I guess everyone should have at least one good flying experience this summer. Mine qualified. Both flights took off and landed on schedule to the minute, and — far more important — didn’t crash. I never fly without considering the possibility of a crash, whereas I only occasionally think of this while driving. Statistics say if one of the two will get me, it’s the car crash, but I stand by my anxieties.

The picture is of an amusing rarity: A used bookstore in an airport. Because I breezed through check-in in about 15 seconds, I had some time to browse. It was wonderful, my platonic ideal of airport book shopping — no stacks of get-rich-now or kill-your-business-rival tomes, no celebrity biographies, no (or at least fewer) Grisham/DaVinci Code schlock bestsellers. Instead, stacks of well-thumbed mass-market paperbacks, all selling for three-four bucks, plus hundreds of other choices in dozens of categories. In other words, something you might actually want to read, and cheap enough that you might be tempted to “set it free” when you’re finished.

(Ms. Lippman has written about setting books free, i.e., leaving them behind in public places, so that someone else might find and enjoy them, perhaps with a note absolving others of guilt for taking them. I’ve never been that evolved; I either clutch the great ones to my bosom or keep the bad ones on the shelf forever to sneer at every time I pass by. Then I complain bitterly that I own too many books and have nowhere to keep them. No one ever accused me of consistency.)

I bought two — “Riding the Rap,” because I’m going through a reread of Elmore Leonard’s mid-’90s Florida period, and “Lonesome Dove,” in mass-market size. The latter was perhaps a mistake; in order to keep this bricklike tome somewhat less bricklike, the type is small and the leading tiny, but I don’t care. I plucked a copy off Deb’s shelf this weekend for my bedtime reading, and became as mired as a Hat Creek heifer in riverbank mud. Of course I’d read it before, probably twice, but I never owned it, perhaps because I feared the riverbank-mud thing. Deb said when she read it the first time she came to the end and paged through the endpapers to the back cover, hoping to find anything that might take the story an inch further. It’s that kind of book. (Although, in the writers-are-human-too tradition, I’m half pleased to report the sequels are said to be simply awful. At least I don’t have to read those.)

After that I wandered the shops, looking for a little something to take home to Kate. I considered a T-shirt, and noted the choices — “Hillary for President 2008,” “Bill Clinton for First Lady,” at two separate stores. Chocolate candies in novelty packaging were widespread, too, labeled “Wisconsin bullshit,” “Minnesota bullshit,” “Badger bullshit” and “Presidential bullshit,” with a little cartoon of Dubya. As a former newspaper columnist who’s pulled many of them straight out her ass, I’m wary of making sweeping pronouncements based on airport shopping, but I’m going to go way out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps the sitting president is a tetch unpopular.

Kate got three windup toys, btw. I love windup toys, especially when they’re monkeys who march around smashing little cymbals together.

The rest of the trip? Sublime. I slept on a futon in Deb’s basement rec room, where I was watched over by my life’s guiding spirit:

This was a wedding present. I recall at one point, at Deb’s reception, looking up to see this surging mass of humanity on the dance floor. Someone was holding Elvis up over his head, like mourners at the Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral with a picture of the deceased, and he was bobbing along, too. Wish I’d had a camera. This’ll have to do.

I’m also sorry I forgot my camera Saturday night, when we drove to Madison to meet Frank and Cindy for dinner. What a beautiful city. Liberal paradise. (Question for the room: If liberals are so bad at governing, why do we have all the cool cities? Santa Monica, Ann Arbor, Madison, etc. And if conservatives and/or “the market” is so great, why do all the right-wing cities suck so bad? Salt Lake City, Houston, Jacksonville, etc.) A full moon rose over Lake Monona while we watched from the terrace of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed community center there. Turn your back on the moon, and there is the state capitol dome in the middle of the isthmus. Frank and I left Fort Wayne about the same time, for the same reason (job elimination). I’d say he landed better, but we’re both doing OK. Life goes on, and if you’re lucky, the planes leave on time.

