One of the right-rail Bridge stories is mine this week. A couple, actually, but this is the one I’m thinking of, about Proposal 6, about bridges past, present and yet to come. In the course of trying to nail down one fact — does any other state with an international border crossing over water have a similar law to the one being proposed? — a nice lady in the Texas Department of Transportation sent me a list of the four Rio Grande crossings in private hands.

One was the Los Ebanos Ferry, family-owned, a two-minute crossing across a narrow spot in the river. Hand-operated. It rang a bell that got louder until it finally pierced the fog — a John D. MacDonald novel, but not one of the Travis McGee series. What was it called? I know I own it. A glance at the bookshelf. Yes! “The Damned,” published 1952. A group of strangers find themselves at a Mexican ferry crossing, stuck — the ferry isn’t working, so they’re free to sit around in the broiling sun and fight, love and have interior monologues. In true JDM style, they’re vivid, pulpy characters with just enough realness to keep them from tipping over into parody.

A minute or two with Professor Google, and I found this marvelous review, with lots of quoted passages, so I don’t have to retype them. One of the marooned is a businessman who, two weeks previous, had found himself poleaxed by a juicy young thing, and on impulse, bundled her into his car and took off south of the border. A couple weeks later, the erotic heat having burned off, he’s coming back home, despising the girl, disgusted by himself and wondering what he had been thinking. What a wonderful picture MacDonald paints here; you can almost smell the sour booze coming off the philanderer’s pores:

He had tried to call it a deathless romance, a great love. And the rationalization had shattered suddenly, leaving him naked. He saw a gaunt foolish man of middle years spending his savings on a raw, big-bodied young girl with limited IQ. The pores of her cheeks and nose were unpleasantly enlarged. In conversation she repeated herself interminably, expressing childish infatuations with movie actors, TV stars, disc jockeys. Her love-making was an unimaginative compound of all the movies she had seen, all the confession stories she had read. He stared in wonder at the meaty mass of her hips, at the lactic, bovine breasts, startled that he should have thought this worth the risk of destroying his world.

It turns out the ferry in this book, fictional or not, isn’t over the Rio Grande, but the Rio Conchos. Oh, well. It was a nice trip down Pulp Lane.

Watching the debate now, enjoying my third glass of wine, so we’ll see how long I last. I’m having #3 because Kate had a great bass lesson today, and I’m entitled. She took on the upright a couple months ago, and is coming along swimmingly. Such a beautiful instrument, but as I always say when we load it into the car, in my next life my kid plays piccolo.

A little bloggage for those who

The latest variety of hoo-hah from Up North: (ominous chords, organ sting) Agenda 21!!!!!!

Back to the Joe and Paul show.

Thank Coozledad for today’s entertainment; he sent me this a while back. It’s Elvis Costello, performing at the White House two years ago:

Enjoy the delightful four and a half minutes, and you will enjoy it. It got me thinking about…well, about a lot of things. First thing: Who determines who plays at the nation’s No. 1 venue? I’m not naive enough to believe it’s entirely up to the First Family; it’s surely a combination of their preferences, the WH social secretary, and some constellation of other parties weighing in. Timing certainly plays a part, don’t you think? There’s a time when the performer who was once rebellious and not suitable for a presidential audience suddenly becomes so. There’s a time when the cellist is ready for his Lincoln Center honor. But surely the First Family has something to do with it.

So. Today, a thought experiment, and I encourage you not to yield to the easy temptation of snark. Suppose Romney wins the election. Who plays in his White House? Who will be the first performers we’ll see in the East Room with Mitt and Ann in the front row center?

I’m honestly curious. It occurs to me that, for all I know about the Romneys, I have no idea what stirs his soul, besides dressage and his church. Do Mormons have a pop-music vein worth tapping?

I ask this in part because I read this story earlier tonight, about Romney’s church activities in Massachusetts. Another few thousand words that tells you a lot but, in the end, only makes the picture murkier.

On to the bloggage:

This is, what, Jimmy Hoffa’s ninth or tenth possible final resting place? They won’t find him there, but if they do, oh how sad that would be. A driveway in Roseville? (Trust me: It ain’t much.) If he can’t be in the end zone at whatever NFL stadium he’s supposedly in, at least let him be buried under the I-696/75 interchange, which is the last place I heard (on inside information, natch).

