In case you haven’t heard: White shirts are in for fall 2009. (Citation, high and low.) On the one hand I am thrilled, as I am a big fan of white shirts and own several, so even though I don’t follow trends, it’s nice to have a trend follow me from time to time.

On the other hand I am disillusioned. Here’s why: A few years ago Alan and I went to New York and saw the Mingus Big Band one night, at a club called Fez. It’s a dense basement space, and all the tables are the same size — six-tops, I think. If you don’t have that many in your party, you share your table with strangers. The woman we sat across from was very nice, also a journalist — what are the odds? As we talked before the show, she said she covered the garment industry for a trade journal so far inside I’d never heard of it, and was based in Los Angeles. She’d come to New York in hopes of finding a job closer to the creative end of the business, as she was tiring of covering the nuts-and-bolts part. What do you write about? I asked.

“Textiles,” she said. Hence the L.A. location — textiles are an industry of the Pacific Rim.

“So,” I asked, “is brown really the new black?” She looked puzzled for a minute, and then said she didn’t really know, as she was so far from the consumer end of the business, she couldn’t even say anymore. The textile industry, she informed us, is two to three years ahead of what you see in stores, and whatever arm of the industry is looking for that sort of thing left the brown/black question behind literally years ago, and had moved on to whether orange was the new pink, or whatever. Industrial looms can’t be changed on a whim, and it takes time to set up raw materials and dyes and supply chains and shipping and whatever else is involved in getting you a new white shirt for fall.

I guess I wasn’t that surprised — the auto industry is the same way, and one of the frustrating things about the discussion of it in recent months has been the public’s ignorance of what exactly it takes to take a car from the imagination stage to the showroom floor. The length of the lead time seemed a bit much — it’s fabric, not a Prius — but who am I to question the mighty Asian textiles industry? I’ll take her word for it.

Like a lot of information, knowing this bit of it both spoiled and deepened my appreciation of fashion. Now, when I see white shirts everywhere, I think that two or three years ago there was a bumper crop of cotton on the world market, not a single simultaneous idea across the entire creative end of the industry. (I don’t know what the return of the ’80s shoulder means, but I’m sure shoulder pads are manufactured and supplied under much the same market conditions.)

The older I get, the more interested I am in commercial and utilitarian art. You could argue that all of it is, but I especially like art that we touch, use, work with or see every day, art that does a job other than entertain or hang on a wall in a museum. It’s interesting to think about the great convergence of market and creative forces battling for the upper hand. Plus I love great design, and the feel of a well-turned handle is a real pleasure. Almost as much as a great white shirt.

And now a pause for Meryl Streep’s great speech in “The Devil Wears Prada.”

You go to your closet and you select, oh I don’t know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you’re trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don’t know is that that sweater is not just blue, it’s not turquoise, it’s not lapis, it’s actually cerulean. You’re also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn’t it, who showed cerulean military jackets? …And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of eight different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic Casual Corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it’s sort of comical how you think that you’ve made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you’re wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of …stuff.

Bloggage? Sure, we got some:

I’m not crazy about anthropomorphizing work animals, but this was an interesting story, with a great slideshow — about the King’s Troop Royal Horse Artillery, which every year around this time takes a break from ordinary training and goes to the seashore at Cornwall for few days of galloping on the beach.

The long-awaited sequel to “Pride and Prejudice and Zombies” is here — “Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.”

A great Detroitblog piece, from the Metro Times (but I’m linking to the blog, because of the extra pictures), about the city’s small troop of outdoor sign painters. That’s one thing I noticed immediately after I moved here — how much of the city’s signage is painted. Paint is cheap, even when you use an artist, and many don’t. I love them for their odd punctuation: We do not buy “stolen” tires or rims. Well, I hope not.

Now I have to read a big chunk of “Walden” — the great-books reading club starts today.

God, I hate it when NPR tries to be hip. I also hate it when they show willful obtuseness in the face of pop culture. On this score, I’m impossible to please, and should probably just tune out when they try something like an “appreciation” of Patrick Swayze, which didn’t quite work. Terry Gross could have handled it, but she’s got her own fish to fry, and can’t be popping in to the other shows to give them notes.

It’s hard to say what was wrong with the Swayze piece; maybe it was done by someone too young to really grasp the dual wonder and disappointment of the guy — he was always the best thing in a bad movie, but couldn’t really make the leap to good ones. He belonged in a different era, when his Gene Kelly combination of physical grace and unquestioned masculinity could have been packaged in his own “Singin’ in the Rain.” Either that, or he needed to live a little longer, until Quentin Tarantino could have built a script around him, like he did for John Travolta and Robert Forster. As it is, he’ll be remembered for doing his best work in individual scenes where he could shine — the last few minutes of “Dirty Dancing,” the Chippendale’s sketch from “Saturday Night Live” — rather than one single movie.

