This is Fashion Week in New York. You might not know this, but in the Nall-Derringer co-prosperity sphere, with its alarmingly New York-centric newspaper and magazine subscriptions, it’s hard to escape. Maybe you’re feeling lost. I will try to help.

As some of you may know, I once covered fashion. Sort of. Here’s how it happened: My paper’s longtime fashion writer, June Wells Dill, a grandmotherly sort of woman who occasionally wore hats, was retiring. At the staff meeting to discuss her replacement, no one else wanted the job.

“Does it still include a couple trips to New York every year?” I asked. It did, I was told.

“OK, I’ll do it,” I said. And that’s how the big papers handled staffing, once upon a time. At least in the women’s department. And so I packed my suitcase and my portable computer — a primitive device that weighed a ton, generated a printout as you wrote and somehow managed to transmit an electronic copy of your story back to the newsroom — and went off to New York.

An aside: I required training on the computer. Because 90 percent of the newsroom travel at the time was done by the sportswriters, I was taught by our Cincinnati Reds beat writer.

“And this is how you make a quote mark. You’ll need this if the dresses have anything to say,” he said. A real wiseguy. Have you ever heard the sorts of things baseball players say? You could put that shit on a user key, only we didn’t know what a user key was, back then.

Anyway, off to New York I went. I didn’t go for Fashion Week per se, which didn’t exist in the current form. Rather, all the designers showed around the same time of year, and you ran around between their studios or whatever they had booked for their 20-minute shows. But that was for the New York Times, Women’s Wear Daily and the other bigs. Papers from Rubetown went for Eleanor Lambert’s coordinated week of shows, which was actually the forerunner of Fashion Week itself.

In my era, the event was held at the Plaza, and I sat there on the runway and got a self-taught crash course in descriptive writing. The thing about fashion is, after a while it’s just a blur. Dress dress dress suit suit suit dress dress dress wedding gown. (The wedding gown is — was — the traditional finale of every show. Does anyone do that anymore?) So I quickly learned the jargon, tissue faille and gabardine and ruching. And then I learned about the details, bateau collars and swing pleats and bugle beads. And then I learned the high-level vocabulary that everyone uses, almost all of which is meaningless and can be recombined endlessly. It’s based on a few simple adjectives, which I reveal to you now:

1) Modern
2) Sexy
3) Unconstructed / Constructed
4) Edgy
5) Retro

“It’s an unconstructed jacket with retro touches, very modern and sexy.”

“I love that edgy, constructed thing he has going on. It’s modern and retro at the same time. Which is what makes it so edgy.”

See how easy? Watch a few episodes of “The Rachel Zoe Project,” and play along. Rachel is famously inarticulate, so drop unconstructed/constructed and substitute major: “This collection is so major, so sexy and modern, I just love it.”

It’s amusing to me how often “sexy” gets thrown around, given how many clothes are designed by gay men, who have no sexual interest in women, and displayed on walking hangers with no tits or ass to speak of, parading with angry scowls on their faces, perhaps with violent slashes of neon-green eyeshadow or with their hair greased into threatening spikes. Some of these people have strange ideas of sexy.

Here’s a sexy dress, or so I’m told, one of the most famous red-carpet dresses ever, the Versace safety-pin dress worn by Elizabeth Hurley in 1994. I thought she looked like a streetwalker. Any dress you have to be glued into, that has to be minded at every minute lest your boobs pop out or your abdomen reveal a wrinkle, isn’t sexy to me. Halle Berry’s Oscar dress — that’s sexy.

But I’m getting away from my point. Oh, wait: I didn’t have one.

Can I just ask one question about Rachel Zoe, however: What, exactly, does she do for her clients that qualifies her to be called a stylist? A stylist, as I understand the job, puts together looks for you. Every time I see Rachel Zoe, she’s just shopping, swanning around fashion shows and boutiques, loving everything and name-dropping: I love this for Demi. It’s so major. She cadges free dresses, and her clients try them on, and she claps her hands. What’s her business model? How is she paid? Did Cameron Diaz finance those crackbrain shopping trips to Europe? I don’t get it. If you have the means to hire her, you should be spending your money on someone who can really help you look your best — a gay man.

Anyway, I have to go. There was a Tom Ford show yesterday, and I’m on the hunt for photos. Oh, wait — only one photographer was allowed to take pictures (which explains all these point-and-shoot pix of someone’s nostrils, with credit lines to the reporter). A fashion show with no photographers. How modern. How edgy.

Bloggage?

You know all that talk about how we’re going to have to come to grips with retiring later? Have you ever noticed how often it’s written by people with jobs like “economist” and “college professor?” A look at what work, real work, is like for many blue-collar workers, and why they can’t work until they’re 70.

Jon Stewart, last night. It’s worth watching just for his “Community Center of Death” graphic open.

I have two stories to write today. Nothin’ big — just 2,000 words by day’s end. Groan. Better get to it.

