A little swamped here today, folks, so you’ll have to carry the conversation yourselves. We had middle-school registration this morning, which sort of monkey-wrenched my usual blogging time, and now I’ve got a story to write.

In the meantime, howzabout a pretty picture? My friend Vince Patton is an amateur photographer, and entered a number of his photos in the Oregon State Fair, where they were chosen for exhibition, including one of my favorites, Mount St. Helens at sunset. Click to enlarge:

There’s a People’s Choice award, so you Oregonians should go stuff the ballot boxes. And you can see more of his photos, including images from the Galapagos Islands, Italy, Iceland and elsewhere, at his website. (The Mount St. Helens photos were taken in flight over the last few years, in connection with his last job, as environmental reporter at KGW-TV, in Portland.)

If you guessed “Eight is enough,” go to the head of the class!

I went to high school with this guy named…I’m going blank. Bill? Bob? Something like that. Bill/Bob was in the class ahead of me, 1974, but finished in 1975. In his senior year, he started playing euchre in the student lounge and smoking area. (Yes, smoking area. Hello, I am old.) And he started down a dangerous path, paved with 24 cards, the 9 through the ace. He couldn’t stop.

He started skipping class to play euchre. The players came and went, but he would deal and play with any and all comers. I played him many times, but I never skipped class to do so. When players left, others would take their place. To say he was single-minded about it was an understatement; he just dealt and played, dealt and played, until the final bell rang.

I don’t know why someone didn’t stage an intervention with him. Maybe someone did, but it didn’t take. When he showed up for class in the fall, months after he was supposed to graduate, I asked what happened.

“I got euchred on my last trick,” he said.

Those of you reading this outside the midwest may not understand the lure of euchre, but trust me, it is strong. It’s a simple game that anyone can play, but rewards experience and a certain amount of strategy; in other words, perfectly suited for a 17-year-old mind. You doubtless have something like it in your part of the country, but that’s not what I want to talk about today. I’m thinking about addiction, and the computer’s role in it.

Many years later, there was a woman at the News-Sentinel who couldn’t stop playing Windows solitaire. Two women, actually, and one of them was me, but I was limited by not having it on my primitive, DOS-based computer. I had to go to Leo Morris’ office to play, but play I did. Both of us did. When I quit smoking, it replaced cigarettes as my favorite tool of procrastination. In the old days, I’d write a few grafs, lean back and light a cigarette, regarding my prose through a few puffs, then stub it out and write some more. Replace the cigarette with getting up and sauntering down to Leo’s office, where I’d wave him aside — he’d usually go outside to smoke, having failed to conquer that addiction — and play until he came back, sometimes longer. We’d run up the wins/losses in dollar figures and pretend we were getting rich off our mad solitaire skilz. Eventually, though, he’d have to write an editorial, and I’d go back to my cubicle and feel grateful my computer didn’t have Windows, because that’s some dangerous shit, that solitaire.

The other woman had Windows, and lo, she was weak. She played for hours, and I know because I could recognize the telltale mouse movements, the way a junkie knows which guy in the park is the connect. She had an office, too, and could angle her screen slightly so no one could see just how many times she was dealing herself a new hand, except of course everyone knew. (Her output didn’t match the keyboard hours she was putting in.) When the time came for the newsroom to lose an FTE, the editor in chief chose her department to take the loss, and further decided the solitaire addict was a fine candidate for the copy desk, a plain and humiliating demotion. It did cure her solitaire problem, but it sort of wrecked her newspaper career, although she landed on her feet in local government, where for all I know she’s still playing.

Procrastination is one of the two great temptations for writers. (The other: Alcohol.) Go have a cigarette. Make a phone call. Take a walk around the block. Feign writer’s block. Anything but confronting that blank screen. I once read someone’s theory about why the O.J. Simpson trial got so big so fast, and it was refreshing, having nothing to do with brown skin or blonde hair. The writer speculated that the case built buzz because Los Angeles is full of screenwriters avoiding their work, who instead expended their energies watching the trial, e-mailing one another about the trial, spinning alternate theories about the culpability of the various players, etc. It made perfect sense to me.

