A remarkable story in yesterday NYT asked a question I’d never even considered:

What’s your beauty budget?

Hmm. Well, OK, let’s see if we can tote it up: Haircut/color every six weeks, roughly $100 including tip. Eyebrow wax when I’m feeling sorry for myself, ahem bathing-suit area maintenance ahem in summer. Say, $200 a year. “Product” when I run short of it — shampoo, sunscreen, soap, drugstore-line makeup. A wildly inflated guess on that would be $200 a year. Add it all up, and I’d say between $1,000 and $1,200 a year, and I feel damn guilty about that hair color, but hey, I’m in the Gray Zone, and I’m not giving up this early.

Still, I’m practically a hairy-legged hippie compared to Ginger Grace, 40, a real-estate agent in Beverly Hills. Her scorecard:

Every other day: hair blown out, 45 minutes, $65. Twice a week: personal trainer, one hour, $80. Twice a week: eyebrow waxing, five minutes, $30. Twice a week: thigh treatment, 45 minutes, $125. Weekly: hiking with trainer, two hours, $150. Weekly: Zone Diet food delivery, $250. Twice a month: pedicure (with manicure), one hour, $40. Twice a month: facial, one hour, $160. Twice a month: massage, one hour, $125. Several times a month: makeup and eyelash application, $145. Monthly: photo facial, 15 minutes, $500. Every six weeks: hair color, two hours, $450. Every three months: hair cut, 45 minutes, $140. Twice a year: Botox and Restylane, one hour, $1,000.

The “thigh treatment” is some sort of “electrical-current thing,” she says, and adds that she considers herself a hairy-legged hippie, at least by local standards: “I am probably the only person in Los Angeles who doesn’t see a chiropractor, an acupuncturist or a nutritionist, but it’s so youth-driven here that maybe I should.”

Good lord. I’m sure a Beverly Hills Realtor makes a pile of dough, but that adds up to $12,000 a year. You see where we got the term “high-maintenance.” She gets her eyebrows waxed twice a week? Someone needs to learn how to work a pair of tweezers. And those prices! Four hundred fifty bucks for hair color? A haircut for $140? A hiking coach? As someone who’s hiked many miles, maybe I can save Ms. Grace some money. Psst: Just keep putting one foot in front of the other. Thank you. We’ll be passing the hat later.

I guess the upside is, Ms. Grace is a fetching gal with tingly thighs. Still. I’d rather tour Asia with the 12 grand. I could stay long enough to grow an inch of gray roots.

I suppose I should spend some time thinking about the Supreme Court, but to be honest, I don’t have the caffeine in me just yet. And at this point I really should be praying for my immortal soul, having just committed the unpardonable sin of buying a 10-year-old an iPod Nano. Rest assured, I have an elaborate rationalization for it, which I’ll share upon request, but for now the sight of her sitting at the park-bus stop with white buds in her tender ears is already making me think I made a terrible, terrible mistake.

Have a great weekend.

Who’s your favorite Spice Girl?

She needs a new dress, but I vote for Ginger. She looks like she’s been around, but still has her optimism. That’s how a woman in her 30s should look.

Posh is the new Scary. A guy could put an eye out on one of those plastic hooters.

And if you’re wondering, here’s the news peg: They’re going back on tour.

On my iPod now:

What happened to funk/rock music with horns? What happened to afros like that? Dammit, I want to be 17 again.

I was at the pool, watching all the bodies in their scant coverings of spandex, when I started thinking about abstinence programs. (Gee, I don’t know why, either. Actually, first I thought about tattoos for a while, then abstinence programs. My thoughts on tats are unchanged, which is why I moved on to abstinence so quickly.) Recently I had taken one of those left-right-left turns on the internet and ended up at an account of the Sex Lady, Jennifer Waters, and her entertaining presentation to middle-schoolers:

Jennifer Waters calls herself the Sex Lady. She likes to play matchmaker with Miss Tape and unwitting teen boys.

She slaps a piece of clear tape across Julian’s arm. He winces.

“It’s gonna hurt when I take it off,” the lanky boy protests.

“But it’s fine now, isn’t it?” Ms. Waters whips back.

The puzzled looks on 18 eighth-graders at Carrollton’s Arbor Creek Middle School brighten. The Sex Lady has made her point: Bad relationships hurt.

