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.

Mitch Harper advised his readers to visit a farm market over the weekend. I did, but I was going to anyway. I usually go to the Eastern Market downtown, but Saturday decided to offset a little carbon and ride my bike to the West Park Farmers Market, down in GPP. Now that I’ve lived here a few years, I realize the mistake of not buying in GPP, Grosse Pointe Park, or just “the Park” around here. That’s where my people live, but hey, it’s only a couple miles down Kercheval. The market, alas, is less wonderful. It’s festive and market-like, but with only a few sellers of actual produce — everyone else is hawking bottled gourmet sauces, handmade jewelry and that sort of thing. I bought four lovely-looking Georgia peaches, took them home, bit into one and immediately spit it out. It had that interior mealiness that suggests weeks spent in cold storage, with a dark hint that perhaps it wasn’t even a Georgia peach at all, but maybe one of the loathsome California variety.

Note to California readers: I’m sure the peaches you buy are pretty good, and I expect some defense of home-state produce, so save your protests. The lousy California peaches are all exported to the Midwest, where they sit in supermarkets looking like the platonic ideal of peachiness, truly beautiful specimens. If only they weren’t rock-hard and inedible. I used to buy them and put them in paper bags on my counter, waiting for ripeness to arrive. Ripeness = Godot. When a lovely peach sits for two weeks and can’t soften even incrementally, something very strange is going on.

That was dispiriting. The tradeoff in being able to ride a bike to market is always variety — the Eastern Market has the critical mass of customers to support such local treasures as Mushroom Man, Organic Egg Guy and the vital-to-our-emotional-well-being Gratiot Central Market, for all — and I mean all — your meat needs, but still. It’s six more days to next Saturday, and I really wanted some Georgia peaches.

Even more dispiriting was that the bike ride sapped my energies, and the rhinovirus came in for the kill. What’s less exciting than a summer Saturday night spent at home with a worsening cold? This must be why we pay big bucks for digital cable. Nothing particularly good was on, but hey, “Summer of Sam” was coming around on the Retro channel. I have two major allergies in today’s multiplex — Steven Spielberg and Spike Lee. Where critics see (and say, endlessly) “gifted,” “accomplished” and “national treasure,” I see only “overrated.” But now that Spielberg’s made a movie I can not only stomach but actually enjoyed (“Munich”), it seemed time to see whether my immunity had changed with Lee. “Summer of Sam” it was, then. And the short answer is? No. He still sucks*.

Overdirected? Check. Half-baked script? Check. Casting of capable actors in parts that hogtie their talent? Check. Obscenity-strewn** dialogue scenes that go on three times as long as they need to, until you hold your head in your hands screaming stop stop someone please make it stop? Check. Oh, and wait — is there a Message Stick lying around, and is it used to beat on us at regular intervals? Certainly, yes. Finally, did Roger Ebert ladle an astonishing dollop of praise over the whole mess, as he has over pretty much the whole Lee catalog, proving everyone has his blind spots? Yup. Am I saying there wasn’t one good thing about it? No. I liked Adrien Brody, and I thought the “Baba O’Riley” montage was OK, but then, it’s hard to go wrong with “Baba O’Riley.” So there.

(*”S.O.S.” was made in 1999, so I acknowledge “still” may not be accurate. One always hopes for growth in an artist. I only saw part one of the Katrina thing, and it was OK, but it didn’t make me want to watch parts 2, 3 and 4.)

(**As for “obscenity-strewn,” I yield to no one in my tolerance for rough language, but there’s a point at which it becomes annoying, distracting background noise, especially in an overlong scene, because you want to shake the characters and say, “If you’d stop saying ‘fuck’ so often you could maybe get to the point, you fucking asshole.”)

Enough about my little problems. Bloggage!

Evil, evil, evil, evil, stupid: A surgeon general’s report in 2006 that called on Americans to help tackle global health problems has been kept from the public by a Bush political appointee without any background or expertise in medicine or public health, chiefly because the report did not promote the administration’s policy accomplishments, according to current and former public health officials.