OID: Leg on a stretcher. Fake leg. Still.

Finally, one for you Vietnam vets. The napalm girl, later. Beautiful.

I didn’t sleep well last night, due to a too-light dinner and a heavy workload. Nothing like waking up at 4 a.m. with hunger pangs and the usual dead-of-night conviction that ALL THE WORK YOU DO IS SHIT, AND SOONER OR LATER THE WORLD WILL DISCOVER THIS.

I read the iPad for a while, dozed off, got up for good at 5:30. It’s amazing how many people are updating their Facebook and Twitter at that hour. There are really only a couple of hours in the very dead of night when my stream is dead. I know this because one of my Twitter follows is @big_ben_clock, which does nothing but chime on the hour. When two or three of those stack up, I know the United States is sound asleep, coast to coast.

I should follow some Europeans. At that hour, the day is already moving at full speed over there. (And yes, I could simply try to go back to sleep like a normal person, but how can you do that when the world is thrumming with news and information?)

But as usually happens, my wee-hours fears were for naught, the day went well, and I just finished a salad-and-pasta meal with two glasses of wine. I would very much like to watch “Bachelorette” on demand, but fear I’ll be taken down before it’s over. Carbs + alcohol = an early bedtime for me.

In the meantime, I’ll tell you about the fall movies I’m planning to see. Roger Ebert reported a bit from Toronto this week, and says he’s willing to bet “Argo” will be the year’s Best Picture Oscar winner. On the list? Why, yes. Also, “The Master” and certainly “Cloud Atlas,” because I lurved the novel so, so much. Roger says: Stirring and grand, and maybe great, but maybe not. Honestly, as usually happens with books I love, I’m less taken with the plot — although the plot(s) in “Cloud Atlas” are mind-boggling — than I am with the author’s prose style, which movies generally don’t deal with.

And yeah, I think “The Sessions,” but that will probably be a wait-for-DVD. And likely “Lincoln,” although if I can’t go as Brian Stouder’s and Jeff the MM’s date, what’s the damn point?

Did any news happen today? We had a little office chat about Nate Silver, who is so bullish on Obama’s reelection that he’s either going to make his career on Election Night or be struck with the urge to take a long vacation. He was scarily right last time, but who knows what that means?

I was perhaps too flip yesterday in dismissing Jonathan Kozol’s own too-flip observation about homelessness. At the time he made it, I recall a changing world in which great wealth was flooding into the nation’s large cities, closing the SRO hotels that had housed the addicted fringe. They were driven into the street with the freed mentally ill, and walking among this cohort in places like New York, Chicago and even Columbus, it was easy to get frustrated with anyone who suggested a simple solution. As many of you have pointed out, housing is the solution to homelessness, but it has to be the right sort of housing, and it has to be bolstered with appropriate support. If I oversimplified, I apologize.

Tom & Lorenzo have been at Fashion Week and critiquing actresses at the various Toronto film festival premieres, and I’m enjoying both very much. Adding to bucket list: Once, just once, inspiring a smart fashion eye to say, “Bow down, bitches.”

September 11, 2012 — an odd-year anniversary, but discuss if you like.

One of the things we did last weekend was go to the Titanic exhibition at the Henry Ford. It’s exactly the sort of exhibit I despise — timed entrance (NO EXCEPTIONS), gimmicky (your “boarding pass” contains an Actual Passenger Name), ultimately sort of meh. Its official name is “Titanic: The Artifact Exhibit,” and unfortunately, I’m not an artifact person. I’ve been ruined by CGI and, frankly, my own imagination — nothing about a 100-year-old piece of china does it for me.

But this is a modern exhibit, which means it is “interactive,” and in this case, it meant there was a giant iceberg — presumably refreshed every night — you could put your hands on. And that was marred for Ms. Grammar and Usage Nitpicker by the legend on the wall nearby:

“Iceberg Right Ahead!”

I don’t care how loud he yelled it, those words shouldn’t be capitalized. They knew that sort of thing in 1912.

