I bought a giant sunflower head at the farm market last week, and finally got around to hanging it from one of the trees. It took the squirrels a day to strip it bare and leave it in pieces on the ground. This guy was so excited he was like Ramona Quimby, who took a single bite out of each apple in an entire box, on the grounds the first bite is always the best.

Click to enlarge. These black squirrels are aggressive bastards, but this one will have a very glossy coat.

My iPhone’s been giving me problems for a few weeks, and Saturday I finally managed to organize myself into a trip to the Genius Bar. The Genius Bar is the only part of the Apple experience I don’t like, and the part I don’t like is the name. Also, that you have to make an appointment, but that’s a byproduct of success. I don’t think I’ve been in an Apple store in the last five years when it hasn’t been crowded.

So I get to the Genius Bar, and I tell them my sad tale of woe. He stops me one-third of the way through the narrative and says, “OK, you get a new phone. Hang on, I’ll get you one.”

This is the typical G.B. experience for me: I have a problem, they give me a new one. Alan’s computer has had its motherboard, hard drive and wifi innards replaced over the years, all without data loss. For a while I wondered if I’d get a thrilling new third-generation iPhone, but no, they replaced my second-generation model out of old inventory, or maybe it was reconditioned — they can’t tell, and neither can I. Anyway, I got a brand-new phone, and since I’d backed up the old one the day before, all I had to do was plug it into my laptop when I got home, wait a few minutes, and unplug it with everything exactly the way it was on the old one, minus the problems but including my home-screen photo of Eastern Market vegetables and custom ring settings.

In the middle of this, a man about my age approached the G.B. “I downloaded the new software for the iPod Touch, and when I reloaded it, it blew up the iPod,” he groused. “Spent an hour on the phone with tech support.”

The Genius looked regretful. “OK, you get a new one,” he said, whisking it away.

The curmudgeon caught my eye. “I was going to get an iPhone,” he said. “But not now! This settles it!”

I said nothing, but he went on. “This is ridiculous! Thing just quit!”

I said, “You’re getting a new one.” The Genius walked up at this point, unwrapping a new iPod Touch.

“Is that some reconditioned job?” the old fart said.

“I don’t know,” the Genius said. “They don’t tell us. It could be brand new, or it could be factory reconditioned. If it doesn’t work, we’ll replace it, too.”

“It has scratches on it!” crowed Mr. Grouchypants.

“Oh, no,” said the Genius, before it was pointed out the scratches were on the box, and the iPod was indeed shiny and twinkling.

“What if this blows up, too?” asked Grouchypants.

“We’ll replace it, but if that happens, the problem’s with your computer,” the Genius said. “We’ll take a look at that, if you like.” Grouchypants fell silent. Aha! Probably a PC user.

To be sure, an hour on the phone with tech support can turn anyone into a jerk — it certainly does me. But I doubt he’d get better service, or a new device, from Sony. Wait until he goes home, syncs it up and realizes, hey, I have a new iPod now. I wonder if he’ll feel guilty for jerkitude. Unlikely.

Encroaching jerkitude is a hazard of middle age. Your back hurts, your ass sags, you can’t get waited on in a deli without wearing a purple pashmina and a metallic gold tote bag, so often the logical reaction is: I think I’ll lash out at the next person forced to interact with me. I’m going to blow Dentu-Creme breath all over his or her unlined face. I try to remember this when someone is a jerk to me. (Not always successfully, I should add.) Add a keyboard and internet connection to the mix, and it’s a wonder anyone is ever civil.

I love my new phone. It’s shiny and unscratched. And it, unlike the last one, can find a wifi signal.

The boat haul-out went pretty well. The boat is out, anyway. The marina added a bunch of security since we were last there in the spring; there are now card keys and beeping gates. I don’t know if they’ve had theft problems, but it would be a miracle if they didn’t, as boats can be hard to secure and much of what’s valuable about them sits out in plain sight. Last year we passed a handsome cruiser with a high-end flat-screen TV bolted to the outside bulkhead, facing the cocktail deck. Maybe the owner found blue skies and sea gulls boring, or maybe he wanted to work on his tan while he watched golf, but a smart thief could have a field day stripping that vessel clean.

