Sorry I’m late today. Tuesdays are nearly as crazed as Mondays, but today wasn’t so bad, as I got to edit an intern’s story about the school board meeting last night, one of the last he’ll do for GrossePointeToday.com, and damn if he didn’t show noticeable improvement over the course of the summer. I can’t work with my interns in a traditional newsroom, where they could watch me work on their stories, observe staff interactions and generally learn the ways of the tribe. I have to handle them via email, phone calls and text messages, only occasionally face-to-face, and that’s a hard way to teach. But check it, the kid hit this one out of the park:

The bad blood continued to boil Monday night (July 25) as the Grosse Pointe school board’s schism widened in the wake of the superintendent search, this time over staffing cuts and the controversial Head Start program for Poupard Elementary.

No chairs were kicked this time, but there was name-calling and accusations. Board member Fred Minturn called president John Steininger a “bully,” while Steininger called out Minturn on missing more votes than any other board member. Steininger turned red in the face while talking about Head Start, as did Minturn. A meeting with a routine agenda ran past 11 p.m., with a full house watching every thrust and parry.

OK, I added “thrust and parry.” He said they watched with “shock and awe.” The fencing term is twee, but meh, it’s better than the other, if only marginally.

Who knows what a parry is? I took a few fencing classes, so I do: It’s the deflection of a blow, particularly in sword fighting. (I always scored the first point in my matches, because I came out after en garde with a quick poke to the chest. My parrying skills lagged, however.) Here’s another term I looked up recently: flotsam and jetsam. I know what it means — trash, basically — but why do they always go together like that? It has to do with maritime law. Flotsam is floating debris of a shipwreck, and is distinguished from jetsam, which describes that which was intentionally thrown overboard, or jettisoned, frequently in times of distress. I guess the distinction comes in when a court is sorting out claims on wreckage of value. But when it’s all afloat around the site of a sunken ship, it’s pretty hard to tell apart, so the words go together.

And that has been your dose of Arcane English Usage with Nance, for this Tuesday. I should have a show on public radio.

OK, Oslo. Let’s talk Oslo. Or rather, let’s talk after-Oslo. I’m going to refrain from piling on Jennifer Rubin, as richly as she deserves it. If you write a column, or a blog, sooner or later this will happen to you, unless you are an extraordinarily careful person, and if you are, you likely don’t have a column or blog (at least not one supported by someone else, that you get paid to write). It’s happened to me, and it’ll probably happen again. The internet wants immediate reaction and analysis, and if you provide it, sooner or later reality will bollix up your hastily jumped-to conclusions. Besides, Stephen Colbert took care of her last night, and that’s a place — at the end of Colbert’s sword — I wouldn’t wish on anyone. So I’ll give her a pass out of sisterhood, and instead make a few random observations:

Some are calling this guy a Norwegian Tim McVeigh, and that sounds about right. Also, he seems to be quite the autodidact, and named several American writers and websites that he found to be really on the beam, including Pamela Geller’s batty belfry, Atlas Shrugged, among others. It reminds me of the time, many years ago, when the talk-radio station I dabbled at (can’t really call it “work”) used to run an overnight show by some lunatic who raved about the Bilderbergers, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Rothschilds, the Federal Reserve — you know the type. I didn’t hear this call I’m about to describe, but my partner Mark did: One night a guy called and, with chilling certainty, told the host he was on his way to Washington to get things done on that front. He said he was carrying the right tools for the job, if you catch his drift, etc. The host, suddenly confronted with apparent evidence that someone out there was taking his carnival act seriously, started buh-buh-buhing, stammering and trying to keep two far-apart plates spinning — the one that contended every word out of his mouth, about stopping these bastards before they take the country down, was God’s honest truth; and the one that said this isn’t the way to do it, which ran counter to his fiery rhetoric about watering the tree of liberty with the blood of tyrants, etc. Mark, who keeps a sardonic twinkle in his eye most of the time, thought this was quite the entertainment. I don’t know how the call ended, but no one was assassinated in Washington that week, so I guess the caller changed his mind.

Anyway, when that happens — when a crazy person has taken your rhetoric and run with it — it seems that responding is a delicate matter. How not to do it: Sarah Palin’s poor-me act after Gabrielle Giffords’ shooting in April, Geller’s shrieking. How to do it: Bruce Bawer in the Wall Street Journal, who writes:

It is chilling to think that blog entries that I composed in my home in west Oslo over the past couple of years were being read and copied out by this future mass-murderer in his home in west Oslo. …In Norway, to speak negatively about any aspect of the Muslim faith has always been a touchy matter, inviting charges of “Islamophobia” and racism. It will, I fear, be a great deal more difficult to broach these issues now that this murderous madman has become the poster boy for the criticism of Islam.

Good to know.

I said yesterday I was hoarding links. Many have already been posted in comments, but lots of you don’t read those, so apologies if some of them are old to you. In no particular order:

Via Moe and Cooz, Charles Pierce in Esquire on the bomb that didn’t go off. A great, worrisome read.

Another great read, from Michael Kruse at the St. Petersburg Times, one of the last papers that does this sort of thing: How a woman can disappear in plain sight. Not news for anyone with mental illness in their family, but worth your time.

Neil Steinberg posted this on his Facebook yesterday, an oldie from 1997, but still fresh, as a case study in corporate cluelessness, the tale of how Quaker Oats wrecked Snapple. (Remember the Snapple lady, who read customer letters in commercials? She was fired by Quaker. Their “beverage consultant” told the company, “Not everyone in the country starts the morning with a bagel.” Gee, I wonder what that meant.)

A truly spectacular newspaper-correction story.

One of the best Tom & Lorenzo posts ever, on Cathy Cambridge’s wedding gown.

Finally, worth a complete click-through: The insides of refrigerators, a photo essay. Includes one from Fort Wayne, but no clue who it might be.

And that is it, and that is all, and this is me, getting back to real work.

Here’s something I see more often these days — a lament for dangerous playgrounds. Frequently the argument has an undercurrent of hostility; I recall one by a father of two that basically boiled down to, these kids today could all use a few more broken arms, but I’m sorry, I can’t find it now. Most of the people advocating it seem well-intentioned enough, although I note they tend to live in the land of the anonymous “some” who are ruining childhood, but not for attribution.

That many of the Some may be made of straw and live in the Land of Oddly Articulate Taxi Drivers occurs to me, yes.

Here’s how the argument goes: Children’s playgrounds are being, or have already been, ruined. By lawyers, by — finger quotes — experts, but mostly by Some, who want to take all the risk out of childhood, and hence, all the fun.

