Slate has a story today on why vintage stoves are better than modern ones, and while the writer, Regina Schrambling, comes at the subject from a somewhat more oblique angle than I would have — she bought her ’50’s-era Wedgewood as “vintage” in the early ’90s — we arrive at the same place. Not long ago the New York Times ran a story on Jim Harrison, the poet/novelist, at his winter home in Arizona. Harrison is a famous gourmand, and one of the great pleasures of his writing are his descriptions of food and meals. But I was delighted to see, in a video accompanying the story, that he cooks on a plain old standard-size electric range that looks as though it came from Sears.

“Why spend $6,000 on a stove when you can spend $6,000 on food?” he said. Dean & Deluca thanks you too, Mr. Harrison.

I’m a dedicated home cook, and while I far prefer gas cooktops (I have electric), I have to admit my basic suburban kitchen setup is good enough for 95 percent of anything I want to do there. If I had my druthers, equipment-wise, it would be nice to have a second oven, but I admit it would only get used at Thanksgiving and a handful of other occasions. The one thing my modern stove has that Schrambling’s likely doesn’t — a self-cleaning cycle — is a pretty big plus. (I remember Easy-Off, which was neither.)

But we agree in principal principle. Here’s my popcorn popper:

It’s a Kenmore, and it’s older than me. My mother recalled it was a gift from our Aunt Charlene to my brother and sister when they were toddlers. Both qualify for AARP membership now. (So do I, but only on the early-admission program.) I have no great sentimental attachment to it, and will give it up without tears if it ever breaks, but it refuses to do so. Schrambling writes of her Wedgewood:

So many other essentials in life are clearly improved in their latest incarnation: Phones are smaller and portable; stereos are downsized to ear buds; cars are safer and run on less fuel. But stoves are a basic that should stick to the basics: The fewer bells and whistles, the less need for bell-and-whistle repairmen. Motherboard is not a word that should ever be associated with the kitchen—put computer technology in a stove, and you’re asking for a crash. Google “I hate my Viking” these days, and you get a sense of how many things can go wrong with techno-overload. Some of these ranges combine electric and gas elements, which is a recipe for trouble, as is microwave or convection capability. This kind of overdesign is what killed combination tuner/turntables—one goes, and the other dies from neglect.

My popcorn popper doesn’t have an on-off switch. You plug it in, and coils in the bottom unit — the stained, non-washable part in the photo — come on. Put one tablespoon of oil and one-third cup of popcorn on the bowl and replace the lid. In a couple of minutes, the popping will start. Keep your ear cocked to when it stops, unplug, empty and serve. If you like, you can melt a tablespoon of butter in the bowl after you dump out the popcorn — it takes about another minute. That’s it.

Popping corn is so simple, you wouldn’t think planned obsolescence would come into the mix, but it did — poppers where the lid doubles as the serving bowl, where the butter can be melted simultaneously, where you can dispense with oil altogether — all these have come and gone since Sears sold this antique to Aunt Charlene. And yet the Kenmore soldiers on, homely and dented, but still showing up for work. What more can you ask?

Some bloggage before gym time:

Detroit culled its 167 or so city council candidates to nine finalists Tuesday. The top vote-getter was Charles Pugh, whom I remember during his time in Fort Wayne, as a reporter for WKJG. He hadn’t started shaving his head, wasn’t openly gay and was, as I recall, sort of dim. Well, you could have made the same claim about me. People change, and let’s bloody well hope it’s true in this case, because Detroit has had all the dim-witted city council members it can handle. (I’m not completely confident in this case. Pugh was the subject of a fashion feature in a local magazine a while back, and confessed that his trademark glasses — he has 30 pair or so — are completely for show. Clear-glass Non-corrective lenses. What sort of serious person indulges a witless vanity like that?)

The primary’s big loser: Martha Reeves, who sounds as though she’s losing her marbles. Or just criminally dumb. Sad.

Coozledad brought this to our attention yesterday: Your health-care vote or your life? This shit is getting out of hand.

