I was at the pool, watching all the bodies in their scant coverings of spandex, when I started thinking about abstinence programs. (Gee, I don’t know why, either. Actually, first I thought about tattoos for a while, then abstinence programs. My thoughts on tats are unchanged, which is why I moved on to abstinence so quickly.) Recently I had taken one of those left-right-left turns on the internet and ended up at an account of the Sex Lady, Jennifer Waters, and her entertaining presentation to middle-schoolers:

Jennifer Waters calls herself the Sex Lady. She likes to play matchmaker with Miss Tape and unwitting teen boys.

She slaps a piece of clear tape across Julian’s arm. He winces.

“It’s gonna hurt when I take it off,” the lanky boy protests.

“But it’s fine now, isn’t it?” Ms. Waters whips back.

The puzzled looks on 18 eighth-graders at Carrollton’s Arbor Creek Middle School brighten. The Sex Lady has made her point: Bad relationships hurt.

Is that her point? Actually, the point comes later in the hour:

The Sex Lady tells Julian to break up with Miss Tape.

“I don’t wanna,” Julian screeches before obeying. He cradles his arm as he sits down.

Ms. Waters shows Miss Tape to the class before calling up another boy, Spencer.

“We got some skin, Julian’s hair,” she says. “Spencer, did you get a good look at Miss Tape?

“You bond with Miss Tape,” she says, slapping the strip onto Spencer’s arm. “Everything Julian had has now been passed on to you.”

Ms. Waters does this again with a third boy, Jonathan. This time, when they break up, the tape comes off pretty easy.

“What happened to the bond?” Ms. Waters asked the class.

“It didn’t hurt as much,” a girl replies.

Get it? Sleep with too many people, and you’re like an old piece of tape. Note that the tape is female. Of course. In these little presentations, women hardly ever get to be actual human beings. Don’t buy the cow if you can get the milk free. Remember that one? Then I read something where the woman was a tree, climbed by a man, and honestly, if the writer hadn’t said, “This is a metaphor of marriage,” I wouldn’t have had the first clue what he was talking about, except that it sounded pretty Freudian, the guy clambering around in the branches and all.

Now it’s tape. I don’t think this is a good thing, going from a hooved mammal to a tree to a piece of sticky plastic. No wonder abstinence programs don’t work.

But we shouldn’t be surprised. I had drug education in high school. You remember that: There was a movie featuring Sonny Bono in an orange satin suit, talking about the dangers of mary jane. The story was that the movie was part of Sonny’s community-service sentence on drug charges, which sounds like a crock, but I don’t know. (Hey, I wonder if it’s on YouTube. Are you kidding? Everything’s on YouTube. Parts one, two and three.) Rewatching it today, I can see that the film makes a number of sound points — yes, I would rather the pilot of an airplane I was a passenger on to have recently smoked a cigarette rather than a joint — mixed with the usual heapin’ helpin’ of bullshit. I’ve known people who wrecked their cars when they were high, not because they were so tripped out and groovin’ on the cool summer day that they actually drove off a cliff, as the film shows, but because they tried to take the curve too fast.

There was another movie where a girl, babysitting and tripping on acid, puts the baby in the oven, thinking it’s a turkey. You don’t need me to tell you it was greeted by guffaws and several cries of “I’ll have what she’s having” from the darkened classroom.

I always wonder why we can’t try the truth. Is subtlety too hard for teenagers to grasp? We expect them to understand moral ambiguity by junior year (in English class, anyway); can’t we also tell them that taking drugs is a bad idea, but like many bad ideas, there’s a time when they seem like a very good idea. (I always thought everything you need to know about marijuana could be summed up by Samuel L. Jackson’s great exchange with Bridget Fonda in “Jackie Brown:” “That shit robs you of your ambition.” “Not if your ambition is to get high and watch T.V.”)

Same with sex. Nothing — even a bikini wax, even tape on your arm — hurts like your first heartbreak, but like virtually every other human being on the planet, you’ll live to love again, and better. Sex is a bad idea at 14, a less-bad one at 18, and if you’re not having sex, married or not, by 25, you’re missing out on a big part of life at the best time of your life to enjoy it. I’ve always found the fetishizing of virginity to be deeply creepy, medieval, Islamic. And get a clue, Sex Lady: Women are not tape. Nor are they trees, or cows.

Lecture concluded.

It’s another beautiful day in the neighborhood; lately I feel like I’m living in southern California. An enormous storm system passed through the area yesterday, and true to form, voided about eight raindrops on our little patch of heaven. It’s like all the heat rising off this asphalt island repels rain, or something. Anyway, the temperatures have moderated, the humidity’s down, and I’m off to Ralph’s Kroger for supplies.

