Neil Steinberg had a great blog yesterday, about his intention to see the entire Ring cycle at Chicago’s Lyric Opera in 2020. For you non-opera fans, this is the four-part, 15-hour magnum opus of Richard Wagner’s “The Ring of the Niebelung,” the most operatic opera of all. Staging it is the Mt. Everest of opera, and watching it is pretty much the same. In Chicago…

The first opera in the cycle, “Das Rheingold,” will be staged in the 2016/17 season, with the other three, “Die Walkure,” “Siegried” and “Gotterdammerung” performed in each subsequent season, with the whole megillah, as Wagner definitely would not say, being performed — three complete Ring Cycles — in April, 2020.

Mark your calendars.

What I liked about it, though, were his observations on Big Works, and why they’re still important:

…like a mountain, a massive work calls to you. Not by its pure massivity, mind you. There are plenty of works that are long, multi-part 19th century romance novels and such, that have fallen into deserved obscurity.

But certain long works endure into our Twittery time, not because they’re big, but because they’re also good. Very good, wonderful, something that becomes clear when you gird your loins and finally sit down and read them. If they weren’t, they’d be forgotten. People don’t hold onto these things because they should, but because they have to. War and Peace is the template for every Barbara Cartland novel that followed. It isn’t tedious — well, much of it isn’t — but filled with love and conversation, with blood and battle, with war and, umm, peace. It’s a great book. That sounds obvious, but so many years of it being a “great book” sometimes obscure that. Tolstoy knew his stuff.

I need to read a great work this summer. So much depends on translation, though, and how do you choose the right one? I started “Dr. Zhivago” when I found a copy at a vacation house we rented years ago, but absolutely couldn’t penetrate it. Just show me one hint of Julie Christie and Omar Sharif, I kept thinking. Nothing doing.

Maybe that’s part of the problem. So many great books have been adapted into something else, and necessarily sliced down to a shadow of their original selves. We need to approach them as something completely new. On the other hand, Steinberg does a nice job explaining why the Ring is pretty much the single source for all opera jokes in pop culture; it is where the fat lady sang, after all.

OK, a quick cut to the bloggage, because this has been one long icy-lumpy-fuck week:

Columbusites! Remember Larry’s bar on High Street? Here’s a lot of old pictures from the place. I wasn’t a regular, but I loved that place.

I just found this, but it MUST BE SHARED. Of course Wendy’s day-care center posts daily photos; how else would her humans get through a day without her? (This is from Monday, obvs.)

Finally, can the Marlise Munoz case in Texas get any worse? Hard to imagine. How awful.

Let’s all have a good weekend.

If I get through the North American International Auto Show Charity Preview tonight, aka the Car Prom, it will be a damn miracle. Things just aren’t going my way. For weeks, I’ve been wondering if my poor knees can stand three hours in high heels, and to be sure, the heels I have don’t really work with my dress, but fuck it, these are about the most comfortable heels I can find (they have cork soles), and some things have to give when you’ve recently lost an ACL.

But now it’s worse, as today, I was fetching one from the closet for a final try-on, and what happened? I dropped it on my foot. The heel landed with the feeling of a scimitar to my third toe, just blinding pain. Hours later, it’s a vivid shade of purple and it hurts to walk. Oh, well — pain is how ladies roll at formal events.

It’s been snowing, anyway. I may well schlep to the event in my L.L. Bean boots with my shoes in a bag. We’re already going on the People Mover; you can call me the Spirit of Detroit.

Ouch.

OK, I have to make this short, because the end of the week is nigh and, well, see above. I see Neil Steinberg is no fan of the new Chicago Cubs mascot, Clark the Cub. It puts me in mind of when the Fort Wayne Wizards moved to a new stadium, and rebranded as the Tin Caps, the historical reference for which can be found via Wikipedia. I got an email from a lurker on this blog, asking if I could come up with an alternative team name on very short notice. I suggested “the Rivermen,” which I’m still sort of fond of. But the Tin Caps is what it was, and what it has stayed. Go with God, Tin Caps.

