Give Detroit this, people: It has manly testicles, oozing spleen and can’t get out of the bathroom before it needs another shave. Only here can a mayor, indicted on no fewer than 10 felonies, lurching through a nearly year-long scandal, seemingly needing a pry bar to remove himself from office — only this man, on the day he strikes a deal that calls for resignation and a seven-figure restitution and surrender of his law license and jail time and a five-year probation/moratorium on running for public office, can say, upon his exit:

“Detroit, you done set me up for a comeback.”

I mean, it’s hilarious. Isn’t it? How can it not be? It’s true. If this were a slasher movie, this would only be the first time the killer is thought to be dead. He’s got six or seven reanimations left in him, and when he comes out of jail, with his redemption narrative, he’ll start rebuilding his base. By the time the clock runs out on the five years, well, “tanned, rested and ready” doesn’t really describe it.

I love this town. It’s never boring. You know what else? People don’t posture (so much). You get the boilerplate shout-outs to God’s will and all, but for the most part people don’t pretend to be Moses here. Politics is bare-knuckled, the race card is played so often its corners are cracked and curled, but I like to think at the end of the day everyone can sit down and have a drink. Maybe that’s naive, or just wrong — there was a shoving match in a Detroit breakfast place during the primary season, between members of opposing candidates’ camps — and maybe it’s projection. Detroit politics, with its pander bears and open-handed thievery, seems positively angelic in comparison to recent days. Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing “Milk” this fall, the other political movie featuring Josh Brolin.

Folks, I be exhausted. I’m steeling myself for a bike ride and the wind is blowing about 25 knots — my least-favorite fair-weather conditions, but it must be done. So let’s skip to the bloggage and start the weekend early, eh?

Why do people even attempt fiction, when real life is so much more interesting? The fascinating tale of the Aquatots.

Be still, my heart: I love the way my new boyfriend Javier says “John Travolta.” (Video link.)

The tourism-ization of the shoulder season: Halloween becomes a reason to vacation.

I can never write a zombie movie like this one, in which the z-virus is spread through…conversation. Now that’s imaginative.

Off to reignite my own.

* That’s elitist for, “How uppity.”

Lance Mannion says it better than I ever could, so go read him on the subject of Anthony and Elizabeth’s marriage in “For Better or For Worse.” This was once one of my favorite comic strips, and he comes close to capturing my utter disappointment in this awful plot development. Someone said here a while back that Lynn Johnston recently suffered some tawdry personal tragedy — her husband ran off with her younger assistant, or something — and I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t play a huge part in this.

It’s hard to believe, watching an interesting young woman stripped of her career and married off to a dickless bore, that this cartoonist once had the guts to kill a dog in a daily comic strip.

Poor Lizard Breath. Ick.

Whatever you do, please don’t send me an e-mail first thing on a Monday morning with this line:

Anyone up for the challenge of making a sophisticated Zombie short? Nancy, any new plots occur to you?

This is from the director of our 48-hour film-challenge short. And here I thought I’d get some work done today. Suggestions, anyone? So far I have a zombie “Mamma Mia!” and a zombie “Recount” (“McCaaaaain has no braaaaaain…”), but that’s it. I may need a bike ride for this one.

My sense of Biden as an underwhelming choice passed quickly. I only had to think: The man whom he will replace is Dick Cheney. That made it all better, somehow. Foreign policy expertise = a plus, particularly given the wreckage the current model is in. Remember, folks — look beyond the fence.

As you can see, folks, it’s Monday and I got nuthin’. Spent the weekend trying to put the house in order and mostly failing. The start of the school year — mandated by law to be after Labor Day — seems as though it will never arrive, and yet, I don’t really want it to. It’s been a good summer, and I’ve enjoyed having my little kitten around. Alan had a far more interesting weekend, having seen the following on his afternoon kayak trip yesterday: A 300-pound woman and “a guy who looked like Napoleon Dynamite” sharing a tiny inflatable boat, cruising slowly around the mouth of our marina, and she? Was topless. “She had a tube-top thing, pushed down below all the folds,” Alan reports. “I wonder if maybe they were putting on a show for me.” If so, he…well, “enjoyed” isn’t the word. “Noted the effort,” maybe.

See why I don’t want summer to end?

So let’s skip to some good ol’ bloggage, eh?

From Sunday’s NYT, a long read that’s worth your time, about the struggles of a Florida science teacher to not just teach evolution, but to really get his students engaged with it. It’s an endeavor that is nothing short of heroic — David Campbell seems to be one of those teachers people remember on their deathbed — and equally frustrating:

“Can anybody think of a question science can’t answer?”

“Is there a God?” shot back a boy near the window.

“Good,” said Mr. Campbell, an Anglican who attends church most Sundays. “Can’t test it. Can’t prove it, can’t disprove it. It’s not a question for science.”