If you’re a fan of “Point Break,” I don’t want to hear about it.

And while I hate it when bloggers link to their own past work like it’s some sort of scholarship, I reread what I wrote about Swayze at the time of his diagnosis last year, and I’ll stand by it. You can read it here.

I just watched the “Dirty Dancing” clip again. Great dancing, of course, but why did the rest of the movie have to suck so bad? Why is Jerry Orbach glowering when everyone around him is happy? Why is the orchestra leader conducting, when we’ve already clearly seen they’re dancing to a record? And when the old people join in I have to pull the covers over my head and die a little bit.

(You know a movie I’d pay to see? One about Jennifer Grey’s nose job. I know it’s been discussed on TV, but a smart movie that drills down into plastic surgery and all its implications, using Baby’s rhinoplasty as a through line? That would be worth doing.)

Oh, and my all-time fave Excruciating NPR Pop-Cult Moment is when Noah Adams tried to lead a segment explicating the career of the late Big Pun, the rapper. Yeah, that guy. Yeah, Noah Adams. It’s still one of the funniest things I ever heard.

Friends, it appears that casting a couple worms in the job pool this morning has eaten up my blogging time. What are we thinking of “Mad Men” so far this season? I’m thinking it’s simultaneously wonderful and awful, which is, I hasten to add, a very good thing for me. I love entertainments where everyone involved points at the highest rows in the house and says, “That’s what we’re aiming for” and then maybe falls short, but dies trying. The mood so far this season seems to be “the thing that’s coming? It’s getting very close…” It’s not quite there yet, so we’re seeing a lot of Peggy slowly getting the message about what women are worth, really, and Betty ditto, and we really need more Joan, but so far it’s hard to see how it’s all coming together. The last scene this week was wonderful, all of Betty’s hopes deserting her at the time hope likes to do so — in the middle of the night — while the primordial ball-and-chain of all womankind wails from its crib. (Yes, it’s a joy, too. It’s both. That’s the point.) She’s going to have the worst post-partum depression ever.

I’m getting a little tired of the hollaback lines and scenes we’re all supposed to titter over. From the un-seat-belted children playing with dry cleaner bags in the first season, we’re now expected to gasp over the OB nurse telling Betty to get ready for her shave and enema. standard for childbirth back in the day. This feels forced.

What say you? I’m off to the gym to think about it.

I’m wondering if I need to stop paying attention to politics for a while. It was a beautiful weekend, and while checking e-mail Saturday I surfed over to Memeorandum to see what was going on with the teabaggers. Michelle Malkin’s blog proclaimed the march at 2 million strong. I rolled my eyes, shut down my browser and went back downstairs to think about what to do with the pattypan squash I bought at the farmer’s market.

I’m one of the worst crowd-estimators in journalism, in keeping with the long tradition of people who are good with words being stupid with numbers. I always avoided making crowd estimates in stories I wrote, and when I was pressed to do so, fudged with time-tested phrases like “a packed hearing room” or “scores,” or else found a less numerically challenged source to give me a number. But even I know 2 million is plain and simple balderdash. Nate Silver at fivethirtyeight.com explains how the whopper came to be — the very short answer: Someone lied to Malkin — and adds:

Malkin herself did not lie; she merely repeated a lie. It does not particularly call into question her character. It does, however, call into question her judgment. The reason is that if there had in fact been 2 million protesters in Washington yesterday, there would have been no need to lie about it — the magnitude of the protests would have been self-evident. I was in Washington for the inauguration, an event at which there really were almost 2 million people present — and let me tell you, it was a Holy Mess. Hotels, charging double or treble their usual rates, were booked weeks in advance. Major stations on the Metro system were shut down for hours at a time. The National Guard was brought in. At least 3,000 people got stuck in a tunnel. Essentially the entirety of the National Mall, from the Capitol to the Washington Monument, was dotted with onlookers. Heaps of trash were left behind. The entire city was basically a warzone for a period of about 20 hours, from midnight through mid-evening.