There’s some truth to this, at least to the bare fact of ruination, although I wonder how much it has to do with risk and how much with money. But I’ve seen some pretty wan playgrounds in my time. The one at a nearby elementary school in Fort Wayne had a single piece of equipment on it — something that looked like a folded slice of Swiss cheese, with a total height of maybe five feet. I gather you climbed on it. Not that I ever saw a child do so.

But something else happened along the way, and playgrounds started getting fun again. When I was a kid, I played at the elementary at the end of my block. There were four or five different playgrounds, sized for the range of grades, and if I remember correctly, they were basic — swings and monkey bars and slides and see-saws, anchored to asphalt. If you fell, you fell hard, although that was rare. But it happened. My major dread of the playground was being dumped from the high position on the see-saw; I had a friend who specialized in it, with a truly perverse timing that suggests she had a bright future in torture of all sorts.

By the time Kate was born, the playground had changed. The “playscape” had come on the scene — sprawling constructions that mimicked kid-size castles, with spiral slides, swinging footbridges, climbing walls and all manner of things you could swing on, jump from and otherwise exhaust your energy and imagination.

A few of our favorites: Planet Westerville, near my sister’s house in suburban Columbus; Kids Crossing and Foster Park’s playground in Fort Wayne; and a Kids Crossing clone here in Grosse Pointe Woods’ Lake Front Park.

One thing all these playscapes had in common was some sort of soft footing underneath, usually wood chips, although I’ve also seen sand and shredded rubber. I honestly never gave these a thought, other than to be grateful for them. It seemed like, oh, progress, the way a padded dashboard is progress, and seat belts, and bike helmets.

I’m now informed I was all wrong. Modern playgrounds destroy children’s natural risk-taking impulses:

When seesaws and tall slides and other perils were disappearing from New York’s playgrounds, Henry Stern drew a line in the sandbox. As the city’s parks commissioner in the 1990s, he issued an edict concerning the 10-foot-high jungle gym near his childhood home in northern Manhattan.

“I grew up on the monkey bars in Fort Tryon Park, and I never forgot how good it felt to get to the top of them,” Mr. Stern said. “I didn’t want to see that playground bowdlerized. I said that as long as I was parks commissioner, those monkey bars were going to stay.”

His philosophy seemed reactionary at the time, but today it’s shared by some researchers who question the value of safety-first playgrounds. Even if children do suffer fewer physical injuries — and the evidence for that is debatable — the critics say that these playgrounds may stunt emotional development, leaving children with anxieties and fears that are ultimately worse than a broken bone.

Excuse me, but New York Times? What a crock of shit. I can go a long way with this movement — yes, kids must take risks to grow; no, playgrounds shouldn’t be made entirely risk-free — but when you need to tuck “stunted emotional development” in there, hiding behind that big “may,” I’m going somewhere else to play.

The story goes on with the usual reporting; a Norwegian psychologist consults her clipboard and identifies “six categories of risky play” and then we get to the inevitable sources for these types of it-seems-one-way-but-it’s-really-not stories — an evolutionary psychologist. The more bullshit I find in the world, the more I can trace back to evolutionary psychology, the talk radio of soft-science scholarship.

“Risky play mirrors effective cognitive behavioral therapy of anxiety,” they write in the journal Evolutionary Psychology, concluding that this “anti-phobic effect” helps explain the evolution of children’s fondness for thrill-seeking. While a youthful zest for exploring heights might not seem adaptive — why would natural selection favor children who risk death before they have a chance to reproduce? — the dangers seemed to be outweighed by the benefits of conquering fear and developing a sense of mastery.

“Paradoxically,” the psychologists write, “we posit that our fear of children being harmed by mostly harmless injuries may result in more fearful children and increased levels of psychopathology.”

I always wanted to use “posit” as a verb. So here goes: I posit that all this hand-wringing over too-safe playgrounds is perpetrated by a handful of people who really don’t like children all that much. As I said before, it’s important that kids take risks and try new things, but this barely disguised yearning for them to fall from the top of the monkey bars and break bones is deeply hostile. To them I say: OK, your kid goes first. And if you don’t have any, shut up.

Somewhat related, an old treat found while Googling: Sweet Juniper’s Jim on the unique nature of Detroit playground culture.

Let’s hop to the bloggage, so I can get dressed for weights class:

I do not use special soap on my crotch. There, I said it! Nevertheless, Vagisil would like to sell me some, using some lamely “provocative” viral videos they want everyone to post on their Facebooks and be outraged by. I look at these and think, More good voice work for actors. Huzzah.

I used to be lonely, in my discussions with fellow Elmore Leonard fans, when the topic of film adaptations would come up. “Of course, ‘Get Shorty’ was the best adaptation of a Leonard novel,” someone would say, to nods all around. No! No! I screamed inwardly. “Get Shorty” was a huge improvement over all that came before, and a breakthrough, but no way it’s the best, because that title belongs to “Out of Sight,” and this guy agrees with me, so er’body just shut up.

So, two videos:

You wanted to tussle; we tussled. My favorite scene from “Out of Sight”:

And a video I worked on with my summer interns. I’m not much of a video producer, and it’s hard for me to teach this stuff, because I barely have a handle on the technology, and what I see in my head is so different from what appears on the monitor. Still: The assignment was to do a slice-of-life video aboard a Mackinac racer. We were invited out for a Thursday night of fun-type racing. Took two small cameras, the Flip and the GoPro, mostly handled by the interns. And virtually all the audio turned out like that in the first 10 seconds — spoiled by a persistent roar of wind. (Cheap mics are the bane of cheap cameras.) I fixed it by going back a few nights later with my good USB mic, going belowdecks, and reconducting the interview in acoustically cleaner conditions. My critique of the video is: Too many cut-off heads, too few detail closeups to cut away to, not enough of a narrative arc — it plays like a sketchbook. On the other hand, given the raw materials, I don’t think it turned out too-too badly. Tell me what you think, and have a great weekend. Stay cool.

I can’t let fishfly season go by without at least one photo documentation:

That’s from a few days ago, the typical leavings of a single night. They’re pretty much done now, but they had one last hurrah last weekend, when the Detroit Symphony Orchestra was playing on the shores of Lake St. Clair. It was a two-night gig. The first night they played the first half of the program and took intermission while night fell and the hatch came. Within minutes, the insects covered the players’ music — they’re attracted to anything white — and, it’s safe to say, were probably arousing a wide gamut of emotions among them, as well as the audience. The following night they dropped the intermission and shortened the program, so as to get everything wrapped before the disaster movie started.