OK, time to start the day. I have no bloggage, because I realize I’m posting all my amusing links over on Facebook. Here’s an oldie from last week that still makes me giggle. Detroit, you’re a town with my kind of fun:

Farmington Hills — The Detroit Symphony Orchestra’s chief financial officer will be sentenced next month after he and his wife pleaded guilty to inciting a riot outside an Ohio nursing home.

Have a swell day, all.

I feel better, and I don’t quite trust it. You know how these things go: You step out of the shower and proclaim lo, I am healed, set off about your day and feel like crap by noon. I have a full day of training tomorrow in Ann Arbor, and I need all my strength to carry a few bags out of Zingerman’s. So I’m laying low for another 24 hours.

I am not a hypochondriac. This season more than ever anyone who coughs in public faces the wrath of all those standing within germshot, and frankly, I don’t blame them. If only it was like this every year; I remember one flu season when Alan sat between two tubercular hackers, and I had to listen to a 10-minute rant every day when he stepped through the door. There, there, dear, I’d say, pressing a glass of wine into his hand. I sat close enough to hear it all, and I know that even if the coughs themselves were germ-free, the sound alone would send a sane person right over the top.

So one more day. Carry on while I eat some Jell-o.

Yesterday was a holiday, I discovered when I started my police rounds. Let me see the hands of those who are a) employed in the private sector; b) had yesterday off; and c) don’t live in Columbus, Ohio.

Yes, I thought so. Columbus Day is one of those holidays we give to public-sector employees in lieu of more money. [Pause.] Just looked at that sentence, and reflected for a moment on the traditional deal we make with public-sector employment: Less money, more holidays, better benefits. For a long time, that was the way of the world. The recession may reorder things a bit. I know many, many people in the private sector who have, in the last year, had to swallow pay cuts. Not a no-raise year, not a watch-your-raise-be-eaten-by-health-care-cost-increases year, but an across-the-board decrease, accompanied by a bigger bite from health care, for a grand total of, well, a lot. Ten, 15 percent, in some cases.

Public-sector workers have been insulated from that, somewhat, at least the ones with contracts. A while back I related my jaw-drop moment while reading about the benefits bestowed upon Detroit city employees, including health care for children up to age twenty-damn-FIVE, and more days off than Ronald Reagan enjoyed in his last years in office. The new mayor, Dave Bing, has baldly stated this is unsustainable. In my own little burg, 2010 means contract-negotiation time, and while no one’s said it out loud yet, there are whispers of haircuts all around. Many other states have had public employees on unpaid furloughs already, however; I’m a follower of Amy Welborn’s Twitter feed, and down in Alabama, I gather she’s been trying to get her driver’s license renewed, enduring Soviet-style lines in the few offices that remain open, and still hasn’t been successful.

All this by way of saying that if you got Columbus Day off, and you got paid for it, I hope you did something wonderful, because that feels like a holiday past its sell-by date.

In the newspaper business, we never got the B-level holidays off — Columbus Day, Veterans’ Day, MLK Day and so on. Plus we got the lousy paychecks, too. You see why we’re so surly and wear cheap shoes.

A shabby guy on a crummy bicycle just rode past my house, checking out the recycling bins. Hard times in Michigan.

So. I want to tell you what we did this past weekend, now that I’ve finally exposed the secrets of middle-school dances. After watching “Whip It” the week before, we thought we might check out the local roller derby. And so we did: The Detroit Roller Girls met the Dairyland Dolls of Madison, Wisconsin Saturday at the Masonic Temple. It was a doubleheader, the two travel teams and then the varsity, and it was? Wonderful. Better than “Whip It,” because it wasn’t pretty actresses playing tough, but real tough girls who, you can tell, do not require a security guard to escort them to their cars after the crowd has gone home.

