Happy 16th birthday (80 in Jack Russell years) today to the other man of the house:

Now I have to take him to the BMV to get his license. Among the things I will not be doing today, however, is baking a bacon chicken layer cake, although I’m happy to share the recipe. What did we do before Google? I ask you:

Bacon Chicken Layer Cake

This recipe makes a real layer cake! Chicken, bacon and yogurt provide aromas that drive dogs crazy for this cake.

3 cups flour

1 T. baking powder

1/2 cup margarine, softened

6 eggs, beaten

1/2 cup corn oil

2 jars strained chicken baby food

2 cups finely shredded carrots

plain or vanilla yogurt

2 or 3 strips of bacon, fried crisp, then crumbled, or use bacon-flavored jerky strips, cut into bits.

Generously grease and flour two 8″ round cake pans; set aside. Combine flour and baking powder; set aside. In a mixing bowl, beat softened margarine until smooth. Add eggs and corn oil; mix well. Add strained chicken, and shredded carrots and mix until smooth. Add flour mixture and mix thoroughly. Pour batter into the 2 prepared 8″ cake pans. Bake at 325° for 60 minutes. Let cool for a few minutes before removing from pans. Cool completely on wire racks.

Place one layer on a serving plate and spread yogurt over top. Place second layer on top, then spread yogurt on top and sides of entire cake. Sprinkle crumbled bacon or bits of jerky strips over top. Use “Pupperoni” sticks for candles.

More later. I got some bidness to take care of.

I think I mentioned our dryer died. From the distant clanks coming from the basement, I suspect Alan’s trying to fix it right now. I did my part yesterday — driving to Roseville to pick up a switch that turned out not to be the problem. (Of course. It was simple and inexpensive. We’ll have a new dryer by week’s end, I predict.)

On the way, I started woolgathering about machines.

Alan’s a good partner to have in a household because he understands machines at a level I never did. He grew up in a working-class family, where a core value is you never pay someone to do what you can do yourself. As a teenager, he campaigned a motocross racer, needless to say at a level where you don’t have a pit crew. So when something breaks, he approaches the problem the way he would any other, by breaking down the components, the chain of connections that make the thing work, and tries to find the failure. What is a dryer? A drum that turns while hot air is blown through it. What are its essential parts? The motor, the fan, the heater. What’s the nature of the malfunction? It runs and blows, but the air isn’t warm. And so the problem is isolated — it’s something to do with the heater.

On the way out to Roseville, I thought about how few of us really understand how the machines we use work. I thought back to junior high and tried to remember the elements of the internal combustion engine, which we learned in physical science. I was one of only a few girls who got an A on that unit, and I still remember the feeling of wonder at the unlocking of the secret — the valve opens, the mixture sprays in the cylinder, the piston rises, the spark plug ignites, the piston is pushed down, another valve opens and the exhaust exits. My brother was a car guy, and I finally understood all that language he used. Manifold, camshaft, drive shaft, flywheel. I understood carburetion! And I was 14 years old. It was thrilling.

(My proudest moment: I wiggled under my friend Mark’s ’69 Camaro with a wrench and unjammed the shift linkage, based on having seen it done once before. It wasn’t a complicated repair — a good whack to unjam it — but I was the only one who could do it, and everyone cheered when I wiggled back out, because it meant we wouldn’t have to drive home from Sault Ste. Marie in second gear.)

Well, Henry Ford got old and died, and fuel injection replaced carburetion, and it’s safe to say most of my knowledge is obsolete now. I once interviewed a man who had been, at one time, the most sought-after Volvo/Mercedes mechanic in the region. He’d moved up in the world, and now owned a dealership. He said he’d be utterly lost under the hood these days, that it was more electronic than mechanical anymore, and while it made cars unquestionably better in a million ways, he could no longer fix them.

So this is what was on my mind when I got home, and found John and Sam had arrived in my absence. Their new Prius was in the driveway.