Is that her point? Actually, the point comes later in the hour:

The Sex Lady tells Julian to break up with Miss Tape.

“I don’t wanna,” Julian screeches before obeying. He cradles his arm as he sits down.

Ms. Waters shows Miss Tape to the class before calling up another boy, Spencer.

“We got some skin, Julian’s hair,” she says. “Spencer, did you get a good look at Miss Tape?

“You bond with Miss Tape,” she says, slapping the strip onto Spencer’s arm. “Everything Julian had has now been passed on to you.”

Ms. Waters does this again with a third boy, Jonathan. This time, when they break up, the tape comes off pretty easy.

“What happened to the bond?” Ms. Waters asked the class.

“It didn’t hurt as much,” a girl replies.

Get it? Sleep with too many people, and you’re like an old piece of tape. Note that the tape is female. Of course. In these little presentations, women hardly ever get to be actual human beings. Don’t buy the cow if you can get the milk free. Remember that one? Then I read something where the woman was a tree, climbed by a man, and honestly, if the writer hadn’t said, “This is a metaphor of marriage,” I wouldn’t have had the first clue what he was talking about, except that it sounded pretty Freudian, the guy clambering around in the branches and all.

Now it’s tape. I don’t think this is a good thing, going from a hooved mammal to a tree to a piece of sticky plastic. No wonder abstinence programs don’t work.

But we shouldn’t be surprised. I had drug education in high school. You remember that: There was a movie featuring Sonny Bono in an orange satin suit, talking about the dangers of mary jane. The story was that the movie was part of Sonny’s community-service sentence on drug charges, which sounds like a crock, but I don’t know. (Hey, I wonder if it’s on YouTube. Are you kidding? Everything’s on YouTube. Parts one, two and three.) Rewatching it today, I can see that the film makes a number of sound points — yes, I would rather the pilot of an airplane I was a passenger on to have recently smoked a cigarette rather than a joint — mixed with the usual heapin’ helpin’ of bullshit. I’ve known people who wrecked their cars when they were high, not because they were so tripped out and groovin’ on the cool summer day that they actually drove off a cliff, as the film shows, but because they tried to take the curve too fast.

There was another movie where a girl, babysitting and tripping on acid, puts the baby in the oven, thinking it’s a turkey. You don’t need me to tell you it was greeted by guffaws and several cries of “I’ll have what she’s having” from the darkened classroom.

I always wonder why we can’t try the truth. Is subtlety too hard for teenagers to grasp? We expect them to understand moral ambiguity by junior year (in English class, anyway); can’t we also tell them that taking drugs is a bad idea, but like many bad ideas, there’s a time when they seem like a very good idea. (I always thought everything you need to know about marijuana could be summed up by Samuel L. Jackson’s great exchange with Bridget Fonda in “Jackie Brown:” “That shit robs you of your ambition.” “Not if your ambition is to get high and watch T.V.”)

Same with sex. Nothing — even a bikini wax, even tape on your arm — hurts like your first heartbreak, but like virtually every other human being on the planet, you’ll live to love again, and better. Sex is a bad idea at 14, a less-bad one at 18, and if you’re not having sex, married or not, by 25, you’re missing out on a big part of life at the best time of your life to enjoy it. I’ve always found the fetishizing of virginity to be deeply creepy, medieval, Islamic. And get a clue, Sex Lady: Women are not tape. Nor are they trees, or cows.

Lecture concluded.

It’s another beautiful day in the neighborhood; lately I feel like I’m living in southern California. An enormous storm system passed through the area yesterday, and true to form, voided about eight raindrops on our little patch of heaven. It’s like all the heat rising off this asphalt island repels rain, or something. Anyway, the temperatures have moderated, the humidity’s down, and I’m off to Ralph’s Kroger for supplies.

Via Metafilter: Blogging the Definitive 1,000 Songs from 1955 to 2005 and Counting to 1 million — on the internet — has blogging reached its wank-rific nadir?

No, that would be this site.

Thanks for all the suggestions on how to spend my windfall. Making final decision soon, and I’ll let you all know.

Have a swell day.