A not-safe-for-work photo array, but hugely beautiful — a lovely yoga practitioner, doing so in stark nakedness. It’s one of those photo essays that’s so beautiful it transcends sex; I found myself mostly examining her musculature. I’m sure you guys will be examining something else, but be forewarned. Not for the office.

Finally, I know some of you remember Marcia, who used to comment here a couple of years ago. You might not know that her family hit a rough patch for a while, culminating in the death of her nephew, just weeks before his graduation from Duke law school. There’s a final chapter to the story, and it’s a good read. Drink it in.

A good weekend, all!

Boy, do I feel awful tonight. Nothing specific, just a lack of sleep woven with intermittent lower-abdominal pain stitched to the deep ache in my knee and sprinkled with the onset of cold weather overnight. Supposed to get down to the 20s. It snowed earlier. It was a thoroughly Monday sort of Monday.

Tomorrow, however, there will be a new Martin Cruz Smith novel on my iPad. I learned today it was not an easy book for him to write:

Author of the 1981 blockbuster “Gorky Park” and many acclaimed books since, Mr. Smith writes about people who uncover and keep secrets. But for 18 years, he has had a secret of his own.

In 1995, he received a diagnosis of Parkinson’s disease. But he kept it hidden, not only from the public, but from his publisher and editors.

…Ingenuity, gumption, and others’ generosity have allowed him to keep working. “Tatiana,” whose title character is a journalist who writes despite life-threatening dangers, was produced in an especially unusual way, which he also hid from his publisher and editor. In a room with a blue floor and a window glazed with prehistoric creatures, Mr. Smith perched on a wooden stool and spun out words while his wife, Emily, known as Em, typed them into the computer, gave feedback, and made his on-the-spot changes.

Sort of puts one’s own abdominal pain in perspective, doesn’t it? Probably bad clams.

So, with that? I think I’m going to bed. I leave you with Tom & Lorenzo, and yet another ghastly Miley Cyrus outfit. Let’s see how Tuesday goes.

I remember when my nephew hit puberty, and stopped smelling like a person and started smelling like a French whorehouse. Or whatever your preferred euphemism is for “too much cologne.”

I don’t know what it is with adolescent boys and their mustard gas-intensity fragrances. It must be some combination of anxiety over one’s rapidly changing body and — I don’t know what. But my nephew was hardly the only one who seemingly bathed in the stuff. The Axe Body Spray cartel could give any women’s personal-care product a run for its money.

So I immediately dived into Dahlia Lithwick’s hilarious piece about what happened when she went a solid week, wearing Axe and Axe-y products. She’s such a good writer; why confine her to the Supreme Court? Behold:

What happens when a fortysomething women walks around smelling like a 13-year-old boy for a week? Mostly nothing. As it turns out, ours is a culture in which, as a general principle, people don’t really feel comfortable commenting on your scent, even when it is so powerful as to be causing climate change. So even if you apply Axe before a funeral—as I did—nobody is going to grab you by the arm and ask you to please leave. I wore a heavy coating of it to a dinner party one night. Eliciting no response, even when I started helpfully jamming my neck into the other guests’ noses, I did learn from several mothers that the Wall of Axe (a naturally occurring phenomenon in which eight or more teen boys reapply Axe after phys ed, then stand in the stairwell together) has become so bad at some local schools that it’s been banned altogether. Another guest described a perennial teen rite of passage—the agony of spraying Axe down your own pants for the first time.

It’s a little anticlimactic; you see the premise and you expect to hear stories of rooms emptying and cats fainting, and it’s not quite that lively. But honestly, my hat is off to anyone who can olfactorily bond with a teenage boy like that.

I had a few boyfriends who were fond of male fragrance. I grew to the point where I would rather smell regular old b.o. and farts than CK1.

Tired, I am. I’m always tired at this point of the day. How about a dog picture? Wendy wants to be a meerkat for Halloween:

Something outside was very interesting.

Here’s Neil Steinberg, laying out a few of his least-favorite companies:

Maybe there is something about humans that just needs to hate something, and since I can’t find it in my heart to despise any particular group of people based on race, religion or nationality, I express that natural tendency to loathe by really getting my back into hating certain companies and their products, and not always rationally either.