They’ve become Prius cult members, more effective salesmen than anyone paid by Toyota. We talked about the marvels of the car — the hybrid synergy drive, the seamless transition between the battery, the electric motor and the gas engine, the keyless entry and starting (you push a button). And then they insisted I drive when we went out to dinner. I tried to navigate the nasty Detroit freeways while maximizing my mileage, aided by the display of animated colored arrows. (Hybrid enthusiasts speak of the fender-benders they tend to have when their cars are brand-new, and they can’t tear their eyes away from the display.)

I stepped on the brake. “You’re think you’re braking, but you’re not,” John said, explaining that the car is smarter than I am, and knows braking is unnecessary, so it’s transferring energy from the brake to the battery, or something like that.

“Look, you have one and a half green cars,” said Sam, switching to the how’m-I-doing mileage display. Apparently it’s good to have green cars, and you try to get more. Driving this car is like being stuck in a video game. And I haven’t even told you about the cable John bought, so he can hook his car up to his laptop, and watch numbers fly by; it’s for the diagnostics when it breaks down, whenever that might be. “Yes, I know, we might have a kernel panic on the freeway. We may have to reboot,” John said with real glee. All his life he’s been waiting for Apple to make everything in his life, and it seems Toyota has come close enough, at least with the car.

This morning they got up before dawn and slipped away in their silent car, and I didn’t even hear them go. I guess I shouldn’t, but I sort of miss carburetion. At least I understood that.

No bloggage today; my fatigue is at the walking-into-walls level, and I have to go buy groceries and dryer parts. How about an entertaining comment caught in the spam net?

hello , my name is Richard and I know you get a lot of spammy comments ,
I can help you with this problem . I know a lot of spammers and I will ask them not to post on your site. It will reduce the volume of spam by 30-50% .In return Id like to ask you to put a link to my site on the index page of your site. The link will be small and your visitors will hardly notice it , its just done for higher rankings in search engines. Contact me icq 454528835 or write me tedirectory(at)yahoo.com , i will give you my site url and you will give me yours if you are interested. thank you

This might be the best one ever.

Enjoy the day. It’s hot here, so if it’s hot there, keep your radiator cool.

The headline for today’s post has been running through my head all weekend, since I heard it in the mix on Old-School Saturday, my favorite radio show in the whole wide etcetera. Remember the rest of the line? …and then she goes back. Bye bye bye bye there. Sly & the Family Stone, taking you all the way back to the summer of 1969. I was 11. Let us speak no more of time’s terrible swift sword. Labor Day has that effect on me.

But it was a wonderful summer, all things considered. I spent the last two weekends reconnecting with old friends, last weekend in Wisconsin and this weekend in Ohio. My old demi-roomie Jeff Borden was invited to a big nuptial throwdown in the state capital, so I brunched with him and his wife Joanna and dinnered with ol’ pals Cindy and Mark. All concerned knew me back in the day, so the whole weekend had the taste of fine old wine, along with plenty of the newer variety.

Jeff reminded me of a Christmas party we had once. It lasted past 3 a.m., and on a weeknight. At one point, Jeff said, “I came out of the bathroom, and of the nine people in my living room, every single one was talking.” Ah, the ’80s. It was a talkative time. It was also a time when you could stay up until 3 or so, rise at 8 and head on in to work without requiring hospitalization afterward or IV fluids beforehand. Time’s terrible swift sword, chapter 2.

But now buckle-down season arrives, and frankly, I’m ready. At some point this week, Kate will go back to school. Tomorrow, I believe, but they don’t want the little darlings to stress too much, so it’s a half day. Schools are required by state law to begin no earlier than the day after Labor Day, but the GP throws in a travel day. I love my little girl so much it makes my teeth ache, but to say I am ready for school to begin again is an understatement so vast it cannot be overstated. (Wha’?)

So how was your weekend? Also, has anyone ever made a cardboard boat in one of those team-building exercises? What’s the secret of a winning cardboard boat? Some readers of this blog want to know, but don’t want to be revealed, because it would reveal that they know the cardboard-boat team-building exercise is coming, and that would be cheating. Which may be Lesson 1 in successful cardboard boating: Whenever possible, cheat.

