Dammit, I always miss the big anniversaries. First I missed June 3 and a chance to blog about “Ode to Billy Jo,” and now this: The 40th anniversary of the Cleveland Indians’ 10-cent beer night fiasco was Wednesday.

Fortunately, Michael Heaton remembered — he’d better — and brings us a Q-and-A with Dan Coughlin, a Plain Dealer sportswriter who covered it in 1974:

Q. When did it turn from silly to nasty?

A. Late in the game fans started throwing cherry bombs on top of the Rangers’ dugout. That’s when things got menacing. A fan ran out and grabbed Ranger player Jeff Burroughs’ hat. Burroughs went to kick the kid and fell. From the dugout Billy Martin thought his player had been attacked. That’s when the whole Ranger team charged the field with bats. The Indians even defended the Rangers as a form of professional courtesy. The game was called then because fans had stolen all three bases. The game couldn’t continue.

Alcohol and drunkenness is not inherently funny, but every time I read about this dark day, I crack up. Fans literally stole the bases. A woman ran onto the field and flashed her breasts, and a father-son team did a double moon, then slid into second base. That’s funny.

I read a deeper dive on this a few years ago, from the bloggers at Lawyers, Guns & Money, which provides some historic context:

The 1960s and 1970s were an awful time for northern Ohio, as the departure of heavy industry and the frenzied flight of white residents to the suburbs helped cut the city’s population nearly in half from its post-World War II high of 900,000. By 1974, Cleveland was five years past the infamous Cuyahoga River chemical fire and four years from declaring bankruptcy. For those who were able to struggle out of bed on June 4, the opportunity to drown in cheap alcohol must have seemed like an instance of divine intervention.

I’m a little wary of throwing the Grand Sweep of History into these things, but they’re right about the preceding years not being kind to the region. The detail about the Kent State shootings in 1970 that only locals remember was the wildcat Teamsters strike that the Ohio National Guard had only recently been called off of. It was a nasty one, with striking truckers dropping heavy objects onto Guard convoys from highway overpasses. From that exhausting duty, the troops were called out to police student demonstrations at Kent. So: Deindustrialization, white flight, urban decay, the national shame of a student slaughter. To this, just add beer; what could possibly go wrong?

Not funny, I know.

Even less funny: A beer in today’s MLB facility will cost you about $8.

And I should also add that despite today’s headline, I like Cleveland very much. I always have a good time there.

OK, so: I must rush today and crash a deadline on the book project, but I have one thing I want you to look at, completely without comment from moi. The photo is set for Public on Facebook, so I’m hoping you can all click through to see three Michigan legislators showing how well they understand women.

A great weekend to all, and I’ll be less-crushed on the other side.

I think I mentioned a few times that I received a Misfit Shine for Christmas — it’s a “wearable,” the latest thing for fitness/health nerds. You put it somewhere on your body, and it tracks your activity level. It sounds simultaneously Orwellian and narcissistic, but I have to say, it got me through the winter and reminded me many times that it wouldn’t hurt to take the stairs. Of a thousand little modifications is a 10-pound weight loss made.

Of course, such a silly-sounding item does have its detractors. I’ll admit it’s silly, but it’s my kind of silly. I need an extra boot in the ass. The longer I live, the more I think the most important lesson is: Whatever works, works. Don’t ask too many questions if it’s working.

But. I’ve learned the Shine can be gamed. Wear it on different parts of your body, and it responds differently. If I tuck it into my bra, I get mad points — it interprets normal jiggling as the exertion of a sprinter. If I wear it on my wrist, it’s much more realistic. On a necklace sort of splits the difference.

All of which makes me wonder what might be coming, now that Apple’s unveiled Healthkit, a health-statistics tracking system that sounds positively Big Brother, except that it could conceivably also save your life.

From the advance look, it appears to do everything but stick a thermometer up your ass, and keeps track not only of the stuff it can read from a wearable — your pulse, temperature and the like — but also recent test results. (Your doctors will upload to the app. Theoretically, anyway.)

It’s simultaneously sort of cool and, frankly, a little frightening. This “cloud” we’re all trusting — what is it, really? Sort of like Jesus’ dad’s house — a place with many mansions, where our only hope is to have a health profile so boring and ordinary no one wants to tinker with it.

