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.

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.

One of my local Twitter follows has established a coyote-sighting Google map. He rendered it in Earth, which gives it that CIA-surveillance flava:

Of course I tweeted it to GrossePointeToday.com, and with that I conclude today’s edition of Sentences That Wouldn’t Have Made a Lick of Sense a Decade Ago.

No, one more: Shopping with Kate the other day, I heard a song I liked on the store’s playlist, so I Shazam’d it, but waited until we got home to buy it.

(It was “Rock & Roll Queen” by the Subways. Go ahead and laugh, but I’ve always had a weakness for a tight little single that can reach the finish line in under three minutes.)

I was making my cop-shop rounds yesterday in sandals and a T-shirt, freezing to death, when I glanced at the dashboard thermometer and read an appalling figure: 56 degrees. I began an R-rated sort of gibbering rant not unlike the father’s battles with the furnace in “A Christmas Story.” School is out in two days, summer swimming programs begin the following Monday, and the pool is about as appealing as, well, a pool on a 56-degree day. I’m all for a little character-building weather, but my character feels fully constructed at the moment, thanks very much.

When I took responsibility for collecting the public-safety reports for the new website, I anticipated handing this chore off to one of my students, but now that I’ve done it a while? No way. It’s too much fun for a storyteller to examine these little tragedies and comedies, rendered so succinctly in the passive-voice poetry of Copspeak:

A traffic stop was effected…I detected an odor commonly associated with intoxicants…Suspect was confrontagious…

Some of these accounts could be entered in a short-short story contest. Disputes between neighbors are the most interesting, because I have the advantage the involved parties do not: Distance. In my god’s-eye view of things, I can look down with a cool head and only marvel that all these hard feelings, all this yelling, all this paperwork was over…a barking dog. (On the other hand, there is nothing like being awakened at a too-early hour by a gas-powered leaf blower to send the blood pressure off the charts; I have experienced this myself.) Two weeks ago there was an account of a gutter-cleaning job that nearly came to fisticuffs. My takeaway lesson: Do not spray gunky gutter debris on a freshly washed car. In the Motor City, people take these things very, very seriously.

As you can see, I’m short on material today. Fortunately, I have an excess of bloggage:

I hope Kym Worthy sends Kwame Kilpatrick back to jail, and this time she throws away the key.

Jon Stewart, national treasure: Make sure you watch the embedded clip.

The Pope was “visibly upset” over details of abuse in Irish penal institutions church-run homes for wayward children, but the report doesn’t say what, exactly, he was upset about. My money’s on: “that the rest of the world heard our secret.” Count me among those with more than two working brain cells who believe the idea that Rome didn’t know about this vast national network of sadism academies as, well, bullshit. Maybe he didn’t have “The Magdalene Sisters” in his Netflix queue.

But because we like to end on an up note: Sex With Ducks, the music-video response to Pat Robertson’s concerns what legalizing gay marriage may lead to. Safe for work, at least with headphones.

I have so much work to do it’s not funny. So I’m off to do it.

Gourmet magazine has a recipe this month for homemade ketchup, and Alan asked if I’d be making any. Short answer: No. But it reminded me I already have a cookbook with a homemade-ketchup recipe, and for the first time in years, I dug out the Southside Farmers Market cookbook, published as a fundraiser for Fort Wayne’s market in 2001.

When I left town, the market wasn’t exactly dying, but every year it got a little sadder to visit. The old stalwarts who kept it going were well past retirement age, and the locavore movement hadn’t caught on yet. When I asked people whether they visited, most said they didn’t, citing the usual reasons — convenience, distance. Sometimes they said they wouldn’t buy lettuce fresh from the farm when you could get it cheaper at the Wal-Mart Super Center; these folks I wrote off as missing the point. A few talked vaguely about it being “so far away,” and sometimes they were and sometimes I sensed what they were really saying is, “But it’s in a black neighborhood!” These folks I also wrote off. But I told everyone they were missing something, that you could find the best tomatoes and corn and melons and all the rest of it. I still miss Cherry Day in June, when a guy drove a truckload of frozen cherries up from southern Indiana. He sold one unit — 25 pounds of pitted tart cherries mixed with five pounds of sugar and frozen in a five-gallon bucket. I waited until it thawed enough to handle, then broke everything down into one-quart bags and put it all back into the freezer, and had enough to eat cherry pie all year long. There’s nothing like that in Detroit. Dammit.

Anyway, the cookbook had not one but three ketchup recipes, all aimed at the home canner; one calls for 15 pounds of tomatoes, which suggests you’ll be giving the condiments aisle a pass for a good long while. But I spent some time going over the rest of it as well, and realized it was a mistake to leave it on the shelf so long.

