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.

If nothing else, I hope my students learn from me how to write a lead (“lede” to you journos) for a story when circumstances will dictate you’re going to be among the last to file. It isn’t supposed to be like this for online news; we’re the hypercaffeinated tweeters filing via 3G and wifi so that you learn things in more or less real time.

But in this case — the school board meeting following the firings of the principal and his underling — that wasn’t going to happen. Our competition at Patch goes to meetings with a wifi stick on her laptop, and covers them via Facebook updates. Mixed results on that one, I’d say. If it’s a hot meeting, it works. Otherwise it amounts to public note-taking. But last night was a big ol’ foregone conclusion. What was the board going to do? Beg them to stay? And when the reporter is a college student and the editor leaves the meeting to go immediately to her other job, we’re not going to beat TV, and we’re not going to beat Patch, and we’re not even going to beat the papers. So write a fancy lede, play up the atmosphere, and go for the fourth-paragraph chop. (Not quite a Miller Chop, but it’s there.)

Jeez, I’m tired. Worked yesterday from 9:30 a.m. to 1 a.m., with a two-hour break to lie on my bed and stare at the ceiling and wonder why I don’t have time to write a novel. If I did, I’d call it “Porno Principal,” because that’s a great title.

Needless to say, I didn’t see Barry O’Bama’s speech in Ireland yesterday, but at the urging of our own mild-mannered Jeff, I looked it up on the White House’s website. It sings on the page, so I’m sure it danced a merry jig with the first great orator of the 21st century delivering it:

My name is Barack Obama of the Moneygall Obamas. And I’ve come home to find the apostrophe that we lost somewhere along the way.

Good one.

Since I have nothing much to report today, here’s some bloggage y’all can chew on:

Toe-suckin’ Dick Morris was disinvited from a GOP event at the request of the governor, and he ain’t happy about it: “Apparently free speech has its limits in Snyder’s Michigan.” Oh, shut up. If it’s that damn important, say it on a street corner, no one will stop you. Please note this is about a local issue — the Ambassador Bridge — and not necessarily about deep divisions within the party. Morris is the bridge owner’s latest paid mouthpiece, which may indicate how tone-deaf he is.

And what did Mrs. O’Bama wear on her trip to Ireland? Dunno, but T-Lo is on the case for her stop in England. I think she looks smashing, but what’s up with Camilla’s hat? That seems a bit much. Maybe she has alopecia.

And with that, I must move over to the other pile of copy on my virtual desk, and get to real work. Tuesday is the new Monday.

First thing this morning: Editing an intern’s story for the website. What a joy to handle copy that doesn’t require major surgery. Give me a kid whose only story notes are “learn the difference between citizens and residents,” and I can teach that one something.

My online dictionary has them as virtual synonyms, but my online dictionary is full of shit. Citizens carry passports, residents only a driver’s license. Do not make this mistake in your daily writing again. Tomorrow we’ll tackle “convince” and “persuade.”

Kate’s been having a grind of it lately, between school and track and having a spring cold. But she’s holding up her end with more aplomb than I would have mustered at her age, so I was looking for some little reward I could offer her for the homestretch of the year. Tickets to the Movement festival downtown over Memorial Day weekend? Better ask first; kids her age have strong ideas about what’s cool and what’s lame, and for all I know, techno and electronica is the latter. This would be one of those affairs where we’d go along; no way am I turning my kid loose in the middle of something like this without at least one adult within shouting distance. What would I say as she left the car? “No ecstasy, honey!”

But as I said: Better ask first. She and her friends have complicated flow charts of the various sects of youth culture; you should hear them expound on the difference between hipsters and scenesters, both of which they disapprove of and neither of which I could confidently identify. The last time I asked what a scenester was, it involved “some girl, and she takes a picture of herself with her webcam, and she’s like holding up her hand like a claw, and underneath it says dinosaurs go rawr.” OK, whatever.

Maybe I should put it this way: I’d like to go to Movement. Maybe she’d like to come along.

Would you?