A declaration: I don’t give a fat rat’s ass about Hillary Clinton’s cleavage — I have my own to worry about — but evidently others do. Thousands of words were spent in the last week discussing whether the junior senator from New York did or did not display uncontrovertible evidence that yes, she does indeed possess a pair of breasts, but by far, the stupidest of all came, fittingly, from Dan Quayle’s former aide Lisa Schiffren. She, mind you, also doesn’t give a fat rat’s ass about Hillary’s cleavage, although being a Republican wife and mother, she puts it more delicately: I overcame my desire to comment on this tempest earlier this week. But then she does — it’s “legit” to talk about the big C, she opines — and then ends with one of those sorority sister, it’s-for-your-own-good-that-I’m-saying-this lemon shake-ups:

But let’s be real here. The fact is, Hillary was wearing a fairly low cut summer top. She was not displaying cleavage, as the shot on Drudge indicates. Someone else wearing the same outfit might have done. But Hillary Clinton does not have cleavage to display. Period. Indeed, Hillary never forgave her mother-in-law, Virginia Kelly for pointing this out decades ago to the young Bill Clinton, a cleavage man if ever there was one. So…it’s OK to discuss something that doesn’t exist? Thanks, girlfriend.

And now, because I believe in saving the most important, depressing, vein-opening stuff for after the trivial, whiny, vein-opening stuff about bad peaches, crappy movies and cleavage, “Inside the Surge,” excellent photos and video from Guardian photographer Sean Smith, embedded with U.S. Marines in Iraq. Just about as depressing as you’d imagine. But required viewing.

It’s easy to remember when I took my first get-on-a-plane-and-fly-somewhere vacation with a parent. It was the summer of 1968, and my mom took my sister and me to Nassau. (My mom was frugal but not cheap, so we went to the Bahamas in summer.) I was dragged through a number of British forts and other historical sites, but basically it was a beach vacation. I met a girl at the pool about my age, and we played together. She was from Chicago. Later my mother told me her parents were fleeing the expected anarchy of the Democratic Convention, and I guess they had the right idea.

Anyway, I guess we’ve been dragging Kate here and there with us on our travels, but I figure now is when things start to sink in. Taking a toddler to Paris only makes sense if the price of a sitter exceeds the plane fare. Or maybe not. But that’s been my experience.

Since this trip was en famille, we knew certain activities would be inevitable. It’s cruel to take a kid to New York and not let them see Times Square. Which is to say, you are going to the Statue of Liberty. The good news is: It’s not so bad. There’s some actual history there — on Ellis Island, anyway — and even though the security is even stricter than the airports’, it’s worth a visit. Of course, it’s a National Historic Landmark, and hence run by the government, so the emphasis is on learning and explanation. I had a lively chat with a ranger who told me about the new security perimeter, and how the statue’s arm got speared by her crown in the Black Tom explosion, and how even though you can’t climb up to the crown anymore, you probably don’t want to anyway, because it’s hot and smelly inside. Wandering through the accompanying exhibits, Kate found a sister who shares her affliction, the heartbreak of Morton’s Toe. I’d hoped for some dawning realization of the breadth and depth of the immigrant story, but you know kids — it’s all about them.

The same cannot be said of the city’s other big tourist magnet, the Empire State Building. It’s a joke, isn’t it, about how many people live in New York and have never been to the top? Let me tell you something: That’s because New Yorkers are smart. It was undoubtedly the low point of the trip, a money-extraction racket start to finish and anticlimactic to boot. If you ever visit the city and feel the urge to see where King Kong frolicked, look at it from the sidewalk. Or else, this: Catch a cab to the airport and board the next flight to Chicago. From O’Hare, make your way downtown and choose any of the tall buildings with public observatories at the top; I recommend the Hancock tower, although the Sears is nice, too. Go up, look around, take your time, snap some pictures. Then come down, return to the airport, fly back to Manhattan. The elapsed time will be approximately what it would have taken to get through the Empire State line, and you’ll have seen Lake Michigan in the bargain. Trust me on this.