Cookbooks are all products of their time. Auguste Escoffier may have been the modern father of French cuisine, but who makes his recipes anymore? Who has time? Even Julia Child’s original recipes seem slightly ridiculous; in “My Kitchen Wars” I remember Betty Fussell talking about making a roast encrusted in Swiss cheese or something. Veal Prince Orloff is mostly remembered as a punchline in a Mary Tyler Moore episode.

Times change, technologies change, one day you look up and you can get fresh lemongrass and Mexican tomatillas in your local supermarket, spring mix year-round, so you know, you have to have ideas on how to use them that match.

But these sorts of cookbooks aren’t getting perused by Ruth Reichl, which is why I love them. They’re the collected wisdom of hundreds of Hoosier cooks handed down to their daughters, who might change them a little or a lot, and hand them down some more.

Face it, some should have been dropped along the way, like the Braunschweiger Ball, which is you-know-what mixed with onion soup mix (I guess because a soft, subtle flavor like Braunschweiger needs a little kick in the pants) and formed into a ball, after which it’s covered with a mixture of cream cheese and Miracle Whip (I guess because, you know, there’s just not enough fat in it to make it satisfying otherwise).

But there’s also a recipe for dandelion wine, although where I might find a quart of dandelion blossoms I’m not sure. Beyond that, the ingredients are one orange, three pounds of sugar, one sliced lemon and one cake of yeast. Hmm. There’s also something called Russian Tea, which calls for Tang, powdered instant tea, powdered lemonade mix, cinnamon, cloves and sugar. Mix all the powders and make it one cup at a time. Again: Hmm.

There’s a fair amount of the sort of country cooking that would disappoint Alice Waters, food like the Amish make, with canned this and dehydrated that, and if you don’t like it, see what you feel like making after you’ve spent an entire day in back-breaking labor, either in the field or at the factory. Dump Cake, Oreos layered with Cool Whip, that sort of thing. But there’s also a beet-apple puree that looks worthy of “The Splendid Table” if not Chez Panisse, and I may make it myself in the fall. There are quite a lot of cabbage recipes, which remind me I like cabbage and should do more with it. I wasn’t surprised to find the fish chapter is very short, only six recipes, five of which call for canned tuna or salmon. Indiana is far from any ocean.

And then there’s Impossible Pie:

I cup sugar
4 eggs
2 cups milk
1/2 cup flour
1/2 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon nutmeg
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/4 cup melted butter
1/2 cup coconut

Put all ingredients into blender for 30 seconds. Pour into 9 inch pie pan and bake for one hour at 375 degrees. Makes its own crust, filling and topping. Easy! Enjoy!

I’m tempted.

What’s your favorite countrified recipe?

And how was your weekend? We saw “Up,” in 3D. Once again, I’m reminded there are two ways to make “family” entertainment. One is the Rugrats/Dreamworks way, which is to sprinkle the script with pop-culture references that kids don’t get and adults do, which I’ve always thought was cheap and snarky and ultimately reminds you how much you don’t want to be there.

The other is the Pixar way — to write outstanding stories that appeal to every person in the audience, to tug the adults toward their children and children toward their parents, and then do them completely sincerely, without irony, and with the highest possible technical standards. That’s “Up,” in a nutshell. Not my favorite (that would be “Ratatouille,” which had me in tears at the reading of Anton Ego’s restaurant review), but they are all so uniformly wonderful trying to rank them is just a waste of time.

This is also the first movie I’ve seen to use 3D as a way to enhance the visual experience, rather than as a gimmick. Nothing is flung toward the viewer, there are no gotcha shots, there’s nothing that, when you see it on your own TV in six months, will make you think, “What were they going for with that one?” It’s just visual artistry, pure and simple. My kind of guys.

Manic Monday commences in five, four, three, etc. Have a good one.

How did I manage to schedule a 9 a.m. meeting and a 10 a.m. haircut on the one day of the week that usually belongs entirely to me? God knows. Anyway, because time is fleeting, a quick hop to this week’s Embarrassing Photo. Me, nervous on a mountain:

I don’t trust these damn things. This is in Wyoming, Brokeback Mountain country, 1992. We were trying to get into Yellowstone Park, but the east entrance was closed. Why? Because — and this is where the mistrust comes in — rain and 70 degrees in Cody translated to snow up to your butt in the mountains between us and the park. This photo was taken a few days before the summer solstice. What you can’t see in the picture: I’m wearing shorts.

But that’s not the embarrassing part. The embarrassing part is the curly perm. Thirty-four years old, and I still hadn’t learned.

I’ve been a flatlander all my life. I don’t care how pretty it is; I can’t get comfortable in a place where you can fall off the earth and die.

