First things first: As most of you have figured out by now, our connectivity problems continue. It is out of our hands, in large part, but J.C. is sitting in the NN.C control room, which is encased in lead and concrete and located deep beneath the earth in an undisclosed location, working on it. To the extent that he can. Long story short, we hope it will improve soon. If not, we’ll find a new hosting company.

In the meantime, don’t try to resubmit comments! J.C., yesterday: We’re doing a cache thing to help our poor hobbled server and the downside of that is that you may not see your comment show up immediately.

Thanks for hanging in there with us. This site is nothing without you guys.

Because I don’t have much to offer, many days, do I? But here’s this: A movie recommendation, now that it’s out on streaming/DVD — “The Bling Ring,” which we watched over the weekend. (Alan’s a big Sofia Coppola fan.) A light fictionalization of a real story, about how a gang of Los Angeles teens robbed a series of Hollywood stars’ homes, aided and abetted by the internet and the stars’ own carelessness (for the most part, they entered through unlocked doors and windows). They took clothes, jewelry and cash, but mainly seemed interested in stealing as much stardust as possible.

“Is this Herve Leger? I LOVE it!” one says, pawing through Paris Hilton’s closet. “This. Is a Birkin,” says another, helping herself. In a world where luxury brands are shoved in the faces of these vapid teenagers — or all of us — it’s almost a case of can-you-blame-them? Paris Hilton kept the key to her front door under the mat, and had to be informed of the thefts; she had so much stuff, she didn’t notice anything missing. And so this aimless and empty little band drifted from one house to the next — getting tips on their owners’ absences from TMZ and other gossip sites — collecting luxury items and cash and crap. An emptier existence could hardly be imagined, but uncommon? No way. Didn’t we spend some time yesterday batting around those Emmy runway photos? “Who are you wearing?” is a common question. We all know who Herve Leger is.

It’s not a great movie. It’s sort of depressing, especially when you consider how many stories I’ve read about what a clotheshorse Sofia Coppola is, how much she swims in this world she holds in such contempt. But I liked it anyway.

We have some good bloggage today.

Newspapers have stripped away so much of their content in recent years I almost forget how much I enjoy reading a smart critic from time to time. Especially Hank Stuever, writing about a forgettable sitcom that wants to be a nostalgia trip:

You could set your atomic clock by the predictable rhythms of retromania: When I was a boy in the ’70s, we briefly wanted nothing more than to be Fonzie in the ’50s (inasmuch as “Happy Days” struggled to depict the ’50s; in reruns it just looks like the ’70s). Out came the Dippity-Do and switchblade combs.

If only our forebears had possessed the wisdom to outlaw public displays of nostalgia! When I got to college in the mid-’80s, every other dorm room had a Jim Morrison or John Lennon poster on the wall, yet our preoccupation with the ’60s while living in the ’80s is something you never see in today’s films and TV shows that are set in the ’80s. The anachronisms — then and now — require too much nuance and an understanding that the passage of time and accumulation of popular culture is a fluid experience: It’s less like a free-flowing river and more like a dammed-up lake.

Meanwhile, someone explain to me how this bizarre story about a horse biting a man’s penis works: It’s written in English, but the quotes are in (presumably) Tagalog.

Criticizing AIG bonuses is just like being a Nazi. The AIG executives say so. Talk about confirmation bias.

Hump day. Thank ya lord.

What a weekend. High pressure, unlimited ceiling, temps in the 80s. After a delightful improvement over last summer — Rain! Temperatures in the 60s! IN JULY!!! — it seems 2013’s is going out with what everyone expects and wants. I’m watering for the first time this season. But everything is still juicy.

And with that, I’ve once again violated Elmore Leonard’s No. 1 rule of writing. Oh, well. It’s what Midwesterners do — talk about the weather.

Besides, nothing much else happened, other than the usual weekend-y things — farmers market, dry cleaners, grocery, laundry cooking, exercise, sailing. We took the dog:

She has to wear her life jacket until we can trust her not to take a flying leap after a passing flock of geese. Also, it’s easy to grab her by the handle on top when we need to move her quickly.

