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.

I didn’t realize until yesterday that it was the 10th anniversary of the great midwest blackout, which I am not going to capitalize and you can’t make me. The Free Press headline writer asked where I was, and OK, I’ll bite:

I was at the pool at Veterans Memorial Park in Ann Arbor, enjoying some idle time before my Knight Wallace Fellowship commenced at the end of the month. Kate and her buddy were enjoying the water slide when suddenly the water stopped sluicing down the chute. There were a few moments of confusion, and then the lifeguards started whistling everybody out of the pool. Power was out, pool was closing. This was around 4 p.m. or so.

So we went home, just a couple blocks away. Power was out there, too. I turned on the battery-powered radio, and learned power was out in a whole lot of places. The NPR reporter’s voice was shaking; just two years after 9/11, it was plain she feared this was a terror attack, and if the terror was lacking for now, it would surely be on its way.

Alan came home, and we assessed the situation. We’d been intending to go back to Indiana in the next couple of days anyway, and with no juice for the foreseeable future, we packed up and hit the road, already low on gas. We pulled off the freeway in Jackson. No power, and hence no working gas pumps. Tried again around Marshall. Nope. On I-69 we dropped our speed to save fuel and crossed our fingers. There’s a truck stop just over the Indiana line with enough gas to fill an ocean. As it hove into view, it hove into view — we could see the lights and the warm glow of civilization.

We coasted in on fumes and filled ‘er up, then filled ourselves with Wendy’s. I reflected that Indiana is out-of-step with its neighbors on so many things, but I’d finally found something I could get behind — it’s even on a different power grid. But that time, it was one that worked.

Most people’s stories of how they weathered important events are boring, and I am no exception. Man, those Wendyburgers tasted good.

Bloggage:

So today, the same guy who did the Crisco Fist art prank pulled another — putting For Sale signs on street lights, public statues and other buildings around the downtown area. As jokes go? Pretty lame, but you can see how the media covered it dutifully. It went a little like this:

(God, I loved that movie.)

Second somebody-explain-this-guy request of the week: I don’t read sci-fi (with a few exceptions), and so know nothing about Orson Scott Card, but I thought he was a generally respected author in the genre, albeit one with a problem with gay people. Now it appears he is, instead, actually nuts. Do these crazy ideas get passed around in a newsletter or something? This is the second or third time I’ve heard the Obama’s Band of Urban Gangs theory.

Over and out. I’m thinking it’s Oberon time.

Someone is going to have to explain Elon Musk to me. I know the basics — founder of Tesla, fighter with New York Times auto writers, etc. — but beyond that, all I have to go on are a few clues. I’ve noticed he seems to be very popular with a certain sort of young libertarian male, who believes all we have to do is cut the chains that keep our young geniuses from soaring, and man, will they ever soar! Etc.

But I read this the other day, and I have to say…well, you tell me:

Tesla and SpaceX chief executive Elon Musk is announcing his plans for the “Hyperloop” Monday — a high-speed transportation system that, ideally, could take passengers between San Francisco and Los Angeles for a fraction of the cost and faster than the $68 billion high-speed rail system scheduled to begin running in 2028. Musk has said the Hyperloop, as he envisions it, could get you from San Francisco to Los Angeles in about 30 minutes, traveling at about the speed of sound.

As exciting as all of that sounds, the key word here is “ideally.” Musk described the Hyperloop at the D11 conference in May, and the outline was less than scientific.

“It’s a cross between a Concord and a rail gun and an air hockey table. If they did a threeway and had a baby somehow,” said Musk, you’d have a kicking, screaming Hyperloop.

O rly? There are other buzzwords in the piece, including my fave (“he is publishing the plans as open source”) and my other fave (he “requested ‘critical feedback’ from the general public via Twitter”). It’s all very something-something-and-then-a-miracle-happens, although I suppose there is room for people like that in the world. In the Henry Ford museum, you can walk through Buckmister Fuller’s Dymaxion house, which he envisioned as a sort of metal yurt that could be easily collapsed and transported to another site, should you want to move but not necessarily live in a different house. It was all very futuristic, except that reality intruded and the miracle never happened.

Ninety minutes from New York to Paris, why by ’76 we’ll be A-OK…

So, I needed to get out of the house for a while today, and chose to work at the library. What’s this, the American Spectator? God, it’s been years; the editorial page editor used to subscribe, and I used to read it regularly. Let’s see how this once-proud journal of the conservative movement is attracting the next generation. OK, the cover:

Yep, that’s a paean to AM radio, and that cover says so much, doesn’t it? Gathering around the console in some fantasy of the past — how old do you have to be to even get the cultural reference of a living-room radio? (My age at the absolute youngest.) How old do you have to be to give a fat rat’s ass about a radio band you only subject yourself to if you’re…well, that you never subject yourself to, because who cares?

