the humid perfume of pickled baby shit that had marinated in a brine of cold urine for a week. I watched it rise in the basin as the washing machine spun. Just when the vile brew threatened to spill over the top it began to subside in a roaring, fecal Charybdis above the drain. I swear I heard the voices of demons or lost souls calling desperately to me from the gurgling ferment.

That man is a good writer.

When I lived in Indiana, and I was about to attend my first Indy 500, I went prancing back to the sports department to pick up my press pass. Ooh, how exciting! The old geezer who covered, I think, golf and some other boring sport looked at me and shook his head sadly. He’d been to the race, he said. Once. He took his kids; they had great seats right on the main stretch. The race started, that thrilling moment when 33 cars go into that first turn like a flock of fighter jets flying in tight formation, and then this happened on the second lap:

Right in front of the biggest part of the crowd, right in front of his kids. The old sportswriter bundled his hysterical children into the car while they were still clearing the track, drove back to Fort Wayne and never felt the need to attend Indiana’s signature sporting event again. Those sitting close told stories much like this:

I see a driver being carried on a stretcher into the infield hospital. I am close enough I could have reached out and touched him. He is burned so badly there is no way to tell who he is. The figure is barely recognizable as a human being. I have never been able to get that image erased from my memory.

This particular writer is given to melancholy and hand-wringing; maybe this is why.

Off to hunt up my melon baller. So I can ball some melons. Shut your mouth. Back later.

Summer is party time, and it won’t be long now before we can’t open a magazine without hearing about some rapper’s coming-out party in the Hamptons, where guests sampled hors d’oeuvres made from fetal veal, served by waitresses dressed as mermaids, who swam around the perimeter of a fountain with trays held high. Upon arriving, everybody walked through a footbath of Cristal, just to get their toes all tingly and refreshed. At midnight, fireworks erupted from the ass of the ice sculpture of Michelangelo’s David, and as a lovely parting gesture, everyone got a goody bag contained gift certificates for round-the-world cruises and Lancome’s summer line of eye shadow. In Style will have all the photos.

Someone will bitch about the fetal-veal canapés. It’s not included in their Zone diet plan, or something.

Sunday morning I did my Alter Road loop ride, about 12 miles, maybe a little less. Alter Road makes a 90-degree turn at its southeastern terminus, and there’s a park there — Mariner’s Park, little more than a parking lot, a field and a fishing plaza overlooking Windmill Point, where Lake St. Clair narrows and becomes the Detroit River. It’s never deserted; no matter when I come there are always at least a few people with rods set in the brackets, trying their luck.

On Sunday, the white bass were biting with a vengeance. Everybody’s bucket was full, and those who had double hooks on their lines were bringing them up two at a time. A party atmosphere prevailed among this mostly middle-aged and older crowd — old-school floating from a boom box, lots of laughing and comparing the biggest on the stringer. One lady brought a portable grill, and was firing it up to make some lunch with the abundant catch.

No one asked me to either party, but I think I’d rather attend the second one. From the looks of the clothes everyone was wearing and, especially, the cars in the parking lot, no one here had a lot of dough. (There was one aging Ford Taurus that looked like it was, literally, held together with silicon sealer, Bondo and superglue.) But they sure were having a good time. It was the ten thousandth reminder that parties don’t turn on the food, the venue or even the occasion. Parties turn on the guest list, and the spirit everyone brings to the event.

Something to remember when you’re planning your Fourth of July soiree.

As for me, I was up early on an empty stomach. Package 2 of the 50th birthday present from my doctor is the usual blood work. You know I’m going to put off opening Package 3 for as long as possible, but the nurse was very stern: “We’ve had several patients who refused to accept this present, who are now seeing oncologists.” Got it. Anyway, after an hour spent with a growling stomach, cooling my heels in various waiting rooms, I rewarded myself with scrambled eggs with black beans and salsa, basically a breakfast burrito without the tortilla. And now I feel at one with the world and in love with all humankind. What a way to start Monday.

So, a bit of bloggage? Sure:

Hank Stuever tackles the question that’s been keeping you up nights: Just who wrote ‘Footprints,’ anyway? It should not surprise you to learn that lawsuits are involved.

The Chinese take the Soviets’ place as medal-mongers. Just one more thing I hate about the Olympics:

The American and Chinese (rowing) programs are drastically different.

In this Olympic year, about 60 United States rowers receive monthly stipends of $1,200 from the U.S.O.C. Last winter, they trained together for about four months, all expenses paid, but for the most part, they pay their own way.