As I was in aggressive fun-type mode this weekend, I wasn’t exactly trolling for linkage, although I’m pleased to report Mitch Albom had the day off Sunday and did not write anything about Elmore Leonard, which is a very good thing. They’d still be cleaning the brain explosion from the walls.

However, there is this, from the NYPost, not a paper I read regularly. Call it the confessions of a high-dollar college-admissions counselor:

One father requested that my meetings with his son take place in the Midtown offices of his private-equity group. His son would take the train in from Greenwich and meet me there. I offered to meet the boy somewhere easier, but no. It wasn’t safe, the father explained, as he led me into the vast glass space of his office, where his son was sitting; in fact, he had personally walked to Penn Station to meet his son’s train and escort him here.

Then he took out his checkbook and asked me, in front of the boy, what I’d charge to write his essays.

Oh, and I watched “History of the Eagles,” at least the first part of it; my interest in the solo career of Henley and Frey died in a 1980s aerobics class that used “The Heat is On” once too often. Bill Simmons take on it, linked last week, was pretty much dead on.

And we found our way to “Beware of Mr. Baker,” another rockumentary, but amusing where the Eagles thing wasn’t. Ginger Baker — what a wild man. At first I thought we were going down a path that would lead to another great musician robbed of his treasure by a trick of the copyright laws. He’s broke, he makes no money off the Cream catalog, what an injustice, etc. Later we learn he received $5 million for the Cream reunion, enough to take care of him for the rest of his life — if he hadn’t immediately gone out and spent it on 38 polo ponies and an endowment for a veterinary hospital.

Musicians. Go bloody figure.

Anyway, good Monday to all and a good last week of summer.

The thing about the death of most 87-year-olds is, their heyday is usually long past. The other day Kate was mourning the loss of Ray Manzarek, and I pointed out the Doors stopped making music more than 40 years ago. Acknowledge great work when its maker passes, sure, but don’t soak your pillow with tears. We live in the age of the internet. Everybody’s best work is right here at our fingertips.

Elmore Leonard, though — he’s an exception. At 87, he got a lot more years than our allotted threescore-and-ten, and made them count. He was working, and writing exceptionally well, until the very end. I don’t think “Raylan,” “Djibouti” or “Road Dogs” (his last three novels) belong in his very top rank, but they were still better than 90 percent of the crime fiction published today, still very entertaining reads. If I’m doing work like this past my 80th birthday, I will die happy.

Leonard has been dead less than 24 hours, and already I’m tired of reading his 10 tips for writing, which is a good lesson, but if you really want to learn how to write, just read his books. Figure out how he does it.

In “Unknown Man #89,” a process server is looking for a man and thinks he may have found his wife. She’s an alcoholic, drinking the afternoon away at he Good Times Bar in the Cass Corridor in Detroit. (Just those details alone — the name of the bar and the neighborhood — tells you something, at least if you’re a Detroiter.) See the way he captures a drunk’s speech patterns, how they laugh at their own jokes and go off on their little verbal jags. Less observant writers make it all about slurring. Later on, he sets up a showdown at a bar, deep in a black neighborhood, called Watts Club Mozambique. It’s midafternoon, hardly anyone in the place, when the shit starts to go down:

The manager and the lady bartender, in the pen of the U-shaped bar, standing by the cash register, didn’t move. It it wasn’t a robbery, they assumed it was dope business. The employee in the cloakroom stood by the counter of the hall door. No one in the place screamed; no one said a thing.

You go to work in a place called Watts Club Mozambique, you know how these things play out.

A friend of mine, an English professor, says that when the historians of the future want to know how we lived, the details of our daily lives, they’ll turn to the genre novelists to tell us. They will find a deep vein in Leonard’s work. Take “52 Pickup,” a great slice of ’70s life in Detroit. It’s about an extortion attempt on a successful businessman who’s been having an affair. He runs an auto supplier in Mount Clemens, lives in Bloomfield Village. The girlfriend was in on it, and has turned over some home movies to the two guys running the deal, one of whom is showing him the spliced-together film of him on the Bahamian beach with her, narrating the action:

“Here comes sport now, rum collins for the broad and a Heineken. Loaded and he still drinks beer. That’s your background showing, man. Eleven years on the line at Dodge Main. Couple of shots and a beer every day after the shift, right?”

