God, I love the internet. New time-wasting site: TSGTV.

Needless to say, a tad NSFW.

Good news: The divorce lawyers will have to find some other couple to put asunder. I only had to warn Alan to stop yelling once. And he did. But now the deed is done, the boat floats for another season and eventually it’ll be rigged (with NEW sails) and we can go sailing. It seems like a lot of work, and it is, but let me point out the current price at the gas dock: $3.99/gallon. The wind, I remind you, is free.

I promised pictures. But I haven’t moved Photoshop over to the new machine. So some thumbnails to save bandwidth. (Click if you want to see them bigger.)

That’s the last bit of bottom-painting, and Alan lying down to whisper sweet nothings to his mistress. Not much in the way of pictures, but what can I say? It was hot. And I was helping raise the mast.

And today comes another flake-out. I’m a chaperone for the payoff on Kate’s year of service on student council — Tigers v. Angels at Comerica. The forecast is for bright, sunny skies and unseasonable warmth, sunglasses weather. Take me out to the ballgame. But I leave you with…bloggage:

Jon Carroll was there during the ’60s (although, he notes, much of it took place in the ’70s), and contrary to the standard witticism, there’s a lot he remembers. And thank God for that:

I was working for Rolling Stone in 1970, which should have meant that I was at the white hot center of whatever the hell it was. I was assigned to go cover a press conference announcing something called the Toronto Peace Festival. The press conference was at the Jefferson Airplane (as they then were) house on Folsom. John Lennon was supposed to be there but wasn’t.

So I was listening to these people describing the event, which would of course be free and would have every fabulous group you ever heard of, and there would be a big area right at the center of the festival that would be brightly lit because, on the last night of the show, our alien brothers were going to join us. In a spaceship. With gifts.

There was such a fine silence in the room. The late Michael Grieg, a wonderful Chronicle reporter and an old beatnik who had seen it all, asked softly, “alien spaceships?” Nods all around. So we all knew we were covering the biggest story of our lifetime, or we were listening to crazy people.

I have been giving the Freep a certain amount of abuse lately, so let me call out something I enjoyed, a story and short video on Jim Dunne, known in the trade as an “autorazzi,” because he stalks the reclusive and takes pictures, only he’s after cars, not people. Yes, you can make a living at it; he raised seven children on the proceeds of auto-espionage, and had the sort of brass ones you need for the job. He once purchased a small strip of land with a fine view of Chrysler’s proving ground in Arizona and shot with impunity for some time before he was found out and foiled. (I bet he sold the property to Chrysler with a twinkle in his eye, and for a fat profit.) Note the fool-the-autofocus camouflage on the cars in the video, a common sight around the Motor City. Inside joke: the “disgruntled executive” who speaks from the darkness in the video is GM’s Bob Lutz.

It’s a boy! And he has grandfather’s dead, soulless eyes! (Joke stolen from a Metafilter thread, I think.) Happy birthday, Samuel David Cheney, and congratulations to both your mommies.

Today’s question:

What was your wedding like?

I ask because I want to know how the generational divide works here. We got married late in life, planned it ourselves and spent a little less than $5,000, at the time about half the average cost in the U.S. and enough to buy two — but only two — Martha Stewart-style wedding cakes at current prices. I thought it was a pretty nice wedding, but then, I was the guest of honor. There were things I’d do differently today, but on the whole, I thought it worked OK. I re-learned the most important lesson of any party, whether it’s for a bris, a marriage, a wake or a kegger — it’s not the food or the booze or the flowers or the table decorations, it’s the guest list. You can throw a great party for practically nothing, if you have the right friends. (And I’m not talking about getting your friends to design the invitations, although that’s a big help.) Which is one reason I’m so baffled by the MegaWedding phenomenon.

