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.

Alex raises a question in the comments of an old thread: If Don Imus had referred to the Rutgers baseball players as lesbians rather than prostitutes, would the outcome today be different? Hmm.

“Nappy-headed dykes,” say, or (more likely) “tattooed dykes.” I don’t wish to be a cynic. But if I think his insult had been seasoned differently, had been about sexual identity — which all good Americans know is entirely a choice, something you pick out in a store like a pair of Levi’s — rather than race, Imus would be interviewing Frank Rich as we speak and we wouldn’t be looking at his Andy Rooney eyebrows in the newspaper today.

Since this topic is now so played it’s like discussing the weather (STILL TOO COLD), maybe we could take it away in that direction. Or maybe you’re as sick of hearing about it as I am.

Me, I went shopping yesterday. Nickel-and-dimed my discretionary spending away on things like foot cream and a misting fountain for Kate’s room (long story boiled short: she loves it). But I counted myself victorious, because I went to the Container Store and only bought two 99-cent plastic squeeze bottles and a marked-down iPod case. As soon as I walked through the doors I knew I was at high risk to produce a credit card and start making sweeping arm motions at entire aisles. The place is like a porn store for women, dangling the fantasy that we all hold in our heads — that somehow, somewhere, with the right filing system and a lot of clear plastic boxes, you can find a place for everything and put everything in its place.

Years ago, my sister bought a SimpleHuman trash can. It cost something like $130, which may strike you as insane (it did me, at the time), but everyone who experiences the marvel of this trash can is entirely sold on its clean design and smooth operation, then goes out and buys one. Yesterday I saw the logical upgrade — a $199 electronic model that raises its lid when you stick your foot in the sensor zone at its base.

No, I didn’t buy it. But I drooled. Afterward I came to my senses, the way a man who 20 minutes ago was thinking, “Hmm, yeah, Jenna Jameson might make a nice life partner for a guy like me” might wake up and say, “Um, maybe not.”

Visual joke: For sale at the checkout of the $199 trash can store? Copies of Real Simple magazine, pitched at the person vexed by owning too much stuff.

OK, we’re back on the road today. No. 1 on today’s to-do list: Find a babysitter. Because guess what snuck up on me? Tonight is Iggy at the Fox in Detroit. If necessary, Kate can sit in the car.

My neighbors have a big TV. Really big TV. How big is it? Can’t say — I’ve never seen it up close, because I don’t have to. If the curtains are open even a little bit, I can tell what they’re watching with 75 percent accuracy. (Right now, hockey.) And they live across the street and one door down; it’s a good 200 feet or more from my couch to their TV. That’s a big TV.

Big TVs are all the rage, now that the bugs have been worked out, now that they no longer have the footprint of a Volkswagen Beetle. Everybody I know is buying one. (True story: My friends John and Mary bought one, and hired a guy to hang it on the wall. He said he’d just finished a similar job at then-Sixer/now-Piston Chris Webber’s house. [Yes, he’s a Pointer.] He’d hung 13 of them. Thirteen flat-screens in one house! It’s like an episode of “Cribs.”)

Anyway, I guess eventually we’ll have a giant TV, too, once the price drops to $1.98, which it seems on track to do by year’s end. But I won’t feel good about it. I love TV now that TV is so much better than it used to be — thanks, HBO. I love watching DVDs at home. But my TV guilt-meter was calibrated in the days of “Three’s Company,” and there’s something about a giant TV that suggests a world of La-Z-Boy recliners with built-in cupholders and crocheted Kleenex-box cozies. It rings every snob bell I have, and I have a tower full of them. I hate myself. Why? Because part of me wants one, and the other part is covered in shame for doing so.

Here’s the thing about a giant TV: It wants to be on, all the time. I like a TV to be off most of the time. My first and most hard-core TV rule is this: If it’s on, the people in the room must be paying attention to it. If you leave the room for any reason other than a bathroom break or to fetch another beer, it must go off. Once I interviewed some lottery winners, plain old hardscrabble people who woke up one morning $9 million richer, courtesy of the state of Ohio. I caught them after they’d had the money for several months, which is to say, their old house was full to the rafters with new toys, but the new house — 1,000-square-foot master suite, cement pond out back, the works — was still under construction. There was a rock on her finger and a Corvette in his garage, and a giant TV in the living room, which was too small to accommodate it. It was mid-morning, around the time a movie old enough to shave was on TBS. I took a seat to the right of the screen, they sat opposite me. The TV stayed on. When I was talking, they both watched the TV. When they were talking, the one who was talking looked at me, the other one watched TV.