The weather last Thursday was give-me-a-break hot, the sort of heat that makes you irritable because it’s already September, for cryin’ out loud and DO WE REALLY DESERVE 94 DEGREES? REALLY? Then a front blew through — and I do mean blew — and 15 minutes of horizontal rain later, it was fall. Justlikethat. The temperature on Saturday didn’t touch 70. Weirdest thing.

To me, it was perfect. I’m like a brick house at this time of year — it takes me a while to lose my heat. And anyway, it was only an early warning. Eighties again today. Then 70s, and then we march for real toward the dying of the light. At the Eastern Market Saturday I ran into Jim from Sweet Juniper. He said this was the peak weekend for the market; by next week the blueberries will be gone, then the peaches and tomatoes, and “before you know it, it’s six months of root vegetables.”

They should put that on our license plate, a special foodie edition: Six months of root vegetables. I’d buy that.

One of the things I did on my time away from the blog, and the internet, and all the rest of it was, well, two things, actually. I did some reading, and I did some thinking. I carried Laura Lippman’s latest, “I’d Know You Anywhere,” through Cedar Point, reading while the girls stood in line for the coasters. I went in with about half the book already under my belt, figuring these little intervals would be plenty to keep me covered for two days of coaster-waiting. It was not. I churned through the whole second half in one afternoon. Folks, we have a page-turner on our hands.

“Lippman’s best!” would be my blurb, but that’s just me. I think I wrote before, in discussing the disappointment of Scott Smith’s second novel (“The Ruins,” which featured an evil talking plant) as compared to his first (“A Simple Plan,” which featured evil talking people), that there’s little in life as mysterious and ultimately terrifying as the human heart, but it’s the hardest thing to write about in a world where crime fiction routinely features albino monks and deranged thrill killers. Readers who have been numbed by those “The Girl Who Owned the Bestseller List” doorstops might find Lippman’s main character, the hostage and sole survivor of a spree killer, a pale sister to Lisbeth what’s-her-name, but I ask you: What’s harder to write? A page-turner about a genius hacker who can sniff out buried urges, stage a hidden-camera rape (of herself!) to turn it to her advantage and crack the tightest computer security in the world? Or one about an average girl who survives a harrowing ordeal mostly by being sort of average?

Which is to say, Laura writes about real women in extraordinary situations, and still makes the action tense and complex. This is genre fiction, and certain tropes are expected, but they were in short supply here, or at least they felt integral to the story. An ordinary woman, behaving not like an ex-Delta Force commando, but pretty much like…an ordinary woman. And yet still you can’t put her story down. Read, enjoy, and try to figure out how she pulled it off. Not an easy thing to do.

Then I got home, and drew down my Amazon gift-card balance* with two purchases — “Freedom” and “Last Call,” both of which strike me as keepers. I read the NYT’s review of the former with my jaw steadily dropping toward my chest, and put it down thinking, jeez, get a room. But I still want to read it. I was one of those who read and loved “The Corrections,” Jonathan Franzen’s last novel, although I was equally entertained by the author’s ability to shoot his own foot off. This was the announced-and-withdrawn Oprah selection, after Franzen was a little too upfront with his ew-the-proletariat act. It was also, oddly enough, key to my first souring on post-9/11 blogger triumphalism. Jeff Jarvis wrote at the time that he’d bought the book, but couldn’t bring himself to read it in the Wake of the Day that Changed Everything, because he found blogs so much more satisfying and engaging. Show me a man who’d rather read Instapundit than Franzen, and I’ll show you a real idiot.

Which sort of leads to my second activity of the weekend — the thinking. I spent a lot of time marveling, “It sure is nice not being online this weekend.” (Although I was, but not much.) I considered how much I enjoy reading for pleasure, how refreshing it is to give your focus to lines on a page and sustain it for an hour or more at a time. Hank wrote earlier this summer about another book, “Hamlet’s BlackBerry,” that seems to capture this longing for just a little more time in the slow lane, ignoring YouTube and blogs and all the rest of it.

Hank notes:

One of my favorite things Bill wrote (and apparently one of David Carr’s favorites, too) was about the onslaught of “Did You See?” that infected our culture in the mid-2000s. (I like to write it as Didjusee?) It was about the beginning of the Internet all-you-can-eat buffet and the end of people actually reading or considering all the links they were clicking on or re-linking (now called retweeting). It no longer mattered. The question was only “Didjusee what so-and-so wrote on Slate?” “Didjusee the Lindsey Lohan video on TMZ?” “Didjusee what Mitt Romney told the Times?” Didjusee? Didjusee?

Ah, but did you read it as well? Usually no.

I want to read more. I want to write different things. I want to stop caring about viral video or what someone wrote on Slate. On today, the first day of school, the first day of Adult Summer (this still-warm, kid-free few weeks we grownups can enjoy before the weather turns for good), the beginning of a new year, it seems the right time to make a few resolutions.

So, some bloggage:

While we’re on the subject of Laura Lippman, from her own blog, a few thoughts about physical vs. digital books, and the frankly creepy digital triumphalism that has a lot in common with? See above.