Some, like Matt Muffelman, work part time. He is an associate at the Home Depot in Ewing, N.J., where he answers gardening questions like, “Are those mums squirrel-proof?” and “Where is the mulch?”

In non-Olympic years, most United States rowers work full time or attend school, often following training schedules prepared by coaches who live elsewhere. Some stop rowing.

Bryan Volpenhein won a gold medal in the men’s eight at the 2004 Olympics, then moved to Seattle for culinary school, preparing for what he called “real life.” Now 31, he returned last spring to the national team’s base in Princeton, N.J., where it rents boathouse space. Some rowers live communally, but Volpenhein house-sits for a professor. For meals, they fend for themselves.

Needless to say, the Chinese do not fend for themselves.

Someone — Jolene, maybe? — wondered if I had anything to add to the Michigan delegate fiasco, how the story was playing here, and the answer is: Not loudly. The fact is, we have bigger fish to fry — it’s hard to overstate how bad the local and state economy is at the moment; we’re heading into “Roger & Me” territory — and that’s good news for the architects of this bloody fiasco, who have largely escaped punishment. I’m not tight with the Hillary camp, but I’d think they’re smart enough to see the writing on the wall and settle for the 50 percent solution reached over the weekend. Brian Dickerson at the Freep has more, but I think the best course of action is to say, “We made our point,” sit down and shut up.

I won’t say anymore, because like I said before, I’m feeling in love with mankind this morning, and want to stay that way. Despite what the self-portrait, taken just moments ago, suggests:

Have a merry Monday.

Almost enough to make you forget that sore knee.

Although now my shoulder is sore, too.

Oops. Debbie Stabenow’s husband suffers from Eliot Spitzer’s Disease.

I see at least two only-in-Detroit details in the following paragraph; see if you can spot them:

Thomas L. Athans was stopped Feb. 26 by undercover officers investigating a possible prostitution ring in a room at the Residence Inn near Big Beaver and Interstate 75. Athans paid a 20-year-old prostitute $150 for sex in a Troy hotel but was not arrested, according to police reports obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request by The Detroit News. The police report said officers observed Athans enter a room under surveillance and leave 15 minutes later. Detectives followed and stopped Athans’ silver 2002 Cadillac DeVille on Interstate 75 near Square Lake Road.

UPDATE:
Well, at
least the
girl dresses for
Michigan weather:

Sorry for the unexpected day off yesterday. I’d written and crumpled about four posts when the phone rang. It was the school, telling me my daughter has officially inherited her father’s tendency toward headaches. They’d been creeping up for a while, but yesterday was the first appearance of the big-M variety, if my amateur diagnosis is correct. Severe headaches accompanied by vision changes and nausea automatically = migraine, don’t they? (Unless, Dr. Google tells me, it’s multiple sclerosis. Or, you know, a brain tumor.) Anyway, the big purge went a long way toward making things better, but she spent the rest of the day on the couch, and my own was pretty much off the rails.

So thanks to all of you who took the ball and ran with it. Nothing like discussing that old-time cussin’, is there?

One of my old neighbors had a theory that sounds a little New Age-y, but nevertheless has a ring of truth to it. He said every person has a consistent weak spot in their body’s defenses, a door the germs will find unlocked more often than not. His son’s was his nose, Kate’s was her throat, his own was his head, mine was…I guess it was my big mouth, which has no discernment whatsoever, and will say and eat pretty much anything. Although I’ve never had trench mouth, gum disease, or even many cavities. So I guess that theory falls apart.

Anyway, all is well today, if 30 degrees colder than yesterday. Ah, spring.

Between making therapeutic Jell-O and buying Tylenol, I finally got around to reading the Harvard virgin story from the NYT magazine over the weekend. I was looking for some indication that this no-sex club was different from other no-sex clubs, and it seems to boil down to: But this is Harvard. I guess they have Veritas stamped on their chastity belts, or something. And people wonder why the Ivy League still matters. (If nothing else, it’s given us women who’ll be quoted in the paper of record calling oral sex “disrespectful and disgusting.” For you, maybe.)

This meme is making its way around, I notice:

She began talking about oxytocin, the hormone released at birth, in breast-feeding and also during sex. True Love Revolution gives it the utmost significance, claiming on its Web site that the hormone’s “powerful bonding” effect can be “a cause of joy and marital harmony” but that outside of marriage it can create “serious problems.” Released arbitrarily, it can blur “the distinction between infatuation and lasting love,” the Web site cautions, making rational mating decisions difficult. Fredell said oxytocin could also bond people who didn’t necessarily want to be bound, and “you can bond yourself to the wrong guy in the wrong situation.”