It could have been the fact the whole space was elbow-to-elbow that got on my nerves. We saw “Woman Holding a Balance” by none other than Johannes Vermeer two weeks ago at the DIA, walking right in and standing in front of it as long as we liked, occasionally stepping aside to let others peer at it.

And yes, I am Mrs. Nose-in-the-Air. Because, y’know, Vermeer and James Cameron’s mythology.

Would we have cared so much about the Titanic if it weren’t, as we’re told over and over, the height of luxury? Or was it the fact several of the richest people in the world we among those who went down, and all their money couldn’t save them? Ultimately, I just don’t care all that much. And I thought the “stand on the bow” photo-op gimmick was silly — and a gouge. The person on my boarding pass died, by the way. Kate was Madeline Astor, and lived.

So: Change of subject.

You all know how much I love a good montage scene on the TV box. There was a nice one in Sunday’s “Breaking Bad,” and here it is:

Some of the imagery may be confusing, if you’re not a BB fan, but trust me — it all works. Or maybe I just love that song. Tommy James? Shondells? You were among the good ones.

I agree with Neil Steinberg: We shouldn’t mock Romney’s religion. Believe it, don’t believe it, but keep your mouth shut. We’re supposed to be better than that.

Think I’ll watch the First Lady’s speech. Is it Hump Day already? How’d that happen?

(Tried to write something last night, found myself plumb out of gas after a day of bothering people on the phone, researching tax policy and exchanging emails about the election. Wouldn’t you? Now 6:47 a.m. Let’s see how this goes.)

Early morning, hoping for rain. The radar is encouraging, but it’s been a lying bitch for weeks now. The lawn is still green(ish), but that’s due to the sheltering effects of the front-yard oak, not sprinkling. Honey Boo Boo chile don’t sprinkle, and look, look! It’s taken only hours for me to internalize Honey Boo Boo and, in essence, justify whatever dollars were spent on producing that carnival of American entertainment. And I didn’t even watch much of it. Alan vetoed it after a few minutes, but I caught a bit here and there — the family ultrasound of HBB’s older sister, who is pregnant. HBB’s mother, June, revealed she’d been 15 when she’d first become a mother, which was presumably before she married her husband, Sugar Bear, and certainly before she started attending auctions to buy outdated or fell-off-the-truck packages of Chips Ahoy, another little snippet I caught. After the ultrasound, we learned that the family refers to a woman’s genitals as her biscuit.

“Because when you get a biscuit — a good biscuit, like at Hardee’s — you can kind of pull ’em apart…” — June throws her head back and laughs, and thanks! Thanks, June and Honey Boo Boo! Now I can never eat a biscuit again. Although I had a neighbor once who called that same thing a muffin, and I still eat those.

In time, it will pass. The American freak show. I bet they don’t so anything like this in Turkey.

I desperately need coffee. I should have exercised this morning. Maybe a bike ride later? I’m hungry. This is my brain in the early morning — Travis Bickle without the guns: I tried several times to call her, but after the first call, she wouldn’t come to the phone any longer. I also sent flowers but with no luck. The smell of the flowers only made me sicker. The headaches got worse. I think I got stomach cancer. I shouldn’t complain though. You’re only as healthy, you’re only as healthy as you feel. You’re only as…healthy…as…you…feel.

It takes three to make a trend, but I think we have a good start on making naked DUI into a Thing.

First, the Rev. Peter Petroske, Catholic priest, arrested and suspended for driving through Dearborn naked and drunk, and I really wish I knew more, but I don’t. There’s a lot about Fr. Petroske’s background in the story. Commenters who say they knew him say he’s a great guy. The priesthood is stressful. I hope he gets the help he needs.

And then, today, Randy Travis, upon whom I once had a 10-minute crush, before the gaydar kicked in, now reduced to raving in the back seat of the squad car, naked and drunk and threatening to kill the cops.

I do not mean to make light of what is obviously a couple of miserable human beings, but it’s odd how these things come in clusters. I’ve been naked and I’ve been drunk, sometimes at the same time, but I’ve never considered going for a drive while in that condition. And for that, the world can be grateful.

I sense we’re already lowering the tone.