That was a formative experience in giant-TV culture. I still haven’t shaken it.

Oy, we had ourselves a day in the D yesterday. A “workplace shooting,” as they’ve come to be known. Guy fired from an accounting firm on Friday came back on Monday and shot a retiree helping out for tax season and two partners. The retiree died. The other two are still alive. Of course we have a sidebar story on how this might be avoided in the future. Grim humor within: An HR expert says Friday is “traditionally” the day to fire people. Really? I didn’t know that. I tried to think of firings I’ve witnessed, and the only common denominator they all had was the Box. You know the Box, usually a banker’s box, filled by either the fired party (or security) with the detritus of one work life — a few personal files, a stained coffee cup, a framed picture. Is there a sadder sight than a banker’s box with a “you don’t have to be crazy to work here, but it helps” mug overturned in the bottom? I don’t think so.

“The Office” has gone a long way toward pointing out the thousand soul-abrading, death-by-a-thousand-cuts indignities of life in cubicle land, but I don’t think they’ll tackle this subject for a while.

I predict [raises finger aloft] that we will come through this blogging thing, turn 320 degrees or so, and out the other side — yes, this is metaphor is intentional — with newfound respect for our unsung friend, the editor. Yesterday’s post was up for hours before I noticed I wrote “…for years I’ve tried very hard to annoy my site statistics.” I meant I ignore them. They’re like the quicksand of narcissism. I’ve read about people who monitor their credit scores daily, who track their eBay feedback nearly as often. And some people track their site stats obsessively, which is one reason I’ve avoided doing so. I mean, I like affirmation as much as the next person, but please.

However, Google Analytics is just out there waiting to be installed and noodled over, and today, my first day with it, was nearly enough to run me off the rails. I have a reader — or else a robo-reader — in Reykjavik. (Holla back, Iceland.) Someone came here via Googling the phrase “what hoody does TI wear in chevy commercial.” (Who’s TI?) And then there are those of you whom I can call by name. One reader in Portland (hey, Vince). One in Cincinnati (Rob!). Forty in Fort Wayne, approximately the remaining readership of the News-Sentinel. I have to stop. I have enough things to procrastinate with.

I once interviewed a guy, back in the early days of blogging, who insisted on referring to the non-digital, non-online world as “meatspace.” It was trendy at the time, and he refused all nudges to use another word or phrase. The more I looked at my notes, the more I hated the word. It brought to mind a picture of walking veal chops and beef roasts, perhaps leaving grease trails in their wake, like slugs. (Has someone done an online quiz for this yet? “What Cut of Meat Are You?” I like to think of myself as something tasty and delicate, like rack of lamb, but I’m probably closer to a plain old pot roast — cheap, tough, but capable of tenderness after long simmering.)

The digital age has given us some imaginative slang. I think it was one of William Gibson’s cyberpunk novels that first used the term “meat puppet,” to describe genetically engineered sex workers. I like it better than “hooker,” but it never caught on. Whereas every third site I visit seems to use the term “pwned,” which I’ve never really understood. (Oh, I get that it’s a typo-y version of “owned.” So why not just say “owned?”)

“Meatspace” never got into wide use, either. I guess others didn’t think of themselves as whole fryers or pork tenderloins, either.

Anyway, I was thinking of slang this week, after my local weekly ran a story that sent me racing to the bathroom to check the mirror, so sure was I that I had stepped into a time-space crevasse and had fallen into 1971. The story was on the dangers of drugs. It included a sidebar, headlined “Some drug lingo rings a few bells.” It rang none with me, but then, I always ran with straight talkers.

The cocaine years raged around me in the 1980s, and in that time, I can recall only a few alternative words for it. There was “coke,” of course. Occasionally someone would call it “blow,” but always half-ironically, aware of sounding like a pamphlet. “Bolivian marching powder” was for total, arched-eyebrow wiseasses, specifically those who’d read “Bright Lights, Big City.” No one ever called it “nose candy,” which sounded like something a narc would say. And I never, ever heard anyone use the term “Angie,” which, my newspaper informed me, is not only slang for cocaine, it’s “the title of a song by the Rolling Stones.” As is “Aunt Nora,” “coconut” and “Roxanne.” Hmm.