Bryce raised his hand.

“But there is scientific proof that there is a God,” he said. “Over in Turkey there’s a piece of wood from Noah’s ark that came out of a glacier.”

Mr. Campbell chose his words carefully.

“If I could prove, tomorrow, that that chunk of wood is not from the ark, is not even 500 years old and not even from the right kind of tree — would that damage your religious faith at all?”

Bryce thought for a moment.

“No,” he said.

The room was unusually quiet.

“Faith is not based on science,” Mr. Campbell said. “And science is not based on faith. I don’t expect you to ‘believe’ the scientific explanation of evolution that we’re going to talk about over the next few weeks.”

“But I do,” he added, “expect you to understand it.”

Jon Carroll dissed rude cyclists a few weeks ago, and has been hearing about it since. Today, a cyclist puts into words what underlies my policy of judicious stop-sign running:

Another, somewhat calmer letter on the entire matter from Gene Eplett: “Think motivation. Think momentum. Cars and pedestrians pay nothing, or nearly nothing, for their momentum. For cars it is simply a matter of which pedal to push, brake or gas. For pedestrians, it is a matter of speed, or lack of it. A turtle doesn’t mind stopping frequently either, because momentum simply is not an issue.

“Bicyclists, on the other hand, expend a lot of effort getting up to speed. Cranking up the momentum every single block, and then giving it all up at every single stop sign, gets old really fast. So, whenever there is any question whether to stop or not, such as when there is little oppositional traffic at stop signs, or anywhere else for that matter, (s)he, understandably, doesn’t stop – doesn’t give up his or her hard-won momentum, that is to say. After a while, if one bikes all the time, a pattern (or habit?) gets established. That’s what you and the complainers are witnessing.”

Zombies on bicycles! It could work!

Back in a bit.

One more story to write today, and then I’m free to clean my house for two days. (Isn’t my life, just, super-glam?) So maybe something a few shorts today, as nothing is itching me but deadline:

* The infamous “Is Obama too skinny to be president?” story contained one factoid I took note of: When the candidate is too rushed to eat a proper meal, he will opt for something called a Met-Rx bar. It so happens I know a few people who do the same thing, and find the meal-in-a-puck solution preferable to the inevitable starvation-then-overeating. And the day after I read this, I saw Met-Rx bars in my local Kroger, on sale. It seemed like a sign. I bought two.

And all I have to say is, if Obama is eating these things, I hope he spends the next several hours in a well-ventilated room, if you catch my drift. And if you were in the same room with me, you would.

* I’m growing weary of Olympics coverage. I always do, in the second week. I become very very tired of her Olympic dream, whether it ends in golden glory or is crushed by defeat. I’ve had it up to here with hearing athletes not two decades old describe their experience as awesome, even if they lose, how glad they are just to be there. (I’m cheered by the number of fat parents in the stands, however. That is just endlessly amusing to me, how these tubbies produced such gods of athleticism.) I’m really, really sick of Bob Costas, sicker still of whoever’s color-commenting the gymnastics, with his “This…is…a disaster” every time someone wobbles out there. (Just once I want to hear “That’s gotta hurt!”) I hate beach volleyball; where is the modern pentathalon coverage? “Medal” should not be a verb. And where are the flag-desecration alarmists when some sweaty sprinter is taking a victory lap using Old Glory as a shawl? These are only a few of my long list of grievances.

* It’s nice to know J-Lo shares many of my complaints, too.

* Michigan: We’re number 10! Better luck next year, suckas.

OK, enough f-off time for now. Deadline in four hours. You folks are on your own.

Thanks to Jim for sending along the NYT story about the escalating war — not in the northern Caucasus, but perhaps right outside your window. It’s the one between cyclists and motorists, and since it’s obviously only going to get worse, I might as well state my manifesto and start the shooting war.

The story starts with the customary oh-my-god anecdote:

It seemed like a good idea at the time.

Save gas money, be environmentally correct, lose weight — just by biking to work. And so after two decades, Dan Cooley, 41, saddled up a silver 21-speed Raleigh in April to make the daily two-mile commute to his nursing job at a senior citizen center in Louisville, Ky. In four months, he lost 15 pounds. Way to go, Dan!

Friday morning, July 25, around 6:50 a.m., he was pedaling on a residential street, wearing his green hospital scrubs, when a Volkswagen roared out of a driveway in front of him. Swerving to avoid the car, Mr. Cooley cursed loudly and rode on.

The driver and his passenger cursed back. As Mr. Cooley pulled over to the sidewalk, the car turned onto a driveway, knocking him off his bike. In Mr. Cooley’s narrative, the passenger, swearing, jumped out and pummeled him. Then he got back into the car, which zoomed away. Mr. Cooley lay prostrate on the sidewalk, bloodied, with a concussion and a torn ligament.