“It does, however, call into question her judgment.” That’s it in a nutshell. That’s the problem with journalism as practiced by mere mortals, but it’s especially the problem with mortals who are proudly partisan, who scoff at “objectivity” as a fiction, etc. I’m not one of those journalists — and lately, I should add, I don’t consider myself much of one; I feel like I’m on a floe that has broken away from the main icecap and is steadily drifting away — who worries what will happen to Journalism when all the newspapers have been hollowed out or killed. That’s because I already know (and excuse me if I’ve said this before; I think I’ll be saying it for a long time). We’re headed into an age when we will flock to the media source that flatters our own prejudices with a unique set of facts. We had that for a long time, in fact; although nearly everybody here is too young to remember when even middling cities had multiple dailies to reflect every reading niche, from labor to plutocrats. You could even make the argument that the vaunted value of Fairness and Objectivity, which in J-school you learn was handed down from Mt. Olympus, is really just a cold-eyed business tactic, that once the Workers Daily and the Plutocracy Times folded, the net needed to be cast a lot wider and the masthead slogan changed from Screwing the Proles since 1851 to Shining the Light of Truth.

Most reputable crowd estimates put it in the “tens of thousands,” perhaps as many as 100,000. The Daily Mail in London, relying on “Mail Foreign Service,” went with “up to two million.” Damn liberal media.

This isn’t really about politics, anyway; it’s about numeric shenanigans. I love Silver’s blog because he’s that rarity, a genius with numbers and more than competent with words. I love stories that make a splash because someone challenged numeric conventional wisdom. One of the Denver papers won a Pulitzer in the ’80s for pointing out that the numbers of missing and abducted children were wildly inflated, that if every face on the milk carton belonged to a kid who’d been snatched by a stranger, virtually everyone in the country would know someone whose child had suffered such a fate. And yet, we repeat these whoppers over and over.

Oh, well. It was a lovely weekend. Spent a chunk of it at a local block party, which featured a DJ. I took a moment to marvel how it only took a cute dance to turn “Y.M.C.A.” from a tune about anonymous gay sex in a public gymnasium (as Garry Trudeau amusingly put it), to a song adorable toddlers tumble to while their parents look on and snap pictures. Which Village Person are you? I think I’m the construction worker.

If a woman this size shook her tennis racquet at me, I don’t know if I’d feel in fear for my life, but I might tremble a little. What a whiny baby; she deserved to lose that one. And what is it about tennis that seems to breed these uniquely awful tantrum-tossers?

And speaking of rude…

So another Monday begins? The Magic 8 ball says yes.

You all know about my fear of heights. Look what I found today — BASE jumping from the RenCen here in Detroit:

This makes my head whirl. Someone on the local forum where I found this pointed out it’s at least a few years old; it predates the riverfront improvements. Still. A friend told me once about his roommate, who did this crackbrain pursuit. (Does everyone know what BASE jumping refers to? Building, Antenna, Span, Earth.) He landed badly after jumping from a tall building in Los Angeles, perhaps because he didn’t have time to prepare, perhaps because security guards were chasing him and his buddies up the stairs to the top. In keeping with the agreement they all made ahead of time, the same buddies abandoned him at the bottom, so they wouldn’t be arrested. He screwed up his legs but good, and spent months in a rehab hospital learning to walk again. Good times!

This is the sort of activity that leads to terms like “testosterone poisoning.”

When I rode horses, I became acquainted with the idea there are certain equine personalities that are suited for certain jobs, and no amount of cross-training will ever overcome it. Fortunately, there are disciplines suited for nearly all of them, and thank God for that, because if there weren’t steeplechases left in the world, a lot of hard-charging jumpers would wither on the vine. Which is to say, I guess guys like this do stuff like this because there are no machine-gun nests to charge.

In my webby perambulations of late, I’ve found a bit of bloggage but no grand unifying theories, so let’s just cut to the chase, eh?

For you Chicagoans: Eric Zorn blogged Blago’s book so you don’t have to. Table of contents post here. Sample:

Blagojevich portrays himself as a great and noble and selfless man who fought for the people over the entrenched political interests. I believe this. What I mean by that is that I believe he sees himself this way — that he is nearly blind to his own personal failings.

Which suggests this book is going to be every bit as tedious and repetitive and uninsightful as the series of media interviews he gave in early January of this year. No self awareness. Just self justification.

Last September, here:

Quick tech question for some one who knows: There was a guy at the Dirtbombs concert Friday night with some thing I’ve never seen before. It looked like a horizontal mount for seven count ‘em seven identical digital cameras — Canon PowerShots, I b’lieve. He’d hold it up, they’d all twinkle their autofocus lights and fire as one. What the heck was it? And please don’t say “a horizontal mount for seven cameras.”