Off to press and squat. Happy Thursday.

As you can imagine, yesterday wasn’t a very good day all around, even as we were all certain we did the right thing. Sprig started to fail on Sunday. At first we thought it was a repeat of the bad indigestion he had a couple months ago. But by Monday evening I was taking him to the animal ER for subcutaneous fluids and an anti-nausea shot, which the vet told me bluntly was “hospice care.”

Whatever it was, it gave him a good night’s sleep. Tuesday I rolled him onto his sternum and he tottered outside and peed like a man, but that was pretty much the end of his locomotion — he’s been growing steadily feebler over the last few months, and it was clear this was just about the end. We went to the vet later, and he said, “He’s working very hard just to stay alive,” and we made the decision. We all petted him, and I held my hand on him until I felt his heart stop. He didn’t move or stir; he just wasn’t there anymore.

Later on, I bought a six-pack of supermarket cupcakes and ate two for dinner. I bloody well deserved it, too.

I’m touched by how many people stopped by to leave comments, but not surprised — this dog made an impression on people. He liked to stick his head out the window when we drove, and there was something about that eyepatch and the mismatched ears that just slayed people, who would roll down the windows to tell him how cute he was. (We called them Spriggy Davidians.) Many times we remarked that if the same personality was in a much bigger, uglier dog, he wouldn’t have survived puppyhood. But when you’re under 20 pounds and adorable, people cut you slack.

I think the template for his life was set when, at 9 months or so, we took him with us when we visited a friend in the Upper Peninsula. He was at his most exhausting, and I was looking forward to taking him somewhere we could let him exhaust himself for a change. (My friend’s cottage is on an island with no cars.) For the most part, he behaved himself, but there was a moment when we looked around and couldn’t see him anywhere. I searched the property, calling him. Nothing. We started to worry; the island, while car-free, is vast and wild in its interior, and all I could think was, he’d seen a deer, chased it into the woods, and was now out of earshot, maybe bogged in a cedar swamp, porcupine quills protruding from his nose, scared and miserable.

We decided on one more thorough search. I went to one side of the property, Alan to the other. Five minutes later, Alan came walking toward me, the dog in his arms, free of swamp mud and quills. He’d found him in the Les Cheneaux Yacht Club, which was having its end-of-summer Bloody Mary brunch. Forget chasing deer; he was chasing spilled popcorn and tipsy ladies willing to feed cheese cubes to cute little dogs. He was recruiting Davidians.

When Alan spotted him, he said, “There you are!” and Spriggy looked over his shoulder, saw his master, and ran in the opposite direction. He cornered him in a dead end near the bathrooms (Gulls and Buoys) and scooped him up. Busted. The ladies all wanted to give him a final pet as he was carried out.

He repeated this behavior the year he slipped away from the Christmas celebration at my sister’s, climbed onto the dining-room table, and ate the remainder of the pork tenderloin. He saw me see him, grabbed one last giant mouthful of sliced pork, leaped off the table and ran to the laundry room, wolfing it down as he went.

I’ve told myself to wait a few more days before picking up the bowls and beds. And a few weeks before we start thinking of another pet. Big shoes shouldn’t be filled quickly.

And thank you for all your notes, public and private. The contributions to the humane society are much appreciated, too. I’m donating his leftover special-diet food to our own local chapter; among the many tragedies of our economic decline has been the number of families leaving the area and leaving pets behind, some of which are old and virtually un-adoptable. Whatever helps, I guess.

So, howsabout some bloggage? OK:

The silver fox does it again, conservatives disapprove. Roy has the roundup.

Another gem from Detroitblog, via the Metro Times: A farm in the city, presided over by an 86-year-old woman who has seen it all:

A year later, just before the ’67 riot, (her son) Howard got into a street fight and police were called. They broke down the door of the King house to find him, and Mary wound up in a wrestling match with a cop.