The bout itself was so lopsided — we left at halftime when the score was 151-8, or some such — that I suspect the Dairyland Dolls sent the junior-junior varsity. The Dolls had no D, they had no O, but they did have helmets festooned with Holstein markings. (Where was Wisconsin in its state marketing before cows became kitschy?) But it was still fun, and I think I discovered my roller-derby name, which you may address me by, but don’t tell its owner, who will hunt me down and kill me for theft. Ready? Keyser Suze.

The Detroit Derby Girls field four separate teams. Best name: Detroit Pistoffs.

And now I commence 72 hours of top-speed work, made that way in part by the Columbus Day holiday. Expect thin gruel for a while.

Grosse Pointe is a community that honors tradition. (Sometimes to a fault. That’s for another day.) Lots of people who live here as adults grew up here, went away to college, and came back like homing pigeons, because they like the continuity of the place, its small-town feel, its bedrock of lifers and rotating cast of newcomers, drawn by the beauty, the schools, the lake.

What that means is, when the Grosse Pointe War Memorial (a community center) announces the dates for its middle-school dances, many of the parents you know will remember attending them when they were 12 years old. Or, like my friend Michael, whose son grew up here with his ex-wife, will have a different memory:

“I remember how scantily clad the girls were,” he told me as I prepared to drive Kate to her first one. Michael went to Catholic school, so he has a certain Catholic-schoolboy idea of what constitutes scantily clad. That’s what I thought, anyway.

Five minutes later, I pulled into the parking lot, and beheld two girls shivering by the door. On a chilly October evening, they were wearing shorts and tank tops. I immediately wondered if the other thing I heard about the dances, which everyone calls War Dances, was true — that they were cesspools of drinking, smoking and oh-my-god-I-can’t-even-imagine. I hadn’t believed that, because I thought how stupid can the people who run these things be? The procedure for just buying a ticket made in loco parentis sound like dangerous permissiveness. There was a special ID only a parent could buy, after swearing your child was a lawfully enrolled student of the school system, and you couldn’t buy a ticket without the ID. There were strict hours, pickup and dropoff policies. No one would be allowed to leave before 10 p.m.; there were no ins-and-outs. I think you’d have an easier time getting into the White House.

On the other hand, there were those girls, dressed for the Fourth of July in October.

Kate was no help. I insisted she dress appropriately, but she never told me why, month after month, I was picking up the only girl in long pants and sleeves. She said shorts and tanks were just what everyone else wore, and I chalked it up to one of the quirkier sub-traditions, one that, needless to say, I would hold the line against.

Well. This year I finally got to set foot inside the place, when I offered to chaperone. It immediately became clear why summer outfits are the uniform, and I smacked my forehead for stupidity: When you put a couple hundred sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders into a ballroom and crank up the tunes, it takes about eight minutes for the room to reach the temperature of a sauna. The ballroom looks out over the lake, but the million-dollar view is gone by the third song, as condensation covers the floor-to-ceiling windows. At the stroke of 7:30, the doors open and the kids pile up at the check-in tables, where they must display the special ID and have it checked against the computer-generated list of names. No ticket sales at the door. If you haven’t paid for a ticket by noon on dance day, you are turned away — no exceptions. Lady Gaga is already blasting from the ballroom, and they’re eager to get moving. Within 20 minutes, nearly everyone is there, the lights are down, the light outside — what you can see of it through the condensation — has faded into gray, and we’re war-dancing.

What that means is, and this will be familiar to anyone who ever attended a middle-school dance of any sort, clots of three to seven girls dance together in constellations, while boys talk in similar-size knots, or else sit in the chairs that line the walls. And that is pretty much how it goes for the next two and a half hours.

After everyone checks in, we set up the refreshments, which consist of ice water and lemonade. The one parent-volunteer holdover from last year rolled out a cart with what seemed like an excessive number of water pitchers. We refilled them all three or four times through the night, and for a solid hour, all we did was pour, pour, pour. As soon as we could set down a dozen cups, a dozen kids would pile out, red-faced, throw down the ice water like marathoners, discard the cups and head back into the heat. Lady Gaga gave way to Beyoncé, who gave way to Mylie Cyrus, who gave way to half a dozen artists I’ve never heard of. When I got tired of pouring I would circle the perimeter of the floor, careful always to avert my gaze from my own kid, to whom I’m promised I would give no indication of our relationship. Girls dancing, boys watching — check. Then I’d leave, because I was dressed in long pants and long sleeves, and brother, it was hot in there.

