Atul Gawande linked to the obesity report released yesterday and suggested it was reasonable for fat to be an issue in the next presidential campaign. I gotta say, just a glance at the stats was jaw-dropping, and he may be right.

I tell my journalism students, when considering data, the news is in the change. This is a lot of change in a short time:

Twelve states now have obesity rates above 30 percent. Four years ago, only one state was above 30 percent. … Twenty years ago, no state had an obesity rate above 15 percent. Today, more than two out of three states, 38 total, have obesity rates over 25 percent, and just one has a rate lower than 20 percent. Since 1995, when data was available for every state, obesity rates have doubled in seven states and increased by at least 90 percent in 10 others. Obesity rates have grown fastest in Oklahoma, Alabama, and Tennessee, and slowest in Washington, D.C., Colorado, and Connecticut. …Adult obesity rates increased in 16 states in the past year and did not decline in any state.

This isn’t change over the course of a generation. This is change in, what, five years? Appalling. What is most disheartening is how swiftly this is becoming an economic issue. Michigan is now No. 10, down from 1995’s ranking, when we were tied for fourth, but that’s mainly because everyone else surged (particularly the American south). In that time, we still managed to increase our obesity rate 77 percent, from 17.2 percent to over 30 percent. Final, the-news-is-the-change comparison:

“Today, the state with the lowest adult obesity rate would have had the highest rate in 1995,” said Jeff Levi, Ph.D., executive director of TFAH.

That’s only 16 years ago! I remember 1995! (I was 30 pounds lighter.) So, a question for the room: Why? I’ve always believed complex problems do not have simple answers, but off the top of my head, I can think of a double handful of reasons that have all dovetailed, one way or another, to drive the problem: Portion size, the loss of cooking skills, an aging population (we gain weight as we grow older), agricultural policies that encourage the production of crops that become cheap, calorically rich additives (I’m looking at you, corn). Fast food, restaurant food in general, 20-ounce soda, a culture that cements overeating in place by encouraging portion sizes once only found in stuff-your-face contests. Taco Bell runs specials from time to time, which packages six deluxe tacos in a single combo meal. Six. For one person. Supersize it, biggie-size it, etc.

I mentioned economics. I live in an affluent area, where people are generally normal-size. There’s a running club for kids. I see people exercising with their children. People are always bitching that the nearest Whole Foods is too far away. I walk through Kate’s school during class change, and fat kids are distributed in about the same proportions as they were when I was young — one in 10, maybe, one in 15. I drive past Detroit schools at dismissal time, and half the kids are waddling.

Gawande says this is a presidential issue because of health costs, obviously. Twenty-seven percent of Army recruits are disqualified from enlistment because of obesity.

In other news at this hour, my pants felt loose yesterday, so I stepped on the scale. Down five pounds. How the hell did that happen? Short answer: Summer cycling, plus an absent kid means I don’t feel obligated to make the dishes she prefers. Last night’s dinner was a frittata with sautéed spinach, garlic and goat cheese. Took me 10 minutes to make.

Well, having children will pack on the pounds. Every mother knows this.

A few more tasty bits of bloggage, then I’m off to edit video.

Every copy-desk chief knows you have to have at least one pervert on the crew, someone who will see the dirty joke in everything. It saves you from some of the more embarrassing exampled detailed here. (Although it doesn’t save you from one of the worst of my career, the time a front-page story reported a phone number for some worthy charity effort, and transposed digits sent readers to a sex line. For that one, the only cure is the plain old boring rule of copy editing: Last thing you do before releasing a page with a phone number? DIAL THE NUMBER.)

Here’s another question for the room: I’ve been reading a lot of stories of late about children misbehaving in public. This column is typical, and pretty restrained, as these things go; I’ve read some truly nasty rants from others, whose day can apparently be ruined by the presence of one whiny kid in a public place. I was always pretty lucky in this regard; Kate wasn’t much of a misbehaver when she was little, and the few times she cried in public, I whisked her out of there so fast, trailing apologies in my wake, that once I startled a couple at a nearby table, who weren’t even aware there’d been a baby in the room.

But I only had one, and a girl, and an easy keeper at that. And a restaurant is not an airport, or an airplane, the latter two of which are far harder to leave. Since then, I’ve aged, and mellowed, and now I’m far more likely to be that couple in the restaurant. I have tune-out skills, and I accept that children are part of the human family, and that overhearing an occasional blowup in a mall or elsewhere is part of the price we pay for a public space. (In any event, I find them far less offensive than hearing some Neanderthal shout curses into his cell phone, an increasingly common occurrence these days.) So my question is: Are kids really worse than they used to be, or does the internet simply give more people a place to complain about them?

Also, I direct your attention to this blog from Lisa Belkin at the NYT, which provides a counterpoint from the mother of a particular noisy child.

OK, the weekend is officially in progress. I might make it to the pool today. Enjoy yours, whatever the weather.

I think I mentioned before that the royal wedding in Monaco sort of snuck up on me. I didn’t know the deed had been done until yesterday, but fortunately we live in the age of the amazing internet, when no detail is too small to report, including that the bride allegedly tried to flee Monaco — three times! — in the days before the ceremony, and was prevented from doing so by Prince Albert’s goon squad, who actually confiscated her passport rather than let her get on that plane back to Johannesburg and the chance to have a happier life.

The precipitating incident?