It’s never gotten that far with me, knock wood, although I’ve had that exact same experience — the sudden swerve to avoid a car — approximately a thousand times. Usually I don’t swear. I say STOP STOP STOP LOOK OUT CAN’T YOU SEE ME and maybe that’s why no one has felt the need to pull over and kick my ass, but there’s always tomorrow.

Here are my baseline beliefs when I roll out of my driveway on two wheels:

1) I want to avoid cars in every way possible.
2) In nearly all car/bike collisions, the bike loses.
3) Bikes don’t need to follow every rule of the road that cars do, at least not all the time, especially if a little law-breaking accomplishes objective No. 1, above.

Let’s start with the first two, because they govern the rest of it. If you’re a motorist, I’m going to avoid all contact with you. That means I will choose a quiet residential street over a main artery. If a main artery is unavoidable, I’ll ride on the sidewalk. Of course I go slower when I do. Of course I’m mindful of pedestrians. And yes, I know it’s illegal, but I’ll take the risk of a ticket over an accident every day, because see No. 2, above. I don’t want to die, or spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, or even a few weeks in a cast. If I always ride in a way that puts self-preservation uppermost in mind.

I also run stop signs now and then. Some of them, anyway. I have my reasons. Rules of the road were overwhelmingly written with cars in mind. Cars are big, heavy and deadly. Cars can’t stop as fast as I can. Drivers can’t see what I can. Even with an iPod, I can hear more. On my residential street grid, I frequently roll up on four-way stops. If I can see deserted roadway in three directions, I run the stop. What is the point of stopping? The intersection is empty. There’s rarely even a pedestrian around. Who can I hurt? What’s the harm? If a car is closer than half a block, I slow down and look for a visual cue from the driver to go ahead, and I usually get it. But trust me on this: I am never going to put myself at serious risk of injury if I can help it. See #2.

Sometimes a motorist is behind me when I run those stop signs, and sometimes I get a glare when they catch up and pass. Damn bicycles! Sometimes the glare comes when the motorist is talking on the phone, which is sort of a hoot, speaking of safe driving hint hint. It’s times like this I recall that while nearly all cyclists are motorists, most motorists aren’t cyclists and just don’t get it. It is to the motorist’s advantage to have nimble, two-wheeled me moving on ahead, rather than stopping for nothing and then starting up, wobbly, right in front of their car. I’m at my most unstable when starting from a dead stop, and neither one of us benefits from my instability. I wish more drivers understood this.

(And yes, I know it’s wrong, but as I said, I only do it when I’m alone on the road. I think of myself as a libertarian whenever I do so.)

I always obey rules of the road in traffic, however. I signal my turns, even, which is more than I can say for most drivers. I don’t text or talk on the phone, either. Here’s something else I do: If I come up to a red light, sometimes I’ll swoop up on the sidewalk and cross at the crosswalk as though I were a pedestrian. Drivers bitch about this, too, but again: I never do this if there are actual bipedal beings on the sidewalk or in the crosswalk nor in anything heavier than light traffic. I only do it if it’s clear, and I only do it to keep myself moving and in better control around cars. I don’t do it to thumb my nose at motorists, who are all less sweaty, better dressed, more comfortable and getting to their destinations faster than I am. The last time this happened, I did it after stopping the way I am supposed to. The last vehicle in line was a garbage truck, with a side-emitting exhaust and a diesel engine. Thought I was going to die. It felt entirely justified.

Also: Sometimes, if there’s a Supremes song on the iPod, I’ll sit up straight and ride no-handed for a hundred yards or so, the better to do the hand motions to “I Hear a Symphony.”

Speaking of music, I’m mindful of the iPod. A comfortable volume still lets in most traffic noise, which is important. But I remember something my friend Borden pointed out about radios, about how often they survive the worst crashes and continue to play. “There’s something so awful about bombing along, grooving to your favorite song, then crashing and having it be the first thing you hear after the glass stops falling. Your favorite song, forever associated with this lousy memory. Mocking you.” So true. If I check out in a bicycle crash, I hope the last thing in my ear isn’t Cheap Trick. This encourages me to keep the volume low.

So that’s me. If you see me out there, you might call me a scofflaw or a problem cyclist, but just know that I have my reasons for everything I do, and I’m not being an asshole on purpose. For what it’s worth, I’ve never ridden up beside anyone and slapped them on the fanny, the way a motorist did with me once. I never drove a golf cart on a bike path, the way golfers constantly do when they play on adjacent courses (hello, Foster Park). And I never was such a crappy golfer that my drive off the tee went wildly awry and came thisclose to hitting a certain middle-aged female cyclist who shall remain nameless.

