My sentence at the car dealer’s yesterday ran through lunchtime, but without wheels the options were a) vending machines; or b) walk two dealerships down to Fuddrucker’s. I chose B. One thing I’ll say about Grosse Pointe — it’s generally free of these sorts of places, the chain food-stravaganza. We’ve got bagel joints, Panera and a number of utterly mediocre locally owned restaurants, but hardly anything with a drive-through window and even fewer of these big-box grease pits.

The idea of Fuddrucker’s — and yes, every time I see it, I think of “Idiocracy,” in which one of the visual jokes is the evolution of the name into its logical obscenity — is to build your own burger. Giant burgers, all the condiments you could think of. I chose a 1/3-pound burger, the “small” size. Remember when McDonald’s introduced the quarter-pounder? My God, man, now that’s a hungry man’s meal! A quarter-pound burger? That’ll fill a tummy, ain’a?

That was a long time ago.

OK, so a 1/3-pound burger. What the hell, I’ll get what I usually put on it at home — grilled onions and crumbled blue cheese.

“We don’t have that kind of blue cheese.”

That kind? What kind do you have?

“Blue cheese dressing.”

Oh. OK, then. Grilled onions, blue cheese dressing on the side, and let’s try to get out of here at under a million calories. Fries? Sure. Something from the fountain to drink. Nine bucks and change.

The burger came piled high with grilled onions. Now there’s a menu phrase — “piled high.” When you’re cooking at home, how often do you pile anything high? I could have stuck my finger into this onion pile down to the second knuckle. Onions are a low-cost item, so it pays to stack ‘em deep. It gives the customer the sense of getting a bargain for his food dollar. Judging from the other customers in the place, these are folks who drive a hard bargain. Only in the Midwest, witty Jim Harrison once wrote, is overeating seen as heroic.

I picked off seven-eights of the onions and added an experimental dab of blue-cheese dressing, wondering if it would sub for my beloved crumbled Stilton. It did not. The fries were thick-cut slabs of potatoes, no doubt sliced, seasoned and prepped at a processing factory far, far away. They were speckled with a seasoning blend that is probably “secret.” Fries like this frequently disappoint me, and so did these. I ate a few, left the rest.

I once asked a short-order cook why I couldn’t make a hamburger as good as his. “Because you wouldn’t fucking believe how much salt I put in it,” he said. (He’d been drinking.) “Almost a tablespoon. And then I add butter to the grill.”

I can’t speak for the butter, but they surely didn’t skimp on the salt in my lunch. If salt was the bass note, it was blasting out the windows of the car. I sat and did the L.A. Times crossword — too easy — waiting for the clamor in my mouth to subside. It didn’t. I grabbed a cookie on my way out for the relief of sugar. Mission accomplished, Fuddrucker’s! Customer carpet-bombed with sodium chloride and grease, upsold dessert upon exit. Well-done.

Maybe this is a good sign. There was a time in my life when I would have happily cleaned my plate, but lately I’m working toward, what’s the word? Mindfulness. Nothing prohibited, just carefully considered. Maybe I should have fallen happily into the Fuddrucker embrace and gone whole-hog with the cheese, which would have been the yang to the yin of salt. Or maybe I should have had another glass of water and some yogic breathing, and just put off lunch another 90 minutes.

Lately I’ve been reading about David Kessler’s new book, “The End of Overeating: Taking Control of the Insatiable American Appetite,” in which the former FDA chief takes a look at so-called food engineering, in which chemists seek to find just the right layers of salt, fat and sugar to find the “bliss point” that gets us cleaning our plates and ordering more:

Foods rich in sugar and fat are relatively recent arrivals on the food landscape, Dr. Kessler noted. But today, foods are more than just a combination of ingredients. They are highly complex creations, loaded up with layer upon layer of stimulating tastes that result in a multisensory experience for the brain. Food companies “design food for irresistibility,” Dr. Kessler noted. “It’s been part of their business plans.”

But this book is less an exposé about the food industry and more an exploration of us. “My real goal is, How do you explain to people what’s going on with them?” Dr. Kessler said. “Nobody has ever explained to people how their brains have been captured.”

My brain has been captured. Lately, I’ve been trying to take it back.