It starts with Caribou. It goes on.

Wednesday. Ohhh-kay. I’m going to bed.

Because I have a very modest public profile as a writer, I get a lot of social-media connection requests from people I don’t actually know. Over time, I’ve developed a general rule: I accept nearly all friend requests on Facebook, followers on Twitter, whatever the hell they call it on Google Plus. And then I wait, and see what happens — what people post, how they use the platform in general, whether they feel the need to have a screaming bald eagle as a profile picture. If I like what I see, or feel neutral about it, I generally keep them around. If I don’t, I either bump them down several notches on the ladder, “hide” or just unfriend them.

They have to be pretty bad to be unfriended, but I was in a tetchy mood the other day, and unfriended someone I probably should have kept around. (Mood: VERY tetchy, come to think of it.) I did it because I kept seeing baldly inaccurate political posts in my feed, and it was one of those fuckitlifestooshortforthiscrap things. This time, I actually read one post, and followed the links all the way back. Here’s how one went:

OBAMACARE WILL ALLOW GOVERNMENT AGENTS TO ENTER YOUR HOME! linked to a slightly less hysterical post saying the same thing, which linked to a HHS website, which outlined? Anyone? Yes, a visiting-nurse service for patients who have difficulty traveling to a doctor — brand-new mothers, the elderly, the carless, etc. Those are the government agents. Nurses.

(I allowed one of these jackbooted thugs into my home after Kate was born. She told me I had a cute baby, and that breastfeeding would get easier.)

It seemed to crystalize something I’ve become increasingly aware of: No one reads anything anymore. And the social-media business model has this as its cornerstone. Just keep clicking, sheeple. Click, like and comment! Retweet!

Earlier this week, during the discussion of Yoffe’s rape column, attention fell on this sentence: “Researchers such as Abbey and David Lisak have explored how these men use alcohol, instead of violence, to commit their crimes.” Now, a reader with a room-temperature IQ could understand what she was saying here: That these perpetrators don’t hold a gun to a woman’s head, but keep refilling her glass. Nevertheless, this was a typical comment: “Someone needs to tell Emily Yoffe ALL rape is violent,” followed by the amen chorale. Don’t read. Forget comprehension. Just react!

Miley Cyrus, a woman who hardly speaks in Zen koans, gave an interview to Rolling Stone where she mentioned Detroit, and Detroit being as parochial as any tank town, the local media picked it up. The passage in question:

Miley’s transformation from America’s sweetheart into whatever the hell she is now kicked into high gear three years ago, when she went to Detroit to shoot a movie called LOL. “Detroit’s where I felt like I really grew up,” she says. “It was only for a summer, but that’s where I started going to clubs, where I got my first tattoo. Well, not my first tattoo, but my first without my mom’s consent. I got it on 8 Mile! I lied to the guy and told him I was 18. I got a heart on my finger and wore a Band-Aid for two months so my mom wouldn’t find out.”

Which a local TV station tacked onto a blatant traffic grab:

Miley Cyrus says she grew up in Detroit. How does that make you feel?…

Which prompted the usual responses, which ranged from “stupid bitch” to “she’s a liar.” And so a vapid pop star’s pedestrian observation on how she came of age was twisted into her somehow lying about an upbringing that’s been in every celebrity magazine in America, including Rolling Stone.

Nobody reads anything. Except you, of course. You’re reading this, and you understand it. Bless your heart.

So, bloggage:

This story cries out for satire, and maybe TBogg is up to the task, but man, just read this stuff:

James Hancock wanted to meet a woman who shared his core values. But when you’re a strict Objectivist, it can be a little tricky.

So he found a dating site catering to Ayn Rand aficionados. And he found one, and now they have…well, I guess you’d call it a marriage:

They now live with their 3-year-old daughter in North Walpole, N.H. Their dog, Frisco, is named for Francisco d’Anconia, the mining tycoon in “Atlas Shrugged.”