I wish there were more bike paths and lanes. In Ann Arbor (of course), most of the major arteries that can accommodate one have a designated bike lane, and oh my god is that a wonderful thing. Of course, it wouldn’t help these people:

Will the Hatfields and the McCoys ever be able to coexist? Ground zero for such tensions may be Woodside, Calif. (population 5,600, 14 square miles), on the San Francisco peninsula, tucked in forested mountains. Its famous switchbacks are so narrow they are often unmarked by white stripes.

Woodside is host to hundreds of recreational cyclists on weekends. And on many weekdays, a peloton known as “the noon riders” — as many as 100 cyclists from Silicon Valley businesses riding during lunch break — blasts through.

“Mention the noon riders to anyone in town and you’ll see the blood pressure go up,” said Susan George, Woodside’s town manager. One day, she said, she rounded a bend and came upon them: “I slammed on the brakes and they swarmed around me, screaming and yelling obscenities. My heart was pounding. It was very scary.”

See, that’s just stupid. And wrong. And probably way too fast for me.

So let’s start the battle, eh? Take your shots.

A little bloggage: Laura Lippman will have the Sunday serial in the New York Times Sunday magazine, starting September 7, and boy are we thrilled for her. Also, for fans of her series, because “The Girl in the Green Raincoat” is a Tess Monaghan story, and? And she’s pregnant, Laura reports. That should be fun. Congratulations.

Jon Carroll, with an amusing story about bean burritos and the Perseid meteor shower. A column about farting that never uses the word, but still satisfies. Like a good fart.

This is old, but it’s amusing and has pictures of a lovely actress, so what the hell: Anne Hathaway’s Chic Revenge. (I’ve been looking for some version of that black coatdress my whole life. I guess it helps to have a stylist and a bottomless bank account, not to mention a slender form, long legs and…never mind.

And, of course, what we’ve been putting off reading all weekend: The world edges closer to chaos by the minute. Do your duty.

Last summer when Alex visited we drove past Theatre Bizarre, a place that lives up to its name. I first found it after taking Kate and a friend to the state fair in 2005. We drove out of a gate onto a city street called, fittingly enough, State Fair, and saw what looked like the remains of a ’30s carnival arrayed across two or three city lots:

This is the main stage. There’s more.

Now, I’m not stupid. I knew this was the work of art students, not actual carnies. But the illusion was pretty great — the faded banners for the fat lady and other freaks, and the signs for the Ghost Train and Hell Mouth dotted with incandescent bulbs (every eighth one burned out) looked amazingly authentic. Maybe some of them were. I don’t know what was salvage and what was new, but I doubt Hollywood could have done a better job.

I went home and hit the Google. Not nearly enough was out there, but I learned Theatre Bizarre was the venue for one pretty epic Halloween party a year, and not much else. So when Alan and I found ourselves at liberty on Saturday, and the local alt-weekly had a listing for an event there, I knew where we were going, even if we couldn’t quite pull off the costuming as Hairy Man and the Fat Lady. (We went in our customary Land’s End/Ann Taylor Grosse Pointe Squaresville togs.)

The party was the Squared Circle Review, and the best capsule definition is “Mexican-style wrestling, heavy metal, retro-carny acts and old-school burlesque,” and if that’s a pretty wordy capsule, so be it. But that’s what it was — a wrestling ring was erected in the biggest open space in front of the stage, and that’s where Gunther T. Strongman took on six clowns, and Roxi Dlite did her striptease, and the fire-eaters and hoop-twirlers ate fire and twirled hoops. The main stage was for A Mayonnaise Graveyard and Downtown Brown. I’m sorry we missed Polka Madre from Mexico, but I can’t stay up all damn night; when we left at 1 a.m. the Snake vs. Cat wrestling bout was still going on, with a three-piece band led by an electric violin providing the improv soundtrack.

We really need to get out more.

What interests me most in all this is Theatre Bizarre. We ran into one of Alan’s co-workers there, who knows more about it, and she said the space belongs to a guy who buys and renovates houses, and the Theatre Bizarre project is just a way to fill some vacant lots in one of the city’s most blighted neighborhoods. (We went around the block on our way out, and the street directly behind the TB is straight out of the haunted forest. A rat ran across the road in front of our car. I think Central Casting sent him.) He lives in one of the adjacent properties and is content to let this epic stage set — a couple of Flickr sets for your amusement — sit vacant most of the year.

As I have marveled many times: Only in Detroit can artists be real-estate developers.

Around the corner is the Stone House Bar, a biker bar in a building said to have once been a hangout for the Purple Gang. I think that’s next on our urban exploration. I hope they make a decent cheeseburger there.

So, a bit of bloggage:

Time magazine is slowly putting their archives online, and it was there I found this story from 1960, about the first public revelation of the Grosse Pointe point system, the codified tool of discrimination used to keep the Wrong People out of our neighborhood in the postwar expansion. Of course I’d heard about it, but I didn’t know the details, which are fascinating:

Unlike similar communities, where neighborhood solidarity is based on an unwritten gentleman’s agreement, Grosse Pointe’s screening system is based on a “written questionnaire, filled out by a private investigator on behalf of Grosse Pointe’s “owner-vigilantes.”