When I first signed up for Google AdSense, the money came in at, if not a brisk clip, then certainly a found-money sort of way. For about three days, my little craptastic monument to personal narcissism and avoiding my paying gigs was bringing in about $5 a day. My goodness, this will pay the cable bill and have money left over for lattes, I thought giddily. Why didn’t I do this years ago?

I don’t know what happened. It’s as though Google sniffed around for a while, then left me behind, because soon I was getting bupkis, pennies per day. Apparently your demographically desirable eyeballs are worth a mere fraction of your stupid click finger. Not that this should be construed as a prod to click on the ads, because I’m forbidden by my user agreement to tell you to do so — I’m just explaining how the system works. (You’re starting to see, perhaps, why web advertising doesn’t even bring a wan smile to publishers’ faces.) I think I mentioned, the day of my Lileks screed, when I got linked all over the place and saw something like 9,000 unique visitors in a single day — about 10 times the usual traffic — I made 15 cents. So much for the new-media business model.

After a while I stopped checking daily, it was so disappointing. They don’t write you a check until you reach $100, after all. The other day was my first log-in for some time, and I saw that I had cracked $93 and would maybe get to $100 within a few more …weeks, maybe. But it felt like a C-note in my pocket, so I decided to do what my friend Fatih advised the last time I was broke: “Nancyderringer,” (he always called me by my married name, mushed together like that) “in Turkey we have a saying: ‘You must spend your money so the money that’s trying to find you will know where you are.'” Someone else will have to tell me if this is true, but Fatih is such a dear, and it sounded so amusing in his accent, that I’ve used it ever since as an excuse to stay broke.

So I decided to give most of the $100 away. To other bloggers. I spend $600 a year to get the New York Times delivered to my home, and a couple hundred more in magazine subscriptions; surely I can spread a little to the volunteer pundits of the world. There won’t be many bequests — I’m parceling it out in $10 to $20 chunks so as not to be entirely insulting — but I’m hoping it will be a small gesture of thanks to some of my favorites, who amuse me daily with the work they give away free. I sent $10 to the Send John Scalzi to the Creation Museum fund, which raised an astonishing $5,118.36 for Americans United for Separation of Church and State, a worthy achievement indeed. (And I can’t wait for the report from the Creation Museum.) I sent TBogg a bauble from his Amazon Wish List. Lance got a tenner in his tip jar. The Poor Man suggested a donation to Oxfam in the name of The Poor Man Institute for Freedom and Democracy and a Pony. I asked Roy to make a wish, too, and he declined, because he’s prosperous at the moment, but did tell me his birthday, so I have to think of something. (I think, for Roy, it has to be a gesture in the Bob Evans/Joe Eszterhas note-in-vagina spirit.)

That’s about half my stash. Who else deserves a little spare change? I went through my bookmarks, and my other faves either aren’t asking, haven’t replied to e-mails, have well-paying professional jobs or would, I’m convinced, spend it all on crack. Make a suggestion, you folks who follow the blogosphere with more attention than I do. Someone out there has cancer or is facing foreclosure. For a gesture this small and meaningless, the sky’s the limit.

(Or maybe I should take the remaining $45 down to the casino and try to figure out craps once and for all. I’ve read the rules a million times, and they go through my head like grass through a goose. Every time I’ve been to one of the three downtown gambling palaces, it’s the only game that interests me even a little. The slots are full of crabby old people with oxygen tanks, the poker tables populated with guys who watch way too much poker on TV, and yes I’m talking about you in the sunglasses, and blackjack, my old favorite, seems to have lost its mojo — it’s all funereal mopes at those tables, too. Whereas at least one craps table is ringed by seven or eight threatening-looking rapper types, laughing and having a high old time and waving cash around like flags at a GOP convention. I want to go to that party.)

The good news about summer: I’m getting more sleep, at least at night, as long as the AC is on and I’m not awakened at dawn by squabbling blue jays, surely a sound they will play on infinite loop in hell. The bad news: Lawn services. Times are tough in the Mitten, and I’m reluctant to criticize anyone who’s found a way to make a living, but the other day I was grilling at something like 7:30 p.m. on a freakin’ Saturday, and the people two doors down had their service there, running two gas blowers and a string trimmer. It was like standing at the end of the runway with the Concorde taking off five inches overhead, only louder.

They have a noise ordinance in Bloomfield Hills, and I’m told it’s never questioned and strictly enforced. Ah, to live in Bloomfield Hills.