Via Metafilter: Blogging the Definitive 1,000 Songs from 1955 to 2005 and Counting to 1 million — on the internet — has blogging reached its wank-rific nadir?

No, that would be this site.

Thanks for all the suggestions on how to spend my windfall. Making final decision soon, and I’ll let you all know.

Have a swell day.

Today is a big housekeeping post, plus bloggage. I’m hoping that tying up loose ends and answering reader requests here will inspire me to do the same in my physical space. Kate brought home the contents of her desk and locker this week, which apparently are like those little cars that the clowns pile out of. What am I bid for a pink plastic recorder, people?

Starting things off, someone — Joel Nelson, it says on the packing slip — sent me this CD, “Lazarus Beach,” by a band called Through the Sparks. I’m having a horrible senior moment, wondering if someone offered to send it and I said yeah, or if it was just unsolicited. Whatever, I appreciate it. Noodling around the band’s website, it seems they’re blurbing their blog mentions, so let me add one. Disclosure: I stole it from my husband. Ahem:

“Reminds me of Guided by Voices.”

I simply cannot top the band’s own self-description, from their website again: While there are still the noise and synth-laden marshes, horn and big-harmony choruses and crescendos loom over beds of ukulele, honky-tonk piano, funeral home organ and pedal steel. Of course, there’s still a copious amount of gleaming guitars and a few signature triplet beats.

Booyah.

A few random snapshots (click for larger):

The new behind-the-garage space, by reader request:

You can see the grass is starting to come in. Spriggy can’t wait to pee on it. No, I don’t know why that tree is already dropping yellow leaves. I suspect it has Detroit Tree Death Syndrome; you have never seen so much standing deadwood in your life as in this area. Most of it is because of the emerald ash borer, another product of globalization — it’s an Asian native. That tree is not an ash, but maybe it’s dying in sympathy.

This handsome devil was waiting on my pool chair the other day:

Yes, it’s the dawning of fish-fly season here in the Pointes. Last year I vowed to have a new video camera by June, so I could shoot my long-planned short feature: “Night of the Fish Flies.” Oh, well.

If you’re trying to reach me via cell phone lately, try an e-mail. I lost it yesterday (bad news). Now I can get an iPhone (good news). Not really — I need a $600 cell phone like I need a $100 million diamond skull — but I guess I can dream. Besides, I have faith the pink Razr will turn up somewhere. As I tell Kate, it’s not lost, you just can’t see it at the moment.

UPDATE: Found it. And Alan, I also found your GPS quick-start guide, missing for eight months, in the same place (under the driver’s seat in my car).

LA Mary wants a T-shirt with this on it, and OMG, so do I:

Mitch Harper says he has a line on custom T-shirts; maybe he can hook us up.

Because I know how bad summer Fridays in the office can be, Iron Butterfly line dancing:

I said I had bloggage, but I don’t want to break the mood of the Iron Butterfly. But if you’re in a self-punishing mood, join me and Glenn Greenwald in our mystification that a journalist with a national platform (Chris Matthews), would say something like this about a presidential candidate (Fred Thompson):

Does [Fred Thompson] have sex appeal? I’m looking at this guy and I’m trying to find out the new order of things, and what works for women and what doesn’t. Does this guy have some sort of thing going for him that I should notice? . . .

Gene, do you think there’s a sex appeal for this guy, this sort of mature, older man, you know? He looks sort of seasoned and in charge of himself. What is this appeal? Because I keep star quality. You were throwing the word out, shining star, Ana Marie, before I checked you on it. . . .

Can you smell the English leather on this guy, the Aqua Velva, the sort of mature man’s shaving cream, or whatever, you know, after he shaved? Do you smell that sort of — a little bit of cigar smoke? You know, whatever.

Yeah. You know, whatever. Have a swell weekend.

Every so often I wonder if I’m destined to move again, and where it might be. I wonder if I was wrong to leave Columbus, and if I’ll ever go back there on a semi-permanent basis. It’s where my family is, good ol’ Aunt Pam and Uncle Charlie. Uncle Charlie owns a bar, which would seem to be a nice thing to have in the family in your golden years. My mom, who toiled for the Bell System her whole career, got free long distance for life after she retired. I think, when your brother owns a bar, you might get a free beer every week or so.

(I must always remember, however, the story Charlie told at our dad’s wake, which I think I’ve told here before, so I won’t. We call it “Michelob 3-5-7,” and it involves the entrepreneurial spirit, and its moral is: There is no free beer.)