LA Mary mentioned in the comments yesterday that she watched a “Mad Men” marathon to stay out of the SoCal heat wave this weekend. Back then, they built teams the old-fashioned way — with alcohol. No more. Time’s terrible swift sword, etc.

I forgot to mention the weekend’s capper: John and Sam are planning a last-minute fly-by visit tonight, so I can’t tarry. They’re old friends, too, old enough that when I said, “Sure, come visit, but the dryer’s broken, so I can’t give you clean sheets. That OK with you?” John said, “No problem.” Now those are old friends worth having, I’d say.

So, bloggage:

“The Wire” wrapped production on its fifth and final season. As one of the 1.6 million Americans who watch and love this show, I can only strangle a sob and lift a virtual glass with the other 1.599999. If you’re not watching, go to your library and find a previous season on DVD. Just so we have something to talk about after the last season starts to air. (There’s also a video, if you’re interested, but it reveals nothing about the upcoming season and nothing a dedicated Wire fan doesn’t already know, so be advised.)

I’ll say one thing for the current Bush administration, it sure is giving the world better books than the last one. And it’s so fun to see Karl Rove shanking his fellow travelers, isn’t it?

And just to round out our trio with yet another WashPost link, how about some postcoital Diana remorse? Gush, gush, gush! Funny.

You all know I spend four hours each night farming news from the health-care field. Last night’s headline of the evening came from Bloomberg:

‘Designer Vagina’ Surgery Is a $5,500 Danger, Gynecologists Say

If you ask me, “designer vagina” is almost as much fun to say as “ample bottom.” You want to hear it in a song lyric:

Design-a vagina, nothin’ is fine-a / So let’s pour another glass of wine-a…

OK. Sorry for the late post, Danny. You’re not the boss of me, Danny. Actually, I’m not goofing off or anything like it, Danny. I’m working. But since you insist…

My schedule got all discombobulated this morning; I had my eyes checked for a new pair of glasses. It was an interesting experience; the optician took my old ones and led me into the exam room before disappearing with them. A blur entered and introduced herself as the doctor. She asked me to read what I could from the chart.

“And where, exactly, is the chart?” I asked. This is what we call a baseline reading. I was finally able to make out the single-letter line: “That’s an O, unless it’s a C.” It’s official — I’ve turned into Burgess Meredith in the Twilight Zone. Next step is a white cane and a golden retriever, no doubt.

I came home and had to put my nose directly to the grindstone, and am just now coming up for air. Just in time for the end of summer. My brain is already on vacation, as you can plainly see. Since we’ve been trifling all week, let’s keep up the theme, eh?

Today in anorexia: Really, Keira, you look great in that dress. And what man wouldn’t prefer the rag-and-bone Renee Zellweger over the plumper one in the red dress? That picture is horrifying — you can see veins in her shins. Scroll down from Keira’s lollipop figure to Joely Richardson, who appears to have recently returned from a long stay in a country with no food. You could chip your tooth if you tried to kiss her shoulder, but who would?

Meanwhile, I got a note from a fellow fan of “Mad Men” who says the redheaded secretary played by Christina Hendricks is his new dream girl. That picture’s just a headshot, but trust me — she’s got it goin’ on, upstairs and downstairs. Her clothes don’t “hang” well, because in the ’50s they weren’t made to hang; they were made to cling. Clothing designers then acknowledged women have waists and hips and what’s more — crazy to think of — men might appreciate seeing them once in a while.

I was three years old during the era this show depicts. Once again, I miss the boat. Story of my life.

No wonder women feel they need a designer vagina these days. Once upon a time, tits ‘n’ ass would do. Have a great weekend. I’ll be traveling down Columbus way. Marcia, drop me a line if you’re not working. The rest of you, back whenever.

I guess everyone should have at least one good flying experience this summer. Mine qualified. Both flights took off and landed on schedule to the minute, and — far more important — didn’t crash. I never fly without considering the possibility of a crash, whereas I only occasionally think of this while driving. Statistics say if one of the two will get me, it’s the car crash, but I stand by my anxieties.