Bloggage:

I was going to link to Miss Teen South Carolina via YouTube, but I see the clip is now over 2 million views and isn’t loading well, so here’s a cobbled-together Flash workaround that gives you the gist. Poor girl. Someone buy her a map.

LOLBikinis: Everything I know about surfing I learned from Kem Nunn, but one thing I know is that female surfers rarely wear jangling chains, upper-arm bracelets and bikinis that could be stripped off by a medium-size wave when they’re out shooting curls. But then, they’re not Elle Macpherson, either. Do you think she might have been expecting photographers?

Soccer mom tidbit: Emily Yoffe speaks for us all.

And that’s it. Glad to be back from the good land.

The Committee had an early meeting today. That would be the Committee to Deprive Nance of Her Hard-Earned Rest. Over the years it’s had various subcommittees and chairs, but at the moment, the Worker Men are in their ascendancy, and have wrestled control away from the Blue Jays, the previous cadre at the top of the pyramid, squabbling REALLY LOUDLY for the chance to wake me up at an unreasonable hour.

The Worker Men are the guys in charge of tearing up our street, then leaving for a couple weeks, then coming back to push some stuff around, then leave for a couple more weeks, etc. Ostensibly they’re replacing a water main, but the new main has been buried for weeks now, and once again, work seems to have stalled. That doesn’t keep them from making an early appearance. For several days, someone was in charge of moving a backhoe from one end of the street to the other — CLANK CLANK CLANK CLANK — at 7:45 a.m., then leaving it there, unused, for the rest of the day. I go to bed somewhere around 1 a.m.; all I want to do is sleep until 8; IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK? Apparently so.

This morning they put in a stronger, and louder, show of force, pushing several pieces of heavy equipment around, complete with those horrible beep-beep-beep backup noises. I look outside, and for the life of me I can’t figure out what they’re doing, other than making noise. I suspect the whole crew is comprised of toddler boys, who have discovered this cache of really big Tonka trucks, and are just having fun driving them around.

OK, rant over. Second cup of coffee in progress. I guess if I wanted I could close the windows and turn on the A/C, but it’s a cool, pleasant morning and I want to feel the breeze on my face as I sit next to the window. IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK? Never mind. Counting blessings now.

Actually, if it were permitted, I’d love to hang out with these guys for a day or two, just to watch them work. No one really knows how things are done anymore, do they? What’s involved in building a bridge, replacing a water main, raising a skyscraper? I’m 95 percent clueless. That’s where I envy Alan his time spent working in factories while he decided whether to finish college; he understands the grit-and-grime part of the world far better than I do. (Too well, actually; having worked in a canned-soup factory, he won’t eat canned soup. His stories about moving dough around in the frozen-pizza plant will put you off frozen pizza forever. The less said about Etch-a-Sketch production, the better, and if I can leave you with one lesson, it’s this: Don’t ever buy manufactured housing, unless you want to learn how “DAP it” became a catch phrase in our household.)

Well, obviously I got nuttin to say. Do I have bloggage? Not much of that, either. (The world is on vacation.) But a little:

Why charity is complicated these days: CARE turns down 45 million American dollars, because a needlessly complex system of shipping subsidized American crops overseas to sell in the Third World wastes money and undermines local farmers. Color me shocked.

Hacking Starbucks, testimony that nonfat journalism doesn’t have to be boring.

In my perambulations around Flickr the other day, I found this gem, shot by Bobby Alcott, a local Detroit pro. It reminded me of my ex-neighbor Dennis in Indiana, who left our little street in the city to move to the country and breed championship Angus cattle. He mostly dealt in embryos and frozen semen but kept a few head around the place, and I loved to scratch their sweet-smelling foreheads. “You really like livestock, don’t you?” he asked once, amazed. Well, how can you not? They’re irresistible.