You know what I had for lunch the other day? A kale smoothie. I’m not kidding. Alan has this pasta dish he likes, with Italian sausage and peppers and kale, and it always leaves me with a lot of leftover kale. I found this recipe online: Put two cups of chopped kale in a blender with a frozen ripe banana, half a cup of orange juice and a quarter-cup of skim milk. Blend and serve. It looks like grass clippings, but it’s actually quite tasty. Those of you who make smoothies a lot know the ingredients are utterly malleable — one person said to try it with pineapple juice instead, and I’ll probably substitute a dollop of vanilla yogurt for the skim milk next time. And when you’ve drained your glass, you’ve eaten kale instead of chocolate ice cream, and you’re not so very deprived at all.

Maybe I’ll open a kale smoothie shack in retirement. Call it Buttpuckers. “So good, it’ll make you clench your cheeks.”

OK, maybe not.

Some bloggage:

Life is strange in Oklahoma. A state legislator blames the economic crisis on divorce, abortion and homosexuality. Well, that’s one way to look at it.

One thing I did yesterday while I waited on $600 worth of repairs on a car that was running fine: Read the Sarah Palin piece in Vanity Fair. Nothing really new, except the obligatory Olbermann dog-whistle item about writing in the voice of God, but it was nice to see it all in one place.

I swore I’d have nothing more to say on it, and I really don’t, but here’s something that bugs me about the blacks-take-pride-in-Michael-Jackson stories popping up here and there: How much racial pride can you project upon a man who, when he had the choice, chose to have WHITE CHILDREN?

I ask you. And now I head to the shower, and another day too full of obligation, but hey — work’s work.

You know what the world needs? More choreography like this:

And like this:

(Every year at my all-white junior high and high school, there was a talent show, and there were always two lip-synch acts, always Motown, always the most popular kids in school — the cheerleader girls did a Supremes/Martha & the Vandellas/Marvelettes, etc. number, and the jock boys did a Temptations/Four Tops, etc. song. I wonder how they learned the choreography, this being before YouTube and even videotape. No one ever noted the oddity of white kids dressed in matching orange tuxedos and/or sequined fishtail gowns, imitating black music acts. Berry Gordy really did bring the races together, didn’t he?)

I’m posting those clips because, as promised, I spent the weekend trying to ignore M.J., but a few nice pieces cut through the static, and one was written by Alistair Macaulay, the NYT dance critic, who looked at nothing but Jackson the dancer. Whenever someone names this or that MTV phenom as a great dancer, I always wonder how you could tell, as the quick-cut editing that defines music videos can make anyone look like a great dancer. Move, cut, move, cut, etc. — I always thought dancing was how you put the moves together. Paula Abdul’s “Straight Up” is a pretty good example, and now that I watch it again I notice that the sustained shot at the beginning is a pretty long one, and could have been a stand-in. I take her word it’s really her, but music video, more than any other medium, took dance and chopped it up into a series of tricks. (Two-left-footed me could probably be made graceful with a good editor.) So it’s nice to watch these old J-5 performance clips and be reminded that in his case, it was real, and in that, I can start to find a little empathy with the departed.

Dancers and athletes thrill us with a few years of amazing physical feats, and too many spend the rest of their lives paying for it. A few years back, our late pal Ashley Morris tipped me to a story on a Hall of Fame running back, a man who once had thighs of an outrageous, fearsome circumference, who now cannot climb the stadium stairs to watch his own son play college ball, and I’m sorry but I can’t remember who it was. I once read an interview with Mikhail Baryshnikov, who talked about the constant pain that dancers live with, even young ones. He was in his 40s by then, long retired, but still took class when he could. One quote stuck with me: “A dancer knows what kind of day he’s going to have the moment he gets out of bed.” (Misha in “Giselle.”)

Anyway, Macaulay notes:

But to watch “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” (1979) is to be amazed at just how much charm the 20-year-old Mr. Jackson had, and the charm gets more infectious as the dancing proceeds. You begin by noticing the pelvis, doing its characteristic pulsation, and you recognize how close you are to the world of John Travolta in “Saturday Night Fever.” Fairly soon, you take in the heels, or rather the action of the insteps that keeps rhythmically lifting the heels off the floor, and then, in various ways, you see the ripple of motion between feet and those very slender hips.