It followed confirmation by palace sources that Albert, 53, was due to undergo DNA tests because of claims by at least one unnamed woman that he has fathered another illegitimate child.

He already has two he acknowledges. The “at least one” became two in some reports, for an even four. I think, as we are obviously dealing with a man with a severe allergy to latex, we can assume there could easily be more. One is said to be a toddler, which means he’s been stepping out on his beautiful blonde broodmare for some time. I don’t often feel pity for women who are richer, taller and that much better-looking than me, but my heart is not made of stone: Poor Princess Charlene.

There are 63 photos in this slide show, and I beseech you to view them all, if you can. It’s the usual royal freak show, but if you can only hit the highlights, well, start with Grand Duchess Maria of Russia, who picked up her outfit at a Target white sale. Princess Charlotte Casiraghi found a far nicer dress at Chanel — it really is a wow — and Auntie Steph has real balls to stand next to her, now that a lifetime of Mediterranean sun and smoking has taken its toll on her once-lovely face. Note, also, Stephanie’s tattoo, which demonstrates she certainly favors the commoner’s side of the bloodline. Like the Middletons, the bride’s family looks perfectly nice and presentable, and probably behaved better at the reception, off in the corner table reserved for the non-Francophone guests. Charlene got a little emotional during the ceremony, and closeups taken in the church showed a tear rolling down her cheek. I have to say, I’ve never seen a more miserable bride.

Sometimes you can see a couple’s whole life in how they kiss. You certainly can with this one.

But man, a spectacular dress. Although, with that bod, she could probably make Grand Duchess Maria of Russia’s outfit look good. He looks awful. I assume we’re headed for the usual marital denouement, followed by a swift annulment from Rome, to keep those tithes coming from the li’l principality that could.

Another zillion pix from the WashPost.

So, how was your weekend? Mine was quite nice. I made an effort to do little work and mostly succeeded. Went for a fast bike ride on a blisteringly hot Saturday and nearly died, but recovered in time to spin the evening away at a venerable biker bar in Detroit called the Stone House. We sat on the front porch while an enormous thunderstorm mostly missed us, then rode home in that yellowy-bruise light that only midwestern thunderstorms bring. Went to the Eastern Market. Barbecued ribs. Cleaned Kate’s room. The usual.

A lot of bloggage piled up over the weekend, so let’s get to it:

Christopher Hitchens filets Michele Bachmann as only he can, or rather, the particular vote-for-me-I’m-from-Podunk attitude she represents:

Where does it come from, this silly and feigned idea that it’s good to be able to claim a small-town background? It was once said that rural America moved to the cities as fast as it could, and then from urban to suburban as fast as it could after that. Every census for decades has confirmed this trend. Overall demographic impulses to one side, there is nothing about a bucolic upbringing that breeds the skills necessary to govern a complex society in an age of globalization and violent unease. We need candidates who know about laboratories, drones, trade cycles, and polychrome conurbations both here and overseas. Yet the media make us complicit in the myth—all politics is yokel?—that the fast-vanishing small-town life is the key to ancient virtues. Wasilla, Alaska, is only the most vivid recent demonstration of the severe limitations of this worldview. But still it goes on.

“All politics is yokel” — that’s a good one.

Jane Scott, the Cleveland Plain Dealer’s legendary rock critic, died Monday. She was a legend because she started covering rock ‘n’ roll when she was already middle-aged, at a time when pop music writers were nearly always among the youngest in the newsroom, and because she stuck with it for decades. She was 92 when she died, 83 when she retired, 45 when she covered the Beatles’ first appearance in Cleveland, in 1964. She wasn’t much of a prose stylist, but she was enough of a reporter to know news when she saw it:

“I never before saw thousands of 14-year-old girls, all screaming and yelling,” she recalled later. “I realized this was a phenomenon. . . . The whole world changed.”

The Plain Dealer obit, linked above, contains several links to her past pieces. I get the feeling that by the end, being the senior citizen with a backstage pass was part of her brand, as they say. I grew up in a different city, and didn’t know about her until I got to college, where all the journalism students from northeast Ohio worshipped her. One of my classmates took a chance one day, and showed up at Swingo’s, the hotel where all the rockers stayed when they were passing through Cleveland (seen in “Almost Famous”). She swallowed hard and told the desk clerk, “I’m here to interview Bob Marley.” She was a pretty little peach, and they waved her right up, no doubt used to this sort of thing. She still had to clear the road manager in the hallway, though. She told him she was there to interview Bob for the newspaper.

“You must be Jane Scott,” he said.

“Yes, I am,” my classmate said, walked in and shared a spliff and a conversation with the reggae star, and that’s how the student newspaper from Ohio University snagged an interview it likely wouldn’t have gotten otherwise. She was in and out before the real critic, then 60, showed up. I bet that was a funny scene.

Another good appreciation, from the L.A. Times.

And I guess that’s it for me now. Tuesday is now Monday, so I best get rolling. Have a swell short week.

I have to say: I totally don’t get the Roger Ebert “controversy” over tweeting (I still wince, using that as a verb) a mildly critical comment about a dead guy, a few hours after he died.

The dead guy, Ryan Dunn, is part of the “Jackass” crew, a bunch of young men who do heedless, outrageous stunts on camera and release them as movies, which people pay to see. I guess that makes him an actor, although “personality” seems to be a better word for it. Whatever, I think we can all agree one line we don’t want in our obituaries is “was famous for inserting a toy car into his rectum.” But there you go.