On the other hand, say you’re wearing an iWatch or whatever, and it detects a troublesome heart rhythm in your pulse hours before it drops you like a rock? It might be worth the invasion of your pulse-rate privacy, right?

Or it might just be a way to make sure that all your records are with the patient they’re supposed to follow. I doubt they are now.

So. A steamy day downtown today. I took a couple of walks and felt like I’d been misted with canola oil and grime. Summer is here. The children’s sandbox has been opened at Campus Martius Park:

Enjoy it, kids. The real world is nothing like this, except when it is.

So tired, I might die. Talk tomorrow?

I’ve lost a bit of weight. Not much — I still have 12 pounds to go before the CDC no longer considers me overweight — but enough that my clothes don’t fit right anymore. As much fun as it is to be able to insert your fist between your stomach and waistband, it’s equally a pain to have to keep hitching your pants up. So I’ve been rewarding myself with a little shopping. The closeout place I like for cheap workout gear and this ‘n’ that has been throwing one of these into their delivery boxes:

Speaking of losing weight. Let’s see if we can count all the silliness just on the front of the label. These are “dark chocolate covered real fruit juice pieces.” Please explain how juice, a liquid, can come in a “piece.” Then there’s the mysterious açai berry, which I’ve been seeing in my junk mail for a couple years now — apparently it’s a superfood, or a weight-loss aid, or something. But there’s blueberry in there, too; I have to assume it’s juice, so… this is a mixture of acai and blueberry juice, somehow pieced out and covered with dark chocolate. It’s a “natural source of flavanol antioxidants.” What is this stuff, anyway? It’s health-food candy. It’s not a Snickers bar, it has antioxidants! Antioxidants go in pursuit of free radicals in your body, which everybody knows are rilly, rilly bad. So eat the candy. Guilt-free.

It was tasty, I’ll give it that. Sixty-five calories.

Getting back to the CDC and its body-mass index, which has been criticized for being stupid and inaccurate: I’m going to keep trying to lose, but entirely without any pressure or expectation; the BMI is just a guideline. After years of being nauseated by my thighs (but not enough to lose my appetite), I’ve decided to accept them. I’ve said before that the truth of being female in this culture is, the body you hate today will be the one you wish you still had tomorrow, and I’m going to appreciate mine while it still works and is still relatively pain-free. Strength, flexibility, balance, fun — if it hits on at least three of those cylinders most of the time, I’m going to call it a good day.

Yoga helps with all of this, which may explain its popularity. But for someone like me and, maybe, you — those of us whose heads tend to go buzz buzz buzz all the livelong day — it provides a solid hour in which the sole command is: Pay attention. I have a couple of good teachers at the moment, who are gentle and kind and walk that careful yoga line between too little and too much woo-woo. The other day I was sitting in the deepest twist I could muster, concentrating on breathing and back muscles, and reflected that most of us pay attention to our stomachs and genitals and not much else. I’m willing to believe that breathing deeply in this twist somehow makes my internal organs happy. How can thousands of years of flexible little Indian dudes be entirely wrong?

I can’t get on the antioxidants bandwagon, but I will eat their candy when it comes along.

Sorry to be boring.

A little bloggage:

We’ve discussed the wedding-industrial complex here many times, but I thought this blog post from Esquire.com made an important point: As a proportion of wealth, the typical American wedding is far more expensive than the Kanye/Kardashian affair in Florence over the weekend. And then there’s this part:

The culture that demands a big wedding hurts the poor worst of all. In 2005’s “Promises I Can Keep: Why Poor Women Put Motherhood Before Marriage,” Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas explained why even women who didn’t have much money wanted a lavish wedding. “Having the wherewithal to throw a ‘big’ wedding is a vivid display that the couple has achieved enough financial security to do more than live from paycheck to paycheck, a stressful situation that most believe leads almost inevitably to divorce. Hosting a “proper” wedding is a sign that the couple only plans to do it once, “given the obvious financial sacrifice.” This is the equivalent, financially, of cutting of your arm to demonstrate how strong you are. The needs of a big wedding also leads to poor people marrying later and less often than rich people, which brings with it a host of negative socioeconomic consequences.

Yup.