Stupid goddamn Mondays. I worked, on something, all damn weekend. Except for Saturday night, when we went to the Concert of Colors down at the orchestra hall for the Don Was All-Star Detroit Revue. It wasn’t bad, and if it skewed old, well, that was the audience. Martha Reeves was the finale, still workin’ it after all these years. Her voice is shot, but she was able to shake it on down for “Dancin’ in the Street,” helped along by a vigorous horn section and the love of the crowd. They rolled out a cake for her 70th birthday, happening that very night, and she didn’t look entirely thrilled about it. Kate came with us, which I thought was game of her. I am shlepping her to Cleveland on Tuesday for the Warped Tour, so she owes me one.

Warped will not be held in an air-conditioned orchestra hall, either. In fact, the forecast for the rest of the week is for temps in the 90s. Groan.

So as I must away, a brief bit of bloggage and we’ll try to do better tomorrow.

Why there are more typos in books. Duh:

Editors I spoke to confirmed my guesses. Before digital technology unsettled both the economics and the routines of book publishing, they explained, most publishers employed battalions of fulltime copy editors and proofreaders to filter out an author’s mistakes. Now, they are gone.

I have an RSS feed that picks up every mention of Grosse Pointe on Twitter, excluding “Grosse Pointe Blank,” a cult movie that will live forever in film geekdom. It blew up overnight with a story in the Detroit News, about our school district’s rejection of a Head Start program at one elementary. But all the tweets were from automated feeds aimed at stock traders. I couldn’t figure out why, until I remembered the elementary principal’s name — Penny Stocks. A useful reminder how much of what we now rely on to tell us what people want to know is run by robots.

I was in a grumpy mood pretty much all day yesterday. Would have happily gone 15 rounds with anybody over anything, but I confined it to one nasty email. It started when the lawn service showed up at one next-door neighbor’s house, followed by the carpet cleaner on the other. We finally get a couple of perfect summer days, the sorts of days when you glory in the breeze blowing through the open windows, and then you have to close them all BECAUSE YOU CAN’T HEAR YOURSELF FUCKING THINK.

The worst of the noise was over in an hour. Still. And guess who just showed up five minutes ago? The lawn treatment service, which squirts their potions from a truck-loaded tank, powered by a generator. Just slammed the windows shut again. Get outta my way.

But because I was grumpy, I can totally see why the comment thread on this TPM story about the end of the Minnesota government shutdown immediately fixated on a typo/usage error in the first graf:

Lawmakers on Thursday evening announced they had reached an budget agreement to end the shutdown.

For my money, that’s a typo. Someone wrote “an agreement on the budget” and an editor changed it to “an budget agreement” but forgot to make the a/an change. Someone carped. Someone else responded, and lo, we got ourselves a convoy:

…agreement is between the indefinite article and the NOUN – not the ADJECTIVE. I know is sounds odd, but it is definitely correct. 😀 (remove the word ‘budget’ to see my point). I know we were all taught that one went by the initial vowel sound of the adjective (whether an actual vowel or a soft ‘h’ sound, as in ‘historian’) – but this usage has come to be accepted as well.

The hell you say. After a few people piled on saying the same thing, the original offender doubled down:

Modern usage references ALL agree on the usage rule that I gave you. It may not ‘sound’ good to you – or to me – but it is accepted and used throughout the professional publishing world. And being a published author myself, as well as a historian who reads upwards of 12 professional journals a month, I can assure you that the ‘vowel sound of the adjective’ rule has been dead for a good 20 years now.

Oh, bullshit, and don’t pull that “published author” crapola on me. If it appears in “professional journals,” it’s because those things are, first, written by professionals in every field except writing, and lightly edited, if at all, by grad students working for peanuts, who concentrate on headlines and cutlines and don’t give a shit about a/an agreement. I’m so glad these arguments take place on the internet, because if I’d read it yesterday in the frame of mind I was in, I’d have smashed a beer bottle on a table and started waving the broken neck around.

I’ll bet $50 this guy is an engineer. They know everything. True story: Guy I know was trying to teach another guy I know how to pilot his — the second guy’s — brand-new boat. First guy said: “It would be unwise to drive the boat there, because even though the water looks just like the water in the middle of the lake? Frequently at the end of a natural point of land, there will be shallow water stretching for some distance beyond it. It’s called a shoal, and–”

“I’m an engineer, I know what I’m doing.”

(muffled thump belowdecks)

Well, I’m a writer, Mr. Published Author, and I say it’s either “a budget agreement” or “an agreement on the budget,” and I say the hell with it. Two dozen comments later, they finally got around to discussing it — the budget agreement — on the thread.

The lawn-treatment guys are gone now. I feel much better.

I’ve been thinking about this topic a bit lately — the true weight of comments left on the internet. The old rule of thumb in newsrooms is that every phone call equals 10 readers, and every letter, 100 — or something like that. If you get a few phone calls about something you’ve published, it’s probably no biggie. If you get a pile of letters, it is. I’m starting to wonder, however, if comments left on Facebook and other websites actually go in the opposite direction, if they might equal a fraction of a person who cares. Let’s call this unit a “shit,” as in the phrase “give a shit.” One phone call = 10 shits given, one letter = 100 shits given, one web comment = .3 of a shit given. Some people seem to have little else to do.

Which seems as good a time as any to go bloggage-ing.

You remember Saul Steinberg’s famous map of the U.S. for the cover of the New Yorker? An updated version of the same idea. My favorite is the driving distance between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

It’s not opening until August, but “Rise of the Planet of the Apes” is already on heavy TV-commercial rotation, and I totally want to see it. The trailer makes me laff ‘n’ laff. Go, monkeys!

And thanks to Coozledad for finding this.

Finally, remember Velvet Goldmine’s daughter Phoebe, and how y’all chipped in to send her to summer leadership camp at Yale? Guess where she is:

You all are good people. And Phoebe’s dad looks exactly like his brother, whom some of you may know as Mr. Lance Mannion.

OK, a long-awaited weekend is nearly here. So I’m off to join it.

I guess the Wall Street Journal thinks of its Saturday Review section cover these days as the place for the essay-as-sharp-stick. First the Tiger Mom, now this: “The Divorce Generation,” a cri de coeur from Generation X:

For much of my generation—Generation X, born between 1965 and 1980—there is only one question: “When did your parents get divorced?” Our lives have been framed by the answer. Ask us. We remember everything.