The three-page questionnaire, scaled on the basis of “points” (highest score: 100), grades would-be home owners on such qualities as descent, way of life (American?), occupation (Typical of his own race?), swarthiness (Very? Medium? Slightly? Not at all?), accent (Pronounced? Medium? Slight? None?), name (Typically American?), repute, education, dress (Neat or slovenly? Conservative or flashy?), status of occupation (sufficient eminence may offset poor grades in other respects). Religion is not scored, but weighed in the balance by a three-man Grosse Pointe screening committee. All prospects are handicapped on an ethnic and racial basis: Jews, for example, must score a minimum of 85 points, Italians 75, Greeks 65, Poles 55; Negroes and Orientals do not count.

Interesting that Jews had the highest bar to jump (all to move into a place with zero synagogues), at time when the concentration camps were still a new revelation.

Much talk on the gossip sites about “The New New Face,” the cover story in New York magazine this week. It tells the story behind, among other things, Madonna’s cheek implants, and how and why plastic surgeons believe the future of face work isn’t the lift, but the stuffing. Nut graf:

Through some unholy marriage of extreme fitness and calorie restriction (and maybe a little lipo), women have figured out how to tame their aging bodies for longer than ever. You see them everywhere in New York City: forty- and fiftysomethings who look better than a 25-year-old in a fitted little dress or a tight pair of jeans. But this level of fitness has created a new problem to which the New New Face is the solution—gauntness. Past a certain age, to paraphrase Catherine Deneuve, it’s either your fanny or your face. In other words, if your body is fierce (from yoga, Pilates, and the treadmill), your face will have no fat on it either and it will be … unfierce. It was only a matter of time before a certain segment of the female population would figure out how to have it both ways, even if it means working out two hours a day and then paying someone to volumize their faces, as they say in the dermatology business. As a friend of mine recently pointed out, there is now a whole new class of women walking around with wiry little bodies and “big ol’ baby faces.” And they look, well, if not exactly young, then attractive in a different way. A yoga body plus the New New Face may not be a fountain of youth, but it’s a fountain of indeterminate age.

Sigh. Bring back the matron, I say.

And finally, another late-arriver, from Sunday’s NYT, about Europeans in the U.S. this summer, buying luxury goods like hungry locusts in a fresh alfalfa field. We noticed this phenomenon in San Francisco last month, where every street-corner conversation was in German or French, and the line out the Apple store was a block long. At one point I finally cracked in the chill and headed to the Levi’s store in Union Square to pick up a pair of long pants. I had to elbow my way past half the population of Stuttgart to get to the fitting room.

“Surely these people can buy Levi’s in Germany,” I said to the clerk.

“Not at these prices,” she said, explaining that the U.S. price was, to Europeans, about a 66 percent savings.

This is your country in 2008, America: Vietnam for Germans. And the dollar’s still falling.

Buy Detroit real estate! It’s cheap even in dollars!

Have a swell Tuesday. And Michiganders: Don’t forget to vote.

A mostly photo post today, because I’m lazy.

On Saturday I went kayaking. I’m sort of on an exercise binge, at least to the extent that I’m capable. A true exercise binger would have been undaunted by the brisk wind from the west, and would have dug in and headed out to the shipping channel for a quick there-and-back, damn the rollers, but not me. I stayed in the canals and collected data for my eventual master’s thesis on boat naming.

You can make a study of these things. Once upon a time boats were named for monarchs (Queen Mary), nobler ideas (Courage, Intrepid) or people who’d earned the privilege (Edmund Fitzgerald, Harry S. Truman). These aren’t names you’ll see in your local marina, unless you live in Liverpool or Norfolk or some such. For the average boat-owning American, naming the vessel is less high-minded and more fun, an occasion that calls for all the creativity they can muster. Like most creativity, though, it’s kind of predictable, and tends to fall into broad categories. Most common is puns and wordplay:

Some boaters can’t get over how the first two syllables in “nautical” make a homophone of “naughty.” People drink beer on boats and wear brief swimwear; naughtiness is frequently uppermost in mind. Also, basic facility with lines and knots is a requirement of the job, and so “knotty” is sometimes deployed in its place. We had a boat docked nearby our first year called the Knotty Lady, with the name spelled out in a font that looked like ropes. Alan once overheard the owner’s wife saying, “It says on our contract that if the boat isn’t removed from the water by November 1, they’ll do it for you. Isn’t that nice of them?” Perhaps Dumb Lady would have been more appropriate.