Remember how old you felt when you learned rappers were calling marijuana “the chronic”? How about these hipster alternatives? “Babysitter,” “catnip,” “Colorado cocktail,” “haircut,” “yeh” and “yellow submarine.” I can’t wait to sidle up to a Grosse Pointe high school kid at TCBY and ask where I can score some haircut.

I read this Thursday afternoon and snickered to myself. I was working in the living room later that night when I heard Alan, at the kitchen table, mutter “Jesus Christ.”

“Someone’s reading the Grosse Pointe News,” I called out.

“Let’s ‘fly Mexican airlines,'” he called back. (“To smoke marijuana,” the paper informed its readers.)

One amusing passage I made a note of: To use Ecstasy and Viagra together is known as “hammerheading.” Woo-hoo.

(My favorite drug slang was always hyperlocal, like the time a truck driver told me that amphetamines of all sorts are known among long-haulers as “west coast turnarounds.” Maybe he just made it up. Great slang, though. A girl I knew swore that in the Upper Peninsula, marijuana was known as “browns.” The word was infinitely adaptable. You could smoke a brown. “Let’s get browned.” And my favorite, “Need a brown to bring you around?” She also claimed “strap” as a synonym for sex. Seldom have I heard a putdown as succinct as “All she wants to do is strap.” The UP is a funny-talking place.)

What’s the strangest, silliest or most apt slang you’ve heard? Leave it in the comments. I’ll be on the road most of Monday, so I look forward to coming home in the afternoon and building my vocabulary.

It’s my blessing and curse to remember writing, the way a fashionista remembers details of an outfit years later (“…and then there was the most extraordinary string of Mikimoto pearls, in graduated sizes, about 18 inches, falling just below the clavicle notch…”). And so I recall, in much greater detail than I’d like, the overheated phrases of an Ann Landers column that ran when I was about Kate’s age. It was about the dangers of the drug scene. Er, drug “scene.” Ann hung quotes on every word that she identified as youth-culture slang, so it was quite the column. I particularly remember her description of a “sick thrill” she called “fruit salad.” The gist: Everyone comes to the party with whatever pills they could “score” on the street or “liberate” from mom’s medicine chest. All the pills are thrown together in a bowl, and everyone at the party swallows a handful.

(At this point I should say that in my youth, which included many brushes with drug culture, I never, ever saw anything resembling a “fruit salad” that didn’t consist of mixed berries and maybe kiwi. Of course, I was behind the bleeding edge of the baby boom, so who knows? As my friend Name Redacted used to mourn, “Pot was a party drug. You lit up a joint, you passed it to the closest person. It brought people together, it made the party more fun. Cocaine is all about shutting people out. You pick whoever you want to suck up to, and invite them to go to the bathroom with you. This isn’t a good thing.”)

(I should also note that when I was Kate’s age, I was reading the daily newspaper. Two of them, in fact, as we subscribed to both the Columbus Citizen-Journal and the afternoon Columbus Dispatch. I still subscribe to two newspapers. Kate doesn’t read either.)

Well, I’m rambling. My aim, today, is to finally give the Ann Landers fruit salad a proper name. I propose: Anna Nicole’s Casserole, or if you’re French, Cassoulet a la Anna Nicole. This is in honor of her autopsy report, released yesterday. Her system was so packed with fun that the Associated Press ran the full list as a sidebar. Seriously. Here’s the text, in its entirety:

The following drugs were found in Anna Nicole Smith’s body during the autopsy, according to the Broward County medical examiner’s office:

Brand Name (Drug) indication

— Ativan (lorazepam): anti-anxiety medication
— Cipro (ciprofloxacin): antibiotic
— Klonopin (clonazepam): anti-seizure medicine also used to treat anxiety
— Methadone: strong painkiller, often used to suppress withdrawal from heroin
— Noctec (chloral hydrate): sedative and sleeping medication
— Robaxin (methocarbamol): muscle relaxant
— Soma (meprobamate): muscle relaxant
— Topamax (topiramate): anti-seizure medication also used to treat migraines
— Tylenol (acetaminophen): pain reliever
— Valium (diazepam): anti-anxiety medication, also used as a sedative and to treat seizures

In addition, she had also taken these around the time of her death, according to interviews and other evidence gathered by the medical examiner’s office:

— Benadryl (diphenhydramine): antihistamine
— Human growth hormone: touted as a muscle-building, weight-reducing agent
— Nicorette (nicotine polacrilex): used to quit smoking
— Tamiflu (oseltamivir phosphate): anti-viral medicine
— Vitamin B12: helps formation of red blood cells

Source: Broward County medical examiner’s office; University of Miami toxicology department

My favorite single item? The B12. It’s one of those health cures I’ve heard about all my life. “I need a B12 shot,” people are always saying. “Really? What does B12 do?” I ask. No one knows. It’s like “toxins.” It’s good for you. Ask no questions.