But eventually I consider that even though I was wrong about Columbus being a hick town, and while I now frankly admit it’s a fine place to live and work, it’s no longer for me. There’s not enough nature there.

Central Ohio is a flat place, cleaved by two brown rivers. It has parks, and it tries very hard with what it has, but ultimately: Bleah. I once covered a suicide at a place called Antrim Park, which has a running/biking path that surrounds a charmless, man-made pond about the size and shape of a football field. A man in a wheelchair had turned it 90 degrees on the path, leaned into his chin switch and drove himself down the bank to his death. I looked around at his surroundings and thought, well, you can see why he did it. There are two “yacht clubs” in Columbus; both sail on reservoirs. The area is so desperate for liquid resources that Buckeye Lake, in my day a fetid near-swamp, is now sprouting $600,000 weekend retreats. My friend Cindy was out boating on it once when they ran out of gas. “Do we wait for someone to tow us in?” she asked the skipper. “Actually,” Skip replied, “we could walk from here.”

Fort Wayne has brown rivers, too — three of them, but they have the advantage of being historically signficant. In their day, they were as important to commerce in the area as the Port of Seattle is to the Pacific Rim. Now they’re pretty well ruined — a doctor once warned me not to kayak in the St. Marys without an immune globulin shot — but at the right time of day, in the right light, you can still see the Indians and soldiers on the banks, going at one another with muskets and tomahawks. If you squint. Also, the Fort is just east of the glacier’s stallout, and one county to the west begins Lake Country, dozens of pretty little kettles and potholes where, if you break down, you can’t walk home, but at least it’s safe to swim.

Detroit is in many ways an environmental disaster. I interviewed someone involved with reclaiming the Rouge River, another flaming ditch that caught fire once, like the Cuyahoga. She said she used to live in southwest Detroit, near where the Rouge meets the Detroit River, and sometimes in the middle of the night tanker trucks would roll into her neighborhood, put their outflow pipes down city sewers, and throw the switch. She’d call the police to report these crimes against the environment and be told, “Oh, they do that all the time.”

But Detroit has the big lake, and the big river, and even as fouled as they’ve been in the past, even with the pressure of millions of people flushing their toilets and running their boats and driving their cars close by, they still retain magnificence. Yesterday afternoon I had an interview in a conference room high up in a nondescript building downtown, and afterward one of them invited me to her private office, to show off her Saarinen furniture. She had giant windows overlooking the south and east, and I stepped in and gasped. It was simply breathtaking. The river is blue, not brown, wide and powerful, carrying ore freighters down to Erie and Ontario. The Ambassador Bridge is framed in the south window like a painting; at certain times of year you get great sunsets there, she said. It’s the kind of office that tells its occupant she has arrived, although I’m sure if it were mine, I’d get no work done. I’d be looking out the windows with binoculars all day long, spying on Canada.

OK. The week is limping toward its finale. It’s more exhausting than the holidays, this end-of-school thing. But at least today it’s over. I need to run off to school for the grand finale, yes, an awards ceremony.

Bloggage:

You may not be able to get a flying car yet, but someone is once again taking a run at the aqua-car. Click-through recommended, if only for the photoillustration that suggests a freak accident where two Aquadas collide where the water meets the land.

I’m going to print this story and give it to my Korean dry cleaner. He has a sly sense of humor, and would appreciate it.

This afternoon I plan to catch up on e-mail. If I owe you one, you’re in line. Later, folks.

We talked about weddings here a couple of weeks ago — great stories from all — but we didn’t talk much about brides. Bridezilla, bride from hell, J-Lo on crack — these are the bridal archetypes these days. I try to think back to the (first) weddings of my generation, and I don’t recall too many of those girls. I remember tearful brides, and exhausted brides, and a great many stoned brides, but not a lot of sacred-monster brides. There was one who had to choose her dress to cover her tattoos, and who spent much of the reception smoking cigarettes, which was where I decided there’s nothing more charming than a bride with a butt hanging from the corner of her mouth. It really says “happily ever after,” doesn’t it?

It’s the wedding racket that makes them this way. The $100,000 wedding, even if it is paid for with daddy’s money, hangs a sword of Damocles over everyone’s head, and who wouldn’t flip out? Brides today snicker at the hippie weddings of my generation, barefoot brides on the beach carrying bouquets of wildflowers and serving homemade cookies at the reception, but I’ll tell you what — none of those girls ever threatened their grooms with a cake knife. Or sent their bridesmaids specific instructions, down to the color formula, for what sort of highlights they should have on the big day.