You can read about what happened elsewhere, if you haven’t already — Dunn died and gossip sites posted photos taken hours earlier, of Dunn drinking at a Philadelphia-area bar, while police agencies weighed in, estimating that Dunn was traveling far in excess of posted speed limits, maybe as fast as 100 mph. Adding 2 + 2, Ebert said on Twitter, “Jackasses don’t let friends drink and drive.” A “firestorm” ensued, led by the Jackass crew member Bam Margera, and blah blah blah, now it’s a full-fledged “controversy.”

For what it’s worth, I thought Ebert’s partial walkback was artfully done, and contained just the right amount of apology, which boiled down to, “maybe there’s a time for observations like this, but it’s not in the immediate aftermath of a painful event, and I’m sorry I did.” I rather wish he’d gone further and said, “maybe we should all stay away from Twitter and Facebook for, like, a week. See if the world goes on without it. See how we feel about it.” But he didn’t. Alas.

But yesterday must have been a slow news day, because in my perambulations around the web last night, it seemed every major news outlet had a little piece on it. None of them said what I feel like saying, however, so I’ll say it now:

What the hell?

It seems to me that when you make a living doing outrageous things, when you’re an edgy envelope-pusher and toy-car-up-the-butt shover, when you’ve made a nice buck making the mothers of 13-year-old boys around the planet hate your guts for reasons so obvious they don’t even bear repeating here, when you’re known far and wide as a very fast driver and you pose for photos in bars slurping up liquor with your buddies — when you’re all that, and you then die in a fiery car crash, and the worst thing anyone says about you is a mild observation of the obvious, well, maybe you got off easy. Someone else died in that crash, a Jackass hanger-on who was a passenger in the car, which makes you guilty of second-degree murder in many states. You have now officially lost all claim to my sympathies. Jackass.

But also, this: You can track the outrage over this along demographic lines, don’t you think? The younger you are, the more likely you are to be offended that an old man said something mean about a young man who died so tragically, so unfairly. Young people have a hard time believing they will ever die, ever ever ever, and dislike being reminded they will. Plus, old people disapprove of “Jackass” because they’re old and their bones break easily. I remember riding in an elevator at the Columbus Dispatch after the Who concert tragedy in Cincinnati, and listening to some geezer copy editor thunder about these young people “trampling their own kind,” as though that’s what the stampede was about — hey, screw those people if they can’t stay on their feet, I wanna get Roger Daltry’s sweat on me! No one ever did that at a Benny Goodman show, by cracky. I seethed. I kept my mouth shut. I’m sure, had Twitter existed, I’d have marched to a computer and said something stupid about it.

Well, every generation has its Jimi Hendrix moment, I guess. The lesson remains: Friends don’t let friends drink and drive.

A little bloggage today?

Jon Stewart runs down the list of Fox News lies. Very funny.

Newt Gingrich: The other diamond earring drops.

Michele Bachmann’s first dude, Marcus. Fascinating.

Another busy day awaits, but today it pays me some actual money (I hope). So off to do it.

I spent the early hours of Bloomsday — happy Bloomsday, all, especially you, stately plump Buck Mulligan — riven with insomnia, so I took the chance to catch up on some reading. First, Michelle Goldberg’s closer look at Michele Bachmann as something other than comic relief. Although lord knows, you have to laugh. First, a scene-setter with Bachmann at a 2005 town-hall meeting, and what happened when two lesbians tried to have a conversation with the congressional candidate:

A few dozen people showed up at the town hall for the April 9 event, and Bachmann greeted them warmly. But when, during the question and answer session, the topic turned to gay marriage, Bachmann ended the meeting 20 minutes early and rushed to the bathroom. Hoping to speak to her, Arnold and another middle-aged woman, a former nun, followed her. As Bachmann washed her hands and Arnold looked on, the ex-nun tried to talk to her about theology. Suddenly, after less than a minute, Bachmann let out a shriek. “Help!” she screamed. “Help! I’m being held against my will!”

Arnold, who is just over 5 feet tall, was stunned, and hurried to open the door. Bachmann bolted out and fled, crying, to an SUV outside. Then she called the police, saying, according to the police report, that she was “absolutely terrified and has never been that terrorized before as she had no idea what those two women were going to do to her.”

GOP front-runner! Yes!

Actually, a more useful response is not to mock. Dave Weigel points out that it’s far wiser to look closer and try to figure out where she got so many of her crazy ideas. Like the one about the slave-owning founding fathers “working tirelessly” to end slavery. That one comes from a man she describes as an intellectual mentor, John Eidsmoe, a professor at the law school at Oral Roberts University, and yes, they have one there:

In books by Eidsmoe and others who approach history from what they call a Christian worldview, this is a truism. Despite his defense of the Confederacy, Eidsmoe also argues that even those founders who owned slaves opposed the institution and wanted it to disappear, and that it was only Christian for them to protect their slaves until it did. “It might be very difficult for a freed slave to make a living in that economy; under such circumstances setting slaves free was both inhumane and irresponsible,” he wrote.

Weigel notes there’s always a market for historical revisionism, and he’s right about that. Particularly for those who backed history’s losing horses, it’s always nice to see, a few years down the road, a critical re-examination of the race that shows your horse was misunderstood, or slipped a mickey in the saddling area, or whatever. You could almost argue that history is revisionism, that no one has a monopoly on truth, and that when you look at things with different eyes, a story looks different. But whether facts do or do not equal truth, this seems a stretch.