Bertram is a big manufacturer of motor yachts. I don’t think this is one of them:

More wordplay. It says something about the world of boating that you can drive around in a vehicle with a giant advertisement on the back saying, essentially, “There’s a good chance I’m drunk.” For the record, the law of the Michigan sea says you can drink aboard, but you can’t operate while drunk. Imagine driving down the highway, knowing you can legally raise a bottle in salute to a passing cop, as long as you won’t blow .08. (The funniest car-accident photo I ever saw was from a small paper in Indiana, showing a beater that had run off the road. Emblazoned across its trunk lid: “Daved and confused.” Go Dave!)

Many boat owners, in choosing names for their vessels, emphasize the mental-health angle:

Walk through any marina, and you’ll find versions of this: Seaclusion, Serenity, Escape, Cool Breezes, Hakuna Matata, In Recess. (The more jargon a job has, the more likely it’ll turn up on a stern somewhere. Lawyers in particular are guilty of this, but I bet if we’d explored the yacht basin in Sausalito, I’m sure we would have found at least one Offline and Away Message.) Skippers like to emphasize how chill they are, which lasts until the next set of bills comes, or one hits a rock. In my time on the water, I’ve witnessed beautiful watercraft pounded into near-splinters by heedless teenagers, squabbling crew members, screaming couples, fires onboard, near-sinkings. Somehow, you never see boats named Divorce Court or Poor House. Huh.

Also, note: This is Tranquillity II. Some people only have one name in them; all over the nation’s waterways are the Three B’s IV, Gone Fishin’ III, etc. Boats are distinct from one another; this just seems wrong to me.

I’m baffled by this one:

Inside joke/reference, I guess. Maybe Christine got a palimony settlement from Andrew Lloyd Webber. Maybe she got the house in the divorce, leaving her ex with this consolation prize.

Local color plays its part. This is a terrible name for a boat:

What’s the point? It moves fast? It would fit for an iceboat, but the last thing most people want to think about during summer sailing season is the Red Wings. But then, a boat is like a little floating nation with a single monarch, who gets to have it his/her way. So there.

Another local reference. Anyone get it?

It’s a Kid Rock lyric:

Buy a yacht with a flag sayin’ chillin’ the most
Then rock that bitch up and down the coast

Kid Rock is a local hero. He’s got a big hit now (“All Summer Long”) that name-checks northern Michigan, every Mitten Stater’s favorite summer-vacation spot. In the video…

…he drives a classic mahogany speedboat, which I will bet a sawbuck is not an original but one of those jillion-dollar reproductions. My friends Paul and Mark had a boat like that, and still do. It was a Chris-Craft, named The Kid. Here it is, in a scene from a summer day much like the ones in the video, only no one is pole-dancing or displaying breast implants:

I don’t know who that girl is. She looks drunk.

Anyway, Kid Rock’s boat name in the video is also a reference to that song about chillin’ the most, but not, I’m happy to say, something like Rockin’ That Bitch. It’s just the song title: Cowboy.

Then there’s ours:

Alan’s a jazz fan. I favored this name, and suggested Kind of Blue as an alternative. I thought Boplicity would be cool (it’s a Miles Davis song), even though no one would get it, and probably pronounce it “Bopple City.” Long after our friend J.C. designed this new name for us and it was installed, Alan revealed his secret second choice: Box of Rain.

I didn’t even know he liked the Grateful Dead.

Bloggage:

Fascinating story in Sunday’s NYT magazine on trolling (the internet variety). What awful people.

That Obama-is-skinny story was made even worse over the weekend, after Maureen Dowd echoed its central premise and money quote, taken from a Yahoo politics message board. In both the WSJ and the NYT, it was reported as, “I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.”

In its full version, it reads: “Yes I think He is to skinny to be President.Hillary has a potbelly and chuckybutt I’d of Voted for Her.I won’t vote for any beanpole guy.” Hmm. The story appeared Friday, which tells me Maureen Dowd is still writing her Sunday column on Friday morning — not unheard of, certainly, but if she’s going to cut it that close, she should check the blogs first. That thing had been stripped by piranhas by noon.

Can I just say that few things drive me as insane as people who write “I’d of voted for…?” It’s my “supposebly.”

And that’s it for today. Monday. Another one. Sigh.

You know it’s August — when all the nation’s brains go on 50 percent power — when you open the No. 2 daily in the country and read this:

Too Fit to Be President?

Facing an Overweight Electorate,
Barack Obama Might Find
Low Body Fat a Drawback

Speaking to donors at a San Diego fund-raiser last month, Barack Obama reassured the crowd that he wouldn’t give in to Republican tactics to throw his candidacy off track.

“Listen, I’m skinny but I’m tough,” Sen. Obama said.

But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama’s skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.

Two quotes follow:

“He’s too new … and he needs to put some meat on his bones,” says Diana Koenig, 42, a housewife in Corpus Christi, Texas, who says she voted for Sen. Hillary Clinton in the Democratic primary.