Off to my meeting. Sorry for the big file size. One of these days I’m going to get another copy of Photoshop and its fabulous “save for web” setting. Have a great weekend.

Publishing success frequently lies in a niche that goes something like this: X Tells You What the Experts Won’t. Vicki Iovine, a clever writer who married a rich recording executive and could have retired to a life of indolence and manicures, hit a succession of books out of the park, all with the title, “The Girlfriend’s Guide to…” etc. I read the pregnancy volume cover-to-cover and skimmed the rest, but they all had the same idea at their root: Screw doctors and nurses, they lie. I will tell you the truth.

There’s something to this. Not all doctors lie, but I do wish more would use plain language, which would help a lot. Say “pain” rather than “discomfort,” for instance. “You will probably” beats “you may experience.” And so on.

Lately I’ve been thinking I should write a girlfriend’s guide to aging, although it would have to be more like The Old Crone’s Guide. I could spend an entire chapter on eyebrows alone. It would be called “When You Look in the Mirror and Andy Rooney Looks Back,” or just “Eyebrows: WTF?!?” Of all the mysterious, horrible, humiliating changes connected to aging, I’ve never read about eyebrows, at least not in women. No one told me about these long eyebrow hairs that appear out of nowhere (I call them “Andys”) and must be banished. No one said I would turn into a schnauzer. I’ve taken to screeching, “Goddamn Andy Rooney eyebrows!” in the mirror as I do battle with tweezers, which prompts Alan to reply, “What the hell are you talking about?”

I should add: For men, this is the only permissible response. That is to say: blindness. The wife of a friend of mine had three babies in five years and idly asked while she was getting dressed one morning, “Do you think we could afford a little work on these?” Indicating her breasts, of course. “Nothing drastic, just a lift.” He said, “Well, I suppose we could figure something out,” and was instantly rewarded with a metaphorical shoe to the head. He didn’t realize the question being asked wasn’t about cosmetic surgery but about their enduring attractiveness, and his scripted answer was, “What are you talking about? They’re perfect the way they are.”

The Old Crone’s Guide to Marital Chit-Chat While Dressing. There’s my title.

So, how’s your week going so far? I’m sitting here knitting my Andys together, scowling out the window. The closed window. The temperature will not reach 70 degrees today. It didn’t reach 70 yesterday. It briefly reached 74 the day before, when the wind changed rather abruptly and imported some air from Arkansas or something. But then it changed back and, well, it’s June and I expect the windows to be open by now, but we’re still walking around in sweatshirts, being grumpy.

Speaking of eyebrows, let’s kick off the bloggage with this short piece, “The Tragedy of Susan Boyle,” by John Wright. (HT: Wolcott.) A taste:

The world which celebrity promises those who embrace its life affirming narrative is a world absent of pain, poverty, boredom, and sadness. It is a fairytale lived in three dimensional splendour, replete with the adulation of millions, more money than you could ever spend, along with untold glamour and excitement. More importantly it offers the only freedom worthy of the name – the freedom to be the person you always dreamed of being, rather than the person you are.

Susan Boyle was one of the anointed few to be allowed entry to this fairytale. This unfashionable, unglamorous, poor woman from an unfashionable, unglamorous, and poor town in Scotland was plucked from obscurity, stuck centre stage, and celebrated by millions of adoring fans around the world. Dubbed the ‘hairy angel’, here was the archetypal ugly duckling with the voice of a swan.

But then something happened, something unscripted and completely out of kilter with the expectations of a world weaned on the promise and the dream of everlasting happiness through fame and fortune. Susan Boyle let the world down. Instead of playing the part of the ‘hairy angel’ with the sonorous voice and thus fulfilling the myth by which we escape the drudgery of our daily lives, to be sure a prime time TV version of the ‘Hunchback of Notre Dame’ or ‘The Phantom of the Opera’, she committed the crime of pulling back the curtain on the myth to reveal its ugly truth – human despair.

Ah. Sigh. I haven’t really been following this story, but it doesn’t surprise me.

Some comic relief from Gawker: Watch the Fox & Friends Bunch Try to Process the Bruno-Eminem Stunt. This may require more pop-culture awareness than many of you have, so a thumbnail of the story so far: Sacha Baron Cohen stuck his bare butt in Eminem’s face at some MTV event. There was a flying harness involved and two people with hot product to sell in the entertainment marketplace, and that’s really all you need to know, but it’s still funny to watch these three clueless souls try to figure it out. I had a boss once who was gay but only sorta out about it, and even though everyone knew he was gay, there was one staff member who simply wouldn’t believe it, because he had once been married, and so that meant he couldn’t be gay, didn’t it? Didn’t it? The Foxies remind me of him.

Off to pluck something. Also, edit. Wish me luck.