So I was appalled, but not particularly surprised, to read Emily Yoffe’s roundup of bridal horror in Slate, today:

Is there anything more revealing than the phrase—uttered with a stamping of the foot and a rising of the voice—”my day”? Of course it’s not “our day,” because the groom is merely an accessory, like a cake topper. The first time a bride-to-be utters the words “my day,” I recommend potential bridesmaids and grooms respond, “Mayday.”

My favorite single anecdote:

Weddings were once the place for loved ones to witness the union of the bride and groom. All guests—be they halt, lame, blind, or colorblind—were welcome. But now some brides see themselves as auteurs and their guests merely extras on the production set. How else to explain the letter I received from a groom-to-be who signed himself “Under Moral Siege.” His dear female friend, who wears thick glasses, had been selected as a bridesmaid. But the bride insisted this bridesmaid leave her glasses at home because “glasses are an inappropriate accessory for women’s formalwear, and the bridal magazines have convinced her that there can be no exceptions to the no-glasses rule.” It makes me hope that as the groom tries to explain this to his friend, he’ll find himself looking deep into her Coke-bottle lenses, suddenly declare, “Why, Miss Keeler, you’re beautiful!” and run away with her.

True anecdote: I once knew a bride who was, by conservative estimates, somewhere between 350 and 400 pounds. She was unashamed by her size, and had a big wedding. I wasn’t invited, but my friend Paul was, and described the processional. The bridesmaids start coming down the aisle, and each one is beautiful, just breathtaking. They seem to have been arranged in ascending order of stunningness, starting with the Heidi Klum lookalike, progressing to the Stephanie Seymour clone and so on, finishing with the maid of honor, a blonde who would make Elle Macpherson weep with shame. And then here comes the bride, the size of a boxcar draped in flowing white moiré silk. I never thought much of her before that, but just knowing she had the ovaries to make herself the star of that show raised my opinion of her by several notches.

Anyway, lots more wedding horror in Slate’s wedding issue, which doesn’t have an index page, but Yoffe’s story will lead you to the rest of the stuff. Or you can just go to Slate and click around.

God willing, today is the last hurdle of this preposterously drawn-out farewell-to-school fortnight — an all-day (yes, really) picnic at our lakefront park, the thought of which makes me weep with joy. I can’t wait to see what sort of wedding Kate expects after a school career like this.

Pray for me.

Because I have several appointments today, because I slept badly last night, because I haven’t had my coffee, because all I want to do is go back to bed with an old Travis McGee novel and drift off into sweet, sweet oblivion for another couple of hours, it’s all-bloggage Tuesday! Feel free to carry on a lively discussion in the comments; I’ll be back eventually.

Last week’s garage-sale find:

What am I bid for a new-with-tags, XL, apparently never-worn commemorative T-shirt, from the 1997 Stanley Cup celebration? The image is a front-page reproduction of the old JOA News/Free Press Saturday edition. That’s Steve Yzerman with the cup. I recall that victory because we went on vacation in northern Michigan the following week, and were reading the Detroit papers when two members of the team were seriously injured in a post-victory car crash. To call the coverage “hysterical” would have been a grievous understatement. One of the injured players lingered in a coma for some time, but the beast had to be fed, every day. We were there during the “others who survived comas and head injuries offer their thoughts” stories. People speak of beating a dead horse. This story was a smear on the pavement by the time it went away, I suspect.

Alicublog reads the loons so you don’t have to, and I’m grateful, because I’d rather he tracked “Knocked Up” and the ululating approval of the culture warriors. Also, he’s funnier.

James Lileks won’t have to take his chances in the job market with the rest of us, after all. Good for him. It’s hard for me to say that, not because I’m jealous, but because he remains such a clueless nimrod. Ahem:

But this business has been insulated for so long from this sort of agita that it’s really like the Pope introducing merit pay into the College of Cardinals. There’s a reason they call it the Velvet Coffin, after all. There’s something about the journalism profession that makes some of its members feel like secular academics, if you know what I mean. …The union confers a form of tenure. People expect to leave the craft before the craft leaves them.

Dear Jim: Some of us spent a career in the newspaper business without ever being a member of the Newspaper Guild. I, for one, never referred to my job as the Velvet Coffin, nor did I ever hear any other person in my newsroom(s) do so. A few even called their jobs as reporters or editors “the thing I do before I go to work at the Estee Lauder counter, or The Gap, so I have hopes of paying off my student loan before I’m 40.” (Of course, since we worked in smaller markets, we were all talentless hacks, and deserved it.) Most of us worked for significantly less than $92K per annum, and much of it involved work on weekends, nights, holidays and other inconvenient times. And many had nothing you could call “a form of tenure,” as a quick look around YOUR OWN NEWSROOM should tell you. Ah, well. I understand you haven’t been spending much time there for the last zillion years. Maybe in the future, with your continuing income, you can buy a clue. In the meantime, please, shut your piehole. Or go cover a plane crash, if that’s not beyond your capabilities.

