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.

Some rather startling photos from the funeral of Malcolm McLaren in London yesterday. The Sex Pistols’ manager was laid to rest in a coffin emblazoned TOO FAST TO LIVE TOO YOUNG TO DIE. I suppose we’ll be seeing a lot more of this sort of thing — the “fun” funeral, that is — as the generation-that-younger-people-wish-would-not-be-named starts heads down the Ghost Road in greater numbers.

I feel the same way about this that I do about all the other rituals my contemporaries found wanting, when it came to be their turn: [Shrug.] Every so often I meet a hand-wringer who frets that, by throwing out (insert number of years) of tradition, we have somehow ruined the wedding/funeral/christening/whatever. I reply that when a person has lived a full life and — in McLaren’s case, anyway — had at least a reasonable allotment of years, what’s the problem with turning their funeral into something other than damp hankies and hushed conversations? And if the old model was so satisfying, why did it suck so bad? It’s one thing to be laid to rest by a clergyman who knew you all your life. But I’ve been to many, many funerals where the officiant needed crib notes and all but mispronounced the decedent’s name. Bah. Throw it out.

When things started to turn bad in the newspaper business, I had a fantasy: I would take my buyout money (ha!) and start a small business out of my bedroom, providing digital slideshows with musical accompaniment for funerals. These would play during visiting hours, and anyone who wanted one could buy the DVD. I even had a name: Kinflicks. I still think it was a good idea, although it would have made a lousy business, because it’s so easy to do now that most funeral homes prepare them in-house, or else it’s punted to a nerd cousin who knows how to drag and drop. (My slideshows would have been distinguished by the quality of music, I decided; none of that “My Way” stuff. Instead, maybe “Anarchy in the U.K.”) At the time, the idea of having a slideshow play at a funeral, even at a visitation, was sort of edgy. Now every Slumber Room has a flatscreen.

I don’t know what McLaren’s funeral was like, aside from the casket, but if you haven’t seen it, Roger Ebert has a fabulous remembrance of his intersection with the Sex Pistols, which includes a few scenes from a planned Sex Pistols film, to be directed by Russ Meyer. As always with Roger, it’s the details that sell it:

I’ve mentioned before that, for Russ, typing was synonymous with writing. If he didn’t hear the typewriter, no writing was being done. When I was writing “Beneath the Valley of the Ultra Vixens” for him, he located me in his living room (all office furniture) and listened from his upstairs office. When my typewriter fell silent, he’d call down, “What’s the matter?”

Which is as good a way as any to kick off the bloggage:

While Rome burned, the SEC…watched porn?

Look out, world, Monica Conyers is already planning her next chapter. I’m sure MMJeff will be pleased to hear what it is: Divinity school.

I haven’t had anything to say about “Treme” yet, I know. I’d like to watch a couple more episodes and let the vibe set in. But in the meantime, a story that gives background on one of the subplots — the disappearance of LaDonna’s brother in the Orleans Parish Prison meltdown/flooding. What does one do with a prison full of inmates in rising waters? Good question.

Can you give a dime, a dollar, or a pair of socks? Restore Stephen Baldwin!

So, what’s the tackiest funeral you’ve ever attended?

Question of the day for a cool-but-sunny Monday: When did bacon become a joke?

Bacon, says Alton Brown, is “meat candy.” It’s certainly tasty, and has always been my favorite breakfast protein — I can barely tolerate those insipid American sausages — but only recently did I become aware that eating it is something of a comedy act. Sites like This is Why You’re Fat and “recipes” like the Bacon Explosion have turned my not-particularly-guilty pleasure into a sideshow.

What happened to two eggs, two strips and out the door? Now we have the KFC Double Down, a bacon “sandwich” between two “buns” of fried chicken breast. Nate Silver at FiveThirtyEight shows that even fast food can be number-crunched, and demonstrates that, while bad, the Double Down isn’t the worst thing you can order, all things considered. Urp. I prefer Sam Sifton’s digestion of the sandwich at the NYT; while I generally am game for a taste of almost anything, this is one I’ll experience entirely vicariously, especially when it gives me an excuse to read The Onion’s review:

Instead of the expected chicken filling, the Double Down sticks two different kinds of cheese—pepper jack and a mystery variety created by the devil himself to win souls and punish humanity by inciting a massive wave of gluttony-induced heart attacks—bacon (yes, bacon), and something called “The Colonel’s Sauce” between two fried, breaded chicken-breast patties. (The Colonel’s Sauce, incidentally, only sounds like a crude euphemism for ejaculate.)

Rule No. 1 of adventurous eating: Beware of all secret sauces. You really don’t want to know the secret. Although the Big Mac’s is obvious: Some sort of mayo/thousand-island-dressing mashup.

Anyway, back to bacon. I think the problems started when gluttons started adding it to cheeseburgers. You ask me, proteins can be combined in another medium — bouillabaisse is fish stew, paella a big ol’ mess of fried rice — and sometimes on a sandwich (submarine), but not on a cheeseburger. Make up your mind: Do you want a bacon sandwich or a cheeseburger? You can’t have both. But that, I think, was the tipping point. Soon bacon became a joke ingredient, the magic un-PC add-on for everything from cookies to martinis. You think I’m joking. Go ahead, click.

The NYT link above explains that food has always tolerated a certain amount of silly showmanship, mentioning the custom of putting a napkin on one’s head while eating an ortolan. (I’ve read about this. Supposedly it concentrates the exquisite aroma of the endangered French songbird. Also, it keeps God from seeing you do such a vile thing.) We all know about turduckens, and even Julia Child has a recipe for a whole boned chicken stuffed with something else, but God almighty, who goes to the trouble of boning a chicken while leaving it intact? I bet that one came out of some decadent regal kitchen seeking to impress a bored monarch. Peasant cooks — the real gastronomic pioneers — don’t have time for such silliness.