The picture is of an amusing rarity: A used bookstore in an airport. Because I breezed through check-in in about 15 seconds, I had some time to browse. It was wonderful, my platonic ideal of airport book shopping — no stacks of get-rich-now or kill-your-business-rival tomes, no celebrity biographies, no (or at least fewer) Grisham/DaVinci Code schlock bestsellers. Instead, stacks of well-thumbed mass-market paperbacks, all selling for three-four bucks, plus hundreds of other choices in dozens of categories. In other words, something you might actually want to read, and cheap enough that you might be tempted to “set it free” when you’re finished.

(Ms. Lippman has written about setting books free, i.e., leaving them behind in public places, so that someone else might find and enjoy them, perhaps with a note absolving others of guilt for taking them. I’ve never been that evolved; I either clutch the great ones to my bosom or keep the bad ones on the shelf forever to sneer at every time I pass by. Then I complain bitterly that I own too many books and have nowhere to keep them. No one ever accused me of consistency.)

I bought two — “Riding the Rap,” because I’m going through a reread of Elmore Leonard’s mid-’90s Florida period, and “Lonesome Dove,” in mass-market size. The latter was perhaps a mistake; in order to keep this bricklike tome somewhat less bricklike, the type is small and the leading tiny, but I don’t care. I plucked a copy off Deb’s shelf this weekend for my bedtime reading, and became as mired as a Hat Creek heifer in riverbank mud. Of course I’d read it before, probably twice, but I never owned it, perhaps because I feared the riverbank-mud thing. Deb said when she read it the first time she came to the end and paged through the endpapers to the back cover, hoping to find anything that might take the story an inch further. It’s that kind of book. (Although, in the writers-are-human-too tradition, I’m half pleased to report the sequels are said to be simply awful. At least I don’t have to read those.)

After that I wandered the shops, looking for a little something to take home to Kate. I considered a T-shirt, and noted the choices — “Hillary for President 2008,” “Bill Clinton for First Lady,” at two separate stores. Chocolate candies in novelty packaging were widespread, too, labeled “Wisconsin bullshit,” “Minnesota bullshit,” “Badger bullshit” and “Presidential bullshit,” with a little cartoon of Dubya. As a former newspaper columnist who’s pulled many of them straight out her ass, I’m wary of making sweeping pronouncements based on airport shopping, but I’m going to go way out on a limb here and suggest that perhaps the sitting president is a tetch unpopular.

Kate got three windup toys, btw. I love windup toys, especially when they’re monkeys who march around smashing little cymbals together.

The rest of the trip? Sublime. I slept on a futon in Deb’s basement rec room, where I was watched over by my life’s guiding spirit:

This was a wedding present. I recall at one point, at Deb’s reception, looking up to see this surging mass of humanity on the dance floor. Someone was holding Elvis up over his head, like mourners at the Ayatollah Khomeini’s funeral with a picture of the deceased, and he was bobbing along, too. Wish I’d had a camera. This’ll have to do.

I’m also sorry I forgot my camera Saturday night, when we drove to Madison to meet Frank and Cindy for dinner. What a beautiful city. Liberal paradise. (Question for the room: If liberals are so bad at governing, why do we have all the cool cities? Santa Monica, Ann Arbor, Madison, etc. And if conservatives and/or “the market” is so great, why do all the right-wing cities suck so bad? Salt Lake City, Houston, Jacksonville, etc.) A full moon rose over Lake Monona while we watched from the terrace of the Frank Lloyd Wright-designed community center there. Turn your back on the moon, and there is the state capitol dome in the middle of the isthmus. Frank and I left Fort Wayne about the same time, for the same reason (job elimination). I’d say he landed better, but we’re both doing OK. Life goes on, and if you’re lucky, the planes leave on time.

Bloggage:

I was going to link to Miss Teen South Carolina via YouTube, but I see the clip is now over 2 million views and isn’t loading well, so here’s a cobbled-together Flash workaround that gives you the gist. Poor girl. Someone buy her a map.