“I won’t vote for any beanpole guy,” another Clinton supporter wrote last week on a Yahoo politics message board.

The rest is filler about skinny presidents (Lincoln), chubby presidents (Clinton), famous food-on-the-campaign-trail moments (Gerry Ford bit into a tamale with the husk still on) and other tangential crap like this:

Former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, a self-described “recovering foodaholic” who shed 110 pounds from his 5-foot-11 frame in two years and made fitness and nutrition central to his White House run, says voters “probably want someone who takes care of his health … as an example of the kind of personal discipline necessary to do the job.”

So it goes, your basic notebook dump for, hello, 1,400 words. And there you have it: Trend Story in a Nutshell. Put a question mark in your headline, pad with vague phrasing (“just might have some Americans wondering…”) and if anyone calls you on any part of it, say, “Why are you so serious? It’s August! It’s just a fun story on the features front!”

Actually, when it comes to this sort of material, I’m growing fond of Gina Kolata’s Personal Best column in the NYT, which seems to be aimed at human robots. It debuted last year with this burning question: How long into pregnancy is it acceptable to run for exercise? And we’re not talking a jog around the block, but training for marathons, women who run seven-minute miles in their third trimester — you know, women just like you and me. Another piece examined whether serious exercisers should only see doctors who are serious exercisers themselves, the better to avoid downer advice like, “maybe your knee would feel better if you didn’t exercise so much.”

It’s like visiting another planet.

I get three newspapers delivered to my home. This is why.

And here’s another reason: The mystery of the anthrax letters looks to be an unsatisfying, but probably good-enough, wrap. Rereading the story took me back to that crazy time in the fall of 2001 when it seemed the world really was falling down around our ears. Alan had a job interview in Traverse City around that time, and at the time moving that far north — out of the prevailing winds of a nuclear attack on, say, Chicago — seemed like an excellent idea. I remember sitting at my desk in the newsroom, which was near the police radio, listening to the scanner traffic. This was the Friday after the attacks, and there was a call to investigate a mysterious swarthy-faced character roughly every 15 minutes. Many came from the neighborhood near the Indiana Tech campus, where swarthy was the rule for about every third student. Strange times.

My friend Dave, a sportswriter, says Osama bid Hidin’ missed a much better opportunity than the World Trade Center — attacks on four open-air football stadiums on September 9, basically “Black Sunday” times four. But Arabs have a thing for buildings, and so. He might have a point. When college football games were cancelled the Saturday after 9/11, all anyone could think about was another plane crash-landing in Michigan Stadium, or someplace similar. Then the anthrax attacks started, and we were reminded: Whatever we think of, it’ll probably be something else. That’s a useful lesson.

That’s also how we got seven years down the road, mired in Iraq, an American most likely to blame for the anthrax, and a certain tall Arab with chronic kidney problems still MIA.

Bloggage:

“American Teen,” a film shot near Fort Wayne, gets generally good reviews.

And I’m off to enjoy the weekend. You do the same.

UPDATE: Wow. That WSJ story is even hinkier than at first blush.

My weekly newspaper, the Grosse Pointe News, is the worst weekly in the United States. Someone needs to hold the title, and there I said it. We have a hot primary election coming up here in the GP, for the Michigan House, and the local paper has had zero coverage of it. Yes: [crickets.]

Not an endorsement, not a voter’s guide, not even a few lousy letters to the editor. I don’t know why. My first thought is that an endorsement for an open seat would confound their stated endorsement policy, which is to always back the incumbent. Yes, it’s in writing, and yes, my jaw dropped, too. While trying to inform myself on the candidates’ positions using the awesome power of the Google, I found this amazing account, on the website of the Eastside Republican Club, of a speech by the paper’s then-editor. Their endorse-the-incumbent policy was “in view of the sacrifice the citizen has made.” And you wonder how lousy government gets that way.

Of course, there’s been an ownership/management change since then, but it looks like the new owner has even less interest in government, although, oddly, they did cover Nancy Pelosi’s fly-by last week to endorse Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick. This is week three of a letters-column battle over whether the Easy Riders Bicycle Touring Club does or does not observe traffic safety rules in its jaunts around town, and of course the police briefs thrive:

A resident of the first block of Muir reported that sometime between July 12-22 someone entered his unsecured garage and stole 12 brown leaf bags, a red 2 1/2-gallon gasoline can and one yellow work glove.

But nothing about the primary coming up next week. Oh, well. It’s not like it’s important or anything.

I don’t mean to rant about these things, but anyone who’s worked for any newspaper short of Grain ‘n’ Shit Weekly knows that elections are part of the franchise. No other news medium covers government the way the dead-tree variety does, and it’s one part of your coverage you should take seriously enough to do. [Cue the patriotic piccolo music, please.] When a candidate goes to the trouble to gather signatures, file for candidacy, walk door to door, shake hands and everything else, your local newspaper should take the time to notice and publish the outline of your platform. (Your TV stations certainly won’t.) Every paper I’ve worked for has published election guides, and we did them for every single one, and yes, there were probably eagles holding red-white-and-blue bunting in their beaks in every issue. It’s what you do, because it’s important.