I have no tasty bloggage for you, no wait, I do. Those of you who spend less time online than I do may not be familiar with the LOLcats phenom; go here for a dry, Wikipedia take on things. It’s not hard to understand, as the wildly addictive I Can Has Cheezburger can attest. (Warning: FLYPAPER!)

And it was only a matter of time before someone took it in a new direction:

Have a hot, sticky day with scattered thunderstorms. That’s what I’m planning for.

As a rule, reporters hate 89 percent of all “localizations” they’re assigned to do. A localization is when you take a big national story and find the local angle. For all the times it’s worthwhile — local people in New York City on 9/11 describe the scene — most times they’re just lame. Worst of all are man-on-the-street reaction stories, which editors believe capture the rough-hewn wisdom of the common man, but almost always boil down to: Ill-informed Morons Find Their Voice.

But every so often, you get one that’s fun to do:

It may not have been another “Bullitt,” but the Ford Expedition has again made the Blue Oval part of Hollywood history thanks to its cameo role in one of the climactic scenes of Sunday night’s final episode of “The Sopranos.”

You know which one: The Phil Leotardo whacking scene.

The camera then shifts again to the Ford logo, this time emblazoned on the wheel of the Expedition. The wheel begins to turn, rolling slowly over Leotardo’s head, which is crushed with a sickening crunch.

I bring this up to single out and mock the expert quoted low in the story, who said:

But automotive marketing expert Jim Hossack of AutoPacific Inc. said there is such a thing as bad publicity, and he thinks the depiction of the Blue Oval in Sunday night’s Sopranos climax definitely crossed that line. “I don’t think that is the way you want to get press,” Hossack said. “I sure wouldn’t have paid for it.”

If you’ve ever wondered how stupid the management class thinks you are, well, there you are. We’d better not buy that car, Martha. Someday I might be getting out of it and someone could mistake me for Phil Leotardo and put a bullet in my head. I have a lot of gray, you know. I mean, you want to talk lousy product placement Sunday night, the people who have something to complain about are the ones at Nissan, who now have millions of people believing their vehicles will burst into flames if parked in leaves.

Nice shout-out to “Bullitt,” by the way. That movie did for Mustangs what “Risky Business” did for sex on trains.

Once again I have a day loaded with appointments that don’t want to accommodate blogging. (Last full day of freedom before school dismisses for good tomorrow.) I have a big picture/roundup post due for this week, so bear with me. In the meantime, let’s doff our hats to NN.C commenter Brian Stouder, whom you are all now instructed to call Jimmy Olson, citizen journalist. I’ll be back in a bit.

We talked about weddings here a couple of weeks ago — great stories from all — but we didn’t talk much about brides. Bridezilla, bride from hell, J-Lo on crack — these are the bridal archetypes these days. I try to think back to the (first) weddings of my generation, and I don’t recall too many of those girls. I remember tearful brides, and exhausted brides, and a great many stoned brides, but not a lot of sacred-monster brides. There was one who had to choose her dress to cover her tattoos, and who spent much of the reception smoking cigarettes, which was where I decided there’s nothing more charming than a bride with a butt hanging from the corner of her mouth. It really says “happily ever after,” doesn’t it?

It’s the wedding racket that makes them this way. The $100,000 wedding, even if it is paid for with daddy’s money, hangs a sword of Damocles over everyone’s head, and who wouldn’t flip out? Brides today snicker at the hippie weddings of my generation, barefoot brides on the beach carrying bouquets of wildflowers and serving homemade cookies at the reception, but I’ll tell you what — none of those girls ever threatened their grooms with a cake knife. Or sent their bridesmaids specific instructions, down to the color formula, for what sort of highlights they should have on the big day.

So I was appalled, but not particularly surprised, to read Emily Yoffe’s roundup of bridal horror in Slate, today:

Is there anything more revealing than the phrase—uttered with a stamping of the foot and a rising of the voice—”my day”? Of course it’s not “our day,” because the groom is merely an accessory, like a cake topper. The first time a bride-to-be utters the words “my day,” I recommend potential bridesmaids and grooms respond, “Mayday.”