But computer games may be the stickiest quicksand of all. Almost all writers work at a computer. Almost all computers come with some sort of game. It’s like holding AA meetings in a bar. When we had our first iMac, it came with a game called Bugdom, and Kate and I played it together. When I started it in the presence of John and Sam, our friends from Atlanta, both shuddered and turned away. “What’s wrong?” I asked, only to be told that the music had bad associations for both of them; it’s “the sound of Sammy not writing her dissertation,” John said.

(She got her dissertation written, but it went down to the wire. She’s Dr. Sam now.)

Anyway, I guess my point is, I’ve been thinking about how quickly any behavior can become compulsive, and why it does. I suppose Bill/Bob was using euchre as a way to avoid the rest of his senior year. I know I was using Windows solitaire to avoid writing. I’ve noticed that even when I have a deadline, I rarely miss a day of blogging, so blogging is obviously a replacement for solitaire — it’s writing that allows me to avoid other writing, and isn’t that quite the trick.

In getting to know the iPhone, I’ve downloaded two games from the App Store — Jawbreaker, a form of Bejeweled/Bubbles, where you pop contiguous circles; and Peg Jump, an electronic version of the golf-tee game in every Cracker Barrel on the interstate. Neither one is addictive. Yet. Jawbreaker is my favorite, but so far it’s no Windows solitaire. I limit myself to 10 games at a stretch, and so far have kept my vow. But you never know. There are times I think I should just start smoking again; maybe I’d get more work done.

A bit of bloggage:

Observers of the hackneyed prose style of Mitch Albom know one of his favorite tricks is the Dramatic Repetition, singling out one phrase and repeating it every five grafs, usually set off by itself. It’s an old trick and not a very effective one, but he’s very proud of it, and uses it in most of his columns. When I saw he was writing about Michael Phelps yesterday, I imagined, Carnack-like, what the phrase would be, and whaddaya know, I guessed it on the nose. See if you can, too. No fair peeking. I’ll post the answer later in the day. P.S. It’s an obvious one.

They say the days after Halloween are battle-stations, no-vacation-days-for-anyone times in orthodontists’ offices, when kids who promised not to endanger their braces with taffy and chewing gum come a cropper. In the UK, something called the Gadget Helpline is dealing with a number of calls (story’s unclear on how many, the sure sign of a b.s. trend story, but what the hell) from people wanting to adjust their stationary bikes and ergometers — rowing machines — to match the pace of Great Britain’s Olympians. Of course, the story winds up with the duh quote, from a physiologist from the English Institute of Sport:

“It’s great that people are being inspired by the Games and the performances taking place across different sports, but each individual needs to know their limits. To avoid injuring yourself by overstretching, setting smaller targets for performance improvements in your fitness regime would be the best start in improving your exercise rates, whether that’s on the rowing machine, bike or on the treadmill.”

And don’t forget the sunscreen. Come back later and see if you scored in the Write Like Mitch competition.

My weekly newspaper, the Grosse Pointe News, is the worst weekly in the United States. Someone needs to hold the title, and there I said it. We have a hot primary election coming up here in the GP, for the Michigan House, and the local paper has had zero coverage of it. Yes: [crickets.]

Not an endorsement, not a voter’s guide, not even a few lousy letters to the editor. I don’t know why. My first thought is that an endorsement for an open seat would confound their stated endorsement policy, which is to always back the incumbent. Yes, it’s in writing, and yes, my jaw dropped, too. While trying to inform myself on the candidates’ positions using the awesome power of the Google, I found this amazing account, on the website of the Eastside Republican Club, of a speech by the paper’s then-editor. Their endorse-the-incumbent policy was “in view of the sacrifice the citizen has made.” And you wonder how lousy government gets that way.