But Mr. Jackson was an upper-body dancer too: there’s a marvelous moment here when he tilts back and stays there. Now go to “Billie Jean” in Motown’s 25th-anniversary celebration (1983). You can see that already everything is much more choreographed, both in the bad sense of unspontaneous and the good sense of dance structure. Most of the time his dancing is so aflame you don’t feel any lack of freshness, and he’s so alert that you hardly have time to laugh — though I think you ought, happily — at the way his busy pelvis keeps hoisting his pants up and revealing his off-white socks. (The changing expanse of socks becomes part of the rhythm.)

“Busy pelvis” — now there’s a great name for a band. (Video HT: Hank.)

How was your weekend? We spent part of it traveling for the wrong reasons — Alan’s 94-year-old Aunt Martha, the last of the Smith sisters, his mom’s side, went to her reward last week, and the funeral was Saturday. “Reward” is literal when you’ve lived that long; we all agreed that the wind really went out of her sails when Alan’s mom died, followed by her last sibling, Dorothy, a few months later. The circle is closed, and the organist was instructed to dial back the mournful tone by 30 percent or so. The lunch and fellowship afterward took place among the still-standing structures of Vacation Bible School, which evidently had a class in Roman history — there were draped tents, plastic swords and CLOSED BY ORDER OF CAESAR AUGUSTUS signs here and there. They even had a little aqueduct made of shipping tubes sawed in half lengthwise.

Alan reports VBS is where he learned to sing, “Oh I’ve got joy joy joy joy down in my heart,” etc. VBS is a real Protestant tradition, ain’a, JeffTMMO? I had no such experience, although after years of CCD classes they’d have had to take me there in leg irons.

Oh, and we had a collective eye-roll over the last hours of Martha’s life: After her heart attack, she was taken to the local hospital, where, even though she had a DNR order, etc., they insisted on transporting her, BY HELICOPTER, to Toledo. They did the same thing to Alan’s mom, even though all agreed her case was hopeless and she would end her life in hospice care within a few days. The Toledo hospital is like the Atlanta airport — you can’t go anywhere without passing through their ER first. And we wonder why health-care costs are staggering.

Even though it’s Monday, it’s a fine and sunny day and I’ve got joy joy joy joy down in my heart. I think this is due to me getting more sleep, however. Off to bicycle through my weekly cop-shop rounds and find out where the bodies are buried. (Like they’d tell us. Hah.)

I think Time magazine touched this story a while back. Certainly some smart business reporter must have done it by now, too, looking at the dark world of the internet, where otherwise straight-arrow corporations come out to play.

Exhibit A: Gillette offers you tips on how to shave your groin. Why would you do this? Because “when there’s no underbrush, the tree looks taller.” Ha ha, let’s pause for a moment and listen to Don Draper spin in his grave for a moment. (Lung cancer took him. Too soon.) For the curious, Gillette offers similar videos covering armpits, chest, head, and back. (The videos use animation, not live models, so they’re SFW.)

Exhibit B: Budweiser recycles the old standby — guy buying porn gets embarrassed — into a Bud Light commercial. Two minutes of jokey fun about magazines called Tongue in Cheeks, and you don’t even notice you’re watching a commercial for watery beer. I have to say, however, that the casting is perfect — that guy looks exactly like the sort of cubicle drone who picks up a sixer of Bud Light on the way home from work, then decides to make a night of it with a dirty magazine. The real star of the show is the other customer in line, who is probably buying something other than beer.

I’m sure there are dozens more out there. Marketers aren’t stupid. Pube-shavers need a lot of razor blades. So you can’t run a spot like that on “30 Rock” — who cares? If they don’t tell you how to do it, someone else will, and they’re not as likely to tout your products. Sooner or later this stuff will end up on mainstream TV, and so you’d best watch those and get ready, because I’m sure Rod Dreher is already preparing a big whiny blog post on them, only by then he’ll be writing for the goddamn New York Times. (Sooner or later Ross Douchehat will run out of material.)