This story has so many coulds, mights and isn’t-even-on-the-drawing-board-yets you wonder why it even exists, but the idea is intriguing: a muscle-car hybrid. A Camaro hybrid. I’d buy that just to piss people off, even though I know it’ll fall apart in six months and cost me thousands of dollars and thousands of tears. It’s just funny.

What’s that I hear outside? It’s the beepbeepbeeping of a backhoe! Time to get to work.

Ah, the Cranbrook Educational Community. The hoity-toityest private school in all of southeast Michigan. Its classrooms and studios have gestated luminaries as numerous as the stars: Michael Kinsley. Bob Woodruff. Mitt Romney! Nestled in the green bosom of Bloomfield Hills, it’s known for its lovely, peaceful campus, its public art — that’s Carl Milles’ Orpheus Fountain, above, along with Europa and the Bull — its museums, academies and general devotion to learning and enlightenment.

Eliel Saarinen was the main architect of the place, as well as the art school’s director. He and his wife lived in a house on campus. Since Alex was here, taking advantage of the Stay With a Blogger Weekend special, and since Alex is a huge fan of 20th century modern, it seemed a good time to finally get out there and see the Saarinen house.

Well, it’s everything you’d expect a Saarinen house to be — beautiful, austere, clean, symmetrical, attention paid to the last detail, and terribly uncomfortable-looking. Those Finns and their hospitality — everything about them says, “Come and admire, but don’t stay too long.” There was a “cozy corner,” a built-in banquette that ran around two sides of a room. A rug was draped over the seat, and extended out onto the floor. The guide said guests would sit on the bench and pull the rug up over their legs to stay warm. How cozy. What hospitality.

But hey, it’s Saarinen. Some people design for the comfort of the body. Others design for the benefit of the eye. You need a mix.

After that we took the long way home. I wanted Alex to see the Theatre Bizarre, in the back yard of a house along State Fair Road:

It’s…well, I’m not sure what it is. Nearest I can tell, it’s a performance space that opens one night a year — Halloween or thereabouts — for a night of macabre revelry. More pictures at the links.

The next day we spent on the water. Blue sky, blue water, blue T-shirt, blue freighter:

Our next Stay With the Blogger weekend will be after I change the sheets. Make your applications soon.

Bloggage: Ashley Morris has met his match.

Some people don’t like Crocs. Some people must not have children. Or a job that requires standing up for long periods of the day, evidently.

The Columbus Dispatch is running a three-part series on the shooting of a local teenager by the sort of resident politely described as “eccentric.” I’ve read enough multi-part series on wrenching medical conditions to see me through the rest of my life, but part one — about the shooting and how it happened — is well-done and well-worth your time. Some people shouldn’t have guns.

That’s it for me. Time slips away, and I have a lot to do in what remains.

My life is even more boring than usual, so it’s all-bloggage Thursday:

Watching online video journalism find its footing is fascinating. I’ve said before I live in one of the worst markets for TV news — big and prosperous, but fully in the grasp of people who are squeezing it for every dime they can, while they still can — but this stuff is giving me hope.

I stumbled across this in my work last night, an index page for a video series on entrepreneurs produced by Crain’s Chicago Business. There are only two stories up, and both are good, but the one on the bike messenger is great. I’ve messed around a bit with digital video, so I have an idea what went into making it, and the answer is: A lot of work, and not a lot of money. They attached a POV (point of view) camera to the messenger and let him do his thing, then sat him down and had him talk about it a little bit, which they added as a voiceover. The video is nerve-wracking — I kept wanting to scream, “watch out!” — but his voice is calm, talking about finding the natural flow of the traffic and being like a river running through the rocks (rocks = cars). The reporting happens almost by accident. We learn that the messenger is a co-owner of his business, the Four Star Courier Collective, that it runs by “commie ideals” and that it makes for a unique niche of the profit-making community. There are a few facts about the messenger industry in general — it’s in decline — and the daily grind of getting from the Sears to the Hancock tower in five minutes, but then having to spend far more time being vetted by security.