This is, I believe, the “science” behind the tape exercise performed in some abstinence classes, where the teacher goes around pressing tape to students’ arms, then ripping it off and repasting it on other arms. This underlines the important lesson that you can get all kinds of diseases from others — because the tape gets kind of gross as it goes around sticking to arms — and also…well, something, I’m sure. If you stick your tape to someone else, not only does it hurt when you rip it off, you’re less sticky the next time around. And this is backed by science! You could look it up!

No wonder these folks can’t get any traction in the real world. Not only are they up against the unstoppable force of humanity, they use bad science and stupid teaching techniques. If people wonder why I pay taxes through the nose to send my kid to a halfway-decent public school, here’s one reason: Because the last time I looked at the health curriculum, it didn’t call for duct tape.

OK, a little lite nosh of bloggage, shall we?

Most people outside the city don’t know that the Detroit mayor, Kwame Kilpatrick, rolls with a security posse to rival Suge Knight’s. Brian Dickerson pulls it apart, a little bit. He offers the priceless detail that the entourage, already preposterously large to begin with, has been increased in response to “threats” against Special KK, and then notes:

In 2003, after a diamond-studded L. Brooks Patterson memorably lampooned Kilpatrick’s gangsta style by striding into the Mackinac Policy Conference surrounded by aides sporting dark glasses and earpieces, the mayor’s security footprint grew noticeably smaller.

L. Brooks Patterson is the county executive in adjacent Oakland County, and has spent his entire career goading Detroit in one way or another. Guy has a sense of humor, too.

Baseball’s Opening Day is problematic in places other than Detroit. A cool time-lapse video from Cleveland shows how hard a grounds crew can work when snow is in the forecast.

OK, enough. It’s good to be back. Now I’m up to Kate’s room, which is getting a small makeover, to blow dust off the stuffed animals and make way for some storage pieces (or “solutions,” as they’re inevitably called). Back later.

On edit: Does the type size on this site these days look just enormous? It does to me — more so than usual. I have a call in to J.C., but as long as we’re here, let me know if you like it this big. Does it mark us as a nest of baby boomers too lazy to put on a pair of readers, or is it just easy on the eyes?)

How do I get on the Talking Points of the Day mailing list? Because I’m obviously missing something.

Memeorandum notes that the indictment of Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick is national news. I was puzzled to notice all the blog reaction came from the right wing, and what do they rise as one to say?

HOW COME THE MEDIA ISN’T MENTIONING KILPATRICK’S PARTY AFFILIATION? BECAUSE HE’S A DEMOCRAT, YOU KNOW.

My guess would be this: Because it’s so obvious the black mayor of a black city would be a Democrat, it isn’t even worth noting? Because Republicans don’t even put candidates on the mayoral ballot in Detroit? (Help me out here, Del, JohnC — was there a Republican on the November ballot in 2005? I can’t remember, mainly because the primary is the final battle for that office.) Because anyone who knows anything about Detroit other than “it’s where the Supremes came from” and “they make cars there” would know this? Because if there was some distant, outside, ghost of a chance that a black Republican might be running this city, he would be a regular commenter on Fox News by now? Take your pick.

I know they read different newspapers out there in the rest of the country, but come on, people — some knowledge truly is general. And that black cities in the rust belt have Democratic mayors, usually black Democrats, is right down at the duh level.

You can live in a place a long time before you really get to know it. So it was that it took me three years to get to the Edsel and Eleanor Ford House, as chaperone on a Girl Scout field trip. It’s a lovely house, a piece of local history; the Fords were generous people. We all bow in their general direction. Let us stipulate that up front, because there’s something about drooling over rich people — and that’s the response encouraged by the tour — that bugs me. Many of the home’s stellar details were plucked from the rubble of English country houses falling to neglect and reversed circumstances — the six-inch-wide oak floorboards from here, the stained-glass medallions on the windows from there. Maybe in another 200 years they’ll be in some rich man’s house in China or India. The great wheel turns.

One doesn’t feel encouraged to say these things out loud. In Edsel’s office there’s a photograph of him with his dad, Henry, and Edward, Prince of Wales. That was a real meeting of titans — two fortunate princes of lucky birth and one man who made his own fortune. What were they talking about? The Jewish Problem? Henry and Edward were on-the-record anti-Semites, and some accounts say Edsel was the one who got his old man to tone things down, at least for the sake of business. These things don’t come up on the tour; you are invited to exclaim over the woodwork. Ah, well. It’s worth an exclamation or three.