Off-topic, but via Ta-Nehisi Coates, a few notes on Shelby Foote’s own peculiar historical myopia.

Then I read, or reread, having skimmed it earlier in the evening, an ex-CIA guy’s account of how the Bush administration requested the agency go after Juan Cole, the University of Michigan scholar and influential Middle East blogger who rose to prominence as one of the most well-informed critics of the Iraq war and related fiascos. I was struck by this passage:

Professor Cole said he would have been a disappointing target for the White House. “They must have been dismayed at what a boring life I lead,” he said.

I don’t doubt it. Cole was one of our seminar speakers the year I spent in Ann Arbor, and my overwhelming impression is that he was a college professor right out of Central Casting’s nerd closet, a multilingual wonk whose idea of fun was to stay up all night reading al-Jazeera and other Arab and Israeli news sources in the original languages. In fact, after that year, when I was doing a brief job tryout at Minnesota Public Radio, I suggested him as a guest for a morning news show. The producer said she’d asked before, and that he declined all live interviews before lunchtime, as he slept late after his overnight web perambulations, and couldn’t be articulate at an early hour.

But I also don’t doubt the administration would do such a thing, either. He was pretty relentless. I bet Cheney was behind that one.

By then I was feeling rather sour, so I read my old college pal Mark’s project, in the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, on military suicides. Very grim. Suicide is now the leading cause of death among active-duty personnel. Not what you’d call a day-brightener, and by now daylight was only a couple of hours away.

So I slept a little. Still, I could use something silly at the moment. Time to stop by Cute Overload, where they did not disappoint. A kitten video! Yay.

This is the very last, final, no-more-after-today day of school. Yesterday was a half day, today was a half day. Why not have one last full day and call it a year? Dunno. You’d have to ask an administrator. The only event of the day is yearbook distribution and the talent show, and from now until the day after Labor Day, I am free to sleep until I feel like not sleeping, which I estimate will be 45 extra minutes a day. My nature is to be an early riser, and even sleep deprivation doesn’t really get in the way of that. Dammit.

I keep meaning to change the nightstand book to “Game of Thrones,” which I just finished reading on the iPad. Despite my oft-mentioned distaste for fantasy fiction, I have to say, it’s worth the trip. Not a lot of style in the prose, but the plot makes up for it. As an introduction to e-reading it’s a little frustrating, as the technology doesn’t accommodate my flip-around style, but I’m getting used to it. My sister has taken to her Christmas-gift Kindle like a duck to water, and now reports paper books get on her nerves. Not so much with me, but she has a six-month jump on me. And for those of you who are watching the series, I can only say, DO NOT MISS THE FINALE SUNDAY. You won’t believe the cliffhanger. Or maybe you will. The foreshadowing’s been there all along, but even I was wowed.

OK, at nine minutes to quitting time, I’m slapping some frosting on this misbegotten cake and calling it done. They can’t all be masterpieces. Next time, more sleep.

I was trolling the iTunes app store yesterday and saw the new iPad edition of T.S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land.” It’s a true e-book, featuring video clips, interviews, and more. Here’s the bulleted list:

A powerful filmed performance of the entire poem by Fiona Shaw, synchronised to the text

Complete audio readings of the poem, also synchronised to the text, by T. S. Eliot himself, Alec Guinness, Ted Hughes, and Viggo Mortensen

Comprehensive interactive notes to guide the user through the poem’s many references

Over 35 expert video perspectives on the poem, filmed in partnership with BBC Arena, including contributions from Seamus Heaney and Jeanette Winterson

Original manuscript pages revealing how the poem took shape under Ezra Pound’s editing

And while it looked interesting, the budget is simply too tight this summer for a $14 multimedia exploration of a poem I’ve studied on my own and in classrooms many times. (Did you know April is the cruelest month? True dat.) But it made one thing clear: My hopes that the tablet computer might ease my textbook bill when Kate gets to college are well and truly dashed. The $85 psych 101 textbook will no doubt be the $120 e-textbook by 2015. All that will be reduced is the weight in her backpack.

One of my partners in GrossePointeToday.com is married to a textbook salesman, and I asked her once why they’re so goddamn expensive. (Don’t get me started on net weight; I could work up a sweat bench-pressing Kate’s algebra book this year.) The short answer: Because they contain a lot of expensive material that has to be licensed from the content creator — photos and research and the like. The ink and paper isn’t all that much in the grand scheme of things. In e-book, true e-book publishing, that money will go to pay Fiona Shaw and Viggo Mortensen, I guess.

Still, Laura Miller says the… app? e-book? is a huge creative success, for a number of reasons:

First, “The Waste Land” is difficult; even T.S. Eliot acknowledged this in 1922, when he decided to publish notes along with the poem. Touch Press’ version comes with even more notes (by B.C. Southam), illuminating the complex web of literary allusions in those immortal 434 lines. The usual titles at the top of e-book bestseller lists don’t call for this sort of exegesis. There’s not much call to dig deeper unless the book in question has some depth. I don’t really need anyone to help me read a Stieg Larsson thriller, and I don’t plan to be ruminating on it much once I’m done.