You know what else happens when you clear away the underbrush, gents? You look like the kind of guy who thinks an optical illusion really fools something other than the eye. Go buy some Bud Light.

Here’s another video I found en route to looking up the Gillette spots. By the hit count I may be the last American to actually see it, but still recommended.

Another scorcher ahead — mid-90s, we’re promised. So while we’re all sitting in the nice a/c, contemplate what the hell with Gov. Sanford. Argentina? Did he go for a spur-of-the-moment tango lesson? I could hear Keith Olbermann in his second-most insufferable persona last night beating this dead horse to a bloody pulp, and this isn’t going to help. But still — this guy sounds like he has a few screws loose.

You’ll be living in a van down by the river! Another gem from Detroitblog, a portrait of one of those singular community-activist types that make city life worth living:

In the early ’80s Hume bid on a neighboring city-owned marina, won as the low bidder, then the city canceled the sale without clear explanation. Hume sued, the city settled. He took the money, bought video cameras and started a company called Public Eye Video, a one-man operation that taped all council meetings after he found crazy statements made by council members never made it into the meeting minutes. “I videotaped their asses, so at least somebody would have a record of what the fuck they’re saying,” he says.

It drove them nuts. They tried to shut him down, but learned they couldn’t because it was a public meeting and he had a right to record it. Then they tried to cut off his use of their electricity, but he found a way to buy it directly from the City-County Building authorities instead. At one point council member Kay Everett lost it in front of his camera, shouting at Hume, “You’re very close to getting this thing rammed down your throat!”

As I’ve said many times in the last few years: And people wonder why I love this crazy-ass town.

Headline of the day: “‘You Light Up My Life’ Composer is Criminal Sex Monster, Naturally.” Hell yes.

Off to beat the day into submission. I suspect it’ll be sweaty.

I really don’t want to be a pill about this, but here goes: I keep running into the World’s Loudest Lawn Service. No matter where I go, they are my neighbor’s choice for lawn care, lawn treatment and especially running a goddamn gas-powered edger — talk about the world’s stupidest lawn chore — around the perimeter of the lawn, preferably twice, getting right up next to the pavement so sparks fly from the blade and the sound goes SCREE SCREE SCREE for 30 minutes or so.

After which they will fire up the gas-powered blower.

The blower is always last. I am accustomed to working in newsrooms, and I like to believe there’s no noise I can’t tune out if it’s just consistent. Teletype machines, phones, colleagues with droning nasal voices explaining tax policy to their editors — all of these can become white noise with a little mind yoga. (In fact, I’ve often thought teletypes are even soothing, that chugging sound they make, occasionally punctuated by bells. New lede! Writethru! Fixes Burns’ title, adds spokesman comment, background!) But people operating gas-powered lawn equipment are like the sorts of people who own motorcycles — they don’t know this thing we call “idle.” The sound of a motor just going put-put-put doesn’t satisfy. And so they must throw in little revs every 12 seconds or so, goose the throttle a little, just to show all the other bitches out there how we roll.

Ann Arbor wasn’t lawn-crazy. You found shaggy, weedy lawns in the nicest neighborhoods in town; leggy saplings, little more than lignifying (look it up) weeds, sprouted in every park strip. Tree Town always looks a little scruffy and mossy, the sign of a populace preoccupied with grading papers or translating ancient Greek or arguing over Hugo Chavez, and far too bohemian to worry about something as stupid as crabgrass. Also, quiet.

Ah, well. The owner of my gym says his aches and pains remind him he’s alive. I suppose, when you open windows, you have to listen to your neighbors from time to time. I just wish they’d let me finish my goddamn coffee before they start.

The New York Times has a pretty good package today on the Steve Jobs liver transplant, and the question it’s raising. Looking for justice in American health-care resource allocation is a fool’s errand, but I am interested in the investors’ angle, i.e., can a CEO with this high a profile get away with claiming privacy when he’s obviously gravely ill? This is a publicly traded company and Jobs is hardly another cog in the Apple wheel. I’d be interested in hearing anyone else’s thoughts about this. I’m equally amused by how quickly Jobs abandoned the alternative therapies he was said to be trying after his diagnosis. Nothing like an organ transplant to make one a believer in the miracles of western medicine. Which is one way of saying one reason American health care is so expensive is because, hello, you can get a liver transplant. You can take statins. You can replace your damn knee when it falls apart. I’m old enough to remember ads in magazines for trusses. I’m sure Jobs had great insurance, but still.