Something I did not know until this weekend: There’s a film version of “The Big Valley” in production right this minute, and it almost shot in Michigan. “The Big Valley” was very popular with my high-school crowd, and yes, I guess you could say we watched it ironically. We each had a role; I was Audra Barkley, a girl too tempestuous to tame. I still occasionally run across an episode on the Western channel, and while I can see its many flaws clearly, I still think it’s a hoot and I see now why it was the embryonic gay men in my gang who singled it out — it had Barbara Stanwyck and Lee Majors, attitude and sex. The former was always ordering bad guys off her place with a shotgun, the latter posed a lot in chaps.

We had a party every Christmas in its honor — the Barkley party, cowboy hats and six-guns required. I’d suggest one for the release of the film, but alas, Jerrod and Nick are dead, Heath lives in the U.P. year-round and no one knows where Victoria is these days. That leaves me, Audra. Guess I’ll get some false eyelashes and give it a go.

And now my work week begins. Enjoy yours. Enjoy Adult Summer.

* If I haven’t mentioned lately how much I appreciate those of you who order your Amazon through my store, earning me a small kickback, let me do so now: I appreciate you.

Last week the roof project finally concluded with a little mop-up: A guy came out to rehang the back-side gutters and install a couple more downspouts. Now our brand-new roof will shed water efficiently. I pause to stick my finger in my cheek for a weak pop, and then I wave it in the air and say woo. Big effin’ deal.

This is new for me. In the past, I had pride of ownership in almost every repair we made, to this house and to our last house. There’s something about caring well for one’s house that’s always resonated with me, but not so much anymore. It’s true that a new roof doesn’t satisfy like a new kitchen, but it still felt virtuous, because you were adding to your home’s resale value and maintaining the property, which reflected on the neighborhood and made everyone rest a little easier at night.

But our real estate market can be explained in a headline which I swear I’ve read 400 times in the last five years in the local weekly: Has the market hit bottom? The answer is always the same: Maybe. The answer is always wrong, because the correct answer is: No. So putting a roof on my house, which used to feel like forgoing a new dress to put the money in the bank, now feels more like tearing up hundred-dollar bills and throwing them into a flushing toilet. And as long as we’re reading the Obvious News, it seems I have lots of company.

When this recession is over — if it ever is — and the historians start to sort it out, I don’t think anything will be as important, in the long run, as what it did to real estate. It’s still my main disappointment with Barack Obama, that he didn’t launch a big show trial on Jan. 21, 2009 that would have marched the Wall Street shitheads who wrecked the housing market before a tribunal of foreclosed and washed-out homeowners and a judge that was a combination of, ohhhh, Al Sharpton and Judge Judy, say. His gavel would be oversized, and he’d be welcome to use it on both his bench and the defendants’ heads. A guillotine would be right outside the courtroom, and we’d use it until the rope broke and the blade dulled.

That, at least, would show we take the damage these people did seriously. People who don’t own houses or apartments get a little impatient with this, and I guess I don’t blame them, but trust me: This crash hurts everyone, owner or not. For those of us who don’t live in the places where the middle class are shut out of owning real estate — which is to say, most of the country outside of New York City, San Francisco and much (but not all) of Los Angeles — our houses are the most expensive thing we own, and are far more than a place to lay our weary heads and store our record collections. The sale of my parents’ house provided half their retirement stake. They were of the generation that saved up for a down payment, shopped carefully, bought and stayed put. No flipping or trading up for them. Three bedrooms, 1.5 baths, bought in 1962 and sold in 1995, paid off and worth seven times what they paid for it.

My generation was different, but not Alan and me, so much. This is our second house, in our second city. I pay extra principal on our house every month, although God knows why. Optimistically, it’s worth half what we paid for it. Recovery of our purchase price might be 20 years off. The Detroit Metro has special problems, to be sure, but the whole country is sweeping up this wreckage, and I will never forget who caused it. (Hint: It wasn’t Barney Frank.)

For years, for practically ever, real estate was the safest investment you could make. My mom started bugging me to buy a condo as soon as I had a full-time job. You couldn’t lose. Everybody pays something for housing, after all, and you might as well pay yourself, plus the mortgage interest is tax-deductible. And housing always went up. It didn’t rise at the redonkulous rates of recent years, but a steady 1 to 3 percent was a given.

And while I may be overstating the virtues of ownership, I still firmly believe that a neighborhood of owners is, in the broadest terms, better than one of renters. When you have a financial stake in something, you pay more attention to it. You care if the local schools are good, even if you don’t have children in them. You don’t like it when your neighbors let their lawn go to prairie (unless everyone else’s is prairie, too). You keep the walks swept. It’s the broken-window theory on a less dramatic scale, and for generations, it worked.

But that’s only part of it. Local governments rely on property-tax revenues to provide services. When property values slide, so do tax receipts. We’re only beginning to see these problems, cities letting streets go or not replacing lighting or laying off firefighters. And how long did I say it might be before recovery?