Loaded and he still drinks beer. Perfect. You can learn more about white-collar and blue-collar lives, and how they intersected in Detroit, from that novel than any dissertation on class boundaries in the Wayne State library.

There’s more, there’s so much more, but I don’t have time to pull down every book and transcribe long passages. I do want to hit some bullet points, though:

** He wrote great female characters, not the way women write them, but the way a man who likes women does. I interviewed him once, and commented on it. He said, “I don’t think of them as women. I think of them as people.” Quick, read “The Switch,” published in 1978, before Hollywood pollutes it forever.

** His villains are great, too. I’m with Matt Zoller Seitz:

His books were tough, but his heart was warm. He liked people. He felt for them. He was able to see through their eyes, no matter how naive or cruel or dumb or scared they were. He didn’t seem to believe in evil, only in stupidity: meaning, you have to be stupid, or stupidly selfish, to be evil. Most of his villains are pathetic and deluded. He never wrote a Hannibal Lecter or Tom Ripley. No masterminds, no puppet masters, no Corleone-style crime lords. His criminals were criminals because they were too dumb or greedy to do anything else, or because they’d fallen into crime a long time ago and never got out. Maybe they were lazy. Maybe they had bad luck. Whatever the explanation, Leonard understood it, even if he didn’t condone it. He believed in free will, but he also had compassion. He got it.

** Speaking of Hollywood. For a writer best-known for his great dialogue, filmmakers hardly ever got his material right. Leonard told the story many times of how he coached Barry Sonnenfeld on how to direct his characters in “Get Shorty,” which many acknowledge as the first adaptation to be worthy of the source material. He told Sonnenfeld no reaction shots, medium shots only and tell your actors that they are saying funny things, but their characters don’t know they’re funny. Personally, I think “Get Shorty” is overrated as an adaptation; it can’t hold a candle to “Out of Sight,” which to this day remains my favorite EL movie, my favorite Detroit movie and my favorite George Clooney movie — the actor was just emerging as a heavy-duty movie star but didn’t act like it and (more important) director Steven Soderbergh didn’t shoot him like one. Can we also say that Soderbergh achieved the miracle of a fine performance out of Jennifer Lopez? Because he did. Her wardrobe in that movie was killer, too. Favorite scene:

And though “Out of Sight” is my No. 1, “Jackie Brown” was also very good. After that, it mostly sucks. Some profoundly so. “Freaky Deaky,” shot in Detroit two summers ago, went straight to video and who can be surprised, when it was uprooted out of its time period and cast with standouts like Crispin Glover? “Killshot” did even worse; thanks, Mickey Rourke and …Joseph Gordon-Levitt? As the bad guy?

** Leonard was refreshingly bullshit-free. About pretty much everything. He always told the truth about writing, anyway. Besides the 10 rules, mainly you just have to sit down every day and do it.

So, I have some links for you:

First and best of all, the Detroit News, bless ’em, re-ran a 1978 piece by the man himself, a deep embed with a Detroit homicide squad. It’s great:

Five a.m. on Terry Street, Detroit’s Northwest side. The fire equipment had left the scene. The gutted two-story colonial stood empty, with its door open, windows smashed, the smell of wet ashes filling its darkness, a faint sound of water dripping in the basement. Someone said the woman found down there, lying on a bed, had been “iced.” A curious verb to use. The woman had burned to death, or had been beaten to death with a blunt instrument. The fire had been started to destroy evidence.

Dick Newcomb, Executive Sergeant of Squad 7, came out of the house with his foot-and-a-half-long flashlight and a photo album of smiling high school graduates in red caps and gowns.

One of them, a 17-year-old girl named Michelle, was at that moment in intensive care at Mount Carmel. She had been found unconscious — severely beaten and bleeding from deep lacerations – in an abandoned house several doors north of the burned-out colonial.

“You can go in if you want,” Newcomb said, “but you’ll smell of smoke all day, have to have your suit cleaned.”

While we’re at the News, a seven-year-old piece by columnist Neal Rubin on EL’s relationship with Woodward Avenue, the city’s spine and east-west dividing line. Again, very good but maybe of less interest outside of Detroit.

A five-year-old profile by Neely Tucker at the WashPost.