“I was 260 pounds back then,” she laughs. “I got him right quick and I put him on the ground.” She grabbed his gun and nearly blew his brains out. “The devil was saying, ‘Shoot him! Shoot him!'” she recounts. Instead, Mary got up off the cop. Then she was thrown in the squad car, hit with a baton and bitten in the neck, which required a tetanus shot.

All wasn’t awful yesterday — it was also the premiere of my friend Rob Gulley’s short film, “Nikki & Eli,” at the Mitten Movie Project. It was, I’m pleased to say, very fine. Great job, Rob and all concerned. Remember me when you’re giving interviews in Cannes someday.

And life goes on. At the moment it goes down to the basement and folds the laundry.

I set out yesterday on my police rounds via bicycle, which would be my favorite workout of the week if not for all the sweating: I cover 15 miles or so with five cop-shop breaks for rest and entertainment. There’s nothing like finding a report on a neighbor complaining that his neighbor’s garden fountain is too loud to brighten a girl’s Monday, or seeing a grimmer one to fuel the grind to the next station.

But alas, it was not to be. The skies opened en route to the Farms, and I had to cut the whole thing short. I knew it was trouble when I stopped at a corner, and just that gentle braking was enough to make me skid. There’s enough skidding to be done around here in winter, no need to pile it on. As I stood under the sheltering eaves, screwing it up for a drenching, one of those Lance Armstrong types blew past — dressed European-style, head down, lean as…well, as Lance. A rolling Nike commercial. Just do it, it said. So I did.

Got pretty wet. But as my dad used to say, “You’re not sugar. You won’t melt.” (Other dads tell their daughters they’re pretty pretty princesses. My father preferred a different model.)

Ladies and gentlemen, a moment of silence: An F.O.M. has died. Which is? Why, a friend of Mitch (Albom), of course. I first discovered the F.O.M. obit when Warren Zevon left us; I thought the top of my skull would fly off, as Mitch told us all how much the deceased had loved… Mitch. Today’s F.O.M. is typical:

We first got to know each other when our books came out a year apart. We shared the joys and pressures of fast success, asking each other, “So what do we do now?” Frank wasn’t much into sports, but he would quiz me about “DEE-troit,” the accent on the wrong syllable, the “tr” rolling through his Irish brogue and making our industrial town sound like something out of “Finian’s Rainbow.”

“You’re a good fellah,” he would tell me, after we did speeches or book fairs together. To sit next to him was to sit at the knee of a better storyteller than your grandfather. And when I played “Danny Boy” on the piano, he would rise as if singing a national anthem.

That’s Frank McCourt, of course. I strived to see anything that would indicate Mitch had even read the man’s books, but other than the obvious Irish clichés — the word “impish” appears, as does “twinkle” — alas there was nothing. But you don’t have to have read a famous author (McCourt) when you’ve appeared onstage with him, do you?

The last song he did with our band was the cowboy tune “Don’t Fence Me In,” an odd choice for an Irishman. But it seems sadly fitting now, because you couldn’t fence him in…

I love things that are “sadly fitting” in retrospect, and especially when they are sadly fitting in a trite, obvious way, don’t you? It’s so satisfying.

Oh, it’s been a great morning for all the bookmarks in my Idiots folder. Lileks:

As I’ve said before, nothing sums up the seventies, and the awful guttering of the national spirit, than a pop song about Skylab falling on people’s heads. “Skylab’s Falling,” a novelty hit in the summer of ’79.

Wha-? Huh? Once again: What the hell is he talking about? A little Googling, and it seems it’s most likely this, and to call it a “hit” seems to be stretching it, but well, when you’re a soldier in the War on Straw, what’s a stretch, anyway. “Skylab” seems to be by none other than Steve Dahl, whose wife reads this blog from time to time; I hope she gets a kick out of this. I remember Skylab fondly, m’self, as I won an office pool on the splashdown site. My guess: Krakatoa, east of Java.