When you think about it, pretty much everything in our economy is predicated on the idea that we’ll always be growing. (Certainly our health-care costs have done that.) A few flat years we can handle. But a full-on retreat, a crash? This is new for me. Last week our boring old city council got a little testy over some penny-ante travel for the city clerk, nothing big, but one of the members grumped that they were looking at another enormous shortfall the following year, and nickels and dimes add up. I can’t imagine what they’ll be fighting over in three years. Probably which one gets to quit first.

My house, my millstone. But with a nice new roof.

So, a little bloggage? Sure. Scott Rosenberg at Salon looks at a phenomenon I’ve been seeing in my news searching for a while now: The content farms have gamed Google. Don’t be evil!

“I think his dad’s bought them off, sometimes. He’s practically selling dope out of the trunk of his car. I have to give him one thing, though. Watching his personality disintegrate made me give up pot for good. Well, that and the fact the shit makes you so fucking retarded these days. The last time I smoked was spring last year. I was so paranoid I walked out of the house and hid in that big wall of shrubs by the sorority house. And the girls started that goddamn singing. ‘Together forever. Together forever.’ Do you have any idea how much that sounds like you’re eavesdropping on some kind of blood sacrifice?” — why I added Coozledad’s blog to my RSS feed. I was missing too many of these, or discovering them days later.

Another great Tom-and-Lorenzo Mad Style entry, this one on Francine Hanson, played by the sublime Anne Dudek.

I’ve taken a casual interest in Stephanie Seymour ever since Alan and I discovered the “November Rain” video on MTV. One of us would always say to the other, “She dies in the end.” Today, the NYT did a silly-season Sunday Styles front on the disintegration of her marriage to Peter Brant, described as “a taller, more dashing version of Buddy Hackett.” Her “November Rain” role was described thusly: “she portrayed a bride who dies.” Everyone remembers her!

So have a great Monday, all. Mine will, as usual, be busy.

I try to engineer my week so that Fridays belong to me and only me. I start working on Sunday afternoons, and I front-load my work week to the point that by Wednesday, I am starting to get a little breathing room. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t, but if all goes as planned, by noon Friday, I’m cruising.

Sometimes it doesn’t go as planned. Last Friday, I got a call from one of my friends from my fellowship year, an Israeli who’s now U.S. bureau chief for Yedioth Ahronoth, the largest daily (I think) in Tel Aviv. Could I put together something quickly on the Flint Slasher? For actual money? Anything for you, Adi. (And anything for a little money. I spend so much time writing for little or nothing, I’d forgotten what that’s like.) And so off I rolled around lunchtime, cruising for Genesee County instead.

And? A very sad place. Granted, I was on the po’ side of town. I remember, after “Roger & Me” insulted conservatives with the suggestion that perhaps capitalism isn’t win-win for everyone, reading something specific to Flint in one of their ideological house organs, which arrived by the truckload at my paper’s editorial page. Yes, downtown Flint retail was dead, the writer said, but that’s because everyone was shopping at the brand-new mall, etc. etc. Perhaps. (That’s certainly what happened in Fort Wayne.) And surely a comprehensive tour of the area with experts would have revealed a fuller picture of the place. But I drove around a bit, and my overwhelming impression was Springsteenian: Foreman said these jobs are goin’, boys, and they ain’t comin’ back to your hometown. In Detroit, the ruin is Roman — you can see what was once a great city under the decay. In Flint, the disaster befell someplace far more ordinary. Which made it starker, and sadder.

The term for these sorts of excursions is “parachute journalism.” I was happy to pack my chute and leave at the end of the day. And the result? Your basic fly-by visit by some empty suit.

Poor Adi. Deadline was 2 p.m. Saturday, but that was for the final, finished product. Translation is a bear, especially on deadline.

And so the week begins. It’s a special one for one of our group: Laura Lippman’s latest, “I’d Know You Anywhere,” drops tomorrow, and oh, how the praise has flowed. Amazon says it will be arriving by tomorrow, but hasn’t shipped yet. “Three Stations,” which I also pre-ordered and is published the same day, has shipped. So I’ll pay twice for shipping. But I’m happy to give my fave writer all-important “velocity” in first-week sales.

A little bloggage? Ohhh-kay:

An outsider experiences fair food, swoons. A nice wrap-up of what’s being deep-fried this year.

The Diego Rivera murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts, reconsidered.

I noticed this when I was in Ann Arbor a few years back. It blew my mind then, and still does: College students who check in with their parents multiple times a day. I called my mom once a week, and that was because we had free long distance (Ohio Bell was our family’s coal mine).

And now, having flown by, I must fly. Ta ta.

It’s one of those mornings. Just a warning.

These things happen, late in the week. The accumulated lack of sleep piles up until Thursday, when I’m positively dull-witted. Friday I get a second wind, but Thursdays just suck. To quote a recent Kim Severson tweet: The bags under my eyes are so big Delta charged me $25 each. I should be used to working late and getting up early, but friends, I am not. My boss told me once he hasn’t gotten more than four hours sleep since he started his company. I shudder to think.