LOLBikinis: Everything I know about surfing I learned from Kem Nunn, but one thing I know is that female surfers rarely wear jangling chains, upper-arm bracelets and bikinis that could be stripped off by a medium-size wave when they’re out shooting curls. But then, they’re not Elle Macpherson, either. Do you think she might have been expecting photographers?

Soccer mom tidbit: Emily Yoffe speaks for us all.

And that’s it. Glad to be back from the good land.

Wayne Campbell: So, do you come to Milwaukee often?

Alice Cooper: Well, I’m a regular visitor here, but Milwaukee has certainly had its share of visitors. The French missionaries and explorers began visiting here in the late 16th century.

Pete: Hey, isn’t “Milwaukee” an Indian name?

Alice Cooper: Yes, Pete, it is. In fact, it was originally an Algonquin term meaning “the good land.”

Wayne Campbell: I was not aware of that.

Alice Cooper: I think one of the most interesting things about Milwaukee is that it’s the only American city to elect three Socialist mayors.

Wayne Campbell: [to the camera] Does this guy know how to party or what?

Guess where I’m going this weekend. Yepper, it’s wheels up for the good land Friday morning. Off to visit my BFF Deb, and then on to Madison for dinner with Dr. Frank and his consort, the lovely Cindy. It’s a weekend in the Dairy State — do I live an exciting life, or what? (Although, truly, I think it’s fascinating that Milwaukee has elected three Socialist mayors.)

Cheese for all!

Lately signs have been going up in the neighborhood — OUR TROOPS HOME NOW. It reminds me of 2003, when the signs in Fort Wayne said PRAY FOR OUR TROOPS and the ones in Ann Arbor commanded NO BLOOD FOR OIL and others advertised ANOTHER FAMILY FOR PEACE. Ann Arbor was a photo-negative version of Fort Wayne, I told people at the time; I’m sure it still is.

I never thought the war was a good idea, but I hoped it wouldn’t be a disaster. I hoped it would go the way we were promised it would, that the casualties would be minimal, the shooting brief, the outcome something not too shameful. Well, it turned out to be anything but those things. For most of 2003 I was living in Indiana, and I remember the runup to the invasion, the endless letters to the editor about the importance of supporting the troops and the tiresome repetition of what even then were talked-out talking points, about “fighting them there so we won’t have to fight them here.” There was just so much of that crap. Alan was scowled at in a news meeting when he suggested, not long after Mission Accomplished, that we were going to be in Iraq for quite a bit longer. All of this — and, to be sure, a few other events in my life — made me feel I was regarding my community from behind a thick sheet of plexiglass. I’d sit in meetings, interviews, and want to ask, Who the hell are you people?

Things change, and I apologize for woolgathering. It’s just that here we are, four years later, and everything’s different, eh?

Sunday the New York Times ran “The War as We Saw It,” a column with seven bylines, all sergeants and specialists fighting in Iraq. The short version: We’re being lied to, yet again. The surge isn’t working. The situation is FUBAR. No one has a clue. I was struck by this paragraph:

In short, we operate in a bewildering context of determined enemies and questionable allies, one where the balance of forces on the ground remains entirely unclear. (In the course of writing this article, this fact became all too clear: one of us, Staff Sergeant Murphy, an Army Ranger and reconnaissance team leader, was shot in the head during a “time-sensitive target acquisition mission” on Aug. 12; he is expected to survive and is being flown to a military hospital in the United States.) While we have the will and the resources to fight in this context, we are effectively hamstrung because realities on the ground require measures we will always refuse — namely, the widespread use of lethal and brutal force.

That’s my emphasis, by the way. To save the village, we must destroy it, in other words. Saving ourselves, eh, that’s another matter. It’s times like these that I think the Rose Garden doesn’t need a wedding, it needs a hanging. Several hangings.

How depressing. Sorry about that. How about a Simpsons avatar instead?

It’s amazingly accurate, everyone who knows me will attest. Get your own.

The Committee had an early meeting today. That would be the Committee to Deprive Nance of Her Hard-Earned Rest. Over the years it’s had various subcommittees and chairs, but at the moment, the Worker Men are in their ascendancy, and have wrestled control away from the Blue Jays, the previous cadre at the top of the pyramid, squabbling REALLY LOUDLY for the chance to wake me up at an unreasonable hour.