UPDATE: J.C. Burns and kind commenter DanG appear to have the answer: It’s how you get the ‘bullet-time’ effect…dollying dimensionally around a frozen or slo-mo image. The rig was similar to this, only wider and with an antenna-like thing above it that could have been a microphone. Think of an old-timey photographer’s flash bar; it was like that, only with cameras instead of flash powder. But I think they’re right — it’s for capturing that Matrix-y effect.

Not quite. Mystery solved:

Get yer old-skool 3-D glasses out … now! Most astute observers have no doubt seen local artist Chris Dean’s work somewhere around the city, whether it’s on those 1800 Tequila billboards or on the walls of the now-defunct CPOP Gallery. And if you’re a regular clubgoer, you’ve probably seen Dean himself at rock shows. He’s the guy lugging that unmistakable rig that includes seven digital cameras, which he uses to create three-dimensional “lenticular” images (you know, like those old Cracker Jack prizes). The artist recently switched from digital art to photography for a show — titled “D3D” — that debuts this Saturday.

A few of you asked when our 48 hour challenge film, “A Little Knowledge,” would be available for viewing. Here it is, on the imperfect 48.tv site, but there you go. You’ll need Flash, a fast connection and forgiveness in your heart.

Why birtherism will flourish forevermore.

Britney Spears was in town last night. The Freep critic was unimpressed; the News’, about the same. I’m wondering what the tickets cost. So far I’ve been pleased my own kid’s musical tastes ran toward the more alternative, i.e., less expensive acts like Paramore. Until I bought tickets for a show next month and paid a surcharge of about 40 percent. And I have to print them on my own computer! Now I see what Eddie Vedder was so pissed about.

Ruby, our new rabbit, has her first official nickname. Spriggy had approximately a thousand, ranging from Fart in a Hot Skillet to his Indian name, Joe Walks Along. So we like to call our animals by handles other than their given names. But even I was impressed when Alan threw this one out: Miss Lisa Bunnay.

It’s an inside joke going back to the late ’80s, when a bunch of us made a video for a friend’s upcoming wedding. (We edited it using two VCRs, which tells you something.) It was set 20 years in the future, when we had all moved on to other things and the wedding couple had spiraled into rural poverty. (One of my favorite clips is one character’s description of coming upon their house, with all the barefoot kids running around the yard yelling, “Stranger comin’!”) Anyway, I believe my fate was to work as a writer for the “Miss Lisa Bonet Show,” which tells you something. It’s hard to overstate what a cultural Bigfoot Bill Cosby was in the ’80s. I found an old open for “The Cosby Show” on YouTube or Hulu or something, and called Kate over to watch; I’ve long contended that Raven Symone is actually 42 years old, and wanted her to see for herself.

It turns out I was wrong, but seeing anew the overwhelming smugness and self-satisfaction of the whole presentation blew my hair back. The mugging! The preening! You get the idea these people are still ordering coffee, then striking a pose for the roar from the laugh track. We the viewers were just as complicit; we had made a black family sitcom into a juggernaut, and yes, the words “post-racial America” were heard then, too. Phylicia Rashad’s husband proposed to her on national television, and she accepted likewise. She even changed her name for him, which is a form of hubris in and of itself. (It turns out she was right about that one, though — unless I missed something, they’re still married.) Dr. Alvin Poussaint was a paid consultant to every episode, which was like printing “now with oat bran” on a box of donuts. It was extra good-and-good-for-you.

Bill Cosby was in town yesterday, going door to door, pushing education to Detroit parents, who must send their children to some of the worst public schools in the country. Fortunately, we saved a little local color just for him:

The neighborhood celebrating his appearance got an extra dose of excitement when a man hit a tree driving what police say was a stolen van. Officer Leon Rahmaan, a police spokesman, says the man was speeding through the neighborhood about 5 p.m. when he spotted police accompanying Cosby.

Rahmaan says the man made a quick turn, lost control of the van and hit the tree less than two blocks from where Cosby was speaking with residents about keeping their kids in Detroit Public Schools. The man ran from the smashed-up van but was arrested after a brief foot chase.

I loves you, Detroit.

As a parent, I will pause and gives Cosby props for “Little Bill.” It was everything “The Cosby Show” wasn’t — simple, endearing, quiet. Kate loved it when she was little, and I loved watching it with her.

Miss Lisa Bunnay’s next nickname will probably be some version of Greased Lightning. I have never seen an animal so unwilling to follow orders when it’s time to return to the cage.

A little beautiful-day bloggage? Sure:

When life imitates “The Wire.” I usually link to the Metro Times version of Detroitblog’s biweekly dispatches, but one of the additional photos on his blog made me think of “The Wire,” so here you are. It’s about a family of squatters in the most squat-friendly city in North America.