So, in honor of my lack of functioning brain cells, let’s lower the tone. Let’s talk about…oh, what’s in the file here… Got it! Boobs.

If you’re not online as much as I am, you’ve doubtless missed the story of Debrahlee Lorenzana, who is apparently bringing suit against her former employer, who fired her (she claims) because her smokin’ hotness. The story has been followed mostly by Gawker, and thanks to the miracle of tagging, I can link you to a single page of posts, where you are advised to start at the bottom and read up.

Debrahlee is, indeed, lovely, and it’s easy to see how a bunch of loutish bankers would find her distracting when she strolled through the room. I used to work with a woman somewhat like this — young, beautiful, and a very sharp dresser. It was the latter that made her a head-turner, because most newsrooms are oceans of Dockers and polo shirts and other unfortunate sartorial choices. She was also Asian, and had that almost impossibly tiny frame Asian women frequently have. She was fond of wide, waist-cinching belts, and whenever she walked by, I would think, Somewhere, Scarlett O’Hara is weeping.

Anyhoo, Debrahlee. (I’m going to start calling her “Debbie.” This ridiculous spelling is getting on my nerves.) Debbie’s case is very strange, because her lawyer appears to have tricked her out in a number of plunging necklines and stiletto heels to…what end, exactly? Demonstrate how hot she is? Is this to bolster her case? Because if I were an office manager I’d probably tell her to lay off the V-necks, too. Which reminds me of another one of my former colleagues, a summer intern who once appeared for work in a sheer blouse and a hot-pink bra. You didn’t get the sense she was going for any sort of va-va-voom factor, it was just, y’know, what was clean that morning. The editor who sent her home to change earned her check that week. It was widely believed at the time that she had “some sort of developmental delay,” as the health writer delicately put it. Yes, friends, that was our newsroom — the place that hired mentally challenged interns.

Back to Debbie. She keeps turning up in the news, always with many, many photographs, always with a vague message that seemed to boil down to I am sooo hot. At one point she said she couldn’t help the way she looked, her slender body and her full breasts were “genetic,” and shouldn’t she be able to hold a job like everyone else? She almost had me for a while; the Gorgeous-American community has rights, too.

Then, yesterday, Gawker found the smoking videotape — Debbie featured in a plastic-surgery marketing video shot some years back, asking for “huge, double-D breasts” so she can look like “a Playboy Playmate.” So much for genetics, but you probably already figured that out.

Which brings us to the other boob story of the morning: Did Sarah Palin buy herself a pair? Please please please let this story be true. Please. (I’m dubious, however. She doesn’t look all that enhanced. On the other hand, there is no way those are the natural breasts of a fortysomething veteran of five pregnancies.) If it’s true, it would indicate desperation has begun to nibble around the edges of her steely confidence. And that’s a good thing.

Boobs, male variety: Don’t let the children of gay parents go to our Catholic school! They’ll probably bring porn and dildos to show-and-tell. No further comment needed.

Belated attention to Hank Stuever, who is not a boob, with some suggestions, and a couple musts-to-avoid, for your summer reading list. (There’s a boob-related anecdote within.)

Via Brendan, a Brian Dickerson column on how Michigan might emulate California, but in a good way. Boob factor: The state legislature.

And with that, the caffeine has kicked in and I’m outta here. Off to the gym. To work on my pectorals.

The catering gig was a mixed bag. I miscalculated for lunch, and came up short by about three people. Of course it’s embarrassing and unfair; the people who come to lunch last are frequently the hardest-working of the crew, and you feel bad that they have to settle for peanut butter. But I miscalculated on two fronts — the weather (freezing) and the fact this is a war movie, and young men possess the sorts of appetites that make mothers all over the world put off buying new clothes, for fear of running short for the groceries. Should have doubled the chili.

But we did OK at dinner (lasagna), and I felt somewhat redeemed. When people are working for nothing — and with every one of these things we do, we get more people, and they work harder — the least you can do is feed them.

I mentioned the weather. Boy, did it suck. A front blew through Friday night with tornado watches and violent thunderstorms, followed by temperatures that didn’t touch 50 degrees all day, with a steady 25-30 mile per hour wind, many stronger gusts. In other words: Suckitude. And I was inside all day. A memo ahead of time mentioned the need to keep lots of water on set, as some of the actors would be wearing rubberized costumes and would need to hydrate frequently. Ha ha. They were the lucky ones.

But that’s water gone by, and now we look forward. I had lots of down time between meals, and spent it catching up on my web-surfing. As Monday is my busiest day, I offer you plenty of bloggage:

Beautiful Lena Horne, gone at 92. I saw her a few months back in “Cabin in the Sky,” which TMC was showing during Oscar month. Fun fact from her NYT obit:

One number she shot for that film, “Ain’t It the Truth,” which she sang while taking a bubble bath, was deleted before the film was released — not for racial reasons, as her stand-alone performances in other MGM musicals sometimes were, but because it was considered too risqué.