I asked the man who, along with his wife, organizes these affairs, how the drugs-and-alcohol rumors got started. He said the only incident he’d known of was about three years ago, when some eighth-grade girls showed up drunk, got past check-in and promptly barfed on the dance floor. Two police officers monitor the doors and occasionally do a perimeter trot-around. The bathroom is a two-stall affair with the door left open to the hallway. The no-entry-without-ID policy eliminates drop-ins, and things have gone smoothly pretty much forever.

At 10 p.m. sharp — you could set your watch — the lights come on, the music stops, and the whole crew piles out like puppies to meet the line of parents lined up for the trip home. I made one last pass through the ballroom, which, though emptying swiftly, still retained its heat.

I wished I were wearing shorts, too.

Bloggage? Some good stuff today:

An interview with Maurice Sendak (HT: Laura Lippman) about his enduring children’s classic, and the upcoming movie adaptation. Some great evidence of why editors aren’t always right:

The entire staff at the publishing house were keen on my changing the word “hot” to “warm” on the last page. Because “hot” meant “burn.”

(For some reason this reminds me of the time on the old Dick Van Dyke show, when Laura wrote a charming children’s book, and Rob, the envious professional writer, wanted to work on it. He changed “sad” to “morose.”)

A long segment from Rachel Maddow, but she just nails the Nobel and is smarter than everything else I read about Friday’s news, and that includes Tom Friedman’s stupid “the speech he should give in Oslo” paint-by-numbers kit. (If there any column-writing trope more stale than “the speech he should give”? Yes: the “open letter.” Now you know.)

Finally, for Stratford fans only: Douglas Campbell died recently. The Scottish-Canadian actor was 87 and a founding member of the greatest Shakespeare company in North America. Robert Fulford explains why he mattered, in the National Post.

How did I manage to plan my week so everything happens on Monday or Tuesday? Bottom line is, I have work on top of work to do today, and in jettisoning chores, the blog draws the short straw today. Regular readers know I consider this my daily warmup and batting practice, and you watch: I’m gonna pull a writing muscle today, I just know it.

Anyhoo, I’m not going to have time to write anything fun until late afternoon, so let’s just bag it today, eh? Open thread to take wherever you want. I’m participating in a fun thread with one of my Facebook friends over the Sight & Sound best-films lists; did you know there are people in the world who consider “Raging Bull” to be overrated? Bah.

But you can talk about Afghanistan, too. You’ll just have to do it without me.

What to say about David Letterman? Cad? Sexual harasser? Sugar daddy? All of the above. My head hurts. I’m struck by this unsourced gossip, via Defamer, which implies a gig working for Dave was win-win all around, if you didn’t mind occasional sexual service in return for having your law-school bill paid. For the record, I disapprove. For all the good that will do.

A man I know once told an approving anecdote about an ambitious female journalist who got a coveted job by sleeping with the right people, that this is the way of the world, who are we to judge, etc. Well, I’m judging. Consenting adults aren’t always co-equals, and the more comely young assistants there are in the world willing to do kneepads work with the boss in return for graduating from law school debt-free, the tawdrier the world gets. I’m not after a perfect one, just one a little less tawdry.

Whatever happens to Letterman is obviously up to his bosses. My guess is, he’ll survive and thrive. He has a lot of fans, and he’s good at his job. He’s no hypocrite; while he mines his personal life for material, he’s never claimed to be perfect.

A topical Top 10 list.

Well, OK. Pals, this week has been brutal, and today dawned — if that’s the word for it — overcast, rainy and chilly. Which means it’s a perfect day to go to Costco and buy in bulk. Also, I’m looking forward to tonight, when I chaperone one of the middle-school dances our community is known for. I’ve been told by opposing parental camps that they are either a) fun affairs with lemonade; or b) dodgy dens of misbehavior approved of by short Polish-speaking film directors. I volunteered to help so I could see for myself, but I’m not expecting to see much beyond option A, above. If nothing else, it gives me yet another hammer to hang over a certain seventh-grader’s head: If you don’t do X, I will shake my booty on your dance floor. Talk about a motivator.