Maroons.

Everything went fine yesterday, although Alan says I tried to engage the recovery-room nurse in lite chit-chat about my large intestine. (That’s a great ice-breaker, I’ve found.) Sleeping the afternoon away was pleasant until it wasn’t — nausea and a killer headache set in around 5 p.m. The headache was almost certainly from caffeine withdrawal, but I didn’t dare put coffee on an empty stomach, which couldn’t even hold water for a time. Alan said when he left me to go back to work, I was eating yogurt with a fork. And to think I used to be a world-class partier. No more, I guess.

A little bloggage? Sure. Much of this is pre-packed by Metafilter:

20 Ways to Die Trying to Dunk a Basketball. With video clips.

This one’s for Brian: The secret Catholicism of John C. Frémont. Everything old is new again.

Best LOLcats ever: Cats that look like Wilford Brimley. It’s …uncanny.

If it’s light and sloppy today, sorry. Ten percent of my brain thinks it wants more deep hypnotic drugs.

It was perhaps foolish to take a weightlifting class on the same day I’m restricted to a clear-liquid diet, but oh well. I’m already hungry, and the zero hour isn’t for another 20. Sigh. Gonna be a long day.

I briefed Kate on mom’s upcoming procedure, and she thinks it’s simply hilarious. “You have to drink ALL THAT? And it has LAXATIVES in it?” Then she falls out laughing, perhaps at the joy of being 11 years old and 39 years away from her first routine colonoscopy. Who can blame her? And speaking of being 50 and having an 11-year-old daughter, thanks to LAMary for passing along some handy visual aids to show why Hollywood stars keep Photoshop geniuses on retainer (and why the paps work so hard to get the unguarded shot). Jesus, cheek implants, Madge — whose idea was that?

Well, I hope she enjoys her colonoscopy.

As you can imagine, I’ve been thinking a lot about bowels today. (And I haven’t even started with the magic drink.) They really are a mystery to too many people. One day when Alan’s mom and Aunt Dorothy were still alive, we went to Defiance one day, only to be told, “Dorothy’s bowel is dead.”

“What do you mean?” I said.

“The doctors say it’s just dead. Everything she eats, it just goes straight through her.”

I can’t recall how close this was to the decline and fall of my own parents, but it must have been close, because I snapped a little. I’d grown a little tired of calling mom and dad, asking about their latest medical appointments, and being told, essentially: [Shrug.] I don’t know if they didn’t know the questions to ask or failed to remember the answers, but their attitude was always, “Ah, well. There’s nothing to be done.” It was like living in a 19th-century novel, where people were always “in a decline,” after which they’d either take to their beds and die or visit a sanitarium and recover, but there was rarely anything more to be done.

“Well, if Dorothy’s bowel is dead, you’d all better say goodbye, because the rest of her will soon be following,” I said, a little sharper than I’d intended. “You really can’t live without a bowel.”

We saw Dorothy later that day, and while she seemed to be in some pain, her color was good and she didn’t look like a person who wasn’t digesting anything, although, once again, she claimed that anything she ate would come out the other end, more or less untouched, within minutes. I kept my self-control this time and settled for muttering, under my breath, “That’s impossible.”

Dorothy lived another decade at least. I meditated on the subject for a while. The mysteries of what happens below the navel have been a source of fascination — and money-making opportunities — for as long as we’ve been self-aware. (Warning: Much grossness at that last link. Best leave it untouched. You’ve been warned.) Dogs just sniff and, occasionally, taste. We analyze.

A couple years ago, we had a marvelous discussion here about the 37-pounds-of-impacted-feces urban legend, which is said to be the postmortem fate of either Elvis Presley or John Wayne, and turns up from time to time in places it shouldn’t. Not the celebrity angle, but the standard line peddled by the colonics industry, which I still find in publications that should know better. A few months ago, a medical magazine asked me for story ideas. I replied with a few, and added a P.S.: “By the way — the colonics story in this issue? Where the writer says that all meat eaters carry three to five pounds of mucous-covered decaying meat in their intestines? That’s not true.”

I never got an assignment from the magazine, although one of my ideas turned up under a different writer’s byline a few months later. The secrets of my success, revealed!

Anyway, here’s a line I’ve been waiting my whole life to write: By the time some of you read this, I’ll have a 17,000-foot-long tube up my butt. Try to contain your excitement.

I’ll be back when I’m able, but I don’t think I’ll be able to improve on Dave Barry’s account (HT: Jen), so let’s leave it at that, eh? Fingers crossed for pink and healthy, and a 10-year break before the next one.