She had the va-va, and certainly the voom.

Why Two-Newspaper Towns are Good, this chuckle from the Detroit News. Short version: New pedestrian bridge opens in Detroit, is instantly hit by taggers. Surveillance cameras clearly show one of the taggers is a Free Press copy editor and blogger, whose blog frequently mourns the collapse in civility and good citizenship. Here’s the passage that caught my eye, from her spectacularly lame mea culpa:

I was excited when I saw the bench and that people had written on it and wanted to add my tag to it. That’s what we did in New York City when I was young: We put our tags on the park benches.

Social scientists speak frequently of “new norms.” There’s one, right there.

Deadspin has a remarkable document, a letter of castigation by the owner of a party lodge where the Miami University chapter of the Pi Beta Phi sorority had their spring formal. Short version: They arrived drunk, got drunker, puked everywhere, peed in the sinks, pooped in the bushes. Miami University had a reputation, when I was growing up in Ohio, as academically rigorous, preppy, snotty and very Greek. The Pi Phis at Miami would be 10 times worse, on all measures, than those at Ohio University, where I went to school. I guess that’s …changed.

Via Lance, Digby on the Kent State shootings. She quotes Rick Perlstein’s “Nixonland” on the reaction to the tragedy:

When it was established that none of the four victims were guardsmen, citizens greeted each other by flashing four fingers in the air (“The score is four / And next time more”). The Kent paper printed pages of letters for weeks, a community purgation: “Hurray! I shout for God and Country, recourse to justice under law, fifes, drums, marshal music, parades, ice cream cones – America – support it or leave it.” “Why do they allow these so-called educated punks, who apparently know only how to spell four-lettered words, to run loose on our campuses tearing down and destroying that which good men spent years building up? …”

…A rumor spread in Kent that Jeff Miller, whose head was blown off, was such a dirty hippie that they had to keep the ambulance door open on the way to the hospital for the smell. Another rumor was that five hundred Black Panthers were on their way from elsewhere in Ohio to lead a real riot; and that Allison Krause was “the campus whore” and found with hand grenades on her.

As Digby, and Lance, point out: Ann Coulter et al is nothing new in this country.

Hank Stuever on Betty White in the WashPost, and on his own blog, the SNL Homowatch. From the blog, after the Scared Straight sketch:

I would need several thousand words to dissect why America has always thought prison rape is so hilarious. (Not only hilarious, but acceptable. We are a culture that believes strongly in “don’t drop the soap” jokes as a normal way to taunt criminals; indeed, we seem to hope that our most offensive male criminals will in fact be repeatedly raped by other men in prison; “making” someone your “bitch” is recess playground vernacular now.)

And because I’m late getting to this, Hank, again, on why writers should tackle the subjects that scare them. Wise words, those. And now, I’m off.

I’d forgotten about this until Gail Collins mentioned it in her column today. A little lagniappe for the weekend:

Memorial Coliseum, the big concert venue in Fort Wayne, maintained a “parents’ room” for big nights, where guess-who could go for a little relief during the show. I wrote about it once, and although it was before I was a parent myself, all it took was 30 seconds in the house during an M.C. Hammer show to appreciate the sweet relief it offered to anyone not in the M.C. Hammer demographic — good lord, that volume was painful.

The contrast couldn’t have been greater. Management provided free Pepsi and pretzels, laid out decks of cards and rolled in a TV with VCR. Movie of the night: “Driving Miss Daisy.” I only wish I was kidding. Mothers crocheted and fathers chatted while their futures unspooled on TV. They could only wish that the kids they’d so kindly taken to the show would be responsible enough, and wealthy enough, to hire a driver for them in their dotage. But it was blessedly free of can’t-touch-this, so you couldn’t complain.

It wasn’t my best column, and I remember it mainly for the tiff-ette I had with a young African American copy editor, who thought I’d emphasized the wrong contrast in my scene-setting. It wasn’t about “Driving Miss Daisy,” the movie about being old, playing while teenagers danced ecstatically down the hall, it was about Morgan Freeman being a forelock-tugging servant while M.C. Hammer, young and strong and rich, gets it done on his own terms. Well. Who’s laughing now? M.C. Hammer will be lucky to get a job as some old lady’s chauffeur, as even the comeback tours will go away eventually, and maybe sooner.

But I digress. Detroit being a hipper town, and the Fillmore a smaller venue, they had a different place for the parents, what few there were who accompanied their children to the show last night.

“Would you like to sit in the bar? It’s just off the lobby,” the nice ticket-taker asked as I showed her my main-floor ticket on re-entry during the opening act’s set. The pain must have shown in my face. I hope the relief did, too. And while, being a responsible adult, I didn’t exactly get M.C. hammered, I did enjoy a tall Leinenkugel’s Summer Shandy while watching ultimate fighting on the bar TV. The beer was lemony, and the fighting was disgusting. Really. Blood smeared the mat while the fighters grappled in, frankly, rather homoerotic style. One guy, the bleeder, was getting his ass kicked, but refused to surrender. They went down in another clinch, and the dominator leaned close to his ear. He appeared to be saying something, and I hope it was, “Jesus Christ, your blood is spoiling my footing. Tap out, you moron.” Finally, he did, and the director took the time for a dramatic overhead shot of the carmine aftermath.