So here’s this: Gawker had a little exchange with Henrik Rummel, aka Boner Rower. He is one hell of a good sport:

What was your initial reaction when the story of your boner hit the internet? Have you gotten a lot of feedback? New fans?

I laughed very hard! I woke up my girlfriend and told her the story. Then I told everyone else I knew, except my parents.

Wise choice, kiddo. Now your mom will never find out.

I can’t tell you how happy I am that gymnastics is over. I don’t know how many more plucky brats I can handle. These track athletes are much more my speed, although I don’t really get the obsession with makeup some of these women have. When I’m sweating, false eyelashes are the last things I want to worry about, but then, it is worldwide television and there’s a lot of money lying on the ground for a fetching athlete to pick up, whether or not she’s a winner. So: Plucky brats bad, lanky brats with false eyelashes good.

Failing that, you can always go for a reality-TV show. What do you call a vagina?

Coffee. Cooooffffeeeee…..

First things first. Let’s have a kiki:

Some of the language in that video is NSFW, but hey, it’s the Scissor Sisters. I need to get in a gay frame of mind, because “Project Runway” is starting, and I’m giving it a try this season. I got a little pissed when the girl with the Skrillex hair won, she and her series of flowy, drapey, dress-like outfits. They were very wearable, if you were a six-foot-tall skeleton with no tits whatsoever.

I’ll tell you, the first flowy-drapey thing that wins, I’m totally outta there. Although I can see the crowd includes an insane Japanese guy with an afro, so I have high hopes.

[Long pause.]

And with that, I must confess: I fell asleep on the couch in the second half hour of “Project Runway,” it’s now Friday morning, and I just learned that your generic crazed American madman in Aurora, Colo., killed 14 people at a midnight showing of the new Batman movie.

I thought we were done with that in this country. Guess not.

Now CNN is reporting the casualties include children as young as 6. Because that’s where you take a 6-year-old these days — to a midnight screening of a dark, violent comic-book movie. Which is not to say any parent shares the blame for this. Only, as they say on the internet, smh.

(Shaking my head, for you geezers.)

Watching CNN, the choppers are circling what looks like an apartment building. Presumably, that’s the killer’s house. It looks like the kind of place you see in every city in the land. If I were looking to hide in plain sight, I’d move into one of those — maybe a dozen units, every one the same, window air conditioners, neighbors only known as a collection of thumps and noises on the other side of a wall. Maybe that’s what he was after.

Not much bloggage now, but maybe one fitting piece — Alex Pareene on “The Newsroom,” Aaron Sorkin’s hugely disappointing HBO show. I’ve given it four chances, but I have to agree with Pareene:

Even his sparkling banter is one-note. His characters always say exactly, precisely what they mean, at all times. There’s no subtext, no irony, nothing ever left unspoken in his dialogue. His characters don’t even get to be sarcastic without someone asking them if they’re being sarcastic. Everyone alternates between speechifying, quipping and dumbly setting up other people’s quips. It’s exhausting.

I’m imagining how the crew from “The Newsroom” would cover this tragedy. Probably with much rushing around, and a dramatic moment where someone has to decide whether there’s a 15th victim, based on sketchy reports. Then the plucky intern would slam down the phone and say, “I just talked to the anesthesiologist! She’s out of surgery, and she’s alive!” That actually happened in the last episode, which dealt with the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. I actually guffawed. Because, as a journalist who’s tried to contact many doctors in the course of my work, I can tell you with absolute confidence that you don’t just ring up the anesthesiologist after trauma surgery. Unless, of course, the anesthesiologist is the caller’s college roommate’s father, and she just happens to have the number of his cell phone, and he answers it, and he decides talking to the media is a great idea. (And yes, that connection has been used a time or two so far, in only four episodes. What a well-connected group of journalists.)

The Today show just went to a commercial. I guess what that means is, it’s not that important a story.

Have a good weekend, all.

Oh, and for those who watched: Was “Project Runway” any good?