I have Russian homework to do, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

Hungover owls. To fill the gap left by Fuck You, Penguin, I guess. (Forget electronic music; this is what I should be schooling my kid in — coming up with one amusing idea broad enough to sustain a single quickie book sold at Urban Outfitters and hello, University of Michigan B-school! We’d spend her college fund on a boat.)

To give the oft-abused Mitch Albom his due, I will admit that of all his media personae, he plays best on the radio. In that universe of outsize jerkoffs, his regular-guy act, false though it may be, resembles something approaching normalcy. So I’m sure that if I’d heard this on-air confrontation with local right-wing host Frank Beckmann, I’d have been on Team Mitch. Beckmann, a Limbaugh manqué whose act I caught once (lasted about three minutes, snapped it off, never went back) has been claiming Albom’s staunch defense of the Michigan film incentives constitute some sort of journalistic conflict of interest, because one of his books is a movie-in-progress. Albom has stated before that he gets paid — has already been paid, in fact — no matter where the project shoots, and his interest is strictly for the local people who will work on it.

Can I get it on the record? I agree with Mitch Albom. Yes, I AGREE WITH MITCH ALBOM. He’s right about this. “Have a Little Faith” could shoot in Cleveland or Toronto or Timbuktu, and it won’t make no never-mind to his end. He’s already moved on to shuffling headshots of who will be his next on-air portrayer, having already used up Hank Azaria and Michael Imperioli. (I’ve got five bucks on Shia LaBeouf, although this is a — snicker — Hallmark production, so they will probably go a little cheaper.) I’m sure I still would have laughed at this exchange:

Albom’s tenor went airborne a few times, and when he commented that Beckmann “wasn’t knowledgeable” about the issue, Beckmann’s baritone boomed out, “Oh, so I’m stupid?”

Then: “Of course, you’re knowledgeable, Mitch. It must be a burden to carry that around.”

I wouldn’t have been able to resist that fat soft one up the middle. Yes, you’re stupid, Frank. This isn’t a hard one to figure out. Ultimately, though, this is like a war between two people you can’t stand. Whoever wins, you win.

Gene Weingarten Twittered this under his “should be convicted on mugshot alone” series. I’d call it: Forceps babies, the later chapters.

Better get out of here before lightning strikes. On a day when I can find something nice to say about Mitch, anything can happen.

Happy Wednesday, all.

Forty-six degrees and fog as I write this, but it’s supposed to climb to 70 today. Woot, 70 whole degrees the last week of April at 42 degrees north latitude. But with thunderstorms. Always a downside.

Sorry, feeling a little grumpy today. My iPhone is failing. It’s three years old and it’s probably time for replacement, but the idea of getting a new one fills me with resentment. My model is the 3G clearance special that AT&T is now giving away for $50, and I’d be happy to do that, but I’m sure I’d need to sign a two-year contract. I hate two-year contracts. I hate all contracts, frankly. In two years, I could be dead. In two years, the 3G clearance special will be as antique as a four-pound all-metal Ma Bell desk model with the corkscrew cord.

Speaking of which, I loved those phones. I love scenes in movies where someone uses a phone to beat someone else, like Joe Pesci does with the pay phone in “Goodfellas.” He put a serious hurt on that guy, and he only used the receiver. Nowadays, I drop my phone and we all gasp — Is it dead? Is the screen cracked? You couldn’t beat a hamster to death with an iPhone.

On the other hand, I have dropped this sucker plenty, and the worst thing that’s happened is, the SIM card has popped out. It’s been a pretty good phone. But I still resent it, the way I would resent crack cocaine, if that were my addiction, instead of constant phone-checking. There’s been some talk of late of smartphone etiquette — talk about an oxymoron — and I’m sympathetic, really I am, but the goddamn thing is just so convenient, it’s insinuated itself into my life so thoroughly, that I feel I might as well be wearing a tether. We always hate the ones we love.

Since today is already a train wreck, and I have hours of work ahead, let’s go right to the bloggage:

At least it’s spring on the Coozledad farm. Is that Llewd, or Purley? No matter, because today, it’s Ferdinand.