I don’t think I’ll renew Vanity Fair this year. They’re starting to embarrass themselves.

Today’s flash-in-the-pan website (HT: Hank): Keggers of Yore. I think I’m in some of these pictures.

Work. Exercise. The last days of summer. I’m away to do it all.

Caught part of the Joan Rivers roast on Comedy Central the other night. To paraphrase Philip Roth: Never have I heard the word vagina spoken so much in one evening, and I am a woman who has heard the word vagina spoken.

Joan’s vagina, we heard, is old, dry, old, stretched, old, foul-smelling, old, well-traveled and I’m probably forgetting something else, but you get the gist. When they weren’t talking about her vagina they were talking about her face, which is fair game when someone has had as much plastic surgery as she has. I never know how the roastee is supposed to react at those things; I guess you’re pretty much required to be a good sport, but Rivers’ face work made it hard to tell — her expression was the same smile throughout, even when they were joking about her late husband, a suicide.

But mostly the talk was about vaginas. When did we decide “vagina” was not only OK to say on television, but funny? It’s not a funny word. It sounds too medical, like pancreas. When I was a girl and first encountered the word in print — because that was a time before people spoke it aloud outside of a doctor’s office — I thought it was pronounced va-GEE-na, and as far as I’m concerned it should be. It was years before I met that hostile long-I sound, and I disliked it immediately. Saying vagina the way it’s correctly pronounced makes you open your mouth just a tad too wide. Like Joan Rivers’ vagina! See, I can be a roaster, too.

“Vagina” isn’t funny. The body part’s other euphemisms? Funny. Kitty, poontang, ya ya — all funny. “Muffin” — very funny. And the roasters were, in general, not funny, or not funny enough. If you’re going to work that blue, you better be funny, but after the first few vaginas, it just got dull. Gilbert Gottfried livened things up with a long, long vagina riff that actually was funny; it took on the surreal colors of his Aristocrats joke at the Hugh Hefner roast. It was the line about the unicorn peeking out that cracked me up. Gottfried isn’t afraid to walk right up to the abyss and lean way out; in this sense he distinguishes himself from the other no-names or never-wases on the stage. (See this classic account of the Hugh Hefner event, just weeks after 9/11, at which Gottfried brought the house down, and even Jimmy Kimmel wasn’t bad.)

I don’t know how to wrap this up, so how about if I just repeat a Gilbert Gottfried line: Joan Rivers’ vagina has tested positive for dust.

And then go to the bloggage:

The poster for the new “Mad Men” series was not Photoshopped:

I sat in a giant tank of water for a solid Saturday, and it was kind of fun, actually. I mean, once you’re wet, you’re wet. You don’t get any more wet. So you’re just kind of like, “All right, here we are.” And it was a bunch of crewmembers and waiters and an incredibly skillfully constructed set, and I think a pretty cool image that they got out of it as well. I’m sure they could have done some kind of photo trickery, but this makes for a better story, and it’s way cooler to go build it and do it for reals. I think online, there’s a time-lapse image of it filling up, too.

Santorum in 2012! No, I’m not kidding.

Well, shut my mouth: Turns out Rove was involved in the U.S. attorney firings after all.

This is cool: Vote for your favorite song from Woodstock. I’m down with “Soul Sacrifice,” but as usual, I’m in the minority.

I see more of these around here than I did in Indiana. In Royal Oak the other day:

That is, a Ford Crown Vic Police Interceptor, still the best all-purpose cop car of the era, now retired to the private sector. I assume they’re great on the straightaway, less so in the corners, can idle until the cows come home and have lots of butt-funk and spilled coffee in the seat cushions. Alan and I went to a dinner thing earlier in the year, and sat with someone who drove one, decommissioned from an unknown p.d. somewhere in the area. It needed a good deal of work in the low four-figure price range, he said, but once he got it running right? Awesome.

Of course, like the example above, you always hope you can find one with the black-and-white paint job and cow catcher intact. I wonder if, like an old fire horse, it tries to respond when called for backup.

OK, then. It’s Friday, and my attention is preoccupied with the weekend’s activity, the 48 Hour Film Project, beginning today at 7 p.m., concluding, duh, 48 hours later. I guess this entitles me to display a badge:

Here’s something else I’ve been meaning to post for a while; it came up in my drug searching this week. It’s an AP story about the effective legalization of marijuana in California. If you read the New Yorker story a few months ago, little here is all that shocking, but it’s still…shocking. If you’re old enough to have lived through criminalization, decriminalization, recriminalization and now de facto legalization, it’s hard to believe what it’s come to. You can now get butt-kicking pot over the counter with nothing more than the additional bureaucratic step of getting a winking doctor to write you a scrip. Voters approved medical marijuana use in Michigan last year, so I’m paying close attention.