If this were on one of my local newscasts, we would have seen the reporter’s face at least six times. There would have been silly wordplay and a question about firm thighs. The cuts would have come at a 3X pace, because people get so bored if they have to look at the same thing for longer than four seconds. And then there would have been the chuckling handoff to the anchors, who would say stupid things, and then on to the animal story.

I suppose, in the interest of transparency, I should admit that I sometimes indulge in a brief fantasy of being a bike messenger myself. Alan’s getaway-career fantasy is boatbuilding; mine is hangin’ with the dreadlocked boys down in the Messenger Center, comparing scars. This may have colored my opinion.

Why should the nation rebuild New Orleans? To give the world more fertile ground for the production of whorehouse proprietors who give good quote, that’s why:

“I know he’s not a drug addict,” she said. “I know he’s not a person that would down talk a woman. I know that he’s respectful. I know from what I’ve seen that he is honorable, that he’s a good man. His wife should be very proud of her husband irregardless of what he’s done. He was not a freak. He was not into anything unusual or kinky or weird.”

What a heart of gold that girl has!

I knew, sooner or later, Bigfoot would turn up in Michigan.

Today’s dirty-joke thrill: Unintentionally sexual comics covers/panels. You’ll feel so ashamed for giggling.

Have you noticed the amount of random b.s. that goes around the conversational circuit during your average day? A few months ago we discussed the “every meat eater has several pounds of undigested hot dogs in their bowel” meme, which I was astonished to read not long ago in, no kidding, a health magazine. It was a first-person piece on getting a colon cleanse; I guess someone drank the Kool-Aid.

One of the neighborhood kids is a veritable font of this stuff. “Did you know that you swallow, on average, eight spiders a night?” she told Kate the other day. This was followed by the news that “some ring of rocks” was “put there by aliens.” Kate, bless her heart, said, “the asteroid belt?” No. Further questioning revealed she was talking about Stonehenge. I tried to correct her, but I doubt it sunk in.

Today I read in the New York Times that someone is pushing a $25,000 genuine horsehair mattress with claims that it “breathes,” useful in that “the average person sweats about a pint a night.” Yes, a pint. Yes, “average.” Does anyone ever dare to say, “Um, that’s a load of crap” to people like this?

Anyway, I’m of two minds. I’ve introduced Kate to Snopes and their valuable service, so that’s one. The other is to fight fire with fire, to make up my own counter “facts,” a la John Hodgman. Next time I’ll tell that kid that you not only swallow eight spiders a night, but usually at least one millipede, and, while camping, two earthworms.

That’s it for me, folks. Discuss.

Moments in the life of Mother of the Year:

I rode my bike down to the park to summon home Kate and a friend, who were playing there. When I found them they were crawling around in some bushes, trying to find her friend’s hat. The hat had been snatched, and hidden somewhere in the park, by a boy who lurks there and regularly gives them trouble. This was the second incident in a month, and I let fly with my opinion that this boy is “a nasty little shithead.” Well, it cheered them up, anyway. Where before they’d been near tears, now they were thrilled that they’d heard an adult — not only an adult, but a mother — use a bad word, and about someone they knew.

I’m sure it was all over the park in two minutes flat.

Mostly, I try not to swear around my kid. There will be time for her to discover the poetry of profanity, but that time isn’t now. What I try to do instead is use my entire vocabulary; if I’d been faster on my feet, that boy would have been “overcompensating thug-boy.” I also try not to be coy. I hate the way we think “fuck” is enough to cause fainting, but “f- – -” is A-OK. Some years ago one of my colleagues wrote a story about a dust-up at a high-school newspaper, which featured students quoted accurately using profanity. The stock phrase of description editors settled on was not “the students used a variety of obscenities,” but “the students used the f-word, the s-word, the a-word and several variations.” Something like that, anyway. It was so silly.