Now to do the crossword puzzle and try to beat Eric Zorn’s time. Have a great weekend, all.

Lazy morning, watching the bunny hop around. While Ruby will never claim her place in the pet hall of fame, it has been interesting having her live with us. Humanity’s deal with companion animals has always been that we’ll share our bounty in exchange for something of theirs — mousing ability, a nose that can find game or just a wagging tail when we come home after a brutal day among the other primates. I’m still figuring out what we get from Ruby, although Kate is thrilled every time she sees her slammin’ cuteness or strokes her cloudlike fur. I enjoy carrying on squeaky-voice conversations with her and hand-feeding her pieces of apple and banana. But on a quiet morning when I’m alone in the house, sometimes I just enjoy watching her explore her world.

Despite their ability to use a litter box, rabbits make mediocre house pets, at least for people with nice houses. They’re too inclined to destruction, and while intelligent, they don’t really possess the brainpower to make the chew-this-not-that distinction dogs do. I’d hoped by this point Ruby would have lost her natural wariness around us, but she’s still one of the world’s tastiest and most abundant prey animals, and if I’m stroking her on my lap in the office, all it takes is the sound of Kate bounding up the stairs to send her under the bed for 20 minutes of trembling. The fading light in evening is always my cue to round her up and put her back in her cage, because otherwise she’ll pick her hiding place for the night and refuse to come out for love, money or carrot greens.

But one reason we keep animals in the house is to see the world through their eyes. Who isn’t thrilled by the dog who stares into the darkness outside the glow of the home fires and growls deep in his throat? To a rabbit, all the world is meadow and moor, the highest place in it is a vantage spot to watch for predators, the lowest a burrow for digging. I threw a couple of cheap blankets on the guest-room bed for her amusement, and she’s pleased to root through them for an hour at a time, pushing them with her nose and paws into a landscape that suits her. If I join her there with the laptop, sometimes she will put her twitchy nose up against my ear and kiss me.

It’s hard not to anthropomorphize, though. Note how I just turned a sniff into a kiss.

I’m starting to think we gave her the wrong name. Kate was commenting on her smoky-eye markings, and sang the Maybelline jingle. And I thought Maybelline would have suited her perfectly. She grooms more often than most supermodels.

God, I’ll be glad when this week is over. Funny how losing just one more hour of sleep at night can bollix up your productivity but good. Bloggage? A little:

Jim at Sweet Juniper keeps a Polaroid camera in his car for feral-dog shots. and has a new collection up today. I think I’ve seen that brindle pit bull bitch before. Or else one of her sisters.

Are salaries like Scott Simon’s the dirty little secret of public broadcasting? I’ve known a few people in broadcasting, and a few more in public broadcasting, and the model is the same in both places — a few bloated “personalities” at the top get a big pile of cash, while the rank and file work second jobs to afford studio apartments. But if I knew the guy was making $300K, I wouldn’t give them my $50, either.

If bloggers are going to do the work of paid journalists, they’d better grow some thick skins, as some learn what the people they cover really think of them. Living in Portsmouth (pronounced “Pors’muf” locally) should be good preparation, though.

If no one has used the term “Polanski-palooza” yet, let me be the first. If only I could collect a royalty — I think it’s a winner.

Have a good rest of the day. I’m getting going any minute now.

My search for the ideal stimulant continues. I’m trying to find that elusive pick-me-up that I can down sometime around 10 p.m. that will keep me alert until 1 a.m., but still let me sleep afterward. Two cups of coffee handle the stay-awake part, but sour my stomach for sleeping. Energy drinks make me feel like a 51-year-old in baggy shorts, tryin’ to hang with the kids. Today I got a brainstorm — a memory, actually. Morning Thunder.