This man is a hero:

The father of a young man gunned down Friday during the rampage in Santa Barbara said he is asking members of Congress to stop calling him to offer condolences but nothing more for the death of his only child, Christopher Michaels-Martinez.

“I don’t care about your sympathy. I don’t give a s— that you feel sorry for me,” Richard Martinez said during an extensive interview, his face flushed as tears rolled down his face. “Get to work and do something. I’ll tell the president the same thing if he calls me. Getting a call from a politician doesn’t impress me.”

If a few more people said that to a few more members of Congress, daily, things might change in Washington. Maybe.

Let’s go out on a bitter laugh; the Onion nails it with just the headline: ‘No Way To Prevent This,’ Says Only Nation Where This Regularly Happens

Sometime when I was away these past, what? Thirty years? My hometown’s nickname became “C-bus.” Yep, it’s a thing.

I don’t understand it. When I was writing my return address on letters and bill payments all those years ago, I went for “Cols., OH.” When I referred to the city to my out-of-town friends, I’d sometimes call it Cowtown, which was the trendy, ironic preference of the time. But ultimately, it’s only three slurry syllables, and C-bus is silly.

Detroit has a million nicknames, though, and it only has two syllables. But Columbus always suffered from what one of my editors called State Capital Syndrome, that being the bland, centrally located city that was a compromise between the two or three brawnier cities in the same state. Think Harrisburg, Lansing, etc. But in the 21st century, the brawny have been laid low and the nerd cities are in their ascendancy. And so Columbus, white-collar city of state government, higher education, insurance and science think tanks, gets its own hipster diminutive. C-bus.

I’m sort of glad I don’t live there anymore. I couldn’t say that with a straight face.

One final note: When I was there, the lost, economically exiled children of Youngstown would hold a vast party in C-bus, called Y-town is My Town. Speaking of industrial brawn being laid low.

So a quick skip to the bloggage:

Dinesh D’Souza, it couldn’t have happened to a nicer guy.

If it’s spring, it’s time for falcon cams. I went looking for some last night and it looks like Fort Wayne’s is up and running. So is Lansing.

When I think back on all the crap I learned in high school, it’s a wonder I can think at all. Or anyone else.

Bedtime. Have a good hump day.

I cannot tell a lie. I set aside a little chunk of time to blog today, and things went awry. Not in the usual sense of awry, but rather, because I started reading this amazing Los Angeles Times story about the very strange marriage of Donald and Shelly Sterling. I haven’t said much of anything about Sterling, because what’s the point? It’s just a sideshow made for social media and the paint-by-numbers columnists who come in their wake. Racism, it turns out, is bad. Duh.

But, while it’s perfectly obvious that Sterling is a horrible person, and we should expect nothing less from him, it’s less perfectly obvious just how weird his personal life is. Really, I couldn’t tear my eyes away:

Donald Sterling openly kept a string of mistresses and in at least one case, had a woman sign a contract acknowledging that he would never leave his wife and giving up the right to sue for palimony, according to court filings and testimony.

Sterling “is happily married, has a family and has no intention of engaging in any activity inconsistent with his domestic relationship,” read a “friendship agreement” signed by Alexandra Castro in 1999.

Shelly Sterling was well aware of her husband’s affairs, Castro wrote in court papers. On one of their first dates, she and Sterling dined with Shelly in the couple’s Malibu mansion and then went as a trio to a movie where Donald held his mistress’ hand, according to Castro.

…Castro signed five separate agreements saying that she understood Sterling was happily married and that any disputes between them would be resolved in private arbitration, court filings show.

In 2002, Castro ended the relationship, in part, she wrote in court filings, because he reneged on a promise to have a child with her. Sterling asked her to come back, according to court papers, and when she refused, he sued, demanding the return of a four-bedroom million-dollar home in Beverly Hills.

And so on. None of this matters a whit in the grand scheme of things, but it’s always interesting to see how billionaires live their lives. (Any way they want, but to a degree most of us wouldn’t even begin to recognize.)

Anyway, you should read it. If you don’t have time, read the Slate summation.

And if you’re not into that, just swing by Tom & Lorenzo and see what they have to say about the Met Gala dresses. Lure: It’s the first break in their infatuation with Lupita Nyong’o.