Of course, there’s been an ownership/management change since then, but it looks like the new owner has even less interest in government, although, oddly, they did cover Nancy Pelosi’s fly-by last week to endorse Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick. This is week three of a letters-column battle over whether the Easy Riders Bicycle Touring Club does or does not observe traffic safety rules in its jaunts around town, and of course the police briefs thrive:

A resident of the first block of Muir reported that sometime between July 12-22 someone entered his unsecured garage and stole 12 brown leaf bags, a red 2 1/2-gallon gasoline can and one yellow work glove.

But nothing about the primary coming up next week. Oh, well. It’s not like it’s important or anything.

I don’t mean to rant about these things, but anyone who’s worked for any newspaper short of Grain ‘n’ Shit Weekly knows that elections are part of the franchise. No other news medium covers government the way the dead-tree variety does, and it’s one part of your coverage you should take seriously enough to do. [Cue the patriotic piccolo music, please.] When a candidate goes to the trouble to gather signatures, file for candidacy, walk door to door, shake hands and everything else, your local newspaper should take the time to notice and publish the outline of your platform. (Your TV stations certainly won’t.) Every paper I’ve worked for has published election guides, and we did them for every single one, and yes, there were probably eagles holding red-white-and-blue bunting in their beaks in every issue. It’s what you do, because it’s important.

Maroons.

Everything went fine yesterday, although Alan says I tried to engage the recovery-room nurse in lite chit-chat about my large intestine. (That’s a great ice-breaker, I’ve found.) Sleeping the afternoon away was pleasant until it wasn’t — nausea and a killer headache set in around 5 p.m. The headache was almost certainly from caffeine withdrawal, but I didn’t dare put coffee on an empty stomach, which couldn’t even hold water for a time. Alan said when he left me to go back to work, I was eating yogurt with a fork. And to think I used to be a world-class partier. No more, I guess.

A little bloggage? Sure. Much of this is pre-packed by Metafilter:

20 Ways to Die Trying to Dunk a Basketball. With video clips.

This one’s for Brian: The secret Catholicism of John C. Frémont. Everything old is new again.

Best LOLcats ever: Cats that look like Wilford Brimley. It’s …uncanny.

If it’s light and sloppy today, sorry. Ten percent of my brain thinks it wants more deep hypnotic drugs.

Ms. Lippman claims to be on an internet diet. As she is a very disciplined person, I believe it. (I add that I’m honored she includes this site in her restricted surfing, particularly considering it has no supplemental vitamin or minerals.) What’s more, I think she’s on to something. I didn’t miss the internet (too much) during our vacation, and I’m thinking I want to be more analog for a while.

So I’m going on a diet. I will not be neglecting this site. Too much. Same daily updates, perhaps less bloggage. Maybe you won’t notice it at all, but I’m going to restrict my time spent a) blogging and b) looking for things to blog about to 45 minutes a day, 60 at most. I have a few writing opportunities I want to explore, and if the mile of tombstones* this year has reminded me of anything, it’s that we don’t have all the time in the world, just some of it. Wouldn’t it be stupid to lie on your deathbed and think, “I spent it all blogging”? I think so.

Also, I need to do more video. Even though I am unemployable by traditional media, I like to keep the skills sharp.

What I mainly think I’m going to do is stop reading the sites that bug me. While there’s a certain scab-picking satisfaction in seeing What That Idiot Has to Say Today, it’s just, alas, a waste of time. So long, Jim Lileks. Au revoir, Rod Dreher. Farewell, about a dozen other blogs. It was fun while it lasted, and besides, I’m still reading Roy, who will keep us updated on the highlights.

* turn of phrase borrowed from Thomas McGuane, who used it as the title of an essay about a rash of deaths in his family

OK, then. What a nice weekend. Spent it at Eastern Market (July! Time for corn, peaches, snow peas, bok choy, sugar snaps, tomatoes, beets, weensy little carrots and yes I made two trips to the car), sailing, moviegoing (“Journey to the Center of the Earth,” which will go on my parental-duty roster in the plus column, but otherwise be entirely forgotten in a matter of days) and, Sunday, a Tigers game. As a recent transplant, I really don’t give a crap about the Tiger Stadium demolition, despite the Free Press’ dedication to covering every swing of the wrecking ball, and besides, Comerica is hardly a dump. It was hot and sweaty in the sun, but the seats were great (thanks, Michael and Diane) and the Tigers won. Pudge Rodriguez went four-for-four — a Hot Pudge Sunday — and there were a couple of nice homers. And the heat wasn’t even that bad; fortunately, there was beer.