My second-favorite item: The Tylenol. Talk about feeling no pain!

And finally, bringing up the rear: Nicorette gum. Because it’s important to give up one’s unhealthy habits.

This is better than River Phoenix, who died after a similar heapin’ helpin’ of Anna Nicole’s Casserole. But he was a vegetarian, because red meat can kill you, man.

Lots to do today, not enough time to do it in. Console yourselves, children, with bloggage:

The 10 Worst Rap Album Covers Ever Made. No. 1 belongs in the Smithsonian.

I’m so crushed “Rome” is over. I want to be BFF with Atia. Can’t we do a sequel?

And now, off to the gym. Class is called “Flex Appeal.” I have no idea what this means, but I could use some flexing.

How did a deuce like me end up with an ace like Alan? This is something I think about frequently, usually on a day like yesterday, when I notice that my husband, the man who chose me to marry, is doing something like taking apart a 36-year-old bicycle drum brake and going hmm, OK, this goes here and that goes there and maybe we should clean out some of this rust, and, and…

Getting ahead of myself.

Project Tandem has reached its conclusion. After a series of coordinated phone calls, e-mails and a late-afternoon drive to Lansing, we’re the new owners of a 1971 Schwinn Deluxe Twinn, five-speed tranny, in Kool Lemon. It’s dreamy. And although it’s in excellent condition for a bike of its age, it hadn’t been ridden in decades and needed some work. Alan spent Sunday learning its mysteries.

First were the tires. How, we wondered, did such cracked and rotted tires, surely the originals, still manage to feel as full and drum-tight as they did? Whatever, they’d have to go; it was only a matter of time before they gave way. He drove a nail into one to deflate it. It not only didn’t go flat, it didn’t want to give up the nail. He tried prying the tire off the rim with a screwdriver, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, I looked up to see Alan removing the tire with, yes, a saw. The “tube,” such as it was, revealed itself to be a length of stout rubber hose suitable for beating South American political prisoners. Weighed about three pounds each. The guy at the bike shop said he’d only heard of such things; they’re a specialty item for slender rubber tires used in places where they’d go flat frequently, like the floor in a carpet-tack factory, perhaps.

Anyway, they’re gone now. Next was the brake.

I don’t know about you, but I approach most machinery with a certain wary respect. I’m not totally buffaloed by it, but I recognize that the capability of understanding precisely how things work is either beyond me or of little interest. Alan’s knowledge is harder-won; he grew up in a working-class family, where if you needed something fixed, you fixed it yourself. The idea of paying someone to do something you could do yourself was not only preposterous, but wasteful, like paying someone to scratch your back. And since Alan was a boy with a bicycle and then a minibike and then a motocross racer, in a family that owned outboard motors and lawn mowers and small electrics, he learned quickly that if you took something apart carefully, you could usually figure out what the problem was, fix it, and then reassemble it with no harm done, at a fraction of the price a repair shop would charge.

Anyway, this bike, which weighs around 60 pounds (65 with the old tires) and carries two people, needs more serious stopping power than two caliper-style brakes would provide. So the rear brake is a drum. “I really don’t know how that works,” the seller’s wife said as we were looking it over.

“It’s simple,” Alan said. “There’s a cam, and when you put on the brake, the cam rotates and presses two shoes to the outside of the drum, and stops its turning.” She nodded politely. I recognized the expression on her face.

Alan disconnected the cable from the brake, removed the wheel, removed two nuts and then a third, and lifted off the top of the drum. “Just as I suspected,” he said. “Rust.” He cleaned it out with mineral spirits and then — I still can’t believe he can do this — put it back together. Then he put it back on the frame. And then he reconnected the cable, which involved three or four different nuts and twisty things. And he drenched it all in WD-40. And now it works like aces.