The rest of the trip was pretty free-form. We wandered uptown and down, stumbled onto a movie set, ate ridiculously rich rice pudding, went to the Guggenheim, the Museum of Natural History (very fine, but second banana to the Field, IMO) and a nearby shop called Maxilla & Mandible, where we considered buying a witty bit of taxidermy — a single squirrel severed at the waist, each half adorning one of a pair of bookends. (That is, until we heard the price, which seemed a bit steep for a squirrel.) Hoped for “Hairspray” at the TKTS booth, but settled for “The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee.”

And we met our old pal and colleague Scott at some Belgian beer garden near Washington Square, which was sort of amusing, considering the closest thing we have to a local here in Detroit is the Cadieux Cafe, another Belgian bar. That there were two outside Belgium seemed stunning. Later we wandered to the square and Kate got dragooned into some street theater; a freelance acrobat did a somersault over her head, and I dropped a fiver in his bucket, in thanks for not killing her.

By far, one of the worst things about this new chapter in our lives — with its higher cost of living and unpredictable finances — has been the curtailing of our travel. No matter where you live, you need to get away sometimes and clear all the crap out of your head. Change the scenery. Gaze upon a new landscape. Be here now. And so on. It was a welcome trip, and I needed it.

Bloggage returns tomorrow. We have a new Tim Goeglein column to deconstruct, and fun to be had everywhere.

Friends, every so often the well goes dry. Or rather, the well still has water in it, but another client is thirsty. Or it’s time for vacation. Or something. Anyway, that’s me, today — all three. I have a big project that must go into rubber-burning mode, we’re leaving town for a few days, and honestly, I feel a bit empty of things to say, other than the usual repetition, old stories and snark.

So it’s off to NYC with the fam, and I’m leaving the laptop behind. E-mail might be a possibility, but don’t count on it. If you need to reach me, call me on my cell. If I know you, you already have the number.

We’re not leaving until tomorrow, so I’ll be e-mailable until late tonight.

People have been asking all week: What’s your agenda? Good lord, it’s New York — you don’t need one. You just walk out of the subway and let the wind fill your sails. But seeing as how we’ll have a kid in tow, I expect the agenda will have at least some of the stuff only tourists do — Statue of Liberty, Empire State Building, “Hairspray.” I also hope to have a drink with young Zach; now that he’s a tycoon, he can pick up the check. Kate is hoping we catch the Cash Cab. Alan will amble along with us, thinking his thoughts, as is his habit. I’m just hoping we avoid al Qaeda’s Summer o’ Terror Tour. Also, Northwest Airlines’ Summer o’ Five-Hour Runway Delays.

So that’s it. Back Tuesday.

Ah, the Cranbrook Educational Community. The hoity-toityest private school in all of southeast Michigan. Its classrooms and studios have gestated luminaries as numerous as the stars: Michael Kinsley. Bob Woodruff. Mitt Romney! Nestled in the green bosom of Bloomfield Hills, it’s known for its lovely, peaceful campus, its public art — that’s Carl Milles’ Orpheus Fountain, above, along with Europa and the Bull — its museums, academies and general devotion to learning and enlightenment.

Eliel Saarinen was the main architect of the place, as well as the art school’s director. He and his wife lived in a house on campus. Since Alex was here, taking advantage of the Stay With a Blogger Weekend special, and since Alex is a huge fan of 20th century modern, it seemed a good time to finally get out there and see the Saarinen house.

Well, it’s everything you’d expect a Saarinen house to be — beautiful, austere, clean, symmetrical, attention paid to the last detail, and terribly uncomfortable-looking. Those Finns and their hospitality — everything about them says, “Come and admire, but don’t stay too long.” There was a “cozy corner,” a built-in banquette that ran around two sides of a room. A rug was draped over the seat, and extended out onto the floor. The guide said guests would sit on the bench and pull the rug up over their legs to stay warm. How cozy. What hospitality.

But hey, it’s Saarinen. Some people design for the comfort of the body. Others design for the benefit of the eye. You need a mix.