OK, Susan Gregory Thomas, I’m in. Tell me about it. And she does, and it stings — it’s no fun when your parents split up, no matter what. She deals a few anecdotes off the deck, standard procedure for a personal essay, and then starts down her own story’s path. I had a feeling what was coming, thanks to the subhed (“Having survived their own family splits, Generation X parents are determined to keep their marriages together. It doesn’t always work.”), but I was willing to come along for the ride.

One aside here: I understand the existential pain of the Gen-Xer, really I do. People think of the baby boom as this monolith of demography, but it isn’t. When we talk about baby boomers, we’re really talking about the early boomers, those born, oh, 1946 to 1951, say. The ones who were old enough to actually experience the ’60s as we commonly think of them. The year of my birth, 1957, was technically the peak of the boom, but we were the little siblings of the leading edge. Sally Draper was an early(ish) boomer; I was Bobby Draper. They were psychedelia, we were disco. My older siblings worried about being drafted, we led the New Traditionalism, reviving everything from prom to Greek life on campus to blackout drinking. And so on.

So I get that Gen-X-ers feel neglected by the media, by history, etc. But I will also say that when it comes to pouting and resentment, man, some of these folks really peg the needle. And being a world-class pouter and resenter myself, I know what I’m talking about. But for now, let’s not go there; this is just in the interest of full disclosure.

“Whatever happens, we’re never going to get divorced.” Over the course of 16 years, I said that often to my husband, especially after our children were born. Apparently, much of my generation feels at least roughly the same way: Divorce rates, which peaked around 1980, are now at their lowest level since 1970. In fact, the often-cited statistic that half of all marriages end in divorce was true only in the 1970s—in other words, our parents’ marriages.

…No marital scenario, I told myself, could become so bleak or hopeless as to compel me to embed my children in the torture of a split family. And I wasn’t the only one with strong personal reasons to make this commitment. According to a 2004 marketing study about generational differences, my age cohort “went through its all-important, formative years as one of the least parented, least nurtured generations in U.S. history.” Census data show that almost half of us come from split families; 40% were latch-key kids.

The boldface is where she started to lose me. Never mind quoting a marketing study; never mind the “one of the most” fudge words. Has this woman read American history? Un-parented and un-nurtured children were as common as ticks for most of it. Pioneer-era orphans wandered the woods like feral monkeys. The boom periods of modern cities in the early 20th century were marked by children roaming the streets while their parents worked or drank or otherwise suffered as infantry troops in the industrial revolution. It’s one reason the social-work movement was born. I’m sorry her father was neglectful and her mother preoccupied with her own misery, but presumably she had enough to eat.

And then we’re off down the path of her happy marriage, with the ominous clouds bulking on the horizon, and before too long, I see where she went wrong:

When I had my first child at 32, I went into therapy for a while to sort through, among other things, just why the world—as open and wonderful as it had become with my child’s presence—had also become more treacherous than I ever could have imagined. It wasn’t until my daughter was a few months old that it dawned on me that when the pediatricians and child-care books referred to “separation anxiety,” they were referring to the baby’s psyche, not to mine.

The thought of placing her in someone else’s care sent waves of pure, white fear whipping up my spine. It occurred to me that perhaps my own origins had something to do with what a freak show I was. After hearing about my background for some time, my distinguished therapist made an announcement: “You,” she said, “are a war orphan.”

I know this woman. I’ve met her many times. To some extent she’s like all of us with our tender newborns, terrified that if we let them out of our sight for even a moment, they will burst into flames. But the hormones ebb, and we get over that. We learn that other caregivers are not just convenient, but necessary for the long journey to begin — the child’s long journey, that is, to independence. Even as infants, they profit from interaction with others.

She reminds me of a friend’s sister-in-law, who actually endangered her daughter’s muscle development by refusing to not only let others care for her, but to even put her down, so she could crawl and toddle and explore the world. She was ordered by her pediatrician: Lighten up.

OK, let’s cut to the chase:

I had married the kindest, most stable person I’d ever known to ensure that our children would never know anything of the void of my own childhood. I nursed, loved, read to and lolled about with my babies—restructured and re-imagined my career—so that they would be secure, happy, attended to. My husband and I made the happiest, most comfy nest possible. We worked as a team; we loved our kids; we did everything right, better than right. And yet divorce came. In spite of everything.

In other words, she lived for her children, and stopped sleeping with her husband. In spite of everything.

John Rosemond, the parenting expert, gets on my last nerve these days. My newspaper ran his column for years, and I watched him evolve in that time from a reasonable moderate to a right-wing scold, but the core of his advice is still sound, and it boils down to this: Attend to your marriage. Do what you need to do to keep it appealing for both parties, and the kids will take care of themselves. In fact, they’ll do better than if you make them the center of your world. Be authoritative and confident, but most especially, love your spouse. Susan Gregory Thomas concentrated on her comfy nest and forgot about her husband. It happens. It’s maybe a natural reaction to being the children of Don and Betty Draper’s divorce. She overcorrected.

Which leads us to the second divorce story of the day, Bethany Patchin’s:

In August 1999, Bethany Patchin, an 18-year-old college sophomore from Wisconsin, wrote in an article for Boundless, an evangelical Web magazine, that Christians should not kiss before marriage. Sam Torode, a 23-year-old Chicagoan, replied in a letter to the editor that Ms. Patchin’s piece could not help but “drive young Christian men mad with desire.”

The two began corresponding by e-mail, met in January 2000 and were married that November. Nine months later, Ms. Torode (she took her husband’s name) gave birth to a son, Gideon. Over the next six years, the Torodes had four more progeny: another son, two daughters and a book, “Open Embrace: A Protestant Couple Rethinks Contraception.”

You read that right: Four kids in six years, from the book of Duggar, Chapters 1-5. Full quivers, full households, full hearts. Until, oops, reality intruded:

In 2006, the Torodes wrote on the Web that they no longer believed natural family planning was the best method of birth control. They divorced in 2009. Both now attend liberal churches. Ms. Patchin — that is her name once again — now says she uses birth control, and she even voted for Barack Obama for president.

“I was 19 when we got married,” Ms. Patchin said by telephone from Nashville, where she and her former husband live and share custody of their four children. “And I was 20 when we had Gideon. My parents weren’t anti-birth-control; they were pretty middle-ground evangelicals. So I kind of rebelled by being more conservative. That was my identity.”