To be sure, I’m not crazy about this; the last thing the world needs is more impaired drivers. On the other hand? It’s pot. I’m reminded on a nice exchange in “Jackie Brown,” Samuel L. Jackson and Bridget Fonda:

ORDELL I’m serious, you smoke too much of that shit. That shit robs you of your ambition.

MELANIE Not if your ambition is to get high and watch T.V.

In other news that turns up when one of your search terms in “prescription drugs,” an Australian daily is reporting Michael Jackson had a chemo port — essentially, a permanent IV site — in his neck. No link; story’s gone; it must be vile libel. Disregard what I just said.

Thanks to Hank Stuever, who posted it on his Facebook yesterday, this is my daughter’s new favorite YouTube video, and perhaps mine, too:

And finally, speak now or forever hold your peace. If ever a video deserved to go viral, it’s this one:

I remember how crestfallen my Catholic bride friends were, when the priest told them they couldn’t play “Here Comes the Bride” in the church. Wait until they getta loada this.

Off to obsess, worry and have stage fright. Starting gun at 7! Think I’ll go ride my bike.

In the closed and humid little world of newspapering, the sports desk is commonly called the Toy Department, and yes, they resent it terribly. (My feeling has always been: Walk into any newsroom and follow your eyes to the men dressed like overgrown toddlers. Guess where you’ll be.) However, I never thought it was entirely apt, especially when there’s a features department nearby.

What is it with the New York Times, anyway? They aren’t fit to carry the WashPost’s water in features, and every time they try something like this, they only embarrass themselves:

…As this particular summer finally heats up, even citizens who believe that climate control is a God-given right may be questioning whether (air conditioning) has become a luxury they can no longer afford.

Really? This I have to read. First note the weasel words “may be,” a trend-follower’s best friend, along with “seems” and “appears,” a way to spin a trend out of three anecdotes. Then a nod to the obvious — air conditioning is a relatively recent wrinkle in human endeavor, “the great pyramids of Egypt were built al fresco,” blah blah. Then on to the masochists:

Lisa Finkelstein, a freelance editor, stopped using the semi-functional air-conditioning and heating unit in her rented cottage in Tallahassee, Fla., two years ago, mostly for economic reasons.

(Ha ha. As one who shares Finkelstein’s job title, I’d say “mostly for” is entirely b.s. “Entirely for” is more like it. But it gets better.)

“We spent an entire summer getting to know our kids by sitting outside trying to keep our electricity bill down,” said Ms. Holmes, who estimated that the family saved $2,100 last summer; they are repeating the experience this year. “It was very therapeutic and we got closer. We also got thinner — all of our diets changed because we were eating a lot of grilled food. And by the time fall came around, with the change in the economy, we had learned to live off less. So when everyone started talking about how hard things are, we felt like we had already experienced the worst of the worst. It prepared us for the whole year.”

Weight loss! Win-win. I’m sure the kids will look back on their summers of sweaty Monopoly fondly. But there’s more:

“In our social circle, use of the air-conditioner is extremely limited,” said Martin Focazio, who lives in Upper Black Eddy, Pa., and commutes into Manhattan four days a week to his job as a digital media strategist. “It’s not like we’re health-nut crazies or a bunch of dirty hippies dancing naked around the fire. We’re all white-collar geeks living an exurban lifestyle. We just all share the philosophy of rolling with the seasons if you can.”

“In our social circle” = “smug assholes.”

For the record, I get along without a/c as much as possible, too. After all these years in the Midwest, I’ve come to enjoy our warm months. My indoor-temperature comfort zone tops out at 79-80 degrees, however, at which point I flip the switch and don’t feel bad about it for even a minute. I’ve known a few alt-lifestyles types, who try to overthink every economy, and draw squiggly lines around this one (Zen), excluding that one (drudgery), etc. The same woman who gave up her dishwasher because she likes a few minutes of peace and quiet and manual labor after meals wouldn’t dream of washing her lingerie by hand, and vice versa.

It’s all just how you choose to live, that’s all. Finally, we get to my favorite anecdote:

Kim Gorode said her cat became dehydrated from the heat the first summer she went without air-conditioning in her fourth-floor Brooklyn walk-up apartment.

“I had just moved to New York and had no money, and I thought I could get by with fans,” said Ms. Gorode, a 26-year-old who works in public relations.