Glenn Kenny, to whom I link because lots of you probably don’t know about him. A film blogger, but an appreciator of prose as well. I had to laugh because Abel Ferrara agrees with me about “Get Shorty:”

He rolled his eyes. “God. So studio-ized. Every time they shoot Travolta from a low angle they’ve got the fucking key light giving him a halo.”

I laugh because Ferrara was fired midway through a p.o.s. movie a friend of mine worked on here, and achieved the remarkable feat of being banned from every single restaurant in the Book Cadillac hotel in something like 10 days. And Kenny takes a look at a typical paragraph of EL text, and explains why it’s good.

Here’s an audio piece I did years ago, for WDET, a version of the blog I linked to yesterday. My takeaway: I hate the sound of my own voice.

Finally, the Onion. Because.

Have a good Wednesday, all.

When it comes to Mitch Albom columns, I’m getting harder to impress. I’ve become numb to week after week of hastily dashed-off I-was-just-thinkin’ or join-me-in-my-outrage-over-something-dumb or weren’t-the-good-ol’-days great, etc. I believe it’s been three consecutive Sundays that he’s been peeved about something having to do with the Internet, because the Internet is baaaad.

Sunday’s column, however, was beyond the pale. Couched as a ringing defense of celebrity privacy, pegged to Tigers first baseman Prince Fielder’s recently revealed divorce filing, it is positively Grandpa-Simpsonian, whining about “Internet morsels” and “cyberspace monsters” and how-dare-we (which is to say, you), and a truly bizarre section about the abuse of the Freedom of Information Act, which is weird, as the mere fact of looking up a person’s divorce filing has nothing to do with FOIA. You just go down to the courthouse and check the file. Never mind the irony of a guy who’s invoked his status as a professional journalist (as opposed to those wicked bloggers) who went to professional journalist school not knowing this.

But never mind all that. I read it and decided to just let it all go, or at least wait and see if I still thought he was full of shit after I went for a long bike ride. Fortunately, by the time I got back — 22 miles — someone else had taken it on. Very satisfying takedown. I’m glad he could do it, because 22 miles in the direct sun takes it out of you. Although I felt so good that I sprinted the last half-mile or so home. The pavement on my last leg was like glass, and I just felt like it. The app on my phone said I hit 19 mph. Take that, Lance Armstrong.

What a glorious weekend it was. Lovely weather, not too hot or cold, sunshine all the way. I failed to mow the lawn, but it’s stopped growing anyway. August. The driveway is covered with acorns, the markets are tumbling with peaches and tomatoes, and the light is coming in at a new angle. I want to enjoy every final minute.

So, bloggage:

I know lots of people run hot and cold on Bill Simmons, but when he gets rolling, I’m there for every word (if I understand what he’s talking about). His examination of a Showtime documentary on the Eagles is a great specimen. If you grew up in the ’70s, you will like it. Whether or not you like the Eagles.

Guess what I made for dinner last night? Corn and tomato pie. With a biscuit crust. Yum.

Kate’s going away for a few days over the weekend, so last night we went to the movies. No action tentpoles this time, but “Twenty Feet From Stardom,” an engaging documentary about a handful of great background singers. Like? Like Darlene Love, Merry Clayton, Claudia Lennear (to exhaust the ones I’d heard of), as well as Judith Hill, Lisa Fischer, Tåta Vega and many others (whom I hadn’t heard of).

Most Stones fans know who Clayton was: The voice doing the wailing-woman breaks in “Gimme Shelter.” Whenever I listened to that song, I pictured her as a Tina Turner manqué, but the reality is both funnier and more mundane — rousted at bedtime and told to get down to the studio p.d.q., she showed up in her pj’s, a scarf over her curlers, and was handed a lyric sheet that said, Rape, murder, it’s just a shot away. Mick Jagger wryly observes that sometimes, when you record at 2 a.m., you don’t know something is good until you listen the next day.

The film bogs a bit toward the end, when we examine how these talented women failed to make it as soloists, but it’s a small complaint. I was touched a bit by Lennear, whom we first meet as one of the sexiest Ikettes and later see touring with the Stones. She now teaches Spanish and didn’t look how you say fulfilled by it. It all ends on a certain lamentation for talent, period, in pop music, now that so much can be auto-tuned and fixed in the mix.