Needless to say, we never, ever used the word “nigger.” It was either “the racial slur known as the n-word” or “n- – – – -,” but the word itself was radioactive. A suspect in a racially motivated murder was arraigned, and the story pointed out that the man had several tattoos that suggested he would make no African-American friends in prison, so his lawyer asked for protective custody. Were it up to me, I’d have written, “The suspect has prominent tattoos featuring racial slurs,” but the AP went with “the suspect has a tattoo that reads, ‘Die, n- – – – -, die.'” When I first read this, I thought for half a second that he’d gotten a tattoo with dashes in it.

You see what I’m saying? Say it or don’t say it. But don’t pussyfoot around. The dashes don’t make it any less offensive. It’s just so much fan-fluttering.

After this, our editor, who was gay, promoted “faggot” and “queer” to dashed-out status, on the grounds they were the gay version of the ultimate racial slur. I truly mourned these, and not because I heard them so often coming out of the mouths of gay people. I just like language, all language, and the more, the better. Gay people have so many amusing euphemisms for homosexuality, I feared we were sliding down the slope toward incoherence, with such great terms as “nelly queen,” “Miss Thing” and my favorite — “nancyboy” — banished to the twilight of dashes.

You know where this is heading, don’t you? The NAACP is meeting in Detroit this week, and yesterday they “buried the n-word.”

Good luck with that. I’m sympathetic, but pessimistic. Also, cynical — I await the day, surely arriving any minute now, when someone says “nigga” is an entirely different word, and hence OK. I actually agree; if anyone can’t tell the difference between one black kid telling another “you’re my nigga” and a white racist saying the same thing in, eh, a different tone of voice, they probably haven’t read this far. Language is paint. You can apply it with a fine brush, a wide one, a spray can or a bucket, but the art is in the execution.

Interesting note: The Free Press marked this occasion with several stories, two editorials, a cartoon and letters to the editor about the issue. But they didn’t allow online comments on the original story yesterday. Now that would be an interesting thing to read an editor’s column about. I’m not holding my breath.

Not to change the subject too abruptly, but guess who’s coming to Detroit in September, and for whom will I shove aside all comers in my quest for tickets when they go on sale Friday? George Clinton, that’s who. Now two weeks away from his sixty-funkin’-seventh birthday, it sounds like George is sometimes baffled by kids today, and their filthy mouths, too:

Though he’s popular with rappers, Clinton says he doesn’t completely understand the hip-hop culture. “I can’t get used to [rappers] saying the things they say to girls and then expecting them to make love to that,” he laughs. “One guy was cursing this one girl out and I said, ‘Man, don’t talk like that to that girl,’ and she said, ‘Oh, here comes Captain Save-a-Ho.’”

By the way, if you want to know why Clinton is still important today, here’s a clue:

“We do it different all the time,” he says. “People want to hear the same songs they know, and at the same time they want something different. You have to be conscious of that. They say they’re nostalgic for that old music. I don’t want to be nostalgic,” he pauses. “I want to see what’s next.”

“I want to see what’s next.” I’ve known people who have been looking backward since they were 30 years old.

So, bloggage:

How the Chinese deal with corruption widely known to be deep, broad and systemic: They execute the head of their FDA equivalent. Well, that’ll surely take care of the problem, don’t you think? Everybody back to work!

Do you read the Comics Curmudgeon? If not, you should.

That’s all for this morning, the last (so we’re told) in the heat wave. And Mercury is no longer retrograde. Let’s all start new projects.

UPDATE: Undercover Black Man has your Giant Negro Roundup, for those you who follow such things. As I know UBM is a sometime writer for “The Wire,” I wonder if he shares any responsibility for one of the better lines from a recent season: After the shooting of Stringer Bell, one homicide detective asks another if they have a suspect description. “BNBG,” the second one says. “Big negro, big gun.”

Current temperature: 95 degrees. Relative humidity is a low — for this neighborhood, anyway — 28 percent. Which is not exactly a dry heat, but not the usual punishment, either. It’s a good test for whether you like warm weather.