Really interesting little story playing out up NPR way — an intern wrote a blog about her music-acquisition habits. You’d say music-buying, but she doesn’t do that. She just…has it, and she hasn’t paid for very much:

I am an avid music listener, concertgoer, and college radio DJ. My world is music-centric. I’ve only bought 15 CDs in my lifetime. Yet, my entire iTunes library exceeds 11,000 songs.

You can read a lot more at the two links above, but I think the best of it was this thoughtful response from David Lowery at the Trichordist, “a community blog for those interested in contributing to the advancement of an Ethical Internet, and the protection of Artists Rights in the Digital Age.” (Capitalization obviously not mine.) It’s long, but it’s worth the read, because he takes apart the intern’s argument pretty effectively:

The existential questions that your generation gets to answer are these:

Why are we willing to pay for computers, iPods, smartphones, data plans, and high speed internet access but not the music itself? Why do we gladly give our money to some of the largest richest corporations in the world but not the companies and individuals who create and sell music?

This is a bit of hyperbole to emphasize the point. But it’s as if:

Networks: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!

Hardware: Giant mega corporations. Cool! have some money!

Artists: 99.9 % lower middle class. Screw you, you greedy bastards!

Congratulations, your generation is the first generation in history to rebel by unsticking it to the man and instead sticking it to the weirdo freak musicians!

I don’t think Emily, the NPR blogger, will know what hit her, but she — and a lot of other people — need to hear this. I gave my students last term a reading assignment about Kim Dotcom, an obscenely rich jerkoff who’s made his dough on sites that hold huge files, no questions asked. I’d never heard of the guy; they all had, and many had accounts on his site. I just don’t get it. Or maybe I do — they don’t have a lot of spending money, but somehow they’ve gotten their priorities screwed up. Lowery nails it: Spending for the hardware isn’t a problem, but the rest of it should be free.

Ergh.

While we’re on the subject of digital matters and stealing, I was surprised to see myself turn up in this piece about Jonah Lehrer, someone I hadn’t even heard of until this week, when he was accused of self-plagiarizing, i.e. rerunning his own work for multiple paying clients. And why would he do this? I think this Slate piece gets to the point: He’s not really a journalist, but an “idea man.” Some people look at a mop and see a high-paying corporate lecture; I look at a mop and say, time to clean the floor.

Let’s wrap up with a T-Lo post, what they might call your daily pretty: Mrs. FLOTUS looking like a million bucks.

I can see this Sandusky trial is going to be…a trial. I think I’m going to have to read the weekly summaries, because I can’t take too much more of this daily stuff. Especially stuff like this:

“Sandusky was standing right up against the back of the young boy with his arms wrapped around (the boy’s) midsection in the closest proximity I think you can be,” McQueary said. “I was extremely alarmed, flustered and shocked.”

At one point, McQueary said, he returned to his locker and slammed the locker door “in an attempt to say someone’s here, ‘break it up.'”

I’ve said this before, I’ll say it again: None of us knows how we would react in such a situation. But my god, I’m growing tired of all the harrumphing and locker-slamming and eye-averting that went on in this case. I think, every time, of the women I know, the mothers. I could tick off a dozen 110-pounders who, if they saw such a thing, would have rushed in like those little birds you see in the spring driving crows away from their nests. They would have Heisman’d that old perv and taken the boy out under their fierce little wings, and if anyone tried to stop them, well, then you’d see the fingernails.

But again, we don’t know what we’d do. We only hope we’d do better.

For Detroiters and visitors: The owner/chef at Supino’s Pizza gives you a few options for local dining, in GQ. Did I mention Hank Stuever is coming to visit in a couple of weeks? Hank, what looks good to you?

I hope I’m recovered by then. Went to the doctor today, for the second time in a week. I told her my head felt like I was wearing a diving bell at all times, that Alan was complaining about how loud I was setting the TV volume, that I drove an unknown number of miles yesterday with my turn signal on, because I couldn’t hear the thing clicking at me.

“Ear infections take their time to resolve,” she said.

“I don’t say this often, seriously,” I replied. “But I want a more powerful antibiotic. Not the carpet bomb. Just something with a little higher octane.”

So, a Z-pack. Fingers crossed.

And so, bloggage:

Worst songs of all time: Bobby Goldsboro’s “Honey.” Worse than “Dreams of the Everyday Housewife?” Worse than “Watchin’ Scotty Grow?” Yeah, I think so.