But about halfway through the summer, Waldo, her orange tabby cat, began vomiting and passing out.

“The vet put him on medication and gave him a saline IV for rehydrating,” she said. The bill for $400 dwarfed the $100 she wound up paying for an air-conditioner.

When in doubt, do it for the kitties.

When my dog was younger, he’d come in from his walks and find the tile hearth, upon which he’d lay belly-down, terrier-style, with his legs sticking straight out behind him. Dog a/c. Smart dog.

Oy, another long day awaits at the end of it, i.e, a seven-hour shift editing health-care news, starting at 6 p.m. I wouldn’t do it without proper a/c on a bet, but what that means is, it’s time to step away from the keys and rest the ol’ wrists. In the meantime, chew on this:

Jon Carroll examines the Tour de France, finds it confusing. Worth reading for one nice simile: Philadelphia Eagles fans are darned Franciscan monks compared with these people. I’ve often wondered how the riders stand the close quarters, m’self.

Gymward bound.

Kate and I had some bidness in Royal Oak last night, and started for home right about the time this happened. I’d estimate we were moments behind the action, which if you don’t want to click, is this, in summary: A tanker truck crashed on I-75 about 8:30 p.m. and burst into flames, involving another semi and a car. The fire melted and collapsed the 9 Mile Road overpass and, as the journos like to say, sent a roiling plume of heavy black smoke 200 feet into the air.

We weren’t on 75, but I-696, another freeway that crosses it, about a mile north. From that overpass we were able to briefly see the whole thing — the smoke, the terrible fire, the location. About this far away, but in the other direction.

So what did I do? Called Alan at work, told him to tell the city desk. I’ll be calling the damn city desk until I die. When I was in Fort Wayne, at the beginning of my time there, we still had stringers to cover the rural areas, paid them a pittance to be there when tankers crashed and burned in their neck of the woods. Most of them were old, veterans of days when being a newspaper reporter meant something (which is to say, barely more than it means today). But they brought real enthusiasm to the job — no one could cover all the angles of a feral dog pack terrorizing rural sheep herds — and, by our eyes, real comedy, sometimes.

Our man in Adams County was Simon Schwartz. (Carrying that name in that neck of the woods is like being called Abe Goldberg in New York City. It’s an insider’s name.) He was well into his 80s, and had health problems that sometimes took him off duty for a spell. But at least twice a week, he typed up the week’s news on onionskin paper, on a manual typewriter probably as old as he was, addressed them with a quavery hand and always added a note off to the side on the envelope: RUSH. The editors got a kick out of that one, but I’ll tell you, when a natural-gas explosion in Berne took out a house and burned its occupants, man, Simon dragged his old bones out of bed and got to a phone, dictated the news on deadline and filed a follow by mail, which was rushed to the metro desk.

As I recall, he added a cover note to the editor with whom he’d been working, whom he addressed as Miss Montgomery: “They say (the burn victim) is suffering terribly. It must be like the way sinners will suffer in the fires of Hell. A useful reminder to prepare for Eternity!”

I’m sure Simon is in Eternity by now, and I hope, wherever he is, he’s not suffering. Any man with that kind of work ethic can’t be all bad.

Anyway, the fire is still smoldering here in Detroit this morning. Love quotes like this: “There’s still something burning under there,” (a fire chief) said. “We poured water on the section that collapsed and it boiled.” The freeway will be closed indefinitely, and the overpass, which was brand-new, will have to be rebuilt. Cause of the crash? Still unclear, but it looks like speeding. A car lost control on the curve. A useful reminder to slow down.

I don’t have much bloggage, but I have some:

The Brits have had our language longer than we have, which is how they can come up with so much great slang.

Chickens as art objects.

And now time for breakfast, and the gym. I spent hours at the keys yesterday. Time to spend a few hours away, eh?

I was born in November, 1957. If I read his obsessive ongoing autobiography closely, James Lileks was born in August, 1958. How the hell did I get so much older than him, anyway? Ahem:

Kids today. No respect for kids of yesterday. Thing is, we were required to know every fargin’ thing about the 60s when we were coming up, being schooled in the ways of the Most Important Musical Genre Ever. You were required to nod at your elder and respect their sage ways, and thus I found myself in a few dorm rooms listening to peers explain why Crosby, Stills, Nash, Young, Reefer and Cocaine were incredible not just for their harmony and song-writing skills, but their abilty to make music that on longer than three minutes. To which you could only say: may all your girlfriends take “Love the One You’re With” to heart everytime you’re out of town.