I’ve been to one of these affairs, and it was very nice, but it was the first of my experience that had a theme. You wouldn’t think a wedding would need a theme — Bob and Sue Get Married would seem to do the trick — but this one’s was Candy. The execution was sly and clever. The invitation came in a box made of white chocolate. Table assignments were on all-day suckers. The entrance to the outdoor area where they did the deed was flanked by giant “bouquets” of licorice whips, suckers and the like. There was an intermezzo course of cocktails named for candy bars. The tabletop candles sat in glasses crusted with rock candy. The placemats were peppermint-swirled. Toward the end of the night I picked up a lovely petit-four and nearly broke a tooth. It was a souvenir candle. Whoops, too many chocolate martinis.

And while I remember all of it vividly, when we talk about that weekend, we inevitably recall the elderly guest who had seemingly spent his entire 401(k) having his face lifted, contoured with implants and, I don’t know, buffed to a high sheen. Which is not to say a theme is unimportant, just that people were talking about the guy with the facelift. (Note: I hope they’re not talking about the drunk who tried to eat the candle.)

All this by way of pointing you to this interview with Rebecca Mead, author of “One Perfect Day: The Selling of the American Wedding.”

Mead’s book is said to be the first to tackle the American wedding racket the way Jessica Mitford did the funeral industry, which I find astonishing. Granted, I was long in the tooth and a practiced cynic by the time I tied the knot, but I hope, for the future of our country, that most brides-to-be could see through the naked greed and polished b.s. of so much of what you’re peddled between the she-says-yes and the I-dos. I recall one small item among many. It was a collection of small rings of not-particularly-precious metal, each attached to a ribbon. You — or your designated pastry chef — baked them into a cake with the ribbons streaming out. This cake was to be served at a bridal shower, where each bridesmaid would grab a ribbon and pull, thereby revealing her destiny. (Each ring carried a different symbol.) According to the advertising, it was said to be the hot new “tradition,” but all I could see was a cake that would be a pain in the ass to bake and then disintegrate when six girls yanked its guts out. Crumbs everywhere and a ruined dessert — that’s a wedding for you.

But then I recall the brides I’ve known who fell into real depressions after their weddings were over, after they returned from the honeymoon, opened all the gifts, put them on the shelf and said, “Now what?” It’s like nobody told them a wedding is followed by a marriage, which lasts a lot longer and features hors d’oeuvres only occasionally.

In the interview, Mead mentions In Style Weddings, the special edition of the consumer magazine that always features a celebrity bride on its cover. She doesn’t mention that for the longest time, this particular match was cursed — several consecutive couples broke up before the ink was dry. Even the zillion-dollar cake couldn’t save them. Imagine that.

So, bloggage before a busy day gets up and running:

Bill Maxwell left the St. Petersburg Times in 2004 to teach journalism at Stillman College, an historically black school in Alabama. It didn’t go well. The story is very sad.

I should have known it would be a lousy night. The proverbial strong line of thunderstorms blew through the area late in the afternoon. When I showed up for my writing workshop at Wayne State, I was one of two (2) to do so. And it wasn’t a very productive session, either, even with a vastly improved student-teacher ratio.

I got disoriented leaving the library — why are college campuses laid out so oddly? I ask you — and had to walk halfway around a long city block, in the driving rain, to find my car.

And then it was out onto I-94 for the chariot race home, only things were moving slower because of the rain. But it was moving, and then the taillights up ahead started winking red for something involving police lights. This being Detroit, it could have been anything from a flooded dip in the road to a rabid pit bull firing a machine gun. I was slowing down in the center lane when the person behind me on the right did the quintessential D-town freeway move — the multiple-lane high-speed cutover in heavy traffic. I felt the crunch as s/he clipped my left taillight.

And watched as the offender sped off into the twilight.

I scanned my options for a moment and considered the correct one was probably the most ridiculous: Pull over, stop, call 911 and await further instructions for a no-injury, minor-damage accident during a howling thunderstorm. Or I could get proactive. Reader, an air bag of inspiration deployed; I gave chase.