As if.

But let’s end on a high note, as D at Lawyers, Guns and Money recalls the 33rd anniversary of Ten-Cent Beer Night at Cleveland Stadium, a one-time-only affair:

During the first few innings, tipsy fans tossed smoke bombs and firecrackers at each other. By the second inning, a topless woman had leaped onto the field and chased down one of the umpires for an unwanted kiss; another streaker joined the Rangers’ Tom Grieve as he circled the bases following his second home run of the night; a father and son team ran into the outfield and dropped their pants. Meantime, golf balls, rocks and batteries rained down on Texas’ players throughout the game. At one point, someone heaved an empty gallon of Thunderbird wine at Rangers’s first baseman Mike Hargrove. As the game neared its conclusion, the evening descended into total chaos. During the ninth inning, the Indians managed to tie the score and placed the winning run on third base. At that point, a fan ran into the outfield to steal Jeff Burroughs’ glove. When Burroughs began chasing the fan, Rangers’ manager Billy Martin, along with several of Burroughs’ teammates, rushed to help out — several of them, including Martin, carried bats.

I feel like I was there.

Homeownership sucks. Responsibility sucks. Nothing like homeownership — particularly in a market with declining real-estate values — to make one yearn for the simpler days of an apartment, a mailbox with everyone else’s by the front entrance, a community pool and a call to Maintenance when things went wrong.

A little history: In true Detroit style, a previous owner of our house was enamored of gas-hungry machines, specifically recreational vehicles. In what may be a metaphor for the relationship between motor vehicles and the natural world, they used this enthusiasm to ruin the back yard. They picked up the garage and rotated it 90 degrees, plunking it in the goddamn middle of the yard. In between the garage and the house, they installed a deck. This is nice. In between the garage and the back of the property, they poured another parking slab, and in the thin stretch left before the property line, they poured gravel. (In the sales listing for the house, this was described as a “play area,” the same way “squalid shithole” becomes “handyman’s special.”) Everything else was paved.

For the first two years we lived here, we regarded this arrangement with contempt. Alan in particular was fond of referring to “the automotive engineer” who dreamed it up, even though he had no evidence that the person in question was an automotive engineer; this was just the part of him that knew sooner or later we were going to have to right the wrong, venting its entirely justified disgust. It would have been so much easier, and likely cheaper, to keep the stupid RV in a storage facility.

Well. We don’t have the tens of thousands of dollars required to either move the garage back or, better yet, tear it down and build a new one where the garage should be, break up and remove all the concrete and reclaim the back yard for the forces of good. But we had enough to get an estimate on hauling out all the gravel from the “play area” and replacing it with topsoil. The estimate was what we expected, so we told Mr. Landscaper to get a crew over here and git ‘er done. Which he did. The Bobcat had been working for an hour when they hit the surprise. “A body?” I asked hopefully. No, Alan said; they’d found giant heaps of broken-up concrete. The neighbor ambled over and explained that when the garage was removed from its original foundation, they’d broken up the slab and used it to underlay the gravel in the back corner of the lot, to support parking for yet another very heavy recreational vehicle. Mr. Landscaper said this would complicate things, that they’d need another man and a lot more dirt, but I said, “Let’s just do it the way it should be done,” and OK’d the cost overrun, which I was informed could increase the bill by as much as 100 percent.

The job got done and a good job it was. We added a couple hundred square feet of arable land to what had been weed-pocked gravel. When the bill came, I swallowed hard and opened it.

It was more than triple the estimate.

After I picked myself off the floor, I told myself all the things you tell yourself: All home-improvement projects go over budget, or It’s a real improvement, and you knew that wouldn’t be cheap and Would you rather be looking at weed-pocked gravel for a third summer? Each one of these platitudes was like a strong drink for my buyer’s remorse, and after I settled accounts with Mr. Landscaper, Alan went to the nursery and started planting. It took him the weekend, but now we have a small herb garden, two raspberry bushes, some climbing roses, a butterfly bush, some dead-nettle groundcover, new hostas and a birdbath. What had been impervious landscape is now nice and pervious again, and we’re putting oxygen into the air, plus growing raspberries. Which is more than you can say for those RVs, I hope.