Here’s something interesting I learned: Edsel commuted to his job in Dearborn in true style — by water. Google won’t let me alter the route off the actual pavement, so you’ll have to use your imagination. Here’s how he would have gone via asphalt today:

View Larger Map

Now imagine a stylish man in a mahogany speedboat, pulling away from his backyard dock and going south on Lake St. Clair, into the Detroit River, taking a right at the Rouge River and tying up at dad’s place, or at least someplace where the motoring leg to the office would be only a short hop. It was 28 miles by water, the guide said; in that pre-freeway era, it was a 2.5-hour surface-street commute. Edsel liked the wind in his face, I guess. Can’t blame him.

Quick bloggage, because today is Organize the Tax Records Day:

Today’s NYT profile is the most I’ve yet read about Stanley Ann Dunham Soetoro, aka Barack Obama’s mother. Worth reading if only as an interesting counterpoint to the old argument that only children raised in stable, two-parent homes grow up to amount to anything. Soetoro’s life was a whirl of marriage, divorce, children by different fathers, relocation across continents and heart-following work, and it may yet turn out that she raised the next president of the United States. A fascinating portrait.

The story ends with an image of Soetoro’s children scattering her ashes in the Pacific Ocean off Oahu, which reminded me of Jon Carroll’s column about doing the same thing when his mother died. Through the miracle of the Google, we can enjoy it again. Bonus not-very-fun fact: Jon Carroll’s mother was adopted into “a wealthy Grosse Pointe family,” and later disinherited from it after her marriage to a poor Irish Catholic. Another useful lesson about the good old days, maybe.

Yesterday we had a parent-teacher conference in which the teacher encouraged us to help our kid increase her vocabulary. (Please, no jokes.) I’m going to require daily 10-minute sessions on Free Rice. (And yes, I know I’m only the latest person in a very long line to tell you about Free Rice. Humor me.)

You can’t legislate morality, but you sure can tax it. Unfortunately, morality has a way of evading taxes. A look at the the fallout from Michigan’s $2/pack cigarette tax, in today’s Freep. My friend Frank, the doctor, says high cigarette prices are the most effective discourager of young people taking up smoking, so I’m not unsympathetic. But you really can’t blame people for making a quick hop over to Indiana to pick up cheap smokes, either.

The baby polar bear picture of the day is giving me a new time-waster (because surely I need another one of those): internet translation. When the daily picture showed little Flocke gnawing on her keeper’s back, it read:

Milch, Hundefutter, Kalbsknochen – alles lecker, aber nichts geht über einen saftigen Pflegerrücken.

Which, translated, means:

Milk, dog fodder, calf bone – all lecker, but nothing goes over a juicy male nurse back.

Crude, but enough to get the gist. “Hundefutter” = dog food. German is funny.

That is all for me today, friends. Enjoy the start of Green Beer Weekend.

We’re going to keep this clean for a few days. God knows what some of the newer visitors must think of me. They came here to see us lift high the bloodstained banner, and what do they get? The C-word and that other C-word.

So let’s dial it down a little. Go smoke a bowl with Mary Ann.

There. Everyone mellowed out? Good. (And thanks, Ashley, for the tippage.)

Sounds like Spitzer may be out of a job before I can hit “publish” today. Ah, well. It was inevitable. Why am I reminded of the speech Beadie gives McNulty in “The Wire” this season, about who comes to your wake when you die? “A nice guy and good tipper” isn’t the worst epitaph in the world, but for a man with three daughters, I’d say he has some reparations to make.

Fortunately, because this is politics and the great circle of life, we didn’t even have to wait a few minutes before fresh entertainment arrived: Dr. Kevorkian says he’s running for Congress. Well, he can’t practice medicine anymore and he’s overqualified to pump gas, so I’d say this fits. He’s challenging Joe Knollenberg, known locally as “Toilet Joe” for his willingness to march into battle against the scourge of low-flow toilets. Jack Lessenberry provides the details:

Toilet Joe got his nickname from his as-yet-unpassed “Plumbing Standards Improvement Act.” That would permit our Johnnys to use more than twice as much water per flush, certainly a fine environmental idea in the parched Southwest, and one of the many reasons the League of Conservation Voters rates T.J. a perfect zero.