Hit me and take off, will you? Well, we shall see about that! The vehicle, a pickup, was easy to track — DODGE in big white letters on a black tailgate. I gained on it, dropped in behind, flashed my brights in search of the plate number. At which point the driver felt an urgent need to exit, which fit my purposes perfectly; I could catch up the way a yellow flag bunches up a Nascar field. I got the license plate, scrawled it on my writing-workshop folder, and what’s this? S/he’s pulling over? Excellent. I pulled over behind the truck. As soon as we were both stopped, the driver laid rubber going away. I followed for a few more blocks of amateurish left-right-left-right shenanigans, then stopped and called 911. I didn’t need to get lost in an unfamiliar neighborhood at night. The man at the state police post was very nice. I have to go down today and file a report, at which point the system will yawn in my face. As much as I might hope for a CSI-style investigation, complete with flyovers with infrared scopes and Marg Helgenberger gathering paint chips from my bumper, this is a no-fault insurance state. No injuries, no complications, sign here and here and here and pay the $500 deductible.

So that was my night. How was yours?

It got me thinking later, when the blood had settled a bit. The last time I was in an accident serious enough to get insurance adjusters involved was nearly 20 years ago. I was sitting at a light at Creighton and Fairfield in lovely south-side Fort Wayne, Indiana when I looked up to see a driverless car leaving the gas station, approaching my passenger door at a 90-degree angle. It hit me hard enough to push me into the next lane. I got out and walked over to the car. Sitting behind the wheel was a smiling, gurgling, apparently unharmed boy of about 2. His father had left him unrestrained in a running car while he went inside to buy cigarettes or something. Guess what he said when he came out to discover his son had had his first fender-bender before he was toilet-trained.

“I told him not to touch nothin’.”

Well, at least I have amusing accidents.

Moving on, then. I see Brian got a little miffed at the “grave-dancing” in yesterday’s comments, over the late Rev. Fartwell. No less a pinko than Roy opted out as well. Fine, it’s a defensible choice. When someone dies, it zeroes the scales, or at least reduces them by 21 grams. Don’t speak ill of the dead, etc. At the same time, though, we have to give a dead man his due. I really don’t have an ax to grind with the guy — he existed in the realm of Ann Coulter for me — so I started thinking back, as dispassionately as I could, on the Rev’s public statements, trying to recall if, even once, he tried to be taken seriously, if he ever brought anything to the discussion to indicate he wanted to play fair in the fields of policy debate.

And I couldn’t think of anything. Tim Noah at Slate gives us the highlights. And let’s not forget his role in the Clinton Chronicles. I won’t say “good riddance,” but I will say: I won’t miss him. Oh, and thanks to Kirk for finding this YouTube clip from the breaking-news cycle that shows, as if you needed to see it again, how credulous too many journalists can be.

The iPod threw out a gem on yesterday’s bike ride — “It’s Madison Time,” by the Ray Bryant Combo. It’s the most complicated dance record in history, I think: Now when I say hit it, I want you to go two up and two back, double cross and come out of it with the rifleman. Later verses call for a “Cleveland box,” “Jackie Gleason” and a “basketball, with a Wilt Chamberlain hook.” What-ever. I first heard the song in “Hairspray,” original recipe. I figured it, like so much in that movie, was an obscure Baltimore reference, and thought of asking Ms. Lippman about it. Asked Google instead, and I’m so glad I did. Because it turns out the Madison started in…Columbus, according to William “Bubbles” Holloway, anyhow. (Warning: Really obnoxious embedded sound.) The scanned newspaper clip on that page shows a sharp-looking line of black folks doing the Madison at “the LVA Club on E. Long St.” Get out!

Let’s bring the bloggage full circle, back to Detroit, as we wrap up with Detroitblog’s report from the Cinco de Mayo parade:

The Freep mentioned the parade on its front page the day before, so I expected an influx of newcomers eager for a glimpse of the city outside the usual downtown radius most people think of as “Detroit.” Instead there was a mere handful, consisting either of pale hipsters exposing their pasty flanks to the climbing sun, or several odd academic types in their 50s, complete with standard professorial attire like a tweed jacket (seriously), whose confused demeanor suggested they came to observe this mysterious and heretofore unfamiliar phenomenon called Local Mexican People, who constitute nearly the entire population of this area.