And we can all come back after hump day.

If Nance is in the kitchen making deviled eggs, cucumber sandwiches and chocolate cream pie, it can only mean one thing:

She is invited to a “Mad Men” viewing party, and needs period snacks to bring to the potluck. But surely deviled eggs are outdated by now in the series, right? We’re into 1969, Megan’s making fondue, and deviled eggs and WASPy little sandwiches are too Betty-in-season-two. However? I don’t care. Deviled eggs are tasty, so deviled eggs it is.

But I put in extra dijon, a mustard that didn’t exist even in sophisticated Megan Draper’s refrigerator, I’d wager. Gotta update.

I am looking forward to this season, but I am not optimistic. I want the holy-shit verve of season 5, not the bourbon-soaked ennui of 1968. If this is Matthew Weiner’s idea of a slow glide to the finish, I will be pissed. Vince Gilligan may have written the manual on how to go out in style with “Breaking Bad.” Weiner may not have it in him. After all, he made his own kid a minor player in this ensemble.

Soon it will be time for me to jump in the shower, so let’s bloggage it up:

This is a developing story, so I may update the link: Someone’s shooting at …elderly Jews? Why? At least they got this one alive. I guess more will be revealed.

One of my social-media connections described going out to a restaurant Saturday night and seeing a couple of mother-daughter pairs, dressed identically in skin-tight this and stiletto that. Chances are, they were headed for the Palace, to the Miley Cyrus concert. She entered on a slide shaped like a tongue and exited on a flying hot dog. And she earned thousands and thousands of dollars doing so. That’s entertainment! Mercy:

“Drive,” aided by an arsenal of lasers, was a power moment, where her vocals took center stage over production tricks, and she dropped the stunts and let her voice carry a set of covers performed at a B-stage in the back of the arena, taking on Bob Dylan (“You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go”), Lana del Rey (“Summertime Sadness”), Coldplay (“The Scientist”) and Dolly Parton (“Jolene”). She returned to the main stage for “23,” the one song of the night that felt expendable. But she was soon on to her killer encore, which packed “We Can’t Stop,” “Wrecking Ball” and “Party in the USA” – complete with dancing versions of Mount Rushmore, the Liberty Bell, the Statue of Liberty, Abraham Lincoln, Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan — back-to-back-to-back.

Speaking of “Mad Men,” I think Andy Greenwald gets it right.

And another action-packed week begins.

Something I learned today: “…the rear end is a repository for lactic acid buildup from all kinds of leg injuries.”

I had no idea. You never know what reading a lengthy, deep-dive story about a skeevy sex abuser of teens will turn up. It’s about a Mr. Clean Marine super-Christian ex-baseball player from West Michigan, Chad Curtis, who ended up — I know you will be as astonished by this as I was — to be a guy who basically wanted to paw teenage girls, and did, quite successfully. The fact nugget about lactic acid in the buttocks was offered at his trial as justification for why he had to knead the rumps of the girls he was doing “sports massage” on.

It’s a pretty icky story. I fear for women, even teenage girls, who will lie under the hands of a man who is clearly assaulting them and say nothing, because he’s such a good Christian, this can’t possibly be wrong. What are we failing to teach them? Or is this just the dark side of being female, with our self-effacement and pleasing others and other essential life skills? And of course there is this:

He asks if I’m familiar with the show Pretty Little Liars. He says he prays daily for his teenage accusers, all of whom had similar athletic builds and All-American good looks. He says all he was doing in that locked, windowless, dungeon-like training room was helping those girls recover from sports injuries. He says he took the same all-out approach to treating sports injuries as he did to playing baseball — “whether it was running into an outfield wall or breaking up a double play.”

As for why the girls thought otherwise, and accused him of touching their rear ends, breasts and, in one case, genitals, he doesn’t want to speculate: “I’ve been really discouraged by how often and how wrong people have assumed my motivations, so I’ll extend them that same courtesy,” he says.

He doesn’t mention that not a single boy testified to having gone down to the trainer’s room for similar treatment.

Yeesh.

Let’s skip through that ordeal, shall we? Did we all have a pleasant Tuesday? I did. There was work, and a dog walk, and kale for lunch, and two helpings of beans. I believe I will regret the second one. Swam most of a mile, and my “most” I mean in five more minutes I’d have broken that tape. Yay me. I read this, which is quite stirring and sobering in equal measure.