The story is OK, but the headline is one for the ages: Patient emits potentially harmful gas; hazmat called to Ann Arbor hospital.

The problem with The Onion: Real life is always crazier than fiction.

A companion piece to that long-ago news story about the newspaper of the future — remember that one? — is this more recent, though still ancient, report on the newest wrinkle, c. 1994. The tablet newspaper:

It’s useful to watch these, as I’ve been among those who said the newspaper industry was blindsided by the internet. That’s not true. From almost the beginning, we saw the future. We just didn’t see the future business model, i.e., free. Free free free free free. Plus ad blockers.

OK, it’s time to pull the plug on this disaster and set nose to grindstone. A bloody mess, dead ahead.

Mitch Albom has a new play opening this week. The Free Press assigned a reporter, and another reporter, but of course no Albom media event would be complete without a contribution from the man himself.

He modestly says “Ernie” is a wonderful play. Srsly. He really does say that:

You start with stories. His humble roots. His speech impediment. The time he got Babe Ruth to sign his shoe. You move through his World War II service, his early career, his relationship with JackieRobinson, Willie Mays, then on to Detroit, the 1968 champions, the Jose Feliciano brouhaha, the 1984 World Series. You explore his firing from the Tigers, his fondness for Tiger Stadium. And you layer the whole thing with one of the great love stories in baseball, Ernie and Lulu.

And you find there is a beautiful play there, a man about to make his farewell speech at a ballpark, wondering how he could be worth such a fuss.

As usual, this is all played in the key of aw-shucks, all I did was write it all down:

The show runs until June, but already in preview performances, it is amazing how people gasp a little when they hear Will speak like Ernie, how they laugh, nod and even cry at familiar stories, and how, when Ernie talks of his lifetime honeymoon with his wife, they all sigh at the same time.

The first time I read about “Ernie,” I declared that I’d rather be locked in for the overnight shift in a daycare center full of crack babies and poisonous snakes than see this. Add “and 14 little dogs that do nothing but bark-bark-bark,” and you’ve got it about right.

The theater where this sapfest is booked is across Woodward Avenue from Comerica Park, and showtimes are scheduled to coordinate with home game starting times. So you can catch “Ernie,” and then, face still wet with tears, cross the street, pass the statue of Ernie near the main gate, and catch a game.

If Ernie Harwell was really half as humble and self-effacing as Albom and others make him out to be, he is rolling in his grave. As one of my Facebook friends commented, Albom has made more money off dead guys than Yoko Ono.

Next on the agenda: Bread, water and a healthy bowl of high-fiber gruel — a Michigan legislator gets into the spirit of the age with proposed legislation that the state’s foster children should be clothed solely in the castoffs of others:

(State Sen. Bruce) Caswell says he wants to make sure that state money set aside to buy clothes for foster children and kids of the working poor is actually used for that purpose.

He says they should get “gift cards” to be used only at Salvation Army, Goodwill or other thrift stores.

“I never had anything new,” Caswell says. “I got all the hand-me-downs. And my dad, he did a lot of shopping at the Salvation Army, and his comment was — and quite frankly it’s true — once you’re out of the store and you walk down the street, nobody knows where you bought your clothes.”

Caswell is 61. He “never” had anything new. So why should anyone else? Look what it did for him: He graduated from Michigan State! Actually, his Wikipedia bio is intriguing. Graduated high school in 1967 and went to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, leaving after two years to finish undergrad at MSU, before re-enrolling and finishing with a master’s in 1976. Nowhere in there do I see the name of a certain southeast Asian country that begins with the letter V. Hmm.

So, it was a weekend for entertainment catch-up. Watched “Game of Thrones,” part 1. This one’s going to be difficult, I can see — I’m already sorting characters by hair color. You can tell the producers had the same idea, giving one brother-sister pair identical shades of peroxide-white, and another familial unit a uniform strawberry blonde. Thank heaven, as I’m certainly not going to catch their names as they fly by, each one ending in -ian or -aeus. What is the appeal of fantasy, I ask you fans out there. Escapism? Must be, although each novel I’ve picked up loses me in endless tangles of family trees, and I always have to check the map on the endpapers to orient me in space. “Game of Thrones” helpfully does this in the credits; although after one episode all I really know is: Winterfell is in “the north” and north of Winterfell is “the Wall,” behind which are monsters and dire wolves. I wonder how many fantasy readers know the dire wolf was a real species of the Pleistocene era. Lived in these parts, even. A 250-pound wolf. Now that would have been a sight to see.