Friday night at the movies was something else, however — we went to the 5 p.m. show and came out in the midst of Macomb County Friday Night, a vast gathering at a new “lifestyle center” mall up in the northern ‘burbs. “Lifestyle center” = open-air. Their gimmick is, they allow dogs, and every time I go there I wonder if this will be the day disaster strikes. Because there are an awful lot of stupid people in the world, people who think dogs “enjoy” a Friday night spent strolling at the mall, in the company of hundreds of people and dozens of strange dogs, some of which are barely under control in the first place. Since we were last there the mall added an outdoor splash fountain and climbable play area, so add a bunch of toddlers to the mix, too. Every time I go there I witness at least one dog argument barely avoided, sometimes between, oh, an 80-pound boxer and a 100-pound lab, both straining at the ends of their leashes, which are held by 110-pound women who simply don’t have a clue. About anything.

Also, these trips enable me to see how many people think it is normal and admirable to put clothes on dogs. I’m not talking a bandanna around the neck, either. I ask you.

So, a little bit of bloggage:

Mitch Albom, I beg you, take the buyout. A grateful readership would thank you. I would, anyway.

And one final housekeeping note: This week is when I’m collecting the last of my doctor’s 50th-birthday presents, the one that requires a special diet, Miralax and general anesthesia. So if I disappear for a couple of days, please try not to picture what I’ll be doing. ‘kay?

Last day before vacation, and it’s already filled with duties and errands. So not much today but a bit of attention that must be paid:

My ex-colleague William Carlton, arts writer for The News-Sentinel in Fort Wayne, died unexpectedly earlier this week. The story going around is that he called 911 in the middle of the night, and by the time the medics arrived he was unresponsive. Bill had a history of heart problems and lived alone, as befits the odd duck he was.

How odd? Well, let me tell you who Bill’s previous employer was, before joining the N-S when I did, in the large Class of ’84: The New York Daily News. That paper was already struggling then, and offered buyouts to reduce staff, and Bill took one. Why he was crazy enough to come to the opposite end of the earth from New York City remains a mystery to me, although I asked him several times, and got explanations that all boiled down to a shrug: Why not? He brought a lot to the newsroom — a certain tabloid, rat-a-tat-tat prose style full of puns and wordplay; a gruff personality that could still sparkle, usually when the topic was ribald; and a wide and deep knowledge of the arts that revealed itself in both his work and in his casual newsroom conversation. It was always a pleasure to talk to him and be surprised by his knowledge — he once explained to me why opera singers are the greatest musicians and the truest artists on stage today, and did it so concisely and expertly that I still believe it.

Not that he was a snob. He had an abiding love for boxing, and could explain the ballet of a heavyweight fight with equal authority. I once asked him how George Foreman or Buster Douglas or some unlikely victor had done it, and he pointed to a spot on his chin and said, “See this? There’s a button right here. If you look very closely, it says, ‘The Puncher’s Chance’ on it. Hit the button just right, and goodnight Irene.”

The paper asked Alan and I me for memories of Bill, but mostly they’re, um, unsuitable for a family newspaper. I remember when a local bail bondsman who owned a few massage parlors was on trial for pandering, and Bill, an unapologetic customer of one of them, explained to a rapt metro staff how the front-room procedure worked. (“But forget Friday nights. The high school football teams tie everything up.”) I remember his story about going out drinking with the Daily News staff after work, and the obscene Algonquin Round Table banter: A drunken photographer sat down opposite a crusty old national correspondent, a woman, and said, “Barbara? I want to eat your pussy.” Barbara took a world-weary drag of her cigarette and said, “Jesus. Doesn’t anyone just like to fuck anymore?”