After that we took the long way home. I wanted Alex to see the Theatre Bizarre, in the back yard of a house along State Fair Road:

It’s…well, I’m not sure what it is. Nearest I can tell, it’s a performance space that opens one night a year — Halloween or thereabouts — for a night of macabre revelry. More pictures at the links.

The next day we spent on the water. Blue sky, blue water, blue T-shirt, blue freighter:

Our next Stay With the Blogger weekend will be after I change the sheets. Make your applications soon.

Bloggage: Ashley Morris has met his match.

Some people don’t like Crocs. Some people must not have children. Or a job that requires standing up for long periods of the day, evidently.

The Columbus Dispatch is running a three-part series on the shooting of a local teenager by the sort of resident politely described as “eccentric.” I’ve read enough multi-part series on wrenching medical conditions to see me through the rest of my life, but part one — about the shooting and how it happened — is well-done and well-worth your time. Some people shouldn’t have guns.

That’s it for me. Time slips away, and I have a lot to do in what remains.

I’m not quite ashamed to say I watched the hot-dog eating contest on ESPN Wednesday. I’m especially grateful that the runner-up, Takeru Kobayashi, covered his mouth during his “reversal” in the final seconds, and spared a national audience that. Although he did take his final bow with vomit or something like it down the front of his shirt, and I notice he and the winner didn’t shake hands.

Competitive eating is all the rage these days among reporters looking for the last unexplored, non-sexual subculture safe for a family newspaper. I guess it rings all those obesity-epidemic bells with editors, but speaking as one who tuned in during the introduction of contestants, I can tell you more were skinny or average-size than fat. Both Joey Chestnut, the winner, and Kobayashi, the six-time defending champion, are guys I could easily knock down in a sumo bout. The trick to winning seems to be in technique, not capacity — how wide you can open your jaw, how much you can relax your throat muscles, how much you can suppress your gag reflex. Also, how much you like wet hot dogs; arrayed before each contestant was a battery of cups, presumably filled with water. Each dipped their dogs before stuffing it into the piehole, I suppose partly for lubrication and partly to collapse the bun. There are few things I enjoy in summer more than a good hot dog, but this was just vile. (And not because one of the sponsors was Heinz. KETCHUP DOES NOT BELONG ON HOT DOGS. There will be no further discussion.)

You’d think a place like Michigan would be the cradle of competitive-eating stars, but I guess not. One of my favorite Jim Harrison lines: “Only in the Midwest is overeating seen as heroic.”

I fished almonds out of a bag of granola while Alan peeped through his fingers. I kept expecting something like the 2006 Preakness. But Kobayashi thoughtfully covered his mouth.

The older I get, the less I overeat, which is sometimes hard to reconcile with my size, but believe me, it’s true. And it’s not because I’m getting the middle-aged heartburn thing, either; I still can eat pretty much anything I want without paying a price in anything but thigh circumference. Maybe it has to do with the gradual ebbing of the hormonal tide. I’ve yet to meet a man who can fully understand what it’s like to be female and in the grip of a PMS-induced potato-chip destruction mission. (I always say, “You know how your dick makes you do stupid things? It’s like that.”) I hope it has to do with refinement, with being happy with a little quality rather than a lot of crap, but that might not be it, either. In the long run, it might just be the beginning of the downhill slide toward the Earlybird Special. All the things our bodies do to embarrass us — sweat, exude, crave — diminish with age, or are transmogrified into one area (hair sprouting in places it doesn’t belong). Say what you will about inappropriate sexual urges, but at least it’s proof you’re alive.

You ever notice how many contemporary libido scolds get that way in their 40s? Laura Schlessinger plowed a wide swath in her well-photographed youth, then decided it was her mission in life to condemn all younger women who did the same. The blood cools, and the memories of what it was like to be 25 — they fly right out the window.