The Patchin-Torode co-prosperity sphere learned some hard lessons: That children are stressers, and that having four so close together — they came as two sets of Irish twins, and yes, she was nursing when the younger ones were conceived — is particularly so. Also, that having to postpone sex so often isn’t good for a young couple. As Torode put it:

“Wanting to make love to your spouse often is a good thing, but (natural family planning) often lays an unfair burden of guilt on men for feeling this,” the Torodes wrote. And it is “a theological attack on women to always require that abstinence during the time of the wife’s peak sexual desire (ovulation) for the entire duration of her fertile life, except for the handful of times when she conceives.”

In other words, viva modernity! Sometimes God’s plan involves birth control.

I feel bad for both of these couples. I feel bad for their kids. I wonder if it’s possible that we’ll ever find a happy medium that doesn’t involve swinging past it, clinging to a pendulum. But I think I like the Patchin-Torodes more. Or maybe I just haven’t read their first-person essay yet.

I’ve gone on too long, I fear. Any bloggage?

Nope, I think I’m tapioca on that front. Post some of your own if you like, but me, I’m off to work.

Joel Achenbach, the WashPost blogger, is on vacation this week, and his substitute has gone spelunking in his career, via Lexis-Nexis. She posted a story of Achenbach’s from 1985, which was Twitter-flagged by the editor who handled it, none other than the legendary Gene Weingarten of the Miami Herald; from its tone and length, it can only be from Tropic, that paper’s Sunday magazine.

Got all that? Anyway, it’s from 1985, 26 long years ago, another era in the newspaper biz. The internet was confined to college campuses (and only the faculty offices of the computer-science department, at that), the Herald and its parent company, Knight-Ridder, were absorbing workers jettisoned from Viewtron, a failed experiment to deliver the news via computer, still a rare appliance in American homes. There would be a few more glory years in the newspaper biz yet, where a smart editor could find a local story (the opening of South Florida’s first sperm bank), assign a smart young writer (Achenbach), and come up with this long, meandering story about how it works and who the people are behind it, told through Achenbach’s visit to the facility, and his attempt to make a deposit.

I know a guy who had performance anxiety at a sperm bank — he tells it as a very funny dinner-party story — so every word of the long opening anecdote rings true:

Do sperm scream? wonders Mr. Posterity as he sits in the sperm bank. He is alone in a room so bright he cannot find a shadow. In his hand is a large cup. The doctor has asked him to produce within 15 minutes. He has already wasted five.

…The doctor at the sperm bank has been thoughtful enough to leave a girlie magazine in the room (it’s the only thing in sight with any trace of color). But when Mr. Posterity flips the pages he can barely focus, the Girls of Texas are bending over backwards to help him in this wretched moment, but all he sees is paper.

…Voices come from outside the door. It is the doctor and another person, laughing at something, probably something not very funny. Mr. Posterity makes a mental note that the door does not lock. He is trying to be cool about this whole thing, but he wonders if perhaps a lock would have been a good idea, a lock and chain and a hefty deadbolt, and maybe the room could have been down a long hallway or in the basement — jeez, he could have just mailed it in, no hassle.

Eventually cold logic takes over, and Mr. Posterity steels himself, realizing that there would be no greater humiliation than to exit the room with nothing to show for his time. He had vowed to be productive. He had vowed to be manly.

And so . . .

When he leaves the room he is wearing his dark shades. He is not proud. More than ever, the cup seems needlessly vast, a virtual bucket, mocking him. This is a tense moment and he wants to look slick, but the cup is proving awkward, he isn’t sure how to hold it. He decides to grip it close to the stomach, the way he holds a Bud at a party.

This is why I got into the newspaper business, to be able to write like this and get paid for it. This is what newspapers used to do — some of them, anyway. We would publish pieces like this on a Sunday, and no one would ask, as they would in later years, “But what’s the utility here? Can we include a sidebar on the sperm bank’s hours and rates? This seems awfully long. Are we being self-indulgent here? I mean, really, who cares?”

No one asked those questions because this was a Sunday-magazine piece, and that’s what Sunday magazines did. They gave people lounging in their living rooms, drinking coffee, surrounded by sections of the fat newspaper, something to read they wouldn’t get Monday through Saturday. Maybe people were busy then; I’m sure they were, in fact. But we figured, hey, Sunday — if it’s going to run any day of the week, this is when it should run. These were, to some extent, the experimental John Cage pieces. They required commitment from readers, a more sophisticated reader’s eye. They assumed at least a few Monday-morning phone calls, from some pissed-off old lady or evangelical, who simply cannot believe that in her newspaper, which she pays for, the thing she invites into her home, there’s a story about a reporter with a several-hundred word lede drolly detailing how he jerked off into a cup. And so on.

The day was dawning, however. If the Herald editors had looked to the east, they would have seen a pinkening sky as the new era approached. Or, to switch metaphors abruptly, Pandora had already opened the box, and the harpies were pouring out. Competition. Declining literacy rates. Something that was called, in meetings, “time starvation.” Falling ad lineage. The last ones out of the box would be the bean-counters, the number-crunchers, the people who could put an essay like this through an analysis and say, yes, while personally they had enjoyed this immersive visit to the sperm bank, really, research shows that the average reader only spends 17 minutes with the paper, maybe less, and was this really where the paper wanted to put its resources? When there was real news to cover?

For a while around this time, everyone wanted suburban readers, those wealthy boomers spending like drunken sailors on everything from home improvements to cars to dinners out, and so came the birth of Neighbors, zoned editions pegged to the compass points of individual metro areas. No one at Neighbors would scorn your suburban town board meetings, no sir, and we covered the crap out of them, but that didn’t pay off, either. Sunday magazines went first — rotogravure printing, long deadlines, scarce advertising, and those nice people at Parade and USA Weekend were offering their product practically free. Neighbors came later. Cut, cut, cut, trim, trim, trim. Retiring employees weren’t replaced, others were bought out, some laid off. Cut, shrink, deny, sell, consolidate, reduce. A new publisher arrived in Fort Wayne. When Alan, the features editor, met her, she asked how many staff he had in his department. Eight, he replied, and she made a face, like, are you kidding me? There are three now.

You’ve heard all this before. I’m oversimplifying. I’m telling the story from only one perspective. It’s boring. It’s ancient history. It’s water over the dam and under the bridge. Both Weingarten and Achenbach still have jobs, still write long-form pieces rich with style and detail, only they do them at the Washington Post, one of the tiny handful of papers that still swings for the fences from time to time. There’s still lots of good writing out there, and a lot of it — I’m always struck, on a day like today, how much I can be distracted by great pieces, on the web, in books, in Kindle Singles. I have too much to read, really; it’s hard to get work done sometimes.