Dr. Death vs. Toilet Joe? Where else can you get entertainment like this at these prices?

Note: Journalistic objectivity requires me to make a couple of observations. Kevorkian’s run will likely not happen; he needs to gather signatures and has supposedly been dying of kidney disease for years now, and most people think this is, what do we say these days? “A cry for help,” yes. Also, everything I know about low-flow toilets comes from Dave Barry; apparently some people really consider them an affront. But my sister remodeled her bathroom last year and cannot say enough good things about hers, which is not only efficient but, being low-flow, refills in just a few seconds. Plumbing seems much louder in the middle of the night, and a fast-refilling potty is something you want. “But what about the multiple-flush phenomenon I’ve read about, in which a simple number two cannot be sent on its way without supplemental explosives?” She said she’s never needed it, and even if you did, 75 percent of all toilet-flushing is for number one, so you’re still saving water. Having used this very toilet myself, I have to say I was impressed. It does seem very efficient for only using a gallon and a half.

So I’m voting for Kevorkian!

Actually, I can’t vote for Kevorkian, because I don’t live in his district. My own congressman is Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, mother of the current mayor of Detroit. He is what we reporters generally call “embattled.” (It’s one of our special-vocabulary things, like “war-torn.”) A few weeks ago, one of our commenters, JohnC, predicted Kwame would play the race card before his current troubles are through; not to take anything away from JohnC, who is a very sharp observer, but this is a little like predicting winter will be colder than summer. It came last night in his State of the City address, the race card with extreme prejudice:

“In the past 30 days, I’ve been called a nigger more than any time in my entire life,” Kilpatrick said, his voice rising and his finger wagging at the suddenly electrified audience, which stood and applauded.

“In the past three days, I’ve received more death threats than I have in my entire administration,” he continued. “I’ve heard these words, but I’ve never heard people say them about my wife and children. I have to say this, because it’s very personal to me.”

And then, in a swipe at the media, he said, “I don’t believe that a Nielsen rating is worth the life of my children or your children. This unethical, illegal lynch-mob mentality has to stop.”

Well-played, sir! The N-word and a lynch mob in one fell swoop! Let’s see how it goes. Every week it gets worse for him, but never, ever count out a crook in Detroit. In many ways, the city hasn’t found its bottom yet.

OK. Second cup of coffee and extra sleep is now fully operational, and it’s time to get to work. No bloggage today…no, wait. Ken Levine is back on the job, taking apart “American Idol” for the amusement of parents across this great land of ours, trapped on our couches watching this crap with the kids:

Amanda Overmyer wailed on “You Can’t Do That”, a song referring to her black and white striped slacks.

Of course she’s the one from Indiana. Figures.

Have a great afternoon. I’m off to write queries.

Let’s forget Silda Spitzer for now. The question at hand is this: Did Carlita Kilpatrick, wife of Detroit’s mayor, walk in on the jaw-dropping sight of a stripper “touching her husband” as part of said stripper’s performance, leave the room, come back with “a wooden object” and commence beating on the bethonged skank?

(“Wooden object” — snerk. In my mind, it’s a rolling pin. In reality, probably nothing so fitting.)

Pity the wife of a political bounder, these days. I think we’re reaching a tipping point. I never agreed with Chris Matthews’ belief that the secret of Hillary Clinton’s success is her husband’s dowsing rod, but even allowing for it, it can’t last forever. Women can empathize with a wronged spouse, but no one likes to back a self-deluding fool. My gut says there’s more sympathy for Donna Hanover no-longer-Giuliani, pitching a public fit over her scoundrel trying to move his girlfriend into the spare bedroom, than over the spouse whose coping mechanism is to pour another martini and think of the children.

That’s why they do it, of course — for the children. They stand up with Daddy as a way of telling the kids to not be afraid, we’re all presenting a united front. Your home will not break up over this. At least for now, we’re joining hands and supporting one another, because that’s what families do.

I have no idea what the “might not be safe” activities might constitute. My money’s on coprophilia; someone else I know suggests erotic asphyxiation. It’s a truism that powerful men are among the most enthusiastic bottoms in their sex fantasies — every so often, you just have to give up control — so keep that in mind, too.

Anyone who wants to take up that in comments, go ahead, but maybe the rest of you might want to wear latex.

I’m ducking out of this entry early — the weightlifting class at the gym starts in 15 minutes. I’ll add some bloggage after I return. If you like, my last-episode Wire blog is over at The New Package (or NuPac, as we’re calling it now). For now, my flabby ass takes precedence.