I spent the evening with Tom & Lorenzo. They’re so right about the Cambridges, especially Cathy’s silly hat (but fab coat). Lena Dunham, do you even own a comb? And Nicole Kidman, what are you doing with my dress? Box it up and send it to ME. Also, I wish Leslie Mann would just go away. Stop trying to make Leslie Mann happen, Judd Apatow! She’s not funny and looks like a stringy old chicken. Surely the Hollywood Wives Full Employment Act can find her a position where she isn’t actually in the movies.

Excuse me, but I spent the day looking at data. I need to spend the evening looking at frocks.

I don’t think it’s any secret that most people who write for a living eventually want to write books. At least one, anyway. There’s something about that ISDN ISBN number that says: Ah, immortality.

But alas, it seems your best shot at author-hood these days is to be a troll. From Amy Chua to the Princeton Mom, the path to success is: Needle the shit out of people. Chua:

The “triple package” is touted as the combination of magic ingredients that enable certain ethnic groups to achieve extraordinary success in modern America. Chua and Rubenfeld identify three key qualities: a superiority complex, a sense of insecurity and “impulse control”.

It should not surprise you to learn that both Chua and her husband, who is Jewish, both come from certain ethnic groups that achieve extraordinary success in modern America. They just want to help! As to the Princeton Mom, aka Susan Patton, well, she’s a real piece of work:

“Marry Smart” (which Patton plans to follow with Parent Smart and Work Smart) advocates starting the husband-search during the college years. Its advice ranges from practical (“plan for your personal happiness with the same commitment and dedication that you plan for your professional success”) to old-fashioned (“it’s the lonely cow that gives away free milk”) to charmingly kooky (an ode to her “lifelong imaginary friend” Caroline Kennedy) to shockingly offensive (a chapter entitled “Birds of a Feather” denounces interracial and interfaith relationships). She also questions the legitimacy of date rape. “‘Date rape’ is like ‘politically correct,’” Patton tells me, as she holds out a bone for Lucille. “Either something is correct or it isn’t. Saying something is ‘politically correct’ is like saying you ‘almost won.’ You ‘almost won’? That means you lost.”

What helpful advice for young women. What a penetrating, forward-thinking insight for a rapidly diversifying culture. What crap.

Oh, but why start the weekend off on a sour note? My workplace officially moves to the D today, it’s Pi Day, and there’s no reason not to spend some time thinking about, oh, the missing Malaysian 777, for instance, which now could be en route to Mars, for all the rest of us know.

The search for a missing Malaysian jetliner with 239 people on board could expand west into the Indian Ocean based on information that the plane may have flown for four more hours after it dropped from radar, U.S. officials said Thursday.

A senior American official said the information came from a data stream sent directly by engines aboard Malaysia Airlines Flight 370. If the two engines on the Boeing 777 functioned for up to four additional hours, that could strengthen concern that a rogue pilot or hijacker took control of the plane early Saturday over the Gulf of Thailand.

The sea is so, so big. Who knows where the thing is?

As to the Ban Bossy movement, I have nothing profound to say, only that any writer who voluntarily gives up standard language ought to get their card pulled. What a waste of time. Maybe that’s Sheryl Sandberg’s next book.

Finally, I bid you all a great weekend. I think I will…pine for spring.

It’s difficult to write about not being beautiful. It’s so easy to sound envious. Or self-pitying. People want to leap to your defense: Yes, you are! You’re a beautiful person! That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking physical beauty, the kind that gets you voted Hot rather than Not, the mathematic formulas that make up the perfect proportions of your body parts. I’m not talking about making the best of what you’ve got. I’m talking gorgeousness that comes from being kissed by the angels.

I’ve probably told this story before: Sometime in maybe week three of the Princess Diana Worldwide Mourning Tour, I wrote a column suggesting maybe, just maybe, the world had gone a little nuts and it might be a good time to step back and ask ourselves what, exactly, we were so upset about. A reader responded in a letter: “I wonder if you wrote that because you are envious of the attention Princess Diana is getting, because you are so plain.” This is what people think un-beauty is worth: That it makes you envy the dead. The beautiful dead, anyway.