I know the feeling he gets when I marvel over this; it’s the same one a woman gets when her 24-year-old boyfriend is tucking into the first home-cooked meal she’s made for him. He looks at her with love in his eyes. She has performed alchemy, just like Mom. She’s marriage material.

And then there was more WD-40, and an Unfortunate Chain Incident (quickly put right), and we were ready to take it out. I have no pictures of the shakedown cruise, but here’s the finished project:

The basket is for carrying home picturesque bags of groceries, with carrot greens and six inches of baguette protruding from the top. The lock is for current Detroit realities. (The brand’s motto: “Tough world. Tough locks.”) The rest is for fun.

So, bloggage:

Most of you aren’t journalists, so I won’t spend much time on this, but I got an e-mail from a friend last week, when the Great Los Angeles Times Guest Editor Crisis was unfolding. A short e-mail. In its entirety, it read: Is it just me, or has our profession gone completely off its rocker? I replied: It’s not just you. I was thinking the same thing. Michael Kinsley sums it up well.

Why I love This American Life: Last week’s show was “What I Learned From TV.” The last chapter has Dan Savage, gay parent, telling why he’s creeped out by “The Suite Life of Zack and Cody.” I was listening to it and found Kate creeping close to eavesdrop — after all, she kept hearing the names of characters she knows like siblings — and I had to say, while wiping laughter-tears from my eyes, “Look, someday you can hear this, but not yet.” (Astonishingly, she accepts this explanation.) But you, you’re a grown-up. Enjoy.

When I see a promo line reading, “George Will on anger,” I’m gonna read it. It should not surprise you to learn that George Will disapproves of anger. Why not try superciliousness, like him? The anger directed at Bush today, like that directed at Clinton during his presidency, luxuriates in its own vehemence, he writes. Funny how it didn’t bug him so much then.

Where does Ken Levine find these things? Girl is deathly afraid of pickles, so she goes on “Maury,” where people chase her around with pickles:

I like a nice crunchy garlic dill myself.

I’ve been shopping for a new toy of late — a tandem bicycle. I’m gonna offset me some carbon with a vengeance, once I get my hands on one. Kate and I will pedal all over the Pointes on it this summer, but first I have to find just the right candidate. My price range is “reasonable,” which means “below $500.” Mitch Harper had a drool-worthy one on his site earlier this week, but it’s way too rich for my blood, and I don’t think they’re going to drop the price by 50 percent. (It does, however, match my current bike perfectly; they’re both Cannondales from the same year.)

So the answer is, more likely, an old Schwinn Twinn or something similar. Poking around has led me deep into the world of vintage-bicycle nerds and their odd ideas of what things are worth. To give you a sense, I’ve seen Twinns in various states of repair at prices ranging from $80 to $1,500, and the condition of the bikes didn’t range nearly that wide. I’m convinced some people just don’t really want to sell, and so set outrageous price tags to make sure the bike stays in their garage.

Anyway, I have my eye on a couple. I love you, eBay. I cover you with kisses.

Bloggage:

Boy, Madonna and I really are nearly the same age, aren’t we? I kinda like some of these items from her H&M collection. They strike me as understated and classy. What’s wrong with me? What’s wrong with her?

Laura Lippman makes the NYT best-seller list this week: I’m #11, separated by an asterisk from Mitch Albom at #10, which means our sales are virtually the same for the week. That’s gotta be a good feeling. Congratulations. Buy the book. Let’s get her above Mitch next week. SHAMEFUL UPDATE: The book is “What the Dead Know.” (Blush.)

I shouldn’t spend so much time blowing love to Ken Levine, but I’d pay money to hear him tell Hollywood stories. Fortunately, he tells them free of charge:

Our line producer informed me that the studio refused to pay our secretary’s parking. The budget for each episode was over a million dollars. Weekly parking was $13. Above-the-line people (writers, directors, producers, actors) got to park on the lot for free. Below-the-line peons had to park in a structure across the street.

And don’t let the Hollywood address fool you. This was not a great neighborhood. I used to call the lot “Fort Paramount.” While working at WINGS on rewrite night we often watched drug deals go down across the street at the parking structure. An ice cream truck would arrive every night about 11 and we would say, “Cracky the clown is here. Looks like he’s got some great shit tonight for the kiddies!”