The prof types near us looked slightly disappointed or bewildered as the parade plowed forward, as if they expected to see perhaps a solemn procession paying tribute to ancient Mayan roots, or marchers carrying effigies representing genocidal conquistadors imposing an alien culture on meek native peoples, the kind of scene that brings a flutter to the modern academic heart.

Instead they got chihuahuas, Virgin Mary tapestries, low-cut shirts, pit bulls pulling children in wagons, child boxers, tortillas handed out from floats, and hot rods galore, painted in varying levels of gaudiness and beauty. Their facial expressions suggested that they were seeing brazenly and merrily paraded before them the same supposed stereotypes they’ve likely lectured their students to avoid assuming.

But every ethnic parade is a host of stereotypes, or cultural icons, depending on your point of view. One person’s stereotype is another person’s “screw you, I actually do like hot rods.”

Me, too. Off to do battle with the insurance industry.

Elmore Leonard’s on “Detroit Today,” a local call-in show on WDET, promoting his new book, and jeeeeez, they just made him sit there while they replayed my essay about him.

(Pause. Razor poised over wrist.)

Hey, he said he liked it.

Well, now I’m awake. Back to work.

Regular readers may notice something new on the nightstand — the Warren Zevon biography, the existence of which I only learned about a few days before it appeared in stores last week. In years past, I’d have known for months ahead of time, had the date circled on the calendar and been among the first to buy a copy when Border’s unlocked its doors. Ah, well. Groupiedom really doesn’t become a woman as long in the tooth as I am.

“I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” weighs in at 450 pages or so, a lot for a rock musician who remained stubbornly unpopular until the end of his life. No matter — if his popularity wasn’t wide (and personally enriching), it was deep. The right people loved Zevon, writers and filmmakers and politicians and other musicians. David Letterman, Martin Scorsese, Carl Hiaasen. Every journalist I know loves him; it seems half the Zevon concerts I attended were with carloads of colleagues, driving to Chicago or Indianapolis in raucous caravans and pounding the table along with “Lawyers, Guns and Money.” Ah, memories. Zevon died in 2003 of mesothelioma, a rare lung cancer linked to asbestos, not smoking, a bad habit Zevon had for most of his life. As has been chronicled a million times by a million sympathetic journalists, smoking was the least of it.

Well, there’s always room for one more. Crystal Zevon, the man’s long-suffering ex-wife, says Warren himself asked her to write his story, more or less on his deathbed. He promised her his diaries, and told her to tell the whole truth, “even the awful, ugly parts.” That she has done, delivering a manuscript that still has the power to shock and dismay, even longtime fans/students like me, who thought they knew it all. Note to all my caravan buddies: We didn’t.

It’s not the big stuff that’s appalling, although some of it really and truly is. It’s the little things that pile up. The compulsive shopping, the vanity, the child-support dodging, the casual cruelty to the people who cared most about him (his children, notably, especially his daughter), the lying, the cheating. He withheld LeRoy Marinell’s share of the “Werewolves of London” royalties for a number of years, a five-figure sum. After he quit drinking, he seemed to transfer his addictive behavior to women — housewives by the score, you might say — and plowed through auditoriums full of them. (Combining two vices in one, he even details getting laid at a tanning salon, on the damn tanning bed, which made me think of my friend Emma, who once worked at such a place. People were always peeing in the wastebaskets and doing other vile bodily functions behind closed doors. Maybe medical science can investigate the effect of UV light on human inhibitions.) He battered his wife in a blackout and later cursed her for trying to pin her black eye on him.

You start to wonder, what exactly did anyone find to like about him?