Human beings — can’t live without ’em, although some people would sure like to.

So. Unlike many people, I don’t block ads from the news sites I visit, although I do practice some avoidance. Embedded-text links I avoid like potholes, and Mac Keeper can kiss my elderly ass, but I understand ads pay salaries, so I will let them play, most days. (Besides, I’ve found if you allow one to play, you can avoid more later.) However, lately I’ve been thinking about what’s fair, ad-wise. Fifteen seconds, I think. A 15-second ad is fair, but a 30-second ad is not. Most web videos are less than two minutes, and I think asking for 25 percent more in the form of a Toyota ad is an ad too far. What say you?

As for me, I think I’m going to bed. Enjoy the end of the week, but I still have a lot to do.

In the never-ending stream of Excuses for Lame Blogging, add this:

Tonight the three of us, plus one of Kate’s friends, had two peak experiences:

1) First visit to a Hooters, ever; and

2) “World War Z.”

I have to say, I enjoyed them both. And both beat swimming the Detroit river.

I promise better tomorrow.

EDIT: What. The HELL.

OK, so it’s Thursday night, and I think the only thing to o with this retrograded Mercury week is watch “Sharknado,” a Syfy channel original movie about what happens when a superstorm sucks a bunch of sharks up from the ocean and redistributes them through southern California. Just watching the opening credits now. One of the actors is named “Jaason.” Perfect. Five minutes in, and the shots down’t match, the effects look like they were drawn with a crayon and any minute now, Tara Reid is going to make an appearance.

The storm is a hurricane. In California. Well, as with snake ranges, it seems you learn something new every day.

Via Twitter, the thinking person’s Sharknado post.

I think I’m going to wrap this up with?

Some good bloggage, about rich people shopping for congressional districts to run from…

…and a dog picture:

Have a good weekend, all.

It seems to be documentary-film week around this place, so let’s roll with it.

A few weeks ago, Dexter first sent me the trailer to “Oxyana,” a new doc about the opiate culture in a West Virginia town called Oceana. The filmmaker, Sean Dunne, was director of “American Juggalo,” and “Oxyana” is his first feature. It seemed worth keeping an eye on.

Then I watched the trailer.

You get a sense of what it’s about at a molecular level – the heart-stopping beauty of the mountains, the primitive music, and the rural poverty-porn imagery. But a couple of the sound bites brought me up short: The 23-year-old claiming “half (his) high-school class” is dead of overdoses, and the unseen one who claims he’s seen 9-year-old children shooting dope.

Both of these claims, I’d wager, are exaggerations. Evidently there were more. From an interview Dunne did with a West Virginia public-radio reporter:

Lilly: “Also in the documentary, there were people that spouted out percentages, numbers, information about homelessness, overdoses, hepatitis C cases, babies born on methadone and so on. How did you verify that information?”

Dunne: “That’s the thing. This isn’t a film that is meant to be informational in that way. It’s meant to be immersive. It’s meant to show the up close and personal of what drug addiction looks like. These are stories from the people down there. These are their perspectives. These are people dealing with this every day. We didn’t question those things we just we were a vessel to their voice.”

Oh, spare me. Don’t bother me with the facts. Here’s just one of the distortions:

Some of the statistics that went unverified by the production crew included, things like, 70 to 80 percent of people in the town have hepatitis C because of intravenous drug use.

According to the Office of Epidemiology and Prevention Services between 2007 and 2011 Wyoming County saw less than 5 chronic hepatitis C cases.

To me, this is just another version of the cheap reporter’s trick of underlining the most tragic facts in a story with Albomian bombast. Believe me, the horrors of opiate abuse in southern Ohio, Kentucky and West Virginia are easily portrayed with simple facts that don’t require passing along whoppers about hepatitis C.

A film blogger on a PBS site makes the point:

But not everyone does it so well. And when I watched Oxyana, I was bothered by the lack of context and long, languid shots of that dirty old town and its beautiful blue hills.

I sometimes didn’t know what I was watching. Or didn’t know why I was watching what I was watching.

After the film was over, in the Q&A, Dunne spoke of how he went to West Virginia a few times to film, with one trip lasting several weeks (maybe it was a couple of months.)