But that was just the cover, which could be excused as a nostalgia piece. What else is in the July/August issue? This:

Those are the movie reviews, by the way. “Reminders of America’s decline.” OK, so, anything else?

And this:

Yep, that’s Ben Stein, taking his Diary column into its 4,821st year. Because the life of a Hollywood whatever-he-is is nothing but fun. Finally, Taki, also a contributor of many years, winds up and takes a swat — because that’s what he does, slaps like a little bitch — at that menace to society, Barbara Walters:

I used to read this rag and get angry. Pity is a new feeling.

Ladies and gentlemen, I give to you…

the many moods…of WENDY:

It’s so much fun to have a dog in the house again, seeing how she’s different from and the same as the last one. Having an excuse to get up and take a walk at noon, instead of reading something you’ve been putting off. Someone to talk to. Taking her to the dog park at the end of the day, where she can amuse herself for 20 minutes by throwing a crabapple in the air and catching it. She must have learned to play by herself when she was in the shelter; it’s like working out in a 4-by-8 cell, using only your own body weight.

So.

Of all the artistic regrets in my life, one of the biggest is that I never learned to appreciate opera. I don’t think the ship has sailed, but a window has closed; I’m just never going to get the art form like a lifelong fan. My sister dated a boy in high school whose family was sort of aggressively Italian, and I remember her playing “Pagliacci” in her room for a few weeks. But other than pop-culture moments here and there, the whole thing mostly escapes me.

Joe Queenan wrote one of his famously misanthropic columns a few years ago, about liking opera because it’s one place where the fans do not put up with bullshit. Ever. Think of all the times you’ve seen cowlike American audiences give standing ovations to mediocre performances, and contrast that to opera where, so Queenan said, getting booed offstage is a fairly common occurrence, especially in Europe, where they know their opera. He cited a famous case where a male lead was handed off to an understudy between acts, because the star just wasn’t making it, and the audience was in open revolt.

That’s a crowd I can identify with.

So imagine my delight and vexation to read this New York Times story — oh, how I hope you haven’t used up your 20-article quota this months yet, but what am I saying? It’s Aug. 2 — about a spectacular debacle in Bayreuth, Germany, where a radical reimagining of Wagner’s Ring cycle didn’t go over well:

When Frank Castorf, the avant-garde German director responsible for this confounding concept , took the stage with his production team, almost the entire audience, it seemed, erupted with loud, prolonged boos. It went on for nearly 10 minutes, by my watch, because Mr. Castorf, 62, who has been running the Volksbühne (People’s Theater) of Berlin since 1992, stood steadfast on stage, his arms folded stiffly, he sometimes jabbed a finger at the audience,essentially defying the crowd to keep it coming.

This “Ring” was presented as “a metaphorical story of the global quest for oil,” and the accompanying photo shows a giant Mt. Rushmore featuring Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao. I’ve never seen the Ring cycle, or even a little bit of it, so I’m not sure where he’s going with that, but I loved the detail that “for no clear reasons singers smear one another with crude oil.”

And you’ve heard about the fat lady singing? Holy shit:

My earnest attempt to be open-minded about this baffling “Ring” almost foundered for good near the end of “Siegfried” when (you can’t make this up) a monster crocodile swallowed the poor Forest Bird in one big gulp.

This last scene, of course, is the ecstatic love duet between Siegfried, our rambunctious hero (who, by the way, instead of forging a sword assembles a semi-automatic rifle), and the smitten Brünnhilde. In this production, at the most climactic moment in the music the stage rotated to reveal two of those monster crocodiles busily copulating.

Looking hungry after sex, the squiggling reptiles, their jaws flapping, headed toward Siegfried and Brünnhilde, who were singing away.

That would be so awesome, I don’t think I could handle it. I’d be the one screaming BRAVO among all those boos.

Another week gone by, another Friday looms. Oh, let me kiss Friday’s sweet lips.