I don’t like warm weather. Not this warm, anyway.

I really don’t understand why people move to Arizona. Isn’t there an easier, less expensive way to get skin cancer and die of heatstroke?

OK, so.

I know I give a lot of love to the NYT around here, but the place isn’t entirely all that. The Sunday Styles section is the paper’s true toy department; at least one story a week is laughingly stupid or brings the duh. This week there are two: One reveals the astounding news that young librarians tend to be hip, something I discovered in the sophisticated metropolis of Fort Wayne, Indiana…when? More than a decade ago, certainly, and maybe earlier. (And yes, Miss Beth, it was you who opened my eyes.) Oh well — we know NYT reporters get all their books free from Michiko Kakutani’s castoffs and don’t visit the humble regions of the local branch. Not that they haven’t done their research; they’ve watched lots of old movies:

Librarians? Aren’t they supposed to be bespectacled women with a love of classic books and a perpetual annoyance with talkative patrons — the ultimate humorless shushers?

Take it away, Connie.

But the real talker of the week was this, on Fred Thompson’s boobalicious trophy wife, and whether America is “ready” for a president with arm candy 24 years his junior. It’s Mrs. Thompson’s husband I’m not ready for, personally. I like to think the country has seen the hazard of electing an affable empty suit to the White House, but who knows?

Although if it leads to more New York Post leads like this, I might be swayed:

Gruff, graying Republican Fred Thompson has a proven track record of tapping into a younger generation – starting with his wife.

OK, then.

Tiger Stadium is doomed. Everyone knows this. It’s been doomed for a decade, but it’s double-secret probation doomed now. The Tigers have been playing in Comerica Park since 2000, the old temple is yet another crumbling ruin in a city full of them, and the time has come to git ‘er done. There have been plans over the years ranging from clearing it for a big box to the current one, the best (or most ambitious, at least) of the lot: Knock down all but a small portion of the entrance. Preserve the field for a Little League/amateur venue, the centerpiece of a park/history center. Most of the perimeter would be condo/mixed-use development. It’s not a done deal — there’s no developer willing to sign on the line — but a little momentum on the part of the city would help, and at this point “momentum” means “start swinging the wrecking ball.”

Well. This story has been Totally Detroit from the get-go, combining two of the city’s perennial roadblocks to success — race and nostalgia.

Exhibit A:

(The) city is moving to dismantle the stadium — with most of the structure to be razed next year. The council threw a monkey wrench into the plan this year when several members balked at the racial composition of the community committee created to advise the city on how to proceed, saying there were not enough minority members.

And Exhibit B:

“This doesn’t have to be torn down,” said Aaron Burton, 52, of South Lyon, who opposes demolition of the stadium. “There is plenty of other space in the area that can be developed. Keep the ballpark and use it.”

What an attitude. The follow-up question — Use it for what? — is rarely asked, or if asked, never answered with anything more than a shrug. I did a story on this last year, and was amazed by how many people seem to think the world clamors for old baseball stadiums, and is just waiting to get its mitts on one, so they can turn it into…”a minor-league park,” is the most common answer.

Yes, yes, a minor-league park. Because surely a city with four major-league professional sports competing for scarce dollars in a depressed economy, with two Big Ten colleges within a 90-minute drive, is clamoring for minor-league baseball. And lord knows how many teams would love to spend millions rehabbing a crumbing ruin with four or five times the seating they would require on the biggest day of the year. And surely the Tigers’ current owners won’t object to discount baseball being played a mile away from their home plate.

But…but…Babe Ruth played there! And Ty Cobb! And several World Series, and what about Ernie Harwell? Let’s keep it up another few years, at least, so we can think about it some more. Not do anything rash.

Boy, I’ll tell you, if there’s one thing living in the Rust Belt has taught me, it’s that nostalgia can be as corrosive as urban blight itself. The Yankees will be building a new park soon, if they aren’t already; excuse me, I don’t keep up with all these things. Ask New Yorkers what’s happening to the old place. In a place like New York, I doubt it will be there long.