OK, it’s Easter Monday, which means it’s still a quasi-holiday here in holiday-mad Michigan, but I have work to do just the same. Happy week to all, although with rain in the forecast nearly every day, we’ll have to see about that.

It took a while, but I got through the Jon Krakauer piece about the “Three Cups of Tea” guy, Greg Mortenson. I guess I feel the way I did after I read about Jack Kelley, the fabulist USA Today reporter of some years back, i.e., I wish I had been reading this stuff when everyone else was. Because I like to think I’d have spotted this.

Or maybe that’s just preening. My sole feat of unmasking writerly fraud came by accident. But some of the excerpts Krakauer quotes at length are simply beyond belief. Like the time Mortenson was “kidnapped by the Taliban” in Pakistan and held for eight days, forced to poop before an audience and given nothing more to amuse himself with than a 25-year-old copy of Time magazine. And just when he thinks this is it, here comes the bullet, oh goodbye cruel world…

Fortunately, as Mortenson was taking what he feared were his final breaths, the truck skidded to a stop, whereupon the commander removed Mortenson’s blindfold and gave him a hug. “We’re throwing a party,” the Talib announced. “A party before we take you back to Peshawar.” Instead of being executed by a Taliban firing squad, Mortenson was feted as the guest of honor at a rowdy Pashtun hoedown featuring barbecued goat, lots of hashish, and boisterous dancing. Throughout the bacchanal, dozens of Taliban embraced Mortenson like a long-lost brother and stuffed wads of hundred-rupee notes into his pockets. “For your schools!” the commander explained, shouting in Mortenson’s ear to be heard over bursts of celebratory gunfire. “So, Inshallah, you’ll build many more!”

Oh, yeah, the old hold-him-in-solitary-for-eight-days-then-throw-him-a-surprise-party trick. Those Pakistanis and their mind games.

I have to admit, I skimmed much of the last half of the journo-novella, although I paused to see how he’d weasel out of the inevitable confrontation. (Plead a sudden cardiac procedure.) In this case, I think LAMary had the right idea: Some people are just bad judges of literature, and that includes Oprah.

Kelley, you probably don’t recall, was also known for his incredibly vivid writing from the Middle East, which is full of people who melt away into the crowded cities after news happens, and can’t be called to verify just how many rupees were pressed into a man’s hand. (Besides, everyone smoked a LOT of hash.) One of Kelley’s many whoppers was about a suicide bombing in which heads rolled down the street, eyes still open and blinking, presumably a detail Kelley saw with his own. And it got past the copy desk? Wow.

Of course, the lies were one thing, and to many readers, unimportant. A good story is its own reward. The financial irregularities were quite another. But as I read on, already convinced of the shenanigans, I became more interested in the Byliner interface, which seems very much made for tablet-style reading. Guess I better order that iPad.

Just a brief bit of bloggage today, an OID like few others, from a Wayne County Prosecutor’s Office press release:

Today Prosecutor Kym L. Worthy has charged Cornell Lowman, 49 of Detroit with Criminal Sexual Conduct 4th Degree and Habitual 4th Offender (upon conviction the sentence can be enhanced up to 15 year in prison because CSC 4 is a 2 year misdemeanor) It is alleged that on April 17, 2011 Lowman went to a nursing home in the 690 block of East Grand Boulevard to visit another person when he went into the room of a 65-year-old female coma patient and had sexual contact with her. He was observed by a witness who immediately contacted the police. The defendant was arrested at the scene.

Finally, it’s pretty obvious what else is new today. J.C. describes the new design as “a retrenchment…with a lot less garbage being loaded behind the scenes. We can add some more splash and dash, but I thought this was a nice grownup way to make a transition.