Alan told them about the time a penguin at the zoo unleashed a torrent of digested smelt all over his brand-new Banana Republic khakis and Bill expensed them. That’ll probably make the paper.

When the turmoil at the paper started, the real downsizing, Bill stuck around to see what the new editor was about. He took her measure accurately in about five minutes, and decided to retire. I don’t know if he ever looked back. I got an occasional e-mail from him, and like so many people you spend eight hours a day with one day and zero the next, more or less disappeared.

Wherever he is now, I hope there’s a good title fight on pay-per-view and and opera across the street. Bill appreciated the whole spectrum. I guess that’s the point.

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

This is from February 7, 2002:

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Shut her down? Janie? When?” I said.

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

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

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

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

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

Bloggage:

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

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

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

Kids these days. Adults these days. Sheesh.

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

I’ve spent so much time on this blog complaining about other columnists, I should probably send a little love to the good ones. So indulge me:

Who are your favorite columnists, Nance?

There have been many over the years. I always liked Mike Harden, although he was sometimes uneven. (As are all columnists.) Carl Hiaasen had some gems, but was mostly Florida-centric, and so the bulk of his newspaper work was lost on me. Dave Barry, of course, but only in the early, funny ones. (That’s a joke.) Gene Weingarten. But through it all there was one guy I read religiously. His weekly column moved on the wire on Mondays, and I would actually wait for it, start checking around the time it usually moved, be sad if it wasn’t on time.

Pete Dexter.

Dexter is sort of famous in journalism circles. He wrote for the Philadelphia Daily News when that paper was unique among American newspapers, a tabloid with a real sense of humor about itself, and I guess he wrote your typical big-city newspaper column. Then he fell in with Randall “Tex” Cobb, whom most of you know as the evil biker in “Raising Arizona,” and the two of them got into a pretty serious bar fight. As Wikipedia tells the tale [citation needed]:

(Dexter) began writing fiction after a life-changing 1981 incident in which thirty drunken Philadelphians, armed with baseball bats and upset by a recent column, beat the writer severely.

Now that’s what you call reader feedback.

Anyway, Dexter spent a lot of time in the hospital, and then recovering at home, and somewhere along the line he relocated to Sacramento and then to Seattle, and there were novels and screenplays and a National Book Award, and this is about the time I started reading him. I think the first piece was in the mid-’80s, for Playboy, about a guy at the Philadelphia Inquirer who rebelled against being screwed over by management. He did so by erecting a puppet theater on his desk, and every so often a new puppet would appear that bore a strong resemblance to a top editor at the Inquirer. He arranged them in tableaux; my favorite was one where all the puppets knelt before the editor puppet. The Inquirer was, of course, a Knight-Ridder paper, and I was at another K-R property, one where the BS skills were quite as well-honed as they were in Philly, but I recognized it the way I do my own bedroom. It was a perfectly told story of life in a certain sort of newsroom at a certain sort of time, and I fell in love.

Anyway, over the years, Dexter wrote some of my favorite columns ever, but the best of them all was about Mike Tyson after one of the Holyfield losses, a grand tale of tragedy rendered in 650 words or so, and I’ve been waiting years to see it anthologized. Just the other day I learned that Dexter’s had an anthology out for a solid year and a half, and boy do I feel dumb. So I rush down to the library and get a copy, only to flip it open and discover there’s no table of contents, no index, no division by (or even acknowledgment of) publication, no nothing. The first column is 1 and the last one is 82, and if I’m going to find Mike Tyson, I’m going to have to start at the beginning and read right through to the end, and…

…OK. I’m starting to see the reasoning here.

But I have a bad feeling. I have flipped and flipped and flipped through “Paper Trails,” and Tyson’s name hasn’t jumped out at me. Neither has the word “puppet.”