But how the hell are you going to make a truthful document of a complex problem that’s destroying real lives if you’re skimming the surface, with a few drive-by days of filming?

Yeah, what he said.

I think what has happened is, the technology for this sort of filmmaking is now ridiculously cheap; you can make a beautiful-looking film with a DSLR, consumer-level software and whatever talent you bring to things. But telling a story is not nearly so easy. It requires skill, empathy, intelligence, wisdom and a lot of other things. You can’t do it by just turning your camera on a beaten-up poor West Virginian and letting him or her talk, unchallenged. Calling it “immersive” is just excuse-making.

Oh, am I grumpy today? Maybe so. Here’s some comic relief: Apply for an Indiana marriage license as a same-sex couple? Risk jail:

Currently the state’s electronic marriage license application specifically designates “male applicant” and “female applicant” sections for gathering required background data.

“In Indiana the law clearly states that one man and one woman are the only two who can apply for a marriage license and can have a marriage ceremony performed,” Coffey explained.

Those who were to submit false information on the marriage license could face up to 18 months in prison and a potential fine of up to $10,000.

Don’t think it would happen, but who knows? This is Tippecanoe County we’re talking about.

Is it Wednesday already? Really?

I don’t know what I could say about Roger Ebert that I didn’t say three years ago, when the extent of his injury, and his badly reconstructed new face, was revealed in Esquire magazine. I wouldn’t change a word, but in looking around the web in the late afternoon, I can see that I missed a lot.

This was maybe my favorite, the public spat between Ebert and Conrad Black, who owned the Chicago Sun-Times for a while. Black was a Canadian and believed all the good things in the world were made for him and him alone, and the correspondence between the two, carried out in public, is delightful:

Dear Roger,

I have been disappointed to read your complaints about the former Hollinger International management. I vividly recall your avaricious negotiating techniques through your lawyer, replete with threats to quit, and your generous treatment from David Radler, which yielded you an income of over $500,000 per year from us, plus options worth hundreds of thousands of dollars, and your own Web site at the company’s expense. …

…which led to:

Dear Conrad,

One of the things I have always admired about you, and that sets you aside from the general run of proprietors, is that you so articulately and amusingly say exactly what is on your mind. I am not at all surprised by your letter to me, because I would assume that is how you would feel; what is refreshing is that you say so.

Let me just say in response that I have never complained about my salary at the Sun-Times, but to describe my lawyer as ”avaricious” is a bit much; he engaged in spirited negotiations, as he should have, and he and you settled on a contract. It goes without saying that any contract negotiation includes the possibility that either party might choose to leave rather than to sign. I hope you are grateful that I did not demand an additional payment for agreeing not to compete with myself. Since you have made my salary public, let me say that when I learned that Barbara received $300,000 a year from the paper for duties described as reading the paper and discussing it with you, I did not feel overpaid.

You really had to live through the newspaper business to believe it.

This, Will Leitch’s story about how he loved Ebert, then insulted him, instantly regretted it and came to be forgiven, is the talker of the hour, but it’ll be a few more hours before you read this, and something else may come up in the interim.

You might also like to read Neil Steinberg’s obit, which is very fine.

Oh, this is such a loss. He worked so hard, for so long, it seemed he’d never stop.

By the way, if you’re looking for some longform Ebert to read, I suggest “The Great Movies” collections, particularly Vol. 1. He really loved his work.

And Roger wins the New Yorker caption contest is worth your time, too.

So let’s skip to the bloggage, shall we?

While we’re on the subject of working as long as one is able, Elaine Stritch is playing her final shows, at the Carlyle, before retiring to Michigan. She’s 88. I hope to see her in a cafe somewhere around here soon.

And not to leave you with a total bummer, here are some squirrels, in some remarkable tableaux.

Oh, and the president, doing what he does, with the cutest kid ever.

Let’s all have a happy weekend, shall we?

ADDED: An editor (of Ebert’s) speaks. Some good stuff (for writers, anyway) on his process, and what he was like to work with:

He was a celebrity in the journalism and film world, but he never pulled the star act. He was quite amenable to editing. If you needed or wanted to make a change, he was fine with that. He just rarely needed it. The prose just flowed. He was a real wordsmith.