This, friends, is what is killing boxing, a sport I’ve finally come to appreciate during all my Miss Daisy stay-at-home Saturday nights, which is when they show the bouts on HBO. I like the strategy of it, the skill needed to score while protecting yourself, the necessity of enduring a certain amount of what must be crushing pain in pursuit of victory. I like the trainers’ corner talk, which, being HBO, is not censored: “You’ve got to put this fucker down,” etc. (For the non-English speakers, they provide translation.) And I like watching the cut men work their magic with icy enswells and petroleum jelly. A good cut man knows as much or more about the blood vessels of the human head than a doctor.

At one point the ultimate-fighting bout was stopped so that a guy in latex gloves could examine the bleeder. He wiped the fighter’s face with a towel. Somewhere in a squared circle in heaven, Cus D’amato wept.

I went back into the house for the last 10 minutes of 3Oh!3’s set. I hear they’re tight with Ke$ha. The less you know about both, the better.

And now off for stock-up shopping for my weekend catering gig, as well as boat-launching. Every year the latter gets easier, and I’m told I will not be required for much. Huzzah. But I still need some heavy-duty foil pans, racks, maybe some sterno. Restaurant-supply store, here I come.

Some bloggage:

Thanks to Michael G for finding this nice Ken Levine appreciation of Ernie Harwell. Crisp, simple, to the point and worth your time. Meanwhile, it appears yesterday’s treacle-fest by Albom was only the warmup. Today:

There is a sound to silence. We heard it around the world Wednesday. It was the sound of tears, laughter, noses sniffling, voices quivering, it was the sound of a million baseball memories echoing in the sudden silence of the Voice of Summer…

Get a grip, Mitch. The funeral is still a couple days away. Today Harwell lies in repose at Comerica Park, which was setting up for the event as we left the show last night. Lights on, no ballgame. Sad.

I don’t care what anyone says, and yes, I’m biased, but our guy is funnier at the White House Correspondents Dinner than their guy ever was. President Obama’s timing is great, he strikes just the right tone and whoever’s writing his material is pretty good. I loved his aside after the stuff about Michael Steele — he did the same Steele bit last year, but hey, it still works.

(Plus, he has a great smile. That’s No. 482 on the endless list of things that drive Republicans crazy about him. George Bush smirked, Sarah Palin’s still looks like the pageant runway and John McCain’s was some sort of numb rictus. But when Obama’s having fun, he looks like he’s having the most fun of all.)

Obama was in the Mitten earlier Saturday, speaking at the University of Michigan commencement. Sellout crowd. He told students to contribute to democracy and keep their minds open to opposing viewpoints. (Outside, protesters called him a socialist. Ho-hum.) The university gave him an honorary degree, his second as president. I wonder if there’s anyone at Arizona State, the first university to snag him as a commencement speaker but the only one to deny him an honorary degree, still feeling sheepish about that spectacularly boneheaded move.

Which makes now a good time to twist the knife with this Daily Show segment. Let’s all line up and give Arizona a swift kick. Boneheads.

Do any of you keep tabs on the Photoshop Disasters blog? You should, as Photoshop is one of the most pernicious forces afoot in culture today, unless I’m using it to remove a zit from a picture of me, in which case it’s OK, really. I do get peevish when I see it used to make awful people like Kimora Lee Simmons into space aliens, but am amused when it reveals who really lost a foot in that “Mad Men” episode last year. (Missing limbs are a recurring theme.) This is funny, too, considering Toyota’s recent problems. But perhaps no single person (other than Madonna) has been Photoshopped more than the “Sex and the City” quartet of perimenopausal beauties who get stranger-looking with every new chapter.

The poster is bad enough. But this Harper’s Bizarre cover — misspelling CQ — is somehow worse. I think it has something to do with the expression on Sarah Jessica Parker’s face, which looks entirely assembled from parts. Sometimes I wonder if the paparazzi would be so insatiable if celebrities didn’t hide behind this nonsense. Street pictures of SJP reveal about what you’d expect — a stew bird with veiny, sinewy Madonna arms. But I’d rather look at that than this.

A little bloggage before the first cop shop bicycle tour of the year:

Sweet Juniper teaches eco-terrorism to the children of the inner city. Kidding. But there’s something about “seed bomb” that sounds sinister. It’s not.

During my year in Ann Arbor, one of my Turkish friends referred to Greeks as “lazy and stupid people” as casually as you’d remark on the weather. I know the Greeks have given us a lot, but criminy, people, when your nation is upside-down in debt, PAY YOUR TAXES.

It seemed half my Facebook friends were sending me spam and other crap over the weekend. It was cartoonishly easy to spot, as I am a geezer and most of my friends are geezers, stick to conventional spellings of HAWT and eschew emoticons. This might have something to do with it. In the meantime, open no gifts.