My favorite single anecdote:

Weddings were once the place for loved ones to witness the union of the bride and groom. All guests—be they halt, lame, blind, or colorblind—were welcome. But now some brides see themselves as auteurs and their guests merely extras on the production set. How else to explain the letter I received from a groom-to-be who signed himself “Under Moral Siege.” His dear female friend, who wears thick glasses, had been selected as a bridesmaid. But the bride insisted this bridesmaid leave her glasses at home because “glasses are an inappropriate accessory for women’s formalwear, and the bridal magazines have convinced her that there can be no exceptions to the no-glasses rule.” It makes me hope that as the groom tries to explain this to his friend, he’ll find himself looking deep into her Coke-bottle lenses, suddenly declare, “Why, Miss Keeler, you’re beautiful!” and run away with her.

True anecdote: I once knew a bride who was, by conservative estimates, somewhere between 350 and 400 pounds. She was unashamed by her size, and had a big wedding. I wasn’t invited, but my friend Paul was, and described the processional. The bridesmaids start coming down the aisle, and each one is beautiful, just breathtaking. They seem to have been arranged in ascending order of stunningness, starting with the Heidi Klum lookalike, progressing to the Stephanie Seymour clone and so on, finishing with the maid of honor, a blonde who would make Elle Macpherson weep with shame. And then here comes the bride, the size of a boxcar draped in flowing white moiré silk. I never thought much of her before that, but just knowing she had the ovaries to make herself the star of that show raised my opinion of her by several notches.

Anyway, lots more wedding horror in Slate’s wedding issue, which doesn’t have an index page, but Yoffe’s story will lead you to the rest of the stuff. Or you can just go to Slate and click around.

God willing, today is the last hurdle of this preposterously drawn-out farewell-to-school fortnight — an all-day (yes, really) picnic at our lakefront park, the thought of which makes me weep with joy. I can’t wait to see what sort of wedding Kate expects after a school career like this.

Pray for me.

Homeownership sucks. Responsibility sucks. Nothing like homeownership — particularly in a market with declining real-estate values — to make one yearn for the simpler days of an apartment, a mailbox with everyone else’s by the front entrance, a community pool and a call to Maintenance when things went wrong.

A little history: In true Detroit style, a previous owner of our house was enamored of gas-hungry machines, specifically recreational vehicles. In what may be a metaphor for the relationship between motor vehicles and the natural world, they used this enthusiasm to ruin the back yard. They picked up the garage and rotated it 90 degrees, plunking it in the goddamn middle of the yard. In between the garage and the house, they installed a deck. This is nice. In between the garage and the back of the property, they poured another parking slab, and in the thin stretch left before the property line, they poured gravel. (In the sales listing for the house, this was described as a “play area,” the same way “squalid shithole” becomes “handyman’s special.”) Everything else was paved.

For the first two years we lived here, we regarded this arrangement with contempt. Alan in particular was fond of referring to “the automotive engineer” who dreamed it up, even though he had no evidence that the person in question was an automotive engineer; this was just the part of him that knew sooner or later we were going to have to right the wrong, venting its entirely justified disgust. It would have been so much easier, and likely cheaper, to keep the stupid RV in a storage facility.

Well. We don’t have the tens of thousands of dollars required to either move the garage back or, better yet, tear it down and build a new one where the garage should be, break up and remove all the concrete and reclaim the back yard for the forces of good. But we had enough to get an estimate on hauling out all the gravel from the “play area” and replacing it with topsoil. The estimate was what we expected, so we told Mr. Landscaper to get a crew over here and git ‘er done. Which he did. The Bobcat had been working for an hour when they hit the surprise. “A body?” I asked hopefully. No, Alan said; they’d found giant heaps of broken-up concrete. The neighbor ambled over and explained that when the garage was removed from its original foundation, they’d broken up the slab and used it to underlay the gravel in the back corner of the lot, to support parking for yet another very heavy recreational vehicle. Mr. Landscaper said this would complicate things, that they’d need another man and a lot more dirt, but I said, “Let’s just do it the way it should be done,” and OK’d the cost overrun, which I was informed could increase the bill by as much as 100 percent.

The job got done and a good job it was. We added a couple hundred square feet of arable land to what had been weed-pocked gravel. When the bill came, I swallowed hard and opened it.

It was more than triple the estimate.