I’ve probably heard more inside-Hollywood stories than most Midwesterners, but far fewer than the average Californian. Nevertheless, I’m always amazed at how often parking plays a major role in showbiz power struggles. It’s a place where everyone works out all the time, and yet having to walk from a too-distant parking space is considered an appalling insult. (The safety factor Levine mentions is a wild card.) My screenwriting-rewrite teacher was working on a project with Katie Holmes the semester our class was meeting; this was before she became Scientology’s zombie bride. He was going out to Los Angeles most weeks and “taking” meetings with his writing partner and Katie, who was “attached” to this project. (I just love slinging that lingo, but my outsider status requires me to put it in quotes.) One day they arrived at a movie lot in two cars. My teacher and his partner were directed to an inside-the-gate spot, while Katie was told to park at a remote lot two blocks away. That she did this cheerfully and without complaint — even keeping a pair of sneakers in her car for just these occasions — was offered to us as proof of what a wonderful, sweet, not-Hollywood-at-all, down-to-earth girl she was. “She’s really from Toledo,” he’d say.

The project later dissolved before it bore fruit, as I gather 99 percent of them do. You know the rest of Katie’s story.

Rented “Babel” this weekend, an event remarkable only in that it whittles the unseen-Oscar-best-picture-nominees down to two (“The Queen,” “Letters from Iwo Jima”), which is pretty good for post-parenthood Nance. I liked it a lot, but I’ve liked Alejandro González Iñárritu ever since “Amores Perros,” which blew my doors off. “The Mexican Quentin Tarantino,” he’s called, but he’s much better than that. More serious, anyway.

The theme of “Babel” and “Amores Perros” is one that I’m always a sucker for — the way our lives all connect, stranger to stranger, even across continents. The Butterfly Theory in human form, maybe. But here’s what I have to ask someone who saw it in the theater:

Were there subtitles?

Because there were none for the DVD, a pretty cheeky directorial decision for a film where characters speak in seven-count-’em-seven languages, according to IMDB: Japanese Sign Language, French, English, Spanish, Japanese, Berber and Arabic. When I realized none were forthcoming, I decided to just settle in and groove with it — dialogue is just words, and acting is a lot more — and found that I understood it pretty much perfectly, with the exception of the Japanese girl’s backstory, which was superfluous anyway. I know her backstory because I looked it up online; helpful souls at Wikipedia, who apparently speak all these tongues, figured it out and posted a complete synopsis. The movie is called “Babel,” after all. And making people do supplemental reading is totally, whoa, postmodern.

Before I took the DVD back to Blockbuster, I went through the menu until I found a setup screen. I selected “English subtitles” and hit “play.” No subtitles. So who the hell knows? I enjoyed the movie. Brad Pitt may be a handsome devil, but now he’s a handsome devil with serious eye-crinkle. Like his friend George Clooney, he’s striving to age in an interesting manner. I heard Alec Baldwin talk in an interview about the morning-afterness of being last year’s hunk, how it’s not as difficult for men as it is for women, but it is difficult, breaking through into something resembling serious work, especially when women fan themselves at the thought of your butt. (Or at least how it looked in “Thelma and Louise.”)

Through the magic of the Google, I looked up my old Prof. Terry’s take on “Babel.” He frequently surprises me, and this was one of them: Two lousy stars, and a flip of the hand:

Though “Babel” would seem to be a plea for more cross-cultural empathy and understanding … it fails to provide dramatic evidence that any of the bad things that happen to the generally good people here could have been avoided if we all spoke the same language.

Hmm, I didn’t get that that was its aim, but then, I watch a movie in my living room very differently than I do in a theater. At home, I’m a much easier lay. The other day I found myself whiling away an early Friday evening with “Imagine Me & You,” which I objectively recognized as a total piece of crap but still failed to turn off. I think it was because all the characters dressed so well. I just wanted to see what the next scene’s sweater would look like. (There were also a lot of knit hats in that one. I have never been able to wear a knit hat without looking like a person who sells newspapers out of a van on a busy corner.)

“300” — there’s another one I won’t be catching until it hits cable, even if it shaping up to be the “Billy Jack” of the Bush-boosters. Even if it is, like, the gayest movie since “Top Gun” and maybe gayer. Even the previews make that obvious, but this blogger puts the cherry on it:

Any movie that features this many half naked, really good looking guys running around thrusting long shafts into each other over and over and over again, in which so many men spend so much time demanding that other men kneel before them, and in which so many truly butch guys dressed only in panties and leather straps manage to get so constantly and thoroughly spattered with the body fluids of other men… I don’t know. I’m thinking that pointing out that the Greek culture which the Spartans were part of and which they were fighting, killing, and dying to defend was homosexual by choice is, well, appropriate, and merited.