But this one took me back. I should look forward. So that’s that.

Let’s get to the bloggage, which is scarce today:

According to one blogger who found this yesterday, it is “comedy gold.” I’ll say: Marcia Clark opining on the Casey Anthony trial, calling it “worse than O.J.!” Considering the O.J. case was booted in large part because of Clark’s prosecutorial missteps, that’s a pretty big contention. (If you haven’t read “The Run of His Life,” Jeffrey Toobin’s account of the O.J. case, I highly recommend it. Marcia might gain some valuable insight.)

The stolen babies of Spain. Taken, it seems, as political retribution, later just for cash, with the help of doctors, nurses and nuns. Unbelievable.

Outta here. Have a great Thursday.

I think I mentioned before that the royal wedding in Monaco sort of snuck up on me. I didn’t know the deed had been done until yesterday, but fortunately we live in the age of the amazing internet, when no detail is too small to report, including that the bride allegedly tried to flee Monaco — three times! — in the days before the ceremony, and was prevented from doing so by Prince Albert’s goon squad, who actually confiscated her passport rather than let her get on that plane back to Johannesburg and the chance to have a happier life.

The precipitating incident?

It followed confirmation by palace sources that Albert, 53, was due to undergo DNA tests because of claims by at least one unnamed woman that he has fathered another illegitimate child.

He already has two he acknowledges. The “at least one” became two in some reports, for an even four. I think, as we are obviously dealing with a man with a severe allergy to latex, we can assume there could easily be more. One is said to be a toddler, which means he’s been stepping out on his beautiful blonde broodmare for some time. I don’t often feel pity for women who are richer, taller and that much better-looking than me, but my heart is not made of stone: Poor Princess Charlene.

There are 63 photos in this slide show, and I beseech you to view them all, if you can. It’s the usual royal freak show, but if you can only hit the highlights, well, start with Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, who picked up her outfit at a Target white sale. Princess Charlotte Casiraghi found a far nicer dress at Chanel — it really is a wow — and Auntie Steph has real balls to stand next to her, now that a lifetime of Mediterranean sun and smoking has taken its toll on her once-lovely face. Note, also, Stephanie’s tattoo, which demonstrates she certainly favors the commoner’s side of the bloodline. Like the Middletons, the bride’s family looks perfectly nice and presentable, and probably behaved better at the reception, off in the corner table reserved for the non-Francophone guests. Charlene got a little emotional during the ceremony, and closeups taken in the church showed a tear rolling down her cheek. I have to say, I’ve never seen a more miserable bride.

Sometimes you can see a couple’s whole life in how they kiss. You certainly can with this one.

But man, a spectacular dress. Although, with that bod, she could probably make Grand Duchess Maria of Russia’s outfit look good. He looks awful. I assume we’re headed for the usual marital denouement, followed by a swift annulment from Rome, to keep those tithes coming from the li’l principality that could.

Another zillion pix from the WashPost.

So, how was your weekend? Mine was quite nice. I made an effort to do little work and mostly succeeded. Went for a fast bike ride on a blisteringly hot Saturday and nearly died, but recovered in time to spin the evening away at a venerable biker bar in Detroit called the Stone House. We sat on the front porch while an enormous thunderstorm mostly missed us, then rode home in that yellowy-bruise light that only midwestern thunderstorms bring. Went to the Eastern Market. Barbecued ribs. Cleaned Kate’s room. The usual.

A lot of bloggage piled up over the weekend, so let’s get to it:

Christopher Hitchens filets Michele Bachmann as only he can, or rather, the particular vote-for-me-I’m-from-Podunk attitude she represents:

Where does it come from, this silly and feigned idea that it’s good to be able to claim a small-town background? It was once said that rural America moved to the cities as fast as it could, and then from urban to suburban as fast as it could after that. Every census for decades has confirmed this trend. Overall demographic impulses to one side, there is nothing about a bucolic upbringing that breeds the skills necessary to govern a complex society in an age of globalization and violent unease. We need candidates who know about laboratories, drones, trade cycles, and polychrome conurbations both here and overseas. Yet the media make us complicit in the myth—all politics is yokel?—that the fast-vanishing small-town life is the key to ancient virtues. Wasilla, Alaska, is only the most vivid recent demonstration of the severe limitations of this worldview. But still it goes on.

“All politics is yokel” — that’s a good one.

Jane Scott, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s legendary rock critic, died Monday. She was a legend because she started covering rock ‘n’ roll when she was already middle-aged, at a time when pop music writers were nearly always among the youngest in the newsroom, and because she stuck with it for decades. She was 92 when she died, 83 when she retired, 45 when she covered the Beatles’ first appearance in Cleveland, in 1964. She wasn’t much of a prose stylist, but she was enough of a reporter to know news when she saw it:

“I never before saw thousands of 14-year-old girls, all screaming and yelling,” she recalled later. “I realized this was a phenomenon. . . . The whole world changed.”

The Plain Dealer obit, linked above, contains several links to her past pieces. I get the feeling that by the end, being the senior citizen with a backstage pass was part of her brand, as they say. I grew up in a different city, and didn’t know about her until I got to college, where all the journalism students from northeast Ohio worshipped her. One of my classmates took a chance one day, and showed up at Swingo’s, the hotel where all the rockers stayed when they were passing through Cleveland (seen in “Almost Famous”). She swallowed hard and told the desk clerk, “I’m here to interview Bob Marley.” She was a pretty little peach, and they waved her right up, no doubt used to this sort of thing. She still had to clear the road manager in the hallway, though. She told him she was there to interview Bob for the newspaper.

“You must be Jane Scott,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” my classmate said, walked in and shared a spliff and a conversation with the reggae star, and that’s how the student newspaper from Ohio University snagged an interview it likely wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. She was in and out before the real critic, then 60, showed up. I bet that was a funny scene.

Another good appreciation, from the L.A. Times.

And I guess that’s it for me now. Tuesday is now Monday, so I best get rolling. Have a swell short week.

Flooding is the natural-disaster story of the summer season, which is a definite upgrade from spring’s tornados, but, as anyone who’s lived through one can tell you, is no picnic.

Flooding was a hardy perennial in Fort Wayne, which sits at the confluence of three rivers, and despite its laughable name (the Summit City, technically true), floods like a toilet in a jail. When I interviewed there, in 1984, the paper had just won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the flood of ’82. I read the framed front pages that flanked the Big P on the wall and got the strong impression the flood was a rare event, although there had been one in 1978 that ranked right up there.