OK, then.

Just checked the forecast. We were promised storms and a “slow cooling.” The sky is as clear as a baby’s complexion and the high will be…95!

Ugh. And so the week begins.

I’m not quite ashamed to say I watched the hot-dog eating contest on ESPN Wednesday. I’m especially grateful that the runner-up, Takeru Kobayashi, covered his mouth during his “reversal” in the final seconds, and spared a national audience that. Although he did take his final bow with vomit or something like it down the front of his shirt, and I notice he and the winner didn’t shake hands.

Competitive eating is all the rage these days among reporters looking for the last unexplored, non-sexual subculture safe for a family newspaper. I guess it rings all those obesity-epidemic bells with editors, but speaking as one who tuned in during the introduction of contestants, I can tell you more were skinny or average-size than fat. Both Joey Chestnut, the winner, and Kobayashi, the six-time defending champion, are guys I could easily knock down in a sumo bout. The trick to winning seems to be in technique, not capacity — how wide you can open your jaw, how much you can relax your throat muscles, how much you can suppress your gag reflex. Also, how much you like wet hot dogs; arrayed before each contestant was a battery of cups, presumably filled with water. Each dipped their dogs before stuffing it into the piehole, I suppose partly for lubrication and partly to collapse the bun. There are few things I enjoy in summer more than a good hot dog, but this was just vile. (And not because one of the sponsors was Heinz. KETCHUP DOES NOT BELONG ON HOT DOGS. There will be no further discussion.)

You’d think a place like Michigan would be the cradle of competitive-eating stars, but I guess not. One of my favorite Jim Harrison lines: “Only in the Midwest is overeating seen as heroic.”

I fished almonds out of a bag of granola while Alan peeped through his fingers. I kept expecting something like the 2006 Preakness. But Kobayashi thoughtfully covered his mouth.

The older I get, the less I overeat, which is sometimes hard to reconcile with my size, but believe me, it’s true. And it’s not because I’m getting the middle-aged heartburn thing, either; I still can eat pretty much anything I want without paying a price in anything but thigh circumference. Maybe it has to do with the gradual ebbing of the hormonal tide. I’ve yet to meet a man who can fully understand what it’s like to be female and in the grip of a PMS-induced potato-chip destruction mission. (I always say, “You know how your dick makes you do stupid things? It’s like that.”) I hope it has to do with refinement, with being happy with a little quality rather than a lot of crap, but that might not be it, either. In the long run, it might just be the beginning of the downhill slide toward the Earlybird Special. All the things our bodies do to embarrass us — sweat, exude, crave — diminish with age, or are transmogrified into one area (hair sprouting in places it doesn’t belong). Say what you will about inappropriate sexual urges, but at least it’s proof you’re alive.

You ever notice how many contemporary libido scolds get that way in their 40s? Laura Schlessinger plowed a wide swath in her well-photographed youth, then decided it was her mission in life to condemn all younger women who did the same. The blood cools, and the memories of what it was like to be 25 — they fly right out the window.

Speaking of hormones, I was talking to someone at a party last week, another ex-newsie, who asked if I ever missed it. I said the only thing I missed was the newsroom, and we both agreed there was no better place to work than a bullpen city room, back before fear and flop sweat took over the business. He told a funny story about his northern California paper, which had not one but two transsexuals-in-transition working there, and the uproar it caused — mostly over the which-bathroom-do-you-use issue. He said one night he had to phone in a story, late, and the dictation was taken by Michelle, formerly Mike. It all went well until he signed off with “thank you, sir” and unleashed a torrent of estrogen-induced recrimination about respect and honoring choices and blah blah blah. And all my friend wanted to do was point out that the hormones change everything but the voice, and he just forgot.

Good times.