Those birds better appreciate that damn birdbath, is all I can say.

At times like this, it’s important to not think like a renter. Otherwise you’d start thinking dangerous thoughts about how you might have spent that $2,000 if you didn’t have a house. In days gone by, you’d say, “Ah, but the house will be worth 4 percent more at the end of this year whether I do anything or not, so it’s just gravy.” Around here, though, that’s not the case. This just in: The auto industry is imploding. Blame the engineers.

So. The Brooklyn crew got 2/3 of the Jersey crew’s power structure last night, and at episode’s end, Tony was all alone with his machine gun in a bedroom with bad wallpaper, lying on a bare mattress in the dark, waiting for next Sunday and the last episode. I think that’s where I’m going to spend this week, too. The show is ending both the way we’ve always known it will, but not, if that makes any sense. Tony said, over and over and over in the last seven years, “Guys like me, we only end up dead or in the can,” and we keep telling ourselves, “Please, not for another season.” Well, it’s almost over, and I don’t see it ending any way but dead or in the can. I’ve been rooting for dead, but lately I’m thinking it would be amusing to see Carmela’s house sold to another family in the final montage, perhaps one of a non-white persuasion. I’m not going to be happy unless Blondie is appropriately punished, too. And I think, for her, that would be a fate worse than death.

Fave moment: When all the strippers and customers come out of the Bing to see what the excitement’s about. Was that a priest in the crowd?

Bloggage:

If someone asked for a show of hands of all the people who’ve heard “Respect” enough times that they never, ever want to hear it again, well, I’m reaching for the ceiling. Still. Make room in your head for one more, as it’s heard in Kelley Carter’s video package on Aretha Franklin’s greatest hit, “40 Years of Respect,” on Freep.com. A really nice job, with some great archival photos and interviews from people who knew Detroit’s daughter then and now. My favorite nugget: When Franklin’s son reveals that mom had a cold during the recording of the vocal, and points out the line where you can hear her falter. Roy Peter Clark, who teaches writing through the Poynter Institute, uses the Otis Redding and Aretha Franklin recordings of “Respect” to illustrate the concept of “voice.” (Yes, how sad that people choose to become writers and then have to learn what voice is.) One more note: A very old-school TV guy told me once that you could teach a word person TV skills a lot easier than you could teach a TV person word skills, and boy do you ever see it here. If more TV journalists worked like this, I might watch more TV.

Alan gazes wistfully at a club that will probably never have him as a member.

That’s the Grosse Pointe Yacht Club, by the way. Isn’t it pretty? (OK, so you can’t actually see it, but take my word for it. It’s pretty.) I love that tower, a great landmark when you’re out on the water, and easy on the eyes, too. (And I’m kidding about them not admitting the likes of us. They’re not all that exclusive, and besides, we’ve never tried.)

On Saturday, it rained. Sunday, likewise. But Monday, the holiday, was clear and bright and, well, you see the picture. A perfect day. We sailed close along the coast, and I put the binoculars on the big houses, while contemplating a heist story in which the thieves would hit the houses in January, then make their getaway by snowmobile, over the ice. We passed a giant freighter called Federal Yukon, whose stern announced its hailing port: Hong Kong. I guess that makes it a salty, unless they’re talking about the obscure port of Hong Kong, Minnesota. It’s a bulk carrier, our “Know Your Ships” guide said. BCs carry everything from taconite pellets to potash. (Kind of makes you wonder if the Edmund Fitzgerald would have a song written about it, had it been carrying potash. Hard to rhyme that one without sounding stupid.)

Here’s a stern shot of the Federal Yukon. Note that diagonal structure rising over the aft deck. It took me a minute before I figured out what it was; the blaze-orange lozenge within was the clue. It’s the lifeboat. Orange for visibility, enclosed for survival, it looks like a tiny submarine, nothing as picturesque as the Titanic lifeboats, those big open rowboats staffed by freaked-out members of the White Star Line. But then, I guess by the time you reach the lifeboats, being picturesque is no longer a concern. I’d like to know the launching procedure, and why it’s up on that structure. I’d imagine there’s a stairway to a rear hatch, and it deploys automatically if it ever reaches the water, with all souls on board kissing their asses goodbye.

I’d love to take a trip on one of these suckers, and write about it. Please, no hello-sailor jokes.

Last weekend we saw the Best Actress performance, so this weekend it was Forest Whitaker’s turn. “The Last King of Scotland” was fine enough, and the Oscar was well-deserved, a real game-set-match turn, but I think I’ve OD’d on Africa movies for a while. Black savages, unspeakable violence, death-by-machete brutality, flawed white heroes — is there ever a variation on this theme? Why can’t someone make a film of “King Leopold’s Ghost”? At least then we’d know where the natives got the inspiration for all that limb-severing.