Lileks is dusting off this week’s meme, popular among conservative libertarians: Damn the torpedoes, on to Mars! Depending on where they fall on the spectrum, libertarians will advocate removing the government from everything from zoning to infrastructure maintenance to education, but if you talk to them long enough, you inevitably find the place where they advocate Uncle Sam just write a blank check, and why? Because they like this thing, that’s why, and so you find yourself talking to a person who doesn’t think the government should build an interstate highway, but should sink billions or trillions into a mission to Mars. Perhaps they all imagine that in another time, they would be the men standing on the prows of ships sailing off to the unknown, in profile to a setting sun. Because they are Libertarians, and they are Free.

I need to stop reading these people, although they certainly don’t disappoint in the blogfodder department, do they?

Bloggage elsewhere: I also need to start following Sarah Palin on Twitter, but maybe that’s what Gawker is for.

Speaking of Sarah: Funny.

Back to Gawker: Rachel Maddow, national treasure.

Off to the gym for death squats. Why do I bother? I’m still fat.

Even a peaceful suburb grows interesting after midnight. I went to bed at 1:15 a.m. and laid lay for a while listening to the night sounds. A few blocks away, I could hear an animal in distress, and tried to figure out what it was. Definitely not a cat, not quite a dog. Coyote? Possible, but again — not quite canine. I finally pegged it as a mortally wounded rabbit, which scream like little girls under those circumstances. Maybe an owl or hawk dropped it en route back to the tree. And then…

Two shots fired from a large-caliber handgun, the throaty kind. Pop pop. Instant silence.

Oh. OK. Remind me not to play the stereo too loud. A few minutes passed, and just as I was drifting off, the wounded-bunny sound started again.

I let sleep take me down, and hoped whoever was policing the neighborhood had good aim.

The birds started at 6 a.m., by the way. By 9 a.m., they’ve all vacated the arbor virea under my window and are off doing their bird activities, and you can’t hear a peep. But by then the lawn equipment has started. As I speak, someone has one of those goddamn power washers idling nearby, and all I can say is, I’m glad I don’t have a large-caliber handgun.

I’ll sleep when I’m dead, as Warren used to sing. I didn’t know he meant it literally.

Little Miss Grumpypants on a beautiful summer day. More coffee, stat.

So I’ve been reading about Senator Ensign, and wondering how things can get worse for him. The people who would have forgiven him for the affair surely have to be rocked back on their heels by the payoff to the paramour by…his parents? Mommy and daddy? Cleaning up after a 51-year-old man? And they say young people today are over-reliant on the ‘rents. They learned from the best. My mother bought a rug for me when I was starting out, a 9-by-12 raw-edged remnant, and I felt covered in shame. I told her I’d pay her back, and I never did, but still. The idea of her paying hush money to someone I’d shtupped would be unbearable.

This lesson keeps presenting itself over and over, and no one seems capable of learning it: Those who live by the “values” sword will die by it, and so let’s have mutual disarmament. I don’t know much about Ensign beyond that he’s a Republican with the usual Republican opportunism when it comes to lecturing others about family and marriage and so forth. Clearly these guys do it because they think it works, but when are they going to understand that when you do that, you are putting up big glass windows in your house, and when you act in conflict to your stated “values,” you are passing out a big basket of rocks.

So why not let it drop? Affairs happen. People are imperfect. We are all sinners. We live in a fallen world. Take your pick of platitudes, but mainly, cock your ear toward President Obama and recall his response to questions about Bristol Palin’s out-of-wedlock pregnancy last summer: “My mother had me when she was 18.” Don’t just listen to the words, but also the subtext: Life is a messy business sometimes. Knowing that none of us get out of it alive and far fewer unscathed, why not stop making “family values” a cornerstone of your platform? Democrats get away with this not because of their enabling media stooges, but because they never claimed to be paragons in the first place.

And I don’t care how rich your parents are, any man who would let mom and dad pay off his mistress should just go ahead and put his balls in escrow.

Bloggage for the weekend:

Don’t read this Eric Zorn story if you’re in a place where crying is frowned upon. Yes, it’s a dog story. Meanwhile, Jim at Sweet Juniper found a dog clubhouse. Love the comment about how they all play poker and smoke cigars.