I don’t know why I keep doing this to myself. Reading reviews of the new Kanye West album, that is. I’m not trying to be down with the kids, or up on the Kardashians, but it seems everywhere I turn there’s news about “Yeezus,” i.e., the album, and I’m just…just…well:

New York magazine:

Shock, surely, is the point. Kanye wants to get under our skin, to rile and appall. In recent years, we’ve had a lot of dark-tinged music about sex: the brooding boudoir R&B of the Weeknd, the glum sex raps of Drake. West means to deliver the ultimate in “bummer sex” — unfiltered nastiness, set to a punishingly bleak soundtrack. The problem, ultimately, isn’t moral; it’s aesthetic. Kanye’s a wack rake. If he has a weakness as an artist, it’s his rapping, his stiff flow and sometimes awkward rhymes. When he tries to come on like a rogue, the corniness is accentuated: “Baby girl, he’s a loner/ Late-night organ donor”; “I’m a rap-lic priest/ Getting head by the nuns”; “Eatin’ Asian pussy/ All I need was sweet and sour sauce.” In the words of that rock critic Barack Obama, he sounds like a jackass.

Grantland:

On “Blood on the Leaves,” he revives the soul-sampling, love-’em-and-leave-’em crowd-pleaser of “Gold Digger.” Only this time, instead of Jamie Foxx’s sunny Ray Charles impersonation, West provocatively deploys Nina Simone’s rendition of “Strange Fruit” in a song that finds him complaining that he can’t force one of his “second-string bitches” to get an abortion because of all that religious “Jesus Walks” stuff. On “I’m in It,” the thoughtful messages of Watch the Throne are perverted into a devilish dancehall-accented treatise on the pleasures of multicultural sport-fucking. (“Uh, black girl sippin’ white wine / put my fist in her like a civil rights sign” is the queasiest lyric on a record with lots of competition for the distinction.) On “I Am a God,” the anti-materialism of “All Falls Down” from his 2004 debut, The College Dropout, is negated by a campy stew of clanking, Sprockets-y industrial-rock portentousness and West’s overplayed petulance about the painfully slow service at French-ass restaurants.

The Wall Street Journal:

At Monday’s event, he said having YouTube display his videos next to other people’s would be like a store stocking Louis Vuitton next to lesser brands. “I don’t want to be in that context,” the rapper said while introducing his album to the crowd with a characteristically breathless and topic-hopping statement. “I got this new strategy: It’s called no strategy. I got an idea how to sell more music: It’s called make better music.”

The New York damn Times:

Mr. West is angry, all right. In “Black Skinhead” he snarls, “I’ve been a menace for the longest/But I ain’t finished, I’m devoted,” over a track that switches between a blunt glam-rock drumbeat and a distorted synthesizer line. In “New Slaves” he’s furious at the segregation his mother’s generation faced, at corporations trying to control him, at profit-making prisons, at the media (of course) and — after many songs on previous albums that proudly itemized his collection of designer clothes — at the way designer labels are marketed to those who can’t afford them.

I don’t even know what this shit means anymore. I only know I don’t want to hear this record. Not even a little bit. Eating Asian pussy without sweet-and-sour sauce? Sampling “Strange Fruit” to bitch about your groupie problems? Why doesn’t someone clock this idiot and put us all out of his misery?

I’m writing this in early evening, having laid the groundwork for dinner this morning. Wednesday is Alan’s late night at the office, but he sometimes gets home before 9, so let’s be optimistic. Then the day unfolded, events that included:

Suspension of the Hoffa dig;
The exit of the mayoral front-runner due to filing errors, his disqualification upheld by two courts;
Plans for a new hockey arena, to be partially funded with public money

I’m probably forgetting something. But now I’m wondering if he’ll ever come home.

We’ve been having a string of perfectly lovely, perfectly perfect days, the kind where you think you should be wearing sunscreen just sitting on the couch. So of course we’re going to be smothered starting this weekend — high ’80s and chance of storms, which means humidity of the sort that makes mold grow in the elastic of your bra. Tomorrow night should be the last of the perfection, so I’m going out.

So, some bloggage:

Back to Grantland for something I fear is true: Season six of “Mad Men” was a disappointment. Since we were talking about what we’ve been watching lately.

Well, if Paula Deen thought Anthony Bourdain was tough on her before, wait until he gets a load of this.

And with that, I’m uncorking a bottle and about to enjoy a lovely evening. Hope your Thursday is what you want it to be.

The sun was out today, the temperatures reasonably mild, and in what I hope is the first of many mild, sunny evenings, I headed out on the new two-wheeler. Did I tell you I bought a new two-wheeler? I did. A used one, of course — a Volkscycle, an old frame tricked out with new components from the hipster bike shop down in the Cass corridor. Weren’t too much money, and I’m adding some clipless pedals. Look for me to add a broken elbow to my wounded eyeball any day now.