My friend Paul hated coffee but needed serious stimulation to get going in the morning, and used to drink a gigantic tankard of Celestial Seasonings’ Morning Thunder tea, with four or five bags steeping in there. It was a pretty vile drink, but it did the trick. I tried it for a while (one bag at a time), but dropped it when I got tired of people making poop jokes about my beverage. (What brings on the famous 10 a.m. session with the morning paper, anyway? Is it the alimentary canal making room for breakfast, the hot liquid or the caffeine? And why does it mostly affect men? I’ve never known one who didn’t need a little me-time at midmorning.) After a while, it made me associate Morning Thunder with boom-booms, and by then I had developed the obligatory journalist’s taste for rancid newsroom coffee, which was free.

But with this unusual need for a specific eye-opener, maybe it’s time to check out the M.T. again. So I stopped where I never do — the tea section at the supermarket.

It’s kind of depressing. Tea runs in cycles like everything else, and now we’re deep into the relaxation thing. With eye-opening delegated to Starbucks and dark-roast arabica beans, tea has to take the opposite tack, and the most common word is decaffeinated, along with calming and serenity. No Morning Thunder in evidence. Ah, well.

Last night a triple-e from Starbucks at 8:45 did the trick magnificently. Drowsiness arrived at 12:55 a.m. If I try it tonight, it’ll either be too much or too little.

Do the guys at Starbucks try to speak Italian to you, too? “Here’s your tripplio,” or whatever; I wasn’t taking notes. Sometimes, when I feel like making my triple a dessert, I’ll order it with whipped cream. Tripplio con panna, the baristas say. They’re probably the same wiseasses who refer to Detroit as day-twah. Blech.

What a pleasant weekend, made for long bike rides, a little weightlifting and a pass through the Nordstrom’s shoe sale. The Steve Madden boots I’ve been eyeing keep falling in price, but they’re still not a justifiable purchase. I don’t have the legs, or the youth, to stuff jeans into boots anymore. And Kate will give up her Ed Hardy sneakers when they pry them off her cold, dead feet. Best would be a cool pair of ankle boots, but the only ones like that they’re making these days have towering heels. My knees hurt just looking at them. Where is a woman somewhere between stilettos and Hush Puppies to find her footwear? Not at Nordstrom’s shoe sale, evidently.

As you can see, friends, I have very little today. I stayed away from my computer for a couple of days and strongly recommend it, except for the pile of e-mail that accumulates under the slot. And I didn’t get too much bloggage, but a little:

New York magazine looks at the birther/wacker far right. What a bunch of maroons.

And now off to begin manic Monday. Kate woke up with a sore throat and informs me it’s sweepin’ the schoolyard. Oh, joy.

Ruby the rabbit is turning out to be less pet by far than a dog or cat, but still amusing. I keep her close by, to monitor her chewing and miscellaneous destruction, but also to observe her wacky antics. She likes to climb to the tops of things, then jump up and down for the fun of it. Yesterday she interrupted a nap by placing a single paw on my back three or four times — hey, you awake? Lately she’s fond of long grooms, followed by mini-naps in fluffy-ball position, and then an extended paper-shred project. She prefers the paper be nice and crackly. I knew maintaining all these newspaper subscriptions would pay off one day.

The only bedroom I let her in is the guest room/office, which has a white bedspread (camouflage). I keep a couple of cheap blankets up there, and she likes to burrow and dig in them. She photographs better against the darker colors of the downstairs:

Why do we keep pets, anyway? Because we like carrying on conversations with them in squeaky voices? That’s my theory today, anyway.

You should hear the conversations Ruby and I can have over a bundle of carrot greens. You’d be …horrified.

Ugh. Another short night of sleep, another early meeting. I don’t feel capable of anything approaching serious discussion yet, so your loss, toots — sometimes you get what you pay for. How about a cavalcade of idiocy?

Everybody’s seen this by now, but the classics stay fresh forever: Ernie Anastos, anchorMAN! Stay classy, New York City.

A friend of mine works for the Palm Beach Post, and once told me the paper’s older, conservative readership dictates that they be downright prudish in their discussions of any story with a sex angle. You could read the entirety of the Bill and Monica clip file, for instance, and never know what, precisely, the two did together, as it was always referred to as simply “sex.” Well. Looks like they changed their policy. At least on the racy internets, anyway.