Well, that’s there, too. He was hugely smart and very funny, great with the quip — no wonder journalists liked him. Musicians admired him, too. You look at the list of guest artists who played with him, everyone from Neil Young to Bob Dylan to George Clinton, for cryin’ out loud. He wrote great songs, right until the end — “The Wind” was the record that won the Grammys, but for my money, “My Ride’s Here” was the creative peak, the title track being one of the all-time great death songs. It begins:

I was staying at the Marriott
With Jesus and John Wayne
I was waiting for a chariot
They were waiting for a train
The sky was full of carrion
“I’ll take the mazuma”
Said Jesus to Marion
“That’s the 3:10 to Yuma
My ride’s here…”

Rhyming “mazuma” with “3:10 to Yuma” — that’s Zevon all over. Played in the key of laughter-through-tears, they way so many of them were.

The underlying theme to all this, if there is one, is just how much havoc one addict can wreak, in their own lives and in the lives of others, acts that reverberate through generations. I was halfway through “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” when I stopped and wrote a fan letter to Crystal Zevon (her e-mail is public). It’s hard to write about being an alcoholic’s wife without lapsing into one or two predictable slots — victim or fool. She doesn’t do that, perhaps because at some point she realized she had her own drinking problem, which she acknowledges, and what it took to quit. The tone is not one of pity-me but of clear-eyed, dispassionate truth-telling. I have a feeling some people are going to portray her as the embittered ex seeking revenge now that the man who hurt her is unable to protest. I hope that doesn’t happen, because she fulfilled every writer’s No. 1 obligation: She told the truth. People, especially creative people, are complicated, and very few have public and private faces that would recognize one another. “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” doesn’t affect my opinions on the music, only what it took to make it. It ain’t that pretty at all, as the man himself once sang. If we didn’t hear it, then maybe we weren’t really listening.

Thanks to all who stopped by yesterday. This has happened a time or two before, and most people don’t come back afterward, but we sometimes pick up a few new readers. For them, a briefing: This blog isn’t about anything in particular. My politics are center-left, but I try not to harp on them. I live in the suburbs of Detroit, a city of spectacular weirdness and great stories and frequently awful weather. I’m a freelance writer, living with my husband Alan, daughter Kate (10 going on 30), dog Spriggy and a few bad habits. My interests are small-c catholic but I’m particularly fond of good writing, movies, strange current events and domestic life. “Daily life, with links” — that’s the log line for this blog. I came up with it six years ago, and it seems to fit as well today as it ever did.

I think I’m done talking about Lileks, but feel free if you’d like to continue the discussion. I was struck by a point some people made yesterday, in all the comments — that there are many who find Lileks’ writing “hilarious.” I’m not one of them, obviously, but it got me thinking about humor writing, in the newspapers and elsewhere, and sometime in the next few days I’ll try to wrestle them to the ground. I don’t expect it to be terribly funny, but if you feel like it, stick around.

Well, lots of things, but up there in the top five would be that I had no photographers following me around when I was 19.

(What’s the old saying? “The girls all get prettier at closing time.” No. And I don’t even want to know what that stuff is all over her face. She looks like she’s about to suggest we go get some French toast.)

Warning: A beautiful day is in progress at this very moment, the trees are blooming, I have much to do today and a yoga class starts at the gym in one hour. Translation: Expect short shrift. Here, have a few crumbs from the table.

From reading the message boards here and there, it’s plain there are two kinds of Sopranos fans in the world: The kind who want lots of mob business and whackage, and the kind who are content to watch Edie Falco reinvent denial every week in intense kitchen scenes. I’m the second kind. In fact, the mob whackage sort of gets in the way. We’ve had two in the last two weeks, and in both cases I’m thinking, “Who is this? And why do I care?” For us, the mob story is only the frame; the canvas is the psychological drama of watching Tony try to keep family away from Family, and failing. In these last few episodes, we — I, anyway — want some payoff. We want to see him finally pay, and pay dearly, for the life he’s led.

Well, the payback has begun, and, true to form, it’s a bitch. His outburst at Carmella over her spec house might as well have been made to the mirror. In Vito Jr., there’s yet another reminder of the toll mob life takes on a family. The gambling, particularly ironic in that Tony has always referred to such people as “degenerate gamblers,” is self-abuse. As for me, I’m keeping a copy of “The Western Lands” close, because I think that’s the key:

The ancient Egyptians postulated seven souls. Top soul, and the first to leave at the moment of death, is Ren, the Secret Name. This corresponds to my Director. He directs the film of your life from conception to death. The Secret Name is the title of your film. When you die, that’s where Ren came in.