So, the bloggage:

Not much today — I stayed away from digital devices most of the weekend — but I found yet another time-waster: Overheard in the Office, along with its sister sites Overheard in New York and Overheard at the Beach. As an enthusiastic and unapologetic eavesdropper, I love this stuff. I may submit my most recent gem, overheard at the video store:

First guy, holding DVD box: This one shows a hot chick with a sword.
Second guy, holding DVD box: This one just has a bunch of dudes on it.
First guy: So this one wins.
Second guy: Totally.

Twelve-zip? Isn’t that supposed to be a football score? On the other hand, a lopsided blowout is proof your team won, so I won’t complain. It was hot, sunny and our seats were in the shade, if a little high up for foul-ball action. And how often do you get to see a triple? That was in the fifth, after which the Tigers were up 10-0.

Comerica Park — an antimatter version of Ford Field, known locally as Home of the Losers.

As should be blindingly obvious to regular readers, I’m not a sports fan, but if I were, I’d be a baseball fan. It has all the advantages — a season that runs through the pleasant ones of the natural world, players that are good-looking but not mutant freaks (depending on their steroid preferences), beer. My term editing sports copy ran through most of baseball season, and many of the people in the newsroom in the 5 a.m. hour were baseball fans, so I have these pleasant memories of a very quiet place punctuated by the clicking of computer keys and a discussion of the previous day’s games between Andrew (Yankees fan) and Rick (Indians fan). Rick was my boss, and tolerated even the stupidest questions I had about the game; it was like he was instructing the daughter he didn’t have (and who was older than him, but never mind that). He explained walk-off homers and the fierce power of the players’ union, sacrifice fly balls and saves, and ruled on whether “midsummer classic” should be up. (It should, so: Midsummer Classic.)

If I’d had another season with him, I might have understood why Sean Casey was intentionally walked in the third, but I’m afraid my understanding of the game remains at the kindergarten level. Oh, so what? There’s beer.

A Muslim family sat a row over from us, although I’m sure I’m getting the relationships wrong. Four girls approximately the same age (12-13-ish), all in headscarves, dressed American-style modest: long pants, but jeans; T-shirts, but with long-sleeved undershirts. One girl wore Ben Wallace’s Pistons jersey with matching headscarf, another chose Tigers blue/orange. Must be some of those moderate Muslims we’ve been hearing about lately. Also, sports fans.

And now the weekend is nearly here, and I have to catch up on all the stuff I put off when I was doing weekend-type stuff earlier in the week. We have now entered the Twilight Zone of the school year, in which no learning happens, replaced by the whirlwind of end-of-year parties, picnics and gift envelopes for the teacher. Jeez, whatever happened to an apple and a nice note saying “thanks for doing your job”? I don’t begrudge Kate’s teacher his gifts, but the first two weeks of every June is like my last year of high school.

OK, I’m officially bagging it. I’m distracted by Project Playlist. I’m trying to put together a list called Men You Should Avoid, based on my thunderstruck revelation that I own — and love — two songs that are basically about women who are in love with bums.* Not as in “rascally guys,” but “train-hopping hobos without a job, or any hope of holding one.” So now I have to comb the internets for “Wives and Lovers” and goddamn, but did anyone ever invent a better procrastination tool than the internet? Didn’t think so.

Also, I just discovered Brewer & Shipley’s version of “Witchi-Tai-To” on iTunes. And you thought they were one-hit wonders.

Have a good weekend. Back after it.

* “Gentle on My Mind” and “Rainy Night in Georgia,” if you’re interested.

Good news: The divorce lawyers will have to find some other couple to put asunder. I only had to warn Alan to stop yelling once. And he did. But now the deed is done, the boat floats for another season and eventually it’ll be rigged (with NEW sails) and we can go sailing. It seems like a lot of work, and it is, but let me point out the current price at the gas dock: $3.99/gallon. The wind, I remind you, is free.

I promised pictures. But I haven’t moved Photoshop over to the new machine. So some thumbnails to save bandwidth. (Click if you want to see them bigger.)

That’s the last bit of bottom-painting, and Alan lying down to whisper sweet nothings to his mistress. Not much in the way of pictures, but what can I say? It was hot. And I was helping raise the mast.