After I picked myself off the floor, I told myself all the things you tell yourself: All home-improvement projects go over budget, or It’s a real improvement, and you knew that wouldn’t be cheap and Would you rather be looking at weed-pocked gravel for a third summer? Each one of these platitudes was like a strong drink for my buyer’s remorse, and after I settled accounts with Mr. Landscaper, Alan went to the nursery and started planting. It took him the weekend, but now we have a small herb garden, two raspberry bushes, some climbing roses, a butterfly bush, some dead-nettle groundcover, new hostas and a birdbath. What had been impervious landscape is now nice and pervious again, and we’re putting oxygen into the air, plus growing raspberries. Which is more than you can say for those RVs, I hope.

Those birds better appreciate that damn birdbath, is all I can say.

At times like this, it’s important to not think like a renter. Otherwise you’d start thinking dangerous thoughts about how you might have spent that $2,000 if you didn’t have a house. In days gone by, you’d say, “Ah, but the house will be worth 4 percent more at the end of this year whether I do anything or not, so it’s just gravy.” Around here, though, that’s not the case. This just in: The auto industry is imploding. Blame the engineers.

So. The Brooklyn crew got 2/3 of the Jersey crew’s power structure last night, and at episode’s end, Tony was all alone with his machine gun in a bedroom with bad wallpaper, lying on a bare mattress in the dark, waiting for next Sunday and the last episode. I think that’s where I’m going to spend this week, too. The show is ending both the way we’ve always known it will, but not, if that makes any sense. Tony said, over and over and over in the last seven years, “Guys like me, we only end up dead or in the can,” and we keep telling ourselves, “Please, not for another season.” Well, it’s almost over, and I don’t see it ending any way but dead or in the can. I’ve been rooting for dead, but lately I’m thinking it would be amusing to see Carmela’s house sold to another family in the final montage, perhaps one of a non-white persuasion. I’m not going to be happy unless Blondie is appropriately punished, too. And I think, for her, that would be a fate worse than death.

Fave moment: When all the strippers and customers come out of the Bing to see what the excitement’s about. Was that a priest in the crowd?

Bloggage:

If someone asked for a show of hands of all the people who’ve heard “Respect” enough times that they never, ever want to hear it again, well, I’m reaching for the ceiling. Still. Make room in your head for one more, as it’s heard in Kelley Carter’s video package on Aretha Franklin’s greatest hit, “40 Years of Respect,” on Freep.com. A really nice job, with some great archival photos and interviews from people who knew Detroit’s daughter then and now. My favorite nugget: When Franklin’s son reveals that mom had a cold during the recording of the vocal, and points out the line where you can hear her falter. Roy Peter Clark, who teaches writing through the Poynter Institute, uses the Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin recordings of “Respect” to illustrate the concept of “voice.” (Yes, how sad that people choose to become writers and then have to learn what voice is.) One more note: A very old-school TV guy told me once that you could teach a word person TV skills a lot easier than you could teach a TV person word skills, and boy do you ever see it here. If more TV journalists worked like this, I might watch more TV.

My best boss ever, Richard Battin, used to spice up the Friday news meetings in our old joint with a quiz. It was just a way to enliven a long, otherwise horrible 40 minutes with a little brain-teasing — car names, lines from movies, that sort of thing. (I always thought he should publish them or syndicate them, or something. Editors everywhere would thank him.) He gave one at this time of year testing your knowledge of Bobbie Gentry’s “Ode to Billie Joe.” In his honor, then, let’s have our own Friday fun, shall we?

No fair Googling. And when you’re done, check your answers against this fine performance by Bobbie Gentry:

That’s all for today, folks.

A very smart person who liked to portray himself as otherwise — yes, I’m talking about you, Rob Daumeyer — once told me the secret to business reporting: All stories are business stories. Find the money angle and emphasize it enough to satisfy your boss, then tell the rest of the story. A good story is a good story; don’t get in its way and all will be revealed.

That’s a wise outlook, and it’s one reason I enjoy my night-shift editing job, surfing the great digital media landscape in search of stories of interest to our corporate clients, who are in the health-care trade. Many of these are four-graf snoozers on ABC Biotech being bought by XYZ Pharma, but several times a night I find real gems, great stories that just happen to be health-related. As Rob pointed out, almost every story has a money angle. That’s also true for health-care stories. If a doctor appears somewhere in the story, you’re good to go. Every hospital in your town is more crammed with pathos, humor, greed and plot twists than any newspaper can carry.