Speaking of hormones, I was talking to someone at a party last week, another ex-newsie, who asked if I ever missed it. I said the only thing I missed was the newsroom, and we both agreed there was no better place to work than a bullpen city room, back before fear and flop sweat took over the business. He told a funny story about his northern California paper, which had not one but two transsexuals-in-transition working there, and the uproar it caused — mostly over the which-bathroom-do-you-use issue. He said one night he had to phone in a story, late, and the dictation was taken by Michelle, formerly Mike. It all went well until he signed off with “thank you, sir” and unleashed a torrent of estrogen-induced recrimination about respect and honoring choices and blah blah blah. And all my friend wanted to do was point out that the hormones change everything but the voice, and he just forgot.

Good times.

Well, we seem to have gone to stream-of-consciousness today, haven’t we? Let’s blog it up a little:

A Chicago Tribune critic/blogger asks his colleagues, “If a movie ever made you walk out, what was it?” I don’t know if I ever have — once I’ve paid the money, I’ll sit through just about anything — but I do have a few aborted-rental movies, including “Zoolander” and “Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas.”

This one’s for the Detroiters — ever wonder what the original Pistons logo looked like? Mitch Harper dug up one from the days of the Zollner Pistons, the current club’s predecessor. That guy looks like he’s quick on his Chuck Taylors, eh? Hilarious.

One of the advantages of being French is that natural slimness, born of cigarettes, genetics and aerobic rudeness. The new French president prefers to maintain it with exercise, which leads his constituents to rise as one and shout, “Quel fromage!”

Back to work. Have a great weekend.

The New York Times home section provides the same service as the Wall Street Journal’s features section — it opens a window onto the unique problems of wealthy people. A recent example: How difficult it is to get specialized service personnel to work at your remote vacation house. As the man says, I used to be disgusted, now I try to be amused.

Take today, for instance: Return from vacation. If you dare. Yet another piece on how hard it is to find good help these days, in this case housesitters. It turns out that once you turn the keys over to these temporary caretakers, they do all kinds of stuff you don’t want to know about. They drink your wine. They wear your underwear. And they take videos of your 37-pound cat and post them on the internet.

The nerve.

The cat video is disappointing, by the way. You really don’t get a sense of its size.

However, if you wish to mock, I recommend the whole story. There are some amusing anecdotes, the best about a rambunctious terrier named Taffy, a sadly deceased cat and the solution, which shouldn’t surprise anyone: The old switcheroo.

How was your Fourth? Mine was fine. Played a little, worked a little, saw “Ratatouille.” It was stunning; I was near tears over an animated rat and his search for artistic expression. Overheard outside the multiplex: “It’s like I felt emotionally attached to those robots, dude.” (Someone must have seen “Transformers.”) In the evening, we attended some friends’ fireworks show. Overheard after the fireworks, as the neighborhood resounded with mortar fire: “Listen to that. It’s like the people are giving it back to Bush for the Scooter Libby thing.” It featured illegal ones, safely deployed, and set me to thinking about mid-week Fourths, the ones that don’t stretch easily around a neighboring weekend. The work week moves at half-speed, and the Fourth is a feast of idleness. On one of these, years ago, a friend and I blew up a cake. The cake was for sale in a deli where he worked. Spectacularly ugly, decorated in a patriotic theme, it was unsold at closing time, so the owner told my friend to take it home and try to enjoy it. We did. We put a mystery explosive in it, one of those fat round things the size of a tennis ball, set it out in the back yard, lit the fuse and ran.

The explosion was deafening — evidently the firecracker was a version of those really loud things that signal the beginning of a municipal show. It blew a shallow crater in the yard, and needless to say, there wasn’t a scrap of cake to be seen anywhere.

And now it’s back to work, just in time for the weather to clear up and make me feel bad about staying inside. Maybe I’ll take the laptop to the deck.

Back later, perhaps.

I’ve always found medicine interesting, but also, how you say, gross. I shadowed a general surgeon once, and watched him remove a gall bladder (pre-laparoscope days), repair a hernia, do a breast biopsy and one other procedure I can’t recall. It left two overwhelming impressions, the first of tenderness for the patients, whom I only saw after they were completely anesthetized. Laid out on their tables, their heads tipped to one side, skin stained with Betadine, their most intimate body parts exposed, it was almost unbearable to watch them. I wanted to cup their cheeks and kiss their foreheads, tell them they’d be OK.