OK, off to the gym. Speaking of achy knees. Back later, but not for long, because hello? Eighty-six degrees and sunny? I’m going to the pool.

Up north to a wedding this weekend. Always fun to attend weddings. They beat funerals, for one thing. There’s cake. And usually wine, and frequently champagne.

There was certainly no shortage at this wedding, which was held in the northern Michigan woods. Not all the way off the grid, but edging in that direction — catering, but with porta-potties and an explicit warning from the wedding couple not to wear heels, because of the walk in from the road, which was decidedly unfriendly to delicate footwear. But once back there, it was a little oasis of loveliness, with a blue color scheme. The bride wore a $30 gown she got at Goodwill and had altered to her taste; why wear Vera Wang to trail behind you down a dirt path en route to the forest clearing? Any last-minute fit alterations just went with the color scheme:

The couple was said to be going for an effect that was “rustic, not redneck.” I’d say they succeeded. All guests were invited to camp on the surrounding acreage, and many took them up on it. We didn’t, and stayed at another guest’s nearby hunting cabin, which had the benefit of window screens on a night when the mosquitos were feeling particularly bloodthirsty. On the other hand, I bet the afterparty was a blast.

Leaving, it occurred to me the last wedding I went to in northern Michigan was also held right around the summer solstice. The sky after 10 p.m., as we were leaving:

They prize summer in the north. “Three months of bad sledding,” etc.

That was my weekend. How was yours?

On the way we passed the Perma-Log Co., a company about which the name says everything. I regret that the website doesn’t feature the other perma-items from the company’s acreage on M-33, which included perma-Stonehenge and perma-Easter Island heads. Both of which would be perma-cool in our front yard, I think. Northern Michigan kitsch doesn’t have quite the same feel as that of, say, southern Ohio. Not so many fat ladies bending over or plywood silhouettes of a guy leaning against a tree, but there’s nothing like a flying-bird windmill to let you know you’re not in the city anymore.

Actually, there are lots of ways to tell you’re not in the city, once you get out of it, headed north. The entire economy of northern Michigan, never robust in the first place, seems to rest on competition between hospitals to land your next heart attack, at least to judge from the billboards. In between those billboards are other billboards advertising schools that can get you in a scrub top and working in the wide-open world of health care faster than the next one. Nothing really says, “We are a region of the obese and old” more clearly than this. I bet, in places like Portland and California, you might see the occasional ad for sports-medicine and laparoscopic knee surgery.

But we also sat with one of our filmmaking party, who moonlights as a DJ. One of his gigs is the local women’s roller-derby team, and he shared their favorite requests — 2 Live Crew, and assorted other acts whose lyrics feature maximum degradation of women. This tickles me, as it suggests rollergirls know more about what feminism entails than those who have PhDs in gender studies. There’s something about picturing these jammers and blockers, any one of whom could kill you with her bare hands, throwing ‘em up to “Me So Horny” that cracks me up.

Bloggage? Surrrreee:

We’ve had a local story breaking in the past few days, with the Fox affiliate leading the way. The coverage — all bluster, posturing and “as I told you exclusively” — has been excruciating, but not as excruciating as this, which I beg you to watch, because besides being excruciating, it’s also sort of awesome.

The etiquette of the CrackBerry, something I admit I struggle with myself. Nothing like those little interstitial spaces in life for multitasking on your smartphone, I always say. Nothing like a little Wurdle to fill up a two-minute bathroom break in a meeting. When does it cross the line into rudeness? A question for our time.

My question for today is, can I get everything done that I have to get done? Only if I sign off now and go pick the dog up from the vet’s boarding kennel. Latuh.

Sometimes I think the reason so much fuss is made over places like Pictured Rocks and Sleeping Bear Dunes is because they’re parts of the Great Lakes shoreline that look different from all the other parts. Kidding. But all of my northern-Michigan pictures feature the same low line of conifers on the horizon, like they’re following me around.