But it was a glorious ride, and I am so, so glad to be out of the house after all these months. What happened to me? I used to love winter. Now it’s just an ordeal to get through. Is this how people end up in Florida? Because this is disturbing. Along with this eye thing, this is making me feel very, very old. Other than the standard-issue lower back and knee pain, I’ve not really had any age-related decrepitude yet. And now it’s just dawning on me that I’ll be seeing a fucking ophthalmologist every six months for the rest of my life.

Makes me want to get on my bike and ride until I reach some other place. Someplace younger. Not Florida.

Oh, but before I do, I have bloggage:

This is so damn disturbing. Remember Patiend Zero from Randy Shilts’ AIDS book, “And the Band Played On”? The sexy Canadian flight attendant, whose promiscuity jump-started HIV all over the globe? He existed, but he didn’t really function as the Typhoid Mary of AIDS. It was exaggerated to sell books. Doesn’t that make you feel wonderful about American health reporting?

Here’s a long, readable and compelling story about what happens when the Satmar sect of Hasidism takes over an entire town.
And what do they do? Dismantle the public schools. Because they don’t use them, and besides, they really want to the few non-Jews left around to move out. It’s a fairly horrifying story.

This might be worth a trip to the National Archives: Searching for the Seventies. This woman could have been me, c. 1978. I loved this decade.

Finally, the Boston bombers’ horrible parents.

And now, let’s get Tuesday under way, OK?

I was struck by the comment discussion the other day about marijuana. I think it’s fair to say I won’t be touching marijuana until I need it for my terminal-cancer fight — either that, or a particularly stupid late-midlife crisis. As I told someone today, there seem to be enough substances in the world to make me stupid; why invite another?

Also, it hasn’t escaped my notice that marijuana today isn’t like the marijuana of yesterday. Which brings us to this Slate piece, about the unmet need for a weaker, ’70s-era marijuana. Because of old boomers, natch:

Marijuana is much stronger than it used to be. Lots of the strains for sale at medical marijuana dispensaries are approaching 25 percent THC, or tetrahydrocannabinol, the compound in the plant known for getting you wicked high. Sitting around a winter solstice bonfire in the Seattle area this December, I heard a woman in her 60s tell a story about her husband taking a tiny toke on a joint that was going around a dinner party, only to pass out in his chair. Another friend and her husband, in their 30s, decided to share a marijuana caramel after their daughter went to bed. They got way too stoned and entered a shared freak-out about how they would deal if she came out to ask for a glass of water.

An elder statesman of Generation X, comedian Louis C.K., has a bit in his Live at the Beacon Theater special about taking “big hits. Like big, 1970s, jean jacket, Bad Company hits” of modern, high potency dope, and then everything going terrifically terrible. “When I was a kid you could just smoke a joint for a while. Now you take two hits and you go insane,” he says. “It’s not doable anymore.”

Well, OK. I guess, if I were a dedicated drinker of two glasses of wine after work, and suddenly it was like drinking two glasses of grain alcohol, I might see this as a problem. But my impulse would likely be to quit drinking, or drink something else, but probably quit drinking.

Marijuana is now legal in Detroit, and medical marijuana is legal in Michigan, and one of the problems that comes with that is how you test for it when someone’s driving gets out of control. If we’re going to let this drug into the legal corral, then I don’t think it’s irresponsible to wish there were weaker varieties of it to be had. And not just for aging boomers who want giggle-weed instead of a sledgehammer to the forehead.

The lab the writer mentions in her opening paragraphs? I interviewed a guy who runs a similar facility here in Michigan. Sometimes when I’m bored, I go to their results page and read the names of the various batches. Girl Scout Cookies? Organic Amnesia? I’m always amused.

And so we come to the end of another week. I will break the tape with relief. I play you out with some bloggage:

Peggy Noonan asks if the GOP can recover from Iraq. After fretting over such casualties as the party’s “respect for economic stewardship” and “the political ascendance that began in 1980,” she remembers who actually fought this fiasco:

All this of course is apart from the central tragedy, which is the human one—the lost lives, the wounded, the families that will now not be formed, or that have been left smaller, and damaged.

A shout-out to the maimed at the two-thirds mark. Well, at least she didn’t forget entirely.