Another story I’ve probably told before: Once, many years ago, I attended a horse show with a friend at the time, one blessed with the whole package — tall, slim, lovely,  great eyes. The show was at a hunt club in Snootyville, and I was happily surprised to find people were anything but. It was a gray, chilly, drizzly day, and we were watching one class at ringside, next to a large pickup truck parked at the rail. The door opened. “Would you ladies like a warmer seat?” the man inside said, inviting us in. My friend took the front seat and I slid into the back. It was a minute before I realized the man behind the wheel, now paying a great deal of attention to my friend, was judging the class. In the middle of doing a job he was being paid for, he’d taken the time to offer aid to the leggy beauty out in the rain. Her, and her less-attractive friend.

It was like that all day — merchants gave us close, helpful attention in the sales tents, the waiter at the restaurant where we ate lunch performed outstanding service with a smile. It took hours before I realized Snootyville was so welcoming not because we were wrong about the place, but because one of us had the sort of face and body that just makes people…nicer.

Over the years, I’ve seen great-looking women get extra everything — attention, praise, career advancement, and as to this last, I stand firm. I’ve seen it happen so many times I simply won’t argue it anymore. It happens, and it happens a lot.

If Princess Diana had led the exact same life she did, but looked like Princess Anne, would the world have collapsed in mourning her death? Would Sarah Palin be known outside Alaska if her looks hadn’t bewitched Bill Kristol? Do we even have to ask these questions?

Being born beautiful is like being born with a great deal of money. Like money, beauty comes with its own problems, but they’re problems anyone with the opposite set of problems would trade for. A gorgeous woman may complain that she never really knows if a man likes her for her, or for her face and body. The next time someone says this, suggest she go to a plastic surgeon and have some lumps of fat added to her thighs, or a bump to her nose, or maybe she could just shave her head or put on 35 pounds. Ha ha! Will never happen. You probably couldn’t even find a doctor who’d do such a thing.

Which brings me to Kim Novak, again. As much as I liked Farran Smith Nehme’s excellent take on the pathetic sight of Novak, now 81, showing up at the Oscars with her wrecked face, a tiny part of me was not kind. Poor pretty lady isn’t pretty anymore and can’t stand it, boo fucking hoo. If you’re invited to the Oscars at 81, you show up in a nice dress and you read from the cards, because if you can’t get over yourself by 81, what’s the use of anything?

But then I read Laura Lippman’s equally excellent take on Novak, on faces of both genders, on the way we see and don’t see ourselves.

I am generally unhappy with all photographs of myself these days. I look older, fatter, messier than I am in my head. When I pick up my iPad or iPhone, the reflection I see in those devices makes me shudder.

…Yes, beauty isn’t exactly my stock in trade and I am only a semi-public person. I am ridiculous. So all I could think was, God love you, Kim Novak. We criticize women for aging. We criticize women for not aging. We criticize women’s bodies. We criticize women for bad plastic surgery.

You know who doesn’t get criticized? People who look great and pretend they’ve never had surgery. Come on, someone must be getting terrific results or no one would do this. I wish that every person who walks a red carpet was annotated or wore a label, detailing exactly how much work they’ve had done. Not to shame them, quite the opposite. We need to stop lying about how people age. We need to own our Botox, our fillers, our nose jobs, our liposuction. Remember that crazy alibi in Legally Blonde, when the fitness guru accused of murder was getting liposuction and would rather go to jail than admit it? That happens in real life. Not the alibi, but the lipo.

I’m with Laura that we should probably all ease up on ourselves, starting with Kim Novak. But I’d like to reserve the right to be a little judgey about those of you were were kissed by the angels. I’d like you to come out and say, Yep, I’m very lucky, and I got that promotion because I batted my baby blues at my boss and he liked the shape of my ass. You probably deserved that job. Sorry-not-sorry. The friend who went with me to the horse show? She married her way richer boss. I found her on Facebook a while ago, a little wrinkled, a touch of gray, but with the same killer cheekbones. Lucky.

So, some bloggage:

What’s it like to walk across eight miles of Lake Michigan ice to North Manitou Island? It’s like this. Great photos.