The backpacks are the tell in this week’s Embarrassing Photos — that’s Isle Royale, August 1991. Ten days or so in the backcountry in northern Lake Superior, one of the prettiest and least-visited National Parks in the country. Saw: Moose, pileated woodpeckers, miscellaneous eagles, a snake swallowing a toad, a load of canine poop shot through with hair, which is about as close to one of the island’s wolves as one should ever get. Heard: Loons, the wind whipping across a series of corduroy ridges like ocean waves. Did not hear: Internal combustion engines. Allowed: Nerves to relax, leg hair to grow. The shower when we came out of the country was one of the best of my life. The rest was unsettling, to learn that while we’d been gone there’d been rioting between blacks and Jews in Crown Heights, a coup in the Soviet Union and a tree that fell on J.C. and Sam’s house, nearly cutting it in two.

It sort of made us want to turn around and go back in.

[Pause.] Well, “error establishing database connection” just ate the bottom half of this post. I’m taking that as a sign that it was worthless and weak and starting my Friday chores on schedule, instead of trying to recreate it. Bloggage? Sure:

Roy disposes of the Andrew Sullivan-led Twitter revolution, plus a video. (I actually own that record. Even as a callow youth, I wondered if anyone had actually asked seven-eighths of these people to even play Sun City, so they could refuse.)

Well, now we know why her husband’s staff code-named her “Ghetto:” Monica Conyers can be bought with a pawn-shop shopping spree. Allegedly. In fairness, she also has more upmarket tastes.

And with that, another half-assed effort limps to a close! A few more like this and I may beat this blogging jones after all.

I spend a lot of time these days thinking about work. Not specific concepts, mind you, but the idea of work. If Edwin Starr was standing behind me, he’d be singing, “Work, huh! What is it good for? Absolutely somethin’.”

This is what working for nothing will get you: Existential conflict.

Because so much of what I do these days is unpaid, I find myself on long bike rides, trying to content myself with a stupid Socratic dialogue about it:

Why do you work?

Oh, you know, the usual reasons: sense of purpose, payin’ the bills, beats television.

But your husband is payin’ most of the bills, isn’t he?

I do my part. I contribute.

Would those dust bunnies blowing through the family room count as contribution? What about the refrigerator, that empty space you’re paying to keep nice and cold?

La la la la I can’t hear you la la la la.

So what do you have planned for this summer?

Well, I’m teaching…

How does that pay?

Not so great, but it’s something.

Anything else?

Writing, as usual.

Writing where?

The blog, of course.

How’s that Google Ads thing working out for you?

Year to date? Two hundred sixty-seven dollars.

Get OUT.

And 54 cents.

Where else?

Oh, freelancing here and there. Just finished an assignment the other day. I’ll be billing $400. And the night-shift editing stuff; pays well, keeps me reading the British papers, where you can learn all kinds of stuff. Did you know that Brits call vaccines “jabs?” On first reference? “Chickenpox jabs are available on the NHS.” Seriously.

How are you doing vis-a-vis your last year of gainful employment in newspapers?

I’m in the ballpark, but not quite to home plate. On the other hand, I no longer work for vindictive power-mad psychos, either. It’s a tradeoff.

So that’s it? So you spend huge amounts of time on two websites that pay, literally, pennies per hour? And retirement is on the horizon?

I have something else. Faith.

Faith in what?

Faith that some day my ship will come in.

Is that also on the horizon?

If you look very hard, you can see the tip of the mast. But really, isn’t work worth something in and of itself?

Tell that to the aides at the Medicaid nursing home where you’ll be spending your golden years.

I heard this thing on NPR last year.

Do tell.

It was about a retirement center for artists in New York. I can’t remember the details, but it was about a city-subsidized building where artists can live extremely cheaply, and some of them had been there for decades and were very old. These people were poorer than poor, lived in no more room than a wino could buy at a flophouse, but they were so incredibly happy. They were artists. They could make a walk to the corner store sound like a stroll along the Seine. The way the light hit a building at a particular hour of the day could fill them with joy. It’s all in how you look at the world. Do you ever listen to these Wall Street jerkoffs and their horrible wives? Do you think all their gold toilets and Bentleys and plastic surgery and private jets made them happy?