All this by way of pointing out one I found last night, from The Hindu, an English-language paper in India. It’s about the elephant in the Chinese living room, which coughs and smells like an ashtray:

Eyes shining and lips aquiver, the bride stands along with her family at the entrance to a five star hotel in downtown Kunming, the capital of China’s Yunnan province. Outfitted in layers of meringue-like white lace, she hands out welcome gifts to the wedding guests who pull up in a steady stream of flashy cars.

The gifts consist chiefly of cigarettes. Later on in the festivities the bride lights the cigarettes of all the male guests, a common ritual at Chinese weddings that is supposed to auger well for the newlywed’s ability to have children.

Would you not kill to see this? I mean, can you even imagine the sight of a bride making the rounds of her own wedding with a Zippo? I wonder if this is done casually — if she mingles through the guests, lighting everyone up — or if it’s more of a ritual, with all the men lining up with a Marlboro dangling from their lips, and she flits, bride-like, down the line. We could spend all day discussing how this became a ritual in the first place, how putting flame to a tube of a known carcinogen somehow became a fertility ritual. (I suspect Hollywood, and all those post-coital cigarettes.) Or we could just enjoy the essential weirdness of our big world, and feel grateful that we live in it, at a time when you can read The Hindu online.

The rest of the story, by the way, is about what happens when all those guests have been smoking for a few decades:

Chinese society today is in a crisis. The crisis is to do with the health of the world’s most populous society and the culprit is tobacco. With an estimated 350 million smokers, China is both the largest producer and consumer of tobacco, accounting for a third of the world’s smokers. According to official statistics, the country sells around 1.6 trillion cigarettes a year.

The WHO says smoking related diseases kill one million Chinese annually and if unchecked this number could double by 2020. With incomes in China rising steadily over the last few decades, so has the average daily consumption of cigarettes per smoker from around four in 1972 to 10 in 1992 to nearly 15 today. Smokers are also beginning to develop the habit at ever younger ages with a staggering 100 million smokers estimated to be under the age of 18.

But despite the alarming evidence, many in the Chinese government claim the country cannot afford to quit smoking, given the value of the tobacco industry to the Chinese economy. Cigarette companies not only generate tens of thousands of jobs (up to 100 million Chinese are directly or indirectly dependent for their livelihood on the tobacco industry) but are also among the top tax payers, contributing $30 billion or eight per cent of total central government revenue in 2005.

It’s the oldest story in the world: Oops, we did it again.

So, some bloggage:

Yesterday I said I love the internet. Sometimes I hate it. The story of Allison Stokke is one good reason to. It’s about a teenage athlete of some accomplishment who has become the new Cindy Margolis on the strength of one photo of her looking very pretty (or hawt, as you kids like to say) at a track meet. And then, well…

Three weeks later, Stokke has decided that control is essentially beyond her grasp. Instead, she said, she has learned a distressing lesson in the unruly momentum of the Internet. A fan on a Cal football message board posted a picture of the attractive, athletic pole vaulter. A popular sports blogger in New York found the picture and posted it on his site. Dozens of other bloggers picked up the same image and spread it. Within days, hundreds of thousands of Internet users had searched for Stokke’s picture and leered.

The wave of attention has steamrolled Stokke and her family in Newport Beach, Calif. She is recognized — and stared at — in coffee shops. She locks her doors and tries not to leave the house alone. Her father, Allan Stokke, comes home from his job as a lawyer and searches the Internet. He reads message boards and tries to pick out potential stalkers.

Argh. (And in case you’re wondering, yes, I considered not linking to the photo. But what was the first thing I did after reading that story? Look for the photo. And what is the one thing my editors used to do that drove me insane when I worked in newspapers? Decline to publish something widely known/available elsewhere, on the grounds of moral or ethical purity. I try to live in the reality-based world. Anyway, I looked at the photo and said, “That is a girl who takes great care of herself.” Your reaction may be different.)

Fortunately, though, we can console ourselves by turning our attention spans, now whittled down to a sub-toddler level, to more amusing pictures like this. Look, something shiny and funny!

That’s it for now. Tune in tomorrow for our semi-whatever salute to “Ode to Billie Joe”!