The other was that all that crap about the “delicate hands of a surgeon” is just that — crap. “Nancy, would you like to see the appendix before I take it out?” the doctor asked. (Apparently it’s routine to snip the appendix anytime you’ve got the abdomen open.) I said OK, took my look, and watched as this very competent general surgeon stuffed the patient’s large intestine back into her cavity with all the grace and care I bring to stuffing my Thanksgiving turkey. Doctors are, essentially, very highly skilled, and highly paid, mechanics.

But it was the breast biopsy that got to me the most, for obvious reasons. The patient was a woman in her 40s with a long history of benign lumps, and fortunately this one was, too. But it took a chunk out of her breast, and so it made me think of the big C and the small r (that would be “reconstruction,” for those who cannot read my mind).

Which made me think of plastic surgeons, the bastards.

OK, they’re not bastards. But there’s a reason they’re not cardiologists, either. About 10 years ago, a top-heavy stripper won a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. She’d deducted the cost of her implants as a business expense, the IRS disallowed it, and she appealed, and won. The woman was nobody you’ve heard of, but it turned out she “lived” in Fort Wayne, “lived” meaning she got her mail and spent a couple nights a year in an apartment there. It was a nice central location for the clubs she spent her life touring between. (The life of a B-list stripper is not a glamorous one.) And she’d had her surgery — surgeries — done there. Really? the city’s journalists queried as one. By whom? Sorry, folks, that was a secret more closely guarded than Dick Cheney’s undisclosed location. But one of the city’s corps of plastic surgeons had opened this girl up multiple times and installed implants of ever-ballooning size until she had the 54-inch bustline of a true stripping entrepreneur. (Part of her argument was that every surgery boosted her income by a predictable margin, and that once she was ready to retire she planned to have them removed, as they impeded life as a private citizen. Amish men at the mall would walk into walls staring at her.)

Call me crazy, but I don’t think this counts as “practicing medicine.” Whenever I talked to a plastic surgeon, I tried to balance the polarities of the job. On the one hand, a talented plastics specialist at Ohio State University had repaired the faces of two of my friends when they hit hard, unforgiving surfaces. Others gave women maimed by cancer a chance to feel whole again. But on the other, well, a doctor friend of mine put it best: “A kid with asthma in Brooklyn has to take four buses and trains in the middle of January to get a breathing treatment and we can’t seem to do anything about that, but let a cardiologist’s wife want to upgrade to a D-cup, and man, we are all over that.”

All this by way of taking the long way around to the NSFW link o’ the week: The Plastic Surgery Beauty Enhancement Awards, brought to you by Make Me Heal, for “all your cosmetic surgery and anti-aging needs.” Actually, the links above are SFW, but if you go further into the site — and don’t think I don’t know where you’re headed, you perverts — be advised it’s not only unsafe for work, but probably unsafe for breakfast, too. Especially some of the postop photos.

Ah, beauty.

So, bloggage:

Nothing is sacred, but this, this! Is elephant dung on the Virgin Mary!

Oh, look. The president of the United States committed an act of craven bullshittery. Shocked, shocked. Etc.

Back to real work now. You all flay Scooter in the comments.

Went for a long bike ride yesterday. Temperature: low 90s. Humidity: Merciless. I felt like riding fast and hard, so I did. About halfway through I started noticing people looking at me. Normally people don’t look at me. I’m no head-turner on my best day, and have fully arrived at that state of middle-aged female invisibility where you begin to blend in with the wallpaper. (I’m convinced I could walk into a bank, enter the vault, fill my pockets with cash and walk out unnoticed. At least if the bank is anything like the deli counter.) But I was turning heads. Pigeon crap on my forehead? The vile jiggling of my thighs? A bloody nose? The hint of cleavage even my hydraulic sports bra cannot contain? I turned the final corner, slowed for a cooldown and thought, “Hmm. I don’t think I’ll be cool by the time I hit the driveway.” Parked the bike, went inside, checked a mirror. My face was the color of an overripe tomato. I mean, not just a flush, not just a healthy glow, but the alarming shade people get before their head actually bursts into flames. I looked about to sustain a cerebral hemorrhage.