… Instead, the people willing to shell out a premium for “The Waste Land” app are more likely to be older, the sort who feel they could have gotten a lot more out of the poem in college if they’d only been a little less distracted by the temptations that assail freshman English majors. Eliot’s poem is a bit daunting, but undeniably powerful, I told myself when a group of friends arranged a staged reading several years ago. I wish I knew it better, now that I’m more able to grasp its nuances. A new edition often provides the occasion for such revisits, which is one reason why publishers keep commissioning new translations of “Inferno” and “Madame Bovary.”

Sounds like I’m the target demographic. Too bad my classes were canceled this term and I have less spending money.

Which reminds me: I need to get to work. Fer real. I’m late today because I was editing a student intern’s report of a lively city council meeting last night. He mentioned the city’s contribution to “the Divine Plan Foundation.” I stared at this for a minute or two, tried to call him (no luck), then called the city manager, who gently explained it was the defined plan under consideration, i.e., the pension obligation.

Sometimes there isn’t enough coffee in the world.

I have no bloggage of note today, do I? No, I have this:

My friend Lance Mannion on David Mamet and his much-ballyhooed turn to the right.

And now, must run. Kate forgot her Spanish textbook for the turn-in today, so I’ll take the opportunity to cycle over there. While hefty, it’s still manageable.

Be good, all.

The heat has broken. Some angry bruises moved through on the radar in the middle of the night, and dropped temperatures like a rock, although not as much as expected. And it didn’t rain more than a few angry spitballs here and there. After one of the wettest springs in anyone’s memory, we’ve now gone a week without rain, and already my neighbors’ sprinklers are coming on in the wee sunrise hours. Is it enough to awaken the household’s most fitful sleeper? Why yes, it is, although I can usually fall back into a doze afterward in the click-click-click white noise. It could be far worse, I know; neighborhoods with wild pheasants get to listen to them crow at the same hour.

A few years ago, I interviewed the head of the groundskeeping crew at Comerica Park about lawn care, for some short thing in a local magazine. Ask the experts, etc. What’s the biggest mistake people make with their own lawns, I asked.

Overwatering. Ha ha.

So how’s everyone today? I’m counting the last few before the end of school, and it can’t really come soon enough. Today and tomorrow are the de facto final days, as next week is a blur of promotion/honors ceremonies, celebratory end-of-year lunches out and, once again, a trip to Cedar Point. At least I don’t have to drag her there this summer; she’s had enough roller-coastering to hold her for the year, and my policy on the Point is every other year. No, this summer I have to drag my daughter and three of her friends to Cleveland, for the Warped Tour show we’re missing because the Detroit stop falls during her summer camp. (Oh, to be 14 again.) The bargain I struck: I will take you to Cleveland, but you must go to the Rock ‘n’ Roll Hall of Fame with me on the same trip. Agreed. And, you must watch the 20-minute movie that ties rock ‘n’ roll to Delta blues and African tribal rhythms, because lo, it is educational. Agreed. Kate has much sneering contempt for what she calls “butt rock,” which seems to boil down to “anything my parents like, or the parents of any of my friends,” although she’ll allow that the Ramones might still approach coolness. And though she’d never, ever admit it, she might occasionally have a thought that her parents’ taste in butt rock might exceed that of her friends’ parents, one of whom asked her, while playing Guitar Hero, if her mother (that would be me, in this convoluted sentence of unclear antecedents) was “a member of the Kiss Army” back in the day.

“Jesus Christ, no. Are you kidding me?” I replied in horror upon hearing this. I try to keep the pottymouth to a minimum around her, but if anything called for taking the Lord’s name in vain, it’s the idea that I ever, ever listened to Kiss with anything approaching pleasure and affirmation. My sole grudging acknowledgement of their presence on earth is a copy of “Detroit Rock City” in my iTunes, and even that is the Mighty Mighty Bosstones’ version, a gift from Ashley Morris when we moved here. Ashley liked Kiss, but his overall coolness trumps the Lame factor, and besides, he was younger than me. We all have our guilty pleasures from high school, but the first Kiss album was released when I was already in college, and was listening to Roxy Music. I stuck the first Roxy Music CD in the car player last winter, and asked Kate what she thought of “Re-Make/Re-Model.” She listened for about four seconds and delivered her default shrug. Which means: Butt rock.

OK, then. The morning is fleeting, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

I followed the link LAMary posted yesterday to Jezebel post on rabbit showjumping. I’d seen the video before, but I hadn’t seen the amazing still photos of the same activity in the Daily Mail. In my riding days, I probably looked at a million photos of horses clearing fences, but these are fascinating in a whole new way. It’s striking how similar the jumping form of the two animals is. Now all they need is some mouse “riders,” and we’re on our way to Cute Overload. A final note: The headline and story both refer to rabbit jumping as “dressage.” You’d think a daily newspaper in a country where equestrian sports were invented would know what dressage is, but obviously not. It ain’t jumping.

I generally stay away from any site with “watch” in the title, but these clips of David Barton, yet another right-wing scholar, beggar belief.

I’ve been neglecting Tom & Lorenzo lately, mainly because their redesign bugs me, but I need to get back in the habit:

What’s the point in showing up to a children’s benefit if you’re going to scowl like a mafioso in all the pictures? Once again, he looks like a kid wearing his big brother’s suit. It’s not a bad suit and normally the fact that it’s too big on him wouldn’t cause us to take so many points off, but his perma-scowl is pissing us off and making him unpleasant to look at, so… Score: 4/10. Lighten the fuck up, dude.