It flooded in 1985. It flooded so many times before I left in 2004 that the routine, and the slate of stories we always wrote, became familiar. First the parks filled, then certain neighborhoods, almost all poor — I know, I’m astonished too — then a few more neighborhoods. We did stories on the city’s flood command center, where the public-works people dispatched sandbags. We did stories on the sandbagging, on the plucky teens and other volunteers who would come down to the city garage to fill them and stack them. When the Army Corps of Engineers sent their heavy-duty pumps, we wrote about that, too. For a while, the paper went through metro editors the way Spinal Tap went through drummers, and one of them was an out-of-towner. We had a rare summer flood one year, and she said in a meeting she didn’t understand how the St. Mary’s had flooded, it didn’t rain that much. Someone else explained that 16 inches of rain had fallen in the watershed in the last 10 days or so, and from the way she blinked, he knew she didn’t know what a watershed was. I’m sure she learned. Everyone learned.

We had a storm here in May that dumped 2.7 inches of rain in an hour, and some people had basement flooding, much of it raw sewage. A public-works consultant came to the city council meeting to explain about combined sewers and pump failure and all the rest of it, and I felt like a Hoosier again. I was helping my intern, and explained in a whisper what a combined sewer was — storm and sanitary together, bad — and realized I’m a flooding expert. Sort of; I don’t need the jargon explained, anyway. I know what flap gates are. I know you can’t get let combined-sewer runoff go into a lake or river to save a few basements, at least not without a nice fine from the EPA. And I learned something, too; you can let runoff in, but it has to be a 100-year storm, and there better be documentation. (I know what a 100-year storm is; they happen about every five years.)

I covered Mississippi River flooding in 1993. One of the last gasps of ambition of our little paper was this form of foreign correspondence; we didn’t cover national political conventions, but we did cover floods in other cities. I watched people in Iowa reclaim their houses from floodwaters that had reached the gutters, and thought, all in all, I’d prefer fire, assuming everyone gets out of the house safely. Then you don’t have to look at your belongings through a thin film of sewage.

Writing that last line — looking at your belongings under a thin film of sewage — it occurred to me that I’d written all this before. And whaddaya know, I have. Almost at the same time of year. Three years ago.

Maybe it’s time to shut down this blog. Maybe I’ve run out of things to say. Oh, what the hell — it never stopped Mitch Albom or Bob Greene! Onward!

Actually, this is a good time to note that this is a particularly nutso week, and there will be no entry Wednesday. I’m taking Kate to summer camp that day, and we’ll be rolling out at oh-dark something. This is her first such experience, at a fine-arts camp on the other side of the state. (Not Interlochen. Thanks for asking, though.) She may fancy herself a rock ‘n’ rolla, but she’s going to get some discipline in jazz bass first.

So since this seems to be the place for it, some bloggage:

In 2003, a Fort Wayne doctor crashed the plane he was flying, killing his wife and two of his three children. He survived, along with his son, 8 at the time. Terrible tragedy. He rebuilt his life, he and his son recovered, and he remarried. On Friday, he crashed another plane, killing his second wife and himself, although the son survived. Again. He’s very badly hurt, but expected to survive. What are the odds, Pilot Joe?

Did I mention my man Mitch a little while ago? He feeds the needy cookies. Someone else’s cookies, but oh well — I’m sure he paid for them.

Virginia Heffernan at the NYT on content farms, and Google’s new algorithm that allegedly freezes them out. The details are almost unbelievable, but are all true. One of my students had a brief interlude with one. He wrote one article, and was paid 38 cents. A couple CFs picked up the porn principal story, and ran it through some weird copyright-cleanser; a ‘bot changed every few words to synonyms. But there were lots of ads. I hope it paid someone.

OK, off to drink a lot more coffee and see if I can make sense of the day. Enjoy yours.

In recent years, the influx of red-winged blackbirds to our area has prompted some non-official but civic-minded soul to post signs along the heavily used lakefront sidewalk. The birds defend their nests aggressively, and joggers and pedestrians were getting head-pecked. They nest near our lake cottage, and I know they prefer a water view, preferably a swamp, so I wasn’t thinking about head protection when I rode my bicycle down Mack Avenue, a business strip about a mile from any water, or even a backyard water fountain.

Fortunately, I was wearing some anyway. It’s a strange feeling, a bird attack — the bonk isn’t much, especially through a styrofoam-lined plastic hat — but the accompanying aggression call and the wings flapping so close to your eyes summon up a deep lizard-brain response. I’ve known two people in my life who have an unreasonable fear of birds, and for the first time, I understand why. The little fuckers are what’s left of dinosaurs, after all.

If you have red-winged blackbirds in your neighborhood, beware. They don’t play.

So. I recently bookmarked the Daily Beast. Again. In my old age, I’m becoming very stingy with bookmarks, and if your site doesn’t deliver, I’m totally out of there. But they keep hiring good people, and occasionally publishing something worth reading, and I keep thinking they’re worth a daily visit, and then, today, I read something like this:

Headline: Clooney Breakup’s Red Flags. Subhed: Fans thought she’d get him to the altar, but Barbie Nadeau says the flameout of Hollywood’s most eligible bachelor and his showgirl squeeze started months ago.

Really? Fans thought that? I’m a George Clooney fan, and how well I recall those days of …sometime in the last couple of years, when I would call my fellow Clooneyheads and say, “You know, I think this is the One. I think she’ll get him to the altar.” And we were so astounded when they broke up that I’m now going to read this piece, in the authoritative voice of Barbie Nadeau, who was scanning the heavens for warning signs of this flameout. She saw it coming months ago. And so:

The 50-year-old graying stallion announced that he and his 32-year-old Italian showgirl have called their fairytale romance quits.

One sentence — not even a compound one — and three clichés/tropes. A graying stallion, a showgirl, and a fairytale romance. I can’t count the times I read Kate bedtime stories about middle-aged actors, Italian beauties of indeterminate careers and how they fell in love for a year or so.

Sad as it may be, it’s fair to say that “Cloonalis” was probably doomed from the start.

I’m totally sad about Cloonalis.

Since they first fell into each others’ arms in 2009, there’s been much speculation that perhaps Canalis was the siren who could finally wrestle America’s most eligible bachelor to the altar. The two seemed inseparable, and Clooney had passed several coupledom milestones with Canalis, like vacationing with her parents and bonding with her girlfriends. They had been effectively joined at the hip from the beaches of Mexico to the red carpets of the Kodak Theater for two full years. He stood by her side when she was questioned about her role in a prostitution ring in Milan, and she accompanied him to the Emmys when he won the Bob Hope Humanitarian Award.