From the I Love Detroit file: 167 people are running for City Council, and in such a crowded field, have to find their own ways to stand out. Like John Cromer:

He’s basing his campaign on appealing to felons by promising to remove questions about criminal records from the city of Detroit’s job applications.

In Detroit, that may well be enough of a constituency to put him over the top.

Elitism watch! Mary Katherine Ham at The Weekly Standard gets a big yuk out of Anderson Cooper not understanding what Cool Whip is, and embeds the YouTube clip to prove it. Only it’s not Cool Whip, it’s Redi-Whip, dumbass, and even if he doesn’t know what it is at first, he catches on quick. Once Kate said, “I wish Spriggy could talk.” And I replied, “But what if he said stuff we didn’t want to hear?”

“Like what?” she said.

“Oh, like…’I don’t like it when you pet me that way, and I’ve never liked it.'”

She caught on fast. “Yeah. Or, ‘Kate was eating the Redi-Whip right out of the can with the refrigerator door open,'” she said, and then stopped, abruptly. Sometimes it’s best not to even let the dog in on your secrets.

Have a good weekend, all.

UPDATE: Google suspended my AdSense account. No, I don’t know why. Yes, I appealed. No, they didn’t accept my appeal. Have you ever tried arguing with Google? It’s like scratching your nails down the side of the Sears Tower, hoping to draw blood. In the meantime, I’m looking for a new ad network, because the loss of that TWO HUNDRED THIRTY SIX WHOLE CRAPPY DOLLARS is really going to put a dent in my income this year. Suggestions? I’m all ears.

Twenty minutes! That’s all the time I have before I have to hit the ground running, and I really should wash my face and put on a bra first, so make that…15 minutes! Let’s bunt this post with a cleanout of my iPhone photos, stupid picture-notebook stuff I’ve been carrying around thinking this might make a blog item, but probably won’t. (And usually doesn’t.) But maybe when we combine them, we can get a much bigger lame-ass blog. Let’s find out. First, a Proustian memory-prod:

Pyramids of this stuff were stacked in the window of my local paint store, which I don’t visit often, but it’s next door to the bakery, which I do. It went up around the end of the school year, and even though this area doesn’t do much in the way of student rentals, there’s something about this no-nonsense product — “Detroit’s Original”? Really? — that conjures up memories of end-of-term moving day, of packing the boxes and suitcases and carrying them to the truck. The stuff you thought was so important in September turned out to be not-so-much; in fact, September is a distant memory. You leave behind a few loose papers, maybe some hangers in the closet. Soon the painters will be here with five gallons of Detroit’s Original Xtra Hide Apartment Flat, and that will be the end of your chapter in this place.

OK, so not exactly a madeleine. Let’s move on.

I have so many stories that begin “I knew the newspaper business was finished when…” that I really look like an idiot. If I knew, why didn’t I leave when I had the chance? Answer: Because I’m lazy and inert, and suck at everything else. But here’s one of those I-knew moments, in the Pets aisle at Target:

Do you realize, in a few more years, reporters won’t be able to make jokes about their work today being used to housebreak dogs tomorrow? It’ll be like the expression “dropping a dime.” What’s that? A pay phone? And it once cost a dime? Why didn’t they use Skype, grandpa? Shaddup, kid.

Finally, I’ve seen several of these vehicles around town in the last couple years:

They have signs on posts, too, but at least two and maybe three white vehicles — I’ve seen an SUV and this van — with the same message. SOMEONE KILLED R*SA, and dammit, they’re going to let the world know about it. (I don’t dare use this woman’s name, as I suspect they troll Google every 30 minutes, and the last mailing list I want to be on is theirs.) I went to the website, and it appears they do have a valid complaint; patients should not fall off the table in the cath lab. Nevertheless, it’s possible to view this as cruel and unusual punishment for poor Dr. B*rman.

And now it’s been 15 minutes, and I must begone. Begone! And have a swell day.

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. (CORRECTION, 9/2: Website updated. Check out Easter Island, Michigan.) 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.