What the hell is he talking about? I have no recollection of this. There was no bright line between ’60s music and ’70s music. There are few bright lines in any art form, but I guess if you wanted to pick it apart, you could find places where the next thing seemed to arrive allofasudden, but it certainly wasn’t between the ’60s and ’70s, unless you’re talking disco, but I don’t think he is. Rather, I think he’s pooching his little lip out and pouting that in the ’60s, we elevated drug addicts and America-haters to the Top 10.

Of course, I had older brothers and sisters, and picked up their enthusiasms along the way. I started listening to pop music when I was very young; everybody did. You tuned your AM radio to WCOL and left it there until 1972 or so, when WCOL-FM started playing some crazy stuff called “progressive rock” in the overnight hours. (Yes, way — they were country-and-western during the day, and at 9 p.m. or so the Stetsons went home and the hippies took over.) But everyone still listened to the Top 40, too, and the ’60s were a rich, rich time for that. You had everyone from the Jefferson Airplane to Glen Campbell to Martha and the Vandellas elbowing for space. I can still recall, as vividly as the moon landing, the DJ telling everyone they’d be playing the new Rolling Stones single at 2 p.m. sharp, so be there if you wanted to hear it first. And that’s where I heard the opening cowbell of “Honky Tonk Women” for the first time, in my bedroom, on my transistor radio.

Checking Wikipedia; it was the same summer as the moon landing, and guess what the B-side was? “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” In many ways, the ’60s were better, Jimbo.

I asked a friend of similar age for a reality check. He replied, “my bet was his little turntable in his room with the cowboy wallpaper only had Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass, Sgt. Barry Sadler and the soundtrack to Patton.”

Lileks has made some money trashing the ’70s, but I won’t have any of it, especially where music is concerned. There was some great pop music made then, and for some genres — I’m thinking soul and funk — there wasn’t any better time, before or since. I wouldn’t imagine Parliament/Funkadelic made it all the way to Fargo, however.

But don’t trust me; I even liked disco, at least in its natural habitat, i.e., the disco. If you’d ever joined a dance floor full of sweaty, shirtless men waving their hands in the air to “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real),” you would, too. And as for the bright line between the ’70s and the ’80s, which Lileks loves, I have only to note that I heard quite a few of those early New Wave tunes in the disco, and the shirtless men danced to those, too. They fit right in for a reason.

Eh. I hate all this genre fascism. Bring back the melting pot of ’60s Top 40. There are still places in this racist town where you can turn on a rock station and hear their top of the hour promos: Today’s best rock…and NO RAP. Oh, that’s comforting. Meanwhile, I was driving home late last summer listening to an R&B station, black DJs, black artists, the usual. They were in their Saturday-night old-school groove, Prince and LTD and so on, and guess what they slipped into the mix? Thomas Dolby, “She Blinded Me With Science.” I’m glad they’re not as tight-assed as their colleagues at the rock stations.

Enough. Now I’m boring myself. So let’s start the bloggage off with an unveiling:

WashPost pop-culture writer and NN.c reader Hank Stuever has a blog! Yay! It’s called Tonsil and it’s not about throats, but a build-up for his great new book, due out in November, “Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present.” (It’s available for pre-order on Amazon, via Nance’s Kickback Lounge.) I for one hope Tonsil will live beyond Christmas, since Hank’s voice is one we need to hear more of:

When the Post was starting a far too many blogs in the mid-‘00s, I carped in an in-house memo that none of the paper’s writers should be blogging at all; we should be writing stories that are blogged about. I also have enormous issues about writing for free.

Well, some things have changed. I still work at the Post (last I checked), but I feel like now I have some reasons to blog. (As for writing for free, well, it’s a fucking renaissance out there, isn’t it? So long, six centuries of the printed word! Hello, crapola!)

Anything else?

…it’s nice to be able to type the word “fucking” and just hit publish.

Yes, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m working my way through “Tinsel” now, and will discuss it at length as we get closer to its pub date. (Or when it “drops,” as the hip-hoppers have taught us to say.) It’s Christmas in July in my recreational reading, but as life in Michigan will teach you, winter is never that far away. In the meantime, bookmark Hank, and ignore that pimpage of yours truly in his first entry. This is a mutual-admiration society built on mutual admiration.

Next item: Next month our little family, plus dog, will be vacationing in Chicago for a couple of days, before moving up the west coast of the Mitten to spend the rest of the week at the beach. Any interest in a modest Chicago meetup? Grab a big table at someplace like Buca di Beppo and pass around a platter of meatballs? If so, e-mail me separately.

Breakfast time, and a lot of work ahead. Enjoy it.