Farewell from inside the diving bell.

I wasn’t going to write about the new restrictions on extra-large sugary soft drink sales in New York City, and then MMJeff brought it up elsewhere, and so let’s thrash, shall we?

I don’t have strong feelings on it one way or another. The subject of obesity comes up from time to time here, and we’ve run through the usual reasons. The more I think about it, the more I look at photos from my youth and marvel at how few people, even among my parents’ friends, were seriously overweight — well, I don’t have any answers, just a few hunches. And I think portion size is a big part of it.

I think portion size is one of those insidious things. It creeps up a little at a time. We’re told to fill our plates, and we do — even though the plate is two inches bigger than the ones we grew up eating from. It’s bigger because kitchens are bigger, and kitchen tables are bigger, and everything is bigger because otherwise, what will motivate you to buy a new set of dishes? You need that stuff.

Anyway, as I’ve probably stated here a million times, I grew up drinking those little 6.5-ounce Cokes. Sometimes my mom would buy the 12-ounce six-packs, or the 16-ounce Pepsi six-packs. Returnable bottles. We had little plastic caps to reseal them. You never drank a whole bottle by yourself. A six-pack kept four of us happy for a week.

New York City is a small place, and even the millions who live there comprise only a fraction of the country’s population. But it’s the Temple Mount of our culture — almost everything starts there. I think Mayor Bloomberg knows this. I don’t think he’s doing this with any serious policy effect in mind; I think he’s just trying to start a conversation.

In 1979, I started my first newspaper job. I was in an seven-person department, and four of us smoked. A guy I walked by several times a day had an ashtray the size of a hubcap on his desk, and he filled that sucker up, every day. Alan and I went to New York 22 years later, when the city was the largest one in the country with a city-wide smoking ban. We saw the Mingus Big Band in a low-ceilinged, basement club, and left two hours later remarking on how nice it was to not be reeking of cigarettes. Michigan now bans smoking in nearly all public places. Who thinks this is a crazy intrusion of the nanny state now?

In my lifetime, we’ve vanquished cigarettes, or at least put them in full retreat. Bad food may be the next front in the war, and should be, given how disproportionately it effects affects the poor, the young and the powerless.

Does banning gigantic sody-pops look like a solution? No. But it’s a conversation-starter. I’m willing to have it.

Good lord, this plague is persistent. Every time I think I’m out of it? IT PULLS ME BACK IN. So I have no bloggage today. Do you?

Watching the National Geographic Geography Bee, hosted by Alex Trebek. Of the 10 finalists, only one is a white male and one is female; all the rest are Americans of Asian (or south Asian) descent. The first ones eliminated were? The white boy and the girl (who is Indian). Hello, future masters! Enjoy this crazy country.

This is ridiculously hard. I’m getting about one question in eight. I really need to brush up on my Asian peninsulas.

It’s killer when they get eliminated, too. I imagine a Tiger Mom screeching backstage about how they’re going to get into Harvard NOW, eh, Mr. Smart Guy?

And with that, I will dispense with the ethnic stereotypes.

The four finalists left were asked the capital of Uzbekistan. Or, as we know it, Uz-beki-beki-beki-stan-stan.

The answer is Tashkent.

I’m already feeling weekend-y; are you? What I mean by that is, I’m just thinking about reading, doing a little biking, hoping the air-conditioning doesn’t break down and stopping in at Movement, aka the Detroit Electronic Music Festival, for a little dubstep.

Or, as my boss says: It’s potato-salad season! And I’ll be making some.

A note about next week: Light posting, maybe non-existent posting, maybe some pix. I’ll be on Mackinac Island, attending the Detroit Regional Chamber’s annual public-policy conference. It’s Tuesday through Thursday, so with travel and all the rest of it thrown in, I’ll be lucky to crank out a few shots of the Grant Hotel and blue coastlines. But you never know.

Until then, some bloggage:

The peculiar smarminess of online mourning, by the great Monica Hesse at the WashPost.

The best of prom 2012, compiled by Buzzfeed.

Have a great long weekend, all.