A stretch, some more coffee, and then I’m off. Tomorrow: Treme so far.

Almost forgot: Good thoughts to the Bassets, flooded out in Nashville over the weekend.

Some of you may not be watching “American Idol,” and who can blame you. I’m not, but Kate is, and every so often I wander through the room while she’s catching up with the recordings that are stacked like cordwood in our DVR. (I suspect her interest is flagging, too.) So maybe you saw this clip and maybe you didn’t — it’s the Black Eyed Peas stinking up the room with a live performance of whatever their new single is. Oh, right: “Rock That Body.” Wow. Original. What was the name of their last single? “Bodies That Rock?” Or was it “Rockin’ My Body?” I can never remember.

It’s a pretty good example of what too much pop music has come to — bands selected by labels based on how good they look in videos, then bound over to producers who smush them through the best technology and support staff money can buy, until they emerge, glossy and sexy and autotuned to a fare-thee-well, to put on huge arena shows with lasers and explosions and backup dancers and lots and lots of costume changes, all for $150, minimum, for a floor seat, and it all works really well until it doesn’t, and you can see it in that clip. Is anyone in sync? Is anyone even remotely close to …I guess it’s not “notes,” exactly, or “music,” so let me put it this way: Is anyone yelling the part they’re supposed to yell with any degree of precision? I can’t see it. Lots of busywork up there, with everyone marching around and waving their hands in the air and demanding that everyone else wave their hands in the air and rock that body! come on come on rock that body! come on come on rock! that! body!

It so happened that a couple of days later, I was in the gym, and whoever was in charge of the radio had tuned it to the urban-pop station, which is to say, it’s a little rougher than the sub-niche of pop that Taylor Swift rules, and there’s hip-hop in there but not the really hard-core stuff, just cut after cut after cut of Black Eyed Peas-style party music — that thumpy, looped club-style foundation, over which are pasted this or that autotuned singer, asking us to rock our bodies, or shake them, or shake them while rocking, whatever. After 15 minutes of this, I was ready to kill someone. After 25 I said to the gray head on the next machine, “I don’t care what anybody fucking says, the music we listened to when we were young was better than this. Not different. Better. BETTER.” He said that’s why God made iPods, but seriously, if I worked in a store that played this bilge all day I’d seriously consider pouring acid into my ears.

You think this is just another rant of a baby boomer, and maybe it is. Get me some Dentu-Creme. But I think what pushed me into the red zone today was this story in the NYT, about the Live Nation/Ticketmaster takeover of virtually the entire concert industry, and the new music-business model, which is to write off recorded-music sales in favor of a robust gouge at the ticket office, so that nine-figure “360-degree” deals with people like Madonna and Jay-Z can be financed.

Madonna played here on her last tour, a last-minute addition in what calls itself her hometown. I’m told Ford Field’s seating was discreetly draped, the better to mask all the unsold seats. (It’s tough to sell $200 tickets in a state with 17 percent unemployment, Madge. You should know that.) The show was marked by top-notch production values — in that there were many props and costume changes — and a robot-like performance by the star, who treated the concert stage as yet another two-hour cardio workout in a lifetime full of them. Even Britney Spears, that old train wreck, was getting $100 a head for her autotuna-palooza last year.

May I see the hands of any soul out there who thinks Britney Spears is actually singing during these shows? Or Madonna? You are spending hundreds of dollars on tickets and t-shirts for the chance to watch the big star on a Jumbotron. After taking Kate and her friend to the Miley Cyrus 3-D concert movie a couple years ago, I reflected that there should be a lot more of these things, because $30 for the three of us (plus popcorn) had saved us $75 a head to see her down at Cobo, and the seat was better, the parking was free and we got to go backstage! Plus, one of the Jonas Brothers threw his drumstick at the camera, and we all flinched! Cool.

There aren’t many days I go to the gym and think, thank God I’m an old bag, but friends, I saw Elton John blow the roof off of St. John Arena, and I was so close I could almost pluck those big sunglasses off his face, and it cost me ten bucks. There were cynics and money-grubbers in the business then, too, but we got out with the shirts on our back.

These days, I’m shopping for tickets to “Tosca,” which is playing at the Detroit Opera House the weekend of our anniversary. TIckets are steep — pushing $100 for the main floor — but you’re paying for a lot when you see an opera. What I don’t understand is the $9.75-per “convenience charge” tacked on by Ticketmaster. And guess what they’re charging for me to print the ticket on my own printer? Two-fifty each. As Tosca herself might say: Siediti e ruotare.

Some bloggage:

Thanks, Sarah Palin, for all you do to make this country a better place! States warn of ‘Obamacare’ scams: In Illinois, a telemarketer recently sold an elderly woman a fraudulent health insurance plan that supposedly protected her against “death panels,” the state insurance director says.

The things you find when you check your pingbacks: Coozledad, again.

And as I have too much to do tomorrow, it’s off to bed with me.