In the last two days, my laptop’s fan has taken to running continuously, and for good reason — it’s hot enough to give my actual lap second-degree burns. (Of course, as it’s now 3.5 years old, it’s entirely possible that the machine is menopausal, and these are hot flashes.) As my editing job requires me to stay online for four hours a night, this gets on my last damn nerve, as you can imagine. So it’s off to the Apple store we go this morning. I’m hopeful for a repair, but as these things usually happen, there’s at least a 50-50 chance I’ll be coming home with a new computer, dammitall.

(And, of course, now I’ve had the thing running for 10 minutes and the fan hasn’t come on yet. Which is probably what will happen in the store. …Ah, there it goes. Still broken.)

So you carry on here, and I’ll be back eventually, probably poorer. Now to go online and make a reservation at the Genius Bar. (Sheesh. You know, I love Apple, and I love my Mac, but sometimes they make it a little hard.) Wish me luck.

I seem to be taking a break. Please enjoy your holiday weekend, and I’ll be back in a day or two.

I loves my readers. Jason had a little time on his hands today. He doesn’t understand why it’s so hard to find Waldo in that NYC picture. He said he found him right away:

And over at Grosse Pointe Today, a profile by its sole proprietor, of another local entrepreneur and his quest to give the world a real electric car. He let me drive it.

Craigslist is the place to go for several things: Free classifieds that skew to younger eyeballs, casual sex hook-ups and pornography of a different sort:

I need someone who can correct,explain grammatical errors,show grammer rules and using more complicated words to rewrite my essays through e-mail.
My short essay will be included not over 500 words.
I need someone help me over 3 or 4 months, and you can return my assignment the next day or the day after next day.
I will pay 2 dollars for per assignment.

Two dollars. Not even five. Not even a medium latte.

Try Bangalore, bub. We pay union wages here.

Busy day, plus I’m coming down with something. I’m off to buy zinc and pick up dry cleaning, but I leave you with bloggage:

NN.C is in its sixth year of Proudly Bringing You the Irrelevant and Uninteresting, but my thirst for online shenanigans remains unslaked. And so this week comes the soft launch of Grosse Pointe Today, a learn-as-I-go experiment in web-based hyperlocal community journalism. I’m not looking for congratulations as much as I am feedback, so if you go over there, pretend you live here and tell me what would make you visit such a site on a daily basis. My ambitions are not so much to be the next William Randolph Hearst as Mitch Harper, only with less politics.

Columnist goes toe-to-toe with publisher, and publisher blinks. To paraphrase Homer Simpson (“Kill my boss? Dare I live the American dream?), Carl Hiaasen is truly living it. The American Dream, that is.

Scalzi has a list of Mark Foley’s next ten heart-rending personal disclosures.

Off to head this rhinovirus off at the pass.

Two issues at hand today:

1) If you try to post a comment and it doesn’t appear, let me know. Several things could have happened — spam-filtering being the most obvious. Occasionally I delete comments because they’re really stupid, but that happens only rarely.

2) If you use HTML in your comments — which I allow — please check your tags before you publish. For want of a tag, a thread is lost, or at least screwed up.

That said, Laura, I think I deleted your comment. I thought de-spamming it would make it post, but I guess not. Then I deleted the whole spam file and pfft. Sorry.

…and it feels so good.

Just a note: This weekend is the semi-regular reunion of the Knight-Wallace Fellows, over Ann Arbor way. Of course I’m going, which means I’ll be scarce around these parts until the last thunderous round of applause has faded from the air. That is, sometime on Sunday. Until then it’ll be lectures and seminars and maybe, MAYbe, a little drinking.

And it all starts with lunch in about two hours, when fF Vince Patton arrives in Grosse Pointe and demands to be shown around. So I have to clean the house. Later, dudes.

It reads: Closed for Labor Day weekend. The party restarts Monday or Tuesday.

In the meantime, you “Deadwood” fans might want to read Lance on the subject: Deadwood and the Libel of George Hearst.

Doing a massive office cleaning today, and I’d like some advice: What paper should you save? Really. Do you ever really need some of this stuff again? I’m saving anything that might come up in a tax audit, brokerage statements, sentimental “I Love My Mom” drawings from Kate, but the rest is going into the shredder.

A ruling, please, on some of these items:

** My property tax assessment (not the bill).
** Disclosure documents for our mortgage — the “good faith estimate” stuff, not the closing statements.
** A book report on “We’ll Race You, Henry: A story about Henry Ford.” I’m telling myself I’m saving it for the check-plus-plus/”outstanding!” grade, but I think I’m really saving it because I can’t believe my child is learning about Henry Ford and not Eddie Rickenbacker.
** An old copy of O magazine. I don’t think I’m ever going to write for them.

UPDATE: OK, this is a keeper:

Chez Panisse, downstairs dinner menus for the week of May 17-22, 1993

…Tuesday, May 18, $45
Salmon steamed in fig leaves
New garlic soup a la James Beard
Duck grilled over vine cuttings with garden salad
Neapolitan cherry savarin

We went on the BART from our hotel in San Francisco. We arrived early, and so explored the record stores on Telegraph Avenue. It was there I learned that the Metal category had about two dozen sub-categories, each one occupied by one and no more than two bands. Because god forbid Speed should get mixed in with Death.

Our honeymoon — ah memories.

Hey, thanks! We’re all pretty again!

Yes, some d’bag in Turkey hacked our little collection of websites. If you’re seeing this, it probably looks different, which I hope will be temporary. My web guy’s on vacation in Kentucky, so it may be a while before he can restore it to its former loveliness.

Meanwhile, this is a test.

UPDATE: Thanks, Danny. So the RSS feed is fine and you can see individual posts if you access via the feed, but no main page. To make matters worse, the guy whose living room the server occupies is getting his e-mail bounced. Still working on it; of course this is a day when I’m working a story on a deadline tighter than paint on a wall. Argh.