The Worker Men are the guys in charge of tearing up our street, then leaving for a couple weeks, then coming back to push some stuff around, then leave for a couple more weeks, etc. Ostensibly they’re replacing a water main, but the new main has been buried for weeks now, and once again, work seems to have stalled. That doesn’t keep them from making an early appearance. For several days, someone was in charge of moving a backhoe from one end of the street to the other — CLANK CLANK CLANK CLANK — at 7:45 a.m., then leaving it there, unused, for the rest of the day. I go to bed somewhere around 1 a.m.; all I want to do is sleep until 8; IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK? Apparently so.

This morning they put in a stronger, and louder, show of force, pushing several pieces of heavy equipment around, complete with those horrible beep-beep-beep backup noises. I look outside, and for the life of me I can’t figure out what they’re doing, other than making noise. I suspect the whole crew is comprised of toddler boys, who have discovered this cache of really big Tonka trucks, and are just having fun driving them around.

OK, rant over. Second cup of coffee in progress. I guess if I wanted I could close the windows and turn on the A/C, but it’s a cool, pleasant morning and I want to feel the breeze on my face as I sit next to the window. IS THAT SO MUCH TO ASK? Never mind. Counting blessings now.

Actually, if it were permitted, I’d love to hang out with these guys for a day or two, just to watch them work. No one really knows how things are done anymore, do they? What’s involved in building a bridge, replacing a water main, raising a skyscraper? I’m 95 percent clueless. That’s where I envy Alan his time spent working in factories while he decided whether to finish college; he understands the grit-and-grime part of the world far better than I do. (Too well, actually; having worked in a canned-soup factory, he won’t eat canned soup. His stories about moving dough around in the frozen-pizza plant will put you off frozen pizza forever. The less said about Etch-a-Sketch production, the better, and if I can leave you with one lesson, it’s this: Don’t ever buy manufactured housing, unless you want to learn how “DAP it” became a catch phrase in our household.)

Well, obviously I got nuttin to say. Do I have bloggage? Not much of that, either. (The world is on vacation.) But a little:

Why charity is complicated these days: CARE turns down 45 million American dollars, because a needlessly complex system of shipping subsidized American crops overseas to sell in the Third World wastes money and undermines local farmers. Color me shocked.

Hacking Starbucks, testimony that nonfat journalism doesn’t have to be boring.

In my perambulations around Flickr the other day, I found this gem, shot by Bobby Alcott, a local Detroit pro. It reminded me of my ex-neighbor Dennis in Indiana, who left our little street in the city to move to the country and breed championship Angus cattle. He mostly dealt in embryos and frozen semen but kept a few head around the place, and I loved to scratch their sweet-smelling foreheads. “You really like livestock, don’t you?” he asked once, amazed. Well, how can you not? They’re irresistible.

This story has so many coulds, mights and isn’t-even-on-the-drawing-board-yets you wonder why it even exists, but the idea is intriguing: a muscle-car hybrid. A Camaro hybrid. I’d buy that just to piss people off, even though I know it’ll fall apart in six months and cost me thousands of dollars and thousands of tears. It’s just funny.

What’s that I hear outside? It’s the beepbeepbeeping of a backhoe! Time to get to work.

Another image from New York: Turtle Pond is in Central Park. Just as the latter is so named because it’s a park in the center of Manhattan, Turtle Pond is, duh, full of turtles. I mean: Crammed. I don’t know how they manage the population, if at all, but I do know that the occupants of Turtle Pond have learned about hanging around the dock where people throw food into the water. Like carp, or pigeons, or seagulls, they’re urban survivors. Photo by Kate.

Sorry for taking the day off. Had an early appointment in Detroit Wednesday morning, a day that promised to be brutally hot (and delivered), with an ozone alert to boot. Curtail your driving, the radio warned. So I took the long way home.