Second soul, and second one off the sinking ship, is Sekem: Energy, Power, Light. The Director gives the orders, Sekem presses the right buttons.

Number three is Khu, the Guardian Angel. He, she, or it is third man out, depicted as flying away across a full moon, a bird with luminous wings and head of light. Sort of thing you might see on a screen in an Indian restaurant in Panama. The Khu is responsible for the subject and can be injured in his defense — but not permanently, since the first three souls are eternal. They go back to Heaven for another vessel.

The four remaining souls must take their chances with the subject in the Land of the Dead.

Number four is Ba, the heart, often treacherous. This is a hawk’s body with your face on it, shrunk down to the size of a fist. Many a hero has been brought down, like Samson, by a perfidious Ba.

Number five is Ka, the Double, most closely associated with the subject. The Ka, which usually reaches adolescence at the time of bodily death, is the only reliable guide through the Land of the Dead to the western lands.

Number six is Khaibit, the Shadow, Memory, your whole past conditioning from this and other lives.

Number seven is Sekhu, the Remains.

So. Speaking of seven souls, I see Warren Zevon’s ex-wife has not only published a book, it’s a book about her ex, and it was done at his request. What’s more, it sounds…not terrible:

The Mr. Zevon on these pages is surprisingly image-conscious, abusive, petty, jealous, sordid, vain, shopaholic and even banal; among his obsessive-compulsive tics was buying the same kind of gray T-shirt over and over again. His diary entries often focus on such things, so they are less scintillating than the literary lyrics for which he is known. Among the livelier entries is this one: “Went over to Ryan’s. Later in the evening I got stuck in the elevator — Fire Dept. had to come. Not as much fun as it sounds.”

But this lack of show-business artifice is precisely what makes the Zevon story so telling. What was even more unusual than his dark thoughts — like resenting the fact that Jackson Browne and Neil Young had lost people close to them and written beautiful, much-admired songs about those deaths — was his willingness to admit to those thoughts. On his deathbed, discussing the merits of having a funeral, he said, “I just don’t want to have to spend my last days wondering whether Henley” — Don Henley of the Eagles, who did not attend — “will show up.”

I guess that’s next on the nightstand.

You know those people who kill family members and then hide the bodies in freezers? Do you ever wonder what goes on inside their heads? Wonder no more. The DetNews offers an odd demi-interview with one of these guys, pegged to a more recent dismemberment murder hereabouts. It’s hilarious at many levels, including the one where, after a shockingly brief sentence (10 years), the killer says his crime is “water over the dam,” and that he paid his debt to society. And the banal details: “For three years and three months, (the body) lay atop frozen hamburger and kielbasa wrapped in brown butcher paper.” On the other hand, it sounds like no one missed the wife, who slept with her daughter’s boyfriend, among other unmotherly things.

Finally, in the thick of journalism awards season, congrats to our old pal Ron, winner of the coveted (because all awards must be described so) Golden Wheel.

Time for downward dog. Woof.

I was listening to Alec Baldwin tune up on his daughter, trying to think of the worst thing I ever said to my own kid. The list is so long. I try not to lose my temper, but sometimes I do. I’ve never called her a rude, thoughtless little pig, but once when she was a baby, when she was pounding on her high chair tray and shrieking BANANA! BANANA! BANANA! I may have turned to her at hissed, Jack Nicholson-style, “WE DON’T HAVE ANY GODDAMN BANANAS.”

My defense: It was 7 o’clock on a winter morning and I was feeling really, really raw. I tried not to yell; I delivered the line the way Jack did in “Terms of Endearment,” when he’s having his first, disastrous lunch with Shirley Maclaine, and he encourages her to order a drink. “I think you need a lot of drinks,” he says. “To kill that bug up your ass.” (That’s the sequence that ends with the two of them driving his Corvette down the beach, Jack sitting on top of the driver’s seat, steering with his feet, bellowing “Wind in the hair! Lead in the pencil!” Great scene.) But it was pretty menacing; her eyes got big and round, and she stopped yelling for bananas.