“It has some nice features…the window resizes nicely to hold the content and when you’re reading in single story mode, there’s an agglomeration…almost but not really a cloud…a PARADE of your commenters in the sidebar that are in fact links, so you can punch through the comment stream by poking the names…and as you’ll see, the sidebar on those pages kinda slides around to keep up with you.”

I know how fervently any sort of change around here is despised, so hey — let the hatred begin!

This, friends, is the definition of what is colloquially known as “some bullshit.”

It won’t last. Doesn’t matter. Last night I took Kate to a concert, a freakin’ long one, and we drove home under a bright full moon. Eighteen hours of high, freezing winds had finally abated, and I thought, OK, that’s over. Evidently, it’s not over. This is what the winds were bringing us. Should have known.

The concert was Anarbor, the same band we saw last November. Actually, it was five bands, with Anarbor in the middle, although we had to stay until nearly the bitter end. This week is spring break, so getting home at a decent hour wasn’t a big concern, but the headliners played for a Springsteen-like interval and they were getting on my nerves. So I discovered one use for text messaging, i.e., contacting your daughter on the other side of the club:

Let’s go. This band sux.

We’re waiting for Mike.

Mike being the Anarbor guitarist. All the other members had been out to pose for photos and sign merch, but Mike was the last holdout. I guess you have to stagger these things to maximize merch purchases, an important revenue stream for a young touring band. On the other hand, one more song by A Rocket to the Moon seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. So I walked up to the secured lounge area where I’d seen some of the other acts coming and going, and caught one going.

“Mike in there?”

“Yeah.”

“Send him out.”

Let me tell you, folks, one of the very few advantages to being an old bag is, if you look like someone’s mother, a well-raised young man will frequently obey a direct order. Thirty seconds later: Mike.

“Hey, Mike, thanks for coming out. My daughter wants to get her poster signed. Hang on while I text her.”

“That’s great you’re down with the texting, got the iPhone and everything. I wish my mom was.”

Text: I’ve got Mike at the top of the stairs. On the double.

So Mike and I chatted about this and that, the weather and Phoenix (where they live) and Po, Kate’s band. The look on Kate’s face when she rounded the corner on the staircase with her friends and saw her mother having a conversation with her guitar hero was something to see. Mike signed the poster: “Rock and roll, Mike” and posed for pictures.

Mike is a very nice guy. I only wish he would cool it with the marijuana boosterism.

Mike is 21 years old. In some parts of Detroit, I’m old enough to be his grandmother.

It’s spring break, but I’m still working. So let’s get Monday under way.

Roy Edroso saw “Atlas Shrugged” so you don’t have to:

(As) much fun as it is to slag rotten movies, it is much better to be surprised by a good one, especially when you’ve reached the stage in life where two hours in front of a stinker sets you dreaming of the warm couch and leftover sesame chicken that you left back home. But it is my great regret to inform you that Atlas Shrugged: Part I is neither good nor good-bad, but bad-bad-bad-bad. I dreamed, not of sesame chicken, but of my own swift and merciful death, and that of the director, not necessarily in that order. It is not a pleasurable surprise, not a hoot, nor an outrage; it is Rand’s granite crushed, reconstituted, and spread across the screen with steamrollers.

You’ll hear a certain amount of handwringing over this story — computer out-writes human sports reporter — but I honestly believe it has more to do with sportswriting than journalism in general. Still, amusing, as well as proof that if we could harness the power of pissed-off readers, we could light Los Angeles for a month. (This whole project was touched off by a college-age reporter whose story of a perfect game neglected to mention that little detail until the penultimate graf. Kirk, stop pounding your forehead on the desk. You’ll leave a mark.)

You’ve probably seen this, but let’s give it a little more exposure: Racist Orange County Republicans keep outdoing themselves. Amazing. No, not amazing.

OK, up and at ’em. Let’s hope for a swift melt.