Did flying commercial the last time you traveled make you happy?

That’s not the point. My point is, work is its own reward, and the best work I do is on my stupid websites, and even if they aren’t monetized — there’s a real Wall Street word — they give me a certain satisfaction, and you can’t really put a price tag on that.

Whenever someone says, “You can’t put a price tag on that,” it means the price tag would read SUPER CLEARANCE! TAKE HALF OFF LOWEST MARKED PRICE.

As the Terminator would say…

What does the Terminator say?

Fuck you, asshole.

Do you have bloggage today?

Sure:

I hope whatever Sandra Tsing Loh got paid for her piece in the current Atlantic, it was a whole hell of a lot, because in the last 24 hours I’ve heard others describe her as everything from self-absorbed to smug to a narcissist to a bitch and — this is never far behind when you’ve got two X chromosomes — ugly and unattractive. On the other hand, the piece, about the breakup of Loh’s marriage, wasn’t so great, either, but am I the only person in the world who thinks “pleasing everyone” should never be on a writer’s to-do list? Also, because I read the British rags, I have learned to appreciate the bomb-throwing essay, which is designed purely to rattle windows and make the world a little less boring and predictable. (This is a stock feature of the London dailies: I hate kids and they should all be quarantined! Fat people are a plague and a pox and should wear burkas! And so on. They’re not policy statements, they’re conversation-starters. Deal.) Also, I met Loh once at a conference and really liked her, so foo.

I also hope FiveThirtyEight takes a look at this NYT poll, which says people a) approve of the job the president’s doing, but b) don’t approve of the job the president’s doing. On the other hand, I heard a local councilperson’s vote on a particular issue criticized as being for “political reasons,” as though elected officials voting on the public’s business isn’t, somehow, political. I ask you.

A baby beaten to death is not classified as a homicide: Jukin’ the stats, Detroit-style.

Off to the gym.

I was killing a few minutes yesterday, taking empty hangers out of the closet to make a little room, when I ran across an old manila envelope on Alan’s shelf. It was part of the things he brought home from his mother’s house. I knew it contained some of the family’s World War II ephemera, and I knew there were some V-mails and old telegrams in there; did you know that if your son was wounded, the Army would send you periodic check-the-box postcards assuring you he was “recovering normally?” Now you do.

I knew there were letters in there, too, but I hadn’t read one. Thought I’d dig one out. It’s from Alan’s dad, Roger, to his mom, back home in Defiance:

Dec. 17 ‘43
Italy

Love, Bud

Well. As Peter Riegert said in “Crossing Delancey” — “Your bubbie is giving you diamonds. You should write them down.”

When I first transcribed this, I puzzled over one word. I asked Alan when he got home, “Did your dad ever mention ‘dagars’ or ‘dogars’? I can’t find them on Google, at least not in Italy. There is a Pakistani tribe called the Dogars, but he seems to be describing some sort of, I dunno, maybe an Italian subculture? Could it be ‘drovers’?”

He looked at me like I was the stupidest person in the world and said, “Dagos.”

Oh.

Yes, that was Gen. Mark Clark. He served in World War I, too. According to Wikipedia, he was only a lieutenant general at the time, but I guess he had enough stars to get a few salutes.

Isn’t that a great letter? Sometimes I’ll have to dig out some of my brother’s letters to me from Germany when he was in the service. Different time entirely.

Today’s Embarrassing Photo isn’t, just an old picture from our first weeks in our new house with our first baby:

Both his ears stick straight up now. How did that happen?

Not much bloggage today; I’m thinking I’m going to have to do some disk maintenance this weekend — my Mac is a draggy, beachballing fool of late and could probably use a hard-drive massage. I’m hoping for a happy ending.

But there’s this. This is one of those stories I studiously avoid, until the day I find the story or blog post that explains everything. I think this link tells you all you need to know about Miss California USA, and if you don’t care, don’t click.

Have a good weekend, all. I’ll mainly be working.

Ebony and ivoreeee live together in perfect har-mo-neeeee side by side on my formica kitchen table, oh lord, why don’t weeeeee?