…Mr. Hancock says the couple’s shared Objectivist values ensure familial harmony. If their daughter doesn’t want to brush her teeth, they both agree that she has to do it. “There’s no back-and-forth or ‘well, just let her do it this one time,’ ” he says. “We know that if we don’t do this now, it’ll be worse later. So that’s logic and reason instead of just emotion and inconvenience.”

I don’t know how I missed Motivational Biden until now:

My new favorite person to see Tom & Lorenzo pick on is Allison Williams, daughter of Brian, co-star of “Girls.” She cultivates a sort of classic American/thoroughbred style that frequently comes across as boring. Or, as T-Lo put it, “She looks like a Chief of Surgery’s wife attending a hospital benefit.”

Attend the benefit of your choice this weekend, because it’s HERE.

The New York Times had a great piece on an old episode of “The Dick Van Dyke Show,” one I saw once as a child and never again. Over the years, I’d ask others if they remembered it, and I think only one did. Thank God for him, because it almost seemed I’d hallucinated it:

“Remember that episode where Rob was convinced they’d taken the wrong baby home from the hospital?” Blank stare. (Except for Lance Mannion, who watched every episode of every show ever aired, evidently.)

Well, I didn’t. “That’s My Boy??” is a classic of the civil-rights era, and — critic Neil Genzlinger points out — a milestone of racial relations in TV entertainment.

The plot: Rob is recounting the days around little Richie’s birth. He’s getting ready to take Laura and the baby home from the hospital, and the nurse delivers the wrong envelope of jewelry. No, this is Mrs. Peters’ jewelry, Laura says, remarking that it’s been happening all week: She got Mrs. Peters’ flowers, and Mrs. Peters got her rice pudding. Their names are similar, after all — Peters, Petrie. This starts Rob thinking that maybe they swapped something else, too. Something more important.

The rest of the episode is Rob staring into the bassinet, trying to find any family resemblance. Finally, he calls the Peters, who live nearby, and tells them his suspicions. They agree to stop by that night.

The doorbell rings in the middle of a squabble between Rob and Laura, who refuses to believe the baby is anything other than hers. Rob goes to the door, opens it:

“Hi! We’re Mr. and Mrs. Peters!” And they step into the room. It’s Greg Morris and another African-American actress, although then she would have been a Negro actress. The studio audience is howling with laughter. Morris can’t keep a straight face, either. I remember laughing so hard in my own living room that I almost peed. It was one of the funniest moments of TV I’ve ever seen. Here’s a two-minute clip of the big reveal.

Genzlinger:

Today TV seems to push various envelopes with a vengeance, often clumsily so, trying for shock value in a world that is increasingly hard to shock. You have to admire the bravery and the unwillingness to tolerate any barrier, whether it be the one against gay characters or characters with disabilities or unsettling subjects like rape and child abuse. But you also sometimes are left mourning the lack of subtlety and art.

Carl Reiner knew what he was doing, that’s for sure.

I started writing this with some gusto, and then my connection started flickering again, so let’s get this going:

Make a man 300 sandwiches, earn an engagement ring! Jezebel takes it apart — hilariously.

Yet another reason Kid Rock sucks: His Malibu house — of course he has a Malibu house — has a stripper pole in the living room.

Thursday already? You don’t say.

I don’t know about you, but on the day after a big awards show, I could spend hours reading Tom & Lorenzo’s take on the red-carpet outfits. Of course, the pans are the most fun, what with Zosia Mamet’s bizarre leather boobs, and Christian Hendricks’ ace putdown of Ryan Seacrest:

…she told Ryan Seacrest she picked this dress because it looked “like a Sargent painting,” which is absolutely true and the stating of such caused Seacrest to blink vapidly for a few seconds and weakly repeat “… a Sargent painting… ” because he CLEARLY had no frikkin clue what she was talking about. Anyone who can reveal Seacrest for the uncultured tool he is with one phrase is someone who deserves all the neck rolls and finger snaps in the WORLD.

(The Sargent painting in question.)

Cat Deeley’s rueful regret:

A lot of arching of the back with the arms clamped to her sides. A shame. Your instincts were telling you not to wear this, hon, but you fell in love with the sheer Bob Mackie-ness of it all, didn’t you? We can understand.