But this new bacon stunt work is just silly, the sort of thing you link and pass around Facebook, but never cook and never eat.

I stand corrected: John Scalzi ate a piece of Bacon Explosion. Someone made it for him as a joke. This may be the single best description of it I’ve ever read, and now I don’t even have to think about it anymore:

Oh, God, imagine there’s bacon on one side of my mouth and sausage on the other and they meet and have hot and angry make-up sex in the middle while a salt lick cheers them on.

As for me, I’ll stick with bacon with pancakes, with eggs, sprinkled on a salad, the occasional carbonara and your late-summer BLTs with tomatoes straight out of the garden. You take your bacon cheeseburgers, your bacon explosions, and your Double Downs right back to hell, stunt eaters of the world. You are embarrassing the pig. You should be ashamed.

So, bloggage:

In keeping with today’s sodium-heavy theme, a story about Detroit’s salt mines, and relations with the neighbors. (Not good.) I think Joe or someone else mentioned them a while back, so there you are.

On those annual get-to-know-the-freshman-class memos, the ones that college in Wisconsin prepares every year to remind the faculty that some of the kids in their classes have never even seen a typewriter, let alone used one, someone should add: The 18-year-olds of today have never known responsible Republicans. I was IM-ing with a younger friend the other day, and realized he had no idea what a Rockefeller Republican was. Jacob Weisberg asks who killed them, and fingers who else? Bill Kristol.

Oh, look: Comcast is backing RightNetwork, a new cable channel focused on “entertainment with Pro-America, Pro-Business, Pro-Military sensibilities.” Looks like Kelsey Grammer is involved. Funny how actors shouldn’t be involved in politics when it’s lefty politics, but on the right they get the Strange New Respect Award. Kelsey, once again, you can’t have it both ways. Although evidently you do.

Hello, manic Monday. Have a good one.

I admit I spent too much time yesterday reading New York magazine’s cover story this week about “the Half-Hooker Economy.” I don’t know what to think about it; I just don’t have enough foundational information about how high-end nightclubs and the ho’s and athletes who patronize them actually work. I do know a little about rich people, however, and it’s this: Deep down, they’re cheap. I have a hard time believing that no matter how drunk they are, they spend six-figure sums in a single night, paying a thousand bucks for a bottle of Gray Goose vodka, but who knows? It’s not like this is my world. (And, to be sure, there are lots of weasel words in the piece, lots of “up to” and “can be as high as” and “she has seen” in there. I don’t think it would survive a rigorous fact-check.)

I was almost through with the piece before I realized I’d been tricked into reading yet another story about yet another hybrid of prostitution. Is there no end to the public’s thirst for learning the ugly details of how sex is exchanged for money and luxury goods? Evidently not. Even when they trot out the same details the same way. Ahem: cntrl/F college:

Kim became a bottle girl after she graduated from a very good college on the East Coast. “I figured: I’m cute, I’m young, I can make a shitload of money, so,” she says, holding up two middle fingers, “fuck it!” She had previously worked as a restaurant waitress, and she wasn’t naïve about the difference between that job and this one. “If you say you’re a bottle waitress, it’s better than saying you’re a stripper. But it’s the same thing as being a stripper,” she says. What she means by stripper is someone who is a touchable commodity. There is never money exchanged, but there are gifts the following week. Pairs of Louboutins, Louis Vuitton bags, trips. It’s not unusual for a bottle waitress to take two days off and fly to Vegas with a client. She won’t get fired for that, so long as when they return, the client will spend large at the club.

Every story like this features a college girl, and not just any college girl. No one holding an associate’s degree from the Everest Institute appears in stories like this, only those from “very good” schools “on the East Coast.” The code: Not even that fancy Ivy League education will save your daughter from getting Tiger Woods’ hand prints all over her butt. Your girls are at risk, even with MBAs.

Feh. I stand by everything I wrote back then. Maybe the more interesting question is why we aren’t training more girls to recognize this game for what it is. A beautiful young woman is a perishable asset. I think I mentioned a disturbing “This American Life” episode a few months back, about the drinking culture at Penn State, i.e., pretty much all colleges. It was horrifying top to bottom, but the worst was a throwaway section about how girls have to dress to get into frat parties, where the kegs flow all night and you can get hammered away from the prying eyes of the police. They show up on doorsteps wearing the tiniest dresses and the tallest heels, looking as hawt as they can make themselves, hoping to be admitted by the doorman.

I suppose some of these girls will go on to become party girls at high-end nightclubs, angling for a spot at Derek Jeter’s elbow. Does Penn State count as a very good college?

So how is everyone’s springtime going? I’m looking at my backyard forsythia now, in full and lovely bloom, and I’m hoping for just a few notches less warmth over the next few days, so they stay a while. These summer temperatures got everything going allatonce, and I waited a long damn time for that yellow, I want to appreciate it. On the other hand, Alan is suffering with pollen allergies — the warmth was accompanied by a hot wind, which blew everything around and made the allergic miserable.

I’m so glad I avoided these things. Can’t even say.

So, some bloggage:

The WSJ takes on a trendlet you might call “extreme foreclosure.” Rather than post a link to another story most people can’t read, I’ll just point you to the Gawker summation.

Why it’s OK to hate Mississippi.

Why everyone should have Awful Plastic Surgery bookmarked.

Why I’m outta here: Work. Shopping. Spring break.