A few years ago, I went into the Sacramento Bee archive (Dexter’s home base at the time) and bought the Tyson column, and ran it here on the blog, a total copyright violation, for which I received the following angry response from the paper’s lawyers: Silence. No one reads this blog.

But I noticed something. I had that column printed out and pinned to a wall in my cubicle at work, and whenever I felt in need of inspiration I’d take it like a vitamin, so after a while I got to know its phrasing pretty well. And when I saw the SacBee version, something was different. He’d described the people who flocked around Tyson after his success as “pimps, whores and gangsters,” a phrase some helpful editor recast as “men.” But remember: It’s the internet that’s killing newspapers.

[Long pause.]

OK, this is going to bug me all day. I just went into my hard-copy archives — the CD-ROM backups I did of this site back before it was a blog — and found the file on the first try. Here was the edited phrase:

By the time he went away, Tyson had replaced D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney with an assembly of men who are there to this day and will be there as long as the smell of money is in the air.

That’s a real copy-editor’s trim, that. You can sit with one all day and explain how “D’Amato, Jacobs and Rooney” and “pimps, whores and gangsters” are parallel phrases, that they match rhythmically, that making this change is like playing “shave and a haircut” and then “fifteen dollars and forty-three cents, plus applicable taxes.” They don’t hear it. All they hear is some supervising editor dressing them down because an old lady called and is canceling her subscription after needing her smelling salts. Also, one of the pimps, whores or gangsters might sue.

Rant over.

Anyway, this is what I’ll be reading on the plane.

Bloggage:

Things I just learned: Coozledad has a blog! (Suggestion: Disable the SnapShots preview. Irritating.)

However, I think we have a job for Coozledad’s bull: U.S. exports cigarettes, bras, bull semen to Iran. I had a neighbor in Fort Wayne who bought bull semen, to inseminate his herd of comely Black Angus heifers. It arrived in straws frozen in liquid nitrogen, sometimes transported by a pretty vet student from MSU, and if you’re thinking that’s the setup for a dirty movie, why shame on you.

I’ve lived so long, I remember how Sylvester Stallone and Brigitte Nielsen met. (She sent a nude photo of herself to his hotel room. How romantic.) So I guess it’s not surprising she would have a boob job on live national television. In Germany. During prime time. I guess they don’t have HBO there yet.

Off to do paying work. Enjoy your lovely summer day, if you have one.

The trip to Cornerstone went well, if you were wondering. As Jeff commented in an earlier post, Cornerstone isn’t really your typical Christian music festival. It’s more…alt-Christian. Multi-colored hair, much body ink, piercings, ear grommets, you know the drill. The mood was much closer to this…

…than, say, Up With People.

(Man, I just realized how little I know about contemporary Christian music.)

But the talk went well, and I had an interesting chat with Jane Hertenstein, who is a member of Jesus People USA, who put on the festival. It’s JPUSA for short, pronounced J’poosa. J’poosans live communally in their very own 10-story apartment building on the north side of Chicago, kind of like those FLDS compounds, but without the wack hairdos, child abuse, plural marriage, raids by the feds and, of course, a scary prophet. If it sounds a little hippie, I guess it is — they admit their roots are in the Jesus-freaky movement of the late ’60s and ’70s. I read a little in their website and, while I can no more imagine living communally than I can living in, say, Kabul, I can see its appeal, and they truly do seem to be doing their best to imitate Christ.

Their festival is certainly tolerant of all types:

Not sure what this guy’s journey was, but he was eye-catching.

I think this van belonged to Brother Ray:

Brother Ray wandered into the speakers’ hospitality trailer. Most people would notice his yard-long gray dreadlocks, but I was intrigued by his feet, which looked so toughened by exposure to the elements they were more like paws. If that is his vehicle, I suspect he propels it Flintstone-style.

It was a nice trip. A lot of travel for less than an hour of work, but what else is summer for but crashing in your friends’ guest room, driving far up into the wilds of east-central Illinois, crossing all the swollen rivers and creeks, hanging with the Christians for a few hours and then doing it all in reverse? I’m sorry I missed most of the speaker who followed me, from Exodus International. I could scarcely believe this crowd was swallowing it, but I also noticed the speaker didn’t wear a wedding band, so it’s possible she was selling the 20-percent-less-offensive alternative of celibacy for gay people, rather than full-out joining the other team. Dunno.