Well, we seem to have gone to stream-of-consciousness today, haven’t we? Let’s blog it up a little:

A Chicago Tribune critic/blogger asks his colleagues, “If a movie ever made you walk out, what was it?” I don’t know if I ever have — once I’ve paid the money, I’ll sit through just about anything — but I do have a few aborted-rental movies, including “Zoolander” and “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.”

This one’s for the Detroiters — ever wonder what the original Pistons logo looked like? Mitch Harper dug up one from the days of the Zollner Pistons, the current club’s predecessor. That guy looks like he’s quick on his Chuck Taylors, eh? Hilarious.

One of the advantages of being French is that natural slimness, born of cigarettes, genetics and aerobic rudeness. The new French president prefers to maintain it with exercise, which leads his constituents to rise as one and shout, “Quel fromage!”

Back to work. Have a great weekend.

Just remember: If you’re going to tell a joke, tell it all the way.

Great promotion for the Simpsons movie. Yes, it has a blog.

Thanks to Undercover Black Man for singling out my kind of cultural anniversary — the 40th anniversary of the release of “(I Wanna) Testify” by the Parliaments, soon to become Parliament, then Parliament/Funkadelic and, for my money, the most sublime force in funk music ever.

However, UBM went above and beyond when he assembled no fewer than six versions of the song, with embedded sound, so you can compare and contrast. As George Clinton says, we will return it to you as soon as you are groovin’. So get groovin’.

I don’t understand newspapers anymore. Oh, I get the gist, but it’s this making-it-up-as-we-go stuff that sometimes escapes me. Everyone has a dream of how journalism will work in the age when you no longer buy ink by the barrel, and the dreams will differ. Some people see a world in which investigative reporting contains hotlinks to the various public databases that offered the information; others see dog pictures. To be sure, the internet means you can have both, but it all adds up to a lot of confusion for dinosaurs like me.

By the way, I should say: I love that dog picture. That’s one that belongs in the newspaper.

Lameness continues today. Alan said if we want any family-vacation time we have to take it in July, because he has a maternity leave coming up on his staff in August, which means he’ll be chained to the grindstone. So now I have to hustle and figure out how we can enjoy a few days in fabulous New York City sooner rather than later. This trip has been in the discussion stage for a while, but I’ve been dragging my feet, waiting for the airlines to get their act together. Ha! And now we’ll be arriving just in time for TerrorFest 07. Ah, no worries. I’m a Brit at heart on this subject, and nothing but nothing will stop me from dragging my kid through the nation’s greatest city. I don’t care if there are car bombs on every corner.

I wonder what we might be missing here. This is the 40th anniversary of Detroit’s personal When Everything Changed moment, and the collective recollection of the ’67 riots has already begun. In the writing class I took this spring, the instructor asked if anyone had a story to tell about “the riots, or the uprising, whatever.” Interesting how “uprising” is now a preferred alternative for civil unrest, although even honkies here acknowledge that police brutality was a leading cause of our own personal Troubles. (Note, in that link, the reference to the “Big Four,” four-man jump-out squads of cops that patrolled black neighborhoods, with a license to hassle.) It was well before my time, though, and I’ll leave the recollections to those who were here.

(Amusingly, one of the best riot stories anyone in that class told was that of a young man who lived, as a toddler, through the 1984 World Series riot. He sat on his mom’s lap while the crowd rocked their car menacingly. It was one of his earliest memories, and guess what the takeaway message was? Baseball must be a very important game, if it makes people act like this. Gotta love it. He talked a lot about this photo, the iconic image of that crazy October.)

So, instead, have a load of bloggage:

Irony of ironies: Michael Moore and General Motors have common ground on the issue of health care.

A typically absorbing WashPost read on a family of fierce competitors. In this case, competing with coonhounds.

And for the parents in the house, one of the best comment threads — and most-linked, I’m sure — ever: Tell us how your kids embarrassed you. Some great stories, many involving little kids and the stories they tell about their genitalia. Loudly, and in public.

I’m outta here. Back in a bit.