Who else could this be about? Marc Anthony, Mr. J-Lo.

OK, must dash.

One of my neighbors has outdoor speakers, and is enjoying them now. I’d never before noticed how lame the great American songbook can sound when given the full attention of a certain sort of cocktail pianist — the kind who plays as though paid by the note. “Someone to Watch Over Me” is a lovely song, but less so when you can practically see the performer energetically tickling the ivories. Every one of them. In glissando.

Oh, well. It beats the Shirley Bassey/Barbra Streisand/Steve and Eydie compilations I sometimes hear coming from that direction. I didn’t know Shirley Bassey had a career beyond singing the “Goldfinger” theme until I met one of my boyfriend’s mothers, who was exactly the sort of woman Mike Myers immortalized in Linda Richman. She loved Shirley Bassey. So do many people, evidently. Something I didn’t know before today: She’s Welsh, like that other great interpreter of James Bond movie themes, Tom Jones.

Welcome to the week, after a lovely weekend. Saturday was stiflingly hot, but I guess I’ll take it. And yesterday was better, but Sunday is really the beginning of my work week, so meh. I did take a little time to run bike errands. Went to Lowe’s, in the mall near beb’s and CrazyCatLady’s house, which Grosse Pointe mom-scuttlebutt says is LIKE TAKING YOUR LIFE IN YOUR HANDS OMG I CAN’T BELIEVE YOU WENT THERE. Two years ago, I got an email with approximately 7,000 forwards in the address field, from a woman who claimed she had her purse snatched there. I don’t doubt it; it happens. Someone else had added, along the way: “And I know there are frequent forcible rapes in the parking lot.” This I do doubt, but what can you do? People will believe anything if it confirms already-existing fears. But I needed some Dishwasher Magic, and it wasn’t going to buy itself. It’s a straight, bike-friendly shot west from my house, through Harper Woods, a middle/working-class suburb, and the route takes me down a street with towering oaks and deep, enormous lots, even though the houses on them are fairly modest. You can get a glimpse, here and there, of fabulous gardens and, yes, the occasional above-ground swimming pool. (I always want to ask if that’s the InstaRust model or the Skeeter Breeder.)

Then there’s the mall, and Lowe’s had Dishwasher Magic, as well as one of the local police chiefs, dressed in weekend shlump-wear, with no apparent sidearm. He must feel safe there. But as I was already warmed up and in the mood, I rolled farther down Old Homestead Road, to St. Sabbas the Sanctified, surely one of the weirder things to sit smack in the middle of a middle-class residential neighborhood around here. I’ve written about this Russian monastery before, part of the “patriarchal Bulgarian archdiocese of America, Canada and Australia,” although I haven’t been back since. I was interested to see whether the brothers have expanded their footprint at all — I think they’re on about six lots now. Couldn’t tell. It being Sunday, I assume they were at prayer. A hired tree guy was taking down a sizable maple limb wrenched loose in a recent storm. I remembered my main takeaway from my first visit — women must cover their heads, lest they arouse demons — turned around and pedaled home.

Some bloggage today, much of it excellent:

Brian Dickerson on the Kevorkian problem, i.e., yes, he did it wrong, but how often does the clumsy person who does it first ever do it right?

For “Game of Thrones” fans, a map of Westeros. Click to enlarge.

Don’t think that just because this story is about how Anna Nicole Smith met her elderly husband, you don’t want to read it. I was hooked here:

It began—all of it, really—when an old, sad man decided to give his life one last go.

J. Howard Marshall II was sitting in the backseat of his Mercedes sedan one afternoon in Houston in October 1991. He was 86 years old and in the throes of a terrible mourning. He was, his staff worried, suicidal.

Dan Manning, Marshall’s friend and personal driver, was particularly concerned.

“J. Howard,” Manning said, looking up at him in the rearview mirror, “I’ve been thinking.”

There was a pause. “Go ahead.”

“I’ve been thinking maybe it might be time for a new young lady.”

J. Howard looked at Manning in the mirror. He said, “You might be right.”

The GOP’s unyielding orthodoxy — no new taxes. An examination of what it’s gained and lost.

And is that it? I believe it is. Time to take the morning’s breakfast out of the oven — a spinach-and-garlic frittata — and see if it was worth the trouble. Happy Monday, happy week, all.

This, friends, is the definition of what is colloquially known as “some bullshit.”

It won’t last. Doesn’t matter. Last night I took Kate to a concert, a freakin’ long one, and we drove home under a bright full moon. Eighteen hours of high, freezing winds had finally abated, and I thought, OK, that’s over. Evidently, it’s not over. This is what the winds were bringing us. Should have known.

The concert was Anarbor, the same band we saw last November. Actually, it was five bands, with Anarbor in the middle, although we had to stay until nearly the bitter end. This week is spring break, so getting home at a decent hour wasn’t a big concern, but the headliners played for a Springsteen-like interval and they were getting on my nerves. So I discovered one use for text messaging, i.e., contacting your daughter on the other side of the club:

Let’s go. This band sux.

We’re waiting for Mike.