What I said the other day about appreciating fashion as art? One aspect is how it relates to the times in which it is made. A good piece on the fashions of the 1930s.

Finally, Charles Pierce on Sarah Palin. A gas.

A long entry for what promises to be a long week. Expect scantiness later. We shall see, but onward we go.

For some reason I found myself reading the cover story in the current issue of Rolling Stone, about Justin Bieber. I managed to avoid Bieber more or less entirely; he either fell just outside of Kate’s teen-idol sweet spot, or she never had one at all. (I suspect the latter; smart girl.)

Anyway, he’s really terra incognita, so I read nearly all of this stupid story (no link; firewall), pegged to his recent screwups. And it was sort of fascinating, with many rich details of what you might call Graceland Life, that zone that rich entertainers and sports stars can afford to live in, surrounded by yes-men and layers of lawyers, managers, fixers and others who make unpleasantness go away. I learned that Bieber carried $75,000 in small bills, packed in two duffel bags — carried by underlings — to distribute to strippers’ G-strings at a Miami club. A photo array in the article featured a devastating headline: “The Wolf of Sesame Street.”

And I learned that many trace this arrested infant’s current spiral to the re-entry of his once-estranged father into his life. Pa Bieber, a brawler, recovering addict and all-around swell guy, has taken his place in the charmed circle.

And that reminded me of something I read over the weekend, a book excerpt about Lance Armstrong. A chunk of it concerned J.T. Neal, Armstrong’s first real mentor, who served as guess-what to him in the early days of his career:

Neal’s first impression was that the kid’s ego exceeded his talent. Armstrong was brash and ill-mannered, in desperate need of refinement. But the more he learned of Armstrong’s home life, the sorrier Neal began to feel for him. He was a boy without a reliable father. Linda Armstrong wrote in her 2005 autobiography that she was pleased that her son had found a responsible male role model, and that Neal had lent a sympathetic ear to her while she dealt with the rocky transition between marriages.

Neal soon recognized that Armstrong’s insecurities and anger were products of his broken family: He felt abandoned by his biological father and mistreated by his adoptive one.

Neal, ironically, was diagnosed with cancer around the same time Armstrong was. But he didn’t survive. And that reminded me of Pete Dexter’s several stories about Cus D’Amato, the boxing trainer, who made Mike Tyson into a profoundly dangerous heavyweight fighter, and then died, leaving the 19-year-old bereft and at the top of a very fast ride straight down. A father figure who left before the job was done.

Fathers. They’re so important. I bet Jeff could write a few million words about that one.

Yesterday we were talking a bit about music, yes? Their albums — especially “Feats Don’t Fail Me Now” — were part of the soundtrack of the ’70s, but I haven’t given Little Feat much thought, so I read this Slate piece on the band with some interest. I don’t know if I’m down with the first sentence; “the most underrated band of the ’70s,” really? But what the hell, it’s just pop music.

I wasn’t entirely convinced, but there were some good memories in those video links. “Willin’,” I told someone the other day, is the trucker song America was too stupid, and too busy making “Convoy” a smash hit, to appreciate.

And while it may seem the long way around, I followed a link in the piece to a Rolling Stone reader poll on the best live albums of all time. Just to see what the other nine were. And when I saw that “Frampton Comes Alive” was included by not the J. Geils Band’s “Full House,” well, that’s when I knew what a Rolling Stone reader poll is worth: NOTHING.

Some people I knew in Indiana would have an annual party in honor of Lloyd Lowell George, Little Feat’s founder, who died young. While Peter Frampton yet lives. I ask you.

And now we come to the end of the week. I’m headed out tonight to see a friend and former student play in his new band at the Lager House, one of those Detroit institutions. The band is called Clevinger, named for the character in “Catch-22.” It’s been so long since I’ve read the book I can’t remember, so I asked Wikipedia to tell me about Clevinger:

“A highly principled, highly educated man who acts as Yossarian’s foil within the story. His optimistic view of the world causes Yossarian to consider him to be a ‘dope,’ and he and Yossarian each believe the other is crazy.”

One piece of bloggage: If the Detroit Tigers can replace an entire goddamn baseball field’s worth of grass in the depths of this winter, why can’t we send a manned mission to Mars? Surely it can’t be that hard.