My personal best in show: Anna Gunn.

Claire Danes’ mistake:

You just barely have your nipples covered and you’re going with anchorwoman hair, clean eyes, and sensible diamond studs in your ears? Girl, no.

But if you’re just perusing the home page, the best of all is Miley Cyrus, trotting out yet another of her fun outfits, which includes black pasties, panties with suspenders, and a fishnet dress with a bunchy zipper.

Nothing says “I have no persona of my own” than freezing your face into nothing more than a logo for pictures and thinking that it makes you look interesting.

Yeah, she’s doing that tongue thing again.

I’m talking fashion because I can’t talk about “Breaking Bad” — the last few episodes are killing me. It’s simply magnificent, brave television, and you can read dozens of great TV critics pulling it apart. You don’t need me.

I’m out of gas. Enjoy the dresses.

“Low Winter Sun” just aired its third episode, and I am watching out of a sense of duty — it was shot here in Detroit, the story relocated here (from Britain, I understand), friends worked on the crews, etc. My tax dollars at work. I want it to succeed. So far? Not an unqualified success.

I do give Ernest Dickerson, who directed the first two episodes, a great deal of credit for finding the visual interest in the city. He gets the ruin thing, of course, but that’s not all he gets. The cameras have found some largely unseen (even by locals) corners, particularly down near the end of Alter Road, one of my favorite bike routes. He sees the way someone who’s been here a few times (but hasn’t been jaded to it all) sees, so I can’t complain about the look of the show or its setting.

What has bugged me are the local touches to the dialogue, all of which sound like they were gleaned from a one-sheet sent over from the Free Press features department. One character cuts down another, saying something like, “You haven’t gotten a thrill like that since you were 15 and got a blow job hand job at the Dream Cruise,” truly a laugh line, as the Dream Cruise is attended almost exclusively by older people who generally have to plan for blow jobs hand jobs, with medication.

This week, there was an exchange about coneys. Detroit has two next-door neighbor coney islands in the middle of town, American and Lafayette, and allegedly there is a great tribal thing over which one you patronize. You know me, I’m just a tourist here, but I find both equally gross, and I keep waiting for someone to point this out in the many stories I’ve read about this great dividing line. (Interestingly, I have never, not once, heard a native express a preference for one over another, although they’re always doing so in newspaper and magazine stories. Whatever.)

I keep thinking about “The Wire,” in which the city of Baltimore was, as the critics like to say, a character in the story, and the difference between it and “Low Winter Sun.” I think it comes down to David Simon and his writing staff’s deep familiarity with the place. Simon, of course, worked as a police reporter there for years, and had a long embed with the homicide squad. That’s how you get wonderful details that became plot points and other great moments in the show — the Sunday truce, the exchange between the tourists and the stoop-sitting corner kids about the Poe House, and the two cops eating crabs in an interrogation room, one scooping out the guts with his fingers and reproving the other for being too much of a pussy to eat them.

It’s the difference between really knowing a city and only being here for the scenery and tax credits.

Last week on “Low Winter Sun,” one cop tells his partner that he took a woman “across the border, to Windsor.” No one would say that here; they’d just say Windsor, or across the border. Not both. That’s forgivable, though, because most non-Detroiters don’t know where Windsor is, and judging from how often the Canadian border is even left off locator maps in major newspapers, maybe we should be glad the line wasn’t, “I took her across the Canadian border, to Windsor, Ontario. That’s a province in Canada, Frank, not exactly equivalent to a state in the U.S. More a regional thing.”

I’m going to keep watching, because the show isn’t bad. I only wish they’d hire a local to read the scripts first. (I think I’m available.)

So, speaking of local weirdness, I was amazed by this story in today’s Freep, about a longtime political fixer — sort of a professional connector — suing a judge over an unpaid bill. The fixer, a woman named Jean West, brokers appearances by candidates running for office at local churches, senior centers and neighborhood groups. This was the part that hit me:

The 77-year-old plaintiff, a retired nurse who dived into politics after helping the first black woman get elected to Detroit’s City Council, called it a first. Never in her 43 years of working on campaigns had she ever gone unpaid, she said, despite her old-school methods.