I love these details, presented with a straight face. He stood by her side when she was questioned about her role in a prostitution ring. I remember when Alan and I passed that coupledom milestone, too.

But it doesn’t take more than a glance through the recent tabloids to see a number of red flags foreshadowing this breakup.

Oh, do we really need to do this? The Daily Beast, deleted.

Which seems as good a time as any to skip to the bloggage. First, a twofer from two of our favorite WashPost writers, not necessarily in the WashPost. Gene Weingarten’s reply to a journalism grad student who asked him how he’d built his personal brand over the years:

The best way to build a brand is to take a three-foot length of malleable iron and get one end red-hot. Then, apply it vigorously to the buttocks of the instructor who gave you this question. You want a nice, meaty sizzle.

She’ll get an A on her project and probably miss the point entirely.

Hank Stuever in the Stranger, the Seattle alt-weekly, for its annual Pride Week-pegged gay issue. The theme — You’re doing it wrong — inspired his essay on “Glee,” which says everything that needs to be said:

If Glee was in touch with the reality of being gay—which can have its dark side—it would make the cruelly honest decision to switch off the Auto-Tune and razzle-dazzle and show a bunch of kids in a choir room singing badly but believing they’re great.

I didn’t hate this show immediately, but I soured early on, although I stuck through season one. (If nothing else, Rachel Berry’s “Don’t Rain on My Parade” was worth the trip.) I gather that in season two, it devolved into Very Special Episode territory almost immediately, which might mark a new record in the trip from smart-and-hip to dumb-and-predictable. Kate’s 8th-grade choir did “Don’t Stop Believin'” for their spring concert this year, which makes the circle complete — now “Glee” influences show choirs, instead of the other way around. (The crowd started to cheer when they heard the now-familiar choir arrangement, which made me want to stab everyone in the throat.) Anyway, worth a read.

Newspaper columnists like to write personal essays they think readers will find warm and funny, but they should all just give it up, because they’ll never be as good as the best personal essay-writin’ bloggers. That is all. EDIT: For some reason, this link isn’t working at the moment. Hope for a revival when their server comes back up — or whatever the problem is, gets fixed.

And that is all. Happy weekend. I’m off to see Matt & Kim tonight at the Majestic.

I’ve largely stayed out of the Anthony Weiner story. It seemed to require a level of commitment I’m increasingly unwilling to make, particularly for a story that required me to look at a boner. Nothing against boners in general; I just… well, let’s say that I’m really tired and I have a headache and I just ate a full meal and I have to get up early tomorrow and leave it at that.

But now all has been revealed, so let me just throw a few things out there, and maybe you all can run with them:

Lesson No. 1: You can look like this and still have your husband act out sexually like a teenager. In fact, you could almost argue that it’s more likely to happen.

Lesson No. 2: I remind you, in case you wonder what sort of people are on the other side, that Weiner’s wife, Huma Abedin, the Indian/Pakistani beauty referenced above, was widely whispered to be a lesbian during her time as Hillary Clinton’s assistant. Because of course Hillary must be one, and who else would an aging lesbian choose to have carrying her BlackBerry than a young, beautiful lesbian? I don’t need to tell you who was doing the whispering. Always useful to remember that whatever Weiner did, at least he didn’t do it while telling unmarried people they should practice abstinence, while cruising men’s bathrooms and insisting he’s not gay, etc. On the other hand, you want people you generally agree with to behave themselves. Sometimes they don’t. These are not mutually exclusive positions. Grow up.

Lesson No. 3: Of all the jokes made about this, the James Franco bit from Jon Stewart might be best of all.

Lesson No. 4: Remember Photomat? Fotomat? Those little kiosks in parking lots where you could drop off your film and, three days later, pick up your vacation pictures? I can’t remember what the value-added element was over standard drugstore photo processing; probably the drive-through aspect. Anyway, if we still relied on other human beings to develop our pictures, there’d be less of this nonsense going on. Each of those little digital cameras is a Pandora’s box containing all the misery in the world.

Lesson No. 5: MSNBC needs to embed shorter Rachel Maddow clips. Nevertheless, this is pretty good, especially once she gets to the Post-Bill Clinton Modern American Political Sex-Scandal Consequence-o-Meter.

Lesson No. 6: I saw Dexter on Facebook yesterday, predicting the New York Post would use WEINER ROAST in a headline today. No. No, no, no, no, no. Something far better. Lesson: Don’t ever try to second-guess a great tabloid.

And with that, I’m done talking about boners. I don’t want to think about boners for a while. Whatever the world is poking me with on the great standing-room-only subway of life, it better not be a boner. So let’s hop to the more amusing bloggage:

A father notes his son is totally embarrassed when he, dad, waves at son’s passing school bus. So he decides to make a game of it, and starts dressing in costume for the morning waves, a different one every day. Of course he kept a blog. Note that dad is missing a leg. That doesn’t have anything to do with this — he lost it in a motorcycle accident, a little googling reveals — but it did come in handy on pirate day.

The Coozledads have a new foster child at their vegetarian petting zoo. A crow.

Not quite OID, but D-centric: There’s a fight going on here, which most of you probably haven’t heard about, on a proposed second bridge between the U.S. and Canada across the Detroit River. I’ll boil it down as succinctly as I can: The current bridge, the Ambassador, is privately owned, and has helped make its owner, a grumbling octogenarian who lives on the American side (in Grosse Pointe Shores!), a billionaire. The state of Michigan believes any crossing that important should be in public hands, and preferably international hands. Both sides agree the Ambassador needs replacing, but the owner wants to build the second one himself right next to the current one and keep it the title, and the state, along with Ontario’s provincial government, wants to build it a mile or so downstream, to keep trucks from rumbling through the heart of Windsor, among other reasons. Lately, the grumbling octogenarian has gone on a PR campaign. He hired Dick Morris, of all people; you know, Mr. Charming? The latest move: Sticking mock “eviction notices” to the front doors of the residential neighborhood most affected by the proposed new bridge. Charming:

Dolores Toth, 81, who has heart problems, began to shake after reading the notice, said her son, Steve. “How low can you go?” Steve Toth said. “This isn’t something you do, I don’t care who you are.”

And with that, I’m outta here. I need to take a picture of my underwear and mail it to someone.