Ah well — exercise isn’t for sissies. I drank a quart of water, filled a ziploc with ice and sat with it on my head a while. It still took 45 minutes for the flush to clear. I wonder how close I was to actually passing out.

You know those ads that always say, “See your doctor before starting any exercise program”? And how you say, “Yeah, right”? Well, there’s a reason for those, and I think I’ve found it. Onrushing decrepitude is no longer a vague concept; the fragility of one’s body is a fact that must be faced. Your entire youth was the writing of a check that is now being presented for cash.

On the other hand, look at Jack Lalanne. Please. (And note well: Nice package, Jack!)

Speaking of “stakes” at the movies — we were, weren’t we? — I’m looking forward to the new “Die Hard,” if only to see what’s at stake. The first one touched off a furious round of movie-heist inflation, as I believe Alan Rickman was angling to steal something like $600 million in bearer bonds. (For a long time I was convinced “bearer bonds” were a Hollywood fiction, as they seemed such a convenient stand-in for cash and turned up in so many movies. But no, they really exist.) In the second “Die Hard,” I forget what the bad guys were after, except that it involved a squirrely Latin American dictator and perhaps a planeload of drugs worth considerably more than $600 million. And in the third installment, we all remember Jeremy Irons’ plan was to steal all the money in the world. Seriously; they were carting it away in dump trucks — the gold that backed all the G8’s paper currencies. The bad guys evidently planned to enjoy their wealth in a world where money was worthless, and they held all the precious metals.

As far as I can tell from the previews, in the newest “Die Hard,” Timothy Olyphant is threatening to take away everyone’s e-mail and internet connections. Which means the stakes are terrifyingly high, indeed.

As a former Hoosier, of course I took note of Richard Lugar’s big splash yesterday. I always felt conflicted about Dick when he was one of my senators, for reasons that, to fully understand, you had to live here. On the one hand, I took him as he presented himself: Smart, sober, conservative-but-not-crazy Republican who at least seemed to understand that the rest of the world existed, and conducted himself as such. Like so many Indiana office-holders, he is cemented in office. Democrats ran against him for reasons entirely divorced from the crazy idea that they might take his job — name recognition, street cred, whatever. The whole exercise was simply a more polite version of stretching your neck under a guillotine. On the other hand, I remember one year when he actually bought TV ads — I guess he needed to spend some money — and they featured him in a flannel shirt, proclaiming himself a man of the soil. While always a safe message in Indiana, it creeped me out. Donald Trump is more a man of the soil than the brainy Rhodes Scholar Lugar. It suggested there was a cruder sort of calculation inside that silver head. I didn’t waste a lot of time worrying about it — there’s always the point at which you think “at least he’s not Dan Quayle” — but there it was.

Fortunately Doghouse Riley, who still lives there, puts his finger on it pretty squarely:

Somehow nobody asks “Why is it a moderate Republican, a respected foreign-policy expert, takes five years to recognize and moderately object to an utter fucking Republican foreign policy disaster?” Dick Lugar had the opportunity to be the William Morse of his day and party, or at least its Bill Fulbright; his Hoosier seat would have stayed warm, or at least body temp. Instead he goes on providing cover for dingbats at risk of getting mussed in the next election.

Oh my, look — someone stood up to Ann Coulter. (Well, we knew it wouldn’t be Chris Matthews.) Nothing like putting the mother of a dead child up against a fortysomething bullshit artist to say, “Stop making cheap cracks about my dead child” to make some great TV. Coulter plays it cool, but be not fooled — she felt the need to flip her hair about 60 times once she knew who was on the phone. Playing with her long, blonde locks is her tell. Maybe someone will point this out to her (Coulter), and she can make a crack about how at least she HAS hair, unlike that chemo-crone Elizabeth Edwards.