It might have been an environmental misdemeanor, but until you’ve worked at home, you don’t know how important it is to just get the hell out of the house once in a while. I followed Woodward to Jefferson and took a lap of Belle Isle, which is being readied for the Indy Grand Prix Labor Day weekend. I’m not sure what the exact course is, but if it’s what I think, there’s one sharp turn pretty near the water, and I wondered what the chances of a spin-out ending up in the river might be. That would be so awesome.

But mostly I looked at the landscape. We’re deep in the Big Dry now — haven’t had a significant rain in weeks and weeks. A shower here, some drops there, but little more than that. It’s making everything look tired and zapped. In Grosse Pointe, people water constantly, even the median strips are sprinklered, so it’s still fairly lush, but in Detroit, not so. In the car with Kate, I’ve taken to pointing out dead trees — the emerald ash borer continues its sawdusty reign of terror — and they’re more common than P.T. Bruisers. Especially in Detroit, where they can’t keep up with removing dead buildings, let alone dead trees. (Wait until we finally do get a thunderstorm, and they come down on power lines.) One of the many incongruous sights in this city is a profusion of green growing over a crumbling ruin, like the “ghetto palms” that sprout on roofs and through cracks in pavement. It seems to make a statement about the implacability of nature and the impermanence of everything else, but when nature can’t keep up anymore, it’s sort of creepy.

Today will be hotter, we’re told. Oh, I can’t wait to see my electric bill this month.

Last night was taken by the tragedy in Minneapolis. Whenever there’s a breaking story like this, the first thing the over-cabled household does is look for the channel with the least offensive anchor presiding over it all. CNN had Paula Zahn, whose passive-aggressive style requires her to mention children on that school bus seen “with blood on their faces” and no other explanation. So I switched to MSNBC. Keith Olbermann can be insufferable in many contexts, but I liked him doing breaking news; he prefaced every fact with a million caveats — this just in, unverified, we don’t know if this is true, chaotic information streams, etc. Given how much of breaking-news info turns out to be b.s., it’s nice to hear a little honesty. One other thing: Olbermann has a command of the English language that’s getting rarer every day. Yesterday I heard a radio host speak of “accolations” instead of “accolades,” and of a body being “interned,” rather than “interred.” One of the bridge-collapse witnesses said he’d crossed the span moments before, “and that’s too close to call.” Of course he was upset, but he meant to say “too close for comfort.” I don’t blame the guy for flubbing the common expression, but does it have to go on the newspaper website?

(Note to non-journalists: You fix that by lopping the last two words — “…and that’s too close.” The quote is still accurate, and it makes more sense. Or you don’t use the quote.)

It’s unseemly to quibble like this when there’s been a tragedy of such magnitude. As I write this, it’s nine confirmed dead and 20 missing, which suggests the final death toll will be around 30. Just an average day in Baghdad. And a final note: Much of the early TV coverage concerned the children on the school bus, and rightly so. We’re hard-wired to protect children; they are, as the great philosopher Whitney Houston tells us, the future. That’s one reason I was so stunned to learn that, in actuarial terms, the death of a child is nothing much. I learned this from a man who’d had a child drown at his summer camp, and participated in the wrongful-death settlement. Kids, for all their innocence and potential, for the injustice of having them taken from us, for the devastating pain it causes their survivors, the insurance companies don’t really pay a lot for them. Their father or mother, yes, especially if they’re sole support of a family. But you don’t pay for potential. This is the market at work.

So, bloggage:

I read the Daily Telegraph every day. How did I miss this? Fifty must-watch web videos. They’re a tad Brit-centric, but the must-sees of all this TV are David Attenborough’s lyre bird segment and, of course, the Mike Tyson montage. God, that guy was an animal. I don’t know why more of his opponents didn’t just shit their pants and faint at the sound of the bell.

A nice deconstruction of yet another legacy of the Bush family, Clarence Thomas. It concerns his legal arguments, not his video-rental habits.

Roy has a cold, too, but it didn’t stop him from appreciating the most recent 6,000-word geyser of crap from Camille Paglia. This one’s a gem. Read.

Off to stare at the punishing sun and mutter.