We’re finally getting some competition for Comcast in these parts. As Comcast has recently rewarded my years of customer loyalty with a $20 monthly rate hike, to give me services I don’t use, I listened when the WOW cable guy stopped by yesterday. Most intriguing offer: Real savings on the land line, thanks to the choice of three tiers of service. We use it so little I know that if it rings, it’s likely someone I don’t want to talk to. I’d drop it if it weren’t for my husband’s objections, and the fact the phone mount in my kitchen is huge and will require a large framed portrait of Alexander Graham Bell to hide. So this would work for us, and I’m pissed Comcast hasn’t stepped in with an alternative.

They also offer three tiers of internet service, but in this area I require Maserati-like speed, so no savings there.

But the real elephant in the business-model room would be true choice in cable TV. The doomsday scenario for that industry is when customers can craft their own package from the channels they actually watch. Farewell, Golf Channel, hello AMC, etc. We’re there, more or less, at least with anyone willing to watch TV on their computer. I’m not. I still practice the exhaustion model of TV consumption — slump in chair, pick up remote, surf — enough that it would bug me to not have the option.

Anyone with WOW experience, I’m all ears.

Someone sent me this article, more food apocalypse-porn from Gary Taubes. Headline: Is Sugar Toxic? Let’s see if I can guess what the answer might be, coming from a writer who’s been beating the drum for the low-carb, paleo diet for years. Do I even need to read it? Probably not.

New rule: I no longer listen to anyone who tells me a food that I, and millions of other human beings, have enjoyed for centuries, is “toxic.” If nothing else, I’d like to enforce a certain strict constructionism in language. A toxin is a poison. If I eat this cookie, will I fall to the floor in a writhing heap? No? Then I’m going to eat it. Taubes acknowledges as much in his opening paragraphs:

It’s one thing to suggest, as most nutritionists will, that a healthful diet includes more fruits and vegetables, and maybe less fat, red meat and salt, or less of everything. It’s entirely different to claim that one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it. Suggesting that sugar might kill us is what zealots do. But Lustig, who has genuine expertise, has accumulated and synthesized a mass of evidence, which he finds compelling enough to convict sugar. His critics consider that evidence insufficient, but there’s no way to know who might be right, or what must be done to find out, without discussing it.

If I didn’t buy this argument myself, I wouldn’t be writing about it here.

OK, then!

The longer I live, the more I throw in with those nutritionists. I come from a long line of moderate people who lived into their ninth decade by practicing moderation, and eating a piece of birthday cake ever year.

However. Speaking of food, someone posted this on Facebook yesterday, and while its headline is immoderate — The 20 Worst Foods in America — it’s worth a click-through on your next coffee break. It’s not foods, exactly, but restaurant dishes, compiled by the folks at Eat This, Not That ™, yet another insta-book that became a franchise overnight. I don’t eat at places like the Cheesecake Factory and Blimpie’s often, but every so often circumstances will force us off the freeway and into an Olive Garden or some such. Just last week, Kate and I ate at a Chili’s nearby; I fired up the Fast Food Calorie Counter app on my phone, to get a sense of what we were in for.

And nearly fell on the floor. I’ve never seen so many 1,800-calorie appetizers in my life. Everything seemed to boil down to a fat stuffed into a carb, then deep-fried and glazed with more fat — crispy-cheesey tortilla bombs. I ordered the chicken tacos and ate half. Kate got the sliders and ate half. As these are not foods that reheat well, we passed on the go-boxes, but it reminded me of the other thing that is making us fat — portion size. Do you remember when restaurant plates became platters, when the goal was not to feed you so much as stuff you like a foie gras goose? I do. It was approximately the mid-70s. It started with Chi-Chis. I knew a woman who waitressed there; she was living in a hippie farm commune and asked the dishwashers to scrape the plates into a special garbage bag, which she took home at the end of every shift to feed to their pig. Fitting.

OK, the morning is fleeing, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

Longish, but worth a read, as Hugh Grant — yes, the actor — sits down with a former tabloid hack and gets the download on how prevalent surveillance techniques like phone-hacking and other digital eavesdropping is. Via hidden recording. Brilliant. P.S. And this is a developing story.