Yeah, me too.

(By the way, those who have seen “300” — does Leonidas have any scene where he’s not yelling at the top of his lungs? The whole trailer, he’s bellowing. “This…is…SPAH-TA! Then we will fight…IN THE SHADE!!!” That would get old fast.)

I’m retooling my blog bookmarks again. My rule: The drop-down menu must not extend beyond the depth of the screen. Every few weeks I add and drop to make it fit. I added Bats left, throws right for the sheer novelty of a Hoosier liberal. Found Kim Morgan, who writes better about movies than I do, via Wolcott. Kept the increasingly disappointing DetNews politics blog because they provide my health insurance. Laura Lippman’s blogging her book tour, but she’s so nice she can’t say anything mean about anybody; her life is an exercise in gratitude. Also, discretion:

Just this morning, I tried on some outfits in anticipation of an engagement later this week. The outfit I ended up choosing is, according to the one outside opinion I sought, “classy and becoming.” It also is a) twelve years old and b) from Banana Republic. But no one will know that unless I wear it inside out. My hunch is that the context of the engagement — not to mention the killer shoes — will lead people to think the outfit is nicer than it is. Unless you read this blog, in which case, if you catch this particular gig, you’ll probably be thinking: “I can’t believe that Laura is such a dork that she’s wearing a 12-year-old Banana Republic outfit.”

From further analysis, I suspect the engagement was an appearance on CBS’ morning show, whatever they’re calling it these days. I missed it, and too bad, because I would have liked to fire off an e-mail to the producer chastising her guest for wearing a 12-year-old Banana Republic outfit.

And then there’s Ken Levine, whose St. Patrick’s Day post I didn’t see until after I’d done St. Patrick’s Day. It’s from a “Cheers” episode that he wrote, so he’s allowed to quote it:

AN IRISH BAND ENTERS. THEY’RE ALL WEARING CABLE-KNIT SWEATERS. ONE OF THEM IS NAMED SEAN.

…

THE BAND BEGINS TO SING AND PLAY A SLOW IRISH BALLAD:

SEAN
(singing) “They broke into our Dublin home, the dirty English dogs. They took away my sister and they beat my dad with logs.”

THEY BREAK INTO A QUICK UP BEAT IRISH JIG FOR A BEAT, THEN RESUME THE LYRICS:

SEAN
(singing) “Along the ring of Kerry you can hear the bleat of gulls, I’ll sip the blood of the English from their bleached and hollowed skulls.” (TO THE BAR) Everybody!!

Everybody! Happy week to all.

Eric Zorn’s RSS reader must be the best one in the world, because it somehow snagged the Lost Post in the 120 seconds or so that it existed. So here it is, and we love us some Eric:

Among the pleasures of the internet age, from sub-sub-sub-niche pornography (brunettes in pure-white Keds, anyone?) to the London dailies a click away, I have a new nominee for Top 25 status: The online package tracker.

I do a certain amount of catalog ordering, and have fallen in love with the small joy of watching my box, on this trip holding New Balance running shoes and two sports bras — please, draw no conclusions about my fitness plans — make its way to me. Origin scan, March 9: Commerce City, Colo., after which it was scanned for departure, arrival and departure again, all at the same facility. (I’m assuming it’s a hub.) On to Omaha, then Davenport, Iowa — how are you enjoying the humidity of the east, shoes and bras? much different from Colorado, no? — then Hodgkins, Ill., wherever that is. From Hodgkins to Livonia, Mich., where it stayed only a few hours. Its final departure scan took it to Detroit. In at 6:45 a.m., out at 7:40, delivered at 1:49 p.m., to the back door.

The dog didn’t bark. He’s likely to sleep through these things, these days.

Why can’t they put this technology on the cable guy? “We’ll be there sometime between 8 a.m. and 2 p.m. Can’t be more specific than that, sorry.”

(Of course, one day they will. And I’ll complain that it’s wrong to micromanage human beings to this extent, and predict that the cable guy with a bar code on his forehead is the next disgruntled postal worker, and who will be able to blame them? People are not packages. Consistency, thy name is…not mine.)

But until then, it’s nice to dream.