Tom & Lorenzo have been posting photos of the “Mad Men” cast as they appeared at their red-carpet premiere earlier this week. May I just say? If I’d been dealt the genetic hand January Jones was, I wouldn’t go out in public looking like this. Never mind the dress — which I don’t think is as awful as some — but yes, mind that hair. Does this girl not own a comb?

This is hilarious: Newt Gingrich and Rick Santorum tried to craft a “unity ticket” to unseat Mitt Romney as frontrunner last year, but couldn’t agree on which one would be on top. Because unity.

Have a great weekend, all.

Someone mentioned in comments yesterday the main thing that struck me about that WashPost story I linked to, about the man who shot and nearly killed his wife, and what happened to the family afterward: He fired a shotgun at his wife in front of their children, and he only spent a few hours behind bars?

The pertinent passage:

In the days after the shooting, Fran was in and out of surgery. And she decided not to press charges. She wanted Ken to get a job and pay child support, she says now, because that would most help the children. “I had six children. I couldn’t work.”

For the attempted murder of his wife, Ken Vessels spent a couple of hours in jail.

This was in 1964. Please remember this when someone brings up the good old days. Today we find it astonishing that such a thing could happen, but speaking as someone who did some reporting on domestic violence when it was taking its turn in the spotlight, I can’t say that I’m entirely surprised. This was Louisville, Ky., after all. And it could have been anywhere.

Every so often I get tired of reading improving fiction, serious newspapers and Gawker, and reach for one of my treasured John D. MacDonald paperbacks. On Sunday, I chose one at random off the high shelf — “A Purple Place for Dying.” Published in 1964, it’s the third of the Travis McGee series. I’ve read the whole string, most more than once, but I always manage to forget enough of the plot(s) in between to make the rereads interesting. MacDonald was a Harvard B-school graduate and is especially good when he’s plotting out business swindles, which appear in a lot of these novels. It’s too bad he died before our contemporary era of high finance; I’m sure he would have had a ball with it.

But what I really like the early McGee series for is its look at women. McGee is a little ahead of his time in many ways. He’s a tender lover and seems to have truly catholic taste in women; I always admire how often his heroines are described as having lumpy noses or stumpy legs or other flaws, but are still sexy. One of the biggest reasons books are abandoned in my house is too-perfect characters, especially in a physical sense. I put John Sandford down forever when he described a central character as having olive skin and pale blue eyes. Pick one, I thought, rolling my eyes. Oh, and she had long legs, too.

But MacDonald was also a writer of his time, and shows it. Women are brought to ecstasy by missionary-position intercourse, period. They don’t menstruate or get pregnant, with one notable exception. They’re married at 18 and washed up by 30 — you know the drill. But in “A Purple Place for Dying” I noted, again, how casually men speak of punishing their women physically, and how no one says anything about it.

An important character in “Purple” is bumped off in the first 20 pages. In the ensuing ones, her husband casually refers to “making steam rise on that cheating tail of hers.” She’s described as “not being able to sit down without whining” after a fight. There’s a reference to “a grade A thrashing, which she deserves.” And so on.

No one says, “Hm, maybe you shouldn’t do that.” It’s just what powerful men do to their women.

“Mad Men” gets criticized a lot, sometimes fairly, sometimes not, but they introduced a new generation to what sexism really was, once upon a time. It wasn’t about getting your bottom pinched. Sometimes it was paddled.

Some bloggage:

The 38 best local-news captions of all time. Warning: BuzzFeed link.

Speaking of “Mad Men” — look at little Sally Draper, all grown up.

Two more minutes of goats yelling like humans.

And with that, I’m off to my deep, soft, warm bed.

My old buddy Frank Byrne posted this on his Facebook yesterday. I was there the night it was taken:

Frank’s on the left. He’s a doctor, although today he runs a hospital in Madison, Wis. I don’t remember who, exactly, brought C. Everett Koop to Fort Wayne that night, but I’m sure it was a fundraiser of some sort. Koop spoke at the Scottish Rite auditorium and Frank, a pulmonologist, introduced him. It was very moving, that introduction; Frank said Koop was not only his role model, but a personal hero. He explained how Koop had accepted the job of surgeon general and seemed to be one thing — an anti-abortion conservative in the Reagan-revolution mode, with a strain of weirdness (the uniform, the facial hair) — but turned out to be something else entirely. A doctor. A real doctor, who put his patients first and didn’t care what the tobacco industry thought he should say about their product line.