Anyway, that was my weekend. How was yours?

(Note: He didn’t. But he tried.)

Bloggage:

I don’t truck much in the workings of the blogosphere, mainly because it’s a huge waste of time. The oh-no-you-di’n’t between the right and the left can go on forever, and frequently does. But I still read it from time to time, and if I recall correctly, wasn’t there a dust-up about so-called liberal photojournalists altering photos to make smoke blacker or some such? I guess the practice is catching on, only in a more chickenshit sort of way. Embedded video has the visual evidence. (Gawker has it in a one-stop, non-video graphic, too.) The NYT has picked up the story, and notes the network’s defense that “altering photos for humorous effect is a common practice on cable news stations.” I’m calling bullshit on that — there’s obvious Photoshopping and there’s this kind, which is just nasty. Note that one of the victims is Jewish; couldn’t they fit a few dollar signs on his eyeballs?

Lots to catch up on today, and I’ll be back later. Enjoy Monday. If you can.

A few short items this morning before I start packing for the Christian Burning Man:

We’ve been visiting our lake cottage in Branch County less and less over the years, and perhaps you’d like to know why. OK.

Our next-door neighbor there, who bought the cottage built by Alan’s uncle, tore it down this year. No harm in that — it’s small and had a powder-post beetle infestation at one point. It probably needed doing. Of course we knew they’d put up something much bigger, but we were hopeful it would be, er, in character with the neighborhood. They decided on a prefab Swiss chalet. Other houses on the strip had been brought there in pieces, so there was a precedent. Can they get the truck to the lot without major damage? Oh sure, no problem.

The chalet went in this week. Their truck driver backed his semi across our front lawn and without so much as an oops, flattened two 10-year-old river birches Alan planted when Kate was a baby. Number of profuse apologies that have arrived at this address, or that of my sister-in-law, in the interim: Zero. Simple acknowledgment? None.

That’s it, in a nutshell.

We’ve told Spriggy that if he’d care to entrust us with his share of Leona Helmsley’s $8 billion, we’ll take very good care of it. Jeez, what a bitter old crone — $12 million for her own Maltese wasn’t enough, I suppose. I love dogs as much as you do, maybe more, and let me tell you: $12 million for a single dog deeply misunderstands the nature and needs of all dogs. You can argue with the foundation setup — I suppose there’s always someone who needs to hear the spay/neuter argument again — but at its heart it’s the work of a true misanthrope, in love with the poochies but not a dime for humanity. You know what I think? I think it’s because LA Mary couldn’t get her the strawberry preserves she wanted for her hotels. It queered her on two-legged creatures once and for all.

Inside baseball: Hank Stuever on why Clay Felker mattered:

Appreciate Clay Felker? It’s all anyone ever did, who wanted anything to do with magazines. Was it emulation, or was it envy, or was it a fantasy — working for the perfect place, the perfect editor, at the perfect time?

When I started freelancing, I had a simple goal: To do as much work as possible for editors who could help me improve. Needless to say, I never met Clay Felker.

Metro mayhem: Someone stole the copper plumbing from one of the city’s most visible landmarks. A six-figure repair bill for a few bucks in scrap metal.

John Scalzi printed one of his famous sunset pictures and included his cat, so I LOL’d it. No one will get it:

Bonus: Stay at Scalzi’s for a little perspective on the military service/electability track record.

That should keep you. I’ll be in and out until I leave for the airport, so, y’know, whatever. Oh, and thanks for all the SF recommendations, folks. I neglected to mention, this trip is basically a rerun of our honeymoon lo those many years ago. (Alan: “You sure you don’t want a diamond ring?” Me: “I want a two-week honeymoon more.”) You brought back memories and gave me some new ideas. You guys are the best.