I’m glad no one recorded that moment, although I guess I just did. Maybe that’s how Baldwin can get through this; he can call in every marker he has and ask them all to stand up and say, essentially, “I am Spartacus.” I doubt it would work; we promote the myth of the perfect parent relentlessly in this country.

There’s a guy, Tim Goeglein, who writes occasional guest columns for my old newspaper (he’s from Fort Wayne). He has a very big job in the White House, “special assistant to the president,” serving as liaison between the Worst President Ever and conservative special-interest groups. You’d think he’d write an occasional piece about policy or D.C. culture or whatever, but no, for years now he’s been contributing these awful, drippy essays about his sainted parents and how good the good old days were, and blah blah blah. The last one he wrote about mom ‘n’ dad was typical, and I’d like to quote from it for you, but I’m finding that none of his columns appear to be in the paper’s archive. Oh, but here’s Memory Lane for you, a story from the archive in which his name is mentioned. Who do you think wrote this snappy prose?

What did I tell you? What did I tell you? Did I not tell you that Madonna’s insult of Evansville would not pass without some high-ranking weenie embarrassing himself with a totally humorless effort to “change her mind?” I did. Only even I underestimated the weenieosity that would be unleashed. I thought the inevitable blustery response would come from a chamber of commerce official, or maybe the mayor, but nooooo. We have a real U.S. senator getting in on

It cuts off because you only get the first few lines of a story in the paid archive. That’s from 1991. Yours truly, getting the word “weenieosity” in the newspaper.

Back to Timmy. I’d like to quote from one of his columns but I can’t, so I’ll paraphrase the last one from memory: Mom and Dad have been married for many years. Never for one day have they been less than 100 percent devoted to one another. They owe their love to their intense devotion to Jesus Christ, who has rewarded them with a marriage so strong and perfect that it enriches all who behold it. Mother never let a cross word pass her lips, and we could all rely on Father’s quiet wisdom in times of trouble, which we hardly ever had because Jesus was blessing us all the time. And so on.

Listening to Laura Lippman speak last night, she said, “I hate perfect people,” by way of explaining how she approaches the characters in her fiction. Of course, no one is perfect, but many work very hard to convince you they are. I was in my 30s before I was able to get my brain around the idea that a person could be a titan of accomplishment in one area of their life, and a miserable failure in another, and that the latter did not take away from the former. And I’m not talking about being a great father and occasionally putting the water bottle back in the refrigerator with only an ounce left in it. I’m talking about Miles Davis, for example, simultaneously a musical genius and a wife-beater. If you were God, and you had the option of saving Cicely Tyson some black eyes by pushing the “miscarry” button on an embryonic Miles Davis, would the world be a better place without him? I don’t think so.

This was a huge relief to finally accept. I could enjoy art again without fretting that the artist was a schmuck. Which most of them are.

Which most of us are, actually. At least sometimes. I’ve never yelled at my daughter’s voice mail. But I have it in me.

OK, then:

Last night was great, if only to be in my old neighborhood again. The reading was at Nicola’s Books, an independent book store in the Westgate shopping center, which all you Tree Towners should patronize, because it is an exceptionally good one. Nicola herself took us all out to dinner afterward, which was more generous than we deserved; I knew I should have bought some more books while I was there. We had some publishing-industry gossip, and some journalism gossip, and Laura told us the line she delivers in her cameo in Season 5, Episode 1 of “The Wire.” Ahem: “I’m not the police reporter.” (Or maybe it was, “Do I look like the police reporter?” Can’t recall.) I laughed, because everyone who’s ever worked in a newsroom has heard that line approximately a million times, sometimes in its alternative forms: “Do I resemble an obit clerk?” “Are you mistaking me for the education writer?” or the ever-popular, “Can we give this one to Features?” When I was first given the newsroom mail to open, there was but one firm order: Give as much of this as possible to other departments. Buck-passing — it’s our art form.