OK, one more:

One day an inspector from the Chicago Post Office came to our editor, James Hoge, with a puzzling discovery. Several hundred empty envelopes addressed to Ann Landers had been found in the trash behind an address in Hyde Park. With an eerie certainty, Jim called in Milton and asked him for his address. Milton, whose jobs included distributing mail, had been stealing the quarters sent in for Ann Landers’ pamphlet, Petting: When Does It Go Too Far? Discussing his firing after work at Billy Goat’s, he was philosophical: “Hundreds of kids can thank me that they were conceived.”

First (long) bike ride of the season was Saturday. Fifteen miles at a bit of a clip left me thinking:

1) God, am I out of shape.
2) Even for Detroit, this is a lot of broken glass on the street.
3) I need a road bike.
4) No you don’t. Get your ass in shape and stop thinking equipment is the answer to this scurrying-on-a-wheel feeling.
4) But I’m in my top gear and I’m scurrying! I need a bigger ring.
5) Shut up and look at the scenery.

So I did. It was a gorgeous, warm day, which in Detroit means all the snow is gone, but the detritus of the winter has not yet been cleaned up or overgrown. Belle Isle is not looking good, which makes sense in a bankrupt city I suppose, but a trash-strewn shame just the same. The conservancy folks haven’t gotten busy yet, so we’ll see what we have in another month. And even on a bad day, Belle Isle has the river and a breeze and lots of birds, so — did I say breeze? Whose idea was it to make eastbound the first part of this ride, anyway?

The bike will only come when the right Craigslist bargain drops into my lap. But for now, I think another couple of padded-crotch shorts are definitely in order. Plus a lot more time in the saddle.

All in all, it was a grateful-to-be-alive sort of day. I needed it.

Saturday night was the dilemma of the season: “The Ten Commandments” on ABC or a gorge on “Homeland,” screening as part of Comcast’s free-everything weekend? I did a little of both, savoring just enough of the restored Technicolor cheese-fest and then three straight hours of watching Claire Danes do her face-crumple cry thing on Showtime. “Homeland” has grown on me, although I can see it painting itself into a corner this season, but if ANYone think they’re going to spoil the second half of the season for me in comments, I will CUT YOU. It’s better than any other Showtime series I’ve seen, by a mile. There are those who like “Dexter,” but I watched it a couple times and meh. “Nurse Jackie” had me for a time, but then meh. Dollar for dollar, I’m still an HBO girl. And I hope that soon I won’t be an anything girl, because I’ll be out riding my bike so much.

I hope everyone had a pleasant Easter. We went to Toledo for lunch with Alan’s sister, then to the museum for a couple of hours. It’s a very good museum for a city its size, thanks to the Libbeys and other responsible local tycoons. I spent a little time with “Alex,” a Chuck Close canvas.

I wish I could afford more art. If I won the lottery, my indulgences would be, in order: Travel, art, land. Not a house, land. All I really want out of a house anymore is a fireplace and a decent kitchen, and not even that’s essential. Art-wise, you go through our house, and you can see our starving-reporter days (framed posters), then less-starving (framed prints), then photos, and a painting or two. I still like everything we have on the walls, whatever that means.

Do I have bloggage before I make dinner and we watch “Game of Thrones?” Why yes, I do:

Laugh-out-loud funny is Anne Lamott, describing dating in late middle age, something I hope I never, ever have to do:

…91 percent of men snore loudly – badly, like very sick bears. I would say that CPAP machines are the greatest advance in marital joy since the vibrator. It transforms an experience similar to sleeping next to a dying silverback gorilla into sleeping next to an aquarium.

…Yet union with a partner — someone with whom to wake, whom you love, and talk with on and off all day, and sit with at dinner, and watch TV and movies, read together in bed, do hard tasks together, and to be loved by. That sounds really lovely.

Who is killing the prosecutors of Kaufman County, Texas? (Texas has a Kaufman County? Who knew?)

In Detroit, “garden supply centers,” particular those with “hydroponic” on the sign, is a nudge-wink that means “medical marijuana will be in your future sooner than you think.” Apparently this is the same elsewhere, too, although for one couple, it just meant fresh vegetables year-round. To the police’s embarrassment.

Monday awaits! Enjoy your week, y’all.