The best writers tell you about something you don’t really care about — in this case, a dead pitcher — and make you care. Jon Carroll on the late Rod Beck:

I loved watching Rod Beck. He was the closer back when the Giants were good. He had a body that did not appear to have encountered the wonders of Pilates; he had an amazing, unapologetic Fu Manchu mustache; he had a mullet so large it seemed to be a separate creature that had agreed, in exchange for considerations, to spend some time on top of his head.

He looked badder than you; he looked badder than anyone. His entire attitude on the mound was aggression. Just the expression on his face as he leaned in to take the sign was malevolent. The hunch of his shoulders was frightening. I saw major league batters bail on a Rod Beck pitch before it was halfway to home plate. “Life is too short,” I could almost hear them muttering to themselves.

The New Yorker arrives even later in the week here than it did in Indiana, so it was Saturday before I finished Sy Hersh’s debriefing of Gen. Antonio Taguba in re: Abu Ghraib. This was Saturday morning; I was lying on a lounge poolside, waiting for Kate to swim her event in the Lakeside Swimming Association meet. (Breaststroke; she came in second.) When I finished I put the magazine aside, fumed for a few minutes and then flipped open my phone and started going through the address book, vowing to call the first person who was likely to be awake — it was still early — and tell them how much I have come to loathe the Bush administration and everyone in it.

Lance Mannion’s wife, the Blonde, has a first name that starts with A. So I called the Mannion Manse, in the faraway Hudson River valley. The Blonde answered, and I said, “Have I mentioned lately how much I fucking hate the Bush administration? Have I?”

It occurred to me that I was sitting within earshot of a bunch of other parents, and they may not hate the Bush administration. This is a suburb, after all, and not the sort with a gay pride parade. I recently went through my zip code’s political donations via one of those websites that tracks such things, and discovered I live within walking distance of a lot of people who gave four-figure sums to Rick Santorum and George Allen. Scary. It also occurred to me that even though there were no children nearby, they might not be comfortable with the sort of casual profanity people use in zip codes more supportive of Barack Obama and stricter CAFE standards. I made a quick decision, dropped the profanity, continued the harangue. I mentioned Gen. Taguba, the wholesale looting of the national forests, the castration of the FDA, what an evil evil evil man Donald Rumsfeld is, and so on. (I left out Santorum and Allen, but only because I couldn’t find a news peg.)

“George Bush’s approval ratings are in the 20s?” I barked. “They should be in the teens. In the single digits. Name Redacted, Name Redacted, a few more right-wing feebs, and that’s it.”

The Blonde agreed with everything I said, of course. We affirmed one another’s narrow viewpoints, discussed the kids and the jobs for a bit, and hung up.

And now I have another reason to despise the party in power. They have turned me into that which I hate — a raving loon howling into a cell phone, disturbing the peace in a pleasant setting on a lovely, cool June morning.

Well, they started it!

That was Saturday morning. Saturday afternoon we went to a family reunion/birthday party down Ohio way. It was thrilling to see Alan’s cousin Joanne, always sure to enliven the joint. She used to be chancellor at Fort Wayne’s IU/PU branch campus, and told a funny story about having to defend a purchase order for a few gross of unlubricated condoms, an item that set phones ringing at every stop on the line. They were to hold water samples for a student’s research on declining water levels in Lake Chad, selected because they were cheap, clean, sturdy, could be written upon with a Sharpie, stacked in a carton, etc. Alan’s family is aging at the same rate everyone else’s is, and when the conversation veers into who died, who’s dying, who needs a donor kidney, etc., it’s nice to have someone around who can make small talk about Trojans.

My life is so boring, I should join a book club.

Do I have bloggage? A bit:

Serena Williams can kill a man with her thighs, and don’t you forget it.

Don’t wear your nice jewelry around the plumber. Especially when he has a rap sheet.

I can’t tell you how often I dodged golf balls around Foster Park, a public course that attracts a lot of, shall we say, not-Tigers. I wonder how many cyclists they’re hitting today, with those big drivers. When the gardeners have to wear hardhats — a cautionary tale for those who live near the fairways. (Note: Broken link fixed.)

I’ll be more awake later, when the coffee kicks in.