OK, I have to get to work now.

What a night Friday was for people-watching on Woodward Avenue. At the State Theater, the Tragically Hip. Across the street at Ford Field, “Battle Cry,” some sort of Christian teen thing in which people like me (that is, members of the so-called secular media) were equated with jihadists.

And at the Fox, Iggy and the Stooges. Alan and I sat at a window table in a bar called Proof, trying to peg which venue the passersby were heading to. The Battle Criers were easy: Pudgy teenagers in high-school sweatshirts, traveling in groups, high on life. The Tragically Hip fans were, fittingly, tragically hip. But the aging bikers towing soccer-mom wives, the young punks too cool for the room, the prosperous autoworker types and what seemed like half the journalists in town — those were Iggy’s people.

We were Iggy’s people, too. Not hard-core, mind you; we were at that very moment skipping the opening act. And if you think the Tragically Hip would get me to hire a babysitter, you’re nuts. But Iggy, doing a downtown hometown show? I’m so there. I tried to powder down my suburban unhipness for the occasion, but it was hopeless, and, to be sure, absolutely unnoticeable in a crowd that was diverse in pretty much every way but racial. Alan saw a 4-year-old kid in the men’s room, sporting a fully spiked mohawk, there with his dad. There were at least two people in wheelchairs. The couple sitting next to me were young enough they felt the need to French-kiss every 90 seconds or so. A woman in the lobby showed off cell-phone pictures of her kids to a friend. “Wow, they’re so big,” the friend said. “You don’t know how old we are,” the woman replied.

Well, actually we do. Iggy himself turns 60 this coming Saturday. I expect he’ll still be touring with the Stooges, doing “I Wanna Be Your Dog,” “1969” and “Real Cool Time.” For the latter, he invites a few dozen members of the audience up on the stage to mill around, sing the chorus and generally have a real cool time.

At one point I yelled in Alan’s ear, “I remember when my dad was this age.” He was a well-preserved man throughout his late middle age, but he wasn’t up for performing shirtless for 90 minutes, in a raging shower of decibels, and complete with stage dives. Not the running-start sort of wild swan dives a younger punk might make, mind you — Iggy sort of stands on the edge of the stage and falls forward. It’s an AARP stage dive. (The roadie hovers nervously; you can tell he wishes he had a leash around his ankle.)

This isn’t a concert review; you can follow the links for that. But hey — Viva Iggy. He’s still making music that sounds better screamed out over a bunch of bobbing heads in a venue like the Fox than it does on a CD. Fifty-nine going on 60 and he still wants to be your dog.

So, bloggage:

Tom Watson on Imus. Maybe the best — and pray god, the last — word. And via Wolcott, I also liked David Kamp’s observation of the obvious:

But I’ve always winced at anyone who bills himself (or has his representatives bill him) as an “equal-opportunity offender”–which is the tack that the defenders of Don Imus have taken. Any true aficionado of comedy and comedians knows that “equal-opportunity offender” is apologist code for “hack entertainer trading in dated ethnographic material.” Jackie Mason comes to mind (he actually has a DVD out called Equal Opportunity Offender), as does Carlos Mencia. A corollary to this, which I learned from my old Spy boss Kurt Andersen, is that anyone who uses a construction along the lines of “I treat people all the same; I don’t care if they’re black, white, purple, or green”–who uses colors that no human being can actually be–is inherently a racist bastard.*

Is it dressage…or is it dancing?

Later, folks.

UPDATE: Sorry I’m late getting to this, but I wanted to boost a couple of things out of the comments. First, Tom Watson’s newcritics take on the last Iggy bio. Ashley points out his faboo concert rider, courtesy of The Smoking Gun, our national treasure. And finally, James Burns’ Grumbles on the subject. Note, Jim: He didn’t sing “Lust for Life” Friday night. I guess it’s now been thoroughly melded to images of yuppies swimming with the dolphins on cruise lines.