When candidates seek her services, West brokers deals with a verbal contract and a handshake, promising to get them into as many Detroit churches as possible. And when she wants to get paid — her typical fee is $350 per week — the clients meet her in her backyard or at her dining room table and pay her, usually in cash.

No invoices. No formal contracts. She gets paid.

She’s suing for $3,500. Do you think the attention she’ll draw from the IRS will be worth that much?

Via Jeff the MM, one of those great Telegraph obits, of Col. Julian Fane, deceased at 92, a war hero:

On May 28 they received a message to make a break for it and head for Dunkirk. Fane, at the head of a small group of men, managed to slip away in the darkness. He was wounded in the arm by a mortar bomb as they scrambled through hedges and over ditches, guided by the flashes of guns on the coast and the light from burning farm houses.

At 3am they hid up in a barn and grabbed some sleep. During the day, the Germans arrived and the farmer climbed up a ladder and whispered to them to stay concealed under the straw. The next night, Fane and his men crept past an enemy bicycle patrol which was fast asleep under a hedge beside a towpath.

On June 2, after covering more than 20 miles of enemy-held country, he was standing in the doorway of a small terrace house close to the beach when a bomb fell nearby. The house collapsed and he was blown into the street.

His party reached Dunkirk in time to be evacuated back to England. Fane received the first of his MCs for his part in the fighting withdrawal.

Finally, I have nothing to say about a certain Disney pop tart a few years past her sell-by date, and her activities of the past couple of days, but before you write her off entirely, ask yourself whether this girl still lives inside her somewhere, and how she might be encouraged to reassert herself.

In the meantime, I just wish she’d put her damn tongue back in her mouth.

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.

From the Who ARE These People file, a Colorado state senator with the charming name Vicki Marble puts her foot so far into her mouth that the drool from her sock could fill a 55-gallon drum.

Short version for non-clickers: At a meeting of the Economic Opportunity Poverty Reduction Task Force, the senator went off on a strange, rambling speech that managed to blame fried chicken and barbecue for African Americans’ health problems, a lack of vegetables for Mexican Americans’ (“I’ve read a study”) and towards the end, goes of on this sort of Tourette-y thing — “freedom,” “personal responsibility,” etc. I’m not usually one for these long, you-must-listen-to-the-whole-thing files, but this one sucked me in. It has the strange magnetism of a public meltdown, which I guess it was, complete with ridiculous apology:

“My comments were not meant to be disparaging to any community,” she said. “I am saddened they were taken in that regard. I take my responsibility seriously and I hope our work on this committee will offer real solutions to the health and financial challenges of our vulnerable populations.”

And in other entries in the same file, we have Scott Lively, and a typically excellent Dahlia Lithwick piece on him — exploring whether he can be prosecuted in this country for fueling the anti-gay movement in faraway Uganda:

Lively has openly bragged of his own role as the “father” of the anti-gay movement in Uganda, calling his campaign “a nuclear bomb against the ‘gay’ agenda in Uganda.” The question is whether all this constitutes mere speech or something more.

Last year Lively was named in a lawsuit brought by the organization Sexual Minorities Uganda, aka SMUG, that included three claims under the Alien Tort Statute, a law that gives “survivors of egregious human rights abuses, wherever committed, the right to sue the perpetrators in the United States.” SMUG, represented in this lawsuit by the New-York based Center for Constitutional Rights, claimed at argument in a motion to dismiss the suit last January that Lively’s actions over the course of a decade resulted in the persecution, arrest, torture, and murder of members of Uganda’s LGBT community. Federal Judge Michael Ponsor heard arguments in Lively’s motion to dismiss, and last January he seemed to suggest that he saw little activity on Lively’s part that wasn’t protected expressive behavior. But last week Ponsor tossed out the motion to dismiss, allowing the suit to go forward.

But that’s enough weight for a Friday. Here’s Coozledad’s favorite stew bird, Madonna, opening a gym overseas. The grill picture will rock you back in your seat. WITH HORROR.

Is it Friday? How can this be? How can it not be?