Look, free crack! And it’s not addictive at all; you can quit anytime you want. That’s what I tell myself, anyway.

You get in every morning, naked, and it makes you feel warm and good. So of course it’s out to kill you.

Meeting. Bicycle. Back later.

Is mental illness afoot in the land? If you say, “Spiders are crawling up the wall! Can’t you see them?” And I say no I can’t but here, let’s take a picture of them; if there are none in the picture will you believe they’re imaginary? And you say, well, OK, and I take the picture and there are no spiders, and you say you cast a spell and made the spiders invisible! Does that suggest disordered thinking to you?

It does to me. Which is only my way of saying the people who are today saying, “Sure, Obama’s school speech is innocuous now. What do you think it looked like before brave patriots stood up and objected, huh?” Those people? Sound insane.

But I’m keeping my mouth shut. I sent an e-mail to my local school board about the administration’s decision on the speech. (They’re delaying it for later use — defensible under the circumstances — but allowing for parental opt-out, which… isn’t.) I hope I struck the right note of arch douchiness; I described myself as disappointed and disillusioned, which I think is just perfect for notes like these, a little bit of parallel redundancy to underline one offense with another. There’s something about writing a j’accuse letter that makes me want to use phrases like “I think not.” You just can never de-smug them entirely.

OK, then. Summer’s mostly over, and the past week — the last week of Kate’s vacation — was lovely. We went to the pool Sunday, and I made an appropriate end-of-summer gesture: I went without sunscreen. Ask me how much I regret my sun wrinkles. Yeah. About that much.

Meanwhile, I spent a chunk of a relaxed weekend catching up with a bit of neglected culture. First, “In the Loop,” one of those movies so small it barely exists, but god, funny as hell. Set in the U.K., Washington and New York in the drumbeat before the Iraq war, it’s sort of a meaner, blacker, harder-to-understand “West Wing,” with Aaron Sorkin’s politics sucked out and extra funny pumped in. I only caught about a third of it, cloaked as it was in thick Scottish burrs and English slang, delivered at a blistering pace. I think I’d need about two more watchings to absorb it all.

The action begins when a somewhat dim British politician tells the BBC that war is “unforseeable,” a word that puts the prime minister’s office into a tizzy and incurs the wrath of Malcolm Tucker, the p.m.’s chief of communication, so gloriously profane his rants edge into poetry. (When the minister steps further into the goo by saying, that sometimes a country must “climb the mountain of conflict,” Tucker accuses him of being a “Nazi Julie Andrews.” It’s the flat-A sound in “Nazi” that kills.) Soon said politician is off to Washington and then to the U.N., trailing aides far smarter than he is, if only at the fine art of ass-kissing and jockeying for favor.

If you have a decent on-demand cable service, you’ll find it on one of the IFC channels for about six or seven bucks. Definitely worth it.

And I got a good way into “Closing Time,” Joe Queenan’s memoir of growing up with a father so drunk and brutal he could only have fathered, well, Joe Queenan, the celebrated master of mean. Reviews tell me this story ends without the customary weepy reconciliation between father and son standard in alcoholism memoirs, and that’s what intrigues me — the bleakness that lies at the heart of a man who can honestly say his father beat him so hard, so often and so unjustly that he finally thrashed every last shred of love out of his own child. The NYT critic notes:

There will be truces near the end, but when the family attends the old man at his deathbed, there is precious little warmth or nostalgia. Two of his daughters consider their father “beyond redemption,” and their mother refuses, for herself and those daughters, to be listed in the obituary. The son feels neither love nor respect; he is there only because “having a bad father does not give anyone the right to be a bad son.” Three years later, the anniversary of Joe Sr.’s death passes unnoticed. “My father was dead,” Queenan writes, “and I did not miss him.”

As grim as that sounds, it’s still a vastly entertaining read.

And now it begins. Fall. Still weeks of warm weather ahead, but for all intents and purposes, we must put away our white shoes and put our noses back to the grindstone. I’m packing the sunblock and thinking of projects. How about you?