Mike being the Anarbor guitarist. All the other members had been out to pose for photos and sign merch, but Mike was the last holdout. I guess you have to stagger these things to maximize merch purchases, an important revenue stream for a young touring band. On the other hand, one more song by A Rocket to the Moon seemed like cruel and unusual punishment. So I walked up to the secured lounge area where I’d seen some of the other acts coming and going, and caught one going.

“Mike in there?”

“Yeah.”

“Send him out.”

Let me tell you, folks, one of the very few advantages to being an old bag is, if you look like someone’s mother, a well-raised young man will frequently obey a direct order. Thirty seconds later: Mike.

“Hey, Mike, thanks for coming out. My daughter wants to get her poster signed. Hang on while I text her.”

“That’s great you’re down with the texting, got the iPhone and everything. I wish my mom was.”

Text: I’ve got Mike at the top of the stairs. On the double.

So Mike and I chatted about this and that, the weather and Phoenix (where they live) and Po, Kate’s band. The look on Kate’s face when she rounded the corner on the staircase with her friends and saw her mother having a conversation with her guitar hero was something to see. Mike signed the poster: “Rock and roll, Mike” and posed for pictures.

Mike is a very nice guy. I only wish he would cool it with the marijuana boosterism.

Mike is 21 years old. In some parts of Detroit, I’m old enough to be his grandmother.

It’s spring break, but I’m still working. So let’s get Monday under way.

Roy Edroso saw “Atlas Shrugged” so you don’t have to:

(As) much fun as it is to slag rotten movies, it is much better to be surprised by a good one, especially when you’ve reached the stage in life where two hours in front of a stinker sets you dreaming of the warm couch and leftover sesame chicken that you left back home. But it is my great regret to inform you that Atlas Shrugged: Part I is neither good nor good-bad, but bad-bad-bad-bad. I dreamed, not of sesame chicken, but of my own swift and merciful death, and that of the director, not necessarily in that order. It is not a pleasurable surprise, not a hoot, nor an outrage; it is Rand’s granite crushed, reconstituted, and spread across the screen with steamrollers.

You’ll hear a certain amount of handwringing over this story — computer out-writes human sports reporter — but I honestly believe it has more to do with sportswriting than journalism in general. Still, amusing, as well as proof that if we could harness the power of pissed-off readers, we could light Los Angeles for a month. (This whole project was touched off by a college-age reporter whose story of a perfect game neglected to mention that little detail until the penultimate graf. Kirk, stop pounding your forehead on the desk. You’ll leave a mark.)

You’ve probably seen this, but let’s give it a little more exposure: Racist Orange County Republicans keep outdoing themselves. Amazing. No, not amazing.

OK, up and at ’em. Let’s hope for a swift melt.

Many years ago, a bunch of my friends and I ended up in Florida for a week. Not spring break, a wedding. What an exciting week it was, of which we must never, ever speak publicly. Daytimes, we recovered in the usual Florida fashion — laying out in chaise lounges by the pool and/or beach.

One day Paul got up to go inside to freshen his drink and didn’t come back. I went in a bit later to freshen my own and found him putting the last touches on a fairly elaborate snack platter — Triscuits with tuna salad, fruit, little cheesy things, etc. Plus a fresh cocktail with a fruit flag on the rim of the glass.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

“Erica’s getting married,” he said. “I’m having a reception.”

Oh, right. “All My Children.” And there Erica was, wearing a modest red-sequined wedding cocktail dress, marrying for the fourth time, to Adam Chandler. He’d also be the male lead in marriage no. 7, out of 10 as of 2005, the last list I could find, and I’m not spending an extra minute researching Erica’s marriages, let me tell you. Erica Kane Martin Brent Cudahy Chandler Montgomery Montgomery Chandler Marick Marick Montgomery.

I’m sorry Paul died before the internet took over our lives, as I’m sure he’d enjoy surfing the “All My Children” blogs every day, maybe keeping one himself. You know what the big news would be today — it and “One Life to Live” are being cancelled after 40 years or so, part of the slow collapse of the daytime soap. Hard to imagine. I remember my grandmother watching these afternoon stories in the ’60s, when they were in black and white, the action punctuated with organ stings.

Soaps were always the golden handcuffs for actors, steady work that paid very well, but didn’t carry much prestige outside of fan conventions. Although I’m always amazed at how many respectable ones got their start there — Julianne Moore, Marisa Tomei. Demi Moore was on “General Hospital,” although I think we can all agree her technique still has one foot in the Significant Close-up to Close a Scene.

The New Yorker ran a hilarious profile of the showrunner of “Days of Our Lives” a few years back. It was there I learned that the writing on soaps has reached the point where scenes in heaven are fairly routine now. Never watched ’em, myself. Tried, during the Luke and Laura “General Hospital” era, but couldn’t get into it.

So how about a picture? From the Kid Rock cruise:

That’s from the Facebook of Deke Dickerson, whom I gather was a musician in one of the backup bands. Thanks to BobNG for pointing it out. As I said late in yesterday’s comments, I’m disappointed at how much better his album is than any of the many photo galleries published by the Free Press. If you’re on Facebook, you can look it up yourself; they’re public on his wall, but I don’t think any link I’d put here would work. I’m amazed, although I shouldn’t be, by how many guests had multiple Kid Rock tattoos. One had an interesting surgery scar on her thigh, too. I’m sure the story behind that one is something to hear.