For the record, I thought the grilled-cheese sandwich thread was hilarious. Tacos. Ha. Otherwise I didn’t keep up with much news yesterday. My day was full to the brim with activity and hostessing, so I didn’t really learn about the Holocaust Museum shooting until this morning, not to mention the David Letterman kerfuffle among the rightbloggers, and you know what? There’s nothing like a day away from the news to let you know what’s important. Of course, any day that begins with a trip to one of the automotives is always well-spent, especially when they take you driving on one of their proving grounds. You learn the most amusing things, like the names of certain stretches of test pavement — “sine wave,” for instance, and “pitch and jounce.”

But the best thing was the entrance and exit ramps, which were banked. Seriously banked. Nothing like flying through a banked turn to make you say wheeee.

Then it was lunch in Mexicantown and a stop at the Honeybee Market for mangos, and home to make agua fresca and wait for John and Sam. The New York Times featured agua fresca in its Recipes for Health column a few days back, Laura Lippman Facebooked it and credited it with all sort of miracle-working powers, so I thought, OK, I’ll bite. I even made two pitchers — one mango, one watermelon. And both were fabulous, but the mango went dry first. I’m old enough to have relatives who think a mango is a green pepper, and here they are, years later, readily available in any old Kroger. I think, how long did Latin America keep these fruits to themselves, and can we bring action for this in some sort of international court?

I also think: You know what would go well with this? A shot of vodka.

Tip: Make it with the smaller, yellow mangoes. They’re sweeter. Although I’m sure the big red ones would work splendidly, too. You really can’t go wrong with mangoes.

Agua fresca was only one thing on the menu, however. The other beverage was wine, which may explain why I forgot to make a salad. Also, one of my students stopped by — long story, not interesting — and when he left, his clutch failed, so there was 10 minutes spend bleeding the air out of something under the hood, and long story short, dinner was sort of a blur. But a fun blur! Who cares when your friends are in your kitchen?

Oh, and for all you Detroit haters? The car with the bum clutch was a Honda.

After dinner we ate ice cream and watched the first two episodes of “Nurse Jackie.” Edie Falco is great, isn’t she? They really worked to wash the Carmela off of her — that frosted-tips haircut is just inspired — although her scrub tops looks suspiciously…fitted. But she transcends the costume, I’d say. Our one-year arrangement with Comcast expires in August, at which time I figured I’d boot Showtime and Starz, the two premium channels they threw in gratis when we switched our phone service. Not being a fan of either “Dexter” or “Weeds,” I thought this would be easy to do. Now? Damn.

So what happened in your neck of the woods yesterday?

If you didn’t see Connie’s husband’s heron pictures, you are missing a treat. Big file, long download even in broadband, absolutely worth the wait.

Look, the museum shooter thinks the president isn’t a natural-born citizen. How shocked I am to learn this.

And now I am off. But I’ll be back.

I’m out to Dearborn early on assignment, then back here to greet J.C. and Sammy, passing through en route home from the U.P. We have this inside joke when they come through. John says, “Now don’t go to no trouble,” but when people sleep under your roof, you sort of have to clean the bathroom. You have to go to that much trouble. But as crazed as I’ve been of late, I can’t go to much more trouble than that. The kitchen floor could stand a mopping, but it’s going unmopped.

This visit may be the ultimate no-trouble visit. Clean sheets, a clean bathroom, but that’s it. I expect we’ll go to Trader Joe’s and spend a million dollars on wine and nibbles. I’m taking the night off. It’ll be awesome.

All this by way of saying you guys are on your own today. Maybe we can kick off the discussion with Coozledad’s letter to the editor:

I’ve been to many places in the United States, and I’ve also been to Lynchburg, VA. I assume Mr. Roberts has done some traveling, when he presumes to speak for American values, because Lynchburg may as well be Moscow, or Beijing, or Tehran. It’s one of the least American places on the planet. Pork-barbecue theocracy with a dash of scuba-suit kink and compulsory inbreeding is by no means a plan for the rest of this nation.

“Scuba-suit kink” — I wonder if, somewhere in wingnut heaven, that guy knows the gift he left behind, just by being his own sweet self.

Also, Dexter someone who sent an e-mail to Dexter saved a turtle. And paid the price.

I’ll check in sometime Wednesday. You all stay classy.