I like my shoes and bras, by the way. They’re all closeouts, for obvious reasons which I won’t get into, except to say: Bra designers, don’t put seams right down the middle of the boob, OK? Most women prefer a nice smooth line there. But it’ll do for something to sweat in this summer.

One deadline passes, another approaches — they’re like telephone poles on the highway. In the meantime, though, I have to see my doctor this morning, to find out why my knee hurts. No, I know why (slipped on the ice); I need to know why so long. Also, I’m hoping to score some powerful narcotics. I wonder if that would work, not pussyfooting around with the so-called drug-seeking behavior, but just asking outright: “How about a little Vicodin/Oxycontin mixed grill, doc?” It worked with my old doctor, who appreciated directness, as well as the fact I never asked for anything stronger than Tylenol 3. (On a scale of 1-10, there’s a reason that one has a 3 in its name.) A few weeks back, the Wall Street Journal ran a story on off-label prescribing. The opening anecdote was about a woman who was licking those narco-lollipops for relief of pregnancy-related migraines*. She was up to five (!!!!) a day by the time labor started, and surprise surprise, her baby’s first words were, “(Sniff.) How much for an eightball, doc? Can I get it on credit? I seem to have left my wallet in my other diaper.”

Of course, if he says I have arthritis I’ll just ask for a bullet. To shoot myself.

In the meantime, festive bloggage:

I’m not the biggest fan of the Freep’s pop-music critic, but I thought he did a pretty good piece on Why Cobo Matters, even if that wasn’t the headline (but should have been).

Jacob Weisberg went to the American Enterprise Institute’s gala the other night, and wrote a nice piece for Slate. They should change their name to Home of the Unrepentant Neocon:

In his address, the 90-year-old (Bernard) Lewis did not revisit his argument that regime change in Iraq would provide the jolt needed to modernize the Middle East. Instead, he spoke at length about the millennial struggle between Christianity and Islam. Lewis argues that Muslims have adopted migration, along with terror, as the latest strategy in their “cosmic struggle for world domination.” This is a familiar framework from the original author of the phrase “the clash of civilizations”—made more famous by Harvard scholar Samuel Huntington. What did surprise me was Lewis’ denunciation of Pope John Paul II’s 2000 apology for the Crusades as political correctness run amok. This drew applause. Lewis’ view is that the Muslims started it by invading Europe in the eighth century. The Crusades were merely a failed imitation of Muslim jihad in an endless see-saw of conquest and re-conquest.

Were you to start counting the ironies here, where would you stop? Here was a Jewish scholar criticizing the pope for apologizing to Muslims for a holy war against Muslims, which was also a massacre of the Jews. Here were the theorists of the invasion of Iraq, many of them also Jewish, applauding the notion that the Crusades were not so terrible and embracing a time horizon that makes it impossible to judge them wrong. And here was the clubhouse of the neocons throwing itself a lavish ‘do, when the biggest question in American politics is how to escape the hole they’ve dug. Reality seemed to have taken up residence elsewhere for the evening.

Mark Steyn can turn a clever phrase, but reading this piece o’ crap (only the first two grafs available online, sorry) last night made me want to cancel my subscription to The Atlantic. Please, editors of the world, don’t let idealogues write arts criticism, OK? Styled as a tribute to the talent-free Denny Doherty (“the other Papa”), it comes off as one long snark about the excesses of the ’60s, which is a record played so often by this crowd you can’t even hear the music anymore. Not that they ever heard the music in the first place. Michelle Phillips, he says, is “seriously hot, in a way few rock chicks are in the cold light of day when the drugs have worn off.” Oh, please. How would you know? There’s more snarkage about Cass Elliot, who could only get laid because she had drugs, and pokes at John Phillips’ “vacuous” lyrics, proving Steyn may be the only person alive who could listen to the Mamas and the Papas and think their appeal was about the lyrics.

Put it this way: Reading this, I was reminded of the time Alexander Cockburn, hard-core leftist, described the scene in “The Untouchables,” where Elliot Ness throws Frank Nitti off the roof after the latter taunted Ness about how his recently departed colleague (Sean Connery, sigh), “squealed like a stuck Irish pig” before he died. This person, Nitti, Cockburn describes as “an unarmed murder suspect.” So there.

Off to tend the knee.

Late-breaking update: Knee diagnosis unclear, but he suspects arthritis. (Muffled gunshot. Thump.)

* I originally wrote “nausea.” My memory was faulty.