A little bloggage for the weekend:

U.S. Postal Service FAIL, as the kids say: The new Statue of Liberty stamp turns out to be a photograph of the one in Las Vegas, not in New York Harbor. Another delightful read by Kim Severson, off the food beat for a while now, and blooming where she’s planted. I saw her speak at a conference in Ann Arbor, and she was by far the most amusing one there.

Finally, something to consider while our American kids are being taught to the test. Tell me if you think these Australian kids will ever forget this lesson about dinoaurs for the rest of their lives:

What does a getup like that cost, anyway? Can I save enough money by next Halloween?

Jolly good weekend to all.

We’re finally getting some competition for Comcast in these parts. As Comcast has recently rewarded my years of customer loyalty with a $20 monthly rate hike, to give me services I don’t use, I listened when the WOW cable guy stopped by yesterday. Most intriguing offer: Real savings on the land line, thanks to the choice of three tiers of service. We use it so little I know that if it rings, it’s likely someone I don’t want to talk to. I’d drop it if it weren’t for my husband’s objections, and the fact the phone mount in my kitchen is huge and will require a large framed portrait of Alexander Graham Bell to hide. So this would work for us, and I’m pissed Comcast hasn’t stepped in with an alternative.

They also offer three tiers of internet service, but in this area I require Maserati-like speed, so no savings there.

But the real elephant in the business-model room would be true choice in cable TV. The doomsday scenario for that industry is when customers can craft their own package from the channels they actually watch. Farewell, Golf Channel, hello AMC, etc. We’re there, more or less, at least with anyone willing to watch TV on their computer. I’m not. I still practice the exhaustion model of TV consumption — slump in chair, pick up remote, surf — enough that it would bug me to not have the option.

Anyone with WOW experience, I’m all ears.

Someone sent me this article, more food apocalypse-porn from Gary Taubes. Headline: Is Sugar Toxic? Let’s see if I can guess what the answer might be, coming from a writer who’s been beating the drum for the low-carb, paleo diet for years. Do I even need to read it? Probably not.

New rule: I no longer listen to anyone who tells me a food that I, and millions of other human beings, have enjoyed for centuries, is “toxic.” If nothing else, I’d like to enforce a certain strict constructionism in language. A toxin is a poison. If I eat this cookie, will I fall to the floor in a writhing heap? No? Then I’m going to eat it. Taubes acknowledges as much in his opening paragraphs:

It’s one thing to suggest, as most nutritionists will, that a healthful diet includes more fruits and vegetables, and maybe less fat, red meat and salt, or less of everything. It’s entirely different to claim that one particularly cherished aspect of our diet might not just be an unhealthful indulgence but actually be toxic, that when you bake your children a birthday cake or give them lemonade on a hot summer day, you may be doing them more harm than good, despite all the love that goes with it. Suggesting that sugar might kill us is what zealots do. But Lustig, who has genuine expertise, has accumulated and synthesized a mass of evidence, which he finds compelling enough to convict sugar. His critics consider that evidence insufficient, but there’s no way to know who might be right, or what must be done to find out, without discussing it.

If I didn’t buy this argument myself, I wouldn’t be writing about it here.

OK, then!

The longer I live, the more I throw in with those nutritionists. I come from a long line of moderate people who lived into their ninth decade by practicing moderation, and eating a piece of birthday cake ever year.

However. Speaking of food, someone posted this on Facebook yesterday, and while its headline is immoderate — The 20 Worst Foods in America — it’s worth a click-through on your next coffee break. It’s not foods, exactly, but restaurant dishes, compiled by the folks at Eat This, Not That ™, yet another insta-book that became a franchise overnight. I don’t eat at places like the Cheesecake Factory and Blimpie’s often, but every so often circumstances will force us off the freeway and into an Olive Garden or some such. Just last week, Kate and I ate at a Chili’s nearby; I fired up the Fast Food Calorie Counter app on my phone, to get a sense of what we were in for.

And nearly fell on the floor. I’ve never seen so many 1,800-calorie appetizers in my life. Everything seemed to boil down to a fat stuffed into a carb, then deep-fried and glazed with more fat — crispy-cheesey tortilla bombs. I ordered the chicken tacos and ate half. Kate got the sliders and ate half. As these are not foods that reheat well, we passed on the go-boxes, but it reminded me of the other thing that is making us fat — portion size. Do you remember when restaurant plates became platters, when the goal was not to feed you so much as stuff you like a foie gras goose? I do. It was approximately the mid-70s. It started with Chi-Chis. I knew a woman who waitressed there; she was living in a hippie farm commune and asked the dishwashers to scrape the plates into a special garbage bag, which she took home at the end of every shift to feed to their pig. Fitting.

OK, the morning is fleeing, so let’s skip to the bloggage:

Longish, but worth a read, as Hugh Grant — yes, the actor — sits down with a former tabloid hack and gets the download on how prevalent surveillance techniques like phone-hacking and other digital eavesdropping is. Via hidden recording. Brilliant. P.S. And this is a developing story.

Speaking of food, Roy Edroso linked to this, and so am I: A few notes on modernist cuisine and molecular gastronomy, at both the restaurant and McDonald’s-lab level, from the Chicago magazine 312 blog. (Broken link fixed. Sorry.)

It’s not “Sophomore dies in kiln explosion,” but it’s close: Yale student dies when her hair gets caught in a lathe. Something to remember when you’re considering what factory work should pay.

OK, off to the bike, and outta here. The week, it’s nearly over!