And today comes another flake-out. I’m a chaperone for the payoff on Kate’s year of service on student council — Tigers v. Angels at Comerica. The forecast is for bright, sunny skies and unseasonable warmth, sunglasses weather. Take me out to the ballgame. But I leave you with…bloggage:

Jon Carroll was there during the ’60s (although, he notes, much of it took place in the ’70s), and contrary to the standard witticism, there’s a lot he remembers. And thank God for that:

I was working for Rolling Stone in 1970, which should have meant that I was at the white hot center of whatever the hell it was. I was assigned to go cover a press conference announcing something called the Toronto Peace Festival. The press conference was at the Jefferson Airplane (as they then were) house on Folsom. John Lennon was supposed to be there but wasn’t.

So I was listening to these people describing the event, which would of course be free and would have every fabulous group you ever heard of, and there would be a big area right at the center of the festival that would be brightly lit because, on the last night of the show, our alien brothers were going to join us. In a spaceship. With gifts.

There was such a fine silence in the room. The late Michael Grieg, a wonderful Chronicle reporter and an old beatnik who had seen it all, asked softly, “alien spaceships?” Nods all around. So we all knew we were covering the biggest story of our lifetime, or we were listening to crazy people.

I have been giving the Freep a certain amount of abuse lately, so let me call out something I enjoyed, a story and short video on Jim Dunne, known in the trade as an “autorazzi,” because he stalks the reclusive and takes pictures, only he’s after cars, not people. Yes, you can make a living at it; he raised seven children on the proceeds of auto-espionage, and had the sort of brass ones you need for the job. He once purchased a small strip of land with a fine view of Chrysler’s proving ground in Arizona and shot with impunity for some time before he was found out and foiled. (I bet he sold the property to Chrysler with a twinkle in his eye, and for a fat profit.) Note the fool-the-autofocus camouflage on the cars in the video, a common sight around the Motor City. Inside joke: the “disgruntled executive” who speaks from the darkness in the video is GM’s Bob Lutz.

It’s a boy! And he has grandfather’s dead, soulless eyes! (Joke stolen from a Metafilter thread, I think.) Happy birthday, Samuel David Cheney, and congratulations to both your mommies.

Spring is here, which means it’s time for the Derringer clan to do its semi-annual flirtation with divorce. Yes, it’s boat-launching day. I thought this event had lost its drama once we got the kinks out; last year’s launch, and even autumn’s melancholy take-out, went better than expected. But this year lingering knee pain complicates matters, and the temperature is predicted to be a blazing 85. Will this day end in cursing, tears and lawyers? Tune in tomorrow.

Two bits of bloggage, one short, one long:

Like dripping ice, like descending smog, there was karma all over the building Tuesday night — and still the Red Wings almost shook it off, they fought to the choking finish. But in the end, it was covered in feathers and spoke with a beak. This, friends, is the kind of prose that makes you a national treasure.

The Yak is the Detroit Free Press’ big furry animal. Its job is to encourage children to read the paper, via its ongoing feature, Yak’s Corner. When the Freep and my ex-employer were both Knight Ridder papers, we ran Yak’s Corner, too. I guess, in the Freep sale and subsequent dissolution of KR, the Yak was not considered corporate property, because it’s still in the Freep.

One time, to promote the feature at some convention-center show the paper was involved in, the Freep loaned the Yak costume to our newsroom in Fort Wayne. It arrived in a big case on wheels, and was taken to the managing editor’s office, whose job it was to find an occupant. She needed someone who was both slim and had nothing better to do on the weekend, and found her ideal candidate in Name Redacted.

Redacted tells the story better than I do, but the bottom line is: It was a disaster. The suit was claustrophobic, and the children were horrible; they especially liked running full-tilt into the poor Yak, trying to knock it down. Or they’d beat on the suit with their fists to provoke a reaction. Imagine being inside this thing — hot, sweaty, trying to see out the fur-screened peephole, besieged by brats who will probably not grow up to be daily newspaper subscribers. The Yak had an escort, the teenage daughter of an editor also in attendance. After a good deal of this torture, Redacted started to feel the suit closing in, so to speak. She turned to the escort and said, “GET YOUR MOM,” only it sounded like “Mmmf mfuf mmmffm” and so the escort did nothing. “PLEASE, PLEASE GET YOUR MOM” came out “MMFF MFFM mfmfuf mffmf” and the torture continued. Finally, the Yak bolted from the hall, ripped the head off the costume, climbed into her car in a state of barely restrained panic and vomited down her shirt.

This would have been a sight to see. I only wish my life was this cinematic.

I mention this only because whenever I see a video like this one, I think, “If they made me do that, I’d puke, too.”

Back later, with pictures.