Speaking of food, Roy Edroso linked to this, and so am I: A few notes on modernist cuisine and molecular gastronomy, at both the restaurant and McDonald’s-lab level, from the Chicago magazine 312 blog. (Broken link fixed. Sorry.)

It’s not “Sophomore dies in kiln explosion,” but it’s close: Yale student dies when her hair gets caught in a lathe. Something to remember when you’re considering what factory work should pay.

OK, off to the bike, and outta here. The week, it’s nearly over!

With apologies to Linda, who is using her hydroponic greenhouse for salad greens, I have to establish ground rules for any discussion of the medical-marijuana issue. It’s pretty simple: I will happily concede that marijuana has a role to play in the health care of many people who either are not helped by conventional pharmaceuticals, or don’t wish to take them. In return, I only ask that they stop pretending legalized medical marijuana isn’t the best thing to happen to recreational pot smokers since the invention of Zig-Zags.

Not so much to ask. And yet, here is medical marijuana, happily taking root in Michigan, and to listen to one side, you’d think the entire state is filled with chemo patients, or MS sufferers, or victims of AIDS-related wasting, or some other affliction that can only be helped by Nurse Mary Jane. And the other side says it’s all about potheads who are claiming “anxiety,” “insomnia,” “excessive whiteness of the eyes” or whatever else they can come up with, to Drs. Feelgood all over the state who will happily write “prescriptions” for a drug whose strength and efficacy — even the dosage — is either a big question mark, or left up to the user.

Before I get Prospero all up in my grill, I hasten to add I have no particular problem with pot smoking, as long as a) it’s not done by my husband or child; and b) it’s done in a place where it won’t affect my own personal safety — which is to say, not behind the wheel. I have no interest in it personally, having reached a point where I most often cut myself off alcohol after two. The way I look at it, the world is already full of attractive substances that will make me dumber, from Facebook to poorly executed LOLcats. I don’t need any more.

I should add this: De facto legalization seems to have made the air a little more herb-scented. In my unscientific observations, I see pot appearing more often in the police reports I see, smell it more often on the street. Some guy was smoking a blunt in the butcher shops at Eastern Market this weekend. Just standing there, self-medicating in front of dozens of people, no effort to conceal it at all.

Two “dispensaries” have opened in our neck of the woods in the last couple of weeks, both on the Detroit side of our border. This is the story behind one of them. I guess Big Daddy got what he needed from medical marijuana. (Although I’m puzzled by the math in the story. It says a work injury and subsequent convalescence pushed Big Daddy from 300 to 600 pounds, and that treating himself with marijuana allowed him to shed 250, which means he’s still 350 pounds. Well, munchies can be a pow’ful thing.)

For what it’s worth, I’ll be surprised if it’s still legal in 10 years. It’s possible the legislature will tune up the law to everyone’s satisfaction, but I doubt it. Bigger fish to fry, etc.

Why the New York Times is worth whatever they’re charging; A.O. Scott on Charlie Sheen’s Detroit show:

You could say that Mr. Sheen and the audience failed each other. The ticket buyers did not show him the “love and gratitude” to which he felt entitled, and he did not give them the kind of entertainment they thought they had paid for. But you could also say that the performer and the audience deserved each other, and that their mutual contempt was its own kind of bond. The ushers, in their black gold-braided uniforms, retained an air of inscrutable dignity in the midst of an orgy of depthless vulgarity. Everyone else in the room — onstage, backstage, in the $69 orchestra seats — had to swallow a gag-inducing, self-administered dose of shame. And no, the journalists who traveled to Detroit to gawk and philosophize at the spectacle are not exempt from that judgment.

What is this horrible man, Clarence Thomas, doing on our Supreme Court?

Via LGM, a little wit from Krugman.

Finally, a tax-season cautionary tale of stupidity: Don’t be as dumb as this TV anchor, who thought, because she was on the teevee and everybody else did it, that she could deduct the cost of all her work clothes, as well as her contact lenses, teeth whitening, manicures, hairdressing, and thong underwear.

Monday commences now. Have a good one, all.