What’s more, when it became evident that HIV/AIDS was an epidemic, and was killing people, he also stepped up, and did something else remarkable. He supervised the production of a pamphlet called “Understanding AIDS” that explained exactly how the virus was transmitted, using terms like anal sex and intravenous drug use and sharing needles. Politically, he was right in line with the man who appointed him, but when the time came, he was a doctor first and foremost.

Koop died this week, after 96 years of what I suspect was extremely clean living. The obituary has more, but I think that picture says an awful lot about him — the three-piece suit, the bow tie, the bulldog expression. Doctors are frequently eccentric dressers, I’ve noticed.

Oh, and the guy on the right? Mike Mirro. If you’re ever in Fort Wayne and feel a pain in your chest, and wake up to see that face looking down at you, rest assured you are in very good hands. Maybe the best.

I have to get up early in the morning to go to an all-day policy conference, so let’s keep this short. I have some good bloggage today, anyway.

How big heads became a part of college-basketball culture. A fun read about something I’ve never heard of. And it all started with Michael Jackson.

My alma mater has been known for its fine photojournalists for some time, and I’m glad to see the tradition is continuing, although nothing about this photo essay is easy to look at. (Jeff? I’m afraid it will be just another day at the office for you.) Subject: Domestic violence. Remarkable photos.

It’s Sunday afternoon, and I’m thinking I should be doing our taxes. It’s a perfect do-the-taxes day — not lovely enough that I should be outside, cold enough that inside chores are called for, and taxes are the ultimate inside chore. And yet, I’m not doing the taxes. I did organize the tax-document box, which is considerably easier now that I’m no longer freelancing. So yay me.

Instead, I’m thinking about naked Lena Dunham.

I’ve become a reluctant fan of “Girls,” the HBO series about 20something New Yorkers learning about life and love, at least that tiny slice of life and love as its experienced in hipster Brooklyn. All four of the titular cast members are the privileged daughters of wealthy artists and/or media figures, although I’m not sure you can call the former drummer for Bad Company, father of cast member Jemima Kirke, an artist. But what the hell, let’s go along with it.

Because these girls (the actors) were born into money and fabulousness and now have achieved the next level of money and fabulousness with cable-TV success, and because the show is a pretty accurate reflection of a certain sort of demographic (theirs), only they’re pretending to be poor and salad days-y, it can be a challenge to watch, much as it may have bugged the servants to watch Marie Antoinette pretend to be a peasant at Versailles. Everyone is hyperarticulate and crazy and impulsive and does stupid self-sabotaging shit, and it took me a long time to admit that what’s discomfiting about it is, it’s true.

And Dunham is naked in this thing. A LOT. The sex scenes are excruciating, in the way that watching actual sex is discomfiting and movie sex isn’t. The clothes come off with considerable trouble,
one party frequently looks to be having a terrible time, and Dunham cares not a whit that she’s overweight, pear-shaped, small-breasted and pretty much the polar opposite of what we consider suitable for public nudity. This is a little weird at first, but you get used to it, much as you got used to the idea that three of the “Sex and the City” quartet routinely had sex with their bras on.

She’s naked so often, in fact, that it borders on gratuitous, and that’s a word I don’t use lightly. Last week, the show petered out on Dunham’s character lounging in her tub, singing “Wonderwall” to herself, when Kirke’s character shows up. These girls love to bathe together, and it’s pretty clear Kirke is going to climb in, but not before Dunham rises to her knees, so we can get a shot of her breasts again. Alan, who likes boobs as much as the next guy, actually said, “Noooooo!”

Dunham’s wardrobe is also terrible. I’d love to see T-Lo take it on — beyond the red-carpet stuff they’ve already done, that is.

More on naked Lena.

Hope y’all had a good weekend, and if you were snowed upon, that it was pretty and not too awful. Some bloggage:

Tonight is the Grammy awards. I’ve always hated the Grammies, for reasons explained here. A sample:

1989’s Record and Song of the Year went to Bobby McFerrin’s “Don’t Worry Be Happy,” a T-shirt slogan of a song that has aged as well as a beer koozie that says, “Is that your final answer?” It beat Anita Baker’s “Giving You The Best That I Got,” Steve Winwood’s “Roll With It, ” Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and Michael Jackson’s “Man In The Mirror.”

The Michigan GOP gets on Wayne LaPierre’s train. I’m totally sure an armed, 110-pound female teacher will somehow never be surprised and disarmed by, say, a 220-pound high school linebacker who needs a weapon, quick.

Another homeowners’ association horror story, featuring two equally loathsome parties bent on mutual assured destruction. Enjoy, Jeff!

And let’s all have a good week.